THE CHECK-OUT GIRL

Tanya was bored.

It was boxing day, the shop was open but not so many customers seemed to want to shop and the queue at her till was non-existent. Maybe, she thought, they all filled their fat bellies yesterday on Christmas dinner and can’t be bothered to roll out of their homes and down to the shops today…

“Or maybe,” murmured Davy Oldster, making her jump, “or maybe they’re bothered about buying too much.”

She looked up. She didn’t know Davy Oldster from Adam, though there was a little something about him, an odd little flirtatious glance, that suggested she might. She hadn’t seen him forming a queue as he pushed his few purchases along the belt towards her till. It was as if he’d materialised out of thin air like people do when you’re day-dreaming.

“Pardon, sir?” she asked out of politeness. In truth she wasn’t remotely interested in what the older man had to say. She had a few random thoughts of her own playing hide-and-seek inside her head and that was enough for her. And, to underline her total lack of fascination in the words of this particular gentlemen she had a hangover. At least she hoped it was a hangover because her head wasn’t half fuzzy.

Who wouldn’t be suffering a bit after a Christmas day which had started brilliantly and only got better as the wine was sipped (or gulped depending in your definition of events) and, around midnight, you found yourself, like she had, in bed with a bloke she hardly knew, a mature bloke with wandering hands. The hangover was inevitable.

“I was wondering,” murmured Davy Oldster, “if most people might be worried about buying too much.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” she conceded without thinking about the matter, “some people will worry about anything.”

“Maybe because they have to,” he chided, “take me, for instance, I’ve got enough to last me for the rest of my life, so why would I need to buy more?”

She thought about that. Tanya didn’t like committing herself to anything without thinking first. She’d thought about it last night when a virtual stranger had whisked her off to bed in her own home and done goodness-knows not with her, and after due consideration she seemed to remember helping him with her bra strap as she’d climbed rather unsteadily into bed.

“That’s all well and good if you know how long the rest of your life is,” she told him, blushing as she remembered one or two things she’d suggested last night to the blond … or was it dark-haired or ginger rather mature stranger under her duvet with her.

“Oh, I know that,” he grinned, broadly. “It’s either more or less than a week or so, and who can possibly want cupboards filled with comestibles when time’s that short? I mean, it would be the height of cruelty to slaughter a bull for meat so that I can have dinner a week next Thursday if a week next Thursday is never going to come along for me and I’m actually being incinerated at the local facility a week next Wednesday?”

“The local facility?” she asked weakly.

“Crematorium,” he filled in for her and pronouncing the word as one might if he was shortly going to become intimately involved in the place.

“But … but you’re alive and well!” she exclaimed, waving the turnip from his basket in front of the flickery red scanner light that read its details in an accurate microsecond.

He looked at her and shook his head gently.

How can a bloke shake his head like that if he reckons he’s got no more than a week left? she asked herself. It’s a good job that man last night did what he did with me … if I only had a week and a bit left I’d be wanting him to do it all the time. I only wish I could remember it but I know it must have been great! And what a hangover to wake up to. Pity he’d left already. We could have enjoyed a second chapter before I had to come to work…

“Not everything is what it looks like,” he said quietly as she scanned his pork pie. “Sometimes things are very much opposite to what they look like. And what I see now looks like one thing, but you can take my word for it, it’s something very different.”

She was confused. “I’m confused,” she confessed, “and that’ll be four pounds thirty, please.”

“Of course it will be,” he sighed, and he rummaged in his pocket for his money. “I only hope I finish this pork pie in time,” he murmured as he sorted the copper from the silver.

“Of course you will!” she told him with a girlish giggle, the sort that she knew men liked because of the way it made her sound childishly innocent. She’d used it last night at the party, in her bedroom, in her bed…

“But I fear I’m not that keen on eating it,” he murmured, “it’s the sort with an egg in it, all hard-boiled and delicious, but when did they boil it..?”

“It looks lovely,” she said, her eyes sparkling as if she was actually feeling pleasure deep inside her at the thought of him eating a pork pie.

“Yes, I would normally agree with you, but not this time, you see, it’s almost out of date. That’s why it’s cheap, but I’m a bit of a cheapskate, so woe to me!” he whispered, packing the pork pie with the rest of his few items of shopping in a reusable carrier bag.

This old cove is dafter than a brush, she thought, frowning suddenly, I wonder what turns him on? Does anything? I mean, not being around a week next Thursday…

“Next please,” she said to the queue of two that had formed behind him at her till.

“You fancy him don’t you dear?” asked the over made-up young beauty with dark rimmed spectacles next in the queue.

“No!” she exclaimed, almost loud, “it’s just that, well, he said he might die soon and that made me think…”

“Oh, he will,” nodded the ravishing creature. “We all die, sooner or later, and he’ll die and be buried by a week next Thursday.”

“You know that?” she asked, eyes open wide.

“It’s why I was sent, dear,” smiled the bombshell, “it’s what I’m doing here. Collecting the souls of the almost departed, cataloguing them and then taking them to where they rightly belong. And it’s good to get two together. It makes my job so much the easier, especially on holidays.”

“Two? Together?” stammered Tanya.

“Well, he bought that pork pie which he’ll eat for dinner, and I happen to know it’s full to the brim with salmonella which will breed like mad inside him and do for him, and last night, my dear, you died. That makes two.”

“Me?” Tanya went suddenly pale as though there ought to be something she could remember but had forgotten.

“Of course,” almost cackled the smiling beauty, “it was a good party yesterday, eh? And all those nibbles. And that gentleman who tucked you into bed?”

“Yes,” sighed Tanya, then “how do you know about that?” she almost yelped.

“I’m sorry, dear, don’t you remember? But they seldom do! But he’s got a bit of a reputation, you know! It was a mistake going with him, dear, a terrible mistake, but you were too gone to care. I’m afraid he killed you after he’d had his wicked way with you, and it was wicked, really, really wicked, goodness me it was…”

“Nonsense!” she yelped.

“Don’t you worry, dear, he’ll be joining us once he’s chewed his way through the egg in that pork pie. Remember it was you who served him with it. Then you’ll be able to tell him exactly how you feel about serial killers who have serially killed you! Now come on, take my hand, walk this way, we’re nearly there, who cares which Thursday it is any more, or Wednesday come to think of it, or that your very last lover was a sad old man with a penchant for murder…”

© Peter Rogerson 26.12.17

GABRIEL’S GRIEF

“There’s one thing that gets me really fed up,” grunted Gabriel to the ring of nymphets sitting in a deliciously attractive ring at his feet and surrounding him with the delicious smell of oestrogen, “and that’s when they create that abortive collage of the dusky Mary and me just before she gets pregnant. I have no idea why she told them that story and rather suppose that she never did, but it rankles with me more than anything else in the eternity of the Universe does. The last thing I’d do is have underage sex with a scruffy little tart like she was let alone let her tell the world about it…”

“Is that what they say you did?” asked Deadora, possibly his favourite amongst the ring of beauty that was spending the longest ever-after hanging on to his every word and teasing him by flicking their locks of beautiful hair in a way that the enormity of endless time had taught them he got most excited by. Not that their hair was all the fascinated him, but they could tell that, for the moment, he was troubled.

“It’s their assumption,” grunted Gabriel, “it’s how the story has grown. It started with me (and this never happened) visiting her (I swear it didn’t) and telling her that my Master (I mean, do I have a master anyway?) had just impregnated her virginity and she was going to have (and this is plainly impossible) a baby son. I mean, back then they couldn’t even tell what gender the baby was going to be until it was born and certainly not at the time of the actual conception!”

“You poor darling,” whispered Angelina, maybe his second favourite if she wasn’t favourite per se, “fancy being accused of doing something you didn’t have the pleasure of actually doing, and everyone knows how stonkingly virile you are and how much you like the ladies…”

“Angelina, please,” purred Gabriel, “I know I’ve a teensy weensy little addiction to you ladies, all of you sweet little things, but coarse and fleshy humans with their sweaty armpits and smelly bits … it’s unthinkable!”

“Why do you think they say it about you?” asked Janina, a particularly desirable spirit with sparkling eyes and a bewitching smile, stirring her left foot against his calf as though it was a totally accidental contact, knowing that he knew that it wasn’t.

“It’s the nonsense bit of human nature,” snorted Gabriel, “they seem to have evolved…”

“Evolved?” queried Janina, interrupting he Lord and Master even though interruptions when Gabriel was full flood were never de rigueur.

“Yes, sweetheart, evolved,” frowned Gabriel, “they did evolve, you know. There was a time when their antecedents were monkeys, for goodness’ sake! And before then amoeba even, single celled little morons with no brain. They hadn’t realised it at the time, though all the evidence was there, but it was going to take a few centuries for that evidence to mean anything sensible to them. No, they had pre-formed ideas, absurd notions invented round camp fires in the earliest days and told by hoary old gaffers who were high on a particular variety of mushroom among other things. And those weird tales somehow found their way along the corridors of time and they still believed that someone they refer as to my master created them in an orgy of stupidity, and here’s the rub, by using words only! And he did it in six short days, believe it or not, and not just them but everything under every sun, not that they knew that the stars were suns! It’s odd what men and women with what are really quite complex brains can fool themselves into believing.”

“And they used your name in order to explain something they didn’t understand?” asked Angelina, reaching up and stroking his chest with the back of a languid hand and aware that he was smiling wistfully at her alone.

“It was even more complex than that,” sighed Gabriel, “what had happened was they were, as a people, under the domination of an ever-growing empire and they didn’t like it, so when a man emerged who seemed willing to challenge the emperor’s man and got himself executed for his cheek they had to give him a back-story to keep rumour of him going. Don’t forget: there was no internet back then and news travelled slowly! It was no good just saying that a man who a couple of years earlier had been unheard of was worth rallying round, but if this same man had a magical birth and was executed for being good and right in everything he said, then he might be a symbol of rebellion because of his very honesty, and being dead that symbol could live on in underground places, and spread like the sort of cancer that it was…”

“That’s harsh,” murmured Deadora, picking his naked toes with gentle fingers.

“I don’t think it is,” countered Gabriel, “not when I’ve been treated as a sort of male prostitute for two thousand of their years! And every year they still tell the same sordid story, of me impregnating a slut of a teenage harlot when everyone with a brain cell still working knows that it’s only a back story invented for a rather pathetic purpose and has no echo in the real world at all! For goodness’ sake, there was no virgin birth! It’s plain impossible! And if I had somehow managed to become the father then the baby would have been a girl! I’d have made sure of that much! I’ve always thought the future should be in female hands, not only here in this marvellous place where you beauties need stroking and fondling, but down there on that wretched and rather disgusting planet. Girls are so much better than brutish men. It’s the testosterone that ruins things.”

“But you’re a gorgeous male,” tinkled Tinkerbelle from her junior place at the back of the circle.

“Not quite,” replied Gabriel soberly, “not quite at all. Check the word androgynous next time you get a dictionary in your hands because I’m proud to say I’m one of those…”

“That’s wonderful!” laughed Janina, “so you could have been father and mother! That would have made it a much better story!”

“And the baby,” said Gabriel loftily, “could have been twins. One of each. That would have given them something really special to fantasise about!”

“One of each?” asked Janina innocently, “you mean triplets? Think of the beliefs that could have triggered!”

“I could always arrange it,” murmured Gabriel darkly.

© Peter Rogerson 23.12.17

AN UNINVITED VISITOR

A door creaked, a slow and almost silent barrage of clicks and squeals, but not this door, not this door because this door was the bedroom door and it wasn’t that one. He could see it from his bed. It was firmly shut and he wanted it to stay that way.

Jack Smith sat up in bed and stared towards his bedroom door, wondering what in Earth he was listening to. A door was most definitely creaking, and he wasn’t asleep and dreaming. He pinched himself to make sure, and it hurt. He was, surely, awake.

Thank goodness, silence.

And another door creaked. Another door that wasn’t his bedroom door and wasn’t that other door either.

And it was louder. Just a tiny bit louder, but definitely louder. And its creak was harsher as though the place on the other side of it was wrapped in winter’s freezing coat.

Jack Smith shivered at the thought and pulled his duvet over his head.

And his bedroom door opened.

He sensed that it opened rather than saw it, but his sensing was accurate enough. The door opened right enough. It opened wide, it opened with barely a creak, and someone came in.

He didn’t see someone come in but knew that someone had.

He smelt it. He felt it in the air under his duvet. And he was suddenly aware that a shadow fell across it as if shadows had a weight.

Jack Smith was shaking. It wasn’t with fear but it was with something worse than that. Maybe you’d call it terror. Sheer unadulterated terror.

After all, his senses told him there was an uninvited visit in his room.

He wanted to look, but daren’t. He just lay there shaking, praying that he might be saved from whatever unwanted malevolence was standing by his bed, praying desperately to a universe of nameless deities just in case amongst them one was real and might volunteer to help.

“Ho Ho Ho,” said a voice not so far from his still hidden head.

Who spoke like that? Who had a monosyllabic vocabulary that consisted entirely of the word “Ho” repeated like that?

Was it the red Christmas elf? The fat man dressed in red? The absurdity he had once believed in cosily, like children do. The one with reindeer that had the absurd ability to fly without wings? The whole idea made him snort.

“Harrumph!” he almost exploded under his duvet.

“Ho Ho Ho!” repeated the voice, and it wasn’t so much scary and threatening as peculiar, with what amounted to an amused smile somehow managing to attach itself to the sound.

By the sonnd of it, if the voice was peculiar it was probably uttered by a completely non-threatening individual. Could it be the Christmas elf? The one he’d stopped believing in, oh, decades ago?

Was the old story true after all?

Could there possibly be a fat jolly man full of ho ho hos with gravity-defying reindeer and a gigantic sack of of goodies?

An elf with a stomach fat with mince pies and a mind blurred by port and sherry in considerable excess?

And somewhere a door creaked.

A different door. Not his bedroom door but one closer to him than that. One that couldn’t possibly be there, but the evidence of his ears suggested it was.

“Come, come, come,” said the voice.

Should he?

Should he come out of his rather pathetic hiding, his ostrich head in a bed of sand, and greet his unexpected visitor? Should he banish his nervous fear to where it properly belonged and look boldly at the ho ho ho-ing apparition?

He struggled, fear battling with curiosity while he was sure he could hear someone tut-tutting and gently stamping his feet in frustration like a frustrated parent waiting for a naughty child.

Then, on an impulse because he couldn’t see himself doing anything else, he pulled his head out from under the duvet.

“About time too,” said the grim reaper gently, a humorous glint in his eyes. “We’ve a long way to go today my lad, loads of doors to open and close and pass through, and it’s getting late.”

“But you’re not…” gasped Jack.

“Ho ho ho,” teased Death, “Ho ho ho ho!”

And the shock was too much for Jack’s old heart. He didn’t hear the next door creak, but he did walk slowly through it.

© Peter Rogerson 22.12.17

AN ALTERNATIVE TRUTH

“I’m pregnant, Joseph, I’m sure I am,” wept Mary, “I feel sick every morning and I’ve not had my monthly bleed for ages…”

He stared at her open-eyed, and then:

“That’s disgusting!” he almost shouted, “what were you thinking? What have you done? They’ll stone you, you know that, because a good stoning is what you deserve, going about like a foreign street girl and dong dirty things like that!”

“What do you mean, Joseph?” she wept.

“We all know what a girl has to do to get herself in the family way, and it’s disgusting!”

“I … I don’t know … nobody ever told me…”

“Going with foul men and their unwashed bodies, lying with them, damn you, and doing intimate things, wicked things, gasping and begging for more…”

“I wouldn’t do that! You must know me better than that! I’ve never been with any man, not a single one, except…

“Ha! Except! You acknowledge except! So there have been some.”

“One, Joseph, only one…”

“And who might that be, little innocent Mary with her gown off and her … I don’t like to think of it, what with us getting married like we’re supposed to be!”

“There was nobody else…” Mary’s body was shaking with two kinds of grief, her condition and his accusation.

“Then which of the old men with wrinkled whatsits have you been lying with, you harlot?”

“ONLY YOU!” she shouted, “Only with you,” she added, in a grief-stricken whisper.

“Only me?” He went pale as the significance of what she’d said hit him like a bolt from the big wide blue.

“Yes, you.” This time there was a suggestion of defiance in her voice. “And I hate it when you don’t believe me even when you must know the truth,” she added, trying to hold him with her eyes, still moist from too much weeping.

“You mustn’t tell anyone…” he gasped, thinking hurriedly. “This must be our secret, yours and mine. I can’t have father thinking that we’ve … that we’ve … that we’ve done it! He would thrash me, beat me until the bruises had bruises of their own, and then he would put his arms round me and say that he had to do it, he had to half kill me, out of love, he’d say, I’d understand one day… I can almost hear him now! So you mustn’t let on. Keep it to yourself.”

“And grow fat with child? On my own? With the Priests looking on and knowing what I’ve done, and pointing their gnarled old fingers at me, and ordering that I make penance for my sin, ordering that I be stoned to death against the town wall, that my battered body have the infant ripped from it and… and … and….”

“But it was a sin,” pointed out Joseph.

“My sin alone? Nobody else’s?”

He didn’t understand. “Of course it was you alone!” he protested, “Who else could be to blame? Who else was there? Of course it was only you and therefore you are the one who deserves the punishment!”

“And you weren’t with me, Joseph?”

“Well, yes, but it’s what us men do. You can’t blame us because we’ve got instincts and urges! You could have said no!”

“Didn’t you hear me, Joseph?”

“Hear you? When?”

“When you lay with me and touched me and I cried out ‘NO’ at the top of my voice when you were gasping and pushing and doing the things that you did… didn’t you hear me?”

“I’m not deaf! Of course I heard you! But I knew that you didn’t mean it. The light in your eyes told me that much!”

“It did?”

“A woman can say no a million times and not mean it. It’s up to us men to understand, and I understood full well back then what you wanted, so we did it. That’s all there was to it. I might as well not been there. If it hadn’t been me you’d have caught another man in your web and done it with him! It’s what you women do.”

“But I’m fourteen, Joseph, still quite young and I haven’t learned all these tricks. I always thought that ‘No’ meant ‘No’.”

“Well it doesn’t. And you meant ‘yes’. I knew that you did.”

“When I said ‘No’?”

“Of course. Surely you can remember?”

“My folks were away, the house was empty except for us, and you started fumbling with me. And I said ‘no’ more than once. I even tried to run away, Joseph, but you’re stronger than me and you grabbed hold of me really hard. You even bruised me! How didn’t that mean ‘no’?”

“I knew what you were doing,” he sighed, struggling for another argument, “you were playing hard to get like all the pretty girls do. But I knew what you wanted.”

“And now they’re going to stone me to death? Because you thought that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ and that running away is my way of teasing you and playing hard to get? And when I’m dead and my cold body cast away into the desert for the carrion to feed on, you might, just might, get a sound beating if you mention to your dad that it was you who … who …”

“Who what, Mary?”

“RAPED ME!” she shouted.

“Then so be it,” he sighed, “I’ll miss you if that happens. But it won’t, because I’ve got a plan and enough coin to pay for it.”

“You’ve got a plan, Joseph?”

“I know a wise woman. In a village less than half a day’s walk away, and she knows how to help a girl in trouble like you’re in trouble. She’ll help. She’s done it before.”

“You know?”

He looked suddenly shy and like the little boy he hadn’t been for a good decade. “There was this other lass,” he murmured, “she got into trouble too, and I had enough coin … she was all right afterwards. It was easy-peasy, didn’t hurt her one bit and now she’s living a happy life with another man… Annie she is, you might know her?”

“The sad woman who tries so hard to have babies for her husband to fuss over, but for whom it never happens, month after month?”

“It can turn out like that,” nodded Jospeh, “but not always. That’s what the wise woman told me. Not always. So what do you say?”

“I suppose it’s better than a stoning,” whispered Mary, “when can we go?”

“Now,” he said, “we’ll be home by nightfall. Nobody need know.”

“Right!” she said, determinedly, “We’ll go now!”

And they did. Right there and then they walked the long road to the other village and the wise woman.

“It makes you think,” said Joseph as they went along, “how when you’ve done it and the baby’s no longer there, that everything he would have done with his life, the things he might have said, the words that folks might have listened to, will all go unsaid and unheard… it makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“The trouble with you, Joseph, is you don’t think enough!” she snapped back at him, and they trudged on.

© Peter Rogerson 02.12.17

DISCOVERING FAIRYLAND (2)

 

Jeremy Cumming was confused. There’s no other way to express the melee of odd thoughts that were suddenly turning his mind upside down and inside out.

And, worst of all, his feet weren’t on the ground! Indeed, far from being on the ground they were rising every higher into the sky until the country road he’d been walking along, the fields that bordered it, the meadow that nudged itself against a winding stream in the distance, even the pretty little village of Briddleton where he had his expensive house, all were like images on a complex and very accurate map.

And he was holding the hand of a man-(or woman)-sized fairy in a beautiful white dress and sporting the most delicate set of wings imaginable. And it was those wings that were fluttering, bearing him ever higher through an azure blue sky.

So he said the only thing that came into his mind when the fairy smiled sweetly at him and asked him how he felt.

“I can see your knickers,” he said.

“It’s the breeze and there’s precious little I can do about that,” she replied.

“Where…?” He wanted to ask where they were going, but he knew that if he did so the chances that he would understand the answer were slimmer than zero. But she understood the question anyway.

“I told you. To the birthing house,” she said, and suddenly he felt a twinge of something a little bit more distressing than uncertainty creep into his mind.

After all, she had said that all fairies were female and if they wanted to have young they had to use human males in order to get them.

“It’s all right,” she cooed at him, “it won’t hurt!”

Of course it wouldn’t hurt! He knew all about human reproduction because he’d personally reproduced, and as far as the male side of the proceedings were concerned they’d been more delightful than anything else he had experienced in his entire life.

He looked back at the fairy in whose firm grip he was suspended goodness-knows how high above the terrain below. He loved the look of her, and he was a married man who loved his wife with a depth and certainty that sometimes made him weep and incited him to even buy her flowers on the odd occasion. But this fairy, this creature with wings, was perfect, physically, in every possible respect.

And he could still, quite plainly, see up that pristine white skirt or dress or whatever it was at her knickers as the breeze caught it by the gossamer hem and stirred it and swirled it around almost mischievously.

“We’re going there,” she pointed, ignoring the direction his bulging eyes were gazing, “to the birthing house…”

The scary part of that was that she’d pointed with the forefinger of the hand that had been holding his, the hand that was his only support, that prevented him from plunging to break his neck and as many other parts of him that were breakable on the ground below.

It seemed that he’d reached a point beyond which he would start tumbling back down when she grasped his hand again and, with a tinkling laugh, said “did you see it?”

“I can’t see any house,” he said, once he’d decided that he wasn’t falling to his death after all.

“It’s not exactly a house as you’d understand the word house,” tinkled his guide, “but it’s still a house with a resident.”

“A resident?” he asked, aware that they had started descending through the blue and summer skies back towards terra firma.

“Our queen,” she replied in the sort of voice that suggested that he might be about to meet the mightiest and most precious soul on the entire planet, and that he should be fully aware of the huge privilege and honour being bestowed upon him.

“I’ll explain,” she tinkled, “it’s our queen who has the babies and I do believe that the barest memory of her long sleep has become entrenched in some of your children’s stories. But the truth is, the queen needs huge strength if she is to lay enough eggs, so she sleeps a lot…”

“Lay eggs?” asked Jeremy, “you cannot be serious!”

She landed on a gravel drive-way that curved away from the country road he had been walking down and vanished out of sight in front of them. He found landing to be absurdly unsteadying and found himself lying on the gravel, face down and with a grazed knee and with blood seeping through his fine summer trousers.

“Don’t worry about that,” she giggled. “Blood soon dries up, and skin heals,” she added. “Now let me explain. Ahead of us and just round the corner you will see the birthing house. As I said, it doesn’t really look much like a house at all. It’s in there that our queen lies sleeping and has been for quite a long time, until her eggs were needed.”

“I don’t know anything about…” began Jeremy.

“You don’t have to know anything, silly!” tinkled the fairy, “except that if you approach her where she lies, her breath coming gently and her eyes closed, and kiss her fully on the mouth, then she will be able to lay her eggs, fertilised by the warmth of your kiss, and any fairies who sadly pass away because thoughtless people say they don’t believe in them will be replaced, and our future will be secure.”

“I need powerful psychotropic drugs myself, engaging in this kind of conversation with a flying woman,” grunted Jeremy, his old grumpy personality slowly returning to cast the shadow of his perceived reality on events.

“When you see her you will kiss her,” vowed his fairy, “You won’t be able not to! For whereas I am accounted as plain and almost ugly, she is accounted as truly and spectacularly beautiful.”

“You’re nothing like plain or ugly,” grunted Jeremy, rubbing his knee. “Actually, I think you’re spectacularly beautiful myself, though I’ve never been much a judge of such things.”

“You sweet little man!” tinkled the fairy, “so come along! Let’s go to the birthing house and see what we shall see.

She took him by one hand again and the two of them drifted about half a foot above the ground, just above the gravel driveway and round the bend at the far end.

Jeremy gasped when he saw it.

Before him and on a luxurious lawn with borders of flowers of every colour under the sun was a glass casket, or what looked like a glass casket.

“It’s not glass, but diamond,” the fairy corrected his thoughts.

But it wasn’t the crystal casket that made him gasp.

Inside it, and lying on a bed of pure white feathers, slept the most ravishingly beautiful creature he had ever seen. She, too, was dressed in the purest white with folds and pleats of a silky cloth that must surely be even whiter than the whitest snow. Yet her face, with closed eyes and lips that were the most perfect pink he had ever seen, was the softest, smoothest, most perfect face he had ever seen. And the hair … he’d always had what his wife at home called a fetish for long, curling golden hair, and that’s what it was: long and curling and golden.

“Come,” said his fairy, “that’s enough gawping!”

He shook his head, unable to comprehend the absurd mixture of confusion and absolute beauty that his mind was trying to cope with.

Then, with the least of sounds, a door in the crystal casket opened, and he knew that he was as close to the ravishingly magnificent female as he was to the ground beneath his feet. He couldn’t help it. Nothing could have stopped him.

He entered the birthing house and took the gorgeous lady by one hand. Then, shaking as if a powerful electric shock had been administered to his entire body, he bent forwards and, totally out of control and knowing with a strange certainty that he was doing the right thing, he kissed her on the lips. And not a nonsense, brief sort of throw-away kiss, the sort favoured by nerdy lads on their first date, either, but something he needed to do, something that seemed to last for an eternity of its own.

“My, you’re good at that!” gasped the queen. And at the sound of her perfect voice he swayed away from her. Her eyes were open, bluer than the sky, and her breath was sweeter than the sweetest honey, and, totally out of control, he kissed her again.

And then in a kind of dream he found himself flying through the air again, holding the precious hand of the fairy he’d met by the road signs, WELCOME TO FAIRYLAND and FAIRYLAND WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS.

“Goodbye,” she whispered, “and thank you so very much.”

“What for?” he asked, still more confused than a snake that’s accidentally tied itself in a reef knot.

“For the future. Our future, the future of our race,” tinkled the fairy, and that was that. “So thank you, thank you, thank you, and if, in the future, you should ever chance to hear a little voice saying thank you daddy you might remember your gift to us…”

And off she flew, swiftly becoming a vanishing dot in the blue.

And Jeremy Cumming sat on the grass verge, held his head in his hands, and wept. It’s not, he told himself severely, not everyone who goes to Heaven and back in a single day…

And when his eyes were almost dry he stood back up and looked at the sign on the road.

BRIDDLETON WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS it read.

“And home,” he mumbled to himself.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 29.11.17

DISCOVERING FAIRYLAND (1)

“It is,” thought Jeremy Cumming to himself, “it is a day when just about anything might be expected to happen. That’s it! An anything sort of sunny day in summer, so I’d best look where I plant my feet.”

And he did look, very carefully. He gazed down at first one foot, then the other, as he walked down the sweet and cosy lane on the outskirts of the pretty little village of Briddleton.

“That’s odd!” he thought suddenly, out of the blue, “that’s very odd indeed! The world, for a moment, seemed to ripple, and worlds don’t do that! Do they?”

But he couldn’t answer himself because, in all honesty, ne thought the question might be bordering on the nonsensical, so he carried on, humming to himself almost melodically, until he came to a large road sign with a heraldic device involving wings and sugar plums engraved on it and the message WELCOME TO FAIRYLAND in gigantic black letters.

“Someone’s playing silly games,” he muttered, “Fairyland, indeed.”

Then, mere minutes later, he came upon a second sign and almost choked when he read FAIRYLAND WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS”, also in thick black letters.

“Arrant nonsense!” snorted Jeremy to himself.

“That’s unduly discourteous of you,” said a voice just behind him, and he spun round because he’s been absolutely one hundred per-cent sure there was nobody within half a mile of him. That’s why he was walking down this road, to get away from the pests he knew people could be.

And he saw her, clear as a very clear day, hovering half a foot above the middle of the road with the cutest gossamer wings glittering and fluttering and the brightest, most beautiful smile on her peaches-and-cream face.

Jeremy bunched both of his hands into fists and screwed them into his eyes. This sort of vision was something he poo-pooed in others when they said they saw things or heard voices, and here was he both seeing something and hearing a voice. It needed erasing before it drove him mad, and his vision returning to normal or he might start thinking he had caught one of the dreadful psychological disturbances enjoyed by his more special patients (Jeremy Cumming was a head-doctor, his own description and not mine, and he knew a thing or two about insanity).

“I am here, you know,” said the pretty tinkling voice, and he peeped between two fingers praying that the owner of the voice would turn out to be any little old lady in an overcoat and headscarf who chanced to be walking down that road. But it wasn’t.

The actual and real owner of that voice was a beautiful female of normal woman size but dressed all in pristine white like a ballerina or classical dancer off that popular television programme that everyone’s talking about, and with the addition fluttering gossamer wings that gleamed like shot silver in the sunlight. And, what’s more, her costume (it simply had to be a costume, no real woman would dress so delightfully or even provocatively in the normal run of things) was so almost indecently short to his very proper mind, and he had a clear and unobstructed view of her frilly underthings, a vision that embarrassed him no end and made him blush.

“Women don’t fly,” he said, sounding absurd.

“I do,” she giggled, “look at me! We all fly in our country! And before you say another word let me warn you against saying you don’t believe in fairies, because if you were to something truly disastrous would happen.”

“What do you mean?” he stammered, aware that any observer would order a special re-enforced ambulance to cart him off to the nearest facility for the criminally insane, and he’d worked for long enough in that kind of institution as a medical man with a respected reputation to know it was the very last kind of place he wanted to go to during his day off.

“Every time someone says they don’t believe in fairies, one of us dies,” murmured the driftting delight, and she floated the foot or so that separated her from the road and landed so close to Jeremy that he could smell the hypnotic sweetness of her breath every time she breathed, which nearly knocked him out.

“But…” he stammered, remembering that only last week he’d ordered a concentrated regime of electric shock treatment coupled with high doses of powerful psychotropic drugs for a seriously disturbed elderly gentleman who claimed to have had a conversation with a fairy himself, and the treatment had been so cutting-edge and powerful that his patient had, alas, passed away.

He didn’t fancy being subjected to that himself, yet here he was seemingly talking to an actual fairy. And not only talking: he could see her, could (and he actually did this mentally) gaze rapturously at the shapely perfection of her beautifully bare legs and that low-cut minuscule white dress didn’t leave much to the imagination either.

Someone, he was sure, had decided he needed to be taught a lesson. Talking with fairies indeed! What kind of man did they think he was? Delusional or what?

“Who’s put you up to this?” he asked, and his own voice sounded so crude and bluff to him he could have withdrawn the words, but that sort of thing has always been plainly impossible. Once out, words are out. They cannot be unsaid.

“Silly man,” giggled the fairy, and she fluttered her wings and rose several inches into the air and hovered right up close to him until he was absolutely certain that she had encroached seriously into his own personal space.

How did she do that? Did she have one of those science-fiction hover-boards tucked in her knickers? How else could a full-sized woman rise into the air like that? It certainly couldn’t be the wings, which were barely big enough to lift anything more substantial than a church bible into the air. He could feel the draught of them fluttering, and like her breath the smell was captivating, a bit like he imagined a summer meadow might smell like if you lay in it and covered yourself with its flowers.

“You’re to come with me,” she giggled.

“How…?” he spluttered, really meaning to add do I get back to the rational everyday world of Briddleton, but failing to utter more than the initial monosyllable.

“Come on, silly?” she giggled, and she took him by one hand.

She actually touched his skin with her skin!

And the feeling of that skin against his nasty rough epidermis was what a gentle floating piece of thistledown might experience when it touched upon a nasty crusty nettle.

“Your hands are soft,” he whispered, not wanting to sound crude or rough by speaking louder.

She giggled again, a tinkling, cheery, delightful giggle, and her tiny skirt fluttered in the air as together they rose as high as the tops of the trees that bordered the road, and he found himself ogling her underwear as if he was a teenage boy experiencing his first flood of hormones.

Suddenly he knew what perfection was: perfection of soft skin, perfection of sweet fragrance, perfection of movement, even perfection of vision as he watched the world beneath them silently slide by.

“Where…?” He was going to ask where are we going but thought the question might be a little bit too nosey.

“We’re going to the birthing house,” she trilled, “you and me together,”

“We are?” he asked, not knowing what on Earth she meant.

“Of course! I told you, didn’t I, that every time someone says they don’t believe in fairies then one of us must die … so baby fairies need to be born or our people will all die out, and that can’t be right, can it? But there are no male fairies, none at all, so we need to welcome fresh blood … blood from the world of men … welcome to fairyland, welcome to our world…”

TO BE CONTINUED

© Peter Rogerson 28.11.17

THE HERITAGE TRAIN

 

This was something Jonas Smyth had been looking forward to since forever. He was going for what he guessed would be an all-too short trip on a heritage railway.

 

The carriages were the sort he’d travelled on as a boy with his parents and sister, the kind with corridors that opened on compartments for about eight people and with posters to seaside resorts to gaze at with an excited pair of eyes because that was exactly where he was going. To the seaside. For his once in a year holiday on golden sands. When, he seemed to recall, it never rained and ice-creams were sold on every corner and nobody mentioned bad teeth when you ate your candy floss.

 

Where the air was filled with the appetising aroma of frying fish and chips.

 

Where everything had been practically perfect, especially the ride on a steam train to get there.

 

Now he was what the grandkids called “well-old” and he was having a treat all on hos own. He was going for a dozen or so miles on a heritage railway in a carriage he remembered and pulled by a steam engine that still filled his heart with wonder when he thought about it.

 

Those days had been great, but there had been one journey he’d always wanted to forget. And that one journey was seared on his memory as if it had happened only yesterday. Yesterday and sixty-five years ago. The journey that had stolen his sister from him.

 

Jonas looked out of the window. The train had still to leave the station and men and women, foolish enough to be bordering on missing it, were still half-running towards the open doors.

 

The engine whistled, and then, at the back of the train, the guard whistled as a sort of plaintive echo, doors were slammed, the last dribs and drabs of passengers found their seats.

 

And then the door to his compartment opened and a family edged silently in, bringing with them a strange old-fashioned sweet fragrance. A boy, a girl, a father, a mother. Possibly. Sometimes, these days, families weren’t what they’d once been and there was no certainty that there hadn’t been falling out and swapping and changing after the children were born, and different fathers or mothers or both appearing on the scene. Family life wasn’t what it used to be. Which, he supposed, was sometimes a good thing. But this little group looked family enough.

 

And they did look sort of familiar. Like he might have seen them before. Somewhere.

 

They sat in their seats, the man and his son sitting opposite the woman and her daughter. Was the man the girl’s father or the woman the boy’s mother? Or had there been some interweaving of two discrete groups?

 

“We’re off, dad!” said the boy.

 

That sorted one part of the puzzle, then.

 

And there was something eerily familiar about the whole little scene. Man, boy, we’re off, dad…

 

The engine gave a mighty series of thumps as the train moved forwards. He remembered the thumps from the past, when he’d been no older than the boy sitting next to the man who was certainly his father because he was dad.

 

“It’s scary, mummy,” whispered the girl.

 

It might have been his own sister saying that, back in the old times when they’d been going for their annual holiday to the seaside. He was sure it might have been. He was sure he remembered it’s scary, mummy, from a long time ago as the holiday train had eased into movement. And she’d had every right to be scared, hadn’t she? Poor Jane…

 

“Your brother’s not scared,” said the mother, smiling at her daughter.

 

So that solved the problem. They were a family. Somehow it was comforting to know that. The girl had a brother and he wasn’t scared.

 

Of course he wasn’t! He was a boy, a creature that scorned fear, a creature who was never scared of anything or anyone, except Mr Johnson at school and his cane.

 

I was a boy once, he thought, a boy just like that one. Why, I even wore the same sort of clothes … those shorts do look a bit old fashioned come to think of it. And the girl’s dress, it’s pretty like a lot of modern clothes aren’t. My sister Jane wore dresses like that…

 

“Jonas is never scared of anything,” sniffed the girl.

 

What a coincidence! His name was Jonas, and so was that small boy’s! How old might he be? Eight or nine, enjoying the same sort of ride as he’d enjoyed all those years ago, in the post-war years when it had been a financial struggle but his parents had managed it. And it’s not as if Jonas has ever been a particularly common name…

 

“It’s because I’m a boy, Jane,” said the lad seriously.

 

Jonas and Jane! Now that was more than a coincidence, surely? I’d better ask them…

 

“Excuse me,” he said as the train gained speed, “I couldn’t help overhearing … are those your names, Jonas and Jane?”

 

He might not have said anything or made a sound! The boy sat next to the man and gazed at the picture on the wall above the head of his mother opposite. The man smiled at him and ruffled his already tousled hair. The woman open a bag and took out a bag of potato crisps.

 

“Anyone want a crisp?” she asked.

 

“Put the salt in first,” suggested the man.

 

“Of course I will, Tony,” smiled the woman, “we want them to taste good, don’t we?”

 

Inside the bag of crisps she found a little screwed up bag, a blue bag, one like bags of crisps used to have, a bag of salt. And Jonas had known she would find it there because he remembered, long years ago, going on holiday in a train not unlike this one.

 

It had been a horrible journey.

 

It had been the train ride he’d never forgotten. The one that was forever in his head, that still replayed itself in nightmares. And he had plenty of those, still. All these years later.

 

“No!” he shouted, “No, no, no!”

 

“Can I have the first crisp?” asked Jane.

 

“No, No, No!” His voice was hoarse, but nobody took a blind bit of notice of him. It was as if he wasn’t there. It was as if they couldn’t hear him.

 

“If Jonas doesn’t mind,” said the mother.

 

“Go on, greedy guts, you have it,” grinned the boy.

 

And with a crunchy crispy crack the girl bit into the crisp.

 

“Spit it out!” he shouted, “For Christ’s sake spit it out!”

 

“Can you hear something?” asked the mother, “a sort of whisper?”

 

“I thought I could,” replied the father, “a sort of cry, but from miles and miles away.

 

“It’s horrible, this crisp,” said Jane. “And I heard it too, sort of warning.”

 

And she spat the crisp out. Because it tasted all wrong. Because she’d heard a whisper in the air.

 

Like all those years ago she hadn’t…

 

“Go on, eat the whole lot!” grinned the boy. Grinned Jonas. He remembered it. With dreadful guilt as she had, to tease him and deny him because that’s what brothers and sisters did to each other.

 

“Yuk!” declared the girl, “there’s something wrong with them. They don’t taste like crisps at all.”

 

“I’ll take them back to the shop, then,” muttered the mother, “to that new self-service shop. I knew no good would come from self-service in shops. Anything could happen. Bad people could even tamper with food.

 

“Why, someone might even die!”

 

Like Jane had, sixty-five years ago, thought Jonas.

 

The train clattered and clicked on, it rattled over points, it felt better than any train had ever felt before.

 

But when he looked up, to thank the family for hearing him, maybe, or wish them well, they were no longer there. The seats were bare.

 

The only clue that they’d ever been there was a half-chewed crisp on the floor and an odd old-fashioned smell he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

 

© Peter Rogerson 27.11.17

 

 

A LIFE IN THE PARK

Malcolm Drury sat on the bench seat in the park and watched the water trickling by in a stream that had been there all his life even though the bench seat hadn’t. He sighed, contentedly. He’d always liked it here.

 Malcolm Drury sat on the bench seat in the park and watched the water trickling by in a stream that had been there all his life even though the bench seat hadn’t. He sighed, contentedly. He’d always liked it here.

But now he was feeling tired.

As far as he was concerned there was no good reason for him feeling like he did. He’d had a good night’s sleep, hadn’t he, with only one trip to the toilet for a wee? But tired he was feeling, and he sighed.

The stream, like life, trickled along.

He didn’t see where the boys came from but suddenly, as if he’d blinked (though he couldn’t remember blinking) they were there at the edge of his vision, two lads that were so familiar it shocked him.

“They remind me…” he sighed to himself. And they did, but not of his own two sons, men nearing middle age now, but never quite as familiar as these two.

“Pardon?” That was a woman who’d come to sit next to him when he’d been busy looking at the stream and almost basking at the way it giggled and gurgled on its way along.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, staring at the ground in front of his feet, “it was the boys…”

“Boys?” she asked.

“Over there, in the grey school shorts, exactly like I used to wear when I was knee-high to a grasshopper myself. They remind me…”

“Of days gone by? Of the good old days? Of when you knew what was what and everything was in order?” she asked.

He nodded. “That’s it in a nutshell,” he murmured.

“Well, I’ll leave you to your pondering,” she said quietly, “I’m going to look at the stream and maybe even dip my toes in if nobody’s looking…”

He was going to reply that he remembered his mum doing that, way back, in the forties, the nineteen-forties, but didn’t. It might sound daft, as if he was likening the woman who had been sitting next to him with a woman who’d been long dead, bless her. But mum had been. Long, long dead, and it still broke his heart.

He glanced at the woman’s back as she walked off, towards the stream. That skirt, brown, severe, familiar … surely… no!

“Wanna play footie, mister?” asked the boy. The one with the grey school shorts and the socks that never stayed up properly.

Like his had never stayed up.

He smiled at him. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “I’m a bit old for that.”

“You’re never too old, mister, for fun,” the boy told him. And he was right! Of course he was right. But you could be too old for kicking a football around, even a modern plastic one, though the one the boy had look heavy and leathery and wet.

“What’s your name?” he asked, “what do you want me to call you?”

“I’m Malcolm, though you can call me Malc,” grinned the boy.

I know you, he thought, a boy called Malcolm…

“I’m Malcolm too,” he confided in the boy, “fancy that, you and me having the same name, only you’re very young and I’m very old…”

“It’s not so strange really,” murmured the boy, still grinning, “there are millions of boys and a lot less than millions of names. Here’s my friend Ricky. He’s playing footie with me, and then we might catch tiddlers in the stream and save them in a jam jar before we put them back”

“I used to do that,” sighed Malcolm senior, “I used to catch loads of tiddlers in the stream and feed with with stuff they never wanted to eat and then, before I went home, put them back in the stream. And, you know, I did it with a good friend too, a friend also called Ricky.”

“That’s spooky!” exclaimed the boy.

“The war hadn’t been over long, and there weren’t many things for us to play with back then,” sighed the old man. “I suppose you might call it a boring time, but we didn’t mind. There were tiddlers to catch. Sticklebacks.

“There are lots of things to do these days,” explained the boy, “nothing’s ever boring! And, you know, I even play hopscotch with the girls down the street if I can’t think of anything else to do. But whittling’s what I love. Whittling wood with my penknife, making things.”

“Hopscotch? Whittling? I remember…” sighed the man.

“Then there’s the library,” enthused the boy, and he laughed quietly for a moment. “The woman who works there and stamps our books, she likes me all right! She says I’m a right little book worm!”

“Audrey…” whispered the older Malcolm, “I remember Audrey… she stamped my hand once, when I asked her, and told me not to let on it was her! I loved the Famous Five and the Secret Seven… though the girls’ books by Enid Blyton were a bit soppy.”

“Hey! They’re what I read!” shouted Ricky, who’d joined them. “But not the girls’ ones,” he added in case he was misunderstood.

“So, you see, these days there’s plenty to do,” explained the boy Malc. “Loads and loads of really good things, all the time. There’s conkers and fag cards and marbles, glassies and them made of pottery that break. You know what I do, mister? When mum sends me to bed I snuggle under the blankets and take my torch with me, and read my library books until my eyes don’t want to read any more or the torch batteries are dim, and then I go to sleep. Next day, secretly, I shove my torch batteries in the oven along with mum’s baking, and that puts them right for another day or two.”

“I did that,” sighed the old man. “Batteries in the oven…”

“I feel sorry for the kids who lived before the war,” went on the boy.

“The war? What war?” asked the man.

“The war against the Germans, against Hitler. Don’t you know anything, mister?” grinned Ricky.

“I remember that, but I was only a boy, younger than you two,” sighed Malcolm the Elder. “Days were dark back then, and the nights were darker! There wasn’t much on the television but once a week, on Saturday mornings, we went to the pictures if we had enough pennies. That was good, that was!”

“We do that too!” laughed Malcolm the Younger, “but it’s mostly cowboys and Indians and bang-bang, they’re dead!”

“It was in my time too,” murmured the elder Malcolm, frowning. “Well, boys, it’s been really grand talking to you but is that lady over there, the one with her feet in the stream and the brown skirt calling you?”

The boys looked.

“Coming, mummy,” shouted Malcolm, and “coming mummy,” shouted Malcolm.

Old Malcolm struggled to rise to his feet, but suddenly they seemed to have turned to lead. Suddenly nothing would move and slowly, like evening fading to night, the light of the sun shining on the world and illuminating the park dimmed and went out, and a sudden, eerie silence replaced the giggling trickling of the stream

And at the same time the two boys were gone, and the paddling woman, and every shadow from yesterday.

And that was that.

© Peter Rogerson 26.11.17

A TROUBLED NURSE

“Haven’t you finished in there yet?” called Monica from outside the bathroom door. “I need a wee myself,” she added, meaningfully.

“Just a moment. I’ve got to fill this little plastic bottle so that I can take it with me to the doctor’s for my check up,” he replied, “but it isn’t easy being as small as it is.”

“You’re better equipped to do it than me or any other woman is,” she told him. “I have to use a funnel!”

“Maybe, but that don’t make it any easier for me, but I’ve done it. Just.”

“About time too! Hurry up! You’ve got to be there in less than half an hour, and I’m coming with you so that we can do a bit of shopping afterwards.”

The bathroom door opened and he came out, grinning at her and holding his sample bottle for her to see.

“Urgh! It’s dripping! Be careful!” she admonished him as she swept past him and shut the door.

He was off for his annual check-up for which he’d already donated a couple of tubes of blood last week, and now he was going to be looked at, weighed, have his blood pressure monitored and have the secrets implied by his corpuscles explained to him.

Nurse Gemma Thompson was a buxom woman in her thirties with a contagiously happy personality, the sort of woman he felt he could quite happily explain details of his life to, so he did.

“I’m really happily married,” he said when asked about his personal life, “and my wife’s waiting out in the waiting room for me. We’re off shopping as soon as you’ve done your best.”

“You did bring a water sample with you?” she prompted him, and he produced his little plastic bottle.

“It’s wrapped in some cling-film in case it leaked,” he explained, and she placed it carefully next to the sink where she unscrewed the top and slipped a thin length of card in..

“It’s good stuff,” she told him, examining the tester that had turned to the right colour to make her happy.

“Self-processed whiskey,” he told her, “pure as sunlight, sweet as … I dunno.”

“I hope you don’t get through too much of the stuff,” she said, “it’s another question I have to ask though I don’t take much notice of what men say because they mostly lie. But I have to note what they say though the honest answer would probably involve doubling or even trebling it!”

“Then I’ll be exactly truthful,” he said, and was. “You see, I like a drop, but not too much,” he explained.

“I wish my father could be as frugal,” she told him, “but he isn’t, I’m afraid. He likes what he calls his wee dram a little bit too much some times!”

She finished the appointment by praising him for the condition of his liver and with his mind soothed by her description of his healthy insides as encoded in his blood, he left.

When he was gone she picked up the little plastic bottle and screwed the cap back on it before slipping it into her handbag where it clattered against one or two others. Then she looked at her watch and switched her computer terminal off.

Noon. She smiled at her own reflection in the mirror. “Lunch time,” she told herself, “Better hurry.”

And hurry she did.

She lived a mere ten minutes from the surgery. What seemed to be like the middle of a thriving Midlands town soon gave way to a green and pleasant countryside as she walked down a narrow road towards the isolated Dingle Cottage where she lived with her father.

He didn’t get out much these days though he was younger than many of the patients who had their appointments for an annual check-up having passed the age of retirement. But her father had his weaknesses. She knew all about them and was determined to help him sort himself out while he still had time.

And she had her theories, theories that had evolved from her own deep thought and deeper convictions. Maybe they weren’t based on scientific research or even country knowledge but they made sense to her. Other attempted interventions hadn’t worked but she was damned sure this would. It had to, or she would no longer have a father, and despite his obvious frailties she knew she’d miss him when he was gone.

She opened the front door of Dingle Cottage and stepped into the relative cool and dark of its cosy interior.

“I’m home, dad,” she called out.

He was somewhere in the front room. She heard the clatter of something falling, and the sound of breaking glass.

“Are you all right?” she called.

“Yesh, I’m here…”

His voice was slurred, like she’d known it would be.

“Bloody whiskey,” she muttered under her breath.

“I’ve got a special treat for you,” she told him as she made her way past shards of broken glass where his tumbler lay shattered on the polished wooden floor.

“It fell. Yesh, it fell,” he complained, indicating the damage with a wide sweep of his arms and almost falling off his chair in the process.

“I’ve got lunch for you. Five minutes in the microwave,” she said.

“Don’ wan’ any lunch. But if you’ve got a wee dram…?”

“You know it isn’t good for you, dad,”

“It don’ matter. Wha’ve I got to live for anyway, at my age an’ with a good woman in her grave…?”

“Mother’s not dead, dad, and you know it. She’s living in Dorking with a conjuror and doing really well.”

“Well, she could’ve been doin’ really well living’ here, Gemma. She din’ ‘ave to go to Dorking!”

“It was your drinking, dad. You know it was, never sober, so you can’t blame your state on mum not being here.”

“I can’ help it. I need a wee dram now. Not ‘ad one since I don’ know when.”

“I do. Not since I opened the front door and came in. You really are too bad! But guess what. I’ve got a special drop for you, a very special drop. Here, let me get you a fresh glass seeing as you’ve broken the one you had.”

“Ish it good stuff, Gemma?”

“It should be. Reconstituted whiskey. Not anywhere near as harmful to the body.”

She disappeared into the kitchen and slipped a meal in the microwave for herself. Then she reached for a fresh tumbler and carefully poured the contents of Lionel’s urine sample bottle into it. It looked just right. The colour and beauty of pure Scotch whiskey.

“You’ll like this, dad,” she called, and walked nimbly through into the front room bearing the tumble.

“This might even do you good,” she purred as she handed it to him.

He took it and held it up so that he could see the light from outside the cottage window shining through the pale amber liquid, clearer than Scotch mist.

“Looks okay,” he acknowledged, and then he slowly and carefully took one sip.

“Funny stuff this,” he muttered, swirling it round his mouth, “don’t taste o’ whiskey at all…”

“It’s reconstituted,” Gemma told him.

“It ain’t,” he ground out, a look of horror on his face, and then he dashed the tumbler onto the ground.

“It’sh pish!” he shouted, his face twisted in anger, “it’s pure and poisonous pish!”

Nurse Gemma Thompson returned to the kitchen when the microwave pinged, a small smile hovering about the corners of her mouth.

“Well, I thought it might be good,” she called to him, “You know, the real McCoy. I thought you might really like it. After all, an old man who came for his check-up today had!”

© Peter Rogerson 25.11.17

A DECENT MAN

“It looks like rain,” suggested Monica as she prepared to pop into town for provisions.

“Maybe, but I don’t mind,” replied Lionel, “I’m not so keen on shopping and there isn’t much to fetch. You pop to the Supermarket and I’ll take a walk round the site and find out what’s what and where’s where.”

Monica was the wife, Lionel was the husband and the site was where they had parked their mobile home, intending to stay for a fortnight, they being both retired from the pressures of work and out to enjoy themselves.

“But what if it rains?” asked Monica, “because it surely looks like it.”

“Then I’ll get wet or find a pub,” he grinned back at her. “I’ll be all right! A few drops of rain isn’t the end of the world.”

“Just remember that chest of yours,” she sniffed, and Lionel nodded.

“Of course I will. If it rains I’ll find shelter. Now I’ll be off for a walk and you be careful.” he replied, leaving the vehicle and waving her off.

Monica had been right about the rain. He hadn’t walked above a hundred yards when it started, belting down from a sky that had suddenly decided to be grey, overcast and with a fresh wind of its own.

“Sod it,” he muttered.

The rain seemed to have the devil in it as it ripped into him as close to horizontally as any rain he’d known in a longish life of observing rain.

In seconds he was wet.

And there was no shelter anywhere near him. There was a scattering of other motor homes, that was true, and a handful of caravans, it being still early in the season and nothing quite at its peak yet.

“She was right,” he mumbled to himself, “but then, she’s always right. I hope she remembers the beans and sausages.”

She would, he knew that much. She had a memory he envied. His was very much a weak affair, easily recalling unimportant trivia and rarely mindful of important stuff, like tins of beans and sausages.

“You’re getting wet,” called a voice. A pleasant voice, female, not young and not old, and a head poked out of a caravan door, fortunately in the lea of the rain.

“Don’t I know it,” he called back, shaking himself so that rainwater tumbled from his clothing and onto the ground.

“You’d better come and shelter then,” giggled the voice.

He thought about that. Wet as he was, he didn’t want to inconvenience anyone, and least of all a stranger. And he knew how uncomfortable it can be in a caravan with water splashing everywhere off wet bodies.

“I’m too wet,” he replied, honestly.

“Come on, silly! You’ll be safe here, and I’ve got my daughter who can chaperone you!”

“Me,” came a second voice, another woman, younger but not so young you’d think they were mother and child if it hadn’t been mentioned.

“I’d better not,” he said ruefully.

“Come on, or you’ll drown!” That was the daughter, in her twenties he supposed, and laughing at him.

“We saw your motorhome being driven off, I guess by your good lady,” put in the older woman, “so you can shelter here until she comes back. She is returning, I suppose? She’s not lost patience with an old timer who’s happy getting soaked by an early summer storm, is she? And gone for good? That would be sad…”

“Monica. She’s gone to the supermarket,” he explained.

“Then you’re a silly boy not going with her,” chastised the mother.

“She nags me like that all the time,” laughed the daughter, “now come on in or I’ll come and fetch you…”

The rain was worse if anything, so he cast any caution he felt to the winds and slopped towards the women and their caravan.

It was warm and dry in there.

“I bet you could fancy a coffee,” suggested the mother. “I’m Jane, but the way, and this is Terry. Short for Theresa, but she won’t be called that and if you try it she’ll probably batter you.”

He reached the caravan and climbed in.

It was warm in there, and snug, the air smelled of a floral air-freshioner and the mother, Jane, was grinning broadly. She might have been anywhere in her fifties and had the kind of face a man might automatically like looking at. Meanwhile, the daughter, Terry, possibly in her twenties, was attending to a kettle.

“You’d better take that soaking shirt off,” sniffed Jane, “we’ve got a dryer that works off the mains supply that we’re plugged into. It’ll be dry in a tick.”

“And your trousers,” giggled Terry, “take your trousers off. We can’t have wet trousers on our nice new upholstery.”

“I’ll give you a towel, here you are, it’s not the world’s biggest towel but this is a caravan and space is important.”

It certainly wasn’t the world’s biggest towel, but it did to dry his hair.

He didn’t want to remove his trousers. Two women and a man of his age … it wouldn’t be the right thing to do at all.

“Trousers?” prompted Terry. He could tell, by the laughter lines already being etched onto her face, that she was the mischievous sort.

“You’ll embarrass the poor man,” warned Jane, “I know men. They spend most of their lives dreaming of bumping into naked women, but the merest suggestion that they remove their trousers sends them into a spiral of despair.”

“Then they’re silly,” decided Terry. “My ex was silly,” she added thoughtfully, “but he was the other way round, always wanting to provide me with a chance to snigger at his bare bottom as well as his other collection of absurd bits and pieces!”

“It’s just,” stammered Lionel, “it’s decency. It’s a matter of what’s decent in mixed company.”

“I suppose catching pneumonia is decent,” murmured Jane, “or any of the nasty side-effects of a good soaking!”

“Who decides what’s decent and what isn’t?” asked Terry. “There must have been a time when our truly distant ancestors went about naked all the time, day in and day out … was that indecent?”

Lionel was lost for words. Had his ancestors dared to go about like that? And what had they done it? What had motivated them not to wear clothing when it makes sense for any number of reasons. Warmth, fashion, decency, they all sprang to his mind. He had always been a very moral man and decency was foremost in his mind.

“I don’t think they did…” he mumbled, “at least mine didn’t. I know what the young folks these days get up to, but back when we knew right from wrong everyone wore clothes. They must have. I always do.”

“Please yourself,” smiled Jane, “but I’m prepared to bet that Terry’s right and that for more than half of the story of our species, from a simple hominid on the African plains to now, our forefathers had no idea what clothing meant, and when they did pull something on them, for warmth, maybe, they didn’t have modesty or decency in mind, just comfort, and the garment that warmed them would have been a smelly old animal pelt.”

He was out of his depth. He’d never given much thought to beginnings. He’d never had the time.

“I’d better go,” he stammered, “can I have my shirt back?”

“But it’s still soaking!” laughed Terry, “Let’s at least get that into the dryer … and the rain hasn’t eased much either.”

“Monica’s due back,” he mumbled, telling himself that next time his darling wife predicted rain he’d better take more notice of her. “Thanks for the shelter, but….”

He pulled the wet shirt on. It felt cold and sticky and horrible. But he was going to keep his trousers on. That was important, honourable and, yes, decent.

He almost ran out of their caravan.

Monica was longer than he’d expected. Apparently she’d bumped into an old friend, of all coincidences seeing they were miles from home, and they’d had coffee and a bun.

“Did you get out of the rain all right?” she asked, “I said it would come, oh ye of little faith…”

“I sheltered in a caravan for a few minutes,” he told her, “but the women there, two of them, they wanted to dry my trousers. Of all the things!”

“Why, were they wet?”

He nodded. “They’re getting dry now,” he assured her.

“You should have had them dried, silly,” she laughed, “You didn’t forget your undies, did you? They would have given you quite enough protection from peeping eyes!”

“I forgot. They said people used to go around naked!”

“Who did?”

“The ladies in the caravan.”

“Well, I suppose they did. Once upon a time,” decided Monica.

“Oh.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just didn’t seem quite …”

“Quite what?”

“Decent, I suppose,” mumbled Lionel, and suddenly, out of the blue, he sneezed.

© Peter Rogerson 23.11.17