Piece

The two girls were called Lutra and Glis-Glis. Meles wasn't sure whether they were southern European, north African, south-east Asian, Argentinian or what. Lutra looked as if she might once have belonged to one of the indigenous Lapp tribes of northern Scandinavia, except that she was too dark-skinned. But maybe that was just her tan. After all, she had spent most of her adult life by the shores of the lake.

Meles reclined on a long handmade wicker chair that looked a little like a picnic basket turned on its side. Out on the improbably named Tomb Lake a large fish-eating bird cackled and trod water, occasionally jabbing its beak at the treacly surface and spearing a small bottle-green fish. Meles watched Lutra watching the bird. The bird was joined by another. Lutra called to Glis-Glis in a language Meles did not understand; Glis-Glis was sleeping, slightly curled, on a towel on the sand. Lutra slipped into the lake with lithe soundlessness and swam quickly out to the two fish-eating birds. The birds squabbled and prodded each other in a half-friendly manner. Glis-Glis turned in her sleep. She had a compact, lovely form, Meles thought. Not as classically beautiful as Lutra, but lovely, really lovely.

Meles didn't see the birds depart but they were gone by the time Lutra reached the spot in the middle of the lake where they had been fishing. Lutra's back formed an arc and she tumbled forward and down under the surface of the thick-looking water. Meles looked back at Glis-Glis and she stirred and opened one eye.

'Lutra fishing again?' she said in that accent Meles could not pin down. 'Always fishing, that one. Learned it off the natives.'

Meles lit a cigarette and Lutra emerged from the water. Sure enough she had hold of a fish, a green-grey fish about six inches long. She swam towards the other side of the lake where the curved trunk of a dead tree broke the surface like the head and neck of a monster. Lutra climbed nimbly onto the tree and crossed her legs. She hit the head of the fish once on the trunk. It went still instantly.

Meles was not surprised at Lutra's behaviour. He had seen some gleeful, girlish madness in her, even back at the hotel.

Glis-Glis stretched out supine, a book - Elizabethen poetry - propped against her small bag. She read out loud in her own language. Meles realised that she was translating directly from English. He looked at Lutra, who was now floating on her back with her eyes closed, slowly drifting shorewards.

Glis-Glis was still speaking, but was no longer looking at the book. She had made her way down to the water's edge. Reluctantly she put a tiny bare foot into the water and quickly removed it. She made a sound that Meles could only describe as a disgusted sneeze and went back to her towel.

'She's mad,' she said, gesturing her head in Lutra's direction. Lutra was now only a few metres from land. 'You hear that? You're mad, Lutra. Mental.'

Lutra laughed and ran out of the shallows like Ursula Andress then shook her head like a dog as she came between Meles and Glis-Glis. Meles shivered, not without pleasure, as the water fell on him. Glis-Glis made the sneezing sound again.

Taking Glis-Glis's bag and causing the book to fall open on the sand, Lutra found a hair band and tied her hair back into a ponytail.

'Let's build a fire,' she said. Glis-Glis smiled and nodded in assent.

Lutra collected small sticks that had been stranded by evaporation just above the water line. Meles searched further inland along the line of woodland for larger pieces of wood. Glis-Glis screwed up some pages from a fashion magazine and formed a rough cone over the top with the smaller sticks. Lutra took a Zippo lighter from her friend's bag and had the fire going expertly within seconds. Glis-Glis sat close to the fire, palms outward, despite the warmth of the weather. The towel was damp and cool and Meles sat on it and flicked through the little green book of Elizabethen poetry, not reading it. The pull of the water exerted itself on Lutra again, and she slipped back in, telling Glis-Glis not to let the fire go out.

Meles said to Glis-Glis, 'Doesn't she ever stop?'

'I think it's a kind of illness,' she replied.

'What, like ADHD?'

'Something like that. She could have been an Olympic swimmer. Probably a gymnast too. She eats too many sweets.'

Glis-Glis almost seemed to be asleep. She had picked up a piece of wood and was turning it mechanically, peeling the bark with her thumbnail. Every time she removed a piece she flicked it with her thumb into the centre of the fire and watched it combust, rear up and disappear in an instant. She sang a low, wordless tune for a short time, finishing on a long, sustained note. Lutra reappeared, scolding Glis-Glis for letting the fire burn low. She shook herself like before and the black and silver shards of water from Tomb Lake glittered and kissed in the fire. She went back to the side of the lake and picked up three greenish, purplish fish by the gills. She called, 'Look what I have caught. We can cook them on the fire. We don't have to go back to the hotel. The food there is mediocre.'

Glis-Glis was about to say something in return but checked herself, crossed her legs, shook her head and smiled.

Meles said, 'Is that allowed?' and Glis-Glis smiled more.

Lutra threw the fish down on the sand and said, 'Glis-Glis, get some life into that fire, old girl. Meles, come with me. Come on. Chop chop. God, I feel like Mary Poppins with you two.'

Glis-Glis obeyed and Meles got up.

'Where are we going then, Miss Poppins?'

'To the woods. We need some vegetables.'

He followed, barely able to keep up.

The Items Required to Write a Short Story

The cathedral organist was testing out the monstrous pipe organ, testing up and down, down and up, testing the entire range of the instrument. David rubbed an eye. Some of the bass notes were present in his stomach rather than his ears. Sound reduced to nausea.

David mounted a set of three low red stone steps, and sat on the top one. He was sure that this part of the cathedral was called something other than simply steps: all the features of churches had names that were different from those of normal buildings. Chancel. Nave. Transept. Until he had started researching a story set in the cathedral he had had no idea what any of these were.

A teenaged Chinese girl was edging around the inside perimeter of the building, one hand constantly in contact with the brickwork, the other holding a camera in front of her, as if it were an auxiliary eye. She reached the great girth of a flying buttress - another term David had learned from research - and let her camera hang on a cord around her wrist, using both hands to feel around the base, groping as if blind, drinking the coarse sandstone through her fingertips. She took up her camera once again, stepped back and photographed the lower portion of the buttress.

David photographed the Chinese girl. The unseen organist hit his highest note, and began to descend again. A small boy kicked a stone off an unknown bridge into an unknown waterway in the centre of Copenhagen. He rubbed his eye, bored, waiting for something to happen, he didn't know what. He tried to kick another stone, but his feet weren't there, so he shrugged as the Chinese girl rounded the corner into the north transept and disappeared. David whistled an imperfect counterpoint to the organ's scales without realising he was doing it and stood up slowly, swinging his camera in increasing circles. He pushed open two heavy glass doors, sat down at a table in the cathedral's little cafe, took out his notebook and pencil and began to write. In an unseen part of the building a Chinese girl bit her lip in soft appreciative thought as she ran a hand along the angle of a wall, unaware that she was being photographed by a young man in a checked shirt who was in turn unaware that in Copenhagen a boy on a bridge thought himself into non-existance.

On the bus David looked through the various items in a plastic carrier bag. These were his notebook, a book about neo-gothic architecture, a pack of arborio risotto rice, two fine ballpoint pens, one HB pencil and the Lonely Planet guide to Denmark. He took out the notebook, the guide to Denmark and one of the ballpoints, and flicked to the required page in the guide, preparing to make notes as the young boy reappeared on the Copenhagen bridge. Where had he been? He felt he may have been floating somewhere over the cold, sprawling low-rise city, although he had no actual memory. He felt he knew the patterns of the streets and the incisions of the waterways, the green splatters of parkland and the great grey harbour. A knowledge of the names of things came back to him, or to him for the first time. He knew the heaving waters of the Ore Sund and the umbilical ribbon of its bridge, Hans Christian Andersson's Boulevard and the Langebro, where he had stood forever while David sharpened pencils, looked at foreign maps.

Some time after midnight. A young Chinese girl wakes, finds herself fully clothed in a cold building, her camera broken on the floor. She is aware of someone watching her. She move in the direction of the exit. In front of her: row upon row of pews, like a barrier. She attempts to negotiate the pews, finds that they have been arranged to form a maze. Their wooden backs are taller than she is. She heads towards the middle.

David woke early. It was not yet light. He reached for his notebook, intent on continuing the story he had researhed the day before. But he instantly felt the cold drowning death of writers' block. Doodling an intricate maze in the dark, he thought about his dreams and decided to write them down.

She Is Growing Up, Slowly and In The Dark

She has a thing for molten candle wax. She likes how it comes away from things and leaves them smooth. She likes the feel of it against her skin: it makes her bubble up inside. She particularly likes it when he puts his index finger into the still pool of a burning candle and unexpectedly presses the hot wax onto the soft skin on the inside of her wrist. It makes her catch her breath audibly like she has jumped into the cold, cold sea, even when he does it in public. Especially when he does it in public.

She had found out about it by accident: they had been at a friend's barbecue. There were outdoor candles - the ones with citronella in to keep the insects off - and she had nearly wet herself with the unexpected pleasure.



Fortunately he likes it too, she is sure.



She is thinking about candle wax as she walks up the hill into work. The morning is sallow and undecided - the sky furrowing its brow as if trying to decide what to do with the rest of the day.

She is thinking about candle wax because she has just had a cold shower - one which was not supposed to be cold - and is wondering why the feeling of ice cold water on her back should feel so similar to hot wax on the soft skin on the inside of her wrist. She bites her bottom lip. It is a day like any other, so why should she be biting her bottom lip? She feels like a terror suspect, like she has got a secret something strapped to her chest, something that could explode in a red rain of liquid wax and bring down a happy death upon all the clever and stupid people of the Borough of Swindon. She fights it; sees herself in a shop window and things she looks ugly in her work suit.



The last time she saw him he had been drunk, singing a song from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. She can't remember which song.



She can bear to be away from him for about seventeen hours, plus however long she can sleep for. Not more than a day in total. After that, she can't handle it. It's not that she misses his company; she just gets bored with herself. But thankfully her work has become more enjoyable of late. It's quiet and she gets to email all of her old friends, trying not to mention him once, like she is testing herself, her mental strength. Opposite her window is a doctor's surgery. She sees the girls go in, have tests, come out. She used to attempt to work out what tests they had had, what the results were, by the looks on their faces. Now she looks at their cars - the ones who have cars - and tries to guess their jobs. Everyone has grown up in this town.

What is so special about today that she has to bite her bottom lip? She can't put her finger on it. There is an old brown dog tied to the bicycle rack outside the doctor's, next to the bike that has been there for as long as she has worked here. Probably much longer. She can't remember seeing anyone tie the dog up.

She works as a secretary for a chartered accountant. The office is on the ground floor of a handsome terraced property in the old part of town. In the front bay window is a sticker:

SLEEP BETTER

WITH A CHARTERED ACCOUNTANT

Her boss laughed for a week after he first put it up. She hasn't the heart to tell him that it is the probable cause of his recent downturn in business. The man is clearly lonely. He has a collection of cacti, for fuck's sake. He looks like a cross between Heinrich Himmler and Nicholas Cage; describes himself as a bachelor. Which means he was already an old man at heart when he started college. Now in his forties, she can imagine him retired, alone, in sheltered accommodation, unembarrassed about having to ask the nurses to clean up his faeces.

But he always lets her go early on quiet days, and today is a quiet day, so by four o'clock she is walking home between the rows of town houses. A band of rain creeps up behind her, falling diagonally between the terraces, not heavy but nonetheless soaking, the kind of rain that within minutes becomes offensive to every part of the body. With the onset of night quickened by the rain clouds, she notices the first flash of light and as she reacts by looking to the sky she hears a crippling boom, a sound that seems to be sucked along the maze of avenues, echoing at every corner. It takes her a few seconds to remember that it is the fifth of November. As her heart rate regains normality she stops to watch the fireworks that are now appearing with fierce regularity above the shining roofs. The rain comes down and the fireworks fizz up. Then they too come down, deflated, spraying their guts in a warm rain of light. She sees them as tears, and begins to cry with them. She sees this as the zenith of her life. For the first time since this morning she thinks about him, and why he hasn't called in two days.

The First Step

It was the twenty-first century. Matthew walked on Bold Street, a busy half-pedestrianised street running through the centre of Liverpool from the derelict church of Saint Luke to the modern chapel of Burgerking. Matthew was going in the other direction, looking for a bin in which to deposit the greased wrappers of two double cheeseburgers before he went into the book shop. In the eleven years he had been on this planet Matthew had never before set foot inside a book shop. He was an adequate reader; but he didn't enjoy it very much. He preferred to collect football stickers: his gods were Arteta, Cahil, Osman. But his sister's birthday was coming up and he knew she wanted to study history at university so he thought he might buy her a book on the Romans.

The four o'clock dusk came with sudden curtain of brisk, chilling rain. Matthew coudn't find a bin, so he stood in the doorway of Waterstones while he screwed up the wrappers into two tight little globes like golf balls and put one in each pocket. He looked at the street for a minute, the people cramming into bright shops to avoid the rain. There was a pile of fresh horse manure on the slick cobble stones, probably left by one of the huge, shuddering police horses that patrolled outside the bars and clubs on Concert Square. The street smelled old, and looked old. For a moment Matthew had the feeling that he was observing a scene from a hundred years ago, and, godlike, he could move back and forward in time as he wished. He looked up at the street light: it was an old-fashioned one, shaped like a Victorian oil lamp, and it glowed a warm orange. But Matthew shivered and went into Waterstones quickly.

Inside the shop, standing each side of the door as if on guard, were two gigantic stuffed polar bears, up on their hind legs. Their heads were thrown back and their open mouths were an eternal blood-red gape. The forepaws of each bear were positioned so as to display large and ancient-looking books. Matthew approached the bear on the left and touched the fur on its exposed belly. He had to stand on tiptoe to reach the book in its right hand and he nearly fell under its weight as he hauled it down. The book had no title on the brown cover, but on its first page were the words The First Step. Matthew tried to read the text at the start of the book, but the font was small and delicate, and the language archaic. He flicked through until he found a page of illustrations. The drawings looked like something out of a geometry textbook, but not one of this world. The shapes were strange and incomprehensible. Figure 1 was labelled The Four-Dimensional Cube. All Matthew could say afterwards when asked to describe this shape was that it looked like a cube inside a cube, but the cube that was on the inside was also on the outside. Figure 2 was entitled The Mirror Image of the Inside of a Spherical Object. Matthew looked at it for too long and felt like he was going to go blind. There were other, more complex shapes in the book, each more difficult to describe than the last.

'Shit, this is weird,' Matthew said to himself.

Immediately someone answered him, 'I will have no profanities uttered in this shop. I beg you be a little more polite or leave, young man.'

The voice came from a corner, though Matthew was not sure which corner. The shop had many, and they were all dark.

He offered a meek apology to a row of shelves, and another row of shelves replied, 'Alright, just don't do it again.'

He couldn't make out whether the voice was male or female, child or adult, and he strained his eyes looking into the shop's recesses. A figure no taller than himself came out from behind the nearest shelf, pushing a small retractable wooden step-ladder on wheels. Eventually Matthew discerned that the person was a small old man with no hair on his head. He wore what looked like the plain brown dress of a monk. This on closer inspection was flecked with silver-white strands. The man noticed Matthew looking at his clothing and self-consciously brushed some of the white strands off with his hand. They glittered like snow as they fell.

'Excuse me,' he said. 'The bears are moulting. They always do at this time of year. Can't be helped. Last year I saved it all up and sold it to a wig-maker. Polar bear hair is the finest, warmest hair you could hope to have on your head.'

'How do stuffed bears moult?' asked Matthew.

The man answered him with a look that said 'What kind of a question is that?'

The two looked at each other for a few moments. The man was close enough now for Matthew to read his carved hardwood badge. It said John and, in smaller letters underneath, Department of Steps & Stairs, and in even smaller letters, Keeper of the Bears.

'So, how can I help you?' said John. 'I expect you want some help with your maths homework? I see you've been looking at that elementary mathematics book. Still learning about the calculus, eh? Leibnitz and Newton? Well, I can show you much more interesting books than that.'

'Actually I'm looking for a book about the Roman empire,' Matthew said, trying to sound clever.

'Ah, history, my very favourite subject. Follow me!'

John pranced off at speed, dragging his little ladder between rows of books to a dark desk at the far end of the shop, followed with some difficulty by Matthew. John jumped onto the top rung of his ladder, and from there to the surface of the large desk, upsetting a sheaf of handwritten maunscripts. He reached up to a shelf above the desk and extracted a book that looked externally identical to the one Matthew had been reading earlier.

'This is one of the best. Really takes you back to the old times. Gladiators and grapes and goddesses and whatnot.' Still standing on the table he presented the book to Matthew with a dignified little bow, then handed him a lit candle.

Matthew opened the book about half-way through and began to read:

Messalina became the third wife of the emperor Claudius. Her life was one of unsurpassed vice, and her fittingly violent death was brought about by her perfidious sluttishness. It is said that as a child of nine she was visited by the god Mercury, whom she seduced. Mercury told her that on her death she would become the goddess of prostitution and whore-houses. It seems she devoted the rest of her life to preparation for this divine vocation.

'My sister'll love this. How much do you want for it?'

The little man looked shifty and, still on the desk, shrugged his shoulders and twitched his boots together.

'Well,' he said. 'I'm afraid it's a little expensive. You see, it's the only copy we have, and we couldn't part with it cheaply. We'll take a guinea, nothing less.'

'I've only got this.' Matthew pulled out the twenty-pound note his mother had lent him that morning. He wondered what a guinea looked like, and where he could get one.

'What's that?' said John. 'I'm afraid we don't take foreign moneys in here, my boy!'

'It's twenty quid.'

'Twenty pounds? Here, let's see that.'

He held the note up against the light of the candle and said, 'Hmm. It's certainly no forgery. I can tell the work of the Royal Mint anywhere. But I've never seen anything quite like this. A most extraordinary shade of purple. How delightful!'

John examined the note from various angles, sighing occasionally. Matthew, growing bored, let slip a low cough.

'Oh, I'm sorry, young man. I expect you want some change.'

From a drawer in the desk he pulled out a cloth bag and counted out a handful of big and golden-looking coins, which Matthew took in silent surprise.

'Now, before you go,' said John, 'I would like your opinion on something. I have been writing a history book of my own, something a little bit different. The subject is close to my heart. It is about how bears have influenced the leadership of the mighty Russian nation. I'll read a bit to you.'

He picked up a manuscript at random and began to orate. His eyes gave the impression of being firmly closed.

'The prince Rasputin came out of the north from the wastes of cold Siberia. He was seven feet tall and his carriage was made of ice. Beside it ran twelve giant silver-haired borzoi hounds. The carriage was pulled not by horses but by a team of four tame polar bears. Beside Rasputin sat his oldest friend Mark Markovich, the first Keeper of the Bears of the Russian Imperial Court. He had stolen the polar bears as cubs and been both mother and father to them. It was he who taught the language of the bears to Rasputin, a skill that would later save the great man's life, when a family of bears heard him calling from underneath a frozen river, bleeding, poisoned and tied in a sack.'

At this point John paused, shook himself like a waking animal and said, 'Well, what do you think so far? Not too colloquial, is it? I'm always afraid that my writing is not formal enough.'

'Yeah, it's great.' Matthew didn't really know what to say, so he changed the subject. 'I should be going now. Which way do I go to get out?'

'Out?' John was preoccupied with his manuscripts. 'Just go up those steps behind you. Oh, and thank you. I have greatly enjoyed talking to you. Come back whenever you please and listen to the rest of my book. We don't get much custom these days, you know.'

Matthew was at the top of the stairs before he realised that he couldn't actually remember going down any stairs since he had been in the shop. He was not worried though. In front of him he could now see the door and the orange glow of the street beyond. The two bears at the door appeared to have been moved. They now faced inwards. Probably some unseen shop assistant, he thought. John had said 'We,' not 'I,' when he had been talking about the shop.

As he passed the bears he instinctively reached for the book he had read when he first entered the shop. It seemed to be lower than before, and he took it out of the bear's cupped forepaw with ease, replacing it with a fist of gold coins. He slipped through the door silently, a heavy book in each hand. Outside, the rain had changed to icy sleet. Across the road in Starbucks businesswomen caressed mugs to ward off the numbing cold that bit at their hands. Matthew brushed a few stray white hairs from the front of his Everton replica shirt. He shivered, put the books under his coat, and zipped it up against the night.