Sunday (by Michael Lawton)

I have removed this while I ‘cannibalise’ it. Sorry, any question let me know.

ML

Into the Woods (by George Cutts)

I check my watch, 6.30am. Standing on the pavement, I pull the front door closed for the last time. The dead lock turns with a thud and I stuff the keys through the letterbox. It’s that milky early morning light I only ever see through sleepy eyes. The sun is appearing over the row of terraced houses opposite but the air is still chilly and the grass verges are damp with dew. I go to take off my navy wool jumper but can’t stomach any more faffing and leave it on.

I pick up the rucksack laid at my feet and swing it with some effort over my shoulder, contorting my back to slide in my right then left arm. It takes a moment to balance myself and I clip the support belt around my waist, hating the bulges it creates. I look through the window into the empty front room. An intermittent scrape runs across the bare boards, caused by dragging a heavy Victorian wardrobe across the floor. We couldn’t get the wardrobe up the stairs and it ended up sitting in the back garden, like a grand privy. The back wall of the front room is divided into two by a straight edge of dirt where the sofa used to be; where I would put my arm around her shoulders and tickle her ear whilst we watched television in the evening. The paint below shines white.

A reflection stares back at me in the window; recently clippered brown hair, squinting eyes and a dark jaw covered by 3 weeks’ worth of stubble, almost a beard. I close my eyes for a second, open them and set off. I stop at the end of the road and glance back at the house; bare ochre bricks, the bright red door re-painted last summer and the wicker hanging basket, red, purple and white flowers straggling over the side; they’ve not been watered for weeks. The ‘for sale/sold’ sign scars the house façade and I turn away, repeating a mantra in my head; ‘walk, walk, walk.’

I would normally turn right here towards the town, past the short row of eclectic shops; a funeral parlour, bakers and bathroom showroom, but I go left, in the direction of the sun. A girl in a green tunic is walking along the pavement towards me. She looks pretty from a distance. Pretending to be interested in the architecture of the houses opposite, I watch her out of the corner of my eye as she gets closer. We pass without making eye contact. She has an unformed teenage face. I hoist the rucksack up on my shoulders.

I pull out the small notepad from my jeans and flick to the middle pages, mentally running through the list against what I am carrying. I shouldn’t have packed so much, but I think I need it. Stopping at the post-box set into the wall, I pull 6 envelopes from my back pocket and check each name and address. Hesitating, I then bung them into the slit with the same force as wine bottles into an empty bottle bank. The letters, written last night but composed over the last few weeks are brief, mostly truthful. I resist the temptation to bang my head against the wall.

I carry on through semi-familiar streets usually seen from the drivers’ seat of a car. The roads get wider; the houses get bigger and have front gardens. After ten minutes, I regret not taking my jumper off. Sweat is forming in my armpits and down my back. Fuck it. I diagonally cross the empty park (not even a dog being walked), bisecting two football pitches. Dampness creeps across my brown leather boots. I come to the main road out of town and walk alongside the sparse morning traffic until I reach the 24 hour garage. At the entrance I drop the rucksack onto the floor next to the newspaper stand and pick up a copy of the Times. The warning sound of the door startles me; EET EEP. I go to the till and ask for a pouch of Drum tobacco. Realising that my wallet is in a side pocket of the rucksack, I tell the attendant and go to fetch it; EET EEP. I’ve never lost a wallet and never forget it, apart from on holiday. This is what happens when there is no routine to guide you.

I go back inside; EET EEP. The attendant has spotted the rucksack:

‘Where are you off to?’

For a second I don’t have an answer; ‘A festival.’

‘Oh right, hope the weather is good.’

‘Me too.’

He hands me the change.

‘Cheers.’

‘Thanks.’

EET EEP.

I take a swig of water and take off the jumper. My plain white t-shirt rides up, showing the roll of fat above my belt as the rucksack is heaved on once again. I cross the road waiting for two vans to pass and go up a narrow lane. The pavement abruptly ends but there is no traffic. On the left hand side there are large houses with sheltered gated driveways. The right hand side is wooded. I walk with my head down counting my footsteps. After around twenty minutes I take a right hand turn onto a stoned track with a padlocked metal five bar gate, a hand painted ‘Keep out’ sign held in place by faded red string.

I take off the rucksack and lug it over the gate. I climb over and follow the track. My breathing is getting heavy. I’m unfit. Too much time spent living on sandwiches. I look through the trees for movement. It is still. These aren’t woods passed through by joggers or gangs of children roaming around with recently acquired cigarette lighters and bottles of cider. There are no scrunched up carrier bags soiled with glue.

I turn left off the track onto a narrow overgrown path. It is barely even a path anymore. I walk into the woods identifying the trees; Scots pine and Douglas fir. Oak, ash, birch, hazel, sycamore and willow are all here. The path peters out. I carry on until I reach a familiar arrangement of birch trees. 7.47am. I’ve arrived.  I stand the rucksack up against one of the trees and retrieve a battered pouch of tobacco. I also get out a pair of grey gardening gloves which I stuff into my back pocket. Standing, I roll a cigarette and smoke, planning what to do next.

The floor is covered in plants of various sizes, branches and leaf litter. I put on the gloves and clear a small area, pulling up the most intrusive straggling brambles and stamping down the remaining vegetation. I unclip the tent from the rucksack, unpack it and quickly erect the basic structure. The pegs slide into the moist earth and I tighten the guide ropes. The small blue igloo shaped tent sits incongruously in the woods. Enough room to lie down at night or to sit crossed legged in the doorway. I’ve not thought about you for twenty minutes now.

I’ve thought about this for the last eleven weeks. Since you didn’t come home and I got the phone call. 6 weeks ago, I called the number on the website and now I’m the owner of 3 ½ acres of woodland, bought for £20k, from the profit of selling the house. The land was cheap, it has  little or no commercial value and there would never be permission to build on it. The surrounding wood is maintained but the area is quiet.

It is not yet 10am. I start unpacking. Most things end up in the tent for now to make sure they don’t get wet.

Carrying the fold-up spade and a toilet roll, I walk 100 steps away from the camp and reach a clump of bushes. I dig a hole, the size of a bucket, with some difficulty through the chalky earth. I was hoping not to have to do this so soon. I look around to vainly check there is no one watching me and pull down my trousers. I squat over the hole and laugh. After, I throw some earth into the hole and wipe my hands with anti-bacterial gel.

I spend the afternoon walking around the woods getting familiar with my new surroundings and collecting firewood. I go back to the camp and build a fire. A dinner of baked beans and sausages eaten hot from the tin. Already I crave bread. I need to lose weight anyway. I sit by the fire swigging on a bottle of rum, smoking, watching the flames and listening. ‘What am I doing?’

The firewood runs out. The trees stand black against the greying sky. Looking up, silhouetted leaves dance against the greying sky. The floor is black around me and it’s no use looking for more firewood. I take a final swig of rum. Time for bed. I stand a little way from the dying fire facing away from the camp, convinced that at any moment something will come out of the dark. ‘Fuckitfuckitfuckitidon’tgiveashit’. Nothing happens, just a steady thrum on the earth.

I get into the tent, gathering around the things that reassure me. Spotlighting each with the small torch; Swiss army knife, large knife, and dead mobile phone. £1K cash is spread throughout my belongings, but that is less important. I take off my shoes and jeans and jumper, and climb into the sleeping bag. I turn off the torch. Everything is black. I lay awake for a long time, listening to the wind through the trees, paranoid thoughts of attack in my mind, in spite of the numbing rum. The occasional snap sends a wave of heat through my body, followed by an outbreak of cold sweat. I don’t hear any animals. It’s not that different from being in the empty house. There are less ghosts here but the memories still come; your 27^th birthday at Alton Towers, when we met at a friends’ birthday; sat on a beach under scorching sun in Turkey. ‘I fucking miss you so much.’ Curled up on my side I cry jerkily into my chest, supressing the sobs. I concentrate on bringing my breathing under control and lie there for a long time.

I open my eyes, it is no longer black. I roll over, 5.23am. I try to go back to sleep; rolling from side to side, until i next check the clock 6.17am. I sit up in the sleeping bag, reluctant to leave its warmth, and unzip the tent. The cold air is immediately sucked in. The apprehension of the night has gone. The wood is still, full of light and fresh. I tune into the sound of birds. This time yesterday I was locking the front door.

Using the gas stove I boil the kettle, roll a cigarette and make a black coffee. I take out the notebook and spend twenty minutes writing down everything that has happened over the last twenty four hours.

_________________________________________________________________________

 

‘Alright.’

‘Alright.’

They shake hands, and he is pulled into an embrace. Reluctant tears are running down the cheeks of both men.

The newcomer chokes a stupid question: ‘This is where you’ve been?’

He doesn’t answer. They part and he sits down on the tree trunk. The interloper sits down next to him.

‘You’ve been here for two months? You look different, you’re not as fat. The beard looks daft. Have you cut your own hair?’

‘Yep. So does yours, you’re tanned.’

‘Just got back from Brittany, we thought you might be there.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve been looking for you since we got the letters.’

‘I told you I was going away.’

‘We rang the FCO after a few days and they knew nothing about you.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘By accident, the solicitor’s secretary saw Janey in the pub and asked about the woods.’

The blackened kettle puffs and whistles.

‘Brew?’

‘OK, what is it?’

‘Coffee. I’ve not been living on berries and nettle tea.’

‘Mum’s been out of her mind.’

‘I don’t have milk, except for special occasions. Sugar, rum?’

‘No thanks.’

The visitor takes in the camp. Silence. He hands over the coffee in a cup stained brown and adds a tot of rum to his own.

‘Go on then.’

He dribbles the rum into the outstretched mug.

‘Say ‘when.’

‘When.’

‘Christ, your fingers are dirty.’

They both laugh, blowing into their mugs.

‘What have you been doing?

‘Walking around collecting firewood mainly.’

‘Shelter looks good. I didn’t see it for ages. It was only the smoke that made me think I wasn’t being stupid looking for you in the woods.’

‘I should have used gas.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ They smile.

‘What’s it been like, what have you been doing?’

‘Alright. Once you get used to the dark. The food’s crap.’

‘I can tell.’

‘I tried to keep a diary.’

‘How long did it last?’

‘One day.’

Silence. They stare at the dying fire.

‘England whitewashed Australia.’

‘I know, I’ve got a radio. Good, wasn’t it’?’

‘I went to the Oval with work.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘People miss you, you know? Couldn’t you have told us?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come back with me. Have a bath, you stink and we’ll get fish and chips. Have a beer. Stay with us.’

‘Hmmm’.

‘You can’t stay here forever. You’ll fucking freeze to death.’

‘I will come back.’

‘When? You’re as stubborn as ever then, what if I tell you to stay, will you come back then, I don’t know how she put up with you for fucks’ sake.’

‘Piss off.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I miss her so fucking much.’

‘I know.’

‘I don’t know what to do now she’s gone.’

‘She wouldn’t want…’

‘Don’t.’ 

They sit in silence drinking the coffee.

‘Is there anything I can bring? I’ll come back tomorrow.’

‘No, I’m fine; I have everything, thanks.’

‘I’m still coming back’.

There is no malice in either voice now. Neither wants to argue. They get up and embrace (‘Christ, you’re skinny.’) saying goodbye.

He watches his brother walk through the woods.

‘WAIT UP'

He grabs his jumper, zips up the tent, and begins the walk back.

 

Into the Woods is part of a larger work in progress.

 

I Miss The North (by Michael Lawton)

‘I miss the North,’ she thought.

 

‘I miss the North,’ she thought as she was cleaning the espresso machine the pub had bought during its refit. She saw her face, frowning with exertion as she wiped the milk frother, distorted in the metal of the appliance which with its dials and handles reminded her of a rudimentary time machine. The pubs she had grown up in hadn’t had espresso machines. The pubs that she’d grown up in, where she’s met Tony, 16 years ago. They were jukebox-places, places you were loud in to show you were pissed off with the world, not loud because everybody else was. The pubs that she’d grown up in, where she’d got her first job, crisps-kicked-across-the-floor-places. She smiled at the cycles of life; she was back behind the bar. 

She was singing to herself as she cleaned, she had emptied the fridges of their bottles and was wiping the shelves. She was listening to the Richard Hawley album Lowedges. It was a present from one her colleagues; Mark.

“He’s one of yours isn’t he?” He’d said referring to the fact Richard Hawley like her was from Sheffield. His slight surliness not hiding that he clearly had a thing for her, he’d bought her the CD after all, he didn’t own it himself; he’d just downloaded onto his IPod. He’d tried to explain the process to her, to convince her she should buy an MP3 player. 

“I’m 34 and a northerner Mark, it doesn’t mean I’m thick. Don’t patronise me. I’ve got other things to spend my money on, not least; rent.’

She’d let him seduce her though. She liked him and she was lonely. She was living in ‘shared accommodation’ for the first time in her life, the Victorian properties with sloping floors and skewiff window ledges. She lived with other ‘young professionals’ a term that’d made her bark with laughter when she’d heard it. She didn’t see much of her flatmates and they didn’t seem to spend much time with each other. She was close to one girl, Lucille, a postgraduate student from South America who was close to her age.

 

“Why did you move to London?”

 

She’d whistled softly, thinking of her reply.

 

“That’s a big question; I guess I’ve always wanted to see it. To live somewhere different and well to get away from my life, it was bringing me down in Sheffield.”

She’d confided in Lucille up to a point, but a complete explanation would mean getting her own head around it and she found that difficult to think about.  Where would she start, meeting Tony in the pub was where her life started. Or her life as it was anyway. He chatted her up, ‘coppers have to be good at talking,’ he’d said. They’d dated for a year then married. She’d got pregnant, given birth to Hayley, raised her, something had gone wrong. They’d separated and she’d moved / got kicked out: A life in a paragraph.

 

But she missed the North. Missed the friendliness of the café she’d go to. The music made her think of parks. Of taking Hayley to the park when she was little, the winter air heavy in the park as she pushed Hayley on the swings. Do I miss the North, or do I just miss my youth she wondered. What youth? Or what twenties? She wanted the amorphousness of the twenties of her colleagues. Twenties of nothing save gathering experiences; as Mark had it:

 

‘I love your stretch marks; lines of experience and life.’

 

‘Shut up you soft git, stop being so pretentious,’

 

Was how she replied. But she liked being with him, immersed in his life. He was a DJ as were half the people his age she’d met in London. There was nine years between them. All of it showing in her mind.

 

She’d tried to find office work in London. She’d gone to a temping agency, but had walked out. She didn’t like the women there. The pink cowboy hats in their in-trays, ready for the forced abandonment of a Friday night. She was bored of that. She seen a sign in the window of her local and applied there. And here she was. 

The CD had repeated, track three was playing…“All my love’s too late…” She’d scream this as she was lying on her bed, damp after a shower, drying in the air. “All my love’s too late…” She’d bawl this thinking about Hayley her daughter who had chosen to stay with her father.

Hayley had shown no inclination to visit her. Not even to go shopping. ‘I can go to Meadowhall mum.’ But every text message lifted her, to know Hayley was thinking of her.

 

She didn’t know what she was going to do. She knew she had to make a decision sooner or late, point her life in some direction and head that way but which way, she was giving herself time to do nothing. 

She turned to greet the man who’d entered, a newspaper under his arm, she could tell he’d knocked off early, as he was smiling gently at having the pub to himself, he’d a start on the city that evening.

“Yes luv?”

Transparency: A Future Without Sunday Drivers (by Gene George Earle)

Ways of Looking

A question no-one really asks is what happened to transparent casings for computerized objects. I recall as a child peering with fascination at chips and motherboards inside old VCRs and PCs, bewildered by how impossible it seemed that an abstract world of unnatural green and sharp solderings could make the tapes spin, CD’s play, or Doom beasts explode. What the original manufacturers had in mind is anyone’s guess, having had what seems a very brief lifespan somewhere in the late eighties and early nineties, yet subsequently falling into ‘failed design gimmick’ obscurity thereafter. Some techno-acculturated minds might procure the image of the first Apple computers that tried their hand at the ‘transparency’ quip on a commercial scale, disappointingly doing it only in a referent way that manufactured semi-transparent blue and orange cases and keyboards which in sum, never amounted sadly to much other than curvy but dirty looking fish tanks. And though it might surface here or there every now and again, its modern manifestations are predominantly squeezed out along a miserable production line of a vastly inferior objects, failing usually to poke its existence above the mere gimmicks and other ‘retro’ inanities like plastic vomit, Furbies, Tamagotchis and heart-shaped frying pans. Even today it seems astonishing that there hasn’t been one mobile phone range with this particular quality incorporated in its design, a commodity as protean as it comes. There’s something strange going on when the ‘transparency’ of objects are largely absent from the present but wholly part of some of our speculative futures, making notable cameos namely in the literature of cyberpunk (it’s heyday -by no accident- being in the eighties). But its realized relics remain few; all I have salvaged from this fuzzy phase of product design is a bedside lamp and an old Gameboy, things which –looking simultaneously at and through them now- casts once again the power of wonder over the inner child, offering the hidden interior life of an electrical good up to the eyes in a way that emulates the most basic unit of advertising; the shop display.

 

The World As A Shop Display

For practical reasons no-one asks why glass wasn’t used -though as a thought experiment computers glazed in glass doesn’t seem completely inconceivable-, however on the surface of it, the temperament of transparency (or its lack) would seem rather at odds with much of what today is perceived to be embedded in ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’, in a era where we have great hopes for transparency. It for one it enjoys regular outings in political rhetoric, used as reprimands in expense scandals, birthing initiatives such as the Publish what You Pay Campaign, designed for mining and oil companies in the third world (a mention should go to Gordon Brown’s voluntary ‘Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’, a less successful programme with an eye on the same aim) and institutions as far ranging (or near, as the case me be) as police and newspapers/journalism. But as on the side of the built world too, these are things relate more specifically to a balance of power; its no accident that glass is today one of the most loved materials in city architecture -most notably it follows financial or business districts, where towering glass houses exude a symbolic transparency of an ideological ‘all seeing’ office community-. In fact in the context of global capital, it’s truly a material for the future. Some of these buildings do the exact opposite and play with their own invisibility (employing mirrored or one way glass for example as an alternative), deflecting the would-be gazes of pedestrians into a hall of mirrors tour of themselves, dipping as if in and out of dreams in front of shop displays¹. But big transparent glassy offices operate differently by operating paradoxically; despite offering the entire interior visually to us, the spectacle is there not to be truly looked in but at. It may sound like a confusing window, but the principle is familiar to any cinemagoer perennially exposed to the illusory visual experience of fusing the flat moving image with depth, mistaking the screen for a world. These ways of seeing in visual shorthand’s are probably inherited from the usual suspects (many adding cynically that the world is becoming one big advert) and have become practically second nature to the well-initiated city dweller who, walking through the city in the late afternoon, somehow intuitively catches the mysterious broadcast left by the intentioned architects; that work needs to be visualised.  Whether this process is anxiety driven, symptomatic of a specific ideology, or simply a third wave unimaginative response to a more generalizable trend is an open question. However what can be accounted for is that the expression of work in this way has meant turning our physical trajectories through such buildings into virtual narratives and allegorical energy flows, things which in Tati’s ‘Playtime’ (perhaps the most instructive exemplar to date) describes the design of the modern office as the ultimate panopticon; and which much more radically also proposes that for the ‘civilized’ worker/inhabitant of these spaces, that they are actors on an penultimate stage².

Sunday Drivers

 

Yet despite its shortcomings, transparency -limited to objects- seems entirely plausible as a fixture in our modern world, operating if it must, like buildings, on an almost secondary level of looking. Perhaps its because most of us have become (to use a stubborn term of George Friedmann’s) Sunday Drivers. Whilst Friedmann meant it as a way of describing people who have never opened their car bonnets (this was the fifties after all) and who had no idea of what was under their hoods, contemporaneously the notion spreads to entire swathes of our technologically governed lives. As gadgetry and technical machinery have proliferated, the mythologies and morphology that mask and conceal the inner lives and function have moved correspondingly, like complimentary steps in a dance. This in a sense constitutes the beginning of a fashion. The very existence of such forms necessarily hinge on the need for obscuring the integral mechanisms or components at the very point when it has become apparent that our language and vocabulary for describing the multiplicity of objects and their minute components have stagnated. Furthermore, language has been left behind by the sheer velocity of competitive markets perpetually driven by nuanced innovations, outstripping the ability to name and comprehend items truly fast enough.³

 

Anxious Luddites, the Cyberpunks Are Waiting…

 

The cyberpunks for example, know what to call that-thing-that-does-that-thing, everyone who doesn’t is either vulnerable or extinct. The protagonists in these novels are nearly always the antithesis of Sunday Drivers (implying nearly always in them that those who don’t are extremely rich and live sheltered lives -usually in high orbit-, or dead) when it comes to computerized technology, knowing how to hack, physically make, manipulate, and customize from scrap, ensures better survival; the old order of automated machinery and technology implies ignorance. Not only that, it would seem futuristically, it implies a weak disposition; for the smooth casings that made early Mac laptops the white gold, are they say, for the benefit of the psychological comfort of those who can’t bear ugly inner truth; structures are violent. Perhaps it means that transparency will never make a true comeback until earthly conditions get more apocalyptic, and our relationships to our objects are determined less by the manufacturers, who always have a consumer in mind. Maybe the eighties was a blip on the radar of time for transparency, but fictionally its heart seems closer to the Cold War. Some popular dystopian visions stem precisely from allowing the luddite’s classic anxieties to have authority over the landscape, who looking at much of our alarm clocks, TVs, microwaves and vacuum cleaners know that apart from their immediate use value, each is a terrifying testimony to a void of knowledge. It is perhaps this mild ambience of precariousness that in daily living disturbs, and which to add to the anxiety, implies we no longer know how to even fix things. The things that are now taking over more and more space in the house, the garage, the bottom of the wardrobes, sometimes kept there for years, some noisy (so we have to work round it, never putting it on before bed) some always solidly but silently at work, have in many cases become like a familiar and bizarre cast of sitcom characters with no or limited life insurance. The modern day user is like an imbecilic doctor in relation to them, not knowing how to diagnose, and when it comes to surgery, will lose patient after patient. Here is where our inner luddite feels them crushing him with their ontological weight. So for now we’re content with enamel white elliptical laptops, silver fridges and things that look ready for space travel, their forms always steeped in the formal mystiques of our present time (forgetting hubristically that we are living in fashions, and that they too, when the structure of production alters, will look –or be resurrected- again and again with a new body). For functioning is not merely the function of things, but also their mystery.

 

Notes

¹ Around a recent roundtable discussion concerning urban planning, it became clear that there was real ambivalence towards the modern phenomenon of seeing oneself multiplied into the surrounding architecture, the positive attitude akin almost to a ‘modern take’ on the Narcissus’s myth, the other akin to the fabled tribesmen who upon smiling to a camera and seeing Polaroid’s of themselves, thought that a their souls were being stolen.  

²One of the most haunting signifiers of this relationship between work, transparency, and the built world exists in the quintessentially modern phenomenon of lights being left on in office blocks, even when the normal working day has quite clearly ended. Putting aside the fact that our working hours have stretched into a disorientated global rhythm, from a pious (and sensible) perspective, it’s a waste of electricity, one which the offending companies should be taken to task for. Simultaneously however its symbolic function feels like a solemn visual hymn, or a chord that drones from the aggregate of each individual lit office culminating into a sheer symphony of the city. It somehow seems indispensible (paranormal even, considering how collectively well co-ordinated the entire affair has been between buildings and employees who have never met each other). From a psychoanalytical perspective, perhaps it expresses or enounces the modern anxiety of being alone in a place where we are never able to be alone (much like the functional by-product of muzak), or perhaps it’s a grand conspiracy to communicate with objects, donning materiality with spirituality. Either way, we let the messenger live. 

³ Oddly enough this seems like a reversal or parable of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, who must have had several very frustrating episodes trying to invent new names for things; not least having been later expelled from the garden and forced to start again in the fallows. Regardless, in studying our own use of language in relation to increasingly more computerized technologies, it has become evident objects for us today are less ‘natural’ in essence but more biological than ever; the supreme examples being the systems theory inspired automated environments and regulatory ecosystems that both HAL and GERTY preside over.  

Her Eyes Reflecting Everything (by Lewis Acott)

Photograph by Margaret Durow

Beaver looked at me as if I had a hole in my chest. “You opened it the wrong way.” He spoke. He spoke? He’d been sitting opposite playing with his lips for half an hour. “What the hell Beaver?” I said. He said, “You opened your crisps upside down. That’s unlucky.” I said “good”. Playground lies. After a few minutes I said “go back to school Beaver.” I was thinking it wasn’t too late for a come-back. He didn’t respond. He was completing a Sudoku, it looked disorderly. I offered him a crisp, he hesitated and then he said shook his head.

I pretended I didn’t care about this superstition. But I thought about it all day. I kept the crisp bag with me rustling in my coat pocket as if disposing of it would make the situation worse. Later I opened it out the other way too. It made me feel better. It was a clever thing to do.

                                                                                   ***

After work I felt more lucky than not. I went to visit Carl with Mum and Suzie. I sat on the back seat of the car on the way there. Robbie Williams was playing on the radio and Suzie tapped her shoes together. “Let me entertain you....” We were letting him entertain us. Carl was at a friend’s, in a country house. The friends were not there with him, just him and his girlfriend and a black cat that was like a tiny panther. We arrived and drove up a gravel drive-way, and I felt like Inspector Morse.

The house was one you walk around slowly, as if looking through the pages of a magazine, it was spacious and everything was made of real wood. The bath had lions feet. The house sat snugly on two acres of chlorophyll with tall trees standing like monoliths. There was a small woodland further down near the back. There were two Mongolian yurts, one larger than the other. Both hidden behind a queue of small trees and foliage, their thick generous shadows folding over the sides and over the tops of the yurts. Two wooden steps led to each of the tiny doors - big enough for no-one it seemed. A large vegetable patch was filled with kale and large malformed tomatoes, rocket, lettuce, and other leaves I didn’t know. There were onions and garlic growing, and a neat row of potatoes. We picked the kale, and tomatoes and rocket, and used it in the dinner we had that night. We all helped, but Carl cooked. At the table we tried to remember how to draw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, taking turns drawing ugly burger-headed monsters on scraps of paper.

In the evening after the meal we went into the woods, pushed logs together and built a fire to sit around. The night folded us up in an ambience of hazy intimacy. As we talked I felt a light tap on my shoulder as if a tiny man wanted my attention, and I touched the spot to see if borrowers were indeed real. My hand came away warm and messy from an owl’s well-aimed crap (dead mice, shrews... I thought. It was practically still screaming...) that was now slowly dripping down my mums work fleece which I was wearing. I let out a small cry and pointed the torch I had in my hand at it pathetically. And everyone laughed, and talked quickly at the same time... “It’s lucky!” “Eurgh...” “That’s my work fleece!”.

I walked back to the house then with the torch in one hand, and my poo hand held out in front of me. The torch was a small toy torch, which had some cartoon cars on the side, and which made it only slightly better than walking in the dark. I walked quickly towards the dark bulk of the house. Through the back door I was in the kitchen, and I took some time cleaning my mum’s fleece and washing my hand. It wasn’t as bad as I thought and I curiously didn’t mind. Though it smelt fusty. The cat purred at my ankles and then slinked off outside. The lucky bird poo reminded me of the bag of crisps earlier, and I couldn’t work out whether I was lucky or what now but it didn’t matter. I put the fleece back on and walked out back to the fire. And they were all smiling at me, sitting in a circle, their faces warmly lit up and rosy.

When we put out the fire and started walking back to the house I said I wanted to sleep in the yurt. So everyone went around and gathered blankets inside because it was by now cold. In no time at all the bed was ready and looked like an over-sized vibrant birds nest. And then we were sipping tea inside, in the kitchen. We talked drowsily and happily. And after some time we said goodnight; Ben slept on the floor in the lounge, and everyone else had beds around the house. I went around with my mum and helped tuck everyone in and then lastly she went to bed. I walked downstairs and Carl had put the kettle back on.

Carl and I went outside with our cups filled again with tea and sat on our knees in the bigger yurt. The cat came in later and curled up on the bed and slept, sometimes silently lifting her head to listen. Her eyes reflecting everything. We drew pictures as we talked. One drawing was a spiral, with two smiling snails leading off of it, their trails making up the spiral behind them. Arrows pointed two separate ways from one of the snails. One way pointed to two children, their outlines drawn lightly. The other was to an ellipsis.

Carl told me smoothly he thought human spirits would be able to inhabit animals. I said “you’re a piece of gold.” But I believed him. He convinced me that Nanny could be there with us, in the cat, and when he wasn’t looking I looked in the cats eyes to try and see a sign that this was true. There was no sign. A long time after Carl said goodnight and I heard him walk away back up the garden with that toy torch.

I looked at the cat and willed her to stay with me. I curled my body around hers, where it was, and shifted carefully under the blankets, awkwardly half covered. I lay awake for a long time with fuzzy thoughts that didn’t lie down with me. At some point I fell asleep, it must have been for an hour or less, as I woke and it was still as dark as it could be and still cold. I moved over onto my back, pulling the blankets with the cat over me, so it was curled up on top of my chest. She looked up briefly chewing the air, and then went back to sleep. And I fell asleep again. I woke at sunrise, as the cat stretched and yawned and jumped off my belly. It sat poised for a moment, and then walked away, out a small hole next to the door. The morning was cold but it felt new, and it felt good. I rubbed my arms and stood up, aching slightly. I stuffed a pillow up the front of my mums fleece, which I was still wearing, as a last minute maneuver against the cold. Then I stepped out the small door of the yurt and out into the open.

Just beyond the front wooden step was a dead mouse, flattening a tiny portion of grass. It’s delicate body effortlessly dead. It made death look easy. No wounds or blood, no mess. I thought it could be my breakfast from the cat. I felt humbled, and grateful. I left it where it was.

Inspired by the cats’ early enthusiasm, I went exploring, treading slowly around a tall pile of wood. Behind this I found a fence, and a small paved path running off into thick woodland. It was overgrown, and the path collapsed in places. I followed it and came out eventually into a small clearing, the far side ending with another small fence. Beyond this was an infinity of fog. It was crisp and silent. The sky was a purpley red. A non-colour. A colour I couldn’t describe. A hill stood barely visible behind the fog, standing on its own like an animal, and I’m sure I could see it breathing. For a long time I stood there, wordlessly.

I came back the same way, along the broken path. I started treading again around the pile of wood. But I saw something grey and white and large in between all the leaves at my side and so I kneeled down then and had a look. Half buried in fallen leaves was an old statue of a heron, lichen on its concrete wings and beak. So I crawled forwards, under the boughs of this thick tree and I grabbed hold of the heron’s thin legs, dragging it out whilst crawling backwards. When I had it out it was half my size. I carried it with me out beyond the yurt, and stood it up in a small border bush, and patted it lightly on the head. Then I walked up the grass to the house. I looked back and from far away it looked real.

I could see my mum in the kitchen as I approached, and then opened the back door. She had the radio on quietly, a barely audible murmur, so as not to wake anyone up. She was washing up last night’s dishes. The kettle was boiling behind her. She looked up as I walked in and smiled, while her hands continued to wash up without her.