Effie

Observations on life from a peripatetic cleaning lady, inspired by conversations with my friend Dorothy, and written when the Queen was still with us and David Cameron was Prime Minister.

Aye, you’re right. I suppose ‘cleaner’ would be less sexist, and ‘cleaning woman’ less twee, but here by Forfar in 2015, ‘cleaning lady’ is what people say, and that’s what I do, and that’s what I am. So, we’ll go with that. As for ‘peripatetic’, that just means I’ve got a tricycle.

Euphemia Gaggy, at your service. Let me know if you want me to pop round on my trike once a week to dust your doodahs and glimmer your gewgaws. Reasonable rates, Forfar area only. Yes, I’m a Gaggy. It sounds awful, doesn’t it? But it’s an ancient name, from Angus in Scotland, a diminutive from the Old French ‘gogue’, meaning enjoyment and relaxation. It was originally a nickname for someone, like me, of easy-going temperament. Gaggy first appeared in Scotland in the early 14th Century, so you see, it has a proud history, and I’m in no hurry to abandon it.

It’s Tuesday today, my busy day. I walk down my garden path, like most mornings, to the blue-painted shed by the gate. Today, it looks a bit black over Bills’ mother’s, so I’m thinking rain later. Still, I’m not made of candy floss. I won’t dissolve. My radish patch is coming on nicely. And my rhubarb is looking magnificent. I’ll pick some tomorrow, maybe make a crumble.

Today, The Colonel is curled up in my new wheelbarrow, like a soft black comma. The Colonel’s not my cat, but spends most of his time in my garden anyway, because it has shady nooks and secret crannies and sun-puddled corners. Such is the way of cats.

I love my new wheelbarrow very much. On the day I bought it, as I pushed it home, every person I passed stopped to give it an admire. “Bright red,” they’d say. “Fancy.” Or “Ooh la-la.” Or suchlike.

The barrow clearly has The Colonel’s approval too, judging from his sleepy purr. A fat splot of water, an early escapee from the lowering clouds, lands bang on his head. He shakes it, then stares up at me grumpily, as if he demands a written explanation and apology.

“Get away home, you walloper,” I say. “The heavens will open soon.” He ignores me and settles back into his dreams. No such luck for me, though, not on a Tuesday. I wrestle my trike out of the shed and set off for my first call.

Mrs. B.

Tuesday morning’s dog, ancient, deaf and farty, is not in his kennel, from where he usually greets me with a half-hearted thump of his old tail. I hope that he’s not shuffled off this mortal coil since my last visit. His indoor bed is still in the corner of the lounge, mind, so I’ll simply cross my fingers and worry.

Perhaps he’s just over having a poo in Her-Next-Door’s garden. Mind you, he has a way to go to get there: Mrs. B’s own garden is huge, with fortress fences. Somehow, though, the decrepit labrador manages, with impressive regularity, to find a way out and leave a substantial twist of steaming feculence right in the middle of Her-Next-Door’s closely manicured lawn. Mrs. B. doesn’t give a toss. She says Her-Next-Door’s all fur coat and no knickers, and can go boil her head.

My canine concern is deepened when Mrs. B. greets me with “Good morning, Effie. Would you be a dear before you start, and see if you can find my spade in the garden?”

Jings, I hope she doesn’t want me to bury the dog.

I step out of the door again and cast my eyes about. Spades are entirely C by their A. It always strikes me funny, that phrase – ‘cast your eyes about’ – as if you’re plucking the eyeballs from your head and tossing them over by the compost heap to look there.

It’s a big garden, like I said, and I try to think where she might last have been digging. She’s probably left it there. The sky’s getting darker as I cross to Mrs. B’s nearby vegetable patch, and my skin goosepimples at a slight spray of drizzle. There’ll be proper rain soon. Amongst the beautiful, healthy potatoes and cabbages lies a fluffy pink slipper, but no spade. I pick up the slipper and return to the house.

“Ah, you’ve found it!” Mrs. B. says.

“This is what you were looking for?”

“Aye, that’s why I asked you to look.”

“No, Mrs. B,” I say. “You asked me to find a spade.”

“Why would I want a spade, dear?”

I’m saved from answering by the old labrador, who emerges from behind the settee and lets rip the mother of all farts, loud and bubbly. He wags his tail hard in delight at this achievement, which also has the effect of fanning the stench through the entire room. I get started on the cleaning at once.

The sky still hasn’t broken when I leave an hour later, pedalling hard up the big hill to see to Mr. S.

Mr. S.

Mr. S. is packing to go on his holidays. He closes his case, and tells me to start on the lounge while he goes to the kitchen to nicotine up.

“Don’t come in while I have a ciggie,” he shouts through. “It’s a health hazard zone, Effie!”

“It’s likely no worse than Mrs. B’s dog that farts like a howitzer!” I yell back.

“The dog probably just eats too fast,” he calls. “Gulps down air. What she needs to do is get two bowls—”

I turn on the vacuum cleaner. So very often, when a client is in a chatty mood and I want to get on, the vacuum cleaner is my friend: “Sorry, can’t hear! Vacuum cleaner!”

This one, though, is a Sebo. Sebo vacuum cleaners – recommended by John Lewis to people who will never have to use the bloody thing themselves. It’s like lugging round a submarine. Do excuse me while I try not to kill myself on the stairs.

When I turn it off again, Mr. S. has finished both his ciggie and his arcane advice about dog farts. He has made me a cup of tea.

“No milk, Effie, just as you like it,” he says. Lovely. He has no biscuits, though. He’d be far better off eating biscuits than smoking, and I’d be a lot happier.

“Where are you off to?” I ask him.

“Railways and castles in Wales for five days,” he says, and takes a leaflet from his pocket to read. “From our base in charming Llandudno, we experience the best of North Wales. Soak up the scenery as we ride aboard historic steam railways, and travel back in time to a beautiful mountainous region, with castles dotted along the coastline.”

“Dotted castles,” I say. “That sounds bonny.”

“Hope so,” he says. “Look, I’d best be off. Lock up when you’re done and leave the key under the gnome as usual.”

After he goes I bleach everything, in a vain attempt to get rid of the mawkit nicotine smell that clings everywhere. There’s only so much a cleaner can do, mind. When I leave, the sky has come over as black as The Earl of Hell’s waistcoat

Mrs. M.

“Effie, it’s raining so hard now,” Mrs. M. greets me at her door. “Did you have to cycle today?”

How the shite else will I get to you? I almost say, but manage to bite my tongue. Honestly, some days I don’t have the patience of a gnat. I’m wet, I have earache from the cold rain, and I have old lady compassion fatigue. I’m not proud of myself.

“It’s getting really wet now, Effie! Will you not put it in the garage?”

Yes. Yes, I will. I wheel my trike into her roomy garage, peel off my cagoul and hang it to drip-dry on an old rocking horse, then go through the inside door into the house.

“Have you seen the headline in the Daily Express, Effie?” Mrs. M. says, sitting in her reclining chair. “The Queen has a sore eye. Look! But she’s still smiling. I’ve put the milk in your tea, Effie.” Nooooo! I surreptitiously tip it down the sink. Not for the first time I wonder whether all this is worth twenty quid.

“Do you take the Daily Express, Effie?”

“No, Mrs M.” Jings, no, a world of no. No to the seventh power.

“Oh, dear. Would you like mine when I’ve read it?”

“No, thank you, that’s fine.” Internal screaming.

“It’s normally very good at reporting news,” she says. “Although I don’t understand this about the Prime Minister. What did he do? Did he kill a pig?”

Oh GOD. I’ll have to tell her.

“No, Mrs. M.” I say. “He was intimate with it.”

“I don’t … what do you mean?” she says, face all creased with puzzlement. I turn on the vacuum cleaner.

“Sorry, can’t hear!” I say. “Vacuum cleaner!”

Mrs. M furiously looks through the paper, forwards and backwards, while I try not to either giggle or weep. When I finish the vacuuming, she’s still leafing through her paper.

“Look at these portraits from the award thingy,” she says. She means the National Portrait Gallery annual awards.

“They’re good, aren’t they?” I say, looking over her shoulder.

“I’d like to have my portrait painted one day,” she says, dreamily. “Always fancied that, so classy. You know, before I die.”

“Better then than after,” I say. Mrs. M. chortles.

“Although look at that one,” she says. “He’s smoking in it. Who’d want to be painted making a stink?”

“One of my clients smokes,” I say, “Though I think he’d like to stop. It is difficult, mind.”

“I stopped my Gerald smoking, easy,” she says. “At first, whenever he lit one, I’d suck it up with my Dustbuster, but he never knew what to do with his fingers without one. Do you want to know what kept his fingers busy instead?”

Jings, dare I ask? “Go on,” I say.

“Wooden clothes pegs,” she says. “You can buy a pack from the pound shop. I’d give him one of them to hold instead, and he said he found it surprisingly satisfying. He could also chew on them, and snap them under his thumb, which was extra-helpful to a simple soul like him.”

I muse on poor old Gerald, chewing on his clothes pegs, while I immerse myself in Mrs. M’s hospital corners. The things we do for love, eh? The rain has stopped by the time I finish with Mrs. M., and it’s a pleasant ride down the hedged country lanes to my last client of the day.

Mrs. H

Mrs. H. greets me with “Hello, my lovely. Ooh, you look like a drowned rat. Come in & get warm.” And with that I can breathe. Mrs. H. is on her second sherry, bless her heart. She brings me paracetamol for my earache, and offers to pour oil in. I settle for just the paracetamol.

I can’t describe how much I love Mr. and Mrs. H. They are the warmest people on this earth. Sometimes I feel bogged down by the utter drudgery of this work, and then the Mr. and Mrs. H’s of this world sit me down and remind me that my job is more about the people than the cleaning.

“You know,” Mrs. H. says, “you’d think with all this cycling you’d be as thin as a rake, but you’re not, are you, cariad?”

I look at her and her eyes twinkle knowingly.

“Where’s Mr. H?” I say.

“In the back, experimenting with oils,” she says.

“Jings,” I say, “He’s a lively one.” I wink and she grins.

“Oil paint, I mean. He’s got a sheet down and his easel up in the back room, painting a landscape from a photo. Speaking of lively ones, are you seeing your young man this weekend?”

“He’s forty-seven, Mrs. H. He’s hardly young.”

“About time we met him then, don’t you think?”

“It’s about time I got on with your cleaning,” I say.

“Oh,” she waves her hand, “I’ve done all that. Let’s just sit and have a little chat.”

Somehow Mrs. H. has remembered that it’s exactly a year since I started cleaning for her, and she wants to give me something as a small thankyou to mark the occasion.

“I was going to give you some tatties from my garden,” she says, “but they’re rubbish again. I just don’t have the knack for them. So I got you this.”

She hands me a gift wrapped in flowery paper. Bottle-shaped.

“Don’t worry!” she says. “I know you don’t drink. It’s a cocktail.”

I’m not sure where she got the idea that cocktails were non-alcoholic, but I’m touched anyway and thank her profusely. Mr. H. joins us, all tweeds and paint-spattered cheeks, and we natter away for an hour about dogs, Wales, politics and vegetables.

I get back home to a house full of dead crow. I’d left the kitchen window open, apparently. Thank you, Colonel. While I’m cleaning up his mess, I think about my day, and the people who have filled it, and I realise – they make up a daisy-chain of skills and needs, of friendly supply and demand, each able to offer help to another who needs it. Mr. S. can help Mrs. B. stop her dog farting. Mrs. M. knows how Mr. S. can stop smoking. Mr. H. can paint Mrs. M’s portrait. And Mrs. B. can help Mrs. H. with her tatties. They just need to meet each other and chat.

I sit at my bureau and take out four invitation cards. On each of them I write the following:

Ms. Euphemia Gaggy requests the pleasure of your company for AFTERNOON TEA and lovely chats

Photograph

For those who don’t know, in December I went to the doctor for what I thought was a minor ailment and ended up being rushed to hospital in an ambulance, and diagnosed with cancer and acute kidney impairment. When I was allowed home, the first song I listened to was John Otway’s ‘Photograph’. This story clearly embraces all of those experiences. I warn you, it’s pretty downbeat. I’ll aim for something more light-hearted next time.

I open my book, a worn and well-thumbed copy of HG Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’, and a photograph falls onto my lap. It had clearly been used as a bookmark on a previous unremembered and incomplete journey through the book’s pages. Wells’ masterpiece is a novel I’ve read numerous times. It thrilled me when first I read it as a boy, and over the years and countless re-readings has grown into a comfy jumper of a book. Now, I hope I have enough time left to read it through once more.

The nurse finishes pricking my finger to test my blood sugar, sticks a thermometer in my ear, and measures my blood pressure, which she declares ‘a bit low’. She bustles out of the room, trundling her trolley-full of beeping machines behind her.

The photograph itself is old. The reverse no longer a blank white, but yellowed and covered with random groupings of tiny brown speckles that remind me of the bone scans of my skeleton, and the scattered black patches sprinkled across it as if a starless cold night had spilled into me while I slept. When I saw them my first thought was how pretty cancer looked. A pretty poison. In the corner, faded by the decades but still just about legible, is the legend 1973, written in pencil. I turn the photograph over and there you are. My heart skips faster, even after all this time.

A young man in a red tabard comes in to take my order for the evening meal. He writes on his clipboard as I opt for chicken soup, followed by ice cream. Do I want a crusty roll with my soup? No thank you. My teeth are not up to much chewing these days.

This image of you, beautifully lit from the side with a golden light, was taken half a century ago, shortly before your inexplicable decision that your tomorrows would be doom-laden and not worth waiting for. You are wearing a long black dress, and lounging languidly across a large easy chair, your long legs draped over one arm, bare below the knee where the dress has fallen away to the side. You are smiling, your eyes full of amused vivacity.

The nurse returns and empties the urine collection bag for my catheter. She tells me she has asked the doctor to come and see me later, to have a closer look at my fibrillating heart and lowered blood pressure.

On that long ago day I had sat with you all afternoon, playing guitar, singing songs that you loved; Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Fairport Convention. Occasionally you would join me in song, and at the end of one duet your eyes lit up with utter delight at a long, high note well held. Struck by the joy and beauty of your expression in that moment, I had grabbed the camera and took the photograph that I now hold, fifty years later, capturing forever what was, perhaps, your last ever moment of pure contentment.

My chest feels odd. Perhaps it’s just nostalgic emotion, or maybe it’s something more. Perhaps I won’t, after all, have time to read ‘War of the Worlds’ one more time. I take another look at the photograph.

Your delicate fingers, loosely holding a pen, hover over a notebook that rests in your lap, a diary that you kept back then, so that in the future you would be able to remember every nuance of your youth; every movement, every thought and every word. Outside the depth of field, the words on the page are just too blurred to read, but peering closely I can just about make out the sentence ‘Please don’t let this stop’. Then suddenly, about a week afterwards, it did stop. You no longer sang. You no longer laughed. You no longer wrote, and never again raised a pen to fill the empty pages and the empty days. I was utterly mystified, and you refused to tell me what was wrong, even though it must have been a terrible epiphany indeed to lead you to decide that this world would be better off without you in it.

The machine attached to my arm squawks an alarm. Damn.

I kiss your paper smile and close my eyes. I think it’s time. The book slips from my fingers and falls to the floor. I let out a long sigh and fill my mind with memories of you. I remember reading your note, about my having to climb Everest with one hand behind my back. I have never understood why you felt that it was you that kept me from getting to the very top, when in fact you were the whole reason for my ascent, my Sherpa Tensing. I imagine you letting your own book drop and holding out your hands to me.

Behind the squawking alarm I hear, faintly, running footsteps and echoed voices.

Whatever you thought back then, whatever you believed that led to your terrible decision, you were wrong. Disastrously wrong. Yet I’m not angry, not any longer, although since you left life has been nothing but a pain to be endured, a fixed ache that just goes on and on, a constant nag of … why? Perhaps now that question can be answered. Perhaps now, finally, you can tell me why you left life behind. Why you left me behind.

It won’t be long now. Please be waiting for me. See you soon.

Just Say When: a short timey-wimey story

“Hey, Vesper, what have you found over there?” I said, stowing a new dirt sample in the back of the Rover.

Nguyen, sixty metres away by a large upthrust of rust-coloured rock, turned to face me with that little bunny-hop bounce necessitated by the low gravity and her EVA suit. Nguyen is Vietnamese. You’re maybe having trouble pronouncing her name. That’s OK, so do I. The first time I met her, in a small Houston bar, I couldn’t get it right at all.

“That first syllable can be hard for Western tongues,” she had allowed. “Why don’t you just say ‘Wen’?”

“Just say when? Like I’m pouring you a drink?”

“Thanks, I’ll have a Vesper.”

That comment sealed our friendship immediately, and since that day I had simply called her by the name of her favourite cocktail instead. She was happy with that, even amused, and reciprocated by calling me after my own favourite tipple.

“You’ll like this, Shirley Temple,” she said, her voice crackling a little in my earpiece. “It’s a cave.”

Now, before you go getting the wrong idea, Nguyen and I are not, and have never been, a couple. Sure, we’re a team, and a good one: we work well together as colleagues, and as friends, but there’s no romance involved. Throughout training and testing we’d consistently done well, both individually and together, and when the time came we’d both been chosen for the first HEOMD manned expedition to Mars.

I double-checked the screen on the Rover’s output dash. “Geoscan shows nothing in this rock formation but, well, rock,” I said.

We had launched from the Lunar Gateway a year ago now. Nguyen won our rock-paper-scissors decider, despite her missing middle finger, the result of a childhood accident, making it more a game of rock-paper-skewer. Her victory gave her the honour of being the first human ever to set foot on Mars. I’d followed a few minutes later, the Martian Buzz Aldrin. And yes, the moon landings had been a giant leap off the doorstep, but now humankind had properly left home and walked down the road. Humanity reaching out to neighbouring worlds borrow a cup of sugar. Boots on the red planet.

“Nevertheless,” Nguyen said, “a cave there is, and it’s a biggie. Come on, Shirley, get your hairy ass over here.”

I bounced over to her, using the comedic hop-skip gait we’d developed to move safely in the weak Martian gravity. She was standing by a dark opening in the rock, a jagged crack twice my height, yet only a metre wide. I shone my helmet light into the opening. The crevice widened out just inside and ran back a fair way.

“Turn your light off,” Nguyen said.

“What?”

“You heard.”

I did as she said and looked again into the crevice. There was something in there, back in the darkness: a deep red glow, the colour of cinnabar. It pulsed gently, almost like a beating heart.

“What the slippery wiggins is that?” I said.

“I know exactly what that is,” she said. “It’s an anomaly.”

“An anomaly? What’s that? Don’t tell me; is this another Star Trek reference?” Nguyen loved her Star Trek. I’m more of a Buffy man myself.

“Yes. Generally, it means ‘We have no idea what this unexpected thing is’. You can have all sorts of anomaly – this is possibly a crystalline anomaly, a subspace anomaly, or maybe just a common-or-garden spatial anomaly.”

“Should we go inside and investigate?”

“We’re explorers, Shirley. Investigation kind of goes with the territory. To boldly go. Adventure: without it, why live?”

“I take your point. Just say when, Vesper.”

“When.”

We turned on our helmet lights and squeezed into the cave. It widened out after a couple of feet: dust had blown into the entrance a few yards, but further inside the floor was hard and even: safe for us to walk on. Ahead of us, in the dark, the ‘anomaly’ pulsed and beckoned. I watched it for a while, then closed my eyes and watched the green afterglow that remained against my eyelids.

“Fuck. Ing. Hell.” It was unlike Nguyen to swear so baldly, so I pulled my attention away from the radiance.  She was facing the side of the cave, shining her lamp towards the foot of the wall. I joined my light with hers, and when I saw what she was looking at, my sense of the universe changed forever.

“F … Sh … what?” I struggled for words.

Nesting at the foot of the wall was a pile of bones. Human bones, with a human skull and vertebrae, and arm and hand bones reaching towards the cave wall.

“It seems that I might not be the first person to walk on Mars after all.” Nguyen said.

“But … how?”

“All I’ve got is ‘fucking hell’.”

“OK. Perhaps … perhaps there were actual Martians once, humanoids like us, and this is one of them. The bone looks blackened, old.”

There was something – a scratch, a mark – at the very base of the rock wall close to the finger bones. I squatted as best I could in the confines of my suit and looked more closely. There were indeed scratches, faint and worn away by years. At first I thought they were random marks, left by the desperate clawing of a dying Martian, but as I studied them it occurred to me that they resembled three slightly overlapping letters: J, S and W.

“This thing is pulsing faster,” Nguyen said, and I looked up to see she had moved and was staring at the light, which hovered at about head-height just in front of the back wall of the cave. It was indeed pulsing more rapidly, as if excited, like a heart at the sight of a lover. Fascinated, Nguyen lifted her hand to touch it. I’ll regret to my dying day that I was too slow to stop her.

A tsunami of crimson light flooded the cave, causing my helmet faceplate to darken in automatic response, and when it cleared Nguyen was gone. She hadn’t run outside: I checked, obviously. No, she’d just vanished into thin air (quite literally given Mars’ weedy atmosphere). I stared at the space where she’d been, and the pulsing light that had apparently … I don’t know, what? Absorbed her?

What the hell was it? Would it absorb me? Probably, if I got too close. What was it that Nguyen had said about anomalies? Surely Star Trek was fiction; but then a lot of what Star Trek had predicted had come true in the years after it was broadcast, so why not these? What kind of anomaly appeared as a pulsing red light?

Eventually a thought occurred to me, and I returned to the impossible skeleton. This time I paid more attention to the bones near the wall, the outstretched hand. There were no middle-finger bones. At that moment I knew what the scratches on the wall meant, and an hour later, when I contacted Houston, I was with some confidence able to use the words ‘temporal anomaly’. Thirty minutes later their reply, delayed by distance, arrived.

“Please investigate the anomaly <beep>,” it said. “Be cautious but use camera and infra-red analysis for initial investigation. <beep> You might like to toss a rock into it. <beep>”

“Sorry, Houston, no,” I sent back. “I’m not ready to go anywhere near that thing yet.”

Thirty minutes later: “Understood, Mars One <beep>. Tell us when you are ready. <beep> Just say when.”

Moss

     You are four hundred million years old.

     You live on every continent,

     with neither roots nor towering trunks.

     You tasted the air before the first feather,

     before shrews stirred the leaf litter,

     before even ferns uncurled their fingers.

     When my mind hisses like a kettle,

     I look to your long, patient silence,

     to the green lessons of

     soft, simple quiet beneath the sun.

Scrimshaw

I watched my jailer die painfully on the ground, clutching his chest. I thrust my arm through the small view-hole of the locked door and made a claw of my hand, gripping and twisting the air, so that he would die thinking that it was my magic stopping his heart, rather than his clogged arteries.

He had just locked me away in my cell again after my mandated seasonal view of the sky. The King himself had pronounced my sentence some years ago: “The traitor is to be locked, secluded, in our dungeons, for the remainder of his life. His cell will have no view of sky, nor any other natural thing. On the first day of every season he is to be taken outside for one hour and shown the sky, the forest on the hill, and the lake in the valley. He is to hear birdsong and the wind, so that he will remember, over the rest of his unmorrowing dark days, all that I have taken from him.”

As a punishment, I had to admit, it was genius. To view the world’s beauty briefly, only to be shut away again for three long months, over and over: that is true torture. The silence was the worst thing: my jailers, ugly, unkempt men surrounded by a miasma from their own filth, were not allowed to speak to me. There were two of them, working alternate turns of duty. In an attempt to lighten my heavy days, I called them both Susan. They did not possess the wit to care.

Susan Fatbastard would turn up on the first day of Spring to relieve Susan Wartynose, take me outside in manacles and leg irons for my ‘freedom hour’, then spend three months keeping me alive with perpetual rat and squirrel stew, dried smoked meats, hard biscuits, and pickled vegetables. On the first day of Summer, Susan Wartynose would return to relieve Susan Fatbastard, bringing with him another three-month supply of preserved foods. And so it continued, always the same monotonous grind.

Until today, the first day of Autumn in the fifth year of my confinement. Susan Wartynose had toddled off down the hill for his three-month break, and Susan Fatbastard had just brought me back inside after showing me a milk-grey sky, a forest aflame with golden foliage, and the courtyard clattered by hailstones that bounced high from the ground, like maggots fried in a too-hot pan. I did not care about the bad weather. I was outside, and it was glorious. All too soon, Susan Fatbastard had put me back in the cell, given me some salted fish on a tin plate, removed my irons, and locked the door.

“Thank you, Susan,” I said, at which he grabbed at his chest and fell, making a sound like a queen falling from a turret window six floors up and hitting the flagstones below like a hefty bag filled with vegetable soup. The little cell key dropped to the stone floor, where it lay next to him, tantalisingly in view but out of reach. If it really had been my magic stopping his heart I would have made damn sure he died inside the cell.

“Peter, some advice please?” I called. Peter is my friend. He is a rat, but he is very intelligent, has a quick wit, and can provide sparkling conversation on dark nights. Over the years he has become a close companion. He speaks to me in my head, and but for him I think I might have gone insane and started hearing voices that were not there.

Peter appeared from his hole in the corner, ran over to my salted fish and began to eat it. “What is it, Fartsack?” he said.

“Bit of a problem,” I said. “Susan is dead.”

“Which one?”

“Does it matter?”

Peter considered this, then spoke with a wisdom that can only come from experience, like a man who went blind from looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it, and now goes around the country warning about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

“No,” he said.

“Right. So, the thing is,” I told him, “I’m locked in here—”

“As per.”

“As, as you say, per. Actually, you know, I can’t actually remember now why I’m locked in here? I wonder what crime I committed?”

“The king caught you diddling the queen, and if you ask me you should count yourself lucky that you’re still alive. He threw her out of the turret window, six floors up.”

“Oh, yes, the queen! She beguiled me with her lady parts. Such a lovely woman.”

“Until about a foot above the ground, I imagine she was.”

“Anyway, the problem: Susan Fatbastard is dead, and therefore unable to feed me. I can see the cell key, but I can’t reach it. I will soon begin to starve. Susan Wartynose will not turn up until winter, at which point…” I found it hard to state the obvious.

“At which point death will lie upon you like a December frost.”

“Wow. Poetic.”

“Learn your Shakespeare, Fartsack.”

“Can Shakespeare help me here? Does he have any ideas? Do you have any ideas?”

“Yes, I have many ideas,” Peter said. I knew I could rely on him. “For instance, how confident of victory must the Swiss have been to include a corkscrew on their army knife?”

“No, I mean something a little more relevant to me?”

“Don’t eat too much cheese. It can clog up your bottom-hole.”

“I swear, I will shove that fish right up your bottom-hole if you don’t take this seriously.”

“Okay, sorry. Then yes, it seems to me that you have two options.”

“Excellent. What’s the easiest?”

“Wait morosely for starvation and death.”

“Let’s put that one on the back-burner for now. What’s the other one?”

“How big is the cell key?”

“Remarkably small, actually.” I indicated a couple of inches with my finger and thumb. “It’s a very high-tech lock. There’s no way I could pick it.” I lifted Peter up so that he could look through the opening in the door.

“I see,” he said. “Then this might work. You won’t like it, but it will mean you get to keep on living.” I put him back down and he cleaned his whiskers.

“Go on,” I said.

Peter outlined his plan, and he was right. I did not like it. I did not like it one bit. The only part I did like was that I would be alive and free at the end of it, rather than keeping Susan Fatbastard company in death.

First, Peter had me fashion a rough knife from the thin metal plate – once he had finished the salted fish, of course. This I achieved by bending the cheap metal to and fro until it split, then, using rags torn from my bedding, binding the two halves together to form a point and a ragged edge, with a cloth handle. It was no Swiss army knife, but it was, more or less, a knife, and it would cut. It was the cutting that bothered me, actually. It was obvious I would need a mighty determination born of an unquenchable desire to stay alive. Did I desire to live? Damn right I did. Was it unquenchable? That remained to be seen.

“I think I’m ready,” I told Peter. “Which one?”

“Of all your fingers, you might think your diddler is the most useless. But no! Your little finger is particularly important in a strong grip, and hand surgeons agree if you’re going to lose one, the index finger is the best one to lose. Proximal phalanx. Fifty millimetres, about two inches long.”

“When did you become a hand expert?”

“When you’ve eaten as many corpses as I have…” he shrugged. If you’ve never seen a rat shrug, I can recommend it. It’s a fascinating sight. “So listen – it’s easy to cut into flesh and tendons, which your fingers barely have to begin with, but getting through bone is trickier. You need to find and split the joint cleanly, severing the ligaments and tendons.”

“Oh God. Are you sure a rat bone wouldn’t work?”

“Bugger off, Fartsack.” Peter backed away. “Get on with it. The longer you leave it, the weaker you’ll become.”

He was right, of course. I had to do this. I sat on my bed and lay my left hand flat on my small table. I emptied my lungs, then drew in the largest breath I could. I jabbed the knife-point deep into the base of my left forefinger. Blood oozed out.

“Cut through the flesh!” shouted Peter, jumping to the table so he could see. “Slice the flesh from around the knuckle!”

“Damn! Ouch! Fuck … rist’s sake, that hurts!” Despite the agony burning along my nerves, I sawed through the flesh to the bone. There was so much blood, so much pain. My head began to spin.

“You have to externalise the pain,” said Peter. “Name five red things you can see.”

“Blood!” I spat through the pain. “Blood, blood, blood and blood! There’s nothing else red in here, it’s all bloody blood!”

“Then tell me what you saw outside this morning. Five things. Then find the joint between the bones and cut down. Hard.”

“Bright flags, king’s colours,” I said. It was impossible to see anything but blood.

“High metal fence,” I said. Peter lapped at the edge of the crimson pool.

“Beyond the fence, trees, the forest,” I said. The metal edge dipped slightly, into the space where the bones joined.

“To the west, a distant horizon,” I said. I took a deep, sobbing breath and heaved down hard on the knife. It suddenly cut clean through to the table.

“Freedom,” I said. Tears wet my face, and I tasted blood where I had bitten my lip, but I was suddenly very calm, possibly from shock, possibly from casting my mind into the outside world.

“One word,” said Peter, taking the severed finger in his teeth and pulling it away from my hand. “Bravo.”

I wrapped my hand tightly in bedding, to staunch the bleeding. The pain throbbed like a bastard.

“It’ll stop bleeding soon,” Peter said. He was right, if by ‘soon’ he meant ‘after four days of intense torment’. In the meantime, he kindly stripped my finger-bone of flesh. He did offer to let me eat it (I would need the strength, he told me), but I could not face that horror. And so I began to use my rudimentary knife to whittle the cleaned finger bone into the shape of the key I could see on the floor outside my cell. It was a slow process, but by the time Susan Fatbastard started turning green, leaking bodily fluids, and stinking to high heaven, I had carved a close facsimile of the cell key.

I held my breath as I slid it into the lock. I need not have worried, it worked perfectly. I swung open the cell door and stepped outside. I went to kick Susan Fatbastard but Peter stopped me.

“Don’t!” he piped. “What if your foot goes inside him and releases all sorts of putrid liquids?”

“Ah yes, that would rather spoil the moment. Thank you, my friend. Hey, are you coming with me?”

“I’d better not,” he said. “The missus is waiting for me. I’ll see you to the gate though.”

We circled around Susan Fatbastard’s corpse, and walked to the front door and the outside world. I pulled a clean tablecloth from a table as we passed and redressed my hand, thrusting it under my right armpit to keep the pressure on the wound and the pain manageable.

Outside, the sun shone, and the sky went on forever. I grinned my joy as I crossed eagerly to the gate in the high metal fence that surrounded the courtyard. I pulled. I pushed. The gate did not budge. It was locked.

“What a shame,” I said, only with far more swear words than that. “I suppose the king did not trust Susan Fatbastard not to just run off and leave me to rot.”

“Wait,” said Peter, peering through the gate. “I can see the key, look, on that hook out there. It’s huge, far too heavy for me to lift.” He gave me a curious look. “It’s about the length of a man’s forearm.”

Scorched Pages Found In A Ruined Observatory

Stargazing journal, 67^th evening of observation:

I cannot abide this place any longer. From my first observation of that distant globe, a glorious blue jewel, and through all subsequent examinations, I have realised that my time on this ugly metal world, in this tainted city, would have to end soon. How could I possibly rest content in this quagmire of filth, corruption and religious fanaticism, when there exists up there an entirely new world, just within my reach, ripe for exploration?

After two years of ceaseless effort, the means of my departure is almost within my grasp … despite the recent setback. Fossick was a fine young apprentice, and a dedicated laboratory assistant. I miss him enormously. Oh, you cannot appreciate the keening anguish I suffered as I pulled his entrails from the main plaza’s great statue. Worst of all, I realise now that it was my miscalculations that cost the lad his life.

How could I have been so dense? The scientific principle is sound, I am sure. Using my patented Sunsplode Device – an explosive of the highest magnitude – a thick wooden box can pierce the heavens and travel the distance needed to reach the stars. How stupid of me on the first trial not to include a protective layer of lead.

But the past is exactly that, and it is time to move on. I have today hired a new assistant; a drunken old crone named Hilde, who will make the next test flight tomorrow morning. I will place the reconfigured Sunsplode Device beneath the box, and ignite it from a distance. Fortunate Hilde will be the first traveller to soar to that beautiful new world.

Once there, she will communicate with me via smoke signals when it is safe for me to proceed there myself. She is, of course, a bit nervous about climbing into a box perched upon a mighty explosive, but a pint of aged gin should be enough to put her fears to rest.

Tomorrow, then – to the stars!

The Road Warrior

Dennis. Yep, that’s my name. Dennis; beagle-hound extraordinaire and proud warrior of the road, at your service. That’s me, right up front with the wind tossing my ears, stalwartly leading the way as usual. Of course my hat and scarf are more a muddy grey-brown these days rather than their original vivid colours, but such are the signs of a true road warrior. My being lashed up here in all weathers is bound to have an effect. My job is vital, however. Without me cable-tied to the front of their dustcart the team’s morale would soon plummet, and they’d be constantly dropping rubbish all over the road. I’m the essential glue that holds them together, really. So essential that the bin lorry even has my name in huge silver letters across the front. Quite how the team coped before they found me I just can’t imagine. Of course, before they managed to free me and adopted me I wasn’t called Dennis. Back then I was called …

Please No Duvets. Yes, yes, I know. It was a ridiculous name. You see, I’ve always tried to conduct myself according to what Mr. Kaczmarek said all those years ago, and that sign stuck to the side of the recycling skip was the only thing nearby that had words on it. So ‘Please No Duvets’ I became. I wasn’t there long, luckily, for it was a place of endless tedium and discomfort. It stank, for one thing. Inside the skip flies and other unseen crawly things moved over my bottom, and outside my face gazed out over a tedious dirt car park. The worst part was when people said bad words at me for blocking the opening and they had to throw their unwanted detritus onto an ever-growing pile on the ground. Some folk tried to pull me out, but Gwynedd, as angry as a thunder sky, had jammed me in there as tightly as the stuffing in my paws. In her incandescent rage, she had lost any love that she once had for her cuddly …

Bythie. Apparently Gwynedd’s name for me was short for ‘bytheiad’, which she had told Huw meant ‘hound’. This had been the second time that a human had named me, and I rather liked it. Life with Gwynedd and Huw was joyful. They loved and laughed together constantly in their little house on the hill, or at least they had until that last day when Huw had loved and laughed with Mrs. Probert from the corner shop instead. When Gwynedd found them together in the narrow bed everything cracked apart. I was devastated. I had held such a special place in their now-shattered hearts, having been part of their first evening together when they met at the fair. Huw had won despite all of Mr. Llewellyn’s sneaky tricks, such as weighting the hoops differently, and when he asked a delighted Gwynedd which prize she wanted she said “Can I have the ci hyll, please?” She had kissed Huw and he had kissed her back. Their future together seemed so bright when I first saw them, back when my name was …

Hoopla. In those days I dangled by my ears from a string at the back of the gaudy, flashy stall. Fairground music played every night and coloured lights dazzled my glass eyes. I looked down on an endless stream of people happy to give Mr. Llewellyn a pound for the chance to fling his oddly-weighted hoops at stubby candy-striped wooden pegs. Very few people managed to get even one hoop over a peg, still fewer two. I was a three-hoop prize, there more for decoration than for winning. The occasional person who did somehow manage to ring three pegs never wanted the ugly dog in the bright hat, and would choose a fairy or amusing hat instead. It had been just the same before Mr. Llewellyn found me, too. No-one wanted me then either, and I was stuffed into a wicker basket, half-forgotten, until that fateful day when I heard Mr. Llewellyn say “Got any cheap stuffed toys?”

“In the basket, cariad,” the shop-woman said, and I felt large hands rummaging through and around me before lifting me out into the light.

“You’ll do, boyo,” Mr. Llewelyn nodded, paying twenty pence for me and fifty for a fairy that he also pulled from the bric-a-brac in the basket. That was the moment my name changed from …

Oxfam, I’m pleased to say. Oh, I loved my life in the odd little shop full of people’s cast-away treasures. There was plenty of time for people-watching from my high shelf above the books, and on the whole the customers were kind people. My name had to be ‘Oxfam’, of course, even though to my mind it was an ugly name with its spiky ‘X’. The word was written all around me, and had even been painted in enormous letters above the door when Emily’s mum had brought me here. I had been so nervous at what to expect as she had carried me through the door. Emily’s mum had told the shop-woman that Emily had gone away to learn how to be something called a lawyer, and so she was taking the chance to have a bit of a clear out. That day was a tremendous shock to my system, I can tell you, after years of being …

Cuggly. Years of being hugged, years of being loved, years of having the bobble on my hat sucked by Emily when she was very young and very tired. Oh my, we had such a wonderful life together. We had tea-parties on the carpet in the front room. When she went off to school I was always there to welcome her home. When she cried because Danny Potts had ignored her, I was there to comfort her. I sat on her desk during exams, bringing her the luck that helped her to get into university. So many long years of friendship and love since that long-ago day that she had pointed at me in the toy shop and said “Cuggly!”

“Are you sure?” her mum asked, “There are far prettier cuddlies.”

“Cuggly!” Emily had insisted, and so I became hers, leaving behind my life as …

Ten shillings. There were four or five of us sitting above the sign that said that. We were surrounded by bright notices and shiny cellophane-wrapped boxes of vivid colour that contained new toys. The laughter of happy smiling children rang around the shop, competing with the musical box tinklings of ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ emerging from the display on the shelf below us. This gaudy, noisy world fascinated me. Its entertainment value had been apparent immediately I had arrived, and it helped me to get over the initial shock I had felt when I was taken out of the dark, stifling box after hours of being thrown around and jostled. The happy, lively toy shop lifted my spirits, easing my transition from my previous existence as …

Wyjście pożarowe. That was my name when I was born. Those words in white letters on a green sign were my first sight as my eyes were stitched into place. I was passed from hand to gnarled hand, having my head stuffed, my paws sewn on and my tail attached. Mr. Kaczmarek spread glue liberally around my head. Ever the poet, as he stuck the gaudy hat permanently to my scalp he said the words that have stuck with me through all of my eight lives.

“It is odd to think,” he mused, “how all of these identical fabrications of cloth and glass will eventually end up with different names depending each upon their circumstance. People, and I daresay even places themselves, will name them and give them character.” He looked straight into my glass eyes.

“I wonder what your name will be?”

NOTE: In the UK and across Europe, many/most dustcarts are made by Dennis Eagle, and have DENNIS writ large across the front. See here http://www.dennis-eagle.co.uk/

The Owlman of Mawnan Smith

A short story for @Crowmogh, who introduced me to the legend of the Owlman, & for @MrsTrevithick, for being the inspiration for, well, Mrs. Trevithick. The illustration is a drawing by someone who claimed to have seen the Owlman in 1976.

---

The sound was a howl of ancient evil; the despairing moan of an old, dying race.

“Th’piskies are abroad,” said Mrs. Trevithick. She frowned at the empty cup before her, as the noise rose and fell, like the ghost of a long-dead smuggler.

“It’s only that warped window,” Kirsten said. “It whistles that way when the wind is coming straight in off the sea. Pour yourself a cup of tea. I’ll just get some sticky tape and close the gap.”

“Thank ‘ee,” said Mrs. Trevithick. She poured tea from the warm pot into the floral cup on the small table at her side. “You might want to try blue tack.”

“Good idea. The tape does leave horrible marks.”

“Of course, stopping th’hole won’t keep pobol vean out. They have ways.”

“It’s not the little people I worry about.”

“You should. Kernow is special. There are secrets here that no-one can fathom. And while humans go about their little lives, so sure that this world belongs to them, shadowed creatures of legend are hiding in plain sight.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Kirsten said, taking a ball of blue tack from the bureau. She moulded it between her fingers, softening it with her warmth. “Last week I went to Gwennap Pit. A troubled place, I felt. There was a whole pig’s leg left out on the stones. I’ve felt … haunted, ever since.”

“How do you mean, dear?” Mrs. Trevithick sipped from her cup and twisted her mouth.

“I don’t know – certainly I’ve had nothing but bad luck since then. It’s…” she looked at Mrs. Trevithick, who gave her a small nod of encouragement. “It’s as if an ancient malevolence was dogging me. So yes, I do believe, somewhere in the core of me, that there is true magic here – but the little people don’t concern me.”

Mrs. Trevithick allowed unswallowed tea to dribble back from her mouth into the cup. “No?” she said.

Kirsten pushed the putty into the warped window frame. Outside, the leafless oak swayed like a skeleton scratched onto the furious sky by some dark god. Behind the tree, the slate sea was veined by froth whipped up by the same wind that was making her window cry.

“No,” she said. “The thing that puts the willies up me is a much larger creature indeed.”

“Jan Tregeagle, th’howling demon?”

Kirsten shook her head as she stood up. Her efforts had made little difference to the banshee-howl from her window. Behind her Mrs. Trevithick emptied her cup into the pot-plant on the table.

“As far as I know,” Kirsten said, “Jan Tregeagle doesn’t kill folk so much as play tricks on them. No, the creature that terrifies me is said to live close by where we met today.”

“Mawnan Smith?”

“Indeed. It is a pretty village, but I’m gripped with fear whenever I pass the church. Do you know the story of the Owlman?”

“A monstrous owl-like creature, the size of a man, with clawed wings, dark and ragged. Its eyes glow red even in the golden light of a Cornish afternoon. Its legs and body are as a human’s, though swathed in feathers the colour of charcoal, and its beak is cruelly curved, as are the claws that adorn its feet. They do say as it carries people off in those mighty talons.”

“Off to where, though? And what becomes of them?” Kirsten drew in a shaky breath.

“Legend do say the Owlman carries its prey to the top of th’church tower, where it eats their faces, so it can mimic their appearance and walk amongst us.”

Kirsten shuddered and poured herself a cup of tea. “Above the church porch it says ‘Da thymi nesse the Dhu’,” she said.

“It is good to draw nigh to th’Lord,” Mrs. Trevithick said.

“Yes. Does that sound a bit like a threat to you? Sort of implying that death will find you soon, and you were a fool to go anywhere near the place?”

“Well, now, I thought ‘ee looked a little shaky, dear. No wonder, if you’ve been having those kinds of thoughts.”

“Is there any prospect so unnerving as becoming the very thing that terrifies you?” Kirsten said. “I was proper shook up today. Thank you for walking home with me. I appreciated the company.”

“Oh, the Owlman is quite the other way round, dear,” Mrs. Trevithick said. “In his case, he – th’thing that terrifies – becomes you.”

Mrs. Trevithick stood. Her body seemed to undulate and shake. Kirsten rubbed her eyes.

“You just, well, die,” Mrs. Trevithick continued. “I mean, if you’ve had your face eaten off, that’s going to happen, ent it?”

Mrs’ Trevithick lifted her arms, and they became wings, clawed, dark and ragged. Her eyes widened and glowed red. Her tweed skirt and silk blouse shifted and became instead charcoal-coloured feathers.

“Legend do not say what the Owlman does with th’corpses he collects, but I see no reason not to tell ‘ee now. I eats ’em, bones and all. I reckon you’ll last about a week.”

Mrs. Trevithick’s face was gone, the transformation complete, the beak in the now-feathered owl face was cruelly curved, as were the claws that protruded from the creature’s feet.

Kirsten finally broke out of her horrified stupor and scrambled towards the door. The Owlman descended upon her, tearing and ripping at her flesh, and gripped her in its sharp claws. It smashed through lamenting window, and rose into the grey sky towards Mawnan Smith. Kirsten’s last sight was of her life pouring from her and tumbling like red rain to the distant earth.

A Cloud of Swallows

I took a deep breath, held it, and stepped through the window. It shlukked behind me, closing, and I breathed again. First thing you learn, that is: if you don’t want shredded lungs, hold your breath when you go through.

He didn’t recognise me, of course. I’m almost seventy, bald and fat, my massive beard as white as a dandelion clock. My scarecrow eyebrows sprout more hair than does the top of my head, and my eyes have gone, well, wonky. I walk slowly, with the help of an old, twisted length of hazel that I had cut long ago and fashioned into a thumbstick. If he had looked closely at the words and symbols I had carved into it over the years, his suspicions might have been aroused, but his eyes were fixed on the shadows that fluttered and whirled above the bright field.

He leaned on an old farm gate, looking out across sunsodden greengold wheat, margined brightly by hawthorn and willow-herb. Atop the far hill my familiar old windmill stood, young and unbroken, the sails turning leisurely in the summer heat.

“Owdo,” I said. “Grand day.”

“The birds seem to think so,” he nodded towards the swooping, tumbling host above the hot golden field. The dark arrows tumbled, dashing and zig-zagging, swivelling and diving, chasing invisible insects. Our sluggish eyes struggled to track them as they slalomed across the sky. They danced upon the air, innocent of the devastation that was about to be unleashed.

“Swallows,” I said.

“Yeah?” he said. “I’m never sure whether I’m looking at swallows or swifts.”

“Look close, lad. See how the lower third of their body looks bulky when they fold their long wings? That’s because the wing-tips extend to the end of their tails. Also, swifts don’t tuck in their wings at all when flying. And sithee, the tops of their wings look oddly large an’all, like …” I struggled to find a simile.

“Like epaulettes,” he said. We shared a grin.

“Aye.”

“You know a lot about birds, then?”

“Hellfire, no. But once upon a summerday long ago, a man older than death told me the way of swallows, and it’s always stuck in my head. I love to watch them enjoying their time in the sun, dancing in a strip of sunlight for a brief summer, while the winter darkness is at an ebb.”

“Like people,” he said.

“How do you mean?”

His eyes flicked, watching the swirl of swallows. “We’re born alone, pieces of rough driftwood on the shores of an endless dark ocean, and we’ll be carried away again soon enough by the swell. But in between the ebb tides of oblivion, in a single summer of life – of dancing in a strip of sunlight, if I might steal your words – we find relationships, love, and the companionship that makes us whole. Makes us human.”

“You’re a poet, then?”

“Forester,” he grinned again. A thunder-growl tumbled across the cloudless sky. Above the wheat, the swallows suddenly gathered, weaving themselves together into a dark seething cloud, and swept away across the valley.

“Ah, look, they’ve buggered off,” I said. “It’s time. Come on, poet, we’ve got to get inside.”

“Inside? Where? Why?” He laughed.

“There’s a cave just down the path here. And why? Because your dark tide of oblivion is about to flood this earth. Humanity’s dance in the sunlight is ending. Look to the sky.”

He raised his eyes, and saw, slashed across the blue like a thousand raw wounds, the blood-red streaks that heralded the downfall of humanity.

“What the hell is that?”

“I’ll tell you in the cave,” I said.

“No offence, you seem nice enough, but I’m not interested in your cave, as you call it.”

“Look, sunshine, here’s your choice: you can either die screaming in a fiery inferno, or you can shelter with me and instead live a long life of struggle against the alien invaders, and eventually, with the aid of their stolen technology, invent a time machine.”

“What?”

“Besides, you already have come into the cave. I’m proof of that.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You still haven’t recognised me, have you?”

He stared at me for a moment, frowning. Across the valley the first emerald explosion of plasma energy left the windmill a smoking ruin. Then the shock of recognition dropped his jaw and his eyes widened, reflecting more green flashes as the valley was destroyed.

“Hellfire!” he said. “Yeah, take me to your cave.”

Thanks to @alexbrightsmith for the title.

How Kevin Foiled the Alien Invasion of Earth

A short tale for Miranda Kate’s Midweeker, riffing off the picture below, after I noticed the creature at the top hiding his eyes.

---

“Kevin—”

“No!”

“Just look up at the lens.”

“NO!”

“Kevin, we all agreed.”

“You lot agreed, Susan, I didn’t.”

“If you’ll just look up at the lens, we can finally get out of here.”

“What, and have my eyeballs sucked out like yours? Fat chance.”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“It makes a nauseating sound, though, like somebody pulling a grape out of their nostrils. I don’t understand why they need my eyeballs, anyway. They have all of yours already, what difference would mine make?”

“The Voice Above said they needed forty pairs or they couldn’t take off.”

“Take off what? Our heads?”

“Their ship. They use human eyeballs to drive their starship.”

“Do they bollocks. Where are you getting all this?”

“I had a quiet word with The Voice Above. He told me. We had quite a nice chat, actually.”

“What? When was all this? We’d all have heard you.”

“You know when they lift us out of here sometimes and, like, probe us and stuff?”

“Oh yeah, I enjoyed that.”

“Well, it was then. I was all manacled down, having my orifices probed, and … we had a little natter.”

“What a lovely image. Nice. So when’s the wedding? ‘I, Susan, take thee, Voice Above…’”

“I’ll ignore your sarcasm about what was a very touching moment, actually. The point is, eyeballs make their space-engine work…”

“How you can say that with a straight face is beyond me.”

“… and once they’re off this planet they’ll set us all free and look after us properly.”

“And you believe that, do you?”

“After someone’s probed me I think I know whether I can trust them.”

“You’re so naive, Susan.”

“Oh shut up, Kevin. You’ve had your chance to be reasonable. Grab him, fellers! We’ll force him to look at the lens.”

“Ha ha! Sod off!”

“Shit, where’s he gone? Damn it, Kevin!”

“Can’t catch me!”

“He’s ducked down by your feet, the squirmy little bastard. Grab him, someone!”

“Oh dear, you missed again! If only you were able to look down, eh?”

“Damn, he’s like a kid in a ball pool. Kick him in the head or something!”

“OW! Ow, fucking AAAAARGH!”

“Wait, wait! Don’t kick his eyes, though!”

“Too fucking late, you bitch! Jesus, that hurts! I hope your boyfriend’s happy with thirty-nine pairs of eyes.”

“Oh, Kevin.”

“S’not fair.”