STORIES FROM RORY No. 9

 

SUBTRAFUGE

Captain Roberts had been keeping his eye on the sub’s diesel fuel gauge....almost half full.  He had safely arrived at the coastal drop-off point for the three Royal Marines he had been ordered to deliver at a Bell’s Cove just after midnight. They took to their inflatable dinghy and quietly rowed ashore, watched by Roberts through his telescope from the sub’s conning tower.  The men easily located the rock-lined coastal cave indicated on their map and settled in to rest up for their morning assignments.

Their goal was to infiltrate the seaside village of Dundalk and, dressed in the local, inconspicuous clothing they wore leaving the sub, blend in with the local county fair festivities scheduled for the weekend.  After each taking the pills which would keep them alert during the dangerous mission, they clambered over the coastal rocks and joined the early morning preparations for the fair events.  They helped in raising the two circus tents, earning them free passes to the carnival rides which would open at noon.

They would not take advantage of those free rides, however!  As the fair grounds began to fill, they walked into Dundalk and sought out their target’s house.  The map accurately led them to the house with a large family crest prominently displayed on the double garage next to the stone steps leading up to the house.  The Murray crest was  further confirmation that they had reached the correct house.  Spacing themselves 10 meters apart, they slowly walked up the forty-five steps until they reached a beautifully manicured garden framing the impressive three storey Victorian mansion. None of them knew their target’s family members but they must be very wealthy.  The Aston-Marin parked outside the Murray garage confirmed that.  They must have done something very bad for them to deserve what was coming!

The mission now dictated that they find the entrance to the house’s cellar, enter it and place the explosives they had carried in their back packs at the precise foundation points noted on the reverse side of their map.  There was no sound coming from the floors above so they surmised the Murray family was away for the weekend, as had been noted in their mission briefing.  But what about that handsome roadster down at the garage?  As they descended the steps and left they glanced back at the DB4, its British Racing Green bonnet glistening in the sun, and hoped that debris from the exploding house would not rain down and damage this wonderful example of British engineering.  They had to trust that the Murray family had done something terribly wrong to deserve this!  Government-sponsored terrorism against its own citizens.  “The greater good,” was how the mission briefing on the sub had put it.  Let’s hope so.

Chuck Wallace

In the Cellar

We had enjoyed a party in the Bulrush pub cellar. I must have passed out, and I woke with a start and a splitting headache. For some minutes I couldn’t fathom where I was. Then one cell in my brain began to work; ah, now I remember. I am alone here and everyone else has vanished, well, gone home, I supposed.

I climbed the steps up to the bar and Malcolm the pub manager greeted me.

“Wow, you look like hell. You seemed like you had hollow legs and kept drinking everything you could swallow. It was as if you were taking your last drink, and you drank everyone else under the table.”

I put my hand over my eyes as the light was blinding.

“Have you anything to take this headache away mate?” I asked.

“Paracetamol do?” He put some capsules on the bar-top with a glass of water.

“Thanks, mate,” I said, and I couldn’t wait for the tablets to kick in. Then I ran to the gents to be sick. I washed my face and hands and after a while I felt a bit better.

I parked myself on one of the WCs to pull myself together.

Looking around the sparkling wash room, I noticed something I’d not noticed before. It was a painting someone had worked hard on, and it was great work and extremely unusual.

It was a yellow submarine, and the artist had painted part of the layout of inside the sub. The artist had painted a speedo and a fuel gauge, also a map with an x to mark the spot with a pint of beer next to the x.

It made me wonder what the artist was trying to say and I thought I would ask Malcolm when I emerged from the wash room.

I came out of the gents and asked Malcolm about the Muriel on the wash-room wall. He chuckled as he explained the meaning of the yellow submarine.

“Well, the yellow submarine was all the rage when this artist came here to drink. It was sung by the Beatles and one of their greatest hits. The lads all used to sing this song when they’d had a few. They also would wind each other up and make up stories to tell their wives why they got home late in a drunken state.

“The fuel gauge was to alert them when they’d had one too many. The speedo was to represent how fast they could run away from their wives’ rolling pins, or frying pans.

“The map with the X next to the pint of beer is asking them a question.”

“So what is the question, Malc?”

“Do you love the beer more than your wife?”

He laughed again and mentioned that most of the lads would say, “I’ll settle for the beer, I know what kind of headache to expect from a pint, but not sure what sort of pain in the head I’ll get from her indoors.”

My memory fully refreshed, now I remembered my poor wife sitting at home, wringing her hands, wondering where I am.

On the way home I made up all sorts of excuses for being out all night. I gave a sigh of relief as I got through the door. Angela smiled and kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m so sorry love I should have rung to let you know I’d be late, and honestly, I never expected to be out all night,” I said, tongue in cheek.

“Oh don’t worry, Brian, Malcolm phoned me to let me know it was about to be an all-nighter, and so I had the girls over, and we had our own celebration. It was great, and we also got very tipsy.”

I guess that’s why I married Angela; she’s such a good sport.

I gave Malcolm a ring and thanked him for phoning our home.

Josephine Smith

TRADITION

The wind was cold. The tent did little to keep out the chill. It was new. The wind was old, and knew many more tricks. It came from miles and miles away, from lands that were still covered in snow, where the ground never thawed, not even in summer. Here, near the sea, in the country of the Pruzzen, there was mud again, just enough, not too much. That was why the Duke had ordered the campaign to begin afresh, the one he had reluctantly abandoned in the autumn rains. Gerd thought it was folly, but he was too young, his family too new and too poor, to have any influence in the councils, and now that the Duke’s brother had become leader of the German Order the Great Man could whistle up God on his side.

Which bit of God, Gerd wondered, was supposed to be fighting on their side? It couldn’t be the soft-eyed Son, who still had the wounds to show from His last encounter with soldiery; and it was unlikely to be the Bird, the Dove, who traditionally brought peace. It must be the Old Man, with the big beard, the one who liked smiting, and wasn’t always too careful who He smote. The one who claimed vengeance as His Own, and then deputed people to be His agents.

Like now. In a nice clean tent – well, it had been clean when they started – with a pennant on the top, and big black crosses round the sides, just the thing to scare the natives, when the Knights, or rather their servants, set up camp and these giant mushrooms looked as though they’d popped out of the ground overnight.

Gerd didn’t believe the natives were scared. He thought they were just being cautious, keeping out of sight, doing things that the Knights couldn’t see, wouldn’t see until it was too late. Stakes, for instance, concealed with brushwood, to spike the horses when they landed, after their over-confident riders urged them on to jump these negligible obstacles.

Gerd knew he wasn’t especially clever. He just kept his eyes open. He’d kept them open last time he was up here, as a page, rapidly promoted to squire, as the casualties rose, and squires had to be made knights. He hadn’t asked to come, not then, not now. His family had urged him, pushed him, forced him. They wanted better territory and more of it. One way to get that, of course, was to go to the Duke’s court and fawn on him – but to do that, you had to have money to start with, for the fine clothes and the rich presents, and (so they said) for the expensive perfumes that disposed the Duke especially well towards pretty young men. Gerd’s father had neither the money nor the manners for that road to acquiring land, nor, to his credit, did he wish his eldest son to become a courtier of that kind. A boor, thought Gerd, but an honest boor.

Gerd’s eyes were always open. Others might shut them in terror, or wilful ignorance, or prayer – he had watched them do that often enough, both here and at home – but he kept looking, and when he had the time, and thought it appropriate, he judged. But he waited with judgement, till he had enough knowledge, and even after he had made his judgement he still collected knowledge, because he knew that out of ignorance he might have judged wrong.

If his eyes were open now, though, it was because sleep fled him. He rose, and left the tent, with its other sleepers muttering, snorting, sprawling, twitching, and went to stalk his quarry. If sleep would not come of its own accord – and, in the circumstances, why should it? – then it had to be tracked down. So the hunter moved quietly through the flickering darkness.

The camp was never quiet, not completely.

Horses stirred, whinnied softly to one another – who could tell what they were saying? Ah, what a gift it would be, to know that! How language could link!

Men moved to and fro, errands, duties, perhaps even messages. Preparations for the morrow: checking the horses’ tack – many a rider had been lost by an unsound girth or a bent buckle; readying food; and bandages, to staunch wounds and bind up broken limbs. Swords and spears were sharpened, shafts tested for soundness. Archers kept their bows warm and dry beside them, some even caressed the flights of their arrows and murmured to them to fly straight, charms in old languages they took care that the priests should not hear.

The priests made their magic in their own tent, where the candles burnt all night before the altar, and incense wafted out through the flap to fight with all the other smells of the camp and lose. They sang, those priests, it was not a simple muttering in the tongue of holiness and charters and histories, but a quiet song that bemused and made spellbound with its repetitions.

Gerd stood there in the darkness, at the back of the priests’ tent, wondering what they were singing, and what it had to do with the fury that would be unleashed when the dawn came. His younger brother, Erwin, with the twisted leg, was destined for the priesthood, or perhaps for the law – a chancellery official. Already he wrote a good round hand, and discoursed as easily in Latin as in his native tongue. Gerd’s father had had the wit to turn a disadvantage to an advantage. The younger would secure with the pen what the elder won with the sword.

But nothing was won yet, and the future was as dark and light-speckled as what lay around him.

He turned away from the quiet hum – like a bee-hive by night, he thought – towards the darker dark, where trees and bushes were even blacker silhouettes against the dark grey sky where no moon shone and a marching army of clouds obscured the stars.

Sentries were posted – but they were sparse and lax, because the wisdom was that the natives had fled, primitively thinking to oppose them in a pitched battle the next day. Gerd was far more cautious than that – but it meant that his mood, which was growing calmer with steady walking, as he crept up on his prey, sleep, did not need to be disturbed by challenge and answer.

He wondered, indeed, whether he had fallen asleep while walking, and missed a few score paces, for he found himself in a place that he had never seen before, though he had walked round the camp three times in the daylight, to understand the ground over which, if the worst came to the worst, the Duke’s army might have to retreat.

In front of him he saw an arbour of rowan-trees, with some of their winter berries still hanging shrivelled from the branches. They sheltered a kind of mound, a low hut roofed with branches and dried grass and moss and turves to make it waterproof. Perhaps, thought Gerd, its framework has been made from living rowan trees, bent over as saplings and rooted again. He noticed, though the wind blew still as keenly, that the trees around were motionless. A steady glow crept out of the round hole which served as the hut’s entrance, and Gerd could hear a low singing, just one voice, more mysterious and more melodious than the noise the priests made.

He stopped to listen. The sound drew him. Sleep beckoned. What he had hunted was there, waiting for him, tame, and welcoming. He lowered his head, and bent his knees, and shuffled into the cramped space.

Inside, it did not seem cramped at all. The embers in the stone-edged fire-pit glowed enough to show a face on the far side, its high, shiny cheek-bones, its glinting eyes. The rest of it was in shadow. Specks of light came back from points on indistinct objects around. Were they bones? Were they shiny metal, glass beads, stones, crystals, drops of water, tears of amber with something inside them? Gerd could not say. It did not seem important. There was a scent enfolding him, stroking his eyelids until they had to close.

But as his outer eyes closed, his inner ones opened. And his ears. He was not sure which language was being spoken, only that he understood it. During his first time in the land of the Pruzzen as a page he had had to do with the natives, buying food from farms, listening to conversations, trying to comprehend from gestures and laughter and frowns and shaken heads just what was being said. Then, before the Duke had determined on conquest and the Church on conversion, it had been possible to be friendly. The people then had thought that the strangers, with their angular tongue, might be more generous, more merciful, than the native nobility who spoke their own language and mostly used it to order them around and make demands. Time had proved them wrong.

Questions were asked, and Gerd gave answers, without knowing what words he used, but he knew what was being offered to him, and what he said in reply.

What he wanted to know about was the future. Not just his. Not just whether he would die in the battle to come, or survive and perhaps be rewarded. Those things he would find out for himself in due course. Knowing would change nothing. He wanted to know what would happen to his family. Not those he knew now. He could imagine their fates. His father would continue to be discontented and grumbling, constantly dissatisfied with his offspring, driving them on to further efforts, as he had been driven by his own father, as had been the case all the way back to the moment when one particularly brave, bold, lucky, foolish man had distinguished himself in battle and caught the eye of his lord for long enough to be given a title and some land. That was where it had all started. Gerd wanted to know – not where it would all finish, but where it would all go. Even if he perished before the next sunset, or Erwin became a priest without issue, Gerd knew that his father had already married a good little breeder to replace Erwin’s mother, who had died of the next child – a girl – what did you expect? And before the apoplexy took him – too much food, too much drink, too much anger – he would have done his best to sire a few more.

In his way, Gerd was pleased to think that there was something outside himself and beyond himself that would continue – and that was before he considered his uncles and cousins… And so he made his request… and found that the world around him had changed…

There were steps under his feet, going down, he heard the echo, a vast hall, and a gentle splash of water. Lights above – not torches – he looked back down towards the water – that, at least, he thought he understood, though not what he saw floating in it.

The vision swam before his eyes – the eyes of his descendant, far, far in the future – but it was Gerd’s eyes, looking out through them, that could not encompass what he saw.

When the view cleared, everything was closer, much, much closer. He was enclosed – by what? No brick, no stone, no wood. Everything seemed to be made of metal, plates riveted together, when he could see where they joined. Smooth metal pipes ran everywhere, like the lead that was used in fountains, but shinier, harder… Men sat in chairs, chairs, too, made from metal. He paid no attention to the clothes they wore. Clothes always changed. No wonder in that. They stared at discs, with pointers that moved. Someone had told him once about such things – he had thought it a traveller’s tale – they could tell the time – time passed, whether it was told or not – others pointed the way for ships –

In his head, Gerd asked a question. He knew he had been granted his wish, but he hoped he could ask for something more. He thought about the best way to put it. Where am I? would not help. The answer would only be the name of a place, which he might or might not recognise. What is around me? There was a hesitation before the answer came, but when it did, he understood. Armour – Panzer. A vast suit of armour, with space in it for many men. Gerd began to imagine how such a vast creature might be made to move and stride over the landscape, dealing death and destruction wherever it went, and the men who worked it sat in safety…

He ventured another question: What am I doing? The answer almost had a chuckle in it – Hunting. He chanced a third question: Hunting what? The answer was not what he had expected: Ships – and the cargo and people they carry. There was a muffled roar, and a mighty blow struck the gigantic suit of armour in which he found himself. It lurched and slewed to the right, and began to tilt downwards. The quality of light in it changed, growing suddenly darker. The men were shouting and running to and fro. Only he – his descendant – stood still, and calm, amid the panic and chaos, though perhaps it was not that, but just a speedy response to danger.

His descendant’s eyes glanced down, and Gerd could see water rising round his feet. One of the dials with a pointer on flew off the wall, and a jet of water spurted out from the broken pipe to which it had been attached. Gerd’s descendant put his hand into a pocket and pulled out a tiny coloured tube, as long as the end-joint of his little finger, looked at it for an instant, then put it away, and joined his men – for surely he was their commander, his bearing, his sense of tradition, all bore that out – and with that, the vision ended.

Gerd came back to himself, drawing in deep breaths, as though he had been on the point of drowning, as though he had been under the water, which, he knew, he had been.

He shook his head, to clear it. He was back in the small hut, the embers had dulled, the scent had grown less, the eyes on the other side of the dying fire still looked at him, and a voice spoke in his head: You cannot change the future. Too many other people, too many other events will conspire to make it what it will be. Only your own next action is still in your hands.

Suddenly, the glow died. Choking smoke billowed up and drove him, staggering, from the hut. When he turned round again, still catching his breath, even the mound seemed to have sunk back into the earth. A sentry, who had just noticed him, called a challenge, and Gerd responded, and found himself walking back towards the camp.

The tent was as he had left it. His fellow-sleepers still lay in their unguarded attitudes, puffed, gurgled, burbled and threshed about them, offering him no help or guidance in his decision.

His imagination presented him with realities and possibilities. In a very short while, armoured men would ride down the Pruzzen, slaughtering all they could. Then, under the auspices of the Church, with its blessing, connivance, and direct involvement, the process of annexation and colonisation would begin: kill the men, rape the women, baptise and enslave the children, turning them into serfs, tied to land owned by people who refused to speak their language.

Some of the knights would die, that was sure, or be unhorsed and dragged off for ransom or torture. Were he not there at the end of the battle, they would assume that had been his fate, and, eventually, inform his father accordingly. (Somewhere there was a cleric who delighted in keeping lists, but always had too many to keep and too little time to do it, so was always behindhand with them.)

If Gerd wanted to hunt – and he did – he would sooner hunt animals than people or ships, and not in armour, either, so as to give the animals a fair chance to hunt him. There were woods here. When the battle was over, there would be plenty of game in them again, certainly enough to nourish a man with a good bow and good arrows and a good set of spears. The sword he would keep for other eventualities.

He strode to the weapons tent. The guard was nodding, but started at the intrusion. Gerd shushed him back to a drowsing sleep and took a handful of spears, the ones without knightly pennons, a stout longbow and a quiver of arrows.

The sky in the east had a silver edge to it by the time he reached the horse-lines.

“Scouting,” he whispered to the guard, as he unhitched a light palfrey and led it away to the clump of trees where he had already left his weapons, tied securely together, and a bundle of clothes in a blanket. It was spring, after all, and the wind had dropped at last, and before the autumn he should have found a place to make himself a shelter –

Perhaps he would tie together some rowan-trees…

Every tradition has to start somewhere.

Mike Rogers

STORIES FROM RORY No. 8

 

Mistaken Identity

John and Brian fell out of the pub and they’d had enough to make them lose their balance. They had tripped over the step and landed with a thud on the car park outside. It was like broad daylight and the moon was full and waxing. They both lay there for a while looking up at the stars.

“Hey! John, is that really stars in the sky? Or are they buzzing around the inside of my head?”

Brian tried to stand up and failed miserably.

“I dunno, mate, ’cause everything is spinning,” John’s slurred reply came back.

Brian said, “I think I’ll phone for a taxi to get us home, or we won’t make it.”

“Who’s gonna pay for that? I ain’t got any money left.”

John pulled out his pockets.

Brian then suggested that they walk home. “We can either go through the graveyard or through the sheep field. Which way, mate? You choose.”

“If we go through the graveyard we’ll need a torch. Don’t forget it’s the old man Hammer’s burial tomorrow. I don’t fancy falling into any graves tonight. Although if we do, I suppose we can sleep it off until tomorrow.” John tried to put Brian off that idea, and he gave himself the shivers. “God we could get buried ourselves, if we fall asleep in there.”

Brian saw the funny side. “Well, at least we won’t be late for our own funeral.” He chuckled and went on.“Okay, I guess it’s the sheep field, then. I hope we don’t stand in any sheep poo, as it stinks. Still, it’s good for the garden.”

“I’ll use my mobile and try and get us a taxi,” John decided. “I can use my credit card to pay. Be my treat.”

In the taxi Brian looked at John and laughed at his snoozing face. He had a bar of chocolate in his pocket and it had melted. He giggled as he smothered John’s face with it.

As they got home, John reached into his pocket for the credit card. But instead he’d pulled out a rose compass. John carried it with him everywhere as it was a present from his late father.

“I can’t accept that,” the taxi driver said.

“Why not?” John was getting shirty. He still thought he was holding his credit card.

“That isn’t a credit card, it’s a rose compass, and we don’t take them.”

John finally paid for the cab, he went indoors and the baby was crying. He went to check on her and got quite a shock. Behind her cot it looked like a monster hovering there.

He went outside of the room and said. “Now I know I’ve had too many.”

John hadn’t realised it was his own face in the mirror, covered in chocolate.

Josie Smith

THE CRADLE RULES THE WORLD

It was supposed to be a game – only a game. You shine a torch, tight-beam, of course, and put your fingers in the way, and the strangest shapes appear on the wall. What are they? Who can say? Those with imagination, that’s who. Are they blessed? Are they cursed?

He wasn’t doing it for the baby – the baby just happened to be looking at the time. Babies do look, when they’re not asleep – and they’re never asleep when you want them to be, are they? Not much you can do about that – they haven’t learnt to count anything when they’re that age, even if they do go goo-goo when you show them the picture of the sheep on the mobile spinning above their head. They go goo-goo when you point to the cat, as well, and the cow and the rabbit and the dog, all of them twirling in the air…

And he wouldn’t have been sitting there, baby-minding, if he could have found his bank-card. He’d have been out, having fun, not still round his sister’s flat because he wanted to avoid his parents. He’d called in on her on his way to town, to have a chat – and then, when he’d wanted to go, he’d picked up his jacket, and put his hand in the pocket for the bank-card for the bus – and there it hadn’t been…

He carried on making the shapes, because there was nothing else to do. He’d have played a game on his mobile phone, if he could have found it. But that, too, had gone walkabout, wandered off into that big area of the Not Available Dreamtime. He’d had it, he knew he’d had it, like the bank-card, and he could have sworn it had been in his jacket-pocket. Borrowers, he thought? In my jacket? Or is my jacket-pocket like a wardrobe, a secret portal to another world?

The thought made him laugh. A good job something does! he reflected. Maybe he’d be better off as a little baby – look at the little bundle, fast asleep now, tiny fist clenched on top of the blanket. What does a baby need? Bank-card? Mobile phone? No – nothing. Just a bit of love and a bit of warmth. If only life were that simple for him… Well, it might have been, if he could’ve rung Jenny, and if she’d been free, and if he’d had any money… And after the pub, walking her home… there was a moon… he could see it through the window… Always one for moonlight, Jenny was, said it made her feel all…

WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!

That was the end of any dream. The baby was awake. He put down the torch, which he still had in his hand, and moved towards the cot, hesitantly. He knew one thing about babies. However you touch them, it’ll be wrong – especially if the mother’s only next door, which she was. And that noise wasn’t going to be stopped by a plaster-board wall. He leant over. There was a funny noise coming from the baby’s chest. Was it a kind of wheeze? He was about to intervene – but his sister barged him out of the way with the kind of body-check he was more used to getting on the rugby-field.

“There’s something wrong with its breathing… I heard an odd sound… ”

The mother, who had the bundle out of the cot and in her arms, reached inside the baby’s smock, pulled something out, and put it in his hand, which he had stretched out to indicate his concern. The mobile phone continued to buzz and vibrate.

Even as he looked, to see who was calling him, his mind was still partly on the child, and on maintaining his relationship with his sister, as a safe haven from his parents…

“And its hand,” he said, “its hand seems all stiff…”

The mother, rocking her child gently, opened the clenched little fingers, extracted the bank-card and passed it wordlessly to her brother, who took it open-mouthed with one hand, while continuing to text a reply with the other.

He nodded his gratitude, but he was already at the door, and clattering down the stairs.

His sister shouted after him, “I’ve told you before – hang your jacket up! Don’t just dump it on the cot!”

But he was already in the street, racing away.

The moon was full and bright!

Mike Rogers

STORIES FROM RORY No. 7

 

Strange But True

James offered me some of his magic mushroom, which I declined. Obviously he participated in taking some himself. Oh wow, he sank down to the floor and he must have been on a disastrous journey. He screamed, “Take it away!” He was trying to disappear into the corner that he’d slumped down into.

This went on for over an hour, and then it got a whole lot worse. He screamed again.

“Save me! That pirate is going to make me walk the plank and there are sharks in the water. Help, help! Get that monkey off my back, the thing’s choking me.”

There was an axe on the wall and he flew across the room and then began attacking the furniture and then he came for me. I punched him and put him out, and the silence was deafening.

I bent to check if he was still alive. He’d been acting crazy and I’d hit him hard. Picking up my specs, that had fallen off as I’d hit him, I phoned the police. I was shaking and wasn’t sure they would understand that what I was telling them was the truth.

I buried my head in a picture on the wall which was of a dinosaur and felt it might be good if he could come to life and eat me. How the heck had I got into this mess? How will I explain about the magic mushroom, and how I had refused to partake? They will probably think that I’d supplied him with it.

I should have gone with John to Cornwall fishing or crabbing, that would have been great.

If only I had not come here. It was a case that James was new to our community and had no friends to speak of; I’d felt sorry for him. I placed my hands over my eyes as my thoughts were driving me mad. I stooped and picked up a toy ray gun, and I said under my breath, Beam me up, Scotty, it’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.

The Police arrived and got James into an ambulance. He was still very quiet. They asked me to accompany them to the Police station. I asked if I could use the loo as I needed to pee. Reluctantly they agreed to allow it.

I sat in the police car staring out of the window. I gazed at the mountains and felt a shiver as the snow on the Scottish mountains was so white and looked really cold.

At the Cop shop I tried to explain what had happened and apologised that I had hit James. But I explained that he would have killed me in his drug-ridden stupor if I didn’t defend myself.

Their faces said it all, a tall story, I was sure that’s what they were thinking. I have never been so wrong. After they had checked James out they found he moved from his last place because the police had found he was supplying drugs and his usual trip was the Toadstools or the magic mushrooms. As I left the Police station I took a deep breath and a lung full of air. Glad to be free. I’ll be more careful in future.

When my mates meet me after their holidays I will tell them about my adventure with the magic mushroom and the Police. I just bet they think I’m spinning a tall story.

Josie Smith

INTERPRETATION

She knew she had another pair, but she also knew she’d need the first pair to find them. She always kept a spare spare pair in the car, as well as a spare pair for driving, but the car-key wasn’t in its usual place in the hall-stand drawer, and if her fingers couldn’t locate it, her eyes certainly wouldn’t be able to… The ones for driving, which were in the right place, where the key should have been, were only good for seeing things that were already thirty metres away. They glared sneeringly up at her from the drawer.

Did it – at the moment – matter? She ran through what she had to do. Tim was coming for lunch – but he was bringing it with him from the market. Fresh crab! She wasn’t a dog, and she didn’t actually know anyone called Pavlov, but she felt the glands in her mouth begin to work…

Should she tidy up? Caution advised against it. If she didn’t recognise what she was dealing with, how could she be sure she was putting it in the right place? If it was in the wrong place, she’d never find it again! Printed matter was right out. Even things with pictures could be mistaken for other things with pictures…

Surely she could prepare salad with safety? Rip lettuce apart? Grate carrot? Slice cucumber? Mushrooms? She hesitated. She’d been on a fungus foray at the weekend. Her trophies were still in a brown paper bag in the kitchen. What if… ? She shuddered. Simpler was safer. Not being able to see clearly was bad enough. Seeing things that weren’t there, after eating the wrong kind of mushroom, would be horrendous.

She raised her head from the sink, where she was washing the lettuce. Was that really a monkey, hanging from the whirligig washing line by its tail, with its mischievous head looking straight at her? She closed her untrustworthy eyes, and didn’t open them again until she knew she’d be looking at a head of lollo rosso. She let her fingers do the work, and the salad spinner.

The bell rang. Tim early? She ran up the hall. Through the glass of the front door she saw a pirate, his head scarved in a bandana, his hand raising an axe. Naturally, she stopped running, breathed to calm down and switched on her reason. Mad axemen, she said to herself, don’t ring the bell.

It was a smiling, Central European deliverer, baseball cap on back to front (bandanas, after all, were so seventies) and holding a long box, wrapped in shiny black plastic up at an angle that caught the sun, while he fumbled for his signature machine. And after all that – it was for next door.

She’d turned round, and was going back to the kitchen when she saw the brontosaurus skull and backbone hanging on one of the hall-stand hooks. Its eyes glinted at her. It was enough. It was too much. She stood where she was and covered her face with her hands.

Fortunately, Tim was a little early. He rang the bell. He peered through the glass. There was something large and upright in the hall. A carpet? He knew Sheila was planning some changes in the house – that was why he’d brought with him the thing that weighed so heavily in his left hand. He shifted it to his right, and pressed the bell again, in case it hadn’t made a connection.

Sheila, motionless in her brown cord trouser suit, turned and went to the door, eyes downcast, as if she were a Victorian heroine, for fear of seeing anything. As it was, she noticed at once what Tim had in his right hand, which would have eluded her gaze if she’d been on tiptoe, ready for a peck on the cheek.

“My God, what’ve you brought a bloody gun for?” she said – not screaming – she had enough sense not to do that – but in a voice sharpened to breathless hoarseness by intense concern and anxiety. On the one hand, she wanted to close the door, to have the disturbing conversation in privacy – on the other hand, she didn’t want to voluntarily shut herself in with a homicidal maniac.

“It’s a drill,” said Tim, as flatly as he could (which was pretty flat). “You said you needed some shelves putting up.” Normally, he’d have given Sheila a peck on the cheek, and stepped inside – but as things were, he felt a little hesitant.

So she grabbed him, and pulled him in, and back-heeled the door into place as she spun round, and jumped up and pecked him on the cheek and hissed into his ear, “I’ve lost my glasses.”

“These?” said Tim, stretching out his arm towards the hallstand hooks.

The brontosaurus’ll have him! she thought – but it didn’t, because he grabbed its eyes, and it never even moved. But by now Sheila had closed her own eyes, and was just standing completely still.

She felt Tim putting something into her hands, a shape whose feel she recognised. She took what he had offered her, and put it in place on her face, with her eyes still closed, and then opened them.

The brontosaurus head was still on the hook – but it was a crumpled crocheted beret, with bobbles and hollows, and its shiny eyes were gone, she now understood, because they were helping her own pair make sense of the world. Below it hung a coarsely-knitted scarf that she had braided over and over with itself, to keep it from hanging down and snagging on the tops of the umbrella-ribs underneath.

“I came early,” said Tim, putting the drill down carefully on the hall-stand, “because I’ve got to go early – something unexpected came up – so we’d better eat at once, if that’s all right.”

“I’ll just go and finish the salad,” said Sheila, brushing past him, to get into the kitchen.

“Can I do anything?” he asked. “In the way of DIY, that is?”

“Well,” Sheila called from the kitchen, “the painting by the fireplace is meant to go over it. If you put a screw in the wall, we can adjust the height with the picture cord afterwards.”

As she washed the carrot before grating it she looked out of the window. The cheeky peg-bag had half unhooked itself from the whirligig clothes-line and was dangling by one prehensile handle, while the other was reaching down to pick up a piece of fruit. She laughed quietly to herself. Who needs drugs? she thought.

Tim had already hung the picture. She thanked him. They ate. They chatted. They ate. He caught sight of the clock and had to go. The peck at the door lasted a bit longer than usual – after all, he’d just saved her sanity.

She came back in, sat at the table and slowly finished the second half of her glass of white wine, looking at his handiwork, and reflecting on the problem it posed.

It was a large and artistic photograph of snow-capped mountains reflected in the stillest of still lakes, seen, as Tim saw it, from underneath the branches of a shady, overhanging tree… Dark and anonymous foliage framed the top of the picture, and the reflection in the water glowed with inner light. However, if one thought of it differently, or actually looked at the label on the back, which had presumably been stuck on the right way up, one formed a different impression…

Who was she to assert that her view of things was the only right one? Of course, she could hang it the other way up when she was alone in the house – but then she’d have to remember to turn it the other way up whenever Tim was coming round, and that would be an awful bore if he started coming round as often as she hoped he would after that slightly longer than usual peck… Maybe she’d have to get used to his way of seeing things a bit more of the time… and if she ever found that a little constricting… well, she could always just take off her glasses!

Mike Rogers

STORIES FROM RORY No.6

 

The Map

I was asked to help an old man to sort out his library for him. When I got there I did not realise that the library was so large. It was going to take me a month to go through everything.

I decided to start from the top shelves and work down, so getting the ladder out of the broom- cupboard I set it up against the shelves.

The books were all in alphabetical order, so that made things easier for me. After about an hour I was half way through the B’s and I saw a book on magic beans, this intrigued me, so thinking I had done enough for now I got down off the ladder and decided to take a break. Sitting at the table in the centre of the room I opened the book and started reading. The explanation for the magic or jumping beans was that grubs that were laid inside the beans were growing, and by moving about and that was what made them move.

Being a little disappointed in the book I got back to work on the shelves. I went through books on cactus, cameras, dwarves and giants. By lunch time it had started to rain and was getting a little dark, so I switched on the lights.

I took out my flask and sandwiches and had my lunch before starting again on the books, the next book I took off the shelf and opened a piece of paper fell to the floor so I came down the ladder and picked it up. It was a map and on checking it it looked like a map of the house that I was working in.

It showed the shelves that I was working on, and at the right hand of the fourth shelf there was a mark, so on examining the shelf I found a small switch. I flicked the switch and the bookcase started to move. Before long I could see that there was a room behind the bookcase and in the room was a chest.

All excited I could not get into the room fast enough, and opening the chest I could not believe my eyes, the chest was full of guess what… MORE BOOKS.

Ken Smith

IMAGES

The angle. The light. The composition. The contrast. That was always the problem. Light against dark flared and lost definition – but grey on grey lost interest.

Could he win this competition? Would it be the way to re-start his career as a photographer after the – unpleasantness? (Don’t think about the – unpleasantness. Always be positive. That was what his shrink had said. And the shrink should know. She was being paid enough that she had to know.)

How far away from the dirt-road dared he walk, to get the shot he wanted? How exacting should he be in the demands he made? After all, he knew he was top-class – and how many other top-class people would bother to drive all the way out here? A competition with prestige, sure – but a limited field.

Hell – that was a stupid way to talk about it! The field was un-limited, if you wanted to talk about the desert! But the guy who was putting up the money had been very specific about where the shots had to be taken. Could he really check that? The temptation to dishonesty – again – was like something crawling round his feet. He stamped about, kicking up the dust, as if he’d seen one of those tiny scorpions.

And when he raised his eyes from looking down at his past, he saw the shot he wanted. A cactus straight out of a Western – but that wasn’t enough, was it? Everybody did those. No – this one had a piece of paper caught on its spines, halfway up the left-hand arm, where the wind had put it. That was what he had to capture: the contrast between nature and humanity – a piece of paper in all that empty waste – and the fact that it was chance. That he hadn’t come out here with a ladder, and contrived the shot, just to be picturesque.

So he kept on taking picture after picture, time-stamped, date-stamped, to prove that there were no footprints anywhere near, no disturbance of the sand – and to do that, he had to use his biggest lenses, on maximum zoom, and his digital cameras as well – oh, he used his skill in the composition, too – but he’d use his judgement to choose the image that would win the prize, and his craft in developing (old-fashioned chemical processes, down to the level of the molecules, way beyond pixels) – he’d – show them, that was it!

But the way it worked out didn’t match the image he’d had of his success.

He got a job out of it, though, a good job, a job for life, with freedom to take as many “art” pictures as he wanted, working for one of those casino-hotel complexes in Vegas. Given it by the man who owned it, personally – well, probably the man behind the man who officially owned it. He was the guy who’d set up the whole competition, and he’d stipulated that all the entrants had to come to him and show him their pictures, in person, in his room at the hotel, with big guys on the doors who had bulges under their shoulders that weren’t their wallets.

The big guy had looked at the picture. Then he’d got out a magnifying glass. Then he’d smiled. A big smile, and not just because he was a big guy. Then he’d said, “You got any more of these?”

“Sure. How many d’you want?”

And the big guy had said, “All of them. And the negatives. And your hard drives.” And he’d paid. Well. Very, very well. And there’d never been another word about the competition. Just a phone-call and a letter and the job.

The camera doesn’t lie, they say. But not everyone can see what it shows. And it can’t show everything. Here, for instance, are some other images.

There’s a guy, in a convertible, with the top down. He likes the wind in his hair. He’s driving through the desert, to dig up something that’s very important to a very big man. The guy knows just where he’s supposed to be going, because he has a piece of paper on the seat beside him. And he keeps looking down at it, to check, until…

Is that the contrast you were looking for?

Mike Rogers