Amplification

“Sweet fuck, can you smell that?”

“What did he do? Piss in it?”

“Yeah, probably. Look. The whole board’s burnt. Why do you keep him in the band?”

“There’s no one like him. He’s…you know…abrasive.”

“With an itty-bitty practice amp, yeah, right. Go and find another one of those.” Sam held up a charred component that he had snipped out of the amplifier, digging in his pocket for the phone that had started vibrating there.

“Yes, I’m on my way now,” he said into the phone, waving the smelly blackened thing until it was taken from him. “Of course I will.”

“Where are they?”

“In those drawers,” he said, pointing, and turning back to the workbench. “I can, but it’ll make me late.”

“What am I looking for?”

“One of those, with four wires. I’ll hit traffic on the way back if I do.”

“This?”

“No. Four wires. Just make up your mind. Why do you always do this?”

“This?”

“Too small.” He shook his head from side to side to emphasize the point. “I’m not doing anything deliberately. You’re the one who asked me…”

He lodged the phone between his head and his shoulder and started to work with the soldering iron, leaning back sharply when smoke rose into his face. “Have you found one yet? No, not you. Look, I’ve said I’ll come. Why can’t you leave well enough alone?”

“This is the only one. Won’t it do?”

“What does it say on it? Five? Ten? What would you know about that? This is between you and me.”

“Ten. See? It’s the same size as the one that burnt out.”

“Yeeeees. The one that burnt out was that size. That’s why I want you to find a biiiigger one. No we don’t! Have you forgotten what happened last time?”

“But a bigger one won’t fit.”

“I’ll bend it to make it fit. Only because you got started, like you always do.”

“What about this?”

“Brilliant! I have to go. Sorry. See you later.”

“But it’s huge! It says two hundred.”

“Give it here. No I’m not. See you later.” He put the phone down on the bench, where it almost immediately started vibrating again.

“You’re going to upgrade it to two hundred watts? Wow!”

“No, just the rectifier so it won’t go on fire next time.” He grinned. “Something else will go on fire next time.” He took a deep breath, answered the phone, and listened for a moment. “Leave it. Just leave it, that’s all.”

“It’s sticking up in the air.”

“That’ll help keep it cool. What would be the point? I’m not going to have this conversation with you, not now.”

“Is it done?”

“Try it and see. Yes I do, you just don’t get it. Goodbye.” He put the phone back on the bench and watched it.

Chords blared out. “Yay!”

The phone buzzed again, and he lifted it. “Like what? I’m just fine.”

“This is amazing. I have to get going.”

“No, that’s yourself you’re talking about. I don’t know why I put up with this. Hope the gig goes well.”

“Thanks. See you.”

“Fine, fine, it’s my loss. Is that all you have to say? Do you want a lift?”

“I thought you couldn’t…”

“Well, you heard.”

“We’re not too much of a handful?”

“Yeah, you are.” He grinned and reached for his jacket.

The words in this week’s prompt for writers at Three Word Wednesday can all have negative connotations: abrasive, handful, loss I wanted to turn their meanings round, finding virtue in being an abrasive performer, enjoyment in being with people who are a handful, and freedom resulting from loss. It was difficult to write the two conversations going on at the same time, and probably difficult to read, but an interesting experiment nevertheless.

Speaking

She lay motionless between dank sheets, pressed down by the weight of thick blankets and an old-fashioned eiderdown into the chill hollow of a sagging mattress. Through thin curtains, which had shrunk so they no longer covered the whole window, moonlight came and went as the clouds passed. Time passed too, and she did not sleep.

After a while, beginning to move a little, she turned over to her left to look at the clock, but the fluorescence of its hands had already faded, and she could no longer see them. She craned her neck to look around the unfamiliar room in the moonlight, identifying the shadows as furniture. Over in the corner by the window a patch of mist seemed to hang in the air, as if her breath had turned to fog in the cold, but too far away to be her breath. She blinked and looked away, then peered back at it.

A soft quiet voice seemed to say gently, “Speak?”

She jumped, and held her breath, listening. Nothing in the room had changed. A cloud covered the moon and the bedroom went dark. As the cloud continued on its way, the patch of mist seemed to ripple in the moving shadows, and in its rippling she could make out a woman’s face—the way a sculptor can portray a woman’s face behind a veil of solid stone, this was a woman’s face behind a veil of mist.

“Speak?” the voice said again, just as gently but more confidently.

“Hello?” she said aloud.

“You can hear me indeed!” said the voice, with warmth now.

“Who are you? Where are you?” she said, sitting up a little.

“I no longer know who I am. I just am. As for where…why, your eyes are lookin’ right at me.”

“So this is a dream, right?”

“We are all dreams.”

She lay back down and pulled the bed clothes over her head, turning over on to her side and sighing.

“Speak,” said the voice. “Please speak, Miss.”

She turned over again and sat up a little, looking into the corner where the mist still hung in the air. “What do you want, then?”

“For you to stay, Miss.”

“What do you mean, stay? Stay here? This is my mother’s house.”

“Your ma don’t have the…she can’t speak like you and me. We would have you stay because you can speak to us. Your daughter, too.”

“I don’t have a daughter. I came with my son.”

“The boy’s like your ma. He don’t even notice us.”

She sighed again and reached over towards the lamp on the bedside table.

“Please, no, not yet!” said the voice.

She lay back and spoke to the ceiling. “Where are you from? I can’t place your accent.”

“I don’t remember things like that no more. Nothing to remember them by, I s’pose. Nothing to remember them for. Haven’t talked for a long while. No one to talk to.”

“You’re a ghost, aren’t you. Do you haunt everyone who sleeps here?”

“Not by a jugfull, Miss. Haunting’s not polite. Haunting’s like having a conniption fit. It just upsets folks.”

“Like a hissy fit?”

The voice chuckled, “A hissy fit. I like that. It’s so nice to speak words. If you hadn’t been so all-overish in that damp bed we would never have got to talk.”

“It’s a janky bed alright.”

“So you might stay here?”

“I have to get some sleep. I have things to do in the morning.”

“It’s just that…”

“You want me to stay here.”

“Yes. No, it’s just that I want you to know that you would be welcome. We would never make you wrathy. At the first sign of trouble we would scooch out of the way.”

“Scoot, then.”

She reached over towards the lamp again and turned it on to look at the clock. Just after two. Then she looked over at the corner by the window. There was nothing there but a patch of damp on the wall. Reaching back to turn the light off, she couldn’t help glancing at the list of things she had to do in the morning, couldn’t help seeing the top item: Preggy T. Maybe she did have a daughter.

This week’s prompt for writers at Three Word Wednesday was challenging, because the words are so unusual: conniption, janky, scooch While ‘janky’ is evidently modern, the other two put me in mind of Mark Twain, so I contrived a conversation between people from different times and cultures, and introduced other slang so those words do not stand out so much. ‘Preggy T’ is generally a T-shirt, but if she had written ‘HPT’ on her list, I wasn’t sure many readers would have been able to decode it. The story follows on from the last one: Ghosts

Ghosts

Suddenly blind, she stopped and stood completely still, her eyes closed. The boy took a few more steps, then turned back to face her. “You! Stopped! Again!” he accused, emphasising each word in staccato frustration.

“I’m enjoying the sunlight,” she said.

“Come! On!”

The mud of the path was frozen solid. Below the level of the sun’s rays the woods were dark, glimmering faintly with frost, holding their breath, waiting for the light and warmth she had just tasted. Ghosts of tiny creatures rustled in the frozen undergrowth. Ghosts of hunters shivered behind trees. The ghosts of their prey eyed them. Other ghosts loitered on the path behind her, watching, envying.

She lowered her eyes into the darkness and continued up the hill. Sunlight gradually lit her from head to toe as she reached the brow and the edge of the trees where the boy was waiting for her.

“No! Stopping!”

She stopped. A broad valley was spread out before her in the morning light, pale with frost. Mist snaked along the river to her right, a surreal negative image in white of the dark waters. In the distance a few plumes of smoke rose lazily into still air. From the dark shadows under the trees by the river, ghosts of lovers stared back at her. From the graveyard beyond, the ghosts of mourners jostled with the ghosts of those they had mourned. Behind her, the ghosts of the woods closed ranks.

“Look,” she said.

“What?” he demanded.

“Look,” she said again.

“There’s! Nothing! To! Look! At!”

“That bird.” She pointed and the boy turned to look.

“Where?”

She came up behind him and hugged him, squatting to place her head beside his, and pointing over his other shoulder. “That one hovering. It’s looking for its breakfast.”

“What’s it looking for?”

“I don’t know. A nice mouse, probably.”

“Will it kill it?”

“Of course it will. It’ll eat it.”

He wriggled free and they started their descent. The boy ran ahead to the stile, and then ran back. “Which way?”

“Wait for me,” she said.

She began to climb over and looked across the field. A frozen ocean swell of ancient ridges and furrows lay ahead of her, the tops gleaming and beginning to steam, the dark shadows still harbouring the ghosts of peasant farmers, the ghosts of their dogs, the ghosts of cats and of field mice. She shivered.

“No! No! No!” He took her hand and pulled, and they set off again.

“Boots!” she called ahead as he ran indoors, and he paused only for a moment to kick them off. As she picked them up she smiled, hearing his voice from the kitchen, fluent now.

“Granny! Granny! We saw a bird that was going to eat a mouse!”

Based on the prompts for writers at Three Word Wednesday.

This week’s words were: descent, kill, surreal The story centres around ‘kill’, of course.

Straight home

“Ya!” Oliver shouted. None of them moved. “Yaaaaaa!” he tried again, even louder, but still the birds ignored him. “Yyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” he tried a third time, dropping the bag and running with his arms outstretched. This time a few of the flock rose into the air a little before settling again. He tried throwing a handful of pebbles at the nearest crow, and then a stone. The big black bird just hobbled from one foot to the other, eyeing him.

In the distance, old Mr. Patrick had looked up from his digging. “Clear off, Oliver.”

Oliver threw another stone.

“Clear off!” Mr Patrick had put his spade down and was heading for the gate.

Oliver went back for the bag. A tin had fallen out and he replaced it, squashing the loaf to make room. “Come straight home,” his mother had said. He set off instead towards the park. Looking back, he saw Mr. Patrick watching him from the gate.

In the park some younger children were playing football. As Oliver approached, the ball came towards him. He let it pass him, turned, and kicked it away into the bushes. There was uproar from the little kids. One of them threw a harmless little stick in his direction, a gesture of outrage. Another had run across to some grown-ups sitting on a bench, and one of the men had got up. He was coming towards Oliver, who turned and jogged to the path on the opposite side. When he looked back, the man had stopped and was standing with his hands on his hips, shaking his head.

On another bench a couple were sitting very close, talking. They would both look down at the same time, and then both look up at each other. Oliver sat on a grass bank where he could watch. The man leaned further towards the woman, but she gave a little yelp and moved away from him, looking all around nervously. She spotted Oliver and said something to the man. She pointed. Oliver rose and left, a moist patch visible where he had sat.

As Oliver walked along the path at the edge of the park, he saw a police car turning at the end of the road and coming towards him. He stopped and watched it as it passed, stepping into the shrubbery and going over to the iron railings so he could see the car travel all the way down to the traffic lights. Its brake lights flared and it stopped. Oliver watched and waited until the lights changed and it turned left, until it was out of sight.

Reaching the gate into the field, Oliver leaned over to release the latch. But there was no latch. It was lying on the ground a couple of feet away, the grey steel bolt and the nut close by. Oliver looked around slowly. There was no one to be seen. The sheep were minding their own business at the far end of the field. Oliver put down the bag of shopping and picked up the metal pieces, fitting them together. The nut turned easily. He unscrewed it and fitted the latch to the gate. A washer was already embedded in the wood, and Oliver screwed the nut as tightly as he could against it, rattling the latch and tightening the nut at the same time until his fingers hurt.

Then he tested the gate, opening it and shutting it, shaking it, climbing on it and jumping up and down, checking every time that the nut was still tight. Finally he looked all around once more before picking up the bag and setting off home. No one had seen.

Another story based on the prompts for writers at Three Word Wednesday.

This week’s words were: harmless, moist, yelp The story really arose from thinking about ‘harmless’, but by the end the word hadn’t appeared, so I had to go back and ‘stick’ it in.

Bubbles

In an austere drawing room where everything that could be white, black or grey was white, black or grey, Tom’s footsteps echoed on grey tiles as he paced, avoiding the rug. Rugs were not made for pacing, he thought. At each turn his eyes were drawn to the photograph on a table in the corner, the only photograph in the room. The eyes of the schoolgirl in the photograph seemed likewise drawn to his. He could see his own mother in her eyes. A granddaughter! The very idea made something in him quiver with excitement, and something else in him wonder why on earth he was quivering. Would she be here? The house was silent. How would he meet her? It would obviously be difficult. What is her name? He would at least have to know her name. Surely he would be able to discover her name.

As he reached the French windows yet again, looking out into a sunny courtyard, there were at last footsteps behind him. Turning, he saw that it was the maid he had burst in on.

“Madame cannot see you today”, she recited slowly, waiting for his reaction calmly and with apparent sorrow. No, more like apprehension, he thought. His brain refused to work, or rather, it worked too fast but at all the wrong things. For a moment, the idea that the maid was frightened of him seemed irresistibly funny, and he started to smirk, but then the thought of what the maid might think if she noticed him smirking at her seemed dangerously inappropriate. From this dilemma, a tactical plan somehow emerged.

“Please tell Madame I will wait,” he said, matching her slow delivery, then matching her calm and waiting for any sign that she had taken in what he had said. But she turned and left. For the first time he sat, prepared for it to be a long wait.

Lizzie swept into the room immediately, an arm outstretched. She must have been outside the door, listening.

“Tom!” she exclaimed, “you”ve come such a long way, and I have another appointment to go to.”

All his plans for their first meeting collapsed. He would embrace her warmly, he would tell her she should call him “Tom”, they would sit side by side, there would be a feeling between them that spanned the years, a feeling that she was still his daughter. There was none of that. She allowed him to touch her fingertips, then she swept away towards the French windows, her back to him. He could see that she had a tissue in her hands. As she turned back, she stuffed the tissue carefully into a little plastic bag and dropped the bag in a bin by the curtain. Unnerved by her businesslike manner, he was reduced to blurting out the only thing on his mind as his eyes again found the photograph.

“Your daughter?”

“How has life treated you, Tom?”

His question had made her pause for only a moment with pursed lips.

“Did you build your boat?” she continued, “I remember you had plans for a boat. You didn’t sail down did you?”

Gathering his wits, he crossed the room towards the windows and looked out on the courtyard.

“No, Lizzie, all that was long ago. Things change, you know. You”re not the little girl I remember. I’m not the father you remember.”

It crossed his mind that he felt like he was reading a prepared speech, even though it was nothing like any speech he would have prepared. He turned and touched her arm. She looked at his hand with an expression of concern, as if to check the damage.

“Well, people don”t change that much in my experience.” She turned to look out of the windows. “What is it you want?”

He turned too, and they were side by side. “This”, he said, pausing for effect before explaining. “For you and me to be able to stand side by side.”

She didn’t reply.

“Is she my granddaughter?” He still had not turned to look at her. “Does she have a name?”

“Her father used to call her Bubbles”, she snorted. “Will that do? You’ll never meet her.”

This sequel to Lizzie was another assignment for a creative writing class in 2009. The brief this time was that the main character should have some goal in the first paragraph, face a series of obstacles, and at the end either succeed or fail. I continued with the same characters because I wanted to find out what happened when Tom and Lizzie finally met, if that makes sense.

Shit

There was a curse from somewhere in the fog ahead, followed by a wet thud, and then more cursing.

“Are you OK, Mrs Irvine?” Jack shouted.

“Yes…slipped,” came the reply from below.

“Watch out for sheep shit when we go down there,” Jack warned the rest of the group, who had now gathered above where the path suddenly descended into fog. “It can be very slippery.”

“It wasn’t like this on the way up,” Mr Irvine complained.

Jack explained with exaggerated patience, “It’s quite common at this time of year. We just have to be careful, that’s all. Let’s go, then. Stay close together.”

There was a more distant yell, more like a scream. “Mrs Irvine?” Jack shouted into the fog, and then, over his shoulder to the group as he set off downhill, “She’s fallen again. Come on.”

The fog seemed to smell faintly of smoke, and also of something sour. As Jack led the remainder of the group slowly down the path, rocks loomed ahead of them. “That wasn’t here before either,” said Mr Irvine from behind. “What the Hell’s going on? Have you got us lost?”

“Everything just looks different in the fog,” Jack said. “Watch out. The path goes to the right here.”

“But that’s towards the rocks,” said the voice from behind him.

“Look, we came up this path, and now we’re going down the same path. It’s just foggy, that’s all. Concentrate on keeping your footing.”

As Jack peered ahead into the darkness at the base of the rocks, trying to work out where the path was heading, he saw a flicker of yellow light. “Mrs Irvine?” he shouted again, thinking she might be coming back with a torch. Then his foot slipped. “Shit,” he said, and a moment later he landed flat on his back, his arms and legs up in the air.

“Whoa…” he began to shout, but he realized he was still sliding. He tried to grab tufts of grass, but his hands just slipped. It had become completely dark, and astonishingly he felt he was still sliding. He swung his legs hard over to the left to try to get off the path, and his boots caught on something. A moment later he found himself in a crumpled heap against the rocks. It was pitch dark, and there was a choking smell like burning rubber, or burning hair, combined with an even fouler smell he couldn’t identify.

Jack sat up carefully. He had not broken anything. A few bruises. Concussion, maybe. To his right and far above, he could now see a faint grey light. To his left and below there was just blackness. And then, suddenly, there was a whooshing sound and a bright flickering yellow light down there, lighting up the whole cave for a moment. A moment later there was a waft of warm air from below, carrying that foul stench.

A noise from Jack’s right made him turn, and although he couldn’t see anything he realized that someone else was sliding down the path. “Here!” he shouted, sticking his hand out in the dark, but whoever it was hurtled past too quickly for him to catch hold of. He felt the path with his fingers. It was slimy with something. It didn’t smell of sheep shit. It had a familiar smell that he couldn’t place.

Again there was that roaring noise and the yellow light, followed by the terrible smell. Jack had to know what it was. Keeping to the rocks, he started to make his way down. As he proceeded, he realized that every time a rock went down ahead of him, there was a flicker of light. He tried to imagine Mrs Irvine with a flame thrower down there, but it didn’t seem likely.

As Jack reached where the slope levelled out, there was another sound of someone sliding down. Whoever it was came to rest. There was a girl’s voice. Two girls’ voices. They must have slid down together clinging to each other. “You hurt?” Jack shouted. His voice was immediately drowned out by the roar of the flame thrower as a huge flame flared into the roof of the cavern they had reached. By its light, Jack just had time to identify the new arrivals as Kate and Lorna, and he was on the point of shouting their names when the flame angled down and scorched the two girls to blackened cinders before going out, restoring the darkness.

Jack pressed himself back against the rocky wall of the cavern, away from the heat of the flame, gagging at the smell and at what he had just seen. As his eyes adjusted to the dark again, he could see glowing embers where the bodies of the two girls lay. Then one of them started to rise into the air. There were sounds of rocks falling on the far side of the cavern. The glowing form was still moving, but Jack couldn’t work out how it was moving or where it was going. Bit by bit, it started to disappear. After a few moments it was gone, leaving only one glowing form on the cavern floor. And then the same thing happened to that one. There were sounds of rocks falling on the far side of the cavern. The charred body, outlined in glowing embers, rose into the air and then gradually disappeared.

Jack picked up a rock and threw it as hard as he could across the cavern. As he predicted, there was a brief flare of the flame thrower. No bodies were to be seen. The flame seemed to have come from a small cave or passageway on the far side of the cavern. There seemed to be a group of several small openings leading off somewhere.

Again, Jack threw a rock, wondering if he could memorize the position of an opening and get to it, or whether he was mad to try that and should instead try to climb back up and out. The flame flared, and Jack peered into the opening above it. A huge yellow eye peered back. Jack froze. It wasn’t just that he kept still, he was paralysed. It wasn’t just that his limbs were paralysed, his mind was paralysed, held in the grip of that eye. Even after the flame went out, he was held in the darkness. He felt terribly old. He felt years pass like fluttering leaves, all the same, unnumbered. He knew that he had died, but yet he felt terrible hunger. He knew he had been buried, but yet he felt a terrible urge to be free.

The eye blinked.

Jack fell back against the rocks and gathered his wits. Shaking, he started to make his way back up along the side of the path. A pebble skipped out from under his boot and skittered back into the cavern. Again the flame flared and Jack risked glancing back. A huge clawed limb was reaching out towards him from one of the other holes in the cavern wall. It couldn’t reach him. He would be able to escape.

The limb curved back, away from the path, and the claw started picking at the hole where the eye had been, chipping away at the rock, making the hole larger. And then the eye reappeared, and Jack couldn’t help but meet its gaze again. This time, before the eye blinked, Jack felt nothing but joy. The joy of tasting morsels of food after being starving. The anticipated joy of flying again after being entombed.

Lizzie

A white taxi drew up outside the double doors of the house, and from his café table across the street he assumed it would be her, he was sure it would be her. The driver had run around to open the passenger door, but no one had yet emerged. The driver just stood there. Eventually a pair of shiny black shoes appeared, and then legs, stockinged, thicker legs than they should be. He realized with annoyance that part of him had been expecting to see the skinny seven-year-old girl he had once known, to see a bigger version of the child he had not seen for so long. That was not how it was going to be. The girl with skinny legs would be long gone, would long ago have become this unknown woman.

She was now standing by the taxi, straightening and brushing off her clothes, a smart cream suit, looking nervously up and down the street, looking for him, perhaps. He kept himself very still. She could not possibly have seen him, could not be expecting him so early. They were not due to meet for nearly an hour. Why was she so nervous? Apparently satisfied with her clothing, she looked back inside the car, and then stood up, and then looked back in the car again. Forgotten something, probably. Yes, now she was looking in her handbag, and looking in the car yet again, bending down to inspect the seat.

This made it necessary for her to adjust her clothes all over again, first to smooth her skirt, then to straighten her jacket, run her hand cautiously over her hair, and adjust her sunglasses. It was exactly the same sequence as last time. She spoke to the driver, stepping back from him abruptly, further back than she really needed to for him to close the passenger door and make his way around to the driver’s door again. She stood stock still, watching until the car drove off, and then looked up and down the street again. Perhaps it was not her. She was making no move to enter the house.

Now she had taken a handkerchief or a tissue from her handbag and was wiping her hands. She crumpled it and replaced it in the bag, before stepping over to the doorbell and pressing it for a long time. He would never press a doorbell for so long, he thought. She stepped back, looked up and down the street again, then once again took a handkerchief or a tissue from her handbag and wiped her hands with it, crumpling it and replacing it in the bag just as before. The right-hand door of the pair opened inwards and she took off her sunglasses as she slipped inside. What had he learned by arriving early and watching for her like this? His heart was pounding, that was all he had learned.

***

“It’s wonderful to see you at last, Lizzie!” he would exclaim on first seeing her, stepping forward and embracing her warmly. That is what he had decided. He had been over it in his mind several times. It felt right. Now that it was time to meet, it still felt right, except for the name “Lizzie”. But she had signed her e-mails that way. It would be wrong to call her something else.

He pressed the doorbell. Just a short press. It would be important for him to be himself, and he felt that this short press of the doorbell was a statement to that effect. There was no sound from within the house, and he was aware only of the sounds of the street behind him. His heart was not pounding now. The time for this had come. He knew how he was going to play it.

When the right-hand door opened it was too narrow for him to walk through with open arms for the embrace he had planned. Instead, he blundered through slightly sideways into the relative dark of the hallway, his voice booming:

“It’s…”

The maid stepped sharply back with an expression of alarm and disapproval. She said something incomprehensible in French and gestured for him to continue deeper into the house.

In Autumn 2009 I joined a creative writing class at the Stanton Guildhouse in Worcestershire. For various reasons I was only able to attend a few times. However, this story was significant as the first fiction I had written since I was a boy. The assignment was to show something of a woman’s character by describing the contents of her handbag.