Shadows in the Spotlight

 All too often, a moment will turn up that I think worthy of a Chesterton-style write-up. And I let it float by, its magic left somewhere in the inter-dimensional heap of subconscious sparks.

I wonder do other people experience these seconds of hyper-awareness. Like, a haze descends over a scene, making it seem very significant. Is that the universal subconscious informing me of somebody’s life turning upside down? An omen of some sort? Or just my own partially damaged brain fogging over, while the excitable mind reads too deeply into it?

---

One of these meaningful moments was waiting for a delayed train with everybody including the operators completely clueless about the correct platform for the next departure. It creates a real sense of camaraderie to share exasperation and work out an immediate problem with a nearby stranger. I still remember the quirky ginger lady with a determined look in her twinkling blue eyes as we took our seats in the train on Platform 2.

“You look like you’re poised to run across the platform,” the bearded man behind her told me with a grin.

“I have an odd feeling it’s actually going to be that one,” I replied. “What do they know that we don’t?” For more than half the punters had remained on Platform 1 when the confused voice over the loudspeaker had said the Platform 2 train would be next to leave towards London.

“No, they said it was this one,” the redhead said irritably. “Those people may be going to Brighton or something.”

I had my doubts that fifty people would be heading from Luton to Brighton on such a day as this, bypassing the much more obvious King’s Cross, but held tight until the Platform 1 train did indeed turn up.

We all ran across to it, whereupon a black man inquired, “is this just going straight to King’s Cross? Is it a fast one?” of the general public, none of whom knew the answer.

He decided it would be quicker for him to rearrange his journey via King’s Cross anyway.

People are fed up when public services go wrong, but they suddenly realise everybody else is as lost as them. 

I still see those passengers’ faces clearly in my mind from the simplest interaction. How easy it is to forget that all these bodies taking up our coveted seats are individuals with personalities we had not yet imagined!

The combination of character traits is infinite. It may be a chore to launch a conversation with a stranger, taking a gamble on the cut of their jib, ending up potentially dragged into a time-wasting exercise. This is why discussing the matter at hand is a great opportunity to realise we’re all as helpless in this world as the next man, cool though he may look in his Ray-Bans and salty-pepper beard.

As the Platform 1 train ambled between fields and industrial units, I no longer recall what I was doing aside from grinding my jaw as it slowed to bicycle pace through north London on its way into King’s Cross Station, spitting on every passenger’s schedule with its lumbering chug.

I no longer recall whether I was reading or writing or planning the next move to reduce my inevitable tardiness. 

One thing I do recall is that redheaded woman exclaiming, “just go already!” from her seat nearby me in the idling beast. I wished I had some quip to follow up her outburst, a sense of entirely unnecessary guilt rising up inside for leaving her hanging. So I remember her, but will she remember me and my bland silence? Was the guilt towards her or myself?

I am naught but a shadow flitting between stations. When no attention falls upon me, I disappear, unaware of my face and body. When it eventually comes, every inch of me burns with self-importance. Caught by surprise in shadow form, the fire takes time to ignite, and the mind struggles to think fast.

Is everyone just a shadow until another puts the spotlight on them?

Let us all shine lights on each other to keep our minds in practice and our bodies alive.

Bye Bye Crack Den

 The crack den across from my flat is finally up for demolition.

Walking past it this sunny evening, I observed a variety of different objects in its front yard.

To begin with, my eye was caught by the simple yet complex beauty of the spring-fresh flowers blooming in the overgrown yard, daisies laughing towards the sun and butterfly bushes flopping dozily at passersby.

The grass, largely concealed under the rubbish, was long, electric green. Nature knows not the concept of “wrong neighbourhoods”.

Among duller items like an unused roll of bubble wrap or a castaway glass coffee table, lay a kick drum from the nearby gospel church and a long pink wig, possibly worn by the sex workers – or were they slaves? - who had been using the building for their business. Or was it someone else’s business?

I half-expected to see human excrement but it may have been buried under the well-fertilised lawn.

The demolition men had set up a conference table and chairs just outside the entrance door, through which I recall watching members of the underworld passing day in and day out for various nefarious purposes.

On the day the developers had boarded it up, I remember hearing local junkies gossiping about it in their unmistakable, aggressive tone: “how are people supposed to get in there now? All their stuff’s in there!”

I wondered whether junkies really were constantly on edge or if, like the Russian language, simply sound pissed off to those who don’t speak it.

There was a tinge of humanity to that man’s exclamation of sympathy for the squatters who had lost access to their home. But they hadn’t lost access, they were just being more discreet about it. One of the doors was left uncovered and people were using it carefully, albeit more nefariously. I’m pretty sure I saw an old man accompanied by a younger one sneak into that yard one night for a blowjob.

One morning some men in balaclavas came out of there, body language hyper as could be. Upon hitting the high street, I walked through a small gathering of men of which one spoke on the phone: “phwoar man, it’d been months since I had some pussy … fifteen!”

The last word ominously echoed through my mind as I reached the train station unscathed.

I also once saw a hooker with a Picasso face walk angrily out of there with her large Polish client, clearly having been thwarted by the newly concealed entrance.

Another image that springs to mind was that of a man easing a rubbish bag, evidently filled with his belongings, through the first floor window on a string down onto the lawn days after the boarding-up. I was out on my porch smoking a joint that night, and I caught his eye. He glared at me and I nervously waved, to which he disappeared into the depths of the room. The paranoia that swept through me that night… well, I imagined only the worst – he knew I’d made them board up the building, he knew where I lived, he hated the comfortably homed, he’d vandalise my flat or beat up my partner or rape me …

What had driven me to the police for the first time in my life was waking up one morning to a furious crackhead screaming someone’s name and throwing rocks through the windows. He had been pacing like a wild animal in his black tracksuit and cap, aiming accurately at every single pane from 6 to 9a.m. as I shivered in fear that my building would be next. The angst of having purchased a flat so ill located next to such feral inhabitants wound my innards ever tighter.

Anyway, now they’re gonna pave paradise, and put up a parking lot.

Acquaintances on a train

 It was an apocalyptic spring evening in London. The wind blew harsh cold air in everyone’s faces outside. Barney dropped his wallet on the way out the electronic gates of his City building. Ruby dropped her keys as she struggled to unlock the rusty chain of her bike, locked up outside a chain restaurant. Faces looked grey, not all of them of course. Barney and Ruby both knew that their mental state tainted the outer world they witnessed. The knowledge made it look  no less frightening, though, when a healthy-looking homeless man with blood down his front came to beg for food money in the train carriage.

Ruby offered him a full pack of cigarettes; she was trying to quit, she said. The man made an off-colour joke about it not helping him to eat! She immediately regretted choosing him as the beneficiary of this actually quite expensive gift. Twenty-packs cost something like 20 quid nowadays, and he gave her barely a thank you. He’d probably beaten the last guy up for his last hit of whatever it was. She returned her face into her book, and Barney averted his eyes as the threatening young man passed him by.

The trained wizzed past green and yellow fields rendered grey and blue by the English evening light. People stared emptily into their phone screens, proverbial “do not disturb” signs plastered over their faces, many of which would have been beautiful to look at. 

Barney was particularly drawn to the look of a sporty young woman with long hair pulled back in a half-pony and an outrageous fake tan. He was initially disappointed with the usual British habit of hiding one’s beauty under millimetres of fakery, but her hands were so dainty, the pink fingernails so gently pointed as she scratched her nose, that he lost himself staring. She was watching mindless videos on her screen with the little wireless earbuds feeding noise into her delicate young ears. He wondered what the depths of her soul would have to say about the vapid filler she was feeding it, both through the phone and through the syringes which had ever-so-subtly enhanced her lips.

Though she had the lithe body of a mare, she removed a can of Pepsi from her bag and nearly dropped it. Barney thought of Sigmund Freud and the way he attributed minor errors to the very intentional reign of the subconscious. Something inside her knew this was not a good habit, but she absent-mindedly proceeded to open the bottle and glug its contents, one eye following the insignificant events on the screen.

Ruby meanwhile had been observing a young mulatto in a black hoodie and tracksuit bottoms. He had very white trainers. His face looked exactly like something out of a nineties children’s cartoon she had loved. He was so endearing, and he was least of all absorbed in his screen. Such people were a minority in these times. She rested her eyes on his childish yet angular face, his one-inch afro, his big black eyes and his lanky figure. He never once returned the look, though Ruby was not bad to look at herself.

Men who returned women’s looks were a minority by then, too. 

She wondered what he had on his mind that kept him so disinterested in the world of his phone. It seemed serious, or maybe he was just a zen guy. Was that such an impossibility, Ruby? Why don’t you get off your damned phone?

Barney had returned his gaze to the hole in his sleeve which had opened up throughout the work day, as he had picked at it in a state of stress. He had had to issue two corrections, one of which was his. Usually a genial chatty type, he had cursed at his screen for hours, having to stay behind after everyone else had gone. Ruby had tried to engage him in conversation but only managed to awkwardly say the wrong thing, so she had gingerly moved on and whispered a goodbye to the empty office.

They did not know they were on the same train, but Barney lived a couple stops before Ruby, in a fancier part of the suburbs. Ruby was on her way to the same place the hoodie guy was getting out at. London had been apocalyptic: Ruby’s house was already in purgatory.

She stepped out the train to quiet minority onlookers and was pleasantly surprised to see a few healthy young faces in the station. It was always a double-take when London seemed to crop up so far out in the Styx; a young hippie with hip-length hair and dreamy doe eyes? A sprightly couple deep in conversation at the station entrance? These must be passers-through. She rolled along to the main road, greeted by the more characteristic alcoholics cursing the rain from underneath the parking roof. This is the ___ I know, thought Ruby.

Barney meanwhile had already made his way through the elegant rows of Victorian houses, not a tossed-out bin in sight (Ruby had had to walk through a pile of used nappies to park up her bike) and came in through the front door of his own. His wife had made dinner and she was upstairs taking a bath. All was well and nobody needed know of his day at work which had affected him so much but somehow all stayed inside that little box in his bag, He shook himself off, hung up the day’s gear and shuffled to the bath with his wife Barbie.

“Daddy!!” screamed one of his small children. This he had not seen coming: they were supposed to be at their grandmother’s.

“What are you doing here Celia?” he asked, bewildered.

“Daddy! Mummy says you need to eat yesterday’s leftovers, the food is for grandmummy!!” Celia informed him.

How utterly rude, he thought. He opened the bathroom door only to get it sharply in the nose: both the door and the smell from inside. Barbie was not bathing, but defecating. He apologised and headed to the kitchen with Celia tailing him closely.

“You can heat up the chicken and the rice but you can’t touch the rabbit stew, daddy!” she was thrilled to announce, knowing it was his favourite.

“Why on earth not, Celia darling?” he said bemusedly.

“It’s for grandmummy! She’s gotten ill,” Celia explained.

“Oh dear.”

He felt serene and ready to comfort his wife for the rest of that evening. She always fretted so for her mother, though he had never quite seen the person behind the wrinkles. It seemed to him that ever since he’d first met her all those decades ago, she had been just a skinny lump of wrinkles. Like a Swiss cheese, somehow more air than substance. But Barbie adored her, and Barbie was spoiling her with her best recipe and far be it from Barney to impede on that decision.

Celia ran back upstairs as he lobbed the leftovers on a plate and into the microwave. It was not all bad. He was home.

---

Ruby meanwhile had been dragged into a conversation with one of her local ruffians. She’d tried to give him her other pack of cigarettes, and this had had quite the opposite effect. He took it extremely seriously, for he knew the value of this gift was more than two days’ work for him. He thanked her so much that it had attracted the attention of all his friends nearby and they, unlike the youth in the train, were not afraid to look a handsome woman in the face.

“It’s OK, really, I’m trying to cut it out,” she was saying.

“You’re lovely, you know that?”

“Think she meant it?”

“I’d give her a bit if she asked.”

“Not every day you see one up close.”

“Nice one, that,” they gossiped like Tuscan nonnas. 

The one who had been lucky enough to receive her offering was following her, much to her chagrin. This meant she would need to operate a detour, remaining in peril’s way for longer but keeping him ignorant to her place of residence; the more effective long-term choice.

She politely said she hoped he would share it with his mates back there, to which he expectorated, “those cunts? Not a fucking chance! Who’m I, mother Theresa? Fuck.”

This was a frightening outburst for a girl alone in the street with a grateful but angry homeless man. She did her utmost to hide the fear, but like dogs they could smell it. 

“You’re a lovely girl.”

“You’re following me.”

“What you mean?”

“I would like to be alone, please,” she explained.

“I’m going that way, too,” he said lamely. “But you’re beautiful, you know that.”

“I do know, thank you.”

“You ever go out with a bloke like me?”

“I’m very happy where I am now, thank you.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“No, I haven’t.”

They were still walking in tandem, he a half-step behind her.

“There’s more to us street rats than meets the eye, you know.”

“I’ve no doubt about that.”

“Why don’t you give it a try, lovely?”

“Because I’m very happy where I am now and do not seek to change my life.”

“Well darling. I’m quite keen to change mine, and didn’t you mention stopping smoking? That’s a change.”

She had been lying about that. She had actually picked up a cheap ten-pack from an airport on her way back from holiday a few months prior and wanted to get rid of them.

“It’s… not really relevant…”

He took her arm, “I’m joking, darling, don’t panic.”

The touch was the border between calculation and panic, veering sharply towards the latter.

Ruby turned pale and stopped in her tracks. “Are you going to abduct me, sir? For giving you a pack of cigarettes?”

The question stalled him. He did not see himself as an abductor. He was only trying to charm a young woman who must have taken a liking to him, if she was to be so generous.

She continued, “please may I go ahead alone? Can you let me go.” 

Ruby knew that tears would either release her from the situation or make it ten times worse, so she fought them back and attempted a straight, detached expression.

“You look like you’re gonna cry,” taunted the jilted lover.

“Give me a cigarette,” said Ruby in a spark of inspiration, “and leave me alone. And if  you don’t leave me alone, you are actually hurting the one person who helped you all day, if not all month or year. And I’ll be a victim of your cruelty. And we’ll both have to live with that.”

A cigarette graced her fingers. “Don’t give up what you love, babycakes,” said the alcoholic with a grin. “It’s all I was trying to teach you.” He lit it for her and walked away to his whooping entourage.

DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 9 Oct 2020

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 I handed it all in today, and well, I am as always torn between deep foreboding of being ever the jobless wonder dependent on loving men, and being joyfully secure in said dependence.

I fear, of course, the pursuit of musical accomplishment, as it has always failed me before due to severe insecurity. However, I have clearly made great strides and must continue along the good path. Enough said on that topic, for this is the diary of journalism.

I will now reflect on the job I did for such a short time and yet gleaned so much from. I see this reverence for old and experienced journalists is beyond me – N--- is certainly experienced, but still makes glaring typographic and accuracy errors on a regular basis in his copy. Is that carelessness due to old age? Perhaps he would indeed have been mellow and permissive, making the job easier than I made it in my own mind.

But the constant feeling that I am not doing the job right would have irked me constantly. This is the problem with solitary and self-motivated work. I could just choose not to run after a poor grieving mother for comment and tell the boss there had been nobody at the inquest, and maybe get away with it, but my work ethic would clash with such an approach. Meanwhile, harassing somebody who doesn’t want to end up in the papers clashes with my life ethic.  

I found myself siding with petty criminals and normal folks in so many cases, but as reporters we must always err on the side of the authority and the law. There is no such thing as calling the status quo into question. And that just proved my suspicions from the very beginning. Over and out!

DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 8 Oct 2020

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 And so, today, I quit. I called the boss and I said, you know how I was already thinking about it before, well, I have been thinking about it again, and well, I quit.

He said he would probably be able to convince me again, but it wasn’t worth the fight every fortnight. He said I might regret it in a month’s time. He said it’s what I trained for.

Thing is, music is what I trained for well before this, and it is what I keep coming back to. I think through these jobs I have been building up confidence on a world level, proving to myself that I am no worse but also no better than any other career-climbing shmuck and I should just get over myself in every which way and just pursue what is within me, which is art, which I have always felt to be art and have always repressed through pure insecurity and, paradoxically, huge ego.

So I found this week too hard. Fumbling around for a story that’s not there, twisting someone’s pain and misery into a cheap sell? and then pretending like it’s for the greater good… no… it’s not. I want to hold the powerful to account, and if that involves crawling over the squirming bodies of the poor dusty folk at the bottom, I don’t want it. Perhaps I am doing some of my own virtue signalling here, but I have sufficient confidence that this will remain for my eyes only for the rest of time.

Life is too short, and I don’t want to be looked at like a filthy bug on the bottom of people’s shoe; some ugly sight at the back of the room that nobody wants to see or hear; an intruder, a paid gossip, a hideous troll. No! I am young, beautiful and I like positive attention, is that so bad? Only one life…

I have observed the obvious flaws in the system now, as more and more lockdown-related tragedies come to light and I have begun reporting them. It’s good to see myself proven right, as to how terribly isolation takes a toll on human life and sanity, but I don’t need to be in the midst of this, so powerless and constantly infuriated. I want to be able to delete my Twitter account and see no more of it.

Today’s story was one of two gay guys who lived together – a sorry-looking landlord of about 40 and a young ruffian off the streets, his tenant. The third tenant seems just to be an innocent bystander. The two characters in this play seem to consider each other great friends, but I think it’s a real opportunistic relationship going on there. And even though the older one takes pains to affirm that there was no romantic involvement whatsoever, I’m sure there was at least infatuation on his part, or why would he do all this for the poor street rat? He takes him in to his home at intervals and puts up with his drink and drug addiction, writes him into his will. The love is deep. The street rat is a lucky little bugger. But lockdown comes and sends him rabid.

So while the older friend is all up in arms about the new rules that have just come into effect two weeks ago, the young man just wants to get off with his new boyfriend. The stickler is all uncomfortable about any outside people coming into the household, and so his little friend has to set up a distraction in order for the boyfriend to get in through the back and into his garden flat. Landlord disbelieves the foolish distraction and, annoyingly, checks his doorbell camera. 

Might I suggest that the advent of ubiquitous cameras into our lives have been a source for more harm than good? The camera proves the distraction was false, but the culprit has indeed snuck a foreign body on to the premises. 

He sends an irritating, passive aggressive message: ‘Only person I see is your boyfriend. Have him leave now, please.’ Understandably, the defendant gets irritated to fuck and smashes his phone against the wall. Somewhat more insanely, he gets a cool vintage razor out of his bedside table and heads into the house and up the stairs into the landlord and best friend’s room, says ‘I’m so sorry’, asks for a hug, then slashes the shit out of him and keeps trying to do so until the landlord grapples him down with a duvet, blood still pouring out of his throat.

All the parties involved refuse to acknowledge the sheer annoyingness of such sticklery for completely ridiculous, arbitrary rules put in place already two weeks earlier with no hint of letting up. They are all, including his defence lawyer, flouting the idea that ‘there simply couldn’t have been the slightest reason for such anger. For some reason, Mr Landlord’s text sent him into a blind rage. Well, yes. Blind it most likely was, but is it so incomprehensible that the guy can no longer bear the restrictions and needs a good shag? At least, at the very least, acknowledge that the ageing, snaggle-toothed landlord was a bit of a cowish, docile stickling motherfucker who clearly wanted to fuck the cute and vulnerable young boy he had fallen in love with. Couldn’t bear the thought of him having another man on the property, especially breaking **gasp** god forbid! The unquestionable lockdown!

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DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 29 Sep 2020

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 Something I’ve learned: neither politicians nor journos care about the social distancing measures they all screech to the public about day in and day out. After seeing hordes of journalists swarming round a police station blatantly undistanced and unmasked, I felt a combination of relief and frank disbelief. As they peddle these fears onto the ever-more-suspecting masses, they themselves enjoy exemption from the so-called rules. Same, we know, as those in power, who flaunt their disregard for the restrictions that they not only forcefully impose but create.

It was cute today to speak to the police officer, saying he really liked sitting in court and listening to all these well-spoken people, with his genuine smile and wry blue eyes. A loveable cop, paired with a clever prosecutor who got me to keep mum about most names in the story. To be honest, I would have done so anyway, though N--- would have squeezed it out of me.  But here I had to be firm as I had promised. It seemed truly needless to publish names of people who were victims of a crime and who might become victims of even more serious ones through publication of such information.

Also I enjoyed the Sunday outing to this odd part of Surrey that had a sort of rich gypsy vibe to it, littered with derelict buildings and strange half-houses that are probably expensive but seem shanty-like.

People with flat caps and joyful billy goats and intense black eye make-up, complaining “they’ll blame it all on the travellers, I just know it” and “an explosion!? What about the horses down there? The poor things will have been spooked to death!” - something, I won’t go into what, has put me off horse ladies. They really are slightly mad, and some horses are too fragile, overall useless creatures in our day and age.

And a completely random cozy little pub in the midst of it all, unsuspecting and quaint though not without an unfortunate modern veneer – all but inevitable with modern expectations. The Daily Mail man and I bemoaned the mask that covered the face of an adorable, keen young blonde waitress who was practically shivering with the desire to please and do well.

I suppose the Sun and the Mail aren’t really the ones peddling the fear so much, and they have been the most chilled I’ve met so far. The Sun woman actually shook my hand, which was a real joy to hold and behold. She was called Francine, too!

It is truly time I handed in my social media subscriptions and started to live in the real world. I used to, back in the pub times, now it’s just all about politics until the vomit comes out through my nose.

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DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 24 Sep 2020

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“Every good reporter starts out at a local paper. Then you build your way up until they trust you with the big stuff.”

This is what I was told upon disclosing my qualms regarding the job. All I can hear in my mind is “careerist… careerist… careerist...” and who is meant to be trusting me, with what precisely?

It’s to avoid misinformation, I suppose. Sigh, but what if the official info is also mis-...

All we do is write down stuff the authorities tell us we can, with some wriggle space when it comes to regular folks in court and maybe kids. There is no diving deep into the system as a journalist unless you really try, and that is when shit goes down – see Assange.

At least, I think it is. I suppose that’s why I’m doing this, to see precisely to what extent the system is corrupt and phony, and to what extent my dad and Chomsky and Jimmy Dore have been correct all along.

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DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 18 Sep 2020

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 Today the defendants that marked me most were both least and most newsworthy. 

The non-newsworthy were a couple of petty criminals who had apparently stolen someone’s wallet from his home and then gone around buying stuff with his card.
The man was a tall, hot-blooded Mediterranean creature with a long face, salt-and-pepper hair, and a black goatee. The woman was a large blonde with a messy clip holding half of it up, a mocking expression on her sour face as the bureaucrats scribbled and typed away, deciding her fate. Audible snorts and ‘pff’s came from the dock to the rhythm of my own inner sighs of exasperation. 

This judge was quite nice though, not too much gobbledegook. Always lovely, the lovely Irish. Quite red-nosed, he was too.

The petty criminal pair exchanged a passionate smooch as they were torn away from each other, the woman sent into custody and the man on bail with an express interdiction to communicate with each other – until the poor woman’s hearing in like, three months.

That broke my heart. All they did was steal someone’s wallet and use it in a Sainsbury’s.

The other one was a very cool, innocent-looking Indian fellow in a nice cotton red-gray jumper and black thick-rimmed glasses. He had beautiful, glossy black hair long enough to cover his ears and an absent yet somehow cheeky expression on his face. I heard from the local court reporter he was a regular punter in court hearings, always getting himself into trouble. This time did not disappoint.

The lawyer, sitting a mere three metres from the university student in the dock, mockingly told the prosecutor the guy’s defence story. As I looked between the lawyers and the bloke with great concern that the cap-and-robe-clad man hadn’t realised the defendant had come in, he said, “the defendant’s right behind us, but he’s off his head on drugs anyway.”

The guy didn’t seem “off his head”, maybe he’d smoked a joint or something. He seemed very much lucid enough to plead not guilty to both strange charges.

They say he tried to frighten the lights out of a pack of estate agents at their place of work by “singing his way through the door with an item with wires and duct tape, with intent to induce belief it would ignite, causing personal injury or property damage” - Because despite the immense post-lockdown backlog of cases to get through, we still have an inordinate amount of time to give to overly populating our sentences with redundant and repetitive clutter, speaking a language only we know fluently and the other peasants in the room sort of catch the gist of if they really focus.

Mr Defence stood and clarified that actually, the defendant had just shoplifted a couple aftershave bottles, nipped in to the Sainsbury’s for some free duct tape, and sauntered into the letting agency by accident. The confused property man made a mistake and panicked needlessly, probably because it would get him out of work that day, or possibly racism.

...Defence man didn’t actually say that last bit. But he did say the quiet glossy-headed man was holding his trousers up with a shoestring, that’s the “wires” bit I suppose.

It’s good, now the guy has to wait in prison until February. The real punishment is the insane waiting period for hearings and trials.

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DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 17 Sep 2020

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 Little to report today. I have already vented my misogynistic spleen to C----- and P---- both, probably a bit too much to P----, maybe I ought not be so anti-woman, but why have I been having such terrible experiences lately? Since A-----, it has only gotten worse. She must have cursed me, must have.

I reported on a homicidal 14-year-old today. A cute little bug with a black button head looking curiously at me with his big eyes. He’d already punched and kicked a man to a heart attack and broken neck, and punctured some poor guy’s eye socket. This time he stabbed two teens, puncturing one’s lung. He needs to be a mafia hitman, he is clearly a cold-blooded killer. Although he would probably be a single-use hitman considering his terrible record of subtlety… but at his age, I am sure he will learn verrrry quickly from all the experienced guys in jail.

It’s hard to say what is the solution with people who are pathologically violent.

The dirty look that woman, apparently his very white stepmother? gave me on my way out of the court is burned into my mind. I’ve never been glared at so evilly. Hatred oozed out of her every pore. I know my profession is low. But is it that bad? Would I feel the same if a press person was at my child’s hearing? Probably. I didn’t really need to be there and intrude on their family time. I am finding it hard to imagine how I would feel, because I don’t think I know anybody who would be in such a situation that it would warrant a reporter to visit their trial or hearing. I think I would probably just ignore them. Not likely that I would read the story anyway or even think to. Also in this case, he can’t even be named, surely it is OK?, although it may now be prejudicial for him in the crown court.

I am starting to understand why the judges and lawyers adopt this confusing language. It creates a barrier between them and potentially violent families of defendants. It forces the regular folk to respect their authority, giving that authority a sort of untouchable quality. If they kind of banteringly said, I sentence you to five years behind bars mate, good luck in there, the defendant or his father might be tempted to fight back, whereas the judge can escape the room while they are still making their way through the thicket of words camouflaging the actual information.

All the criminals I’ve seen and their families rise when the judge rises with reverence. This barrier is probably what keeps that respect a-rolling.

I also heard that a judge had seen one of his harsh sentencees’ family members in a shop, who failed to recognise him for lack of a hair-cap and robes.

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DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 16 Sep 2020

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 The more I frequent these insufferable court hearings, the more frustrated and disgusted I get by this utterly weird language which has so blatantly been put in place to separate the wheat from the, as they would have it, chaff.
 
More and more it appears to me like some cultish code the upper echelons speak in to make sure the plebes struggle to understand them. It is weird beyond belief to see some of these people, actually nice people, who work in this system, force their way into this character and then promptly fall out of it with an almost audible sigh of relief when the interaction is finished.

Because god forbid the court recording device catch you speaking like a normal person while addressing a judge, who probably can not speak in any other way at this point.

It’s things like “the personal mitigation that I rely upon is chiefly age, character and passage of time”; “his fiancee is no longer going to be his fiancee as a result of the proceedings”; “it appears that so far as the gas canister is concerned, I am asked to sentence you on the basis that that canister is there and would be used by you as directed by others”; “having regard to both the facts of the case and matters in mitigations, the starting period for the drugs case is seven years imprisonment. That will be reduced by 30 percent, blah blah blah. That might be marked by a consecutive sentence but that sentence will be reduced very significantly to allow ...”

This is, remember, a massive, life-changing, devastating moment in a man’s life and that of his family. The judge runs rings round them with supremely ugly speech that takes far too long to get anywhere. The sentencing process reminds me of Who Wants to be a Millionaire when the host purposely makes his guest sweat before they can find out whether their wild guess was correct.

I believe it is an integral part of the distinction between common people and educated elites. Problem is, these elites are in no way distinguished in cleverness. Their choice of infuriating language has no bearing on their intelligence – only that they have re-educated themselves to be what in their mind looks like “adults”, while remaining oblivious to real world that surrounds them which is positively crawling with interesting and forthright people.

Forthrightness is seen as a problem in more and more situations nowadays, I think it is precious and not something to be spat upon. While maintaining certain tact, it is so important to see past the bullshit. By god, is there a lot of it.

I am starting to learn that all these adults who intimidated me with their university studies and impossible language are no longer adults in my eyes. They are boys and girls conditioned to their status, a type of communication alien to everybody else in the world but a select few. In more familiar situations these purple speakers sometimes seem to relax though the elitist twang remains.

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DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 10 Sep 2020

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I’m getting more confident walking in and out of court rooms – it seems to be the accepted “thing” for reporters to be roaming around. However I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I am fabricating public humiliation, or as my colleague puts it, “part of the justice system!”.

(Huh. I just realised, it is hilarious, because she reminded me of Julia Louis-Dreyfus or possibly even Elaine when we first met. She puts exclamation points at the end of almost every sentence!)

She was referring to journalists and journalism, but I don’t think that’s right. I think we should be questioning the system itself and not the poor sods caught up in its web of bureaucracy.

My thoughts about the system today were that, damn, it’s hard to get someone behind bars. A guy caught with 5,000 child porn images was sentenced to 25 days of porn training, a symbolic sentence he will never serve, and… that’s it. I guess the public humiliation sort of polishes off his punishment.

The poor sod who just accidentally broke someone’s nose two years ago and now might suffer in his hairdressing practice, that one was unnecessary, but to be fair any reasonable person would understand it wasn’t such a big deal. Though I guess everyone will know about his testicle cancer now – I didn’t mention the one that was removed, out of consideration.

No, what disturbed me today was the sheer amount of nonsense that gets in the way of these trials. Every single one of them was delayed by at least two years. This is two years of mental agony, uncertainty of what might happen once their case is finally opened. Living in fear for years until the incident they were charged with is nothing but a speck in their past life and they have morphed into somebody new… but the beast of bureaucracy, some may call it justice, comes back to bite them, and bite them on the arse followed by the gentle caress of public humiliation.

Like with a dog, you do not rub its nose in its mess after the event – you catch it in the act and punish it right then and there, or it forgets and thinks you have gone mad, you are unpredictable and cruel. Though we humans may have a slightly longer memory span, it surely does not last two, three years. We are keen to disbelieve those defendants who say “I can’t remember”, but can we remember the precise facts of an event or a conversation two years prior?

No, it’s all very convoluted and ugly. I must learn the tools of the trade, learn to talk and act like a reporter, then move the f*** on. Pronto. Callousness can come, but it must come for the right people – not these poor, poor sods.

Saw half a fox today on the M4.

I listened to more government propaganda on the radio despite my promise to self not to do so. It can really wreck my mood for a few hours. I know I should let things wash over me like George Michael’s voice, but this paranoia is getting out of hand. I didn’t wear a mask in the Lidl today, and nearly charmed the mask off the clerk at the till at the end with my klutzy ways. How tragic to see only ¼ of everybody’s faces. I have decided that if confronted, I will say in my innocent manner, “I just think it’s all a bit creepy,” and hope for the best! 

The truth of course would be that it makes my stomach churn to see all these people so readily submit to “government guidelines”… that reduce their social interaction to near-zero… taking for granted the preciousness of our interactions with one another, even if they are from afar. And that, only if the person is elderly or likely to come in contact with an elderly person. On an individual basis, I am happy to make an effort, always. On a mass authoritarian level, no, never. It is messy, meaningless, ugly and overbearing.

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DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 9 Sep 2020

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Today I witnessed an inquest where the cause of death was so lazy the woman basically said it was made up. No one cares, because the guy was a drug addict, as she repeatedly said during her speech. His family did not assist. He died of mysterious causes, found partly decomposed in his flat with a syringe next to his body but no substances either on the syringe or in his body, apart from cannabis. So, of course, the toxicologist made up some nonsense about cannabis-induced cardiac arrhythmia. 

“This case has caused me great difficulties. When you have a suicide, you normally have an intent and an act. Here, we had the intent, but there was no act.”

He apparently left a note saying he was going to god, and his time on earth was up. He was of Arabic descent, but had changed his name to TJ Fuller when he was 16, he was “embarrassed by his name”.

He had started getting different opinions about everything in the past six months, neglecting his friends and was not getting on with people.

The note mentioned “Mr Fuller, the end.” “Ready to die.”

She would not read all of it – out of courtesy.

The case presented great difficulties… a headache, for a clearly unimportant bloke, the way she talked about him, it was callous. It is obvious that if you deal with death on a daily basis, and literally a daily basis, as a coroner, that you will not be particularly moved by anybody’s death. So I don’t take it as an offence against this poor sod that she didn’t give the shadow of a damn.

The real offence lies with the police, the toxicologist, the investigators, and family. The guy was so insignificant that they slapped the laziest possible label on his “partially decomposed” body and got on with it.  (Funny how unknowingly accurate I was in my story of Willy Wurton, huh?)

Clearly, had it been a less drug-addicted, more wealthy man, more people may have perked up at the mysterious circumstances around his death. Here, they were more than eager to consider it drug-related – even if it provably was not. They just did not want to take the extra time. The eyeroll as she described the great difficulties of this case was telling enough.

Thing is, I probably wouldn’t care for the guy either. It is, however, more proof of the shamlike nature of the system itself. The phony bureaucracy which slows everything down and covers it in a veil of acceptability. The truth is we don’t care about all deaths, not everybody is equal, and all the functionaries know it, journalists know it, god knows drug addicts and lower classes know it. I just wish that callousness were not sugar coated in time-wasting exercises for the sake of… of what? Keeping the system going, I suppose. Sigh. Otherwise we might descend into savagery, or would we?

Thought: if an “expert” or doc is “discredited”, what does that mean? By whom?

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DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 8 Sep 2020

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 The sight of roadkill is surprisingly shocking to me. I see these slaughtered creatures, so flattened they are like a detailed painting, in droves each day. In fact the different species whose insides I get the privilege of witnessing on crude display seem to be on the rise. It started with what I think was just a fox last Tuesday and has now, on my sixth day on the job, grown to foxes, badgers, rabbits, a fawn, pigeons, and squirrels.

Possibly the worst one was the rabbit stretched across a solid metre of road, something like a 2D model of the rodent’s intestinal tract.

That is a close tie with the solitary squirrel tail blowing in the wind through the middle of the road.

In other news, I have now observed practices in three different courts. The barristers and clerk in Oxford were having a jolly old time joking between cases, it actually made me kind of maybe want to work in the field. They seem like a solid bunch of smarty pants with a gift for the gab and close interactions with the opposite end of the systemic spectrum. This is a highly interesting domain. I don’t think their laughter and joking was callous, but rather similar to that of a doctor or a nurse. 

They are confronted every day with matters of life and death and, on top of that, humiliation – possibly worse than death? – so they are probably most likely candidates for both empathy and humour. The former is debatable, you might say. I would say that without it, the latter is impossible. So a barrister without a sense of humour is more likely to be callous, uncaring and careerist.
I leave this open to further contemplation. “Sense of humour” itself is an extremely debatable term, because what of the Wall Street lads laughing in the back of a limo caught in a rain of dollar bills, champagne and prostitutes? They probably know a good joke or two as well.

And what of the serious defence lawyer lady working for the accused in the position-of-trust case?

In all her demanding, diabetic glory, she seems a right drag to be around. But her unbelievable persistence in getting what she wants seems, for now, a priceless skill for her job of defending the (potentially) undefendable. Let’s see how the verdict turns out. My point being, the haughty serious types may not be full of humour, or even empathy (who knows what goes on in there), but their commitment to a job immaculately done is a rare and impressive quality indeed. It may portray more integrity than some of the jesters.

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DIARY OF A COURT REPORTER IN COVID TIMES - 3 Sep 2020

My impressions so far.
In my very first week as an observer of the sleaziest parts of everyday modern life, I fell into a court case that happened to make papers all over the world.

Looking over running tables for local courts, I found at least fifteen other cases that stuck out to me as far, far uglier and more shocking. But this was the one that made the cut, because it tickles people’s gossip bones. Everybody is a village numpty more or less deep down.

It’s the case of a woman teacher who, apparently, laid one of her form pupils when he was just turning 16. Putting the legal age of consent aside, the kid was clearly of sound mind when it happened and is not particularly traumatised by the experience which was probably deeply pleasurable for him. I mean, which teenage boy gets to sleep with an experienced 33 year old on the reg? The thrill must have been awesome. For me, just thinking of the day-to-day excitement gives me the chills.

Of course, when you are trying to study and you are infatuated with someone inaccessible whom you happen to have to see every day, that can be a real unhealthy distraction. I recall even at 19, when 33- or 34-year-old T----- would fuck me majestically and then tell me to keep it under wraps and cruelly leave without a kind word, it smarted a little bit. But it toughened me up, wasn’t such a big deal in the grand scheme of life – in fact, some of those memories with him are invaluable to me.

But anyway, this one is quite a bit different. The kid was sixteen and in her class.

I do not get why they make the poor kids say in excruciating detail exactly what they mean by things like “anal” (what do you mean by anal? he put his willy in her bum) and “fingering” (put his fingers inside her. Inside her what? Her vagina). When did children get so adept at sex talk? What are we growing into, as a species? Is it good, maybe? Maybe we were meant to start sex early, considering our age of biological maturity.

Standing outside the court room with the woman a few feet away from me, knowing she knows I’m writing the next salacious story about her that’s going to be the gossip of all the land, was deeply awkward. She behaved very coolly, I must say. Maybe her sharp solicitor has been keeping her spirits up.

The solicitor, phew, there’s a doozy. A heavy woman with nearly thirty years experience, she picks up every tiny detail and turns anybody into a pathological liar if she wants to. I would not want her on my case, though that third boy witness was quite snarky and managed to throw her a little. Her demands for comforts and covid-related hygiene were obnoxious as hell, but I think it’s all a part of the imposing and self-important character.

“I suggest that you lied. I suggest you never slept with her at all.”

Very damning, very cruel to a teenage boy, though they too are notorious for being cruel…

My god, what to think? Whom to believe? It’s like watching a play, only real… With the main character, the centre of all attention, sitting quietly at the back in a glass box, ignored yet intricately scrutinised all at once.

The bumbling prosecutor, chatty and a bit amused by the whole situation, a bit too easygoing. He stumbled over his words I think, one too many times. Eh, why not. He is benevolent.

The chipmunk-faced judge, adorable and formidable. He doesn’t take any nonsense. He has to keep things running to schedule, but he also has to ensure a fair trial. He will pipe in politely – and my god, how polite they are, when they interrupt each other, sometimes I feel Ms Defence Lawyer is on the verge of cursing somebody out but she keeps ultimate respect and calm with the judge no matter what – to clarify anything he did not understand, even if it is basic, just for the jury’s sake. That is what he is for! To make sure the jury understand all in a clean, honest manner.

I befriended the covid cleaner, a nice man from Pakistan who brought me a slice of pizza when I was so hungry. He then became a bit too clingy, saying he’d seen me in a dream and wanted to keep serving me things. Why must my kindness be so gravely misinterpreted? The elite tend to ignore the cleaners, and I treat them just like anybody else. So they like me. Just like children.

...Is that such a demeaning thing to say, when I am the only one actually talking to them and looking them in the eye? Well, it could be argued that I am the one being a phony in this case. But my original perspective honestly was that he was a regular Joe just like any of the big-shot lawyers. It is once I gleaned his pathetic nature that I changed my mind and realised that his attention towards me had indeed been similar to that of a child. So I maintain my high esteem of my own virtue: it is he who proved my good faith in him wrong.

Regardless of such exceptions, I do find janitors and other workers interesting, as they have a very different perspective on things that are happening around us. This cleaner says he delivered food to the now-famous defendant, who lives in the town nearby. A knowing smile suggested that he might have some insight into her character. He can hear the cases from his janitor’s closet, I think I understood him saying. I bet nobody would ever suspect him of anything if he did ever listen in…

Note to self: think about chatting to workers about important people.

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DIARY OF A RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT TRAINEE

 My many weeks of intensive managerial training at L---- restaurants were how one might imagine a sojourn in the military (culinary division). These involved:

Obtaining and upholding the correct uniform. White shirt – not a seam out of place, not a dash of colour or even black writing on the nape of the neck. Blue jeans. Flat black shoes. Hair up, mask on. No jewelry or ornamentation, bra coordinated with the white shirt. Though it may look like a casual uniform to the outside observer – and that is indeed the reasoning behind the move – it is actually a very strictly regimented one, with waiters coming in early, dressed in their own clothes, to iron their white shirt in the tiny, cramped, cluttered staff room that smells of feet. Hooks on the walls hold layers upon layers of employees’ belongings, nothing protected from theft. 

They enter the arena of the restaurant floor with strict orders about how not to address customers and remove glasses from tables. I will not delve into the intense heat of the summer accumulating droplets of sweat behind the revolting facecloth they are forced to wear throughout service to help the customers feel safe (from the smiling faces of filthy peasant servants?), nor into the impossibility of proper communication with three-quarters of one’s face covered up.

They run sometimes an entire floor of punters with little to no help from the manager who delegates, does a lot of digital paperwork and deals with complaints. Running a section means getting to every table in time before the little patience bar above customers’ heads reaches critical level, juggling and staggering orders to keep the kitchen running smoothly. It means removing clutter from tables (using a delicately balanced tray) as they run to pick up a food order that includes hot, heavy and precarious dishes to balance simultaneously between hands and forearms. 

I had the honour of training under J-----, the company’s “German matron” in the boss’s words, though she be of English descent. She was a gorgeous bleached blonde with a 60s fringe, chin length hair, a button nose and sultry eyes that darted round the floor from underneath mile-long fake eyelashes. Hers was certainly a pristine face to front the business. She told me once that even on her days off she would not feel awake until full make-up had been applied. Her lips were large and handsome, boldly outlined in lipliner and a very precise colour filled in to match the rest of the artwork. But the first thing anybody saw of J----- was her most glorious, shapely and most especially sizeable feature, very clearly displayed in the woman’s choice of classy, tight-fitting vintage jeans.

When J----- contorted her face into theatrical expressions of grief or mirth, she began to look a bit like a drag queen. Vulnerability and despair floated constantly near the surface, which, combined with total competence, gave her great standing in the company as a representative for the waiters who would remain easily manipulable by the bosses. I was utterly shocked to find out that she was thirty-five, with an art degree under her belt and still no idea what to do with herself, and she worked there around sixty hours a week.

The management trio were all of an eerie reptilian ilk. The owner’s version was softest, and most human – or at least, he put it on well enough. He would often wear faded workman’s clothes and boast about the humble grunt work of his lofty role. He would swan into a branch by surprise, sheer authority and grandeur oozing from his every pore, and engage in a breezy chat with lowly employees as the manager on duty soiled himself in the background.

He would often briefly take said manager outside, deliver a dressing down about the lighting levels and the sore victim would return to the floor, cowed, as boss man resumed light banter with the fawning staff. The man was a master of manipulation, effortless calculation in his every move, his every glance, his words both kind and cruel. He was tall, Swiss, wide-set with long grey hair and piercing hazel eyes. His face was oddly nondescript – hard to picture, but instantly recognisable. A slight lisp in his genial English accent added to the illusion of humanity.

The managing director was worst at concealing his reptilian nature. Not only was his approach snappy and often harsh, but his sharp face with its incredibly tight brown skin were immediately reminiscent of the common gecko. Every detail of the tall, svelte, perfectly ironed, ageless man’s skull was visible – down to the gap in his temporal bone. His cold black eyes bulged from sunken sockets, his mouth drew back in a painful smile when necessary, but never when talking to his subordinates. He was creative with his words, and quick to dispel my notions of hierarchy: “no, everybody is equal in this company” - just before roasting the manager on duty for forgetting to make him a coffee in plain sight of everybody in the restaurant.

Hard to backpedal from such a merciless depiction of the man; but I will mention nonetheless that he was far from bad-looking, and his exceptionally authoritative demeanour evoked heavy flirting from the sultry adolescent waitress who, on her way out the door, coyly asked him when she could have her meeting with him. Under my knowing laughter (at the gorgeous girl’s sheer audacity), he reacted without an ounce of awkwardness, keeping the exchange professional while sufficiently acknowledging her advances.

He was the embodiment of the corporate machine, a perfectly kept tool for running every cog in the company down to such vagueries as “conflict management”, “diversity and inclusion”, protocols, policy and procedures. He would adapt his tone – as per every management training programme under the western sun – to whomever he was talking to, in order to get his message across in the most scientifically proven way possible. To me, laid-back pragmatist that I am, he effectively communicated an empathetic reaction to my distaste for checklists and countless, (unpaid) time-consuming online courses, making me fold to his commands like a teaspoon in a tub of ice cream.

I recall the managing director’s family coming in for dinner one day, a tired looking woman sitting across the table as their daughter pranced around on his lap. It was an odd vision, an exhibitionist performance of “classic family man” for all employees to enjoy.

Both the managing director and especially his owner almost hypnotically incite bootlicking behaviour in all those in the vicinity, even customers.

The third and absolutely key piece to the ------- puzzle was the handsome human resources lady. While equally reptilian in appearance to the managing director, she had a natural clumsy charm that gave her that HR edge. She was their secret power, the manipulatrice extraordinaire, the “good cop” - everybody sang her praises for how accommodating and understanding she was. She worded demands and contracts perfectly suited to the business needs while appearing to address employees with genuine compassion. When she made a mistake, such as having me work two, not one, unpaid trial shifts, she apologised emphatically, pretending to beat herself up over the injustice she had caused me – a trick I am no stranger to, but gave her a pass nonetheless.

When I, however, made the mistake of double-booking myself, she sent me a tactfully worded threat of demotion: “perhaps you would like to start with us as a waitress, and finish your management training sometime in future.”

When she or the MD would fail to respond to e-mails, they would keep schtum; should an underpaid manager meanwhile fail to be contactable outside of work hours, may the wrath of the corporate gods smite him.

The deeper I plunge into this strange, award-winning, so-called ethical company, the more misery and stress I discover. Minutes after my earful from the MD about their policy of not putting staff on more than five shifts in a row so they can get adequate rest (so that they don’t trip on a slippery tile because they’re tired, which is part of a risk assessment, which must be recorded, blah-di-blah), I learned from the harassed head waitress that she had had one day off in twelve as equally harassed managers continued to pile work on her petite frame. All seemed satisfied by her sulky reply to their empty question, “how are you?” - “fine”.

The tension is palpable during busy shifts, with waiters sniping at each other behind the scenes while putting on highly convincing displays of warmth to their customers, or “guests” as they are euphemistically called (despite pains taken to ensure rapid table-turning and regular remarks about the size of their wallets).

Clearly these reptilian creatures are highly skilled in hiring intelligent yet obedient staff like myself.

I have not yet mentioned the head chef, who quite literally looks like a combination of Lord Voldemort and an evil Pope Benedict. He, too, is ruthless and evokes dread amongst the staff despite his hearty Liverpudlian origins. I know far less of him aside from: his unrelenting, unsympathetic reaction when I begged to wear my own shoes in the kitchen instead of the mandatory ones that hurt my feet over the fifteen-hour shifts I was made to do for peanuts; word from the other chefs that their work load increases whenever he is on a shift because he is far too important to chip in to the menial tasks. His face is what marked me most, from the very first time I saw him: a large bald head with cold, inset eyes like black holes. There was an almost inhuman aspect to the whole man. He always seemed to slither from room to room, or otherwise be standing unnervingly still.

I can just imagine head chef and boss man out on a market research mission to neighbouring eateries. Had they walked into my pub, I would be utterly fascinated by them, would almost certainly flirt with the owner. As their underling, I have deeper insight but frustratingly little use of my feminine powers. Their ironed shirts emit no musky pheromones. 

In the company environment, all messy aspects of human nature are tucked away into the recesses of the most tightly-run ship I’ve ever seen. They hire based on obedience, character and appearance, this much is clear. The innocent teenage waitresses are key to the company’s image. They are spared most mistreatment as their bubbly nature gives the business a veneer of purity, perkiness; an almost virginal appeal.

It is, without a doubt, a fascinating world to study. The kitchen staff seem happier for they are actually living their chosen career and seem to have chances of progression up the ranks. Many of them are ambitious young (and I mean young) fellows who chop fast and fry hard, learning with adorable enthusiasm from the head chef when he mentors them during a lull in service. They may gruff and moan a little, but it is what they love doing. Unlike the front of house. These guys and girls are all pursuing, or at least dreaming of, something completely different, something better, and so desperately unattainable.

Such observations make me wonder whether I was cut out for this. I have fallen too far down the commie hole, seeing all as exploited individuals and the bosses as, well, reptiles. Perhaps I can not boss around tired waitresses who have never a minute for themselves, particularly the ones with children. Or maybe… maybe it is worth seeing if I can learn this skill. Study the reptilian folk, glean some of their alien ways to gain just that little bit more efficiency in managing my own life.

I have not spoken yet of the little starter chef who made my experience in the kitchen such a joyful one. Little A-------, young ginger fellow at the opposite end of the stick from the head aliens discussed above: sensuousness ran through his every sinew. A------- told me what to do in no uncertain terms, and I talked back constantly. Our lighthearted bickering was a joy, it made the air all but vibrate around us. The electric shock that ran through my loins when he touched my back by surprise with the tips of his fingers must have been clocked by the others in the room, if only subconsciously. 

 My furious flirtations scared him a little, it seems, for I don’t think he was aware of his super power. He was half a head shorter than me, with a big head, bad skin and a beady face. It may not be every day that a girl recognises his electric faculties. We exchanged numbers and very nearly met up, until I chickened out about the following: being a manager and sleeping with a low-level chef; not liking him as much outside of the workplace; his likely age, considering the other two chefs at his level were nineteen.

For what most aroused me was his way of bossing me around: “Come over here, woman, and cut these shallots for me.” “It’s not about the size of the knife, love. You’re just shit at it.” His vulgarity was not as harsh as it looks on paper – it was gentle, even affectionate. He had a low, sultry voice that he did not overuse like so many of the other British lads in the kitchen.

 A man of few words, A------- worked hard, smoked cigarettes, and had tattoos all up and down his arms and probably the rest of his little body too. Lord knows it would fill up quickly with tats that size. He had a blue-eyed wolf’s head on the back of his right hand and it stared at me when he showed me how to prep desserts. He would flirt back by posing with his muscular back to me, arms up against the high shelf of the kitchen surface as he talked to the chef. The definition of his shoulders showed through even the thick white cotton of his uniform and the ink on his exposed forearms rippled over well-formed muscles. 

Sometimes I would kneel to get something from the fridge and intentionally hover a little longer than needed around his crotch level, just to get another hit of that erotic energy. I noticed him gruffly adjusting his parts a couple of times, a gesture I find oddly sexy, though it probably be considered gross and even sleazy by most. Maybe I am an underachiever, but I don’t think my crotch would lie to us.

GUTTER TALK - chapter 7: Could almost live like this

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As predicted, Harriet rudely failed to attend despite the grand written invitation to the lady’s great welcome-home party to herself. The hostess promised to serve Harriet’s favourite dessert, creamy homemade meringue with raspberry coulis – did I mention that at that gathering last time? thought Harriet with alarm. By god, those women are good listeners if nothing else.

Jake had seen it, she knew, for she had found it on the kitchen table upon her return from town on a day out with her urban friends. She was a little bit jolly and went on to tease Jake with the card.

“Oh my, darling, look! You would simply regale yourself with Tammy’s cooking. And how thoughtful, look. My husband is also welcome pop along, she writes, at the bottom, in smallest of lettering. Look Jake, how lucky you are! Clearly the village adores us for all our efforts to fit in. Ah go on, we haven’t seen her in so long. Perhaps Andy beat some sense into her during their time away,” she howled with wicked laughter.

“You’ve clearly had a great time out in the city,” said Jake dryly. To be fair, he did envy Harriet her light-hearted view of human nature. The city folk had nothing at stake in their social life. They could flit from group to group or meet new friends altogether once the old gang got nasty. They were not trapped in a circle of rich layabouts and benign retirees, sprinkled with the occasional bored psychopath. All those characters were diluted in the crowd… a sea of blissful anonymity.

Harriet often reproached him his envy of city life. She, to the contrary, had felt unique, wanted, a reason to get dressed up, during her time in the village. Even the odd conspiracy tickled her and the glorious rolling hills took her breath away every single morning from the window of their matrimonial nest.

She loved the townspeople’s honest interest in animal husbandry, their genuine discussions of the weather. The weather had a real impact here, unlike in the city where it was endlessly discussed to break the ice but never actually changed the course of anybody’s day. In the village, it could turn out a matter of life and death for a farmer’s crops, a young woman’s horses, even for a young child.

One of the town’s eccentrics could easily trace her alcoholism back to the day she opened the car door after stalling in a flooded ford and her toddler son had been viciously flushed away by a merciless wave, fatally bashing his head on a nearby rock. The lady was never the same since, but she maintained a solid reputation through relentless creativity and shameless honesty.

This woman lived in the neighbouring village and Harriet was always disappointed to have so little access to her. This was not the petty type who would indulge in shallow, judgmental gossip round a dinner table in the afternoon with a hateful husband leering at her through his zoo-like glass barrier.

Most village folk were too shy to approach the tragic artist except for Lazy Larry, who had happened to participate in the installation of one of the woman’s great exhibitions and had remained friendly with her ever since. Lazy Larry, despite the name and belly, was a hard worker whenever he did any.

Jake had plenty of time for Larry. He had met him earlier that day during the older man’s afternoon waddle through the countryside, and had him in for a drink. The benevolent fellow knew Jake had been having a hard time and he felt there was great integrity in the boy, who toiled away daily to create the perfect home for a future family.

“How you going, Jake my boy?” Larry had boomed, causing Jake to start upright from his focussed efforts on the paving stones leading to the front porch.

“Oh hey, Larry! Long time no see,” he relaxed visibly upon seeing the friendly face. “It’s going, mate, going mental if I daresay,” Jake said with a grin.

“Good to hear you’re joining the rest of us, then. What’s next for this god-forsaken historical site?”

“It’s looking pretty well now mate, to be fair. A couple more bits here and there, the well water connected to the mains and we’re rolling along smooth as cream.”

“That old thing not connected yet? Oh look Jake, I’m sorry I’ve been busy larding up. I would have been glad to help speed it up for you and angry Andy.”

“Please – don’t even give it a second thought,” Jake waved his hand though his gut clenched bitterly. “I seem to remember Harry saying you told her some folksy legend about that thing, by the way. Some woman ghost in there or something?”

“That’s right, she must be what’s holding him up. Distracting him, like, with her womanly wiles. God knows they’re probably wilier than Tamara’s at this point,” he sniggered.

“Yeah, any bird’s a catch after that sneering viper of his,” Jake grimaced. He was so relieved to have a sympathetic ear to disparage Tamara with. Lazy Larry was a strong supporter of the opposition and nodded his chins emphatically.

“Say what you will of the ghost, but the victim surely can’t be pure legend,” insisted Jake in all his curiosity.

“You’re right there, kid. It was only two landowners ago – that’s fifty years – when one of them got so tangled up in the town’a affairs. I think she was a bookkeeper, found out a bit too much about her neighbours’ dealings. Some say she was thrown in, some say she did herself in as the place and all its ugly dramas got to her, but either way a human most certainly find herself decomposing down that well.”

“Christ almighty. I hope – wonder who… fished it out?” Jake said in a hushed voice.

“Can’t say for certain, but I think it was the son of the next occupant. The police round here have always been a band of jokers anyways, nobody believes a word they say for better or worse -” he raised his eyebrow knowingly at Jake - “but poor Andy’s certainly got some heavy history to be dealing with, working on that thing.”

“Well, if he’d just finish up already he wouldn’t have to anymore,” the landlord snapped.

Lazy Larry chuckled a goodbye and walked off, leaving the young man to simmer down. That filter system will have to be state-of-the-art, if there’s a dead fucking body down there, he thought. Better be ghost-proof at any rate. And I’ve dealt enough with these police for another decade at least, no chance I’m asking them for records on that.

He wandered towards the well-room where Andrew had resumed work after the tea that had been dutifully prepared by Harriet and reluctantly served by Jake in order to keep the precarious peace. The old man had a dour expression on his face and Jake realised he had probably overheard – there was no way of knowing how much – the conversation with Larry a few minutes earlier.

This was definitely the last thing Jake needed: Andrew knowing his precise feelings about his – what had he called her? - sneering viper of a wife. And, sure enough, he did. He had also caught the part about the excruciating pace of his work, though that at least was fair comment.

Upon realising the social doom which awaited him, Jake had simply walked away to wait for his woman to return and tell her they would need to hire someone else to finish up. His hope of ever gelling with the villagers was finished.

His musings about the dead bookie had reached fever pitch when Harriet burst, half-drunk, onto the scene only to mock his dislike of the woman who had made his new life, which was supposed to have been perfectly idyllic, a living hell.

“What do you say, my hot mess? Shall we lighten up their evening?” she was leaning on the counter after a particularly turbulent mis-step. The girl’s pretty head turned to the floor tiles to try and settle the booze-storm inside her skull.

“Maybe you should lie down, my drunken doll. We can talk tomorrow morning.”

Andrew had gone a couple of hours ago, with an extremely curt salutation. Jake had not dared to give him the sack then and there, and despised himself not only for this cowardice but for his clumsy display as soon as Larry had granted him the blissful abandon of badmouthing Tamara. The villagers suddenly did not seem so guilty in this whole debacle as he was. They are fools undeniably, and yet I allow myself to be drawn in. I can not even manipulate a septuagenarian hive mind into liking me! No, I cave to their crushing gossip, I avoid them, I bring on more unjust suspicion through my actions. I do not care what they might think if they knew the truth, but this gross misrepresentation insults me beyond belief, traps me like a rat in molasses. They will not rest until I’m done for!

And Harriet, poor Harriet. She could fit in better than I ever could. Ever! Maybe it was my stubborn mother’s fault, and now there’s no way out, where to? Harriet with downplay it all as she always does and stick to this place like a loving tick.

That woman down the well would understand me like nobody else.

She knew the sordid and pathetic lives of these tiny-minded people like the back of her hand. She would sympathise with me better than Harriet ever could, silly, naive Harry, likes to be centre of attention, doesn’t she?… flaunting their generous gifts in my outcast face… the woman of the house, the real lady of the land, she’s down there.

He found himself by the well all of a sudden, delirious.

The shower where Willy Wurton had expired was about three metres to the back of him, through a doorway and a short corridor. Their bedroom stood right above it.

Harriet was busy readying herself for a romantic sparring session with her beloved, whom she assumed was pent-up again. But Jake wasn’t pent up. He was fed up. And he wanted to be master of the village like that woman had been. He needed to share his abject hatred with a sympathetic ear, be it a partly decomposed or spectral one.

Maybe she had not been so pretty as Harriet, he thought in a brief moment of reason. But there was more to life than sex! he reasoned further. There needed to be understanding, sympathy, a shared worldly cynicism. His final thoughts as he plummeted through the darkness were, “the piping looks nearly finished.”

 

 

THE END

GUTTER TALK - chapter 6: Gossip queen takes a holiday

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The weeks after that passed by uneventfully, with the exception (and perhaps for the precise reason) of Tamara and Andrew taking an impromptu holiday to the Antilles. They had, it seemed, found a common language at last.

Aqueous operations at Jake and Harriet’s farm home were still running from the mains, much to Jake’s fury and per Harriet’s resigned expectations. She worked her way through her husband’s tempestuous moods with great dedication and fervour, though they kept the volume away from prying ears, which would be sure to dutifully pass any dropped eaves to Tamara upon her return.

Overall, the village was quite peaceful even for Jake, who found that his mother’s enemy’s cronies dropped most of their suspicious behaviour when the shepherd was away. Some chilliness persisted, but it rather mirrored his own and gave him some amusement when he was in his best of post-coital moods.

The valley he lived in gave him no end of inspiration and pleasure. The glistening sea of green laid freshly cut before the lovers on a glorious morning, the silver ghost of overnight rainfall still in the sky and providing a melancholy backdrop for Jake’s vivid imagination. He felt the sun’s rays strike each individual blade of grass as it forced its way through the rainclouds to reach the couple’s shimmering patch of earth in these English hills.

“I could almost live like this,” he said quietly to himself, startling Harriet somewhat. She said nothing, knowing he had not intended to share his innermost despair so candidly.

She, too, greatly appreciated the heavenly sight before her eyes, but her contemplation was one of simple peace. She saw the high-definition outline of the fluffy trees in bright, tennis-ball green over a dark silver sheet of cloud which only made her wish she had acrylics with her.

Where Jake had spotted an odd, man-shaped shadow standing unnaturally in the nearby stream, Harriet admired the uprooted young oak which had thrust its thickest branch upright through the water in defiance of its untimely fall.

Where Jake observed a panicked vole seeking to escape the gliding buzzards’ all-seeing eyes, Harriet saw an industrious fieldmouse digging around for a perfect home.

In his own way, the sullen man saw the natural beauty of the scene: the constant tug-of-war between good and evil. The glowing greenery never stood out more perfectly than with a chilling thundercloud lurking in the background.

In fact, Jake had to hold in some of the jaw-clenching that oftentimes came with Harriet’s naive expressions of awe. He always pretended to be amused by the girl’s tendency to voice her every sweeping emotion when faced with unutterable (or so it should be) natural beauty, but today it was somehow impossible for him to perform his usual relaxed chuckle and firm embrace. The view was too hostile to merit such wonderment, and he felt she either knew it and was trying to smooth it over, or she was painfully oblivious to the earth’s cruelty even as it so plainly showed itself to them.

If anything, he thought, she should be gasping in horror as the storm cloud approached and swarms of shadowy birds fled the hemisphere with the approach of winter. He gripped her hip harder than usual in a disguised attempt to contain his stress. Harriet turned to him and revealed the top of her breasts in their loose cotton covering by placing her hands on his chest, the fabric drooping away from her skin. She directed her sultriest gaze straight into his tense face, too overwhelmed to suspect what turbulence was rocking his mind.

“I would just love you to take me on top of that green, green hill,” she purred. “Our hill.”

Jake paused to glance at her exposed front, but the sexual urge that would normally have flooded his entire being felt cavernously distant.

“It’s going to rain. Can’t you see?” he spoke through gritted teeth and quickly added, “darling. By the time we made it up there we would be drenched.” And I would be blamed for your subsequent flu by the villagers, he added to himself. “Come in now, Harry. Let’s get warm.”

“But I’m not –” but he had already begun to walk back.

He must be annoyed about something, Harriet speculated, forlorn. Though he did call me Harry, so it can’t be me. Is Tamara coming home soon, I wonder? She adjusted her frock and trotted after her man.

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GUTTER TALK - chapter 5: Half-baked accusations

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Harriet had received a fair few invitations to the mums’ club from various members whom she met on her errands.

“Oh but, you know, I’m not a mum,” she would respond politely. And I wouldn’t be caught dead under your magnifying-glass parties either.

“Darling, it would be a pleasure to have you over anyway. Good to see a fresh face every once in a while! And maybe give you some pointers when you do decide to bring a little baby into the world,” a well-meaning Angela would chirp.

“Well, I’ll give it a think, Angela. Thank you for your kind invitation.”

After such an encounter, the following party would be rife with gossip.

“The poor, secluded thing. ‘Give it a think’, she says – more like ask Jake whether she may leave the house for anything other than buying him tools! Does he think she’s his runner?”

Some days, Harriet would come home with some garish gift or a tin of biscuits from local ladies who considered it their duty to provide her with moral support.

Jake noted that the gestures often correlated with a worsening of his own lot. He observed so many cold faces on his way about town that soon, in his eyes, every closing door was a neighbour rushing to avoid contact.

It was not that Jake cared for any of these people, but he believed in a fair trial, and these silent accusations were anything but. He bristled to think that shopkeepers were probably underserving him or butchers spitting in his cuts of meat before they wrapped them up.

Such were the feelings that accompanied him one morning as he went to the corner shop for Harriet, who was unwell. She liked a particular drink upon such occasions, that her slavic grandmother had accustomed her to: hot milk with melted butter. The dregs Jake had left in the carton after their tea the previous evening would not do, so he set out after an imploring, albeit phlegmy, kiss from his ailing wife.

“Hi there,” he said with a genuine smile upon noticing an unrecognisable face at the counter.

“Hi, sir,” said the spotty young girl uncomfortably, looking round the shop for support. A pang of irritation hit Jake straight in the gut.

“You all right, love?” he inquired in a heroic effort to remain gentle despite his defiance at her unjustified mistrust.

She was, in fact, the shop owner’s adolescent daughter, and it was her third time ever looking after the place on her own. She had no awareness of the drama between the adults of the village, but apprehended every interaction for fear it might cost her father his business. She was also very self-conscious of her awkward appearance. Such a cycle of insecurity can easily spiral into a rather sorry display.

When the girl wanted to say, “I’m great, how are you? How may I help?”, she instead stood dead still as the words sizzled weakly through her head.

Jake grabbed a milk carton and jabbed it more forcefully than either of them expected on the counter, causing the clerk to jump. “That’ll be one pound, sir,” she said tightly. He mumbled a gruff “thanks”, placing the coin in her outstretched hand, and left.

“What’s wrong, Jake my precious?” Harriet felt his internalised rage as soon as he walked in the house and only wished she could assuage it as she knew best, but a persistent cough and sore throat prevented her doing so. She cupped her head in her hands and gave him a languorous kiss instead.

Jake could barely resist her sultry eyes, but could not bear to upset her neither mentally nor physically as she sniffled pathetically in gratitude. He grunted and went off to prepare the oily concoction in the kitchen, taking care not to make any loud noises with cutlery or doors.

Upon his return, Harriet lay docilely naked on the bed, her pale skin even more so in her weakened state. Jake could not wait any longer to ravage her, but not before setting down the mug of hot, buttery milk as far away from the bed as possible.

“Has anybody seen Harriet lately, then?”

It was known as the the “flouer” fete where all the gardeners and pastry chefs showed off their growing and decorating skills, putting their creations to the test of external scrutiny and internal strife. It was a beautiful day for it, too – bouquets all on display like crown jewels, glittering under the effect of their masters’ misting bottles and crisp morning sunlight.

On the other side of the event were the chefs, Angela first and foremost with her own child adoptee which Tamara had generously passed on to her as her own workload became too great. She and the little eleven-year-old girl had prepared three miniature wedding-type cakes, each as floral as the last, all undeniable works of art in her eyes.

Other designs included a whipped-cream sheep sponge, a “piebald foal” (or marble loaf, for non-equestrians), and tennis ball cupcakes in honour of the upcoming world tournament.

The event was far more than a simple good-natured competition – it was cutthroat, and the entrants were having none of Tamara’s chit-chat.

Most people’s replies were along the lines of “indeed, one contestant less”, and Tamara’s inflammatory conversation starters blew away in the gentle wind of fierce anticipation as her gardener friends made last-minute adjustments to their great assemblages of flowers.

Clodagh from the neighbouring hamlet uttered a “hmm, not lately” out of politeness, tweaking an astraloemeria.

Tamara had little success with growing things and very little interest in baking them. She made herself busy bustling between observers and creators, holding the room together as she saw it, full of enthusiastic praise for every competitor. She enjoyed discussing her and Andrew’s vegetable patch which had yielded enough for a week of fresh garnishes and salads.

Polite nattering went on until midday when the judges began their rounds of the flowers.

“Harriet Sadler?”

A current of whispers rippled the petals of nearby bouquets as the woman did not speak up. “Harriet Sadler?”

“Where could the poor girl be,” was the general consensus, the mere sight of Tamara shaping the attendees’ thoughts into ugly bruised forms. The seed had been successfully sown, the slightest suspicion amplified to perfection.

Indeed, Jake had failed to call in Harriet’s absence as he sat up sick with worry for her health. No hints of all-important flower competitions entered his mind despite the garish signs that had been on display at the town hall for the past seven weeks.

The subsequent drinks were rife with inspiration.

“Did you hear how he nearly lost it with Arthur’s little daughter at the shop one morning?”

“Ooh no, I’ve not heard that one,” piped up one Sally, a plump young baker with a passion for icing sugar (but never on a Victoria sponge) and human misery.

“He came in for some milk, she told her dad, and well, he was pretty impatient with the girl – she’s only so new to the business of customer service, you see. Arty’d left her on her own while he went to get some change, and Jake, or a ‘tall curly brown young man’ as she so innocently described him, with a quilted jacket and a growly voice, insisted on asking her how she was and slamming coins down on the counter, and all!” Angela was two gin and tonics down and drunk with glory, for she had won both first and third prize for the flour section of the competition thanks to her ingenious use of the child’s name on one of the pastries.

“Oh yes, I’m sure he would love to set another young, fragile creature straight, the brute.”

Cordelia looked on and quietly questioned the rapidfire conclusion these woman seemed to be drawing from Arthur’s hand-me-down story. Surely the girl had just told her father about the one person who had happened to come in while he had left her alone, and surely one can be grumpy early in the morning?

She looked nobody in the eye and could not join in for fear of having the wrong opinion. The harsh descriptor - “brute” - had particularly jolted her, for until that moment there had only been glaring innuendoes.

Harriet had finally decided to come along to one of the all-female gatherings. She had convalesced with all of Jake’s devotion after a couple weeks of heavy coughs and ruthless headaches. She had forgotten what it felt like to be well, and the ensuing giddiness made her crave society. “Perhaps they can be talked round to our side. Perhaps they’re more reasonable than we give them credit for?” she crooned softly into a dour-faced Jake’s unhearing ear.

“Right, and leave me to deal with the woman’s poor bugger of a husband as he comes to drown his sorrows as slowly as possible in my well,” he replied moodily. Harriet gave her beloved a kiss and a lick on the lips, arousing him greatly before swinging her hips out the door.

He stared after her for a solid minute, then made his way to the bathroom.

Round the beautifully stocked lunch table at Tamara’s, Harriet was shyly recounting some mundane story about gardening to test the waters. Every story seemed to go on without a foreseeable end, until the punchline made it clear to any listener that her efforts in following the various details and characters had ultimately been in vain. Harriet could hardly match the length of some of the more weathered ladies’ stories in her own tale of failed begonias, but she appreciated the simple pleasure of benign conversation after so many weeks in isolation.

Angela, it seemed, was the only one with interesting things to say without fear of upsetting the docile balance in the room.

She was animatedly telling the story of her late husband’s emergency mouth-to-beak resuscitation of one of their hens back in the day. Harriet piped up, “wow! My mum always made me paranoid about parasites you could catch from birds.”

She knew as she said it that the seasoned country folks would look down on such a precious attitude, but she chose to bathe in the awkwardness nevertheless.

“You don’t know how many parasites you can get just from living here!” said Angela amiably. “You city folk and your superstitions about germs,” said farmer Kevin’s wife in a rare moment of independent judgement.

“My mum actually grew up in the country, but I get your point, ladies. I agree with you! After all, I did choose to move here,” said Harriet appeasingly.

The atmosphere softened back into muggy gelatin as the ladies eased their way back into the steady hum of mundane chat.

Harriet had no way of knowing what they would say about her after she departed and in the coming days, but from the sheer number of times she had been invited, she guessed her sudden appearance would not fail to generate a buzz through the village. She also supposed that her agreeable nature might win their favour. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched an irate Andrew grab his coat and tool bag – but not before taking a swig from an unmarked bottle on his desk.

He sat in an office separated from the dining room which by a foggy old window instead of a wall. The effect was something like a zoo, though it was hard to tell which side was the animal enclosure.

He had cursed their choice of making his study often to prying eyes ever since they set it up, but in the throes of passionate drunken love, he had assumed he and Tamara would always be dining together and would always crave to see each other even in their quiet moments.

What folly. Now Tamara’s eagle eye watched him through that window whatever he did, adding up his idle hours and accurately predicting his next moves. She felt all her totalitarian attitudes were justified since his fateful swing had toppled her over in the entrance hall decades ago.

The window was so grubby by now that a casual observer would only spot a silhouette on either side and no more, but a silhouette was plenty for Tamara to count sips of scotch in between jobs or pages of the newspaper.

A more significant amount of eyes on him would send him to work without fail, and this was one such occasion.

“Nice to have a day away from the wife, hey?” he noted gruffly as he came in to Jake’s back room where the well stood uncovered and the pump ready for the handyman. Jake had gotten to know the set-up amid so many hours spent watching and counting Andrew’s thieving hours.

The plumbing was nearly ready to go, the filter had been tested, and Jake had convinced himself that the many years of savings on water bills would certainly make up for this excruciating ordeal.

The crumpled man in his tired suit seemed to expect something upon his arrival, which Harriet would typically deliver without request. The men stood for a while in the entrance to the tack room - Jake exasperated, Andrew dulled with scotch and flustered at his host’s inhospitability – before a whimper from the couple’s new dog gave them a welcome respite. Jake firmly believed that a pet’s main purpose was to effortlessly defuse any awkward situation, and little Roger had arrived in the nick of time to beg for food and attention. Little did the owner know that his working guest awaited a similar treatment. “Hey, little guy. We just got him a few weeks ago now,” explained Jake, unsolicited, leaning over to give the young schnauzer a scratch. “Nice and butch but also portable. A funny bugger,” he added.

“So it is,” said Andrew, thrown by the innocent and lovable newcomer.

The pup uttered an expressive “woooo!” at the sight of an intruder. Jake resolved at this moment never to train the dog out of such behaviour, for he clearly had a natural sense for saving his skin when he had nothing to say. Besides, a well-trained dog is supposed to stay away until called upon, and what’s the use of that? No, thought Jake. This howling is just right.

He genuinely failed to hear Andrew’s request for tea over the din of the young dog’s howling. He smiled benignly, hoping the man would soon get to work so he could return to his own.

Rude prat, thought Andrew. Maybe Tamara has got a point.

And he set off to the well, which had already been prepared for his arrival. Wants to hurry me up, does he? For the first time since he started this two-week job about four weeks ago, Andrew made a conscious effort to work slowly.

“Well. I must be getting home to my Jake now,” said Harriet suddenly. She had not the immense stamina for remembering and recounting endless tales of minimal interest that the others possessed in droves. She was worried that Jake had failed to look after his employee, unwittingly arousing one more townsperson’s ire against himself.

Indeed, a vast list of important errands came crashing into her mind as she dozed throughout the latter part of the gathering – all the things she had been unable to do during her illness. “Plus, I’ve been so ill of late, I’ve a real backlog of errands by now.”

“Oh, dear, have you been ill?”

“Yes, terribly so. Could barely breathe through the bronchitis.” She nearly said phlegm but stuck to a more dignified term.

“Is that why your gorgeous flowers were not at the show the other day?” asked innocent Sally, as very near-audible alarm bells chimed through the parlour.

“Oh, my god! I was certain that was next week! I would have warned the organisers otherwise,” gasped Harriet. “Who won first prize then?”

Pleasantly diverted, thought Tamara coldly as the ladies tittered round the departing girl, loading her up with gifts mostly in the form of baked goods.

Tamara sent her on her way with a bouquet of light pick peonies from ther garden and a warm, understanding smile. Harriet set off to help Jake cope with the woman’s gruff husband, wondering whether he had made any progress whatsoever during her time in the lioness pit.

Clearly, he had not.

Nonetheless, Harriet brought a tray of biscuits and milky tea precisely the way he liked it, immediately upon her return and before even greeting her husband.

Andrew accepted the peace offering with grace, or so he thought.

The soft, curly-haired young woman felt he had sulked up the air in the well room so heavily, the tension between him and Jake was almost tangible.

“Jake! I practically needed a cleaver to slice through the atmosphere between the well room and your study. What did you do?”

Jake was genuinely oblivious as he grabbed her by the delicate waist and kissed her with intent.

“Hmmm, my darling,” she could feel that familiar pheromone tingling through her nose and loins as it simmered its way down through his own. He had been under understandable stress since she had fallen ill and left him to fend for himself with the antipathic villagers.

“You’ll be pleased to know I got them on our side, my sweet!” exclaimed the girl innocently, presenting all the gifts she had been bestowed at the little party. Jake turned cold.

“Oh, I’ll bet they loved you, my doll.”

“And what do you mean to say by that tone, Jake?”

“Only that any shift of the already heavily skewed balance in your favour, darling, is one step closer to that blunt blow from behind that awaits me on my way home one fateful night,” he answered in a frightfully calm voice, pushing aside the gateaux and dainty bouquets she had strewn across his desk.

“You needn’t be so dark about it, my beautiful, intellectual man,” Harriet implored, searching desperately to turn his anger to lust, something she could much better deal with. “I mean, if they like me, they’ll believe me when I speak well of you.”

“They’ll only believe what they want to believe. They’ll think I’ve coerced you somehow, my angel cake,” - his voice dripping with sarcasm - “and why is that blasted old geezer making such a racket in the kitchen instead of finishing my hateful, cursed well?!”

Andy was munching happily on Harriet’s peace offering of tea and biscuits which she had immediately rushed to serve him.

The girl noted her husband’s proprietary use of pronoun for the well as opposed to the kitchen, which in his mind was very much theirs just like the rest of the house and land. Clearly, the well had become a personal affair for the poor man. She scurried to the kitchen to nudge Andy back into work mode.

Though the ladies had not known how to address the matter of Harriet’s forced subservience to her face, they certainly knew how to discuss it in painstaking detail befitting a aspiring screenwriter.

Tamara basked in the humid air of gossiping, tea-drinking mouths. The air was electric: the droplets of saliva in each damning syllable proved the perfect conductor for the well-oiled machine of all-female conversation. It was a perfect storm of unfounded accusations and condescensions, almost all borne of the deeply unsettled, dissatisfied soul long ago bereft of any love or passion. The more hopeful younger ones would then promptly parrot the sentiments, their minds like endless linoleum hallways.

This was the kind of daytime party any self-respecting housewife could only dream of hosting. The long-elusive subject of the whole village’s conversation had finally made an appearance, then left early, with so much time remaining to dissect her every word, every move, even blemishes on her skin. For, although it was seen as rather low to criticise a fellow lady’s appearance outright, in the context of potential conjugal abuse, every small bruise and imperfection or bit of botched make-up was fair game. This part of the chatter was particularly savoured by the younger ones in the room, whose looks recent childbirth had somewhat despoiled and, unbeknownst to them, set them on the same path as the frumpy former beauties they so looked up to. Their husbands felt the change far more acutely than they themselves did, and so canapes and cake continued to fuel the conversation.

“I do hope all our gifts don’t get her into trouble,” chirped Clodagh disingenuously, for she knew it was bin night and on her way home past the Sadlers’ place she would certainly spare a keen glance to the contents of Jake and Harriet’s waste.

“Oh, goodness Clodagh! That’s a good point. I never thought of it,” gasped Angela sweetly. “He will think he’s losing her to us, and I won’t be surprised if we never saw her among us any more.”

This would provide a delicious rationale for Harriet’s certain refusals to partake in any upcoming social gatherings, for what other reason could there possibly be to turn down their invaluable company? Unless, of course, the girl was unforgivably rude, an idea they simply refused to entertain.

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