We’re taking a little break

So, after 30 days, nights and VERY early mornings of speed writing….50,000 words in a total of 29 days, rubiesandduels is taking a little break.
I will be back, with new writing, an exciting project for 2014 and much more in a couple of weeks.

A huge thank you to everyone who read the NANOWRIMO novel, sent me kind messages or re -blogged/ linked into the project.

NANOWRIMO Novel – Cuttings – Day 29 PART 2

The house watches the woman drive slowly towards the road, the back seat of her car is piled high with boxes and bags, obscuring her view, making her an even more cautious driver than usual, the house observes as she waits for a gap large enough for her to inch forward and drive away.

The house relaxes, would, if it could, breathe out, fall back onto its haunches, but instead, of course, it is still, quiet, thoughtful.

It lets its’ awareness, its’ sense of self roam around the house, move from room to room, note the emptiness, the silence after the hours of bumping and banging and the last few days of the woman moving around, taking all traces of the last caretakers away.

The house has been here before, seen this packing process happen again and again.

It finds these periods unsettling, worries about the new caretakers, wonders if they will be as careful as these last ones. It hopes they are, it has felt safe, nurtured over the last 40 years and has in its’ own way tried to repay this, tried to provide a sanctuary, kept them warm and safe even on the coldest winter nights.

It knows that it will have no choice in who moves here next, but, it has its’ own ways. It can make itself colder, darker, a shade less welcoming to those it distrusts, those it fears will not understands its’ needs and so far, it has never been wrong.

So, now, it waits, hopes for the best and although the woman was scrupulous in her closing of windows and doors, there is a draft, a breeze, it ruffles the remaining curtains, the ones left only on the front windows, left to preserve the houses’ sense of modesty, of decency and from nowhere or somewhere very well hidden, one and two and three and four and five and six yellowing, brittle newspaper cuttings flutter in this breeze and find themselves new places to wait, new places where they will be discovered.

The house is content and awaits its’ new life.

 

 

THE END.

NANOWRIMO Novel – Cuttings – Day 29

The woman stands in the doorway, her hand is raised in a half wave, caught in mid movement, unsure if the correct response as the battered removal van pulls into the driveway.

The house clearance men have arrived and she is, by the skin of her teeth, ready for them, final cargo of boxes and bin liners delivered to the nearest charity shop only an hour ago. She feels their weight lift from her shoulders, feels lighter than she has done for days.

In the hallway, there is a neat stack of boxes, yet more black bags, it reminds her of her first move from this house, the shift to college and student living, a pile of  books and posters and the items listed in the helpful University handbook as essential for 1st year student living and this, this pile, is the final move, the shift from daughter to, her tongue stumbles to connect to the correct, accurate word and then she finds it, orphan. Experimentally, she rolls the word around her mouth, orphan, it feels both familiar and completely strange at the same time.

“Orphan” this time she says it out loud as she walks toward the 2 men who have jumped out of the van and are heading towards the front door.

They are not quite what she expects, in her mind she had conjured up some Del Boy, wide boy character, so, their quiet offer of condolences wrong foot her, leave her speechless, biting her lip, the word orphan still bitter in her mouth, on her teeth.

She needs to get another taste, some sweetness, comfort

“Tea ?” she asks, expecting requests for sugar, biscuits, but they confound her again. The older man smiles, shakes her deadlocked head and asks if they can herbal tea and so they sit, 3 of them, an echo of every breakfast of her childhood, at the kitchen table and they sip peppermint tea from tea bags they have brought in from their van, while she sips over sugared coffee and is the only one to dip into the packet of biscuits.

She had hoped that they would be smokers, that she could, with a shame faced grimace, scrounge a fag, smoke it while they carry out the furniture that no-body has any need of to their van to be sold to strangers, but, seeing them now, in the flesh and not the scenario that she has invented, she knows that there will be no smokes, no re-tuning the radio to radio 1 and so, she stands up and the men follow suit and the younger one smiles and asks her if she has marked any special items that she wants to keep and then the older looks directly at her and suggests that she goes for a walk or a drive, gets away for a while and then looks her up and down and asks when she last ate and she realises that she is starving and so, gently chaperoned towards her car, she finds herself heading toward the shopping centre, in search of breakfast.

The coffee shop, generic chain, she is not even sure which one, is busy, coffee machine steaming, filling the space with the smell of warm milk. she joins the line, orders a cappuccino, an apricot Danish pastry and finds a table in the corner. The coffee is good, strong, hot and the sweetness of the cake wipes away the ashy taste this morning has left in her mouth. She looks around,  most of the tables are full of people on their own, plugged into phones and gadgets, avoiding eye contact, fuelling up for a work a day work day. She wonders, just for a moment, what would happen if she stood up and said out loud

“I’m sitting here while 2 Buddhist removal men are taking away all my dead parents’ furniture and I’ve just realised that I’m an orphan”,

wonders if anyone would actually notice, take their eyes away from the screens for long enough to register what she has said, but instead, she stands up, return to the counter, orders another coffee and a pain au chocolat, takes a copy of the free newspaper and sits as the work day crowd ebb and flow and finally, when she is sure that she has allowed enough time, she leaves and drives very slowly, very carefully back to the house.

The men are standing in the garden, clearly waiting for her to return, but they greet her with smiles and walk her through the empty house, rooms echoing, marks in the carpets where wooden legs have rooted for so long. The house feels impersonal, just a space where people used to live, it is hard to imagine her parents here, harder even to imagine her life in this house.

The clearance men show her the packed van and then there is a moment of exquisite awkwardness and the older one digs into his jeans pocket and produces a wad of notes and hands them to her, she wonder s if she is meant to haggle, to count them out, instead she shoves them into her own pocket. They sit uncomfortably, digging into her hip bones and then the men  are gone and she is left, standing in the garden, not really sure what to do next.

She is not quite sure how long she stands there, but suddenly realises that she is cold, very, very cold and she moves quickly into the house, understands that motion, constant motion si the only way to manage this, so grabs the first box, throws it into  the boot and then the next and the next, until the car is packed, stuffed and she is panting, out of breath, warm, but alive, very alive.

She goes back into the sitting room to collect her bag, the last few items of clothing and crams them onto the passenger seat, goes back and checks doors, windows, locks, a parody of her mothers’ leaving the house routine and then she gets into her car and starts to reverse down the drive way, but stops, engine still running and digs into her bag, locates the note-book and places it carefully on the seat beside her, pats it with one finger, smiles and drives away.

NANOWRIMO Novel – Cuttings – Day 28

She knows she is running out of steam, the writing is coming harder and harder, each word pulled sticking and protesting from her pen, the nib threatens to pierce holes in the fine cream paper of her special note-book, her writers notebook.

She wants to stop, unsure why she even started this,  no longer getting any pleasure from this writing, each piece now is a knee jerk reaction to the newspaper clipping and she knows, in the terrible law of diminishing returns, that the writing is getting poorer and poorer, more perfunctory, but she cannot stop, needs to complete the project, although, of course, she can not complete a project when she doesn’t know the parameters, for all she knows there are hundreds, maybe thousands of newspaper cutting, hidden al over the house.

She looks around  her parents’ bedroom again, looks at it as  perspective purchasers will see it. A square, substantial room, painted a serviceable cream just after her mother died, just after her father started sleeping alone for the first time in over 40 years. The furniture is old, not antique, not quirky, just chosen to last, to be functional, comforting in its unchangingness.

She sits, perches really on her mothers’ special seat at the dressing table. she can remember her mothers’ quick glances into the mirror, her look of dissatisfaction, the sense that her relection, her appearance was a quiet let down, a disappointment, but that she contained her vanity, made sure that she didn’t give it too much house room, so only the smallest amount of time could ever be allocated to this daily checking, this daily evaluation.

She can feel herself drifting again, needs to remind herself that she has only until tomorrow morning and some time must be given to multiple charity shop drop off, she does not have time to wander down memory lane, to lose herself in childhood.

So, she grabs piles of cloths from the wardrobe, doesn’t even really look at them, becomes a machine, stuff into another of the growing mountain of black bags, move onto the next one and the next one and she knows that she is crying, but she doesn’t stop, not until she pulls out her fathers’ favourite scarf,  a surprisingly luxurious item, soft wool, maybe even cashmere, warm muted colors, orange and brown and grey. She knows it was a Christmas present, given the first year she went away. She can remember the box it came in, the scarf itself wrapped in tissue paper and the way her mother wrapped it carefully, gently around his neck and the smile they exchanged  and his mock horror at the extravagance and it suddenly hits her.

They had, her mum and dad, a happy marriage, short on demonstration, on declaration, but a little like this functional bedroom furniture, fit for purpose, designed for the long haul and she has stopped crying, is smiling instead, wrapping the scarf around her own neck, enjoying its’ softness. She will keep this she decides, will wear it on cold winter days, will wrap it with love around her own neck.

There are no mysteries,  no hidden stories in this room, just the things that get left behind, the things that other people have to tidy away and so she does, occasionally adding something to the little pile of things that she will keep, will take home with her, will look at in days and months and years to come.

She knows now that she will never understand the newspaper clippings, will never know who or how or why, but it doesn’t really matter.

She stops for a break, makes a coffee and sits on her parents’ bed, such a bitter-sweet moment and wishes with a hunger that surprises her, that just once, she could have sat with them, sipped a drink, talked about the every day, but then she shrugs, imagines the look of horror and invasion that her fathers’ face  would have held if she had ever tried to break into the tiny circle of intimacy that this bedroom, this bed, this closed door represented.

Instead, she flicks through the stories she has written over the last few, strange days,sees clumsy phrases, clunky paragraphs, unwieldy sentences, but also tiny bits that please her,that make her want to go home right now and sit at her little scrubbed wood desk and write and re-write all of these stories into something better.

She understands that this is not finished, that this gift of other people’s’ narratives, wherever it came from, is just a starting point and she smiles, looks at her reflection smiling in the bedroom mirror and then she finishes her coffee and starts dragging the bin bag mountain down the stairs and towards the front door.

NANOWRIMO Novel – Cuttings – Day 28 – The Next Narrative- part 2

The Next Narrative -” I paint your pain and feel it for you”

The process of painting a portrait of a being that can actually answer back has some novelty at first. She moves around him, looking at angles, shapes, how his body fits together. The absence of fur or hair or feathers is a little dis concerting until she gets her eyes in, learn to see form under skin.

He doesn’t actually speak much, there is a strange intensity to his gaze on her, almost as if the roles have been reversed, as if  it is him painting her, his eyes dart between her eyes and her hands and sometimes he leans back, shift his weight and sighs with pleasure.

The painting stutters on, her hands hurt, her head hurts, she has trouble seeing straight and she is trying to not see the changes in him, trying not to see his back straighten, his  hands unfurl, the lines etched on his face relax, slip away.

Somehow, whatever she has done with the pets, is much more marked in him, harder to ignore, because, deep down, she knows his interest is not in her, not in the art, not even in his own portrait, he has purchased not her skill with paint, but the miracle, the promise and delivery of new life, pain-free and rejuvenated.

When they finally part, he is upright, skin taut on his face, handshake firm, whist she, she is exhausted, hardly able to stand, hands shaking, lips moving constantly as she tries to remember everything she wants to say to him.

But once she is free, away from the canvas, away from him, it is another miracle

She stretches up, feels her back move freely, her shoulders unstiffen and she stands for a moment, enjoys the feeling of the sun against her strong young body and then she sits down on a bench and thinks very carefully and very deliberately about what has  happened and what she needs to do next.

Her thinking surprises her, she was not aware of this steel at her core, did not know that she could be so business like, so pragmatic about this gift, so focussed on her own ambition, but she shrugs, maybe after all, she is no better than the concecptualist boys, always looking for the thing that will set them apart, make their names.

She walks home, towards her comfortable garden flat, mind already turning to that glass of wine, her own cats on her lap, the daily cigarette and the smoking ritual that goes along with it.

She knows what she should do, princesses, fairies, good angels have a clear career path in the stories. She should offer her gift up the greater good, relieve suffering, help the lame and poor, make happy endings,

“Bugger that”  she says, almost aloud and before she can think about it too hard, she has dived into a newsagent and bought an extravagant 20 cigarettes and a new lighter and is walking down the street, smoking in public, even blowing a defiant and perfect smoke ring.

Later at home, she makes more plans, she will need an agent, a gallery, but with great discretion, the story always only half told, only  half understood and she will choose the subjects and they will pay her a great deal of money, but more importantly, they will hang her paintings, her life-like accurate representations in every major gallery in the world.

She will change the course of art history, just her, alone.

People will learn to paint again and she will be the most famous artist in the world.

But, of course, you know all of this,  well, the last bit , the bit about the saviour of the art world  and all that , you must know, after all how many days have you stood in line waiting to see the collected works of the worlds’ greatest living artist and yes, I can see your clutching  your ticket, after all its worth a huge prize, a life changing prize, you chance to have your portrait painted by the mistress, if god willing, her health holds out for long enough.

NANOWRIMO Novel – Cuttings – Day 27 and 28 – The Next Narrative- part 1

The Next Narrative -” I paint your pain and feel it for you”

One upon a time, there was a sin eater, well not quite a sin eater, this girl was a pain eater, she could take your pain and feel it for you and leave you light and joyous and free of all the pain that weighed you down.

Of course, she didn’t know, not at first,  that she was a pain eater. She thought that she would be a great artist, a portrait artist and that she would travel the world, painting the rich and famous and would by degree become rich and famous herself.

At art school, staff and students found her ambitions remarkably old-fashioned. They didn’t understand art that had no concept, art that couldn’t be assembled from ready mades, they mocked her lack of digital involvement, her paint spattered jeans, her lack of Saatchi sponsorship.

Sometimes they would stand at the door way to her little work area at the unfashionable end of the college, dangerously close to the illustrators and the graphic designers and watch her, yield paint and brushes, produce images that looked exactly like the objects in front of her easel.

“But, what’s it for?” they asked ” Whats’ the point of painting things that look exactly like real life?”

Sometimes, she tried to explain, tried to share the joy and mystery of manipulating tone and shade and color, but mostly she just ducked her head and went back to painting her fruit bowls and kittens and her own hands and feet.

Some of the young men and not so young tutors saw beyond this tragic affection for the life-like, they noticed her raven dark hair, her snow-white skin, her rosebud lips. They liked to watch her work, often found that afterwards, walking home, late at night, they felt somehow lighter, better. Sometimes, they wondered about trying painting themselves, but in the harsh light of day, in seminar rooms where they listened to lectures on the marketing of art,  the hype of the self, they shook their heads and applied themselves to the  getting of  an agent and a cover on The Face magazine.

She didn’t attend these seminars, floated instead from her tiny attic room to her painting room, ignored the awkward silences when tutors faced with a perfect rendition of a hand or a pewter jar, had nothing to say and simply smiled when other students invited her to take part in digital installation pieces or community projects on dingy east London estates.

She graduated, mostly because no-body could find any real reason to not award her a degree, her final degree show, medium sized canvases, portraits of the cleaners and canteen staff form around the college gained a sort of  notoriety, the only show that year not bought up in its entirety by the Saatchi gallery. The cleaners, however liked the paintings, offered her small sums of money and hung the pictures above their fire places, next to their flat screen TVs and she went out into the big bad art world.

And she struggled, the people who liked her paintings were not the kind of people who bought art and finally, she was reduced to painting pet portraits, it was an art form where accuracy, realism was all important and she discovered that people who would never buy a painting of themselves, were, oddly, more than happy to hand over their hard-won cash for a pencil sketch of their pug, their horse rendered in acrylic, even , but not often enough, a full size oil of the cats.

However, she might never have found her gift, the gift of pain eating, if it hadn’t been for Mctavish.

Mctavish was a cat, an elderly, ailing cat, whose owner wanted more than the usual pet portrait deal, wanted the artist to meet the cat, spend time with him, understand his intrinsic cat being. So, unusually, the artist came to draw the cat from life, came to produce a proper portrait.

Mctaivish, sat on  a cushion, eyes clouded from pained joints, fur thinning, he was usually still and silent, almost a perfect portrait sitter and while his owner fussed in the background, the young artist painted him, carefully, accurately, using all her skill with paints and light and shade and something miraculous happened.

As the portrait developed, from rough pencil sketches to tentative brush strokes, the real life Mctavish began to blossom, his fur regained its gloss, eyes brightened and on the very last day of painting, suddenly he stretched to his full length and leapt with one fluid, elegant movement from the sofa  where he had  lain for so long,  onto a book-case, up the curtains and then out of the cat flap and onto the dewy grass of the garden, where he stood, statue still for a moment before pouncing on a unspecting blackbird and then dragging his victim into  the thicket of blackcurrant bushes at  the bottom of the garden.

After that, pet portrait commissions came in thick and fast and always the same outcome, an ancient horse turning away from the artist and her easel and cantering across a field, kicking his heels in the delight of movement, a dog re-discovering the pleasure of fetch and sticks and rubber balls.

The word went round, the young artist could not only produce a life-like painting, the kind of thing that made a pleasant addition to any sitting room, but the very process of portraiture would give your pet many more years of health and happiness.

She tried to ignore all of this, tried too to ignore the occasional ache in her hips, the sight that sometimes, just for a few moments would blur, become cloudy. She focussed on her paints, her brushstrokes, her need to paint exactly what she could see.

She became an extremely skilled animal portrait maker, a journey man artist  and made a good, even excellent living and felt that she could be happy.

And then, one day, the inevitable happened.

She received a phone call, a well-known captain of industry, a great and gooder, but now elderly, frail, failing, asked her, no, summoned ,her to paint his portrait.

( to be continued)

NANOWRIMO Novel – Cuttings – Day 27

The Next Narrative – the Police Chief who signed his own death note – (continued)

So, the trial continues, every morning, there he is [ and yes, ive started thinking of him as a him, not an it, you can’t work all day with an it], white coated boffins trailing behind him, all printouts and charts and beeping lap tops and every day we head out, onto the streets and he knows everything, knows everything before I can tell him.

We walk past a house and I’m just about to give him the heads up, talk about the family who live there, but before I can even open my mouth there’s a faint whirring noise, or maybe I imagine it, and his flat voice starts listing the occupants and their records and their unpaid fines and what court cases they have pending and we walk on, just a silence between us.

Of course, he gets it wrong sometimes, we’re walking past a non descript terraced house one morning and suddenly he stiffens, turns and says in his flat voice

“Ongoing tag malfunction” and before I can say, do anything, he;s up the little garden path and the doors been lifted off its hinges and he’s  in the house and up the stairs., pushing past a couple of terrified children.

The man who appears is stark bollock naked  and there’s a lot of shouting, well shouting from tag man and his missus, both trying to explain that the tag beeps if it gets wet, the only one not shouting is Robo Cop, who just keep repeating that removing the tag is a court infringement.

After that they take him away for a few days, fiddle with his circuits, prod and poke him or whatever and by now of course, the tag story has gone all round the nick and most of us, the lads, are secretly hoping that this is the last of him and I just get back into my old routines, start relaxing into my job again when he’s back and off we go again.

I’ve stopped talking about work at home, our dinners have become more silent, Patsy’s gone back to bringing her lap top to the table and I’ve gone back to drinking cheap , strong lager and staring into space.

One morning, it’s raining, I mean really raining, pouring down, so I do what I always do on this kind of day, I head over to the Community centre, you could call it intelligence gathering, well that’s what always put on my time sheets, but actually what it is , is the best bacon buttie in the city and a mug of tea so strong that you could stand your spoon in it and Mavis, lovely Mavis, a generous hand with the bacon and the sugar.

So, I’m just easing myself into a seat, mouth-watering at the very thought of the crusty bread and the butter melting into the bacon and I look around and see that nice Mrs Patel, the one who got robbed last year and that reminds me that I need to speak to her about the company her youngest son is keeping and then I spot Bella, hands wrapped around a mug and I smile, knowing that I need to ask her if the local yobs are still playing knock door run at her house and I should check, but carefully, if she’s still taking her medication.

Robo Cop is still standing, scanning the room, and I know that he can see every criminal record, every unpaid fine, every parking ticket shoved in  a glove compartment, but he can’t see any of the things that I can see.

And then I understand, really understand that I’m signing my own death note here, I’m signing the death note  of very beat bobby in the city, in the world.

This one, this Robo Cop, he’s not it, but the next one of the one after that, they’ll be the ones.

Think about it , a bobby that never gets tired, never sneaks off for a crafty fag, never forgets anything, never makes a mistake with his paperwork, well, that’s the future isn’t it?

And despite the 3  slices of bacon in my belly and the warmth of the mug against my hands , I suddenly feel very cold and very afraid.

She stops writing, stretches, wiggles her fingers, she is not used to so much writing by hand, has forgotten the wrist ache, the stiff fingers and the wonderful release when you shake out the tension, stop writing.

This has been productive, proper writing, beginning, middle, end, even a stab at a genre story, the kind of work she could take to her writing group, read out loud, get feedback, make improvements.

No more strangeness, no more stories written in her sleep. She has gone a little strange she thinks, too much time on her own, too little structure, but today, today, she feels much better.

Today, she can get on, work toward the countdown when all the other players in this last act of her parents lives will arrive and the house will no longer be theirs and she will go home.

Today, she will, finally, attack the room she has been avoiding since she arrived, today she will clear her parents bed  room.

And she will start as she means to go on, so she folds up the duvet on the sofa, tidies her drapped and dropped clothes away into a neat pile, scoops up dirty dishes and plates and washes them as the kettle boils and as she makes a cup of sugar less, black coffee.

She ponders for a moment, perhaps a brisk walk before she starts, but she recognises this for what it is, displacement and instead tells herself that if the work goes well, she will reward herself with a walk later, some sensible food shopping, a stocking up of fresh fruit, brown bread, bottled water.

Coffee drunk, she heads up the stairs.

She remembers clearly the last time she was in their room, the morning after her father died, sent here by the undertaker to collect his good suit, tie, smart socks, the outfit he had chosen to be buried in.

Then, she hardly noticed the room, was grateful that the carers had stripped the bed, taken away the flotsam and jetsam of old age and illness and had been heartily glad to shut the door and walk away.

The bedroom door was always shut to her, even as a small child, no Sunday morning bouncing on the bed to wake her parents, no creeping in between their sleep warmed sheets when nightmares sent her cold and disoriented onto the landing. This room, their room was firmly demarcated as an adult space, a private space, so much so that as a teenager she took any opportunity presented to her to snoop, to touch things, to sit at her mothers’ dressing table and stare at her own reflection in the mirror.

The room is cold, with that slightly damp, unused feeling, she wonders when the door was last opened, wonders if she was the very last person to be here and

then , recognising that she is about to slip into a place of complete sadness and blackness, she moves instead, deliberately over to the wardrobe and begins to pull clothes out, throwing then over her shoulder onto the stripped bed.

She realises immediately that some sorting has already taken place,  her father had , before he too became too lost, too confused, taken some, maybe nearly all of her mothers’ clothes somewhere and when she thinks about it, she does have some memory of him discussing taking them to Age Concern, but the conversation moving on quickly, before it became too bogged down.

What are left are clothes he, or maybe she, had some emotional link to, but she is surprised by what he has kept hold of, not, she knows the items that her mother kept for best, her good clothes, but instead a collection of summer frocks, a pink beaded cardigan and a rather severe black dress she has no memory of ever seeing her mother wear.  It is another small mystery and she knows that she could let her self fall into this one, but today is about purpose and clear thinking and so instead, she just stuffs the dresses into a bin bag.

She knows there will be nothing valuable, no secret treasures. Her mother’s will was clear and simple, a few pieces of jewellery, her own small savings, some items from the house shared out between her daughter and the daughters of cousins. She has , but doesn’t wear, a rather nice ruby and emerald ring, she was pleased to get it, it was the best of the rings as befitted her blood status, but knows that she will never wear it.

Her father’s side of the wardrobe is more chaotic, looks as if someone might step into the room at any time and hang the shirts more accurately, pull out a cardigan, change shoes.

Again, she grabs, bundles, but pauses at a fawn cardigan, wool bobbling with age, those leather buttons that alway reminded her of half chewed toffees. For years it was her fathers’ favourite garment, even when he discovered fleece and micro fabrics, he would still return fondly and with a sense of relief  to this cardigan.

She drapes it around her shoulders, enjoys its weight on her, she will keep it she decides, because she cannot bear the idea of some stranger wearing it.

And then she finds his box of cuff links, tie pins, two watches and a surprisingly gaudy ring, these she puts aside, these will come home with her , to be looked at more carefully, later on.

Moving the leather box raises a small cloud of that fluffy cupboard dust and exposes another newspaper clipping, this time, not a headline or a new story or even an advert, this one show a full length photo of a young woman, soulful, long haired, staring artfully into middle distance, it’s some sort of profile piece, but the story has been clipped away, leaving just a fragment of the first sentence.

” The girl who paints sad pictures and feels the sadness when they are painted”

The Next Narrative -” I paint your pain and feel it for you”

NANOWRIMO Novel – Cuttings – Day 26

The Next Narrative – the Police Chief who signed his own death note – (continued)

I didn’t quite know what to expect, the science blokes had kept it all under wraps, big secret, but in my head I’d sort of imagined some kind of big robot thing, some kind of Robo Cop, but when they took me into the briefing room, he/it wasn’t what I expected at all.

He was shorter than me, human shaped, head, arms, legs, but not human, not  even trying to look human, more like a doll really, an approximation of a human.

The scientists explained, at length, what the focus groups had told them, nothing scary, nothing that might be mistaken for a person, people wanted him to look a little like them, but no confusion, no replicant.

He stood in the middle of the room, lots of men and women in white coats clustering around him, tapping on screens and reading through printouts, all of them focussed, an under-current of excitement and crowding in at the door, every single person in the station who coud find a reason to walk past the briefing room and quite a few who shouldn’t have been there at all.

They all had that look on their faces, the one you see on those people who stand outside murder houses, rubber neck as they drive slowly past pile ups on the motorway, a sort of grim fascination, a knowing that they shouldn’t be staring, but doing it anyway.

And then the big brass arrived, a flurry of briefcases and PR smiles  and I get beckoned over, it’s a photo opportunity, me and Robo Cop and the men in white coats and more senior police officers than I’ve ever seen in my life and I smile and smile and then I look at him, I mean really look at him, for the first time and he’s just blank, he’s got sort of facial features but they’re blurred, almost human, but not, not enough.

They talk through what they want us to do that morning, just a trial run, a walk around the beat, make sure his GPS is working, check out how well the main frame is interfacing with his data base and I nod, like I’m really sure what most of this means, a man who had to get the community bobby to reset my phone when I couldnt change the ring tone.

I’m told that he has a working vocabulary, they have carefully identified the most used phrases in a beat officers vocabulary, I can’t help wondering if they include

“fancy a cuppa” and “who do you fancy for the match?”, but I keep my mouth shut and eventually we head off into the streets.

His pace exactly matches mine and just for a second I wonder if I walk like a robot or he walks like a beat bobby, his head moves from side to side, there’s a faint whirring noise, at first I notice it every time he moves, but after a while it stops registering, bit like when you stop noticing the sniff or the cough that used to drive you mad in a new bloke at the station.

We walk up the road, it’s a good day, the kind of day when I might do a quick detour to the park, check out on the kids skiving off school, give them a push in the right direction, say hello to the elderly asian man who always feeds the pigeons and just have a few moments in the sunshine and so, after thinking for a few seconds, I tell Robo Cop what we’re doing and there’s a pause

“This is not on the schedule”

And I sigh and explain that it’s community policing and this must be one of his key phrases because he turns  and waits for me and we walk towards the park gates.

The usual knot of boys who are too cool for school are sprawling on the bench nearest the water fountain, I see them and they see me and my presence gives some of them the nudge, the excuse they need to mutter something, stand, but not too fast and shamble off in the direction of the school at the bottom of the hill. The others, well, they aren’t looking at me, but I know that they know exactly where I am and yeah, I could go over, read them the riot act, take down all their names, like I don’t already know them already, but they don’t want to go to school and by all accounts the school doesn’t want them to turn up, so, we have an agreement, of sorts.

They don’t get too visible and I pretend I can’t see them, but of course Robo Cop doesn’t know any of this and when he sees them, well, he stiffens, reminds me of my dads’ lurcher, the one he had when we were kids, the one he used to take rabbitting, she would do this, whole body pointing towards her prey.

He starts moving towards them and I have to jump in front of him ,explain that this is not real crime and there’s another pause, you can almost hear him absorbing and evaluating this information and then he stops and just stands still and we both stand for  a moment and then I start walking toward the row of benches next to the cricket pavilion, because, there are things I do at the park and Robo Cop or no Robo Cop, I’m keeping to my stick in the mud routine.

Mr Ali is sitting in his normal place, staring straight ahead, hands placed just so on his knees and I nod and sit next to him. We don’t talk, he hasn’t got much english and I haven’t got any Gujarati, but it’s a companionable sort of silence, usually. Today, the presence of Robo Cop is a new thing, which both Mr Ali and I do our best to ignore and then after 10 or so minutes I stand up and very casually, I leave 3 pound coins next to him and I walk away.

I can feel the question before Robo Cop speaks, so I try to get an answer out before he asks the wrong thing

“It’s his daughter in law” I start and already I can hear that this does not sound very police ish, but I plough on “She kicks him out at 8 am, doesn’t let him back in until 6pm, doesn’t give him any lunch, so, it’s just a thing we do, me and the other lads….” I tail off, wonder if I should have said that he’s an informant, make it sound like proper policing.

Another pause, I’m getting used to these and then he speaks, slowly, carefully

“What is the benefit to the local policing profile by this action?”

And then it’s me that pauses, because I’m trying to put it into words, words that will mean something to someone who has a GPS and access to the mainframe and finally I manage to mumble something about beat policing being about more than just crime, it’s about community liaison and building links with ethnic minority communities, but really I want to tell him the truth, the reason we give the old bloke some lunch money is because we feel sorry for him  and we all know what it feels like to be under the feet of a woman, but I don’t think that’s on the mainframe, so I don’t.

We continue the patrol, he spots 3 untaxed cars, I would have let the Datsun slip because I know who owns it and I know they’ve just been made redundant, again and I know they will sort it out as soon as they can, but, he’s started the paperwork, generate dan e-mail while he stands there, so I just shrug.

We walk past a group of the local bad lads and I’m about to give him chapter and verse, but he gets there before me, tells two of them they have unpaid fines and stands there, patient, unmoving while he phones through to the courts and books sessions for them to go in and make payments. It’s not as if he’s loud or assertive or even menacing, he’s very polite and very, very calm, but you just know that he isn’t going to move any time soon.

When we get back to the station, the scientists can’t wait to drag him away, analyse his data, evaluate his performance, get feedback and all the lads are waiting for me, bursting with questions and I don’t really know what to say, in fairness, he’s no worse and no better than any new officer, he hasn’t done anything stupid or dangerous, he doesn’t moan or pick his nose, but, but, he’s not one of us, never will be.

And I want to tell the lads that he’s a disaster, that we have nothing to worry about, but a tiny voice in my head, says that maybe we do have something to worry about, but I let them point and joke and I join in and then we all go to the pub and when I get home Patsy gives me the look and I fall into bed and try not to think about it and I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

(to be continued)

NANOWRIMO Novel – Cuttings – Day 25

The  growing pile of bin bags, stuffed full of things that have been unused for so long comforts her, she feels as if she is returning to the person she was just a few days ago, organised, focussed, someone who gets on with stuff.

She doesn’t recognise, doesnt want to recognise this other woman, the one who sleeps in the day time, hides under bedding, eats at strange times, reads stories in her own notebook she has no memory of writing.

This woman scares her, makes her realise how thin the layers of competency are, how quickly they dissolve when everything else that underpins them is taken away.

She resolves to keep busy for the rest of the stay, keep on track.

She wonders what she will do if she finds anymore of the strange little clippings and feels instantly conflicted. A part of her still believes that they are some sort of message from one or both of her parents, something important that she should ignore at her peril.

For a moment, she has a mad image, her parents sitting at the dinning room table, the orange handled  kitchen scissors between them, cutting these headlines from a teetering pile of old newspapers while they discuss the best hiding places, not too obvious, not so challenging that she will miss them.

But, she knows that this scene is impossible, her mother had left speech behind long before she died and her father, quietly failing, had shown no signs of anything outside of the normal on her dutiful daughter visits.

She shrugs, this is not the type of thinking she should be falling into now, she must stay in the present, stay within the list of tasks to be done, use a red pen to tick things off as they are achieved.

There is an elderly cardboard box right at the back of the wardrobe, it is half wedged against the wood and she has to tug hard to get it out, almost unbalances and falls backwards.

The box has been taped up with sellotape, ageing now, yellowing, loosing its hold on the cardboard edges and as she pulls, it comes apart, revealing the contents.

The box is full of tiny china animals, each one wrapped in tissue paper, placed carefully on top of each other to ensure that none of them will chip or break.

They are hers, the little animals she collected, collected obsessively throughout her childhood and beyond.

She remembers them, lined up on the window sill, the book cases, even on top of the wardrobe, the  favoured ones, kept carefully under her pillow at night and sometimes held tight in her sleeping hand.

She knows she shouldn’t, knows she has far too much to do, but the lure is too strong and she kneels down, the new , but becoming familiar twinge in her knees as she hits the carpet no longer surprising her.

She will just look for a few moments, choose  a handful to take with her, they will, she reasons, look sweet on the shelf in the bathroom.

Like dipping into a lucky dip at a summer fete, she doesn’t even look, just grabs a handful and drops them gently, carefully onto the carpet in front of her and then bends nearer the little pile to unwrap them.

Two rabbits, rabbits were always her second  favourite, a mute reminder to her parents about her lack of pets, a quiet, understated demand for a real bunny, for something to hug and cuddle.

A cat and 3 puppies, a chicken, that one surely a gift, she cannot remember ever having any interest in chickens  and then the best animal, the ones she collected the most, the ones most likely to spend their evenings clutched in her warm hands, the horses.

She can, if she lets herself, remember these horses quite clearly, knows that if she sits here quietly for  a moment or two that their names will float into her mind as if they have never, ever been away from her.

Midnight and Flicka and Ghost and Champion, she picks up the little black pony and trots him across the carpet, her throat re-finding the little clicking noise she used to make to replicate the sound of trotting as the ponies and horses went about their complicated story lives.

She cannot help herself now and digs again into the box, pulls out more and as she unwraps them, she remembers them all and finds herself putting them back into the families they lived in, lined up carefully according to the rules of her complicated china world.

She is so engrossed with these memories, the actual physical reality of the china animals that she almost misses the slip of newspaper, slid between a red squirrel and a slightly chipped china mouse, but there it is and really, she is unsurprised.

This box is so much of her, of her childhood, that anyone who wanted to make sure that she would find a clipping would have placed one here.

Before she unfolds it, she wonder for a minute if this one will be somehow more personal, will give her some clue to the purpose of this little game, treasure hunt, whatever it is, but it is just like all the rest, a headline, no explanation, no date, no story, simply a few words, an outline of an event without the event itself.

She reads the few words.

” Police Chief wrote his own death note”

Nothing else, she cannot tell if this is a obituary, a new story, she re-reads them as if this will make anything clearer and now of course the non story is worming its way into her head, pushing her to use it, to write something and she knows that this is not the time, knows that really she must get on, but it’s too late, this mornings’  focus is slipping away.

She stands up, glad to straighten her legs, take the weight off her knees, wonders for a moment when her body decided to slip into middle age and then she stops, she cannot leave all the animal lying around the floor, she cannot put them in bin bags and so, she spends minutes wrapping them up again, putting them back in  the box, but she keeps a few out, the best horses, a grey rabbit and her best rabbit, black and white and slightly bigger than the other bunnies, always a perfect size to clutch in a palm and these she takes downstairs, wastes a few moments carefully arranging them on the coffee table, smiles at them and then pulls out her notebook and pen and starts to write.

The Next Narrative – The Police Chief who wrote his own death note

This is a simple story of greed and every day folk. The story of what happens to an ordinairy man when he gets greedy, when he thinks he can have it all. It’s my story and i am a very ordinary man indeed.

I always knew I’d be a police officer, not in some superhero fighting crime in Gotham sort of way, not in a personally  tortured, booze loving, opera listening sort of way, not even in a slap the bitch, drive the motor around and around that one deserted car park/wasteland so beloved by 70s tv show makers sort of way.

No, it was much sadder than that, I wanted to be a police officer so that I could help people, so that I could do good. I didnt want to be a detective or a dog handler or a member of the SWOT team, I wanted to be a proper bobby on the beat, walking out in all weathers, measured fiootsteps, knowijng every inch of my patch, my people.

And that’s what I got, for more than 10 years, I was the model beat officer. I took real pride in what I did, the nods from the passers by, the waves from the kiddies in the primary school playground, the nose, the eye, those things they can’t teach you, but once you’ve got them, thry never leave you, that sense of when soemthing, someoen is amis, a wrong un.

And yeah, some days, it was tough, even occcasionaly, a little dangersous, more often, quite tedious, but he liked it, liked the quiet respect, the patterns of his days, the routiines and rituals.

Patsy ‘s given up on me now, has her own glittering career and just smiles when I tell her about my day

” stick in the mud” she calls me,  it’s affectionate and besides it’s true, but just sometimes, I get that urge, the itch, to show her that trhere’s more to me than she knows , which is why I suppose that I said yes, why I’m sitting here now and why I’m writing this down.

It sounded like a joke at first or soemthing out of a science fiction film, Robo cop, but we kept being sent on thses courses and seing these training films and eventually it dwaned on me that there was a Robo Cop, but it wasn’t some huge killing machine, it was being designed to replace the likes of me.

And of ciurse, we all laughed, shook our heads as we sat in the canteen over chips and mugs of tea, I mean how can a machine be a beat officer? How can a lump of metal deal with people and situations and well, stuff?

Then they told us that they were loooking for expreienced officers to pilot the robo cops, well my first reaction was thank you very much, but no thank you and then I just saw Patsys’ face, that slight, fleeting look of boredom when I described what I’d been up to and I thought, that would show her, prove I’m not as dull as she thinks, give us soemthing new to taljk about.

So, to cut a long story short, I said I’d give it a go, I’d take one of these machines out on the beat with me, give it a go and then the scientists turned up and it was a bit like Doctor Who.

Loads of white coats and computers and things that went ping and they followed me around on the beat and took photgraphs and every day when i went home i had something new to tell Patsy and we took to sitting over a glass of wine at the kitchen table and it was, well, nice.

Eventually,  the chief scientist, decent bloke really, said they were ready and that Robo Cop [ it wasnt it’s real name. just a joke really, but it stuck] would do its’ first session on the beat the next day and that I should be ready, alert and on my toes.

At home I told Patsy, we had a second glass of wine each, said we were celebrating, didn’t meet eachothers’ eyes and when we went to bed I couldn’t sleep.

I just wanted the morning to come, get it over with, take Robo Cop out on the beat and I wanted him/it to fail. i wanted to come home that night, smile, shrug and tell Patsy that I wasn’t that easy to replace.

( to be continued)