Jan Miklaszewicz's Blog, page 8

BASE FIRST

What be thee upon yon screen 
a prayer a hex a flex a dream 
a kiss a hiss a sigh a scream 
a base desire to be seen? 

TIMEPLACE

Tell me, do you ever wonder how thoughts of a bygone era can compel your heart blood, just as the moon compels the seas? 
Or how some place unknown can stir the marrow in your bones and spark a longing that can never be appeased? 

PAPILLON

The French know the score: a moth is just another type of butterfly. 

WHAT GOES AROUND

On a Sunday afternoon in late December, Stanley took his son Kyle to the cinema. They waited in the rain for the doors to open. Stanley smoked a cigarette and finished off his cold McDonald’s coffee. Kyle cupped his hands against one of the panes and peered in. 
Twenty minutes later, they were seated, seven rows back from the screen, to the left of the aisle. There was popcorn and a bag of pick and mix. Stanley laid their coats on the seat beside him, took out his mobile phone, and switched it off. 
When the trailers had finished, the audience settled down. The theatre was almost two-thirds full. The film was computer animated and very funny. Everyone seemed to laugh in all the right places. No one seemed to be throwing any popcorn. Kyle seemed to ask fewer questions than usual. 
Two rows back, a couple sat with their noisy, restless toddler. Stanley looked back, and all he could make out in the darkness was white tracksuit tops and baseball caps, a folded pushchair, its rain cover reflecting a portion of the screen. The toddler was shouting out and standing on his seat. His mother called him a gobby little cunt. 
When the whole palaver showed no signs of ending, Stanley went off to find a member of staff. He spoke to the woman at the popcorn stand downstairs. It was unfair that a child so young be allowed into the theatre. Nothing personal, you understand, but why should paying customers have their viewing spoilt? 
Moments after he rejoined Kyle, there was a minor fracas two rows back. Stanley didn’t dare to look around. When a full five minutes had passed, he chanced a glance. The couple and their toddler were gone, and the rest of the film passed by without incident. 
When they got outside, the daylight hurt their eyes. A man in a white tracksuit and baseball cap swiped Stanley’s face with something small and sharp. There was no pain. As the man ran off, Stanley reached up to his cheek. There was so much blood, it was like he had dipped his hand in a tin of red paint. 
Kyle sobbed in the foyer, and the cinema staff called the emergency services. Stanley sat on the stairs with a thick wad of tissue pressed against his cheek. There was so much blood. The woman from the popcorn stand set a bin down beside him with several toilet rolls. There was so much blood. As each new wad became sodden, she would make another and pass it to him. 
‘What goes around comes around,’ she said. 
The police arrived before the ambulance. Statements were taken and Kyle’s mother was called to collect him. She was out of town and would go directly to the hospital. The female police officer was kind to Kyle, the male police officer candid with Stanley. There was no CCTV in this part of town. None of the cinema staff saw what happened. The police would do what they could, of course, but Stanley shouldn’t hold out too much hope. 
‘And remember, what goes around comes around. Not much consolation, I know, but it’s better than nothing, right?’ 
At the hospital, Stanley was seen straight away. The Indian doctor was a pleasant chap, his hands smooth and dry, like earth baked for decades in the sun. 
‘It is an irreducible fact,’ he said, ‘that people get their just desserts.’ 
When Kyle’s mother arrived, her eyes were filled with a compassion that Stanley couldn’t remember seeing before. She told him that what went around always came around. Heaven knew what this thing would do to Kyle. 
Six months on, the scar had more or less healed. It would continue to fade, of course, but would never go away. The police did what they could, but the assailant was never caught. Whenever someone appeared at the edge of Stanley’s vision, his heart would hammer in his chest. He would sometimes dream that he was walking through town and the scar would suddenly open up. There would be a chill feeling in his cheek, and he would stop and look at his reflection in a shop window. The wound would be there, gaping wide, revealing an awful panorama of tongue and teeth. Wide and laughing, like a dog’s mouth seen in profile. 
By late summer, his nerves in tatters, Stanley finally decided to get some counselling. The office was above a row of shops in a run-down part of town. As Stanley headed up the narrow staircase, his assailant was leaving the newsagent’s next door. In the counsellor’s office, Stanley wept for the first time in God knows how long. In a nearby flat, his assailant rubbed off the last of five scratch cards and scooped a hundred grand. 

TONE DEAF

If music be the food of love, then she was a one-man band: emphysaema, plastic hip, and two prosthetic hands. 

BOOK REVIEW - OF SWANS AND STARS

Of Swans and Stars : Finding my own North Star, one poem at a time by E.M. McConnell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Great collection, meticulously laid out and edited. The language is well balanced, sophisticated here, commonplace there, and the poems have a wonderful cadence. I particularly liked the On Love section, which surprised me. Poems on this subject often leave me cold, but these manage to be both tender and perceptive.

View all my reviews

MONK FLUNK

It’s an illusion, best avoided by living on a mountain top. 
It’s a stupid game, best avoided by living in Momma’s basement. 

WOKER

The only fair way to hurt a comedian is by not laughing. 

HEADMAN

I get up, pray, and sleep again until the sunlight hits the far wall of the room. Then I wash and dress, and grab a litre of stove oil and my golok. Mas Yudi, a friend since childhood, calls out from his stall at the edge of the village. I go across, sit on a plastic stool beneath the sun-bleached tarpaulin, ask him to wrap me a packet of yellow rice.

‘You’re gonna do it then, Mas Jovan?’

‘Said I would.’

‘Thought it was just talk.’

‘You ought to know me better than that.’

‘Extra chilli paste?’

Nodding, I take a fritter from one of his wicker trays and ask for a bottle of tea to wash it down with. Bu Yati gives me a wave and a toothless grin from across the street.

‘I’ll take two more teas.’

‘Bag ’em up for you?’

I watch him pour the tea into plastic bags and deftly tie them off with drinking straws. Then I smoke a cigarette, and he sits with me, and we talk about village business. About the promises I made to the elders. And a breeze starts up from the east, and I could sit here all day just watching the world go by.

‘Be careful. Y’know that place ain’t right.’

‘I know people get carried away.’

‘You’re braver than I am.’

‘A sparrow’s braver than you are, Mas Yudi.’

‘Sparrow can’t make yellow rice, though.’

I raise an eyebrow, settle up and leave. The breeze is stronger now, and it feels good and fresh as I stride out of the village and along the red mud road. A group of children shouts to watch out for the ghosts. I wave my golok at them and say it’s the ghosts who should be watching out for me.

After a hundred metres or so, I leave the road and head off into the jungle. The ground is soft from the recent rains, and out of the breeze it’s not long before I’ve broken sweat. At a clearing, I cut a switch from a young sawo tree, then I smoke another cigarette and look up at the sky. Almost ten o’clock. Another half an hour before I’m there.

As I get closer, I can maybe see why people are afraid of this place. The air is different and the trees crowd in and everything is dark and dank and twisted. But it’s only nature, and there’s nothing to fear in this world apart from God. And it would be better for everyone if they could get that into their heads.

I reach the place and the sweat is in my eyes, and I take off my shirt and wipe my face and neck with it. Just a wooden hut, jungle creeping in around it, door hanging off to one side. And for all the talk of the unspeakable things that happened here, there’s nothing to set a shiver down my spine. Just a little hut, no different from any other.

Well, I suppose there might be something for those who like horror stories. The creak of those branches, or that crow on the roof, or the thought of what might be lurking in the shadows. But those stories are a waste of time. They never tell you why, and you’re expected to believe that evil comes out of nowhere.

I sit on a log that’s been used for chopping wood, and I drink the first bag of tea and smoke a cigarette. Then I thrash my way to the hut with my switch and golok. The door comes away in my hand, and I go inside and poke around a bit. Nothing but a rotten kapok mattress, and a big shard of mirror which I gaze into for a moment.

I take the stove oil and splash it around, then I set fire to it and sit back and watch it burn. And pretty soon the roof falls in and the walls collapse and that’s all there is to it. Just a mess of embers sending smoke and ash to the empty sky.

I leave the place and don’t look back, and it seems like only minutes before I’m out of the jungle and onto the road again. Up ahead, the same group of children calls out to me. I wave my golok at them and growl, and they run away screaming.

I go into the village in the white-hot sunshine, and the breeze has gone and the street is almost empty. Mas Yudi beckons me from his stall, and I go across to him.

‘What happened to your shirt?’

I don’t say anything.

‘Hey, what the...?’

I swing at him with my golok, and the plastic stools scatter as he falls back into them. There’s a dark gout of blood—like when we slaughter the goats for Eid al-Adha—and in his horrified eyes I can see him wondering why. Before I swing again, I pause and laugh for a moment. Isn’t that what everyone wants to know?

MANNEQUINS

He finds a tinder lover and he takes her to his bed. 
Her legs are as smooth as oiled teak and go behind her head. 
When each has died a little more they lie there side by side. 
Their pillow talk is wooden and their eyes are hard and dry.