by James Newman
I did.
There were small china plates and brass figurines of Christ on the cross. Tiny paintings of hummingbirds in gold-leaf picture frames. There was a small stove where a kettle boiled. The smell of stale pastries and unwashed clothes. She asked me if I wanted tea. I nodded. She then brought out a tin filled with biscuits and offered me some whilst she made the tea. “Made them myself,” she told me while fussing with the tea and then repeated “Made ‘em myself.” I wondered if her comment warranted a reply.
The biscuits were sweet and crisp and when the tea was ready I dunked a few of them in it and looked up into the old lady’s brown piercing eyes, the eyes of a hawk, or a falcon – seeing eyes. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Jimmy,” I told her.
“And where is your mother?”
“Don’t know.”
“Father?”
“Noah.”
“I see. Has he been good to you, son. Has he fed youse. Taught youse?”
“’pose so.”
“And how about the other children?”
“They’re okay,” I said.
“Good. Now I want you to do something for me, Jimmy. Something very important.” She opened a box and took out a large pink crystal roughly cut away from rock. The crystal was clean and bright. The sunlight through the window reflected rays of light from its surface. “Just hold this for a moment and when you do think about the earliest memory that you have.”
I did.
“Do you see water?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And what else?”
“Ducks and geese. The canal.”
“As I thought,” she said and took the large crystal from me. “He won’t hurt you anymore. You will travel far from here. You belong someplace else, Jimmy, someplace far away.”
“Another camp?”
“Another world,” she said and fell back onto the chair. “Enough. When I see things I get tired. I have seen and I have told. Watch out for the man on the hill, Jimmy. Watch out for the Black Rose.”
“What is the Black Rose?”
“Not what but who?”
“Is she dangerous?”
“Like a snake, son, but, she looks like a flower. The same sun that brings out the lilies brings out the snakes. This is all. How did you know it is a woman?”
I didn’t.
Rose sounded like a girl’s name and wondered If the old woman was crazy. Thought about asking and then thought against it.
She sat back in the chair breathing heavily. I thought she was about to have some kind of seizure, so I left her there.
Never saw her or her caravan again.
Perhaps I had dreamt it.
SNAKEDRIVER
now
JOE DYLAN looked at the bottle behind the bar.
The rum was orange in color and as sweet as a child’s smile. He had had many bottles of Tiger Sweat like it since he transplanted his Harris to the tropics.
This bottle was a bit different, however.
Inside the bottle was a game-changer.
Coiled up inside the bottle was a green pit viper.
“Okay, let’s get this over with,” Dylan looked at the American tourist in the Hawaiian-style beach bar. “First one to walk away or fall from the bar stool calls themselves the loser. That is to say, he loses. The winner, being the man standing after we cut this snake up takes home a thousand US dollars.”
“Hey man, are sure you want to go through with this?” The tourist from Illinois said. He had bushy eyebrows and some kind of nervous tick. The locals had all the money on him. What did Fun City know? They clapped and cheered as the barmaid opened the bottle.
The crowd fell silent as the drinking began.
Joe took the first five shots in a row with the American matching him glass for glass. He ordered a beer partly to wash away the taste and partly to intimidate his opponent.
This was no time to worry about mixing drinks.
The American matched him with the beer and took the lead with the snake juice. They both began to sway as they finished the bottle.
“Looks like we have a draw,” the American said.
“What you gib-gabbering about? Joe slurred. “We haven’t even started. Open the goddam bottle.”
“But, you can’t be serious. The bottle’s finished.”
“Do I look like a humorous man? OPEN IT!”
The crowd quieted as the bare-chested local took a machete from beneath the bar and placed a beer mat over the bottle that was now empty apart from the reptiles. He drew the weapon up and after holding it above his head for a second brought it down with force in an attempt to liberate the alcoholic snake from its boozy aquarium.
Glass shattered and covered the bar. A roar of celebration from the crowd before they began to chant in pulsing rhythm:– “Ngoo, Ngoo, Ngoo!”
For a moment Joe swore he could see the reptile move, slithering across the glass and the cigarette ash. Grabbing firmly ahold of what was left of his senses he reasoned the local rum, was well known to have hallucinogenic properties. The booze was playing with him. He remembered once upon a time lost in the jungle when everything came alive and the plants were talking to him.
Then there was the time with heroin and the dead hookers in a small hotel room. Having a catalog of diasters as reference points helped steady him through the current upheaval.
“Now,” Dylan said, turning to the American, “we have ourselves a match.” Clearing away the glass the bronzed bare-chested local began chopping the snake into bite-sized portions. Again felt sure he could see the chunks of pit viper moving off its own energy, some kind of coiled nerve reflex perhaps? He looked at the American and figured he could see it too. The poor bastard wasn’t expecting this. A couple of weeks by the seaside, perhaps some holiday romance and here he was drunk as a skunk with a pickled snake between him and a thousand bucks.
“Man, I love the tropics.” Dylan said picking up a portion. Popped it into his mouth, chewed and then swallowed and watched the American. “How about you?” The American picked up a piece and following a few moments of tentative chews he began to turn. He closed his eyes. Reached for a glass of water that wasn’t there. Veins in his forehead throbbed as he tried to control the riot in his stomach.
But it was too late.
Joe quickly stood and side-stepped to avoid the jet that sprayed from the American’s mouth.
“Time to pay the fiddler,” Joe said as the American cleaned up. He handed Dylan the money from a fanny-pack and stumbled away into the Fun City evening. Joe kept drinking until it was him, the bar-keeper and the night insects with their steady humming sounds. A tropical storm was blowing over, rain started slowly at first and then the wind picked up and it hammered down. The bar-keeper closed the bar leaving Joe Dylan drinking a bottle in the rain.
Dylan splashed his face with dirty water and stumbled back to his mattress. The deal had been done. Ninety days sobriety was a life time for a queen wasp and the incubation period for a cockroach. What better way to end a period of sobriety than with a drinking contest?
This time he would quit the booze.
With a little help.
His connection had come up with the goods.
Brought it to his room without comment.
Opened the bag and heated the powder on the spoon with a zippo cigarette lighter. Drew up the solution through a syringe and hit it in the main line. Warmth rushed through his back and the calmness returned like a long lost friend. Then he was out cold with visions:
A rose garden and a strange child – As he came close to her she disappeared, as he stepped back she reappeared. She was a girl of seven or eight years old. In her hand she held a gift, arm stretched out, palm open. The shape and texture of a diamond yet amber in color. Some kind of precious stone. It had value he was certain. Whether the value was monetary he could not be sure. Value it had. Her lips moved but he couldn’t hear the words. A sudden sense of danger, the presence of a dead siblin
g in the corner of a child’s bedroom. Words familiar yet distant.
He turned and saw a monster.
It may of once been a man, the transformation into a monster had occurred, he sensed, through a life where unspeakable cruelties had been dealt to him like cards at a gambling table. One disaster after another yet the final hand had brought him wealth, a rose garden and a little girl who disappeared whenever she was approached. And then there was the red brick house and girl with freckles, she had grown into a woman and the more she spoke the more beautiful she became, her face changed as she spoke, the chin became smaller, more feminine, those lips became fuller, she became bolder and threw back her head and laughed, that hair, that fair hair, fell across her shoulder blades. There were others in the room now, three men and a woman, the men played guitars and the women sang words he could not understand. A blood stain on the floral carpet. A carpet like the ones found in old British public houses, blood stains and a fire-place, coals crackled the last breath of death. They wore loose fitting clothes and Joe could smell that they had travelled. And the more she spoke the more beautiful she grew and the bolder he became she did too until she took him in her arms and she spoke in educated convent school tones, a child brought up with wealth yet understanding of the poverty that brought it... “Let’s get out of here,” She told him. He followed, a patch of woodland, a clearing, a tree-house, sunlight shone through the autumn maple leaves spread like buzzard feather sprinkling golden light on a dusty trail.”
Dylan awoke again. Still morning. The most tragic feeling of loss. The loss of happiness, innocence, the loss of youth and pleasure. He had to have another shot to come even close to that feeling. He fell back onto the bed and tried to conjure up the dream again, but it was useless. He looked at his room, the four blank walls, the open window with the sound of motorbikes and fruit peddlers in the street. The tropics, sun scorched cities wore down a man’s concept of reality and reason slowly and surely like the waves on the beach turn the rocks into soft rounded pebbles. The telephone hadn’t rang in weeks, cases came and went but had never been this unsteady. The money from the last case was dwindling down as was his supply of junk. The fridge was empty spare a bag of sliced mango that he had bought from a toothless street trader several nights before. He listened to the beating of his heart and the faint sounds of the bars opening up, distant laughter, the clinking of bottles, the ceiling fan rattling upon every revolution above him. His line of vision watched a cockroach scurry from one end of the room to the other, he watched as its wings opened and it flew with intent towards him.
It landed inches from his shoulder.
He swore, stood, and brushed the creature away from the bed, It rose in flight again. Out of the window, down to the streets below.
He felt that he should follow it.
Decisions were difficult while under the disguise, the mask and serenity of junk.
He felt he could beat it.
But he couldn’t.
The bug had gotten the better of him.
Hit the street, find a case, the insect whispered with its wings.
The cockroach had it all figured out.
BRICK IN THE WALL
then
THE KIDS at the site were fierce and mean and taught me how to use my fists. Noah only fought me when he was drunk, which was most of the time. He would hit me and sometimes I would hit back but he had the strength of a man. A bitter and broken man, yet a man all the same. The women were big, strong, angry women who took shit from nobody. If you had a problem, you didn’t talk to them about it. They had enough of their own problems to talk about.
Hard women led hard lives.
Men even harder.
One day a woman in a trouser suit came to the site and spoke to the gypsies. She was a Grego, an outsider. Hard woman gathered around and spoke in Romany to intimidate her. Like most societies there was a hierarchal system at the camp. This woman, from outside the camp, had hair tied back and held a handkerchief to her nose. It was clean. The hair, that was. The camp. It wasn’t. When she took the handkerchief away from her nose I noticed a large wart on her nose. Was she covering the smell or the wart or perhaps both? It doesn’t really matter now what she was covering. She finished speaking with the elders and then they called the children over to join in the conversation. Noah was the first to speak: “This here is a social worker. Says that all the chavs ought to be going to school, that it’s the law.”
“What’s school?” I asked.
“A bad place, son, not for the likes of us.”
“How can you say that?” the ponytailed woman said.
“Truth be told. We can teach the boy all he need knows.”
“Yeah like ‘ow to make hedgehog pie, motherdie,” one of the kids called Ed laughed.
“Or ‘ow ya make a tonne offfa scrappy,” another chipped in.
“How old are you?” the woman asked me.
“Seven,” I lied. I had no idea of my age. The other kids about my size and height were seven so it seemed believable.
“Do you want to go to school?”
“’O di I know if I aint been there like...”
“They have fields, and sports, and books, and other children to play with. Plus it is the law.” She looked at Noah.
Noah grunted. Opened a can of special brew and took a long hard drink and nodded his battered bearded face.
Looked like I was going to school.
They put me in a special class with the backward children, those from broken homes, with alcoholic fathers, abusive mothers, twisted sisters, travelers, the broken children whom the school chose to manage in one place – The Special Class. There I was me and the other special kids. I spoke to no one and if anyone teased me about the way I smelled and the way I dressed I’d simply deck them. Two hits. Jaw. Floor. It was too easy to be a bully.
Impossible to be liked.
Growing up on a site you learned how to fight.
It seemed important – how to fight.
It was, still is.
Some get by with their education and their good parenting, others like us, had to fight, fight, fight, and these were the ones that made it. The fighters. The ones that put their life on the line to just simply be accepted into a life of game show hosts, canned laughter and TV dinners. The nuclear family, ready to explode.
Life depended on it.
Fighting, that was.
At the camp we didn’t sit round a fire and tell winter tales. We fought. We fought over the most trivial of things while all the time aware of an unspoken bond between us. A bond continually under threat, real or imagined, from the outside world. They were as dangerous to us as we were to them.
The school had a large playing field and a hedge that grew along the fence. At play-time I’d sit in that hedge and watch the other kids, happy faces, kiss chase, bulldog, all the games that kids played.
I never played.
I hated them with their big houses, cars, bathrooms, cosmetics, clean clothes, toys, hair-cuts, visits to the dentists, their bikes, their computer games, their bedrooms with posters on the wall and their cassette collections. I hated them for the easiness in which one day led to another. I even hated their mothers too. I asked Noah what had happened to mine. “She’s swimming with the swans now, son,” he replied.
It kind of made sense.
I hated those kids, but, also, I wanted part of it.
I wanted to have at least a chance.
I’d look into that normal class and hope to get there one day.
Miss Jones, a kindly Welsh teacher with red hair and horse teeth, told me: “Jimmy, if you could only learn to read and write.”
Know what I did?
I took her advice.
Read every book in the school library.
Fiction and non.
Every single volume.
Started out on ladybird books. Peter and Jane. Worked my way up to Enid Blyton – Secret Seven. Famous Five. The Hardy Boys were less of a thrill. Re
ad books on geography and books on science. History, ancient and modern. Found some medical magazines dumped on the site. Read them. I read and then I began to write. I wrote stories, songs, poems on a notebook and pen that I stole from a corner-shop.
After a year I showed Miss Jones a story I’d written much in the style of an Enid trip with all the ginger ale and the dog that thumps its tail.
It was thirty-five pages long.
She read it and then a dry smile danced across her lips. “That’s very nice, Jimmy. But you know that is wrong to try and cheat a teacher. Who really wrote this?”
“The library, Miss. I...”
“Ah, you copied it from one of the books. Well we call that plagiarism. Do you know what plagiarism is?”
I did.
One of those books in the library happened to be called the dictionary.
Gave her the definition: “An instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without permission.”
“What’s an author?” she asked.
“An artist who uses words.”
“Well, you have been busy,” she looked at the clock. “Let’s play a game,” she said. I’ll give you a topic to write about. One page and I’ll sit here while you write it.
“Sound,” I said.
“Tell me about your favorite place.”
I sat down and wrote.
“What’s it called?”
“What?”
“All stories should have a name.”
“Barri Rukh.”
“What does it mean?”
“In our language it means Big Tree.”
It went something like this:
There’s a place in the woods. A clearing where the birds sing in the trees; foxes and badgers use for trails. A stream with a bridge made of stones. A tree-house where I sometimes sat. Once, I saw a kingfisher. I stopped and watched the flash of neon blue dive into the water and return with a tiny silver fish in her bill. I knew that to make one step forward would mean that the bird would fly away forever, and forever is a long time. I waited until she flew by herself. Life seemed better that way. When time is ready she shall fly. That is what time is. And that is what time will always be – something that ends without movement.
