Where once you saw waxwings

“I know a secret,” the old man says.

“What?” you ask, “what?”

“I know,” the old man says, “where Father Christmas keeps his sleigh –”

“Where!”

“– in the Summer.”

“Where? Where does he keep it?”

“An elf told me,” the old man says, and he gives you a knowing nod.

“Where does he keep it? Where does Father Christmas keep his sleigh?”

“I could take you,” he says, “if you were good.”

“Please can we? Please can we go?”

Cabbage is boiling in the kitchen. A fog of dinnertime has flushed the glass behind the geraniums. You can’t be long; it will be ready soon.

“If we’re quick, we can get back before anyone knows we’ve gone.”

Walking beside him through the quiet suburban streets, where colonies of lawnmowers protect their queen, it seems unlikely that the old man would know. It must be a trick, a stage prop from a show. A beautiful troika, copied in intricate detail to give the appearance of the magical vessel whilst on film. You suppose that one of the old man’s friends at the auction house has spotted it and told him where it was. In your head, Leroy Anderson accompanies every step.

“Are we going to the auction house?” you ask.

“Shh,” he tells you, “it’s a secret. We can’t have everyone knowing where it’s kept.”

You’re going to the auction house. This is the way you always go. Perhaps someone has brought a sleigh there to be sold, a sleigh like Father Christmas’s. It could raise a lot of money could that; you don’t suppose these things turn up that often.

Though you do not believe in Father Christmas, you don’t tell the old man this fact. It is something you have long known, that adults enjoy the conspiratorial protection of believing in children’s innocence. Telling him now – asking him, “So, what really is this sleigh?” – would destroy his safety. He would be forced to recognise the pretence that had been going on for years. You had always known; he had not.

“We can’t stay long,” he says, “your dinner will be ready soon.”

The auction house, low and pebble-dashed, sits amongst the industrial sheds around the sweet factory. Burnt sugar smogs the few thwarted rowan trees where once you saw waxwings, but today there are none.

You are not going to the auction house, but instead he leads you down a long, narrow path between two of the adjacent sheds.

“He has to hide it very well,” he says, “no one would find it here.”

You are stepping over cardboard and discarded polythene sheeting. The old man has to push a metal trolley to one side. Leroy’s jingle has become somewhat forced, a reluctant death-rattle as your shoes scrape through the gravel yard behind the building.

“And here it is!” he announces.

And here it is. Even in your most pragmatic reasoning, the sleigh was not this. This is not a sleigh. You stand there and nod. This is what you have come to see; this is what the old man was excited about.

“And he comes to collect it every December, to fill it with toys!”

You nod. Of course he does.

It is made from the same material as your wardrobe at home, only the damp from the yard has seeped into it here; the plastic veneer has buckled revealing the grey, fuzzy chipboard within. It is a large, square box – much like a skip; indeed, it is currently being used as a skip – and on the side is painted the image of a sleigh, packed with toys and a sign: BARGAINS! CURTAIN RAILS! DISCOUNT!

You nod.

“Yes,” you say, “here it is.”

The old man grins at you.

“Aren’t you getting in?”

You look at him, and then at the sleigh, and you cautiously walk towards it, peering down at the contents. It is packed, not with sacks of toys, but with black bin-liners. There is a broken whisky bottle. Some guttering. Moss.

“Go on,” the old man says, “get in and play.”

So you step over the lowest part of the side, and you stand there facing the front, and you stare out. You try to imagine the thing flying over the rooftops of the town – small glittering lights beneath as you have seen in films – but all there is to look at, is the metal shutter to the grey industrial shed, where someone has spray-painted a giant penis.

“Come on,” the old man says, “we haven’t got long. Why don’t you play?”

You look at him, and acceptingly nod, and you pull on your imagined reins with a savagery that could choke a reindeer.

“Why won’t you play?”

Don

Franky and Jimmy

Original artwork taken from 'Merlo the Magician in Payroll Raid'
Boys World Annual, 1966.

Hi-De-Heidegger

Home Improvements

The Denham Commuter Network

Out Now from Black Queen:

"Treading that instinctual graviation between the conspicuously, near magnetic eschatology of the pit's 'accessibility' and the pendulum's Anglican apologia of our own lost period, Edmund Custard's Sash Fiction (Black Queen: 1966) intuitively perceives the semantic ingenuity missing from the majority of works since Hooker, and commands an authority of persistent philosophical and theological deference that revokes the rich speech of 'Little Gidding' and turns us to the cathode ray as our new Messiah."

- Geoffrey Hill

"A lot more papery than I seem to remember books being."

- Harold Bloom

The Tally

Every year, George would give them each a spaniel for Christmas. A generous gift; but George was a man of give and take.

Every year, George would give them a spaniel for Christmas, but without fail by St. Valentine’s, all of the dogs would have mysteriously vanished.

One would run away on Boxing Day night, homesick for its mother; a firecracker would startle one on New Year’s Day. The January frosts took most; they would go out walking and most probably they had fallen through the ice.

The Mill Brook Lake had taken 43 dogs all told. That’s what they said – the bottom must be dog deep.

But every year, George would give them all a spaniel for Christmas.

It would not be the same spaniel; that would be reckless. For such an operation to work you must rotate the dogs, otherwise folks would get suspicious.

“George,” they might have said, “you said dog drowned Mill Brook Lake, Handsel Monday last. Now you give dog back. Why you do this, George?”

But George rotated the dogs, so each would receive their neighbour’s dog of the previous year. Nobody was any the wiser, though occasionally one might say,

“George, I am not so good with the dogs, is there not some better gift? Four have drowned; one stole my horse and left for the East; birds ate two. Please George, no more dogs.”

Or one might think, “the dog at my neighbour’s house is the likeness of poor Rex, who burned straight to ash.”

Every twelve years or so, George would have to buy new dogs. This was the part of the plan he hated most.

Devices

Oxford, 1997.

When was the last time you climbed a ladder? Do you remember how it feels, when there's no-one holding on to the bottom? That's part of the problem, really, how it started: sometimes there just isn't anyone to stand on the bottom rung, and you still need to get to the top. There's a fire, or a cat, some damn thing or other. There's always a reason.

I had made a bad mis-step about eight feet off the ground and for a long sickly-sweet instant I felt that feeling, the feeling that means the centre of your mass has shifted outside the limits of your body. There's nothing quite like it: out there it goes in one swift motion, as if a faith healer has hauled it out in his fingers, and you become weightless, and what used to sit inside you does not, the stone pulled from the date.

There isn't time for this reflection, naturally. Something settles over you, something makes a smooth concession to the abominable state of uncertainty that surrounds you, a presence in the mind that says everything is in control. Not 'under control', but 'in control'. Everything knows what's going on. You don't, necessarily, but that's fine. Objects of notable mass are subject to accelerate due to gravitational force in the absence of an equal and opposing force. Specifically, they fall right out of the fucking sky, sunshine.

At the open end of the twenty-first century, before everything winnowed down to a point, I took a deep breath as the hated mass of my fat body fell apart in the sunlight. Joints separated cleanly and painlessly, the shroud of skin gathering in loose folds and spread smooth in taut planes as lipids smudged and shifted heavily about the anguished skeleton. What business remained was brisk and efficient. I passed into history like the birthday of a dull child.

As I lay dying, I could hear music on the breeze of that summer afternoon. A melody of sorts, ringing and chiming. It put me in mind of a church in a pleasant mood, and I smiled to think of the green-and-blue church by the river I'd promised to take her to. Why hadn't I done it? My skin prickled with tears. How gently these things become so vital, become the edges by which we trace and fumble out the shape of our lives.

Before now it had bothered me, the thought that my last thoughts might be of her, that those last thoughts might make the stuff of my life between those points all a terrible lie. If I sat on the staircase and put my head on my arms in that warm, lonely light and waited for thousands of days. Do you ever stop needing people, I had shouted, was it pre-ordained that you had to hate that failure to be truthful to the next, or the one after that? I had been certain that I was a liar. From host to host, tabletop guitar and broken skin, shadow to sunlight. Priest. No message between these lines.

For some, the day will be unexpected and devastating. For me, losing the images meant losing everything. Yes. Absolutely.

I made very sure of that.

Moving in

00000000: 00 FF FE 00  00 00 02 06  00 00 03 D6  00 00 03 DE
00000010: 00 00 03 E6  00 00 03 F2  00 00 03 FA  00 00 04 02
00000020: 00 00 04 0A  00 00 04 12  00 00 04 1A  00 00 04 26
00000030: 00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  
00000040: 00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  
00000050: 00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  
00000060: 00 00 04 32  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00
00000070: 00 00 11 26  00 00 02 00  00 00 0B 10  00 00 02 00

The remainder of the first block is intentionally blank:

00000080: 00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00
[...]
000000F0: 00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00

Subsequently, certain important information is disclosed:

00000100: 53 45 47 41  20 4D 45 57  41 20 44 52  49 56 45 20
00000110: 28 43 29 53  45 47 41 20  31 39 39 31  2E 41 50 52
00000120: 53 4F 4E 49  43 20 54 48  45 20 20 20  20 20 20 20
00000130: 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20  48 45 44 47  45 48 4F 47

Which is to say:

|SEGA MEGA DRIVE |
|(C)SEGA 1991.APR|
|SONIC THE       |
|        HEDGEHOG|

The majority of the remainder of this block is also left blank. Afterwards things necessarily become human-unreadable:

00002660: 0E AE 0E 4E  08 08 0E A0  08 00 00 00  06 26 0A 2A 
00002670: 0C 4C 0E 8E  0E EE 0A AA  08 88 04 44  08 E0 02 60
00002680: 00 EE 00 88  00 44 00 0E  00 46 00 00  0E EE 02 20
00002690: 04 42 06 64  08 86 0C CA  00 44 00 EE  00 0E 00 0A

Consequently: