Monday 31 October

Marta and Ivan: August 1938:
It’s the most perfect day of the summer. Marta and Ivan were up early, before mama and papa, when only the swarthy cook and the other servants were moving around the house. In the kitchen, where the two children waited uncomfortably, listening to cook’s cold monosyllables echoing in the big space while she oversaw the preparation of their breakfast, the smell of fresh bread and creamy milk combined to create an air of light and warmth. Early sunlight played on the window frames and cast yellow geometric patterns onto the warm, worn surface of the immense oak table, which is so massive that it had to be assembled in the room. On the stove, a bright blue pot contains the children’s boiling eggs: tendrils, planes and wisps of steam rise into the light, turning bright white where the sun catches them before they twist or fade off into the shadows.

After breakfast, Marta and Ivan tuck leftover eggs, apples and bread into their rucksack, and head off for the summerhouse at the top of the estate. It’s only eight o’clock, but the sun is already high and hot, and Marta feels the perspiration breaking out on her throat and forehead as soon as she steps into the light. (She’s noticed that she seems to sweat more easily these days, as she’s getting older, and Ivan has noticed that she’s starting too smell different – as if she doesn’t wash often enough. Sometimes, despite himself, he has to turn his face away as she grabs him for one of her frequent, clumsy hugs.)

The summerhouse is at least a mile from the house, up at the top of the estate, a place where the managed garden ends in a mixture of crumbling red brick walls and straggly hedges and fences, where the grass and weeds have gone wild and the foliage and the wooden posts and the old fence wires are all intertwined. Beyond the summerhouse is a dense, overgrown hawthorn hedge, then a public lane intensely green with overhanging foliage and dense with blackberries in autumn, and then the start of the forest: it’s an overgrown, organic boundary with a complex, rich variety of wild flowers, and small mammals rustling and scratching in the undergrowth.

Two summers ago, playing up at the summerhouse on her own, she had determined that she would catalogue the area immediately surrounding the summerhouse, describing and illustrating all the plants, insects, animals and birds that she could find. Wearing her favourite dress (white cotton with big printed blue flowers) and the straw hat that mama insisted she always wore in the hot months, she had crouched on the bottom-most step of the summerhouse’s porch and demarcated the first metre square search area with four corner stones. Then she settled down with her sketch book, watercolours and pencil and started to draw and annotate.

She only lasted about an hour before giving up in the face of the fractal levels of detail, her inability to capture even the simplest natural form, and the dazzling complexity of the details inside the details of every plant and leaf. The envisioned precision and order of her notebook gave way to a series of botched, scribbled out drawings and increasingly untidy lists, which started neatly and regularly before descending into impatient, hurried jottings. It was as if there was a part of her brain missing, she thought: a magical part that would give her the insight and focus she needed in order to focus on the important parts of the scene, and to see – and reproduce – the significant aspects with clarity. Her mama could do it, she knew: she’d seen her drawing delicate ladies’ faces and elegant gowns on writing paper while she talked on the telephone to the wives of papa’s business acquaintances. And she’d seen papa make his lists in his perfect handwriting, which seemed to speak of control and logic, the straight-line thinking skills of powerful adults that she so wanted to emulate. But put a pencil or a paintbrush in her hand and the inadequacy of her execution was almost instantly revealed: despite her enthusiasm for engaging with nature and her desire to capture it and understand it, to grasp it and dissect it; despite all that, she couldn’t simultaneously hold it in her hand, feel the textures, see the colours and structures and see it whole; she couldn’t seem to examine a thing – a leaf, or a flower, or the whitened skull of a shrew found in the leaf litter – without destroying it; to understand and own it you had to break it up into pieces or strip it slowly down to see how the fabric of the thing was knitted together, to see how the folded shapes merged into each other internally; whereupon the thing lost its mystery and beauty – ceased to be the very thing that had fascinated and enchanted you with its wholeness and beauty. When things are intact they are beautiful, but she can’t understand them. And when she can understand them after they’re deconstructed, they’re no longer beautiful or enchanting. [perhaps a concrete example??]

So now she just enjoys being up here, where the sun shines into the bowl of grass that drops away in front of the summerhouse, and the glittering air is scratchy and smeared with insects all through the long day. In the early morning, when the forest still casts its cool shadows on the summerhouse, the lit grass scintillates with dew, spiders’ tentative webs waver across the clearing, and the long grass is damp and cool against bare legs.

Ivan wearily sloughs the rucksack from his back and leans it against the shadowed porch wall. They brush the excess moisture from the wooden bench and pull it out to the front of the porch’s wooden decking. Then they sit for a while, cooling down after their uphill walk in the morning sunshine, feeling their sweaty skin dry, and hearing the sounds of the forest rise as their own breathing and movements fade out of conscious awareness.

Ivan bores quickly, and he soon gets up and wanders down to the bottom of the grass slope, where a planted honeysuckle has infiltrated a hedge of black-green leaves and stiff reddish thorns. Beyond that boundary there’s a grassy bank, then the stream trickling down between shaggy banks, then a steeper, wild and overgrown bank on the other side, then some boggy land, then the lower forest slopes.

Marta watches Ivan move amongst the tall grasses until only his blond head is visible. The grass shivers and jerks as he moves though it in the sun.

(c. 1110 words)

Sunday 30 October

Letter from Lieutenant Michael Fisher to Gabriella Weiss (his mistress), dated July 25, 1940:

My darling, darling Ella,
How I miss you! I wish you could be here with me to see France, as it is SO BEAUTIFUL. But, darling, I do not think it will be possible for us to arrange to meet as we did in PRAGUE (!) last year. Although the war goes well here, things are not so settled yet in the administration, and it will take some while yet, I think, until they are. Prague! Each time I write that name I must say it aloud also, and I smile at every recollection of the wonderful happiness we shared for that weekend we spent in the Hotel R. I remember how you wrapped yourself in the sheet and stood in the morning sunlight, and it made your hair like a white and yellow flame. But it also makes me so sad to be able to remember such beautiful memories of the time we shared so closely, because they have finished now, and I cannot say when we will be together again. Do you sometimes feel the same thing? You never write of such things in your letters, and sometimes I am filled with doubts. If only I could free myself from Beatrice, we could be married. But I must think of happier thoughts. This is a sad train of thought.

The summer weather is unbelievable, and now that the fighting is finished we can enjoy the blue sky and the sun, and the plentiful good food and drink. There is champagne here, and brandy, and plentiful cheese, meat and eggs. And of course the good French wine. Yesterday, in celebration of our recent victory, the Army commander threw an evening drinks party for the officers of all the units stationed locally. This party was held in the commander’s headquarters – a fairytale chateau in pink stone, with blue-grey turrets and slate roofs. Really quite a sight, with the chandeliers lit and the waiters in their uniforms and the glittering cutlery and jugs and so on on the tables. But all I could think of was you, and how I wish that you could be here with me. I drank a lot of wine and champagne, and sat up late into the night with our C.O., drinking brandy and playing cards. (He likes to have people with him, and the officers take it in turns to stay up with him, as it is very tiring and makes the next day rather difficult.) I did not go to bed until 6:30 this morning. But the whole evening was miserable without you here. But I shall write about something else, darling.
I hope very soon that you will receive the parcel I have sent you. It is about 5kg, and well-packed to prevent breakages: there are two bottles of wine, some soap, some sugar and salt, two bars of chocolate, and some cheese and sausage (local produce). I hope that they will not be delayed too long.

Please write and tell me what you have been doing, Ella. I miss you so much and I wish that you could be here with me. Your letters mean so much to me. Being away from home and loved ones makes one realise how much those people mean to one. When I come home from the war I will never take such love for granted again. Please write soon, darling.
I love you,
M.

Jan remembers tracing the progress of the army as it advanced westward in the early summer of 1940, its lightning strikes and coordinated attacks taking the enemy by surprise and carrying all before it. The tanks only halted when they overstretched their supply lines, by which time the campaign was already won: the only doubt was about the extent of the disaster for the enemy. There were weekly newsreels flown in from home, and the Service officers would gather in a large, cool white tent to watch them on Friday evenings, after dinner. With the ventilation flaps open and the exotic smells of the middle eastern night mingling with the spicy odours of brandy and cigars, Jan watched the images on the rippling, flexible projection screen: grinning tank commanders braced in their turret hatches, racing past, wreathed in sunlit dust clouds; long lines of disconsolate, defeated enemy troops, faces grimy with dust and tears, marching unprofessionally away from the battle and into captivity; piles of captured helmets and weapons; the burning hulks of the enemy’s outdated armour; and roads strewn with dead horses, smashed carts, and the abandoned debris of the refugee columns. With the hysterical triumphalism of the commentator still shrill in his ears, Jan would mark up the latest conquests on the wall map in his office, using thumb tacks and red wool to demarcate his approximations of the new front line. The campaign started in May and, by the end of June, the stretched wool line had reached the enemy capital, and was only a matter of kilometres short of the channel coast. In the neutral country where Jan was posted, the Service officers watched the diplomats of the enemy nations grow increasingly tense and unsmiling as they saw the military situation at home stagger from crisis to crisis, and eventually into hopelessness. When the surrender came, the tension broke, and a period of resigned calm overtook everyone while the European autumn and winter put paid to any threat of further campaigns.

It was a strangely distant war, seen from the middle east, but the newsreels and the newspapers communicated something of the dynamism and excitement of the military’s westward drive, and Jan and his colleagues looked forward to their Friday evening movie shows, which invariably left them feeling elated and optimistic about the future: the fatherland’s forces were peerless and invincible, seemingly capable of carrying off any attack with flair and the guarantee of success.

And there were occasional letters from Mariette as well: she was now a relief worker in one of the light industrial jobs vacated by men drafted into military service. She insisted that she wouldn’t want to stay out at work after the war was over, but Jan could sense that she really enjoyed being engaged in something constructive and creative, and the opportunity to meet and socialise with different kinds of people was clearly intriguing for her. […]

(c. 1060 words)

Saturday 29 October

Administration. He thought that it had its own beauty and meaning. Making the system better and seeing it work predictably and efficiently was sufficient reward in itself for him, and, happily, the Service believed that all other benefits stemmed from [the art of effective administration].

But when, in the autumn of 1937, he’d found himself standing – amazed by the reality of actually being there – on the honey-coloured flagstones of the quay of that middle eastern port on the first morning of his first posting, he wasn’t thinking about administration.

He was thinking instead about the aeroplane flight that he’d made just the day before – his first time in an aeroplane. Passenger flight back then was a rarity, an experience reserved for the powerful and the famous, and yet he too had flown now. As the boat-bottomed seaplane had picked up speed, ploughing bumpily through the grey water and mist of the October Baltic, he had to remind himself that this was happening to him – Jan Martens – and not someone else whose life he was looking in on from outside. The success he’d had at university (starred first class degree), and at the Service Academy (top marks amongst his year’s intake), and the trappings of success (overseas posting, aeroplane travel) all felt strangely abstract to him, as if he wasn’t really experiencing them in a real, concrete way, but only getting fleeting, echoey impressions of them, which he couldn’t hang on to or recall as if they were real/as if he’d really been there. It all seems somehow fraudulent – as if he’s receiving benefits that he doesn’t deserve, and which will be taken away from him once someone in authority realises that a mistake has been made. Yesterday afternoon, when he and Mariette had lain in each others’ arms after making love in their hotel room overlooking the Baltic, he had felt tearful and frightened at the prospect of leaving her behind, and confused by his fear that she would see how upset and uncertain he was. So he had held her close to him, his chin on her shoulder so that she couldn’t see his face, and stroked her smooth skin with a desperate rhythmicness, as if he were petting a dog that needed placating. Later, after she had fallen asleep, he’d gently disentangled himself from her and laid her head gently down onto the pillow, smiling at the way her blonde hair and creamy skin contrasted with the garish rosy pink bedclothes. My god, she’s so delicate and beautiful. I am so lucky, so lucky. For a moment, he felt a tremor of panic – a sense that he couldn’t go, that he’d have to refuse the posting. He pulled the sheet over Mariette, climbed slowly off the bed so as not to disturb her, and scuffed his way across the pale grey linoleum to the room-height French windows, where he pulled aside the net [1930s??] curtains. The rain of the earlier afternoon had cleared and now, with dusk fast approaching, there was some whitish sky showing between the heavy grey clouds. The hotel was only separated from the sea by the two-lane highway and a narrow promenade edged with metal railings, beyond which the masts of small yachts were metronoming back and forth as the boats rocked in the swell. Further out, the water was cloud-shadowed deep grey, with metallic highlights where the hard light shone. On the far side of the channel, obscured by thin mist and early evening gloom, the lights of the towns and villages were starting to twinkle. There was something calming about the light and water, about the swish of the cars on the rain-wet road below the window, and about the distant lights across the water: with the world outside, established and solid and reliable, and Mariette sleeping behind him – his wife, whom he loved, and who had chosen to marry him – these things seemed to settle him, to help him see that everything was in the right place after all.

And now here he is, two days later, in the middle east, thinking about how he’d never seen such a blue sky, even though the sun was still low in the sky, and about how clear the air was, with the sunlight etching the shadows and contours of the warm brown hills far across the glittering water, all the shoulders, [ravines, run-offs] and stray boulders sharp-edged and distinct. The boatman’s boy was perched on the stern decking of the [punt-type boat], still dozy with recent sleep, and plainly bored. When the boat’s slight pitch and fall jerked him awake he looked up at the foreign travellers on the quay, near-silhouettes against the bright sky and the climbing sun behind them, and found nothing there of interest or novelty — just the reminder of the routine journey, and the routine days gone past and still to come; the dull interchangability of anonymous foreigners passing through. Jan sees the boy’s disdain, the way that he judges them and assigns them all the same category, and that irks him; he wants the boy to see that he, Jan, is different — someone who’s genuinely interested in the region and its inhabitants, and who is keen too absorb the culture and to engage with the native people in a profound way.

[some more stuff about his posting…burgeoning career, engagement with the ‘other’. And then the war comes, and he’s shipped back home…]

Which is how he ended up just behind the front line in the summer of ’41, attached to the 109th Police Battalion as a Logistics/Economic Administration Officer. [get him from the station to the unit HQ…]

“Economist…” says Colonel Mechelen, theatrically looking Jan’s papers up and down before laying them down on his leather-topped desk. “…have you been in battle?” (with another patronising peer at the papers, vainly seeking evidence of military service.)
“No. No. I’ve just been transferred – straight out of the Colonial Service to here. I haven’t even had any conversion training – which they said I would get. I haven’t even been home.” He stops, realising that he’s gabbling a bit, and that he’s probably sounding whiny and childish. These are soldiers. This is all different now.
“That’s fine,” says Mechelen, “we don’t expect you to have to do any fighting. In fact, the fighting is pretty much finished out here, probably as far as fity kilometres east of here. It’s all just mopping up here. That’s why we’re here – fucking moppers up.” He laughs a harsh, bitter laugh, and Jan wonders if he might be a little drunk, even though it’s not yet ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning.
“Anyway, fuck that,” says Mechelen, “come and meet the boys.”

(c. 1100 words)

Friday 28 October

(There are some things I cannot tell you, such as the names of the towns we have travelled through.) But! I will tell you everything else, my dearest, you and the children. So that you may remember these days, when your papa does his duty for the fatherland, and for you.

We arrived by train in the evening. It was still warm, and many people were still sitting at the café tables along the boulevards when we marched from the railway station. I noticed hundreds of swifts here, screeching along the streets. I could not help but raise my eyes to watch them as they screeched along. Very lovely to see.
The people here are very welcoming. We have all we want to eat and drink, and people make us welcome in their homes. The people here are enthusiastic about the Führer and about the fatherland.

My lodging is very comfortable. This evening we ate roast duck and dumplings with red cabbage. It was lovely, but I miss your cooking, my darling. Well, I must close now.
With a hug and a kiss for you and the children,
Your Lorrie.

This was long before Jan had been attached to the unit in 1941. Lorenz Thomas was a captain by that stage of the war, the chest pocket of his tunic studded with campaign medals – Poland, Holland, France, Russia. There’s an early unit photograph, taken before they left the homeland, that shows Thomas in the group, seated in the middle of the front row; he had a soft-looking jaw then, and his round glasses perched on his rounded cheeks. When Jan first met him in 1941, he had lost considerable weight, and his black hair had thinned on the top of his skull: he was using a lot of hair oil to smooth it into a more even coverage of his pink scalp area. Thomas saluted, shook hands, and bade Jan ‘welcome to the unit’. Jan noticed that there was a distinct tremor in Thomas’s voice, like the trembling, uncertain pitch of a pre-adolescent boy. “One of my best officers,” said Mechelen, as he led Jan on to the next greeting.

Letter from First Sergeant Lorenz Thomas to his wife Maria, dated March xx, 1939:
Hello dearest – please accept my apology for the delay in replying to your letters. Yes, we have been away from the barracks, in special training. Of course, I cannot say anything more about it. But! You must trust that it is for the best, and that our leaders know the way that is best for us all. I will try and write more often in future, my darling – but it has been difficult for me also.

Tell me how Johann likes his new school? What stories does he tell you when he returns home? I would love to know some of them! Tell our son that he must study hard and learn both practical and mental skills, and then he too can be a soldier like his daddy. (If there are still wars when he is a grown man. If the Fuhrer is correct, then will have no more need of war when our next victory is complete.) And Lise is well, too, you tell me. Please kiss her for me and give papa’s baby a special long hug tonight.
Thank you for the parcel. We have shared the sausage this evening in the mess after dinner. Everyone says ‘thank you’. Please thank your mother also for me. Regards also to your father.
I will send more parcels soon. At present it is not so easy to gather things and visit the post office, but I think that will change soon. Soon there will be more gifts on their way. And then soon it will be Christmastime! I hope to be able to get leave this year and be with you, all four of us together again in our warm house against the snow.
With my love to you and the children,
Your,
Lorrie

In March 1939, when the fatherland’s newly confident armies had sat on more far-flung eastern borders than had existed for decades, Jan had only just started in the Service. He’d finished his degree (Economics, History) in the excitement-rich spring of 1938, and spent the summer with his fiancée Mariette boating and partying among the lakes, rivers, woods and private gardens that girdled the capital. In October, with the days shortening and his passion for Mariette reaching an unbearable intensity – he could only think about her, and couldn’t bear to have anyone else talk to her or make her laugh – he had gone up to the Service’s world-famous Academy.

Back before the war, and before austerity and bombing chipped away at its grandeur, the Academy was an echoing mausoleum in the heart of the capital’s ministerial district. You left the dank October pavement, climbed the broad, sooty steps to a classical portico [?], and attained a separate realm of white stone and chilled light, pillars and mouldings, vast walls of cold, chalky plaster, lofty ceilings, and a hushed stillness that took the sound of your footsteps, paused, judged them, and transmuted them into hollow, squeaking ghosts of themselves. Suspicious voices whispered in those echoes, [even though you belonged]: Who are you? How do have the temerity to pace these halls? Are you not crushed by our disdain?

From the very first class of the very first day of the Academy’s new intake, the tutors had tried to impress on them that the Imperial Service — they were allowed to use the ‘I’ word in those simpler days — was about administration. Not development, nor exoticism, nor policy, nor glamour, nor political intrigue, nor personal advancement. Administration, the thing that Jan was so good at: the details, the systems, the intricate coordination of papers, files and cross-references. All the dancing variables and unknowns that intimidated other people, but which Jan found he could juggle and control, always knowing the where the linkages were (or where they should be, in a better-managed world), always able to put his hand on the relevant folder or index card. It was intuitive. The longer he worked, the more effortless it became, and the less effort he made, the less conscious thinking he had to do. When you watched him at work, you thought of a delicate machine, all sweeping motions and smooth arcs: deliberate, interlocking movements, and balanced, trustworthy outcomes.
(c. 1070 words)

Weds 26 and Thurs 27 October

The thing you notice next about skinhead bloke – after his impressive physical presence and his fighter’s posture – is that he smells like all-day drinking: stale beer, scorched fat, and poverty wage cigarettes. This is the smell of imminent violence, Mathilde thinks. Punky must be stupendously innocent, insensitive, or drunk. Even though it’s her parents’ house, and her Uncle’s pseudo-wake, and even though she does feel vaguely responsible for people’s standards of behaviour in this environment – despite all that, she moves away from the threat of confrontation and violence as quickly as she can, finding her way upstairs to her room which, despite being dominated by the coats that the visitors have piled on the bed, offers her a few moments of the solitude that she craves after so much time spent in other people’s company today.

If she’d been in the living room a few minutes earlier she would have seen how the skinhead/punk face-off started. Some of Jan’s relatives had been talking about him, and about his post-war colonial service, and someone had mentioned how great the country had been when it still had its Empire: then, we were someone in the world – people had taken notice of what we said and did. Look at it now, though…a little country with a little voice, and all the old values gone.

Punky listens suspiciously to the fragments of conversation he can he can hear being muttered or hoarsely discussed – “Who could do such a thing to an old man? Not someone from round here” (with the usual racist undertones). “It’s terrible the way this country’s going – you’re not safe anywhere now, in your own city, in your own home, even…” – everyone’s got their own story to tell about crime, decline, and the increasing decadence of the modern, multicultural city, especially as compared to the simplicity, law-abidingness, community spirit and tolerance, the cultural homogeneity of the old, monoracial neighbourhoods. “Nothing against them, mind, but…”

This had been punky’s cue: his belligerence, teenaged contrariness, smattering of left-wing historical theory and beer-relaxed tongue were an irresistible combination. But maybe it’s actually a good thing that we’re not out there any more? Maybe those colonies are better off without us there, skimming off all the profits and the raw materials while the native people work for nothing? Nobody asked us to go there in the first place…

The consensus amongst the older people was that this young man was rude, ignorant and sadly misguided, but their generalised politeness and solicitude meant that they didn’t express their contradictory views: instead, they smiled indulgently and turned away from punky, seeking less inflammatory subject matter in smaller groups. Punky, though, wasn’t satisfied – he needed a deeper, sharper intellectual victory. So he had to push his argument on until someone took his bait, and so he’d taken up a position where he berated people (in general) who (in general) wouldn’t engage in discussions about things that they knew they’d lose the argument on. That’s the trouble with this country…nobody wants to talk about what really happened in the past. It’s all made up stories and myths from films. This rankled more deeply with the older folks, but this group was sober and mature enough to let punky have his say unchallenged.

But this blanket denunciation of the older – war-fighting – generation had been too much for skinhead: his own father – now housebound with arthritis – had been an air gunner in the bomber force during the Eastern war, and had seen many of his school friends killed or go missing. Punky’s generalised disrespect was an attack on his own father.

“Listen,” skinhead said, putting his latest empty beer bottle on the mantelshelf and stepping into the small space between punky and the old folks, rendering that space suddenly smaller and more claustrophobic, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. My dad was there, and these people were there, and they know more about it than you do. So don’t lecture them.”

Punky was tenacious, with a degree of moral and intellectual conviction that made him feel untouchable: he was fortunate to have been schooled and colleged in an educational environment where wit and cleverness were the only weapons that people used in debate – and in the playground and changing room, too. He’d grown used to the brain and the voice being the arbiter of discussion. He was unfortunately now in a different environment.

“I’m not lecturing anyone,” he said haughtily, “I’m just stating the facts. We went to these places as occupiers, and – ”
“We brought those people civilisation, mate. Civilisation – ” – he jabbed his finger at punky for the first time – “ – without us they wouldn’t have nothing. Nothing.” Punky’s judgement is good enough not to challenge the double negative, but he notices it, and it fuels his unstoppable sense of intellectual and moral superiority. He presses on with a few more pious judgements about history, and ‘ordinary people’s’ motivation in the past, and how it wasn’t really their fault (they were just powerless actors driven forward by impersonal historical forces) before skinhead steps forward, puts his massive arms around punky in a shoulder-height bearhug, and carries him through the living room, through the kitchen (which turns to watch him in silence), and out into the back yard.

Punky can’t see anything now: his face is hidden in skinhead’s t-shirted chest, and he can feel the coarse cotton crushed against his nose and cheeks. He can smell sweat, and beer, and – beneath all that – the sweet fruity smell of skinhead’s deodorant. Punky’s face feels red-brick hot, and he feels a bit sick all of a sudden. He can’t breathe.

Skinhead lets punky’s feet back down onto the dark-shadowed grass near the back fence, but holds him around the shoulders still.

“Listen,” he says, “listen, I mean it. You listening?”
Punky, instantly sobered, and instantly recognising how he has misjudged the reality of how this family’s intellectual dynamic works, and feeling his stomach loosen and yawn with the threat of impending violence, nods silently.
“Sure? You’re really listening?”
Nods, says “Yes. I am.”
“Right. Now listen: if you go back in there, I don’t want to hear you slagging off any old people, or the empire, or anything, OK? My dad fought in the war, my dad was in the air force, OK? So just don’t say anything, OK?” (His alcohol content is lapping at the base of his coherence and belligerence now, the arrow-straight logic of his argument and threat drooping impotently.)

But Punky gets the message. After skinhead releases him, punky waits a while, avoiding the eyes of the smirking lads by the back door, then steels himself to go back into the house, retrieve his bag, and go to the toilet before leaving with as much dignity as his reddened face, untucked shirt and unconditional surrender in the face of violence will allow him. This is one of those humiliating moments that will haunt him with incredible clarity and emotional recall for the rest of his life.

The older people pat skinhead on the back and bring him drinks for the rest of the evening. When he goes home, he’s puffed up with righteousness (and beer gas), and has a shouting argument with his mum and dad about the volume that he’s watching the TV at.

Mathilde – back at Jan’s house later in the week
It doesn’t take her long to work out Jan’s naming conventions, storage patterns and labelling; it’s a bit like assembling the materials for a term’s lessons.

She sorts out the personal and unit diaries and lines them up – as far as she can – in chronological order on the workbench. She’s also found the strips of map that Uncle Jan has cut from atlases, and she pins those up just below the first shelf above the workbench, where a small wall-mounted strip light will illuminate them. She noticed that there were lots of pin holes in the maps, usually clustered around towns, and she’s planning to reconstruct the path of the army’s advance in the same way that she presumes Jan has already done. (As she lays out all these materials, feeling their rough, age-desiccated surfaces against her soft fingertips, she gets the strong feeling that she’s merely following in Jan’s footsteps, and that all these materials have passed through his parched, wrinkled hands in the same way that they’re now passing through hers.) The musty smells and textures of the War Office boxes make her think of her Uncle’s dryish skin, parched hair and tweed jackets.

The workbench is getting crowded now, but she lays out as many of the framed photographs and plastic models as she can as well. She doesn’t know that much about military hardware, but she hazards guesses about which trucks and tanks saw service first, and arranges them, nose to tail, in the best chronological sequence she can.

The first unit diary is dated 1938, and they run through (in different handwriting, and occasionally with typed pages pasted in) all the way to 1947, when the War dribbled the last of its blood into the exhausted Slavic soils of the East.

Reading the diaries is a peculiar experience: she’s so used to the familiar archive footage and talking heads (mainly politicians and senior officers) from the classic documentaries that the voices of the ordinary serving soldiers seem strangely banal and narrow-focused; they don’t speak of strategy or tactics, or about philosophy and nationalism (at least, not much), but they do speak of the concrete, the everyday, and the deeply personal. It’s a new and intriguing perspective for her.

Jan had put out his ‘call for documents’ at the last of the reunion dinners he’d attended, about five years ago. Mariette had been complaining that he didn’t have any hobbies any more, and that all he ever seemed to do was sit with his eyes closed, ‘listening’ (her inverted commas) to music on the radio (she acidly commented that, whenever she asked him what he was listening to, he was rarely able to name it or describe it). Eventually, he got so fed up with her repeated complaints about his ‘laziness’ and ‘vegetation’ that he agreed to do something ‘constructive and creative’. He couldn’t think of anything that he specifically wanted to do, and it had been Mariette who suggested the idea of writing a pamphlet history of the unit that he’d been attached to in the East as an economist/logistician. Once the idea was in place, however, he had embraced it with an enthusiasm and creative gusto that he’d barely known since his teens, when he had been a keen draughtsman. In his mind, it became purely his project – he erased Mariette’s moral rights to any ownership.

So he’d stood up at the start of the reunion dinner (before the drink had really started to kibosh the old boys’ memories) and asked them all to loan him any diaries, memoirs, papers, photographs or mementoes that they still had. He would photograph the artefacts and transcribe anything interesting into a composite unit history that he would have printed at his own expense, and which he would distribute at a subsequent dinner, or by post if people were willing to pay the postage. He’d had a stack of cards made at the printers’ already, with his address and telephone number on, and he distributed this so that the old fellows could contact him and send him their things.

People had been very enthusiastic about his project at the dinner, and he’d had many promises of materials made. When only one letter and a small packet of photographs had arrived a month later, though, he began to suspect that the old soldiers’ enthusiasm was not going to be matched by concrete action. Mariette feared that this would mean another retreat into indolence and sleepiness. Just before Christmas, however, there was a sudden deluge of materials, and thereafter a steady flow of packets, parcels and letters came. He reorganised his workroom and put up some extra shelves to cater for the volume and logistical challenge of organising the materials in a usable, intuitive way. Mariette’s pleasure at his revivified interest in doing something was slightly tempered by the fact that she now seemed to have the downstairs of the house all to herself, while Jan spent most of the day and evening in his workroom.

Letter from Lorenz Thomas to his wife Maria, dated August 17th, 1938: Dearest Marie, I send you my love from the town of L.

(c. 2100 words)

Why I'm Crap

I've been a rubbish human being most of today: there's this bloody great boulder sitting in the heart of my emotional life. I know that I have to get rid of it, but it's so bloody hard to do. It's very heavy, and it's kind of beautiful - hell, it is beautiful - and it's been there for so long that I can't imagine what life will be like without it.

So I went through the day feeling woefully miserable about the boulder's intractable strength, presence and power, and was generally moody and irritable and useless (which obviously endeared me to my colleagues). This filled me with greater self-disgust. Ho hum.

In the evening I went to see the Wallace and Gromit "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" movie. This is an undiluted joy. You should really go and see it if you haven't already.

Missed my 1000 words today as I was out at the flicks. Tomoorrow I will do 2000. See if I don't.

At the hospital, Mathilde is reminded once again of her pitiful deference to authority: when she’s feeling good about herself, and retaining her ironic sense of good-humoured irony, she refers to this as her “the big man’s going to shout at me” syndrome; at these times she reflects that, ever since she was a child, she’s been anxious – mostly unconsciously – about being told off, or being found wanting, or having people laugh at her (especially people who don’t know her, and whose shallow judgements of her would be based on inadequate knowledge: if those people truly knew her, they would see that her authenticity, honesty, integrity and depth offset these momentary lapses of behaviour).

The first memory she has of this syndrome comes from an early school nativity play – she’d have been about six. She was playing the inn-keeper’s wife. (For this particular school production, performed on imaginatively multiply-reused [hollow wooden cubes] in the chilly, blank interior of the cavernous new concrete church, their Religious Instruction teacher had decided that the traditional gender roles should be reversed: thus Mary knocked at the inn door, and Mathilde’s inn keeper’s wife answered her knock while her husband provided ludic relief with a tea towel and a cup that never quite dried.) Once the holy family were installed in the inn’s straw-strewn outbuilding, Mathilde had to wait for another cue that called her back onto the stage to announce that “your supper is within”. At the first performance, already sweating with nervous relief at having delivered her earlier lines successfully, and without stammering or forgetting anything before the gaze of the terrifyingly large audience of parents and older siblings (probably sixty in total), she pre-empted her second cue and found herself standing on top of a wooden block in the bright light, but with nothing to say and nothing to do, and intensely conscious that it was obvious to everyone that she shouldn’t be there. She stood, blinking, for a few seconds, then stepped back out of the light and into the shadow of the flat. She felt the sweat trickling cold down her back, under the woollen jumper she was wearing under her flimsy cotton costume.

The next thing she knew, she was back in the choir’s storage room, which the school was using as a changing room. There, amidst the smell of incense and musty cassocks, she pushed her way to the back of the costume rail and sat down against the cold exterior wall, pressing her skinny back against the rough textured breeze blocks. That was where the teachers eventually found her an hour after everyone else (except her parents) had departed into the frosty December night.

Since then, anxiety and fear of ridicule or exposure have been a constant motif in her behaviour. She knows it’s irrational, and that as she learned it so young it’s not something she should be ashamed of, but it’s still painfully embarrassing to her, and it seems impossible to kick the habit.

At the hospital, the desk nurse makes it very clear – almost brusquely – that Jan [Martens?] is too ill to be seen. They will take his clothes and hygiene equipment for her, but there is no point in her waiting. She should go home. Even before the nurse has finished speaking, Mathilde is moving apologetically towards the rotating doors, feeling guilty for even having come, and having had the temerity to take up any of the hospital staff’s time. As she walks down the concrete ramp to the street and the latest of this evening’s bus stops, she rehearses ways in which she could have made herself less of an imposition on the nurses.

When she gets home, she can hear the noise from the pseudo-wake from the street: there’s no music, but the clatter of plates, chink of glasses, and drunken shouts of laughter carry plainly through the autumn air. She goes round to the rear gate, noting the bright yellow strips of light between the vertical fence slats, and the fast-moving shadows that accompany the running, laughing young men inside.

It is mostly young blokes in the back yard, milling around a growing pile of beer bottles stacked on top of empty crates by the back door. There are some younger boys playing in the yard too, and some others who stand in the shadows near the drinkers, watching their faces and body movements, stashing away memories of the approved adult drinking behaviours for implementation in a couple of years’ time.

Mathilde eases her way through the haze of beer fumes and testosterone and into the kitchen, where her mother kisses her cheek and squeezes her arm, and her father nods and smiles at her over the shoulder of Aunt Iris, who is in the middle of a finger-jabbing bout of needless over-emphasis. Mathilde grabs herself a bottle of beer and sidles off into the dining room, hoping to see her cousin Trudi: Trudi is one of those relatives whom she only seems to see at family gatherings like this, and with whom she has always shared an unspoken sense of understanding and goodwill, despite the rarity of their meetings. Mathilde wishes that she could meet a romantic partner with whom she could share the same kind of innate sympathy and wordless mutual regard.

But Trudi isn’t there. Instead, Mathilde finds herself watching a disagreement escalating into something more physical: two people she doesn’t recognise – a well-built thirty-five year old with a shaven head, and a late teenager with dyed black hair and black-ringed eyes – are facing each other, framed in the doorway that leads to the hall and stairway. As the punky kid’s head waves backwards and forwards, Mathilde can see the white painted balustrades {what are those vertical things at the side of the stairs called?} flickering in and out of vision. The punky kid must be drunk, otherwise he wouldn’t be arguing with the other guy, who has inverted vee-shaped torso of a fireman, and the massive upper arms of someone who lifts weights regularly. Mathilde can see, from the way that the bald guy is staring and nodding at the punk, and shifting his weight from foot to foot, that the first punch or head butt is not too far away. If only the punky guy could see the other guy with sober eyes, he would shut up NOW.

(c. 1050 words)

Sunday Night Dream

I dream I'm sleeping in a long, very dark attic, all heavy, dark timber, like something out of Anselm Kiefer. I wake up, and there's something darker still fluttering against the shadow background. It never resolves itself into anything other than a dusty frenzy of wingbeats and grey haze, but, as I wake up in reality, I know that it was death beating its wings over me in the dark.

It's one of those dreams that leaves you a bit flustered and off-centre, the dream imagery having plugged into your emotional engine and convinced you, through your physical fear and upset, that everything in the dream was real. So you lie there in the dark with your heart bumping, with the sweat drying on your chest hairs, and you try and make things out in the deep darkness of your room.

I turned the radio on, and 'Something Understood', Radio 4's late night Sunday meditation programme, was about mortality. Of course. So I drowse-listen to the poetry and prose about finding the meaning of your life, feeling ever-sadder and more despondent. They play Kurt Weill's September Song, and I promise myself that tomorrow, and from now on, I will live my life as if it weren't a rehearsal; and I promise myself that I will reconcile myself to the ironically amusing nature of my useless, pointless passion, and that I will move on, tomorrow, and find the depth and meaning somewhere else.

Come Monday, I slip back into the same emotional traps, the same petty habits and trivial tramlines.

Tomorrow. Try again tomorrow.

;-)

Monday 24th Fragment

This, she recalls, was Aunt Mariette’s workroom: a shallow room that runs the width of the house, painted in a soft, warm peach colour. Mariette used to have a big sewing machine in there, and a special ironing board with thickly upholstered attachments shaped like padded limbs or fat diving boards. Mariette came from that generation of women that made and adjusted their own clothes, and there stacks of fabric and boxes of dressmaker’s tools and materials. There were also big bags full of different coloured wools, and stacks of vinyl (shellac ?) records beside a boxy record player with a hinged lid. Under one of the windows, on a sparse desk that looked like it came from a military institution, there was a big metal typewriter with a heavy cloth cover.

When she turns on the light, Mathilde can see immediately that all traces of Aunt Mariette have been erased: the walls are now painted a bare white, and a waist-high worktop runs the entire length of the facing wall, overhung with shelves full of books and neatly-labelled boxes, and underslung with cupboards and drawers. There are more boxes stacked on the worktop, along with glass jars full of pens, some pads of paper, and framed black and white photographs, mainly of groups of men in military uniform; there are a few of Mariette, too, including a beautiful one where her face is haloed with dazzling light that bleeds towards the edge of the frame. Her teeth are white, she’s maybe twenty five, and so slim and beautiful that it makes Mathilde’s heart ache to look at it.

Uncle Jan’s tall stool sits dead centre in front of the worktop, where the pens and papers are concentrated. She pulls it away from the worktop and makes a closer examination of the books, papers and boxes. She’s surprised to find that the boxes are all marked with dates, and with single surnames or with lists of names. Many of the names have military ranks appended in brackets. Among the multicoloured and multistyled cardboard boxes there are some of more uniform type: pale green, with leather edging and riveted panels and lids; these are marked ‘War Office’, and they dominate the space with their weight and uniformity.

The swings open a couple of the cupboards under the worktop: there are plastic model kit boxes in there, and some made up models on diorama bases: wartime trucks and tanks, and soldiers in the drab camouflage uniforms of the Eastern war. The cupboards smell of the glue, paint and brush cleaner that Jan’s used in constructing the models. She lifts one of the dioramas gently out of the cupboard: a motorbike and sidecar at a muddy crossroads, the sidecar’s wheel embedded in the shiny goo of a puddle; the two crewman stand by stiffly, there arms and legs clumsily posed. Apart from the inanimate figures, though, Mathilde thinks that the model is pretty good: the ground and mud is well-rendered, with grass that looks like it’s made out of dried tealeaves painted browny green; and the motorbike is well constructed, with a neat paint job that suggests mud and wear and tear.

Her watch alarm beeps: eight o’clock. She need s to get back to the hospital, but she’s conscious that she’d like to stay here and explore these boxes and papers some more; not just as a curious amateur historian, but as a way of getting to know Uncle Jan some more, and of getting closer to him. She promises herself that she’ll come back again if she gets the chance, hopefully with Uncle Jan.

She checks all of the other rooms again, upstairs first, then downstairs, to make sure that everything is secure. The last room she looks in is the sitting room, with its heavy sofa, coffee tables and sideboard. It’s there that she finds the six white envelopes propped against the casing of the big valve radio. The ultra neat tidiness of the house starts to make even more sense.

16. Pieter’s House

Now that the light rain’s stopped and a lot of beer’s been drunk people are starting to spill out of the big kitchen and into the yard. All the house lights are switched on, and the stone-flagged yard is well-lit with warm yellow light. It could almost be a summer celebration party, especially now that the alcohol has taken most people from their initial states of numbness, or shock, or disbelief, to a more accepting, bemused, or forgetful place: for many, the inexorable logic of intoxication, familiarity, habit and shared history facilitates a rapid transition to laughter, profanity, horseplay and crude sexist and racist jokes – still the stock in trade of this cultural milieu.

Pieter sits at the head of the massive wooden table in the kitchen, a fluted half-litre glass in his big red fist. His wife [Angela?] makes endless rounds of sandwiches and boils kettle after kettle of water as waves of relatives and friends arrive to offer sympathy and support. The men hang around the kitchen for a while before drifting off to where the beer glasses congregate most densely, but the women tend to stay on, talking in quiet groups and looking solicitously at Jan’s immediate family. Everyone knows that Jan was the one who made good, who broke out of the family’s traditional straitjacket of expectation, but everyone respects Pieter just as strongly: he’s been the one who’s kept the family tradition of working the waterways, and who’s maintained the family home through another generation, perpetuating the legacy that’s been in the family since the 17th century; since that time, there’s always been a boat and a waterman in the family.

In fact, there are some people – family, even – who think that Jan somehow betrayed the family: after he came back from all that foreign travel and overseas service, he and Mariette had never had children, reducing the chances of an heir to carry on the waterman’s tradition. Pieter and [Angela] had had their two girls, but what was really needed was a boy. And Jan had sacrificed those chances for a career. Aunt Iris is particularly bitter about this, and gives vent to her feelings once her second brandy and crème de menthe loosens up her brain’s inhibition centres…

(c. 1040 words)

Draft Fragment - Sun 23 October

Crouching, she lifts the metal bucket off the dank paving slab and scrabbles up the flat key with her nail-bitten fingers, her sore fingertips dragging sensitively across grit, sticky web residue, and the dried-out shells of disappointed wood lice. When she steps back outside into the night-black garden, there’s a faint drizzle falling, sharp and chilly against her forehead. When she ducks her head, she sees the drizzle making faint yellow tracks through her failing torch beam.

Getting into Uncle Jan’s house was harder than she’d expected: she’d expected that everything would be well-oiled and maintained, but the lock on the back door was tight and stiff, and the door itself jammed against the bottom of the frame such that she had to lean into it with her shoulder to free it, and push her hip against it to close it once she was inside the utility room the door opened into. She hears herself panting slightly in the darkness, the smell of washing powder and polish in her nostrils.

Eventually, as she pockets her dying torch and feels her way through the kitchen, she realises that it’s probably all right to turn on a light, and she runs her fingertips across smoothly emulsioned plaster board until she finds a bank of four switches projecting proudly from the wall; the first switch she chooses doesn’t seem to do anything, the second one turns on an outside lamp in the garden (revealing a heavier rain falling, white and clear in the cold electric light), but the third switch lights up utility room, kitchen, and the downstairs hallway beyond. Everything seems very still and yellow, and she stands for a moment, hearing the desolate silence of the empty house through the hoarse filter of her own breathing. The kitchen’s striplight is cold and desolately harsh in its reflection on the big kitchen window.

Uncle Jan’s kitchen is spotless: there’s nothing in the sink, nothing on the draining board, and there are only storage jars and electrical appliances on the expensive wooden work surfaces. There are a couple of opened letters in the rack underneath the pin board, but even those are cut open rather than torn, and they have the distinct air of having been dealt with: there’s nothing provisional or undone about anything in this room. She realises that she can hear both the tick of the clock and the echo of the second hand’s precision clacking.

It’s been so long since she was here that she has to consciously reconstruct the geography of the house as she stands at the bottom of the stairs: she makes pointed hand gestures as she orients herself, as if she were a tour guide for particularly dim tourists who needed exaggerated direction. All the doors to the downstairs rooms are closed: blank, white-painted surfaces reflecting the overhead light.

As she puts her foot on the first stair everything starts to come back to her, and her movements become less mechanical: even though the upstairs was another ‘forbidden zone’ – like the shed – she crept up here a lot when the adults were all downstairs in the chilly living room drinking their tea from curlicued china cups with gold rims. The staircase walls are the same colour as back then; a warm, rich pale green, like the skin of a ripe apple with hints of red. It was a colour that always made her want to stroke the wall with her fingers, and she remembers that she did so once and left a three foot long greasy trail that she only noticed when she came back downstairs, and when the light fell at a particular angle; her efforts to remove it – with spit and her handkerchief – only resulted in the creation of a larger stain that was much more obvious from all angles. She’d worried about the stain all the way home, but had then forgotten about it until the next time they’d set out to visit Uncle Jan and Aunt Mariette, when she had been wide-eyed with frightened remembrance and anxiety for the whole journey.

Her fingers find the upstairs landing light switch with ease, although it’s lower than her muscle memory recalls. She uses the toilet, which still smells of minty toothpaste and stale water in a plastic tooth mug, and then goes to Uncle Jan’s bedroom to find his nightclothes, the roar and gush of the water pipes still juddering through the house.

The bedroom is pristine, and the wardrobe and drawers painfully tidy and well-ordered: the immaculate layout of uncle Jan’s brown socks and his white string vests and underpants in their moth-balled drawers almost makes her choke with affection: everything is so still and tidy, just like he’d left it this morning, all neat and waiting for him to come home. She notices that the double bed is still made up with pillows for two; she doesn’t look in the sets of drawers on Aunt Mariette’s side of the bed, and which still have a bottle of woman’s perfume set on a doily.

Having put socks, pants, vests, pyjamas, dressing gown, handkerchiefs, toothbrush, flannel and towels into a bag, she goes back along the top landing to the stair head. She pauses with her palm on the gloss-painted balustrade, listening to the thickly-carpeted upstairs silence and thinking about how she used to stand here in the gloomy afternoon light while the adults’ voices rumbled in the sitting room downstairs. Sometimes there would be some light filtering through the net curtains of the room at the end of the landing, edging its way around the angles of the half-closed door and out into the stairwell where it might catch some dust motes drifting in the big space between the lower stairs and the high upstairs ceiling. She would lean her chin against the banister and watch the motes dance, wishing that either (a) she could go home now, where all her things were, or (b) that she could sit in the living room with the adults and impress Uncle Jan and Aunt Mariette in some way, so that they would smile at her.

The door to the room at the end of the landing is ajar, and she puts down the bag and pushes the door fully open.

(1040 words)

Bloggery and writerly

A fellow blogger blogged something on their blog about this national novel writing month thingy (international, I guess, but hey, who's being pedantic?) Anyway, the thing here is that you commit to write a 50, 000 word novel in November - 1, 666.66 (recurring) - words per day.

This is neatly synchronous, as I've recently been resuscitating my 'dark European history/memory/remaking yourself' novel. Part of that resuscitation is writing 1, 000 words a day (which started on Saturday). So my plan is to keep doing that, and use the November NaNoWriMo as a focus/nagging discipline to keep me on track. I'll post the daily drafts as a further act of discipline/habituation - there is something nice and naggy about knowing that "I must keep my commitment and post stuff".

I begin:

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Sat. 22nd October Draft Fragment

On the bus to Uncle Jan’s, passing through the familiar night-time suburban streets, her mind is whirling from thought to thought – please don’t let him die…if he dies, who will inherit the house?…how will dad react? He’s his only brother, after all…I hope I get back to the hospital in time… – but, looking out through the grease- and dust-smeared bus window, she seems to see everything with tremendous clarity and fixedness: the brightly-lit fast food and convenience store windows; the angled stacks of exotic fruits and vegetables outside the ethnic groceries – orange, green, and cream; the kaleidoscope of street fashions and faces picked out in the lights; the glinting windows, mirrors and roof curves of the kerb-parked cars. As she swings her gaze back to the bus interior, she registers the structures, shapes and sheens of the seats, roof and metal safety rails as a whole mesh of function, and sees the other passengers as discrete, delicate individuals, with their own life stories and value and perspective.

And she feels as if she’s barely been alive for years; as if she’s been dreaming, fooling herself by forgetting that all of this will come to an end. She feels simultaneous mood currents of despair and hope washing across each other like reflected waves on a beach. She knows that she must change. She feels affection and sympathy for everyone on the bus – even allowing some uncharacteristically generous indulgence – they’re only young, they’ve got to learn their own way – for the foul-mouthed teenagers that she can hear shouting and swearing on the top deck.

…

As she stands on the open platform at the back of the bus, gripping the white safety rail, waiting for the driver to slow down for the stop nearest Uncle Jan’s house, she feels clouds of chilly autumn air streaming across her cheek, and smells the warm smell of diesel smoke from the exhaust pipe as the driver changes down.

She hasn’t been to Uncle Jan’s in the dark for a long time – how many years must it be? Five? Ten? It would have been a Christmas or an Easter visit…Easter, probably, when they’d left soon after nightfall, carrying their chocolate eggs out to dad’s big black car, placing those delicate masses in the oil-smelling boot, snug amongst the old blanket and the greased, angular metal jack. She remembers that dusty, sickly odour of metal, and chemicals, and hot petrol and paint.

With shock, she realises that it’s more like fifteen years – dad has had at least two different cars since the black one; in her memory, she morphs instantly from eighteen to twelve, seeing her dark hair grow longer and her face fuller, with a suggestion of a double chin. She remembers holding her breath as they got into the car, not wanting to breathe in the smell of the leather seats that never seemed to have dried properly since dad had painted them with the upholstery coating he’d got from someone in the pub: the smell is a cloying mixture, with hints of the thick yellow bleach that mum puts down the toilet on Saturday mornings, and of over-ripe fruit. As soon as the smell starts seeping into her nostrils she can feel her temples tightening, and an incipient headache focusing just behind the bridge of her nose. That sickly feeling is bound up in her mind with memories of Uncle Jan and Aunt Mariette’s front garden at night: the dry rustling of the rose bush leaves against the wooden fencing, the damp smell of the flowerbeds, the grip of dad’s hand around hers, the dark passage down the side of the house that leads to the high wooden gate to the back garden.

And here she is standing by that gate again, ten years later, feeling focused and alive, and much wiser and calmer suddenly this evening, her senses sharpened and precise. But Aunt Mariette is dead, and Uncle Jan might die, and mum and dad barely talk to each other any more unless it’s to criticise or snipe. She looks up, past the sheer dark brick of the house wall, past the black roof edge, and up at the autumn night sky, where thin clouds reflect the city’s amber glow and gust across the shivering background of faint stars.

Dad told her that there was a spare key for Jan’s back door hidden under a bucket in the shed: it’s been there for years. She struggles to open the shed door, the yellowed light from the torch clamped under her arm swaying across the wooden panels as she uses both hands to shift the stiffened barrel of the unforgivingly hard draw-bolt with its sharp-edged brackets. She barks two knuckles – tastes blood and dirt on her tongue as she sucks at the abrasion – before the bolt finally twist-grates free, the door scrapes over the grass that’s grown up between the paving stones, and then she’s inside the dusty, desiccated shed.

Again, it’s like stepping back in time, so strong is the sensory assault on long-forgotten memories. The feeble torchlight casts its pale circles and flares along the length of the big shed, over the canvas-shrouded tools and garden furniture, shadows flickering back and forth like something half-seen in your peripheral vision. Uncle Jan was always a demon for tidying things up: everything had a specified place, and everything stored in here had a particular orientation and angle. As a child, Mathilde had known intuitively that if you came in here – and she knew it was probably wrong to come in here at all – if you came in here, you would have to make sure that everything was put back in precisely the same position, otherwise Uncle Jan would know that you’d been in here, and that you’d touched things; and that would mean…well, she didn’t know quite what, but the threat of something bad was there, that was for sure.

There’s a big wooden workbench on one side, with deep drawers underneath for Jan’s woodworking tools; a metal vice big enough to secure a ship’s hawser gleams at the far end of the bench. She knows that if she scraped open one of those drawers she’s find the tools resting on a bed of curled wood shavings and soft, dampened sawdust. She remembers the feel of those wood residues on her fingertips, the smooth curves of the wooden tool handles, the uncompromising cross-hatchings of flat files, the brutal blades of planes and oiled saws. She remembers how she imagined uncle Jan bent over the bench in his white protective apron, concentrating on the emerging form of the wood he was working, the tools resting easily in his hands, working with precision and control. There would be little flakes of wood and dust in his white moustache, and the dust would have created a faint film on his glasses.

The thought strikes her that those drawers must be full of spiders and small scuttling things, and webs and eggs, and she starts, realising that the air around her head is probably rigged with spiders’ webs, and that those webs will be vibrating with spiders and their moribund prey. She ducks involuntarily and steps back towards the door.

(1200 words)

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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

cough cough

blimey, it's dusty in here, innit?