Renmark - Plastic (by Jon Mann)

Renmark

Rosa sits opposite me at the table, facing away - side-saddle on the short bench, her dark curls falling one way, just one shoulder favoured with the weight of her hair. The swaying, the rising and fall, mirror the curves of her head, its elegant, youthful, lilting moves. She gazes absentmindedly at Clive in his cot to her side. I flick the paper to contrive a movement of her head towards something else, but it stays put, and rests in free-fall. I drop my eyes back to the paper, not part of her now. A few blocks of text hover on the page, glazed, and lay undisturbed, a few more, then I stop and look up again. Her head is down now, in that curiously overt, introspective way - she has left her daydream and wants to be seen to be daydreaming now - I know the difference, I am cunning this way. I glance at the boy as he dozes indifferently and decide it would be good to have her eyes away.

“They say he may be Nordic... His features...”

She looks up and seems pleased this was directed her way. A child still - I can see the wall through her rib-cage.

“The Somerton man. Norwegian, they say”

I knew a Norwegian once, or at least a Norwegian looking one, and it seems like him, it must be him. He was a soldier, and by my side or thereabouts in those wet, hot lands. I remember him sweat like us, and fall the same way we fell, be a loving home to those piercing, siren swarms. His white Caucasian neck ageing quick with the red-brown burn, thickening because it needed to, a wet ham joint ready for its turn, ready to go. Well, weren’t we all! ...and did I see him lying there, apart? No, because he dressed up nice and felt like lying down, and that spot on the beach is far away from our green and beautiful, humid surrounds, where we tried to fight so well.

“Have you seen the photo? ...Though you may be better off not... I think I know him”

From Renmark. It was green and beautiful there, the paradised fields of fruit, row on row. God’s hand is in this work, the orchardist knows - his warm damp land and soil, and the abused river at the centre of it all. The Norwegian was there too - I'll recall his name in time. We worked parallel lines, at the same rate. There are never-ending views in this country, some make the head bow or force sight away, some mean you’ll not last long if you can't escape, but, caught alone, the repeated, regular lanes of that place - so much good! - are piled so high and wide that the good itself is pushed away. No horizon line, the same limitless lanes each way and the uneventful sky, atom dust or galaxy-high - your notched edges and wrong insult this rigid, scaleless trap. Get back to the Norwegian and his centre-parted hair, keep your eyes on his face through the gaps in the leaves and the sweet air.

He was at Nadda too, that scrub maze - he found me there, after my afternoon nap, and I'm grateful for this. I was annoyed at first, because I liked it there, it was warm and comfortable, and a dream of clear, mountainous air was broken by his Scandinavian face, his recognisable call, his gentle touch on my shoulder and the crisp, blistered skin layer.

“Wake up now, it's the best thing to do”

“It's not too late for food and... Your axe is still with you I see! Let's get back shall we”

I'll do the same, return the favour, touch him gently on the shoulder to avoid a scare and repay his words of kindness over so many a year. Karl... Karl! Let's get back shall we? Ah yes, that's his name, I'm sure I'm right. Karl Gudmonsson is the one lying down, this good friend of mine - we fought in tropical and desert climes, saved eachother’s lives more than once before and walked green, god-favoured lanes in Renmark even before the war. I must see him quickly, and show the truth - I think some people, for a reason I cannot know, are saying he is from some other foreign land, but this can't be true, for the man is Karl, he is not from Wales or even England, that confusing place! An Englishman named Carl with a K - no it cannot be. I must visit him in his shirt and tie and closed eyes... tensing though, somehow, as if he is hanging upside down - maybe they did, for he was never as puffed up as that, not holding his breath and waiting to die.

“I'll take the bus down the coast, down Military Road... Although... I could wake early on and walk - it can only be two hours or so...”

I become agitated and stand up quickly, move to the windows and crane my neck to the side to peer through the narrowed frame. I can see the sea from here. I catch Roma looking at me, and I shift my eyes but keep my face on the sea. Both her tiny pale hands are on the table, clasped - her index finger distractedly flicks the webbing of its twin - what can she be worried about that silly girl? She doesn't say a thing! I reply with the same, simple nothings. She traps me in this - my unthinking agitations have changed, through her absent, silent gaze, to an awkward pause - I'm stuck with the end motions of their stuttering forms. I stay by the window to show that I'm formulating a plan, when I know I have one anyway - I'll be up early, claiming a trek, then go somewhere safely far and take the bus to Somerton Town. That way I'll have time to walk around, sit in the spot where he laid down, remember the long orchard shade and the wandering shadows that formed on our arms. My deception pleases me and I play at being calm - I smile at the morning light, look back to her and change the subject to something unattached. Yes, I'll visit him once more, cool and calm.

--

I follow the man four paces behind, trying not to match step. His shoulders drop to the left, just so, as if ducking under a shelf - low, flat strides he floated on, seemingly trying to hold his eyes at a fixed height. The hips and below were all that moved, even the arms in tow were unusually still - weakly interacting halves of composite craft! His split form wound down the dark and lime green hall, the sparsely placed lights showing barely anything at all, save the old wooded panels like splintered bark, soon ready to fall. A sight to see, maybe - a dust cloud in this forlorn grid and its unmoving dead air would be like a frozen, small war in hallway lights, photographic time transferred to life.

The more I see the back of this man, the more I have to fight his style of walk, I hold my shoulders straight just in case and bounce high, low, high, to show that I'm not. The more I think of it, the more I'm enjoying this walk - there's not much of it, of course, and we’re heading for a frozen corpse, but the clean and dull decay of this place and my knowledge of a secret thing to make me the one who solved it right is enough. These are the times when I feel less dead myself, when I can, I think, switch between layers and peek out, see the view around and about - from darkened cell to windowed room, with a view to roll up and eat just out of grasp.

“This way please. Watch the step”

His uniform is ragged and he seemed annoyed, but my army pension keeps him polite. He said as I arrived I'm the one hundred and fifty-first one - one hundred and fifty truthless before the truthful one! I understood his weary eyes, I have those eyes too - I showed him my card and he raised them to mine, placed both tan hands flat on the page and dropped his brow, then back up - an almost imperceptible forward dip of the skull. Two tours. I'm sorry to take your time, I say - he looks back to the form.

“The paper mentions us again today, mentions the lady we had in yesterday. You'll forgive me for earlier? It's becoming quite strange”

I gesture it's nothing, ask the lady’s name - he swivels the paper a neat turn, shifts it my way - Thompson? Funny, the man you have there is Thompsen, you have my word...

He reaches for the door - a different one now, metal I think, with a curved chrome handle I've seen before. It's a windowless thing - I suppose it has to be - and there are two distinct clunks as the handle is pulled up. A slide and a snap, then a weightier fall of some mechanism probably sat in the wall - come in! it seems to say, I have something for you. The words pass me by and head back up to where we’ve been - I turn around to catch them move but all I see are the spheres of evenly spaced lime green, not quite touching, interrupting the straight hall with their swollen and diffuse forms. The man stands calm by the door, handle poised, with a look that equates to mine in his shaded eyes. I stand too, hold his patient gaze, and it seems as though we could stay this way forever - there is wisdom in this wait, I'm sure there is wisdom in silence and nothing while we wait.

I think I know now what I'll see. It peaks around the corner at me, from a distant place. I can't quite make it out but I know it's there. It's the haze at the far line of those green lanes. The indeterminate edge of those Arab sand plains - it calls me then as now and I pause before I move, but I know that I will keep going on. The door fans out as I pass through and the cold air is like a thick layer scared to leave, I feel it move from my leading leg to the back of my head. It's a soothing, cool balm on my face, but it soon moves my mind to realise that I'm home again - this is the inevitable way, the warm is not even real... not real at all. The cold swallows my all, and I feel a hole open up in my forehead - the skin and bone peel back fine and dry, there is no bleeding in this room. The fat organ exposed recoils at first from the fluorescent light but soon adjusts and aims its narrow beam at the white cloth in the near-centre of the room, draped over curious peaks of toe and belly and head - as it hangs still on the edge, the arm is suggested for a tiny part of its length. My forehead hole lets in the rigid, freezing air, and the pink brain starts to struggle, and tremble away - it knows its path though. The man mumbles something - this way? but the increasing shudders make my ears dull and fade. It knows its path and I follow slow, arcing towards the peaked sheet and its glowing shape.

The man curves around the opposite way and meets me at the flat metal table where my friend lays, it's funny, I think, that they found him this way - politely preparing himself for this room and the day I would come and see him, and give them his name. It's a nice thing to do, to know the rigour coming and be as thoughtful as you, to be aware of how you'll look as a corpse, to think things through. I smile an endearing smile his way, aim it at the face and its draped, white shade - my brain through its window of peeled skull case looks intently as well but the unease and increasing vibration of its pink flesh alarms, it shakes loose a bitter, metal taste that filters slowly through my nose and throat like metal filing dust. The spit thickens and seals my tongue slow with a gluey and useless clicking paste, but this stupid face stays set in the previous shape. They seem to exist in different states and I look at them both in astonishment - what this makes for the man to see must be a sight and he seems to be thinking that something isn't right - motions the corner of cloth he has raised back to the clear metal table edge and makes to step back round to the door, his eyes fixed on mine. I manage to raise a hand and force the features of my split face to reform calm. I think I say I'm fine but the gummy air in my ears and around makes only my heartbeat and sick stomach loud - they both work fierce to an awful time and heat up my insides, bring the temperature driving up and sweat to my broken brow. It sits and freezes in its place, plasma soup in a shell of ice. The open brain makes its nauseous signal louder and louder now, it seems, shines its straight beam to the covered face of Karl... Karl Thompsen in his polite sleep. The man, now back facing me, moves his mouth to shape something I cannot know, but it seems from his moves and eyes that he is asking me if I'm alright, or do I want to carry on or something along those lines. I nod, and quickly withdraw the full move, trying not to let my brain fall out, and he reaches for the cover again - the corner by the head - he sends a final look in a questioning way and as I agree he adds a hand and pulls the sheet down. The beam snaps off and the view reframes.

Oh grace no. A fragment passes and with a click my gluey tongue is wet again, too wet, the spit starts to pool under it, a pool of oily sick warning, and I gulp it back - no time to breathe. I see a thin grey mask of face shape but no face is there, heat and cold co-exist, but at the place where they meet... my forehead snaps shut with an icy crack, I feel my eyelids twitch as it does and look to the man to check this is real, but he doesn't move at all - the lights start to dip low from the edge of the room to the faceless grey and as they do, the mask starts to slip and fall. The cold is my home and I'm being shown the way back there. So slowly though... I can't take this withering, crushing pace, the dark gets ever close and I worry that it will end and I'll be left in the dark and cold with... The mask drops to the floor, quiet and slow, and I'm clear about it all now. I feel sleepy, shut my eyes and go.

Renmark - Plastic is part of a larger work in progress.

Workplace Fire Safety (by Matthew Breen)

 

As the fire safety video entered its thirty-ninth minute, Brian started to reassess the meeting room they’d been in all day. It had a high corniced ceiling, walls a pale buff colour, and plenty of space all round for the purposes of the training session. Brian thought about where the room was, in a converted townhouse, on a street in the middle of Spitalfields. Altogether it was much less drab than he’d thought it would be, which led him on to their facilitator.

The facilitator was a flash and bright young man called Wyn, W-y-n, which Brian knew to be spelt so as it had appeared in the first slide of the morning’s presentation. Wyn: he’d typed it out in big purple Comic Sans for their benefit. Brian initially guessed he’d done this just to deal with any doubt or indeed merriment they might have harboured on the peculiarities of his name, but at lunchtime, as Brian had sat in the sunshine, he had realised that it was Wyn’s way of poking fun at the fact that everyone went into these training days expecting them to be horrendously corporate and dull. In Wyn’s hands, the day’s programme had become this weird, self-loathing thing. When going through his flipchart of statistics, Wyn forewarned that this was the part where he’d bombard them with meaningless facts and figures; and when bulletpointing the fire evacuation procedures essential to every workplace, he’d said he hoped they were listening at the back, or else they’d have to do some role-play to liven things up. This was met with titters, or at least good-natured exhalations, though in reality there was no back. It was just the four members of the sales department, all sat around the oval table: Carl, Sunita, Brian, and Liz, who was head of department.

 

‘…I know what you’re thinking at this point,’ said the presenter in the video in his dour, Estuary way. He was fiftysomething, smart-suited and tieless and with salt-and-pepper hair across his head and chest. The top three buttons of his shirt were wide open. The video’s subtitles had introduced him as Grant Neasden, Media & Entertainment Personality. Brian wasn’t good with names, but better with faces, and almost certain he’d never seen him before.

'…Fires, surely they’re just something that happens to other people at other workplaces, right?’ Course that’s what you’re thinking, because that’s what everybody thinks.’ A sombre pause. ‘Right up until it happens to them.’

Grant Neasden, Brian noted, kept referring to himself in the script. ‘I want you to…’ ‘…so keep that in mind for me,’ and suchlike. It made Brian think about Liz, and how she delegated tasks in the department. It was known as the three-faceted approach. When giving instructions, she would explain 1) who the task was for, 2) why it needed doing, and 3) how it would benefit their shared workplace. Liz also tailored the way she spoke to each individual in the department. Brian had been observing this for months. Girlish camaraderie with Sunita; a kind of familiarity—not flirtation, at least not a discernible flirtation that might reflect badly on her—with Carl. And with Brian, Liz reserved a respect particular to him and only him. She had a habit of ccing him into emails that he really didn’t need to be cced into. He’d concluded some time ago this was her way of saying, ‘I value your experience, which is of course far greater than mine.’

Brian flashbacked to his last catch-up with Carol from HR, when she’d asked him how he’d found his (then) new line manager. What he’d done, without any premeditation, was tap a hand down on Carol’s desk, and make an emphatic point about what a fantastic manager Liz was. Carol had nodded eagerly. In fairness to Brian it was hardly a lie. Everyone knew Liz was good with her staff, something her predecessor Gordon certainly hadn’t been, which was why Gordon had been got rid of, and she’d been promoted. Liz didn’t hide in her office or insult people like Gordon. Liz was a people person. She knew how to handle people, how to motivate them, how to direct them, how to reprimand (but only when necessary, which was hardly at all with ‘her fabulous lot’), how to address issues, and how to focus on key zones of potential development in each of them. Even after the 2009 Christmas party, when she drank too much, kicked off her shoes, and danced across the three tables they’d all pushed together in the corner of the Pitcher & Piano at four in the afternoon; the way she openly discussed her antics the next day, and joined in with everyone’s mirth in the staffroom—

A stray cough led Brian back to his colleagues, who were all watching the DVD. Carl was leant back, and had given in to his habit of opening his mouth, baring his teeth in a weird animalistic freeze-frame, and using his tongue to prod at each tooth in what seemed to be an order meaningful to Carl alone. Molar, canine, molar, incisor, incisor. Carl’s tongue tapped at them like piano keys. For reasons unknown, Brian’s imagination was hearing the five-note melody from Close Encounters. Bah-bah-bah-baah-baaah. Sunita was chewing her hair. This, she always did, but having now absolved herself of all self-consciousness she’d worked enough of it into her mouth that it ran taut along her jaw. As she did this she also pulled her necklace around her chin. The little locket at the end twitched beneath her lower lip. Liz had her jotterpad out, and was writing page after page of notes. She wore horn-rimmed glasses, like Brian’s father had done in the Sixties. He registered the seat she’d chosen, the one closest to Wyn—and saw Wyn was looking straight at him. Brian pretended he hadn’t seen, and went back to the DVD.

Grant Neasden was now in conversation with a woman of forty or thereabouts. As the camera closed in on her face, Brian’s first assumption was that she was a burns victim. Then he felt bad, as he realised she simply possessed the shapeless, waxy features of an obese person struggling under the heat of a studio lamp. The subtitles reappeared, reading Valerie Gough, Workplace Fire Survivor.

‘We're a family business,’ said Valerie Gough. ‘Me. Me brother, Richard. Me dad. His brother Trevor...’

She spoke with a broad Lancashire accent. It was the sort of earthy, prepossessing burr that Southerners like Brian dearly wished they had because it would’ve made them sound more trustworthy, and in Brian’s case would probably have bagged him more accounts over the years. She also spoke in such a way that it seemed she’d never heard of conjunctional words such as ‘and’ or ‘with’ or ‘then.’ Was she incapable of stringing complete sentences together, he wondered? He felt guilty about thinking this, given that something tragic had happened to her, as she was no doubt about to explain. And he was feeling bad already about the burns victim thing anyway. The Northern accent, Brian thought, was probably only trumped by the Irish accent in terms of implicitly bestowing moral integrity upon its speaker. He then started to consider if he could categorise all the various Northern sub-accents in order of charm and insinuated decency.

After a half-minute of her backstory, the camera zoomed in on a still photograph of Valerie Gough and three men. They were all sat or stood in a cluttered Portakabin office, on whose wall a vinyl banner read GOUGH FAMILY FIXTURES & FITTINGS. Zooming in on a still photograph was a technique known as the Ken Burns effect. Brian had learnt this from watching the extra features on the DVD of Ken Burns’s documentary on the American Civil War his son had given him for his birthday. His thoughts ricocheted to the picture inside Sunita’s locket, which was of her twin sister, who’d died of leukaemia when they were twelve.

 

Brian came to the abrupt conclusion that the reason Grant Neasden kept referring to himself in the video was to suggest he (Grant) was personally invested in teaching them four of them about fire safety; that he wasn’t just an individual of alleged celebrity parachuted in to breathe life into a corporate video. This took Brian on the same mental segue into Liz’s delegation method. The reason he knew it was called the three-faceted approach was because they’d both gone to the same training day, when she hadn’t been head of department. He hadn’t been angry with Liz, when she’d got the job over him. He knew his age would either work for or against him, and, as it turned out, it worked against him.

Valerie Gough explained that an electrical fire had started on their premises in December 2006. They had overloaded a mains socket with an electrical heater, a paraffin heater, various computer cables, and the fairylights that ornamented their artificial Christmas tree. The fire spread across the carpeting, and reached some overalls draped over a chair that were soaked with oils and solvents… The crux of the story was that Valerie’s uncle Trevor had fallen asleep inside the Portakabin, and died of smoke and toxic fumes inhalation in his sleep, and Brian assumed that was the end of it, but—wait a second—Valerie explained that her brother Richard, returning his van to the yard, had dashed in to try and save his uncle. Richard Gough’s instinct had been to fill a bucket of water, and throw it over what had at that point been a small and localised fire. He electrocuted himself.

A sequence of blurry reconstructed scenes that Brian found hard to follow were overlaid by Valerie Gough’s strangled, clucking sobs. He felt bad a third time, because as her story progressed, and the more upset she became, he just grew more and more irritated. He knew that right now he was supposed to be feeling sorry for her because her brother and uncle were dead. But plugging three adaptors into one mains unit and leaving flammable material lying around was stupid. He knew that already. He hadn’t learnt it that day. He’d learnt it before that day. He didn’t need a crying woman in a video to tell him that. Brian balked at hearing his internal voice’s choice of ‘crying woman’ over ‘crying person,’ and suspected he was channelling all his ire towards Valerie Gough as it was now 5.04pm and she was obliquely responsible for the training running late.

Glancing to either side to see if anybody else might have looked irritated about running overtime, Brian became aware of a change in events, which had been nagging at him, but not consciously until now. It was the absence of the sound Liz’s fountain pen made as it moved across her pad. She’d stopped writing. And in the flesh visible between her revolting glasses and the corner of her mouth, Brian noticed a twitching spasm, like the aftertremors of a twanged elastic band; and as she closed a hand over her mouth, and searched for something out of sight beneath the table—a tissue from her bag—she started to cry. Not wanting to react, and reveal that he’d noticed, Brian kept his head motionless, and swivelled his eyes over to his other two colleagues, to watch a chain reaction in progress. By the time Liz was dabbing at her eyes and nose, in full snotty flow, tears were dribbling down Sunita’s cheeks, and she was sniffing and staunching them with her fingers so as not to smudge her mascara, whilst Carl, Carl didn’t seem to be actually weeping, but his face was pink and crumpled as though he were a little boy, his face arranged in such a way that Brian felt was something he oughtn’t ever to have seen, and Wyn had his arms crossed, hands tucked under armpits, expression fierce if simultaneously compassionate, as if to say, ‘They need to go through this.’ Brian now understood why all the flippancy earlier had been worth it, and why Wyn had left the video until the end of the day when everyone was tired and listless. The dilemma, he realised, was whether to ask Liz for a tissue and join in, or to make what he could only interpret as some kind of a stand, and not cry. But all he could do was vacillate, and return to the DVD, to find Grant Neasden nodding at nothing in particular.

 

Eigg Story or This place where nothing happens (by Rosie Carr)

Everything is so clear, now, standing on the edge of this place. One way there is nothing but thick green sea, silent and bristling, open. On the other side are the crofts, tumbling neatly down the valley, hollow plunks on a skeleton xylophone. From this spot, old Tom can squint and see the ferry nearing the mainland. A dog is barking at seals, fat and oily skins rubbing rocks, and slipping through green water. Down on the pier someone is whistling. Tom sees the mouth pushed forward into a round ‘oh’ but the sound of it is carried off on the wind, blown into a tumble of gulls that shriek at the dog. Tom turns from the ferry and the dog to observe his valley once more. He thinks he will always stay here, and his sons and daughters will live here, and he will die here too.

Deep down in the valley, at the slow crunch of the skeletons backbone is Tom’s Croft. Protected from the wind that whips and cracks at the hills there is smog starting to crawl out of the chimney and a flamboyant sunset peels across the sky, gaudy next to the grey house. The smog drifts towards him; it is gloomy, falling thicker than air. Tom begins his decent. He forces a rasped sigh as his boots sink into the ground.

 

On the peak of the cliff a stone cottage hides behind high grass. A woman waits by the window for Tom. She is stepping from foot to foot impatiently waiting for him to do something, and balances on one leg to lean a little further out. She is like a spy, she thinks, hidden behind the glass, peering out at Tom. Her skin is filmy and pallid, from not washing today or the day before. One grubby toe idles in the dust, tracing the indents in the stone beneath. Even old Tom has forgotten her, she thinks. She lets out a hiss through clenched teeth. It is meant as a regretful sigh, but with not a soul to tut and nod in approval the noise slowly expands and then fades around her. The woman thinks how she is part of this place, how she is rooted in the earth just the same as those fine threads of grass that bluster outside her window. Slight and airy in the breeze, but great long stems that fill the earth so far down they are more underground then above it. Out of the window the light is fading, she can see a wisp of dark smoke above the hill, and the fields remind her of dough that cracks as it rises.  

The gentle fields end at the cottage, where the high grass begins. Here the land starts to curdle with the sea. A sharp vertical fissure the length of a skyscraper falls away to deep water. A trawler rests sleepily on the tide down there, a wide rusty barrel of iron rolling over the water. Gulls swoop as a brazen catch of herring pours across the deck. The glossy body of muscle flaps and pelts at its net, one lucky sliver escapes through a hole in the side and the boy who is watching frowns and memorises the little hole, picks up the sliver and drops it back on top of the rest. The boy watches with taciturn satisfaction as the fish quails and grinds to a slow stop. Now it only spasms occasionally, a nervous echo of animation. The quivers unnerve the boy, who likes things to always be one way or another, not this in-between-life he sees with the fishes.

Once he caught a fish, a beautiful rainbow of colours mixed like petrol on its scales, and it seemed it didn’t belong this far north, and it was somehow lost. He’d watched its hot colours fade as it drowned in the air, which also seemed upside down and spooky because air is what makes you live, not drown. He thought about throwing that one back, that lost fish.

 

It’s darker now; twinkles of electric light appear on the distant hump of mainland as the fishing boat slips into its little bay on the island. Everything is so still, so very quiet, thinks the boy. The hushed water here is just as silent as he imagines the very darkest inkiest fathom of the sea must be, so far down it is through to the other side of the world, this furthest deepest place.