Please

by Peter Wild

  Uncle slacked off on the power and the wheels stopped and the cloud of dust and sand slowly blew away.

  —He ain’t budgin, said my dad.

  —I don’t believe it, shouted Uncle, leanin out the window. He’s gotta budge. That snare’ll tear him clean in two if he don’t.

  —Try 4WD, Dad said. If that don’t do it, we’ll call it quits and leave him be.

  —Oh no, I said, but Dad told me to hush and do what I was told.

  —You gotta be prepared not to get everything you want in life, he said, like that wasn’t a lesson I had to learn close on every day.

  Meanwhile Uncle stopped the engine, pulled the lever for 4WD, and started it up again. Then he really went for it. JNGG JNGG, went the engine as it started straining, and this time the wheels bit hard into the dirt and didn’t spin.

  I counted five seconds passing then another five, and I was just trying to wrap my head around how this was the craziest thing I’d ever seen, an aardvark facing down a Hi-Lux Twin Cam switched to 4WD, when, WAP! The truck scooted forward like a springbok what had caught its tail on fire, and something hard and brown and mean got spat out from the burrow, flew through the air, and landed mashing and squealing in the middle of the river bed.

  Quick as anything Dad fetched up the axe, ran down to it, and clunked the ole fella right on the cap of his head. Crick, crack, the bones went snap, and that was him done, very dead.

  Uncle switched off the engine and jumped out the cab and everything was suddenly all quiet and still.

  We all stood around, getting our first proper look at an aardvark big as this. Or any aardvark, if truth be told. It was a special moment, as we were the first three guys since Simon Old Old to see one up this close and the first guys ever to catch one.

  So this was him, the secret aardvark, the ole fella who sneaks about by night and steals eggs and flour and who no one ever sees. Overall he wasn’t half as big as I thought he’d be. Still, he was a tough one, though. My wire noose was wrapped around his neck alright, but despite me and Dad and the Toyota Twin-Cam haulin on him half the mornin it hadn’t even cut his hide, it was that damn powerful. His arms and legs were real thick, like a honey badger’s, and I reckon he’d got bigger claws than any leopard, which makes sense when you think about it, cuz no leopard ever had to dig out a termite mound, hard as old concrete. I reckon they could could tear you right open, if they got close enough, and they were all he had to hold on with down at the bottom of that ’ole. Must’ve been some sight, to see him clamped on in there for all he was worth. I reckon he must’ve been frightened near to all hell. Poor little critter.

  When we’d looked our fill Dad and Uncle picked him up and slung him in the back of the truck. Then we drove back to our shack where we skinned him and Mum cooked up some of his meat for our dinner, though not before we’d spent a good while roundin up the widow’s goats, which had somehow snuck out of their pound.

  The meat was pretty chewy and tasted pretty strong, so I can’t say it was the best stew I ever ate. After dinner Dad and me sliced up what was left and hung it up to dry and it made much better eatin that way. It took about a week and all that time I was king at school, on account of what had happened. Aloysius was pretty angry to begin with, said it was his aardvark and that I’d stole it from him because he’d seen it first. I asked him did he want to fight me for it and that stopped him complainin because he knew damn well he couldn’t take me on. But later when the meat was ready I took some strips round his house and gave em to him along with one of the aardvark’s paws. After that we were friends again, and we took the rest of the meat and gave it out at school, and we had no trouble with any one for ages after that, cuz not even the older kids had tasted aardvark before and there was no denyin it was strange and magic stuff.

  Girl Afraid

  Rhonda Carrier

  Being on the cusp of something. Wanting everything to change yet fearing the future and who one might be, or not be. The fear of doing something and simultaneously of not doing it. The fear of one’s appetites and dreams because one has a strong suspicion that reality won’t ever live up to them…These are the sentiments The Smiths aroused, or met, in me in my teens, and although this project has made me realise just how many utterly brilliant titles Moz and Co. came up with, and not just brilliant songs, it’s ‘Girl Afraid’ that seems to encapsulate them most fully for me. Above all, I suppose what I tried to evoke in this story was an overall Smithsian mood (fatalistic miserablism meets intense yearning), and that’s why I chose an adolescent girl fumbling with her nascent sexuality, her self-expression and, through those, her place in the world.

  Flying out of Manchester, picking at the chipped purple glitter of her nail polish, she tries not to think of anything. In her lap, the little machine whirrs. With a mechanical motion, barely glancing down, she opens it and flips over the tape. The song starts where it left off, minus about five seconds; she nods, allows herself a smile, of recognition but of something else too, something she can’t define. It’s as if the song is speaking directly to her, as if someone out there–she raises her eyes and probes the darkness outside the window–knows her. Cares. As if the answer is out there somewhere, in the velvet blackness, even if she’s not sure what her question might be.

  She knows each song by heart; she’s listened to nothing but this for the last six weeks. And the in-between bits too, where John Peel introduces the bands in his voice that reminds her of honey and tar mixed together. A random night on Radio One, as she’d twiddled with the dials while rain smudged the streets beyond her window into something formless, otherworldly. A random night, a random hour, the random decision to hit the Record button, and yet somehow it had become the soundtrack to her life. A dozen or so songs of which she never grew bored. Each one speaking to her, of her life. How could she stop listening?

  Prefab Sprout now: a voice, a bit like Morrissey’s, now she comes to think of it, singing about words being like trains, a way of getting past things that ‘have no name’. She wonders about that for a moment, about the name of the group, what it means, and about nameless things. Like the feeling she has, almost all the time now. The strange dread, a dread without object, a fear of something she can’t put her finger on. They tell her she’s good at English, have predicted an A at O-level, an A-level, perhaps even uni. But if she has this talent, how come she can’t put this feeling into words?

  Reclining on a lounger by the pool, she turns over the cassette. After one day in the sun, her legs have scorched; she’s hoping they’ll turn brown before the week is out, that she’ll have at least one thing to show for the holiday. Unfurling them in front of her, she throws her arms up over her head, closes her eyes, abandons herself to the beat of the sun on her body. She feels both sleepy and alert, as if something is waiting for her. She doesn’t know what, but it both excites and frightens her. She opens her eyes and glances about her, but there’s no one there. Mum, Dad and Damian are down on the beach, pinking like prawns. If she cranes her neck a little she can just about see them from the terrace where she lies. Damian, ten, is building a sandcastle with a girl of about the same age. They are laughing, flashing white teeth in the sun. She shields her eyes, feels a headache coming on. She doesn’t know why she can’t be with them, why there’s suddenly this funny sour taste in her mouth, this feeling of her chest filling, or her lungs seizing up, or something, whenever she watches them. They look so ordinary, just like everybody else, with their Woolworths towels and too-tight Speedoes and pale skin slathered with grease like turkeys basted for the oven. Ordinary–the word makes her shudder despite the noon heat. She turns up the volume on her Walkman, tries to drown it out, erase it from her head. She closes her eyes again.

  At the bar, Damian perched on a stool beside her, she lets her long legs dangle and glances about her as she slurps her iced Tango through a straw. Mum and Dad have sent them down ahead, told them not to stray from the bar, not to talk to strangers. She’s not sure about the waiter who kee
ps looking at her as he passes, with lowered eyelids and smoky blue-grey eyes. Does he count as a stranger? Is he one of the forbidden? Not that she could speak to him, if she tried: every time he glances in her direction, she feels dizzy, has to steady herself against the bar with her hand. The fear returns. Or did it ever really go away?

  Throat burning it’s so dry, she remembers how it was in Affleck’s Palace that time, as she browsed for clothes that would express–she didn’t know in what way–how she felt inside. Different. Marked. Cursed, perhaps. And suddenly she’d clocked him, riffling through the rails but eyes on her. She’d pretended not to know, and he’d finally stopped her at the door, asked her whether she wanted a coffee. She’d looked into eyes full of a kind of desperate hope and wanted to say ‘yes’, but ‘no’ came out instead. And she’d stood there with her bags–inside, a frayed beige suede jacket, a mohair tank top, ankle boots–and wondered when life would begin. She takes another sip of the garish orange liquid, shakes her head. The evening ahead unspools in her mind’s eye like a slow-motion film, long hours between her and the moment she can lie on her bed again, looking out into the night, watching the waves glint like little knives beneath the moon, listening to her tape, over and over.

  By the pool again, The Associates, Scritti Politti, The Psychedelic Furs in her ears, she’s trying to lose herself to the stark red light that floods her eyelids when she closes them, to let it flood her entirely, as if she has slipped into a bath of blood: warm, enfolding blood. But here’s that feeling again, of a presence, an imminence. She’s imagining things again. A shadow falls across her. She peels open her eyes and he’s there, a halo of sun around his head, a tray crowded with empty glasses held aloft on his hand. He’s gazing down at her, but with the sun behind him she can’t read his expression.

  He looks around them, but on this little terrace, partitioned off by a bank of foliage, they can’t be seen. Slowly, as if sleepwalking, he bends to place the tray on the table by her lounger and comes to squat beside her. He’s so close, she can smell the vestiges of cheap aftershave on his collar, overlaid by sweat, can see an area of his scalp where the hair is growing sparse. He must be as old as her dad, maybe even older. And yet between her legs she’s grown wet for him. Her desire shocks her.

  He gestures for her to take off her headphones, and she realises that for a moment the rush of blood in her ears has drowned out the music, the music that has become part of her this last month and more, the cadence of her body, the thud of her heart and the flow of her.

  He takes the headphones, adjusts them slightly and places them over his own ears, cocks his head on one side. A bemused smile ripples across his features; his eyes, fast on hers, are questioning. She doesn’t know what this question is either, can only guess.

  ‘The Cocteau Twins,’ she tells him, straining to hear the tinny music above the poolside noise. Not that she needs to hear; she knows the playing order by heart. He’s watching her lips now, observing her from beneath those hooded lids, but she knows that he doesn’t understand what she said, that it doesn’t matter what she said. That there was more than one question in his eyes. He looks up and around as if waking from sleep, and then he reaches out and runs his fine smooth fingers over her bare arm in the same movement as he rises up and away from her, already reaching back to the table for his tray, scanning the poolside again. Before she can say anything, he’s going, melting away like a beguiling dream that won’t let you keep hold, and her racing heart is drowning out the music from the headphones cast aside on the canvas of the lounger.

  And she wants to curl up right there and not get up again. But she’s not so lost that she didn’t clock, as he moved away from her, the name on the little brass badge on his chest.

  At the bar again, on her way back from the loo to the restaurant, she breathes in, swallows the anxiety that’s lodged in her throat like a fur ball, and thrusts the square of folded paper towards the man polishing the glasses.

  ‘For Javier,’ she says, not even sure whether she’s saying it the right way, feeling as if her legs are going to give way beneath her, unable to look him in the face as she speaks. Then she turns and, without daring to look around to see whether he’s even on duty tonight, walks back to the restaurant, keeping her pace steady, fighting the urge to break into a run.

  At the table, Dad is signing the room tab as Mum stubs out her cigarette and stands up, dressed to the nines for dinner in this terrible restaurant with its tepid all-you-can-eat buffet and lousy pianist. Her mother: standing there with that blue eyeshadow, hair so set she might as well still have her rollers in. She stares, wondering how ordinariness can suddenly look so strange, how what is most familiar can become, in a heartbeat, so alien. She feels a sudden stab of pity for Damian; she, at least, will be able to leave in a year’s time. Jangly guitars start up in her head. A year: she can bear that, surely? She turns and heads for the lift.

  Damian slips quickly into sleep, exhausted by the pool and the beach. She’s never felt so awake in her life. Opening the balcony door, she steps out into the darkness, looks out over the sea, blue and calm by day but threatening by night, oily-looking and fathomless. She makes to put on her headphones but then remembers. Sitting down, she watches a couple walking on the sand below her. For a moment they stand looking out at the swell, hand in hand. Then they head to the end of the beach, clamber over some rocks and disappear.

  She glances towards the door, checks her watch. The bar stays open until late, and there’s no telling when he might finish. She’s amazed she even had the guts to do it, and she has no idea what she will say or do if he does show up. But something inside her has broken, some kind of bind or restraint. She’s still frightened as hell, but she’ll be more frightened if she just lets life carry her along like a leaf on the water.

  Though her watch tells her it’s past two, she’s still not sleepy. She steps inside, takes a blanket from her bed, looking at Damian’s face in slumber, so untainted, so unmarked by life. She tries to remember when it started, chewing at her guts every morning when she awoke, like a rodent. Bubbling up inside her. But she can’t. Or had it always been there, part of her, part of being alive? She heads back out onto the balcony, sits down again.

  He’s not coming. She knows that now. She doesn’t know why–perhaps he wasn’t working tonight, or perhaps he had other plans he couldn’t get out of. Perhaps–who knows?–he has a family to go home to. Or perhaps he, too, was afraid. She’ll never know. For a moment she lets the fear wash over her, submits to it: the fear of failure, of being unloved, of never amounting to anything. But then she thinks she’s not sure that it really matters anyway, that he didn’t come. He wanted her, she saw that in his eyes, felt it in the way his fingers twitched as they met her arm, as if electricity had passed between them.

  On the table before her lies her notebook, open, the cheap, chewed Biro finally still beside it. Words have filled the ruled lines across the pages, exploded out of them, running down the margins, filling all available space like an army of insects marching across the white space. She doesn’t really know where they came from, the words, only that they erupted from her as she stared out over the waves, over the beach with its idling couples, with its teenagers swigging from beer bottles on the boardwalk. Had almost vomited out of her as she sat looking at the string of nightclubs with their glittering strings of lights and flickering neon, luring people in like flies to overripe fruit. The yearning inside her she’d felt at the poolside, the yearning to be part of all this, to be part of something: that was what had fuelled her as she wrote, letting the words stream out of her like an exorcism, not caring what they meant, not trying to shape or force them, knowing only that they provided relief. The kind of relief that only the razor blade had afforded her, on those days when it seemed that the rain outside her window would never stop, that the grey streets of Withington must finally yield, must be worn away.

  Flying into Manchester, her notebook spread in front of her, the sublime, flo
ating guitars untangling her as they always do, she looks out at the lights, at the rain washing away the city’s grime, purging it of its sins. Her eyes move back to the pages, her fingers reach again for her pen. She’s found her means of escape.

  Back to the Old House

  Graham Rae

  The following sad tale is actually a quartet of true stories from four real people rolled into one; no names, no pack drill. The relationship between the short story and the song title it is named after needs no explanation.

  Aye yer right pal, getting dumped eftir goin oot wi a lassie fir five years is a fuckin sair yin right enough. Gettin the bullet oor the phone, tae; fuck that fir a game ay sodjers. Jist get anither beer ben ye n try n firget aboot it the night. Ah ken whit it’s like tae get dumped by a lassie yer right intae myself. Iviry man dis. Kin tear the fuckin guts right ootay ye n nae mistake.

  Emotion’s a funny thing awthegither. The way ah look it it, it’s kinnay like drugs, or onythin else thit ye kin lose it on–some kin take it, some cannae. Some fowk jist cannae handle thir fuckin emotions it aw n they end up gettin bent oot ay shape fir the rest ay thir days oor yin specific person when whit they should be daein is getting up n dustin themselves off n jist movin right along.

  Tell ye a classic fuckin example ay whit ah’m talking aboot, n yin thit’ll pit yer ain problems intae perspective. Happened a few year ago, jist eftir ah left the skill. Ah got a YTS–Youth Training Scheme, mind ay them, the late eighties, Christ, ah’m showin ma age–doon whit used tae be the Magnet N Southerns warehouse years ago doon Etna Road alongside this laddie ah used tae be it the skill wi, same form class n ivirythin. Ah wis workin in the actual mill itsel, whereas he startit off in the office n eventually got shoved oot beside whaur ah wis.