A first archival remnant of the year.

detail of skateboard graveyard fist posted jan 10th

This month we are looking through The Archives newly housed at The Institute of Disorganised Elements. Why is explained here.

Archival Remnant No 1 catalogue number MX786

All his friends told him it would be so, and he should have known better anyway.

If you fall in love with a witch there will be a price to pay.

So what! He had always been attracted to witches – their black clothes, their wild unkempt hair, their knowing power over men.

Their cats.

He loved cats.

If he could be an animal he would be a cat.

“I can make that happen’, she had promised.

And so it was.

But there was a price to pay.

A wart.

A wart on his knee, the size of a carbuncle.

He wasn’t sure what a carbuncle was when people first opinoned it, so he looked it up in the dictionary.

An abscess larger than a boil, usually with one or more openings draining pus onto the skin.

Ok, not a carbuncle after all, just the mother of mothers of all warts.

At first he thought it was a spot but then it started to grow.

Something had taken root and was feeding off him.

He went into the forest seeking the witch but she was no longer there.

His friends had warned him about that too. “Flighty bunch the lot of them, I bet she had a broomstick.”

And he should have known better anyhow.

He consulted the best physicians.

“That’s a mother of mothers of a wart”, they all said. “Did you fall in love with a witch?”

“Yes”.

“There’s always a price to pay if you fall for a witch, you should have known better.”

So, scalded by the physicians and shunned by the villagers he took to wandering.

At length, and much later he came to the middle of somewhere else where the only sign of life was a brackish stream and a withered tree growing on the bank.

Here he sat down and fell asleep.

He was awoken by the tap, tap, tap of a Raven’s beak tapping, obviously, on the branch of the withered tree.

The Raven looked down and croaked; “Nice wart, fell in love with a witch did you? You should have known better.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Oooh, touchy eh; missing her?”

“What do you think? She was unlike any woman I’ve ever met and anyone can imagine. Her eyes burnt with the fires of vastitude, her skin tasted of moonlight and her voice was like a summer breeze. She made me feel complete.”

Somewhere in the distance thunder rumbled.

“A storm’s coming,” croaked the crow, “so I’ve got to fly. But if you want to get rid of that wart there is a way.”

“Pray tell.”

“Curse her name thrice fold and dive into this bracken stream, your wandering did not bring you here by chance.”

“I may, one day when I am old and frail, be able to forget her, but I will never curse her name, not even once.”

“Try swimming anyway”, croaked the crow, “maybe it works without the cursing”.

And then it was gone.

The stream looked very uninviting - evil would be the word - but he stripped off and as naked as he was innocent, he dove into the waters.

The thunder rumbled again, nearer this time and as he rose for air, a bolt of lightning severed the sky hitting the tree, which split in two with a deafening screen.

Amongst the smoke and ashes stood the witch; if she had been beautiful before, this time  she was magnificent.

“There will be a price to pay”, she whispered. “A wart is just a beginning”.

He walked toward her.

He didn’t know any better.

First rewrite of the year

At sunrise on St valentines Day 1955, the exact time and day of his birth, William B. Trucker, after a 23 year journey along badly illuminated roads that suddenly seemed to be nothing more than dark, found himself at the traffic lights at the corner of 58^th avenue and 22ns street.

They were red, so he stopped.

At that precise moment his mind was in turmoil and he hesitated between turning left along 58^th Avenue and heading home, or continuing on 22^nd street in the direction of the post office where he would eventually, if fate had been otherwise, post the valentine message that lay alongside him on the empty passenger seat.

He did neither, and when the lights changed to green he failed to move.

The other cars behind beeped impatiently but then, seeing that William B was deaf to their claxon calls, they detoured around him, gesticulating aggressively in the process.

William B was blind to this too, and edging his car closer to the kerb in a token citizenly action he shut off the motor and sighed.

He must have dozed off then and there for he did not notice the snow that started to fall and when he woke hours later the blizzard lay so heavily on his windscreen and windows that he could see nothing abut the faint diamond like glint of the street lights, which by now were illuminated.

He had no idea where he was, or what had happened so he opened the door and stepped outside onto the pavement.

In front of him the lights of a small coffee shop and diner informed him that he was close to the "Finest Home Cooking in the State".

Although this claim remained, for now, unproven the smell of freshly brewed coffee that assailed him across the snow drift that he would have to negotiate, left him in no doubt that his next step was towards it.

So he did.

And then, being as the snow had partly turned to ice, he slipped.

The arms of Benjamin Threx, proprietor of the “Home to the Finest Cooking in the State”, who happened to be exiting the establishment at that precise moment, caught William B as he fell and once he had had set him on his feet eagerly thrust a shovel into William B’s hand.

“Help me with this slush young sir and you can eat on the house”, he offered, and turning started to shovel snow to one side; much to the annoyance of P.J Fox real estate agent who held the business premises next door and whom will come into this tale in time.

editor's note - this originally appeared here

Chapter One of the year.

This is where he lives.

At the end of the village a small path crosses the rocks, it is marked by small splashes of yellow paint that someone put there a long time ago.

At the end of the rocks the path climbs up into the pines and from there it follows the curve of the bay before tumbling down through the sage and thyme that grows wild.

It is mild in the winter so the old man stands outside looking at the sea, though to be honest he is rarely inside except for sleeping.

He is thinking about the past, it’s a safer place than the future, which worries him in the small hours when he can’t sleep and he is too afraid to go outside.

He rubs his hand across his chin, he has not shaved for a couple of days and the skin is rough and feels like the sandpaper that his father used when he too stood outside this house, before it had been built and the timbers that he gathered from the flotsam still needed treatment before they could be called a home.

“I should shave”, he says out loud and the sound echoes back to him from the pebbles that form the beach between home and the ocean.

He looks down at them and one catches his eye, maybe the late evening sun sets it apart a little, maybe it is the shape, which smoothly calls him to caress it.

He stoops and picks it up.

It is warm, the sun has left her touch and he rolls it between his palms. He feels the gentle strength within and the years of surf that have glazed its edge.

From his pocket he takes an old piece of silk and begins to polish it.

From above in the pines the sound of a voice reaches him. Someone is laughing. It is distant and reminds him of bird song.

He looks up and sees a woman struggling through the sage and thyme, she had slipped and this had started the giggles.

She looks down and her eyes meet his, they are blue like the ocean, his are green like the sea.

She waves.

He is startled and doesn’t know what to do, so he just stands watching as she climbs down the steps, and rocks where there are none.

“Hello”, her voice is strong but her eyes are hesitant; “what a beautiful stone.”

The old man looks at the stone, it is, and not knowing why he holds it out to her.

“Would you like it?” he asks, “I seem to have many” and he shows her the beach.

But no one reaches for it.

There is no one there.

And once again the old man realises he was lost in the memory of something that seemed like yesterday, but probably really happened before these pebbles were formed.

He sighs an finishes the polishing, then turns and sets the stone onto the wall with the others.

Then he walks across the beach, stopping once to pick up another, this time random, pebble and pausing only to slip of his shoes he stands in the cold December water.

Just for a moment.

Just for the thrill or the shock, and then he steps back and stretching wrist, arm, shoulder and back he throws the pebble in a high rushing arc and watches it as it plops beneath the  surface.

The Flotsam and The Jetsam - The Gaberdine

He wears a black gabardine raincoat, a grey trilby and wellington boots, a good choice because it has been raining for most of the month and the river is swollen and threatening the pavements.

He walks with a limp - his right leg was damaged as a child in a farm accident - and he is carrying a bunch of roses, held upside down and close to his side to protect them as much as possible from the rain and wind which has driven most folk deep inside the warmth of their houses.

His face betrays no emotion but he is climbing to the cemetery on the other side of the river that carryies fallen leaves and not a few memories to an uncertain and distant ocean.

An hour later he returns still limping - this will never leave him - but his hands are empty.

He stops and talks to someone and though I can’t see his mouth and say for certain that he has little of his teeth left, I can hear that he talks with a lisp.

His whistling reaches me on the wind.

She is also wearing a raincoat and a small hat but no wellington boots, she is clearly intending to go nowhere and has been standing on the opposite corner for over an hour.

She is waiting for something, maybe for the rain to stop falling or maybe for her daughter to return to the village; she left for the city many years ago and doesn’t write.

If the woman had a mobile phone she might get the occasional text but technology decided a long time ago to have nothing to do with her.

So she stands on the corner getting wetter and wetter, and though her gaze has not wavered in the last hour it is now fixed on the back of the mans neck, which is not visible between the hat and gabardine collar which he turned up against the wind as he returned from the cemetery.

Maybe she knows him? They would have gone to the same school.

Apart from the young, people from this village don’t move away. They say that they like it here but the truth is that the village was made to suit the people who lived here already.

People who like the rain and the way it falls in torrents from the hills that circle the valley, people who like the silence that rests on the streets at night time.

People who wait.

.

flotsam and jetsam explained here

From the archives (2)

this is a complete mess, but i'm sticking it here for the moment whilst i wonder what to do with it.

It’s difficult to know where to start a tale like this – at the beginning before I owned the café and knew Jack’s name or at the end when they finally found him and fed him to the lions.

So let’s start in the middle.

Winter.

It was dark, but still early. Through the steamed up window I watched the snow softly settling on the cars waiting at the traffic lights, people hurrying past under the soft yellow glow of the street lamp at the corner and the icicles forming on our sign outside.

Home Brew.

That was the name when I had bought the place and I hadn’t had the heart to change it yet, some of the customers thought it was funny – I was not so sure. The interior was all new, well old but new, as I had used pine from an old boat to build intimate corner benches. This was a café where you could rest, hide if need be but above all feel at home.

I saw his car stop at the lights and she got out – young, Asian I think. She wasn’t wearing a hat so I could see she had black bobbed hair, blacker than the winter night she had stepped into.

“Fuck you”, she screamed and slammed the door. Then she turned away I caught just the fleeting flash of her angry wolven grey eyes. I wouldn’t forget them in a hurry.

I was serving myself a cappuccino when he entered, the bell above the door causing me to look up.

“You open?”

“I am now.”

He was tall, skinny with grey hair. His skin was grey. He looked like someone had thrown dust all over him. His skin, what I could see of his face and arms was tightly drawn in ridges and folds. He resembled a walnut – albeit a grey one. He was wearing a green pullover and faded, almost grey jeans. Specks of snow were melting on his black shoes.

He sat in the corner booth and stared out the window.

from the Bitsnbobs unpublished archives Oct 2010.

from the archives (1) here.

Every single time (one)

Every evening - late and after a long day’s work in the city - Mr Edwards caught the train to the suburbs.

Every night - it was always dark when he arrived - he walked down the hill towards the home he shared with his sister.

Every time, EVERY time, he stopped and peered into the dusty window of the junk shop on the corner.

It was always closed.

It was always dusty.

It was always interesting.

And amongst the tea pots and plates, picture frames (with and without), coronation mugs, silver cutlery (some that wasn’t), Toby jugs and teddy bears - the ceramic tile ALWAYS made him sigh.

It was beautiful.

And though the tea pots and plates, picture frames (with and without), coronation mugs, silver cutlery (some that wasn’t), Toby jugs and teddy bears were always changing, the ceramic tile never did.

Ever.

But one night, the day’s work had finished early, the train arrived before night-fall and the junk shop was still open.

“Hello?” his voice echoed around the dusty shop, there was no one there.

He picked up the tile from the window, it was heavier than he had imagined, and he turned it over – there was no price.

“It’s special”, the voice surprised him and he turned.

“Good evening, are you the owner?” he asked politely, “I hope I’m not too late”.

“Yes. No. I’ve been waiting” replied the owner, an old woman as dusty as the shop.

“Em”, he was a little confused, “how much is this?”

“It’s special”, she replied, and then laughed, “and very expensive.”

Mr Edwards laughed too, “it’s an old tile, I’ll give you five pounds.”

The owner laughed even more, but took his money.

For many years the tile lay in Mr Edward’s sock drawer where he put it just before going to sleep that night.
He dreamed of dust.

When he retired from his work in the city, Mr Edwards bought his own house in the country and he set the tile in the middle of the kitchen floor, everyone who visited said it was beautiful.

“It’s special” he told them, laughing.

Years later, when he was an old man, Mr Edwards moved to a small flat and he forgot the tile, which gathered dust.

Before the house could be sold it was burgled and the thieves wrenched the tile from the floor, and just left the dust.

As the thieves fled they were surprised by the neighbours returning home and the loot was later discovered on waste land behind the local supermarket.

No one noticed the tile amongst the other things and so it was left there with the weeds and twisted shopping trolleys.

A small boy found it there one day and took it home to smash snails in his garden.

His sister thought he was mean took the tile and threw it over the garden fence, and for a while it lay at the bottom of a small stream that ran along a ditch.

A traveller found it there, admired the colour and used it as a table for the sandwich he had been given by the woman who cleaned the church.

The lady that looked after the senior citizens traded it for an old thermos flask she was about to throw out and she used it as a stand for the rubber plant in the day-room.

Dishonest traders bartered for it and the other heirlooms the senior citizens no longer needed, and they sold it to the junk shop on the corner.

Of the hill down from the station.

Where Mr Edwards was passing on his way to visit his sister.

And, like EVERY time, he stopped and peered into the dusty window.