by Heide Goody
“You’re not normal, you know that?” Archie said on his return.
“I work in this place, don’t I?” said Stenton.
*
When Stenton returned that evening, there were more than two dozen gnomes in his flat. They were at his door to greet him. They clustered on the settee and round the coffee table. There was one by the kitchen sink, fishing among the unwashed crockery. There were two in the bedroom, at opposite ends of Stenton’s guitar as though trying to work it as a team. The three in the bath tub looking especially cheeky.
“Christ’s sake,” Stenton growled. He stomped up to the second floor and hammered on Hansa’s door. “Open up!”
“You can’t come in without a warrant, pig!” the young German shouted back.
“I’m not the police.”
There was the sound of movement and then a voice just on the other side of the door. “How can you be sure?” whispered Hansa.
“It’s Stenton, Are you high?”
The door opened. Hansa, long dark hair framing her narrow face, toked on a roll-up and looked him up and down. She wore a paper dress. Her tiny feet were bare. “What is it, Stenton Jones?” she said.
“Why did you do it?” he asked. “Did you think it was funny?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t have any money for drink so I sold them to a man in Kentish Town.”
“—What?” said Stenton.
“What—?” said Hansa.
“I’m talking about the gnomes. What are you talking about?”
“My shoes.” Hansa wiggled her toes. “What gnomes?”
“The gnomes in my flat, Hansa. Did you fill my flat with gnomes?”
“What gnomes?”
Stenton sighed, took her hand and led her downstairs. She looked at the gnomes dotting Stenton’s front room, nodding thoughtfully.
“Jeanie leave any shoes behind?” she asked.
“What?”
“I have wheelbarrow. Fix this in no time. For shoes.”
“Shoes?”
“Yes. Shoes. I am not Sandie fucking Shaw, Stenton Jones.”
*
As darkness fell, Stenton found himself walking towards the river with a barrowful of gnomes and a German girl in new sandals.
“Gnomes,” asked Hansa.
“Yes?”
“They are helpful spirits?”
Stenton shrugged. “They’re just things you put in your garden.”
Hansa nodded. “In Cologne, we have Heinzelmännchen.”
“Heinz what?”
“House spirits. The story says they did everyone’s job for them until one woman put peas on the floor to make them fall over. Then they did not come again.”
Stenton looked at her shrewdly. “Are you saying I should sprinkle peas on my floor?”
“I am saying that maybe gnomes have come to help you.”
“I don’t need help,” said Stenton.
“Sure,” said Hansa and then, “Will Jeanie want her shoes back?”
“I don’t know.”
“You will tell her they are mine now.”
“She’s not coming back for them.”
“But you will tell her.”
They stopped on Vauxhall Bridge.
“What now?” said Stenton.
“Get rid of gnomes,” said Hansa. She picked one up and lobbed it into the Thames.
It hit the brown water, sank for a moment and then bobbed to the surface. It was joined by a second, a third. Stenton looked round to see if they were drawing attention. A face looked down at them from the top floor of the Lambeth bus, but London was generally indifferent. He grabbed two gnomes at once and chucked them in.
Soon the wheelbarrow was empty. Stenton looked down. “They’re floating!” he said.
Twenty or more gnomes bobbed around in the Thames, looking for all the world like they were out for an evening swim.
“They have air inside,” said Hansa. “It looks funny.”
“Funny? It’s not going to be funny when some short-sighted div calls the coppers and tells them there’s a load of schoolkids drowning in the Thames.”
“I wish I had a camera,” said Hansa. “It’s very much the, um, konzeptkunst.” She shrugged, said “I don’t have a camera,” and pulled a compact pistol from inside her jacket.
“Jesus Christ!” Stenton took a step back.
“Was my father’s Mauser,” said Hansa happily.
She took unsteady aim, closed one eye and fired at the gnomes. The bang was loud, far too loud. Stenton didn’t see where the shot went but it clearly missed. Hansa fired again. A Hackney cab swerved. Someone yelled.
“My father once used it to shoot a crazy dog,” said Hansa.
“You’re the bloody crazy one!” gasped Stenton.
As Hansa fired, again and again, Stenton heard something. He couldn’t tell whether it was a police whistle, sirens, or an alarm, but it was bad news either way. He legged it. As he reached the end of the bridge, a police car came along the south bank. Stenton forced himself to slow.
He was heading for home automatically, but if the police picked up Hansa and then came back to the house— No – he didn’t want to go home yet. He ducked into the Scala Picture House on Brixton Hill, bought a ticket, a packet of peanuts, and hid in the cinema.
On the silver screen, cavemen fled from a giant iguana. Stenton hunkered down and waited for Raquel Welch to come on.
He had taken Jeanie to see this film when it first came out. Stenton had promised her it wasn’t a horror film but she had still squirmed into his shoulder when the Ray Harryhausen dinosaurs came on.
“It’s just modelling clay,” he told her.
“It’s freaky,” she replied.
“Freaky?”
“The freakiest.”
Sitting alone, Stenton considered that moment to be one of his happiest. The pair of them: still and quiet in the darkness. Unmoving; together.
*
Stenton crept home, studying the house from afar before slipping up to the door and letting himself in. He expected the slap of a hand on his shoulder at any moment and a “You’re nicked, sonny-boy.” It never came.
He didn’t expect to find Hansa asleep in his bed. Her paper dress, torn, lay on the floor. Stenton looked at her for a time and then went to sleep on the settee.
*
He was woken by a cry of “Scheißefrettchen!” He immediately joined in with a “Bloody hellfire!” of his own.
The flat was full of gnomes.
They covered the floor, the coffee table and the drop-leaf dining table. They marched in lines to the kitchen, stood to attention on the counters and the gas rings. They lurked in the bathroom, teetered precariously on the toilet cistern and peered over the rim of the bath. They clustered in the hallway, the bedroom and utterly surrounded the West German girl wrapped in a bedsheet.
“Is not shitting funny,” Hansa said.
“I didn’t do it.”
She gave him a filthy look, hard and steely. He remembered that she had a pistol. “We must destroy them,” she said.
Stenton thought about it. “Okay,” he said.
“We need explosives.”
He thought about that. “Would fireworks do?”
“Yes. Do you have eggs?”
“—Eggs?”
Hansa got out of bed, kicking over gnomes as she went to the dressing table to look for fags. “You get fireworks. I will cook breakfast.”
*
Stenton returned with a Post Office sack full of fireworks that had been found on platform 3. In a gnome-free kitchen, Hansa had fried an eggy hash of a breakfast.
“Where are they?” he asked.
Hansa jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the back door. Stenton looked out in the back yard. Amused gnome faces peeked over the lip of the bin.
Hansa slid a blob of eggs onto a plate. “Eat your eggs, Stenton Jones,” she said and took the sack from him.
While Stenton ate the interesting mess (the
eggs had a seasoning which he didn’t recognise and was pretty sure didn’t come from his kitchen), Hansa sifted through the sack, a roll-up clenched between her lips.
“Good,” she said, taking out a parcel of fuse wire and brown paper.
Stenton followed out to the dustbin. She lit the fuse with her joint, blowing on it to get it going. With the fuse sparking she pushed the bundle into the dustbin, slammed on the lid and put all her weight on it.
Stenton looked at her for three seconds, said a silent farewell, and slammed the back door. The explosion, with a sound like a lorry load of rocks falling from a rooftop, shook every window in the house. Stenton opened the door. Hansa still sat astride the bin with a wild and exhilarated air about her.
“That was very thrilling,” she said. “I am pleased to do it again.”
Stenton felt giddy and wondered momentarily about Hansa’s egg seasoning. Together, they emptied out the bin, now filled with grey, chalky powder and refilled it with gnomes.
“Banger was good,” said Hansa. “What now?”
“Catherine Wheel,” said Stenton.
“Catherine Wheel?”
Stenton took it out to show her. Hansa nodded approvingly.
This time, Stenton didn’t shut the door. Hansa laughed as the firework rattled inside the bin like a jazz drummer let loose on a steel drum . She rode it like a bucking bronco.
“Next!” she giggled.
As they ran out of fireworks they devised other ways to destroy gnomes. They laid them out on the kitchen floor and stood on them like American logrollers. Stenton wobbled across the room; Hansa windmilled crazily back and forth, clinging on to her balance. Stenton laughed and fetched an armchair so they could take it in turns hauling each other across a floor full of rolling gnomes.
“Do you believe in Heinzelmännchen now, Stenton Jones?” giggled Hansa. “Gnomes have come to help you, for sure.”
It was Stenton’s idea to tie a gnome to a rocket. The first attempt was a loud and colourful failure: the rocket failed to lift the gnome’s weight, fell over and fizzed in the yard. Stenton and Hansa fled for cover before the final explosion. Undaunted and a little high, Stenton argued that all the gnome required was some additional lift. They taped half a dozen rockets around one and positioned him upright on the now lightly scorched lawn.
“This’ll work,” said Stenton.
“Will go into fucking orbit,” said Hansa.
“To boldly go where Gnome man has gone before,” said Stenton.
Hansa lit the fuses.
Stenton saluted the astro-gnome and stood back. Four rockets ignited at roughly the same time. It wobbled heavily, five feet off the ground, threatening to pitch over. Then the last two rockets caught and it rose straight up, accelerating.
“Godspeed,” said Stenton. It exploded in a series of sharp concussions.
“I’m gasping for a cup of tea,” he said, watching Hansa detonate, pound and generally incinerate the last of the gnomes.
*
Stenton didn’t get his tea until the sergeant with an unfeasibly large moustache offered him one later that evening. Stenton clutched it like a lifeline but did not drink.
“Right, lad,” said the sergeant. “You and your accomplice, who’s a faster runner than you and who you describe as ‘a girl who you met at a party who possibly lives in Vauxhall but you’re not sure and, no, you don’t know her name’, were approached by two constables while you were in the act of dumping a roll of carpet at a building site on—”
He looked at his notepad.
“Electric Avenue,” Stenton offered helpfully.
“Indeed,” said the sergeant.
Stenton nodded. “Are we in trouble?” he asked.
The sergeant made an amused noise and slurped his own tea. Little brown dewdrops clung to the bristles of his moustache. “There have been concerns raised by your neighbours, Mr Jones,” he said.
“Have there?” said Stenton.
“Regarding a Miss Jean Thomas.”
“Jeanie?”
“Jeanie,” said the sergeant. He raised his hand like an orchestral conductor for Stenton to elaborate.
“She, um, was my girlfriend,” said Stenton.
“Was?”
Stenton blinked and a horrible picture rose in his mind. “That roll of carpet,” he said. “It only contained some smashed up gnomes.”
“Gnomes?” said the sergeant. He frowned, looked at his notepad, frowned again and stepped out of the room. He returned shortly afterward carrying a soot-stained gnome’s head.
“Gnomes,” said the sergeant pointedly placing it on the table between them. Stenton saw a triangle of tape still clinging to the head. He swallowed uncomfortably.
He opened his mouth to say, “I can explain” and shut it again when he realised he couldn’t.
“Jean. Jeanie,” said the sergeant. “She was your girlfriend. But not anymore?”
“She’s gone to Eastbourne,” said Stenton.
“Has she, lad? When was this?”
“A month ago or thereabouts,” said Stenton.
“Thereabouts?”
“A month ago,” said Stenton.
“She’s not from Eastbourne, is she?”
“No,” said Stenton.
“Do you know where she might be staying? People we can contact?”
Stenton looked at the sergeant. “Do … do you think I did something to her?”
The sergeant shook his head but said, “There have been concerns raised.”
Stenton stared at his cooling tea. “We were going to go there. Eastbourne. For a holiday.”
“Yes?” said the sergeant.
“There’s a little guesthouse her parents once stayed in. Clear View. We talked about it. I sent a postcard to her care of Clear View, Eastbourne but I got no reply.”
The sergeant left the room again. There was the sound of a key in a lock.
There was no clock, no sounds, to mark the passing of time. Stenton scowled at the severed gnome head. “What are you laughing at?”
The gnome said nothing.
“This is all your fault. I was—” He was going to say ‘happy’ but that was far from right. “I was happy. Once upon a time. Her and me. On the sofa, watching TV. Curled up in bed, listening to the radio.”
*
They had been lying in bed together. It was the fourteenth of August, the last day of Big L, London Radio, the day the government killed pirate radio. They listened to the sign off broadcast, the last record – the Beatles – and then the final, curt farewell from the Big L newsreader.
As the station jingle played out to silence and whispering static, Jeanie loosened her hold on Stenton. “Is that it?” she said.
Stenton rolled onto his back and listened to the white noise, imagining it was the sea and that their bed was a boat, like Big L’s MV Galaxy, adrift in an empty ocean.
Jeanie sat up, hugged her knees and looked at the window, even though the curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun. “Did our world just get smaller?” she said.
It was one of the last things she had said to him.
*
The sergeant returned to find Stenton holding the gnome’s head in both hands. “This trouble’s of your own making, lad,” he said.
“What?” said Stenton. “I told you. She went to Eastbourne. The carpet was—” He put the gnome’s head on the table.
The sergeant picked it up, eyes narrowed. “Gnomes. Always hated the little bleeders myself,” he said.
Stenton raised an eyebrow.
“Grandfather had a garden,” continued the sergeant. “It was his world. Spent his whole life looking after it. Grass like a billiard table, roses in a circular bed, even had a peach tree with fruit on it.”
“Sounds nice,” said Stenton, wary of what might be coming next.
“Children never allowed on it,” said the sergeant, his moustache twitching. “You don’t keep grass that nice if you let kids play on it. Only gnomes all
owed in his world. Loads of them, standing and fishing and what-have-you, wherever they bloody liked. Smiling. Always smiling, because they were free. I can see why someone with a few problems might turn on the gnomes. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Stenton swallowed heavily.
The sergeant tore the top sheet from his notepad and put it on the table. It was an address. “Cliff View,” he said. “Not Clear View.”
*
There was a gnome on the settee when Stenton got home, just the one. “Ah, it’s you, is it?” he said.
The gnome’s laugh was silent.
“Are you coming with me, or staying?” Stenton asked.
He decided that the gnome wanted to come with him. He left with a suitcase in one hand and a gnome in the other.
“Are you coming back, Stenton Jones?” called Hansa from above. The sash window was right up, and she was leaning on the sill, wearing a huge, floppy sun hat.
“I don’t know,” said Stenton.
“Okay,” she said, watching him go.
At Victoria, he dropped in on the lost property office counter.
“You’re not due in today,” said Archie.
“Just letting you know I’m not going to be in tomorrow.”
Archie looked him up and down. “You planning on being ill?”
“I’m doing what you told me to do.”
“Eh?”
“I’m moving on,” said Stenton.
“That your new girlfriend?” Archie nodded at the gnome.
“He’s just coming with me.”
Archie gave him a look. “Eastbourne?”
Stenton held up his ticket. “It’s not the ends of the earth, is it?”
WODEN ON THE ROAD
Woden, Freya and Tiw were playing scrabble. As usual, Tiw was cheating by slipping runes into the bag. Woden scowled, then cocked his head at a throaty roar from outside.
“That sounds like—”
“—Loki!” Tiw yelled.
Outside Loki was at the wheel of his vintage Ferrari. He tipped back his shades and gave them all a dazzling smile. “What’s new. cousins?”
