Meeting Mr Fox

Arabian Red Fox picture taken in Al Sukhnah, Jordan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I wrote this simply ages ago for Jordanian website/writer's collective Project Pen, but the site's down nowadays. So I'm putting it up here, just so's I can link to it when I want to and stuff. Enjoy!

Meeting Mr Fox 

The shell that almost killed them all came with no warning, sounded no different to the thousands of others scudding around the blue summer skies like little birds. Baba was reading a newspaper, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Ahmed was sitting under the wooden kitchen table, playing. The shell exploded and suddenly Ahmed wasn’t under the table anymore. There was a lot of dust and smoke. Baba looked asleep, but mother was holding her head in her hands and crying. Ahmed wanted to go to her but his legs wouldn’t work. Baba had eventually woken up and Ahmed had walked with a limp ever since.

After the shell, they had a big piece of orange plastic sheeting over the hole in the wall. It stretched from the floor to the roof. Now summer had fled and the winter had come, it billowed and flapped in the wind and let the cold in. Finding wood for the fire had become very difficult. The winter took everyone by surprise. This proved, Ahmed’s father growled as he hunched over the mean fire in their damaged kitchen, they were all donkeys. Winter always came, this year was no different. Except this year they were distracted as the fighting became worse, the houses shaking with relentless concussions. Ahmed didn’t go to school anymore, so he was at home when the soldiers came.

His mother was making bread, the bakery having been shut by an explosion that took away ovens and bakers alike in a single savage wrench. Baba had salvaged a sack of flour from the ruins before the flames took hold and the stock room collapsed on the heads of some thirty men trying to do the same. They ate bread every Friday to try and make the flour last. Baba was out looking for fuel and food. Foraging, his mother called it. Jamal said it was called looting, like taking the flour, but everyone had to do it because there were no shops. And anyway, nobody had money.

The soldiers shouted a lot and one of them punched Ahmed so stars came. His mother begged them but they didn’t listen to her. She cried as they held her arms and pushed her onto the floor. She screamed when they pulled at her clothes until one of them hit her too and she was quiet.

Ahmed ran and ran through the streets, his ankles twisting on the rubble strewn on the pock-marked ground. He called out for his baba but nobody replied. There was fighting but Ahmed didn’t care about the bullets and they seemed not to care about him, either. None of them plucked at his skin. They buzzed, whistled and spattered on stone. They called out to him. But he didn’t want them, he wanted baba to come and stop the soldiers hurting ummi.

He left the city behind as he tired and stopped running. He walked now, no longer certain of where he was going or why, but impelled by some instinct to get away from buildings and the soldiers and the vague idea that perhaps he would walk and walk until he found his baba. Perhaps God would help him. He started mumbling God’s names, just in case he was listening. He had learned ten of them when school had stopped.

There were soldiers on the road. Ahmed was tired and scared. His legs hurt. He bit his lip when he saw them and slipped off into the woodland. The light was fading and it started to snow. There was a big tree that hadn’t lost its leaves and the patch of ground around it was clear of snow. Ahmed sat down on the damp ground, shivering. He pulled up his knees and wrapped his arms around them, listening for the soldiers in case they had seen him. The woodland grew darker. The silence ached. Occasionally there would be a creak. There were no shells or machine gun fire here. Ahmed could hear his teeth chattering, the shivering convulsions making his weary body ache. The snowflakes became bigger.

Light-headed with exhaustion and cold, Ahmed tilted his head to catch a faint scratching sound. He noticed a hole in the ground. The scratching was coming from the hole. Something glittered in the darkness of the opening. Eyes. A head emerged, red fur and a snout with a black nose.

‘Good evening,’ said the fox in fuzha, the formal Arabic like they had taught at school.

Ahmed closed his eyes and shook his head as if it would make the talking fox go away, but it was still there when he opened them.

‘You’re not a very polite little boy,’ the fox pointed out as he came out of his set and padded over to Ahmed. He sat down a few feet away and cocked his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ahmed tried to remain calm. ‘I’ve just never met a talking dog before.’

The fox sniffed. ‘I am not a dog,’ he said pointedly. ‘I am a fox.’

‘Sorry,’ Ahmed mumbled.

‘And don’t mumble. There’s nothing worse than people who mumble. It’s the height of rudeness.’

Ahmed stopped shivering. He felt very calm. He fancied he saw the fox smiling, but he couldn’t be sure. The woodland was serene, the snowflakes calming and soft as they touched his cheek. ‘Where did you learn to talk?’

The fox rubbed his snout with a forepaw. ‘What sort of question is that? Where did you learn to talk? Humans really do take the biscuit. You’re an arrogant bunch aren’t you? All superior, yet you’ll not find us animals killing each other with weapons like you do.’

‘I don’t kill people. The soldiers kill people.’

 ‘Same thing, child. It’s your species kills people. Whether they wear uniforms or not. They kill foxes, too, when they can. They kill for sport. I wonder you don’t get sick of killing. You don’t even do it properly, to eat. You just kill to kill. Nasty lot, really.’

Ahmed wanted to cry. It seemed so unjust yet he didn’t have an argument against the wiser fox. ‘The soldiers do it. Not me.’

‘You’re just a child. You’ll grow up to it. All those soldiers were children once. The men who came to the wood with spades were children once. Mind you, the chickens were worth the trouble. Delicious.’

‘So why are you even talking to me if you hate humans so much?’

‘You looked lonely.’ The fox shifted and flicked his tail. ‘Where are your parents?’

‘In the city. I ran away from the soldiers. They were hurting ummi. My baba was out and they came.’

‘Shouldn’t you go back? It’s cold out here and you look blue.’

Ahmed nodded. The fox was right, yet he was too tired. He tried to move, but he was frozen to the spot. He felt frozen, too, like a chicken. They used to have a freezer in the house before the electricity went away. It had chickens in it. Ahmed’s eyes started to close, sleep overwhelming him. He moved to lie down and the fox came up to him.

‘Here,’ the animal said, not unkindly. ‘You can have some of my heat. I have it to spare.’

The warm little body snuggled against Ahmed's chest. He smiled. The fox had an animal pungency, his fur was soft. Ahmed closed his eyes.

Later on, the sky black and the moon casting shadows in the white woodland, the fox woke. He turned to the boy’s face and sniffed it. The warmth had left the still form. The fox licked the child’s soft cheek.

After a while, he started to eat.

The Long And Short Of Stories

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have been asked once again by the Canadian University of Dubai to be a judge of their short story competition, '100 words'. This statement is laced with mild surprise that any reputable academic institution would repeat the same awful mistake: I was a judge last year, too.

It's a fascinating task, weeding through submissions from three groups, Under 12's, high school and university level entrants. For a start, you wouldn't necessarily be able to divide the submissions if all three groups were mixed up. Birth and death are themes that run through a number of the stories. Some chose not to send in a story at all, but an essay. Quite a few tried the old trick of setting us up for a punchline ending: a couple delivered with quite astonishing verve.

I always feel a bit sorry for them: while 100 words may not seem too daunting a task - 500 or 1,000 words seeming too much like 'real work' to encourage entries - 100 words puts us in the realm of 'flash fiction', stories of extreme brevity - it's actually quite hard to pull off well. For a start every single word counts and lazy habits like redundancies, filters and adverbs stare out of the screen accusingly at every turn.

She screamed with her mouth. Suddenly the gun fired. She cried deeply and agonisingly, her soul bared for all the world to see her pain. He laughed with joy, the sound of her lovely, golden voice reaching him across the wide yawning gap of the ages. The trophy dropped down to the floor and landed with a bang.

These are all remarkably common occurrences and when you've got 100 words to play with, you can't really afford them. Actually, I'd argue you can't afford them even when you're playing with 90,000 words - I'm currently reading one conventionally published author's second book and his publisher seems to have decided it wasn't worth hiring an editor this time around. I'm actually finding it hard to wade through the text at times, there is so much of this sort of thing going on. So it's no surprise to see them creeping into students' short stories - but they needn't be there. They're cuckoos, stealing space that other words deserve to occupy.

I find Twitter one of the most useful editing tools of all time. Expressing yourself in grammatically correct English using 140 characters (no 'text speak', please) can work wonders in encouraging the habit of actually constructing sentences as elegantly as possible. It's a skill I think we lose when we sit down to type stories on a word processor rather than a clackety typewriter or even, saints preserve us, grabbing a pen. Writers like Durrell, Waugh, Greene and Hemingway had time to think about every sentence, to roll it around in the mouth and savour it before committing it in inky scratches to that sheet of fine vellum. When they weren't busy beating their women or carousing in low bars, of course.

The perfect example of a short short - probably about the flashiest flash fiction you'll find - is often attributed to Hemingway, but sadly it's apocryphal and there's no proof it was Ernie at all...

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

There we go: six words and it never fails to punch way beyond its weight...

Meeting Mr Fox

The shell which almost killed them all had come with no warning, sounded no different to the thousands of others scudding around the blue summer skies like little birds. Baba was reading a newspaper, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Ahmed was sitting under the wooden kitchen table. The shell exploded and suddenly Ahmed wasn’t under the table anymore. There was a lot of dust and smoke. Baba looked asleep but mother was holding her head in her hands and crying. Ahmed wanted to go to her but his legs wouldn’t work. Baba had eventually woken up and Ahmed had walked with a limp ever since.

After the shell, they had a big piece of orange plastic sheeting over the hole in the wall. It stretched from the floor to the roof. Now winter had come, it let the cold in. Finding wood for the fire had become very difficult. The winter took everyone by surprise. This proved, Ahmed’s father growled as he hunched over the mean fire in their damaged kitchen, they were all donkeys. Winter always came, this year was no different. Except this year they were distracted as the fighting became worse, the houses shaking with relentless concussions.

Ahmed didn’t go to school anymore, so he was at home when the soldiers came. His mother was making bread, the bakery having been shut by an explosion that took away ovens and bakers alike in a single savage moment. Baba had salvaged a sack of flour from the ruins before the flames took hold and the stock room collapsed on the heads of some thirty men trying to do the same. They ate bread every Friday to try and make the flour last.

You can read the rest here at Project Pen, where this fantastical short story by me resideth...

Novels, Dreams, Stuff, Books, Things.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I started work on Beirut - An Explosive Thriller way back in November 2009, I posted this here lump of semi-prose on da blog. It was the dream/half-thought that was to lead to the book's creation, along with another nocturnal shade, a morning time dream-memory of a man being propositioned by a peroxide cropped-haired girl in the cold German winter night and brushing her off. These things coalesced over time and became the book that is the book it is.

Olives - A Violent Romance was also conceived from a dream-memory. I woke with a book in my head after sleeping to George Winston's February Sea - a track that made me think of a girl dancing in the rain, a scene that is actually physically and literally at the very centre of the book today.

And Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy started with a dream, too - although the dream sequence itself didn't make it into the final book: Shemlan opens with Jason Hartmoor wakening in a sweat after a nightmare.

I've, literally, dreamed my novels. If I've been stuck with a book's progression, I've taken the problem to bed with me and more often than not woken up with the solution - if not clear in my mind, somehow easier with me as I've tackled it the next day.

I love the story of the bloke who invented the sewing machine. Having wrestled with the problem to no avail, he woke up one morning having dreamed of being chased by pygmy head-hunters brandishing spears with a hole in their tips. Eureka!

I think dreams are our way of managing experience and input, a sort of file management routine that lets us sort our most recent experience and weigh it against our remembered relationships, a way of learning that prioritises and balances our memory, learning and experience. We discard the unimportant, re-calculate our understandings and problem solve our issues. We re-balance, based on the inputs from the day that was. I truly believe my subconscious helps me build books.

I might, clearly, just be a total loony.

Many, many years ago I woke with the below in my head. I shared it with my girlfriend at the time, who lived in Sharjah while I lived in Northampton, in the UK. She's my wife now (Oh dear, that was rather League of Gentlemen, wasn't it?). It's probably my first attempt at writing, although the very idea of writing books hadn't occurred to me at the time. The short story I dashed down while the memory was still clear in my head all those years back has queued patiently to take its turn, but now it is my main focus. This is the core of my new book and I can't stop working on it. I've started writing again, having just finished The Simple Irish Farmer or whatever it'll be called.

I swear to God, it's a disease - an addiction...

______________________________________________________________________

Martin

Ashridge was a welcome contrast from the grey oppression of the city. After only a week living by the forest I had recovered my interest in life and work. The only source of worry in my delight with these freshened circumstances was that Mariam hadn't been able to get away from the city to come up and see me yet.

The city! A memorable misery; three years of making do and being alone amongst millions. Spending my working days in an antiseptic environment, preferable to the dirt, smoke and rush of the morning and evening commute. Even the small bedsit I had managed to find was little comfort as a haven, depressing every sensibility with its Victorian plumbing and Edwardian wallpaper. The ageing shabbiness came with a very modern price tag. London evenings were just a gap to fill between work, food and bed.

Even then, late at night, the city intruded. I had grown used to traffic rumbling through my short time of clear reflection before sleep, too used to faces that had no time, no concern for anything other than their own secret miseries. Now, here in the country, I found light, laughter, sharp air and the heady scents of wet leaves and fresh grass. At night I sat by my own handiwork, a wood fire that filled the living room of the little house with warmth and the hint of pine in its smoke.

Before I went to work at the Institute each day, the cold morning light would find me padding with a little thrill across the rough flagstones of the hall with the makings of the fire to prepare for my homecoming. Scrunched paper, criss-crossed twigs, then a couple of larger cuts laid down ready to take to flame on my return in the chill night. A lifetime away from igniting the Bakelite gas fire that brought warmth to that dingy London flat.

Of course the dog took to his new life immediately, not a moment’s hesitation there as he pounded down the woodland paths each day. Even buying a dog had been a trial in London, the pet shop filled with animal screeches and the sight of puppies scrabbling for space in tiny cages forming a background to the spectacle of the owner in her shabby pink dress and painted face.

Her voice rasped with fags and an awful confiding leer in every vowel. ‘You can't keep a big dog like this in a flat, you know.’ She coughed at me. ‘They grow up hellish fast.’

But I wasn’t buying year-old Bill for a flat. I was buying him to move into the great outdoors and now the patter of his claws on the flagstones peppered the silences, barking as he rushed to meet me every evening, Bill The Happy Labrador. I delighted in the contrast: cold screens and air conditioned clean rooms by day, a red glow and glass of scotch at night. After five days in the country, the hammering in my head receded and my new employer had commented on the brilliance of his find. 

This was my first weekend at Ashridge, and I wasted no time in pulling the collar and lead off the coat hook (with the usual attendant barking and skittering) and sallying forth on a long Saturday walk. Bill pulled and my feet scrunched on the wet gravel path, clouds of breath in the bright morning air. Soon we were away from the road, and I let Bill off and stooped as he bounded away chasing ghosts in the undergrowth. The woods took us both in, the dog and I, and we meandered for over an hour together through the pathways, Bill racing in great, curving arcs through the heather, returning to tease me with his big, brown laughing eyes.

I heard the children laughing a long time before I saw the green light of open field through the woodland. Bill was off nosing through the undergrowth again, muddling through the heather and snuffling excitedly at the day-old scent of pheasant. Labradors, I have found, are the world's greatest optimists, becoming so ecstatic at the prospect of game that they rush off making the most awful racket, never seeming to mind that every animal for a mile around has instantly gone to ground. Making enough noise for six humans, poor old Bill would never catch even the most stupid pheasant. And believe me, pheasants are off the dial stupid.

Nevertheless, he was delighted to be pushing through the bracken, and I was happy enough walking the dark leaf mould and listening to the far-off tinkle of children’s laughter. It must have come a good ten minutes after I had first heard them, the red flash of a tiny figure running past the opening into a field. Bill re-joined me on the path, soil on his muzzle, and leaves on his back. I dropped my cigarette, careful to heel a hole and bury the smoking mottled orange stub in a shallow grave of wet leaves.

I will never know why I didn't just walk straight onto the common. It was the first time I had walked that path, although I had strolled in the vast woodland several times during my short stay in the area. I’d normally have carried on through onto the common, and into the next patch of trees visible past the gentle rise of the otherwise flat grassland. But I stood just inside the shaded boundary of the wood and watched the source of the laughter, six children playing by the other edge of the common, some two hundred yards distant. Four were boys, about eleven years of age. The two girls were distinguishable only because they had longer hair, all six dressed in jumpers and jeans. They were capering around one of the boys, the smallest, who was standing stock still, and looking towards the top of the trees bordering the third side of the grassland.

The girl in the red jumper seemed to be leading the whooping dance around the small, expectant figure. The boy, still fixing his gaze on the treetops, reached down, and touched the tip of a small brown pile with his index figure. As he straightened, Bill pushed against my leg and, in my annoyance at the dog for breaking the spell of my voyeurism, I almost missed the boy reach out his arm to the sky. Red jumper faltered, and fell to the grass, screaming. As the dancers stopped, and the girl on the ground kicked, a bird flew to the small boy, perching on his beckoning index finger. Quick as lighting, he grasped the bird with his other hand, and twisted its neck. I heard the faint, high pitched crack.

Again he reached upwards, and again a sparrow alighted, only to drop to the pile of dead birds. Red jumper screamed again as a third bird came to its caller and fell to the pile. A fourth. A fifth. The dancers had come close now, and were holding hands as a sixth bird died. Red jumper was silent as the pile grew, she staggered to her feet and joined the dancers but I could see her pallor, even from that distance. My senses returned and I blundered through the undergrowth towards the group of children to stop this wrongness. Something clamped onto my mind and I slammed against the trunk of a tree, grasping it like a long lost friend.

The boy had turned, and stood with his hand stretched out to me. Doubt and foreboding filled me as his beckoning filled my vision and the urge to go to him, to give my life up to him, hammered at me. I looked down to avoid that intense stare. Bile rose in my throat. Green stains were slashed across my chest from the lichen on the tree-trunk. My impelled legs were heavy, not mine to command. I fought, my arms clutching at the rough bark, my body compulsively jerking forward. An age of battling the urge to run to him and be consumed before a girl's scream broke the spell. ‘Martin!’

It shed the urge like the lifting of stone weights pressing the life from me. The desire to be another sparrow evaporated as the boy turned and fled with the others into the far woodland. I slid down the trunk, spent, its roughness scraping my back. I sat in the wet leaves, tears running down my cheeks and bewildered Bill licking at my face.

The Infinity Conundrum

 (Photo credit: mag3737)

Professor Liddle seemed to appraise his visitor coolly. Urquhart wore a camel greatcoat and a trilby. Unbuttoning the coat revealed a moss green suit, on his feet brown brogues finished off the odd appearance of a man outside his time. Liddle may have expected to see such a figure at the finishing post of a 1960s race track rather than in the sparkling modernist chrome and smoked glass surfaces of the Advanced Physics Institute.

'It was regarding your Turing Memorial Lecture yesterday, I came, actually,' Urquhart helped himself to a seat in front of Liddle's neat desk. 'I hear it was fascinating.'

'It appeared to have been well received, I do flatter myself to think.'

'What was it? "On Infinity"? I'm surprised it wasn't endless.'

'Very droll, Mr?'

'Urquhart. What was the premise? We are all atoms, wasn't it?'

'Not at all. I explained that we have an altogether too finite view of infinity. We see infinity as being really very big, but rarely do we afford the concept sustained thought that would allow us to truly appreciate infinity as it really is. So when we regard the universe as being infinite, we think of it as an expanse of stars that goes farther than we can see or imagine. It's a little like primitive tribesmen regarding the night sky as heaven. The scope of our imaginations and experiences limits how we can possibly conceive of the infinity of infinity.'

'I'm certainly starting to feel small. You shared a rather fantastic illustration, though.'

'It's by no means fantastic. If you wish to begin comprehending the vastness of the concept of infinity, you could perhaps regard the sun as being an atom and our planets as particles surrounding that atom. If that were the case, then we would be part of a larger entity, so huge that we could barely conceive of it. We would possibly be an atom of Flourine. We might be an infinitesimal part of a very large frying pan, for instance. And that frying pan would be held in hand by a woman cooking in a kitchen on a landmass on a planet so huge that we, standing on a particle of a single atom of Flourine, would find it hard to even scale in our tiny minds. And yet she and her planet are part of another atom, an infinitesimal element of an even greater hand in a greater kitchen.'

Urquhart shifted in his chair. His brown eyes were alive and inquisitive and he waved Liddle on.

'So as we imagine this onion skin of worlds of infinitely larger size, we must also conceive that for them time moves at an infinitely slower pace. Our smaller size quickens us. We are correspondingly more volatile, you see? If the universe is truly infinite, even our concept of time has to give way to an infinite range of the passing of time.'

'I think I do. But you are talking of remarkable scales here. It all sounds, well, fantastical.'

Even his visitor's vocabulary seemed a little old fashioned, Liddle may have pondered, but his mind wouldn't really have been on his audience, but on his favourite subject and he would have been on a race to complete his thought process. 'Infinitity is by its nature fantastical. So we have dimensions to infinity, not just the planar infinity of a universe so large we cannot imagine it, but a universe so small we cannot imagine it. You see? And then we have infinity of scale and of time to take on board. How many thousands of lifetimes on our planet will pass before that frying pan containing its atom of flourine as part of its non-stick coating will be put on the hob and heated. And how long will the changes of that heating process take to manifest themselves in our solar system? You start to see the scale?'

'Yes, but-'

'And so it is for our own frying pan. We are on a scale, just one layer of this infinite onion skin of nested universes, our own frying pan contains countless million solar systems, each containing in its turn countless million more.'

'Which is all very well, but it doesn't explain the odd leap to nuclear-'

Liddle's animation took on an annoyed edge. 'Odd leap? Don't be a fool, man! Think about it! Our universe consists of a perfect amount of mass, which never changes. We might change the state of matter, but we don't change the amount of matter. And so there is balance across this whole infinity of universes. Except for one small problem: every time we split an atom for nuclear energy, we are releasing the power of the destruction of an infinite number of universes smaller than our own. That wondrous release of inexplicable energy is because we are inflicting infinite gigadeath on countless, increasingly infinitesimal, planets and systems. In our natural state we disturb nothing in the universe, but this constant atomic holocaust is inflicting untold destruction in the infinite layers below us. And I believe as an ultimately self repairing system, as all natural systems are, the universe will move to stop us in time.'

Urquhart sat forward, his face unhappy. 'It is a fascinating view of things, Professor, but it has sadly cost your whole audience their lives as, I am afraid, it will cost you yours.'

'I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean,' Liddle twisted in his chair to rise, but there was a gun in Urquhart's hand and Liddle would only have had a second to note the darkness of its little mouth when a sharp report followed by a tremendous impact to his head flared his world into darkness.

Urquhart placed the gun back in his pocket and peered over the desktop at the dead scientist splayed out on the floor. He died because he knew too much and talked too much and spread dangerous ideas that had all too much impact on the gullible and impressionable public. And someone has to weed out thinking like that before it gets out of hand and threatens our cosy view of the world, a view so important to the functioning of a healthy society. It's a job that knows no limits and is, like the universe around us, timeless. But someone, you'll understand, has to do it.

You might have worked out by now that I am Urquhart.

And I'm behind you.