Short Fiction
Issue #1
The Pretty Petty Thieves
Huw
10:49am Saturday
You know what my favourite part o the day is? The morning glory man. No matter who y’are you can wake up and say good fuckin morning with a half hour power shower and a shoutabout.
‘IS IT MYEEEEEE EEEMAGINASHUN …. /
OR HAVE I FINALLY FOUND SOMETHIN
WORTH WAITIN FOR?’
The day can go either way: go to work, pretend you work for yeself not the bank. Bertol Brecht said that jackin a bank was a far lesser crime than startin one. Clever bloody Krauts.
‘I WAS LOOKIN FOR SOME ACSHEEUN
BUT ALL THAT I FOUND WAS
CIGARETTES & ALCOHOL’
Or it can flash past you. Especially when you live where I live – Steel city, the sleepy city where anything goes. Home to Pulp, Cutlery, Meadow-hell and the World Snooker Chamionships.
I’m Huw by the by. Originally from the land o legend Wales but resident here in Sheffield for the foreseeable future. I came for the scene and stayed for the green. That’s what I’m talking about when I say the day goes either way – you wake up and something isn’t quite right, and then the morning joint. An addict will find any excuse mate I tell you. ‘It’ll help chill me out’ or ‘I deserve it’ or even ‘one little one then I’m jackin it in’. Ha ha ha we all knew one was never enough that’s why getting high was so pleasant – it was an excuse to Write Off The Day. You spark up, and let Jimmy Cliff penetrate all other sounds til you lose yourself in absurdity.
It had to stop.
As I climbed out the shower I promised myself today would be the day I’d change the fuckin world. John was stood in the hallway outside our beaten up, minimalist excuse for a bathroom. John’s my housemate – witty, intelligent, and the biggest dropout I’d ever really cared about.
‘Mornin Jonno’ I muttered. His eyes were dark, a sure sign that he’d again had little to no sleep.
‘You gotta stay off the many beans boyo’. I said it nicely – you gotta be cruel to be kind. Mostly I was a smoker and o course any Welshman worth is salt can hold the beer. Sure I have the odd party night at the raves but fair play everything in moderation – see, with John it was more than a spice for the occasional curry. He had to be higher than the Hindu Kush at least twice a week and this was worrying.
‘Why you gotta always take half an hour to wash?’ John spluttered.
‘Sorry bro. The old shit shower shave’
‘It’s Saturday you Welsh muppet! Who d’you want to impress with a shave??’ I always laughed at John’s jokes. Not just the jokes you see but cos I appreciated that he was trying you know? They’ve quick wits the Scouses. Not the stupid thieving cunts that I was led to believe. I’m from a small village ye see and stereotypes is all the source material we have. I mean there’s Scallys there, fair play but there’s scallys everywhere. John was one o those blokes you could never quite get to the bottom of. Full of surprises. We got locked outa the flat last week, a mate’s birthday. It’d been a long night down town when we discovered neither of us had our keys. Well, no joke no lie he whacks out a gizmo and a few clicks on later we’re in.
‘So it’s true your type know a bit about dirty break-ins?’ I was pushing the limit but it was meant as praise.
‘My type? You Welsh prick you should be thanking me we’re back inside the flat.’
‘The benefits of knowing an ugly bugger like you’ I said clapping him on the back.
‘HEY!’ He loomed large over me, his six two frame three inches taller but skinnier than mine. ‘We’re not ugly … we’re the … ‘ John stumbled into me, leaning heavily on the way through the door frame.
‘We’re the Pretty Petty Thieves’ John finished. I guess he was unknowingly prophetic at that time, and not just because of the comedown in a dingy hall – if only thieving had been the worst to come after that bright, otherworldly morning.
Walk in the Snow
Sunday, bloody Sunday. Paul is not religious – who is these days? – yet he’s always felt this should be a day of rest. Well, you work most of your waking life, you know, Sunday’s your day. Paul’s a jack of no trades, has ended up at the DWP downtown. Well, we’ll all be pensioners soon. All he wants is a glass of OJ. Maybe put some Kinks or Bowie on loud and do the hoovering. But twice a week, Paul mentors a kid. A scruffy, Rotherham fourteen year old. You know, violent Dad and that, needs a male in his life according to South Yorkshire social. Paul secretly thinks another male’s the last thing the kid needs, but he goes anyway. Karma points, you know? Besides, despite the kid’s complete lack of thanks, they both enjoy it more than you’d think.
Outside his window a light blanket of snow covers the back garden, pashmina soft, pure snow. The grim Walkley weather won’t stop him, no no no. His flat shares a back garden with four lanky students. They’re good lads but they’ve covered his little square of green with beer cans and fag ends and please that better not be what I think it is. No social conscience whatsoever lads. At least the snow has done its work here too, for all is an even, celestial white, just one can of Boddington’s conspicuous beneath the window. Paul shrugs, pulls on a duffle coat and jeans from the armchair pile, and steps out into the snow.
Maybe he isn’t cut out to be a Father figure. Jesus, he’s only 27. In this society that makes you a boy. The cult of everlasting youth – no-one expects you to grow up. Paul’s trying to write a book. Set himself up and get away. And where to begin? What to say that hasn’t been said? David Lodge, this academic type, says the ‘commonest sign of a lazy or inexperienced writer is inconsistency in handling point of view’. Whatever, David. Paul’s taken advice from older white men his whole life. Lazy? Well, you’ve got him there. Inexperienced? Yeah, technically he’s not written a novel. But Paul’s gift is precisely his inconsistency. Point of view? He’ll try them all. Show the kid there’s more than one voice. Paul will show every one, tell the kid never to stop listening, there’s only one rule and that’s change. What he can give the kid is flux, objectivity, honesty. No more monologue, David. Paul is no Thatcher’s child, he is the middle child of history, interpreter, negotiator. It’s a babble out there, Paul thinks as he nudges a broken bottle off the pavement A riot. The world must seem very confusing for the kid right now. His Dad’s last visit he held the kid’s face to the radiator. No wonder he doesn’t say much.
Hillsborough to the left, ski slope just visible, the hump of Crookes to the left. Here I am, stuck in the middle of hills. This place is Rome with denim. He sighs, glad to be wrapped up warm and feel the thrill of ice-cold Pennine air rushing to greet him. OUCH! He’s walked into someone, they were both daydreaming, so sorry mate. What the hell? The guys shaking his head, walking off muttering obscenities. Surely if Paul didn’t see where he was going, said sorry, the bloke could at least make eye contact. They’d shared a moment, a bump. Either the bloke meant to do it, and he’s a tool, or he didn’t mean to, and he should say sorry. No manners. Paul sighs – he’ll be late.
The Historian
He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him, and writes these words with his pen: ‘I am going to kill myself tomorrow’. Immediately afterwards, he realised this was true. It helps John to write it down; it helps to know that the multitudes of confused, depressing memories will be reduced and aligned to one, defining intention. He sighs, satisfied to have begun his work.
Standing, John looks about his dreary North London flat. How did his story come to this end? Which memories point to a beginning as such. As he peers out at the fetid Finsbury evening, John ponders the next step. How can he begin? He cannot ‘open himself’ to be the passive recipient of memory, he must mould it.
He takes up the pen again: ‘History regards cataclysmic events as impossible before they happen and inevitable after they have’. This is how we anthologise our own lives. ‘Is this how my death will be remembered?’ John feels a desperation to escape his own labyrinth of concentric thoughts. Even as a child, before his career as historian, John felt the need to restructure his own past. ‘Napoleon spent years on lonely Elba, repainting his past and retracing cultural memory of his life … a self made man. I only need a few more hours’. John’s memory willingly folds the events of his life into a narrative, labelling cause and effect, circling and flirting with truth. The words flow until he has written four pages. Self righteous, indifferent reasons as to why a led to b let to c etc until the logical necessity of z, his death. The skill of the narrative he has traced is his legacy, the note his final work. Yet his joy is fleeting. The brief reconnection with his past is conceited, his life is nothing more than a series of events, his identity not fixed bur mutable by something as insignificant as this note. Finally, he accepts that the very act of explaining his life and suicide must necessarily omit much and distort more. The note then, is pointless, but comforting: it gives him an ordered past. Twisting the lid off the angular bottle, he swallows all of the pills remaining. For the first time in years, John is genuinely excited to see what will happen next.