Issue 122. March 3rd - 16th 2006
Some days pass quickly
I sit around a fire on a tarp, a wool blanket over my legs. James squishes me. Martin feeds me marshmallows. Eleven of us in a car on winding streets and I see a ring around the moon.
By Andrea Wong
I Promise To Go Wandering (Part 8)
I imagine people stumbling across these snapshots and worrying slightly, as they click through them, about where precisely I visited to form an opinion about their county.
By Matilda Mother
Hank Williams Last Drive/ The Dreams of Scotty Moore/ The Man in Black
Young Charlie Carr's got this tune running round his head
( It’s Jambalaya - but he don't know that. He don't speak French.)
Whistles it between his teeth over heater hum and Cadi purr.
By Simon James
DON'T BUT DON'T/ FAGMAN/ APOSTLE BOOGIE
'Pass the water'
'Where's the bread?'
'I missed that last bit,
By Daniel Rudd
Aftermath
He doesn't need to say a thing and neither do you. Sometimes silence is the right thing to say and he always seems to say it at the right time.
By Tom Bickell
One star, one girl, one night
Chances are that if you have ever stood under an umbrella of stars breathing in clean dark night you will have glanced upon Talitha for a moment or maybe two, but I doubt you even gave it a second thought.
By Rachel Queen
Live Review : ++Money Can't Buy Music/Theonewhoflew - Nottingham, Rescue Rooms - Wednesday 15th February
I watched the tiny candles flicker on the tables backed my ears filled with hopes and dreams. And for a little while I really did feel I was somewhere slightly more exotic, somewhere slightly more perfect.
By Rachel Queen
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Some days pass quickly.
I sit around a fire on a tarp, a wool blanket over my legs. James squishes me. Martin feeds me marshmallows. Eleven of us in a car on winding streets and I see a ring around the moon. It widens, later. What omen is this? It is Friday, January 13 th and I have completed my eighteenth year.
But sometimes, my existence in this rural suburb slows so dramatically that I hear the breaths of trees,
My brother and I are snaking down the same back roads on foot. I hear a crinkling of twigs. They are still brittle from winter, but already feathery shoots of green leaves are beginning to prickle through their bark. To our left is the nunnery, where retired Sisters in their black robes meditate while hovering over a red brick labyrinth. Between the road and the labyrinth is a forest with networks of pathways through the brush. We stop. Look through the wire fence. A deer. She returns our open-eyed gazes, licks her leathery nose, and resumes her snuffling in the star moss.
Around a bend, beneath leaning Arbutus trees, there is a cove with a rope swing. I am wearing a grey tweed skirt, but I hike it up and sit on the wooden bar anyway. My brother pokes a stick into the creek as it trickles down the steep rock slope on to the beach. "Hey. A merganser." We watch as the duck paddles silently away from us, waves v-ing out from its curled tail as it disappears around the point.
Across the straits, the San Juan Islands are thick with mist. I think: this is what they modelled the west coast background paintings in the museum after . Willow branches tear into the heather-grey sky, and we climb over slimy brown rocks coated in algae to the small cliff back up to Guinevere Lane.
When we tell our parents about our walk, we will not mention the deer, or the creek, or the toxic sewage foam we carried on a stick all the way home.
Instead, I will say, "We saw a bird on our walk."
And Nicholas will say, "It was the smallest bird I have ever seen, a wren."
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I promise to go wandering
Part 8
part 1 ¦¦ part 2¦¦ part 3¦¦ part 4¦¦ part 5¦¦ part 6 ¦¦ part 7
Cheshire
I imagine people stumbling across these snapshots and worrying slightly, as they click through them, about where precisely I visited to form an opinion about their county. Those for whom I found their stately homes and castles will be sitting back smugly, silently thanking whatever whim of meandering took me to the place which shows them in the best light (and the Socialists amongst you thinking, 'but she didn't see anything real'). Cheshire folk have a beautiful county, rural for the most part, with Chester itself still displaying its Roman or Tudor architecture and town planning like a bejewelled badge.
In Cheshire, I visited Ellesmere Port. It's an honourable tradition. So many Black Country people migrated there, during the last couple of centuries, that part of the town is strewn with names relating to its people's origins - Wolveram is a district once populated with Wulfrunians, while on the other side of the High Street, there are roads named for Dudley and other Midlands towns. In 1891, my own bargee gt-gt-grandparents (with my gt-grandmother as a child) were docked up there, as I discovered by chance visiting Ellesmere Port's Boat Museum.
1891
|
Dwelling: Boat 'Bates', docked at Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, England. Census Place: Ellesmere Port. | |||||||
Marr | Age | Sex | Birthp lace | Status in House | Occ. | ||
John POOLE | M | 46 | M | Wolverhampton | Head | Captain | |
Eliza POOLE | M | 37 | F | Wolverhampton | Wife | - | |
Eliza POOLE | 11 | F | Wolverhampton | Daughter | - | ||
Maria POOLE | 7 | F | Wolverhampton | Daughter | - | ||
Ernest POOLE | 2 | M | Wolverhampton | Son | - | ||
So, why might Cheshire people be cringing right around now? Other than those proudly strutting about the 'Port feeling slightly superior to the Scousers on the other side of the Mersey? Because Ellesmere Port's air tastes chemical on the tongue. Indeed, I was informed by the friend who lives there that an application for an old people's home was turned down because the air was too toxic. Something which doesn't appear to have worried the developers of Ches hire Oaks Shopping Complex too much (they cut down the said oaks to build it).
Not that I'm suggesting for one second that the oil refinery dominates the town in anything other than providing jobs for its population, as its great chimneys billow out endlessly, haunting the horizon as you look out from my friend's lounge window. I wouldn't even like to speculate that it had anything to do with the strange mist that covers the ponds beneath it, yet stops dead at the banks. Like something steaming, unlike any mist I've seen, nor smelt, before. We don't talk about such things.
For all that, I do love Ellesmere Port. There's my friend's welcome to be sure, but more than that, I've had some great times up there. I've partied in the pubs; meandered half the night through Stanney Wood; and it's been the homecoming place when I've picked up my friend on forays into North Wales or Blackpool. This year I also got complimented, in a back-handed way, while a lad in his early twenties finally realized that I wasn't the wife or girlfriend of one of my older male companions. 'Oh!' He gasped, his face erupting with a huge grin, 'I thought it was strange, someone like you being with a stunning piece of stuff like her.' I preened all night; he didn't.
My visits this year were numerous enough to 'get' Cheshire a dozen times over on the county quest, but not all for fun. Once I was on a mercy dash as my friend's mother was admitted to the hospital. I'll 'get' Cheshire many times again, but always Ellesmere Port. Perhaps it's then not so bad for the sense of a county to be met, not in tapestry-covered walls and fine art as in the preferred(?) tourist traps, but in the fond heart of a friend who lives there.
Decision time. I knew I had it when I spoke to Kate. I knew
where I'd been since and it was light enough to retrace my steps while
searching. I only had vague clues as to where 'home' was. I decided that the
sensible thing was to see if I could find the phone on the basis that if I got
injured or collapsed that might be my salvation. Also, if I gave up and went
for the road, then I'd need it for a taxi, unless I wanted to add 'finding a
phone box' to my list. If I'd thought that I knew where I was for definite, I'd
have said sod the phone, it's replaceable. So I retraced and found it in the
gorse-bush place. It must have slipped out as I squatted for a wee.
I made my way back across the wetlands and across the bracken. As I crossed a
heath, I saw a patch of forest turn into the most magically beautiful colour. I
turned and welcomed a glorious dawn. That's when I stopped walking for the
first time, sitting on a rock at the edge of the forest, thanking the dawn for
coming. You see, I'd celebrated Beltane in a circle during which I'd watched
the sunset. I now knew precisely where east was and I knew where west had been
in relation to the camp-site. I walked, and walked, and walked.
I stopped. Deer! Remembering the lesson of the rabbits, I didn't fumble for my
digital camera, I just watched and loved it. There were four of them, so
graceful. Each froze and watched me, so I did too. It seemed to go on for an
interminable amount of time, until my legs screamed to sit down, so I moved and
they fled. They weren't like deer as I imagined, either grey or red with white
spots. They seemed dark grey to black, very small with white, broad, stumpy
tails. I entered a forest trail and ended up on that same damn road.
The really stupid thing is that each time I'd followed a clue, I'd ended up
back in the vicinity of the campsite, but upwards of ten mins walk further
south-east. Had I just trusted that, or got the message, and persevered, I'd
have got there, but each time I turned around and ended up approximately three
miles too south at one time. This time I was too tired, I decided to stick with
the road on the basis that it had to lead somewhere and if I collapsed from
exhaustion, then a passer-by would see me. I stood there and looked up and down
this forest road. No clues. I looked at the sun, I chose north-west. :-D
After about 20 mins walking, and wondering if you could call 999 over being
lost or report yourself as a missing person or something, I got so despondent
for the first time. I knew Kate's battery was dead, but I'd half-sat, half-lay
on a grass verge at the side of the road and just wanted to pretend I could
call her. So I did. Her phone had been off long enough to get some charge in
the battery. Looking back, I was so pathetic a figure there! LOL I didn't cry
and there was nothing she could do to help me (I knew that and told her), but I
just wanted to hear a friendly voice and if something did happen, she'd know
that I was last on a proper road somewhere in the forest.
It gave me heart enough to get on my feet and carry on walking. A few minutes
later, I saw the van at the end of the track and knew that the wrong campsite
was just up the way. They would be open now. I could get directions or a taxi.
I walked in there and just fell onto a bench. I got my phone out to tell Kate
where I was, but the buttons wouldn't work. I figured it had been damaged lying
in the dew, but it worked before and since.
A man came by with some dogs and I asked him where Birchwood was. 'Just there,
through the trees'. I stared at him. 'Pardon?' He gave me directions, but I
couldn't take them in. I wrote them in my book and just blurted out, 'I've been
lost in the forest all night!' He said, 'All night?' 'Yes, I got separated from
my friends.' I was losing my voice and I could hear the knackerness in it
myself. He replied, 'You should get better map-reading skills.' I nodded and
got up, thanked him and followed his directions. I still managed to take a
wrong turn, but within sight of the road. I decided against his short-cut
beside the surety of the road.
Within five minutes, I was at the entrance to our campsite. That was such a
beautiful moment! As I walked down the driveway, I saw my guide from the other
campsite coming out of the short-cut he'd sent me down. I waved and called
'thank you' again, touched that he must have followed to see me alright, but
carried on walking towards my tent. There was no sign of anyone. (They were all
sitting IN tents, I found out.) I was too tired to think what this meant. I
opened our tent and Kate called out, 'Who's that?' She sounded really scared.
'It's me.' I mustered. 'Are you alright?' 'Exhausted, but sorted, ta.' She
didn't say anything else, and I thought she was gone to sleep. Moving as
quietly as possible, I removed my sopping wet DMs and socks, revealing white,
wrinkled feet. I sat down and had a fag. My phone told me it was half past 8 in
the morning.
I needed fresh water (a cup of tea would have been better, but there was no
easy access to one) and the loo, before I lay down. I found our friend in the
toilet block and told her what had happened. She'd been abed and didn't know.
She looked at all my cuts and scratches and said to wash them. I told her I
could deal, I have a first aid kit in the tent. I asked her if there was a cafe
on site, because I was desperate for a brew. Nope. I went back to the tent,
opened my bedroom section and just crashed. Then heard a beep, beep from Kate's
half. 'Are you awake?' 'Yes' Kate opened her section and we canted for a bit.
I'd just got to the 'and I could die for a cuppa', when the tent-flap opened
and there was Sue with a huge beaker of tea. I nearly cried.
And that is how I 'got' Dorset. In one of the most magical nights of my life.
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Three Poems About Heroes
Hank William's Last Drive
Young Charlie Carr's got this tune running round his head
( It’s Jambalaya - but he don't know that. He don't speak French.)
Whistles it between his teeth over heater hum and Cadi purr.
Don’t wanna wake The Man
Sweat-stetsoned in the back seat
Staring eyeless at a desert focal point
As a pallid dawn blurs by.
The Dreams of Scotty Moore
The old man smiles
Mother of pearl
Across his fretboard
Does he dream?
Is this his dream?
That his fingers dribble over notes
Like water over the rocks of a Mississippi stream
Where the dangerous boy from Tupelo
Bathes in the spotlight
Visible only from the waist up.
The Man in Black
His head and his hairs were white like wool, and white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto fine brass,as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.
American Bandstand. 1962.
His beltbuckle leaves a searing sunspot on the screen
As he prowls sleek and slick like the Arkansas panther
That used to follow him home from chapel.
His voice the rasp of a sharpening razor.
Beehive girls swarm the foot of the stage
Offer him all with their eyes
Tonight he ambles, a big black bear
With the barrel bellychest and saddlebag eyes
Of a man who’s spent his life in the deep darkness beneath.
Folsom Prison Blues.
That voice
Never missing a piston-beat
Of the freight-train rhythm.
His band of young gunfighters
Still watching for a finger twitch
From the Man in Black
As the song pulls into the sidings
He smiles like he’s seen the sun
Closes it softly like a piano lid
Or a coffin.
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Three Poems by Daniel
DON'T BUT DON'T
Don't get better
But don't get sick
Don't shy away
But don't exist
Don't vote left
But don't vote right
Don't catch the sun
But don't go out at night
Don't be clever
But don't be thick
Don't mistrust people
But don't get tricked
Don't speak out
But don't say nothing at all
Don't play it cool
But don't return the call
Don't be open
Don't be mysterious>
But most important of all
Don't be serious
FAGMAN
FagMan liked to smoke
That much is true
He’d often smoke a pack an hour
Sometimes even two
His clothes smelt bad
His fingers yellow
FagMan didn't care
He's not a vain fellow
Smoking was his only joy
He first fell in love
When just a small boy
On his fathers allotment
Behind the shed
He would sit there and smoke
Friends built dens instead
FagMan would smoke everywhere
And all of the time
He avoided the places
It's considered a crime
FagMan became blighted
Struck down with ill health
It deterred him little
He knew nothing else
'Best get it seen to' he pondered one day
'Get some tablets, and be on my way'
Booked an appointment and bought some matches
Grimaced as he passed by those unsightly patches
The doctor called him to his desk
'I'm afraid I have bad news,
It appears your habit is detrimental
FagMan vowed to give up booze
'It's not the booze' the doctor stressed
'You have cancer of the lung'
'Well it's not the fags' FagMan protested
'It's because I'm highly strung'
FagMan had entered a state of denial
Refusing to blame his habit so vile
Six months later, FagMan was dead
His final thought:
'Should have smoked Lights instead.'
APOSTLE BOOGIE
'Pass the water'
'Where's the bread?'
'I missed that last bit, what was it he said?'
'Something about going away, or least I think'
'Going away? Going where? Pass me that drink'
'Well, I hope he's careful, it's rough out there'
'Careful?! He'll be fine, such style, such flair'
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Aftermath
Gone. No giving or given just the giving of the up. You don't know how it came to this and you, at the moment, don't really care. There was a situation called love and now that situation is no longer there, but you have mauled and been mauled along this pithy road maybe once or twice before, but those other ones hurt and, you reflect throwing babck age old brandy with a severity close to ludicrous, this one, this situation that you find yourself in, it just doesn't hurt and pummell you to a standstill as you might expect it to. What happened was that you simply discovered you had nothing in common. Different ideas of thinking, different friends and friendships and, in the end, when love becomes less than what you feel it should be, then why wait and waste and let life fester for even one more day?
Micheal comes round. You hear the thud thud thud of his boots before he rings the doorbell then lets himself in. You called him last night with the news, and you know there is no pseudo-sympathy or tears or any of this "if you need me for anything I'll be there" bullshit that accompanies the soaps and thus informs public consciousness. He doesn't need to say a thing and neither do you. Sometimes silence is the right thing to say and he always seems to say it at the right time.
This will not hurt.
This will not hurt.
This will not hurt.
He refills your glasses. The music of your youth emanates from a stereo you stole from a house in Glasgow you once shared. No guilt in that one. You doubt if they even noticed it missing, and fuck em if they did.
"Fuck em"
"Who?"
"I was just thinking then, bout the time we nicked this machine from the house we shared with those student cunts."
"They were cunts anyway."
"Cunts"
"Twats"
Pause.
"Garry?"
"What?"
"This brandy stinks of piss."
"Its not the brandy. It's the glass."
"Oh"
We all make mistakes. Some more than others. But that's because they risk more, try more, follow roads less travelled and occasionally get lost.
"So there's a fuckin postcard and its going to the Czech Republic and its written in Czech and so before I put it to airmail I pretend to read the fuckin thing- you know- 'Dear Lenka, having a good time in England but I don't like the weather'- and the blokes on the line next to me are all fuckin listening and taking it all in and they're going 'fuckin hell man, what you doin working in here when yer can read that' and I just fuckin winked and...some people, I tell yer..."
"Most people"
"Fuckin right. Most people"
"What was that thing Hank said? That he got with this bird cos she knew, and he knew, something deep and meaningful- That most people just aren't worth a shit"
You smiled at that.
The phone rings and you let it. It's not that you have an aversion to phones, it's just that the person on the other end never has anything interesting to say.
"Beer?"
"Fuck it. Why not"
"We must be the only ones that switch from brandy to beer."
"Where we going?"
"Don't know. Somewhere where there's some pussy. I fancy an ogle."
"An ogle is all we get these days."
"Don't I fuckin know it."
"How's the wife?"
"Fuckin usual- Fat, boring, telling me I'm nothing, whinging about everything- Biggest mistake of my life. That and.."
"I know. I know, brother..."
At a trendy city centre bar- all cast iron couches and the deadening thud of synthetic drums to eliminate any chance of conversation- you drink expensive continental beer out of bottles and ogle girls to whom you could feasibly be an Uncle. They get younger and younger, or maybe you just get older and older. Life, somehow, passes at a quickening rate the older you get and yet, and yet, you can still taste school dinners and in the blink of an eye be back getting drunk and thrown out of French exams, all bluster and incoherency, full of life and laughter and expectation and a thuddering of hope that eroded with time. Yet you were young then, and in some ways you still are.
Michael stays at your house that night. No call to the wife, no need for explanation, he, like you, resigned to it all.
The sun comes up, drilling holes in shadows and bouncing off the walls and windows.
"What we gonna do?" asks Garry, glugging on the second bottle of cheap co-op Bulgarian red.
"Dunno. When is enough enough?"
"When it's never enough."
You drank to that.
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One star, one girl, one night
Talitha, or Iota Ursae Majorisas as it is also known, is one star in the constellation affectionately known as the Great bear. It sits next to two other stars making up the feet of the bear. Chances are that if you have ever stood under an umbrella of stars breathing in clean dark night you will have glanced upon Talitha for a moment or maybe two, but I doubt you even gave it a second thought.
One star amongst so many other stars that swim on a cold black sky.
What not many people know is that Talitha is the home two people, very much in love. But I'm getting ahead of myself here so let's start again.
Kathleen Stevenson, or Katie as she was also known lived in a small town. One girl lost in a small town in a small country. She worked long and hard in a job she really didn't mind. She spent her days laughing and smiling and her evenings talking to friends.
Night time was different though. Her nights were filled with loneliness and she would stare up at the sky and wonder about all the people in the world and what they were doing. Each night she stared long and hard. One girl amongst so many others trying to make sense of it all.
One night though, her gaze fell upon Talitha and in an instant her loneliness fell away. In an instant she knew that she was not alone. There was someone else out there also looking at the star.
She stared hard convinced that she could see the reflection of his face on the pin prick of light. He was far away but he was real. More real than anything she had ever seen before. He lived in another world to her, and spent his days in a thousand ways that she knew nothing about, but for that brief moment she knew he was there and she knew he needed her as much as she needed him.
She closed her eyes, a smile resting on her lips, and slept.
Katie, spent the next day in a dream. Her mind tracing his soft smile and the creases around his eyes and mouth. But the more she thought the less real he became to her. She became downhearted and despondent.
To make matters worse clouds filled the night sky obscuring her view of Talitha that night. "What was I thinking? People can't fall in love with reflections on stars" she scolded herself angrily.
The sky didn't clear until two night's later and by this time Katie convinced herself that she had imagined him and so it came as quite a shock to her as he gaze rested on Talitha once more to realise that he was there. She took him in her arms and told him everything, and in return he held her tightly and let all his secrets melt away.
Over the days, and months which turned into years and decades the pair fell in love so deeply and so strongly that clouds could no longer get in their way. Although they never met they were no longer alone.
They knew that each other existed and that was enough.
But one day Katie was out walking. It was a crisp cold day in December, the sun was catching the frozen ground, making it shine like rainbow coloured jewels, the day was so perfect, and suddenly she knew he was gone.
She rushed home as fast as she could and despite that fact that her legs now crippled with arthritis she reached her house remarkably quickly.
She lay on her bed. Too numb to cry. Too numb to move. To numb to even think what this meant.
Hours of inertia passed and darkness fell on the room. She looked out across the sky, alone for the first time in decades.
Alone, until her gaze fell upon Talitha. The star was shining brighter than ever and she finally understood what it all meant. She felt her heart soar and her body float out of her bedroom into the cold night sky. She was going home.
Talitha, or Iota Ursae Majorisas as it is also known, is one star in the constellation affectionately known as the Great bear, but more importantly it is the home to two people very much in love.
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