David Hadley's Blog, page 121

The Crystal Week

Each one of those moments was crystal in its clarity. Each day shone like some jewel. Each easily taken into the hand to place carefully in the box of memories we kept for those times when we sat together late at night, watching the flames dancing and listening to the tick of the clock. Kept for those times when time doesn’t matter.

That week though, the Crystal Week was the one we always turned to later when times were not so good, to remind us of what once had been and what – maybe – could be again sometime.

Times, though, cannot be recreated, made again. As Heraclites said you can never step in the same river twice, in the intervening period both you and the river change, so in that way we could never go back. All we could do was remember.

Or, at least, so I thought.

Marie always had a secret smile, something I associated with memory. She could – I often thought – remember much more than me: the details, the incidents, sounds, smells, textures. All the time she remembered past times, especially our Crystal Week, she had that smile on her face. I thought it was some trick, something like biting your lip, scratching your head, to help you remember. But that smile was different.

I remember when it all changed. After a fraught week at work, I sat with Marie, watching the flames, talking again about the Crystal Week, remembering. After a moment of watching the flames, I said ‘I wish I could go back there.’

Marie took my hand in hers, smiling that smile. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you back there.’

And she did.

The Room of Forgetting

These are the words that fade into the silence. This is what is said when there is nothing left to say. These are the hands that make certain half-completed gestures as if they, like the words have nothing left to say.

We turn, each back to our own silences and leave this room empty of everything except the slow dancing dust left in the sunlight to settle down, leaving this room emptier than it has ever been.

The silence grows, spreads out, blanching even the simplest words of meaning and context, turning them to dust that settles and lies undisturbed. A thin veneer left coating the surfaces of the lives that once filled this room.

We no longer have the energy left for the words, nothing except to turn away. Each closing our own doors on this shared room, leaving it empty, a place for the dust of memory to settle and wait until everything is forgotten.

One day this room will fill again with new lives, new words, people with something still to say to one another and the dust will dance again as it swirls and eddies around a living landscape.

Until then though it would be best to keep this doors closed and give the room the time to forget.

Haunted by Memory

Haunted by Memory

We walk back to the place they stood
as morning mists arose to let
the night escape the day and leave
us standing still, alone here, waiting,
for the tide to turn away revealing

a day so haunted by lost time
and memory, the fading footsteps
all left in dampened sand that tell
of someone here for a short while
who shared these haunted moments too.

Crime of the Century

It was one of those cases that baffle the police force and force them to hold informal discussions in front of the coffee machine. Not only that a maverick female officer – who some thought promoted beyond her abilities in the name of political correctness – had to confront a junior officer in the male toilets. She also had to act in direct contravention of her superior’s orders to make an arrest of what turned out to be the least-likely suspect.

Anyway, after one of the longest stake-outs in UK police history the squad were able to track down the perpetrator. As one police officer said, ‘We had to sit there for hours in front of Twitter, just waiting for someone to say something even slightly disparaging. Someone did call the leader of the Opposition a gormless twat at some point. But the CPS said we would never get a conviction on something as factually accurate as that.’

In the end, though, police formally charged a middle-aged woman from Manchester with calling someone from Huddersfield a ‘soft southern poof’ with malice aforethought in a Facebook encounter over the relative merits of Coronation Street versus Eastenders. The Manchester woman was sentenced to five years in a maximum-security prison for the heinous offence of ‘Having an On-Line Strop’. An offence under legislation brought in by the current government in a frantic attempt to appear relevant and to address the grievances of the easily-offended.

However, this attempt to court popular opinion has made absolutely no difference to the government’s poll ratings. In fact, it caused a massive drop in the already negative approval rating of the government when the UK population discovered it is now illegal to call the government ‘a bunch of useless incompetent wankers.’

At No Other Time

What else was there left to say?

We stood, both with heads bowed, foreheads touching as I clasped her hands in mine. Around us, people with places to go bustled around the station while an amplified voice burbled incomprehensibly from speakers all around us.

‘I’ll have to go,’ I said, not moving.

Emma nodded slowly, her hair brushing against mine.

‘I’ll be back,’ I said, wanting to believe it. I didn’t know though, whether I would be or not. That was the thing about time travel. Something we had discovered back at the Institute during the first live experiments. The past is as much a fluctuating possibility as the future. Just as we can’t travel forward in time – yet - because too many possibilities exist in an uncertain future, the past too is uncertain; always balanced on a knife-edge of competing possibilities. I knew that if I did manage to get back to this time, then it more than likely would not be to these possibilities. It could be a world where Emma did not exist, or one where we had never met, or even a world - as had happened to Freeman – without the human.

As my professor said, before he disappeared – possibly – somewhere in the middle of the Battle of Hastings, ‘every visit to the past is a throw of the dice.’ After all, it is always possible he did come back to a future, just not the one he left, because every future we come back to is different from the one we left. We do not even have to step on a butterfly to change the world we hope to return to.

So, eventually I got on the train and Emma disappeared from my life. I couldn’t help thinking about her, each moment of that journey back to my leap point. Each minute I resolved to turn back, stay there in that time – even though I knew what was coming as 1939 dragged on towards its inevitable climax – stay with Emma and see her through what was to come. Even so, I knew I had to try to get back, return to all I’d left behind in a lifetime yet to come.

Falling into the Dunes

We fell together into the dunes, sliding down the sand into each other's arms, our mouths locked together in a kiss.

'We shouldn't,' Suzie said and kissed me deeper pulling my face on to hers. We broke apart, grinning at each other.

'This is wrong.' This time Suzie's hands were moving down my body. My shirt was open and I was wearing only shorts. Already she was unbuttoning, unzipping the shorts. 'We shouldn't.'

I kissed her shoulder, saying nothing, easing off the strap off her bikini top, untying it at the back and letting it fall.

Suzie was kissing down my chest, my stomach. I knelt up and let her carry on. She had my cock in her hand, she looked at it, kissed it and then lowered her warm wet mouth over it.

I arched back, seeing over the top of the dune towards where the rest of our families sat on the beach. I could see Martin, Suzie's husband, digging a sandcastle with a couple of our kids. My wife, Jenny, was down by the sea, Suzie’s baby in her arms and her free hand holding the hand our other daughter paddling next to her.

Suzie looked up at me and I pushed her back down into the dune, pulling her bikini bottoms off with one hand before parting her legs. She tasted of sea and sand and suntan oil, at least down as far as her bikini bottom, then, from then on, she tasted of Suzie. A taste I still remembered, even after all the years since I'd last tasted her.

'We shouldn't, Suzie said again, pulling me on top of her. 'Come on Pete, fuck me… now!'

A Song of Fish and Chips

‘I am Doris Drizzleborn, mother of poodles and auntie to labradors.’ She stood, proud defiance in every bone of her body, plastic mac rustling in the wind.

‘I am the Mighty Bert, ruler of all the chip shops in this land.’

‘I come seeking battered cod,’ she said as her mighty war poodles strained against their leashes.

‘Do you?’ He stepped back from the counter. ‘Want any chips with that?’

‘Do I look like the sort of woman who eats her fish without chips?’ The scorn in her voice made her war poodles tense and skittish.

‘I do not make chips for just any stranger who enters my shop.’ He folded his heavily-muscled arms across his batter-stained vest. ‘Are you worthy?’

She tensed, shortening the leads of her war poodles as they tried to investigate the strange smells of this far distant land. ‘You ask Doris Drizzleborn if she is worthy? I have eaten chips in all corners of this land.’ She stepped forward. ‘I would even dare try your mushy peas!’

Behind her the queue of regulars, as one, stepped back, away from her. None dared speak, or to rush forward to defend the honour of their Lord’s mushy peas.

‘How dare you impugn the quality of my mushy peas!’ The Chip Master cried. ‘Leave my shop forthwith!’ He lifted his serving scoop in warning. ‘And take your filthy curs with you.’

Doris Drizzleborn stood for a moment, trying not to show the bitter taste of defeat that filled her mouth. She stared back impassive. Her war poodles tensed on their leashes, ready to strike. The rest of the queue moved back, out of range of the deadly dog breath.

There was silence.

Doris Drizzleborn eyed the Chip Master’s hand as he reached for the vinegar. She knew only too well – from the tragedy that had taken her brother – what too much vinegar on her chips could do.

‘Come,’ she ordered her battle poodles. She turned on her heel and left the shop. In the doorway, Doris Drizzleborn turned and faced the Chip Master. ‘One day Mighty Bert I will return with an army and we will eat every chip in your shop. You will be on your knees begging for us to leave you a few battered scraps.’

Then she and her war poodles were gone.

All Done For Her

It took time to shape the world I wanted to create for her. I wanted everything to be just right, just how she had always wanted it. It meant doing some research, finding out about her: about what she liked and disliked, loved and hated, wanted and disdained. This meant I had to follow her around as she went about her life. I had to go to the places she went to, see the people she saw and visit everywhere she visited.

Of course, if you have the talents I have, such things are not hard. All I needed was something of hers I could use. Some way through to her so I could, albeit at one remove, see what she saw, talk with whom she talked with, ate what she ate and experience all she experienced.

She knew – somehow – that something was wrong. When I wormed my way into her life, her thoughts, her experiences, she sensed something was not right, as though there was something there. Often, when she thought she was alone, I’d catch her, spinning round trying to catch sight of whatever it was that was watching her. Then telling herself she did not believe in ghosts and wondering if she was turning paranoid, or if some shadowy government agency had – somehow – put her into one of its files by mistake.

Whatever it was, I knew she thought, she would one day break free of it. But she was wrong, I had decided that she was mine and that one day I would take her away from all she’d ever known and keep her for myself in a world I’d made especially for her.

I could hardly wait to see the look on her face when she realised all I had done for her.

The Slow Times Come

The slow times come and take us by the hand, leading us – one by one – out across these plains away from the cities, where we fell, and out into the space and quiet of a land of possibilities. There were times when we shaped our lives around these cities, building them up as high as the buildings that reach towards the skies. Busying our lives as frantic as any rush hour street, racing from somewhere to somewhere else.

Then the times changed; we grew older and our lives slowed down. The city turned away from us as our lives shrank back down and returned to a slowness that made the city become strange, alien, unfamiliar. Those streets that we once saw as safe and familiar as the face of some lover, grew cold and strange, distant, as though the lover had turned away, leaving us alone.

Then we too, turned away from the city, walking those roads we had not taken that led away from the, now turned cold, heart of the city. We headed out away from the high buildings, the crowds and the faces turning away from us.

We came out here to where the slow river flows past as though all the time waits for us to decide how we want to live again.

Give Names

Give Names

You want to give names
to all the nameless things.

You want to create shapes
from this shapelessness.

You want to carve your name
across these indifferent skies.

You want to come to me naked.
You want me to hold you tight

and say it is all still out there
waiting for you to take hold.