The ten words

Many many years ago a child was born profoundly blind. His childhood and youth was spent deep in thought until he had discovered the secret to true happiness. At about the time of his discovery Braille was invented. He spent his early 20’s mastering the language of dots until at last he was able to write down his ten words.

The ten words however only made sense to those people who were also born profoundly blind. The power of the ten words was such that no-one who understood them would ever pass them on to a seeing person. It was subliminally written into the text/Braille that the secret remained with those who lived in the perpetual enlightenment that was blindness.

Many men tried to coerce blind men into reading and passing on the secret. No blind man ever succumbed to the temptation. Other men plucked out their own eyes and learnt Braille in the hope that they would learn the secret; a pointless exercise as pre-natal blindness was essential. Even a child, blinded at birth was excluded; for the sight of the red glow of sunlight through the womb was enough to exclude the knowledge.

Those ten words are in the form of a Haiku.

They are known to few men.

Those men ain’t telling.

I intend to find out what they are and thereby attain true happiness.

The tooth fairy

Whether his alcohol problem was caused or exacerbated by his illiteracy is unclear but his social worker decided that a remedial literacy class would be just the thing to help him.

The first book attempted at his class was titled the tooth fairy, the content was a touch twee but the words used weren’t too difficult and the illustrations colourful. Having been brought up in institutions he had no concept of the tooth fairy and was therefore intrigued.

He was troubled by the word ‘shilling’ and asked for clarity, on being told it was a small coin from long ago he asked what the fairies going rate for a tooth was these days. His teacher said that she did not know precisely but thought it was somewhere in the region of two pounds.

On his way home he practiced his mental arithmetic.

He failed to turn up at the following weeks literacy class.

He missed an AA meeting.

He failed to attend a psychotherapy session.

He had no friends so could not be missed anywhere else.

His neighbour alerted the social services when the smell emanating from his bed-sit became intolerable.

He was found by the police and paramedics lying in a mass of his own blood on his filthy bed. On the floor was a bloodied pair of pliers. As they lifted the body onto a stretcher, the pillow, glued to his head with congealed blood, came with him.

Where the pillow had lain was a pile of mutilated teeth and a piece of paper torn from a children’s book. On one side was printed “The Tooth Fairy’. On the reverse was a child like note written in pencil. It said:

Deer tooth fary. Sory to trubel you but cud you bring vodka instead of muny. I have 23 teeth wich make 46 pounds. Enuf for 3 botels I hope.

Stan.

A confession

I hated that cat
Since it tried to steal my breath

It sat on my cot bound chest and inhaled

I told my parents in infant noises
But they ignored me

I made fur-balls
With hair stolen from my mummy’s hairbrush mixed with spit
Planted them in her tea
And daddies porridge
And the babies milk

I laid the blame on the cat as it lay blameless

I combed wounded hedgehogs for fleas to infest the house
I raked the goldfish with sharpened stickle bricks

I whittled my shit into cat-poo shapes
Loaded his boots, her shoes, the handles of luggage
I planted cat shit in the places they courted
And behind the place that they crapped

Yes I suffocated the new baby with a pillow then
Scattered cat hairs in the cot


Purring...

The Blackbird prince

Molly liked to save money.

That is all I can remember of her. If you asked me what she looked like I could only reply that she looked like she liked to save money. The same applied to her smell and her sounds.

Molly wanted to be seen as a kind woman; she liked to give gifts to her friends… The problem was that she didn’t like buying them. As she liked to save money she needed to find some-one else to buy them. This person was invariably called her boyfriend. I’m using the word boyfriend as a collective noun here… She had a boyfriend of short term relationships. The boyfriends soon left her out of despair, out of horror and always out of pocket

One afternoon, alone scrimping, she spotted an ad on the internet offering a free cake (she borrowed her broadband from neighbours).

She put on her nice thrift shop dress and set out to drive the 20 miles or so to the free cake, she stopped at the garage to put petrol in. She bought a bounty bar (her one luxury) and worming tablets on impulse.

She picked up the cake, thanked the woman kindly and drove home.

At home she put the kettle on then made tea, put out a plate and a knife, sat down and looked at the cake. Before unwrapping it she read the words ‘may contain nuts’ on the label. She sighed and put away the plate and knife.

She eyed the birds in the garden.

Reaching up to scatter morsels of cake on the bird table a blackbird landed on her forearm.

Hello little chap. She said.

Hello! Said the blackbird… and less of the little chap please. I am in fact a prince, a very honest, generous prince, who has been put under this ghastly spell by a wicked witch, only my mother knows why and she isn’t telling. The only way I can change back is by receiving a voluntary kiss from a virgin.

Susie thought about this and decided to kiss him anyway… He's a prince she thought, not a gynaecologist.

There was a puff of smoke and instantly she was transformed in to a black bird.

She was startled for a moment then hopping up to the bird table, thought: Oh well, at least I can eat the cake!

The blackbird prince put a wing around her shoulder and said: This cake is all very well but what I really need is some worms… Look at that dog over there, I bet it is full of worms, if only we could get at them.

Susie looked down at the thrift shop dress on the grass, the bounty bar and worming tablet packet fallen from the pocket and said:

I have an idea.

Arc of a diver

I am aware that I am being most horribly punished for my actions and there is nothing I can do because I have already gone too far. This is unequivocal.

My assumption was; when my life flashed through my minds eye as I fell to my death, that it would contain itself to my past!

Such is the speed at which the human brain can work when pressed that I am allowed the luxury of this consideration as I watch both the wall of the multistory slip by and my future (or what future I would have had, had I not decided to take this final action) flash forward.

So now I know! For one nano-second I am enlightened and it has taken my own snuffing of the candle to illuminate me; what a paradox and surely one that only people such as me have ever been aware of… For if one dies a natural death at the moment specified in our timelines there would be no future life left to taunt us!

In this split second as I plummet headlong to the concrete below I am allowed the horror of seeing the Cancer misdiagnosed and good health regained. I witness the love and patience of my wife as she supports me through the trials of becoming successful as an artist, as she bears me a beautiful daughter who burgeons into an even more beautiful woman who brings two delightful grandchildren into my no longer possible life. I witness the retrospective at the Tate and the accolades that that itself would bring. I kneel before the King and humbly accept my Knighthood. I die peacefully at home, aged 92, surrounded by the people I would have loved!

It occurs to me that my punishment, though harsh, ends now.

Smell

He loved the smell of her neck, could spend hours kissing her there along the line where her hair started and then down her spine or across her shoulders and over the tattoo of a rose that he made her have to cover the one that said ‘Jake’ and 4EVER but it wasn’t forever and it never is forever.

And it isn’t forever she says as she leaves him, I lied she says as she leaves him, someone else is smelling me now as she leaves him.

He consoles himself with breakfast at the brasserie; coffee, croissants and apricot confiture. A glob of jam falls from the spoon onto the back of his hand, he licks it off. then smelling her he put his hand up to his nose and inhales and she is there but she isn’t there and it is him and it was him he loved all along; the smell of his own saliva…

Scouting for girls

I was rooting around in the library
A swine truffling for pearls
When I found a gem in the leaf-mould
It was “practical scouting for girls’.

The girl on the cover was dated
The dust jacket tatty and tired
She looked from the book in a way to convey
That she knew the I want she inspired.

I knew at once I must find her
For her freshness, her woggle, her curls
And I had just the thing that would help me
It was ‘practical scouting for girls’.

I read it from cover to cover
I learnt how to put up a tent
I learnt how to stop a runaway horse
And what establishment meant.

I read a lot about skipping
Then skipped the chapter on verse
The knitting bit had me in stitches
I am now a competent nurse.

I never did find my scout girl
Her freshness her woggle her curls
But woo'd and won the librarian
Helped by practical scouting for girls

Memory

Memory will go; this is what life is about, the future relies on the past and the past relies on memory and as memory diminishes so the future becomes less…less what, I’ve forgotten.

How I got to Judy’s house I cannot remember. I was 18 and fucked on amphetamines dope and alcohol and looking for a bed. I turned up with a bottle of scotch and a hold- all.
She had a terraced house, a husband in prison, a young daughter and a drawer full of drugs. Oh! Yeah she had rats in an aquarium. We drank the whiskey, tried many sorts of her dope and some of her liquid LSD and laughed a lot and laughed a lot more and then she showed me the stairs to my room before showing me her bed: she said you can go up there or stay down here…I was 18, fucked on amphetamines, dope, alcohol, LSD, the pheromones of a middle aged woman and the scent of fear from caged rats. I chose her bed. Less steps to climb. We eventually sublet my room.

We sublet my room to a fat single mother whose baby I often mistook for a pig whilst melting into the soft furnishings on paranoid trips.

For a lot of that time I did not know whether I was toothpaste or cornice moldings or both.

Judy had admirers who would come round and cook her crap meals without knowing that we were shagging in the downstairs loo and laughing and then laughing about that. 35 years later I can remember the crap meals but I cannot remember the fucks. I cannot remember what colour the loo was painted, I cannot remember Judy.

Judy tried to kill me.

I don’t blame her.

She had a Mini clubman, green, British racing green. Fuck... I had to go. The husband was coming out of prison. I could not (would not) fight. We went for a picnic on cleeve hill as some sort of goodbye thing. The child Rosie was with us as we lay under the elephant trees and talked of what might be or might have been. The beech trees were monstrous with bark like grannies elbows and she told me she loved me through a gap in her teeth. I was closer to her daughter’s age than hers.

I went into the woods for a piss, as I stood micturating against a tree I sensed something and ducked; a sock full of nuts bolts nails and screws clouted into the tree just where my head should have been. I managed to wrestle the weapon from Judy’s grasp and force her to the ground. Needless to say she was loud.

Subdued she seemed pleased to miss. I asked her what she had intended and she told me that she wanted to kill me and then write obscenities over my body… She opened her bag, it was full of lipsticks… I cannot remember how this ended. It is true but I cannot remember… I’m alive so she didn’t kill me.

She said she didn’t want me to leave her.

Her husband had been imprisoned for stealing among other things underwear from washing lines. When he was arrested he was wearing it. He had curly blonde hair and a heroin habit. It was 1973 and David Bowie said everything was possible. But I didn’t think a ménage a trios with a middle aged mum and a cross dressing junkie was anything like probable let alone possible.

Judy is 70 now…

The tree of life

Silas was fifteen when his father took him into the forest to give him his tree.

Silas’s father Dan was a woodsman as had been generations of the family before him, each steeped in the lore of the woods and the passing of the seasons. Silas was known in the village as Silas the wise for he had been the first in their little community to receive schooling, he had book-learning and was therefore governed by a greater knowledge and worldly things.

Dan led his son to the clearing in the middle of which stood a giant oak, perhaps the largest in all of Wessex, a tree that had been passed down from generation to generation until finally it was felt that Silas was the son to do best with and by the mighty oak.

‘This is your tree Silas’. Said Dan, in a reverential tone. ‘Manage it well and it will last you a lifetime.

For the next few days Silas fashioned a hut on the edge of the clearing and ferried his meagre belongings from his parent’s cottage.

On the fifth day he set about his tree. Taking his saw he climbed to the first of many elephantine limbs, sat astraddle and began to saw! It took him a day and a half to cut through that branch and as he had been working with the saw between himself and the tree, when the branch fell he fell with it. Breaking his left arm in the process.

After having his arm set by the village doctor Silas spent the next six weeks recovering, spending his time chopping up the smaller branches with his right hand by day and acquiring more knowledge and wisdom from his books by candlelight at night.

When his plaster was removed Silas trimmed the fallen branch, sold the main baulk to the wood dealer and stacked the smaller stuff in his charcoal clamp. He then set about the second mighty branch!

When the second branch fell it broke both a leg and his right wrist in the process.

The third branch re-broke the left arm and his collar bone.

The fourth branch broke his pelvis. During each convalescence he returned to his books and his thirst for wisdom.

After the broken pelvis the curious doctor visited Silas at his clearing and when he saw and heard how the boy had broken so many bones he offered the benefit of his wisdom and suggested Silas cut the whole bloody tree down before he lopped off the branches.

After the doctor had left Silas sharpened his saw and set about chopping down that fabulous tree which in the process of falling killed him stone dead.

When his father arrived having been summoned by Gustav the poacher, he stood sucking his teeth. Finally he looked at his son’s broken body and then at the fallen oak.

‘I was right’ He said. I told him it would last him his lifetime!

The obsidian eye

There’s a guy who drinks in my local, Old guy, in his 80’s I guess, small and wiry, looks honest and hard working and always dapper in his black suit, white shirt and black tie, as if always waiting for a funeral or just come back from one.

The only odd thing about him is his eyes; he has one piercing blue eye and one dark brown, almost black. The dark eye is glass and ill fitting.

Last week I plucked up some courage and bought him a pint, sat down at his table, looked into the good eye and asked about the other one.

He started to talk without hesitation and with great passion.

In 1947 he said In 1947 I was demobbed and me and 3 mates went to Butlins for a week down Southend, we shared a chalet, all them chalets look alike and on the second night I got so pissed I went back to the wrong one didn’t I. I crept in in the dark so as not to wake the others, undressed and climbed into the bottom bunk and fell asleep. I woke meself up with a coughing fit and in doing so startled the girl who was sleeping in the upper bunk.

She mumbled something like she had a mouth full of pebbles and a moment later demanded “who’s that?’

I didn’t know then but I know now that she had a glass eye and she kept it in her mouth at night when she slept so as not to lose it and to keep it moist. She had popped it back into the socket, wet with spit, before demanding who I was.

I was pretty surprised to hear a girls voice from the bunk where me mate was supposed to be so I leaned out and looked up, as I looked up she looked down and her glass eye fell from its socket.

Our eyes met!

Fuck I said you’ve poked me fucking eye out, well you should have caught mine she said and what the bleeding hell are you doing in my chalet?

She sat with me in the doctor’s office as he scooped out my busted eye with a spoon and replaced it with a marble as a temporary measure. Six weeks later I had a brand new glass eye and a beautiful new wife. We were together for 60 years Trish and me. I buried her six weeks ago.

Before the funeral. He went on. Before the funeral I went to see her one last time.


In her box she looked as beautiful as when I first set eyes on her. A mad idea came into me head and I gently eased her glass eye out with me thumb and replaced it with me own. I put her eye into me head before closing her eyelids. I wanted part of me to go with her you see and I wanted part of her to stay with me.

This brown un was hers, beautiful colour ain’t it. Obsidian the poets call it.

The funny thing is, he said with a chuckle, the funny thing is she was such a beautiful woman people used to say to me. Stan, ugly little runt like you, how the fuck did you catch her eye in the first place and I’d say back with a twinkle in me good un, it’s more of a case of how I didn’t catch her eye what did the trick.

The secrets of magic

Things started getting out of hand when the dog got run down in the street out side our window. She had watched it happen and when I got in from work she was standing there in tears. I held her for a while then took her to bed.

I’d first seen her in Stanley Park one afternoon when a bunch of us were sitting around with guitars, playing whatever came into our heads and generally fooling about. A number of kids had congregated to catch the mood and catch the sun, she sat away from the others under the shade of a tree; long thick hair the color of new pennies burning against almost white skin. She wore a green summer dress and red Converse.

I knew she was there but not really there until Gus came along in a daze, stood among us and announced Kurt Cobain was dead. For real! Shot himself in the head and was dead! I looked at her then, alone under that tree; tears running black from her eyeliner. I told myself she needed comfort only really it was me who needed her. So I went to her and held her. She sobbed into my white t-shirt.

We practically stayed like that for the rest of the day, talking about Kurt and singing his songs. Then somebody played ‘In Memory of a Free Festival’ on his boom box and after that the only thing to do was go home or someplace else.

She came back to my place.

We ate pizza and listened to Nirvana CD’s while she cried some more. She laughed when I told her she looked like a clown with her make-up running. We kissed before she left me knowing I would see her again.

Soon we were living together and making plans. Sex wasn’t that great but I put that down to anything I could think of except the truth. I wasn’t going anywhere near the truth back then.

After the dog I started to find more ways to make her cry so I could comfort her. During the day I would make up sad stories to tell her at night. And I would buy her eyeliner and mascara, the cheap stuff that ran, and encourage her to use it.
But I should never have told her about the clown.
.
They found her on the sidewalk, crumpled and broken, except for her face, which, undamaged by the 30 foot fall from the window, she’d made up like a clown’s. Bright red mouth – I’d never known her to wear lipstick - and thick black weep lines running from her eyes. She had cropped her hair. Gelled it so it stood up like a fright wig.

Just like Bepo the clown who at my 8th birthday party led me into the cellar to show me the secrets of magic.