streetlamps. It looked very appealing indeed. In fact at
that second Ricky was seized with the overpowering notion
that all his bodily cravings could be satisfied by the
quenching juice and zesty pulp of that ample citrus fruit
sitting in his palm, so without hesitation he plunged his
thumbnail into the pithy skin and squeezed its entire
contents down his throat. It was then that he heard
footsteps. He slipped the mashed-up orange into his jacket
pocket and looked ahead. A small girl in bare feet came
running up to him. She was wearing a torn, grey pinafore
dress and a dirty white blouse. She couldn’t have been
more than eight or nine, and was clearly distressed. “Sir,
have you seen an orange heading this way?” “No,” lied
Ricky, licking the tangy residue from his lips. Her
shoulders dropped. She said, “They say my father is an
illegal immigrant and tomorrow they will deport him to
Albania. I went to Armley Prison tonight for one last hug
but they turned me away. I stood outside the prison walls
and shouted his name. Through the bars of his cell he blew
me a final kiss and threw me an orange. But I stumbled on
the sloping streets of this steep city and my orange has
disappeared in the night.” Obviously she had a heavy
Albanian accent, almost unintelligible in fact, and for the
sake of comprehension her remarks are paraphrased here.
She fell to her knees and sobbed. “What colour was it?”
Ricky asked. At school, humour would often mitigate his
wrongdoings. “I wanted to eat every morsel of that orange,
even the skin. Its juice was my father’s blood and the flesh
was his spirit,” said the girl. “Why don’t I help you search
for it?” Ricky offered. The girl looked up at Ricky with a
face like a silver coin at the bottom of a deep well caught
by the momentary glimmer of a footman’s lantern. “No
one can replace my father,” she said, “but maybe one day
someone will find it in their heart to care for me. A kind
and honourable man. Someone like yourself.” A perfectly
spherical tear trembled on her eyelash, and there was
nothing Ricky could do to stop his hand from wiping that
tear away, as if all humanity were pulling on a puppet
string connected to his wrist. As his sticky hand neared her
face, her nostrils flared at the scent of the orange. Then her
eyes widened as she saw the fleshy strands of fruit clinging
to his fingers and thumb. She said, “Sir, was that my
orange?” Ricky knew there was a great deal riding on his
answer. It was like chaos theory: the wrong word here and
the tremor would be felt all across Europe. Quick as a flash
he produced the mangled fruit from his pocket. “This?” he
said. “Do you mean this? Oh, no, no, no. In England we
call these apples. This is an apple. Try saying it after me.
Apple. Apple.”
The Knack
Boris was sitting in a field of bullocks above the
house where he’d lived as a boy, trying to be a
writer. There were many wild flowers waiting
patiently to be described. But every time his pen
made contact with the paper his hand skidded and
jumped. Boris had to wonder about the spasms;
were they the onset of epilepsy or some terrible
motor-function illness? Or variant CJD perhaps—
he’d certainly eaten a lot of dubious meat dishes in
his younger years, including a cow’s brain and also
a cow’s heart, though not at the same meal.
However, this sudden loss of muscle control wasn’t
in any way unpleasant, in fact it felt a bit trippy, and
after a time he gave up fighting it and let the pen
wander at will. And although arbitrary, the peaks
and troughs it produced had a confidence about
them, something you couldn’t argue with, like a
cross-section of the Alps or a graph of Romany
populations over the centuries. Eventually Boris
found himself quite detached from his notepad,
gazing down at the small end-terrace, at the frosted
window of the bathroom where his handsome father
had handed him his first disposable razor. “The
knack,” said his father, “is to …” But his advice on
shaving was drowned out by the siren which blared
from the roof of the village fire station, and the old
man bolted from the house, racing along the road on
his bicycle, jumping from bike to fire engine like a
bareback rider switching horses at the circus,
heading for the mushroom of black smoke
mushrooming over a distant town. And there he
entered the Inferno. Boris put his hand to his throat.
The flowers were still waiting. Then James Tate, a
poet much admired in America, went by in an
autogyro, flicking Boris the V-sign. North America,
I should say, though for all I know he might be the
toast of Tierra del Fuego, and a household name in
Bogotá.
The Practical Way to Heaven
The opening of the new exhibition space at the Sculpture
Farm had been a wonderful success. “Would all those
visitors returning to London on the 3:18 from Wakefield
Westgate please make their way to the main entrance from
where the shuttle bus is about to depart,” announced a
nasaly Maggie over the PA system. She’d been having
trouble with her adenoids. The London people put down
their wine glasses and plates and began to move through
the concourse. “Great show, Jack,” said Preminger,
helping himself to a final goat’s cheese tartlet and a
skewered Thai prawn. “And not a pie in sight!” “Thanks
for coming,” said Jack. “Put that somewhere for me, will
you?” said Preminger, passing Jack his redundant cocktail
stick before shaking hands and marching off towards the
coach. A proud and happy man, Jack asked his staff, all
eight of them, to assemble in the cafeteria, and he thanked
them for their effort. “Have all the Londoners gone?” he
asked Maggie. “Yes,” she said through her nose, peering
out of the window as the back wheels of the bus rattled
over the cattle grid. “Very good. So here’s your reward,”
said Jack. He clapped his hands, and in through the double
doors of the kitchen came Bernard driving a forklift truck,
and on it, the most enormous pie. A wild, ecstatic cheer
reverberated among the tables and chairs. “Fill your
wellies!” cried Jack. Tina from the gift shop could not
restrain herself; she ripped off a section of the crust,
dunked her arm in as far as her elbow, and smeared her
face with rich brown gravy. Seth the gardener wasn’t far
behind, gnashing frenziedly at the crimped edging,
followed by Millicent from publicity who hooked out a
juicy piece of steak, went down on all fours and gorged on
it like a starving dingo. Soon everyone was devouring the
pie. And like all the great pies of history, the more they
ate, the bigger it became. Jack threw his jacket int
o the
corner of the room and whipped off his shirt and trousers.
He was wearing blue swimming trunks. Standing on the
rim of the metal dish he lowered himself through the light
pastry topping. Maggie followed suit in her bra and pants,
until all the staff of the Sculpture Farm were rolling or
wading or lolling or lazing or helping themselves in the
great slow pool of the pie. Now the forklift doubled as a
diving board as Bernard bellyflopped from one of its
prongs into the warm mush. It was only after retrieving a
baby carrot from between his toes that Jack looked up and
saw Preminger, who’d forgotten his wallet. “You people,”
he seethed. His face looked like the smell of a broken
sewer in high summer. Jack stood up. “I can explain
everything,” he said. A chunk of braised celery slithered
over his sternum. Preminger spluttered, “You told me the
pie thing was over. Finished. You said it was safe in the
north, Jack Singleton. But look at you. Call yourself a
Sculpture Farmer? You couldn’t clean out a hamster cage.”
“Forgive us,” said Jack. “We’re pie people. Our mothers
and fathers were pie people, and their mothers and fathers
before them. Pies are in our blood.” “Don’t tell it to me.
Tell it to them,” said Preminger, pointing to the window.
On the other side of the glass stood the idling coach. Like a
row of gargoyles, the faces of critics, sponsors, trustees,
rich benefactors and famous names from the world of
animal art looked out disgusted and appalled. Preminger
swivelled on his heel and exited. The bus revved and
departed.
Leaving gravy footprints behind him, Jack wandered out of
the building and into the landscape beyond. And the
crocodile of staff followed him, past the iron pigs, up to the
granite bull on the hill, then along by the pit pony carved in
coal and the shimmering flock of stainless-steel geese in the
far meadow. Finally they found themselves in a small
temple in the woods, with tea lights on the stone steps, the
flames of which looked like the sails from a flotilla of tiny
yachts in a distant bay. Torches to each corner of the
building burned with an imperial pride. In front of Jack,
soaked in pie juice, stood his loyal staff: Jethro with his
three fingers; Maggie with her shopping problem; Tina
who’d fallen in a quarry; Conrad who’d done time. Jack
said, “In the horse I see the plough, in the bull I see the
wheel, in the goat I see the scythe, in the pig I see the stove.
Bernard,” he shouted into the shadowy woods behind them,
“bring out the custard.”
To the Bridge
The same bridge, in fact, where it had occurred to
him that the so-called Manic Street Preachers, for all
their hyperventilation and sulphuric aftershave,
were neither frenzied, credible or remotely
evangelical, just as the so-called Red Hot Chili
Peppers, for all their encouraging ingredients, were
actually no warmer than a baby’s bathwater and not
in the least bit diablo, whereas the Teardrop
Explodes, either by blind accident or through
careful purpose had kept every promise ever made.
Below him, the soupy canal acknowledged that final
thought with an anointing ripple then slouched
unknowingly yet profusely onwards.
Beyond Huddersfield
We drove a couple of hundred miles north. To sip beer in
a log cabin. To taste the air from the mountains and feel
the DNA of our ancestors tingle in our marrow. We
hooked compliant fish from the lake, grilled them over a
log fire and ate with our hands as the sun melted into the
west. And on leaving, we left the place just as we’d found
it: cleaned out the stove, swept the veranda, made a
fingertip search of the meadow for the tiniest slivers of
silver foil and suchlike, and folded the cold ashes into the
earth. On the way south we pulled in at a roadside
recycling site to offload the rubbish. The woman on the
gate with the gun and the clipboard waved us over and said,
“Plastics in one, cans in two, cardboard and paper in three,
and there’s a bear in four, so mind how you go.” True
enough, in the last skip, a black bear was squatting in a pile
of junk. He was a sizeable creature and no mistake, could
have creamed my head clean off with one swipe of those
claws had the notion occurred. But he just sat there, on his
throne of trash, doing nothing, staring his five mile stare.
In the days that followed I thought a lot about that bear.
With every recollection he became more wretched and
undignified in my mind, and I couldn’t suppress the
escalation of inglorious imagery. First he was begging with
a paper cup. The next time I thought about him he was
wearing a nylon housecoat. Then a pair of Ugg boots, and
the tortilla wrap between his paws was a soiled nappy.
Then he was flipping burgers with a floral lampshade on
his head and a whitewall tyre around his neck, and the next
weekend, either for his sake or mine, nothing could stop me
jumping in the car after work and racing north to the tip. It
was two in the morning when I drew up. The gate was
dumping bays and shone a torch into the void. There he
was, asleep in the skip, snoring like a sawmill. But
swinging the car around to drive home the headlights made
one final sweep of the scene, and I saw him again, on his
hind legs now, the grapefruit in his mouth like a luminous
gumshield, pizza toppings and chicken bones hanging from
his matted coat, a red bandana knotted tightly around his
skinny thigh, leaning to his work, busy at his groin, the
gleaming needle digging for the sunken vein.
Cheeses of Nazareth
I fear for the long-term commercial viability of the new
Christian cheese shop in our neighbourhood. Poor old
Nathan, he’s sunk every penny of his payout from the
Criminal Injuries Compensation Board into that place,
but to me the enterprise seems doomed. Last Friday he
had to make a trip across town to the opticians. “Will you
mind the shop for me—I’ll pay you, of course?” he said.
“Nathan, it will be an honour to wear the smart blue
smock of the cheesemonger and to spend time amongst
such noble foodstuffs,” I replied. But in eight hours only
three people crossed the threshold of his emporium: some
knackered old dosser asking for a glass of water, a young
villain in bare feet looking for the needle exchange, and a
pregnant woman suddenly overwhelmed by a craving for
Kraft Cheese Slices, a product Nathan refuses to stock.
“Nathan, Nathan, Nathan, wouldn’t this business have
been better suited to one of the more fashionable
districts? Is it too late to relocate?” He blinked at me
through his new specs. “No, my work is here,” he said.
“Hope must put down it
s anchor even in troubled waters.
Today a cheese shop, tomorrow a wine bar or
delicatessen, next week a community centre or a
playground for the little ones, until ye church be builded.”
Then he went outside with a bucket of soapy water to
attack the graffiti scrawled across his front door.
I almost love Nathan for his dedication to the cause, but
the hour of my betrayal draws ever nearer. How did it
come to this, unemployed and lactose intolerant,
surrounded by expensive and rude-smelling dairy
products in a fleapit of a council flat during the hottest
summer on record? Pretty soon I’ll have to turn my back
on Nathan, slip away like the last visitor in the lamplit
oncology ward withdrawing his hand from the weightless
grip of his mumbling mother-in-law. From up here on the
third floor I can see Nathan right now in his ironed apron
and starched hat. Nathan, oh Nathan, silent and alone,
presiding over the faceless faces of Camembert and Brie,
the millstones of Buterkäse and Zanetti Grana Padano,
the dried teardrop of San Simon, the uninhabited planets
of Gouda and Chaumes, and the cowpat of Cornish Yarg,
mummified in its drab nettle-leaf skin.
Show and Tell
Marlon said, “That was the school on the phone. They
want me to go in and talk to Jennifer’s class.” “You?
Why you? You don’t know shit about shit,” said his
significant other. “All the other dads have done it. They
say it’s my turn.” “Well, you’d better not make a pig’s
arse of it, for your precious little Jenny’s sake. But don’t
ask me, I’m only the wicked stepmother,” she said. Then
she went back to her online taxidermy lesson.
For the next week or so Marlon was in a muck sweat,
fretting about the talk he’d agreed to give. Finally he
decided a quick show-and-tell session should do the trick.
Something to focus their attention—concentrate their
minds. The morning duly arrived, and although Marlon
had visited the school on several occasions, today the
route seemed unfamiliar and through a part of town far
rougher than he remembered. After bottoming the car