Out in the rhododendron, an old wind lies coiled lengthways along thick roots. The acidic slopes they twist through drop steeply towards the curve of the fjord. Sounds of the Atlantic and its dwellers drift up on younger, more eager airs. This tired wind has lost most of its voice, taken to a bed of sinewy shade. It has grown accustomed to perpetual dimness, tolerant of its intolerant soilmates, respectful of their drive, their entrepreneurial vision. But it struggles to relax, to unhitch memories from hungrier ages hurling foam-tipped gales or exhaling light sighs across glint-rippled tapestries.

Some days the fishermen retreat, cursing. Other days return with blessings. Always somewhere hearts are left unsealed to draughts.

Reilly is in the school’s round room. Nothing seems to have changed since he walked out ago ago after the last exam. Faded watercolours and a framed inspirational quote. “Words must be weighed, not counted”. When he’d started reading heavy books he’d felt big in a small town, but now a piece of furniture, identifiable from distance. The real heft lies in the oral tradition, in such venerable classics as “MAYBE SOME OTHER TIME” or “NO”. You can be big in a small town if passing through. Or become scaled down by a narrow description that pares your mysteries back, as far back even as wherever the bare line of dignity is drawn.

That’s Pat Reilly’s middle lad, the dropout who missed the free in the quarter-final.

Out near the lakes, in roofless ruins, a dream of lost love is wedged, a folded note in a gap over a big irregular hearthstone. It once burned bright enough to throw light across the back of a winter, but comings and goings faded to goings alone, and later the village was emptied of its dreamers. This survivor has grown used to silence, tuned to the wear and tear of season etched onto season, grand palimpsest of skins.

It watches the thin sally growing amid tumbled stones, spring fuzz being overtaken by impatient leaves, impossible greens bucking in the breeze.

“Will wait for you on Tuesday at Lough Shindilla by the pier.” ends the note, after much leaking of love. The dream reads its text often, alternating the focus, perhaps on the yearning opening, notes of despair about the middle, urgency towards the end. It looks like it took a long time to finish, many drafts deep.

Can it still be unfolded?

Andrea reaches for her water bottle, wedged into the backpack’s side pocket. She keeps walking. It must be more than four miles to the hostel. Here would be an ok spot to pitch, but after last night’s fragmented sleep and loud rain, she wants a shower, soft bed, sound of voices.

Anxiety from the early days has gone quiet. Now there’s a basicness, the gradual changing of terrain, the carrying of food and planning of meals, the arriving and disappearing of towns and villages. Out here in the wilder sections, wide skies, map checking, big silences, mountains. Soon, the ocean. Can almost smell it.

She pauses to take a photo. She likes verses of skies that carry soft pales, subtle gradients, the vault opposite a sun sliding down horizon’s lip.

Is this what she needed? Is she healing? The better days are when she doesn’t ask.

“The green’s too green. Looks fake.” says Reilly. Michael glances up at the bobbing poplars, continues his tangent. “Which is more important?” he asks. “To be able to do something, or to want to do something?” They are behind the boathouse. The swelling of late April is giving way to the riotous advances of May. Reilly is, as he says, “flat”. The greens look like someone added a filter.

“I suppose if you have things you want to do then you are probably not depressed?”, he says.

Michael snaps open another tin. “Think of all the things you could actually be doing right now if you had a reason. All the places you could be.”

“But how much time should you spend thinking about being somewhere else?”

“Yeah. Tricky. Selling discontent; that’s how a lot of the world seems to roll.”

“There’s a market for it.”

The river gurgles, water boatmen skim about a calm crook in the shelter of a bay in the bank. “I didn’t realise that hanging out by yourself was an ability until I couldn’t do it.” says Reilly. Michael reaches out to kick a low green plant. “That’s another one. Invasive”, he declares. “Probably brought in when they widened this car park”. They survey the car park and what it had brought in. More cars. A jogger goes by, nodding.

“Knotweed,” says Michael. “That’s the real bastard.” He begins to list its qualities. Grows ten centimetres in a day, gets right into concrete foundations, wreaks them from the inside out. Invincible to potions. Sword hacking only makes it spread. “And once it gets in! You can spend years at it, think it’s wiped out, and a horse can trot along after a decade, kick up the ground, and boom, off it goes again.” They both sup. “You know you can’t get a mortgage or sell your house in England if they find it?” They silently consider such a predicament. Neither would be given a mortgage or feel comfortable talking to a bank manager, even about the weather.

They both struggle to explain their unmortgageable trajectories, or would if asked. Let sleeping black hounds lie and so on, but these things have a tendency to gatecrash the small hours.

“Sharon said there’s a pile of it out her way, you know, where the old road goes out to the lakes. Someone dumped a load of topsoil. I heard it was Fitzy’s dad.”

The apathetic old wind has no plans to unwrap itself, but today, all is change. Distant engine noise since morning, getting closer and closer, until soil twists and buckles in a torrent of sound and hack and slice. An attempt at clearing is underway, heavy machines cutting into the soft earth, saws buzzing into stems, Roundup in syringes.

Dislodged, the wind is thrown into the light. It spins, knocks off a man’s hat, rustles the glossy toxic leaves, then rises, jostling awkwardly with the prevailing, afraid at first, confused, then higher up beginning to waken.

It will blow inland, find something loose to scatter.

A forever home is being hoisted up where Fitzy’s lane ends, down past his dad’s sheds, in on the field where Reilly’s oldest brother once tore his knee on a chunk of sheep bone when attempting a sliding tackle. The raft is down, nine feet of wall waiting for a roofer, thick layer of the latest insulation padding up the floor atop a warren of air-to-water pipes. “You can’t even build without this stuff now” says Fitzy. “They won’t sign off on it.” He says he doesn’t know how the Dublin crowd got planning permission in the first place, but they have connections. And cash.

“They’ll fire it up on Airbnb,” he says to Reilly, pulling a leaf from a trendy shrub. “Money flows, price goes up, they’ll come down for a few weeks in the summer.”

Fitzy has the engineering job, mortgageable, never says how much his aul fella got for the site. Claims he doesn’t know, though he bought the beemer after. “At the end of the day it’s money coming in,” he says. “The place needs it. And what’s the alternative?”

Over Lough Shindilla, a stray memory roams, hovering between oaks on the little island, then across to the blackstoned shore. The water is starting to warm. Spring at late tilt, skylarksong, hawthorns preparing to wear white. It has been detached for so long, so free, so lonely, trying to keep its now from seeping into its original. How does it go again?

Two by the water, evening into night, bats flickering over the lake, an unlikely pairing, an intersection of stories, simple but charged hours, hinge on which change spins, one with a name that the other cannot hear later without darts of prickly blue.

The memory has to be careful not to over-remember itself, aware of a delicate co-existence, so easy to distort.

As it traces another lap of the dark lake, a red van comes bouncing down the narrow track running to the east, and the memory is nudged that way by a sudden kink in the air.

Just off the path, Andrea sees a cluster of ruins. Instinctively she begins to walk over, crossing spongy ground, a stream, an undulating field of lazy beds. A wind blows by, throwing hair across her eyes, shaking a skinny willow that grows in one of the long-deserted homes.

Reilly figures he has the right spot, leaves the van on the rough road, pulls the plastic bag from his pocket, walks to the mounds where people dump, marked by a pair of ancient mattresses. On his phone he opens up the knotweed picture. Mike said even a few morsels would do. A fine gift for the blow-ins and their tidy lawns. But he sees first only an indistinct mess of plants, and by the time he starts to resolve them and pick out the segmented redgreen stems of Fallopia japonica, evening is afoot. He puts on gloves and pulls scraps of stem and root and soil into the bag. A wind kicks up. Everything mobile shivers. He straightens up suddenly, shivering too, and he remembers sharply.

She did come after all, down to the pier and she threw stones into the water and cursed them all to hell and they had both cried and sat there for a long time in silence. Until darkness chased the last glimmer of orange over the hills and a crescent moon walked.

And then. Then the long lapse. Heavy whether weighed or counted. And what exactly did she say? And what did he say back? And why?

Andrea lifts the camera up in front of the unusual hearthstone, inside the remnants of cottage. The odd wind returns, stronger, swirling round the little space. The world begins to flap, and when she moves to fix her balance something small and folded blows out from the wall, lands by her feet.

Reilly stuffs the bag into his pocket, leaves the van where it is, starts walking down to the lake, trying to remember better. How is it so urgent and yet so vague?

Impossible blues, impossible greens, impossible kinds of memories.

The note is almost worn through, and tears when she unfolds it, but Andrea can read parts, and a part of her that has been still, stirs.

She sets her bag down, slides out the map. It wobbles in the wind. There’s the lake it names, Shindilla, just a few hundred metres west, right next to the track. She hauls the pack onto her back and clambers out over a crumple of stones.

Beyond the pier the wind is giddy, digs creases into the water. It too remembers being here before. It cannot help but caress, pick and drop, poke or knock, whatever will budge to its bidding.

“Oh, hi, sorry, I didn’t think anyone was out here!”

“That’s ok! Neither did I. Are you from nearby?”

“For my sins. You doing the Western Way?”

Night has set. A red van bumps from a narrow track onto the N59, turns towards Clifden.

Inside, an unlikely pairing of unmortgageables chat with the openness of unguarded strangers.

In his pocket, a plastic bag of dirt and invasives. In her pocket, shards of paper. Between the worn engine pistons, an old wind, massaged by the vibrating drone. In the cabin air, a detached memory that is letting go, ready to be written over. All are
Flimsily tied to
These fleeing hours
That we sometimes share
In happenstance hush that flies
Between the tumbling walls of
Noise.

Written Spring 2022. Been some time since I finished even a very short story. Such is life. Is it even finished now? Every time I read it I see tweaks. I tweak and untweak, never quite sure about the direction. Better or worse? It’s not quite like left or right. I think my stories are both too simple and too complex. Narrative cluelessness, too much texture. I have a tendency to slip into poetic fancies. Fallacies. How much of our mental scape is fantasy? I think life has a tendency to slip into many different kinds of clothes. On it goes. Thank you for reading, you are part of the chosen few. Praise be with you. Go surf that void.

A poor snake charmer, feeling that he was passing his prime, went to the mountain to pray for a better life. “God, I have served you well,” he prayed. “I have paid my dues and expected little in return. But I am getting old and weary and life is avoiding me. I am tired of being invisible to my family and friends. Soon they will forget even my name.” He hiked higher and higher, until he became lost on a holy peak capped with snow and ice.

Somewhere high on this mountain he stopped again to pray with chattering teeth next to the ice and noticed there was a large shape buried within it. Next to the surface, he could make out huge curved teeth and an enormous head. “It is a dragon!” he cried. “A real dragon! This is my future. I have charmed asps, adders, constrictors and cobras. But people lose interest. But a dragon, a real dragon; this will make me famous. I will not be forgotten.”

So the snake charmer returned to his home village far below in a quiet valley. He traded all of his remaining belongings and claimed all his unclaimed favours to assemble a dozen deadbeat donkeys, a big old wagon, and a sack of food and supplies. With great difficulty he went back up the mountain, and began to chip out a huge block of ice with the dragon inside. After a long week of cold cold work, the massive ice cube was carved out and over the next two days he used logs, wedges, chains, ropes, and the donkeys to slide it onto the wagon. Slowly they slipped and slid back down the steep frozen slopes.

Once they reached flatter ground again, they set off, not for the snake charmer’s village, but for the ancient city of Baghdad. There he would find the people who would appreciate his dragon and see that he was no simple dull snake charmer from the highlands.

The road to Baghdad gradually became hot and dusty. The donkeys strained, complained, and grew irritable. They threw kicks and bit each other. Hot sun poured down for hours on end. Faintly at first the heavy block of ice began to melt. The snake charmer gave meltwater to the bickering donkeys and drank more himself. For a long time it seemed they barely moved. But slowly the weight reduced as the ice melted and the pace quickened, and the snake charmer forgot how tired he had become and straightened his shoulders and sang to himself walking behind the cart.

After some days, they began to meet other travellers on the dry road, and some noticed the strange wagon with its strange cargo of melting ice. They began to follow behind, arguing about what was going on and breaking off chunks of ice to suck and share. “What is this ice for? What is that shape inside? A frozen cow? But it is too big. An elephant? Hey old man, where are you going? Your strange load is shrinking with each step.”

The snake charmer soon lost his patience and tried to get them to leave, cursing them and urging the reluctant donkeys to trot, canter, gallop. They refused. So, he stopped at a traders and swapped the two weakest for a huge sheet of canvas that he fastened over the ice. Now it looked inconspicuous, except for little streams of water that fell from the sides. Despite this, the group behind the ice only grew larger as he approached the city. Water poured busily and at times the whole wagon lurched unpredictably. The snake charmer had not slept in a week and down his forehead dripped an unending line of sweat.

Finally, they reached one of the city’s big open squares. Exhausted but happy again, the snake charmer patiently began to lay out his wagon and for a crowd to gather. “Come see!” he shouted. “The most amazing sight of your lives!” “From the frozen peak of an ancient mountain.” Under the covered wagon he lit a fire to melt away the last of the ice. “Come see the world famous Mahmoud, the famous dragon charmer.” By now a crowd had indeed gathered. But they mocked the snake charmer. “There are no dragons you fool!” some cried. “Go back to the mountains.” “Where is your eel, your worm?” The snake charmer paid no heed and eventually took his carefully polished snake flute and began to slowly begin his favourite melody. Every time he played this he was brought back to early boyhood, sitting on his grandfather’s knee in the evenings in the village, listening to sounds of family and mountain, singing and chirping and dozing until dusk had fully dropped into night. And when he played it, it seemed to share the canopy of its oasis with others, even the mesmerised snakes. The rustling crowd quietened, stopped mocking, and pushed closer.

Now the wagon began to twitch and the canvas to shift. The charmer gestured at two of the followers. They grabbed hold of the canvas on each side and dragged it off. Underneath was a groggy thick-scaled emerald green dragon. Waves of gasps rippled through the people. The dragon lifted its head and opened its bright golden eyes. The snake charmer missed not a note, and played with tears flowing down his cheeks. “I have done it” he realised. “They will not forget me now. They will not ignore me nor disrespect me again. I have realised my inner truth on the canvas of life.”

The dragon swayed its head in time. But it was still waking. It began to unfold and stretch powerful wings and flick a long narrow tail. The closest people began to back away. Still the charmer played, smoother and faster than he had ever managed before, than he had ever thought possible with his thin fingers. His life’s many little failures and few little triumphs all passed through his lips and fingers and down into the melody and out into the air of the crowded square. Smoke was now pouring from the dragon’s snorting nostrils. it opened huge jaws revealing glittering dagger-sharp teeth, and it yawned a huge long yawn and stared at its surroundings. Then its eyes began to focus, narrow, notice. Suddenly it casually spat an arc of liquid flame across the square, and the tree at the centre burst into fire. People began to scream and push and run.

Now fully awake and impossibly hungry the dragon stood fully upright, and tore at the donkeys still tied to the wagon. The snake charmer, through his playing, was unable to stop, staring up while staying in tune, his fingers a blur. Huge blasts of red and white heat shot over his head. The dragon looked at him, blinked, and reached down to neatly bite him in two. The tune ended. The dragon swivelled to grasp at more people with tooth, claw and molten flame.

The square ran red with blood and burning, and when nothing was left that stirred a living limb, the fully wakened dragon spread wide its wings, rose into the air still belching fire, and set off to find some other excitement. The snake charmer’s mute flute drifted by on the red river.

**Donal Kelly, January 2020.**

A version of the original Rumi story can be found here: https://harpers.org/blog/2007/12/rumis-the-snake-catchers-tale/

The snake is your animal-soul. When you bring it
into the hot air of your wanting-energy, warmed
by that and by the prospect of power and wealth,
it does massive damage.

Three constables crouch in the lee of the short concrete wall at the stubby pier, their leaking boat bouncing in the miserly harbour shelter. Away from worn old pots and barrels, pipes of a half dozen stills are piled in a tangle by their mud-caked leather boots. The dusk has been swallowed early by thick torn cloud. An unexpected storm is dragging over the small island, raising broad hills of wave on the exposed stretch back out to the mainland.

Having appropriated the poitín operations in a rush, and quit the rising frustration of the islanders, constables three have returned to find their boat scraping loose against the pier in the opening notes of rising gale, with a fresh hole torn near the waterline. Retreat blocked, angry locals behind, in the half shelter of a loose wall, they consider the long night ahead.

Three young constables crouch and mutter and swear.

“Why did we start so bloody late?”

“Why send three? What use is three? They sent a dozen and more to Inishkea, and that was in June.”

“Is that a light up on the hill?”

“Up where?”

“Did you see it?”

“Can’t see a thing.”

Flick flick lights in corners of eyes. Snapping in and out, eager winking notions. Partly there and mostly not. Why does this life of constabling flicker along its edges?

“We should have left.”

“Go if you want. I’m not getting in that boat.”

“Send the three buckos out, and himself grigging behind the desk.”

“How was I to know?”

“It’s rotten cold.”

“There it is again.”

Squat glass bottles of the bitter contraband, fragments of grass floating inside, stacked in a short line. To pass the tumult, three constables taste the fiery liquid. A little to warm cold limbs, a little to burn hungry throat, a little to steady tight nerves. Sip and swig in the leaky lee. Constables three lament their troubles.

“What if we fall asleep?”

“In this weather?”

“With this stuff.”

“We shouldn’t drink it.”

“It’s bloody freezing. Pass it over.”

“We’re sitting ducks.”

“It’s alright for ducks, we’re not made for this.”

She was a fine morning alright and held the gaze and what more could a slosher hope to hold? Respectable receptacles and the same dinner for every tomorrow and pension enough to repair old window panes. Don't mind them they're only jealous of a clean-ironed uniform. An instrument of the wholey God himself and holding hard onto that gaze still it's only a job and who would want to leave a solid patch and rogue away?

“We’ll be good for nothing soon, sleepy and pissed.”

“That’s when they’ll sneak down, throw us into the harbour, sink that bloody boat.”

“Would they?”

“Send the three gombeens to the islands. A great joke.”

Another swig, another rumbling gust over three constables crouching further down.

“I saw lights, up there. Look again.”

“Why are we waiting?”

“Lights out in this gale? Have to be out for us. What else would they be at?”

“We broke up their stills. Probably their only easy money.”

“How do they make a penny out here?”

“Less shite than we have to put up with I’d say.”

“We’re soft. Wouldn’t last here.”

Mallards landing in new canal and the rustle of new park grass under a shining new pram and always something new in the pockets and in the mind and no holes in the new socks and why would they be shouting and roaring over old shite they can't understand and why hiding rifles in damp sheds and always cursing the world and dumb with threats and isn't it good enough as it is?

“A week maybe, never a winter.”

“Now’s our chance. They’re just watching us get drunk.”

“What do we do so?”

“I’m just saying, why wait?”

“This really is strong tack.”

“I think I’d like this wild life.”

“Never mind your wild life muck.”

“We can cut them off up there, or scatter them. We have these ties. We can lash them down. For Christ’s sake we’ve pistols. What do they have? Only old blunt tools.”

“Blunt Knives still sharp enough.”

“Shovels? Oars? Or rocks. Pitchforks. Haven’t they fists and boots?”

“We can tie them down easy. Sleep out this gale, get out quick in the morning. It’s a short run in.”

“It’s long enough.”

“Send out the townies. I’m sure they’re having a good laugh now round the fire.”

Night steadily clamps down on the island. Constables three match each flung gale with fresh sup, squirming and cursing their discomfort and fear.

“Now or never.”

“I’m not staying on this blasted pier all night.”

“Sons of bitches laughing at us.”

One unfolds unsteadily, finally emboldened enough, and the others haltingly follow. For a moment they stand and rock, clumsily checking pistols and waiting for bubbles of dizziness to burst. Then they set off up the knuckle of hill where they swore they saw torches. Up mushy slope, with squalls haring down against them. Boots sliding in short sheep-chewed grass, clumps of rough heather, spurts of rushes, knobs of weathered stone. Boots sticking in holes of wet black soil, falling into hidden hollow drops, taking jerking arrhythmic steps.

“Keep low. Keep low.”

“What?”

“No, the other way, right, right.”

“Quit roaring.”

“What?”

Constables three, table fed mainland gombeens far from the paved ends of regional towns, labouring over unsympathetic soil.

“Low, low, come on, get up.”

Marooned keepers of parochial peace at the mercy of concealed savages, offical steel pistols loaded and cocked and cleaned in prescribed belts.

And now up and over mushsoft hill brow, wind squinting into sharp whip, barrage of rain slung over dull blunt dark. The entire Atlantic tilting from sky to ocean bowl, emptying ancient fatigues on harassed outskirts of rock. Tide after tide of rolling wild, breath chasing breath with barely a gap between.

Three bone drenched constables can no longer speak or swig or see, and wobble under each wave of rushing air. By no choosing now they follow in hunkered lean a furrow towards faint broken cottage walls where field stones converge. Wordless they stumble over spillings of knocked wall and in under the flapping last scrap of roof.

Suddenly they are inside with the islanders.

Teak tough currach-worn men of scythe and oar and long dark damp-turf winters and unshielded ocean sun, blunted on rock-ridden land and giddy pitchfleck sea. Six of them in a low huddle round a lean fire, drunk.

A sudden disorderly straightening of men in dark, one groggy as the next, in the careless lashings of wind singing round the gable to lift and drop the rusted morsel of roof.

Shouts in two languages, severe postures of expectation, all muted in the noise and clutter. Two huddles separate, and constables raise shoulder to shoulder three shivering steel pistols.

“Stay back.”

Goose loose in a bog's bag of flesh. Badger sow stuck in a scraw of tunnel and skinny terriers yelping down down down. Accumulation of wave on wave, one nameless as the next. Creases in bare skin that will soon be leather cliff face waiting to crumble. Wave on wave and the wearing of rock into small round beach stones. Holding on to the gaze of the world.

“Go on. Back.”

Two poitín poised drunk huddles in a broken cottage. An islander leans carefully forward with oar calloused palms showing.

“Steady, lads. Steady now.”

Gawk into shadows on the handle end of a prescription pistol. More polished than pointed. Not what they teach you in constable school. Girth of a long night's craw, carbuncled tunnels of trapped badgersows stonesundering on an uncle's farm into hollow tiers that narrow to thin points. Every man's mainland has breaking shores.

Filled to the gills with the nectar of appropriated island stills, rocking on snapping air snatching at poor shelter. Every man has his myth to maintain, for his sons of sons to be or not to be, or the torture of a bad word from one neighbouring ear to another.

“Steady now. It’s a bad night to be out in lads. A bad aul wind.”

There are myths to maintain and defences to be manned, for fear of being caught on the wrong end of logical inductions. But here, they may reason, before or behind raised handle ends, of gains and losses and future returns, and of the distance of defendable truth from boozeshot memory.

Gusts in the gulley. Constables three consider the drying of feet and the knowing grins worn by sergeant suits.

“I don’t remember exactly, sir. It was a long night. A terrible storm indeed. At least nobody came to harm.”

“We waited out the night sir, by the pier. No shelter at all, not even a tree. Damn lucky to get out of it in one piece.”

“We held our ground, sir, and were well surrounded. But held firm sir.”

“You can have this damn uniform back, I’m done done done.”

Oar worn fingers hold out an open bottle of illicit booze.

“No need for any trouble, is there lads? Don’t we all have homes to go to?”

The thin fire fizzes flame enough to throw weak wobbling shadows.

Lowering shaking pistol, a constable of three reaches his free hand slowly for the outstretched bottle.

“It’s a fierce storm for sure. I don’t know how ye manage them out here.”

“`We manage, same as everyone.”

“`But the winters must be cruel.”

A long pause swallowed in gust. Slowly shoulders relax, soften, and two huddles shrink into one over lean flame.

In the brokendown island cottage tough men drink themselves dumb on dense spirits in the dark of a wild storm. The night folds into itself, and folds again. Stained terriers chasing tumbling down views. What can you grow where the hardiest of trees can’t hold a root?

Far from the paved ends of regional town streets, wave and wind drum away as deepdrunk sleep soaks up the remains of the night.

Hours later.

After elongated waking with coughground draganchor sunkbog wetskull heads, surfacing into fresh dawn, with sea drone from edge to edge, three constables whole stumble out alone over broken stones.

The storm has blown its guts out. The small hill over the harbour is soggy and benign. A skylark pauselessly sings somewhere above. Loose lumps of cloud trawl higher up in implausible blue.

The copper pots and blackened barrels and scraps of pipe have all disappeared from the pier. The hole in the boat had been hastily plugged. The stretch out to the mainland is calm and flat as new road and glimmergreen in the sprinkled glint of early sun. You could make out the white gables of houses speckling the strip between the sea and the hills.

On a clear day, they say, you can see out what’s cooking inside through the open windows.

It seemed measly, frugal to the needy eye: no retort to the heavy null of a stripped bank account. But it was real. And realer still, when he carefully counted the six bundles one by one, taking off each elastic band, touching one to twenty fifties, leaning in close enough to smell them, studying their varied conditions: some fresh and new from an ATM, others worn with soft foldings from round trips through hand, wallet, pocket, till, safe, and bank.

In his mind Joe ticked off what each bundle could offset. A trip to the mechanic avoided since car test repairs. Visits to two old school friends who got him through Christmas. A call out to his brother’s neat gated bungalow. And the bank. Christ, the bank. He would soak up questioning glances; project calm normality. Just another banal lodgement on a quiet Tuesday afternoon.

“Five thousand. Cash. Yes, might as well get square up that overdraft while I’m here.”

Then the envelopes: bills, rent arrears, fees and charges, lapsed subscriptions, accumulated interest, all grown wild from drought. Their thirst swelled as his well dried, drop by drop to a pinched drip. CHecklist of upcoming necessities. A proper car seat for Maria. Untorn couch. Internet connection. Phone credit. Shoes. Cousin’s wedding. Haircut. Bank Holiday weekend.

One hundred and twenty scraps of painted paper. His friends would wonder. His brother would ask. Get a new job? Sell the car? Where from? Who from? Joe trod down on memories of the morning just passed. He’d waited for the first time as a customer in the hotel restaurant, until the Richard Murphy he had only ever messaged on Facebook flowed over like an old friend by happenstance, to sit for half a minute before darting off again. As though he hadn’t stopped at all, an in-flight refuelling high up in thin air, precariously perched in the stratosphere, lumbering fat bird sucking kerosene through a straw. He’d ignored the grey canvas bag left casually on the restaurant table until it seemed normal to be finished; normal as a regular on a daily pitstop.

Joe was a goose fat with corn on a field in France.

*********************************************************************************************************

Fifty then to fill up the car, or maybe fifty five to full, but Joe was loathe to break the notes. One down, one hundred nineteen held. But once inside, minor crisis. The strange fury of options, the power of having the the price of each in his pocket, the inflating of personhood from scavenging crow to keen hovering raptor; they conspired from pump to counter, to accessorize him with a basket of colourful packaging that he barely remembered picking.

“Cash. Yeah, 50 on pump 2. Sound. It is yeah, hopefully it’ll stay dry for the weekend.”

One hundred eighteen and a pocket of jingle. Wine for the dinner. Snacks for Maria. Ennobled emerger, he could glide from one end of the town to the other with the dignity of purchasing power. As the balloon inflated out into its mould, knots of narrowing frugality formed as a view, falling down and away. Eye contact and a firm handshake were restored to the world. From one end of Main Street to the bridge. One hundred seventeen. One hundred sixteen. One hundred fourteen. Ticking off burdens that had drained days to briarthorned gaps. The head up, opening of envelopes, and scornless listening of advertising resumed. One hundred twelve. And finally the bank, first refuser, great tut tutter and besuited charger of fees for nonpayments of fees. And having to fill out a lodgement slip with sweating fingers before the security guard pointed him to a machine instead and then a good minute trying to remember the card password.

“Enter amount to lodge.”

5… 0… 0… 0… backspace… backspace… backspace… backspace… 4… 0… 0… 0… ENTER

The machine didn’t mention the fine weather, just arrived, or muse about its chances of lasting. To the weekend? Beyond?

Joe was a flustered mallard landing in a canal in a strange city.

*********************************************************************************************************

He waited until Michella had left for her new evening class before abandoning couch and tv. He found Maria’s thick puddle suit hanging under the stairs. She blinked and happily made garbled word-shaped sounds as he put her into the sleek car seat. She kept up as they crossed the town and out to one of its appended estates. “Good girl,” he replied every so often to her babbled bubbles of sound.

Mike should be at home by now. And yes the car was outside, and yes he came to the door, and they both marvelled at Maria’s shooting growth and alertness, and how they should have a proper class reunion, and he didn’t stiffen up, much, when Joe put point to purpose and, wishing he was a million miles away under bare sun, asked if he could have the repayed money back again to tie himself over for this month’s rent.

“I think there’s work going down at the meat factory” offered Mike, but only after he had given Joe what cash he had, silently pocketed. “I know you’re doing a bit, but maybe you should ask down there? They’re always busy with the deli trade. And it’s not seasonal like hotel work.”

Joe thanked and thanked meaningfully and needed to leave. Swallow the medicine. Pain, weakness leaving the body. Mike stayed in the door.

“I was surprised you paid me back so quick last time. I mean… I was wondering. Did you get a loan?” Now he looked Joe right in the eye. ” It’s all the same to me Joe, I just want it to work out for you.”

Joe was stuck on the step, stuck stuck stuck, on a needle of knowing in a brute animal getting to tomorrow and tomorrow alone.

“I got a loan, yeah. But it’s… the interest you know? I thought I’d have more hours now. I might go down and ask at the factory alright.”

“Do, do. Steady hours, might do for a while until you get set up.”

He caught Joe’s averted gaze as it passed one more time.

“Listen, I don’t want to be a dick, but, well, I can’t tell you where I heard it, but, well, I did hear you might have borrowed from Murphy. I just wondered if there was anything to it?”

Maria would be getting restless in the car seat. Michella would finish soon. Needle in the hind. Mike had been the soundest of them.

“I was stuck Mike. The bank wouldn’t touch me. You know, the car broke down again and things have been really quiet.”

“I hear ya, I do. He’s a bad fish Joe, a bad fish. Have you had any hassle?”

Joe was a featherless, plucked chicken on a chute to hungry deli cleavers.

“He’s been calling. Leaving messages. Telling me stuff that he knows. About my family. About Michella. Maria even. I stopped answering. I’ve paid off most but there’s a lump left that won’t shrink. Got caught short a few times and he adds new interest.”

“Fuck, Joe, that’s a tough one. That’s a catch. He’s a bad fish, the fucker.”

Joe nodded.

“Listen, I better get going, I have to get her home.”

“Sound. Hang on a second though. That Murphy is a real prick. No good. I know a guy. Well, I know of a guy- might be able to help. Just in case- if it comes to it. There are people who can play him at his own game. You don’t need this shite.

Joe drove home with Maria falling asleep and a number for a guy who knows a guy saved on his phone. He would think about it tomorrow.

*********************************************************************************************************

“Outside the back door of Langans then. Eight. Ya better have it this time. Enough bullshit excuses. If ya want a charity go to the fucking church.”

“I’ll be there. Eight. Have it all this time.”

Joe stared at the phone and wiped his face. There was a steadiness now at least. He could make eight. The rest of it could look after itself.

Michella was changing Maria in the kitchen.

“Are you going out again?”

“Just for a few minutes. Do you need anything from the shop?”

“No; weren’t you down there an hour ago?”

“Yeah but I forgot to get petrol. I have to start early tomorrow.”

“Ok”

7:50. The car had a quarter tank and would last until Friday. Joe parked it off Main street, and walked along looking down at the disjointed pavement. His phone pinged again. New message.

“There now. Will wait. Say nothing to him.”

Head down, and it was dark and quiet, suspended in transition from open to shut. Joe was a vigilant hooded crow on a flickering street light. Langans. The back door down the side lane. Dim as a cellar. He trod on the instinct to survey the shapes of the shadows. What would be, would be. 8:02. He waited.

8:05. The pub back door opened. Murphy. Broad, leaning, shrugging. Purchasing power of embraced lawlessness. Games played in wraps of laneway shadows, banal as the pouring of pints or blinking of bank machines.

“Ya got it?”

“I got it.”

“About time. Come on then.”

Joe looked around, one hand going to pocket, eyes pleading.

Murphy closed in, burstling layers of threat, fist or steel somewhere in the dark.

“Gimmie a second, I got it, I got it.”

“Shut up to fuck and get it over with. You think I’m a fool?”

The first blow and Joe crumpled, electric needle of knowing and crude fuel of giving in, the world proving the charges he set it. The second blow and a scattering of senses.

“The fuck you playing at? I don’t need this shit.”

And then different shadows, peeling off from lane walls, and such a sudden rush of peeling, of forces multiplied, the embodiment and bloodyment of just reply, and two pairs of strong arms finding Murphy to buckle him, shadow throne to blood dripping down laneway drain, with Joe frozen against the other wall until barked at to scram.

He could hear them delivering their message – his message – to uselessly flapping Murphy, as he wished he was a million miles away under bald sun but was still-winded scrambling back towards the streetlights.

“That’s what ya get ya scum. Fuck off back to your hole. We know who you are. Fuck off out of town or you’ll leave in a hearse. Fuck off or you know what’ll happen. Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off.”

Joe was a startled snipe bursting from bog.

**************

“What took you? Did you get petrol?”

“huh? Um, no. Already closed. Just walked a bit”

“You don’t look well. Are you feeling sick again?”

“No, no, just needed some air. I’m ok now.”

“You don’t look ok.”

“I need a shower, that’s all. Shower and sleep. Long week.”

“Always a long week these days.”

And the shower, to wash the stink off, the grace of clean hot water rushing down, white from the soap, heat and steam around the hind of body beneath and the nozzled balloon within. A new bird, bald quarter ounce of chick in a spring hedge nest, aloft in the elbow crook of a woody limb, feeble and hungry. He could go down to the factory again with an open beak, to see about work for tomorrows.

The murk and shadow and stink drained down into the pipes. The prices of negative balances, the absence of scraps of painted papers, and their own vicious purchasing powers, could drain into the septic tank.

After the shower, and goodnights to sleeping Maria, Joe sat in the quiet, picking at microwaved shepards pie in front of the tv on the untorn couch.

The phone was charging in the kitchen, and when he went to get it, new message. Joe blinked.

“All sorted, that prick won’t bother you again. MB”

And another one. Newer. Same number.

“Balance was 3680. Let’s say 3500. SKip this month. Let me know if you need top up.”

Joe was a murmuration of starlings over a bank of winter river reeds.


Donal Kelly, 2018. The original idea from this came from reading an article about political terrorists (not sure if this word is right- loaded terms these) dealing out street justice to criminals, but also, running their own criminal operations. I had also been thinking about how money pressure constricts life down, and how getting out can be so difficult, and how those who cannot pay are condemned to pay fines and fees for not paying.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

The car pulled up outside the entrance and three siblings stepped out into the hot sunshine. Sharp light glared off the glass door and bleached white the surrounding wall.

There was a woman and two men, one of whom paused at the car door.

“I guess I’ll summon it again for an hour?” he said.

The other man replied. “Or just wait till we’re ready?”

Jay, the man at the car, shrugged, put his phone back in a pocket, and watched the silver vehicle indicate and slide smoothly back out into the line of traffic.

Margo was already leading the way inside, pushing in the hot glass door.

“Come in out of this sun. You’ll cook out here.”

The entrance hall was large and the air cool and conditioned. A tall bright screen stood in the centre, in front of a pair of sturdy doors.

Philip, the second man, prodded the interface and it brightened, beeped lightly, and presented options.

“What do I pick? Ah, “Visit”.

Margo looked over his shoulder.

“Just search for the name. See- there- type it in, Argoss, Jane, yeah, now, yeah, that’s her. Now hit ‘Confirm'”

Philip pressed ‘Confirm’. There was a short pause, then one of the two sturdy doors swung open.

A young woman appeared, wearing a tailored dark suit and carrying a large tablet interface. She smiled in greeting.

“Welcome to Hanbury Healthcare! I’m Julie, Mrs Argoss’s care and lifestyle supervisor. I’m sure she’ll be delighted to see you!”

They stood and exchanged platitudes, pointing out the especially hot sun, and then the care supervisor led the three siblings down a series of clean, brightly lit hallways.

Jay sporadically coughed.

“You should get something for that,” said Margo.

“It’s nothing.”

They reached a corridor where one side was lined with large windows onto an enclosed leafy courtyard.

“Nice.” said Philip.

At the end of this corridor they stopped at an open room doorway on the right marked by number 274 etched in a metal plate. A sleek robotic care assistant (RCA) was just emerging with a smooth electric whirr. They stood aside to let it pass, and vaguely acknowledged its nodding head and beeps.

“Here we are” said the supervisor.

She turned to face the visitors.

“Now, you know, of course, that Jane is one of our older clients, and though she is very healthy she may not be 100% aware of her surroundings. So it’s important not to expect too much or to cause any undue stress.” She smiled. “I know she will really appreciate the visit.”

“Of course” replied Margo. “We understand.”

They were led into the broad bright room, where a big window opened out onto the same lush green garden courtyard.

“Hi Mrs Argoss, how are you today? You have visitors! Your three grandchildren!”

Mrs Argoss was sitting up in a large sophisticated bed. She was very small, had skin that was translucent, and her eyes seemed to focus on a distant point beyond the visitors. But she soon raised her head and smiled and nodded and they all smiled back and hesitated.

“Hi gran” said Margo. “You look so healthy!”

Mrs Argoss smiled and nodded and said “hello, hello” in a faraway voice.

The care assistant smiled and began to retreat out into the corridor.

“I’ll be back shortly; just press the buzzer if you need anything.”

The siblings gathered closer to the bed.

“How are you feeling gran?”

“It’s great to see you.”

“I hope they are treating you well.”

Mrs Argoss smiled and nodded and they strained to hear her little voice.

“Hello, hello,” she said. “I’m good, very good. It’s such a nice day. A lovely day.”

“Yes” said Margo. “It’s still very hot out, but they say it will begin to improve soon.”

“You have a beautiful view here.” said Philip.

“I do, I do, it’s such a nice view. And a nice day”

They stood and chatted, the three siblings asking questions in large tones with open smiles and giving Mrs Argoss ample time and strained ears to respond.

“Do you get to go outside gran?” asked Philip.

“I do! I do” she replied. “They take me out, and I get to see all the plants.” She was staring out the window. Leaves on dense shrubs bobbed in the light swirl of sheltered breeze and threw shifting shadows onto the grass and flowers.

“They used to let me pick herbs and even cook. But I don’t have the energy.” She looked back at the window again. Through the glass. Beyond the garden to some unfocusable plane.

Margo put her hand on the bed close to Mrs Argoss.

“Maybe you can do it again soon gran. Do you have everything you need here?”

“Yes, yes, everything. I have my music in the mornings and I just have to press a button for food, any time, and there are lots of things to do. There’s a button for everything. But Mrs Hart is gone. Where is Bob?”

She seemed to be trying to focus now on the faces of the grandchildren.

Margo looked at Philip, questioning. Philip shrugged.

“Bob?” asked Jay.

“Is he too busy to come? He’s always so busy.”

Philip leaned in front of Jay, smiling.

“Um, sure gran, he’s very busy.”

“I understand. It’s nice here. Look at this lunch menu.”

She turned the bed’s screen on its flexible arm with her thin tightly veined hand to show them a colourful list of dishes.

“Wow; looks great gran. So much choice.” said Philip.

“That’s much better than what I can get!” joked Margo.

Mrs Argoss’s voice was of a wren in a dense hedge at the end of a windy garden.

“and in the evenings they bring me to the hall and there’s music or video and we can talk.”

“Super. It sounds lovely.” said Margo.

“Do you have any pain now?” asked Philip.

“And sometimes the doctor comes himself and talks to me. And the nurse. No. No pain. No pain at all. Just no energy.”

She sat back in her bed. It made an instinctive whirr and readjusted itself to let her sink lower.

“Maybe your energy will come back soon.” said Margo. “It seems like a really good place here.”

The voice of Mrs Argoss faded further into a wisp of whisper.

“It’s much better, much better. Bob would like it.”

The siblings soon sat on the three comfy bedside chairs and looked out the window. With glances and gestures they let the conversation become wordless. They shouldn’t waste her energy. She needed to rest. Her bed was a very recent model. Everything was clean and up to date and comfortable.

After a while, and without sitting up or speaking, Mrs Argoss used a little control to turn on the main television screen screen opposite the bed. An episode of an old show resumed.

“Ohh, that’s an old one.” said Margo.

It was a brand of family drama that had long grown out of fashion. In one strand a young couple were arguing and the woman knew she was pregnant but hadn’t told her partner, and in another strand a businessman was confronting a sudden gambling problem while his son was making friends with the ‘bad crowd’ in his school.

As it finished the care supervisor returned.

“How is everyone doing? Would you like some coffee? Tea?”

“Maybe coffee” said Philip dozily.

“Certainly.”

The supervisor went to the bed and tapped a few buttons on a screen at its base. There was a whirr and the bed changed shape again, putting Mrs Argoss in a flatter sleep position, while the low buzz of an AC unit switched on somewhere.

“How is Mrs Argoss getting on? Is everything going well?”

“Yes yes, all fine” said Philip.

Philip stood up and walked to the supervisor. He carried a small briefcase and held it out.

“I brought some more things, some memories, and I was wondering if they could be added.”

“Oh, certainly, certainly. We appreciate any new content. Mrs Argoss has a very keen mind. She loves to go over photos and video.”

“I brought some books too, paper books, and a few magazines. And some printed photographs. Can you use those?”

“Of course, if the books are in the library we can add them. We can access a huge range of audio books too, with almost any accent. Perhaps we can scan some of the magazines and photos. Everything helps. At Hanbury we tune the experience to each individual. We use the latest algorithms.”

“Of course.”

By the window, Jay mumbled “At a cost”.

Margo glared at him. The care assistant smiled.

“I’ll go find a home for this new content.” she said. Here comes your tea and coffee now.”

An RCA appeared with a tray balanced easily on its main arm. Coffee, milk, sugar, cake. It nodded and beeped as the supervisor passed on her way out with the briefcase.

The three had coffee. Mrs Argoss stirred her frail body, then leaned forward and punched the screen that rose to meet her hand. The RCA left and came back almost immediately with another drink in a little plastic container, which it opened and left on her bed tray. The tray zoomed it up under her chest as the bed tilted to raise her torso and head. She smiled and sipped.

“Are you having coffee too gran?” asked Philip.

“Just tea for me. Just tea.”

“Looks healthy.”

They ate and drank in silence and looked out the window. The tv came on, starting another episode of the drama, then abruptly switched off. The RCA returned and adroitly collected mugs and saucers, then left.

“Is that the same one?” asked Margo.

Jay turned.

“The same what? The same robot?”

“Yeah. I was just wondering, if everyone gets their own.”

“I think they’re all connected. They’re all the same. It’s a network” said Philip. He stood and stretched, looked out the window, and sat down again.

The sun was dropping behind the tops of the buildings and walls that surrounded the tightly enclosed garden. Shadows deepened and darkened playfully across its growth. An elderly man was shuffling slowly from one of the far ends to the other, followed at a short distance by an RCA.

“How does so much grow here?” asked Margo.

After a pause, Philip roused.

“Water from pipes. Some kind of roof for when it gets really hot. Probably artificial lights because it is dark so early. Very expensive.”

“It looks so natural.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Such a lovely place.”

Jay looked unimpressed.

“Optimised to the last millimetre of potential, profit willing.” he muttered.

“Cynic”

“Realist.”

“This is the best place. Look how well she’s looked after.”

“And the most expensive and… protracting”

Philip interrupted.

“Isn’t the doctor supposed to call in?”

As if on cue, the doctor suddenly appeared. Middle aged, with a thoughtful, busy expression, a grey beard, and silver framed glasses, he knocked on the open door and walked in as the siblings stood up.

“Hello. I’m doctor Hazan. I’m Mrs Argoss’s health coordinating consultant. I just wanted to pop in to ask if you had any questions about the care.”

Philip responded first. “Well, she seems fine. How is her general health these days?”

The doctor smiled at Mrs Argoss, who seemed to be asleep.

Well, Mrs Argoss is in excellent health, considering her advanced age and her life experience. One doesn’t get to 119 without bumps and jolts. But she’s still physically strong, and mentally very lucid.”

He looked at Mrs Argoss, then down at a tablet interface he carried, then up again.

“We have her on a very advanced program of activities and diet. Daily exercise, mental stimulation, socialising, and the latest generation of life devices, all based on the best research. Shall I go through the details?”

Philip demurred “No, no, we have a good idea. Is she on a lot of meds?”

“Very little. Almost none in fact; just a general level of mild pain relief and some compounds to help her organs function at their best. I can provide a full list if you’d like?”

“No, no, there’s no need. We just wanted to visit and see how she was getting on.”

“Yes, yes, of course. I’m sure she really appreciates the visit.”

He looked up at Mrs Argoss again, then down at the screen in his hands, then back to the siblings.

“She’s in great form and we’re delighted to have her here at Hanbury. She’s lived a remarkable life, has seen so many changes.”

Margo spoke. “She’s been through so much. She deserves the best of care.”

“Absolutely. Here you can see she has access to full-time assistance, 24 hour. And as you know we take a comprehensive view of health, with a service based on her very own life experiences and history. All tailored to provide enjoyable and active late stage living.”

“Yes, yes. we brought some more content with us today.” said Philip.

“Excellent. It all helps. Our clients really enjoy connecting with their past.”

Mrs Argoss smiled at the doctor.

“Hello doctor.” she said feebly.

The doctor smiled back.

“You have visitors today, isn’t that nice?”

He went to the bed base screen and tapped it. The bed readjusted. The AC turned off. A blind slid down to cover a ray of sunlight that had burst through the window to draw patches of bright in the room.

Then he turned to the siblings again.

“So, would that be it all for now? Of course you can always contact me at any time. Day or night. And Hanbury will immediately let you know if there is any change. And you can all access the full suite of remote services, and schedule a video chat with your grandmother. Or any of her care supervisors.”

“Yes, that’s useful” said Philip.

There was a pause.

“Great, so is there anything else I can help you with?”

“No” said Margo. She smiled. “Unless you can fix the weather.”

The doctor laughed as he straightened up and turned towards the doorway.

“I wish I could! I really do!”

Before he left, Jay spoke up again from the window.

“Just one small thing. She mentioned a Bob. I don’t remember gran knowing a Bob… grandad, her husband, was Frank.”

The doctor stopped, pinching thumb and forefinger to his chin in a thoughtful expression.

Mrs Argoss seemed to be sleeping.

“Bob.” mused the doctor. “I can’t say I know of a connection. Of course, at this later stage, you know, experience of the world can become somewhat fractured, and memory can become, quite entangled with it. In fact some clients connect with memories deep in their past, right back into their childhood, better than the world outside. Mrs Argoss has lived a long and involved life.”

Jay said nothing.

“I don’t think it’s anything” said Margo. “She just got a bit confused when we all came in at once.”

“Well I know she is very happy to have you here.”

The sunlight from outside had all but faded. The entire complex, and beyond it the city, was in the shadow of early dusk. An electric light inside came on, and the window blind rolled itself up.

“Well” sad the doctor. “Excellent. I shall bid you adieu then, and will hopefully see you again very soon. You may need to see the accounts officer on your way out when you leave? Ms Kavish, the care assistant will show you the way. Ah, here she is.”

Ms Kavish, the care supervisor, had appeared at the doorway, smiling, holding the briefcase, emptied.

They nodded to each other as he passed her in the doorway. He almost collided with an RCA that was buzzing down the corridor, then turned and walked in the opposite direction.

“Ok” said Philip. “I guess we should go and review the account.”

Ms Kavish smiled. “Certainly, I can show you the way now, or can come back at any time if you want to wait a while. We will serve supper soon if you would like some.”

“No, no,” said Margo. “we should leave gran in peace now. She seems tired.”

Mrs Argoss seemed to be fully asleep though the TV screen was back on.

They went back over to the bed. The supervisor used the screen to readjust the bed, turn the TV off, and the AC on.

“We’re going to go now gran.”

Mrs Argoss opened her eyes dimly but said nothing.

“You tell us if you need anything ok gran?”

She opened her eyes wider but looked confused.

Then she smiled.

“We’ll see you again soon ok?”

She smiled.

They left with the nurse, back through the halls and veering off into a suite of offices to meet the accounts manager. The policy and contract would need to be reviewed for the upcoming year.

“Will I summon the car now?” asked Jay.

By the time they finished, back in room 274, Mrs Argoss was already having supper. An RCA had brought her chosen fresh dish and the bed had shifted to leave her sitting up to eat it. The TV screen showed a series of seated exercises, and she squeezed her toes in time to the routine.

The door opened and Dr Hazan appeared.

“Hello doc.” she said softly between chews.

“Hello again” said the doctor. “Sorry to bother you so soon already. I just need to check something quick”

He tapped the screen at the bed base. Then he took out his phone, tapped it off the bed base screen, and held it to his ear and looked out the window into the dark patch of garden.

“Hello”

“3”

“Hi, could I get the care supervisor for patient 2874.”

“Ok, I’ll wait.”

Music played. He turned to look at Mrs Argoss and smiled.

“The waiting game” he said.

The music stopped.

“Hi, yes, Dr Hazan. Yes, patient 2874.”

“Room 274”

“No, room 274.”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling.”

“I don’t know” He held the phone down.

“Mrs Argoss?” he said.

“Mrs Argoss?”

There was no reply. She seemed fast asleep. The bed had adjusted down. The doctor went back to his phone

“She’s asleep. We’ll have to order an ID test.”

“Definitely 274. Yes, I’ll wait”.

Music played.There was a long pause. An RCA came into the room and the doctor glared at it. It turned and left.

The music stopped. Phone to ear.

“Yes?”

A long pause.

“Oh.”

He looked at the bed.

“I see. Ok. Thanks.”

The doctor put his phone in his pocket and looked at the deeply sleeping woman for a long time before leaving.

—————————————————————————————————————

Written in long tail of winter, 2018. I've been thinking about OPTIMISATION, and how aspects of human life might be treated in a time of even more pervasive technology, with wealth intact (for some) though perhaps not other things. I imagine wildness in narrow serviced pockets and something lurking below the normalcy, maybe political, or historical, maybe unintentional, maybe technological; something where optimisation and the narratives of life and the consciousness of being clash.

To be more clear, Sam McKenna suddenly realised that he was sitting at a table next to a table where Sam McKenna sat.

To be clearer still, here we had Sam McKenna, one of Mallow & Hanly’s least known accounts technicians, picking a seat in a corner of the Chromatica café on Bridge Street, sitting there checking his phone and the menu for the length of half a song, before noticing that the guy at the table next to him, with a strikingly pretty girl wearing her blonde hair in a tight bun, was definitely Sam McKenna: actor, artist, former athlete, writer, lifestyle guru, brand ambassador, and social media influence guru.

This had, on Sam the first, an immediate and pronounced effect. His body performed a series of little shivers and his heart rate abruptly accelerated. On Sam the second, no notice was apparent, and his conversation with the girl flowed on.

“And what I always found was that they treated McMurdo like a holiday rather than an expedition, but I don’t really get that. At all.”

This stark asymmetry of notice was also immediately absorbed by Sam the first and not at all by Sam the second. Sam the first strained to pull back his focus to the ordering of a green tea and a vegetarian wrap from the waiter who suddenly sidled up.

But when the waiter drifted off again, he couldn’t help but indulge hyperawareness, metallic and cold and heavy. He pulled up Instagram on his phone and began to flick through the latest pictures, expecting and then finding it: a morning contribution from @adventuresOfSammyM entitled “Monday = Leg Day. #bringtheburn”.

@adventuresOfSammyM, whose subject/curator sat at the next table, currently had 13K followers, dwarfing his own @samMckenna404 and its puny 109, most of whom he knew by real name. They had created accounts at around the same time, but over this two years or so, @adventuresOfSammyM had added, on average 18 new followers per day. @samMckenna404 had managed 0.15.

@samMckenna404 had been following @adventuresOfSammyM for over half of this period, and in the beginning had ‘liked’ each photo, even commented, but had since stopped. Yet he rarely failed to see them, and they rarely failed to have some effect. His attention, for good or bad, called on the algorithm to slide them up, alarm-call beacons of a different life.

An external observer might have classed it as a needless habit of self-inflicted mini doses of torture. @samMckenna404 sometimes did see it as a joke, played by the universe, with him as the butt. This unsettled him in two ways. One, that the universe might be of a form that played jokes on people, and two, that it would choose to make him the butt of such an aimless one.

In truth he generally felt more than he thought when it came to having a reasonably well known domestic celebrity share his name, and in the main these feelings were a lumpy mix of helplessness, fatalism, speckled greys on a bloom of blue, never feeding into logical thought. He had wished for a different name, but when he once got angry with his mother over it, she had no idea where he was coming from.

“But you could see that it wasn’t going to happen if the American investors pulled out, so I went over there to get some real space in the scene and get it really moving.”

At one table a Sam was explaining how his first book project got an international publisher despite him being from an ‘invisible corner of the planet, no offense’ and at the next a lesser known Sam was discreetly taking notes. It had dawned on him that this was an important moment, one that could be a make-or-break event with genuine consequences. So he scribbled on a notebook with page held open against the clear glass of tea that had silently arrived.

“Haircut (good barber) €30?”

“Gym need 3kg+ MUSCLE”

Every so often he made as subtle a sideways glance as he could manage at the other Sam and the girl. She looked like a model, with delicate makeup, darkly edged eyes, wide lips, sipping a flat white. He was eating his crepe with arms by his side and shirt sleeves neatly rolled up above his elbows and at the same time between chews and swallows chatted industriously.

@samMckenna404 tried to listen in without leaning over.

“Well I’d say it’s more stubbornness you know? If you know you have to get up and do it you will. Don’t even make it a choice.”

@samMckenna404 scribbled additions to his list.

“GET UP! 7am (gym)”

“No crap food.”

“And a day is so short really when you think about it, you have to make each one count, be ready to switch over to something else, always”

“POSTURE” no shoulder sag

“1 chapter of good book p/day”

“It takes a while to find the style that works, but you can always try something new. delete what doesn’t work- should always be tight you know?”

“Delete shit posts/OLD stuff”

“But you know, I could take it or leave it. It’s so much hassle. But I feel like I have to keep it turning. Keep building something.”

“Build website”

@samMckenna404 had gone through overlapping phases in his opinion of @adventuresOfSammyM. In the beginning there was a sense of fresh possibility, where his name, his location, his narrow neck of the wide world, weren’t barriers, weren’t fundamentally inconsistent with a future as a man of the globe.

He liked every post. He commented. He looked up the Wikipedia page and bought the book and noticed mentions in weekend newspaper supplements or TV special interest spots. One or two of his friends would joke and jibe each time that he was in the news again.

But slowly slowly, like the leaves of a tree, off a tree, sparks of possibility and anticipation split at their stems and fell fluttering, specks of disappointment, accumulating into a layer of stubborn soil. The successes, the holiday snaps, the beautiful casually effortless sunlit globe trotting life possessing hand-to-the-sky fly by embraces of existence…. he began to resent. He couldn’t help but drift into visions of two roads diverging in a wild wood, with two Sams taking different paths, and now…

“Let’s just book a flight anyway and hopefully it’ll happen.”

@samMckenna404 was feeling pretty good right now, having filled two pages with his list of change and plan. Many paths break off in the wild wood, and this was another, a new beginning. Today only dictated where he started from, not where he could get to. He began to formulate another plan. He thought, wouldn’t it be good to explain to Sam that he too was Sam, from the same town, and almost the same age ( a little longer of tooth). That would be a real connection. A bond even. A useful root.

All it would take- a sentence or two, the right spacing between the words. No desperation, no neediness, as though he had suddenly noticed for the first time and was totally cool about it, totally cool with it either way, if it happened to exist or not, totally chill in a sea of calm.

Yes, he thought. I will. I can. Nothing to lose. He closed his notebook. Took a drink of tea. Looked at the phone.

The blonde girl suddenly began to rise.

“Gotta go to the loo, back in a tick.”

“Ok babe.”

Sam the first froze. Waited. But now was the time. he began to turn.

But Sam the second was holding his phone in front of his face, coffee cup up in the other hand, taking pictures. Sam the first tried to read the brand of the watch and waited. Sam the second seemed unhappy with the angle and began to try different ones, then took several photos of the table. He moved the girl’s half-empty cup closer to his own. Sam the first waited. Eventually it seemed to be finish. Now Sam the first turned further over.

But the waiter had appeared at the other table and had made eye contact.

“Hi! Sorry to bother you, but I just wanted to say hi. I’m a big fan. I have your book, it’s great.”

“Ah, no worries man, glad you like it. Looks like you’ve been putting it into practice. You go to a gym round here?”

“Yeah, yeah, the Basement gym… I’ve been trying to bulk up a bit lately but will but start cutting again in a few weeks.”

“Good stuff, not easy.”

There was a pause.

“Well, great to meet you, lovely food here, real coffee. will be in again next time I’m in town.”

“Nice one, thanks a lot.”

The waiter realised that the blonde girl was standing behind him.

“Oh, sorry!” he said. “I’ll just get these.”

He lifted the plate of the table and sidled off. The blonde girl smiled and sat down.

Sam the first was caught in his half turn, body twisted left, eyes tilted right, seeing the waiter and Sam and the girl and now caught flat footed trying to recalculate a route.

One of your fans!” laughed the girl.

“Yeah, nice guy.”

Now Sam the second lowered his voice.

“But it’s gotten so bad lately. I mean, what do they want really? I know it’s nice but you feel so… watched. Even when I’m back at home.”

The girl kept smiling.

“That’s just the way it works, right?”

“Yeah, but there’s a time and place you know. They all seem to think they’re the first to… I mean, what can I give them? I put myself out there, for what? “

“But you know the score right? I mean, you play the game no? You… this is what you do right?”

@adventuresOfSammyM looked across at the blonde girl and made an affected dropping sigh, then gazed out at the street.

“Ok, we should go.”

@samMckenna404 swivelled back around to face his own table and looked at his phone again. He watched them get up and gather their shopping bags and pay at the counter and leave a tip with a smile (the girl at the counter laughed at something Sam said) and push the door out into the street.

He sat and looked through the window and the people passing outside. They were dark indistinct shapes and all with their own unique strides, gaits, cuts of jib. An old lady pushing a walker. A group of teenage guys. Two laughing girls. A jogger and then another jogger and a man on a bike with flashing lights and a woman pushing a baby kart with paper shopping bags hanging off it.

Now @samMckenna404 was the only Sam again. He opened his notebook, and began to doodle around the notes he had written, then over them. He wrote “I am Sam” at the bottom of the page. Then he marked out “Sam” and wrote “Me”. “I am Me”. Then he opened Instagram and went to the @adventuresOfSammyM account. There was a new post. A Sam leaning back into a cafe chair with coffee. “Can’t beat catching up with my home town! Love this place! #hometown #timeout”

@samMckenna404 hit “Unfollow”, and felt a little more free and a little more alone.

THE END

Is it done? Finished? Who knows... I change, tweak, update, tinker. And it feels like such a small thing. Just a few minutes of effort. A wren flying from one twig to another. A sideways glance, peripheral, and the machine so glut-full of ownership, elsewhere. I'm listening to songs by going through TOP 50 2017 lists and know so few, so few. And each time I wonder what paths in the wild woods they stepped on or off, and if you knew now could you have known then?

The content of celebrity is anonymous attention, mediated by waves of technology. The relationship is one of access and distance. A telescope into other lives during lunch breaks. I imagined some moment of progress, a challenge, maybe an unfollow. But is it done? Can I finish it? Anything?

Click. swing. Light up. Foodbody? Grabbody. Grabbody smell.

Grab grab. Grab grab go. Up up. Smell loud. Body loud. Away away. Over. Grab grab. Down. Ear loud. Down.

Splash splash. Grab go. Grabbody smell. Swim swim. Swim swim. Light loud. Sound sound. Swim swim. Whir.

No panic no panic. Swim swim. Foot good. See shape. Go shape. Same same. Swim swim.

No panic no panic. Swim swim. Feet ok. Belly ok. Heat ok. Ok ok.

Otherbody? No otherbody. See see. Grabbody up. Up up. Spin around. No. Swim swim.

Foot scrape. Up up? No foot. Swim swim. Foot scrape. Up? No. Swim swim.

Foot ok. Belly ok. Heat ok. No panic.

Foot scrape. Swim swim. Round. Grabbody smell. Grabbody go. Swim swim.

Round swim. Foot scrape swim. Swim swim. Grabbody swim. Heat ok. Swim swim.

Foot scrape. No foot. Swim swim. No foot. Swim foot. Heat ok. Swim foot.

Swim swim. Round swim. Grabbody see. Away swim. Away away.

Belly ok. Heat no. Up up. Foot scrape. Foot loud. Foot stop? Swim swim.

Foot stop? Swim swim. Foot scrape. No foot. Loud loud. Away away.

Swim swim. No foot. Loud foot. See shape. Same same. Go go. Swim swim.

Swim foot. Loud loud. Swim swim. Loud loud. Swim. Belly loud. Swim swim.

Foot loud. Swim. Belly loud . Swim. No otherbody. Swim. No otherbody smell loud. Swim swim.

Why no foot? Swim. Foot loud. Heat loud. Loud loud. Stop stop? Swim swim.

Foot swim loud swim. Foot swim loud swim. Scrape swim loud swim foot swim swim loud swim see swim loud loud.

No otherbody swim why? Swim loud swim belly swim scrape swim scrape swim scrape swim foot loud swim belly swim loud swim loud loud swim stop stop? Loud loud loud.

Stop swim? stop swim? same same swim no otherbody swim no swim no swim why swim Grabbody smell swim why no otherbody swim no smell swim no smell loud.

Swim no smell no otherbody smell foot lost belly loud foot loud no otherbody smell loud no smell loud stop stop swim swim stop swim.

Stop swim stop swim stop stop swim stop swim stop swim swim.

No otherbody smell stop no why swim stop swim stop stop swim stop.

swim stop stop swim stop swim swim stop stop swim stop stop swim stop swim stop stop swim swim swim stop swim stop stop stop stop swim stop stop swim.

No otherbody stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop.

Foot stop scrape stop belly stop no otherbody smell stop grabbody stop see stop swim stop grab stop smell stop away stop.

stop stopstop.

stop.

701-14 Test 3029. 2017-12-15. 16:46.

Click loud. Foodbody foodbody. Grab grab Grabbody. Smell loud. Up up. Grab grab. Smell loud. Down.

Grab grab stop. See grabbody. Food? Food smell. Gobble gobble. Smell smell. New smell. Food smell grabbody smell new smell. No panic. New smell.

Grab grab. Up up. Grabbody smell. Foodbody smell. Down.

Splash splash. Swim swim. Grab gone. Ear loud. Air loud. Up up.

Swim swim. No panic. Swim swim. Up up.

Heat ok. Body ok. Ok ok. Ok ok. Foot ok. Ok ok. Swim foot. Belly ok. New smell.

Swim swim. Light. New smell. Swim swim. Foot swim. See shape. Swim shape. Grabbody foodbody.

Foot scrape. no foot. Swim swim. Foot scrape. No foot. Swim swim. Foot scrape. No foot. Swim swim. Round swim.

No foot. Foot swim. No smell. New smell. No foot. Swim swim. Ear loud.

See shape foot scrape no foot foot scrape round round no smell new smell.

No panic ok ok. Foot ok. Belly ok. No panic see shape. No smell no panic new smell.

See grabbody.. Foodbody. Swim swim. Swim first. No foot. Scrape scrape. Ear loud.

ROund round. Swim swim. grabbody. No grabbody. Grabbody. No grabbody., Scrape swim scrape swim.

Swim swim. No panic. Heat ok. Foot ok. Air ok. Heat ok. Air ok. Belly ok. Swim swim.

Light loud. New smell. Grabbody gone. See shape. Same same. Swim swim.

See shape. Swim swim. Grabbody. New smell. Round round. Foodbody? grabbody. Swim swim.

Swim shape. Round scrape swim loud ear loud swim shape round scrape swim swim.

Light loud ear loud no panic ok ok.

Air ok. Belly ok. Heat ok. See shape. New smell.

Swim swim. Round swim. New smell swim. Foot ok swim. No foot swim.

No foot swim. Air up swim. Swim first swim. Ok ok swim.

Swim swim. Scrape swim. Round swim. See swim. Ear loud swim. Belly ok swim.

Round swim. Ear loud swim. Light swim. Food swim? No food swim. Swim first swim.

New smell swim. Grabbody away swim. Grabbody food swim? Foodbody grab swim?

Light loud swim. No foot swim. No foot no foot swim. Swim swim.

Swim. Ear loud new smell swim.

No food swim. Belly ok swim. Air ok swim. Swim swim swim.

No panic swim. Foot scrape no foot round round swim.

Grabbody swim No grabbody swim. Foot scrape no foot swim.

No panic swim. New smell old smell swim.

Old smell swim. Ear loud old smell swim.

Light round scrape old smell air up swim.

No scrape swim scrape swim. scrape.

Air up swim. Foot loud swim.

Foot loud. Swim swim.

Oldmsell swim. Foot loud swim.

Swim swim. No panic swim.

Earloud nofood Grabbody gone oldsmell swim.

Swim smell oldsmell swim. Foot loud swim. Belly ok swim.

Body ok swim. Foot loud swim. No panic swim.

Foot scrape round scrape round swim.

Grabbody gone foot scrape no foot body loud foot loud ear loud swim.

Swim swim.

Foot loud.

Swim swim.

No foot.

Swim swim.

Oldsmell footloud no foot earloud.

Swim swim.

Round swim.

Air loud. Swim.

Foot loud air loud.

Swim swim.

Air loud foot loud body loud heat loud swim swim swim.

Swim swim swim.

Swim.

Round foot Grabbody foodgone no panic swim food loud air loud ear foot swim loud oldsmell new smell.

Swim swim.

Swim loud.

Loud loud.

Swim swim.

Loud loud.

Foor loud airloud swim.

Swim swim.

Stop?

Stop.

************************************************************************

“Remarkable.”

Avril plucked the soggy limp mouse from the clear plexiglass cylinder.

“Just remarkable.”

Denis turned from the computer on the other workstation.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“This new one. The Impco batch. The 621. 3 micrograms. 12 minutes.”

He spun his chair to face Avril.

“12 minutes. Really? Did you do a marker test”

“6 minutes.”

“Wow. That’s great. That’s the first jump from the new batch.”

“Yeah, I was losing my mind running all of these.”

“Has to be done. Where the funding goes, we follow.”

“Yeah but what they call experimental, I call random. But this 621 one. Different level.”

“12 minutes is great.”

“Finally, yeah it’s… oh”

“Oh?” Denis pushed his office chair so that it rolled across the lab.

“I think it’s dead.”

“Oh.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Yeah…. But 12 minutes. Try it again?”

“Of course. Can you grab me another?”

“Sure. Which ones are ready?”

“Any of the 701 ones. Just let me mark this up”

Avril carried 701-14 as its soft fur dried in the warmth within the grip of her gloves. She carefully wrapped its tiny limp body in a sheet of light tissue, then put it into a sealable plastic bag, and walked down to end of the lab to leave it in the disposal freezer.

THE END

It was December and there was a cold snap, with snow on the hills and scattered along the edges of roads. People marvelled about how one field was pure white and the next one wasn’t.

Galway city was dressed in Christmas lights and brightly decorated window displays that shone out against the early nights.

Gusto was already there, and it turned out his uncle had come too. Two uncles in fact, and a cousin: they had all come over from London. It was Gusto’s first trip back since he left but he seemed the same, engaging, and projecting easy confidence. An extrovert with introverting aspirations, he could sell ice to Eskimos but was a creature of habit. I on the other hand would routinely fail to make even the simplest of phone calls, but would seek to wander down streets I had never been.

They were round a table in the back of the gastropub and one uncle was telling stories. Gusto had told me that he was a businessman who part-owned a chain of restaurants.

I pulled up a stool as the uncle described a wealthy businessman friend of his.

“It’s not about the money. Not at that level. It’s about the deal then, it’s about making that deal- that’s the motivation, not the money.”

To me, it had been a long year. Yet at the same time it seemed like each season was a cloth pulled quick from under dishes – a party trick. Except the trick never works, not in my rendition. The dishes fall and shatter, and only the table remains, smug and bare, every time. Oh dear. I was in, what I call, a trough. A trough, or the trough? Hard to say.

“Brian’s a programmer,” Gusto was telling his uncle. “But he’s taking a break.” “But he could get a job anywhere.” I could see a move-to-London vibe rising.

“Ah I’ll figure it out soon. Did ye order food?”

“I thought that there was a lot of IT work in Ireland. Maybe it’s all in Dublin?”

“Oh, but right now he’s writing jokes. Tell us one of your jokes B”

I hadn’t been writing jokes, not exactly, but I’d been thinking a lot about where jokes come from, and how people can suddenly come up with them at all. Take a joke like “Why did the fish blush? Because the sea-weed” and apply the format to something else.

“Oh, I’m not really writing jokes” I said. “I’m just watching a lot of standup on YouTube. I like to think about how jokes work, like, how they mess with your expectations of language or life.”

“But you wrote some no?”

“Well, I guess, but they’re dumb”

“Go on. Try one.”

“Ok so. Why did the mountain worship the sky?”

“Why”

“Because it rained”

Groans from around the table.

“Why was the mechanic afraid to order the parts?”

Silence.

“They were wheel nuts.”

“Maybe stick to the day job,” laughed one of the uncles.

The stories resumed. Gusto’s uncle began telling us about some Saudi businessmen.

“So they’re opening this massive new building, you know, the Burj Kalifa. And they plan a huge fireworks display. And one of the investors, he sees this big apartment block, 22 floors, that has the only clear view, to the side where the fireworks will be. So he buys it, the whole block. And he gets a designer, a brand, like Gucci, or, you know, Louis Vuitton, to kit out each floor. Each brand kits out one floor. And that’s just to watch the fireworks for the opening. 22 floors.”

I was thinking that Galway now seemed tiny, squashed, bounded on the poor coast by wild sea and back roads that cracked across the middle as they sunk into bog, all under unfolding layers of bad weather.

The pub was quiet. It was still early. Christmas parties would stream in later on, and Christmas jumper drinking sessions. The menus had changed, and the waitress told us there was new management. She’d been there since I had worked nearby the year before.

Stories continued. I didn’t have much to offer.

“So, Brian, what else have you been up to lately?”

“Um, well, I’ve been busy, but, I’m not sure at what, exactly. Stuff. You know, not much structure.”

I tried to think of something to add. I remembered something that happened the day before at home.

“I had an interesting experience yesterday” I tried.

“Yeah? What happened?”

A space opened up just then.

“Very little, I mean, nothing dramatic, but I thought it was interesting”

The space was still there.

“Well, I was indoors for the morning, for a few hours at the computer, and it was cold, and I needed a break. You know, I was feeling a bit crap.”

Maybe too much, but I didn’t tell them about the trough, or how deep or steep or strange it could be.

“So I just went outside and walked a lap around the house to get some air, just before it got too dark to see. And as I walked round the back, a bunch of crows came flying over, over the trees and the back garden.”

They must have wondered where I’m going. A scattering of crows? Where was I going?

“And I just throw my hand up at them, like I’m throwing something.”

It didn’t seem like much of a story now. They were looking and I soldiered on.

“And the crows react. They suddenly spread out, then back in, but it’s so, seamless. It’s like they move before I do, or at the same time, and it makes me realise how, connected everything is, like it’s not not that this happens then this happens, but that everything is happening at once, and it all moves along as, as one.”

Silence.

“Sounds like you’re a buddhist now” says Gusto, smiling. “Zen.”

“What happened then?” asks the cousin.

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “I mean, the crows are already gone. They fly over the garden and the trees and come back in close together, like nothing happened. It just made me feel better, all of a sudden. Like I’d been plugged back in. Nothing dramatic.”

Now I wondered why the hell that moment came to me when I ransacked my brain. It always throws up random stuff.

The conversation bubbled on. The chatty uncle told us about high interest rates in Iran, and how princes in Dubai will spend $500,000 to get a number 1 plate to make their gold-tinted supercar stand out (because you can’t actually buy a car that will stand out no matter what you spend), and how burgers are more expensive in Galway than London, and how a multi-millionaire he knows will still work with a labourer shovelling or cleaning sometimes, or spend hours haggling to get things like toilet paper for a few pennies less.

“It’s not about the money. It’s about a way to live.”

“Maybe it’s like a backstage rider for a band” I tried. “Like Van Halen only wanting brown M&Ms so that they could check if the promoters actually read the contract. Like, its strategic really. Even if you don’t understand- some things are supposed to make no sense.”

I ordered dessert and ate dessert and the pub slowly filled and loudened. There was a decision to move to the city centre. Suddenly everyone began to stand.

When I went to the bar to pay, Gusto and his uncle began to happily argue about who should get the bill. Gusto eventually paid, and paid for all of us. I’d taken my wallet out and stood uselessly behind him, defenseless.

“Come to London, man. You can get a job there easy.”

THE END


Written by Donal Kelly, December 2017.

I did make up those jokes, probably while driving, but they surely already exist.


Interview room 341 is very small and dark, like a segment cut from a corridor. Harry notices the odd ratio of wall to door to window as he automatically moves towards the one empty chair. An inspector sits opposite behind a small desk, staring down at a screen. He’s thin, suited, with short hair starting to grey, and legs crossed with the raised foot absently tapping air.

He doesn’t seem to notice Harry standing there awkwardly. Just swipes and stares. Harry sits. Now the inspector looks up.

“Ah, Mr Thomas?”

“Yes. Yes?”

“Sorry to keep you waiting. It is nice to meet you.”

“Um, yes, it’s nice to meet you, too.”

The inspector smiles, showing his top teeth.

“I hope you got here without any trouble.”

“Yes, it was fine.”

“Well. I’m glad you could make the appointment. We’re very sorry about the delay. You know how things are right now.”

He waits.

“That’s ok.”

“Good, good. I’m sure you understand. It’s beyond our control. And of course doing things properly takes some time.”

He waits again. Smiles. Teeth.

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

“It won’t take long now though. Not long at all. We have gone through your work in detail. Everything in the feed, and everything in the archive. A considerable portfolio.”

He holds the screen up.

“This is your account, right?”

Harry looks at the old feed; its thumbnail images, shared edgy articles, and cringeworthy contributions from an old virtual self. It has been scrolled down to some point in the past, maybe five years ago, or more? There’s a photo of his brother with arms folded, standing outside under trees. Harry remembers it. 35mm Kodak film in a Canon FD camera, on a 50mm lens, just after the house was finished.

“Yes, that looks like my account.”

“Excellent. Yes. It is. We have gone through it in close detail. Thoroughly. Quite a body of work. Substantial.”

He waits. Smiles. Teeth.

“Thanks.”

The inspector turns the screen round. Tap, swipe, tap, tap. He holds it up again.

“And this, this is also yours? From the archive.”

Harry looks. A gallery of much older photos. A red van outside a bungalow on a drumlin hill. A long exposure of waves hitting a dark-rocked coast. A blurred horse running on an island. A boy in woods holding his hand in front of his face. A reflection of a row of white houses in a puddle.

“They are yours?”

“Yes, yes, they’re mine. from before. I haven’t seen them in…”

“Yes, well, here they are. Alive and kicking. Very consistent.”

He puts the screen down on the desk next to a sorry plastic plant.

“Well, we have gone through everything in detail, great detail, and we feel we have a good measure, a very good understanding, of your work. A very broad output indeed. Landscapes mainly, wouldn’t you agree? A degree of escapism? Some Longing? Classic straight composition, with the odd effort, off-piste, as they say.”

Harry’s eyes roll around the very small room.

The inspector waits.

“I guess, I’m drawn to landscape, somewhat.” He shifts in the chair.

“Yes, yes. Landscape is a fine subject. A fine way to spend a day off, out in the open air, recording the conditions, the light, the weather. The change and the unchanging.”

Harry shifts uncomfortably again.

“And of course, some street work here. Black and white in the main. Very, I suppose, un-intrsuive. Unintrsive street scenes, with little eye contact. Some reflections, windows, skies, observations. Perhaps a sense of, disconnect? Certainly a measure of observation and complexity. But a distance nonetheless. Very interesting. The curse of the observer, in the street, of the street, but always feeling outside, perhaps?”

“I suppose.”

Another long pause. Harry looks up at a fan cutting its loop overhead. Snipsnipsnipsnip…

The inspector nods and stares, his finger still flicking across the screen. He angles it so Harry can’t see what he sees. Pale blue light strikes his steady inspector face, and into his steady inspector eyes.

Eventually he puts it down again, and turns to face Harry, folding his hands carefully after thoughtfully brushing dust from the corners of the desk.

“So, this is good. I think we can come to a very clear understanding.”

“I hope so.”

“Certainly. Certainly. You see, your work is excellent, very good, very broad. Curious. Introspective. Persistent. And very consistent. Perhaps trying at times to, er, find a, find a foothold. A voice. What do you think?”

“Well, I guess, I mean, it’s… hard to say. I’ve put a lot of… It’s not really something I’ve…”

“Not to worry. Not to worry. Of course overthinking can disrupt the intuitive quest. Art is an, active form of contemplation, and expression shouldn’t be, pigeon-holed. Never tied down, strictly, fully. In any case, I’m sure it has been a valuable process, very educational. And an interesting, active hobby. We must always strive to see, to see better, no?”

“Sure. Yes.”

“Yes, We have to be, be in the world, and, take it for what it is, with us, in it, in the, flow, exactly. We have to let the world flow by us. Through us. Let it settle, percolate, integrate. Exactly. You have explored and I’m sure have learned a great deal about this human condition of ours.”

He rubs dust off the desk again, and glances at a clock that hangs on the wall behind Harry. Smiles. Teeth.

“Now, I’m glad we agree. You have learned and experienced and explored. A valuable process. You know, people like you are very important, vital even.”

Harry tries to stretch his body out of its slouch. The plastic chair seems designed to push it into a collapsed hunch. The tiny room is warm but he shivers. The daylight that had striped between the narrow grey blinds is gone.

The inspector puts his hands together in another practiced gesture.

“Of course, it is vital too, essential, to help people find their right, role. Their best calling. Vital to all of us. Otherwise, so much, so much potential, goes wasted. A great inefficiency.”

Harry stops fighting the slouch.

“I’m sure you have studied the greats. The giants of the art. Bresson, Capa, Adams. Man Ray. Atget. Aarbus. Koudelka. Steichen. Mann. Strand. Kenna. So many, so many. So true to their art. Art in every direction. We must never forget to study them, learn from them. Try to see as they saw. Don’t you think?”

“I suppose.”

“Yes, of course we do. And at the same time we must also struggle, struggle to find our own path. Sometimes we fall naturally into it, but of course, we can be helped. can we not? We have to embrace our path with integrity.”

“I guess.”

“As sure as we are sitting here. As sure as the sun still rises. We must help each other, for the sake of all of us. Not in a theoretical way. In real ways. Concrete ways. We must keep our purpose clear and our hearts open. Would you say that you are open, Harry?”

Harry lets his eyes float again, from those clean careful hands with close cut nails, to the looping fan, to the grey blinds.

“I, I.. maybe.”

“It is a fact. It is obvious from your work. You are an open, inquisitive individual. With so much to offer. I am sure you can see the opportunity, and that is all it takes, to see it, to see the path ahead.”

The inspector seems to count a preset number of seconds of pause, looking intently at Harry, then thoughtfully at his desk and office and the upturned screen and the clock, as though they have suddenly just appeared and are arranged just right.

“So. Time has no mercy. I am sure you are eager to get moving. It is great to find agreement. I am sure you can have many new experiences, good, great experiences. There is always time” As he speaks he pulls the screen back across with one finger, without looking at it. Then he does look, and it lights up again with the same blue, and he touches and taps.

“Now, here we are. Harry Samuel Thomas. One Seven Six Zero Seven Six Five Nine Two. This is you.”

“That’s me.”

“Of course. Now. Let’s just quickly… (tap tap tap).. and (tap tap tap) ”

He leans over the screen on the desk, but Harry can still see.. another gallery of his photographs. Numbers and dates. His memories. On one side he can see a star rating and underneath it some comments.

Two and a half stars out of five.

The inspector stares for a long moment then tap-tap-taps again.

Now a big button appears saying “Confirm Cleanse”

He looks at the screen.

“No point in looking backwards Harry. We must learn from the masters, pull together, find our optimal path. We must let our lives be our content.”

Harry watches the inspector’s quick fingers tap “Confirm Cleanse”. The screen flashes. A new view: “Confirm content cleanse. All feed content will be removed. Save feed content to archive? Remove all archive material?”

The inspector de-selects “Save feed content to archive”, and selects “Remove all archive material”. He taps “CONFIRM”.

“Identification required. Level Four. Department of Culture and Data Provisioning.”

“Ah, of course.”

He turns the screen to Harry.

“Can you put your thumbs here. Both thumbs? On the circles.”

Harry presses his thumbs onto circles marked L and R.

“Identification confirmed. Processing request.”

A loading bar appears.

“Removing feed content. 3%”

Harry can hear the fan and his own breathing. He tries to remember the places he has been. Fragments. A windswept day out on the coast. Deep grass, hollow-pocked under tripping feet. A windy afternoon and the sun blasting between clouds. Crawling on his belly to the edge and holding the camera over it.

The ocean bellowing below sheer cliffs. Seagulls squealing. The huge mass of the sea stack over the waves. Lines of white froth and bullets of specular glint. Clear horizon and sea sound and sea smell from one edge to the other.

“100%. Source material removed.”

“Removing archive material. 1%”

Or, another time and place, getting out of the subway at night, during winter in a cold city, and turning to look down at steps running back to the station. A man hurrying down, and suddenly jumping the last few steps. Too many to be practical. A flourish, not meant to be seen. Just for the heck of it.

A long time ago now.

“100%. Archive material removed. Procedure complete.”

The inspector smiles broadly and leans forward.

“That is it. That’s great. Nothing to it. Now we can move forward. Onwards and upwards, to new adventures.”

He continues to tap.

“And the requisition unit will call to your home this very day, for the equipment recycle order.”

He turns the screen off.

“Now, good news. We have a great position lined up for you. Perfect. A brand new opening. Right next to your home. A fine promotion. With a highly reputable content subcontractor- Merko Kontent.”

Harry feels far away, and being far away and empty, finds he is now able to meet the inspector’s gaze. It doesn’t waver. It holds his eyes and drinks them in and deletes whatever they are saying, unflinching, unreflective, steady.

“You will be straight into the images department. None of the ground floor work. A proper contract.”

It is easier to look at the blinds, and the lines of darkness where the lines of light had been.

**************************

Office six eight four, floor three, Merko Kontent Building Seven, Department of Content and File Administration. Eight minutes of brisk walking from the outside door of the apartment block.

A lady in a blue suit with a name tag shows Harry to his desk. His name and number are displayed on a large flat display. She points out the bathroom, the coffee and vending machines, and the smaller second screen to the left of the other. On this, a red clock showing “09:00:00”

“Just put your thumbs here.”

Harry puts his two thumbs against the L and R circles on the big display. It immediately lights up. Text appears.

“Assignment 3707124. Content Agent: 176076592. Session: 1186503. Time allocated: 24:28:00. Time accumulated. 00:00:00. Session length: 09:00:00. Press screen to begin.”

There you are”, the lady says. “Just follow the screen. Easy peasy. A basic session to get you started. It automatically stops when you leave your chair.”

She starts to walk away then pauses.

“Oh, and your work will be monitored of course, I mean, especially, for the first few days at least. It’s just protocol. Press the Support button under the clock screen for tech support. But you shouldn’t need it.”

She hurries off. Harry watches her disappear into a maze of separating dividers and then he glances up at the camera overhead. Then at the screen. It waits.

“Press screen to begin.”

He presses the screen.

“Assignment type: Image Allocation. ID 3707124. Session: 1186503”

“Assignment content: Private Feed Images”

“Assignment target cluster segment: Pornography”

“Press screen to continue.”

The only sound is a low background hum, and possibly faraway traffic, and something like flowing water. Overhead pipes?

He presses the screen.

“Instructions overview: Choose Yes if image is of a graphic or pornographic nature. Otherwise choose No. Press screen to continue.”

Harry presses the screen.

The clock on the left suddenly starts counting down.

“8:59:59”

“8:59:58”

On the main display: an image of a windswept sea, probably taken from a boat. Two buttons. YES and NO.

Harry touches NO.

A new image. A truck being unloaded outside a warehouse in the rain.

NO

A group of people in a room, looking at the camera and smiling.

NO

Two young naked women in a kitchen with their hands raised to their faces in ‘owl eyes’ shapes.

YES

***********************************************

When the clock reaches zero, Harry realises he hasn’t eaten, or moved from his station for a full nine hours. The light has stayed exactly the same throughout. The sounds too, bar an odd shuffle of passing feet followed by clunks from a vending machine or whirring from the coffee machine. The big screen is blank. The small one reads “00:00:00”. Now it too fades into black. Harry’s phone vibrates in his pocket. He takes it out. New message.

He takes the stairs down and goes through door, door, gate, to get to the street. It’s dark and not yet busy. An eight minute walk home. He has finished early.

After four minutes, Harry reaches an intersection and stops. His stomach is rumbling. He stands there for two full light changes, watching other workers going home, and cars driving through. He sees lights switch off in the opposite block, and others switch on. He sees a woman walk by with a little girl wearing a dress and eating an ice cream. Instead of going straight on towards the tiny apartment, he turns left, and walks faster.

Eventually, he reaches a bridge and crosses, looking down into the dark river below. Now he is in the old part of the city, where warrens of streets thrown on streets mingle and twist. Old unprofitable shops hang stubbornly onto corners like barnacles.

Harry stops at a dirty lit window with red and black lettering overhead. “Darcy’s. Buy and Sell. Technology specialist. Classic items.” He looks around before pushing the door in.

A bell tinkles. An old man leans over a glass counter at the end of the dark narrow space, working with a little pliers over something disassembled. The centre and sides are lined with shelves and cases. Harry makes a slow line around the outside towards a display of antique cameras. Dented metal SLRs, a couple of worn rangefinders, and a random mix of lenses, bags, and coloured filters. He picks things up, twists knobs, presses shutters.

The old man stops his work and stares.

Harry picks up a small SLR.

“How much for this body and lens?”

The man peers through his thick glasses.

“Mmmmm, that’s not a common model, that one. In good nick too. Serviced it myself. And no digital footprin… mmmmm…. 50 pounds for both.”

“Do you have any film for it?”

“Mmmm, film? I’ll check.”

The keeper disappears into the back, and Harry waits, listening to the sounds of cabinet doors opening and closing and muttered swearing.

The old man returns with a small cardboard box filled with rolls of old film.

“Expired of course. But I had them in the fridge.”

“Fine.”

He picks up a loose roll and holds it up to his face.

“You know, I don’t think you can get these developed anywhere anymore.”

“I know.”

“Oh, well, 3 pounds a roll, as they are.”

Harry picks up and puts down some of the rolls. He looks around the empty shop again then pulls out a battered wallet. Carefully wrapped inside an old receipt are two 50 pound notes.

“Will that do? For the lot?”

“Yep, that’ll do. I’ll find a bag.”

Harry hands him the cash and turns to the door. Back outside, the street is quiet. The streetlights that work throw cones of muddy orange along its narrow curve. Harry fumbles with a roll of the expired film and eventually loads it. He stares at the row of houses, the lights, and the blackness of the sky that they fade into.

He wipes the viewfinder and lens with his sleeve then holds the camera up to his eye. Fragments from the nine hours of “Assignment Section: Pornography” begin to dislodge. He tries to see only what is in the viewfinder.

Click.

THE END

All photos, drawings, and text by Donal Kelly. Please let me know if you liked it. If you hated it, that's ok. I can accept this. But no need to let me know. I find it really hard to get anyone to actually read my efforts, and I can't read it properly myself because it's too familiar. Maybe if I spend a year or two forgetting.

Then I decided to draw an actual sketch. Of the little interview room. Who knows why. Then I felt I had to add lots more, for closure, and then I lost a whole pile of time. Hours and hours. Gobble gobble gobble. And I still think, it probably, should be, you know, deleted.

LISTEN:

John Rufus Clancy tried to become so still that he could feel time pass, but he failed. He could see the clock counting up, but he couldn’t feel its passing. There: that transition between 14:59:59 and 15:00:00, that transition from not late, to late. Where was it? Even if he stared blankly at the mutest emptiest stillest surface, or shut his eyes completely, there was no way to register time itself, just the numbers of its count, the recording of wheels turned or electrons spun. All of his senses were in the soup, a jumble of ingredients unaware of their own dish’s name. His senses and senses of his senses and the idea of a self and its selfness, were all balled up and spun out in time, of time, all the time.

Maybe though, if he pushed himself, those counted numbers themselves, or the idea of counting, or at least some such stuffs, are on the outside, even if the thinking with them is not. Can I, wondered John R. Clancy, 1 minute late now and counting, in my flow of slippery mental states, contain – hold as thought-subject – something that is genuinely outside of time?

The car in front slowed abruptly again. John reacts. Right foot up, over, down, hard on the brake. Friction bites, and his body pushes forward against the rush of road, weight flows into his hands and onto the steering wheel. Find calm, find calm. No, his circulation spikes up, and blood rushes ventricle and vein. Why did he brake? He/she/they/it… there was nothing in the way. Stewy warm anger spurts, encompassing, bladed, intentional, spills like gloss green paint in clear midday sun, or the sound of a cracking plank of dry wood under much load. Kurrsquack of a jagged black raven. The violent words and their rowdy hues assemble with intent at street corners. Will a man ever be calm again? Left foot down, clutch in, gear disengaged, down to fourth, then to third, and all under control again, with enough space, bumper behind bumper. Two minutes late and growing. If you’re stuck in traffic you are traffic.

Would she wait for him this time, clinking her coffee cup and checking the time on her phone? Is she counting up or counting down?

A radio ad is trying its earnest best to sell John a new car, trying to sell him the idea of a new car, trying to sell him the idea of a future, brand new, John R. Clancy in a minty glistened fresh new car, all humble and correct and to be highly regarded, pulling ahead, up the road, citius, altius fortius and high on a sharp summit of escape and presence at once.

Would she wait or would she tip on, and by leaving cleave the story into a before and an after, a then and a not then?

There would be parking on Munster Avenue.

John Rufus Clancy tried to come to rest like a spun top finding its halt (though it is the more graceful aloft), but he failed. Surely, there is a stable plane for all things to return? Equilibrium. Or was it just another connivy dream’s spin? It comes down to a story, its telling when told, and the politics of the organs as they take to any telling. Surely there was a plot where this was the end: the happily afters or the bitter-eat embers of a shot down hellhound. There are the sudden jolts, and then the stretches in between. It could yet be the beginning? There is the spinning mill of narrative, threads woven and rewoven into fabric and pushed out and piled up, in the good old production of order, consistency, structure, cohesion, resolution. Thunkathunkathunkthunka… down it spills like the scroll of a news feed, falling translucent, topless, bottomless, and more real than what’s outside windows with its sweaty graft and buzzing-by flies and mouthfuls of dust and unexplained itches. Imagine eating food that makes you hungrier and hungrier. You eat more, you need more. John R. felt a kind of desire to have more appetite, or something like this, but more vague, muffled, the echo of a banged pipe down the gullet of the briny brain.

“I made my bed, so I have to sleep in it.”

History class. Nineteen-Ninety-something. She didn’t do her homework, or something. Something lost, buried in the scrollfeed, in the making and unmaking of beds. She said that after, whatever, and John had never heard it before and saved it as something really significant. But what wasn’t significant then? Could a life be primed forever by a few snippets plucked from the sky in early days of feels?

The rain is still coming down when John R. reaches the cafe, but is more drizzle now than pelt. Earlier on, the June bloom had been spoiled with light. It turned as it often does, under the whim of blown bellyheavy clouds. It’s wet, or it’s dry. So it rolls, by and by. It’s wet, or it’s dry, or it’s ‘it’s wet, or it’s dry’, and so on. He didn’t put money in the meter- there was less than an hour left in the working man’s metered day.

Maybe she’d left by now, and there was probably a message or three unread. Maybe she’d left just now or five minutes ago or a year ago, according to the piled fabric of narrative, according to its thick knots written and unwritten, a thing to be counted but not felt. Time. Take the world at its most solid, as a lifted black rock from wet soil in the hands or the idea of the number one while lying in a quiet (lonely) bed, and yet but a passing flow over an abrupt stone in a river, or the shimmer of a bent ray deflected by a little ripple of a gurgling stream down a boggy hill finding a pair of eyes and all their percept on some point. Did the history of the world conspire to arrive at just this or that flicker on a ripple?

The ostentatious John R. Clancy was there, but she was there or she was not there. It’s hard to tell, that something isn’t there. You have to search every possible seat and wait to see if anyone comes out from the toilet. Coffee for one so, and messages checked, too late, and suddenly sweating at a little table, with barely tasted cappuccino and cake. Maybe it was a waste of a few euro, or maybe the motions of teeth and throat kept John R. upright, with head down, reading some latest breaking news on a bright screen, hunched over a surge of anger aimed squarely at the idea of himself and all its pretentious wanderling baggage and lazy adorned habits. He wondered if she‘d sat at the same table. He could ask but he wouldn’t ask. Was there a dark-haired girl in just now? How did she appear; I mean, did she look pensive, agitated, or resolved, confident, calm? Did she leave with an unwiped tear or a fine carefree air?

“Get over yourself”

She said that in an art class some time before some forgotten exam. That was when the collapsed self of later school years was still pending reformation, still stuck on its spear-tip of self-consciousness and self-disregard. What self? What over? To jump? And where to land? to climb? And where to ascend? And yet it seemed again, significant, so he saved it down good and deep. To here, years later, some thin- spun maturity, the aggregation of accumulations. Maybe it’s better to barely be a self, but always intertwined and carried by the senses to the great outside, and less aware of the looker looking and just looking, just being.

Ah… beds made, holes dug, selves to get over, and the deeper dimmer dug the more enticing then to just carry on, head down, busy out, duvet over the head and back to sleep, digging.

**********************************************

Much later, John Rufus Clancy tried to set up a comfortable place to sleep, but failed. The only flat patches of open ground that he could find around Ballyvaughan all had signs with

“NO CAMPING. NO OVERNIGHT PARKING. BY ORDER OF CLARE COUNTY COUNCIL”

He had eventually found the lumpy stub of an old broken pier outside the village, and pitched the tent in the middle of it, on a bumpy crop of tall grass and weed. He had cycled down with laden pannier bags, and eaten a pizza where the young waiter spoke English with a Clare accent and French with a French accent. And he had sat out by Monk’s pub on the wall over the sea, with the sounds of a folk band’s ballads carried out through the open door on a calm bright late June night.

“Black is the colour, of my true love’s hair”

High over the bay hung wisps of red and purple woven into the deepening dusk.

“Her lips are like, some roses fair”

He had sat there until his legs grew numb, and he tried to see the fading of the light, tried to see the change itself without looking away, but couldn’t. Lights began to twinkle on the far shore from Galway city out along the west coast of Connemara.

“She’s the sweetest smile, and the gentlest hands”

Only if he closed his eyes for a minute, or more, then opened them, could he see that the sky had dimmed further. But whenever he closed his eyes, so many thoughts argued for attention. Better to stare at the outside. Tourists walked the pier and up towards the village centre. Groups, couples, togethers. The light slowly fading.

“And I love the ground, whereon she stands”

He’d follow them soon, up to the village and continue on out the narrowing road with a flashlight blinking, to the tent on the pier.

John Rufus Clancy tried to get a proper helping of deep dreamless sleep, but he failed. He’d forgotten how damn loud everything was and whenever he slept, restless dreaming. A rookery in the trees over the main road had settled but not settled, and every so often a chorus of kak-kak-kak-kak-kak skrrrrrrrraaaaukkkk sounds would jar him awake. At two thirty a group of drunk people passed, loud, shouting, laughing. Someone lagged behind and got sick on the roadside. “Timothy” they yelled up ahead. “Are you getting sick?” Did they see the bike, the tent? Should he go out and check?

Then, before seven am, he woke from a dream where he could hear an old cat getting sick in a kitchen, and as the sounds got louder, he struggled to break out of it, urging himself to wake, wake, wake, squirming in the tight sleeping bag as though he were bound up in ropes. Eventually he dragged himself to the surface, and unlocked consciousness, and the sound resolved into the lapping of the high tide on the old pier stones a fistful of metres away.

When he figured that the water wouldn’t rise as far as his tent, John scrambled back inside and lay down and listened to the lapping and tried to let everything else down too, and tried to stop holding things at all. He figured he was making some progress too until the phone pinged, and it was from her or it was not from her. It was on the line between not late and late and here and not here, and somewhere in the story, maybe the beginning, maybe the end, and it said

“Hi John, how are things? Are you ok?”

Or maybe there was no message at all, and outside the sea just glooped between the stones and he could see a squadron of earwigs scrambling up the inside of the flysheet and he had nothing to eat for breakfast and he had failed to make provision for these eventualities at all.

THE END

written June/July 2017. Tried a recording outside, Oughterard, July 13th.