For the first time for a long, long time today, I followed my feet and found myself in the heart of the old and ancient forest of Stan Mere, high above my home in dark Brighthelmstone, with its sea mist that creeps in along the coast.

But there in the morning forest, bright sunlight was filtered through limbs about to catch fire with leaf. Long spindles of shadow crept towards me along the stony path, swept clean by recent wind and rain. The first swallows and swifts darted through the sky and I could hear the larks rising from the meadows beyond the trees.

The deeper I progressed into the forest, the more my grandfather’s stories branched from my memory. The Iron Master’s daughter who was left to die in the forest by her violent suitor as she fought his unwanted attentions. The Great Dog that prowled the moor at night ripping apart any being that dared to cross its path.

The Bear Man who haunted the mind of any who looked him in the eye.

The Bullf who gored and trampled the pilgrims on the holy path.

The Pighog whose tantalising gaze sent many a poet mad.

And the wizened Fistingrit, the malevolent little being with the twisted mouth and hanging lip. If granted entry to a homestead, it would spoil the cheese, ruin the pie, poison the cake.

Beneath the great outstretched arms of the Ever Tree, I pondered for a while on the saying it inspired – ‘ever to be honoured, never sworn’, that finishes, or perhaps began, ‘ever living, never born’.

I can’t remember.

But what I did remember was my grandfather, smelling of tobacco and walking unsteadily with the aid of his stick, a thick rod of blackthorn, as he pointed with it toward the trees, where frightening creatures hid themselves during the daylight hours, and the drawn-out dusks of summer evenings. You were much more likely to meet the ‘beasts’ as he called them, on a dark winter night, with a hellish easterly blowing chill into the bones, and sleet or snow gathering at the roots to trigger their release.

As I looked around I began to see the faces of the ‘tree beasts’ in the ‘beast trees’, their features emerging from shadow as the dappled sunlight fell across the trunks. Strange and hideous creatures neither reptile nor mammal, neither foul nor human, but hybrids, drawing their sustenance from the ribbed bark and the dark soil, from the polluted water and the noisome air.

I turned away. In the distance I could see the bluebell woods, with their intense violet haze, covering the woodland floor.

At first shimmering and misty, stepping through the flowers as if through shallow water, then fully discerned, tusks dripping carmine, jowels slavering blood, against all myth and tradition, in daylight the creature advanced, the worst of all, the wastrel and waster, a great iron-bound coffer lashed to its back with ragged, mossy rope, gold coins spilling from gaps and breaches in the casket.

It trudged toward me emitting guttural grunts.

In that moment, I recognised my own monstrous, tragic spawn…

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Carpenter Cottage, High Street, Little Somerston, Gloucestershire PS59 0CH

For the attention of Dr E de Savary, DClinPsy; CPsychol.

De Savary Psychological Services

22 Florence Avenue

Bristol BS78 2NY

February 29th

Dear Dr de Savary,

You know I collect wooden toys – they’ve fascinated me ever since I was a small child. The story of Pinocchio left me spellbound, terrified even – Olympia in the Tales of Hoffmann, mesmerised – and who doesn’t love Woody in Toy Story.

I was about five when my father took me to a shop in Bergamo where a man named Salvini made wooden toys that are a wonder to behold – their movement is so realistic, they captivate children and adults alike. Torso, head, jointed arms, legs, hands and feet – all are carved from a single piece of oak or elm. All are linked through a clever system of levers with a clockwork motor, wound by a key inserted into their back and activated by a small switch at the nape of the neck. They are elegant, gracefully balanced and appear to be of a very simple construction, yet their workings are a mystery to most people.

But not to me. Or so I hoped.

I felt sure that with my precision tool kit and a few YouTube instruction videos, I would be able to take one of the toys apart and put it back together again.

Dismantling the toy was comparatively easy. There were a number of strange little hinges and toggles, pivots and grommets, but I drew the shape around each on a sheet of paper and put them on their own shape, numbered according to their order of deconstruction.

But when I came to put the toy back together I floundered. No matter how carefully I followed my own numbering and naming of parts, the toy was malformed. A lever would stick out from a displaced arm. The head would twist awkwardly or the feet buckle when I tried to stand it up. Inwardly seething at my own incompetence – and against your advice – I drank several large tumblers of whiskey. I wept tears of frustration and anger. I dismantled the imperfect assembly once again, laid all the component parts carefully on my workbench and, after several more tumblers of whiskey, went to bed.

Not surprisingly, I woke with a hangover. I made myself a cup of coffee and filled a bowl with cereal before returning to my workshop, even more determined to rebuild the toy correctly.

Now, I know you’ll say I have been imagining things again, but this is what happened and it’s important you know. As I opened the door to my workshop, I stopped. There was a small figure sitting on the edge of my workbench.

‘Ah, there you are,’ it said, turning towards me. ‘All done.’

Its head waggled slightly as it spoke and it smiled, painted eyes bright with awareness and intelligence, looking straight towards me.

You can imagine my reaction, Dr de Savary. This isn’t the first time.

I closed the door and took two or three deep breaths. I ate most of my cereal in a rush. Reality felt treacherous. Was I daydreaming? Hallucinating again? You know how this makes me feel.

I opened the door again.

‘Still here,’ it said, and gave a little wave. It watched me as I approached. I looked around to see if there was anyone else in the workshop, someone playing a trick on me, one of my work colleagues from RUR Corporation perhaps, where practical jokes are quite common, although never so sophisticated.

‘Just me,’ said the figure as it stood up and walked along the edge of the workbench towards me.

I looked down at the little wooden face.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Rudi. You know, your Salvini mannequin.’

Rudi was the handwritten name on the signed label of the wooden display case where the figure normally lived. I now realised that I had always assumed Rudi was male, but I began to have my doubts as I watched the figure move.

‘Rudi?’

‘Yes. That’s me.’

He sat down again, patting his knees as he did so.

‘In full working order,’ he said.

‘Good. That’s good. But, um…’ I hesitated, shocked and bewildered that I was talking to a puppet. ‘How?’

‘My friends,’ said Rudi. ‘Mr Electrical Screwdriver, take a bow.’

There was a loud clattering from beneath the bench and my Black and Decker screwdriver bounced out of my toolkit.

‘What do you need an electrical screwdriver for?’

‘To unscrew my next friend from the wall. Mrs Knife Sharpener, the spotlight is on you.’

Rudi gestured towards a pale patch of wall where the knife sharpener had been fixed. He then swivelled and swung his hand towards the other end of the bench where the knife sharpener was lying. It promptly sprang up, pirouetted precisely and lay down.

Rudi was standing next to me, leaning towards me. Leaning towards me affectionately. That was the word that came to mind. Affectionately. As if we were old chums having a cosy chat.

‘I hesitate to ask…’ I said.

‘Why to sharpen the knife, of course.’ He pushed me gently in the ribs. ‘Silly.’

‘Of course. And why…?

‘To trim my splinters. And now, the star of our show, the Sandman!’

A wobbly shape clambered up one of the bench’s legs. Reaching the worktop, it revealed itself to be a large man-shaped piece of sandpaper, like one of those cut out figures in a chain of paper dollies made at primary school. It turned its back to us and with a kind of pride pointed to the number on its back. P120.

‘Very fine,’ said Rudi with a smile. ‘Thank you, Sandy. Well done. You smoothed me off nicely.’

He gazed up at me.

‘You see, Patrice – may I call you Patrice?’ I nodded. ‘You see, Patrice, the reason you couldn’t fit me together was nothing to do with a lack of skill on your part or a failure to record the numbering and naming of parts correctly. That should make you feel a little better.’

I nodded. Rudi nodded back with a glum, full-lipped expression mimicking my own. He smiled.

‘Brighten up then. You couldn’t put me back together because of rough edges on my articulated parts.’ He pointed to his shoulder, then his elbow, then his knee, continuing to his ankle, his hip, and neck.

‘Yes, Rudi,’ I said, ‘I get the idea.’

‘A few splinters and hairy ends are all it takes to upset the delicate equilibrium of Signor Salvini’s marionettes.’

‘And not to forget, Timmi,’ said Rudi.

‘Timmy? The cat?’

‘No, Patrice. Timmi with an ‘i’, my friend in the cupboard. Over there.’

Rudi pointed towards the sink unit in the corner of the workshop. Beneath it was a small cupboard. I went over and opened it. At first, I could see nothing but when Rudi called ‘Timmi, Timmi,’ a small pale hand appeared and waved. I crouched down and peered into the half-light. Inside the cupboard there was a very small child, a baby really, naked apart from a nappy. It looked very unwell. Its skin was light blue.

Then I remembered. Years ago, my daughter had left her favourite doll in the cupboard for safe keeping, before she went off to that boarding school, before her mother and I split up, before the acrimonious divorce, before I had to give up my share of the house, before those vile, unjustified accusations of my child abuse, cruelty and violence. It was the very last day I ever saw my daughter.

‘Hi, Rudi,’ said a thin little voice. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Oh, you know,’ said Rudi. ‘Thanks for your help last night.’

‘My pleasure,’ said the voice.

‘Rudi,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘To explain it scientifically would take a very long time and requires an awareness of natural laws and forces that are as yet unknown in your context,’ said Rudi. ‘On the other hand, we could just say we’re part of an unexpected and exciting narrative, a story we’re telling, each of us in our own way. Six characters in search of an author, as Mr Salvini’s friend Pirandello would have said. Well, seven including Timmy.’

‘That’s six, I think.’ I suggested.

‘Seven with Timmy with a ‘y’. The cat.’

‘Have you seen him today?’ I asked. ‘And what role did Timmi with an ‘i’ play in last night’s reconstruction?’

‘I held the knife,’ said the thin little voice. It sounded like an older female pretending to be much younger. The voice was much closer and didn’t sound as if it was coming from the cupboard. Timmi with an ‘i’ was now standing beside the workbench, holding onto one of its legs like a dancer at the barre, looking up at me.

‘I held the knife,’ she repeated. ‘To trim him.’ Her face became a bitter smirk.

‘Trim me?’ Rudi began to feel himself all over ‘Where? Where?’

‘He needed reining back,’ said Timmi. ‘We all agreed.’

Rudi’s hands dashed over his body, pausing below his abdomen.

‘All? All? What you, the sandpaper, the knife sharpener and the electrical screwdriver? What kind of all is that?’ Rudi looked at me, turning his head to one side with a questioning look and holding out his hands.

‘But you are just a maquette, Rudi.’ Something about that word ‘maquette’ jarred and churned some feeling within me – although it will be no surprise to you, Dr de Savary, that I couldn’t immediately pin down the sensation. ‘That must never be forgotten. As a maquette, you stand in for something much greater.’

‘Maquette! Maquette! What kind of stupid word is that? Sounds like a monkey.’

‘That’s a macaque,’ I said. I know a thing or two about monkeys. Rudi became even more agitated.

‘Whaaaat!’ he screamed. He stood and waved his hands around at the side of his head.

A marmalade blur swept across the scene. Rudi squealed. From the top of the shelves beside my workbench, Timmy the cat pounced onto Rudi knocking him to the floor. He grabbed him in the claws of his front feet, then rolled on his back and shredded Rudi to matchstick with the sharp talons of his back feet in a few ferocious moments.

‘OOO,’ said Timmi.

For a second or two there was an uneasy silence and stillness.

‘Was that really necessary?’ A deep, dark, warm, woody voice asked behind me. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled and the chill of a deep, dark foreboding seized my innards.

I turned to confront, a huge wooden man, a veritable simulacrum of Rudi. A knife glinted in his huge wooden hand which he swept down in a backhanded arc across the cat’s throat and whirling round with the jet of its blood, aimed for my own.

I dodged and ran – crashing through the workshop door – through the house where I have lived on my own for four lonely years – through the sitting room where I have seen monkeys ascending and descending the walls like angels – through the kitchen where just below the audible I can hear people talking about me.

My next door neighbour, Mrs Gilgamesh, is letting me hide in her pantry. She has been very kind and has given me a cup of tea and a biscuit. She has assured me she will post my letter when she finds a stamp. She’s said she must ring her daughter and now she’s on the telephone.

But I’m not sure she’s ringing her daughter.

Please help.

With best wishes

Patrice Doxiadis BEng (Hons), CEng, MIEE

P.S. I hope you’re keeping well.

***

De Savary Psychology

Re: Case 0321/1996/SHDoxiadis

To: Coroner’s Office

Dear Miss Millivant-Dempsey

Thank you for your email about this distressing case.

Please convey my sympathy and respect to your colleagues and to the SIO and investigating team for all their efforts, especially at the crime scene which must have been horrendous and a truly harrowing experience for all involved.

I first heard of the death of Mr Doxiadis and Mrs Gilgamesh briefly on the local TV news and as you may imagine I was very shocked that a former patient should be implicated in a suspected homicide. In your email you were able to give considerably more detail about events on that dreadful day which I found very helpful.

As requested I have provided my own commentary on Mr Doxiadis’ state of mind during the period he attended my clinic for treatment. You also asked if I could make any judgement about his psychological state on the day in question and I have endeavoured to do that as well in my full statement which I have submitted online.

Thank you too for the copy of Mr Doxiadis’ letter addressed to me, sent as an attachment. You are correct in your assumption that I never received this letter. You are also correct in your belief that it could be very pertinent in understanding what happened.

Although I have provided a detailed statement, I thought it might be useful for you to have an ‘Executive Summary’ of my thinking.

Mr Doxiadis suffered from a very rare form of psychological disorder Timor Arborum known sometimes as Ballard’s Syndrome. It was diagnosed in his early childhood 7> and he responded well to treatment involving both medication and CBT. However, TA has its roots as a neurodevelopment disorder. Literally, timor arborum is fear of trees. Part of Mr Doxiadis’ early treatment as a child involved him playing with wooden toys, especially wooden human figures, to help neutralise his generalised anxiety about wood.

However, in a very small number of cases so far documented, TA has been known to recur with greater vehemence in later life, even leading to physical violence. And here I think another component of Mr Doxiadis’ psyche has come into play. And that is guilt.

You may not be aware that he was a weapons designer, working on highly advanced technologies. In fact, the reason I was treating him most recently was because he led the team that developed the British Army’s Automilitia – autonomous robot soldiers for front line battlefield deployment. A squadron of these were used by the SAS during the recent mashakil in the Sahel. You will have seen in the news that it has come to light that four of these AI robots went rogue and have so far massacred over 1500 civilians. These renegades are still at large and have yet to be contained. I believe that Mr Doxiadis felt a considerable burden of responsibility for what happened. He was not the most emotionally intelligent of men. His brilliant mind was certainly destabilised by the break-up of his marriage and his exclusion from his daughter.

Judging from the way he describes events in his letter, I believe Mr Doxiadis may have projected his own ego, superego and id onto the toys in his workshop. But only the forensic pathologist can discover how that translated into a murderous attack on his neighbour and how he was able to cut himself so ferociously in the manner described in the SIO’s crime scene report. Has the knife yet been recovered? And I wondered if there is any evidence that Mr Doxiadis had been making wooden prototypes of the battlefield automata?

I hope the attachments assist in your enquiries but please get in touch if you require further information.

Yours faithfully

De Savary Psychological Services

Eamonn De Savary DClinPsy; CPsychol.

www.desavary.psych.org.uk

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Black Swan

I trace the label on the bottle. A swan swimming with its head held high. Black Swan Distillery, Holborn reads the lettering around the base of the label that follows the elegant curve of the swan’s breast and its water-borne body. I look further into the picture, which is very attractive, appealing. It’s drawing me in with its colourful scene of a river and the swan there, lording it, as swans do. Terrible proud birds they are. And a little man sitting on a bench by the river, looking like an old shepherd or a poet, and he’s holding a bottle with a swan on the label, would you believe? There’s someone else there but I can’t quite make out… Oh, it’s a woman, a little woman. How nice is that? Could be some kind of romantic triste, I suppose. It’s a very lovely picture. Pastoral. Idyllic. The kind of place I’d like to be. Hardly makes one think of whiskey. Is that a castle in the background?

I’ve drunk half the bottle, half of a full bottle that is, so I’m as merry as Father Christmas and everything is going fine and I’ve still half the bottle left to ease my way through the remains of the day. The lettering around the top of the label reads Whiskey Distillation Strength 62%.

* * * * * *

Shania, I swear I can hear someone talking, something about sound and a pixie and pixillation, but it’s like hearing the indistinct conversations from the other side of the wall in my apartment when I began to think I was hearing voices and they could communicate with me, asking me to do things I didn’t want to do like ‘Go to Switzerland’ – I didn’t – or ‘Eat more grits’ – I did. But, as they suggested themselves, I think I was just fitting the shapes of words to the sounds I thought I could hear. Today, now, the words are less clear, as though someone has been drinking. But I can’t help trying to listen. It’s like trying to focus on one of those floaters that drift across my eyesight just before I have a migraine. And I only get those when I drink whiskey. Which I don’t very often. Today I’ve brought a nice bottle of Chablis with me. Cigne Noir, Montée de Tonnerre, Yonne. Would you like a drop, Shania? Here, let me pour you a glass. There you go. Yes, it is isn’t it? I put it in the river to cool. When I took it out of the river a couple of minutes ago the label slipped off in my hand. It’s rather nice, showing a large black swan swimming on a river, just like that swan over there. And on the bank of the river, oh yes, I see what you mean. Just like us. With the chateau in the background. And the woods. Well, I never. What a coincidence.

* * * * * *

What or who was that talking about Swaziland and grids, reminding me of those inaudible comments I could hear sometimes, coming through the grating in the wall of that little place where I lived on my own for two years, making suggestions like ‘Visit Auntie Margaret this Saturday’ – I don’t have an Auntie Margaret, or ‘Try carpentry’ – I can’t imagine why? Now what the? What’s that swan in the label doing now? It’s gliding down the river, proud as ever, creating a little V-shaped wake, reflecting deep blues, burgundy reds, a speck of two of white, blossoms that have tumbled to the water from that enchanting wild rose climbing away into the trees. If I look up I can read the lettering around the top, something like Able Was I ‘Ere I Saw Elba or Et In Arcadia Ego. All right. Enough. Why do you keep going back to that? What do you expect? I. I. I. You can’t answer can you? You’ve never had an answer. Et In Arcadia Ego. And in Arcadia I? What the hell does that mean? Why is it so significant?

* * * * * *

It’s very unnerving. Oh, yes, I’m sure I’ll be fine, it’s just, you know, voices in the head, not great, not something you want, puts me a little on edge to be honest, it’s not improving my life, let’s say. Are you sure you can’t hear anything Shania? Someone saying something like ‘Armenia’ or “Elmo’s mean’. Yes, of course I have my little gun with me, the one Anton gave me. I wouldn’t go anywhere without my Sig Sauar. Not with all the reactionaries running around. We have a right to protect ourselves, Shania. Yes, the safety is on and it’s in the holster under my left arm here, see, very inconspicuous. On the left? Well, I’m right-handed, aren’t I? Right hand. Reach to the left. Of course not Shania, I have no intention of using it. Never have. It just gives me a little Swiss courage – although it’s made in Newington now.

* * * * * *

It all started the other day. For years I’ve not had a problem. Not fallen off the go-kart as my mother used to say, she fell off so often. My life was sweet, as sweet a glide as a swan on the water. My career was going well. I’m a research chemist, in pharmaceuticals, working on the fast-track development of an anti-viral against avian flu. We’ve been having good results. I was in the lab, what, three weeks ago, and I had just finished going through the previous day’s data with Shania, my research assistant – she’s a little more than that to be honest, but we keep work and play very separate, it’s good to have boundaries. We had a small disagreement. She had gone to ask our IT guys for help retrieving some more recent data, so I was alone in the lab. It’s kind of pale blue in there because there’s a gel on all the windows left over from a day of filming, and the pressurisation means there’s always a gentle hiss, like tinnitus.

There I am on my ownsome, just empty-brained really, quiet, calm, not sure what I was thinking about, Shania maybe, I think about her a lot, or golf, my albatross on the sixth at the weekend in spite of a claggie lie, I can’t remember. Then loud and clear I hear this voice, not like these nattering voices in the background – what are they saying now? It’s bloody irritating I can’t hear them properly – but loud and clear I hear this voice, though no one I knew, not my father – it was a male voice – nor my twin brother, I don’t think so anyway, although I haven’t seen him for years, and this voice – no it definitely wasn’t my twin brother – as calm as you please and with very good diction, the voice of a well-educated man with no discernible accent or emotion, no sense of the imperative or the threatening, a voice I can still hear so clearly it trembles the tiny nerves at the base of each hair follicle in my neck and I feel goose-flesh shiver across my body.

The voice says calmly and clearly, ‘You really need a drink’. And the voice was so specific, so right, so truthful, I left the lab, went to my car and drove all the way to The Eagle and committed myself once again to my long-standing love affair with whiskey. In three weeks, I have slipped below the surface of the world.

* * * * * *

I am not feeling well. I’ve been quite tearful off and on for days. I think I’m a burnt-out case. Just now I followed that black swan and walked along the river. It’s nice here. A good place for endings. The black swan stopped and I could see its webbed feet moving backwards and forwards in the clear water. I took another hit from my bottle and as I brought the rim down from my lips who do I see? Talk about a coincidence. I had to check the label and look again, so I’m doing this double-take backwards and forwards and he’s saying what are you doing here? And Shania’s with him, Shania who only split up with me a couple of nights before, and it’s as if she’s pleading with him as he’s reached inside his jacket and pulled out a gun he’s pointing at me, but he looks a lot like me so my brain is spinning and my hair follicles are dancing and then he seems to get distracted by Shania who stumbles against the bench on the riverside path, and he loses his temper now for some reason and a bottle goes flying into the river and the black swan takes off and the gun goes off and I’m on my own and Shania is a mess and the black swan, the black swan flies straight into me.

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Share A Patch of Sky

This is a story written in the 1990s that I recently found in a rarely opened folder on my Mac. It’s set in one of those ageing indoor water parks at the seaside, the sort of place where you find used nappies in the changing cubicles, wild teenage boys flicking wet towels at each other, distressed fibreglass flumes and fixtures with metal fatigue.

The boat slewed down the ramp at the end of its journey and plunged into the foaming bulk of water of the recovery pool. It came as no surprise to Waldron that the boat fanned no splash over the queue of people waiting along the rail that ran the whole length of the pool to the stairs. The boat was empty. Faval, upstairs on the launch bay, was messing around again. They all did it to each other. If there had been someone in the boat, a mother and child, or one of those muscular grown-up children from the home, then the splash would have been bigger. Some people even managed to get the boat to take off as it shot out of the steep tunnel of the final flume. As the boat took flight its passengers would always have the same expression on their faces, as their grip tightened on the rubber handles, arms taut, head held high, waiting, waiting for the thwap of rubber on water as the boat landed like a wedge on the tearing torrent and sent up a wave that could soak the whole queue. It was a duty, part of the fun, a final challenge. Usually, the bigger the mass the better the splash. Dads with beer bellies were guaranteed crowd pleasers. But then his mind began to assimilate and reconstruct the series of perceptions that were goading him, the look on the faces of those around him and their sudden focussed silence in spite of the interminable noise of the machinery and the roaring stream.

Waldron did a three-hour shift on the Hellboats, during which time he was expected to take it in turns with his colleagues manning the launch bay, the recovery pool and the grid - the long narrow grating above the top maelstrom flume. Occasionally boats jammed at the end of the conveyor that lifted them up from the launch pool. By raising the grating you could free the boats from the mechanism with the help of a long wooden pole, that everyone called the spike, strapped to the topside of the tube. But Waldron disliked working on the grid. He most enjoyed working in the launch bay. He didn’t mind working at the recovery pool, but he preferred the launch bay.

He had thought long and hard about his reasons. You could talk to the boaters in the launch bay and in the recovery pool. But in the launch bay people were eagerly talkative with anticipation or dread. At the recovery pool if people said anything it was usually just thanks or goodbye or a parting insult, although sometimes teenage girls would stay to help load the inflatables sideways onto the hoist. He had been reprimanded for letting them do this, because of the danger of cutting their feet on the metal floor of the hoist platform, or of entangling their swimming clothes in the hoist’s toothed machinery. But he still let them come, enjoying the frisson of desire and possibility. He also enjoyed the cheers and applause with which the queue rewarded an especially brave or sad or comical completion. One man had stood up in his boat as it glided to rest near the soakaway, holding his arms high, only to be jerked off his feet by the unpredictable buoyancy. The crowd roared. A small girl made a dumb show of being sick as her boat landed, her mother in the back with that expression of frozen doubt on her face. The crowd laughed and looked to each other. What a giggle at the end. A balding boy-like man, with a fixed grimace baring his teeth, knelt up in the front of his boat as it dived off the ramp, clenching his fists at shoulder height in pleased defiance. As he clambered free, a group of friends with equally set grimaces and short stocky bodies clustered around him chattering, patting his back. The crowd cheered yes.

But the crowd could be disappointed, too. Big finishes were de rigeur as far as the crowd were concerned. They had great expectations of young males and issued a communal moan if the performance, the size of the splash and the slapstick or heroics, failed to live up to expectations. A disappointed queue was the biggest problem with working at the recovery pool. They could get impatient. Waldron could feel their mood change like sunburn on the back of his neck. As the only representative of the organisation that ran the pool whoever was on recovery had to tolerate complaints, abuse and at times, violence. The supervisor’s office was just round the corner but the door was always closed. This was called delegation.

The recovery pool area was clean and tidy, although the tile floor was always soaked. Waldron never understood how Faval managed to wear trainers when he was on recovery yet never seemed to get them or any of his clothes wet. But then Faval was very dapper with his crew cut and good looks, always so trim and tidily turned out. Waldron preferred the décor of the launch bay, or the grid, as everyone else called it. It was white-tiled up to the ceiling, so that the whole area was clinical, clean and suggested technical proficiency. When Waldron worked here he felt he had merit in a kind of professional, scientific way, merit that he demonstrated in his feats. He felt in control.

What Waldron liked most about the launch bay was the way that as the queue made its way upstairs the crowd seemed to crystallise out as individuals, so that by the time they reached the rubber apron where they stepped into the boat they were just ones and twos, no crowd any longer. He could scrutinise each face, look into eyes, perhaps smell their presences, before sending them off on their journey down the Stixtube. This sending off involved a complex ritual which culminated, particularly if there was a female passenger, in a feat he considered attractively acrobatic and which he aimed to perfect. To begin with he might pull the boat to the very edge of the launch ramp above the raging torrent in its plastic gorge and make as if he was about to let the boat go backwards. The females would scream as they knew they were meant to, and would scream again as Waldron flicked cold water onto their dry backs or stood on the side of the inflatable and bounced it in the water until it was waterlogged. This gave greater impetus and acceleration to the boat’s precipitate slide down the launch chute, and the screams heard echoing back up the tube were often of genuine dismay, fear or terror.

But before he finally sent a boat on its way Waldron might sit beside it and talk to its passengers, one leg lazily anchoring them. Here they wouldn’t complain, even if they had waited ages, for at last they were on the verge of the experience they desired. For a few brief seconds Waldron could hold and appreciate heavy- hipped grandmothers, small children, blunt fathers and his exquisite favourites, girls and young women, poised in the tenderness of anticipation. Then without warning he would jump up, letting the boat be beckoned by the current, uncertainly at first, towards the avalanche of water pummelling down the chute. He would leap from the side to grasp the ledge above the opening and would swing himself through the opening and back, so that as the boat finally reached the edge of the chute, his feet would land on the soft rounded rubber of the stern and with all his might he would bounce down hard, giving the boat one last tremendous shove and creating the momentum to swing himself back, onto the opposite side from which he had started, with a gymnastic panache in spite of his stocky legs, barrel chest and sticking-out ears. The boat would disappear in a mist of screams and spray.

Afterwards he would glance furtively around him as if seeking invisible applause. Inside he was a cascade of pride. At this point he might check the swathe of Elastoplast across his foot, a badge of war, or look to the cubicle way across the pools and tubes to see if Annette was sitting, as she sometimes did, cross legged on the control box, chewing her lips, watching him. The really good thing about working on the grid was the closer contact it gave with her across the landscape of tubes and pipes that made the ride seem like a chemical factory.

But now Faval was manning the grid, Waldron was on recovery and Annette wasn’t on the control box.

After Pacel, his sister Jess and his mother got into the boat at the top of the flume. Pacel didn’t know what to expect, though everyone said it was brilliant. The noise was constant, but Pacel hardly noticed it, he was so excited to be in the front of the boat. The lad who helped them into the boat kept his leg on its side. Then he jumped up and out and the last Pacel saw of him was a flash of colour leaping, then the roar grew much louder, the boat tipped and Pacel was hurtling into the very force of the torrent, almost vertically it felt, faster and faster with great gushes of spray and a dense mist around them. At some point he felt a heavy push and was jerked backwards with the pressure of acceleration. He couldn’t look back to his mother even if he’d wanted to, he was so transfixed by the movement and speed and roaring. Something seemed to pull the boat to one side for a moment so that it skewed in the flume’s rush, then down, down, down they surged, faster and faster. The light faded suddenly as the density of the tube thickened, and its colour changed from aquamarine to the dark green of fir trees. Although he couldn’t see, Pacel felt the tube had widened too, perhaps because of some change in the quality of the roaring echo, but he was too in awe to wonder. He couldn’t see the furious turbulence that bore the little craft. He couldn’t know what had happened to his mother, or to Jess. For a moment, the boat slowed a little, came out into a dull orange light and began to climb the moving ramp, the rising conveyor. Great sliding metal teeth rose above each other like an escalator in a continuous chain lifting the little boat higher and higher up the steep incline. The boat seemed to be borne on water travelling uphill. Fascinated, Pacel looked back and saw his mother being lumbered up the boiling slope behind him, limbs at all angles, like the night he had walked into her bedroom and found her with a man not his step-father. Then like now a voice was screaming, Mama, mama, and Pacel scrambled round the boat in terror, rocking it from side to side as it reached the top of the incline. The plastic base of the boat was stretchy like frog’s skin and his feet sank into it as the moving tines dropped away and the boat edged toward the rollers at the start of the top flume. There was a groaning sound of a motor under strain, the boat’s shape became strangely distorted, then the bottom of the boat began to peel back like the foil from a pot of yoghurt. Beneath were the rollers and the churning teeth of a dozens cogs, silently doing their work in the roar of the torrent.

On the grid Faval knew that a boat had got stuck. There was a rhythm to their arrival and he noticed any change immediately. Glad of the added interest during his spell on the grating, and the potential opportunity to be a focus of attention, he quickly unlashed the spike, and walked along the grid towards its beginning, looking down all the while to see where the boat was caught. At first sight he thought the boy was holding the sides to stop the boat from moving forward. They did that sometimes. Hey, he yelled, as if the boy would hear him above the roar. Faval looked around, as if seeking aid, and noticed Annette had climbed back onto the control box. Looking over her shoulder she saw him, and gently swung herself round to reveal her opening knees and thighs. His mouth parted, as he watched her careful tantalising movements. For a moment he forgot his work.

By the time Faval had lifted the grille section above the boat, the boy was lying forward. Faval called to him again, and worked the pole under the boat to lever it off the rollers. It was then that he realised the bottom of the boat was missing, so that the inflatable suddenly shot off the cogs like a tyre inner tube and rushed away with the water down the flume. It was then that he realised the boy wasn’t messing around, wasn’t faking. It was then he realised that the tension on the spike was increasing. He had manhandled and pushed the spike so that it had become wedged between the tines and the cogs and it was flexing and springing with each judder of the jammed machinery. Just as he perceived the danger, the need to pull not push, the pole splintered and he toppled forward under the momentum of his own force onto the jagged remains of the haft which pierced the left side of his body like a harpoon. Jammed again into the cogs, it shuddered and jerked Faval like a puppet, his feet dragging in the rushing stream at the mercy of the chewing metal teeth. Sinking down, Faval saw part of the boy glide towards him, and a woman seemed to be struggling with a girl to clamber over the top of the conveyor onto the rollers, their faces lifting and falling in time with the rising prongs. When they tumbled over into the fierce stream of the top flume the deadweight of the bodies knocked away the broken shaft and carried Faval and the boy with them, all unknowing, past caring, all in a fixed embrace like a family. They slid together faster and faster along the top flume, were swept up on the high turn of the whorl, then down into the rushing current as it approached the final ramp.

Waldron was about to pull a boat from the recovery pool and had reached to grip the rubber handles, watched he hoped by a couple of teenage girls in the queue. He looked up to check. As the next surge of water sluiced down the ramp the slewing movement of another boat caught his eye. Because it was empty it came as no surprise to Waldron that the boat fanned no splash over the queue of people waiting along the rail that ran the whole length of the pool to the stairs. Then he noticed that the bottom of the boat had completely disappeared. He straightened up. Something bulky was coming down the final flume, something almost took flight as it came off the ramp, and part of his mind heard his supervisor say no more than two in a boat, no swimming in the flume, but what landed heavily in the churning coils of water sent the biggest splash he’s ever seen across the whole staring silent queue, and for the merest moment, a smile started to grow from the corners of his mouth, but was stillborn, as the huddle drifted towards him and the bottomless boat bobbed up and down in the water like a child’s rubber ring, fringed by pink foam.

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Windy Arbour

Once, many years ago, I lived out in the country in Lancashire, at a school in Cockerham. I’ve written elsewhere about the school and the fact that it was once the house where Leonora Carrington had lived as a child. I’ve included some background about her and the school below.

It’s wild country round there, between the sea and the fells, overlooking Morecambe Bay with its nuclear power station and treacherous sands, and the point where slaves were once landed. It’s the kind of place where Andrew Michael Hurley sets his strange, unsettling books. There’s a website dedicated to Cockerham’s history and there you’ll find mention of ‘Windy Arbour’.

Near where I was living, a canal passed by an old, ruined cottage with that name. In the field beside it, where we used to go coursing, there was the trace of a Roman road. On an autumn evening, when the sun lay flat across the grass, you could still make out the shadow of where a way used to be. Hares and rabbits might run across it now and sheep sleep on it, but that old road lingered.

A tramp lived at the cottage. He would stay there at night after wandering through the fields by day, collecting scraps of metal and bits of dry wood. Nobody really knew who the tramp was or where he came from. The farmer’s wives called him Jasper, but that was just a joke. Most of us simply nodded our heads to him, except Jen, the barmaid at The Manor, who for the sake of politeness always called him Mr Stephen, the name she said he had first given her.

I’ll call him Stephen.

Stephen originally came from down south somewhere. When he was in the Manor, he would start muttering ‘Carry on London. Carry on’. But nobody took much notice. It was simply the signal that Stephen was getting drunk. Most of the money he earned from selling scrap metal or bundles of firewood he spent on the dark brown ales he drank from a sherry glass.

And that’s about the most anyone knew about Stephen. There was a rumour that during the war, he’d lost most of his company during a battle and he had never recovered. It might be true.

One night when I went up to the Manor for a couple of beers, I was surprised to see that Stephen wasn’t in his usual seat next to the fruit machine. Later, after talking it over with the Jen, I decided to walk down the lane to the ruined cottage to see if he was all right. When I got there, was no sign of him. I presumed he had simply changed his drinking habits and had gone to another pub. He had been known to do that in the past. I thought no more about it.

The next evening, I went up to the Manor again, and Stephen was back in his usual place.

I nodded to him. ‘Didn’t fancy our company last night then, eh?’

He glanced up from his drink and looked me in the eye for a moment. His face was white. He closed his eyes and sank back in his seat.

‘Mr Stephen had a bit of bad news last night, didn’t you love?’ said Jen.

Stephen remained silent, said nothing and Jen rubbed a finger near her temples with a knowing look on her face.

‘Shame,’ she murmured.

I sat down next to Stephen. We didn’t speak, but occasionally he would turn to me, and his mouth would open, then close. Later on, he walked out unsteadily, muttering, taking a bottle of beer with him. As he hurried through the door he looked back at me. There was no expression in his pale face.

‘Bugger it’, he muttered and was gone.

I left the pub at about eleven. There was no moon that night, but the stars were bright and the air cold and clear. As I passed the field at the end of the road, something startled me. It wasn’t a noise, more a lack of sound, a stillness. I stopped and scanned the field. I thought I saw Stephen, far down the road away from me near the brook. He seemed to be running along the edge of the wood, a shadow in and out of shadow. There was no sound of his movement, a silent form of rushing darkness. He disappeared into the wood, and I lost him.

I walked home puzzled.

I met him out in the fields a couple of days later. He looked haggard and sick. As usual he was wearing his greasy old raincoat, and he carried a white shopping bag full of old newspapers and some bits and pieces of rusty metal. I walked with him to the road, passing the time of day. He called me Dud or Dudley, because he knew where I came from, and when we reached the roadside he said quietly, ‘Don’t go Dud.’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘All right.’

In the following minutes of silence, I pulled myself up onto a gate and sat there, elbows on knees. Stephen bent over his bag, shuffling his papers. He would stop now and then and look towards the canal, or towards the woods where I had seen him a few nights before. He pulled a piece of newspaper from his bag and held it out to me. I understood I should read it.

It was cutting torn from the Willesden Gazette, dated October 31^st 1947. On it were some lines of verse.

The Tinker’s Tale

by Stefan Gosvitch.

I’ll begin my tale, the old man said

a fag in his fingers as he scratched his head

It’s a tale that’s true, though some may say

I invented the story when I was bored one day.

It all concerns a friend of mine,

a lad named Tom with half a mind

He lived with his dad on a ramshackle farm

He was a quiet lad, never did any harm

But his father hated him very much

If he got in his way he’d give him a cuff.

And he wasn’t looked after very well

His dad often said he could go to hell

for all he cared, & that wasn’t much

So poor Tom had a pretty bad life

& he stood no chance of getting a wife

his only joy was when he came for a drink

he’d knock ‘em back as quick as you blink

Well time went on and Tom began

to get a bit nasty about his old man.

His dad started treating him like a cur

Tom was spoiling to do him a hurt.

Some nights I’d see him with a look in his eye

he’d say he’d get even by and by.

Sure enough that very night

Tom reached his limit and started a fight.

He stabbed his dad with a kitchen knife

And very soon after took his own life.

Well things went quiet on the farm for a while.

The police came down and opened a file,

Closed it soon after, an open and shut case,

But it was opened after a few days….

That was all. The paper was roughly torn at the last line.

‘Did you write this, Stephen?’ I asked but received no reply.

He held his hand up when I went to give him back the cutting.

‘What was your bad news?’ I asked him.

‘Can’t sell the metal.’

He picked up his bag and wandered off along the grass verge keeping close to the hedge. He never looked back. I watched him walk away up the hill. His silvery head bent, his bag swinging against his raincoat, flapping around him as he walked. Near the top of the hill, just below the canal bridge, a crow flew up from the other side of the hedge and lay in the air above the sweep of grass.

It was my birthday. There was a big party at the pub that night and I got pretty drunk. Afterwards I couldn’t sleep and spent a long time prowling round my room. I stood at my window watching the mist thicken across the land. I went out walking in a freezing fog. A deep frost on the ground and in the trees. All the colour had drained from the countryside around me. My ears and eyes ached from the biting cold.

I stopped for a moment to get my bearings, unsure of how far I had walked, but I was sobering up. I was making my way back along the canal when I heard a faint voice drift through the icy air.

‘Dudleee…..’

I stopped by the canal bridge and listened, peering into the mist.

I felt uneasy. There was a bleak moment of eerie quiet.

With a crash of branches giving way and breaking, something pale and heavy fell out of the silence through the trees. It dropped like a gravestone and struck the thin veil of ice on the canal’s dark surface. It was so close to me so that I could smell it falling, rank and sour.

It didn’t move, except as it heaved up and down by the effect of its own descent on the water. It was the corpse of a great white bird, a swan, that lay now in the water, one wing outstretched and its head submerged.

I felt sick with shock. I cursed the dead bird in the broken water.

I stumbled up to the road. Stephen was running towards me along the lane from the cottage as best he could. He met me in the darkness. He dragged me into a field and pushed me down to crouch below the hedge in a tangle of thorn. I begged him to explain but he stood in silence, watching, his hand on my shoulder holding me down.

He was staring at the wood, his mouth open, breathing hard, his white face strained with tension.

A wind had come up and was tearing the grass.

The trees of the wood swayed and twisted like a mass of moving arms.

The speck of golden light came out of the wood. It was but a speck, a tiny speck that grew in the wood itself like a flame. The wood gave birth to this light; it came from the heart of the trees.

“See, see!” Stephen shook me.

The speck of light expanded, became a flower of light, and the flower a shield, which then burst in brilliance, filling the trees, surrounding us, a great golden glow, and beyond it, an unseeable world of black.

The sheer light bathed us and bathed us in silence. There was no sound, no sound at all.

We looked into the heart of light, the silence. I was petrified. I felt naked, I could not see, I could do nothing. I was impotent, my mind at its limit. Yet somehow I knew that this was just a beginning.

The earth began to retch and buckle.

The stretch of grass before us moved unevenly, the sods broke up, turned over, and the crumbling soil beneath came up. Worms, slugs, and insects crawled and writhed and twisted among the clumps of earth. Stephen dropped to his knees beside me. I fell forwards clutching the writhing soil, scraping a noise from my throat.

‘Stop. Stop.’

But the long dead were rising. The light began to fade, to drain underground, sinking into the upturned earth. And as darkness closed around us once more, the scalding noise of a thousand squealing beings burst out of the air. I breathed the noise. Panic-stricken, we ran to hide from it, flinching from its pain. I tried to escape, but was caught in the hedge, and tore my face and hands in a scramble of thorns. I fell, legs twisted, and watched in terror.

The noise intensified, whining, screeching, metal on metal. The light had pooled as it seeped away into the earth. Then it rose, like a slab lifted from a tomb. It shimmered and a human form began to emerge, the spectre of a man, dripping with liquid light that splashed to the ground, to be absorbed by the earth.

One side of his body was whole, but the other side, from eye socket to groin, was alive with maggots and insects. They seethed around the head of a broken spear, stuck fast in his ribs. Clutching at it, his hands were broken and twisted. His one eye was white. He looked blindly towards us.

Behind him, indistinct, vaporous, there lay other men, some as skeletons. Beyond them a troop of corpses carried their own heads. Others clutched swords or spears that pierced their bodies through. Their hands were drenched in blood. Some had no eyes, but worms writhed in the sockets. The noise that addled my brain was their noise. And the light and the darkness were theirs and out of that noise, as it screeched and screamed its loudest, came words, words I felt within me.

Send a messenger.

That we are the men of the wall.

Here is the end of the road.

We cannot hold.

Here is the end of the way.

Guard well the land.

The words trailed away. The noises faded as the spectres seeped back into the land. The golden light dwindled, flickered, sank.

I was terribly cold. I stared at the wood, at the grass, at Stephen. I made myself go to him and held his head in my arms, held him as tightly as I could.

His face was the face of the ghostly soldier.

‘Bugger it,’ he breathed, and his eyes stared up at broken branches and the grey, dawn cloud beyond.

I knew he was dead. I lay beside him and cried for him, shaking uncontrollably.

I spent a lot of time with the police, stayed in the cells. They never believed what I told them. Stephen died of a heart attack after we’d been out drinking. The police told me his name was Thomas Greenwood, an old soldier, he had been parachuted from a glider over Arnhem but took a bayonet in the chest and had been taken prisoner.

When had I first met him, really, they wanted to know. Why did I have such influence over him? People blame me for his death, accuse me of taking an old man out poaching when he wasn’t fit on a bad night. Worse, that I killed him when I was drunk and out of my mind. I think that’s what most people believe.

I was in a secure hospital for a while. I was told I had a personality disorder. It was a long time before I came back here. People don’t talk to me much, and I never go to the pub.

I’ve be working as a volunteer on the archaeological dig in the field near the canal. I was reading the paper yesterday and there was a short article about recent discoveries made here. I cut it out.

According to the professor quoted in the article, a chap I had seen on the dig wearing a woolly balaclava, the Roman road here was never finished. It doesn’t go anywhere. And near the spot where the Roman road petered out, they’ve found what are probably weapons and tools of the men who were building the road. They also found a skeleton, with a bronze spearhead stuck in its ribs.*

From I’ve looked at clouds, A Patch of Sky May 21st 2024

I had a part-time job for my last two years at university, working as a child-care assistant at a dark Victorian pile called Crookhey Hall School, at Cockerham in Lancashire. It was a Liverpool Education Authority residential school for what were then called (!!) ‘Educationally Sub-normal Children’ (!!) This was a catch all for a group of Liverpudlian boys aged between 4 and 15 who ranged from born naturalists who had played truant too often hunting birds nests or field mice, to expert car thieves; from youngsters with autism and learning difficulties, to teens with mental health problems. With such a diverse group, the staff, both teachers and care workers, did an amazing job. Mine was simply to be around two or three evenings a week to make sure they got to bed and settled down. And didn’t abscond. Most of the boys thought they were imprisoned at Stalag Luft III and felt it their moral duty to escape. Some did, only to be brought back to the school by the local plods, who found them wet and cold, sheltering on the moss.

Schemes

I was reminded of the school (in a stark contrast - both sides, now) when I read last week that a painting by Leonora Carrington has been sold for a record price of $28.5 million. That dark Victorian pile, Crookhey Hall, was the house where Leonora Carrington grew up.

The painting which Sotheby’s sold for the record price was Les Distractions de Dagobert, painted by Carrington in 1945. Although Carrington painted Les Distractions de Dagobert soon after moving to Mexico City, for me it, and much of her other work, is full of echoes of Lancashire legends, beings and motifs, boggarts and will o' the wisps, ghosts and shape-shifters, fairies and witches. 'It’s a chaotic yet beautiful painting, bursting with imagery on every inch of the canvas,' writes Aimee Ferrier.

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*I wrote the first draft of Windy Arbour at Crookhey Hall when I worked at the school in 1973. It was one of the first short stories I ever wrote and I read it out to the boys in one of the dormitories as a bedtime story to try it out.

With very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year. Have a great time!