Two Women and Some Books
Friday in the morning mist
Thinking of the ones I’ve kissed
Those who walked a step ahead
Yet in my life were shining threads
Those I’ve loved and somehow lost
Who found the bridge and walked across
Reminding me that, though life ends
Across the stream I’ll find my friends
“Did you really kill a dragon, Gran’ma?”
Hepsy had to hide a smile and scooped her youngest grandson into a hug. It was the end of his fifth birthday party and he had been running around waving the wooden sword his grandfather had made for him, pretending to kill imaginary monsters in the vegetable patch. Now the family sat at table eating a simple birthday meal. Hepsy and her husband, Poll, their middle son and his wife and five grandchildren ranging from mid-teens to the birthday boy.
“Who’s been telling you tales like that?” she asked.
“Was Da. He said you killed a dragon, you and Gran’da. Is it true?”
Something in his tone made her realise it was not just a question wanting a story. She released her grandson and caught her son’s eye. He swallowed the mouthful he was chewing and sat back in his chair.
“Word is there’s a dragon back on High Top. Been taking cows from Vasserdale and burned a farm to the ground. Shal willing, it won’t fly this way.”
“Dragons don’t just turn up places,” Poll said. “They have to be hatched and that takes a lot of magic. It means they will have a master.”
“Or a mistress,” Hepsy put in. “Is there any word of a dragon being seen on Prank’s Peak or Scale Height?”
Her son shrugged.
“Those places are the other side of the mountains. We don’t get word from there often. Was a minstrel up from Durmouth though. Seems there’s war over the Marches again. Hobs and trolls.”
“When I’m grown up I’m going to fight hobs and trolls.”
Hepsy mussed her grandson’s soft hair.
“That’s just what your da said at your age, and now look at him, the finest carpenter in Wyvernvale.”
After the family had gone, Hepsy went into her still room where she made potions and poultices, pickles and jams and pulled out the chest from beneath her work counter, where she pushed it away over thirty years before. Opening the lid she took out the two pieces of her staff and fitted them together, murmuring some words as she did so.
Then she went out and stood in their small garden, shielding her eyes from the low sun to look towards the mountains. High Top could be seen piercing the sky with its needle spire of rock. What she could not see from below though was the steep path that wound up to the plateau from which the steeple of stone began. Nor could she see the cave mouth that led to the lair. But memory told her they were there. Memory and loss.
A sound made her turn.
“You gave me a promise you’d not be using that anymore,” Hepsy said, as Poll came out of the house, her gaze rested on the sword he held in one hand, it’s blade shimmering with a blue light so the runes etched into it stood out. Then she gave a little sigh. “But then I gave you a promise I’d not be using this.” She hefted the staff and small sparks shimmered like dust motes in the air around it. “Looks like we both done broke that vow. But the big question is, what should we be doing?”
“We knew it would happen again,” Poll said, his voice heavy with sorrow. He slid the sword home into the loop on his belt and the blue light faded. Hepsy noticed the buckle was three notches up from the mark showing where he used to wear it. It was not all that had changed since he last took up that sword. His hair then had been thick and black, now it left the top of his head uncovered and was thinning and grey. But then her hair had once been the colour of a wheatfield before the harvest and now was nearly as white as the melting snows.
“We knew,” she agreed. “But I’d not thought t’would be in our lifetime. I thought we’d won the right to have our peace. We’re too old to do it all again. Not now.”
Poll put his arm around her and held her close.
“If not us – then who? The children? The grandchildren?”
Now that was a thought too terrible to dwell upon and Hepsy shook her head. “No. But it’s a dreadful long walk up to High Top and my back and your knee…”
“My knee will bear my weight long enough for what we have to do,” he said gently. “Besides, we’ll take horses this time. Hue owes me for last winter still, he’ll let us have two of his hill ponies.”
Which was a comforting thought because it really was a parlous long way and a terrible steep climb up the mountains. She shivered slightly at the memory and Poll hugged her.
“Less of that, woman. You pack what we need and I’ll go see Hue. We can set out tomorrow with first light. We’ll have to try to find the others and that won’t be easy.”
Hepsy nodded and he released her, his gnarled hands gripping her, work-worn fingers for a moment as he did so.
“They might be dead,” she said. “Do you think we can do it without them?”
Poll drew in a deep breath and looked out towards the mountains, his gaze homing where hers had, to the needle of stone above High Top. “I don’t know, love. I think we need four of us to unlock the seals, but… Well, let’s put out that fire when we can see if it’s burning.”
He was right. Of course. Which left just one question in Hepsy’s burdened heart.
“What do we tell the children?”
For a moment she wondered if he had heard her. She hadn’t spoken loudly and his hearing was no longer so perfect. But then he looked down at her and smiled sadly.
“I think we should tell them nothing,” he said. “They wouldn’t understand.”
The next day they were up before the dawn and Hespy fed the chickens a final time and explained to them that Hue’s wife had promised to come feed them in her absence. That done she went inside and searched deep in her clothes chest. It was still there. At the bottom. She looked at the long robe with its split skirt and fingered the heavy fabric, embroidered with gold and silver symbols with regret. She would no more fit that any more than she would the wedding dress she had given to her eldest daughter. Instead, she chose her most practical clothes and a pair of Poll’s old breeches and decided that maybe looking the part wasn’t so important anymore. She put her hair into a braid and studied the weather-worn face that looked back at her critically from the small hand mirror.
“Still as beautiful as ever,” Poll told her and for a moment his face and hers were captured in the same glass. This mirror never lied and it showed him as he was, which was always a reassurance.
“You and your silver tongue.” She laughed, slipping the mirror into the pouch at her belt where she had already secured some of her most potent potions. You never knew, after all.
They rode out under cloudy skies without a backwards glance.
The countryside swept down from their village to where the River Wyvern wove its way along the bottom of the vale. It was the picture of peace and rustic harmony, with cottages and houses dotting the landscape, roofs tiled with the blue flecked slate from local quarries and walls built from the dark grey rock brought down from the mountains.
The mountains themselves lurked like ominous misshapen giants, stretching fingers or lifting shoulders towards the sky. From the gentle slopes of the vale, they rose to bleak and desolate heights.
The two barrel-shaped hill-ponies seemed happy enough to set a smart pace. Poll had managed to find his old dragonhide targe which he looped over his back and Hepsy was pleased to see the gemstone set in the pommel of his dagger was not glowing. Maybe things were not so desperate as they thought? Maybe it was all rumour and no truth? Maybe…
The artwork was inspired by a description in this piece and is by Ian Bristow. You can view the creation of it here and enjoy the music he composed that the story also inspired, perhaps whilst reading…
This might be better titled ‘how to get away with being an old bat’ or ‘things you can say in your ninth decade without being arrested’.
There are absolutely no circumstances under which I am prepared to divulge my precise age but I’ll give you a clue. When I was a girl a ‘glory hole’ was a cupboard into which one crammed everything that didn’t belong anywhere else, and there were twenty shillings in a pound, and people with orange skin would be either ridiculed or hospitalised.
But I digress. Today is not for reminiscence. No. This week’s lesson concerns the things you can get away with under the umbrella of being old and a bit odd.
You can:
If a person with a clipboard approaches you in a public place it is perfectly in order to do one of the following:
And finally. It’s at last okay to air your opinions. You can say the prime minister/president/crown prince/chairman of the board/whoever is a nasty, ignorant, grabby little bar steward. That the latest fashionable television ‘presenter’ is incomprehensible and about as funny as herpes. That quinoa is just middle class rice. And so on. Be the person who says what everyone else is too polite to mention…
It isn’t given to everybody to be able to identify the precise moment when they fall for the love of their life…
It was Saturday night and the drifter drove his beat-up truck into just one more trail-end town. Truth to tell he would have preferred somewhere livelier as he had money in his pocket, but he was tired and hungry. He parked the Dodge outside a tiny diner only to see the closed sign go up on the door as he swung to the ground. An old timer and his equally ancient dog stopped and looked at him.
“Food at Belle’s Bar over the street’s better than the slop they serve here. Can even get decent coffee if’n you don’t want beer with your meal.”
The drifter tipped his hat in a grateful salute and made his way to Belle’s.
The old timer hadn’t lied about the food or the coffee. By the time the stranger had got outside of a huge plate of savoury stew, a generous helping of peach pie, and three large mugs of steaming hot coffee he was feeling almost human. He decided he might as well stay for a beer while he chewed over his options.
His usual Saturday night agenda involved picking up some lonely woman in a bar and getting invited back to her place for the night. He got bed and breakfast and his lady hostess got what he reckoned to be some pretty hot sex. Something for everybody, and no offence taken if his advances were spurned. However, he had worked for the better part of two months helping a group of dirt farmers plough and weed and build fences, so he was bone weary and he had money enough to get his own room. He’d have that beer and think. He bellied up to the bar and the woman tender stopped polishing glasses.
“I get you, bro?”
“Bro?” the drifter was amused and that made him look closer at the woman. She was maybe thirty years old, and plain of face, but with an infectious grin and the light of intelligence in a pair of strange bi-coloured eyes. She chuckled.
“Yup. Bro. Saves me trying to learn the names of all the damned fools that come in here looking for beer and sympathy.”
He found himself laughing too, and for some reason that felt good.
“I’ll take a beer please, and one for yourself.”
Somehow or other, he was still by the bar when it was closing time. He watched the bartender take off her apron and hang it on the beer pumps before he spoke.
“Anywhere I can get a room in these parts?”
She looked at him for a long moment then seemed to come to a decision.
“I got a bed too big for one woman.”
The drifter felt his smile flow across his cheeks. This one, he thought, would be a real pleasure. He held out a hand and the woman came around the bar and put her own hand in his.
“Hi, pretty lady,” he said, “my name’s…”
She put the fingers of her free hand across his mouth.
“Let’s just keep it to bro, shall we? This time tomorrow you’ll be gone and your name’ll be no manner of good to me.”
He nodded his understanding and they walked out of the bar shoulder to shoulder.
It wasn’t early when she slid from his embrace and padded out to the kitchen. He watched her go, marvelling at how comfortable she was in her own nakedness and how much he had enjoyed that nakedness. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. He was still deep in thought when a voice floated in from the next room.
“I’m sorta making breakfast. What do you want on your toast?”
“A couple eggs would be good,” he responded without thinking.
Almost instantaneously a laughing face appeared in the doorway.
“Eggs bro? Sheesh. The sex wasn’t that good.”
And he knew at that moment that his fate lay in a one-horse trail-end town with this woman by his side.
Yup. Jacintha Farquar. Again. Here to moan in your lugholes about whatever turgid pap you writers seem to think you can hurl at us poor readers with no comeback.
I mean, here to help you aspiring novelists hone your art and improve your technique.
Honestly.
You, yes, you, stop looking away as if this has nothing to do with you because you know you have done it. You will have dropped the names of movies you love, references to books or music you love and that esoteric hobby of yours, somehow into your magnum opus.
Along comes the reader who is twenty years older or younger than you, loving the book and then POW – you’ve lost them. They don’t care that your main character likes listening to Swooky Pizzaface or that the classic scene in Toy Story Two Hundred and Twenty Three was just soo funny. And maybe you were thinking all your fly fishing pals were going to just love that reference on page sixty-two of your post-apocalyptic novel? Well all two of them who ever read the book might do, but for the rest of your readership you’d probably have more reach by mentioning J.R. Hartley…
Did I lose you on that one?
Go Google it.
That makes my point.
One person’s cool cultural reference is another’s ‘Huh?’ or even ‘Ugh’.
Then we come with anachronisms.
Why is it every damn character in the future has a secret passion for 21st Century movies/books/HipHop or history? Now I know for a fact there will be some of you reading this who will be saying ‘Yes, well I have a passion for 4th Century BCE Greco-Roman pottery’. Well good for you if you do, but you know what? There is a reason shows and books about that are not topping any popularity charts.
My son, Moons, won’t even watch a film from the 1990s as he says the visual quality is too crap so by the time we get another century on things from this time will just be sad and dated in the minds of most.
You may fondly imagine readers are smiling as you name check the entire cast of Farscape, but no, they won’t be. They will be being reminded that they are reading a frigging book set five hundred years in the future in which the main character has an utterly unlikely obsession with an old show they never even liked themselves. You will have broken their reading immersion at best and alienated them at worst.
It is not an effing ‘easter egg’ it’s a bloody shambles.
And what about if you write in the past?
Get your facts right. It is not hard to learn when various items were discovered/invented, Google is your friend.
Don’t have someone in Tudor times wave a red rag at a bull – that kind of bull fighting didn’t exist then, and a ‘waving a red rag’ meant flapping your tongue to no good end.
Don’t have your Viking feeling his heart pumping to circulate the blood around his body, no one knew it did that then.
Don’t have a character in the Wars of the Roses thinking about the cells in his body, or talking about a virus or about bacteria – or even germs. They were not known about then.
Don’t have your Roman Senator say he is going to handbag someone or that he fights according to Queensbury rules…
Just don’t…
So in brief make sure your cultural references fit the culture.
And if that hasn’t sent you scurrying back to your keyboard looking for the delete key I don’t know what will. So sod off unless you are going to make me another Bloody Mary…
“The men who came out of the hole in the sky, what did they look like, Dylan?”
Dylan thought for a bit and chewed on his pencil. He wanted to help the nice lady, she had been very kind and said he could play with any of the toys in her room.
“They were big and scary,” he said, and started drawing. “They picked up mummy and Gwen and ran back into the hole in the sky with them.”
“Then the hole closed up?”
Dylan nodded. He wanted to explain how the hole had pulsed and made the air around it shimmer, as if it didn’t belong. He wanted to tell the nice lady how he had tried to run through the hole after the men, and seen a strange boat with a dragon’s head on the other side. But he wasn’t sure how to put the images in his mind into words that made any sense. So he kept working on his picture instead.
“There wasn’t really a hole in the sky, was there?” the nice lady spoke kindly. “It was a car or a van that the men got out of, wasn’t it?”
Dylan wondered if the nice lady was trying to make fun of him. He finished his picture and held it up.
“They looked like this.”
The nice lady must have been very tired because her face went very pale and she suddenly fell asleep on the brightly coloured carpet.
Prunella teaches you how to cook like a toff!
The biggest test of any woman’s cookery skills (as well as her patience and tolerance for alcohol) is luncheon for a group of her own sex.
The best advice, honestly, is to never allow oneself to be inveighed into hosting what can only be accurately described as a bitchfest.
Should you be foolish enough I have a few words of consolation.
However badly the occasion falls out there will always be worse in living memory – with the proviso that you remember the three golden rules.
Never serve chicken (by some intervention of Beelzebub it will always be raw in the middle)
Never run out of booze
Never allow your husband/offspring/brothers within shouting distance (they will find it terribly funny to cause mayhem and leave you apologise for them)
So, ladies, to our muttons. Now might indeed be a good time to break out your finishing school cookery. Or it might not. Perfect salmon en croute may be the normal order of the day for you, but with fifteen arch-critics at the door, failure is guaranteed. Burned pastry with raw fish inside is the best you can expect. Do. Not. Attempt. Anything complicated. If you must show off your culinary talents I strongly suggest a casserole which can be perfected the day before and merely heated on the day.
But. Having, unbeknownst to me, been made a member of a group of ‘ladies who lunch’ (I believe my unlamented mother-in-law to have been responsible) I have developed a coping mechanism which I am prepared to share here.
The food.
Tapas. Consisting of whatever you can find at your nearest German supermarket (not Waitrose, or Samantha, Lucinda et al will even be au fait with the price). Shove your purchases onto the best Coalport serving platters and smile your best humbly self-satisfied smile.
The booze.
Unlimited amounts of sangria and/or Agua de Valencia. Shakes head at puzzled young women. These drinks are both ironic and carefully lethal.
Mix as follows.
Sangria
2 litres red wine
1 litre Fundador or similar sherry-based brandy
2 tablespoons muscovado sugar
2 large oranges sliced
1 large lemon sliced
2 punnets strawberries
1 cinnamon stick
2 star anise
1 litre lemonade
Mix all ingredients except lemonade in large jugs at least three hours prior to luncheon. Add lemonade at the last minute.
Agua de Valencia
2 litres orange juice
4 sliced oranges (blood oranges for preference)
1 bottle cheap gin
1 bottle cheap vodka
4 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 bottles cava
Mix all ingredients except cava beforehand. Add cava just before the wenches descend
And there you have it. A no-fail luncheon for your natural enemies.
Just one last thing. Make no attempt to hide the supermarket packaging the food came in. If you do, your husband’s ex-girlfriend will seek it out and parade it about the room. Which bitchery there is no point to if you leave the packets in a neat pile on the kitchen worktop. Benefit two of this strategy is that when a mildly intoxicated young woman demands to know if the king prawns were prepared to Mary Berry’s recipe or Nigella’s you can recommend her to go and read the packet.
Look out for more tips on how to cook like a toff next week!
January explodes upon the world
With fireworks and cheers
And auld lang syne.
Then creeps she neath her soft blankets
Of snow and mist
Within her house walled with ice
And roofed with frost
And on the casement panes
She prints star patterns,
Draws icicles on eave and gable,
Paints the lawn from green to white
And with bony fingers reaches
Like the leafless trees
To caress the greyness of the sky.
It wanted but ten minutes to midnight when Matthias stepped out of his door and sniffed the starlit air. His dogs, Florence and Fido, came out too and sat at his feet regarding the quiet dark landscape through round, intelligent eyes. Matthias lit up his long, clay pipe and smoked in ruminative quiet for a moment before bending to place one hand on each soft furry head.
“I wonder how many we can expect tonight?”
By way of an answer Florence wagged her tail briefly, and Fido gave a small wuff.
Their master smiled.
“Good dogs.”
It was, he thought, a pleasant night to be standing in the well manicured grass, smoking a pipe, and listening to the small sounds of the night creatures in the trees and the crevices in the dry stone wall that surrounded his demesne.
Somewhere across the silent valley a bell rung, tolling the midnight hour with its melodious chimes. Florence and Fido stiffened, and Matthias knocked the dottle out of his pipe on a convenient stone.
He turned to watch the well-worn path that led uphill from the town and his eyes caught the gleam of a pale light coming his way. What was at first one light, became two, then three, then a dozen, until finally a score or more of the pallid glimmers progressed across the springy grass and through the tall trees to where Matthias stood.
As the first reached him, it changed from an insubstantial mote of light to the figure of an elderly man, bent and soured with age. The dogs barred his way and he looked down vaguely.
Matthias called through the open doorway.
“Who comes to meet Archibald Smith.”
A dozen or so voices replied, so the dogs parted allowing the old man to pass into his new home.
The ritual repeated for each of those who sought entry and it gladdened Matthias’ heart that all had someone to speak for them – meaning he had not any to turn away into the unforgiving sky.
He looked down at the dogs.
“Time to turn in.”
But Fido growled and Florence pointed to where one glimmer of light, paler and more frightened than any that had been before seemed to be trying to hide itself among the tall grass that bordered the wall. Matthias beckoned and it came reluctantly to where he stood beside the square of warm light that marked his door. As the light touched down in front of him it became a very old woman, a woman with no teeth and precious little hair, a woman so wrinkled and wizened and diminished by age that it was difficult to tell what she might have looked like under her loose and greyish skin. But then she looked at Matthias, and the sheer beauty of her grass-green eyes stabbed him in the breast like a sword.
“Why do you try to hide, sister. Is there no one awaiting you beyond the veil?”
“I do not know, sir doorkeeper. I only know that I tremble to think that he who was my husband may see me as I am now and regret awaiting me at the portal for sixty years.”
Matthias smiled his understanding.
“Who comes to meet Grace Sandling?”
“I do,” a great voice from beyond the doorway stirred the air and set the scent of honeysuckle tickling the noses of the dogs.
“Come forth then. It is permitted.”
A tall, strong auburn-haired figure with a neatly trimmed beard and big strong hands walked out into the night.
“My Grace,” he said tenderly and fell to his knees on the award in front of the old woman. “My Grace, come to me at last.”
The woman shook like an aspen tree in the winter and covered her face with her insubstantial hands.
“I am not as you remember me. Cruel eld has robbed me of both beauty and strength. I am ashamed to let you see me thus.”
The man reached out and removed her hands from in front of her face. He looked into her eyes.
“You are exactly as I remember you. Brave and beautiful and kind.”
He carried both her hands to his lips and as Matthias watched the years fell from her, until she stood sword-straight and as lovely as a spring morning. The man offered her his arm and they walked through the doorway together.
Matthias swallowed a lump in his throat before whistling the dogs and walking through the door with them at his heels.
The door closed behind them and the garden and the dry stone walls folded onto themselves leaving only a bare hillside in the cold moonlight.
Friday the Thirteenth!
Who’s afraid of Freddy Krueger then? Lights a fag from the stub of the last one and sneers.
Look at yourselves will you. Frightening yourselves shitless about a random date and a fictional monster.
Get a grip!
Friday the Thirteenth is just another day. It is no more unlucky than any other day.
To illustrate: I met my late and unlamented spouse on a Friday. Only it wasn’t the thirteenth. And I couldn’t blame luck. Nope. I wound up married to the louse because of the effects of rough cider not the friggin’ date….
So. Get out from under the bed. Get your legs down the appropriate holes in your trousers (or pants if you are a bloody colonial), and try to act like you have a brain cell.
Stop watching horror films if you don’t have the balls to realise they are fiction.
Don’t be looking for lucky items of clothing, just put your adult panties on and get on with the day.
Do not walk around with your fingers crossed. You will only wind up hurting yourself.
Put the bloody rabbit foot down. It isn’t lucky for f***’s sake. The poor bloody rabbit is dead.
To cut a possibly very long rant a little shorter here is the bottom line.
Superstition is crap. It will never be anything but crap. It is designed to sell crap. And to allow the feeble-minded to blame their inadequacies on a higher power.
Again I say crap.
If I see anybody surreptitiously turning their money in their pocket, or avoiding their reflection I shall be kicking ass…
Piss off. I’ve said all I’m going to say and you are annoying me now.
Happy Friday suckers!
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