that sounds interesting, how long are the pieces?
28-07-2011, 04:19 PM
5
Re: Creative Writing
Here, There, NowhereDon’t get me wrong – I like to visit other places. I wouldn’t like you to think the only pleasure I get nowadays is lying around here listening to the tiny sounds that creep and rustle round my skull. No, when it feels right inside my head, I start one of my meanderings. House calls, if you will. Whimsical flittings. Call me nosey, but I’ve always had a maudlin fascination about other folks’ lives, what they get up to behind their oh-so-smart doors. The clandestine huddles down dark alleys, the furtive exchanges of drugs, grubby cash, kisses, guns. In short, life as it is lived on an inner city estate such as this.
I have a particular liking for the corner of the park. You know, that triangle of churned up grass and weeds surrounded on two sides by rusty railings and on the other by what the council laughingly called a lake. It probably was a lake once, before the mutilated trolleys and condoms and other detritus clogged up the fountain and the ducks gave up and flew elsewhere. Such a shame. I mean, what’s the matter with people today? Nevertheless, there’s a certain beauty about that small portion of the park. I think it’s the privacy, and the fact that even the dealers and gropers don’t frequent it, so I have it to myself when the fancy takes me. I sometimes spend hours just waiting by the scummy black oily water. I don’t know what I’m waiting for if I’m honest, but something about the dank, mysterious smell coming off the surface holds me there.
Days do drag though, here on the estate. I mean, what is there to do? All the shops in the precinct are boarded up and defaced with ungrammatical and patently impossible gynacological contortions. We had a cinema many years ago, and well attended too – that went the way of the shops and seems now to be the meeting place of God knows what scum, who lie around on the mossy steps shooting up or whatever they call it. Quite disgusting, in my opinion, but who would listen to me?
I’ve wandered many a grubby mile when I’m feeling restless. Over to the depressing maze of identical boxes with identical cars parked on weedy drives. Past yowling and nervy cats, alongside pumped up dogs whose rib cages stand out like xylophones as they strain at leashes. Oh, those dogs! How they hate me! I wish I knew what it was about me that raised their hackles. I love animals, always have done, I wouldn’t so much as tap them on their leathery noses to discipline them. Their owners now, that’s a different matter; I’d string them up, those lardy, ugly no-hopers with their ridiculous mis-spelled tattoos and their bullet shaped heads. The women are as bad! See, I have a sense of humour. Still, I do like to walk their streets, smell the stink of humanity, inhale the canine stench of their pets. I keep myself to myself though. I’ve no desire to be noticed.
Come dusk, the estate takes on a different, less down at heel aspect, as leaden skies bleed into black, and the malformed trees and straggly hedges take on a kind of mysterious beauty.
Well, they do to me. Call me a romantic if you like, I don’t mind. I’ve always liked dark places where you can blend in, and ugliness is hidden. One of the areas I really, really like is the north wall of the old manor house which lies about half a mile along one of the side roads, set well back from the road and guarded like Fort Knox against, well, against us locals. I guess when it was built, it was surrounded by verdant fields with the occasional cow or perhaps placid sheep. Now it sits incongruously slap bang in the middle of this hell hole of a new town, turreted, ageing and splendidly decadent like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake in a Gregg’s window. Ooh, that’s rather good, don’t you think? I do have my moments, but there’s never anyone around to show off to is there? Anyway, the north wall of the manor house is wonderful. It’s absolutely covered with thick dark green and shiny ivy which seems to be infiltrating under the eaves too – and is going to be a real headache for the owners one day. It’s partly hidden from the grounds by huge conifers which line the drive, soldier-like. I’ve spent many an evening just leaning against this living, rustling wall. It’s quite easy to reach the house if you know how, and the security system’s rubbish if you know what’s what. They have dogs too, but they don’t bother me. Not that I’m up to anything dodgy, you understand, I just love this quiet place against their wall.
I love feeling the roughness of the stone, the tiny cracks where the mortar’s been eroded. I like to imagine the generations who’ve lived there, who planted the innocuous little ivy plant that grabbed hold so tenaciously to the lowest stone, like a newborn baby’s grip on its mother’s finger, and started its climb up to the eaves. If I close my eyes when I’m standing there, I can almost hear echoes of laughing, and sometimes sobbing, shouting, horses kicking up the grit on the drive. I never see any signs of life though, and the high windows are always heavily shrouded in curtains. Those sort of people don’t exactly spend their evenings hanging out of the windows on the lookout for their old man to stagger home from the pub, or keeping a lookout for pond feeders nicking their wheels.
Dawn touches the horizon eventually, and I’m back in my most favourite place of all, where I belong. Home. Under the ground, plot 16A, in the churchyard.
28-07-2011, 04:20 PM
6
Re: Creative Writing
Roll Up, Roll UpIt’s the noise of the carousel that’s so intoxicating. Don’t you just love the wheezy grinding of the music, the cheesy, age-old melodies that shout out “enjoy! This is as good as it’s going to get! Hang on tight and pretend you’re a kid again!” Well, that’s what it says to me anyway, even though it’s been so long since I was a kid I’ve forgotten it ever happened.
Fairgrounds – that chipped, garishly painted small cosmos full of desperate people flinging their cash around, sucking on poisonously coloured confections, yelling like maniacs and whooping into the night as if this false, manic half acre of muddy ground was heaven itself. Or perhaps not heaven at all. Perhaps the other place.
So many places to hide, here. Flapping tent openings, tiny wooden booths decorated with signs of the zodiac where, for a price, the gullible learn the secrets of the universe (a pound coin in the slot, a mass produced laminated card with some generic nonsense on request). There are the spaces under all the rides too, of course. Plenty of room there, up close and personal with wet grass, slick mud, snaking cables. Oh, and let’s not overlook behind the scenes of the Ghost Train. There are long, dark tunnels there, damp and claustrophobic, overhung with wobbly witch cutouts and dusty spiders that wouldn’t fool a blind man in a bucket. Still, it’s an interesting journey, bowling along in a mini carriage, clutching your partner, screaming unnecessarily loud and rocking the carriage side to side filled with bravado and testosterone. Not that I ever partook, but I have eyes and ears.
Nobody notices me, naturally. I mean, why would they? This is predominantly a place for young folk, teenagers with money to spend and girls to impress. Kids with parents who keep only half an eye on their charges, lured themselves by slot machines and the siren call of the carousel. I’m just a bloke, quite ordinary, not so shabby that the crowds eye me with suspicion or distaste. I’m spotlessly clean, I am. I thought I’d mention that, as I wouldn’t want you to think me a weirdo or anything. Sometimes I stand quite close to some woman or other, inhale her cheap perfume, and people must think we’re together. I like that, the thought of having someone of my own. I can’t stand there for long though, she always moves off or seeks out whoever she came with. I smile casually before she goes, as if our chance meeting was just that. Chance.
Here’s the thing though. I’m lonely. There, I confess it. Don’t think I’ve never had a relationship, as it’s now called. I have a cruder way of putting it, but you probably don’t want to hear that. I spend all my waking hours at the fairground, and when it moves on after a few weeks, so do I. I move onto wherever it turns up next. It’s the lights and the music, you see. And all the secret places it gives up. The hidey holes, the booths, the other world behind the façade of curtains and jolly cardboard figures, pirates, clowns, ghosts. It’s like a world within a world; there’s the night outside, with the real universe (no pound coin needed here, ha ha) and the jostling, over-the-top hysteria of the punters competing with the coarse cries of the stall holders and the mad, blaring cacophony of dozens of snatches of endlessly upbeat tunes.
Then there’s the much more exciting world, the secret space behind the false lake where the wooden ducks slide past waiting to be shot, the narrow deep alley at the back of the coconut shy, just behind the terrifying scarecrow dummies with chips knocked out of their imbecilic heads. The darkness, the feeling of invisibility was intoxicating back there.
She was about 15, couldn’t have been any older despite the make up slapped on inexpertly and the totally inappropriate high heels. High heels! At a fairground! What was she thinking? She tottered clumsily towards the waltzers, a can of some lager or other in one hand, a tiny glittery bag in the other, grinning at nobody in particular. Her eyes were wide as a baby being shown a balloon for the first time, her ankles thin and white as sapling shoots. I watched her for quite a while, dry mouthed and aching. She was on her own, not pretty enough to attract the feral advances of the stall holders and too unsteady on her feet to perform the flirting dance – in to tease and taunt, back off to show indifference, closer in, move away. I stood at the corner of one of the tents, half hidden by a washing line of grubby cloths and bided my time as she weaved her way towards me, pausing to slurp from her can and examine the heel of her shoe which had caught in something or other.
Really, it was no challenge at all. Piece of cake, if I’m honest. I can be surprisingly charming if pushed, and the uneven light and the late hour hides my face effectively enough. She seemed rather flattered but unsurprised when I offered to help her to somewhere quiet, to fix her shoe. She was wearing some sweet scent that reminded me for a minute of my mum, God rest her soul. Jasmine, was it? Perhaps violet? I ended up with it on my sleeve anyway.
I took her to one of my favourite places. I can’t tell you about it, but it’s the most secret place of all in the fairground. She’s there still, what’s left of her. I cherish her scent on my arm.
29-07-2011, 01:17 AM
8
Re: Creative Writing
I shall read these very soon, but I've also been writing comical stories for several years now. I can't put them on here unfortunately as each story is a continuation from the last, like a TV series I suppose you could say, so they would get lost without the use of a URL facility whereby I could link the stories.Perhaps I'll put Chapter 1 on soon just to get a little feed-back but, like my poems, they are in Lancashire dialect, but I guarantee they are funny!
29-07-2011, 06:59 AM
9
Re: Creative Writing
Here's another one.Speaking in Tongues
He had practised his speech for months. It had become an obsession and he was totally aware that it was an obsession, but it was vital there were no mistakes. He couldn’t afford to hesitate, stumble over words or appear anything less than completely confident, otherwise who would take him seriously? Oratory was powerful, persuasive, spell binding in the right hands. He had listened to so many public speakers waffling on and on about their woolly ideas for improvements, production increases, future plans for a better world and didn’t fail to notice the less than riveted audience fiddling, casting covert looks round the room, checking their watches surreptitiously.
It wasn’t just a matter of engaging his audience either, he realised that. You had to look the part. Here he was less confident. He strode over to the full length mirror in his locked office and paused before his reflection. Well, nobody could have called him a handsome man, he said to himself with a wry smile. Shorter than average, stocky, nondescript features, dark hair. He did have commanding eyes though, even he could see that. They stared back at him, two pools of deep blue, challenging him to do what? Change his mind and return to being forgettable?
Back when he had been a child he’d certainly felt unforgettable, one of the millions of poor kids living out in the country with his strict, cold father and ineffectual mother. Life had inevitably been a struggle for them all and he’d been a sickly child, in and out of hospital with lung infections. He hadn’t been expected to survive, and he didn’t think his parents would have been heartbroken if he had in fact died. After all, one less mouth to feed in those days would have been a blessing. He didn’t resent the realisation, it was just life. Poor children dropped like flies, as did their parents. Poverty was no shame. Of course, it was no fun either, and when it bled over into young adulthood, with dreams of fame and comfort it cut deeper.
He permitted himself a grim smile as he remembered hesitantly telling his father of his desire to enter the priesthood. It was about the only time he had heard him laugh, a rusty wheeze like a poorly oiled machine part that had sprung into life after years of neglect. The derision hadn’t deterred him, at least not immediately; he was well accustomed to a life of self denial and penury and had felt it a lifetime commitment worth any small sacrifices.
He grew out of it though, as young men will. He moved to the city along with many others of his class, hoping for – what? Adventure? Love? Riches? None had come his way, and time on the streets as a penniless drifter soon re-formed his idealistic young daydreams.
And now here he was, a middle aged successful man of substance. He was still not rich and lived simply enough. He had no desire for the outward trappings of wealth and despised vulgar ostentation such as a few of his staff flaunted. As for love, he wasn’t fool enough to think women found in him movie star looks, and by and large he was indifferent to the many women he met socially and officially. He could appreciate them aesthetically of course, their soft shape, the clouds of scent that followed them around, the way they hung onto his every casual word now he was no longer a penniless nobody. He had bedded a few, of course, he wasn’t entirely made of stone. Nobody would ever call him abnormal, but they distracted him with their chatter about things of which they had no real understanding. Women had their place, but it wasn’t here, today. Today was special, a pivotal day for him, and it had to be right.
He glanced down at his notes one last time, mouthed a few lines and cast the paper aside. It wouldn’t do to be seen to refer to notes out there. He walked quickly over to his office door and unlocked it. He straightened his back, smoothed down his jacket and glanced down at his hands. Steady as a rock.
As he walked down the corridor towards a door leading onto the stage an insistent chant could be heard in the still air, thrumming ever louder as he neared. It filled up his head and his soul, and his heart jumped in time.
“Fuhrer! Fuhrer! Fuhrer!”
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