garden flat.

I’m around at my friend Janet’s and she’s talking about death because her father’s been ill, and it’s appropriate because she’s teaching me how to cook a chicken, something that I never learned because I was a vegan for many years. Death is on the menu you might say. I never ordinarily get invited out to people’s homes because I’m unpopular, but today’s butchery lesson is the exception that proves the rule, and it’s also apparently the precursor for morbid ruminations. We are drinking coffee in the sunshine, and she says to me, closing her eyes: so Fred, what happens when we die? What do you think?

When I was younger I used to love talking about death. That’s why I was a vegan for so long. Death death death. The slaughterhouses, the factory farms, the foxhunting, I loved it. A friend thought that vegans were people who really hated animals and wanted nothing to do with them, it was funny. Now that I’m older I try not to think about death so much. I’m a bit closer to it now. Janet is three years younger than me and she looks younger than that so she doesn’t find it disturbing yet. I sense though, that some empathy is called for here, because of her dad being ill. So I try to practice some empathy.

“The Buddhists appear to believe in reincarnation, in the eternal cycle of life, in the immutability of constant change, moment by moment, if you will Janet,” I tell her. “But not in the self or the ego. They’re also quite big on science, more than the average westerner unfamiliar with Buddhism might think.”

Janet raises one eyebrow, slowly, for effect, a la Roger Moore. “Are you a Buddhist then, Fred?” she asks me.

“No, I’m not a Buddhist Janet,” I tell her without so much as a pause. “But I once looked into it.” She raises the other eyebrow: her eyebrows are now more or less level. Level but very much raised, like she’s surprised a burglar. Or has been surprised by one, I suppose. Or maybe the surprise was mutual. I wonder where that expression originated, to surprise a burglar. One would assume that, as most burglars are junkies, or at least fairly desperate people, that nothing much surprises them. They just want to steal your telly, sell it and get their gear. When they come across incest on a Hampstead kitchen table I see them as being really quite blasé about it: yeah, sniff, seen that before, cough, sniff. But now I’m curious as to whether they stop off at home first, plug the telly in and watch a bit of Eastenders and Coronation Street, and when the daily cliffhanger moment comes up at bang on two minutes to eight, and Lewis is doing something evil or Phil is having another moan and another alcoholic relapse, they fall sideways off their milk crate, exclaiming as they go, “fucking hell, I wasn’t expecting that at all!” Just how easy is it to surprise a burglar?

“So what does happen when you die then Fred?” Janet asks me again, seeing that I have been sat there for three minutes with my mouth open, catching flies. “I didn’t know that the Buddhists were big on science”.

She’s always saying things like that: pretending that she doesn’t know stuff in a not quite patronising way. It’s supposed to put you at your ease. But I haven’t got an ease.

“Well,” I tell her, “Buddhist scholars were talking about atoms around the time of birth of the christ, but they might have got that from the ancient Greeks, I’m not sure. I’m a little fuzzy around classical civilisations.” At this point I really want to shoe-horn in a joke that I’ve had for years but have never quite found the right opening for, about the ancient Greeks and science but the moment isn’t right, and so I keep my counsel. “Didn’t you do classical civilisations at university, Janet?” I ask her. “Or at that posh school in Kensington?” I’m bordering on the offensive now. I know that, despite all appearances, she didn’t go to a posh school. But I am unsure of myself, and so I stray onto dangerous ground; I’m also being contentious as a delaying tactic. So that I can have an extra minute or two to ponder on whether ancient Greece and Buddhist India ever mixed, if they ever crossed paths culturally, if they were even in the same time frame at all. But according to Buddhism everything is connected anyway, and time is either an illusion or a physical property of mass at the event horizon. Bingo. I’m all set. But as I look at Janet I can see that she has indeed begun to take offence. So I let her speak.

“I didn’t go to university, Fred” she tells me. I knew that as well, but I allow her to continue. “And I most certainly didn’t go to a posh school. It was a school that was quite near to Harley Street, but it wasn’t a posh school.” I attempt to make eye contact with her. She glances across at me momentarily but she isn’t having any of it. In a final gambit I say to her, “but it was an all girls school wasn’t it, Janet? With school uniforms and that?”

At this she laughs openly and I sense that my gamble has partly paid off. Some of the tension is resolved and I am relieved that I might live to bullshit for another day. After all, she has a garden that she could quite easily bury me in. Or under. You know what these posh people are like, with their drawing rooms and their dark secrets and their skeletons in closets. They didn’t get there just by smiling and being nice. I am working class and I know exactly where garden flats come from.

“Fred, you can’t possibly think that having a school uniform or going to a single sex school makes you posh. Tell me more about the Buddhists and their fundamental grasp of science. I’m slightly curious now… do we not all just come back as carrots or something?” She flashes me a mischievous grin so that I know she’s not being serious. We have this codex and signals thing going on now. I feel privileged, slightly accepted, if only for the most impermanent of moments.

“Well Janet, as I see it, they seemed to believe that we’re all made up out of atoms and the fact that we are, all fits in very well with their hypothesis that everything is connected, and that everything is part of everything else. So when you die the atoms and molecules that make up you don’t die, they go on to make up parts of other people, and of other creatures and compounds, or trees and rocks. They recombine and the cycle of life goes on. Even when they are broken down and processed and excreted by bacteria and whatnot, they still remain as atoms and molecules and they join up with other atoms and molecules and they become part of something much bigger or smaller than themselves all over again, which after a while will die and be broken down again too; except that nothing ever really dies in the accepted sense, and that paradoxically everything is in a constant state of death and rebirth. If we wait seven years, then we find that every single cell in our bodies has died and that we are, physically speaking, completely different people. Except to our own constantly changing eyes we look broadly the same. This is also a proof that the self is an illusion. ‘I’ have to feed ‘myself’ and get ‘myself’ the wherewithal to do that, but if I don’t as an individual do it then it doesn’t matter too much overall: if I die I just become something else. Or maybe even someone else. We are all interconnected, in constant flux, in perpetual birth, decay, respawning, evolution. That’s reincarnation. In the sense that you often hear of each and every one of us breathing in a few molecules in our lifetime that were once part of the body of Julius Caesar, none of us ever dies. We won’t come back as a rat or a dog or even a pantomime horse, somehow thinking at the back of our brains, ‘ooh, I was once Janet in Kensal Green the aspiring novelist and relative of the world’s worst Tory stand up comedian, I wonder what that was like, if only I could remember it better but it’s too blurry!’; but we have all lived before, and we will all live again, because we never really die.”

I’ve finished. I’ve finished for now. Like a disappointing stranger fuck, I have built up my game, then got going really fast, talked too much, said a few of the wrong things, and now I am spent and you are strangely empty… and I lie there naked on the rug, curled into a ball, farting intermittently, absent-mindedly stroking my distended belly, pregnant with the disturbing promise of perhaps more to come in half an hour if you don’t get me out of your house while you can. I have explained Buddhism and I am philosophically spent. I’m knackered.

With tired eyes I look across at Janet. I am waiting for her response. She cautiously meets my eye. “So … Fred,” she tells me slowly. Again I can’t quite tell whether she’s playing with me or not. “Is that it? Is that all there is? Because I’ve asked other people about this and they can’t give me a fucking straight answer either. You’re all like computer salesmen or car mechanics! There just has to be more to it than that.”

I hear her sniff and I look up at her, and for the first time I see her red eyes and I see that this isn’t a joke; that this isn’t just a tuppenny halfpenny philosophical conversation on a spring afternoon in a small garden. That this is all very real for her. Her father is dying and she wants answers, she wants those impossible answers for the questions for which there are none. Some day soon the man who 40 years ago, on a summers day in the summer of love, lent her half of her zygote, will disappear forever and there will be no way around that and no way back from that, and her life will never be the same again. He will never really die and his atoms and his molecules will live on, but she won’t be able to speak to him anymore and whatever kind of a relationship they have today, there will always be something that she never asked him and something that he never said back. And the best that she can do today is to be present, to get on the bus. To make him a cup of tea and cook him a chicken, and feed it to him, and to accept that no relationship can ever be perfect. That we all make mistakes, and that the perfect love that runs through everything encompasses both life and death and every clean and dirty thing that’s in between. And that when she’s on holiday somewhere nice in ten or twenty years and she’s walking through the woods and she hears a babbling brook that’ll be him talking to her through the ether, and the interference from the radio just before the government turned off the last analogue signal, that was him too, and the music from the ice cream van, and the foxes that bark by the bins at 3:45am. But I don’t tell her any of this. I’m afraid that it might sound lame, or that she won’t understand. So instead I say to her…

“Janet, did you know that the ancient Greeks invented science and developed the world’s first ever rudimentary computer, the abacus, and that they were actually the ancient geeks?”

© Ted Curtis 2013

coming home all sweaty

Annie was an art student from Scarborough who had been lucky enough to end up on an illustration course in Swindon. She was very slight, had long blonde hair and skid marks in her knickers. She wore a dirty brown mac. At home she was engaged to be married, but in Swindon she went wild. What I mostly remember is the craziness, and the misery. She liked to drink to blackout and then punch windows through with her fists. She got me banned from the George because she smashed all the windows in the houses opposite, on Eastcott Hill. Not that it took much to get you banned from the George. I was once banned from there for almost a year for smelling of garlic. She knew the butterfly flick but she would never tell me how it was done. She once told me, when I asked her, that my spunk tasted of peanut butter. I didn’t think to ask whether she meant smooth or chunky. She lived with another art student on a house on Dryden street, having fallen out with her last set of housemates. We were both desperate, insane, and destined to be together, if only for a short time.

I was living in a house rented from a former Jamaican policeman who was a local property tycoon, with Hazel Springett, Paddington, and Sarah. It was on Westcott Place, about half way along, on the way to the M4, opposite a school playing field. On Sunday mornings there were always men in donkey jackets digging holes and filling them in again at the edge of the football pitches. Those of us who could not sleep would sit in the front room drinking tea and making up stories about how they were bank robbers looking for their loot, or serial killers checking out the stoniness of the ground for the interment of future victims. Our weekends were madness and by Sunday there was never any money left for food or rent, but there was a quiet there, punctuated only by the soporific drone of the occasional passing car, that was hard to beat. We didn’t last very long in that house. I was working part time and cashing the rent cheques for beer and food, and our landlord didn’t think much of tenants who couldn’t pay their rent.

We had returned from Wales the previous year, and Hazel had put the house together in an attempt to domesticate Paddington. She was a dance student at the town hall studios, a Smiths fan and a lapsed vegetarian. I have no idea how she ended up hanging around with us, other than the pub where we drank, the Castle on north street, seemed to be a beacon for those young women, a little bit alternative but not too much, who wanted a shot at rebellion before they either settled down or went off to university. She was not without her own madness of course. She and Paddington had some pretty fierce arguments.

We still had the hippy traveller bug, and there was a large back alley where Paddington kept his Cortina and a caravan. We were all saving up for trucks that we would buy at auction, but come Friday night all thoughts of saving went out the window. One afternoon Cadwallader and Green Hat Eddie turned up with a couple of tins of Evo Stik and some freezer bags. Freezer bags are very good for solvent abuse, they don’t soak up any of the glue, they keep it fresh. Then Annie came through the back door with a bottle of cider. We had broken up but with a drink inside me I was being very pleasant to her, thinking that maybe I might get lucky again later on. We sat around drinking the cider and it didn’t last long. Finally, Cadwallader brought up the subject of the glue. Hazel was at dance class and Paddington explained to him that she would not take kindly to coming home all sweaty and needing a shower at six o’clock, and finding four or five zombies all over her sitting room floor, bags stuck to the carpet and the house reeking of glue. So we retired to the caravan.

Annie had never done glue before and she had to ask how it worked. Not, you know, how the fumes condensed on your brain and fucked up your synapses, but what you had to do in order to get there. Cadwallader handed her a bag and told her to hold it open. Then he unscrewed the cap of one of the tins and poured a little of the viscous fluid into the bottom of it for her. The caravan immediately filled with noxious fumes. The rest of us, myself, Paddington and Green Hat Eddie, gathered around in rapt attention, our mouths open, keen to see this glue virgin getting a deflowering. Annie was looking right into Cadwallader’s eyes as he poured the glue into the bottom of the bag for her and explained how she should go about getting the best results from it.

"You have to shape the top of the bag into a mouthpiece", he told her, "try to make it as smooth as possible, pull out all of the wrinkles as quickly as you can so that they don’t harden into creases, that way you stand a better chance of not cutting your lips on them later, when you are tripping out of your fucking mind. Then you should pull the bag down lengthwise to get the best channel, the best channel for the fumes, for the glue fumes to travel to your lungs and your brain. You see? That look, the scabs around the mouth, the little spots, that oral herpes look you see on young, inexperienced glueheads, most of that comes from not shaping a proper mouthpiece in the bag. It’s mostly unnecessary. Then, when you are up and running, try to remember to move the bag around as much as possible. That keeps the glue from hardening too quickly, it keeps it nice and fluid for as long as possible. This isn’t Time Bond."

Time Bond was another type of glue, also manufactured by Evo Stik, that came in a smaller black tin. I seem to recall that it had a little skull and crossbones design on the screw cap but I am probably remembering it wrong, romanticizing it. It was slow to harden, hence the name, and you could trip out for maybe ten hours on a single tin. The hallucinations were also smoother, more vivid, and often less frightening. As I looked at Annie I saw that her gaze had not left Cadwallader’s eyes the entire time that he had been talking and that she was now licking her lips. I could feel her heart beating faster through the ether. Without looking at it, she had managed to shape the neck of her bag into a perfectly smooth little o. There is something about young women sniffing glue. I think that it must be the idea of a beautiful thing corrupted, of the dirty teenager doing something that she shouldn’t be doing, reveling in the corruption, and wanting it more and more as she loses control. I noticed that Annie was now holding the bag only in her left hand and that she had her right hand placed on her knee, and I put my hand on top of hers, but she immediately shook me off. Then her face was in the bag and she was away, huffing like a maniac. Her eyes began to bulge, she fell backwards onto the floor, and we all laughed in unison at her despoilment. Then the remaining three of us gathered around Cadwallader to receive our glue. There was something of the religious ceremony about this, like the blessing and the passing around of a chillum. There was complete silence, only the muted sounds of our quickened breathing, as Cadwallader handed the bags out. The slight crinkling noise of the bags being opened to receive the sacrament. And then the slow and silent pouring of the glue. I gave my bag ten rapid lungfuls and then I fell over backwards as well.

I lasted about an hour in the caravan before a fierce headache consumed me, making my ears scream and my eyeballs throb. Annie was now laying on her front, almost onto her knees but not quite, humming a northern folk song into her bag. She looked prone and very sexy, but all thoughts of fucking her again had left me. At one point, she grew two heads which spoke to one another in ancient Hebrew before morphing into a large black anvil that spouted tiny jet engines all along its base. It then blasted off into the sky in an almighty roar. I looked up to follow its ascent and I saw that the caravan now had no roof. The sky was bright purple and I saw god in the background, and he winked at me as he juggled most of the planets, at first clockwise and then counter clockwise, smiling broadly. He had three missing teeth. When I looked back down at Annie to check whether she still had her head, or if she had grown another one, she was in the same position but she had turned into an enormous chicken, still wearing her dirty mac. The chicken wiggled its arse suggestively at me and I stood up, shaking my head rapidly from side to side. This was a mistake: I immediately became very nauseous as I felt my swollen brain banging around against the inside of my skull. I looked down at the others and I saw that they were all sitting cross legged on the caravan floor, huffing away, still human, not too foul. I managed to croak out Green Hat Eddie’s name through the roaring silence and he miraculously heard me, took his mouth away from his bag and looked up. He was drooling. I passed my bag to him and I stepped over the three of them and made my way to the caravan door, opening it and stepping out into the day.

When I was outside I shut the door again and collapsed onto the ground, holding my head in my hands, massaging my temples and breathing rapidly. After a few minutes had passed I began to come to myself again, gradually moving back into my body. My breathing slowed and I noticed that there was a long shadow over me. I looked up and I saw Hazel Springett standing there, her hands on her hips, her thin lips pursed. She was back from her dance class. We must have been in the caravan for longer than I had thought.

"You fucking wasters", she told me. "It’s a spring afternoon and you’re glue sniffing in the fucking caravan. What the fuck do you think you’re playing at? This is a busy thoroughfare. It’s a weekday. Kids walk along here on their way home from school. Kids! Kids with fucking parents! We’re hardly making the rent as it is. I want to keep this house. This isn’t a fucking squat. Who else is in there with you?"

Hazel had something of the savage matron about her and I was powerless to stand up to her interrogation. It took a couple of minutes, but I managed to deliver to her an accurate list of my accomplices. My glue trip had receded by now but the headache was still there, more fierce than ever in the early evening sunshine.

"Annie? What, your Annie? I didn’t know she was a fucking glue sniffer! Jesus!"

I started to mumble something to her about badly needing to clean my teeth and get on the outside of some Nurofen, but when I looked up she had already turned on her heels and gone back into the house.

By the time that it was dark I had managed to sweet talk Hazel into lending me a couple of pounds for some aspirin and beer. We got on very well when it was just the two of us together, we would talk quietly of mighty things, but I could see that she was still very pissed off. Paddington had gone upstairs to sleep it off in the box room and the others had shambled down the alley, toward Farringdon road park. Hazel and myself and Sarah sat watching a documentary about the greenhouse effect on a small black and white television. They were drinking tea, I was slowly sipping at a tin of White Ace cider, my hands shaking. Then, suddenly, between something about the Greenland ice sheet and something else about the plight of the polar bears, there came some enormous crashing and breaking sounds from the direction of the kitchen. Hazel and Sarah immediately sprang up and ran toward the back of the house. I was slow to react and I only turned my head, then I heard Hazel screaming out “oh, for fucks sake!” and suddenly Sarah was back in the room. She moved slowly across it and back to her seat, head down, and when she had gotten out of the way I saw behind her, swaying in the doorway, Annie. She was completely naked apart from her shit stained knickers, which were partway down her legs. One side of them had stuck fast onto the front of her thigh. In her left hand she still held her glue bag. She made to huff at it but it had completely dried up and had stuck to her hand. Then she tried to pull it away, only succeeding in tearing it into several pieces, none of which she seemed able to discard to the floor. While all of this was going on I could hear Hazel in the kitchen sweeping up broken glass, and it was only then that I noticed that Annie was bleeding all of the way down her left forearm and dripping onto the carpet. The next thing that happened was an almighty roar from the kitchen, rapidly coming closer, as Hazel Springett made a sound rarely heard outside of a Mexican bullring, enraged, incensed, and approaching us at the exact speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second. But Einstein must have been wrong, because by the time that she reached us, Annie had already collapsed, face down onto the carpet, her arms splayed out at her sides, unconscious.

Weighed down with stones.

At my first school I could see the Westbury white horse from my desk. The school was in Southwick near Trowbridge, as our mother taught us to say when making us memorise our address in case we got lost. We moved to Bath in 1973, so this would have been ‘72. The only other thing I remember about the school was pissing myself in class on my first day, that there was an outside toilet without a roof I didn't want to go to. I suppose I could be wrong about being able to see the white horse from my desk, but at this remove, does it matter?

I am sitting in Westbury town centre, it is the late morning of a rainy weekday in the summer of 1985. With me is a man called Slag, a nickname he gained at his school because his surname is Hoare. We are eating from a cold tin of beans and a dry sliced white loaf with a teaspoon, making rudimentary sarnies, food that we have bought from a supermarket for a grand total of less than fifty pence. Along with a couple of hundred other punks and hippies we have spent the previous night up on the white horse. The hippies have been chased all around Wiltshire by the police, thrashed and threatened and thrown from site to site all through June, as they attempt to get to Stonehenge. This is the first year that the ban on the Stonehenge free festival has been rigorously enforced. It began with the battle of the beanfield earlier in the month, the police went berserk and there was a lot of bloodshed. The miners strike came to an official end in March, and Margaret Thatcher has declared the Peace Convoy to be the new enemy within. We are only delighted to do anything we can to make life difficult for such things as hippy convoys, she tells the press. The police, emboldened by astronomical pay rises and the free hand they were given during the great strike, know that they can now get away with anything. The BBC are on their side, as they were at Orgreave and Wapping. Their lies at Orgreave will not be exposed for at least another decade; for now they are still generally seen as impartial, and not what they really are: a propaganda mill that would put TASS to shame, the publicity wing of the conservative party. We are not hippies, we are punks, but really we are all of a piece. We have cadged a ride up to Westbury the night before in the back of Chris Spurrell’s little van; myself, Slag, Bully and Howie. We have been to see a punk band at Walcot village hall. They are the Icons of Filth from Cardiff.

Slag is from South Wales as well, from Briton Ferry, just outside of Swansea. Through mouthfuls of cold beans and dry white bread, he tells me it’s bollocks what people say, you don’t need money to have a good time. I don’t say anything. The previous evening has been a washout, literally and figuratively. There have been no bands – there were the usual rumours of amebix and antisect turning up – but even the promised generator didn’t materialise. Neither was there shelter. We slept in a ditch behind a tree and are both soaked through. Handing me the half finished tin of beans and rubbing tomato sauce into the folds of his crusty parka, sucking the rest of the bean juice from his grimy fingers, Slag wonders aloud where Bully has got to. He walked down across the fields and into the town with us but has since disappeared. I tell him I don’t know, he was with us when we passed the church, and I wonder aloud about Howie. Slag doesn’t seem to know who I’m talking about so I tell him Howie’s life story as best I know it.

I don’t know where Howie is from but he is a Bristol squatter, from the notorious demolition ballroom, an old car showroom that has been made empty along with many other properties in the area, in readiness for a new roundabout and one-way system. There is no electricity there, they have been stealing power by discreetly running cables from nearby lampposts. They also occupy an abandoned café next door, which they have christened the demolition diner. They have made it into a new café, the food all vegan, cooked at no charge, but donations appreciated. They have made up stickers to encourage donations, stickers that read dig deep for the diner!’ These are a pastiche of the ubiquitous NUM stickers that said, dig deep for the miners. Some of the new stickers are the old stickers, adapted with black marker pen. The café has its own power, the electricity not yet cut off, so the supply for the demolition ballroom is supplemented by the café as well. In the ballroom there is also no running water. The toilets are situated down a slimy set of stone steps. You go down them in complete darkness, although candle stubs have been left lying around here and there. Few people bother with the steps unless they are truly desperate, or have dysentery. You stand at the top of the steps and you piss down them, into the void. If you do not have dysentery before you go down the steps you will have it by the time you come back up. There is no door at the top of the steps – it has been removed for firewood and beside the doorspace somebody has helpfully painted an arrow and a trilingual sign: the bog, les bogs, el bogo. Once, made desperate by too much lager consumed in a pub about a mile away, I try to piss down the steps. It takes me a moment to get my flow going and my arc right. But as soon as I am in full flow, I hear a scream from below, then a crazed gurgling and rapid footsteps. I turn on my heel, still pissing, and I push people out of my way to make my escape into the street, trying to put my dick away as I go in order to avoid detection. A drunk punk, named appletree because of his green jumpsuit, spiky green hair and a fondness for scrumpy cider, has been sleeping it off at the bottom of the steps and I have woken him up. Pissing down the steps of el bogo is an acquired skill.

Howie is on the run from the army. He is rumoured to have seen action in the Falklands. Traumatised and shellshocked, he has signed up for a further five years but has changed his mind. He has gone AWOL and fetched up on the streets of Bristol, so his barracks are probably a long way away, possibly up north, although his accent is more London. Sleeping in the parks and the multi-storey car parks, he has discovered glue sniffing and has learned how to bark at people who get too close. He carries a hunting knife and still wears his army boots. He lives like this for about a year before he is rescued by the big-hearted animal rights people, who take him back to their squat, wean him off solvents and introduce him to lysergic acid and speed. Despite his near pathological hatred of hippies, his best friend is an acid casualty named furniture, an old man who wears a waist length beard threaded with multi coloured beads and who never speaks. Howie is now a vegan and an anarchist punk. The army are still looking for him, they leave no man behind. He has come with us to the Westbury white horse in search of drugs and free love, and now, like Bully, he has disappeared.

As I finish telling Slag all this, he shrugs his shoulders, still unable to place him. He says something about Taf from disorder owing him some money, a reference to the demolition diner, and then he wipes bean juice from his mouth with the sleeve of his parka and belches loudly. He gets up. I hurriedly finish off the beans and hand him back the teaspoon and the bread, telling him that he should keep it because he has further than me to go. I put out my hand and he helps me up. I tell him that I grew up around here, that I was born only eight miles away, in Bradford on Avon. He shrugs his shoulders again. We walk off toward the A4 in hungover silence, preparing to hitch-hike back to Bath and South Wales. Our boots and our clothes are sodden but, high above us, the sun is breaking through the clouds and the day is beginning to warm. In the next week, the local press will be full of stories and irate letters, because they believe that the punks and the hippies have defaced the white horse – that they, we, have dug up the turf around the horse’s head to give it a horn and make it a unicorn. It turns out that they have arranged an assortment of white bin liners and carrier bags, weighed down with stones, into a cone shape; that when they leave they will tidy up much of the mess they have made and take some of the magic away with them, away to the next site and the next battle. To the next patch of earth from which we have all sprung. This earth, our home.

© Ted Curtis 2012 & 2014.

#makingasmalldentist

While she wasn’t the smallest person I had ever met, she was almost certainly the smallest dentist. Or professional in a white coat of any stripe. That would be good, if dentists, doctors, pharmacists, had to earn their rank and then wear stripes. And pips. The men who work in the hardware shops and builders merchants as well, with the brown coats. I know that’s not really the case these days, that the blokes – did you ever see a woman working in one? – generally wear mufti now, I’m thinking more of the era of the two Ronnies and their celebrated fork handles sketch. You know what I mean.

But getting back to my point, this dentist, the smallest dentist I had ever seen, probably a Lance Corporal to look at her steely blue eyes, couldn’t have been more than 4’10”. If that. I had booked a long overdue appointment to have my remaining two wisdom teeth out. I was wary of the procedure and I thought about bottling it and staying in bed on a Saturday morning, but there was a deposit paid because they have to have someone come in from the outside to do that kind of work. Hence the irregular dentist. The small irregular dentist.

The anaesthetist was the usual one though, I recognised her from the year before and the double crown replacement. A messy business. The gas didn’t quite take and I was spitting blood and yellowed ivory and charging around the room like a rogue elephant, my shirt off and blindfolded with a bandana for reasons I cannot quite recall. Screaming and blubbering through relaxed lips and hanging mandible about my mother, Frank Worthington and Baba Yaga. The gas had relaxed my face but not my brain. A large security man from Tenby had come in and slapped me around a bit to calm me down, then they had knocked me out with ketamine and charged me half price.

The small irregular dentist couldn’t quite reach into my mouth, even with the operating couch right down and me completely horizontal. She had to stand on an orange box. As she prodded around in my mouth with speculum and mirror, trying to get a look at the offending tusks, I tried to tell her the joke about the dentist who goes into Stringfellows and orders a lime soda but she’d already heard it. I followed up with the how-many-dentists-does-it-take-to-change-a-lightbulb one and she groaned audibly. I was starting to like her. There was no pain yet and this was far more response than you usually get for dentist jokes. So I started telling her the true story about the uncle I had never met, the uncle who had died in the battle of Britain, Andrew Howes, shot down and killed by the Luftwaffe over Pewsey on April fools day 1944. They interred what they could find of his remains in Haycombe cemetery.

When Bristol zoo had been closed for the duration of hostilities in 1942, there had been an appeal, and he had adopted a penguin. He built a refrigerated shed for it, powered by the mulch gas from his allotment in Whiteway. It consisted of a tin bath and a lot of ice and frozen fish. Two shelves of books, all the penguin classics. Every afternoon he would take it for a walk through Englishcombe village. When he didn’t come home the penguin was returned to the zoological authority by my grandmother. But every day on his birthday, July 9th, the penguin broke out of the zoo and went to stand next to his grave from dawn until sunset. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them. And its descendants still do this today. They bring flowers from the 24 hour garage on the Bristol road.

When I came around from the anaesthetic my tusks had gone and the small irregular dentist was dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a small paper tissue. Was it true she asked me, was it true about your uncle Andy in the war? Was it true she sniffled, was it true about your uncle Andy’s penguin and all of its descendants?

And that’s how I made a small dentist cry.

©Ted Curtis 2012.

morning

when the end comes
as it surely will
you imagine yourself spending your last
few hundred pounds

on a small van
and driving toward
the Severn bridge
before the Welsh close it off to us
and swathe it in razor wire.

the back of the van filled with:
a small mattress
an arctic sleeping bag
sacks of lentils and potatoes
a small box of books
and some of that good orange juice
that only LIDL sell

you head first to Wiltshire
say a couple of goodbyes
give your copy of Jerusalem
to Paddington

then maybe think twice
about driving through Bristol
the traffic wardens are armed now

you head up through south Cerney
to the forest of Dean
that great wooded hill
where Rosemary West
still roams free

around Monmouth
Brecon
bypassing all towns
now fortified
guarded
24-7

and running out of fuel
three quarters of the way
across the Abergwesyn pass:
you lay down to sleep
awaken at dawn
then walk the hard road
through the morning fog

coming through the mist
a man in a poncho
stained with blood and oil

no arms and a poodle
attached to his waist
with baler twine

you nod
he nods back
not long now, he says

you walk on

For Ron, Danny Dyer's twin.

I got the call up in 2005
between jobs, between worlds, between wars
neither dead nor living
I’d been a mechanic for the RAF twice
which made me a reservist
which made it time to start giving.

not wanting to live all that badly, true
yet not wanting to die on another’s terms
not for the whims of a medieval monarch
or the corporations
I chose gin
vodka
Caribbean rum
the crack house
thought I’d mull it over.

coming round, noticing that the month had changed
the season too, those leaves now orange and earthbound
then plodding the hill to mother’s like a prodigal foetus;
have you noticed there’s always a hill?
and that it only ever faces the same way?
but finding only boards
on the windows and doors
I left.

on the way to the curfew I was grabbed by my kin
screaming she’s gone now you fucker, where the shit have you been?
we went inside, had a drink or four
he told me about the bathroom
the blood on the floor
the note on the door
“I can’t live in a world without my son”
our Stevie, adopted
which only left one.

I’d missed the cremation, inherited two large
walked down side of the M23
found a barge
at Southampton
that was joining a ship at Plymouth sound
which was bound
for Rio
they needed muscle
I was on
I was in.

I worked 72 hours straight, then couldn’t sleep
at all.
only just out of Europe
into the deep
briny blue.
then
finding the hold
in an insomniac, overcaffeinated haze
and finding these animals there
or so it seemed
for they dressed in skins
their only interest being
a recycled square of tin foil
blackened
like the hope of all times.

and the next thing I knew:
that beach that went on forever, the sky so blue
and sleeping there, shivering
and still quivering
four days later
in the bus station
waiting to go
to Pedra do Bau

off the bus three days, I met Ron
he found me in my room
asked me if I had ever know true peace.
I was nonplussed
he was an absolute deadringer for Danny Dyer, you see
yet his accent
was full on RP
he told about living in the moment
told me about being fishers of men
I was hungry

he showed me a neat trick I’d learnt in boot camp, but forgot:
that simply by sitting there on the spot
for 20 minutes or more
you could end the war
in your head
forget yourself
then he said:
“our whole family comes from this”
then he gave me a kiss
told me, “pass it on son”

for six months, six weeks and six days
we carried on in this vein
negotiating pain
hunger
and disease
with ease

there were almost 144 disciples now
Ron seemed like he was expecting something
to come to pass
soon;
then,
by the light of the moon
on the mountain top
as we cracked open our third bottle of scotch
he slurred
every third
word
and told me of the mass suicide
we’d all be embarking on
in three days
at 19:21
the year of his grandfather’s birth
in Mile End
(he had lapsed into cockney by then)
he sang ‘boiled beef and carrots’
‘roll out the barrel’
‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’
and I sensed trouble

I waited for him to
pass out
pulled a blanket over him
considered closing his account
but no
I thought what must be must be
slid down the scree
threw some crackers and Tartex
into my pack
and like that
again
I was gone.

Really quite perfect for a farewell soiree.

One afternoon we all marched across Regents Circus to a wine bar between two amusement arcades. I had never seen the inside of a wine bar before but there we were, and just for today I could hold court in a comfortable bodega corner in a meaningless English small town, bullshitting away to my heart’s content and outlining these fantasies as reality, not thinking for a minute that anyone could possibly disbelieve my sincerity or my capabilities just so long as I kept on talking. A wine bar, it turned out, was really quite perfect for a farewell soiree. The booze was flowing freely, and when I looked at my watch I saw that it was almost a quarter to five. I made to stand up but my legs were not in agreement with my brain and after three attempts to lever myself upright I took a break from my exertions.

I couldn’t stand up straight but I could feel my bowels beginning to move around themselves like a nest of vipers. I attempted to use my elbows to force myself into a standing position. I was almost halfway there when I heard a guttural wail coming up at me from beneath the floorboards, and as I looked around I noticed that all of the eyes of the amateur imbibers were on me and me only. Why were they all staring at me? I began to open my mouth to set them straight, but when I started to do so I immediately noticed that my mouth was already hanging open and leaking drool, and that I was crying profusely. Instinctively, I flung my left arm around Penfold’s shoulders and leant into him. I managed to croak into his ear, “the bogs, the bogs”. He seemed to understand what I was getting at because he was kicking some recently vacated bar stools aside, whilst Tracey dragged a fashionable coffee table from our path, and then we were halfway across the bar floor and toward the stairs that led to the chromium plated lavatories below us. By the time that we got there I had acquired Ian Leighton on my other side, muttering words of comfort along the lines of “Tedski man, don’t panic, don’t panic, code red is over Tedski, we’ve got ya, we’ve gotcha man”. I remember treading air above the stairs themselves just before a greeny-orange mist descended, and then all of the darkness was with me. Somebody must have put something in my drink.

When I came to everything was still spinning slightly and I was on my side, foetal position engaged, on the floor of one of the restroom cubicles: I was half in and half out of it, so to speak, and Lynne was leaning over me. My combat trousers were around my ankles, my pants had disappeared and she was mopping at my rectum with a wad of soggy paper, cradling my forehead in her bosom. As she ran her fingers through my greasy hair I noticed that she wasn’t wearing a bra. She sniffed, cleared her throat, and tossed the slimy wad of used bogroll into the pan. Plop! Then she leaned across me to flush the toilet and gather another handful of paper, which she immediately dipped into the bog and began wiping around my anus afresh. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but it’s a really loving thing to do. I felt like a cross between a patient on a cancer ward and a newborn baby, totally helpless, but completely held and cared for, and it wasn’t something that I had ever felt before. She sniffed again and I managed to open my eyes enough to notice that she had been crying. My eyes stung and my throat was dry and sore, and the space behind my forehead was banging. I tried to say something but I found that I couldn’t, and Lynne immediately put her finger to her lips to quiet me up, and then she began to whisper something instead.

“Don’t say anything, Ted” she told me. “Just lie there, please, just try to just be for a moment. I’m so glad that you’re back, I had this idea that you were gone forever. You were ranting and raving and threatening, you were marching up and down, kicking in the doors and shouting, banging your head against the walls, and I thought that the manager was going to come down with his heavies and throw us all out properly. Then you just sort of collapsed. It took me ages to get your trousers cleaned up. I managed to kind of towel-dry them with lots of loo roll. Your pants were finished though, they had to go.” She made a hand gesture that must have been the international sign language for somebody pulling a toilet flush, whilst pinching her nose shut with her other hand and smiling. I liked that.

Again I tried to speak but my lips felt cracked, as though I had been walking through the desert for a week. Lynne put her finger to her lips again and went on.

“It was like an incident of demonic possession. One moment you were raving, really spewing bile and poison and speaking in tongues, and your eyes were completely blank and rolling back up into your head like one of those stupid toy dolls.” I didn’t know what she was talking about now but I let her go on, because I knew that she would make sense again eventually; because she always did, I thought to myself in my new dreamy hyper-reality. Everything was extremely calm and quiet in there and even my headache was beginning to fade.

“Do you think that you could manage to stand?” she asked as I zoned back into the moment. The walls breathed in and out for a second and I shook my head rapidly from side to side. My brain rattled about in its pod, clackety-clack, and then I was OK. “Well, I can try” I told her. I rolled slowly over onto my ass and hunched myself forward, reached for my breeks, slid their dampness up over my knees. My stomach cramped slightly and it made a little noise and Lynne caught my eye, smiled, beautifully concerned, and then it was gone and I was up on my heels and fastening the buttons. As she edged out of the cubicle I grabbed a hold of her hand and I squeezed it and she squeezed back. Then we made our way through the dull metal and porcelain of the empty space of the washroom, back toward the staircase.

When we got to the top of the stairs and into the bar there was sound again and then a sudden hush, like in that film about the werewolf, and the bar manager came out from behind his bar and he folded his arms and he stared at us. I looked past him and at the staff, three of them standing close to the till in their uniform turquoise polo shirts like slightly out of condition personal trainers from a downmarket gym, and they were frozen in the moment, two of them clutching a handful of change, and it was pretty clear that it was time for us to leave. Then he said into the silence, “just get out, all of you, and never come back here. You’re disgusting, you’re animals and you’re all barred!” I actually physically flinched at that. He was obviously playing to the galley, and speaking in a mockney accent that was before its time, although cardboard cockneys were ten a penny in Swindon all the time that I lived there. But that was Swindon in a nutshell. A small place where mediocrities could act out their impotent power fantasies, a cattle market town for hill-dwelling smock-wearing pig fuckers. I took a step toward him but Lynne gave my chest a gentle shove and I realised that I was done. Done for the night, and done with this whole damned place.

I slept better that night than I had for quite a while; partly it was the early night, and the cool air on the short walk home, but mostly it was the pure loving kindness that Lynne had shown me in that deserted subterranean bathroom – a pub toilet – while she cleaned me up and whispered soothing things into my sleeping ears and didn’t care what would happen had somebody walked in on us. When I woke the sun was streaming into the room around the tattered edges of the dirty pink blanket draped across the window, and it was 8:15 and a beautiful day. I didn’t feel sick and I didn’t have to go to work either. I crawled from under the sticky sheets and I made my way down the stairs through the languid flies for the instant coffee.