Street Artist

He is the secretive puppeteer of invisible marionettes, and he at once fascinates and repulses me. His hands pirouette about their wrists, controlling unseen dolls dancing apart to their own speculative and hesitant rhythms. Lost in their own world, listening to their own impulses, they have no mutual attraction; they do not flirt, do not seek to caress each other, but merely follow as he walks them along the street. One seems to care childlike about the cracks in the pavement – she jumps to avoid them, while the other, the androgynous one, brushes aside all obstacles crying ‘look at me, I’m free!’

They are oblivious to his hesitance at the kerb, his glance at the danger of the busy crossing. Then they stop. They slip self-consciously to the floor while their strings become tangled, awkward.

He has spotted me.

82 - Wings

Linda talked of herself as having a ‘butterfly mind’, and when prompted by puzzled expressions would expand “Oh, I just flit from idea to idea without being able to concentrate on any of them!” She would then take the metaphor further, and explain how at least from her fleeting chance encounters she had gained a good overview of how beautiful the world around her was. What she never understood, what was missing from the eulogizing at her crowded humanist cremation, was how beautiful the friends around her regarded her flitting among them. For from where they stood, Linda’s wings had made a snow angel from their powdery existence.

81 - Scape-bread

One friend taught her to make scape-bread. “Knead it hard for at least ten minutes; I work out all my anger when I’m making bread!”

Another showed her that dough was in want of caresses rather than pummelling. “Fold gently; treat it with respect: it is a living creature.”

So it is that she lives life as an apprentice baker, beating her frustrations into those around her, or nurturing their growth, as the day takes her.

80 - A Quick Game of Drabble ...*

“Hurry up, Mikka!”
Across the space between them appeared ‘Three of the moons were droid-made’.
“Double-phrase for ‘droid-made’, makes 43 klep.”
Sor smiled sweetly as he joined ‘moons’ to ‘Saturn’ with ‘imploded above’.
“Triple-syllable for ‘imploded’: 92.5 to me, sucker!”
Mikka mind-melded with his weapons. You could never be sure an old-time galanaut like Sor had entirely lost the habit of post-victory genocide, and Sor’s ship was itching for a fight.
There was a burst of noise aft.
“Mother ship beacon,” sang Mikka. “Call it a draw.”
Before Sor could answer him, the retreating picket’s neutron-drive scattered the phrases.

* I don't know if sci-fi writers invented flash-fiction, but a 'drabble' is an SF story no more than 100 words long.

79 - The Cock-a-Leekie Ebbs

The cock-a-leekie ebbs from the right of the bowl, and I read in its jetsam a turn to the north. It is part way through the Wellington that I realize that though the meal is just right the train itself is quite wrong. I have until the dessert course to re-think my holiday, and until breakfast to make contact with my luggage, checked-in to the van. I’ve made worse mistakes, I decide, and order a liqueur.

78 - Car Boot

Several early bird car-booters bagged bargains such as a packaged GPS for £20 and a pair of travel rugs for a fiver. The best deal had to be the alloys and slightly muddy tyres for a ton, but the Spear & Jackson stainless steel fork and spade were okay for a tenner. The boots, the overalls, and the box of disposable gloves were £10 the lot, after which pretty well all the forensic evidence was gone.

77 - Elizabeth David and Me

Early one Winter solstice I settled into the top deck of the X5 with Jack Kerouac as my companion and serenaded by kids from St Johns heading for their breakfast club. Down at street level, I saw the handwritten sign: trainee baker wanted – enquire within.

Sal, Dean and Marylou sat quietly in the ’49 Hudson waiting for me to get on board with them. Eddie was starving, but wasn’t he always?

I wondered.

The tall mist–enveloped beeches of the West Woods leaned towards the bus, the rising sun silhouetting us against their boughs. I’d criss-crossed the downs for over a year now, burning in the unremitting summer and freezing in snow-bound traffic. Was all this an escape?

The college catering course had left its indelible inedible stain on shelves of library books. There were five cracked copies in the same paperback edition of English Bread and Yeast Cookery, and there and then I fell in love with the woman who sold out enough to have her own cookery range, but not to the extent that she’d sell garlic presses.

We bicker now and then, Elizabeth David and me. She uses far too much salt, I complain, but maybe I just sold out more than she did in the matter of taste. And I can’t remember on which Midwest sidewalk I left Sal, Dean and Marylou, but Eddie and his kin visit me often. There is always someone hanging around the rubbish skip in the car park behind the bakery.

Some of my best bread goes there.

76 - After Dark

Night fell in the hydroponics lab as if ‘at the flick of a switch’, though only a few of my great-grandparents recalled seeing such a device. The texture of the silence mutated from livestock and distant traffic to wildlife and love-murmuring. There was the staccato snap of a twig broken underfoot, and my hearts skipped a beat. This was a simulation: where in hell did a twig come from, and who or what trod on it?

75 - Games People Play

Tony looked up, a frown of curiosity crossing his features as he wondered what Martin was up to. He heard what sounded like a clockwork boat; surely not? Then he saw the boat, but not clockwork at all: a little steam toy that Martin had bought at a festival some years before. A fully grown man, in his second childhood evidently, playing with a boat in the bathroom sink of all places!

Martin changed the unspoken subject.

“Could you do me a favour? Would you take the egg boxes back to Sandy?"

“Er, okay."

Tony picked up the cartons and turned to the door. He paused awhile, and looking back added: “You alright?"

“Yes: why?"

“Oh, no reason."

Closing the door behind him, Tony raised his eyebrows and breathed out. Dad was being dad, he supposed, but still ….

Back at the washbasin, Martin drained the water and cursed the noisy little toy. He wasn't playing, he was just … okay he was playing, but only to see whether the boat actually worked. In the 10 years since he had bought it on a whim, he'd never even tried it out.

“Well," he mused, “at least now I’ve something to write about.”

Egg boxes delivered, and greetings exchanged with his friend’s mum, Tony ran upstairs to resume the previous day’s game.

“You okay?”

“Good, yeh: you?”

“Yeh. Zombie Revenge?”

“Nah: World of Fury?”

“Okay. Does your dad ever do strange things?”

“He’s an oldie: everything he does is strange.”

“Yeh, but does he play with toys?”

“No! Does yours?”

“Looked like it just now: weird. First to score 300?”

Martin sat down to type. He still hadn’t settled on a plot, and he didn’t want to turn out a stream-of-consciousness ‘literary’ novel, but he had the bones of a character. ‘Edward’ would be playful, enquiring of mind, handsome – of course. Artistic license, it was called.

74 - Job Satisfaction

“Hmph!”

For some reason, cutting the hedge didn’t appeal. It stretched away to his right, perhaps forty metres long; forty metres that spoke of chore, of labour, of boredom.

Too old, and too surrounded by maturity that there was any hope that Tom Sawyer-like he might find friends who’d druther take on the task imposed upon him by the woman of the house, he looked down at the trimmer. It wasn’t showing signs of getting on without him, so he picked it up.

A few perspiring hours later, he stepped back from the hedge and surveyed the forty metres to his left. For all he hated Leylandii, he had to admit that trimmed Leylandii was better than untrimmed. There was, he supposed, something satisfying in such work after all.

“Hmph!”

73 - Whatever Happened to the Daisy Wheel?

Philon the curator, such a lazy man as ever lived on the Isle of Saru, was asleep. He was always asleep, but his sleep was to acquire more than a tinge of guilt.

There were no visitors to the miserable little museum of finds. There never was much call to spend time viewing relics in these humid winter days after the flood. Philon had taken one of the exhibits – a moth-eaten fabric bag of polyvinyl waste – and placed himself upon it under the shade of the welcome sign.

Welcomed to the quiet isle that day – which day? – and arriving who knows how, perhaps by barge, perhaps by sled, was someone after just a single item. Nothing else was touched.

Philon swears even now that no item but one was missing, though its absence was only noted when he roused from his slumbers to eat, to drink a little, and to reluctantly carry on his task of cataloguing the collection. Thus in time perhaps further stock will be reported as missing, but for now …

Now Philon stands mute and helpless in front of the glass case. The fabric backing shows the dust-free silhouette surrounding the nail from which, according to the handwritten label, is missing a “Printer Wheel (Daisy), circa 20^th Century”.

72 - Portrait of Ginny



Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de' Benci



The street-market traders outside the once fashionable Florentine window are a strain on Ginny’s nerves, and she looks away for distraction.

“Please don’t move, signorina”, says Leo.

She sighs and resigns herself to the tiresome young man’s lens. She practices her Italian by trying to understand his ramblings. He seems to mutter to himself about too much light, of wanting to throw the background out of focus. Small wonder he wants to blur it, she thinks, having chosen juniper and laurel branches as a backdrop. What was he thinking: questo pazza?

She supposes her lover Bernie – is he her lover? she wonders – is too stingy - ‘avaro’ or ‘trichio’? - to have paid for Andreas himself to take her picture. Instead she has this apprentice; has to make do with ‘From the studio of …’ rather than ‘By …’; the lot of the mantenuta, the kept woman.

Will things be different once she marries Louis?

71 - Fall Colours

From ice-free pole to ice-free pole, the world is in trouble enough already. Every tree is sacred, so much does the human race’s survival depend on the forests to absorb every extra ounce of CO2.

There is a bitter irony – you know, the sort that leaves an aftertaste – in that it all started with a climatologist accidentally killing a tree by ripping its branches off. He fell the whole way down, grasping furiously until one stopped him about twenty feet up.

State Police told us later he’d been in a light plane taking samples of the air, and had to bail out when he got into trouble, but with trees everywhere in this part of the park he’d no option but to land in the treetops. It was the plane catching fire that was the end of it.

We stood helplessly by as the flames caught him. We had to be rescued ourselves.

Now we stand helplessly by as the last great hope of mankind burns horizon to horizon. It’s hard to be angry. What’s the point?

70 - Honest!

“Honest! He’d an entire conversation with a dung beetle: said the beetle was the fourth reincarnation of Lawrence of Arabia and was desperate to find his old motorbike. Asked the whole audience to help find it, if it was under their seat, ’cos the beetle was really upset. Jeez: just as well it wasn’t a camel! The best 10 euro I’ve ever spent, I tell you: just wait ’til I do my Best Man speech …”

69 - After the Party

“I do like the Chenin, but I must admit a penchant for Gavroche in its many guises.”

“Cynthia dear: you’re looking splendid! You must tell me your secret.”

“… and then he had the cheek to quote some footpath number at me! I sent him packing toute de suite.”

“Howard?”

“Chardonnay is much maligned, but of course you know that.”

“His number dear, your trainer: I must have it.”

“Cigar, old chap? Cuban.”

“Howard! What’s the matter?”

“Sorry, I was just ear-wigging.”

“What do you mean, ‘ear-wigging’? There’s no one here to listen to. What is up with you?”

“Nothing … nothing really.”

He looked once again around the dust-sheeted dining room, then closed forever the front door of his childhood.

68 - Right, said Fred

The mirror-wall of the downtown studio sucked in the Fall gloom, thinning rather than enhancing the weak evening light. Mae stood, expectant, in front of her reflected self, willing him to begin his god dammed audition and let her get her tired god dammed body back to her apartment. She blew cigarette smoke up at the ceiling, and waited some more.

“I, er, haven’t got anything prepared.”

Her dark eyes showed she knew that already.

“Look, I’m more of an actor than a dancer.”

“You’re what the studio says you are if you wanna work in this town, honey.”

She relented a little.

“Come towards me; come at me; and when you reach me, stop as if I’m just too precious to touch.”

He raised an eyebrow; he raised a god dammed eyebrow! She almost liked this guy and his hutzpah.

“Your résumé says you can act and dance a little. Well dance, dammit!”

He thought about it, cupping his chin and smirking. His look seemed to ask: ‘Are you ready, sister?’

He walked. He walked for Christ’s sake! Only, he heel-toe-kicked as he did so, and the nearer he got the quicker he tapped and the harder her heart beat until he stopped dead in front of her. His head inclined to her neck, she could feel his breath, and his hands were either side of her waist, she could feel their warmth. This was so unprofessional, she thought; I’m blushing!

She breathed once more.

“Screen tests begin 7am. Be there.”

“Right.”

67 Well met, Stranger

I know you! You're the guy
I bumped into last year.
"Do I know you?"
I asked,
Thinking we had met.
Only we hadn't
Then.
We have now.
You're the guy I bumped into last year.
Do I know you?

66 - Last Wishes

“It’s quite clever how they can keep yon coffin level when they go up steps like that, isn’t it Muriel?”

“I’m sure they’re doing Alex proud, Gwen, quite proud.”

“Oh we’ll miss him at the Kirk, him and his sense of humour .”

“We will too. Of course he missed Mary so; I dare say it was a broken heart that carried him off.”

“It was that or The Grenadier’s steak pies. I dare say you’re right, though, and what with all that nastiness after she died.”

“Why whatever do you mean?”

“Oh well when Mary died, Drummonds laid her out in the chapel of rest. Only, they made a gay auld mess of her. Alex said she looked like the laughing policemen in the arcade at Leith.”

“Never! Why when he gets laid in his grave, he’ll be fair spunnin’ round that Drummonds did him too!”

“Oh Drummonds was his choice, hen. He paid up front against one of their policies: “Ensure you get the funeral you want!” D’ye remember the flyers they left in St Giles?

“But I don’t understand why he’d go to them when they did his poor Mary so bad.”

“Oh that was Alex’s humour getting the best of his Christian upbringing. He got them tae agree to have pall-bearers carry his coffin from his flat in Hannover Street to the Kirk on High Street. Gave them the map o’ the route, saying he wanted to be taken the way he always walked to Matins.”

“But his arthritis …”

“Aye, hen: wi’ a career in rugby behind him, Alex’s knees were long gone and nae up to walking further than the corner of Princes Street. But Drummond – that’s the red-faced lummock at the rear – disnae have a full set o’ marbles and didna twig when he saw the map.”

“He must’ve had a bit of a shock this morning, then.”

“Oh aye: Playfair Steps is hard on the legs at the best o’ times, but in high summer and carrying the mortal remains of a prop forward … they must feel every one of those steps. What is it: a hundred?”

“Oh the scoundrel! Guid on ’im.”

65 - Beauty

Horn blaring, the silver TT sped past the truck and on under the road bridge.

“Up yours!”

“Is that the tree up there, Billy?”

“Yup.”

“Strange shape, isn’t it.”

“It looks like there were three boles but they took one out to dig the cutting for the by-pass.”

“Sort of gives a hollowed-out look on that side, as if some giant took a bite out of it.”

Billy looked askance at his mate.

“What? Can’t I get a little poetic? ‘I think that I shall never see’, and all that?”

Billy breathed deeply.

“Put the cones out, Ed. I’ll get the chainsaw ready.”

64 - Power

“I said I bet that you look good on the dance floor…”

Jayz clipped his harness on and started craning the basket out over the lip of the tower.

“I don't know if you're looking for romance or …”

He began the slow descent from the service deck to the top glazing, keeping an interested eye on a passing police helicopter.

“Don't know what you're looking for …”

A surprised look came at him from the other side of the glass as an IT guy was distracted from adjusting a projector.

“Well I bet that you look good on the dance floor …”

Jayz clipped his squeegee to his glove and started to clean off the guano that was a particular feature of the topmost floors of the building.

“Dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984 …”

The screen in the executive meeting room went blank and the room fell dark.

“from 1984…”

The basket lurched as the emergency brake fail-safe clicked in. Jayz stopped his iPod, and reached for his radio.

“Chris; Jayz. What’s goin’ on, man? Are you pissing me about?”

“Jayz, we’ve got some sort of power-out. Hang on.”

“good choice of words”, thought Jayz, and he watched the IT guy inside the room. The guy reached for the desk socket, trying to get power back to his projector.

Far below the basket, the sound of car horns swelled. Then came the police sirens. The power drought had started, and Jayz’s abseiling ropes now seemed pitifully short.