David Hadley's Blog, page 173

Monday Poem: Creatures that Crawl

[image error]

Creatures that Crawl

We no longer need to believe
in ghosts or creatures that crawl
out of myth and superstition.
We grow too old for all that.

Still, though, you want to believe
still want to think that something
is waiting closer than safety
for the moment when it can crawl

out of the darker shadows and on
into your unprotected mind
that lies open now, it has not protector
hiding in the beards of the clouds,

to take all that you dread in hand
and then twist the sky in anger
to destroy all that you want to fear.

Waiting for his Return

She would stand up there, day after day, looking out over the sea beneath her, stretching out towards the horizon or – on some days – as far as the mists would allow her to see.

She would stand there each day, at the times when the tides would allow boats to enter the harbour, and watch and wait.

He had gone years before. At first, she knew that he would not be coming back. After what had happened we all knew he would never return, except in chains and only then to live a short time until justice was done… probably up there on the same headland she now stood on, waiting for him to return.

We knew he was not coming back. She knew he was not coming back.

One day the grief must have broken something inside her, something must have changed, because from that day on she would make her way up the long twisting path through the trees, past the fallen rocks and the scrubby grass, up onto that bare cliff top where only the gulls gyred and the old broken gallows stood.

There she would stand and watch. There she would stand and wait.

All we knew was that she would wait up there every day until he came back, and then when he did, she would kill him in revenge for what he had done to her when he killed her husband on that night he escaped to the sea.

The Vegetables of Darkness

[image error]

‘The marrow, the marrow,’ she said in a voice that will haunt me every time I pass a greengrocer or walk the lonely haunted vegetable aisle of a supermarket.

Back in those days, of course, an allotment was a wild and dangerous place, a place for adventurers and those not afraid of the wild and savage heart of the artichoke.

Brassica Legume had that look of someone with a deep knowledge and understanding of the secret ways of vegetables; someone who had looked deep into the heart of the vegetable rack and survived all that it could do to her. If I was not mistaken, sometimes I thought I could see the fading leek scars on her elbows.

*

Due to a disappointment in romance I had turned towards the dark and forbidden need to grow vegetables. I had experimented with seed boxes and potted seedlings on my window ledge as a teenager, of course, but I had never wanted to become involved in gardening, not until that day I met Brassica Legume.

I had thought that we, Brassica and I, would - one day in the not too distant future, take up a small plot of land together and come our weeding day we would spend the rest of our lives working together in that garden, maybe even – one day – growing some cauliflowers together.

However, it was not to be.

One day I turned up at Brassica’s door and there in her porch I asked her to close her eyes. I whipped out my prize courgette and told her – without opening her eyes – to feel it.

She put out a slow, tentative hand, but as soon as her hand touched my courgette she screamed and ran back into the house, slamming the door in my face.

I banged on the door and begged her to let me in, let me explain, but she just screamed something mystifying about me seeing a doctor as soon as possible and to ‘keep away from me with that… that thing!’ and if I ever came near again and asked her to touch it like that she would ‘have me arrested.’

Perplexed by her behaviour, I gave up, tucked my courgette away and walked out of her life, I thought, forever.

*

Then, a few weeks later I met Brassica out on the street. She was carrying a suitcase and – eventually – let me walk with her for a while as I tried to apologise, but I could tell she was not really listening to me.

That was the day she left; leaving me on a bleak and windy railway station platform as she rode off to some distant horticultural adventure with another man she had met through the personal adverts in the back of a seed catalogue.

*

Then, several years later, I received a letter from Brassica, covered with mulch stains and with a pressed dried cabbage leaf I’d once given her as a romantic keepsake falling from the envelope I’d so hastily torn open when I’d recognised her handwriting.

In the letter, she begged me to come to her aid. So I dropped everything, then picked it up again, and ran for the train station.

She had – according to the letter I re-read sitting in the train – married the man from the advert in the personal column of the seed catalogue. Apparently, this Herr Doktor Sproutz was a world authority on vegetables with a professorship at the nearby University of Cudworth. They had settled down in a picturesque country cottage together to grow vegetables. All had been well at first, until he began sneaking back to their allotment at night.

At first she’d suspected he had a lover, or went off to meet one of the ladies of the night who hung around the allotments touting for business and in the hope of getting themselves a handful of radishes or a cucumber in return for their ‘services’.

However, one night she’d followed him, only to see him enter the allotment lean-to on his own. When Brassica built up the nerve to look in through the window she saw that her husband was standing naked in the lean-to with one of the biggest leeks she had ever seen and an economy-sized bottle of extra-virgin olive oil. At first, she’d wondered what he was going to do with such a prize specimen of the vegetable-growers art. However, Brassica’s letter did not go into the details of what horrors she’d witnessed that night.

*

Then, once I arrived at her cottage, Brassica told me she’d seen just what he was about to do with the well-lubricated leek.

‘I almost fainted then,’ she said, taking my hand and squeezing it. ‘B… but when he next turned towards the biggest marrow I’d ever seen and began oiling it up… th… then I did faint.’

She fell into my arms and sobbed against my shoulder. ‘The marrow, the marrow,’ she said in that haunted voice. I almost gave her my handkerchief, but then remembered when I’d last used it... and what for, and then thought better of it.

‘What am I to do?’ she said, once she had stopped sobbing.

‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘Just how big was this leek?’

I blanched when she told me.

‘…and the marrow?’

She told me about that too.

I felt my jaw drop and thought myself lucky to be sitting down, because I felt my legs go weak. ‘But how…?’ was all I could – eventually – say.

Brassica shook her head and wiped away her tears. ‘Just take me away from here,’ she said. ‘I’ve already packed my seed trays and my dibber.’ She looked up at me from under lowered eyelids. ‘I hope you don’t think that is a little too forward of me, especially since I was so cruel about your co….’

‘My courgette?’ I said helpfully.

‘Your courgette?’ Brassica blushed for some reason I didn’t quite grasp. ‘Oh, I thought it was your….’ She seemed to relax as though some great weight was suddenly gone from her mind.

‘Thought it was my what?’ I said, taking her hand.

‘Oh, nothing…’ she shook her head. ‘Nothing at all.’

I waited for a moment, but she said nothing more.

‘When will he… your husb… Herr Sproutz be back?’ I said.

Brassica turned and glanced at the clock.’ Oh, no,’ she cried. ‘He’ll be here any minute now… and if he finds you here…. Well, he has a temper, a vicious temper and he gets so jealous.’ She got up and began rushing around, gathering her things.’ Once a man took me to his allotment, just to show me his shallots…’

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘I shot him… dead,’ a voice from behind me said.

I turned and saw the gun.

*

A short time later, Brassica and I were tied up, bound together face to face, on either side of a roof-support pole in Herr Doctor Sproutz allotment lean-to.

‘You’ll never get away with this,’ I said, but Sproutz just laughed as he prepared something on a small camping stove over in the corner of his shed.

‘Oh… no…’ I could see the despair in Brassica’s eyes as she realised what her husband was preparing for us.

‘What?’ I said as tenderly as I could, staring into those fear-filled eyes only a few inches from mine. ‘I’ve always loved you.’ I added, wishing I could touch her. ‘Tell me, what is he doing?’

Brassica shook her head as her tears began to fall freely from her eyes. ‘Sprouts,’ she said.

‘What about him?’ I turned my head, hoping to catch sight of the dastardly German.

‘No… no,’ Brassica said. ‘Not him, the….’

But it was too late; he came towards us carrying an enormous plate.

‘Brussels sprouts,’ he said, coming closer.

‘Oh, god,’ Brassica moaned, almost fainting with terror. ‘Nooooo!’

‘Yes, my dear,’ Sproutz said. ‘My own creation.’ He turned to me. ‘Giant sprouts!’

He was right, there was no way such monstrosities could be natural. Each sprout was the size of a medicine ball and seemed to glow with some un-earthly green colour that made each of those monstrous vegetables seem far more dangerous than any ordinary sprout.

‘You’ll have to kill us both,’ I spat at him. ‘Neither of us is going to eat such an ungodly abomination.’

‘Yes, you vill die, both of you,’ the madman said. ‘And, yes, you will eat these sprouts I created. You vill have no choice!’

‘But why?’ Brassica said. ‘I thought you loved me.’

Sproutz laughed in her face. ‘No, my dear. I just used you… I only vanted you for your knowledge of vegetables.’

‘Why,’ she repeated as her tears flowed.

‘Because ve all know that var is coming soon and my government believes that chemical veapons vill be the veapon of the future!’

‘Hence the sprouts.’ I nodded. ‘One of the deadliest chemical weapons ever experienced.’

Brassica looked at me, puzzled.

‘You’ve been in the room with your family after the Christmas meal, haven’ t you?’

Realisation dawned in her eyes. ‘Yes, especially my aunt Edna. She always blames the dog, but we know it is her.’ She turned to face her husband. ‘You… you heartless baa.. bas… bastard!’

Herr Doktor Sproutz just laughed. ‘There will be no escape.’ He began to wheel over some device towards us - a giant hopper above a machine of some kind, beneath it he attached two tubes, each ending in a face mask. ‘You vill both have no choice but to eat,’ he said, fitting the masks over our faces.

Turning away from us he began to chop the already-cooked and immense sprouts into smaller, bite-sized pieces. He turned the hopper machine on and I could see the two tubes flexing as the deadly shopped-sprouts made their way – inch by inch towards our mouths. I looked into Brassica’s eyes, both of us knowing that eventually we would have no choice but to chew, eat and swallow. I gulped. I’d never liked sprouts.

Sproutz then took a candle, lit it and put it on the table, looking up to see us both staring wide-eyed at his dastardly trick.

‘Ja,’ he said. ‘When the gas builds up enough and reaches this naked flame…’ He turned towards the door. ‘Don’t worry I will be back to say good-bye before the end.’ He left, locking the door behind him.

Neither of us could speak, except with our eyes, then the sprouts arrived at our mouths and all we could do was eat.

And eat….

And eat….

I thought I would burst. Never if all my life had I eaten so much, and never so much of one thing. I vowed that if we were to get out of this alive I would never eat another vegetable again. I could see from the look of hopeless despair in my beloved’s eyes that she too felt the same.

Eventually, though, after the longest period of prolonged mastication in my life, I swallowed the last mouthful of sprout. A few moments later Brassica did the same.

A few minutes later, Sproutz came back into the leant-to carrying a full suitcase and a briefcase.

Seeing we’d eaten all the sprouts, he removed the machine, enabling us to breathe properly again, although, considering how many sprouts we’d both eaten we soon wouldn’t be able to breathe properly then either, at least not through our noses… and with the naked flame in the room with us, not for long either.

Sproutz hurried over to a filing cabinet and began transferring his papers to the briefcase. I presumed those papers contained all he’d learnt about making offensive chemical weapons from vegetables. A glance at Brassica confirmed my suspicions. We had to do something to prevent those papers reaching the German military high command, but our situation seemed hopeless.

I began to feel a stirring in my stomach.

A moment later, Sproutz sniffed the air. ‘I think it is time I said my good-byes,’ he said.

I glanced at Brassica. It seemed her eyes were swelling. I shook my head. ‘Can you hold it for a while,’ I whispered to her.

Brassica nodded through gritted teeth.

‘Wait..’ I whispered to her. ‘When I say, let it go… all of it.’

‘A…all of it…?’ There was panic in her eyes as she whispered back.

I nodded. ’All of it.’

She took a deep, despairing breath and nodded.

Carefully, slowly I manoeuvred us around the support-pole Sproutz had bound us to, until the candle was right behind Brassica and in-between her and where her husband was preparing to leave.

Sproutz fastened the briefcase and, after putting on his hat, picked up the suitcase. ‘Auf Wiedersehen, my darling and you… mister… mister… I’m afraid I don’t know your name?’

‘No, you don’t,’ I said.

‘No matter,’ Sproutz said and tuned to go. ‘Soon you vill have no need of it.’

I could see that Brassica was struggling to keep it in, screwing up her eyes and biting her lip. I could feel the tension in her body as she clenched herself against the inevitable.

Quickly I made sure the candle was between Brassica’s back and the fiend. ‘Now!’ I said.

I’m afraid I had to close my eyes as I attempted to breathe through my nose. Even with my eyes closed though, I could feel the heat as Brassica turned the candle flame into a deadly flame-thrower.

Sproutz screams were – mercifully – brief.

When we dared open our eyes once again, and breather through our noses, all that remained of Herr Doktor Sproutz was a scorch mark on the lean-to wall and a slightly-singed hat lying next to a pair of smoking shoes and the twisted charred remnants of a briefcase. Everything else was ash and smoke.

Brassica sagged against me in relief. She looked up at me and blushed.

‘Your aunt Edna would have been so proud,’ I said, straining to kiss her. She laughed and leant forward to kiss me back.

‘But how do we get out of here,’ she said, straining, but this time at our bonds.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I went to public school and had to eat their vegetables, so I’m used to this,’ I said, taking a strand of the rope that bound us between my teeth and chewing.

‘Sounds just like my school meals too,’ Brassica said, laughing as she too took a strand of the rope between those lovely lips of hers and began chewing too.

Forty-Two

[image error]

Neil put the drinks down on the pub table, acknowledging Claire’s thanks with a nod. He sat next to her, leant back against the seat backrest and sighed. ‘In a few weeks time I will be forty-two. Where has all the time gone? Pissed away.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Claire said.

‘What?’

‘You haven't pissed your life away.’ She half turned towards Neil as she spoke and sipped at her orange juice.

‘What have I done, though, then?’ Neil stroked his fingers up and down his pint glass, but made no move to pick it up.

‘You've lived it... your life. You've had good times, haven't you?

‘Sometimes, yeah.’ He picked up his glass and drank about a quarter of the beer in one go.

‘Well, sometimes is as good as it gets.’

Neil licked the foam from his upper lip. ‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Yes.’ Claire was emphatic. ‘Nobody could survive a life of constant good times.’ She picked up her glass again. ‘You would get bored.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

Claire half-turned to look at Neil. ‘Yes, you, I, everyone. We need ups and we need downs. Can you imagine how unbearable someone who never had any downs would be?’

‘What?’

Claire took a small drink and put her glass down. ‘Well, you know how someone who is always a sad, moody, bugger gets on your nerves?’ She picked up a beer mat and stood it on an edge holding it upright between her fingers and tapping it on the table.

‘Yes! Oh, yes. I remember whatshisname…? Oh, anyway, it'll come to me. Go on….’

‘Thanks. Well… it would be the same if they were the exact opposite, wouldn't it?’

Neil thought for a moment. ‘What? Yes, like those happy-clappy inane grinning religious folks?’

‘Yes, that's it.’

‘Smug self-righteous bastards.’ Neil sat back, took a drink and cradled his beer glass against his chest. ‘I'd rather be miserable.’

Claire sat back too, smiling to herself as she sipped her orange juice.

Post-War Extreme Sports

[image error]

It is not often appreciated these days that, in the immediate post-war era Splunge Disinfectant was the closest these islands had to a peacetime hero equal to those heroes of the recent war. During the war, of course, the exploits of the men and women of the armed forces had become the mainstay of the media, providing a much-needed morale-boost to those on the home front as well as those actually serving on the front line.

However, it was during the dreary post-war years, as rationing, bomb-damage and other deprivations of the war still made ordinary life difficult, that Splunge Disinfectant and his team of daring back-up engineers and mechanics first attempted to break the world record for opening a tine of corned beef under strict competitive conditions.

Nowadays, we are all familiar with the peculiar characteristics of the corned beef tin and its curious little key and metallic strip combination. In the immediate post-war era, however, the whole concept of using a key to open a tin was still regarded with suspicion by the general public, used to the more traditional tin opener.

Furthermore, back in those early days, opening a tin of corned beef was a very dangerous act, even when taking all the necessary precautions, including a pair of stout gloves and an army-surplus tin helmet. However, to attempt a speed opening of a corned beef tin was considered the height of dangerous folly and many stern editorials in the daily press of the time warned Disinfectant, and his back-up team, against such a foolhardy task, and of the dangerous precedent it would set.

The war-weary British people, though, were desperate for something to bring a little excitement into their drab and dreary existence and Disinfectant’s bravery was glamorous and exciting, especially to the young boys who would save up every spare penny and ration coupon they could get their hands on in an attempt to acquire a tin of corned beef of their own they could use to emulate the antics of their hero.

The newsreels of the time were full of the exploits of Disinfectant and his boffins (as they were called) as they prepared for the first post-war International Corned Beef Tin Opening trials in Switzerland. The British team had developed their own top-secret tin-opening key in the same laboratories where Frank Whittle had developed his jet engine. Consequently, the media of the time, will still condemning Disinfectant for his foolhardiness, were full of praise for this new spirit of enterprise and technological innovation from the nation that had done so much to defeat the Nazi menace.

Boy’s comics too were full of stories about the brave men and their corned beef tins that had done so much to win the war and now seemed poised to win the peace too. It seemed that a new age of heroes and heroics was about to begin.

Unfortunately, though, tragedy struck on Disinfectant’s final pre-competition run, with a training tin, only days before the Swiss final in Innsbruck.

Attempting to get the key around the corner of the tin in record time, Disinfectant didn’t allow the tin to come up to proper operating temperature in the icy cold of a pre-dawn Switzerland. Tragically, Disinfectant’s high-speed corned beef tin key skidded off the training tin and entangled Disinfectant in the razor-sharp metal strip as it unwound from the key, fatally trapping him in its deadly coils.

His boffins rushed to the scene, realising nothing could be done for their heroic companion they gathered up as many of the slices of Disinfectant they could find. Unfortunately, his trade-mark ‘tin-opening cap’ was never found, some believing it was shredded into microscopic pieces by the vicious uncoiling of the metal strip from the tin.

The remains of Splunge Disinfectant were bought back to the UK from Switzerland and interred in a tin, ‘as he would have wanted’ according to the obituary writer in Butcher’s Weekly, then buried in the back of a cupboard at the Royal Society’s London Headquarters.

Although, one of Disinfectant’s ex-boffins later went on to create an attachment for the crude bacon-slicers of the time, that allowed the invention of ‘wafer-thin’ meat slices, refusing to comment when it was later alleged it was Disinfectant’s tragic demise that had inspired his invention.

Such a Cold World

[image error]

It was such a cold world. The squat stone buildings seemed to amplify the wind, rather than protect from it. The wind always blew too, day and night, blowing the snow, or the rain or sometimes both against any bare skin you were foolish enough to leave unprotected as you made your way across the gaps between the buildings.

The people on this desolate planet, when out on the surface were hard to distinguish from the animals that somehow managed to eke out a living from the unforgiving landscape. All were squat hunched-up figures, covered in fur, that scuttled and stumbled around in the blizzards, gales and downpours.

Sitting huddled up close to a fire in one of the squat stone taverns, where it seemed the wind threw barrow-loads of snow against the thin windows and sneaked in around the edges of those windows and the doors, somebody once told me, that the world had spring, summer and autumn as well as winter. I – of course – did not believe him.

I had been there many months, and still I had not got used to how one of those bundles of thick heavy cloths and strange dense furs could shed its outer layers and become a woman who would crawl into my bed and ease away the cold from my frozen bones in the way only a warm, living woman can.

It was only then, one morning, after months and months of cold and rain that I woke up to a strange silence, broken only by the slow breathing of the dark-haired woman who lay sleeping on my chest under the heavy fur blankets that covered us.

At first, reaching for my gun that lay on the table by the bed, I thought I must have heard some intruder, some sound that had woken me. Then I realised it was not a sound that had woken me, but the absence of a sound….

The wind had dropped.

Unbelieving, I looked over towards the window and for the first time since landing on that world, I could see its sky free from storm clouds.

New Technology

[image error]

Anyway, not that I’d used one before, but it seemed obvious enough – at least after you’d shook the lemur off the end of it and set it to vibrate at medium intensity.

Still, though all new technology takes a while to get used to, I suppose, and I am reasonably confident that the Kilt Detector app will come in useful one day, and not only on my very infrequent trips to Scotland. The ability to detect if there is anyone within a 5 mile radius who is wearing a kilt is bound to be nothing but a boon to mankind, if only to increase the awareness of the sporran as an endangered species. That is only to be expected really, as the life-chances of anything are bound to be somewhat precarious when having to eke out an existence that close to a Scotsman’s groin.

Anyway, it has a 32-billion megapixel camera, so those sextexting photographs you have a habit of accidentally sending to your aunt in Cleethorpes, instead of that new girl on Reception, are going to more resemble something like a NASA flypast of some distant planet’s moons rather than give the right romantic piquancy to your candid erotica.

However, I suppose that is the price we all must pay for technological progress.

Monday Poem: The Rough Certainty

[image error]

The Rough Certainty

Touch the rough certainty
of cold ancient stone,

feel the sudden shock
of warm life bursting

into flight from the dark
of a deeper shadowed corner

that turns unliving stone
into something more vital

connecting back through
the warm pulse of blood

to times far too long ago
when hands just like these

took stone from the ground
to make something to last

for reasons we can never know
or even if the gods they made
were satisfied by it at all.

Statistical Anomalies

Seeing that there was nowhere else to put it, I gave it to her, strictly on the understanding that no zebras were to be harmed should she consider taking it out of the bag.

As you probably know, however, there are – at the moment – no recoded incidents of a wild zebra being assaulted by a Northumbrian part-time lottery ticket sales assistant wielding a golf club, which she removed from the golf bag expressly for that purpose. However, statistics are funny things and we wouldn’t want her hanging around the zebra enclosure at her nearest zoo with a golf club just at the time when the cosmic forces that create such unusual statistical anomalies are building up in the area.

After all, no-one around here expected a wild badger to win a seat in the local council election, but when it came down to a choice between candidates from the main political parties and a wild animal sauntering past the school hall used as the polling station on election night, most people knew where they were going to put their cross.

So, there you have it, and here we are all looking forward to having the local services provided by the council run properly for the first time in living memory.

Open the Box of a Moment

There are times that contain their opposites within themselves; times when you can open the box of a moment to discover what it contains. Not until time moves on from that moment, not until you open the box of possibility will you know what is going to come from it, or not come from it.

There is a moment that seems to hang in the air between our two faces drawing closer as the world stops, waiting upon that kiss. If the kiss happens then a world spins into being that was not there before, but if the moment passes, escapes into the realm of what will never again be, then this world will carry on, with only the two of us knowing that a new reality was on the verge of creation and one or both of us turned away from it and left it to blow away on the breeze of lost times.

We, you and I, took a chance on that kiss that lasted longer than I’d expected it to, and when I drew away I saw something in your eyes I had not seen there before; a world growing out of that new moment we had created together. There was a chance of something new forming out of the air around us, air that seemed so full of possibility.

Here we are now, all those years later, and still I see that moment after that kiss when all of this could just as easily all disappeared, never to be.