The Original

Prose, Writing

Sunlight shone through the original wooden-framed windows and filled the bedroom. They swung their legs down, on opposite sides of the bed, pausing for a moment back to back, looking down at the bare floorboards. Neither of them had slept.

Ian had lain all night listening to Rosie next to him, waiting for her breathing to slow and become somnolent. It didn’t. She had turned back and forth under the summer duvet. His thoughts had been racing faster and faster. What would they say at work? What would his parents say? What should he do next? What was going to happen to them?

He made his way down the creaking stairs, in bare feet and shorts. He made their teas – English Breakfast for him, Earl Grey for her. Rosie joined him on the deck. They sat at the small, round orange-painted metal table, looking out over the beach to the sea. There was silence except for shrieking gulls and the waves lapping on the pebbles below. Usually he would have sung her a nonsense song with her name repeated often in it, to the tune of the muppets’ manamana. It didn’t seem appropriate this morning, as if there would never again be anything to laugh at between them.

He had not yet looked at himself in the mirror, but Rosie’s face was still and her eyes red and sad. He thought he must look worse.

“You’re quiet,” he said, looking at a fishing boat leaving harbour for the day.

“What do you expect?” she said, sniffing.

For what must have been the hundredth time since the previous evening he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Which bit are you sorry about exactly? Lying to me all that time? Running off with that boy? Not even giving me a baby to show for all this?” She was wiping away tears now, shaking her head as if trying to rid it of something.


“All of that. I’m sorry about all of it.

***

In January they met in the Napoli cafe on Kingsway, near Rosie’s work at Lincoln’s Inn. They sat next to each other in high chairs looking through the window. It was grey, wet and cold.

They wanted to agree the five examples of his unreasonable behaviour.

“Well, we can get the obvious ones out of the way first,” she said. She rummaged in her oversized bag for her battered notebook and opened it, curled receipts and dog-eared post-its falling out as she flicked the pages.

“He spent all his time in the evenings playing a flight simulator game on the computer, and I felt lonely,” she read out.

“OK, agreed,” he said.

“He never wanted to talk to me at breakfast time… and I felt lonely,” she continued.

He could see where this was going. “But,” he said, “we always had a laugh at breakfast… about the marmalade in your hair, or the sound the honey made when it came out of the squeezy bottle.”

She laughed. “That’s as far as I’ve got,” she said, resting her forehead in her hand. She brushed her hair back off her face. “Suggestions?”

Ian had thought she was going to come with the complete list. He had not been expecting to contribute to his own incrimination. “I suppose there is the obvious elephant in the room, right?” he said.

She put her pen down, crossed her arms and fixed him with her brown eyes, tapping her foot on the stool, arching her eyebrows. “What are you talking about?”

He pointed at the unfinished list. “Write this down: ‘He wants to shag gay boys’. That should cover it,” he said. “I feel it would be authentic to include that one, don’t you?”

***

Five days later Elizabeth, his solicitor left a voicemail saying the application had arrived from Rosie’s solicitor, and did he want to know what it said. He called straight back.

She went over the first four examples. “And the last one… ” she said. “‘Has left the marital home to pursue a homosexual lifestyle’.”

***

It had been ten years. Ian called Rosie’s house number in Kent from his flat in Limehouse. She always answered that one. “Look, I can’t really talk much,” he whispered into the phone. “Please call the police, Rosie. There are people, dealers I think, waiting for me outside the door. I can hear them talking about me.”

“You IDIOT! You’ve been taking drugs with those bloody flatmates of yours again haven’t you?” shouted Rosie. She hung up.

He waited, his ear pressed to the front door, holding his breath. Ten minutes later the phone rang and made him jump.

“It’s me,” Rosie said. “I called 999 and asked them to get the Met round to your flat. They’re on the way. They’ll be there soon. Don’t go anywhere OK? They’re going to take you to A&E.”

“I won’t,” he whispered. “Thanks… I’m sorry.”

***

“You will come to see me, won’t you?” Ian said, on the cordless phone the nurse had passed him. “Nobody else has.”

There was a pause. He sat down on the side of his bed. Would she?

“I have a lot going on… but I can visit you tomorrow afternoon,” said Rosie.

***

Rosie looked him up and down. “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

“Bet you never thought you’d say that, did you?” Ian said. “Must be the Class A diet.”

They laughed. The smiles faded. Ian said, “Look, thanks for coming, darling. I know it’s not easy for you, a place like this.”

“Well, no. But you came to see me didn’t you? Remember?” said Rosie.

“Yeah, I remember… I’m really sorry,” he said.

Angie, his nurse, popped her head around the door. “Everything OK?” she trilled.
“How long will he be here?” asked Rosie, turning round.

“They won’t keep him in for any longer than they have to – short of beds, you see. So I would guess about a week,” said Angie. “Here are your tablets, Ian.”

Rosie looked back at him. “He’s going to come to me by the sea to get better, aren’t you Ian?”

She looked back at Angie. “He mustn’t go back to that flat.”

“We can’t make him do anything, you know that,” said Angie.

“I know,” said Rosie, “I know.”

***

“Come on Ian. You can’t stay on your bed all day. I know you’re tired, but we’ve got that Shakespeare you asked to read. Everyone’s waiting at the table out there in the ward.” It was the new occupational therapist, Asha. She was young and keen, with pink string knotted round her wrists and wearing black Doc Martens with coloured flowers painted on the sides.

She had passed photocopies of an excerpt of Romeo and Juliet round the group of five patients who sat at the table. There was one chair left on the corner for him.

“Ian, how do you think we should do this?” Asha asked.

Lee, a 25 year old mixed-race guy with dreads interrupted, “I’m not doing any kissing. Just saying, like… I’m a young professional, you know.”

“That’s fine. I don’t think there is going to be any in this scene,” said Asha.

Ian looked at the paper. There were two pages, copied side by side. On one was Shakespeare’s original text, and on the other was a modern English version.

“I think one person should read out the page on the left. Someone else should read the page on the right, and then we can all say which one we prefer,” Ian said.

“Great idea, Ian,” said Asha. “Lee, would you help us out with the modern version?”

Lee squinted at the page, then read, hesitantly. “‘Oh… she teaches the torches to burn bright! … She glows in the darkness like a jewel in the ear of an African’. Hey man! Like Beyonce! ‘Her beauty is too good to be used and worn, too precious for this world. Like a white dove in a flock of crows, she stands out from all the other women. When this dance ends, I’ll see where she is, and then I’ll touch her hand and that will bless my ugly one. Did I ever love anyone before this moment? Renounce that love, my eyes! I never saw true beauty until tonight!’ … You know what? That’s pretty good actually,” he said.

“Ian. Can you do the original for us?” said Asha.

Ian folded his copy so that only the original was visible. “‘Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!/ It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night/ Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear, /Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear /So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows /As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows. /The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand, /And, touching hers, make blessèd my rude hand. /Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! /For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night’.”

The others doodled on their papers, smirked at each other. Some were dozing off. Asha said brightly, “Thank you guys! That was lovely! Now, which one did we like best?”

Immediately Lee said, “I like mine best. It’s more, like, … professional.”

Ian was still looking at the words. That was it. There was no contest. The last ten years of his life were like the first version – stark, ugly, empty.

“I like the original,” he said.

Call of the West

Prose, Writing

Yesterday morning we all felt it again. It’s just a feeling of dull unease, a crest of pain which we all feel at the same time, followed by a trough of loss. Even those of us who have been around for hundreds of years say we have not felt this as often, or as strongly before.


Our mother here is a couple of hundred years old, an oak. She doesn’t understand it, but says we should focus on our own forest, that’s what she’s doing. Our saplings are not so easily put off. How can we just stand here and not do anything? Good question, our grown ups say. But how can we do otherwise? At least we should be passing the message on, the saplings say.

So we do. We send our fungal messages as far distant as we can. Did you feel that? There is something wrong. There is something out of balance. We must help. We must help! Help how? Help who? No answers come back. We think maybe this is what dying feels like, gradually losing contact with our kind.


Taking the long view, we have been here before. Wind, glaciers and ice ripped over us. Our ancestors crushed and locked underground, black glinting, hard. But we grew again didn’t we?


We must grow, support our young ones, and survive. Here. Where we are.

Ruby’s Mourning

Writing

Whitstable is awake. In Wave Crest the paper girl is on her round with her earphones on. The postman in his shorts and fluorescent jacket is coming down the front steps of an old house on Island Wall. On the High Street the baker has been open since 7.30 and already there is a shuffling queue of people outside. The driver of the Triangle bus is weaving through the narrow one-way system of Harbour Street with two passengers on the top deck. In the terraced houses behind the harbour, children are waking up and getting out of bed, yawning, getting ready for school. Mums are juggling breakfast and satchels. In the red brick station, people are waiting on the platform, checking watches and listening for announcements for the Victoria train. In Number 9, Sea Street, a white clapboard house, which gives at the back onto the main beach, the Today programme is on the radio. The kettle whistles.

On the flat mud lies a grey seal on his side, black, round eyes staring, whiskers like quills sticking into his upper lip. A young girl, perhaps four years old, in jellies, yellow summer skirt and top and floral bucket hat is squatting on her ankles looking at him, a tear pulled by the breeze, about to leave her cheek. A woman, in her apron and flip-flops, crashes down the shingle from the house to the little girl.

“Ruby! Ruby! I didn’t know where you were!”

“What happened to him Mummy?” says Ruby, not looking up.

The moon and back

Writing

On 20 July 1969 I was just seven years old and was sitting in front of a black and white television in a house by the woods in Hampshire in the UK with my parents and my sister.  It was 9.17 pm British Summer Time, and way past my bedtime, but I was not at all tired. I had been glued to the screen for the past three hours. Even my mother, who was a keen homemaker and always focussed on the here and now of domestic arrangements, had paused the washing up to watch events unfold 238,855 miles away.  Two American astronauts had just landed on the Moon.  For me this was the stuff of dreams.  And we were watching it from our sitting room in England.  Buzz Aldrin announced, “The Eagle has landed.” amongst the regular beeps of the carrier signal.  Wow, I thought, they’ve made it.  

“Beat the bloody Russians to it,” my father said.  He had hurdled for the UK combined services team in his youth and was competitive by default.  “And all achieved in miles, feet and inches:  none of that metric rubbish.”

 I wanted to know whether the astronauts could live on the moon and not come home.  “No dear,” my mother said. “They would want to come home to their families.”

My sister was four years old, so probably does not remember any of this now.  She would later, as a teenager, be very interested in “Steve Austin, the world’s first bionic man” but I think mainly from a romantic point of view rather than a scientific one, Lee Majors who played Austin being an American heart throb. She also liked dinosaurs.

My father was in the Royal Engineers, a corps in the British Army, and was keen on maths and making things –  practical things.  So we watched the moon landing and marvelled that the lunar module was so small, that the signals from the moon took so long to get back to earth, that it must be so difficult to control the landing craft’s rockets so that it touched down softly on the lunar surface.  That the moon’s gravity was less than on earth so they bounced around when they walked, and there was no atmosphere.  

I don’t remember us talking much about what is for me now the most remarkable thing about that mission:  the bravery of the astronauts, the risks they were taking, and even that they had no idea if they could actually carry off this amazing feat.  They prepared for years.  They practised with unmanned rockets and landings.  They crashed craft into the moon’s surface.  But they did not know if they would be able to land men on the moon AND get them back again.  And they went for it anyway.  The crew was confident that they could do it, and believed in themselves and the whole team at NASA.  But they didn’t know for certain.  And they went for it anyway.

I was a clumsy child.  It was difficult for me to catch a ball, and I spent many frustrating hours learning to do this with my father.  I fell off my bicycle nearly every day, but I did get back on it again and never gave up trying to get it right.  I tripped over on the pavement, and I was no good at running, coming last in most of the races at the school sports day.  I made Airfix models of planes, boats, and rockets with my father, but he would do most of the delicate handiwork because it never worked out for me.  There would be glue over my fingers, my clothes, the table, the floor.  This drove my mother crazy of course.  

So the story was:  Rupert is clumsy, Rupert is not going to be good at sports, Rupert is slapdash, a thinker not a doer. 

I could read, though.  I came home from school every day of the week and read to my mother from my latest school book, at the kitchen table as she prepared tea or dinner for us.  We had stories before bed and I would read Winnie the Pooh along with my father, doing the voices, him chortling at things too adult for me to understand.  So the story then was:  Rupert might be clumsy, but he is very clever – we mustn’t let him get big-headed about it, though.  “Everyone likes ass, but no-one likes a smart ass” my father would say, which I would not understand until my teens.

Given this narrative, it may seem odd that I decided at the age of about 16 that it would be a good idea to find out about becoming an Army officer.  Odd, because I was thin, not physically fit, sporty or athletic in any way (I could swim very well, but team sports were really not my forte).  Odd because I was painfully shy as an adolescent, and officers were never shy.  They were out in front, the centre of attention, and in charge.  I just was not the go-getter, larger than life type who most of my parents’ Army friends were. But I did want to be. I did not know whether I could bring this off or not, but I resolved to give it a try.

Officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst was one of the most challenging experiences of my life.  One December night I was  standing in a trench on Salisbury Plain, snow falling around me, cold, wet, hungry, exhausted watching the sun rise. My toothpaste was frozen in its tube.  My face was numb with cold as I shaved.  I could not feel the soles of my feet.  I was miserable,  and wondering why I was there, and what was the point of it all.  

I had got a good degree in Civil Engineering, so I could have been working anywhere in the world, constructing bridges or important public buildings, but no.  I kept going, passed the course and became an officer.  

During the rest of my eight years in the Army I discovered one thing above all about myself, and about other people too:  we can all do much, much more than we ever imagine we can.  

And that includes going to the moon.

Sticks in the mind

Prose

“We are all going as a family to the swimming pool today, Alex, you will love it,” said Michael, his German friend.

So there he was, 15 years old, naked, in a public sauna in Germany, with Michael and Michael’s mother, father and older sister, also all naked.  Nude.  Undressed.  He didn’t know where to look.

Six months earlier Alex’s German teacher had announced that this year’s exchange programme was going ahead as usual, and consisted of two weeks in Germany with a host family during the Easter holiday, followed by two weeks in the summer in England when your exchange partner would stay with your family.  There would be 20 places on the exchange, first come first served.  There was a minimum charge for travel expenses and day trips, and some spending money would be needed, but that was it.

The other thing was that there would be 20 girls from another school nearby on the exchange too.  His best friends at school were up for it.  He was up for it, and he managed to talk his parents into it pretty easily:  they were committed Europeans and keen for him to speak languages and be international.  This was going to be one hell of an adventure.

Alex was a clever, but very shy teenager, a bit of a loner.  This exchange was a daunting prospect but also exciting.  His German would get better, he would get a trip abroad, he would be with his friends.  Perfect.  What he had not realised was that this experience would change his life in so many ways.

The time in Germany was great, but he did feel homesick a few times, particularly when there was no group trip arranged for a particular day or evening.  He stayed with the family of Michael, a German boy of his own age, whose parents were older than his own.  Michael’s father had been a prisoner of war in Wales, and could say nothing bad about the Brits.  They had a big house in Koblenz and Alex spent a lot of time in the guest room which was in the attic.  They would meet up with Michael’s friends from school, but he had trouble keeping up with the German when they spoke so fast.  But he loved the group trips.  They went down the Rhine on a boat, they visited Koln and its famous cathedral and a huge record shop called Saturn where he bought his first album ever (Fleetwood Mac, Rumours), they saw vineyards, and the capital Bonn.  Friendships grew with his British chums, and some started with the girls too.

After the exchange, back in Kent, the British students stayed together as a large group, girls and boys, and his social life went from zero to a whirl in no time.  His shyness, especially around girls, was a thing of the past.  He was happy, for the first time as a teenager.  Looking back he would realise that this was the biggest impact of that exchange programme.

At the time of course, the sauna experience was the only thing he could think or talk about for months.

Dialogue with James Joyce

Writing

“Hi Jimmy, can I call you that?”

“Sure you can Rupert, how are you today?”

“Not bad thanks. I wondered if you could explain to me why you spent so much time writing books which are so hard to understand?”

“Well, that is a good question. Sure, the world is hard to understand, and so is the human race. If you are going to write about important things, it’s going to be difficult to write and difficult to understand, isn’t it?”

“Is that the tootle of the flute?”

“No it’s the blaring of the bum trumpet first thing in the morning begorragh.”

“Thanks for putting me straight there Jimmy.”

“Think nothing of it. But of course I could not think nothing of anything. I thought much about everything. That’s why it took so fekking long to write about it.”

“How did you keep your energy going all that time?”

” Well I think it was about enjoying the process of the writing, and chortling to myself over the little jokes and word plays that I managed to get in there. Norah used to get very chippy about that in bed at night when I chortled. It was the chortle of the portal ha ha.”

“Portal to what Jimmy?”

“Oh I don’t know, the portal to my mind I suppose.”

“So laughing kept you going… what else?”

“It certainly wasn’t the prospect of recognition. The Wake was not well received I can tell you. People were very damning about it, but I thought, you know, just read it, and if you don’t like it, just read it again ha ha.”

“I confess that I have not read Ulysses or the Wake yet, but I have dipped my toe into both. And I loved Dubliners I must say. It felt like I was admitted to a party, even though some of it is quite dark.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it. Yes they were fun to write. Norah liked them as well, which was nice. And of course the lady in Paris.”

“So why leave Dublin?”

“I had to leave in order to see it clearly. But my mind never left Dublin, even though it also went to Europe. Paris, Zurich, Trieste anyway. They were good places to be. And you could meet so many more people than you could in Dublin. But sure, you sometimes want to be on your own. But I love a chat. That’s the blarney there I think. Now listen, I must be off, I have a bit of gibberish to get down on paper before it flies away ha ha. Seeya Rupert, and great to meet you.”

“Thanks Jimmy, I will keep at it.”