Where does my mind reach?

/

I know the way.

The sun had beat down on them for little over a month now, their headclothes had dissolved, what remained on their bodies was bleached and threadbare – the smell of the earth permeated through the core of their very minds, Harkoff, Shredig and Foolio trudged blindly into the southern Nelen suburbs of Lesser Jou.

*

“Mister Minister?”

The old man put down some yellowing typewritten papers before grasping the secretary at his office door with a firm gaze. “Yes?”

“I’ve been authorised to inform you that dispatch team -”

“Contact Field-Marshall Sherpie and tell him to contact Ragzin.”

“Field-Marshall Sherpie? And… and… Ragzin?”

The Minister squinted at the woman standing in the threshold of his tiny, wall-papered room.

“Sherpie has been promoted, Miss, and he must talk to Ragzin about this matter.”

The woman lingered in the doorway and seemed to study the hunched man, and his single black bowler, unmoving on a hatstand to his left. Does this man really command the future of eighty million people?

“Is there something wrong, Miss? Miss Kost, is it?”

“Sorry sir, nothing’s wrong,” Kost turned away and moved to the nearest speaker tube to fulfil her instructions.

**

For about a century, before the Nelen discovered masses of marble in the deep south of Lesser Jou, architects and engineers were fixated on creating structures with concrete. Concrete was more than just the most functional building component ever developed, it was a tradition, a social expression of progress – for a very long time, it seemed to encapsulate what it meant to be Nelen.

Great square structures issued from the ground in Nela’s east, while it spread closer, and ever more jealously towards Jou. Concrete formed simple prisms that housed people closer and more numerously that ever before. It was both dually and simultaneously  speedily dirty, and saturated with new Nelen culture. A new movement carried this espousal of functionalism forward, prioritising not a direct expression of wealth, but the pursual and possession of as much of it as physically possible.

Installation four was a relic of this era. Concrete lift-shafts, concrete access-shafts, concerete hallways. Totally underground, it was another secret government facility that had been converted from office-space to a site for scientific experiements.

[continued, was not going to post but it became enough]

Karvezide – 12.5mg

Slow K – 600mg

Mobic – 15mg

Zoton – 30 mg

Lipitor – 10 mg

Lovan – 20 mg

Frusemide – 20 mg

Marvevan – 3 mg

Zandip – 9.4 mg

The Death of Daffy Duck

.

The two couples had eaten together once a month since their university days; eaten their way through menus of most of the decent restaurants in the city, and more than a few of the indecent. At times other shared their table – other couples, the odd ‘confirmed bachelor’ friend or visiting relative – but the booking was usually a Table For Four.

Things had gone well over the years for the four, professionally. Terry Hicks had established himself as one of the younger, and braver, bone surgeons in the city; his wife Mary – Mary Barratt, one of the first of her generation to keep her maiden name – taught architecture at the Institute. Scott and Jenny Greaves were both lawyers: Scott a barrister with the Crown Law Department, Jenny a private solicitor, dealing mainly with Family Law briefs.

Neither couple had yet produced children, although the time for final decisions was fast approaching. The women were now mid-thirties, and at times, especially late at night – alone with themselves, isolated by insomnia from the snug, sleeping world that surrounded them  – both felt the odd prickle of anxiety. Their various mothers and fathers and mothers-in-law had long ago dropped the subject – on pain of death – but both women retained a half-conscious understanding that yes, they would one day have children, even if they denied the wish in public.

Meanwhile, there was still fun to be had, childless freedom to enjoy. The monthly diners were riotous affairs; money was thrown about as loosely as talk, course followed course, imported liqueurs followed imported wines, the tips at the end of the night were uniformly big irrespective of service. Mary (the architect) had a big penchant for desserts. Her meal often consisted of nothing but an entrée, followed by three different rich desserts; yet somehow she maintained the trimmest figure. Too trim, her friend Jenny privately thought, although in public Jenny always expressed mock chagrin at the quantities of food Mary permitted herself. In their schooldays together Jenny had been the ugly one, tagging along in Mary’s wake; now she felt more equal, was made to feel more equal, even, or especially, by the men. Clothes of most kinds still hung best on Mary but in a swimming pool, or naked before a mirror, Jenny was fully aware of who was more womanly in shape and volume. She was careful to keep her shape that way, but no more, by sticking to small picky seafood portions, salads, fruit platters.

It was usually Jenny’s insistence that led to the choice of restaurant: nouvelle cuisine, northern Chinese, southern Thai, once even a vegetarian place.

The bill was rotated between the couples, although if someone forgot their wallet or purse, or paid out of turn, no one worried – money seemed plentiful, generosity was a virtue that all four could easily afford.

At the birthday dinners – four a year – extravagant gifts changed hands: imported perfumes, cameras, wines, electronic toys. Spending on anything, for its own sake, was a form of generosity, Scott (Deputy Crown Prosecutor at  thirty-five) proclaimed on one such occasion. Small, wiry, quick with his tongue, he liked to harangue his friends as if they were jurors.There was nothing wrong with conspicuous consumption, he pronounced, as long as the money was  spent quickly enough.

‘The velocity of money is what matters, not the amount. You have to keep the money moving. If everyone spends quickly enough, everyone can take turns being a millionaire.’

‘Briefly,’ his wife quibbled.

‘Does that matter? You still get to spend the money.’

There had been occasional hiccups in the relationship; in particular one upper-case Scene involving a smashed glass between the men. Scott was one of those whose dislikes were stronger than his likes, he was at his most passionate on things he detested, especially bad wine. Wine was his area of expertise; Terry had chosen from tthe wine list without consulting him and an absurd argument over degrees of dryness had followed; the smallest of disagreements, as always, provoking the most heated clash.

The second dispute was more serious. Terry had a kind of Daffy Duck voice that he often slipped into, especially late at night, or when drunk: a voice that let things slip out that were too embarrassing or too serious to speak of in normal conversation; a voice that  could say things from behind a duck-mask, with a fool’s frankness. THe voice had quacked out its lust for Jenny – his wife’s friend, his friend’s wife – once too often, the truth half hidden under cover of banter, but this time not sufficiently. The silence that followed revealed something about themselves to each of the four.

That silence seemed to last for minutes. Finally one of the two things had to happen: someone had to say, yes, let’s do it, let’s swap, or someone had to say, I think that’s enough, you’ve spoilt the evening. It could go either way; Mary chose the latter, reining her husband in.

After the paying of that particular bill, there had been no dinner for several months. And yet even lust for another’s spouse was forgivable, and finally easily forgivable; forgiveness was another virtue all four could easisly afford.

And the subject was now dead. Despite the odd thigh grope beneath the table, things had developed no further; all four were contented in their marriages; contented enough, at least, to prefer the ease and familiarity of friendship to the disturbances and and unpredictability of lust.

It was the third Scene that proved irreparable.

Scott and Terry had always been competitors to some extent. Their friendship had grown through the two women, old school-friends on alternate Thursday nights.

Terry had been an athlete, solid and muscular at school; the good life had filled that athleticism out, it was now a little overfed, reddish-skinned, lumpen. His shirt collars were too tight on his plump neck; the skin of his face had thickened and coarsened. He was known in the hospitals as an athletic surgeon: good hands, quick reflexes, capable of record-time joint replacements – a Hero, in the parlance. Neither intellectual nor diagnostician, he enjoyed most the hands-on stuff, the actual sawing, drilling, cutting. He revelled in massive road trauma: multiple injuries, rapid decision making, all-night operating marathons, actual physical challenges.

He always ate red meat. Off-call, beyond bleeper range, he always drank heavily. He often spoke with his mouth full, it seemed to help his Daffy Duck voice. And once – in a crowded Gree Taverna – he breathed in as he spoke.

This also seemed to be a performance at first, a duck-spluttery cry for help.

‘Gone down the wrong way?’ Mary asked, good-humouredly, as her husband began to cough.

Jenny reached over to pat his back, but he had already run out of air to cough with, the cough was swallowed by a strangled sound and suddenly he was on his feet, rearing up, something large and red-faced breaching above the surface of seated diners. His gagging was framed in a total, sudden silence; then people at nearby tables began shouting.

‘He’s choking!’

‘Christ! Somebody help him!’

‘Ring an ambulance!’

His face purpling; he seemed to be trying to say something – perhaps how to help him – but no sound emerged, there was no breath to fill out the words. He took a single step back, then fell forward onto the table in a clatter of glass and cutlery, ripping frantically at his collar and tie.

‘Is there a doctor here?’ a waiter screamed above the shouting diners, but the only doctor seemed to be choking to death, among broken glass and spilled wine, on a table-top.

It took Scott – usually so quick in court, so decisive, at least with his tongue – some time to react. Or to realise what was happening. Somehow he knew what to do: seizing his bigger friend from behind, balling both his fists in the solar plexus, jerking up and back with all his strength. Something seemed to give, a loosened plug; Terry rolled away onto his side on the wrecked table, a stream of vomit was coughed out onto the floor. For a moment everything seemed to stop again – waiting, frozen-frame – then he began wheezing, making great sucking sounds, still panic-stricken. Scott forced a finger into his friend’s mouth, searching for any further blockage, and was rewarded with a bite; he jerked back his finger with a shout of pain, bleeding heavily.

The ambulance arrived, a stretcher was wheeled in, but Terry was rapidly recovering. He recognised the ambulance officers – foot-soldiers from an army that he usually commanded – and abruptly refused to go with them, sitting off to one side of the table, dropping his head between his knees, still wheezing.

‘The might need a couple of stitches,’ an ambulance officer murmured to Scott. He flipped open a first-aid box and wrapped the bleeding, bitten finger in an oily gauze.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Scott said, some part of him not wanting to steal the scene from his friend.

He sat down again at the table with Terry and the two women. Around them the restaurant was returning to normal. Their tablecloth was deftly whipped away with all food cutlery, plates and vomit wrapped inside it; a fresh cloth was flung casually across the wiped wooden surface and drinks and place-settings materialised.

No one seemed to speak, and at length Terry  rose, peeled off a couple of large coloured notes from his wallet, and walked out of the restaurant.

Mary sat for another thirty seconds or so, then rose also:

‘Perhaps, I’d better leave too.’

‘Of course,’ Jenny murmured.

And so they parted, four people who had never, until that moment, asked a single question of the world; had never had reason to. They were innocents, insulated from the kinds of pain that had goaded lesser minds than theirs into better lives than theirs; there had been no real mysteries.

Terry failed to appear at the golf club the following Saturday morning; Scott made up a foursome with some old school friends after waiting an hour at the clubhouse bar. In the afternoon he left a brief, cheerful message on his friend’s answering machine, but  some sixth sense told him not to press further; especially when on Saturday morningg a fortnight later, as he was chipping onto the eighteenth green, he saw Terry on a distant fairway with a couple of total strangers.

Jenny reported home after a bridge night that Mary had merely mentioned that Terry was ‘busy’, avoiding any further discussion. Mary herself rang Scott after a month, her voice steady as she explained that Terry ‘didn’t feel up to facing you right now’.

‘But I would like to thank you for what you did,’ she said. ‘Who knows – it might have been serious.’

Scott took some umbrage at this, as did Jenny when he replayed the conversation to her. Her years as a teenage ugly duckling had given her a sharp sense of justice.

‘It might had been serious?’ she said, in a voice as near to a shout as she ever came. ‘You saved his life! Don’t they know that?’

She planned to make that very point to Mary at the next bridge night, but Mary didn’t show; someone’s husband was required to stand in at short notice to make up the numbers. The same husband was required again the following fortnight, and the fortnight after that a new member was found to join the circle, permanently.

There were no more restaurant Tables For Four; Jenny’s birthday brought a card from mary, and a brief note – snowed under with work, hope to catch up with you soon – which both Scott and Jenny were now able to recognise meant exactly the opposite.

In the small, closed universe of their city all paths intersected sooner or later. Once, Scott thought he saw Terry cross to the other side of the mall, and vanish into a shop as he approached. But there could be no crossing the street when the two men came face to face in a corridor one day of the year later.

‘Terry, how are you?’

“Never been better.’

Scott had halted, but Terry was still moving, almost past him. Scott wanted to reach out to restrain his friend, but hesitated too long. As Terry talked away he made on last attempt to break the ice, turn the taboo subject into a joke, defuse it with humour. Once it was out in the open, he sensed, the problem would vanish.

‘Last time I saw you, you didn’t look so good,’ he said.

Terry stopped, and turned. His face seemed genuinely puzzled: ‘Must have been a long time back, Scott.’

And he walked on, leaving Scott standing, flatfooted; but after a dozen paces he turned yet again, and this time shouted, his face purple with anger, as purple as it had been on the night of the Scene:

‘What do you want – a fucking medal?’

The words came in a shower of duck-spittle; then he turned on his heel and walked quickly away, and the two men would never speak again.

This was written by Peter Goldsworthy, I’ve copied it out of his book Little Deaths. It’s most likely copyrighted, but somehow I hope he doesn’t mind, I find this short story speaks a lot of truth, its message seems almost universal, for me. I was shown this in year 11 and it struck me then, and when I found my photocopy I felt it should go on here.

Sven slept at his desk with a small light on, books open and blinds closed. He dreamt of lawnmovers mowing endless plains of grass, until his vibrating mobile phone finally woke him.

“Dude, everyone’s going to the beach.”

“Studying… I gotta – I gotta study.”

“You sound half asleep, you always fall asleep when you study.”

“Its not my fault that guy wrote Cloudstreet.”

“I think you should come to the beach.”

Canned laughter drifted over plates clattering downstairs.

“I don’t like the beach.”

“You like the beach. You’ve ran into the ocean fully dressed.”

“That was different!”

“Five beers different?”

“I just don’t want to go.”

“You’re so miserable.”

A crackly sigh fizzed in Red’s mobile-phone earpiece.

“Fine, I’ll come.”

“Nah, look, don’t worry about it, you’ve gotta study, or whatever you’ve gotta do.”

“No, fine, I’ll come.”

“No, look, don’t come.”

**

Does anyone else have these really pointless conversations in their head?

‘okay’

‘okay’

‘haha’

‘okay’

.

“You know, that’s it, we’re not making any progress here, just go home guys.”

Chairs met tables, scraped walls, exhausted and exasperated students slipped outside, past the poorly lit faculty façade, Jerome scoffing to himself.

“God.. Idiots.”

Laughter seemed to boil out of the creamy sun-bleached wall light spewing silhouettes onto red bricks, Jerome spun around and a pair of arms locked him from behind.

The tutor might or might not’ve seen two figures he recognised from moments before exacting revenge on the ever-knowledgeable Jerome.

.

HEEEEE-HHHEYYYYY
OH YEAH BABY
-

like a fool,

I went and stayed too long

now Im wondering if your loves still strong

ooooh baby,

here I am,

signed, sealed, delivered

.

“This is

why I don’t

emotionally rely on

people.”

“Winter keeps getting longer over here.”

Bertrina Humphries and the Minister for Malasrion were amongst the dainty flowers of the Sherpie estate gardens.

“It’s absolutely freezing,” Humphries appeared to be wearing about three animals as she squinted at the flower-adorned fountain they stood by, not wanting to miss the possibility of seeing the twinkling streams of water solidifying into tiny little shoe-lace icicles.

“It must be the desert.” The Minister was equally as despondent, his eyes fixed to the horizon, watching the rains soak the concrete town in the next borough. “The Parliament dries the bones out. The desert air is so dry.”

“It’s not even in the desert.”

The Minister moved uneasily.

“What’s the matter with you, Remesko?” Bertrina issued a column of steam into her hands. “You know everyone thinks you’ve gone insane. I’m starting to think there’s some sort of ghost that inhabits whoever inherits the dictatorship of Nela. You knew about the assassinations, didn’t you.”

The Minister could hear the rains echoing off the prefabricated skyline. The water seemed to dissolve into the black clouds belching from the distant angular silhouettes.

“Who was it?”

The rains. The black clouds. Will there be lightning?

“Is it another abortive revolution?”

Very wet.

“Minister! It’s that damn Secret Service outfit of yours, isn’t it? You can’t control them, you know – you send them out to take photographs, they get surrounded, and then it’s knives out when you’re up against the Gremanese!”

“I did it.”

“What?”

“It’s my doing. I ordered that the operatives assassinate the Gremanese High Command.”

“You are insane. I can’t believe this. The rumours are true. Daydreaming through your office windows, weeks of rearmament paperwork undone – I think I’m going to be sick.”

The Minister took off his bowler-hat and ran an un-gloved hand through some thinning silver hair.

“Why the hell would you order the assassination of the Gremanese High Command? You showed me the photographs! Dredged ships in the South Sea fitted with tracks and wheels! Guns fitted to fire shells the size of horses! Why give anyone a reason to use such weapons, let alone the Gremanese?”

“Do you know how old I am, Bertrina?”

“You’re eighty-six, Minister, you probably have dementia.”

“I do have dementia. I’ve had dementia for half a decade, I’ve been lost to the world for weeks at a time – I wake up in a different state hospital ward every few months.”

“So you ordered the killings because you were mentally deranged?”

“No.”

“What? How sick are you?”

“I am eighty-six years old, Bertrina. I had a wife, once.”

“You’re not even with it right now, are you?”

“I grew up in Greater Jou, and I married a rich oil-baron’s daughter. My family made a lot of money as a result, and I met a lot of people, it was like an enormous storm that swept me up. I remember how I started working for the Government for my father-in-law, the big marble hallways and gold-trimmed quills – but all of that was a blur in comparison to what I had with my wife, I regard it as totally unimportant in comparison. What makes me feel sick is that I don’t remember her name. I remember everything about my job, all the important men I worked for, but I can hardly remember anything about my wife. I can’t remember anything I cared about. I think she left me. It’d make sense for her to leave me, given what I do remember about our marriage.

“As the years passed it became increasingly obvious to us, and those around us, that my wife and I were having difficulties having children. We went to a doctor, and he performed an expensive operation on my wife to remedy the biological incompatibility we possessed. My wife suffered a miscarriage as a result of the surgery. Some months after fell pregnant. We shared nine months of exhaustion, anxiety and expectant joy, and then my wife gave birth to her only child.

“From the very moment she was born, she was dying. Doctors were swift and unrelenting to diagnose our daughter with heart, liver and lung failure, and predicted she would have weeks to live. She lived for a year and two weeks. My wife cried for a week leading up to, and on our daughter’s only birthday, a celebration our families marked with obviously outward black irony. Our daughter was detached from the room-full of hoses and wires used to support her failing internal organs in her last month of life, and with gaunt faces we moved all the soft toys we bought in false hope around our child and pretended she was coming home to stay.

“I remember her whispy dark hair and brown eyes. The memory I will forget last is the moment my infant daughter looked at me and transmitted to me that she knew she was dying. She aged one hundred years in only one, and every emotion she conveyed to me with her eyes spoke silently of a deep, deep hidden meaning shared between our family that was never meant to be. It is a wrongful thing to know that an innocent baby can know its life is abortive. I believe my dementia began then, and it is only now that I have begun to become aware of its effects.

“I ordered the assassination because the situation I found myself in fifty years ago is no different to the one I find myself in now. Jardenia is the baby who understands it is going to die. It was born of a cold scalpel-wielding hand that resists fate, that twists at my mind and drives me ever closer towards insanity. Better the apocalypse now than later. I want it over and done with.”

Sherpie found Bertrina and the Minister in the small courtyard a while away from the main gardens. The Minister was staring at the rains pounding in the horizon, whilst Bertrina was vomiting into the fountain in the courtyard’s centre, ruining the two jackets she was wearing.

Harkoff found himself emptying sand onto the cheap rug running across the hollow, thinning floor-boards of the Minister’s office.

“Wake up, little dreamer!” Shrendig rolled Harkoff out of their sack-cloth shade and onto the burning desert sand. He laid there for a moment, before scrambling back into the shade.

“You know you called out in your sleep.”

“Shut up,” Harkoff’s sleep-enduced stupor hadn’t yet worn off.

“You called out for that girl you tattled to about your test-operation.”

“I said shut the fuck up!”

“You know what you said?” Foolio jeered, his headclothes thinning and torn, revealing a beard compacted against his face.

Harkoff rammed a pair of hands underneath his desert-goggles in discomfort.

Shrendig and Foolio jeered even though they were exhausted, and and as they did the ground began to moan and tremble, and in the deep south the wasting three could hear some sort of shrill, distorted wail.

Each looked to the other; they remembered the photographs.

Burn, bridges! Burn!

Become glowing coals,

And boil the river-stream.

Craze the town to burn them all,

Burn!

When I look I cannot see anything but the past.

Curdle my neuroses.