Category: Sandra

Agatha brought the food from stove to table, laying the plates on the bare wood. The room was plain, with the wooden walls of the self-built house unadorned by paint, or decoration, except for the Christ figure on his cross, looking down sombrely upon the family gathered for their repast. Now the only sounds were the occasional clatter of cutlery on the plates and the chewing of food.

At the head of the table, William ate in precise movements, cutting the meat into small chunks and chewing until it was well masticated. He looked at his family from under lowering brows. Agatha ate as he did, she had learned to appreciate what food the Lord gave, as had all his flock.

The children were young and yet to fully understand this precept, and he watched Joesph as he pushed his green beans around the plate. Agatha had seen too; he saw her look of concern. Well, the boy would have to learn that waste was not tolerated.

There, that was the last of it. She poured the bleach down the sink, the bottle giving a few asthmatic wheezes as she emptied it. She hoped that would do it, but it had been a couple of weeks since moving in and she still couldn’t get rid of the smell.

It had intruded on her notice by degrees, the olfactory equivalent of seeing something in the corner of the eye. Just a whiff every now and then as she walked past the kitchen door, or in the hall, or the bathroom. The suggestion of overripe cabbage, or a piece of fish left too long or spoiled meat. She had tried white vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, down the plugholes but that didn’t do anything. She graduated to bleach which seemed to work, at least at first. She had checked the kitchen, the fridge, the most obvious culprits for rotting food, then the oven, which she scrubbed so thoroughly she broke through the baked-on crust to the shine of metal. She thought that had solved it, but over the next few days, the smell had grown more persistent, evolving from a faint hint to a definite statement. The smell evoked childhood memories – the dead mouse found under the stairs; a bird, lying broken among its scattered feathers; a sheep in the fields near the house, that announced its presence on the wind long before the encounter with its wretched woollen carcass, the cavernous stomach putrid with ooze…

Some of this is previous work and the middle piece is new. This is the rough order, but with other chapters to be added.

Pages 1-3 are previous work some of you will have seen.

Pages 4- 7.5 are New

The part ‘A later chapter’ is also previous work.

The Attic

‘Are you going to be ok?’ Joe put his arm around Mags’s shoulder and squeezed.

Mags nodded, her eyes on the floor, whispering ‘I’m fine’.  The sleeves of her jumper were frayed where she’d plucked at them. If she told him what she was thinking, he’d get worried she was unravelling again. Nevertheless, wasn’t there an inevitability about this flat? She felt Death had been close to her, all her life. Not close like a friend, because who was friends with Death? No one living, anyway. Death was nearby, then, like she could put out her hand and touch it and here yet again, death had been present when the previous tenant had killed himself.

‘Well, I’m not sure I am’. Joe turned to Mrs Hardy, the estate agent, ‘Bit of a climb that, wasn’t it?’ he laughed, and Mags felt a rush of affection for him, always stepping in to lighten the mood.

The wind whistled through the gaps in the windows, a mournful sound, accompanied by the flapping snap of the plastic sheeting Derek Gentry had stapled up, in a half-hearted attempt to keep it out. The sounds formed an incongruous duet, but on the 400^th floor, there is always wind; it’s his constant companion, or foe. He looked around the flat, the once trendy mid-23^rd century holo-walls, defunct now, the genuine Flowglow^TM lights, ditto, reduced to inanimate globular ornaments on the ceiling. He supposed he could change it, but he had a world to look after, so new lighting was way down the list.

He shuffled over to Ba, his old bird. She had hunted earlier that morning returning with a small mouse and was contentedly preening herself. She allowed him to stroke her feathers, as he said,

 ‘Well, old girl, it’s time for work, I’d better start.’  Ba watched him but continued to preen. He walked to the centre of the room and his worn dentist’s chair, surrounded by monitors, tubes, and wires. He tapped the monitor and watched as a faint surge of light came and went. There was still enough energy, but it was running low, he’d better get going.

The bright red ball bounces over, coming to rest by his foot. He knows he is expected to pick it up and throw it back, but he doesn’t want to. He nudges it away with his foot and looks around him at the compound, its bright green astroturf, the high fencing, bedecked with lanterns and, at the far end, an azure pool of cool water, filled with excited adults, interacting, and having FUN!

He hugs himself in an effort to become smaller, an invisible ball of misery on the stool in the corner, his snug, ratty jumper enveloping him, its black colour an act of defiance, the colour of funerals, and misery. They had tried to make him wear the approved clothing but he was going to be fucked sideways if they thought he was going to put that romper suit on, and if Mr ‘Call-me-Mark’ Petersen thought he was going to wear anything in primary colours, he would advise him to start watching hell, for when it froze over.

Prologue

The girl heard the key in the door and her mum stopped singing. ‘Clear that up, love, quickly now’ she said, and the girl started to pile her Lego into a box. Her mum laid plates on the table and pushed her hair back from her face. The girl could tell she was nervous, and her tummy started to feel funny.

Her front door slammed behind her father, and the girl knew it was not going to be one of the good nights. Her mum looked at her with scared eyes and jerked her head toward the hallway. She knew it meant ‘run upstairs’ but she didn’t want to leave her. Her father came into the room looking like thunder and swaying into the doorway. She knew that meant he’d been drinking, and she trembled, she knew this was when he was most dangerous.

Her mum tried to smile and said ‘Shall I put the dinner out?’ and with a mumbled ‘yes’, her father slumped at the table. Her mum served the dinner, with shaking hands. All it took was a splash of gravy landing on his trousers, and the girl knew what was going to happen, like it always did. Her father’s roar of rage, the swinging fist, her mother crumpling to the floor and curling up. But this time was worse, her father wouldn’t stop, and she could hear herself whimpering ‘Please daddy, please stop, please…’ but her father carried on kicking and punching.

A white light grew behind her eyes, a pressure building until her head felt too small and something had to give, she just wanted him to stop, he had to stop, stop, ‘STOP! she  was screaming, and the knife was in his hand and he plunged it into his stomach, again and again and again, he had to stop, stop and the blood was pouring over his trousers, much worse than the gravy and her father fell over onto the floor and she was screaming and crying, snot running down her face, and her mum looked at her father and at the girl and her mum picked up the knife and then there was a policeman and more police and she was so tired and her head hurt so much… she had to sleep…

I knocked on Mrs Askham’s door, I’d chosen my time well, having watched Mr Askham leave for work as usual. She opened it, and stared at me for long seconds before, grudgingly, it seemed opening it wide for me. I followed her into the kitchen.

‘Tea?’ she asked.

‘No, thank you’ I made it a rule never to take refreshments at a client’s house, especially when I was about to break bad news.

I plopped an envelope on the counter. She looked at it like I’d put a doggy bag of steaming shit on there, which in one way, I had.

The tower lay on its side, stretched out for a half a mile along the desert floor, half buried by wind and sand, only the windows on the upper half still visible, like implacable black eyes. No one knew when it had fallen, but all the legends spoke of the time when it had pointed straight up to the stars, a long metal tube, its purpose, surely, to talk with the heavens.

A town had grown up, long ago, sustained in the barren dryness by the magic from the tower: the lake. No-one knew how this gift worked, but they knew the great ancestors had discovered the secret of endless water, pouring into the lake. Water was taken by the townsfolk and water must be given, a mantra every child learned at their mother’s knee. All wastewater was siphoned back to the tower, emerging, like a miracle, into clean lake water. Blessed Water. Not a drop was spilled, to knock over a glass of water was a dreadful act, to spit was a sin.

Later, the town was moved, and the palace was built on the shores of the lake, along with the merchant houses, men made rich by the caravan route that passed through the town, an oasis in a world of deserts. 

Did anyone go into the tower? Of course, for the great miracle of the water needed tending to continue, but this was the job of the priests, men who braved the interior, for the heat inside the metal tower was ferocious, and at night when the sun had sunk, the heat rolled off the tower’s sides in blistering waves, as it cooled. Then the shaven-headed priests would enter the tower, dressed only in loin cloths, through the base and work their prayers to keep the life-giving water flowing.

Melissa had lived in the town near the tower base for all her twenty-four years, and she could not imagine any other life, for she had never heard tell of another way, except the stories she loved, passed on by the caravan traders, whispered and contorted by each mouth they passed through until they became wild tales, of fact and fiction melted in the same pot until one was indistinguishable from the other; stories of far off cities with unbelievable wonders, metal carts that powered themselves, towers almost as tall as their fallen one, where people lived in the clouds, or, even stranger, of places with lakes so big their far shores were invisible. So much water, but in a cruel twist, the gods had salted it. Her mother scoffed at these tales, ‘stories for children’ she said, rolling her eyes. But she believed the one about the giant lakes, because the undrinkable water was proof, in her eyes, that the gods punished the sinners. Melissa knew her mother was fond of stories of retribution and punishment by the gods.