She Came In From The Storm

It was horror movie rain. A wall of water that fell like a stage curtain across the front of the house, causing the asbestos sheeting on the roof to drone like the static of a thousand broken TV sets. The hiss of the occasional car outside as it surfed through the puddles only added to the sense of isolation.

Of course, within, the house was warm and bathed in liquid yellow light, but the weather outside intruded by the force of the storm on the windows and walls.

This was a house occupied by itinerants, drifters: People in between here and somewhere else. The floor wasn’t disturbed by sprawling root systems- no one ever stayed long enough to call it home. The letterbox would clog with notifications of unpaid bills and fines for previous tenants, but there remained little evidence of the people whose lives were loaded off and onto trucks with depressing frequency.

I’d lived there a few months- a place to sleep and gather thoughts after a shift in my circumstances. In a faltering half-hearted way I’d tried to make it homely and accommodating, but it remained a half-way house with a distinct echo of loneliness- and a real one since the high-ceilinged space was sparsely furnished.

But then she came. Her yellow car swishing to a stop at the kerb outside, brakes squealing in protest but powerless to resist the arrival. She came, dripping the storm into the house, the rain washing off the life she’d left behind as she brought in bags and boxes, armloads of history.

And so the house of loneliness became a home. A place for warm embraces and shared moments. Of silence broken by hummed music and running baths, of air scented with the intoxicating fragrances of the perfumes and possessions of a woman.

It was always just a house, until you came, squinting the rivulets of water out of your eyes into the dim passage, bringing with you life and new beginnings…

Spitting out Ice-cream

Playing a movie in reverse. Starting at The End. Finis. Not something you see happen too often in the digital age, but I remember the film reels of childhood, when, after too many seasonal drinks and the locked-in fever of an English winter, relatives would show us old home movies, and then, just for fun, play them backwards. We’d collapse with laughter as a seaside holiday turned into a keystone cops undoing of life- fish would hurl themselves backwards off fishing rods back into the safety of the ocean, and ice-creams would be spewed out of tiny messy mouths, even as the faces miraculously cleaned themselves up.

And so it goes. After fifteen years of marriage, I am divorced. The memories and life created have all been rewound, right back to slipping rings off fingers and reversing up the aisle.

Yet this ending is not the time to leave your cinema seat. No, you should grab some snacks and settle down, for this is the beginning of a new epic. Even in pre-production, this next show is hailed to be a prize-winner, an award-winning cast is set to revolutionise the way we view things. From the reverse movie you just chuckled through, I have three children, whose lives are most definitely progressing. I’m thrilled to be part of that. I also have a new partner, and her role in the movie seems to be one that will have equal billing on the credits. Very happy about that.

So I’m settling back, wondering how the scenes will play out, and how the story will end. I’m not reversing this time. I’m hurtling into the future with the expectancy that things will work out, that in this movie, anything could happen.

Grab your popcorn and your cherry slushies. You won’t be bored. Promise.

Laura Norder

My first real job, I was hired to get arrested. The deal was, I worked for a nightclub as a barman. We didn’t have a liquor licence. What we did have was frequent raids by teams of cops. They’d send in a decoy, who would buy a drink with a marked note, and then the rest of the team would storm in and take all of the booze and money, and arrest the manager. The manager would be fined an admission of guilt fine, and then the club would be up and running again. A manager could get two fines before he had a proper court case, so there was a rotational management team- we took turns in getting bundled into a van, fingerprinted and fined.

It seemed to work, and generally the whole process was done out of obligation on the part of the police. Sometimes they’d even let us know they were going to raid so we could hide the drinks in the ceiling or toilet cisterns.

I was arrested a couple of times. Once on my eighteenth birthday. The next time, I was locked up for five days over a long weekend.

So I served drinks and waited for the police.

That was a long, long time ago. I no longer wait to be arrested, or try and find loopholes in the law. My career path has become legit, like a mafia don.

But I am in the business of arrest. I don’t wear a uniform or sit in an unmarked car muttering into a Dictaphone. I don’t storm drug dens with my pulse battering the inside of my ears and my trigger finger twitching.

I write. My job these days is to arrest you. To let you partake in the criminal pleasures of reading, escaping, learning, dreaming, and then, just when you think you’re getting away with it, to throw you to the ground and in an instant change your life. With words.

Arrest isn’t always a bad thing. For a kid drifting away from the too-distant or too-close care of his parents, arrest can redirect his waywardness. Wake-up call.

Same with cardiac arrest- provided it doesn’t leave you gasping like a landed fish, clutching your chest and watching the world fade to a blur, once it’s over, and you’ve survived, you can appreciate sunrises and sunsets, tastes and even pain, with a renewed, almost rebellious, sense of passion.

So I’ll be there. Watching you. Finding out your habits and your delectations. Waiting for the right moment to slip the cuffs over your wrists, and keep you captive in my world for a bit, until you can look at life with an altered perspective. I hope you enjoy the experience.

Fragmented Families Can Be Good

You can have extended family begging you to “stay together for the kids”, but sometimes, a marriage ends. Not always. Some couples manage to find a calm channel through the currents that overwhelm others. Some couples cope with living past each other, others seem to be able to hold hands until arthritis makes it difficult to do so. But when a marriage ends, it’s not the dissolution of a couple when there are children, but an entirely new dynamic of shared responsibilities.

It’s really hard sometimes to think about how many days I have missed of my children growing up and experiencing new things. Sometimes I discover new developments in their lives by default, as they babble happily on about new friends, or a sport they have taken up in the new school term. I manage to mask my surprise and dismay, and look for clues about how they decided to do this, and whether it shows some of their future personality in the choices they are making now.

Of course I’m supportive- anybody would be; it doesn’t make me an extra-special dad because I want to hear about who they are. That’s one of the basic rules of parenting: Listen to your kids. And on reflection, when I was parenting as part of a marriage, huge swathes of time could pass in a blur of breakfasts, laundry and distraction without me noticing a change. Perhaps it’s not so bad, then, that I see them every other week- when they are sick, or sad or talking about something new, I’m that much more able to see it.

It’s a little like maintaining a house- you have a series of spotlights in the ceiling, and one goes out, and unless you sort it out immediately, it can peer blindly down at you for months before you have a bit of home-making epiphany, and find the five minutes it takes to replace the bulb. Or going on holiday and looking at things from a different perspective. Children can be like that. When you are with them constantly, it’s possible to start to miss the microscopic changes, and sometimes even the most fundamental ones.

I’m not advocating spouses separating, or divorced parenting as the better choice, but what I am saying is that rather than sit and mope about what I’ve missed, I’m going to think about all the changes I have been fortunate enough to see, and how my children never look at me as less of a parent because I feel like one. And you can be just as observant within the context of a marriage, of course.

And I do get cross with them, sometimes. And shout, and react rather than respond, and get irritated at mealtimes, and so on… Cos I’m their dad.

Answered Prayers

They came with outstretched fingers, tapping blessings onto the shoulders of the supplicants. They swept around chambers, silence echoing from vaulted ceilings. They moved in a row, a tall thin mass, like a rank of poplar trees dividing a field. Their purpose was defined, their role made meaningful by the hunched shoulders of the morally dispossessed before them.

Their mitred heads gave the impression of a chess set made up entirely of bishops, their slide across the diagonals designed to counteract the halting one-pace steps of the masses. The rasp of their robes against unimaginably jointed meccano legs was in harmony with the dry breathy gasp of the faintest of breezes which crept behind the heavy ancient tapestries like wayward children fearing a beating.

They responded to rules and bells, to chants and incantations. In this room words and gazes were currency, and they were immeasurably wealthy, the impoverished their charges. Without the walls, their power was in the ability to draw the guilty, fearful and desperate through the grey stone doorway and into the place where mercy was placed like a bet on their shoulders.

And yet, despite the menace lurking at the stare-at-your-feet level, where the grey slate was chilled enough to keep haunches of meat cool and fresh, up towards the rafters, the fingers of God pushed rainbow reminders of light through the stained glass, and prayers lifted to mingle with the motes of holy dust which snagged them on their way to heaven.

There were walls. They could not contain what was within.

A Story Full of Asses

I fell off my ass. Yup. I said “off”. I fell off it and onto it. And I was one, too. It was that sort of a time, when I didn’t experience something new, but became part of an ancient tradition of human conflict. It was a brief time of what-ifs and maybes, but in the end I was just part of something beyond my capacity to alter. And yet the impact of that fall did more than leave bruises and remove possessions, it also left a lasting impact on me, in the way I was picked up, and put back on my ass again.

Gratuitous use of the word ass. Sure. This is why. The ass I fell off was the one on which I was travelling: a donkey. Like the guy in the story, I was merely going from one place to another, my ass and me, oblivious to physical threat. Then, like the story, I was set upon by bandits. They beat me up and took whatever they could. No new plot twists there, either. They pulled me off my ass, and literally threw me down, on my ass. I was left in several pools of blood with nothing left.

The next part is important… I made it as far as the police station. They didn’t help me. Then the first of the Samaritans came along. See, I could have fallen asleep in my house, which is where I was attacked, and died; alone, my phones, money and computer gone. Might as well have been lying in a ditch in the semi-desert. And yet over the next few days, I had so many people seeking me out. They’d heard a little bit, and they made sure I was in a safe place, a place of recovery. They gave me enough to get on my feet, and ultimately put me back on my ass.

I was traumatised- the ancient stories and their modern counterparts- movies and books- don’t acknowledge that as a central theme to violence. But despite my behaviour unravelling to the point that I was half-unhinged, a frightened man, vacillating between fantasies of revenge and of wanting to hide, my friends insisted that I had never lost my ass, but that all I had to do was recover, and they would help me climb back on when the time was right.

And I’m back- I sometimes get off to rest, sometimes suspect that the ass could throw me off and refuse to take me on my journey, but so far so good. I could get on a treadmill of hate, hating the bandits or the people who didn’t offer the assistance I required, but instead I want to focus on the amazing way that my Samaritan friends came along. Some of them have never met me. Some of them have. Neither of those factors prevented them from offering love and support, and for that I’m grateful. When I coped with it the wrong way, and fell apart, I was met with wisdom and encouragement, and even when I wasn’t a pleasant person to be around, my friends and extended virtual family didn’t focus on the ugliness, but on the healing.

Once again, it’s worth saying: Friends put friends back on their asses, and my own experience of that is absolutely awe-inspiring. From practical support to a short message beamed through a cable, it made a difference. Made the shadows get shorter, and the light brighter.

In the Belly

It’s a fire. It always starts with a spark. From the speck of orange that connects two substances, it can explode in one swift ball of gases, or it can skirt around the fringes, consuming the dry parts first. It can fold in on itself, a flame parasite devouring the surface which gives it life and so consuming the hope of a future. It can be unstoppable. A wall of flame which devastates an entire landscape, and while it burns there is no time for work or food for those in its path. It sears the flesh leaving blisters, scars, and scores arcs of memory into seared eyes. You can keep it in a fireplace, feed it, watch it, meditate on it as you look into it. It’s a crystal ball of connected thoughts and wistful moments. You can guide it, but you can’t master it. Fire has a way of finding loopholes and surprises. Fire seeks out everything which it can lick and taste, and its appetite is never sated. Fire is pretty to look at, but hard to hold. You can dash across a bed of embers, or breathe it like the moist-lipped circus performer, but you can’t suppress it without killing it completely. You can huddle around it and harness it for cooking, call it entertainment, but it remains an elemental force, channelling your mind into the mists of time, where men walked in fear of serpents and beasts that called in the dark. Sometimes it’s just a candle, nodding away in the corner, giving off a stuttering light in a shadowed room. Sometimes it’s an ember, a smoking piece of moss in a leather pouch waiting to be touched against a ball of grass and blown upon. When it’s out of control, people can’t tame it or quench it. When it sits in the belly of a volcano, it turns rocks to liquid and rolls in on itself,a creative force altering maps and horizons. Fire is one of the sculptors of human destiny and the great-great grandparent of all things mechanical and industrial. Without fire, we’d be doomed to a stone age of gnawed hard things, and nights spent with chattering teeth alone under our woven blankets or flensed hides. Without fire, we’d be without warmth or comfort. Without fire, we’d be gathering on weekends around bowls of fruit, barking our shins on roughly-hewn logs.

Aw, crap. Just wanted to say that love is like fire, and then got a little carried away. Anyway, it really, really, really is. So there.