David Hadley's Blog, page 117

A Conjurer of Tales

When it began, we couldn't really say. These things have no real beginning as such. You could say it began when we first met. But then we do meet so many people over the course of our lives. Not many end up as we ended up, here, huddled together, listening to the sirens drawing closer bringing with them the end of all we hoped for, bringing an end to our futures together.

She was married, of course. I wasn't looking for anyone. I had given up on all that, which is often – according to the stories – when it is most likely to happen, love comes when you don't expect it.

I, though, had given up believing in stories. I had written too many of them to believe in them any more. I knew how they worked. I was like some religious leader who knew how to manipulate happenstance into miracles to fool those who need to believe, I was the magician who knew the secrets of all the illusions.

Love too, I thought at the time, was an illusion, a trick we play on ourselves, or some trick that nature performs so life can go on living.

Anyway, there I was sitting at a desk at the back of a bookshop, a pile of my latest sitting next to me. There was a queue, for which I was grateful. After all, you cannot be a writer without readers, and I liked to think I was a writer, some magician who could weave the stories out of airy nothing. Not much of a magician compared to the greats who came before me and those yet to be, a simple conjurer, nothing more. I could do a few simple card tricks and pull the rabbit from the hat, but nothing beyond that. But, it seems people – well, some people – think that was enough. So the smile I smiled upon each and every one of those readers was one of genuine gratitude.

Or, at least, I like to think so.

You would think someone in that position, A well-established crime writer would be able to pull off the perfect crime, or as close to perfect enough for him and his beautiful accomplice to get away with it.

At least, we thought I could.

But, now, like the last pages in so many of my stories, the sirens are coming for us.

Time that Lasts Forever

All those slow times, those times when it seems moments hang there between us as if suspended. As if the next touch of finger on bare skin, or kiss against flesh could last forever and we could fall together down towards some place where all our tender moments would go on forever.

Time, though, never waited for us. Those moments were gone so fast, even as they seemingly lasted forever. Our time was over and the world pulled us back, apart, away from each other. It turned us out onto the dark rain-soaked streets to walk away, back to lives that seemed suddenly so empty of everything.

I watched you walking away. Already wanting you to turn again, run back to me, so I could take you back to that anonymous room where our time waited for us, ready to take us in its arms.

You never turned back though.

You said, some other time when we lay together in that room, that you did not want to look back, could not look back, because if you saw me there, you'd want to come running back and never leave.

Now, though, these days when I live so far away, lost inside a new life in a new town, I wonder if you ever walk those streets. If you ever glance across at that doorway that led to the anonymous little room that became our world and wonder what happened to those times we wanted to last for ever.

Close Encounters... with a Fridge

Not that I expected it.

Well, you don't, do you? At least, I didn't. After all, when you get up in a morning it is not the first thing you expect to see when your bleary morning eyes focus long enough to see what is in your kitchen.

At first, I thought it was the dog, but the dog was there sitting in the hall, looking guilty. Guilty for the usual reason, I thought, so I was watching the floor, being careful where I put my feet when I heard the noise from the kitchen.

It took me a few seconds to make sense of this, still staring at the floor ahead of me.

Then I thought, burglar?

I looked around for a weapon; I fumbled around in the nearby cutlery drawer and came up with... a spoon. All the knives were – apparently – in the dishwasher again. The dishwasher was – of course – in the kitchen. Briefly, I wondered what the penalties for savagely spooning a burglar in one's on home were, before another noise from the kitchen caused me to creep towards the kitchen door, trusty spoon clutched in my quivering hand.

I looked back at the dog for support, but he just whined and looked away, obviously embarrassed by the spoon.

In the film, the cartoons and all that usually the first words are: 'take me to your leader.'

However, the alien I met in my kitchen, rooting through my fridge, its first words to me were, and I quote: 'Where's the bacon?'

Shadows and Secret Places

Shadows and Secret Places

The morning, formal, stiff and cold, too dark
and distant, waiting there as though it lacks
the strength to dismiss the night and dissolve
its secrets and its rituals in shadows
all hiding at the edge of things and waiting
for darkness creeping back, embracing them
again when daylight falls away to night.

But now unwilling morning drags the dark
away, and pulling the reluctant sun
into the skies, while chasing shadows back
and drying dew to leave no trace of night
to spoil the heart of day with any dark
musings on shadows and the secret places
all best left in the darkness for the night.

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No doubt you have been wondering over the years about what is the most suitable hat for the various breeds of penguin: such as a deerstalker for the King penguins, or whether emperor penguins should wear a top hat.

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Some comments on David Hadley's humour pieces:

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We Could Be Alone

It was a place where we knew we could be alone. We were not – it seemed – even then, much like other people of or own age. We preferred the quiet to the noisy, the contemplative to the rowdy. We preferred the quiet of a walk in the country to a night out at clubs and pubs.

I had never been that good at fitting in, never felt comfortable with other people. Let alone those of my own age, who often seemed more alien to me than those we were supposed not to understand, the older generations.

Miranda, like me was one who didn't fit in. She too, seemed born out of her time. She, though, went her own way, seemingly indifferent to those around her. Unlike all the other girls I'd known, she seemed indifferent to the approval of others, never needing the comfort of fashion or any of the other tribal signifiers and markers with which all our contemporaries displayed their allegiances.

For a while, I had thought about trying to fit in, trying to be like everybody else, but I was never issued with the code book they all used. They knew a different language, use words in a different way, to me. They had a code of dress and style and music and so many other things, which I didn't have, or even know about acquiring.

I lived, as far as I could tell in a parallel but overlapping universe, worlds that didn't quite intersect. So when Miranda and I met, we seemed not only to live on the same plane finding in each other something we both lacked. Then it seemed as though we'd both – at last – found a place we could call home.

The Glorious Revolution

So there we were, or at least most of us were. The rest of them had become bored and wandered off to watch a repeat of Downton Abbey. The one where the servants begin a revolution and storm the sitting room, gaining control of the cucumber sandwiches and the strategically vital posh frocks, just before the advert break.

Anyway, those of us left manning the barricades decided too that we great heroes of the proletariat all deserved at least a two-week break in the sun once the revolution had been established. So the steering committee began at once to outline plans for a people’s travel agency in readiness for the next revolutionary council meeting. Someone suggested ‘something should be done about her from number 22,’ which, after a show of hands of the cadre present, was also added to the agenda.

That night we were expecting a counter-strike by the reactionary anti-revolutionary army. As usual they would – we assumed – commence their attack under cover of the peak-time viewing schedule when most of our forces would be settling down in front of something with heavy audience engagement.

Sure enough, just as the first dance-off began, the counter-revolutionaries began their artillery barrage. Unfortunately for them, they were relying on the renationalised Post Office to deliver their artillery shells to the guns at the front. Therefore, they only had two shells, one of which was a dud and the other caused only minor damage to a public urinal down at the far end of the High Street.

Consequently, their attack was desultory at best, only managing to take one of the town’s less strategically important takeaways, before our gallant comrades, all eager for a late-night curry, beat them back.

The glorious revolution continues and we fight on for another day!

Around the Centre of a Moment

The slow turning of a day around the centre of a moment holds us close to each other, never wanting to let go. We want; we need, time to stop here. Here and now enclosing us and enfolding us in this time that should never end. Here is perfect peace, perfect safety and perfect comfort wrapped around each other as our arms wrap around each other too.

Time should stop now, and not carry on with its seconds falling over one another and stumbling into the minutes, hours, days. All taking us on into that hazy and uncertain future, where we know that times like this must end for us.

It is the mortality though that makes these special times precious, if we had nothing to fear from the future, then these times would not have the importance or the intensity we feel when wrapped inside them. It is only because we know we do not have long, and there will - one day – be an end to all this, we feel this urgency of stasis; this need for the now to become eternal.

If it did become eternal, though, we would soon grow tired of it. We would then long for movement and freedom with the uncertainty the undefined and unknowable future would bring. It is only the knowledge that these times must end, so we can carry on, which makes us want to stay here holding each other close forever.

Take Me with You

'Take me with you,' she said.

'Why?' He looked down at the woman standing in the sodden field, half-covered in mud and a basket at her feet. The basket contained a bare handful of root vegetables, too muddy and scrawny for him to identify what they were.

'I could keep you warm at night.'

A couple of the other women, bent double over their own baskets in the field a few strides away, laughed without looking up.

'How old are you?' He had been about to remount, but he held the reins ready in his hand, wiping the rain from his hair with the other.

'Old enough.'

'You'd be a camp follower … a soldier's whore?' He half-smiled.

She looked around, behind her. 'It has to be better than this.'

He nodded. There had been a time when he'd been a farmer... for a while, before the barbarians came from their strange sea-monster boats in the night. 'You don't know anything about me.'

She nodded this time. 'I like what I see.'

'What you saw, you mean?' He turned his head towards the spindly tree he'd just pissed against.

She smiled showing white strong teeth. 'And that too.' She took a step towards him. 'I'd treat you right... if you treat me right. That's all I ask.'

He shrugged and hauled himself up on his horse. He looked down at her as she too looked down, at the mud in defeat.

He held out his hand. 'Come on, then.'

She took his hand, he hauled her up behind him and off they rode.

All Our Seasons

Then there were seasons. We had our spring and our long warm summer, but then came our autumn of fading days where the darkness of winter covered all our days with cold hard frosts neither of us could break through.

We had a long freezing winter of cold harsh days and lonely shivering nights when the bed turned us away from each other, rather than huddling us together under the heaping drifts of a thick warm quilt.

Then, one day, for reasons neither of us saw, the first day of spring broke through our long years of winter. There was green at the edges of our dull lifeless trudge through the harsh blizzards we had thrown at each other. There was birdsong again in greening trees once stark and bare.

I found a snowdrop growing up out of the cold bare ground and for the first time in years I took it to her and she smiled as though the long thaw began with that one single gesture.

Soon there were signs of spring everywhere, as our world began to bud and bloom again. The bed grew warm as we wrapped ourselves around each other, comforting each other whenever the memories of that long cold winter sent shivers through each of us.