David Hadley's Blog, page 113

Having it Come to Them

Well, you know… or, if you don’t, please consult the appropriate website and/or bloke down the pub for a full explanation and – quite possibly – numbered diagrams. This will go some way towards explaining just how the undercover reporters caught the politician with the – alleged – lady of employable fondness, the water pistol and the scuba gear in a hotel bedroom in Ludlow.

This is now a country somewhat immune to scandals of a sexual nature amongst those in the public eye. Even so, this has been one that still has aroused (if that is the right word) more than the average number of giggles in the British public since the affair has become public knowledge. However, the amount of laughter and general sniggering at the foibles of the great and good has been taken by some as a sign that the British people have at long last recovered from previous political sexual shenanigans. Including the trauma of both the John Major and Edwina Curie incident(s) and the shear horror of the thought that senior members of the former Labour government were actively engaged in sexual intercourse. Sometimes not even with each other.

Consequently, there have been calls in some quarters that a selection of civil servants, party workers and political appointees to that government should receive some sort of public honour or recognition. Mainly for their great courage in going beyond what would normally be expected of people in their positions, or even the favoured positions of those they worked under – as it were.

Still, there is nothing like a nice scandal involving a politician to warm the heart. It helps us realise there may after all, and despite much evidence to the contrary, be some sort of cosmic justice after all when we find them doing it to one another instead of doing it to us.

Fifteen Years

Henry turned towards Eric, glancing at the security monitors, which – as usual – showed no activity in the deserted building. ‘So?’

Eric pushed his cap further back on his head and scratched an eyebrow. ‘So….’

‘Right.’ Henry began unbuttoning his uniform jacket as he leant back in his chair.

‘I can't think of anything to say,’ Eric said, taking his cap off and giving the Security Guard badge on it a quick polish on his uniform sleeve.

Henry shrugged. ‘Neither can I.’

‘Sometimes, y'know….’

Henry turned back towards Eric. ‘What?’

‘Well, I mean. How long have we been together, here, now, H?’

‘Oh, years. Ever since I joined. That's… bloody hell! Fifteen years.’

‘Fifteen years?’

‘Yeah, fifteen.’ Henry shook his head.

Eric sighed. ‘A long time, H.’

‘A very long time,’ Henry said after a pause. ‘The longest I've ever done anything. I've known you longer than I've known my wife.’

‘So… I suppose it is not that surprising then.’

‘What?’

‘Running out of things to say.’ Eric twiddled the joystick that controlled one of the cameras. As usual, it showed just one long empty corridor. ‘I suppose we know all we need to know about each other.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘No perhaps about it, H mate.’

‘Maybe….’

‘All right then….’ Eric sat back in his seat and turned towards the other man. ‘Yesterday was Thursday. So you had steak and chips, and then a couple of pints while you watched that police thing on the telly. You took the dog for a quick stroll when it finished and then you went to bed. Yes?’

Henry sighed. ‘Yes. Exactly.’

The two men looked at each other for a moment, then turned back to watching the monitors in silence.

When She Sang

First, she sang me the song of mornings, giving the sun a tune to rise to. Weaving the words of the day around the early hours as the trees, hills and the day grew out of the morning mists. Then she sang us a love song, using up a few hours of the morning as each verse wrapped itself around us while we lay together, joined in the chorus of skin against skin.

Then she sang us a song of the rest of the day when we left the love song lying on her bed, waiting for us to return to it sometime soon. She sang of the morning, of the hillside and the cliffs and the long winding path down to the beach. Once down there, she sang the songs of the seas and the laments for the sailors who never came home. She sang of mermaids and flotsam found on beaches and tales of storms and ballads of the seaways.

Then, later, as the tide turned, she sang us songs of going home. We climbed back up that winding path as she sang a song to the fading day and a song of welcome to the stars and the night, and a song of what lovers wish for when they see the moon.

Then we were back in her bed ready to sing again the songs that lovers sing before, she sang us both a night-time song to end our day.

Sundays

Sundays

Sundays everywhere were shut.
Closed up tight as a pious pew.
The stone smugness of the churches
with captured, captivated, congregations.

Sunday was a prison, confining,
conforming and confirming
through the conservation
of ritual and ritualistic thought,
constrained by tradition
and the weight of authority.

Sunday was a corpse, as dead
as the surrounding graveyard,
high on the hill above the village,
where the graves stood their ground,
sentries against the possibility of dissent.

No Going Back

It ended there. It was over and all we could do was walk away. I thought about turning back to see if she would turn too, but... well, I didn't want to look back, not any more.

There had been weeks of looking back. Months of searching for that point when we stopped creating the possibility of a future together and began to look away from each other. Each searching the horizon on our evening walks along the cliff path.

There had been a time, and it seemed so long ago now, when we would only ever look at each other on those walks. Then, when we did look at other things, like the porpoises in the bay, it was because one of us had shown them to the other. Almost as if we could only see the world beyond ourselves through the eyes of the other.

Now, though, we did not even turn to see each other leave. She went off, back to that cottage by the sea. I took the train to some new world. Something not bound by the sea and its horizons, but something seeming smaller than that constrained land where we had found something almost limitless, at least for a while.

I thought that maybe – one day – she would call and I would go back to find everything back to how it used to be. Deep down, though, I knew that we could never go back to how it used to be. Even when we return to places that once contained all we could ever want, on returning we find them small, constrained and limited. Far less than we remember, often with hardly any trace of why we once thought them so important.

So, when that call did come, I didn't go back.

Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Well… I suppose… but really, you had to be there. Or, at least, in the almost immediate vicinity. These occurrences – despite the proliferating social media, 24-Hour news and the pot noodle... especially the latter, are still better experienced in the flesh… as it were.

Although, that old saw about the flesh being weak is not really applicable in situations such as this, not with those arms anyway. She also has the kind of face, the look, that… shall we say… er… discourages the disparaging remark. That and the way she chews buses as a between-snacks snack.

At least, she has – on doctor’s orders – cut down on the double-deckers.

Still, she has what is known as a formidable presence and is the sort of person who doesn’t stay at the back of any queue for long. She does have what is best described, at least when she is in earshot, as having a somewhat imposing physical presence. This, apparently enables her to appear at the front of any queue she joins almost as if by a process of osmosis or magic. Maybe, though, it is some vestige of the primal that emerges in those in her vicinity. Who, consequently, somehow feel – deep down – it is best not to have her behind you, especially not with your back turned to her. No doubt this is what somehow encourages her towards the front of the queue.

Maybe it is just her sense of entitlement. One that also seems to entitle her to grab whatever she feels she wants, often on a whim. Which many, subsequently gingerly-stepping, men have discovered at closing time when her desires take an amorous turn. A time when she often reaches out a random hand towards any seemingly-satisfactorily encumbered pair of trousers.

Refusal is not an option, at least if the aforementioned grabbed articles are if not your pride and joy then at least something you would prefer to remain attached to.

Hence my attempt to sneak out quietly now at this time in the early morning. A time once only beloved by whistling milkmen, but now a bare deserted street. The quiet only broken by her earth-shattering snores as she – at last – sleeps the sleep of the finally satisfied.

Explaining the Spoon

We grow old… we grow old….

Which is a bit of a bugger.

There are times, especially when you are standing in the kitchen, usually holding a spoon, when you wonder why you went in there…. Then, inevitably, if you still have a cup of tea cooling somewhere about the rest of the house you may have overlooked. Especially so in your haste to get to the kitchen and get a spoon for….

Well, for whatever it was.

Of course, in your mind you are always that age you think of when you think of yourself. Usually it is an age when you were young and the world spread itself out for you. A time when every time you ended up in the kitchen holding the spoon you knew exactly why you were there and just what that spoon was for.

If there is no cup of tea in your near vicinity and you are fairly sure there is not one elsewhere in the house, perhaps you have come into the kitchen to measure something out with a teaspoon.

It is now advisable to check to see if you are cooking something in the kitchen… that could explain the spoon.

Not only does the spoon remains unexplained, but where has all that time gone? Only yesterday, it seems, it was the 1970s and glam rock was all the rage, but it seems the purveyors of so much of your musical youth are pensioners… or dead.

Not only that the clothes you are wearing are – apparently – back in fashion… yet again. Although, it has to be said that none of the musical heroes of your youth were ever famed as lead spoon player in your favourite bands. As far as you are aware too, despite your clothes being fashionable again, there has been no media article on this year’s must-have fashion accessory – the spoon.

So it can’t be that either.

Eventually, you know too that the wheel will fall off time’s winged chariot for you too. You know too, your sudden departure from this mortal coil will always be remembered for your final moment, remembered only as: found dead in the kitchen… holding a spoon.

And no-one will ever know just why you chose, at your moment of death, to go into the kitchen, or even why you were holding that spoon.

Waiting for the End

This is such a small place.

Once, I could roam free all over this land. It was my land then. I owned as far as I could ride in three days. Even then, I could sit astride my horse and look down upon lands that could be mine, and taken by force, politics or intrigue, if I wished. Some of those further lands connected to me by family relationships too. I could sit there on a hillside looking over all that lay around me, with my men at my back and feel as though I was someone substantial. Feel that my name would be writ large in my family's history. That my name would be the one name my descendants would remember far into a future that is too far to imagine.

Now, I am here, confined to this one room.

No, I am not under arrest, not imprisoned; not officially anyway. But if I dare to venture from this room, attempt to take the long curving staircase down to the land that used to be mine, then I find myself my daughter's guards accompany me. They do no order, or forbid, they would not dare, even now when I'm a frail old man, but there is reluctance, a growing reluctance, to allow me freedom of movement.

There are tales, stories and songs about young beautiful princesses imprisoned in towers, none about old men suffering the same fate, and I doubt any handsome prince, or even a comely princess, is out there now riding to rescue me.

Instead, I sit at the window, watching over the lands that were once mine. Like everyone else in this castle, that was once mine, I wait only for my death.

The Seas of the Night

All those dreams that sail by on the seas of the night, left in the port of the morning. We set out to stride into the heartland of day, leaving those dreams at the mercy of the tides of time and of memory.

She was one of those dreams I left behind as I made my way into the lands of my day.

I left her there to face the sea storms of time and face the battering by the winds of memory. I forgot about her as I went about exploring the hinterland of the day.

Later, I drew closer to the shores of that night. I again began to smell her scent on the sea breezes the night brought down to where I stood on the dark shore. I wait there for those dream ships to carry me far across the deep waters of the night. Those deep waters where so many were lost amongst the wreckage of their dreams. The night took them to itself, drowning them amongst the flotsam of their dreams. The mermaids of the night taking them by the hand, dragging them down to those sunken cities from which no sailor of the night ever returns.

That night too, I saw her waving to me from the night ocean’s swell. Waiting there for me to dive into my dreams and take the hand of my own mermaid. Letting her sing her songs of drowning to me in the darkness as the deep night washed over me and I took her hand to dive deeper than I had ever dived before.

She Could Take My Hand

This is how it could have been.

She could have been the one that took my ordinary days and carved them into jewelled moments. Taken the mundane life I fell into, and created a new world. Made something new out of this dry dust I stumble through as the dull dawn tries to break the hold of the night keeping me prisoner in this cold tower, waiting for the day to come.

She could have been the one that opened that dark door, led me along the corridor and out into the bright daylight. Taken me out into a world where the possible grows like the grass. A place where the trees, the flowers and the birdsong hints of something waiting around the next bend in the road that will make all those years of waiting worthwhile.

Instead, though, I turned away from my window when she came along, walking down that path on her way to bathe in the seas of possibility. I turned back to this desk and the papers. I was far too busy to go with her, despite all the promises she made and the tales she told me of the lands beyond this cold tower.

Instead, I turned back to my papers.

Then I began writing one more story about the woman who came looking for me, and why I turned away.