A Posse of Guardian Angels

June had been good but recently the summer couldn’t work out what to do with itself; one moment scorching sunshine, the next bucketing rain. Around mid-July Mrs Saldanha had taken to putting her washing on the clothes horse and placing it in the shelter of the back porch, so that she didn’t have to lurch out with the cane and take the clothes off the line soon as the weather turned.
On this day it was sunshine with few clouds but you couldn’t trust the skies and she sat in the porch by her hanger, reading one of those Jilly Cooper novels about rich white people getting up to god knows what with each other – they were the only habit she thought of as a vice; good trash to pass the inexplicable days.
Mrs Salhanda had worked for forty years as an auxiliary nurse at Christie’s before being medically retired in ’02; for a few years after, she’d done voluntary days on the SureStart reception off Albert Road, before the hip got too bad for her to hold down even those duties.
Even with the cane and the pills, there was a visible wince as she manoeuvred her body into a standing position; it happened slowly these days, in folds and cracks. Meter readers and parcel bearers learned the value of patience at Mrs Saldanha’s door.
Today Mrs Rasahdi was there. It was obvious that the woman had something to say, and the tension crept back into their discourse for the first time in fifteen years. Mrs Saldanha led her through the front room with all its photographs.
They sat on the back porch and talked around it for a while – the Khan girl’s marriage, the latest mess Mohammed Afsal’s son had got himself into, this new government – before the thing was said.
‘He got his date,’ said Mrs Rasahdi.
‘That right?’
‘Right.’ Pause. ‘October seven.’
They watched the cats circle each other in the grass.
Mrs Saldanha lit a Dunhill.
‘How’d he take it?’
‘Ain’t spoke to him.’ Pause. ‘Wanted you to know before anyone else, cause it’ll get around, and you’ll get calls from the police counselling people, Victim Support an that.’
Victim Support. You work for forty years. You raise five children. You run the Neighbourhood Watch and the TRA. And then suddenly you are just a victim and that’s it.
‘They ain’t called.’
‘Nah, I thought they might have, but just in case.’
‘They ain’t called.’
‘They shoulda called.’
Pause. ‘Thanks,’ said Mrs Saldanha. ‘I real appreciate that.’
‘Thank you.’
They talked on. The Begum girl’s right of abode application had been knocked back again. They were doing something with the post office that had been boarded up the last six years. Aras Qureishi’s boy seemed to be doing alright at the law firm on Stockport Road.
After Mrs Rasahdi was gone to take the dog for a walk down the cycle paths, Mrs Saldanha finished her chapter of the Jilly Cooper book, marked her place with the sleeve, and went inside. It took fifteen minutes to get up the stairs to the bathroom and back down. She tied her scarf around her head, checked she had everything she needed and had done everything correctly, and left the house.
School holidays, and the 169 was full of kids being cheeky and messing around, but by this time only the silliest kid would have dared to cheek Mrs Saldanha or mess her around. She looked out of the window and marked the changes that were happening even now. More For Sale signs on the Princess Road semis. Another totalled bus station left a signature of sparkling blue dust. The Polish place on the Cavendish Road corner had its shutters down at three o’clock.
Normally she visited the Southern Cemetery on three calendar days: the nineteenth of January, the twenty-third of July, and Mother’s Day. This of course was a special occasion. Mrs Saldanha traced her steps to the stone, thinking about how this whole thing started, the pale and tentative woman courtside, and there had been some minister who had praised her after what she’d said, but to Mrs Saldanha her gesture hadn’t been about forgiveness or redemption or even the grace of God (although she did believe in God); she just couldn’t see the point of having this pain and horror extend any further.
She stood graveside for a long time. She moved when she remembered that they closed the gates these days, due to racist and anti-Semitic desecration, plus druggies stripping the metal for cash. Best to get going before the caretaker did his sweep.
Turning around brought a sharp pain above average. Through the trees the sky was still blue but somehow fragile looking, waiting to burst. And yet she’d lived with this condition long enough to know pain didn’t mean rain. Still, in the treelined air there were hovering points of phosphorescence where she tread, like the brightest stars of night in the day.

By Max Dunbar
http://maxdunbar.wordpress.com/

Water under the bridge

From the lodge, it was a short walk along a mud and gravel path down to the riverbank. The temperature outside was pretty mild for the time of year all things considered, Old Frank observed, but those clouds look threatening. He pulled his rainhat further down over his brow, swept his index finger over his moustache, and pulled the wooden door shut behind him. As he did, he sent his rods clattering over onto the floor, and down the track, into the nettles beyond.
‘God shit it.’
Old Frank grunted from his diaphragm as he blundered down the path, after his equipment. As he reached his hand into the nettles to retrieve his rods, he held his face away from the plants, looking up to the sky as his fingers explored the undergrowth. He curled his fist around the cold, smooth plastic, and pulled out the bundle of rods.
‘Got you.’
Pausing to catch his breath, Old Frank looked down to where the riverbank curved below him.
‘Yep. As good as it gets.’
In a nearby willow tree, a bird responded: ‘Scooree, Scooree.’
A smile dispersed under the length of that moustache, and slowly, Old Frank made his way down the path.

Once he got down to the river, to his usual spot, he carefully placed his rods down and opened up his tackle box. His pink eyes swept the surface of the water, as his brain performed the necessary calculations that had become almost subliminal by now. He reached into his box, and retrieved the necessary weight, bait, float and hook to land a good one.
As he cast his first line in with a satisfying plop, Old Frank afforded himself a look around the valley: first downriver, then upriver, then across to the opposite bank, then back up behind him to his own lodge. He could hear the family next-door opening their sliding doors, and clattering out onto the balcony noisily. They were shouting to each other about breakfast, about their sleep, about their day.
Old Frank scowled, and then slumped into his camping chair. Last year, when he had come to the lodge, he had been the only one here. The adjacent holiday apartments were a new thing; an unwelcome blight on the previously unspoilt landscape. It wasn’t that Old Frank didn’t like children – he did. He was always polite to the family. Told them where to shop, where to take a walk. It’s just that this used to be his place, and now he had to share it.
He returned his focus to the flow of the river. Sticks and leaves floated past his gaze, then on downstream. ‘Ignore them Frank,’ he told himself, ‘this is your time. Private time. Time to reflect.’
The orange float danced on the moving currents, and Old Frank tried to think back to the time that he was a young man shouting to his kids over breakfast, but the memories wouldn’t come: too long ago, too long ago. His thoughts tuned out. The float bobbed. In the willow tree, the bird reminded him: ‘Scooree, scooree.’

Take a chainsaw to our future plans

There we stood, you and I, in the rectangle of lawn, blinking up at our future plans which stretched infinitely out above us. You, with a chainsaw hanging from your fists; me holding garden shears, twitching, overwhelmed.

Our future plans had been left to grow unhindered, and now branches forked and sprouted in confident fractals. For quite some time now, I had known that I had to do something about them. Birds were nesting in them. One branch of future possibility (the idea of working abroad for a year) almost reached the side of my house. It could cause structural damage and invite squirrels, you said.

We set to work. You tied the ladder to the trunk of our future plans, and then lodged yourself amidst the branches. I climbed the ladder to pass you the chainsaw, and then stood back to watch your artistry. One by one the boughs of our future plans fell to the ground: plans to write, plans to emigrate, plans for our children dropped and covered the rectangle of lawn. A sawdust of ideas never dreamt snowed down over my head and garden furniture.

When we reached the branch that contained my gap-year plans we paused to take stock of the situation. The branch was pointing in the wrong direction. Whichever way it was cut, it was going to fall towards the house. We didn’t have a rope that we could use to direct the fall, so we came up with a plan: as you sawed the branch, I would push against it using a ladder with all my might, therefore encouraging the branch in the right direction. It was worth a try: you sawed, I pushed. Nothing.

So you sawed a little more. This time, the future plan creaked and I began to feel the force of it looming down above me, threatening to fall. It was at this point that I spotted the flaw in our plan.
‘It’s leaning towards me.’
‘Push back. Harder.’
‘I can’t.’
‘OK,’ you paused momentarily, reviewing our options, ‘I think that you need to put the ladder down, carefully, and run away.’ Unquestioningly, I did as I was told. As I ran, my future plan crashed down behind me, mauling my TV aerial threateningly as it went. So it went on, all through the afternoon. Sometimes the plans fell in my garden, sometimes they fell over the neighbours' fence, and I would retrieve them. Eventually, you climbed back down the ladders, and we stood once again, you and I, looking up at our future plans, now trimmed back to much more manageable trunks. I felt relieved, but still you sought to reassure me: ‘They’ll grow back.’
‘I know.’
Our focus then shifted down to the ground where the now amputated plans lay in random, angular, bifurcated piles as deep as our hips. Neither of us spoke, but clearly the thought occurred to us at the same moment: ‘What are we gonna do with all this stuff?’

Blank canvas

A blank canvas stood, as it had for the last two years, on an easel in Guy’s front room. Guy held the sable brush across his top lip and frowned at the empty white space before him. His shoulders dropped a little as he realised that he had nothing. The inspiration the he had been waiting for was a train that would never arrive. Resigned, he put down the brush, and walked away. Maybe I should try something else, he thought, maybe I should write. How hard can that be?
With a beep and a grinding whirr, Guy started his old PC which lay beneath a frosting of dust and A4 paper in the spare room. For inspiration, Guy picked up an old paperback and flicked through the pages while the computer slowly booted up.
When the PC was finally ready, Guy opened a Word document, and for the second time today was confronted with an intimidating blank white sheet. He remembered hearing that, in his later years, Kingsley Amis would refuse to read anything that didn't begin with the words ‘A shot rang out.’ This seemed as good a place as any to start, so, using only his two index fingers, Guy tentatively poked the words onto the monitor in Times New Roman, font size 12:
‘A shot rang out.’
Satisfied with his beginning, Guy paused to reread his work: Yeh. This is good stuff. He was about to continue, when the words of another Amis (this time his son, Martin) came to mind: ‘A war on cliché’ - hmmm. Perhaps his opening was a little clichéd. And maybe it lacked description – an adverb might be useful. Guy moved his cursor back to the beginning, and changed the sentence:
‘Exquisitely, a shot rang out.’
Still not quite right. The ‘rang’ is wrong. With a click of the mouse, Guy returned to the sentence:
‘Exquisitely, a shot shot out.’
But it needs some conflict in there. Something to pique the reader’s attention:
‘Exquisitely, a shot shot sexily out’
Well, sex sells, he thought. He looked up once again at the sentence and sighed, realising that he was wasting his time. As a first sentence, it was fairly incomprehensible, and (he saw now) he had used the word ‘shot’ twice. Without even saving his work, he switched off the old PC at the wall, and left the room.

When he left his job two months ago people said that this would be the making of him. It would give him the space that he needed to create again. Time stretched ahead of him indefinitely, promisingly. Excited by his new freedom, he had left the office on his final day and rushed straight to the art supplies shop to buy a canvas - the canvas, still blank, that he now confronted once again in his front room. Guy tentatively picked up his paintbrush. Suddenly, a shot rang out.

Bait ball

The cerulean sea sparkled as the late afternoon sun sank lazily back into its chair. A voice from the loudspeaker drifted in and out as the wind blew it across deck. Trey had given up trying to tune his attention to it anyway. Right in front of them, a dolphin curled an arch above the water, then slipped back into its depths. The rest of the boat passengers cooed with amazement. Trey lowered the camcorder from his face.
‘So what’s the plan for tomorrow?’ he asked.
Sally looked blankly at him: ‘No plan. There was a group of Swiss girls back at the dorm that are moving down to Christchurch tomorrow. We could tag along with them.’
‘Yeh. We could. I dunno. I’m keen to get to the mountains. Get away from it all, y’know? I just feel the need to be away from people for a while.’
The speaker crackled and flanged behind them: ‘…out to the Pacific Ocean, where the pod will…’
‘Well, we don’t have to go to Christchurch. It was just a suggestion.’
‘I just think that this was supposed to be an escape, y’know? Limitless possibilities: go wherever we want to go, do whatever we want to do. But instead I feel like we’re being herded from one tourist trap to another; kept in orderly lines. It’s like I’m experiencing the world, but it’s a sanitized version. A hypo-allergenic, PG rated edit.’
‘…can exceed one thousand. This super-pod will remain…’
‘OK well let’s get off the tourist trail. Here…’
Sally took a map from her backpack and began to unfold it on the bench behind them. Trey rolled his eyes.
‘…we’re here, right?’ Sally looked up to check that she had his attention: ‘Where do you want to go? You choose. Any direction, any distance. We can hop on the bus, or we could look into hiring a car. If you want to get completely off the matrix, we should just put our bags on our back and just walk. Just keep walking until we find somewhere we like. We’ve got sleeping bags, the weather is fine: we could just wild camp somewhere.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Come on! You’re the one moaning that we don’t have adventures. I’m offering it to you now. Let’s go! Forget the Lonely Planet guides, just choose somewhere that looks cool on the map and let’s just go.’
Trey looked out towards the green hills that rose from the sea with impossible geometry. The footpaths and lanes beyond them beckoned him, tempted him with a siren’s song. He turned back to Sally, opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. Sally looked at him expectantly.
‘Maybe,’ he answered, ‘we should just move on to Christchurch with the rest of the gang.’
‘…a pod will control a school of fish while individual members take turns ploughing through the school, feeding. The tightly packed school of fish is commonly known as a bait ball.’

Moving images of you, which exist without your knowledge

Without your knowledge or consent, a small collection of video footage exists. The clips vary in their quality, and depict you from the age of nine to the present day. Uncatalogued and widely dispersed, you will never see these films, and this is just as it should be.
On the memory card of a mobile phone, now unused in a kitchen drawer, you eternally perform karaoke. In the footage you show an uncharacteristic lack of reserve, emboldened by drink and the sounds of the Sex Pistols.
At a Fiesta, in a village in Spain, you were once interviewed by the local news crew. Remember? Your attempts at Spanish were dire; you were aware at the time. Delivered with enough conviction to impress your family, but hilarious to the natives. A man named Sal92 was so amused by your nonsensical ramblings that he posted the clip on Youtube, where it has received a not immodest 4991 hits to date.
Various camcorder footage, on VHS and DVD sits in cupboards, TV units and bookshelves across the country. Old friends, ex-lovers, and your mother never watch them anymore, but can’t quite bring themselves to throw them out.
But the most violating of them all is the footage displayed above the reception desk of a college that you once attended. You were so young then, and you stood apart from the world. You didn’t feel as though you were a part of anything. Rather, everything was against you, and you against it. It was a gloriously happy time, this life of rebellion. The ‘not-fitting-in’ was a badge that you wore with pride: the outsider, the rebel. However, this clip does not reflect your unique other-ness: on a college trip to EuroDisney, you stand in front of a parade, dancing like a chicken. Unbeknown to you, this clip has been added to a promotional video for the college. A Feel-Good, Make You Proud commercial designed to show happy, achieving students. The video was used on the college website, and at recruitment drives where your antics regularly induced a titter from the students present.
Now a little dated, the clip is played on a loop through a large flat-screen TV in the reception area of the college. On and on it goes ad infinitum, and each day, a weary and embittered librarian walks past your image, and he sees you parading around like that, and every morning, without ever knowing you, he curses you under his breath.

A Box within a box

Quite a spectacle I must have presented to Mrs Callow, the housekeeper, as I stood at the doorway of the Fairfax home dripping with the evening's vagaries. She ushered me in, and bade me sit down by the kitchen fireside while she fetched blankets. She apologised that the master was not in residence that day, and feared that I had wasted my journey. I entreated her to sit with me a while, perhaps she could help me in my quest. With some amount of cajoling, she finally acquiesced, and her tongue required little loosening once the subject of Master Fairfax's bride was raised.
‘Rangy was she, an' fair too; on a good day, she could command the eyes of many a Gloucester gent about town. Yet there was somethin' about 'er as was cold – in her nature, see? Of all the time I spent with my lady ne'er a conversation did we have. Some say as it was 'er austere nature that led to their comeuppance. All's I'll say is: he were never truly happy since their wedding day. Oh Sir! Sure enough, he loved ‘er, but his whole countenance did change on that fateful day, and still we all wait in vain for the sunshine to return to his cheek. He was such a lovely boy; so full of joy and mischief. Sometimes I fear that the Devil 'imself took his soul on that day: such was the change!
'Once herself had gone – aye, and taken a good piece of his heart with her, he set sail Sir: bound for Italy, and a new life. Still, Mr Cottersgill and I stayed here, tending the house and gardens ready for his return. Occasionally, he would send word back. The letters would always be addressed to my lady, but, I'm ashamed to say Sir, that we did read them, Mr Cottersgill and I. Only because we were so sure in our belief that she was never to return - and we were ever so worried about his wayfaring, see? T'was only in master's interests that we broke his confidence.’
‘Do you still possess any of these missives?’ asked I.
‘Sir I do,’ she replied, and fumbling in a desk-drawer, retrieved a tea-stained letter that she proceeded to unfold in front of me, ‘and this 'un is the most troublin' of the lot.
‘“My Dearest Isabel,” it begins, as they all do, “I write to thee in the fervent hope that you have returned to Tibberton, and await my return. Though I am far away, the thought of your winsome visage sustains me and gives me the will to go on. Italy is a verdant and fecund land; rolling mountains and groves of olives abound. The natives are civilized, to a degree, and for the most part, welcoming. During the days here, I travel from town to town with a trusty asino to aide me. During the evenings, I satiate my hunger with simple bread, cheese and vino, and then slip into slumber in dreams of you. The other night, my dreams were of a most disturbed nature: In my reveries, I was myself, and yet not myself, living in a future world in which menacing iron coaches dominated the roads, and great castles of glass and steel loomed vertiginously towards the heavens. In this fantasy, I sat at a desk on the third floor of such a tower. In front of me was a magical looking-glass that was a portal to the world. Using a tool made of some unearthly material, I could seek information on this looking-glass, and the whole of human history and thought was there before me. Despite this bounty of knowledge, I was weary of the machine, and chose instead to bide my time writing stories under the adopted nom-de-plume of Xianjon. I held my hands like a pianist over the looking-glass tool, and as my fingers danced, the words appeared on the glass before me:
‘“The parcel had remained on my table since lunchtime. Though I had an idea what the contents would be, I had stopped myself from opening. Each time I passed the table, the cardboard box coquettishly winked at me, and beckoned me over. Eventually, I could resist its overtures no longer. Digging my house keys from my trouser pocket, I scored the tape that sealed the parcel, and eagerly opened the flaps to reveal – another box; identical to the first box, only smaller. I slid this second box from its parent, and rotated it in my hands. No clue was evident, so I repeated the same action, slitting the shiny tape again to reveal the content, which was – another box. Feeling that I had encountered the least decorative Matryoshka ever, again I slipped the box from its sleeve, and cut it open to confirm my suspicion that it contained only another box. At this point I paused to review my options. It is very likely, I thought, that this will continue for some time. I will open a box to reveal another box, and so on, ad infinitum. The alternative is that I could place the box back on the table, and dispose of the already opened containers. Caught in this limbo, I weighed the contents of the parcel in my hand, unsure of how to proceed.
‘“The dream is most unusual is it not? And so vividly realised were all the details that it seemed to be true. Perhaps it is prescient in some way, though I know not what it means. I send you all my love, and hope and pray for your health and your happiness. Until the day that we can be together again, I remain eternally yours, Edmund Fairfax.”
‘And there it ends Sir,’ Mrs Cotterill folded the letter in her lap and looked towards me, a state of puzzlement across her brow, ‘I know nothing more of his travels, and since his return, there has been no mention of these dreams. I am only grateful that return he did, in spite of it all.’
‘Indeed.’ I replied, crossing over to the kitchen window to survey the weather conditions outside.
‘Mrs Cotterill, I thank you most graciously for your assistance. As the rain has subdued now, I must take my leave. There is no need to see me out. Good day.’
I placed my hat upon my head and made my way out to the desolate landscape that surrounds us.