Chapter Three (Part Two)

Ethan stared. His mind whirred. He had never wanted a dog.

They were the people; traipsing after their dogs first thing in the morning. It was they who were bouncing around inside his head at that moment. They were the ones on the news. The dog would run off chasing some scent and not come back. Then they would find it, and something else.

‘It was always a dog walker.’ His hand went for his phone; holding it like some sort of amulet.

He began to move forward, freeing his limbs from the crush of indecision. His eyes were fixed on it, his legs moving stiffly, automatically. His innards slid and coiled involuntarily, tossing him weakly towards nausea. He did not even hear the hushed silence all about him; as if the trees and the sky had turned to watch the scene in wonderment.

He crouched unconsciously, his arms held out before him. By the time he was fifteen feet away he had slowed to a creep. His head lowered more, coaxing himself on, forcing his eyes to stay open. His mind was stuck in neutral, spinning round and round inside at breakneck speed but going nowhere, driving nothing.

He was closer now. He could see it from its shape that it was a girl. A tug of sadness, a young girl, a girl’s foot glazed with morning dew in a wet black shoe. Despite himself he jogged forward.

“Hello?” His thin voice vanished immediately with the mist of his breath.

He said it again; his voice firmer this time.

“Hello.”

Still there was nothing. He crouched down slowly and peered beneath the bush. The foot met an ankle and a delicate calf which itself ran into some dark trousers. The body itself was out of sight, lying beneath the matted twigs and leaves.

Ethan was a matter of inches from the leg. It looked so fragile as if held beneath glass. He wouldn’t touch the skin, the white snow skin. He couldn’t do that but he stilled himself and leant further pushing his hand out over the dark trouser.

He held it still, half outstretched, hovering a motion above it.

With a gulp he put it down. He couldn’t feel anything but chill. The fabric was that kind of cold which is indistinguishable from damp. He pulled his hand away with a jolt and as his fingers left the fabric he felt sure, powerfully certain that he felt the ebb of warmth from the cloth. As he did so he noticed his thumb was moving unconsciously to the buttons on his phone. He lowered his palm more deliberately this time, promising himself that he would call 999 if there was only cold, inanimate fabric.

‘Ambulance or police?’ He looked away as he pressed the leg once more, pushing the cold muscles of the thigh across the bone.

He stopped, ‘wait! It, it did! Did it move?’ He was sure it had moved, slightly but definitely.

He pressed once more. ‘There again! Moving sluggishly, weakly, kicking out like someone asleep.’

His reticence fled. He rubbed the leg harder now.

“Hey… hello, hey are you OK?”

After a pause a reed thin “what?” crept out. Her voice sounded like tracing paper.

“Thank God” he said spontaneously, “you’re alright?”

The legs began to move gingerly back and forth, shuffling forward. Slowly as though the ground was giving her up, they became a torso and then shoulders and finally a head of chestnut brown hair, darker where it was damp. He took her thin trembling hand and guided her out.

She was shielding her eyes against the cold, clear light. Her skin had a porcelain brilliance. The only mark was a small moss stain across her cheekbone that looked a little like camouflage against her complexion.

He helped her up, and she, rapidly gathering her dignity, tried to do so on her own. Something stuck in Ethan’s throat. She was a vision, even then a vision of beauty and he felt shamed for noticing.

“You must be freezing.”

She still made no attempt so speak.

He took off his jacket and put it round her shoulders. She took it without a word, looking too confused to understand what was going on. Her shivering hands could barely hold the coat round her shoulders. He took her gently and rubbed her arms and back. She felt so pliant in his arms, and still she didn’t speak. After a moment he stepped back “I’m going to call an ambulance, ok?”

She looked up at him and shook her head gingerly.

“I have to.”

She opened her mouth.

“Don’t, It’s ok. Honest.”

He looked at her face closely, her hair wasn’t wet, and she was beginning to gain a little colour in her cheeks.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” her eyes softened “thank you.”

“You’re lucky not to have hypothermia.”

He grinned. She sneezed.

“Bless you!”

“I think I may yet,” she smiled more to herself than him. Her eyes sparkled and her little upturned nose flushed right to its pointed tip. As if replying Ethan blushed a little.

“Well, we’d better get you home, someone will be worried about you; I’m sure.”

“That’s a good idea.”

He walked her back across the park, up the hill and to a taxi rank. He waited with her until she got into the car, smiled as she waved at him and then turned back to work.

As he sat in the printers, still on his own at that hour, he wondered what her name might have been, and with a heavy heart he dwelt on the thought that he would most likely never see her again.

Chapter Three (Part One)

If Jen was the kind of person to talk about voting against the current local council for their poor litter collection; then Ethan was the kind to pick it up. Plus he liked to walk, and it wasn’t exactly taxing to do both. He had often considered how different he and his sister were, doing what we all do and seeing right through our similarities.

He was up early for work again. He could walk to work; it was the best time to walk, the best time of all the day, when the air was crisp and the park quiet. His customary, sfumato smile played across his lips. He stopped and looked at his watch, it was nearing six and the air was cool, so as to feel like mist.

He felt sure that she thought the same way as he; that they were different, but he also felt sure that she felt it in a more pejorative sense than he, in the way that people with lower self-confidence often do. She had a degree. Did that make her high minded? It certainly didn’t seem to be making her money, or even happy. She was trained to be an academic, but she had no love for academia. It was such a terrible pity to see her waving her conditioning around as if it was more than training.

He deliberately left the path near the entrance to the park and sauntered across the grass towards the stream, the cool dew colouring his trainers. He then turned onto the path which cut across and crept up the hill towards the church and town.

It was as he turned to his left he saw another supermarket trolley stuffed, half upturned into a bush.

A feeling of kinship had developed. In many ways the life of the trolley was not too dissimilar to his. At times it could seem mundane and repetitive, but it was always faced with impervious sprite, good nature and a slight wobbly mischief; and sometimes they had a moment of exhilaration to savour.

It wasn’t the first one he had seen. Actually he saw one every now and again, either lying buckled beyond use at the bottom of the high street, refusing to slow them until the huge flint gate had intervened, lying around in the park after a Friday night or bathing in the stream.

He walked on and it was only as he turned his head back to look up the hill to the spire of the church that he caught the glimpse of something, right at the very edge of his vision. Next to the trolley cage and beneath the shadow of the bush, ghostly against the dark earth lay a slender white foot.

“Shi…t,” the word whistled out spontaneously as he was caught there motionless, struck still by the macabre sight.

It's a start...

Two chapter up and more to follow. I think one a week is about right.
I'm also thinking about putting some short stories and ideas up here as well, see which people like.

Chapter Two

Two buses and twenty minutes behind her younger brother, Jen stood up as they slowed in the school rush-hour traffic. She could see the florists, right before the registry office. The bus ground to a halt again.
Her shoulders slumped. It had been another disheartening day of filling in forms and waiting by the telephone. London life and the career she was desperate for both still seemed a million miles away; she felt like she was going nowhere fast.
“Oh, come on” she muttered as the Stopping sign illuminated with its customary green glow. She pushed up towards the closed door, waiting impatiently for it to open.

She stepped down and walked swiftly into the shop; immediately she was vexed further by the pungent aromas which clogged her nose and always clung to his clothes; this place always needed more air. Levi stood leaning forward onto the counter. His face was crinkled in thought as he scratched the pad with his nib. The door closed with its synthesised tinkle, and as it did he glanced up, and automatically slid the doodle he was scribbling under a sheaf of papers. He smiled a tired, slightly pained grin and looked back down.
“I’m going to grab some flowers for mum?”
He didn’t look up, “take what you want.”
Now wasn’t the time.
Jen looked around and picked up up one from a bucket marked Queen of Denmark. It was an intricate, scarlet and pink rose, ‘this'll be nice.’ She began to gather a few and tied them together.
When she was done he looked over.
"Do you want them wrapped?"
Jen nodded and handed them to him.
“Are you going to come, to the hospital?” She knew he wasn’t going to.
She stood waiting for the flowers not knowing how to break the silence.
"There you go."
“Thanks, I’ll see you later?”
He didn’t seem to think that was a question.

She stepped back outside to that anodyne chime, thinking of how much had changed in those last two years. It was that long ago she had stepped into the shop for the first time and met Levi. Mum had been alright then. It was almost their anniversary but nothing was the same, except that chime, and that sweet but sickly smell. She felt it with quiet embarrassment; how she had come back home full with the exhilaration of university, its possibilities, and met him.
It was even with a disdain that she remembered herself just that short time ago; how naïve, how immature she had been! How much she had been in his thrall.

The door had rung with the same cheery chime, as she was stunned for the first time by the funk of perfumed plant and mildew that permeated throughout the place.
It was then she first saw him. He was a crop of dark hair amidst the shadows and the dark walls towards the rear. A nervous pang had started playing inside her chest, from one side to the other. She didn’t get that anymore.

He stood leaning forward onto the counter like he still did. Seeing her he smiled his simple grin that then had seemed so guileless, his face open and his eyes beautiful and uncomplicated.
Instinctively she grinned back at him and as she did, her eyes instantly dropped to the ground. The pang became a small wave of contraction in her belly. He finished whatever he was working out, tapped the base of his pen on the surface and dropped it.
“Hi” he purred, “is there something I can help you with?”
“Oh, no thanks,” she kicked herself, ‘why did you say that?’

Undeterred, almost predatory, he had loped towards her whistling something inaudible on his breath and in an instant he was there, before her. She looked up, trying to ignore his broad shoulders, his eyes, his gorgeous face and overcome that part of her trying to sabotage everything by anaesthetising her jaw.

She caught his eyes as he gazed down at her, his enormous face and brilliant blue pupils filled her vision to bursting. She was completely overcome, and though she couldn’t have articulated any of that feeling just then; she had felt like a tigress bathing in those first warm rays of the savannah’s long, fierce day. Yes, then she had been his.
But not now; not anymore.

Twenty minutes late Jen entered the bright, bleached reception area of St. Edith’s General Infirmary. Ethan was waiting for her. She smiled with her flexing, slightly superior lips at him and he stretched his great awkward mouth from ear to ear in an enormous grin. He was still thinking about Dogg and the key.
“Hey, you” it felt like and age since he had seen her. They never had the chance since she had moved away to university and in with Levi.
“Hello,” she murmured as she was enveloped in his bear hug.
He put her down gently, holding her shoulder in her hand. He looked round at all the people sitting glassy-eyed in the room and dulled his smile.
“How has she been?” In everything she had forgotten how much she missed her mum. She began and then quickly stopped counting when she realised that it had been at least a two weeks since she last visited.
“Yup, OK.” It was the sort of ‘OK’ that means nothing more “they’ve moved her.”
“Oh,” she stood there waiting for him to show her where, feeling ashamed she didn’t know where to find her now.
He didn’t notice “So how are you?” He said breezily as he led her down the corridor.
“Fine” she lied as obviously as she could.
“Any luck with the job?”
‘What exactly was the fucking point of a degree?’ she thought as she turned to look at him, “no, not yet” she said quietly.
“Ok, well the nurse said we can go in her when we’re ready. We have ‘til five. ”
She nodded, and they began to walk softly down the white corridor. It was so quiet in there that it felt like the whole hospital was listening to his trainers squeak underfoot.
“Sorry, how are you anyway?” Her voice faltered and Jen found herself suppressing tears; she didn’t know why.
Ethan guessed it was about mum.
“It’s ok you know. She’s still ok,” he was trying to protect her.
They turned left at the top of the stairs, through the heavy fire doors and then immediately right into the ward. When the nurses smiled at Ethan, Jen felt even more like she was guilty of neglect.

Just round the corner lay their mother; one of seven ladies in the room. She was asleep, but she was so pale as to be imitating death. The thought occurred to both of them and they looked at each other, knowing with heavy hearts exactly what each had just thought. For a moment they simply stared.
“Looks like there’s nothing wrong” Jen said shaking her head.
“Mum” Ethan said trying to wake her gently. She didn't stir.
“Still" he paused, whispering playfully in her ear "she looks good for a woman in her fifties.”
The sleeping figure suddenly shook awake with a snort. She opened her eyes drowsily and as she recognised her only two children peering down, she sunk back into the pillow smiling weakly as though still wrapped in some delightful dream.

“Hello mum” said Jen, it was almost a maternal affection that was piqued at the sight of her mother lying there so slight and so helpless. She completely forgot about herself “it’s so nice to see you.”
“Hello darling” she slurred as she yawned, and pushed ineffectually at the sheets to move herself upright. Ethan helped and gave her a hug as Jen propped up the pillows.
“You smell, oh, like an ashtray” she chided gently, her nose wrinkled, “you were going to give that up?”
He mumbled an indifferent apology and slunk back, looking at the floor
“So how are you today?” Jen intervened, kissing her mother on the forehead and showing her roses she had brought.
“Oh, thank you, they’re lovely”
“I’ll just fill this up for you.”
Jen took the vase and walked off. Ethan looked down at his mother and filled her already filled glass to the brim from the plastic jug.
“Do you know when you’re coming back home?”
“No, but I wish I did” she whispered to him “it smells funny here.”
He smiled and looked round; no one was paying them any attention.
“It was nicer when you were on your own.”
She smiled, but said nothing.
“We miss you at home. Dad says he’ll be round later, when he can get away from work.”
He pulled up two chairs from the old lady asleep in the bed next to them, and sat on one at her side. He took her hand but his eyes avoided hers.
“How is Jenny?”
“She’s well, but I don’t see her that much.” He stopped, “she’s looking for work still. I don’t think she’s really that happy here. If it wasn’t for Levi she would be back in London, I think.”
“Oh, and you?”
“You know me, I’m always grand.”
She grinned, his smile was contagious, he made everyone feel a little better.
“Are you still going?”
“Can’t wait.”
“But you know how I feel?” she moved her hand along the sheet to him.
“Yes mum” he took it.
Jen returned with the pink roses arranged immaculately in their vase. She set them down next to the bed and sat down next to her brother. Annette talked for a while about the awful food and the nice nurse who comes and chats to her. Apparently she’s the youngest by far in the ward, and the second lady on the left has just become a great-grandmother to twins and the woman beside her used to work with your father’s mother in a typing pool. By the time they left an hour later she seemed ten years younger, a colour in cheeks and eyes.
It was only when they were leaving and Jen bent down to kiss her mother on the cheek that Annette hissed into her ear.
“Tell your brother I’m only 49! Oh he’s still winding me up.”
She beamed after them and as they turned the corner she sunk back into the bed with a short sigh. The effort made her fade visibly.

Chapter One

“Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum…
velut anteacto nil tempore semsimus aegri…”
“Therefore death is nothing to us, meaning not even a trifle…
Just as in time before our births we felt nothing of distress…”
Lucretius De Rerum Natura 3.830/910

The park didn’t seem to have ever had a name. In fact though everyone called it a park it was more like a heath. It tumbled down the slope from the church, stretching on and out around at the base of the hill, a huge puddle of greens and browns flowing out across the flatter ground. A tranquil, sporadically tended and often very muddy puddle; to whose age the clusters of immense oaks bore testament.

A slender key hung there. He almost walked past it, though it was hanging at head height. It was rusty and it had a small yellow fob dangling with it from the tree. Stopping, he left the path and took it in his hand admiring silently the artifice by which it had come there. The yellow fob sheathed a scrap of paper on which was drawn a fish in outline, like a keyhole on its side. He looped the ring from the new grown shoots and brought it down. He turned it over in his hand, wondering silently.
‘Should I take it?’ The question occurred to him.
After a moment he pushed it back carefully onto the branch, let it take the weight again and smiling at the world, he left it hanging.
‘I must remember that,’ he kept on walking, and in two strides it was forgotten.

The grassy expanse was cut through by lightly trodden and gravelled paths that met at its centre. A river also trickled across the subtle gradient. Its water was wide and shallow but its banks had always been inexplicably deep as if it once contained some raging spring water. Across the grass at the southern end it ran like a pebbled gorge beneath the High Street, which vaulted it with a wizened but sturdy stone bridge. Here it was, in the crisp air of a spring weekend morning, that one might find the upturned cage of a supermarket trolley protruding from the water, like the bars of a chrome-plated lobster pot.

He walked on. It was a glorious late autumn day, a warm sun tempered by the touch of soft breeze. The wide lanes wound away from the park, the undulations of the ground and the light splashing through the canopy on his face. He walked downhill then up again towards town, here and there were hints of its past pressing against him. Down to his left a huge flint gateway presided over the traditional entrance to the town.

Ahead, full of smiles two young boys on bikes faced each other in the deserted park lane. One was raising dust behind him dramatically pawing at the ground like a bull, the other was twisting his handlebar making sounds like an engine.
“...eady? GO!”
Together they set off. He stopped to watch them as they began to cycle towards each other. Faster and faster they raced, their little legs pumping up and down, up and down.
They were playing chicken.
‘This is not going to end well,’ but he couldn’t look away.
“Chicken!”
Sure enough, as calamity seemed inevitable they shouted out together and, as if in slow motion, they both turned their handlebars to avoid each other. In a brief moment of indecision they turned exactly the same way and ran straight into each other, clattering wheel to wheel. There were several nasty scraping sounds as the metal frames conjoined.
He winced, then calling out “are you alright?” he jogged over to the wreckage.
There was a long pause.
“Yes... yup” the one on top was flinching at the stinging cuts on his knees. The other still looked a little unsure.
He lifted the bikes up, but there was no more damage than a couple of grazed knees and elbows, and a buckled front wheel.
“Both of you?”
“Yeah!” Of course.
“Good.”
He couldn’t help a smile and he stood their bikes up as they wiped the dusty mess from their sides. They both thanked him sullenly as they took their bikes and walked off, trying to disguise their limping.

The smile turned to an inward chuckle as they grew more distant, and he thought back to that key he had found just ten minutes earlier. Who could have left it there? It must have been there for a while, it was rusty after all. Just how long had it hung there, ready to open something, through seasons and storms and leaves growing, and shedding waiting for someone to show its purpose?

In the streets he now passed along he felt that he could almost turn a corner and run straight into the past. These were a haggard maze of lanes, back turns and dead ends, a brooding part of this ancient town. Much was signed, the old balneae, the public baths, a temple or an arch, but much was not; there was far, far more than the celebrated Roman remains. There were old churches, wells, the low walls of canal skimming inns and cemeteries in these backwater streets with their peculiar, capillary layout.

He slowed. He could feel it here, organic, haphazard; grown not planned. He loved it. It was everything in between the stories, between the lines, the tarmac boiling, bubbling into cobbles and the buildings sloping their black beams and white walls like a melted barcode. A community influencing and being influenced by its surroundings for more than two thousand years; arguments, reconciliations, cock ups, ecstasies, disappointments and ten thousand tragedies; these and more made up this beautiful mess. In these streets he learned what he was, what he wasn’t, and what he was a part of.

The flint walls were bound into shop frontage, streets took crooked and inexplicably awkward paths, bending to round a long defunct well or suddenly breathing in, becoming just too slim for cars’ progress. The town was like that.

Then there was the high street running plumb straight down the same gentle hill on which the town flowed; it was a shiny new zipper joining the twin breasts of antiquity on either side. He walked on, faster now. A glib gilding, not even gilding, a whitewashing of the place’s patina, witnessing its annual influx of tourists, travellers and schoolchildren with pocket money each summer drawn to the curios, the exactingly preserved Roman centre and its tiny, dry, drab museum. The same one he used to visit as a school child.

Tourists, ice cream vans, stalls selling badges, hats, lighters, coloured hairspray and knocked off ciggies as well as musicians, mime artists, amateur dramatists, stand up comedians and an astonishing number of vagrants all invaded and retreated with each summer like the welling of a tide. But for most of the seasons in the year and almost all the weekdays in the week it was as it was now, keeping itself to itself; quaint, misunderstood and something of an anachronism in 90’s England.

Beyond this was the newer part of town, just like any other and his bus stop. A neat, straight road led into it from London, passing the hospital. Here he stopped. He did not have a long wait.

In the breeze at the back of the bus, three kids were milling about him. The tremulous sounds of their chattering voices filled the space. As he waited to get off, he wondered how it was they got that accent.

The doors opened. One of the kids pushed past him onto the pavement and began to run off down the street. Ethan stepped off the bus after him. A moment later he heard one of his companions behind him as he shouted from the door.
“Oi! Mad Dog!”
‘Were they calling down the road at Mad Dog, or Mad Dogg? One ‘G’ or two?’
But Dog was running off, he hadn’t heard them.
“Mad Dogg, Oi!”
‘Definitely double ‘G’’ mused Ethan.
The boys called out again, together this time, but Mad Dogg kept just on kept running. He was nearly out of earshot.

There was silence, a delicious moment of quiet indecision, until one shouted
“Hey Ed!”
The kid stopped dead in his tracks and turned round. All the eleven year old machismo faded from him, his eyes widened inquisitively.
“Yeah?”
Ethan bit his lip and hid his smile as he walked past. It was then that the little yellow fob of the key popped into his mind again.

‘The things I see’ he thought as he turned into the hospital entrance, ‘and I forget all the time’ the thought reminded him that he had for some time wanted to buy himself a pocket notebook.