The Narwhal

I should also say that the book is now directly available through Amazon. You seven, who have come so far with me, and invested so much in me, please now invest £3.08 the bizarre and arbitrary price-tag that Amazon have saddled the book with. Many thanks.

Here is a book I have published through Jottify

Why not buy it for a loved one or a friend or a crush or a hated enemy? There's something to love or hate on every page!


The Narwhal and other stories.
By guysmiley
Price: £2.99

This portmanteau of stories deals with the unknown, the howling chaos that we insulate ourselves against with our mortgages, our satellite-television packages and our celebrity cellulite obsessions. John Patrick Higgins’ occultism is never hidden. His monsters are on the street where you live: doctors, business men and work colleagues; grey-faced invisibles and quotidian killers. These are paranoid tales where the ultimate fear is that of being found out, of being taken to task, of not getting away with it. There are no soft landings for his protagonists; the best that they can hope for is a stay of execution, a phone-call from the governor that never comes.

In “temp” the titular office worker discovers exactly how far his new company will go to stay ahead of the pack.

“The Narwhal” presents us with a city boy who pays a heavy price for both his vanity and his giant, robotic penis.

In “Something old, something blue” hapless club comedian, Jimmy Gemini finds that an accidental death propels him to the top of his profession.

“The Rum Barbers” sees a library book on sympathetic magic used in a turf war between two South London hairdressers.

All of these stories find people attempting to use a power that they don’t understand and suffering for that ignorance.

In “Ding, Dong, Dell” an interior designer discovers the bones of a child under the floor of a stately home that she is refurbishing.

And “A Cup of Cold Sick” remains a disturbingly literal title.

There is a morbid uncertainty at play, a notion that nothing is yours and that everything can be taken away from you at a moment’s notice. And you won’t know why because you don’t know the rules.

John Patrick Higgins makes every day feel like your first day at big school. He throws you in the swimming pool with your shoes on. Here’s to that sinking feeling.

- Guy Smiley, North Hampshire.

This ebook is compatible with almost all ereader devices including the Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle and Sony Ereader

The Rain of Terror

My novel, and I use the term advisedly, "The Rain of Terror" has inspired the creative efforts of two of my friends, the painter Christopher Kasch and the, for want of a better word, designer (though a better title would probably be "Last Bastion of Good Taste") Douglas Steel. Here they have mocked up a fabulous cover for the book, a tale of derring-do's and don't in a pre-swinging sixties, where the Greek God of the Forge is a detective, for some reason.

I mean just look at! I'd buy it! I'd buy it just to have it as an object. Even with the pages uncut it would be a handsome, life enhancing addition to any home. Oh publishers you poor, short-sighted fools...

Temp.

Horror short story written for the reason that I like horror short stories (the Pan and Fontana collections from the seventies, M.R. James, Robert Aickman et al.) and I assume I can write them. Not sure that this proves anything conclusively but I quite like this now...



He rubbed the toe of his shoe on the back of his trouser leg as he pressed the button. A stolid security guard, yellow-eyed and wheezing, waddled over to the door, his tight, white shirt clinging to his chest and pinching tightly beneath his arm-pits. The guard swiped a card, a red light winked, and Paul pushed into the fore-court of Walker-Reynolds.

The guard returned to his desk, adjusting himself as he sat down behind the bank of monitors. He glared at he screens like a sullen child in front of the television.

Paul was uncomfortably neat in his new shoes and stiff tie: he clip-clopped on virgin heels across the floor of the lobby. Behind the reception desk a fat woman in a head-set ignored him. Her skin was flushed with the effort of talking and her conversation rippled through the marbled suet of her neck as she hissed into the phone. Paul waited; elbows splayed on the desk-top, his leg shaking in nervous anticipation; he did not want to not be late on his first day on the job.

She caught his eye and tapped a purple nail on a large ledger in front of him. He looked at the other signatures: “Dave Balham…Walker Reynolds…8:48” “Shireen Wenders…Walker Reynolds…8:51”. Each was followed by a signature and an odd little character, almost a smiley-face; though a gaunt and toothy one.

The receptionist tapped on the book again, the impact shuddering up her arm and causing her bangles to shiver.

Paul signed the register and carefully traced the smiley faced character after his name. The receptionist pressed a button and Paul was through a turn-style and into the lift. It was 8:58.


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

“Hello, Paul is it? You should have a badge. Reception should have issued you with a badge.”
“Sorry,” said Paul, “She was on the phone.”
“You are pacifically required to have a badge otherwise you can’t get in and out. She’s made you a bit of a prisoner here. ”
The slim young woman laughed at this, an abrupt laugh that Paul didn’t feel obliged to share. She beckoned him toward a bank of desks: six cubicles divided like an egg-box with an egg missing. The woman indicated that Paul was the missing egg and he sat down.
“Did the agency say anything to you about the work at all?”
“Not really,”
“Well don’t worry. It’s nothing too taxing. You’re all temps on this desk, so matey-boy next to you will get you up to speed. Won’t you…” she scanned the boy’s desk and found a name-badge, “Won’t you, Owen?”
The boy, pale and pinched with a large red nose and acne trailing from the corner of his mouth, nodded weakly. His eyes were large and glassy, the glare of his computer screen lending them a phosphorescent glow.
“Excellent,” said the slim young woman, “Well, that’s it. Any questions don’t be afraid to arks me. That’s if you can find me.” She gave her quick laugh again and walked over to the coffee machine.
Paul turned to his new teacher. The boy’s nose was perched on the cubicle’s partition wall.
“Alright mate, I’m Paul. What are we doing then? The agency didn’t even tell me what Walker-Reynolds do. I thought I’d be photocopying or something.”
Owen said nothing. He continued to stare over the wall. Paul’s too tight tie squeezed like a garrotte and he wedged a finger into his collar.
“Which agency did you come through?” he said, “I’m with Office Head.”
“We’re all with Office Head” said Owen.
After a couple of seconds Paul realised that this was going to be Owen’s only contribution to the conversation and decided on a new tack.
“This is my first job; just for the summer, like. I’m off to Uni. in September.”
Owen giggled at this.
“So what do we do?” said Paul, annoyed, “The girl said you’d tell me what to do.”
“We don’t do nothing,” said Owen.
“What do you mean?”
“We turn our computers on and put our head-sets on but we don’t do nothing.”
“The company pays you to do nothing?”
“I don’t do nothing. And I haven’t done nothing since I come here.” Owen pulled his nose back over the partition and stared into his monitor.
Paul sat, agitated in his tie. He had wanted to make the most of his work experience but more than that he had a healthy terror of authority and he didn’t want to be told off by the slim girl, should she return. He stood up and addressed the rest of the temps; three girls and a boy.
“Excuse me,” he said, “do any of you know what we’re supposed to be doing? Owen here doesn’t seem to have a clue!”
They each ignored him, continuing to stare into their anonymous blue boxes.
“I’m the last,” said Owen flatly, “they wont answer you.”
Paul felt a wave of dry heat prickle over him. He looked around the office. Gangs of people trailed up and down the corridors looking for meeting rooms, clutching lattes and talking animatedly about their weekends. Hairy I.T. guys wandered around, tumble-weed in t-shirts, pointing to banks of computers and mumbling into their mobiles. Slim Polish girls wheeled hostess trolleys laden with sandwiches, mineral water and, excitingly, mints, to and from the lifts. This was the office life he was expecting: the office life that was going to look good on his C.V: the office life that was going to provide him with valuable transferable skills.
Then he looked around at the temps there seemed to be a change in the quality of the light. A pall was cast over this corner of the office; the silence, the lifelessness of these five wasters, the dull hum of their computer fans unbroken by the chattering of fingers on keys. They really were doing nothing.
There was a tap on his shoulder: it was the slim woman, smiling on full-beam. Behind her, at some distance, was the receptionist, Christmas-tree shaped away from her desk and clutching the ledger that he had signed.
“Paul, what are you doing here? You’re in the wrong seat. What are you like? Come and meet Steve. He’s going to be your daddy.”
She lifted Paul by the shoulders and escorted him over to a sunnier part of the room. As he walked he looked back over his shoulder at the temps. Owen’s nose dripped over the partition like melting wax. His eyes were large and shining as he watched Paul being escorted away; nevertheless they seemed utterly unreadable.

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

The next couple of weeks were a corporate dream. Paul was immersed in the every day hustle of bustling office life. He attended meetings, made notes, made coffee; ran errands and, with his aptness and adaptability, began to gather responsibilities to him like pollen on a bee’s fur.
Matey silver-haired men asked him his name, in an “I’m noting this for the future” and “Hmnn. Managerial material” sort of way and Paul went home each evening smiling and each weekend with money in his pocket. Even his shoes had relaxed, tamed and hollowed by his feet; the blisters shrinking to circles of blanched skin, like the imprint of a condom on wallet leather. Life was good and the notion of University seemed increasingly abstract and unlikely. Why should he go to school to learn about business when this was the real deal? He was learning the mechanics of the industry and earning money while he was doing it! He was confident that he would be asked to stay on after the summer with a proper contract and a proper job description and he could start earning some proper money.

He found out what Walker Reynolds actually did. They ran, managed and published opinion polls and were widely regarded as the most accurate pollsters in the business. There’s was an uncanny grasp on the zeitgeist, a bone-deep understanding of the popular unconscious: time and again they chimed with the under-tow of public opinion, though Paul was at a loss to work out how they did it. The Walker-Reynolds eco-system seemed to be a self-contained exercise in perpetual motion: paper shifted from desk to desk, e-mails pinged from in-box to in-box and court-shoed blondes strode up and down the corridors in an eternal quest for free meeting-rooms. But Paul couldn’t really see where the company’s statistics were coming from. The sales team brought in sales, marketing schmoozed big name clients and the chummy silver haired men in their bevelled-glass offices did whatever it was that company directors did. But Paul never saw anybody collating any information at all. It was most perplexing. Perhaps it was out-sourced to India. Any way, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had the bit of business between his teeth and he was not about to let go. It was just…one thing still bothered him: that bank of desks where the temps sat. The other temps. They were still there; fish-eyed, mouth-breathing, gawping into space. And yet … Paul wasn’t absolutely sure that they were the same ones he had seen before. Owen was still there, his bird-like profile just visible over the blue partition wall. He seemed subtly changed, somehow paler, more ghostly; eroded. The rest of temps didn’t ever look up; their phones never rang. They sat there hunch-shouldered and staring into space. Paul wondered briefly why he was different; why he had been plucked for stardom. But he was not much given to idle speculation, except, potentially, on the stock-exchange.

Summer wore on and Paul found lunching companions and, on Friday nights, drinking buddies at The Queens Arms. There he thrilled to raffish male companionship, hearty types with their ties askew, rosy cheeks and artfully puttied hair. They drank bottled beer under a fug of Hugo Boss and called themselves “The Laughing Boys”. They drank till their eyes swam and the corners of their mouths were flecked with foam so they seemed not only full of beer but starting to spill. At the end of an evening they sat, cheeks sticking to table tops, un-tucked shirts hanging limply from their waistbands like pale, wrinkled cocks.

It was a Friday night hat Paul broached the subject of the temps with Steve, his line manager. Steve was a great bloke, a giant red-faced party guy. His eyes were like wet cloves in the gammon of his face and he had been shouting for hours. Paul felt himself lucky to have such a man as, not just a boss, but a mate.
“So what’s the story with them oddballs?” he said.
Steve wobbled his giant head around the room, his eyes struggling to keep up with it.
“Where?”
“No, you muppet,” said Paul, “Them lot at work: the temps.”
There was a sudden change in Steve’s demeanour. His face, flushed from drink, seemed suddenly to drain of colour; the flesh around his eyes a green-grey. His sweaty skin became uncomfortably gluey.
“What?” he said.
“Those weirdoes in the head-sets over by Karen’s office.”
“What do you mean?” said Steve. Other members of staff were looking at Paul as the first pin-pricks of unease started to penetrate his drunken well-being. He looked anxiously from face to face around the table.
“The temps: I mean what’s that all about?” These last words fell out of his mouth, his tongue curling like a dried leaf.
“Who did your orientation?” said Steve.
“My what?” said Paul.
“When you joined the company, after you signed the contract: who did your orientation?”
“I don’t know,” said Paul, desperation edging in his voice, “I don’t think I signed a contract here. I did it with the agency.”
Steve lurched forward grabbing Paul by the arm and tugging his shirt sleeve back from the wrist. As soon as the hairless arm had been exposed it was dropped to the table, while a palpable shiver ran through the crowd.
“What was that? A Chinese burn? Listen, have I said something? Because…”
“I’d better be going,” said Steve, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair. There was a sound of more chairs scraping, pint pots being slammed against table tops and Paul was left alone with the music of Billy Ocean and a twitchy bar-man calling time.

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

On Monday morning Paul was called into an emergency H.R. meeting. Steve and Paul took the lift down to the basement. Paul had no idea what expect. His stomach lurched and his throat tightened. What had he said? He had been expecting something to happen following Friday night’s strangeness, but a H.R. meeting? Was it disciplinary? Could he actually be fired?
“Steve!” he said.
“Don’t worry about it, mate,” said Steve, rather too quickly, “It’s just something about your contract, something they missed when you joined. It’ll only take five minutes.”
“Right,” said Paul, “and it’s got nothing to do with Friday; in the pub?”
“Dunno what you’re talking about, mate. I was arseholed.”
The doors pinged open and Paul was escorted to Meeting Room B. It was a large, blandly functional room containing a table, six chairs and an unlabelled filing cabinet with a dusty aspidistra squatting on it. At the table was a woman whom Paul had never seen before. She was small and thin with close-cropped red hair. Her nostrils were arched and curlicued with crimson veins, as were her hairless eye-lids. She stared at Paul and Steve with liquid blue eyes; no pupil.

“Hi Paul,” she said, squeezing the corners of her mouth into what was not exactly a smile. “First of all, I don’t want you to worry: this is a formal meeting but not a disciplinary one, okay? We just want to get to know you a bit better, okay? My name, for instance, is Jacqueline.”
“Paul,” said Paul.
“Yes, well I do know that much at least,” she said, “though not much more. This is, in effect, the “orientation” session that you should have had when you first joined us. Obviously some sort of oversight there, so I apologise for that.”
Paul began to relax. It was just an H.R. meeting! All weekend anxiety had squatted in the pit of his stomach, stealing further up his body as he lay awake at night. Sunday night’s sleep, when it came, had been fitful. He lay coiled in a non specific dread that pressed on his chest and bound his limbs like swaddling; which papered over his mouth so it crackled when he breathed. Even now in this grey subterranean room and he felt that fibrous patina again; his skin taut, his bones hollow as a bird’s.
“How long have you been with us Paul?” said Jacqueline, breaking eye contact for the first time, to look at her notes. Paul noticed the receptionist’s ledger on the table in front of her.
“About three weeks,” he said.
“You started on seventh of July,” she said, “look; I can show you in fact. Here!”
She spun the ledger around, a colourless nail indicating his signature.
Paul shrugged. “Okay,” he said.
“Do you notice anything about your signature, Paul; anything unusual?”
Paul stared at his hand-writing, the familiar loops and dots. Possibly a little more erratic than usual, but he had been nervous. Had they consulted a graphologist? Jacqueline’s finger, pressing hard on the coarse paper shifted to the left, stopping at the little doodle he had copied from the signatures above. It resembled, he saw now, a rudimentary skull; light-bulb shaped with thick flat teeth beneath the black cavities of the nose and eyes.
“What’s this supposed to be, Paul?” she said, her fluid eyes training upon him again. This was the problem, he thought: a doodle in the margins of the signing-in book?
“Everyone else did one,” he said, “I don’t know. I just thought it was something you did!”
“Just something you did,” repeated Jacqueline, spinning the book away from him and slamming it shut. Paul felt Steve’s hand drop onto his shoulder, heavy as a stone. He turned but Steve stared fixedly ahead: he was looking at the H.R. consultant who was unfastening her cuff and rolling her sleeve up. She showed Paul her fore-arm, palm side up and fish-belly white; fat blue veins streaking the pale flesh. And there, just above the wrist, was a delicate rust-red tattoo of a bulbous skull, identical to the one Paul had scribbled into the ledger.
“I don’t get it,” said Paul. He tried to get up but Steve’s hand kept him in his seat. “What’s going on?” he said.
“Walker-Reynolds is a very old company, Paul: a very old company. In a sense there has always been a Walker-Reynolds, for ours is truly the oldest profession. Wherever there is money or power; a paranoid king or wealthy despot, there were we: an advisor, a worm-tongue, a whisperer. We’ve been predicting the future for countless millennia, Paul, but today’s market demands something more: today it’s more effective to predict the present. The future is too far off, too abstract: by the time you get there everything has changed. It’s a wasted resource, Paul – no one is buying the future now – you can’t give it away! So we’ve changed tack. We’ve transferred our skills. We tell our customers the present. It makes sound commercial sense – the future only happens once, but the present happens again and again!”

She paused and Paul made a sudden break for it, pushing his chair back and catching Steve in the stomach. Steve bent double and Paul lurched for the door but the big man’s hand never left his shoulder and his other arm grabbed Paul by the neck, his heavy thumb pressing under the parabola of the boy’s skull, pushing his forehead forward onto the desk. Paul lashed out with his left arm, his elbow aimed at Steve’s groin. But he was caught by the wrist and his arm pressed flat onto the desk, his skin goose-fat yellow under the pressure. Paul noticed the mark on Steve’s arm, identical to Jacqueline’s. He noticed as well that it was not a tattoo at all; it had been burned into the skin.
“I don’t understand!” said Paul, his cheek pushed flat against the desk, his voice a muffled squeak. A darkening tee-pee of piss worked its way down his thigh; developing against the grey cloth of his slacks like a photograph.
“Of course you don’t understand,” said Jacqueline, her voice lilting, “how could you? You were destined not to understand. You were processed through our agency as perfect modern material: greedy, arrogant, shallow, needy, aspirational and woefully unimaginative. Your role models are defined by what they wear, what they drive, who they fuck and how much of their tawdry existence they are prepared to act out in front of the cameras. For you success is saturation; the grotesque pressing of your own facile image into every field of human endeavour: the perfume, the ghost-written novel, the stilted cameo. The reality T.V. series and the sponsored wedding: you snuffle it up like the little piggy you are and now we can pick it from your brains.”
“The temps” said Paul.
“The temps, exactly. We’ve come a long way in divination from chicken guts and thrown bones; though you might say that we haven’t strayed too far from human sacrifice.”
Steve pulled Paul back into his chair, a burly arm circling his neck, but the fight had left Paul with the urine and he sat back, his eyes half closed, white foam bubbling on his lips.
“Our methods have changed,” said Jacqueline, “but the effect is much the same. We strip the brain of every impulse, every desire, anything that excites your little lizardy brains, that gets your pupils expanding. It gives us a perfect photograph of a moment; a cultural snapshot, if you like. Of course it sears the brain tissue like flash-fried steak and the subjects become unusable after a couple of weeks. The attrition rates are really quite high – but that’s business: the mediocre go to the wall. We may be an old company, Paul, but we are progressive – we do recycle for instance.”
“Recycle?” said Paul, moments before passing out.
Jacqueline smiled.
“Well if you haven’t the stomach for it I wouldn’t go to the canteen anytime soon. Actually Paul I’m being slightly disingenuous – you’ll be heading there very soon.”

Desire Path II

Desire Path




It took a while for folks round here to notice him. Drifters often passed this way, looking for a hand-out or a bite to eat. You never see them again. But our boy…Every month he comes, along a pathway beaten by his feet alone. It’s been the same these past fifteen years, they say. He is patched together, head down and silent. There is some thing that is burning inside of him; that binds him to this lonely road.

He is big, bigger still in his Frankenstein coat. He jogs like a tortoise, a ridged carapace over his back; almost round. His wide shoulders swing; short legs bending under the weight of the corrugated leather. His face is a half moon, the skin pale under his wide-brimmed hat, his chin eaten away by a beard. His eyes bulge, inexpressive as eggs. You see them coming first: whites that are perfectly white, the dark iris and black pupil like bites taken from their milky flesh.

The wind rises, whips through the trees. The flowering dog-wood, white as a new bride, hooped hem worn high over the knee, the shyer big-tooths; spreading their leaves like hands over a naked body, the quaking aspens, arms outstretched, tinselled for winter and shivering like blue-skinned dancers. Here he comes, through the pignut and shagbark hickories, through the American hornbeams, Old Leathery, bouncing, flat and awkward as a punctured football along his mystery trail.

In every town he has his favourites: the McCrachans in Branchville, Oviatts in Mount Kisco; Pettibones in Trumbull. In Peekskill he returns to the Muzzys. Floyd Muzzy in the drugstore always has a piece to eat for Leathery, though Floyd himself is over sixty and must be the older man. There is something ancient about the Leatherman, something elemental in his stillness and silence. He’s a sailing stone; scoring tracks through the parched earth, pushed by the wind over the flat desert basin.

I spoke to him once.

He smells of the earth and clay and pine; his coat is mud smeared and curls away from the crude stitches that run down it. Rain and snow have turned up the torn seams so that his back has a spine of ragged horns. As he walks, head low like a buffalo, he watches the path ahead of him, and the circles cut into the soft earth by his stick. He carries a patch-work bag over one shoulder. It looks empty, bending as he moves, flapping in the breeze that ripples over the Hudson, as though it has nothing to anchor it. But the big square-cut pocket on his shell of a coat, that’s different; it bulges. There’s something heavy in there.

“I don’t ask him,” said Floyd Muzzy, palms flat on the counter. I was in my second year at a miserable military academy and had the idea to spend as little time as possible on the school’s grounds. The drugstore was a welcome distraction from being “toughened up” for my parent’s sake. My school uniform was stiff and disinclined to bend but I was a determined sloucher and had spread over the counter as if spilled. I quizzed Muzzy on Old Leathery; he had, after all, spoken to him, fed him and on a few occasions even shared a beer with him. He was the nearest thing to an expert on the subject that I knew of and I asked him what he knew about the man’s past.

“You know Albert Beebe, over in Naugatuck?”

I didn’t.

“Well you’ve no need to,” said Muzzy, “Has a store over there and it’s on the Leatherman’s route. Leathery used to drop by; sometimes he’d have money and that’s a mystery in itself. Mostly he didn’t. Albert would always give him something either way. One time, it was just before Christmas and bitter cold, Albert gives him a gill of brandy and has a glass himself to be neighbourly. They set to jawing, and, as the brandy’s beginning to loosen him up, Albert straight up asks the man; why are you walking that big old circle year after year, rain, snow or shine? Without a word Leathery gets up, walks out of the store and never comes back.”

I sucked noisily on my milkshake, the paper straw melting between my lips.

“But you’ve spoken to him, Mr. Muzzy,” I said, “whatever did you talk about?”

“He’s a gentle soul,” said Muzzy, “has a couple of gardens that he tends on his way round, so we talked about that sometimes. In the winter-time he stays in the caves over by Watertown; lights a fire and heats the stones when the weather gets bad. That’s about it. He’s none too talkative anyways, on account of him not speaking too much English and me not speaking too much French.”

This was news. “He’s French?”

“Canadian, most likely,” said Muzzy, “but could be French, could be. That would be one of the things that I wouldn’t ask about,”

I left the drugstore reeling. This was heady and exciting news: Old Leathery was a foreigner! This would explain his outlandish behaviour, his inscrutable actions. If my French were better I felt I could crack the mystery of the Leatherman and his long, seeming pointless journey. I determined to meet him, to speak to him. Back at the school I found a French phrasebook.


A full moon sat low and white in the sky that night, just out of reach of the blackened tips of the trees. I sat on the edge of my bunk looking out through the half shuttered windows. The fluttering breathing of the sleeping boys synchronised with the thin black clouds that striped the moon like peeling paint. Old Leathery was due in Peekskill tomorrow and I intended to talk to him.

He came out of the shivering trees, walking with his usual purpose. In the distance his bobbing head, short legs and patchwork leather coat lent him the likeness of some monstrous bipedal cow. I leaned against a gate in my stiff grey uniform, twin military tram-lines running to my waist. I was as neat and smooth as he was shaggy and unkempt. Never-the-less he tipped his cap at me as he moved past. I froze. I watched him walk by me; the awkward gait, his great corrugated coat hanging down one side, weighted.

“Monsieur,” I shouted. He kept on walking, an arm rising up and waving over his shoulder.

“Monsieur,” I shouted again, “Qu’est que tu…vous ave…dans…Monsieur, please; what do you have in your pocket?”

He stopped and turned, slowly and deliberately. I had the impression that he had not previously turned back on his journey. He made his way down the pathway with an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me. I backed away, unnerved by his scent, like mushrooms, his giant thatched head under the leather cap; those too white eyes; black spots on a hen’s eggs.

“Ma poche?” he said, “Dans ma poche?”

He stood in front of me and I could see the cracks and veins running over that coat, the discoloured patches, the mould and rot. The smell of him was overwhelming and the babyish softness of his face was perverse beaming out of that battered upholstery. His white eyes were smiling. He pulled from his the pocket a thick and rusted iron “U” and held it out for my inspection. It looked like an old horse-shoe but as I studied it closely I could see no sign of human manufacture; there were no sharp edges, no maker’s mark. At the two prongs the metal seemed even more impacted and misshapen and was tinged with a dry earthy red. He pushed the object still closer to my face.

“L’aimant de l’amour,” he said, “pour la chance!”

I looked up helplessly. “I don’t understand,”

He wrapped his fingers around the lump of metal and pushed it back into his pocket, and, turning gracefully on the ball of one elephant’s foot, he carried on down the path, his head low and invisible behind his collars.

“Je suis l’aimant d’amour,” he shouted, “C’est pour ca que chacun m’aime!”

He turned where the river naturally bent and ducked behind a shaggy hill, long wild grass devouring him like thin green flames. That was the only time I saw him.

My parents removed me from the school and took me back to Pennsylvania. They never attempted to instil manly virtues in me again and I later attained an acceptable degree of manliness under my own steam. Old Leathery carried on his journey for another fifteen years or so until they found his body in a cave up by Saw Mills on a beautiful spring day. The Connecticut Humane Society had previously had him arrested and admitted to hospital; he was sick from the constant chewing of tobacco, they said. He ran away, of course, back to the path: back to his life. A search party was formed on the first day that he missed his schedule. He was always so punctual and always so well loved.

Can't take Criticism...

My brother reads my short story "Desire Path" to my mother. She refers to the style as "flowery" and states that I write like an "Old Master" (a line she's cribbed from a school report some thirty years ago and which she has deployed at regular intervals ever since).

She moves on to more specific criticisms: she objects to a line comparing tree-blossom to a wedding dress not because it is trite and rather ordinary but because "not all brides wear white nowadays". She's right, of course. A reference to the tram-line brocade on military uniform trousers vexes her because I don't specify the direction the stripes go in. On having read it to the end she merely asks "Is that it?".

I'm going to try and get her to critique everything I write. (I was going to write "everything I do" but she does that already). She has a unique insight and extraordinary grasp of what I'm not trying to do. Her specific interests are always arresting and alarming and unique to her. She claims that Dickens is her favourite writer but will admit to skimming over all the "descriptions"

My brother, in his cups, tells me that "Desire Path" isn't funny. I say it isn't mean't to be funny. He says "isn't all of your stuff was supposed to be funny?" Touche.

I've spent a long time listening to people telling me that I can't take criticism. In fact the opposite is true: I am a craven masochist - I'm desperate for people to point out the many flaws in my work. I love it. Mnnn. You hate it? Delicious! Can I get some coffee with this?

There are two reasons why. Firstly it means that somebody has actually read it. I'm still at the stage where I can't give away the prose; I'm hustling verse on street corners like pencils in a tin cup. I'd pretend to be a war veteran or hold up a sign saying "Will work for appraisal" if I thought it would do any good. When someone has read my work it is a big deal.

Secondly, I do this stuff to the best of my ability before I show it to anybody but, and it's a Kardashian of a but, eventually you will go word-blind. Text looks diffeent in a notebook, on a computer-screen and printed onto paper (and probably carved into a basalt column): the simple mechanism of printing it onto paper can reveal a myriad of mistakes that hours spent blinking at a monitor will never reveal. So how much better would it be if another pair of eyes scan it; another brain engages with it? Brilliant.

But...this is where I get my rep for being unable to take criticism. I didn't realise for a very long time that there was a social contract meaning that if someone critiques your work you smile politely, take "onboard" what they are saying and buy them a glass of wine/blueberry muffin, depending on circumstances. I always assumed it was a debate or an exchange of views. If there was something I disagreed with I thought it was honourable to defend my work. After all, I wouldn't have wasted their time presenting them with something that I didn't think was very good, now would I?

I realise now that I was very wrong. These days I will meekly accept any barely realised, half-chewed philosophical nugget you choose to spit in my direction. I will scrape it from the wall behind me and swallow it whole.

Because I need you! Help me!

Desire Path

This is my entry for the Guardian short-story competition. The theme is "a journey". It has to be under two thousand words and it is well under that amount though originally it was much longer. Writing is whittling. I quite like it and it is one of the first things I've written without attempting to be funny.


Desire Path


It took a while for folks round here to notice him. Drifters often passed this way looking for a hand-out or a bite to eat. You never see them again. But our boy…Every month he comes, along a pathway beaten by his feet alone. It’s been the same these past fifteen years, they say. He is patched together, head down and silent. There is some thing that is burning inside of him; that binds him to this lonely road.

He is big, bigger still in his Frankenstein coat. He jogs like a tortoise, a ridged carapace over his back; almost round. His wide shoulders swing; his short legs bend under the weight of the corrugated leather. His face is a half moon, the skin pale under his wide-brimmed hat, his chin eaten away by a dark beard. His eyes bulge, inexpressive as eggs. You see them coming first: whites that are perfectly white, the dark iris and black pupil like bites taken from their milky flesh.

The wind rises, whips through the trees. The flowering dog-wood, white as a new bride; hooped hem worn high over the knee, the shyer big-tooth aspens; spreading their leaves like hands over a naked body; the quaking aspens, arms outstretched, tinselled for winter, shivering like blue-skinned dancers. Here he comes, through the pignut and shagbark hickories, through the American hornbeams, Old Leathery, bouncing, as flat and awkward as a punctured football along his mystery trail.

In every town he has his favourites: the McCrachans in Branchville, Oviatts in Mount Kisco; Pettibones in Trumbull. In Peekskill he returns to the Muzzys; Floyd Muzzy in the drugstore always has a piece to eat for Old Leathery, though Floyd himself is over sixty and must be the older man. There is something ancient about the Leatherman, something elemental in his stillness and silence. He’s like a Death Valley sailing stone; scoring tracks through the parched earth, pushed by the wind over the flat desert basin. Though what compels Leathery on his journey along the banks of the Hudson he alone knows.

I spoke to him once.

He smells of the earth and clay and pine; his coat is mud smeared and curls away from the crude stitches that run down it. Rain and snow have turned up the torn seams so his back has a spine of ragged horns. As he walks, head low like a buffalo, he watches the path ahead of him and watches the circles cut into the soft earth by his stick. He carries a large patch-work bag over one shoulder but it looks empty, it bends as he moves, flapping in the breeze that ripples the water, as though it had nothing to anchor it. But his pocket, the big square-cut pocket on his shell of a coat, that’s different; it bulges. There’s something heavy in there.


“I don’t ask him,” said Floyd Muzzy, over the counter. I was in my second year at a miserable military academy and had the idea to spend as little time as possible on the school’s grounds. The drugstore was a welcome distraction from being “toughened up” for my parent’s sake. My uniform was stiff and disinclined to bend but I was a determined sloucher and had spread over the counter as if spilled. I quizzed Muzzy on Old Leathery; he had, after all, spoken to him, fed him and on a few occasions even shared a beer with him. He was the nearest thing to an expert on the subject that I knew of and I asked him what he knew about the man’s past.

“You know Albert Beebe, over in Naugatuck?”

I didn’t.

“Well you’ve no need to,” said Muzzy, “Has a store over there and it’s on the Leatherman’s route. Leathery used to drop by; sometimes he’d have money, and that’s a mystery in itself, but mostly he didn’t. Albert would always give him something either way. One time, it was just before Christmas and bitter cold, Albert gives him a gill of brandy and has a glass himself, to be neighbourly. They set to jawing, and, as the brandy’s beginning to loosen him up, Albert straight up asks the man; why are you walking that big old circle year after year, rain or shine? Without a word Leathery gets up, walks out of the store and never comes back.”

I sucked noisily on my milkshake, the paper straw melting between my lips.

“But you’ve spoken to him, Mr. Muzzy,” I said, “whatever did you talk about?”

“He’s a gentle soul,” said Muzzy, “has a couple of gardens that he tends on his way round so we talked about that sometimes. In the winter-time he stays in the caves over by Watertown; heats the stones and drinks brandy when the weather gets bad. That’s about it. He’s none too talkative anyways, on account of him not speaking too much English and me not speaking too much French.”

This was news. “He’s French?”

“Canadian, most likely,” said Muzzy, “but could be French, could be. That would be one of the things that I wouldn’t ask about,”

I left the drugstore reeling. This was heady and exciting news: Old Leathery was a foreigner! This would explain his outlandish behaviour, his inscrutable actions. If my French were better I felt I could crack the mystery of the Leatherman and his long, seeming pointless journey. I determined to meet him, to speak to him. Back at the school I found a French phrasebook.


A full moon sat low and white in the sky that night, just out of reach of the blackened tips of the trees. I sat on the edge of my bunk looking out through the half shuttered windows. The fluttering breathing of the sleeping boys synchronised with the thin black clouds that striped the moon like peeling paint. Old Leathery was due in Peekskill tomorrow and I intended to talk to him.

He came out of the shivering trees, walking with his usual purpose. In the distance his bobbing head, short legs and patchwork leather coat lent him the likeness of some monstrous bipedal cow. I leaned against a gate in my stiff grey uniform, twin military tram-lines running to my waist. I was as neat and smooth as he was shaggy and unkempt. Never-the-less he tipped his cap at me as he moved past. I froze. I watched him walk by me; the awkward gait, his great corrugated coat hanging down one side, weighted.

“Monsieur,” I shouted. He kept on walking, an arm rising up and waving over his shoulder.

“Monsieur,” I shouted again, “Qu’est que tu…vous ave…dans…Monsieur, please; what do you have in your pocket?”

He stopped and turned, slowly and deliberately. I had the impression that he had not previously turned back on his journey. He made his way down the pathway with an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me. I backed away, unnerved by his scent, like mushrooms, his giant thatched head under the leather cap; those too white eyes; black specks on a hen’s eggs.

“Ma poche?” he said, “Dans ma poche?”

He stood in front of me and I could see the cracks and veins running over that coat, the discoloured patches, the mould and rot. One shoulder was frayed where the bag-strap had gouged a narrow channel through the leather and there was heavily latticed stitching on the pocket into which he now thrust his fat brown hand. The smell of him was overwhelming and the babyish softness of his face was perverse beaming out of that battered upholstery. His white eyes were smiling. He pulled from his the pocket a thick and rusted iron “U” and held it out for my inspection. It looked like an old horse-shoe but as I studied it closely I could see no sign of human manufacture; there were no sharp edges, no maker’s mark. At the two prongs the metal seemed even more impacted and misshapen and was tinged with a dry earthy red. He pushed the object still closer to my face.

“L’aiment de l’amour,” he said, “pour la chance!”

I looked up helplessly. “I don’t understand,” I said.

He wrapped his fingers around the lump of metal and pushed it back into his pocket, and, turning with surprising grace on the ball of one elephant’s foot, he carried on down the path, his head low and invisible behind his collars.

“Je suis l’aiment d’amour,” he shouted, “C’est pour ca que chacun m’aime!”

He turned where the river naturally bent and ducked behind a shaggy hill, long wild grass devouring him like thin green flames. And that was the only time I saw him.

My parents removed me from the school and took me back to Pennsylvania. They never attempted to instil manly virtues in me again and I later attained an acceptable degree of manliness under my own steam. Old Leathery carried on his journey for another fifteen years or so until they found his body in a cave up by Saw Mills on a beautiful spring day. The Connecticut Humane Society had previously had him arrested and admitted to hospital; he was sick from the constant chewing of tobacco, they said. He ran away, of course, back to the path: back to his life. A search party was formed on the first day that he missed his schedule. He was always so punctual and always so well loved.