One for Sorrow, Two for Joy

They live near the hospital, the two of them.  They will continue to live there, together, until the day that one of them doesn’t return.  When she’s not hungry, she prefers to stay with her things.  She likes to see them glitter in the sunshine, to know that they are hers.  But he likes to get out and about, he’s the social one.  He pops up here and there, he likes to watch people go by, and he rattles out a harsh laugh at their foolish antics.  He doesn’t mind that she doesn’t come out with him much.  Because, for some reason, those people are even more entertaining when he’s on his own.  When she’s there, they might look and smile, but then they move on.  But when he’s alone, they stare at him and take notice.  Sometimes they talk to him, sometimes they wave their hands up to their heads.  He likes to think that it’s because they admire him so.  That he’s at his sleeky and glossy best.  He holds his head up and laughs at them.  But he also knows that when he’s alone, he seems to have some mysterious hold on their nerves.  Are they worshipping him?  It’s possible.  He is the most superb of beings.  When he returns to her, he tells her about them.  Then they laugh together, share the joke and a worm.  He doesn’t know about sorrow, he doesn’t know about much at all.  That’s what makes him so joyous.

Just Getting it off My Chest

It’s harvest time.  We reap as we sow, so we are told.  But it’s not quite true is it? Sometimes we reap what others have sown, and the taste is bitter.  Sometimes we reap those things that have grown naturally, without our input.  Biology asserts itself.

Someone set a seedling in my neighbourhood.  We didn’t like it, it was ugly, but he delighted in it like a child.  He tended the seed and it grew a little.  Until now.  Now, its loathsome tentacles have reached out and grabbed us by the throat.  Its rude demeanour offends those who see it and they would cut it down along with those of us held in its grip.  They think that we are part of it.  But we are not, we suffer more than the offended as the grip increases.  There is no life in the soil around it.  It must go.

If only we knew how the plant can die.  It appears so robust.   Will be ever know the end? Will this become an anecdote or the cul de sac?  The grip must loosen.  Biology will eventually re-assert and people will turn away from the sight of a near dead parasite.  But we must move away in case of those things that lie dormant , waiting to spring back to life.

Memories of Jamie

Fresh from academia I began work in a primary school.  A new bite at reality.  The school served a big inter-war estate, built with optimism that couldn’t be sustained 60 years on.  Every morning the playground was cleared of drug paraphernalia.  The pupils looked on with eyes that had seen more in their nine years than I had seen in my 22.

Jamie had seen trouble.  But still I did daily battle with his exuberance in order to try and teach him literacy. There were obstacles.  He liked the band Pulp, and was prone to sudden outbursts of their songs.

‘Ok, then Jamie.  Let’s read Mog.  Mog lives with Debbie.’

‘YER NAME IS DEBORAH, DEBOARAH, IT NEVER SUITED YER!’

One problem with this was that I kind of wanted to join in.  Later on he would catch me humming the tune of his latest song-burst, and laugh happily.  I could see his point.  My own infantile sense of humour matched Jamie’s.  How many of my guffaws were muffled in the stock cupboard, under cover of looking for paper.

One evening after work, I stood in the car park, head in my hands.  Jamie ambled up, flouting the rules.

‘What’s up, Miss?’

‘I think I’ve locked my keys in the car.’

‘Do you want me to break into it for you?  I know how to do it.’  He rolled up his sleeves.

I had no doubt that he could do it.  But a renewed search found the keys in the lining of my coat. He walked on, disappointed at not being my rescuer.  I think he liked me and we made progress that year.

‘Shall we do some work, Jamie?’

‘Alreet.  Being as it’s you, miss.’

All of this has come back to me after seeing his name in the paper.  I wondered if I would see his name in the court roundup – the city’s most charming TWOC-er.  So I’m pleased that it’s not in that section, but the entertainment pages.  His comedy night at The Troc is so successful that it’s going to two nights a week.  I might go along and watch.  This time I can laugh out loud without setting a bad example.

In a Layby Near Stowmarket

The sign on the A14 indicated that there were services ahead.  Martha pulled off the main road; thinking of shops, conveniences and hot food.  What she found was merely a petrol station with a patch of hard-standing.  There had been a café once, but it looked like it had served its last bacon butty before the turn of the century.  The windows were thick with the dust kicked up by a constant convoy of container lorries.  Martha felt much the same herself, like she could scrape the dirt of her journey off her body with a sharp edged implement.  She must stop though, at least wipe her hands and find a cool drink.  She turned off the engine and looked around.  The midday sun glinted off the petrol price list .  Two van drivers in shorts took long swigs from cans and exchanged comments about the roadworks near Cambridge.

The van drivers glanced over at Martha as she got out of the car.  It was a car that attracted people’s attention and they were always curious to see the driver.  It could work against her, people might remember seeing the sleek white coupe gliding along the fast lane.  But, then again, the cameras.  She’d be picked up wherever she went, no matter what the car.  At least this one could go fast, nip between lanes of traffic. 

The pre-occupied woman in the petrol station shop served her with little care and pointed out the toilets as if she had done so a thousand times already that day.  Martha returned to her car, wiping her hands thoroughly with a wipe, and then rubbing in anti-bacterial lotion.  She worked it in between her fingers and up her wrists.  She turned on the engine and left. No need for petrol.  Soon she would be in Harwich with its big anonymous car park and boats to the continent.