‘You can pin a maggot on a mackerel but you can’t pin a mackerel on a maggot,’ whispered the featureless child, his unheard words of wisdom floating away on the wind.

There was lot of wind on theSuffolk coast that day and it was busy dragging the kite belonging to the father of the featureless child along the far side of the beach.

‘Feck it, feck it and feck it,’ scalded Dad.

The snake on a rope thought he said ‘fetch it’ but his impulse to slither over and fetch it was curtailed by a sharp yank on the tie-rope around his neck. His trunk slinked and then coiled up into itself; his gasping tongue protruding to fork the passing currents of air.

Amongst the masses of messed up line attached to the kite emerged a giant ugly deep sea fish. It stank and shouted at a woman and a baby ahead of it.

‘Not mackerel, not a maggot and not a monkfish,’ mumbled and murmured the featureless child.

‘Mmmmer mmmmer mmmmer, can’t make any fecking sense of any fecking thing you say, lad,’ blasted Dad.

‘Sssssand shark, it’sssss a sssssand shark,’ hissssssed the snake.

Dad went to have a closer look. The stinking sand shark bit. He came back with the kite but without his hand.

‘That takes the biscuit,’ sobbed Dad.

‘That took your hand,’ corrected the featureless child.

Dad looked at him for a moment. ‘I understood that bit, lad, you’re right. Good to hear you talk normal for a change.’

The snake slithered back with Dad’s hand.

‘Thanks, snake,’ said Dad with a playful yank at his tie-rope. ‘Now let’s go home, your Mum has got some serious sewing to do.’

Each midnight, Trumpet Forsyth leans out of his sixth floor bedroom window and blows out his horn. The first notes are avant-garde and complicated, angry, like his guernica is inhabited by limbless limbo dancers and drowning hands. The next series of notes are big-nosed-Sonny-Rollins-sax, then tall and meditative, and after that a little fruitless like a man growing wings to turn into a penguin that will never fly. A horse bray and neigh, a dog’s head in a light bulb tree and a dancing man falling flat on his face make up the final third, and then trumpet Forsyth puts away his horn and lets the dogs, cats and manacled maniacs take up his clarion call to wake up the night.

Now lookee here, girl, what do you call that mess on the wall?
Dunno.
It’s a scribble, isn’t it? And a scribble don’t belong on the wall, it belongs on paper. Am I right or am I wrong?
Yep, s’pose so.
Right or wrong I asked, girl.
Right.
Right, thank you.
Granddad Pete was always shooting off about something and his granddaughter, Sophie, was normally in his firing line. She peered out from her lofty vantage point and endured it all with the cold stare of teenage oblivion.
You doing anything later, girl?
Dunno.
What about playing a sport. Tennis? Table tennis? Football?
Table football?
Don’t get fresh now, Sophie. But table football would be a start, wouldn’t it?
Yeah.
Go on then, here’s a pound. And a smile would be nice.
Sophie managed a smile, pecked her Granddad lightly on the cheek, and slouched off.
You will use the money for a game, won’t you?
Sophie mimed the bent over flick wrist motion of the game as she walked away.
Fat chance thought granddad, but she’d be good if she did play; the girl has the right attitude.

CANCER BOB AND THE YOYO

Bob with the Cancer, a charred renegade cowboy scout was puffing and lolloping along on his half-assed, half-blind donkey when he passed two unlikely lads cavorting on the skirted hem of a daisy prairie.
One of the unlikely lads, Pete with a rooster, cried, ‘yo!’
‘Yo,’ repeated his crushed-almond-eyed friend.
Cancer Bob creaked around his saddle to face them: ‘what in the name of sweet Jesus are you two female faggots wanting from me?’
‘Yo yo,’ shouted Rooster Pete and his nutty fiend.
Now the donkey agitated around to bring Cancer Bob nuzzle-up-close to the yoyo pair.
‘I’ll say it only once: why are you rattle-snakes repeating your death rattle claim on my running-out-time?’
‘Yoyo, sir. It’s all the craze in the East. Spare us a dime and we’ll furnish you with our presentation.’
‘What do you think, Dong?’ Cancer Bob asked of his donkey. ‘Shall we give them a dime for their troubles or shall we blast their dim-witted asses back up to Kingdom come?’
Donkey Dong looked heavenward and brayed very loud.
‘Sorry boys, I have my answer,’ said Cancer Bob with a rotten kind of smile. Then out came his pistols and squeeze went the triggers. Bullets flew and the two unfortunate, unlikely lads fell backwards onto the skirted hem of the prairie.
As the rooster cooked on a fire and Donkey Dong hoofed up granules of desert to make two shallow graves, Cancer Bob lay on his back doing an expert cat’s cradle with the yoyo. ‘Those talent less fuckers will be pushing up daisies soon enough,’ he said.
‘And so will you, Bob,’ replied Donkey Dong.
‘Guess I will at that,’ said Cancer Bob allowing a crooked smile to pass across his lips as he offered his donkey dong a drag on his nicotine.

It really was a miserable party, it really was.

Young Hilary Stoppard and his pretentious young set contemplated the splenetic corners of art’s responsibilities within a splintered decaying cosmos.

Under an ageing Soviet philosopher’s smoke exhalation they gathered in an umbilical circle to soak in each of his puritanical philosophisings: ‘Believe in the rhythmic order of your heartbeat and trust no creation younger than your least favourite aunt or neighbourhood spinster.’

Hilary’s girlfriend, Bunti, corrected her spine with a long natural breath and a complex re-interpretation of Alexander technique. Sigmund, who suffers from total-allergy syndrome, adjusted the valve feeding oxygen into his astronaut suit and wondered if air was in itself a poison more potent than Velcro.

The deflated clown behind the punishing philosopher wore a look of utter defeat, his soul carrying the angst of the world in its tiny blue sac.

Hilary Stoppard looked out into the everywhere and imagined himself more than himself but less than an atom.

It really was a miserable party, it really was.

Skidmark Sid and Herbert Hives asked their neighbour, ‘Margaret with two small melons’, round to share a bath. Sid liked Margaret, Herbert liked Sid, and Margaret liked to be naked; no touching was involved. After three months Margaret inherited a million pounds from her pet greyhound, Slim the Jim. They talked about what best to do with the money and decided to open a department store. They called it ‘Skidmark, Melons and Hives’; it wasn’t a success

Does the dog wag the tail or the tail wag the dog? Such questions kept entering Arnold’s mind of late.

            It started with a heightened sense of smell. Nose up, with a slow turn of the head to catch the scents whirling past on the sea breeze.

            Brighton promenade, early morning. Mother in her wheelchair making sticky with an ice-cream cone, a white frothy milk moustache, sucking through the absence of teeth. Arnold beside her; nicknamed Arnold Layne after the Pink Floyd song by the giggling, sweaty boys in 5B. Now there’s a little grey around the temples, pinches of salt and pepper on the muzzle – a lollypop licked, orange on his lips, gazing at two windsurfers gliding on the horizon. The smell of seaweed, an undercurrent of sewage, salt water drying on rocks, and, close by, some dog wet on the railings.

            ‘A bitch, possibly a Pomeranian,’ Arnold is thinking.

            ‘Cold now, I’d like to go home,’ says Mother.

            ‘Get you a cappuccino? It’d warm you up.’

            ‘No, home, please.’

            Mother and Arnold, chair and walker, both quiet and thoughtful along the front, and then the long push home.

In their lounge, small and bent over, cramped by falling angles of bones into her seat, Mother watches Countdown with the sound turned up, an electric blanket, pink and new from Argos, £15.99, over her knees; an electric coal-effect fire; Arnold perched on the armchair beside her, scratching at a hole in his sweater. On the seafront he’d noticed the smell of coffee, that’s why it had come into his head to ask her if she wanted one, but now he can smell something unpleasant.

            ‘You done a two, mum?’

            Snores.

            Investigating in the bathroom. No sign, but he flushes anyway. Soap scents, citrus at the back of the throat; ammonia too, so he coughs.

Thirty years before in the Mini-Traveller, its log cabin sides, Mother, Arnold Layne, and their Yorkshire terrier he’d named Damien after the Omen film; Arnold had a thing for Lee Remick before she fell out of the playroom window. Mother at the wheel, Damien at the back with Arnold; fur soaked with seaweed.

            Mother spoke: ‘you shouldn’t have let him roll in that stuff. He smells like a drowned rat.’

            A whimper from Damien, Arnold’s hand on the bone at the back of Damien’s head, dog nose nuzzled into his chest. So close the two of them. Boy and dog, dog and boy.

            When they arrived home, Arnold brought out the brush to calm Mother’s nerves.

            ‘Not so hard,’ she said. ‘You should always brush in the direction the hair falls.’

            ‘Like this?’ said Arnold.

            ‘That’s my boy,’ said Mother.  

After the promenade, Mother’s night time snores have become damp and wheezy. It was cold on the front and the sea has settled on her chest, a trickle in her lungs. Her scalp is hot; red patches where hair has moved withArnold’s stroking.

           Arnold’s up, changing sheets, dampening her face with a sponge.

            ‘Will you eat something now?’ he asks.

            She shakes her head. He offers her a teaspoon of pink yoghurt.

            ‘Strawberry, your favourite,’ he says.

            ‘Don’t want it, too ill,’ she replies. 

            ‘Aw, mum, you’ll be okay.’

            ‘No, son, this is it.’

            ‘Please don’t say that.’

            ‘I’m not stupid,’ she says.

            A whine when he’s on the phone to the doctor. ‘Things aren’t so good with mum. Come and fetch.’

            He hadn’t meant to say that. The ambulance men carry her out on a canvas stretcher with a red wool blanket pulled over. An oxygen mask too.

            Medical chemicals in Arnold’s head making him dizzy. He asks if it’s all right to lie on the ambulance floor.

            Cold on his shoulder and his head rattling on the metal floor by their boots; leather uppers, a cigarette recently stubbed out on a rubber sole.

            ‘Do you mind moving, sir?’

            ‘Have you got any water?’

            ‘We’re not a cafeteria.’

            Not a cafeteria, the words sound alien. He falls asleep. Dreams. Running through a field, Mother rolling behind, he jumping over a small hedge, her wheelchair doing a Frisbee-flop a moment later.

            ‘Mum, mum,’ his legs twitching on the floor.

            A rush of wind as the ambulance door opens. ‘Move it, please.’ And the stretcher passes a long shadow over his head.

In the ward, Mother’s chest creaks, and Arnold lies curled in a chair by her side thinking of a head being stroked, forever stroked.

            He remembers running with Damien: a game of throw and retrieve.

            ‘Go boy, go.’

            Two jade eyes spied through the mesh of next-door’s fence. Dainty paws lower down, white trim: Kenneth, the tortoise-shell. Damien’s fur on high alert, arching his back, the ball desolate and unchewed in the middle of the lawn.

            Kenneth sprang on top of the fence, claws folded in, paws gripping like toy felt, slinking across the night sky; his tail like a fanning Yucca. Damien charged at the fence so he stuck, legs held fast in stocks; Arnold trying to tug him free.

            Mother at the kitchen door. ‘Arnold, come in this moment.’

            ‘I’ll be back, Damien, sorry.’

             Back as he promised, after a Fray Bentos, overcooked and black on top – Arnold never liking puff pastry ever since – and Damien was gone; Kenneth looking on, smiling wildly, pupils enlarged and speeding.

            But no Damien, even when Arnold cried his name through the streets that night.           

Arnold mourned then, Arnold mourns now; Mother has passed away. A rose bush planted in the garden, yellow and pink, just as she requested. Smells sickly, like the Indian sweets they give him at the Kybher Pass, his nightly take-away. He’s planted a bush for Damien too, in case he ever comes back – ghost-like – to leave his mark, his marauding impression. His favourite bones still buried in the soft earth underneath. 

            After Damien disappeared, Kenneth fell out of a tree. 

It’s raining. Arnold places mum’s urn on the mantelpiece, lies on the carpet, looks at the electric bars glow, and feels their warmth on his tummy. He closes his eyes and listens for a scratch on the bottom of the door. Tomorrow he’ll take himself for a walk on the seafront, buy an ice cream, and scatter the contents of the urn in the sea.

GOAT KILLS SNAKE

Pablo the goat came over all Diablo when a slimy snake slithered under his hoof.
‘Cotton-picking son of a slitherer!’ yelled Pablo, who up until now had never uttered a word in his life.
‘Rattle’ rattled the snake.
‘Enough of that,’ yelled Pablo as he brought his hoof down on the rattling snake’s rattling spine. ‘And take that too,’ he yelled again, bringing his other hoof down to silence the rattler for good and for bad.
The desert fell silent. The moon glowered like a shiny spoon and Pablo began to eat the snake.
‘What’s come over me,’ he thought. ‘I’m normally a peace loving chap and I’ve always been an herbivore.’
The desert stayed quiet and offered no reply but a ball of dry prairie grass rolled by until Pablo ate that too.

Police! Camera! Action!

Another disaster programme done and dusted; and the anchor man made of slime and Milk Tray slips away to relax in the park. Clothes off, neck hair swept back, his metamorphosis into a creeping creeper creep happens within his own moving fog of smug. His form glides as much as it hunches, his eye is cow like, his head that of an antelope. When he arrives in the park proper he sets about worrying the deer by whispering crime statistics and the phrase ‘buckled Austin Princess’ into their hot felt like ears. ‘Bastards’ is a word he savours for unsettling the stags, their bony coat stands tensing as if they might rut and cut at any moment. But as quick as he was there, he’s gone again. Back to the studios and into his early evening television suit, a Chaplin dung stain mopped off his top lip by his adoring assistant, his tiny hooves clasping the calf insoles of his smart heeled shoes.

Smile! Smarm! Action!

The problem with you Brenda is you – you’re your own worst enemy. It was comments like this that made Brenda feel a little mad.  Not because she felt insulted or crazy, but because she didn’t understand what was meant by it.

One person who liked to say this kind of thing was her sister, Margaret.  But Brenda didn’t have time to dwell too long on such things; she was busy being busy and she was normally busy being busy doing things for Margaret.

Brenda picked up her sister’s children, Damian and Alicia, and dropped them off at school each morning.

‘Don’t stop at the gates and gawp,’ Margaret advised her. ‘They’ll sweep you up into the dog rescue van with all the other bitches.’  ‘That’s definitely insulting,’ thought Brenda, ‘but I still don’t know what she means’.

Margaret’s children weren’t any less brutal: ‘Don’t put your smelly bum on the seat next to me,’ yelled Damian from the back of the bus so everyone could hear.

‘She’s a paedo,’ squawked a smirking Alicia, who was six going on a wicked sixty-six.  Plain embarrassing, but no-one said anything or tried to call social services.

Brenda would take them to the primary school gates, hand them their sandwiches, crisps and fizzy drinks, and then wave them goodbye.  They never waved back, but she always stayed there waiting just in case, until they were safely indoors.  Then it was off to collect the shopping from Mr Patel’s for her neighbour, Mrs Doherty, who had problems with her legs and her drains.

Mr Patel always greeted her with a smile.

‘How’s Brenda this morning?’ he’d ask.

‘Brenda is doing fine,’ she replied. ‘And I’m doing fine too.’

‘Hey, hey, funny one, Brenda.  I like that. Very smart reply.’

No-one, except Mr Patel, ever said her name with anything approaching his kindness or respect, and no-one ever complemented her like he did.  She liked to linger in his shop, to keep out the cold, to feel his warmth. 

‘Icy weather, Brenda. When’s it going to stop?’

‘On Sunday; I heard it on the radio this morning.’

‘Good, good.  No need for a weather girl when I’ve got you, eh?’

‘No,’ and Brenda blushed.

She picked up Mrs Doherty’s shopping bags and waved goodbye through the shop window. And Mr Patel waved back.

Mrs Doherty was waiting at her door.

‘Have you got your drains sorted, Mrs D?’ asked Brenda.

‘I’ve rung them a thousand times but they never turn up.’

‘Would you like me to go in and see them?’

‘Silly girl, that wouldn’t do no good, would it?’

‘Okay, Mrs D.  Here’s your shopping and your change’

‘Thank you, Brenda. You take care now.’

‘And you, Mrs D.  Knock on the window if you need . . .’ but the door slammed shut before she could finish what she was saying.

Then it was next-door to feed Mr Pearson’s cat.  He never seemed to feed it and so it had become a habit.  And now he was dead she saw no reason to stop.  She had known Mr Pearson was dead because the sweet sickly smell coming through his letterbox reminded her of when she had nursed her mother, and she had died.  No-one else seemed to know though, and the smell had been wafting out of the door for weeks now. 

Brenda’s day was busy with activities right up until two. Then it was back to the bed-sit she’d lived in since leaving her mother’s house. She liked to get her feet up and eat a peanut butter and banana sandwich with a cup of strong tea.  The sandwich reminded her of a family holiday to Butlins at Bognor Regis in 1988.  An American boy called Clint had shown her how to make one, and she’s been eating them ever since.  She wrote to him every week for three years and received one reply from his mother saying he was doing fine and had just gone off to serve his country againstIraq.  Brenda still has the card tucked into the side of the mirror above her gas fire. 

Twenty minutes of Radio 5 chatter and then it was off to pick up the children from school. On Fridays she treated them to a McDonalds, which made them even more maniacal than usual.

This Friday when she arrived with them at her sister’s house, Margaret wanted to know why she was late.

‘I nearly rang the police.’

‘But I always take them to McDonalds on a Friday,’ replied Brenda.

‘Lucky you! Spending your mad money like you’ve actually earned it.’

‘I’ve got you a Super Mac.’

‘Big Mac!  What about my milk shake?’

‘Strawberry, wasn’t it?’

‘Chocolate! Fuck! Fuck! You never get it right.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Give it here then.’

‘I’ll see you Monday.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Bye, Damian and Ali . . .’ But the door slammed before she was able to hear if they replied.

Brenda loves Mr Pearson’s house because it’s similar to the one she used to share with her Mother. When he died Mr Pearson had left his back door unlocked. After leaving the children she lets herself in and brings his cat in with her.

She drags his emaciated body along the upstairs landing and into his bedroom; tucks him tight in his bed, and presses a rolled up blanket against the crack at the bottom of the door to keep the smell in.

She hurries downstairs to make herself a cup of tea, and then settles down on the sofa to watch her favourite programme, Deal or No Deal.  She puts her feet up on one of his chairs but is careful to put a newspaper on the seat so not to leave a mark.  She reaches into a carrier bag and pulls out her burger – she’d been too nervous earlier to eat it in front of her niece and nephew.

‘Luxury,’ she says.  ‘If you could see me now, Mum, I think you’d be proud. This is really roomy,’ and she twiddles and pokes out her toes to make her point.

Deal or no Deal makes Brenda very heated. She has her favourite numbers – Damian’s and Alicia’s birthdays, her own and Margaret’s; the number of her house she shared with Mum; the date Clint’s mum wrote to her, and last of all, the date of her Mum’s birthday: the 12th. That’s the number she hopes will be in her box if she ever gets onto the programme. Not that she’ll ever try to, because she’d be frightened of embarrassing herself and her family. In her dreams the number 12 serves as a kind of memorial; and as a starting point for discussion so she can tell Noel Edmonds how nice her Mum had been.

Today, Alex, a hairdresser fromEdinburghis chosen along with his box marked 12, and Brenda is straight off the sofa and roaming the room.

‘Go, Alex, go! You can do it!’ she shouts, and Mister Pearson’s small tabby shoots for cover under the dining room table.

In the first few rounds, Alex rides his luck but is still left with the possible jackpot of £250000. Brenda is a flurry of optimistic activity and excitement, taking large gulps of her tea as she paces the room.

In round five, Alex spectacularly loses boxes containing 100000, 75000 and 50000. Noel Edmonds puts a consoling arm on Alex’s shoulder and Brenda’s slumps into the sofa, her face drenched in hot tears. The tabby jumps on her lap to lick her cheeks.

In the studio the Banker rings. Noel Edmonds picks up the phone and tuts throughout the call.

‘Nasty banker, nasty banker!’ yells Brenda.

Alex is made a paltry offer to stop the game by the Banker but the holy grail of 250000 still beckons from the horizon.

‘You only live once,’ declares Alex. ‘I came here with a plan and I’m determined to see it through.’

Brenda repeats his words like a holy mantra: ‘You only live once. I came here with a plan and I’m determined to see it through.’ The audience go wild. Perched on the edge of the sofa, Brenda claps and playfully brings the tabby’s front paws together to clap as well.

The front doorbell rings.

‘This could be the biggest decision of your life,’ suggests Noel and Alex nods in agreement.

‘Ask the question, Noel?’ he says.

‘£10000, Alex. Deal or no deal?’

‘No deal, Noel.’

‘No deal,’ repeats Brenda.

Alex is a gambler: the audience are in ecstasy; they whoop and holler and so does Brenda.

The doorbell rings again.

The penultimate round; there are only five boxes left to choose: four holding insignificant prizes, one with the big one.

Alex gets lucky this time. Three boxes are chosen and ejected from the game. The audience stir up into a gladiatorial frenzy but Brenda is awed into silence. She understands immediately that Alex is now left with the possibility of choosing 50 pence or £250000. A cathedral solemnity suddenly takes over the studio as the audience realise too. This is bigger than life or death. The Banker makes his final call.

The doorbell rings again, and this time Brenda hears it.

‘Go away,’ she whispers but the bell keeps on ringing.

Noel looks more serious than it’s possible to be. ‘Alex, I wasn’t lying before but now really is the biggest decision of your life: £75000.’

Someone taps the lounge window. Brenda sees their hand through the nets; a ghostly palm shaking the pane.

‘Alex, think clearly, £75000 is a lot of money,’ counsels Noel.

Brenda remembers the time when they came and found her with her mother’s dead body in their home. She’d answered the bell that time to let them in; and had ended up locked in Granges Retreat for three years.

‘Even for you this takes the biscuit,’ Margaret had said on her one visit there. ‘How could you let Mum get into that kind of state, you’re worse than an animal.’

So Brenda knows better than to answer the door now.

‘I’m not here,’ she mutters under her breath.

‘Ask me the question, Noel,’ says Alex.

‘£75000, Alex. Deal or no deal?’

There is a voice at the letter box: ‘Brenda, I know you’re in there. I saw you let yourself in. Is everything okay?’ It’s Mrs Doherty.

‘I’m not really here, Mrs D, but everything is okay,’ and as she says it, Brenda crouches at the doorway leading into the hall.

‘No deal, Noel,’ says Alex firmly.

‘Brenda, there’s a terrible racket and smell in there. Is Mr Pearson having problems with his drains too?’

Brenda is caught in nowhere land between the television and Mrs Doherty’s voice at the letter box, between Alex’s fate and her own.

Noel’s tongue circles his lips in anticipation: ‘Alex, I hope and pray that the box in front of you contains £250000 and not just fifty pence. Let’s open the box now and see.’

‘Brenda, I can’t stand here all day, my legs won’t take it. You have thirty seconds to let me in or I’ll have to call your sister.’

The seconds pass without reply.

 ‘Are you opening the door or not?’

Brenda goes determinedly on all fours into the hall to answer the question.

‘No deal, Mrs D,’ she yells up through the letter box. ‘No deal!’

Behind her Brenda can hear the crowd celebrating and going mad like there’s no tomorrow. She rushes back into the lounge, closing the door behind her. She turns the sound on the television up to maximum.

Alex punches the air and is engulfed by a throng of ecstatic well wishers. Some of the audience wipe away tears; others chant Alex’s name.

Brenda scoops up Mr Pearson’s tabby and dances wildly round the room.