Since I think the last instalment only brings the story up to where it already was, here are a few more chapters.
Chapter Seven
The Day of Casting Off didn’t begin with nudity. It began as far from nudity as could be imagined. The entire Ezwayna people assembled outside the Great Hall—which was not a hall, but an enormous tamzan, modelled after the Great Hall they had left behind in the Anarchy. They were not only clothed, their figures were entirely smothered behind layers of cloaks and coats. They looked like huge babies, wrapped up by an overprotective mother.
They stood in a ring around the Great Hall, hand in hand, and Fox stood with them. Nobody was pardoned from this linking of hands, except for those who were bedridden. Fox was holding hands with two boys his age, their hands muffled in gloves though it was not a cold day. He thought it was strange that children were allowed to join in this ritual of nudity, but the Ezwayna children seemed to think it perfectly normal.
Every tenth person in the ring was a Rippler, somebody who knew the Earthly Tale off by heart. The Earthly Tale was the history of the Ezwayna, which they added to every year. It was called “earthly” because it was set on this world, not in magical realms like lots of the Ezwayn’s other stories. Not that the Earthly Tale was without magical events itself. There were miracles aplenty, but mostly it was full of harvests and marriages and births, plagues and persecution and the last words of wise old men. And now it was being recited, line by line.
“And in that year there was the famous race of the Purple and Green, the race over thirty miles, when Oldmaster beat Briddek to the Great Pine…”
They were about thirty years into the chronicles, and it had been two hundred and fifty years since the Ezwayna people had been formed by the Great Pledge. Fox sighed. He’d heard enough about beautiful brides and honourable judges that day. If only he could—
Suddenly a huge cheer arose from all around, and the two boys to either side removed their hands from his own. Suddenly, everybody’s hands were in the air, and Fox quickly copied them, almost without thinking.
“What about all the other years?”, he whispered to the boy beside him when the roar had died down.
“We only go through the Golden Era”, said the boy, whispering even lower and looking straight ahead. “The rest we do inside. It goes on for hours. And even then it’s not finished.”
“Are you hot in all those clothes?”, asked Fox.
“Shut up”, said the other boy. “You’re doing blasphemy.”
The ring was breaking up, and everybody was moving towards the Great Hall. People were hugging each other. Fox saw some old people making their way back to their own tamzans. For the most part, they weren’t dressed up like everybody else.
He heard a voice at his side that he recognised. “I can’t believe that they’re still playing that ridiculous game today—“
“Jasma?”, he asked, looking around and seeing his old nurse almost hidden in a brown woollen cape, which was wrapped around even more layers than anyone else seemed to be wearing. She had a hood of the same colour and material over her head, with a small opening from her eyes to her mouth. She was talking to her closest friend, Secret, who was only a little less wrapped up. Secret was the Ezwayna’s expert on cures and potions, and never let anybody doubt it. The scent of herbs clung around her; she seemed to always have a supply ready.
“Fox”, said Jasma. She had a way of speaking his name that mixed together suspicion, exasperation, resignation and a dozen other unflattering emotions. But right now, she seemed embarrassed more than anything else. “I hope you don’t think you’re joining in this ceremony?”
“I didn’t think you would be”, said Fox. How often had he heard Jasma criticising tavern dancers for showing their legs? And here she was, ready to show a lot more than that.
“You wouldn’t understand, you ignorant boy”, she said, and her voice could have frozen fire. “Haven’t you heard me tell you, The moo of the cow and the song of the lark both praise God?”
“No”, said Fox, truthfully. She had quoted him many proverbs, but none of them had been so tolerant.
“Because you have mud in your ears, that’s why”, said Jasma. “What it means is that are different ways to worship God. And a religious person—like me, Fox—is never ashamed to take part in anybody’s religious ceremony. Now what are you doing?”
Fox realised that Jasma was horrified at the thought of him seeing her naked. He didn’t like the idea, either, so he quickly replied: “I’m not going into the Great Hall. Grandy told me to keep an eye on the tamzans while everybody is inside.”
He could see Jasma’s face relaxing with relief, but her tone didn’t change as she said: “Well, there’s no need to go into ours.” She lived with Secret and several other young women, who patched clothes, made poultices, taught girls and generally made themselves useful, while never seeming to be actually busy. “I don’t want you poking around my stuff. Now be gone with you”.
Half of the congregation were inside the Great Hall right now, and the other half was crowded around its entrance. He turned and went in the opposite direction, and Jasma must have thought he was out of hearing range when he heard her say: “He’s quite a good boy, really. But less trustworthy than a table with a missing leg.”
He walked on until the hubbub of the crowd became a distant murmur, through the thick shrubs with dark green, waxy leaves that seemed everywhere in this country.
They were interesting people. He was eager to get into their tamzans…to see what they kept in their chests and their cabinets…
He was passing the little stream called the Skipwater, which could easily be leaped over for much of its length, when he saw something floating in the current. It was a card of some sort. He picked it up.
It was a playing card, made of thin carved wood. It didn’t look much like any playing card he had seen. It showed a woman with six eyes and four arms, swords in both of them. She was dressed in a jewel-studded robe, and there were towers and domes in the background.
Fox stood looking at her for three or four minutes, strangely delighted with this discovery. She was like the queens in stories; there was nothing weak or vain or silly about her. As he stood there looking at it, he found himself suddenly wishing for a life without any boredom, or petty quarrels, or dull
conversations about the weather. Her world was so clean, so shining. Only great and noble things happened there.
He put it in his pocket and moved on, happy to feel it at his side.
It was strange, walking through the empty tamzans. There was something pleasant about it, but something a little upsetting, too. He sometimes felt like this when he wandered the open spaces of this land. If there were no people, the world would go on, just rabbits and dogs and plants and rain. But who would remember any of it? Who would think about any of it?
Of course, there were people still in the village, he thought. The old. Like Grandy and No-Sooner and Goodfellow, probably all sitting around the Spiral board, maybe happy to be without an audience for once. Like the old woman, the storyteller…
Suddenly an idea struck him, and he was amazed he had not thought of it before. He would go to the storyteller. He would ask her to teach him all her stories. It was what he wanted, he suddenly realised, most in all the world. He wanted to own that power he had felt, listening to her tell the tale of Tamar the Innocent. He wanted to live in the world of stories, a world like the one where the queen in the playing card lived. A world where only wonderful things happened.
He set out for her tamzan, his heart drumming with excitement. Why had it only occurred to him now?
As he made his way through the village—the old lady’s house was on the very edge—he wondered what he was going to say to her. What sort of woman a she? He tried to bring her face to mind, but he had already forgotten. All he could remember her voice, so sweet and yet so austere. It seemed like the voice of someone who had lived through centuries, a voice that spoke through the old woman but did not belong to her.
He saw one bald old man sitting on a tree stump outside his tiny tamzan, looking into the sky as if he was trying to work out some complicated problem. Aside from that, and a few frolicking cats, he passed nobody on his way to the storyteller’s home.
He paused outside, suddenly wishing that he could leave this until another day. But there would be no other day. On any day other than this, there would always be people waiting to hear her stories. So he lifted the latch and entered.
There was a warm smell of herbs hanging the large, dark space. The windows had been shuttered, but some light made its way through chinks in the walls and roof. The old lady was lying on a bed of furs in the middle of the floor, wearing a heavy black nightdress. She looked so small.
He walked a few paces towards her, almost without thinking. The darkness gripped him, and he found himself fearing that one of the creatures from her tales would be waiting in the shadows. He suddenly remembered her face, a single image, a stern look that had come over her during one moment in her story. It frightened him, and he took a step backwards.
But then her voice came from the darkness, shaky and yet sure: “Who is it? Is that the clapping boy?”
Fox couldn’t reply. He was too stunned by the old lady knowing who he was.
“What do you want?”, she asked, and he could see her lifting herself up from the bed. Not with difficulty, as even Grandy sometimes did, but with the utmost ease. She sat at its side, cross-legged There was irritation in her voice, not the good humour that Fox had somehow expected.
“I want you to teach me your stories”, said Fox. He wondered if the old woman would even hear him, the words came out so strangled.
There was a long pause, during which Fox realised the audacity of what he was doing. He was one of the youngest people in the settlement, and the storyteller must have been one of the oldest. By the customs of the Ezwayna, he had no right even to address her.
“And why do you want that?”, she said, eventually, in her rough voice. His eyes were getting used to the gloom of the tamzan, and he could see her face, peering at him. There was no smile on it, no playfulness. She was every bit as serious as him.
“Because…I’ve never heard anything so wonderful.”
He heard her laughing to herself, a bitter laugh. “Why don’t you go to the gulls and ask them to teach you how to fly? That would be even more wonderful.”
Fox thought of saying, I don’t know where to buy wings, but he held his silence. He was probably in enough trouble already, without giving cheek.
“Nobody taught me to tell tales”, she said. “I learnt at the fireside, in the fields, from the lips of washer women. You’ve already heard enough stories to last you a whole lifetime, I’ll warrant. The fish were there, but not the net.”
Fox remembered the bloodthirsty stories Jasma had told him, while he sat drinking tea and watching her chop vegetables, stir pots, and scrub floors. There was plenty of death and horror and betrayal in those stories, but…
“I’ve never heard stories like the ones you told”, he said, feeling more desperate with every moment that he spent in this dark place. “Nothing so happy, so beautiful. Or so sad. I’ve only heard violent stories. Scary stories.”
“Enough!”, snapped the old woman, raising a hand. Only from Grandy had he heard so much force in a single word. “Believe me, you’ve heard every single story I ever told a thousand times before. You hear them all the time”.
“I’d never even heard of Tamar the Innocent—“
“Keep quiet”, cried the storyteller, and Fox took a step back, nervously. His cheeks were burning and his stomach felt like a clenched fist.
“What has Tamar the Innocent got to do with it?”, she demanded, in a softer but somehow even sterner tone. “Names don’t matter one little bit. All of the stories about Tamar have been told about other people, too; soldiers and sailors, and mice and maidens, and gods and ghosts and grandfathers. You don’t understand that, and you have the nerve to ask me to teach you stories? Get out and don’t come back!”
The last words were almost a shout, and Fox turned around and rushed for the door. He had been running for two or three minutes before he stopped to lean against a tree, and realised that he was sobbing like an infant. Where had it come from, this overwhelming desire to learn the old woman’s stories? And already it was crushed. He felt as if he had found the door to life, but found it locked.
Chapter Eight
He took a deep breath and willed his tears to stop. Whenever Grandy had found him crying he’d been almost as angry as if he found him writing on the walls. What difference did blubbering ever make to anything?, he’d say.
Spend your energy in deeds, not tears. That’s what Grandy would say when his anger had cooled. But what was Fox supposed to do now? The old lady had told him to go away, to never come back. And he still had these tamzans to check. The idea of peeping into other peoples’ homes no longer excited him, but he went about it, not having anything else to do.
And there was nothing in the tamzans to get excited about, anyway. He was slightly amused to find a few mock Spiral boards, very roughly painted on wood, most of them with a game left unfinished upon them. Spiral games usually took several sittings to complete, if you didn’t have the time or the patience of Grandy and his friends. Grandy would be furious if he knew games were being played without his permission.
There were many Snakeboy dolls as well, carved out of bone for the most part. Snakeboy was the hero of children’s stories, a prankster and idler who seemed to do exactly what he wanted. Snakeboy had begun as a story parents had told their children to teach them to be good; in those stories, Snakeboy always suffered for his naughty deeds. But the stories took on a life of their own amongst children, and soon he became a hero rather than a warning.
Fox felt like taking one of the Snakeboys—there were almost a dozen in one tamzan—but his respect for toys was too deep. He laid them back on the floor, and moved on.
There were other things to look at, too, like the Firstfather and Firstmother statues. Every family amongst the Ezwayna believed their family name to have begun with a single person, and every member of that family kept a ceramic statue of that ancestor. When they had a problem, or a decision to make, they would sit in front of the statue, believing that the spirits of all their dead relatives hung around it, offering wisdom. The statues were always
smiling, with their arms slightly extended, as if about they were about to hug you. He liked looking at them.
Mostly, though, the tamzans were filled with tools. The Ezwayna had many sayings that warned against working too hard. A scarecrow has no soul was Fox’s favourite, though he hadn’t understood it at first. He also liked Even the sun takes the night off. But in this country, the Ezwayna had no choice but to work very hard, just to keep alive.
He was getting very bored when he came to a medium-sized tamzan, with nothing to distinguish it except a few barrels sitting outside. But when he went inside, his heart froze.
Piper was standing in the tamzan, rummaging through the empty home just as Fox had been doing.
He was bending over a large wooden chest when Fox saw him first, muttering to himself. But in a moment he had looked up and seen the boy. And the next moment, he jumped past him and closed the door, holding it shut with his hand while he stared at Fox with his pale, thin face.
“Have you been following me?”, he asked, and his voice was as soft ever. But his face was tight, and his eyes were full of suspicion.
“No!”, cried Fox, stepping backwards. “I’ve been…”
“What?”
“I’ve been told to keep an eye on the tamzans, to make sure nothing is wrong…”
“By your grandfather?”
“Yes.”
“And is something wrong, Fox?”, asked the criminal, watching him closely. Piper had grown a small beard since arriving in this world, and he’d started wearing a black hat with a wide brim. He was dressed in a tight grey robe, and there was a knife in his belt, seven or eight inches long and curved like a tight smile.
“Nothing”, said Fox. “Nothing wrong”.
“Have you got anything to report to your grandfather?”.
Fox thought for a few moments, though it was hard to think of anything except for the knife in Piper’s belt. “Only that the children are beginning to play Spiral”.
Piper laughed, and Fox began to hope that nothing was going to happen to him. “Are you wondering what I was doing?”
“No…yes”, said Fox. “I don’t care.”
“Well, Fox, the Skullmen had a saying. Count the blades of grass in your garden. It’s an old habit, learning everything I can about the place where I’m staying. Especially when I know the Ezwayna are not too happy about me being here. I want to know exactly what they keep hidden away. Just in case.”
“That’s...a good idea.”
“It’s come in useful now and again.” Piper fell silent, still staring into Fox’s face, still holding the door shut. “Do you see what’s in that chest, for instance?”
Fox turned his head a little to look at the chest Piper had been searching, that still lay open on the floor. All he could see were brightly-coloured cloths, and the glint of something that looked like a silver cup.
“I don’t see—“ he began, looking back at the criminal, but he stopped there. Piper was holding the playing card Fox had found in the Skipwater, turning it around in his hands.
“Where did you get this, boy?”, he asked, and his voice was suddenly sharp.
“I found it in the stream, the Skipwater”, said Fox. He had been watching Piper from the corner of his eye, and hadn’t seen the slightest movement. Jasma had told him the most extravagant tales of pickpockets. She’d told him about people who had tied purses around their stomachs with tight bands, underneath two or three shirts, but who still fell prey to the thieves. Fox had never believed them until now.
“When?”, asked Piper, fixing him with his keen grey eye.
“Today”, said Fox, readying himself to leap out of Piper’s path. “After the Ezwayna went into the Great Hall.”
“By the clump of alder trees, the ones with scores from marble games carved onto them?”
Fox remembered the etched scores, and was amazed that Piper knew where he had crossed the stream.
“Yes”, he said. “There.”
“I think we’re in big trouble”, said Piper, frowning at the card. “The Ezwayna don’t play cards. This must have floated downstream from somewhere else. And—from the looks of that sword—from people who know a lot about weapons.”
He closed his eyes, as if he was trying to work something out, and for a moment Fox thought he looked strangely peaceful.
“They can’t be very far away”, said Piper. “And the Ezwayna are all naked as newborn babies, and lost in the other world. Fox, you have to run to the Great Hall and warn them.”
“What?”, asked Fox, feeling like he sometimes did in dreams, when he realised all of a sudden that he was naked, and everybody was looking at him. “I can’t do that. They lock the doors from inside.”
“Well, bang your fists against them. Tear through the skins. They have to know, Fox.”
“They’re all naked!”
“They might die that way, if you don’t tell them what’s coming.”
“But how do you know they’re coming?”, cried Fox, his fear of Piper entirely forgotten. “What if they don’t?”
“I know”, said the criminal. “There’s not much I’m good for, but I’m good at recognising danger when I see it. This is a vast country, Fox. Nobody would be coming in this direction if they hadn’t followed a trail. And they can only have one thing on their minds.”
“But why don’t you tell them?”, asked Fox, feeling sick at the prospect before him. “They’d listen to you.”
“I have other work to do”, said Piper. He strode to the corner of the tamzan, and pulled aside some heavy rugs that were lying on the floor. Underneath lay a bow and a quiver of arrows, which he scooped up in his arms. “They’ll be coming through Pious Pass. That’s where I have to be.”
“What can you do?”, asked Fox, trying to imagine Piper fighting barbarians. He couldn’t imagine it. Piper looked so thin and unhealthy.
“You’d be surprised”, said Piper. “Not much to do in this place except marbles and hunting. I wish I’d spent less time playing marbles. Now, go.” He did not shout, but something in the simple way he said it made Fox realise he had no way out.
“What if they’re already here and they get me on the way?”
“Then you’ll be out of trouble when it’s only beginning for everybody else. Go, and run as fast as you can, but don’t fall into any more holes.”
Piper opened the door, and pushed Fox through it. A moment later, the criminal was making his way to another tamzan, looking for more arrows. Fox stood watching him for a second, then took a deep swallow and began to run.
Chapter Nine
He stood outside the Great Hall, coughing and heaving air into his body. Slowly, after perhaps five minutes, the dancing colours in front of his eyes disappeared, and he was panting rather than gasping for breath. And now the huge, arch-shaped door of the tamzan lay before him, daring him to pound upon it.
He could hear chanting coming from inside, chanting that sounded like: “Free me from the chains of sin…free me from the chains of sin…”
What if this was all Piper’s joke? He had seemed kind of cheerful when he saw the card. After all, Fox had taken his purple stone. That’s what Piper had been searching his pockets for, he realised. But even Grandy was suspicious when Fox had fallen down that hole and hadn’t been hurt.
He stood in front of the door, suddenly feeling that he couldn’t knock on it even if it meant he was going to die. He remembered the only book in Grandy’s “library”, The Memoirs of Josper Stronghouse. He’d read its thirty-one volumes over and over. The story of Stronghouse’s first speech to the Subjects’ Chamber always made him feel sick. Stronghouse had thrown up that morning. He was twenty-seven years old. Fox felt like he could throw up now.
Instead, he stepped forward, and banged on the door with his fists.
To him it seemed so loud it must have echoed through the fields, but nobody answered. The chanting went on without a pause.
He beat his fists against the door, but the chanting continued. Suddenly he felt feeble, and the door was so thick. What was wrong with them? Were they in some kind of trance?
He looked around, searching for something he could strike against the stubborn wood. There was always thick branches lying around, weren’t there? People picked them up and used them as walking sticks, even children. Where were they now?
But then he saw a large stone, lying in the grass some twenty yards from the door. He hurried over to it, and picked it up with some difficulty. Its edges were jagged, and it bit into his palms. But he managed to drag it towards the door of the Great Hall. He stood there for a moment, hesitating, but the stone was so heavy. He hurled it. It took most of his strength.
The doors buckled when it struck them, and an enormous boom thudded through the earth and sky. Fox put his hand to his mouth, like a scared infant. And he waited, though he wanted to tear away. He was scared he was really going to wet himself.
The chanting inside had stopped, and he could hear somebody coming to the door. It opened, creaking, and there was a short man with a black beard standing there. He had thrown on a black robe, to Fox’s relief. Firelight glowed from behind.
“What in the name of all the ancestors are you doing?”, he asked, in a low voice. The fact that it was Fox standing there seemed to shock him even more than the blasphemous interruption.
“There’s an attack”, said Fox, amazing himself by getting the words out. He was frightened his voice would seize up entirely. “Piper…Piper says there’s an attack.”
“What do you mean, an attack? Wolves?”
More figures were appearing in the door behind him, and when they saw Fox standing there, they stared.
“No, people. There was a card…”
“A card?”, someone asked from behind the bearded man. “What is he talking about?”
“It’s Piper”.
“It’s a trick by Piper.”
“He’s burning the place down…”
“What did I tell you? He should be flogged for this”.
More and more people were coming to the door, and Fox could hear a babble of voices from inside. He couldn’t make out any words, but he could hear that they were all outraged. Soon, there were half a dozen figures standing around him, asking him questions.
“Did you see anybody?”
“Where is Piper?”
“How many of them are there?”
“Shut up!”, shouted somebody, with such energy that every other voice was stilled. They were all looking at an old man, broad and gnarled like a hardy tree. He had a thick brown cape about him, and misty blue eyes that looked able to stare through a wall.
“What exactly did Piper say?”, asked the old man, after a few moments of silence.
Fox tried to speak, but now his throat did close up on him. The old man did not seem in the least bit frustrated; he just kept on staring at the boy, with unflickering patience. The others shuffled, but did not speak. Eventually, Fox said: “I found a playing card in the Skipwater. I was checking up on the tamzans, like my grandfather told me, and…and Piper was in one of them. He took the card out of my pocket…”
“What do you mean, he took it out of your pocket?”, interrupted the old man, frowning.
“I think he was looking for something else”, said Fox, flushing. “Anyway, he looked at it and said that the people who made it must be warriors, because of the sword. Because…because it had a picture of a sword.” Fox felt like he was babbling, but he just kept going. “He’s going to Pirate Pass to shoot arrows at them.”
“Pious Pass?”
“Pious Pass”, said Fox, flushing again. But now a discussion had broken out amongst the surrounding figures. There were dozens now, and more pouring out of the Great Hall all the time.
“It’s a trick”, somebody said. “He’s going in the opposite direction with all of our treasures. Why didn’t somebody..?”
“What if he’s telling the truth, though?”
“What’s all this about a card?”
People were moving away from the Great Hall now, hurrying towards the village, arguing as they went. Children were crying. The last of the crowd were trickling out of the Great Hall.
“This is a judgement”, he heard someone saying, and a woman’s voice snarled: “Shut up, Silversmith. We’ve heard enough about your judgements. Get your sword, or I’ll get it myself, you useless….”
“Get the children back into the Hall! And somebody stay with them!”
Fox stood there, suddenly unnoticed, and wondered what he was supposed to do. But now there was a cry going from person to person.
“Get the children into the Hall!”
“Somebody stay with the children!”
He saw groups of boys and girls, many of them crying—he felt on the verge of tears himself—being rounded up, some of them being held back from running to the village. A hand came on his shoulder, and a voice said: “Fox, are you all right?”
He turned around, and Jasma was standing there, with Secret standing a little behind her. They were both looking at him as if he had caused this upheaval; not angrily, but almost fearfully, as if he had some awesome and terrible power.
“I’m fine”, said Fox, happy beyond words to see somebody he knew. Somebody from the Empire.
“Did Piper try to hurt you?”, asked Secret. She was not an attractive woman—she seemed to be all nose—but there was a look of intelligence about her.
“No...I don’t think so”, said Fox.
“He hardly knows what he’s talking about”, said Secret. “Get him inside with the rest of them.”
Jasma clutched him by the arm and marched him towards the Great Hall, into which several dozen groups of children were being herded, some of them almost hysterical by now. She seemed relieved to have something to do. He could feel her worry in the strength of her grasp, and see it in her ferocious expression.
“I can’t believe they were so stupid as to let him wander around the village”, she said, though she hardly seemed to be addressing Fox. “He’s probably made off with my silver brooch..”
“What if he is telling the truth?”, asked Fox. His mind was filled with images of bearded warriors with long spears, screaming, like the tribes pictured in The Memoirs of Josper Stronghouse.
“Don’t be an idiot, Fox” said Jasma. “The truth would choke him.”
They were inside the Great Hall now, which was filled with the wails of children. Some men, he saw, were carrying swords, though weapons were forbidden inside the Great Hall. The question of where they had got them passed through his mind for only a moment.
The Great Hall was an impressive building, even if it was only an echo of the Great Hall they had left behind in the Anarchy. It was simple, and it was huge. Wooden figures of famous ancestors, perhaps eight foot tall, hung on chains from the huge rafters. He recognised Arazua, the last high priest of the Ezwayna. He was so admired by his people that no new high priest was appointed when he died; Arazua would be their high priest, they declared, even in death, and until the end of the world.
Which might be today, thought Fox…
The great fire was still blazing in the central hearth, lighting up the twelve coloured glass globes around it. They must have been brought from the Anarchy, as there was no glass-maker here. Four great tables were ranged around it, forming a square. Children were being seated at these tables, often by force.
“What’s happening?” Fox asked Jasma, who was frowning at the scene. She seemed to half-adore and half-despise children.
“You’re going to be given something to eat, that’s what’s happening”, said Jasma, looking towards the door of the tamzan, her thoughts obviously on the village. “Nothing like food to calm people down.”
“Are we all going to die, Jasma?”, asked Fox, and tears started down his own cheeks as he said it.
“Absolutely not”, said his old nurse, and the certainty in her words made him less afraid. It was the same tone she had used to chastise him, back in the old house, but he was glad to hear it now. His tears stopped as soon as they had begun. He did not ask himself how Jasma could know. He wanted to believe, to exercise the privilege of children.
But then, behind him, he heard one man whispering to another: “I’ve just been outside. I can hear shouting coming from the village. Fighting.”
He looked up at Jasma. Her face was flushed with fury. She turned around briskly and smacked the man on the cheek with all her force. Her hand was closing in upon him a second time when he grasped her wrist. He was a ruddy-skinned chap, in his early twenties, his face still pimpled. He was staring at Jasma disbelievingly.
“What in the Nameless—“
“Don’t you dare blaspheme in the Great Hall!”, shouted Jasma over him, and he stopped, looked ashamed and confused. “And let go of me. You deserve your bottom spanked for talking nonsense and scaring the children. And it is nonsense.”
The young man blushed, glanced at Fox, and said: “I’m sorry. I was only making it up.”
“That’s right. Now do something useful and help them give out the porridge. And you, too”, Jasma said to the other man, who had anxiously watching her, fearing his own turn. They both hurried off, towards the fire, looking like naughty children.
“God’s wisdom was strangest when he made men”, she quoted. It was probably her favourite proverb.
“What about Grandy, Jasma?”, asked Fox. “What about Goodfellow and No-Sooner? What’s going to happen to them?”
“Nothing is going to happen to anybody, Fox. Thank you.” A woman had laid down a wooden bowl of lumpy porridge in front of Jasma, from which the handle of a spoon was jutting. One was thrust down in front of Fox, too, so briskly that some of it spilled over onto the table.
“But what will they do if the attackers—“
“There are no attackers!”, she said, banging her spoon against the table. “Eat your porridge. Nobody can think sense on an empty stomach.” She spooned a mouthful into her own mouth, and swallowed it loudly. “It’s not bad”.
Reluctantly, Fox took ate a spoonful himself. It wasn’t good, either. But as soon as it reached his belly, he realised how hungry he was. He’d had nothing to eat since morning, and he was exhausted from his run.
“I’ll tell you exactly what’s happening”, said Jasma. “Piper is five miles away already, carrying as much treasure as he can. Not that the Ezwayna have very many treasures”—despite her religion, Jasma had a keen respect for
wealth—“but whatever trinkets and heirlooms they brought out of the Anarchy, he took, to be sure. I just hope he gets himself hanged, one of these days.”
Suddenly, Fox felt very, very tired, as if he had been woken from deep sleep in the middle of the night. He looked about him. Children were putting their heads on the table and rubbing their eyes, and the men and women were carrying some from their chairs. As he drifted into sleep, he wondered if he would ever wake again, but it was a distant thought, as if his own life was merely a story he had been reading. The last thing to pass through his waking mind was Jasma lifting him from his chair.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
More of the Bard's Apprentice
A couple of readers expressed interest in more of The Bard's Apprentice, the young adult fantasy novel that I started serializing some time ago. I stopped when a reader pointed out discrepancies in the story-- characters appearing out of nowhere, characters changing names, little things like that.
I can't remember if I pulled the particular post containing the errors. I suspect I did.
Since then, I lost access to the old laptop that The Bard's Apprentice, A Hundred Nightmares, and several other would-be masterpieces were stored on. I mean, I know it's still there, and it's safe, but it would be a bother to get to it and retrieve my stuff from it.
However, while looking for something else, I discovered I had the complete manuscript of The Bard's Apprentice in my email, as an attachment.
I thought about sprucing it up, but I'm too lazy. As Chesterton said about one of his books: "There is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it." Or as another author, multilinguistic and rather lapidary, once declared: "What I have written, I have written." Apparently Homer's Iliad is riddled with such continuity errors. Who am I to outdo Homer?
Make a game out of it! For every character whose name changes, three points. For every character who appears out of nowhere, eight points. If a character comes back from the dead, twenty points. Day turning to night, one point. Sudden location changes, four points.
You could even make a drinking game out of it, though I want to stress that this blog promotes the responsible use of alcohol, fireworks, firearms and bowling balls.
I think there is a coherent narrative and the discrepancies are minor. But if anything in the story is actually confusing, please point it out and I'll try to clear it up. Hopefully I won't be like Raymond Chandler, whose novel The Big Sleep was so complicated that, when it was being made into a movie and the film-makers asked him who had killed a particular character, he had to admit he didn't know.
Anyway, here's the first of the rest. I'll post more very soon since I suspect I posted this already.
Chapter Four
The first thing that struck him was the cold. He seemed to be indoors, though his eyes were still recovering from the purple flash and it was hard to see. But the cold was still biting. He found he was hugging himself instinctively, the metal box dropped to the floor.
“Fox?”, came a voice, and his body surged with joy when he realised it was Grandy. There was relief in that voice, but even now, it was guarded and gruff. Grandy never lost his self-control.
The boy’s eyes recovered from the flash, and he began to make out the scene around him. He was in some kind of a tent, or a house, or a mix between the two. It had a huge timber frame, with a roof that could not be reached by a tall man on the shoulders of another tall man. In between the timber supports, there were thick skins of some sort, brown and beige and pink. Under his foot were the same skins. There was a golden glow from lamps that hung from the ceiling.
Grandy’s friends and Jasma were standing around, looking at him as if they expected him to have explanations.
“Where’s the stone, boy?”, came a thin voice, and Fox turned to see the criminal standing a little off from the other. He looked more frightened than any of them, but less dangerous than he had seemed through the Proximator.
“I…” Fox looked down at his hand, and realised with a jolt that the purple stone was gone.
The criminal groaned and lowered his hand to his head. “That’s it”, he said, limply. “We’re stuck here forever”.
“What are you complaining about?”, asked Grandy. “They would have hanged you if they hadn’t shot you straight away, where you were.”
The criminal did not reply. He just looked at Grandy with a strange mix of respect and anger.
“For my part, I’m rather happy to be here”, said the old man, giving one of his crooked smiles, “now that Fox has been clever enough to bring my box”.
There was a chorus of agreement from the other players, and Fox had never heard anything more heartfelt. He flushed with pleasure and pride.
“I thought it was all over”, said No-Sooner, walking to the box and lifting it lovingly.
“But you don’t have any boards, or pieces…” Fox began.
“Oh, we can build those”, said Goodfellow, watching Twelvemorning lift the box. All the other players were doing the same, like capsized sailors stranded on an unknown shore, gazing at the sail of a ship coming to save them.
“But without these records…”, said No-Sooner, who had a white furry cloak around him. “It’s funny how we thought we were safe. We all had our own copies in our own boxes and chests, hidden, under lock and key…”
“I wonder if anyone will ever find them?”, asked Goodfellow. “Maybe the game will begin again.”
“But where are we?”, asked Fox, shivering, wishing he had a furry cloak like Goodfellow’s.
“Well, it’s kind of hard to say”, Grandy replied, finally taking his eyes from the box. “We can’t understand a word the natives speak, which is not too surprising. But it’s no country in our world, that’s for sure.”
“What do you mean?”, asked Fox, though he knew what Grandy meant.
“The stars are different from any stars you could see on our world”, said Grandy. “Haven’t you heard stories about people who went through pools, or mirrors, or paintings, into an entirely different world? Of course you have. You listen to Jasma’s ridiculous stories all the time.”
“Why are they ridiculous? It turns out they’re true”, said Jasma, glaring at Grandy.
“Certainly they’re true”, said Grandy. “But you never really believed them, did you? That’s what made them ridiculous.”
Jasma didn’t say anything, and Fox saw the criminal smile to himself.
“So why can’t we get back?”, asked Fox, almost choked with panic.
“Oh, by the thirteen hundred names!”, cried Grandy. “Boys are meant to be adventurous, aren’t they? Aren’t you happy to leave behind a dying Empire for a new world? A whole new world?”
“But It’s so cold”, said Fox. Only then did Harkness take the fur cloak from his own shoulders and put it around the boy, looking rather ashamed that he had only thought of it now.
“You think this is cold?”, asked Grandy. “You should have been in the Great Sickle back in the Maraguan campaign, when our rifles seized up in the freezing air. When five hundred men slept virtually on top of each other…this is a cool autumn day in comparison”.
“Don’t be so pompous, Grandy”, said Goodfellow. “You were in your twenties back then. Fox is ten years old.”
“Eleven”, corrected Fox, automatically.
“I meant eleven”, said Goodfellow, but at that moment the door of the enclosure opened—there was a rattle of beads—and some people entered in, carrying platters of food.
No wonder these people liked high ceilings, thought Fox. They were all giants. There were four women and three men, and none of them were less than six foot two. The tallest man was at least seven foot. They were broad as well as tall, though the fur cloaks they wore (black, white and brown) added to the impression.
They were not especially attractive, though Fox would change his opinion of their looks before too long. They had strong noses and wide mouths, low cheekbones and pale complexions. They looked so far from friendly that Fox felt afraid.
They brought the food (which smelled pleasant enough) to a star-shaped table in one corner of the building. They ushered Fox and the others to high wooden chairs, that were hard but surprisingly comfortable.
One woman carried a large bowl of earth, a smaller bowl from which steam rose, and a yet smaller bowl with some kind of cream, all borne on a tray. She had a length of cloth folded around her arm.
She went to Grandy first, put the bowl upon the table before him, and extended her hands, palms facing upwards. Grandy looked at her questioning for a moment, then extended his arm in the same way. She spread some of the cream on his palms, and rubbed her palms together briskly. He did the same.
Then she put the bowl of earth beneath his outstretched hands, and lifting the bowl of steaming water, poured it over them and into the earth. He rubbed them together again, taking the cloth from her arm to dry them.
“They don’t use forks or knives, then”, said Jasma, disapprovingly. She always grabbed any opportunity to be offended.
As soon as he had washed his hands, Grandy was grabbing food from the platters. Fox knew it was curiosity rather than appetite that made him eager. Grandy seemed to live on a diet of tobacco for the most part. Fox was a chubby boy and didn’t understand.
“It’s pleasant enough”, he said, chewing it and looking around the table. “Fish of some sort. Peas. Some kind of biscuit. All mixed together. Doesn’t look too pleasant though, does it?”.
There was a smile around the table, and an amused murmur. The mash, whatever it was made from, was coloured a greenish-grey that did not excite the palate. But the others were helping themselves, anyway.
Their hosts were trying to speak to them again. The language was quite melodious and soft, and accompanied by constant hand gestures. But the newcomers couldn’t make any sense of it. They began to seem frustrated.
“What do they expect?”, asked Twelvemorning, seeming a bit offended herself. “They don’t understand us”.
“I’d guess this is some sort of common tongue they expect everyone to know”, said Grandy, with the air of self-satisfaction that turned so many people against him.
“I think Ezwayna is their name”, said the criminal.
“What’s that, Piper?”, asked Grandy, roughly. He never liked somebody else to know more than him.
“What would you know about their language?”, asked Jasma, just as sternly as Grandy.
“I’ve spent a lot of time going from place to place”, said Piper. “On the run.” He said it almost defiantly, in response to Jasma’s mutterings. “I was always good at picking up languages I’d never heard before”.
“Indeed?”, mused Grandy, his irritation forgotten now. “Try speaking to them. Do something useful, for once. And don’t even think about double-crossing us.” The criminal only smiled at this.
“They confiscated the pistols, you know”, Jasma whispered to me. Fox didn’t understand why she was whispering, since neither group could
understand the other. “They were very angry when they saw them. So they have pistols, and we don’t.”
“You’re scaring me”, said Fox. She delighted telling him horrifying tales, and they delighted him just as much as they did her. When they were told by the kitchen fire. This horrifying tale was happening, and he didn’t like it one bit.
“Well, I’m scared, too”, said Jasma, rather sulkily. “They look pretty savage to me.”
Piper was trying to talk to their hosts, and he seemed to have scored at least one hit, because they seemed pleased and excited. They waved their hands even harder, and raised their voices, and seemed to have forgotten about anyone other than Piper.
“Look at him”, said Jasma, viciously. “He thinks he’s the robin’s crest.”
“But it looks like he knows what he’s doing”, said Fox.
“Of course he does”, said Jasma. “He’s a conman. Trickery and winning people’s trust is how he’s lived his life. Don’t turn your back to him for a moment.”
Meanwhile, Grandy and his friends were back to discussing Spiral. This had probably been the longest break Fox had ever heard in that never-ending discussion.
“What if someone discovers our boards, and our records”, asked No-Sooner, as if this had been troubling him for some time, “and they start playing themselves, and continuing the game in…in the old world, in the Empire? And we continue it here? What happens if we ever go back? Either we’d have to be right, or the people back there. Hundreds of games just wasted”, he said, with raw pain in his voice.
“It’s nothing to worry about”, said Grandy. “We’re never going back. We may as well get used to it”.
No-Sooner and Goodfellow both looked happier at the idea. Going home seemed to be less important to them than keeping Spiral free from contradictions and muddles.
“How long do you think it will take to build two new boards?, asked Goodfellow. The Proximator wasn’t the only gadget he owned. Goodfellow
was the only one of the three who used his hands for much more than moving Spiral pieces.
“They seem like fair craftsmen”, said No-Sooner, glancing around the tent-house. “I’m sure they have the tools for the job. Of course, they won’t be as sumptuous as our boards…”
“That doesn’t matter”, came the chorus from the other players, and Fox could almost taste their impatience to get back to playing.
They launched into further discussion—Fox understood it little better than he understood the talk of this world’s natives, but he loved listening to them. He loved the lost expression on their faces. He had spent many dreamy hours and days looking at the children playing games in the street, but even they never seemed as utterly serious and utterly enchanted as these old people, talking about shuttles and unicorns and wells and all the other, bewildering parts of Spiral.
He sat there, eating and listening, until he noticed that Jasma was crying softly behind him, unnoticed by anybody.
“What’s wrong?”, he asked, putting his hand to her shoulder but drawing it back at the last moment. She had only hugged him once, earlier today, and it felt too strange to try.
“Oh, blood”, she swore. “Listen to them all, so happy to get away from their lives. That’s all right for them. They’re not leaving anything behind”.
“Oh…your family”, said Fox, suddenly struck by sadness for Jasma. Her sisters and her mother were back in the Empire, depending on her wages.
“My mother always said I was flighty”, she said, fighting back the tears angrily. “She always said I’d disappear without telling her, as soon as someone offered to take me away.”
“She never meant it”, said Fox, who never understood why people said such cruel things of the people they loved.
“I know”, said Jasma, finally giving way to the flood of tears. “That’s the worst thing about it. She’ll think she was wrong about me all along.” She hid her face in her hands, shaking with grief, and for the first time in his life Fox realised she was very young. And he grew a little older in that moment.
Chapter Five
The pistols were not used on them, despite Jasma’s fears. They were simply thrown in a nearby lake. The Ezwayna hated all guns and all violence. They were willing to fight, if they had to—in fact, they had been highly prized as soldiers in the lands they had recently fled. But it went against their nature, which was gentle and peaceful.
Gentle and peaceful, but not cheerful. The Ezwayna were a gloomy people. That very night, a woman had sung them a song that seemed to go on for hours. Fox didn’t have to understand the words to know that it was sad. There was centuries of sadness in her voice, and her people wept openly, the men as well as the woman.
They slept on thick woollen mattresses on the ground—they were very comfortable—and, though the early morning was so cold that Fox thought he might never be able to move again, soon the temperature became more bearable.
He roamed around the country of the Ezwayna the next day. The tent-houses, which the Ezwayna called tamzans, were dotted at distant intervals in this sprawling landscape. They usually in the shade of the massive trees that the Ezwayna called “benefactor trees”, which were broader than any tree Fox had ever seen. They looked like huge domes from far away.
It was winter, and thick snow fell every day. The Ezwayna went hunting, fishing and working at other occupations during the day. Their children seemed to spend most of their time amongst the branches of the benefactor trees, or playing a complicated game of marbles.
The old people launched into the task of making new Spiral boards, using Piper as an interpreter with the Ezwayna, and showing little gratitude for his help. All four of them set to whittling, sawing, smoothing and painting with an energy Fox would never have suspected they possessed. They had them made within two days, though they were certainly not as pretty as the old ones.
The Ezwayna were fascinated by their efforts, especially the young men and women. They watched Grandy and the others making the boards with the
keenest attention, though they never offered to help. They stood a distance back, as if they didn’t want to distract the workers.
“Maybe they’re amazed at how stupid we are”, laughed No-Sooner.
But the Ezwayna always seemed to show the deepest respect to the old people. They all but ignored Jasma and Fox.
“They just think old people should be honoured”, said Piper over dinner, after he had been talking to them for three days. “The head of the people is always the oldest one.”
“Even if it’s a woman?”, asked Jasma.
“Yes,” said Piper, not looking at her. Fox couldn’t blame him; she took every opportunity to be rude to him.
“I don’t think much of it as a philosophy”, said Grandy, who had made the happy discovery that the Ezwayna smoked pipes, though he wasn’t too keen on the weed they used. “The idea that old people automatically grow wiser is very mistaken. Most old people I know are senile fools.”
“Except for all of us”, said No-Sooner. “And I’m not old, anyway.”
“I think it’s stupid”, said Jasma. “Old people are selfish and cruel.” Nobody contradicted her. They just went on eating their fish soup.
“Oh, something you’d better know, Fox”, said Piper. “You don’t speak to your elders here until they speak to you. You don’t disagree with them, and you never criticise them, unless you’re talking to someone your own age.”
“How long have they been here?”, asked Harkness.
“About fifteen years”, Piper replied. Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was a criminal, he was so well-spoken and polite. “They call it Wild Haven.They come from a place they call the Anarchy. People made fun of them there, because they’re so gentle and peaceful, and were always trying to provoke them. Also they found it difficult to deal with cheeky children, and twenty-year-old bureaucrats telling them what to do.”
“Do they believe in God?”, asked Jasma, who was very religious.
“They do”, said Piper. “But please don’t mention the subject. Talking about God is taboo here. It’s considered blasphemy. You have no idea how hard it was for them to explain that to me, without actually talking about God.”
“I agree with them there, anyway”, said Grandy. “What’s more egotistical than the idea that God wants us pestering him?”
Jasma threw more salt into her soup, and flared her nostrils. “How is your ridiculous game going?”, she asked.
All of the old people started talking at once, all to the same effect: the game had resumed wonderfully, and the Ezwayna were almost as absorbed in it as they were.
“This is all I wanted for my declining years”, said No-Sooner. “Leisure to play Spiral, and no distractions. And who do you have to thank for that, except for Mr. Piper?”
Piper smiled, and bowed his head slightly. “Thank you, Mr. No-Sooner”, he said. “I’m not used to gratitude, and I’m sure I don’t deserve it.”
“I agree with that”, said Jasma, with a bitter smile. “Have you told the Ezwayna that you’re a jail-bird?”, she asked.
“No”, said Piper. “This is a new start for me.”
“The tree puts out the same leaves every year”, said Jasma. She knew thousands of proverbs, and all of them could be used to chastise.
Jasma had told him something of Piper, since they arrived here. He was a builder who had joined the Skullmen, the secret society that took it upon themselves to punish brutal bosses and foremen. An informer had given the police his name, and ever since that, he had been on run.
He’d stolen the purple stone from a mansion in Butter Street, the richest part of our city. “He said the man who owned was cruel to his workers”, said Jasma. “As if that made stealing all right.”
“Grandy says lots of poor people in the Empire have to work twelve hours a day”, said Fox.
“Well”, said Jasma, putting on her most prim look. “At least when a poor man is working he isn’t drinking, or beating his wife. And I’ve often worked twelve hours a day”. But Fox knew that Jasma went to sleep whenever she felt like it, and spent hours talking to Mrs. Summershower, the woman who peddled laces and brocades from door to door. Jasma spoke harshly of the poor when she meant other people, and pityingly when she meant herself.
“Do you think more people are going to come here, if they find the purple stone?”, Fox asked Grandy, over supper one night. Meals were the only chance he got to speak to Grandy. The old man spent almost every other moment playing Spiral.
“I don’t expect so”, said his grandfather. “Piper was carrying it for years before it did anything. Something about that moment made it…do whatever it did. Why, are you pining for home?”
“No”, said Fox. “I like it here”.
“So do I”, said Grandy, and his eyes sparkled. Moments like that were the closest they came to affection.
He grew more accustomed to the cold, as time went by. He began to pick up some words of the Ezwayna language. Soon he could speak it without thinking. One day, months after they had come to this world, he realised that he had been speaking Ezwayna to Jasma for an entire conversation, without even realising it. Before long they hardly ever used the language they had brought with them.
He made friends, although sometimes that was a trial. The older boys lorded it over the younger ones here, and speaking out of place earned you a stinging smack on the face. Somehow that didn’t offend these peoples’ hatred of violence. But there was no bullying, and he had more friends than ever before. But he still spent of his time alone, wandering the lakes and woods and thinking his own thoughts.
One day he found himself passing a tamzan, and heard a gale of laughter coming from inside. He went towards it. Nobody thought it wrong to enter a strange house here; knocking at doors was unknown.
An old woman was sitting in the centre of the tamzan, surrounded by dozens of other Ezwayna, of all ages. They were all sitting cross-legged on the floor, transfixed by what the old woman was singing. Some were sipping chora, the bitter berry drink they loved here.
It was a long narrative poem called—Fox subsequently learnt—The Twelve Voyages of Tamar the Innocent. When he joined in—nobody even looked around, although Fox could have sworn that the woman was suddenly addressing him—she was describing how Tamar was being chased by his
shadow, which had grown sick of his endless wandering, and wanted to pin him down.
Fox saw young children actually rolling around the floor, which was something he had always considered a figure of speech. He found himself laughing, not so much at the story—it didn’t seem that funny, and was probably funnier if you’d been listening from the start—than from sheer infection of mirth. It was impossible not to laugh, when laughter was shaking the beams of the tamzan.
The woman did not smile, though. Her teeth were mostly misisng and her skin was wrinkled, but she was curiously beautiful. There was something so hardy and serene about her.
Soon, Fox was as lost in the tale as any of the others. Tamar had managed to cage his shadow inside a little box, and gave it to a squirrel to guard. He moved on to the country of the Queen of Flames, who had murdered her son in a fit of madness, and who sought to detain Tamar, convinced he was her own boy. Suddenly laughter seemed to belong to a different world, and eyes—not just those of children—were glinting with tears.
He stood there for two or three hours, listening. Turn after turn came in the tale, with comic and tragic, heroic and piteous scenes passing through the listeners’ minds, one merging into the next seamlessly. Nobody so much as shifted uncomfortably, through all the time Fox stood there. And how long might she have been talking before Fox arrived?
As she told the tale, Fox thought he could hear a melody behind the words; a silent melody, a music that was softer and yet more overpowering than anything he had ever known before. It was nothing other than life itself, but life as he had never imagined it until now. He had never guessed there were such depths to existence. The old woman’s tale made it seemed so plenteous— an overflowing abundance of different emotions, and characters, and scenes, and possibilities—but not a chaos, either. No, there were patterns in the storm, pictures in the eternal fire. Patterns he might understand one day, or begin to understand.
Of course, he could not have put these thoughts into words, even in the simplest manner. He just stood there, listening to the old woman’s tones
washing over him, feeling more excited than he had felt in his short life. For eleven years, his soul had slumbered in its womb, and in that single moment it was born.
He listened until the very end of the tale—which was no end at all, but a promise of future, greater tales—and began to clap loudly.
Two dozen eyes turned towards him in shock, although the old lady did not seem surprised, or even look at him. He had never a sound more sickening than the echoes of his lonely applause in the spacious tamzan. Then there came laughter, a small whisper at first, followed by a gale.
He turned away, tears of humiliation in his eyes, and stormed out of the tamzan. He strode across the snowy landscape, feeling cheated of his moment of joy. It was cold, but he was hot with shame. Only after a few moments did he realise somebody was following him.
He turned around. It was a boy of his own age. He had curly hair, black like the hair of all his people, and an infuriatingly saucy expression.
“What do you want?”, asked Fox, rudely.
“How old are you?”, asked the other boy.
“Older than you”, said Fox.
“How do you know?”
“I can tell”, said Fox. “I’ve seen more than you’ll ever see”.
“You haven’t seen a madman”, said the other boy.
Fox didn’t reply to this. It was unanswerable.
“Why did you do that?”, asked the boy, his eyes boring into Fox.
“It’s called clapping”, said Fox. “It’s what we do in civilised countries.”
“Everybody thinks you’re weird”, said the boy. “I bet I could beat you to that fence over there.”
Fox had never done much running. But there was no way he’d refuse such a challenge. He nodded, and the very next moment they were both rushing towards the fence.
As might expected, the other boy took the lead within a few seconds, but Fox kept running. He was determined to catch up, no matter what. He pushed himself harder and harder, and he felt the distance between them shortening. The fence was not so far away now…
Then the ground gave way beneath him, and he was tumbling. He seemed to be tumbling for an eternity, and suddenly…
The purple flash again, the one that had come over him when he held the stone. But this time it had come and gone in a moment, almost too quickly to notice.
And then he was looking up from an unbelievably steep pit. The head of the boy who had been chasing after him peered over the edge.
“How come you’re not dead?”, he asked.
Chapter Six
“Tell me again exactly what happened”, said Grandy, pointing his pipe at Fox before shoving it back in his mouth. He stared at the boy as if he was trying to see through him.
“I’ve already told you a hundred times”, said Fox, his patience—or his fear of Grandy—finally used up.
He expected Grandy to thunder at him. Or to slap him in the face. He’d done that before, though not for a long time. Instead, his frown deepened.
“Maybe you think you’re telling me everything. Maybe you’ve forgotten something. Did you see anything in this…this purple? Any shadows, or pictures, or shapes?”
“No”, said Fox, surprised now at Grandy’s own patience.
“Did you hear anything?”, asked Grandy.
“Not…not with my ears”.
“I told you to stop talking nonsense”, said his grandfather, lying back in his wicker chair, as if he’d been exhausted by Fox’s silliness. The shadows from the firelight made his wrinkles stand out on his face.
“It’s not nonsense”, said Fox, almost whispering. “You keep telling me to tell you everything, then you tell me to shut up when I try to”.
“I want to hear what happened, not your feelings”, said Grandy. He said the word feelings in the same way Jasma often said men. Then the look on his face changed; he’d obviously thought of something new. “Fox, have you still got the purple stone? Have you been keeping it quiet? You were always a great one for secrets and mystery.”
“No, I don’t”, said Fox, wishing it was a lie. He probably would have hidden the purple stone, and taken great pleasure in being the only person to know about it.
“And Piper says he hasn’t got one, and he’s too stupid to lie so convincingly”, mused Grandy, staring into the fire. “Well, you’ve caused a commotion here, boy. Half of the mothers don’t want their children mixing with you, and I don’t blame them. They think you’re some sort of a witch.”
Fox knew that the Ezwayna had been constantly accused of witchcraft in their old home. They were terrified of the accusation. The fear had made them paranoid, and they were quicker than anybody else to see witchcraft everywhere.
“But we appeared here in a flash in the first place”, said Fox. One again, he was perplexed by the logic of the adult world.
“Well, that’s different”, said Grandy, tipping the ash from his pipe onto the floor. This tamzan had reeds underfoot, rather than a carpet, but he would have tipped them onto a carpet, just the same. Old people did what they liked in this country, and Grandy had always done just what he liked. “They have stories where ordinary people are transported from one world to another. But no stories where little boys fall down a forty-foot hole and are completely unharmed. And unhurt. Are you unhurt?”
“Yes”, said Fox, wishing he could just storm out of the tamzan. But you didn’t do that with Grandy, no matter what world you happened to be in.
The old man mumbled something to himself, searching Fox’s face for the thousandth time, as if he was looking for clues in it. “Well, you don’t seem to be lying anyway, though maybe you’re just very good at it. So we’re just going to have to leave it there. For the moment, mind”, he stressed, seeing the look of relief on Fox’s face.
Fox made to go, longing to be away from this interrogation, but Grandy said: “Not so fast, buck. There’s something else I have to tell you”.
“What’s that?”
“Are you aware that there’s a big festival tomorrow?”, asked his grandfather, eyeing him up and down, like a tailor making mental measurements.
“No”, said Fox, surprised. Jasma often said he was made of ears, but he hadn’t heard a whisper of this.
”Typical of these people”, sighed Grandy. “They wouldn’t get straight to the point even if they saw a snake about to leap at you. And anything to do with religion turns their lips to marble. Well, for your enlightenment, tomorrow is the Day of Casting Off.”
“And what’s the Day of Casting Off?”, asked Fox, who hadn’t heard mention of it before.
“It’s a day when the Ezwayna cast off all worldly things. And that includes clothes”.
Fox giggled. He couldn’t help it.
“And that’s exactly why you’re not going to take part”, said Grandy, pointing at Fox with his pipe. “Not much point in expecting a pup like you to appreciate the spiritual meaning of the occasion. No, you’ll just double the size of your eyes, staring at the women.”
Fox thought he was going to burn away with embarrassment. He was glad Grandy had forbidden him from joining in. He couldn’t think of anything more mortifying.
“Are you going to….take part?”, asked Fox, finding it impossible to imagine, and trying not to smirk.
“Certainly not”, snapped Grandy. “People of my age aren’t expected to, praise be to the wisdom of the Ezwayna. There would be nothing to be gained, spiritually or otherwise, in looking at my bare body.”
Fox knew better than to laugh, though it was difficult. Grandy only made jokes on the understanding that they would be ignored.
“So I won’t go then”, he said. He was scared that the old man would insist on him going, once he realised Fox’s relief at escaping. It would be just like him.
“That’s not all”, said Grandy. “While the Ezwayna are communing with God—it all happens in the Great Hall— you will be making yourself useful. You’ll go from tamzan to tamzan, making sure no embers have started fires, or that foxes haven’t broken in.”
“There are almost four hundred of them!”, exclaimed Fox, trying to hide his pleasure at getting such a job. The Ezwayna were not a private people, but being in someone’s home when they were there was one thing, and being in someone’s house when they were out was another—and a much more enjoyable one.
“Well, you’ll have a busy day, then”, said Grandy, not trying to hide his satisfaction. “And now, go to Goodfellow’s house, and tell him I would greatly appreciate him joining me in a game of Spiral, in the Spiral House.”
The Spiral House was a tamzan entirely dedicated to the game of Spiral. Previously, it had been a sort of club-house for the younger Ezwayna men, but they had eagerly converted it to a shrine to the game that had seized their imagination.
Grandy and his friends had banned them from playing it, telling them that they didn’t understand it well enough yet. It was not for want of trying. Since they couldn’t actually play Spiral games of their own, the young Ezwayna had played out and studied the games of the past, which they had eagerly copied and re-copied from Grandy’s records.
Fox had even heard that Grandy, No-Sooner and Goodfellow all had their own fans. No-Sooner had the most admirers; he brought his good humour and happy-go-lucky spirit onto the Spiral board with him. But the others had their admirers, too. The Ezwayna who took Spiral most seriously were most likely to be fans of Grandy.
It was an early spring morning, mild for this climate. That was to say, only the faintest frost was still to be seen upon the grass. The moon was still in the sky, and few people were abroad
He went by the grove of benefactor trees’ that some called Bradda’s Walk. He found himself wondering, for the first time, whether Bradda was a man or a woman, and what he or she had done to be remembered here. He liked it. The ground was hilly, and it was full of little pools. He liked little pools. They were like toys, small and useless.
He was marching along, enjoying the crunch of stiff grass under his boots, when he heard voices high above him. He looked up. There were children hanging from the branches, some twenty feet up. No child ever seemed to fall from a benefactor tree. It would be like a bird tumbling out of the air.
As he looked up, they giggled, and he heard some of them chanting: “Woe to the witch! Woe to the witch! Woe to the witch!”. All the words were running together, so that it took him a few moments to realise what they were saying.
He hurried his pace for a few moments, then slowed again, frightened that one of his mockers would crash down from the trees, in their eagerness to keep up with him. Just because he had never seen it happen before, it didn’t mean it was never going to happen. And that would cause no end of trouble. No, all he could do was ignore them. Hopefully they would not start throwing things.
He trudged along for ten minutes or so, when he heard somebody drop behind him with a thump.
He turned around, but the child was standing up. It was a boy, perhaps nine years old. Fox thought he was a very ugly child, and he had a slightly dim-witted look, with mouth agape and staring eyes.
“Disappear”, said the boy, in a loud voice.
Fox walked on, but the boy followed him, not the slightest bit discouraged. Fox could hear the chanting following him through the trees.
“Go on, disappear”, said the boy. “I’ll give you a toy dragon. It’s this big”.
Fox didn’t even look around to see the grandeur of the object in question, though he was curious. He just said: “I can’t disappear”.
“But you did”, said the boy, as if this argument was decisive. “Do it again”.
Fox stopped, and turned on his heel. The boy stepped back a pace or two, as if he expected Fox himself to turn into a real dragon.
“Can you keep a secret?”, asked Fox.
The boy nodded, as eager as a cat watching birds.
“Well”, he said, lowering his mouth to the boy’s ear and whispering. “I can only work magic when I’m in danger. It’s part of the bargain, the bargain I struck with the Green Witch of Blood Valley.” He had to suppress his laughter at the awe on the boy’s face. “It’s to stop me using the magic for evil uses.”
“My mother said you were just lucky”, the boy whispered. “Wait till I tell her—“
“Hey!”, said Fox, feeling indignant himself. He leaned closer to his ear. “If you tell anybody about this, you’ll turn into cheese. Rotten cheese”.
“I won’t tell anyone” said the boy, putting his palm over his mouth. It was a gesture that meant silence amongst the Ezwayna, who were experts at keeping quiet.
“Make sure that you don’t”, whispered Fox, trying to make his voice as menacing as possible. “And stop following me.”
He looked around, and saw a long gap in the benefactor trees, perhaps a hundred paces away. He made for that, wondering how long the boy’s dread of turning to cheese would keep him from blabbing. Not very long, he guessed. Fox wondered whether the Ezwayna would take the boy’s stories seriously. If they did, it would mean more lectures from Grandy.
Sighing with relief when he reached the clearance, he marched along for ten or fifteen minutes, hearing nothing but the chitter-chatter of the birds, and seeing nothing but an occasional squirrel or rabbit. He tried not to think about the purple flash. The shadow of that thought always lay over his mind, but he did his best not to face it. Who knows where he might be whisked away to next? Some place far away from Grandy and Jasma, where he would never see them again?
He repeated of a rhyme he had heard a mother croon to her baby instead:
King Lazybones said from the head of his bed
I never will rise any more;
I won’t lead the force on my dappled grey horse
And I won’t ride away to the war.
But I’ll lie on my pillow, and hire a good fellow
To sing me a song of old times.
And the world can go by, while in comfort I lie,
And sleep through the eight o’clock chimes.
He was about to repeat it for the third time, enjoying the pictures it formed in his mind, when he saw a figure standing by a pool. It was a tall, lean young man—in his early twenties, perhaps. He had a long face and sad, dark eyes. His hair was rather untidy, and his boots were muddy. He looked up when he heard Fox passing by.
“You!”, he said, in a husky voice, and Fox groaned silently. Would he never be allowed to forget his accidental miracle?
“Yes?”, he replied meekly, falling naturally into the respectful tones required of children speaking to adults here.
“You’re Jasma’s friend, aren’t you?”, he asked, turning from the pool and staring at Fox, in a way that was almost rude.
“I suppose”, he replied, wondering what the man wanted.
“I adore her”, burst out the Ezwayna man, closing his eyes for a moment. This was even worse. The Ezwayna didn’t show any embarrassment about romance. Lovers would kiss passionately in any sort of company, and nobody seemed in the least bit put out. “She’s so beautiful”, said the man. “My name is Truevow. I know that yours is Fox”
Fox bowed low, the required thing to do when somebody older introduced themselves to you. But as soon as he had done that, he asked: “Jasma? Beautiful?”
“Don’t you consider her beautiful?”, asked Truevow, surprised rather than annoyed at Fox’s scepticism. “Her beautiful golden hair…”
“Weren’t there any fair-haired women in…in the Anarchy?”, asked Fox, trying to get over his shock at Jasma being called beautiful.
“In the Anarchy? No”, said Truevow, shaking his head sadly. “All black-haired, like us. The only fair-haired women I’ve met are the ones in old tales. I never thought a maiden would step out of the tales into the sight of my eyes”, he finished, looking back down at grass, morosely.
Fox wanted to kick him, but instead he said: “Have you spoken to her?”
“I have told her of my love for her”, said Truevow, nodding, still examining the grass. “She was…mocking. And yet, she kept listening to me. Is that her way?”
“The mockery bit is, anyway.” Jasma, beautiful?
“Has she spoken to you of any other man? Any other…young man?”, asked Truevow, looking up from the grass, staring at Fox in an agony of hope and dread.
“No”, said Fox.
Truevow sighed in relief and disappointment, and then—looking about him, and lowering his voice—he added, “Does she speak about Piper?” He spoke the name as if it was some horrific disease. “The Ezwayna ladies are all besotted with Piper, and I have seen him looking at her”.
“She only ever complains about him”, said Fox, wishing he could run away.
Truevow smiled at this for a moment, but soon his face was troubled again. “Women admire dangerous men”, he said, stating it as a simple matter of fact. “Piper is one of the most dangerous men I’ve ever seen.”
“Is he dangerous?”, asked Fox, suddenly feeling the skin on his spine tighten.
Truevow looked down at him, taken aback by his ignorance. “Of course he’s dangerous! Our old ones have told us all to be exceedingly careful around him. They say he is the kind of man who has murder for a travelling companion, and disaster for a pet.”
Truevow continued to babble on about Jasma’s eyes, and her skin, and the way she stood with her arms folded, but Fox was hardly listening. He was thinking about Piper, and of the way he looked at Grandy sometimes, when he thought nobody was watching; a look Fox could never understand, a deep and dark look. He was thinking about how Grandy had executed Piper’s father, and of Piper’s time with the Skullmen. Jasma had told him all about those cut-throat gangs, in story after bloodthirsty story.
And he remembered Jasma quoting one of their sayings during such a story, in a whisper of delicious dread, though it seemed less delicious now: Three lives for one, that is a good start for revenge.
I can't remember if I pulled the particular post containing the errors. I suspect I did.
Since then, I lost access to the old laptop that The Bard's Apprentice, A Hundred Nightmares, and several other would-be masterpieces were stored on. I mean, I know it's still there, and it's safe, but it would be a bother to get to it and retrieve my stuff from it.
However, while looking for something else, I discovered I had the complete manuscript of The Bard's Apprentice in my email, as an attachment.
I thought about sprucing it up, but I'm too lazy. As Chesterton said about one of his books: "There is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it." Or as another author, multilinguistic and rather lapidary, once declared: "What I have written, I have written." Apparently Homer's Iliad is riddled with such continuity errors. Who am I to outdo Homer?
Make a game out of it! For every character whose name changes, three points. For every character who appears out of nowhere, eight points. If a character comes back from the dead, twenty points. Day turning to night, one point. Sudden location changes, four points.
You could even make a drinking game out of it, though I want to stress that this blog promotes the responsible use of alcohol, fireworks, firearms and bowling balls.
I think there is a coherent narrative and the discrepancies are minor. But if anything in the story is actually confusing, please point it out and I'll try to clear it up. Hopefully I won't be like Raymond Chandler, whose novel The Big Sleep was so complicated that, when it was being made into a movie and the film-makers asked him who had killed a particular character, he had to admit he didn't know.
Anyway, here's the first of the rest. I'll post more very soon since I suspect I posted this already.
Chapter Four
The first thing that struck him was the cold. He seemed to be indoors, though his eyes were still recovering from the purple flash and it was hard to see. But the cold was still biting. He found he was hugging himself instinctively, the metal box dropped to the floor.
“Fox?”, came a voice, and his body surged with joy when he realised it was Grandy. There was relief in that voice, but even now, it was guarded and gruff. Grandy never lost his self-control.
The boy’s eyes recovered from the flash, and he began to make out the scene around him. He was in some kind of a tent, or a house, or a mix between the two. It had a huge timber frame, with a roof that could not be reached by a tall man on the shoulders of another tall man. In between the timber supports, there were thick skins of some sort, brown and beige and pink. Under his foot were the same skins. There was a golden glow from lamps that hung from the ceiling.
Grandy’s friends and Jasma were standing around, looking at him as if they expected him to have explanations.
“Where’s the stone, boy?”, came a thin voice, and Fox turned to see the criminal standing a little off from the other. He looked more frightened than any of them, but less dangerous than he had seemed through the Proximator.
“I…” Fox looked down at his hand, and realised with a jolt that the purple stone was gone.
The criminal groaned and lowered his hand to his head. “That’s it”, he said, limply. “We’re stuck here forever”.
“What are you complaining about?”, asked Grandy. “They would have hanged you if they hadn’t shot you straight away, where you were.”
The criminal did not reply. He just looked at Grandy with a strange mix of respect and anger.
“For my part, I’m rather happy to be here”, said the old man, giving one of his crooked smiles, “now that Fox has been clever enough to bring my box”.
There was a chorus of agreement from the other players, and Fox had never heard anything more heartfelt. He flushed with pleasure and pride.
“I thought it was all over”, said No-Sooner, walking to the box and lifting it lovingly.
“But you don’t have any boards, or pieces…” Fox began.
“Oh, we can build those”, said Goodfellow, watching Twelvemorning lift the box. All the other players were doing the same, like capsized sailors stranded on an unknown shore, gazing at the sail of a ship coming to save them.
“But without these records…”, said No-Sooner, who had a white furry cloak around him. “It’s funny how we thought we were safe. We all had our own copies in our own boxes and chests, hidden, under lock and key…”
“I wonder if anyone will ever find them?”, asked Goodfellow. “Maybe the game will begin again.”
“But where are we?”, asked Fox, shivering, wishing he had a furry cloak like Goodfellow’s.
“Well, it’s kind of hard to say”, Grandy replied, finally taking his eyes from the box. “We can’t understand a word the natives speak, which is not too surprising. But it’s no country in our world, that’s for sure.”
“What do you mean?”, asked Fox, though he knew what Grandy meant.
“The stars are different from any stars you could see on our world”, said Grandy. “Haven’t you heard stories about people who went through pools, or mirrors, or paintings, into an entirely different world? Of course you have. You listen to Jasma’s ridiculous stories all the time.”
“Why are they ridiculous? It turns out they’re true”, said Jasma, glaring at Grandy.
“Certainly they’re true”, said Grandy. “But you never really believed them, did you? That’s what made them ridiculous.”
Jasma didn’t say anything, and Fox saw the criminal smile to himself.
“So why can’t we get back?”, asked Fox, almost choked with panic.
“Oh, by the thirteen hundred names!”, cried Grandy. “Boys are meant to be adventurous, aren’t they? Aren’t you happy to leave behind a dying Empire for a new world? A whole new world?”
“But It’s so cold”, said Fox. Only then did Harkness take the fur cloak from his own shoulders and put it around the boy, looking rather ashamed that he had only thought of it now.
“You think this is cold?”, asked Grandy. “You should have been in the Great Sickle back in the Maraguan campaign, when our rifles seized up in the freezing air. When five hundred men slept virtually on top of each other…this is a cool autumn day in comparison”.
“Don’t be so pompous, Grandy”, said Goodfellow. “You were in your twenties back then. Fox is ten years old.”
“Eleven”, corrected Fox, automatically.
“I meant eleven”, said Goodfellow, but at that moment the door of the enclosure opened—there was a rattle of beads—and some people entered in, carrying platters of food.
No wonder these people liked high ceilings, thought Fox. They were all giants. There were four women and three men, and none of them were less than six foot two. The tallest man was at least seven foot. They were broad as well as tall, though the fur cloaks they wore (black, white and brown) added to the impression.
They were not especially attractive, though Fox would change his opinion of their looks before too long. They had strong noses and wide mouths, low cheekbones and pale complexions. They looked so far from friendly that Fox felt afraid.
They brought the food (which smelled pleasant enough) to a star-shaped table in one corner of the building. They ushered Fox and the others to high wooden chairs, that were hard but surprisingly comfortable.
One woman carried a large bowl of earth, a smaller bowl from which steam rose, and a yet smaller bowl with some kind of cream, all borne on a tray. She had a length of cloth folded around her arm.
She went to Grandy first, put the bowl upon the table before him, and extended her hands, palms facing upwards. Grandy looked at her questioning for a moment, then extended his arm in the same way. She spread some of the cream on his palms, and rubbed her palms together briskly. He did the same.
Then she put the bowl of earth beneath his outstretched hands, and lifting the bowl of steaming water, poured it over them and into the earth. He rubbed them together again, taking the cloth from her arm to dry them.
“They don’t use forks or knives, then”, said Jasma, disapprovingly. She always grabbed any opportunity to be offended.
As soon as he had washed his hands, Grandy was grabbing food from the platters. Fox knew it was curiosity rather than appetite that made him eager. Grandy seemed to live on a diet of tobacco for the most part. Fox was a chubby boy and didn’t understand.
“It’s pleasant enough”, he said, chewing it and looking around the table. “Fish of some sort. Peas. Some kind of biscuit. All mixed together. Doesn’t look too pleasant though, does it?”.
There was a smile around the table, and an amused murmur. The mash, whatever it was made from, was coloured a greenish-grey that did not excite the palate. But the others were helping themselves, anyway.
Their hosts were trying to speak to them again. The language was quite melodious and soft, and accompanied by constant hand gestures. But the newcomers couldn’t make any sense of it. They began to seem frustrated.
“What do they expect?”, asked Twelvemorning, seeming a bit offended herself. “They don’t understand us”.
“I’d guess this is some sort of common tongue they expect everyone to know”, said Grandy, with the air of self-satisfaction that turned so many people against him.
“I think Ezwayna is their name”, said the criminal.
“What’s that, Piper?”, asked Grandy, roughly. He never liked somebody else to know more than him.
“What would you know about their language?”, asked Jasma, just as sternly as Grandy.
“I’ve spent a lot of time going from place to place”, said Piper. “On the run.” He said it almost defiantly, in response to Jasma’s mutterings. “I was always good at picking up languages I’d never heard before”.
“Indeed?”, mused Grandy, his irritation forgotten now. “Try speaking to them. Do something useful, for once. And don’t even think about double-crossing us.” The criminal only smiled at this.
“They confiscated the pistols, you know”, Jasma whispered to me. Fox didn’t understand why she was whispering, since neither group could
understand the other. “They were very angry when they saw them. So they have pistols, and we don’t.”
“You’re scaring me”, said Fox. She delighted telling him horrifying tales, and they delighted him just as much as they did her. When they were told by the kitchen fire. This horrifying tale was happening, and he didn’t like it one bit.
“Well, I’m scared, too”, said Jasma, rather sulkily. “They look pretty savage to me.”
Piper was trying to talk to their hosts, and he seemed to have scored at least one hit, because they seemed pleased and excited. They waved their hands even harder, and raised their voices, and seemed to have forgotten about anyone other than Piper.
“Look at him”, said Jasma, viciously. “He thinks he’s the robin’s crest.”
“But it looks like he knows what he’s doing”, said Fox.
“Of course he does”, said Jasma. “He’s a conman. Trickery and winning people’s trust is how he’s lived his life. Don’t turn your back to him for a moment.”
Meanwhile, Grandy and his friends were back to discussing Spiral. This had probably been the longest break Fox had ever heard in that never-ending discussion.
“What if someone discovers our boards, and our records”, asked No-Sooner, as if this had been troubling him for some time, “and they start playing themselves, and continuing the game in…in the old world, in the Empire? And we continue it here? What happens if we ever go back? Either we’d have to be right, or the people back there. Hundreds of games just wasted”, he said, with raw pain in his voice.
“It’s nothing to worry about”, said Grandy. “We’re never going back. We may as well get used to it”.
No-Sooner and Goodfellow both looked happier at the idea. Going home seemed to be less important to them than keeping Spiral free from contradictions and muddles.
“How long do you think it will take to build two new boards?, asked Goodfellow. The Proximator wasn’t the only gadget he owned. Goodfellow
was the only one of the three who used his hands for much more than moving Spiral pieces.
“They seem like fair craftsmen”, said No-Sooner, glancing around the tent-house. “I’m sure they have the tools for the job. Of course, they won’t be as sumptuous as our boards…”
“That doesn’t matter”, came the chorus from the other players, and Fox could almost taste their impatience to get back to playing.
They launched into further discussion—Fox understood it little better than he understood the talk of this world’s natives, but he loved listening to them. He loved the lost expression on their faces. He had spent many dreamy hours and days looking at the children playing games in the street, but even they never seemed as utterly serious and utterly enchanted as these old people, talking about shuttles and unicorns and wells and all the other, bewildering parts of Spiral.
He sat there, eating and listening, until he noticed that Jasma was crying softly behind him, unnoticed by anybody.
“What’s wrong?”, he asked, putting his hand to her shoulder but drawing it back at the last moment. She had only hugged him once, earlier today, and it felt too strange to try.
“Oh, blood”, she swore. “Listen to them all, so happy to get away from their lives. That’s all right for them. They’re not leaving anything behind”.
“Oh…your family”, said Fox, suddenly struck by sadness for Jasma. Her sisters and her mother were back in the Empire, depending on her wages.
“My mother always said I was flighty”, she said, fighting back the tears angrily. “She always said I’d disappear without telling her, as soon as someone offered to take me away.”
“She never meant it”, said Fox, who never understood why people said such cruel things of the people they loved.
“I know”, said Jasma, finally giving way to the flood of tears. “That’s the worst thing about it. She’ll think she was wrong about me all along.” She hid her face in her hands, shaking with grief, and for the first time in his life Fox realised she was very young. And he grew a little older in that moment.
Chapter Five
The pistols were not used on them, despite Jasma’s fears. They were simply thrown in a nearby lake. The Ezwayna hated all guns and all violence. They were willing to fight, if they had to—in fact, they had been highly prized as soldiers in the lands they had recently fled. But it went against their nature, which was gentle and peaceful.
Gentle and peaceful, but not cheerful. The Ezwayna were a gloomy people. That very night, a woman had sung them a song that seemed to go on for hours. Fox didn’t have to understand the words to know that it was sad. There was centuries of sadness in her voice, and her people wept openly, the men as well as the woman.
They slept on thick woollen mattresses on the ground—they were very comfortable—and, though the early morning was so cold that Fox thought he might never be able to move again, soon the temperature became more bearable.
He roamed around the country of the Ezwayna the next day. The tent-houses, which the Ezwayna called tamzans, were dotted at distant intervals in this sprawling landscape. They usually in the shade of the massive trees that the Ezwayna called “benefactor trees”, which were broader than any tree Fox had ever seen. They looked like huge domes from far away.
It was winter, and thick snow fell every day. The Ezwayna went hunting, fishing and working at other occupations during the day. Their children seemed to spend most of their time amongst the branches of the benefactor trees, or playing a complicated game of marbles.
The old people launched into the task of making new Spiral boards, using Piper as an interpreter with the Ezwayna, and showing little gratitude for his help. All four of them set to whittling, sawing, smoothing and painting with an energy Fox would never have suspected they possessed. They had them made within two days, though they were certainly not as pretty as the old ones.
The Ezwayna were fascinated by their efforts, especially the young men and women. They watched Grandy and the others making the boards with the
keenest attention, though they never offered to help. They stood a distance back, as if they didn’t want to distract the workers.
“Maybe they’re amazed at how stupid we are”, laughed No-Sooner.
But the Ezwayna always seemed to show the deepest respect to the old people. They all but ignored Jasma and Fox.
“They just think old people should be honoured”, said Piper over dinner, after he had been talking to them for three days. “The head of the people is always the oldest one.”
“Even if it’s a woman?”, asked Jasma.
“Yes,” said Piper, not looking at her. Fox couldn’t blame him; she took every opportunity to be rude to him.
“I don’t think much of it as a philosophy”, said Grandy, who had made the happy discovery that the Ezwayna smoked pipes, though he wasn’t too keen on the weed they used. “The idea that old people automatically grow wiser is very mistaken. Most old people I know are senile fools.”
“Except for all of us”, said No-Sooner. “And I’m not old, anyway.”
“I think it’s stupid”, said Jasma. “Old people are selfish and cruel.” Nobody contradicted her. They just went on eating their fish soup.
“Oh, something you’d better know, Fox”, said Piper. “You don’t speak to your elders here until they speak to you. You don’t disagree with them, and you never criticise them, unless you’re talking to someone your own age.”
“How long have they been here?”, asked Harkness.
“About fifteen years”, Piper replied. Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was a criminal, he was so well-spoken and polite. “They call it Wild Haven.They come from a place they call the Anarchy. People made fun of them there, because they’re so gentle and peaceful, and were always trying to provoke them. Also they found it difficult to deal with cheeky children, and twenty-year-old bureaucrats telling them what to do.”
“Do they believe in God?”, asked Jasma, who was very religious.
“They do”, said Piper. “But please don’t mention the subject. Talking about God is taboo here. It’s considered blasphemy. You have no idea how hard it was for them to explain that to me, without actually talking about God.”
“I agree with them there, anyway”, said Grandy. “What’s more egotistical than the idea that God wants us pestering him?”
Jasma threw more salt into her soup, and flared her nostrils. “How is your ridiculous game going?”, she asked.
All of the old people started talking at once, all to the same effect: the game had resumed wonderfully, and the Ezwayna were almost as absorbed in it as they were.
“This is all I wanted for my declining years”, said No-Sooner. “Leisure to play Spiral, and no distractions. And who do you have to thank for that, except for Mr. Piper?”
Piper smiled, and bowed his head slightly. “Thank you, Mr. No-Sooner”, he said. “I’m not used to gratitude, and I’m sure I don’t deserve it.”
“I agree with that”, said Jasma, with a bitter smile. “Have you told the Ezwayna that you’re a jail-bird?”, she asked.
“No”, said Piper. “This is a new start for me.”
“The tree puts out the same leaves every year”, said Jasma. She knew thousands of proverbs, and all of them could be used to chastise.
Jasma had told him something of Piper, since they arrived here. He was a builder who had joined the Skullmen, the secret society that took it upon themselves to punish brutal bosses and foremen. An informer had given the police his name, and ever since that, he had been on run.
He’d stolen the purple stone from a mansion in Butter Street, the richest part of our city. “He said the man who owned was cruel to his workers”, said Jasma. “As if that made stealing all right.”
“Grandy says lots of poor people in the Empire have to work twelve hours a day”, said Fox.
“Well”, said Jasma, putting on her most prim look. “At least when a poor man is working he isn’t drinking, or beating his wife. And I’ve often worked twelve hours a day”. But Fox knew that Jasma went to sleep whenever she felt like it, and spent hours talking to Mrs. Summershower, the woman who peddled laces and brocades from door to door. Jasma spoke harshly of the poor when she meant other people, and pityingly when she meant herself.
“Do you think more people are going to come here, if they find the purple stone?”, Fox asked Grandy, over supper one night. Meals were the only chance he got to speak to Grandy. The old man spent almost every other moment playing Spiral.
“I don’t expect so”, said his grandfather. “Piper was carrying it for years before it did anything. Something about that moment made it…do whatever it did. Why, are you pining for home?”
“No”, said Fox. “I like it here”.
“So do I”, said Grandy, and his eyes sparkled. Moments like that were the closest they came to affection.
He grew more accustomed to the cold, as time went by. He began to pick up some words of the Ezwayna language. Soon he could speak it without thinking. One day, months after they had come to this world, he realised that he had been speaking Ezwayna to Jasma for an entire conversation, without even realising it. Before long they hardly ever used the language they had brought with them.
He made friends, although sometimes that was a trial. The older boys lorded it over the younger ones here, and speaking out of place earned you a stinging smack on the face. Somehow that didn’t offend these peoples’ hatred of violence. But there was no bullying, and he had more friends than ever before. But he still spent of his time alone, wandering the lakes and woods and thinking his own thoughts.
One day he found himself passing a tamzan, and heard a gale of laughter coming from inside. He went towards it. Nobody thought it wrong to enter a strange house here; knocking at doors was unknown.
An old woman was sitting in the centre of the tamzan, surrounded by dozens of other Ezwayna, of all ages. They were all sitting cross-legged on the floor, transfixed by what the old woman was singing. Some were sipping chora, the bitter berry drink they loved here.
It was a long narrative poem called—Fox subsequently learnt—The Twelve Voyages of Tamar the Innocent. When he joined in—nobody even looked around, although Fox could have sworn that the woman was suddenly addressing him—she was describing how Tamar was being chased by his
shadow, which had grown sick of his endless wandering, and wanted to pin him down.
Fox saw young children actually rolling around the floor, which was something he had always considered a figure of speech. He found himself laughing, not so much at the story—it didn’t seem that funny, and was probably funnier if you’d been listening from the start—than from sheer infection of mirth. It was impossible not to laugh, when laughter was shaking the beams of the tamzan.
The woman did not smile, though. Her teeth were mostly misisng and her skin was wrinkled, but she was curiously beautiful. There was something so hardy and serene about her.
Soon, Fox was as lost in the tale as any of the others. Tamar had managed to cage his shadow inside a little box, and gave it to a squirrel to guard. He moved on to the country of the Queen of Flames, who had murdered her son in a fit of madness, and who sought to detain Tamar, convinced he was her own boy. Suddenly laughter seemed to belong to a different world, and eyes—not just those of children—were glinting with tears.
He stood there for two or three hours, listening. Turn after turn came in the tale, with comic and tragic, heroic and piteous scenes passing through the listeners’ minds, one merging into the next seamlessly. Nobody so much as shifted uncomfortably, through all the time Fox stood there. And how long might she have been talking before Fox arrived?
As she told the tale, Fox thought he could hear a melody behind the words; a silent melody, a music that was softer and yet more overpowering than anything he had ever known before. It was nothing other than life itself, but life as he had never imagined it until now. He had never guessed there were such depths to existence. The old woman’s tale made it seemed so plenteous— an overflowing abundance of different emotions, and characters, and scenes, and possibilities—but not a chaos, either. No, there were patterns in the storm, pictures in the eternal fire. Patterns he might understand one day, or begin to understand.
Of course, he could not have put these thoughts into words, even in the simplest manner. He just stood there, listening to the old woman’s tones
washing over him, feeling more excited than he had felt in his short life. For eleven years, his soul had slumbered in its womb, and in that single moment it was born.
He listened until the very end of the tale—which was no end at all, but a promise of future, greater tales—and began to clap loudly.
Two dozen eyes turned towards him in shock, although the old lady did not seem surprised, or even look at him. He had never a sound more sickening than the echoes of his lonely applause in the spacious tamzan. Then there came laughter, a small whisper at first, followed by a gale.
He turned away, tears of humiliation in his eyes, and stormed out of the tamzan. He strode across the snowy landscape, feeling cheated of his moment of joy. It was cold, but he was hot with shame. Only after a few moments did he realise somebody was following him.
He turned around. It was a boy of his own age. He had curly hair, black like the hair of all his people, and an infuriatingly saucy expression.
“What do you want?”, asked Fox, rudely.
“How old are you?”, asked the other boy.
“Older than you”, said Fox.
“How do you know?”
“I can tell”, said Fox. “I’ve seen more than you’ll ever see”.
“You haven’t seen a madman”, said the other boy.
Fox didn’t reply to this. It was unanswerable.
“Why did you do that?”, asked the boy, his eyes boring into Fox.
“It’s called clapping”, said Fox. “It’s what we do in civilised countries.”
“Everybody thinks you’re weird”, said the boy. “I bet I could beat you to that fence over there.”
Fox had never done much running. But there was no way he’d refuse such a challenge. He nodded, and the very next moment they were both rushing towards the fence.
As might expected, the other boy took the lead within a few seconds, but Fox kept running. He was determined to catch up, no matter what. He pushed himself harder and harder, and he felt the distance between them shortening. The fence was not so far away now…
Then the ground gave way beneath him, and he was tumbling. He seemed to be tumbling for an eternity, and suddenly…
The purple flash again, the one that had come over him when he held the stone. But this time it had come and gone in a moment, almost too quickly to notice.
And then he was looking up from an unbelievably steep pit. The head of the boy who had been chasing after him peered over the edge.
“How come you’re not dead?”, he asked.
Chapter Six
“Tell me again exactly what happened”, said Grandy, pointing his pipe at Fox before shoving it back in his mouth. He stared at the boy as if he was trying to see through him.
“I’ve already told you a hundred times”, said Fox, his patience—or his fear of Grandy—finally used up.
He expected Grandy to thunder at him. Or to slap him in the face. He’d done that before, though not for a long time. Instead, his frown deepened.
“Maybe you think you’re telling me everything. Maybe you’ve forgotten something. Did you see anything in this…this purple? Any shadows, or pictures, or shapes?”
“No”, said Fox, surprised now at Grandy’s own patience.
“Did you hear anything?”, asked Grandy.
“Not…not with my ears”.
“I told you to stop talking nonsense”, said his grandfather, lying back in his wicker chair, as if he’d been exhausted by Fox’s silliness. The shadows from the firelight made his wrinkles stand out on his face.
“It’s not nonsense”, said Fox, almost whispering. “You keep telling me to tell you everything, then you tell me to shut up when I try to”.
“I want to hear what happened, not your feelings”, said Grandy. He said the word feelings in the same way Jasma often said men. Then the look on his face changed; he’d obviously thought of something new. “Fox, have you still got the purple stone? Have you been keeping it quiet? You were always a great one for secrets and mystery.”
“No, I don’t”, said Fox, wishing it was a lie. He probably would have hidden the purple stone, and taken great pleasure in being the only person to know about it.
“And Piper says he hasn’t got one, and he’s too stupid to lie so convincingly”, mused Grandy, staring into the fire. “Well, you’ve caused a commotion here, boy. Half of the mothers don’t want their children mixing with you, and I don’t blame them. They think you’re some sort of a witch.”
Fox knew that the Ezwayna had been constantly accused of witchcraft in their old home. They were terrified of the accusation. The fear had made them paranoid, and they were quicker than anybody else to see witchcraft everywhere.
“But we appeared here in a flash in the first place”, said Fox. One again, he was perplexed by the logic of the adult world.
“Well, that’s different”, said Grandy, tipping the ash from his pipe onto the floor. This tamzan had reeds underfoot, rather than a carpet, but he would have tipped them onto a carpet, just the same. Old people did what they liked in this country, and Grandy had always done just what he liked. “They have stories where ordinary people are transported from one world to another. But no stories where little boys fall down a forty-foot hole and are completely unharmed. And unhurt. Are you unhurt?”
“Yes”, said Fox, wishing he could just storm out of the tamzan. But you didn’t do that with Grandy, no matter what world you happened to be in.
The old man mumbled something to himself, searching Fox’s face for the thousandth time, as if he was looking for clues in it. “Well, you don’t seem to be lying anyway, though maybe you’re just very good at it. So we’re just going to have to leave it there. For the moment, mind”, he stressed, seeing the look of relief on Fox’s face.
Fox made to go, longing to be away from this interrogation, but Grandy said: “Not so fast, buck. There’s something else I have to tell you”.
“What’s that?”
“Are you aware that there’s a big festival tomorrow?”, asked his grandfather, eyeing him up and down, like a tailor making mental measurements.
“No”, said Fox, surprised. Jasma often said he was made of ears, but he hadn’t heard a whisper of this.
”Typical of these people”, sighed Grandy. “They wouldn’t get straight to the point even if they saw a snake about to leap at you. And anything to do with religion turns their lips to marble. Well, for your enlightenment, tomorrow is the Day of Casting Off.”
“And what’s the Day of Casting Off?”, asked Fox, who hadn’t heard mention of it before.
“It’s a day when the Ezwayna cast off all worldly things. And that includes clothes”.
Fox giggled. He couldn’t help it.
“And that’s exactly why you’re not going to take part”, said Grandy, pointing at Fox with his pipe. “Not much point in expecting a pup like you to appreciate the spiritual meaning of the occasion. No, you’ll just double the size of your eyes, staring at the women.”
Fox thought he was going to burn away with embarrassment. He was glad Grandy had forbidden him from joining in. He couldn’t think of anything more mortifying.
“Are you going to….take part?”, asked Fox, finding it impossible to imagine, and trying not to smirk.
“Certainly not”, snapped Grandy. “People of my age aren’t expected to, praise be to the wisdom of the Ezwayna. There would be nothing to be gained, spiritually or otherwise, in looking at my bare body.”
Fox knew better than to laugh, though it was difficult. Grandy only made jokes on the understanding that they would be ignored.
“So I won’t go then”, he said. He was scared that the old man would insist on him going, once he realised Fox’s relief at escaping. It would be just like him.
“That’s not all”, said Grandy. “While the Ezwayna are communing with God—it all happens in the Great Hall— you will be making yourself useful. You’ll go from tamzan to tamzan, making sure no embers have started fires, or that foxes haven’t broken in.”
“There are almost four hundred of them!”, exclaimed Fox, trying to hide his pleasure at getting such a job. The Ezwayna were not a private people, but being in someone’s home when they were there was one thing, and being in someone’s house when they were out was another—and a much more enjoyable one.
“Well, you’ll have a busy day, then”, said Grandy, not trying to hide his satisfaction. “And now, go to Goodfellow’s house, and tell him I would greatly appreciate him joining me in a game of Spiral, in the Spiral House.”
The Spiral House was a tamzan entirely dedicated to the game of Spiral. Previously, it had been a sort of club-house for the younger Ezwayna men, but they had eagerly converted it to a shrine to the game that had seized their imagination.
Grandy and his friends had banned them from playing it, telling them that they didn’t understand it well enough yet. It was not for want of trying. Since they couldn’t actually play Spiral games of their own, the young Ezwayna had played out and studied the games of the past, which they had eagerly copied and re-copied from Grandy’s records.
Fox had even heard that Grandy, No-Sooner and Goodfellow all had their own fans. No-Sooner had the most admirers; he brought his good humour and happy-go-lucky spirit onto the Spiral board with him. But the others had their admirers, too. The Ezwayna who took Spiral most seriously were most likely to be fans of Grandy.
It was an early spring morning, mild for this climate. That was to say, only the faintest frost was still to be seen upon the grass. The moon was still in the sky, and few people were abroad
He went by the grove of benefactor trees’ that some called Bradda’s Walk. He found himself wondering, for the first time, whether Bradda was a man or a woman, and what he or she had done to be remembered here. He liked it. The ground was hilly, and it was full of little pools. He liked little pools. They were like toys, small and useless.
He was marching along, enjoying the crunch of stiff grass under his boots, when he heard voices high above him. He looked up. There were children hanging from the branches, some twenty feet up. No child ever seemed to fall from a benefactor tree. It would be like a bird tumbling out of the air.
As he looked up, they giggled, and he heard some of them chanting: “Woe to the witch! Woe to the witch! Woe to the witch!”. All the words were running together, so that it took him a few moments to realise what they were saying.
He hurried his pace for a few moments, then slowed again, frightened that one of his mockers would crash down from the trees, in their eagerness to keep up with him. Just because he had never seen it happen before, it didn’t mean it was never going to happen. And that would cause no end of trouble. No, all he could do was ignore them. Hopefully they would not start throwing things.
He trudged along for ten minutes or so, when he heard somebody drop behind him with a thump.
He turned around, but the child was standing up. It was a boy, perhaps nine years old. Fox thought he was a very ugly child, and he had a slightly dim-witted look, with mouth agape and staring eyes.
“Disappear”, said the boy, in a loud voice.
Fox walked on, but the boy followed him, not the slightest bit discouraged. Fox could hear the chanting following him through the trees.
“Go on, disappear”, said the boy. “I’ll give you a toy dragon. It’s this big”.
Fox didn’t even look around to see the grandeur of the object in question, though he was curious. He just said: “I can’t disappear”.
“But you did”, said the boy, as if this argument was decisive. “Do it again”.
Fox stopped, and turned on his heel. The boy stepped back a pace or two, as if he expected Fox himself to turn into a real dragon.
“Can you keep a secret?”, asked Fox.
The boy nodded, as eager as a cat watching birds.
“Well”, he said, lowering his mouth to the boy’s ear and whispering. “I can only work magic when I’m in danger. It’s part of the bargain, the bargain I struck with the Green Witch of Blood Valley.” He had to suppress his laughter at the awe on the boy’s face. “It’s to stop me using the magic for evil uses.”
“My mother said you were just lucky”, the boy whispered. “Wait till I tell her—“
“Hey!”, said Fox, feeling indignant himself. He leaned closer to his ear. “If you tell anybody about this, you’ll turn into cheese. Rotten cheese”.
“I won’t tell anyone” said the boy, putting his palm over his mouth. It was a gesture that meant silence amongst the Ezwayna, who were experts at keeping quiet.
“Make sure that you don’t”, whispered Fox, trying to make his voice as menacing as possible. “And stop following me.”
He looked around, and saw a long gap in the benefactor trees, perhaps a hundred paces away. He made for that, wondering how long the boy’s dread of turning to cheese would keep him from blabbing. Not very long, he guessed. Fox wondered whether the Ezwayna would take the boy’s stories seriously. If they did, it would mean more lectures from Grandy.
Sighing with relief when he reached the clearance, he marched along for ten or fifteen minutes, hearing nothing but the chitter-chatter of the birds, and seeing nothing but an occasional squirrel or rabbit. He tried not to think about the purple flash. The shadow of that thought always lay over his mind, but he did his best not to face it. Who knows where he might be whisked away to next? Some place far away from Grandy and Jasma, where he would never see them again?
He repeated of a rhyme he had heard a mother croon to her baby instead:
King Lazybones said from the head of his bed
I never will rise any more;
I won’t lead the force on my dappled grey horse
And I won’t ride away to the war.
But I’ll lie on my pillow, and hire a good fellow
To sing me a song of old times.
And the world can go by, while in comfort I lie,
And sleep through the eight o’clock chimes.
He was about to repeat it for the third time, enjoying the pictures it formed in his mind, when he saw a figure standing by a pool. It was a tall, lean young man—in his early twenties, perhaps. He had a long face and sad, dark eyes. His hair was rather untidy, and his boots were muddy. He looked up when he heard Fox passing by.
“You!”, he said, in a husky voice, and Fox groaned silently. Would he never be allowed to forget his accidental miracle?
“Yes?”, he replied meekly, falling naturally into the respectful tones required of children speaking to adults here.
“You’re Jasma’s friend, aren’t you?”, he asked, turning from the pool and staring at Fox, in a way that was almost rude.
“I suppose”, he replied, wondering what the man wanted.
“I adore her”, burst out the Ezwayna man, closing his eyes for a moment. This was even worse. The Ezwayna didn’t show any embarrassment about romance. Lovers would kiss passionately in any sort of company, and nobody seemed in the least bit put out. “She’s so beautiful”, said the man. “My name is Truevow. I know that yours is Fox”
Fox bowed low, the required thing to do when somebody older introduced themselves to you. But as soon as he had done that, he asked: “Jasma? Beautiful?”
“Don’t you consider her beautiful?”, asked Truevow, surprised rather than annoyed at Fox’s scepticism. “Her beautiful golden hair…”
“Weren’t there any fair-haired women in…in the Anarchy?”, asked Fox, trying to get over his shock at Jasma being called beautiful.
“In the Anarchy? No”, said Truevow, shaking his head sadly. “All black-haired, like us. The only fair-haired women I’ve met are the ones in old tales. I never thought a maiden would step out of the tales into the sight of my eyes”, he finished, looking back down at grass, morosely.
Fox wanted to kick him, but instead he said: “Have you spoken to her?”
“I have told her of my love for her”, said Truevow, nodding, still examining the grass. “She was…mocking. And yet, she kept listening to me. Is that her way?”
“The mockery bit is, anyway.” Jasma, beautiful?
“Has she spoken to you of any other man? Any other…young man?”, asked Truevow, looking up from the grass, staring at Fox in an agony of hope and dread.
“No”, said Fox.
Truevow sighed in relief and disappointment, and then—looking about him, and lowering his voice—he added, “Does she speak about Piper?” He spoke the name as if it was some horrific disease. “The Ezwayna ladies are all besotted with Piper, and I have seen him looking at her”.
“She only ever complains about him”, said Fox, wishing he could run away.
Truevow smiled at this for a moment, but soon his face was troubled again. “Women admire dangerous men”, he said, stating it as a simple matter of fact. “Piper is one of the most dangerous men I’ve ever seen.”
“Is he dangerous?”, asked Fox, suddenly feeling the skin on his spine tighten.
Truevow looked down at him, taken aback by his ignorance. “Of course he’s dangerous! Our old ones have told us all to be exceedingly careful around him. They say he is the kind of man who has murder for a travelling companion, and disaster for a pet.”
Truevow continued to babble on about Jasma’s eyes, and her skin, and the way she stood with her arms folded, but Fox was hardly listening. He was thinking about Piper, and of the way he looked at Grandy sometimes, when he thought nobody was watching; a look Fox could never understand, a deep and dark look. He was thinking about how Grandy had executed Piper’s father, and of Piper’s time with the Skullmen. Jasma had told him all about those cut-throat gangs, in story after bloodthirsty story.
And he remembered Jasma quoting one of their sayings during such a story, in a whisper of delicious dread, though it seemed less delicious now: Three lives for one, that is a good start for revenge.
Monday, April 7, 2014
Nine Year Old Poems
For perhaps a decade and a half of my life, I thought of myself primarily as a poet. I wrote poetry every evening, pretty much. I look back in wonder at how much dedication I put into it, for so little reward. It wasn't just free association on paper. I really sweated over every line.
I was going through my files today-- paper files, not virtual files-- and came across some of my poems from 2005. Some of them aren't bad, I think. At least, not that bad. Here are a few.
Proper Function
This is what deserted beaches are for--
Mysterious figures like me who stand alone on the shore
Standing and brooding and watching the white breakers roll
The universally recognized shorthand for having a soul.
The Comedy Club
Every face wears a slowly-spreading grin--
Awaiting the deeper meaning smuggled in,
The point. Did you hear the one about the bloke?
You hear it every day. Life is a joke.
A long shaggy dog story, seemingly absurd--
It might make some sense when it's all been heard.
Hope is the rumble of the cabaret drum--
Life is a joke, but will the punch-line come?
Nursery Crimes
I saw it for a moment there--
A flickering of doubt.
I run my fingers through your hair
And wonder why it feels so fair
To tease your young trust out.
We tell you more fantastic tales
Until the point sinks in--
The Sandman, Santa and Jack Frost
Make sure your innocence is lost
Before life can begin.
See, this is just what people do--
They tell each other lies.
You're armed for what you're growing to
When first you guess my tales aren't true
And faith melts from your eyes.
The Monosyllable
(I used something of a gimmick or a 'trick' in this poem. See if you can spot it.)
From lips of shop-worn women giving change
From loud art-gluttons who are sounding off
From girls when puberty streaks through their veins
From men in pubs who've had more than enough
The monosyllable drops easily.
And once I was a fool enough to scoff
Believing they committed blasphemy
In bandying what should be whispered of.
I thought too little of the highest power--
It blossoms in the daily push-and-shove
As well as in the lonely solemn hour.
It grows unlooked for, unattended, tough--
It glints from boredom, jealousy and greed.
Nothing's too vile for it to be above--
Common as muck, and needful as the air we breathe.
Cast-Offs
(I was always writing poems from the point of view of fictional narrators, leaving it to the reader to work out who was speaking and what about. This one is written from the point of view of a woman who had some kind of mental trouble in her teens and never had the wild party life that she imagines other girls had. I didn't have mental problems in my own teens, but I was very shy and did certainly feel a sense of missing out on all the parties, just like the girl in the poem. I often used female narrators to give myself a distance from a subject. I think this poem has a nice Larkin-esque couplet at the end.)
Boyfriends and clothes, and clubs and clothes, and clothes--
I wish I'd been like them at twenty-three.
No, I have stories full of therapy
And counselling. They own this crowded street.
I own an old back-alley no-one knows.
I want to walk a path-way worn by feet.
I wish I'd had those teenage holidays--
Six to a room, and parties every night.
You say that's all moronic, and you're right--
You say I'm better off to skip that stuff.
But when you talk about your rock-chick phase
The soft light in your eyes has said enough.
I felt the magic that I didn't share--
The worst thing is the way these girls will laugh
Seeing themselves in some old photograph
Ten years from now. Their cast-off yesterday
Won't mean a thing. The hardest thing to bear
Is not to have what others throw away.
Off the Map
Why is it language covers all the bases
For other people, serving words on cue
But all I want to say is like the places
The map preserves a silence of deep blue?
On a Shop Assistant's Name-Tag
Somehow it would seem just like a curse--
Using the name on her tag. She's hardly here.
The soul is buried deep in those blue eyes.
Has she outgrown the dream of a career?
Two syllable that leave me no more wise--
She might be from another universe.
No doubt it's meant to soften things a bit--
The rows of tins, the hard unblinking light--
No doubt they think it lends humanity.
But something is improper in the sight--
Laid bare for all indifferent eyes to see
With every drop of meaning drained from it.
I was going through my files today-- paper files, not virtual files-- and came across some of my poems from 2005. Some of them aren't bad, I think. At least, not that bad. Here are a few.
Proper Function
This is what deserted beaches are for--
Mysterious figures like me who stand alone on the shore
Standing and brooding and watching the white breakers roll
The universally recognized shorthand for having a soul.
The Comedy Club
Every face wears a slowly-spreading grin--
Awaiting the deeper meaning smuggled in,
The point. Did you hear the one about the bloke?
You hear it every day. Life is a joke.
A long shaggy dog story, seemingly absurd--
It might make some sense when it's all been heard.
Hope is the rumble of the cabaret drum--
Life is a joke, but will the punch-line come?
Nursery Crimes
I saw it for a moment there--
A flickering of doubt.
I run my fingers through your hair
And wonder why it feels so fair
To tease your young trust out.
We tell you more fantastic tales
Until the point sinks in--
The Sandman, Santa and Jack Frost
Make sure your innocence is lost
Before life can begin.
See, this is just what people do--
They tell each other lies.
You're armed for what you're growing to
When first you guess my tales aren't true
And faith melts from your eyes.
The Monosyllable
(I used something of a gimmick or a 'trick' in this poem. See if you can spot it.)
From lips of shop-worn women giving change
From loud art-gluttons who are sounding off
From girls when puberty streaks through their veins
From men in pubs who've had more than enough
The monosyllable drops easily.
And once I was a fool enough to scoff
Believing they committed blasphemy
In bandying what should be whispered of.
I thought too little of the highest power--
It blossoms in the daily push-and-shove
As well as in the lonely solemn hour.
It grows unlooked for, unattended, tough--
It glints from boredom, jealousy and greed.
Nothing's too vile for it to be above--
Common as muck, and needful as the air we breathe.
Cast-Offs
(I was always writing poems from the point of view of fictional narrators, leaving it to the reader to work out who was speaking and what about. This one is written from the point of view of a woman who had some kind of mental trouble in her teens and never had the wild party life that she imagines other girls had. I didn't have mental problems in my own teens, but I was very shy and did certainly feel a sense of missing out on all the parties, just like the girl in the poem. I often used female narrators to give myself a distance from a subject. I think this poem has a nice Larkin-esque couplet at the end.)
Boyfriends and clothes, and clubs and clothes, and clothes--
I wish I'd been like them at twenty-three.
No, I have stories full of therapy
And counselling. They own this crowded street.
I own an old back-alley no-one knows.
I want to walk a path-way worn by feet.
I wish I'd had those teenage holidays--
Six to a room, and parties every night.
You say that's all moronic, and you're right--
You say I'm better off to skip that stuff.
But when you talk about your rock-chick phase
The soft light in your eyes has said enough.
I felt the magic that I didn't share--
The worst thing is the way these girls will laugh
Seeing themselves in some old photograph
Ten years from now. Their cast-off yesterday
Won't mean a thing. The hardest thing to bear
Is not to have what others throw away.
Off the Map
Why is it language covers all the bases
For other people, serving words on cue
But all I want to say is like the places
The map preserves a silence of deep blue?
On a Shop Assistant's Name-Tag
Somehow it would seem just like a curse--
Using the name on her tag. She's hardly here.
The soul is buried deep in those blue eyes.
Has she outgrown the dream of a career?
Two syllable that leave me no more wise--
She might be from another universe.
No doubt it's meant to soften things a bit--
The rows of tins, the hard unblinking light--
No doubt they think it lends humanity.
But something is improper in the sight--
Laid bare for all indifferent eyes to see
With every drop of meaning drained from it.
Me and Dale Ahlquist...
The video of the event (beginning just after my introduction and ending just before I returned to the podium!) can be found here.
The event was a great success and I need to thank my wife Michelle, my friend (and fellow Society founder) Angelo, David Quinn for the Iona Institute for their crucial financial and organizational role, Seamus for his advice and Anthony for being happy to help out on the night.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Possibly the Most Controversial Post I'll Ever Write
Forget about the Association of Catholic Priests, female ordination or Michael Voris...I think I really might be asking for trouble with this one, and possibly risking the total and utter loss of whatever credibility I might have accumulated. Anyway, here goes...
Perhaps the difference between a contrarian and most people is simply that a contrarian is more willing to admit to opinions and beliefs and tastes that are generally scorned and derided.
Anyway, being a contrarian, but also because it was my genuine opinion, I disagreed with pretty much everybody else who went to see the 2005 movie version of the Dukes of Hazzard. It was universally slated, and even Sean William Scott, one of the stars, heaped scorn upon it.
I thought it was good. I thought it was really good. I'd never seen the Dukes of Hazzard TV show, so I had nothing to be sentimental or protective about. I thought the movie was a delightful romp that effectively evoked an idealized Deep South atmosphere. It was vivid in a way that few movies are. I bought into its fictional world.
And it had the best car-chase I've ever seen, which you can watch here. (I hope it's fair use; it's been on Youtube for four years and nobody's taken it down.) There's some raunchy dialogue, but what I really love about the scene is the way the interaction in the car, the chase itself, and the AC/DC song are combined in such an inspired way.
I am now going to live in Honduras. Bye!
Perhaps the difference between a contrarian and most people is simply that a contrarian is more willing to admit to opinions and beliefs and tastes that are generally scorned and derided.
Anyway, being a contrarian, but also because it was my genuine opinion, I disagreed with pretty much everybody else who went to see the 2005 movie version of the Dukes of Hazzard. It was universally slated, and even Sean William Scott, one of the stars, heaped scorn upon it.
I thought it was good. I thought it was really good. I'd never seen the Dukes of Hazzard TV show, so I had nothing to be sentimental or protective about. I thought the movie was a delightful romp that effectively evoked an idealized Deep South atmosphere. It was vivid in a way that few movies are. I bought into its fictional world.
And it had the best car-chase I've ever seen, which you can watch here. (I hope it's fair use; it's been on Youtube for four years and nobody's taken it down.) There's some raunchy dialogue, but what I really love about the scene is the way the interaction in the car, the chase itself, and the AC/DC song are combined in such an inspired way.
I am now going to live in Honduras. Bye!
Thursday, April 3, 2014
The Elephant in the Room
A few years ago, I wrote a one-act play called The Elephant in the Room. (It's more like a one-scene play than a one-act play, actually.) I wrote it because I was living in Ballymun and every day I walked past the Axis Centre, Ballymun's state-of-the-art arts centre, which includes a state-of-the-art theatre. The Axis Centre nagged at me every time I passed it. It said, 'You should really try your hand at writing a play'.
So I wrote this, and submitted it. Months passed and I assumed it had been ignored. Then one of the directors of the Axis centre emailed me suggesting we meet up. Naturally, I was excited.
At the meeting, my excitement was quickly cooled. Two directors of the Centre were there and they were quick to tell me that my play was not of a standard to be produced. Or even near to it. Or even close enough to see production as a far-off blur on the horizon. But, said the nicer one of the two, it did make him laugh here and there and was not utterly devoid of any glimmering of potential talent. (Not his exact words. He was sweet about it.)
The other director was incredibly rude, possibly one of the rudest people I'v ever met. (This is not only my experience, but I've heard it from elsewhere, too.) He stared at me throughout the conversation as though I had been caught shop-lifting. He told me I needn't expect to be told my play was wonderful just because I was a local. (Not his exact words, but pretty close.) He also asked me what it was about, in the tone a headmaster might ask: "What were you doing in the assembly hall at that time, anyway?". I was flabbergasted at this man's attitude.
The other director (whose name is Mark) was quite the opposite, though. A few months later he invited me to a dinner for local artists. So I got a free dinner out of the play, such as it is. He also sent a chapter of one of my novels to a professional reader, who said some nice things about it.
His rude colleague was right about the play, though-- it's a mere trifle, and not even a good trifle. And it's not really about anything. I didn't put any great effort into it. But here it is, anyway, presented as a curio. (I'm too lazy to italicize the parts that should be italicized. All the italics disappear when I cut and paste from Word into Blogger. But if you can imagine the scene and the characters, you can imagine the italics, too, right?)
The Elephant in the Room
A one-act play
The curtain opens on the scene of a rather messy living room, evidently on the morning after a party. There is a board game on the coffee table, left as it was at the end of a game. There are glases and beer cans lying everywhere.
But the most conspicous item in the room is an enormous elephant. It can be made of any material and look as unrealistic and ridiculous as you like. It can be any colour, and it is not required to move or speak.
Off-stage, an alarm clock rings. And rings. And rings.
Eventually, it stops, and a few moments later, we hear RUSSELL singing in a groggy voice off-stage.
RUSSELL: Who ate all the pies?
Who ate all the pies?
You fat so-and-so, you fat so-and-so
You ate all the--
He walks into the room and stares at the elephant for a few moments, stunned. He is a middle-aged man wearing a bathrobe and slippers.
RUSSELL (weakly): --Pies.
Silence for a few moments, RUSSELL still staring at the elephant.
RUSSELL (shouting): Dean! Dean!
DEAN (off-stage, in a weary voice): What?
RUSSELL (still shouting): Just get in here now!
We hear the sound of bed-springs creaking offstage. All the while, RUSSELL is staring at the elephant.
Eventually, DEAN appears. He is a teenage boy, wearing an Italian club’s soccer jersey and pyjama bottoms.
RUSSELL: What is that?
DEAN, bleary-eyed, stares at the elephant in apparent bafflement.
RUSSELL: Look at the state of this place!
DEAN now looks all around him.
DEAN: It doesn’t look too bad to me.
RUSELL: Not too bad? Not too bad?
DEAN: I mean, it was a party. There’s always a mess after a party. That’s why they say “the morning after the night before”.
RUSSELL (sarcastically): Oh, it’s traditional, is it? Well, not to worry if it’s traditional. (Sternly, in a gruff patriarchal tone): Clean it up now or you’ll feel my boot—
He leaves the room. DEAN begins to pick up glasses and beer cans.
DEAN (muttering): You don’t even own any boots. Just seven pairs of trainers. And most of these are yours, anyway. Look, Heineken! I never drink Heineken. It’s unspeakable.
He continues to clean up, often having to squeeze past the elephant, but apparently not even seeing it. He starts to recite.
DEAN: Four hundred and thirty two, St. Patrick came to Ireland. Circle eight hundred, the first Viking raids. Thirteen fifty, the Bruce invades. Thirteen sixty-six, the statutes of Kilkenny. Fifteen-thirty-four, the rebellion of Silken Thomas. Fifteen-eighty…fifteen-eighty….
RUSSELL comes in as he is doing this, and gives him a baleful stare.
RUSSELL: What are you babbling on about?
DEAN (a little self-consciously): It’s the history of Ireland.
RUSSELL: You don’t do history. I told you. History is a waste of time.
DEAN: It’s not optional. It’s for transition year.
RUSSELL (making a face): Transition year! No wonder the country is in a mess!
DEAN: Overview of Irish History. That’s one of my modules. Business and Commerce is another. Also, German.
RUSSELL: Business studies? Well, that’s better. But history…!
DEAN: It’s not bad, actually.
RUSSELL: Look, Deano. There’s only one thing you need to know about Irish history. We got hockeyed.
DEAN: Maybe I should write that in my exam.
RUSSELL: There’s exams?
DEAN (cleaning up all the time) Well, they don’t really mean anything…
RUSSELL: I’ll tell you what I’d have instead of transition year. You get out and you get a bloody job for a year. And not just for a week.
DEAN: I do have a bloody job.
RUSSELL: Sitting in a box-office for a few hours isn’t a real job.
DEAN (a little irritably): It’s more than you have, anyway.
RUSSELL: I’d done more work by the time I was your age than you’ll do in a lifetime, buddy. I was operating a fork-lift when I was thirteen years old.
(He sits on the couch and starts to drink from one of the open cans):
DEAN: That’s left over from last night!
RUSSELL: It’s still good.
DEAN: Somebody might have been using it as an ash-tray.
RUSSELL: Gives it flavour.
DEAN: That’s disgusting.
RUSSELL: It’s because you’ve always had everything you’ve ever wanted that you’re willing to just throw things out.
DEAN (back to reciting): Sixteen-hundred and seven, Flight of the Earls. Sixteen-Eighty-One, Blessed Oliver Plunkett martyred—
RUSSELL: Blessed Oliver Plunkett! Don’t get me started on the Catholic Church.
DEAN: OK, I won’t.
RUSSELL: Now I find out they’re brainwashing my children with religion.
DEAN: What were you expecting when you sent me to a Catholic school?
RUSSELL: Don’t give me cheek. Here, I’ve got some dates for you. Nineteen sixty-one, Blessed Russell Coffey is born. Nineteen-seventy-four, Blessed Russell Coffey leaves school because he has to make a living. Nineteen-seventy-eight, Blessed Russell Coffey has a fit of insanity and marries your mother, God rest her soul. He’s no longer so blessed. Nineteen-seventy-nine, plain old Russell Coffey has a daughter to worry about.
DEAN: Nineteen-eighty. That was nineteen-eighty.
RUSSELL: Then a few years later, he has a boy to worry about too. Russell Coffey works night and day and performs miracles—maybe he is Blessed after all—in order to keep them fed and healthy, even though they insist on picking up every infection going and fracturing their bones at every opportunity.
He throws the beer can away. It bounces off the elephant. DEAN bends down and picks it up.
RUSSELL: At seven minutes past two in the morning of the twenty-third of August nineteen-eighty-five, your poor mother passes away. After that, Blessed Russell Coffey has to raise two screaming, sickly, constantly hungry children all by himself. Nineteen-ninety, Blessed Russell Coffey sprains his back while sweating his backside off in a warehouse and has to raise his kids on disability benefit.
DEAN: It’s a pity I don’t have to sit an exam in that. I’ve heard it so often I have it off by heart already.
RUSSELL: Well, it would be about as useful as the history of bloody Ireland. You’d think Ireland would want to hush up its history.
DEAN is finished cleaning.
DEAN: I think I’m going to have some breakfast. Do you want some?
RUSSELL: Please, thank you.
DEAN: Jam and toast. How about that?
RUSSELL (sarcastically): Oh, I was hoping for truffles and smoked salmon! I’ve had years when I would have killed for some jam on toast.
DEAN: Nineteen-forty-eight, rationing ends in Ireland.
DEAN walks out of the room. RUSSELL picks up a TV magazine and starts to read it. He reads aloud.
RUSSELL: “Half-eight. What Did You Do In the Boom, Daddy?”. Celebrity economist David McDavid examines the lives of ordinary and not-so-ordinary Irish people during the Celtic Tiger years. Nine o’clock. “Ceilidh Inferno”. Twelve celebrities try to master Irish traditional dancing. Who will come out on top? Half-nine. “Texts, Lies and Videoconferencing. A documentary that examines young Irish professionals trying to balance work and dating.”
A telephone rings. RUSSELL takes a mobile phone out of his bathrobe pocket. He looks at the screen before answering.
RUSSELL: What’s up, twinkle toes?
Listens to mobile phone..
Don’t you have work today?
Listens to mobile phone.
A bottle of aftershave and a pair of socks.
Listens to mobile phone.
To say the least.
Listens to mobile phone.
No, a slipped sick. Forget about him. Hey, could you get some milk on the way? And some of my cigarettes. (Pause.) Love you, baby. Tomato sauce, too, OK? Are you still there? Tomato sauce. And not the spicy stuff.
Puts down the mobile phone, wearing a rather grim look.
DEAN walks in, carrying a plate of bread and jam and a cup of tea.
DEAN: Golden brown, just the way you like it.
RUSSELL: Not burned, just the way I like it. Ta. I just had a call from Sam.
DEAN (looking worried): Oh.
RUSSELL: Oh. Yes. Oh.
DEAN: Did she have anything to say?
RUSSELL: Just that she was coming here. God knows what it’s about. Just don’t say anything to her, OK?
DEAN: I never say anything to her.
RUSSELL: Well, you should. She’s your sister.
DEAN: I mean I never say anything bad to her.
RUSSELL: Let me tell you this. I’m proud of Sam.
DEAN: OK.
RUSSELL (mimicking): OK? OK? What does that mean? Let me tell you a story about Sam.
DEAN: Let me get my toast first. I’ll need it.
RUSSELL (raising his voice as Dean walks away from him): I remember once, just before my accident. Actually, it was during the nineteen-ninety World Cup. I was coming home from the pub. It was in the small hours. I was walking to the house and I see this figure in the path—
DEAN (coming back in with his toast and tea): Blessed Oliver Plunkett.
RUSSELL: No, it wasn’t Blessed Oliver Plunkett. It was your sister Samantha, in her pyjamas.
DEAN: This jam is off.
RUSSELL (with a terrible English aristocratic accent): Oh, is the jem off, Jenkins? You’re lucky to have jam. Anyway, it was your sister, in her pyjams, and do you know what she had in her hand?
DEAN: Tell me.
RUSSELL (emotionally): My cigarettes! She was holding my cigarettes, and she said, Da, you forgot your fags. She’d been looking out the window for me to come back.
DEAN: I don’t remember that.
RUSSELL: And do you know what she had in her other hand?
DEAN lifts a slice of toast, bites it and chews.
RUSSELL: The remote control. She’d brought out the remote control because she knew I always watched television when I came home from the pub.
DEAN takes a gulp of tea.
RUSSELL: She was always such a sweet little girl. It was OK about the cigarettes, as it turned out. Terry Mooney was in the pub that night and I borrowed some off him.
DEAN: That’s OK, then.
RUSSELL: That was Samantha. That is Samantha, whatever else she…. Just remember that.
DEAN (staring into his tea) It’s just that..
RUSSELL: It’s just what? What?
DEAN: When she’s around, it’s so awkward….dodging around the subject.
RUSSELL: The elephant in the room.
DEAN: That was on my English teacher’s list of clichés.
RUSSELL: What?
DEAN: My English teacher. She wrote a big list of clichés up on the blackboard. That was one of them. She said clichés were like off-the-rack thoughts. She said our thoughts should be tailor-made instead.
RUSSELL: I don’t know why I send you to that school. You’d be a hell of a lot better off in the university of life.
DEAN: Or the school of hard knocks.
RUSSEL: Damn right.
DEAN: But then, youth is wasted on the young.
RUSSELL: I’ve always said that.
DEAN: I know. I’ve heard you.
RUSSELL (swallowing the last of his tea): Well, Sammy will be here any minute. Be nice to her.
DEAN: You make it sound like I’m—
(There’s a rapping on the door.)
RUSSELL: Let her in will you.
DEAN goes offstage to let Samantha in. RUSSELL picks up the remote control and points it in the direction of the elephant. He keeps pressing the button, as though wondering why the television won’t start. Eventually, he puts it back down.
RUSSELL: Never anything good on anyway.
SAMANTHA comes in, followed by DEAN, who’s lagging behind her somewhat. She’s an attractive young lady with neatly permed hair, wearing a professional-looking black skirt-suit. She has an alert, bright look.
She stops at the sight of the elephant, and stares at it for a few moments. RUSSELL picks up the TV guide and starts to examine it with apparent interest. DEAN goes back to finishing his breakfast, staring into his tea again.
SAMANTHA (cheerfully): It’s a bit dark in here, isn’t it?
RUSSELL: I’m sorry we don’t live in a penthouse apartment. It’s difficult to get one on disability benefit.
SAMANTHA: Don’t be silly. Hey, I got you guys some presents.
RUSSELL: “Guys”? You “guys?”
DEAN sniggers.
SAMANTHA: I got you fellahs some presents. (She reaches into her handbag, takes out a box, and hands it to RUSSELL): This is for you.
RUSSELL (looking at the box and reading from it): Paragon 500. Precision technology to give you the closest, easiest shave ever. As used by Jack Hoffmann in Five Hundred Ways to Die.
SAMANTHA: It has twelve hours battery life.
RUSSELL: Are you trying to tell me something?
SAMANTHA: Don’t be silly. (Turns to Dean.) Hey, bro, I got something very special for you.
DEAN looks up, smiling politely.
SAMANTHA: A handheld computer! (She takes out a small handheld computer game.) For a break from the study.
DEAN (takes computer): Thanks! That’s what I’ve.…that’s perfect.
RUSSELL (smiling grimly): I thought you said computers were for zombies.
Long silence. SAMANTHA takes her jacket off and drapes it on the back of an armchair.
RUSSELL: Still, it’s nice to have money.
SAMANTHA (perkily): Well, I do work hard for it.
RUSSELL: In your own way.
SAMANTHA: Work is work. (Pause.) So what are you boys going to do today?
RUSSELL: Well, I thought I’d toddle down to my club for an hour or two, sip a martini while reading the paper. Then a spot of yachting, then lunch with Rex Chisholm…..(thinks of suitable name)…Holmes. Then maybe a bit of skiing.
SAMANTHA: That’s nice.
DEAN: I’m just going to do my English essay.
They all fall silent.
RUSSELL: You have to work hard at school, don’t you? To become a productive member of society. And not a good-for-nothing sponger.
SAMANTHA: I hate that word, sponger.
RUSSELL: Do you prefer waster? What’s the official terminology?
SAMANTHA (turning to Russell again): What’s your essay about?
DEAN: Wasters.
SAMANTHA glares at him.
DEAN seems abashed, looks down for a moment, and then says: The Merchant of Venice.
SAMANTHA: I hated that bloody play.
DEAN: It’s not that bad.
SAMANTHA: Do you know why I hated it?
RUSSELL and DEAN look intrigued.
SAMANTHA: Because I didn’t know what the hell it was all about! Because I don’t have much going on up here! (She raps her knuckles against her skull.)
RUSSELL: Intelligence isn’t everything.
DEAN: Litearature isn’t for everybody.
SAMANTHA: It’s not for me, that’s for sure. Neither is French, or chemistry, or—
DEAN: It all comes down to genetics.
RUSSELL: Do you know what I was telling Dean just before you came in? About a time, during the 1990 World Cup, when I was coming home from the pub—
SAMANTHA: Yeah, you told me that one. I’m going to make a cup of tea.
RUSSELL: Make me one while you’re at it.
DEAN: Me, too.
(Pause. DEAN and RUSSELL look at each other. They look a little pleased.)
RUSSELL: Women think in a different way from men.
DEAN: They don’t think conceptually. It’s to do with evolution. They always had to be looking out for the babies. They couldn’t concentrate.
RUSSELL: That’s why they don’t make politicians. Except for Margaret Thatcher. And she was brutal. It’s just a different way of thinking. Not better or worse, just different. Giz a look at that thing.
DEAN hands RUSSELL the computer, and RUSSELL starts playing around with it. Soon he is absorbed.
SAMANTHA comes back with the tea. She hands a mug to DEAN and then another to RUSSELL.
RUSSELL (absorbed with the game): Just leave it down there. Ta.
DEAN: Ta.
SAMANTHA goes back out.
DEAN takes the box with the shaver from the table and starts to examine it. He runs his fingers experimentally over his chin.
SAMANTHA comes back in to the room, carrying her own town.
SAMANTHA: I have something I wanted to tell you guy—you two today.
RUSSELL (still absorbed in the game, speaking more playfully now): You got accepted to the golf club?
SAMANTHA: Ha ha.
RUSSELL (suddenly looking up and staring at her torso, not-so-furtively): You’re not….
SAMANTHA: Oh, shut up. No.
RUSSELL goes back to playing the computer game: What then?
DEAN (reading the shaver’s box): I can’t stand the suspense a second more.
SAMANTHA (looking irritated): If you don’t want to know, I’ll just go.
She makes a motion to move, but RUSSELL grabs her by the arm. He tries to keep playing the game, swears under his breath, and then puts it aside.
RUSSELL (making the most of it): Anything that’s important to you is important to me, twinkletoes.
SAMANTHA looks a little mollified, but doesn’t say anything.
RUSSELL (looking sternly at DEAN): Isn’t that right?
DEAN: I know what it is already.
SAMANTHA: No, you don’t.
RUSSELL: He thinks he knows it all. Just because he’s doing honours English.
DEAN: And honours French. And honours science.
SAMANTHA: Really? Honours French?
DEAN: Yeah.
SAMANTHA: That’s…amazing.
DEAN: I got a B plus in my test.
SAMANTHA shakes her head slowly, in wonder.
SAMANTHA (now seeming less sure of herself): So what is it that I’m going to tell you?
DEAN: You’re becoming a nun.
RUSSELL: What?
DEAN: I saw a St. Martin magazine in her bag.
SAMANTHA: Why were you looking in my bag?
DEAN: I just saw into it. And I saw you blessing yourself. A few times, when you thought nobody was looking.
RUSSELL (to Samantha): Is this true?
SAMANTHA: So what if this?
RUSSELL: So what? My own daughter becoming a nun? It’s bad enough you being—
SAMANTHA: I’m not becoming a bloody nun!
RUSSELL: Thank God for that! (Turning to DEAN.) What are you talking about? Is this what they teach you in honours French?
DEAN: No. They teach us honours French in honours French. (Sullenly) I did see her blessing herself, though.
RUSSELL: I never thought one of my own children would go in for all that nonsense. After I tried to give you an upbringing free of religious brainwashing.
SAMANTHA: Yeah, that and a few other things.
RUSSELL: What do you mean?
DEAN: Well, if it’s not becoming a nun, what is it?
RUSSELL: What do you mean by a few other things? An accusation has been made here. (Raises hand, as if demanding point of order in a debate.) An accusation has been made.
SAMANTHA: Oh, shut up. Do you want to hear or not?
RUSSELL: I want to hear what you mean by “a few other things”.
DEAN: I want to hear.
SAMANTHA reaches into her handbag and takes out a folded page.
RUSSELL: What’s that?
SAMANTHA: This is a letter. Actually, it’s a copy of a letter I’ve already sent.
RUSSELL (standing up): I didn’t think you were going to go this far.
SAMANTHA (looking at him, confused): What?
RUSSELL: I thought family counted for something, even in your job.
SAMANTHA: Shut up and listen. It’s a letter I sent to my boss.
RUSSELL (even more indignantly): Get out.
SAMANTHA: What?
RUSSELL: I can’t believe you came here to gloat---
SAMANTHA (shouts): SHUT UP AND LISTEN!
There is a long pause. DEAN and RUSSELL look at each other in surprise. Samantha has obviously not shouted very often in the past.
SAMANTHA:
Melissa Cummins
Executive Manager
Inspections Department
Department of Social Welfare
Dear Ms Cummins
I would like to thank you for three stimulating years I have spent working as a social welfare inspector. I took the job with some misgivings but tried to make the best of it.
I feel I am no longer able to continue with my duties as I don’t enjoy playing God and poking my nose into the lives of people who are down on their luck.
Also my friend Gillian is opening a beauty salon and says I can work for her.
May I thank this opportunity to thank you for all your help, apart from the bitching that you did behind my back. P.S. I would like to remind you that I have respected the departmental dress codes at all time, even when you considered my apparel “slutty”.
Thanks a lot
Samantha Belinda Coffey.
Long pause. RUSSELL and DEAN stare at SAMANTHA.
RUSSELL: You can’t send that!
SAMANTHA: I did send it.
DEAN: No, she didn’t. She’s pulling your leg.
SAMANTHA: Yeah, and I’m becoming a nun, too.
RUSSELL (putting his hands to his head): Why would you do something like that?
SAMANTHA: Are you joking?
RUSSELL: Are you joking?
DEAN: She is joking.
SAMANTHA: I’m not joking. You must be joking! You’ve treated me like a leper since I took that job!
RUSSELL: That’s not true.
SAMANTHA: Oh, please…
RUSSELL (raising one hand, his finger pointing upwards, as though making a crucial point): I never said anything! Not one word!
DEAN: She’s joking.
RUSSELL: Shut up, you. (Raises finger again.) I…never…said…one…word.
SAMANTHA: How can you say that? You were always making these snide little remarks…
RUSSELL: If you can’t take a joke…
DEAN: She’s joking, or she’s gone nuts.
RUSSELL: When did I ever actually say anything? I mean, apart from a joke here and there? Tell me one time.
SAMANTHA: Do you want the exact date and time?
RUSSELL: Don’t prevar….(pauses).
DEAN: Prevaricate.
RUSSELL: Prevaricate.
SAMANTHA: Even when you weren’t making jokes. You were always weird around me since I took that job. Like I blackened the family name or something. It was always the elephant in the room.
RUSSELL: That’s a cliché.
SAMANTHA: I don’t care.
DEAN: Clichés are the off-the-peg clothes of language.
SAMANTHA: I don’t care. I didn’t do honours English.
DEAN: You didn’t do honours anything.
SAMANTHA: But I passed the civil service exam. That’s the only reason I took that bloody job. I thought you’d both be pleased.
RUSSELL: But what are you going to do?
SAMANTHA: It’s in the letter. Caroline’s beauty salon.
RUSSELL: I thought you were making that up.
SAMANTHA: No. She’s starting a beauty salon. It’s opening in a few weeks. Miss Perfect.
RUSSELL: What if it falls through? What if it’s a flop?
SAMANTHA: What if a giant meteorite hits the Earth and wipes out all life?
DEAN: You can pray to God to save us.
SAMANTHA: I do pray to God to save you. Both of you. What else do you think has been happening? How did you think you were managing?
RUSSELL: I can’t believe this.
SAMANTHA: Believe it.
RUSSELL (shaking his head): I’m going to have a bath. I have to process this. (Walks off.)
DEAN (makes air quotes): “Process”? He sounds like you!
SAMANTHA: Why does he always have a bath when stuff like this happens?
DEAN: It’s probably psychological.
SAMANTHA (looks at him admiringly): It must be wonderful to be academic.
DEAN shrugs complacently.
DEAN: It’s just the way I am. I mean, you’re good at stuff too.
SAMANTHA: Like what?
DEAN (pause): I can’t think of anything right now.
SAMANTHA: That’s reassuring.
DEAN: Everybody doesn’t have to be good at one particular thing. Da was just talking about you before you came in.
SAMANTHA: Really?
DEAN: Yeah, he was telling a story. He’s told me it a million times. About the time he came back from the pub—
SAMANTHA: Oh, God.
DEAN: And you went out into the street in your pyamas—
SAMANTHA: With his bloody cigarettes and the remote control. Why does he go on and on about that?
DEAN: It’s something to remember you by.
SAMANTHA: I mean, the only reason I did it was because I’d opened his cigarettes. I was smoking one of them when he came home. I sat up watching wrestling and smoking a fag.
DEAN: You were only ten!
SAMANTHA: He thought I’d opened the packet for him. And I knew in the morning he wouldn’t remember how many he’d smoked. I don’t know why he’s always telling that story. He did other stuff with me. I always remember the time he brought me to see Grandma in hospital, when she was dying. He took me into a pub afterwards and we had smokey bacon crisps. They were so tangy. He told me all about his family, going back. He could remember everything that happened to everybody, and the year it happened. Even the day, sometimes.
DEAN: I remember when we used to watch the war films together, on Saturday mornings. We had a tradition of corned beef sandwiches. With loads of mustard.
SAMANTHA: He used to be more— (pauses.)
DEAN: I know. He used to get less--- (pauses.)
SAMANTHA (lowers voice): Before his accident. It didn’t happen straight away. It took a while.
DEAN (lowered voice): It wasn’t the accident so much. It was the way it happened. He knows that everybody knows—
SAMANTHA: I know.
Long pause.
DEAN (self-consciously): Hey, um….
SAMANTHA: What?
DEAN: Well, you know this beauty salon place you’re starting up?
SAMANTHA: What about it?
DEAN: Do you think….do you think I could do something in it?
SAMANTHA (looking bewildered): You?
DEAN: I mean, even if it was cleaning or something. Or security. Or something.
SAMANTHA: You’re already doing one job.
DEAN: Aw, I’m sick of that. They’re all so immature. They’re Neanderthals. They’re prejudiced against anybody with brains.
SAMANTHA: I don’t know….I’d have to ask…
DEAN: Well, will you?
SAMANTHA: It’s just Caroline….
DEAN: Well, whatever. Think about it. But Sam—
SAMANTHA: Yeah?
DEAN: Don’t tell Da. You can imagine what he’d say.
SAMANTHA laughs. After a moment, DEAN does too.
SAMANTHA (looking off, her voice lowered): Here he is now.
RUSSELL walks on. His hair is wet, but he’s still wearing the bathrobe. Suddenly, though, he looks cheerful.
RUSSELL (to Samantha): You know, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think you did the right thing. You’re my daughter after all. You’re not going to have any hand, act or part in oppressing the people. You’re not a tool of officialdom. I didn’t bring you up to be a tool. (Looks at Dean.) And you! With your honours English and honours Irish. I’m proud of both of you.
DEAN and SAMANTHA both looked bemused and a little embarrassed.
RUSSELL: I am! I’m proud. And we’re going out to celebrate. Now!
SAMANTHA: Now?
RUSSELL: Now! It’s a new beginning! The history of the Coffeys is starting over!
DEAN: Six thousand five hundred BC. The first evidence of settlement in Ireland.
RUSSELL (raising his hands in the air and speaking louder): Today is six thousand five hundred B.C.!
SAMANTHA laughs happily.
RUSSELL: We’ll go to the Finn McCool. And we’ll have corned beef sandwiches.
DEAN: And mustard?
RUSSELL: Of course! And—
His mobile phone rings. He takes it out of his bathrobe and answers it.
RUSSELL: Yeah?
(Pause.)
RUSSELL: Enter the Dragon! Save your blushes! What?
(Pause.)
That’s not the only thing she was holding! (Laughs uproariously.)
(Pause.)
RUSSELL: What channel? Cool….I’ll have a look right now. See ya. Enter the Dragon! (Laughs again, puts phone back in pocket.)
RUSSELL: Switch on RTE Two there. Gerard’s sister is going to be on talking about the fire. Where’s the remote?
SAMANTHA: Here. (Takes remote from the table and hands it to Russell.)
They all turn towards the TV—actually, where the TV should be, as the elephant in standing in the way. Russell prods the button on TV several times. Nothing happens.
RUSSELL: I’ve heard the story a hundred times now anyway.
SAMANTHA: It probably would have been twenty seconds or something.
DEAN: Gerard will tape it anyway.
SAMANTHA: Have you ever heard anyone going on about anything the way she goes on about the fire?
DEAN and RUSSELL: No!
RUSSELL: Come on, Dean, get dressed. There’s a table with our name on it in the Finn MacCool.
DEAN and RUSSELL leave the stage.
SAMANTHA stands in the room for a few moments, staring into vacancy. Then she turns to the elephant and gives it an almighty kick.
SAMANTHA: And that’s what I think about you!
(Curtain.)
So I wrote this, and submitted it. Months passed and I assumed it had been ignored. Then one of the directors of the Axis centre emailed me suggesting we meet up. Naturally, I was excited.
At the meeting, my excitement was quickly cooled. Two directors of the Centre were there and they were quick to tell me that my play was not of a standard to be produced. Or even near to it. Or even close enough to see production as a far-off blur on the horizon. But, said the nicer one of the two, it did make him laugh here and there and was not utterly devoid of any glimmering of potential talent. (Not his exact words. He was sweet about it.)
The other director was incredibly rude, possibly one of the rudest people I'v ever met. (This is not only my experience, but I've heard it from elsewhere, too.) He stared at me throughout the conversation as though I had been caught shop-lifting. He told me I needn't expect to be told my play was wonderful just because I was a local. (Not his exact words, but pretty close.) He also asked me what it was about, in the tone a headmaster might ask: "What were you doing in the assembly hall at that time, anyway?". I was flabbergasted at this man's attitude.
The other director (whose name is Mark) was quite the opposite, though. A few months later he invited me to a dinner for local artists. So I got a free dinner out of the play, such as it is. He also sent a chapter of one of my novels to a professional reader, who said some nice things about it.
His rude colleague was right about the play, though-- it's a mere trifle, and not even a good trifle. And it's not really about anything. I didn't put any great effort into it. But here it is, anyway, presented as a curio. (I'm too lazy to italicize the parts that should be italicized. All the italics disappear when I cut and paste from Word into Blogger. But if you can imagine the scene and the characters, you can imagine the italics, too, right?)
The Elephant in the Room
A one-act play
The curtain opens on the scene of a rather messy living room, evidently on the morning after a party. There is a board game on the coffee table, left as it was at the end of a game. There are glases and beer cans lying everywhere.
But the most conspicous item in the room is an enormous elephant. It can be made of any material and look as unrealistic and ridiculous as you like. It can be any colour, and it is not required to move or speak.
Off-stage, an alarm clock rings. And rings. And rings.
Eventually, it stops, and a few moments later, we hear RUSSELL singing in a groggy voice off-stage.
RUSSELL: Who ate all the pies?
Who ate all the pies?
You fat so-and-so, you fat so-and-so
You ate all the--
He walks into the room and stares at the elephant for a few moments, stunned. He is a middle-aged man wearing a bathrobe and slippers.
RUSSELL (weakly): --Pies.
Silence for a few moments, RUSSELL still staring at the elephant.
RUSSELL (shouting): Dean! Dean!
DEAN (off-stage, in a weary voice): What?
RUSSELL (still shouting): Just get in here now!
We hear the sound of bed-springs creaking offstage. All the while, RUSSELL is staring at the elephant.
Eventually, DEAN appears. He is a teenage boy, wearing an Italian club’s soccer jersey and pyjama bottoms.
RUSSELL: What is that?
DEAN, bleary-eyed, stares at the elephant in apparent bafflement.
RUSSELL: Look at the state of this place!
DEAN now looks all around him.
DEAN: It doesn’t look too bad to me.
RUSELL: Not too bad? Not too bad?
DEAN: I mean, it was a party. There’s always a mess after a party. That’s why they say “the morning after the night before”.
RUSSELL (sarcastically): Oh, it’s traditional, is it? Well, not to worry if it’s traditional. (Sternly, in a gruff patriarchal tone): Clean it up now or you’ll feel my boot—
He leaves the room. DEAN begins to pick up glasses and beer cans.
DEAN (muttering): You don’t even own any boots. Just seven pairs of trainers. And most of these are yours, anyway. Look, Heineken! I never drink Heineken. It’s unspeakable.
He continues to clean up, often having to squeeze past the elephant, but apparently not even seeing it. He starts to recite.
DEAN: Four hundred and thirty two, St. Patrick came to Ireland. Circle eight hundred, the first Viking raids. Thirteen fifty, the Bruce invades. Thirteen sixty-six, the statutes of Kilkenny. Fifteen-thirty-four, the rebellion of Silken Thomas. Fifteen-eighty…fifteen-eighty….
RUSSELL comes in as he is doing this, and gives him a baleful stare.
RUSSELL: What are you babbling on about?
DEAN (a little self-consciously): It’s the history of Ireland.
RUSSELL: You don’t do history. I told you. History is a waste of time.
DEAN: It’s not optional. It’s for transition year.
RUSSELL (making a face): Transition year! No wonder the country is in a mess!
DEAN: Overview of Irish History. That’s one of my modules. Business and Commerce is another. Also, German.
RUSSELL: Business studies? Well, that’s better. But history…!
DEAN: It’s not bad, actually.
RUSSELL: Look, Deano. There’s only one thing you need to know about Irish history. We got hockeyed.
DEAN: Maybe I should write that in my exam.
RUSSELL: There’s exams?
DEAN (cleaning up all the time) Well, they don’t really mean anything…
RUSSELL: I’ll tell you what I’d have instead of transition year. You get out and you get a bloody job for a year. And not just for a week.
DEAN: I do have a bloody job.
RUSSELL: Sitting in a box-office for a few hours isn’t a real job.
DEAN (a little irritably): It’s more than you have, anyway.
RUSSELL: I’d done more work by the time I was your age than you’ll do in a lifetime, buddy. I was operating a fork-lift when I was thirteen years old.
(He sits on the couch and starts to drink from one of the open cans):
DEAN: That’s left over from last night!
RUSSELL: It’s still good.
DEAN: Somebody might have been using it as an ash-tray.
RUSSELL: Gives it flavour.
DEAN: That’s disgusting.
RUSSELL: It’s because you’ve always had everything you’ve ever wanted that you’re willing to just throw things out.
DEAN (back to reciting): Sixteen-hundred and seven, Flight of the Earls. Sixteen-Eighty-One, Blessed Oliver Plunkett martyred—
RUSSELL: Blessed Oliver Plunkett! Don’t get me started on the Catholic Church.
DEAN: OK, I won’t.
RUSSELL: Now I find out they’re brainwashing my children with religion.
DEAN: What were you expecting when you sent me to a Catholic school?
RUSSELL: Don’t give me cheek. Here, I’ve got some dates for you. Nineteen sixty-one, Blessed Russell Coffey is born. Nineteen-seventy-four, Blessed Russell Coffey leaves school because he has to make a living. Nineteen-seventy-eight, Blessed Russell Coffey has a fit of insanity and marries your mother, God rest her soul. He’s no longer so blessed. Nineteen-seventy-nine, plain old Russell Coffey has a daughter to worry about.
DEAN: Nineteen-eighty. That was nineteen-eighty.
RUSSELL: Then a few years later, he has a boy to worry about too. Russell Coffey works night and day and performs miracles—maybe he is Blessed after all—in order to keep them fed and healthy, even though they insist on picking up every infection going and fracturing their bones at every opportunity.
He throws the beer can away. It bounces off the elephant. DEAN bends down and picks it up.
RUSSELL: At seven minutes past two in the morning of the twenty-third of August nineteen-eighty-five, your poor mother passes away. After that, Blessed Russell Coffey has to raise two screaming, sickly, constantly hungry children all by himself. Nineteen-ninety, Blessed Russell Coffey sprains his back while sweating his backside off in a warehouse and has to raise his kids on disability benefit.
DEAN: It’s a pity I don’t have to sit an exam in that. I’ve heard it so often I have it off by heart already.
RUSSELL: Well, it would be about as useful as the history of bloody Ireland. You’d think Ireland would want to hush up its history.
DEAN is finished cleaning.
DEAN: I think I’m going to have some breakfast. Do you want some?
RUSSELL: Please, thank you.
DEAN: Jam and toast. How about that?
RUSSELL (sarcastically): Oh, I was hoping for truffles and smoked salmon! I’ve had years when I would have killed for some jam on toast.
DEAN: Nineteen-forty-eight, rationing ends in Ireland.
DEAN walks out of the room. RUSSELL picks up a TV magazine and starts to read it. He reads aloud.
RUSSELL: “Half-eight. What Did You Do In the Boom, Daddy?”. Celebrity economist David McDavid examines the lives of ordinary and not-so-ordinary Irish people during the Celtic Tiger years. Nine o’clock. “Ceilidh Inferno”. Twelve celebrities try to master Irish traditional dancing. Who will come out on top? Half-nine. “Texts, Lies and Videoconferencing. A documentary that examines young Irish professionals trying to balance work and dating.”
A telephone rings. RUSSELL takes a mobile phone out of his bathrobe pocket. He looks at the screen before answering.
RUSSELL: What’s up, twinkle toes?
Listens to mobile phone..
Don’t you have work today?
Listens to mobile phone.
A bottle of aftershave and a pair of socks.
Listens to mobile phone.
To say the least.
Listens to mobile phone.
No, a slipped sick. Forget about him. Hey, could you get some milk on the way? And some of my cigarettes. (Pause.) Love you, baby. Tomato sauce, too, OK? Are you still there? Tomato sauce. And not the spicy stuff.
Puts down the mobile phone, wearing a rather grim look.
DEAN walks in, carrying a plate of bread and jam and a cup of tea.
DEAN: Golden brown, just the way you like it.
RUSSELL: Not burned, just the way I like it. Ta. I just had a call from Sam.
DEAN (looking worried): Oh.
RUSSELL: Oh. Yes. Oh.
DEAN: Did she have anything to say?
RUSSELL: Just that she was coming here. God knows what it’s about. Just don’t say anything to her, OK?
DEAN: I never say anything to her.
RUSSELL: Well, you should. She’s your sister.
DEAN: I mean I never say anything bad to her.
RUSSELL: Let me tell you this. I’m proud of Sam.
DEAN: OK.
RUSSELL (mimicking): OK? OK? What does that mean? Let me tell you a story about Sam.
DEAN: Let me get my toast first. I’ll need it.
RUSSELL (raising his voice as Dean walks away from him): I remember once, just before my accident. Actually, it was during the nineteen-ninety World Cup. I was coming home from the pub. It was in the small hours. I was walking to the house and I see this figure in the path—
DEAN (coming back in with his toast and tea): Blessed Oliver Plunkett.
RUSSELL: No, it wasn’t Blessed Oliver Plunkett. It was your sister Samantha, in her pyjamas.
DEAN: This jam is off.
RUSSELL (with a terrible English aristocratic accent): Oh, is the jem off, Jenkins? You’re lucky to have jam. Anyway, it was your sister, in her pyjams, and do you know what she had in her hand?
DEAN: Tell me.
RUSSELL (emotionally): My cigarettes! She was holding my cigarettes, and she said, Da, you forgot your fags. She’d been looking out the window for me to come back.
DEAN: I don’t remember that.
RUSSELL: And do you know what she had in her other hand?
DEAN lifts a slice of toast, bites it and chews.
RUSSELL: The remote control. She’d brought out the remote control because she knew I always watched television when I came home from the pub.
DEAN takes a gulp of tea.
RUSSELL: She was always such a sweet little girl. It was OK about the cigarettes, as it turned out. Terry Mooney was in the pub that night and I borrowed some off him.
DEAN: That’s OK, then.
RUSSELL: That was Samantha. That is Samantha, whatever else she…. Just remember that.
DEAN (staring into his tea) It’s just that..
RUSSELL: It’s just what? What?
DEAN: When she’s around, it’s so awkward….dodging around the subject.
RUSSELL: The elephant in the room.
DEAN: That was on my English teacher’s list of clichés.
RUSSELL: What?
DEAN: My English teacher. She wrote a big list of clichés up on the blackboard. That was one of them. She said clichés were like off-the-rack thoughts. She said our thoughts should be tailor-made instead.
RUSSELL: I don’t know why I send you to that school. You’d be a hell of a lot better off in the university of life.
DEAN: Or the school of hard knocks.
RUSSEL: Damn right.
DEAN: But then, youth is wasted on the young.
RUSSELL: I’ve always said that.
DEAN: I know. I’ve heard you.
RUSSELL (swallowing the last of his tea): Well, Sammy will be here any minute. Be nice to her.
DEAN: You make it sound like I’m—
(There’s a rapping on the door.)
RUSSELL: Let her in will you.
DEAN goes offstage to let Samantha in. RUSSELL picks up the remote control and points it in the direction of the elephant. He keeps pressing the button, as though wondering why the television won’t start. Eventually, he puts it back down.
RUSSELL: Never anything good on anyway.
SAMANTHA comes in, followed by DEAN, who’s lagging behind her somewhat. She’s an attractive young lady with neatly permed hair, wearing a professional-looking black skirt-suit. She has an alert, bright look.
She stops at the sight of the elephant, and stares at it for a few moments. RUSSELL picks up the TV guide and starts to examine it with apparent interest. DEAN goes back to finishing his breakfast, staring into his tea again.
SAMANTHA (cheerfully): It’s a bit dark in here, isn’t it?
RUSSELL: I’m sorry we don’t live in a penthouse apartment. It’s difficult to get one on disability benefit.
SAMANTHA: Don’t be silly. Hey, I got you guys some presents.
RUSSELL: “Guys”? You “guys?”
DEAN sniggers.
SAMANTHA: I got you fellahs some presents. (She reaches into her handbag, takes out a box, and hands it to RUSSELL): This is for you.
RUSSELL (looking at the box and reading from it): Paragon 500. Precision technology to give you the closest, easiest shave ever. As used by Jack Hoffmann in Five Hundred Ways to Die.
SAMANTHA: It has twelve hours battery life.
RUSSELL: Are you trying to tell me something?
SAMANTHA: Don’t be silly. (Turns to Dean.) Hey, bro, I got something very special for you.
DEAN looks up, smiling politely.
SAMANTHA: A handheld computer! (She takes out a small handheld computer game.) For a break from the study.
DEAN (takes computer): Thanks! That’s what I’ve.…that’s perfect.
RUSSELL (smiling grimly): I thought you said computers were for zombies.
Long silence. SAMANTHA takes her jacket off and drapes it on the back of an armchair.
RUSSELL: Still, it’s nice to have money.
SAMANTHA (perkily): Well, I do work hard for it.
RUSSELL: In your own way.
SAMANTHA: Work is work. (Pause.) So what are you boys going to do today?
RUSSELL: Well, I thought I’d toddle down to my club for an hour or two, sip a martini while reading the paper. Then a spot of yachting, then lunch with Rex Chisholm…..(thinks of suitable name)…Holmes. Then maybe a bit of skiing.
SAMANTHA: That’s nice.
DEAN: I’m just going to do my English essay.
They all fall silent.
RUSSELL: You have to work hard at school, don’t you? To become a productive member of society. And not a good-for-nothing sponger.
SAMANTHA: I hate that word, sponger.
RUSSELL: Do you prefer waster? What’s the official terminology?
SAMANTHA (turning to Russell again): What’s your essay about?
DEAN: Wasters.
SAMANTHA glares at him.
DEAN seems abashed, looks down for a moment, and then says: The Merchant of Venice.
SAMANTHA: I hated that bloody play.
DEAN: It’s not that bad.
SAMANTHA: Do you know why I hated it?
RUSSELL and DEAN look intrigued.
SAMANTHA: Because I didn’t know what the hell it was all about! Because I don’t have much going on up here! (She raps her knuckles against her skull.)
RUSSELL: Intelligence isn’t everything.
DEAN: Litearature isn’t for everybody.
SAMANTHA: It’s not for me, that’s for sure. Neither is French, or chemistry, or—
DEAN: It all comes down to genetics.
RUSSELL: Do you know what I was telling Dean just before you came in? About a time, during the 1990 World Cup, when I was coming home from the pub—
SAMANTHA: Yeah, you told me that one. I’m going to make a cup of tea.
RUSSELL: Make me one while you’re at it.
DEAN: Me, too.
(Pause. DEAN and RUSSELL look at each other. They look a little pleased.)
RUSSELL: Women think in a different way from men.
DEAN: They don’t think conceptually. It’s to do with evolution. They always had to be looking out for the babies. They couldn’t concentrate.
RUSSELL: That’s why they don’t make politicians. Except for Margaret Thatcher. And she was brutal. It’s just a different way of thinking. Not better or worse, just different. Giz a look at that thing.
DEAN hands RUSSELL the computer, and RUSSELL starts playing around with it. Soon he is absorbed.
SAMANTHA comes back with the tea. She hands a mug to DEAN and then another to RUSSELL.
RUSSELL (absorbed with the game): Just leave it down there. Ta.
DEAN: Ta.
SAMANTHA goes back out.
DEAN takes the box with the shaver from the table and starts to examine it. He runs his fingers experimentally over his chin.
SAMANTHA comes back in to the room, carrying her own town.
SAMANTHA: I have something I wanted to tell you guy—you two today.
RUSSELL (still absorbed in the game, speaking more playfully now): You got accepted to the golf club?
SAMANTHA: Ha ha.
RUSSELL (suddenly looking up and staring at her torso, not-so-furtively): You’re not….
SAMANTHA: Oh, shut up. No.
RUSSELL goes back to playing the computer game: What then?
DEAN (reading the shaver’s box): I can’t stand the suspense a second more.
SAMANTHA (looking irritated): If you don’t want to know, I’ll just go.
She makes a motion to move, but RUSSELL grabs her by the arm. He tries to keep playing the game, swears under his breath, and then puts it aside.
RUSSELL (making the most of it): Anything that’s important to you is important to me, twinkletoes.
SAMANTHA looks a little mollified, but doesn’t say anything.
RUSSELL (looking sternly at DEAN): Isn’t that right?
DEAN: I know what it is already.
SAMANTHA: No, you don’t.
RUSSELL: He thinks he knows it all. Just because he’s doing honours English.
DEAN: And honours French. And honours science.
SAMANTHA: Really? Honours French?
DEAN: Yeah.
SAMANTHA: That’s…amazing.
DEAN: I got a B plus in my test.
SAMANTHA shakes her head slowly, in wonder.
SAMANTHA (now seeming less sure of herself): So what is it that I’m going to tell you?
DEAN: You’re becoming a nun.
RUSSELL: What?
DEAN: I saw a St. Martin magazine in her bag.
SAMANTHA: Why were you looking in my bag?
DEAN: I just saw into it. And I saw you blessing yourself. A few times, when you thought nobody was looking.
RUSSELL (to Samantha): Is this true?
SAMANTHA: So what if this?
RUSSELL: So what? My own daughter becoming a nun? It’s bad enough you being—
SAMANTHA: I’m not becoming a bloody nun!
RUSSELL: Thank God for that! (Turning to DEAN.) What are you talking about? Is this what they teach you in honours French?
DEAN: No. They teach us honours French in honours French. (Sullenly) I did see her blessing herself, though.
RUSSELL: I never thought one of my own children would go in for all that nonsense. After I tried to give you an upbringing free of religious brainwashing.
SAMANTHA: Yeah, that and a few other things.
RUSSELL: What do you mean?
DEAN: Well, if it’s not becoming a nun, what is it?
RUSSELL: What do you mean by a few other things? An accusation has been made here. (Raises hand, as if demanding point of order in a debate.) An accusation has been made.
SAMANTHA: Oh, shut up. Do you want to hear or not?
RUSSELL: I want to hear what you mean by “a few other things”.
DEAN: I want to hear.
SAMANTHA reaches into her handbag and takes out a folded page.
RUSSELL: What’s that?
SAMANTHA: This is a letter. Actually, it’s a copy of a letter I’ve already sent.
RUSSELL (standing up): I didn’t think you were going to go this far.
SAMANTHA (looking at him, confused): What?
RUSSELL: I thought family counted for something, even in your job.
SAMANTHA: Shut up and listen. It’s a letter I sent to my boss.
RUSSELL (even more indignantly): Get out.
SAMANTHA: What?
RUSSELL: I can’t believe you came here to gloat---
SAMANTHA (shouts): SHUT UP AND LISTEN!
There is a long pause. DEAN and RUSSELL look at each other in surprise. Samantha has obviously not shouted very often in the past.
SAMANTHA:
Melissa Cummins
Executive Manager
Inspections Department
Department of Social Welfare
Dear Ms Cummins
I would like to thank you for three stimulating years I have spent working as a social welfare inspector. I took the job with some misgivings but tried to make the best of it.
I feel I am no longer able to continue with my duties as I don’t enjoy playing God and poking my nose into the lives of people who are down on their luck.
Also my friend Gillian is opening a beauty salon and says I can work for her.
May I thank this opportunity to thank you for all your help, apart from the bitching that you did behind my back. P.S. I would like to remind you that I have respected the departmental dress codes at all time, even when you considered my apparel “slutty”.
Thanks a lot
Samantha Belinda Coffey.
Long pause. RUSSELL and DEAN stare at SAMANTHA.
RUSSELL: You can’t send that!
SAMANTHA: I did send it.
DEAN: No, she didn’t. She’s pulling your leg.
SAMANTHA: Yeah, and I’m becoming a nun, too.
RUSSELL (putting his hands to his head): Why would you do something like that?
SAMANTHA: Are you joking?
RUSSELL: Are you joking?
DEAN: She is joking.
SAMANTHA: I’m not joking. You must be joking! You’ve treated me like a leper since I took that job!
RUSSELL: That’s not true.
SAMANTHA: Oh, please…
RUSSELL (raising one hand, his finger pointing upwards, as though making a crucial point): I never said anything! Not one word!
DEAN: She’s joking.
RUSSELL: Shut up, you. (Raises finger again.) I…never…said…one…word.
SAMANTHA: How can you say that? You were always making these snide little remarks…
RUSSELL: If you can’t take a joke…
DEAN: She’s joking, or she’s gone nuts.
RUSSELL: When did I ever actually say anything? I mean, apart from a joke here and there? Tell me one time.
SAMANTHA: Do you want the exact date and time?
RUSSELL: Don’t prevar….(pauses).
DEAN: Prevaricate.
RUSSELL: Prevaricate.
SAMANTHA: Even when you weren’t making jokes. You were always weird around me since I took that job. Like I blackened the family name or something. It was always the elephant in the room.
RUSSELL: That’s a cliché.
SAMANTHA: I don’t care.
DEAN: Clichés are the off-the-peg clothes of language.
SAMANTHA: I don’t care. I didn’t do honours English.
DEAN: You didn’t do honours anything.
SAMANTHA: But I passed the civil service exam. That’s the only reason I took that bloody job. I thought you’d both be pleased.
RUSSELL: But what are you going to do?
SAMANTHA: It’s in the letter. Caroline’s beauty salon.
RUSSELL: I thought you were making that up.
SAMANTHA: No. She’s starting a beauty salon. It’s opening in a few weeks. Miss Perfect.
RUSSELL: What if it falls through? What if it’s a flop?
SAMANTHA: What if a giant meteorite hits the Earth and wipes out all life?
DEAN: You can pray to God to save us.
SAMANTHA: I do pray to God to save you. Both of you. What else do you think has been happening? How did you think you were managing?
RUSSELL: I can’t believe this.
SAMANTHA: Believe it.
RUSSELL (shaking his head): I’m going to have a bath. I have to process this. (Walks off.)
DEAN (makes air quotes): “Process”? He sounds like you!
SAMANTHA: Why does he always have a bath when stuff like this happens?
DEAN: It’s probably psychological.
SAMANTHA (looks at him admiringly): It must be wonderful to be academic.
DEAN shrugs complacently.
DEAN: It’s just the way I am. I mean, you’re good at stuff too.
SAMANTHA: Like what?
DEAN (pause): I can’t think of anything right now.
SAMANTHA: That’s reassuring.
DEAN: Everybody doesn’t have to be good at one particular thing. Da was just talking about you before you came in.
SAMANTHA: Really?
DEAN: Yeah, he was telling a story. He’s told me it a million times. About the time he came back from the pub—
SAMANTHA: Oh, God.
DEAN: And you went out into the street in your pyamas—
SAMANTHA: With his bloody cigarettes and the remote control. Why does he go on and on about that?
DEAN: It’s something to remember you by.
SAMANTHA: I mean, the only reason I did it was because I’d opened his cigarettes. I was smoking one of them when he came home. I sat up watching wrestling and smoking a fag.
DEAN: You were only ten!
SAMANTHA: He thought I’d opened the packet for him. And I knew in the morning he wouldn’t remember how many he’d smoked. I don’t know why he’s always telling that story. He did other stuff with me. I always remember the time he brought me to see Grandma in hospital, when she was dying. He took me into a pub afterwards and we had smokey bacon crisps. They were so tangy. He told me all about his family, going back. He could remember everything that happened to everybody, and the year it happened. Even the day, sometimes.
DEAN: I remember when we used to watch the war films together, on Saturday mornings. We had a tradition of corned beef sandwiches. With loads of mustard.
SAMANTHA: He used to be more— (pauses.)
DEAN: I know. He used to get less--- (pauses.)
SAMANTHA (lowers voice): Before his accident. It didn’t happen straight away. It took a while.
DEAN (lowered voice): It wasn’t the accident so much. It was the way it happened. He knows that everybody knows—
SAMANTHA: I know.
Long pause.
DEAN (self-consciously): Hey, um….
SAMANTHA: What?
DEAN: Well, you know this beauty salon place you’re starting up?
SAMANTHA: What about it?
DEAN: Do you think….do you think I could do something in it?
SAMANTHA (looking bewildered): You?
DEAN: I mean, even if it was cleaning or something. Or security. Or something.
SAMANTHA: You’re already doing one job.
DEAN: Aw, I’m sick of that. They’re all so immature. They’re Neanderthals. They’re prejudiced against anybody with brains.
SAMANTHA: I don’t know….I’d have to ask…
DEAN: Well, will you?
SAMANTHA: It’s just Caroline….
DEAN: Well, whatever. Think about it. But Sam—
SAMANTHA: Yeah?
DEAN: Don’t tell Da. You can imagine what he’d say.
SAMANTHA laughs. After a moment, DEAN does too.
SAMANTHA (looking off, her voice lowered): Here he is now.
RUSSELL walks on. His hair is wet, but he’s still wearing the bathrobe. Suddenly, though, he looks cheerful.
RUSSELL (to Samantha): You know, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think you did the right thing. You’re my daughter after all. You’re not going to have any hand, act or part in oppressing the people. You’re not a tool of officialdom. I didn’t bring you up to be a tool. (Looks at Dean.) And you! With your honours English and honours Irish. I’m proud of both of you.
DEAN and SAMANTHA both looked bemused and a little embarrassed.
RUSSELL: I am! I’m proud. And we’re going out to celebrate. Now!
SAMANTHA: Now?
RUSSELL: Now! It’s a new beginning! The history of the Coffeys is starting over!
DEAN: Six thousand five hundred BC. The first evidence of settlement in Ireland.
RUSSELL (raising his hands in the air and speaking louder): Today is six thousand five hundred B.C.!
SAMANTHA laughs happily.
RUSSELL: We’ll go to the Finn McCool. And we’ll have corned beef sandwiches.
DEAN: And mustard?
RUSSELL: Of course! And—
His mobile phone rings. He takes it out of his bathrobe and answers it.
RUSSELL: Yeah?
(Pause.)
RUSSELL: Enter the Dragon! Save your blushes! What?
(Pause.)
That’s not the only thing she was holding! (Laughs uproariously.)
(Pause.)
RUSSELL: What channel? Cool….I’ll have a look right now. See ya. Enter the Dragon! (Laughs again, puts phone back in pocket.)
RUSSELL: Switch on RTE Two there. Gerard’s sister is going to be on talking about the fire. Where’s the remote?
SAMANTHA: Here. (Takes remote from the table and hands it to Russell.)
They all turn towards the TV—actually, where the TV should be, as the elephant in standing in the way. Russell prods the button on TV several times. Nothing happens.
RUSSELL: I’ve heard the story a hundred times now anyway.
SAMANTHA: It probably would have been twenty seconds or something.
DEAN: Gerard will tape it anyway.
SAMANTHA: Have you ever heard anyone going on about anything the way she goes on about the fire?
DEAN and RUSSELL: No!
RUSSELL: Come on, Dean, get dressed. There’s a table with our name on it in the Finn MacCool.
DEAN and RUSSELL leave the stage.
SAMANTHA stands in the room for a few moments, staring into vacancy. Then she turns to the elephant and gives it an almighty kick.
SAMANTHA: And that’s what I think about you!
(Curtain.)
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