All stories

‘Please do sink a welcome drink,’ spoke Angel to the Fool. ‘From all you see you may select, take any pleasure you detect. The finest tea, vintage Chablis, the sparkling, and the still. Indulge your every whim and want, your pleasure is our will.’

‘So unconfined? You are too kind,’ did Fool to Angel answer. ‘You have my praise, for such arrays I have not seen in all my days. I don’t possess, I must confess, the palate for such fare. If you’ll behest, may I request, a simple jug of beer?’

‘Beer? Just beer? Oh dear, how queer. I cannot say we have that here,’ the Angel stewed, but soon renewed. ‘How about instead some food? We’ve pan-fried hake, some rib-eye steak, or sinful chocolate truffle cake!’

‘I’m much obliged,’ the Fool replied. ‘I hungered all my time alive, for though I tried, I did not thrive, in riches I did not arrive. Of kindness, I was not deprived, but still I often had to strive, and furthermore I cannot lie, I did not eat the day I died.’

The Angel’s face lit up with glee, ‘Please then, come and sit with me. I’ve something you must surely see.’ The ghostly host plucked melba toast in fingers all a quiver, ‘You must try this, it’s simply bliss, it’s golden goose’s liver.’

The newly dead did shake his head and pondered o’er what must be said. ‘I do not mean, to sound unkeen, and such a spread I’ve never seen, but when I’ve dined, it weren’t refined, it’s simply not the life I led. If you could find, to be so kind, I’d take some chips wrapped inside bread?’

Foiled once more, the Angel swore, and looked frustrated to the floor. Duty hard upon them wore and at loose feathers, Angel tore. A thought occurred, they would make heard, and to the simple soul addressed, ‘Stomach aside, we must provide. How ‘bout pleasures of the flesh?’

‘Now, I’m intrigued,’ the Fool agreed. ‘How do you plan to meet my need?’

‘Anything that you desire. Anything which lights your fire. We’ve girls, there’s boys, and all between, orgies like you’ve never seen. Pleasures, pains, here nothing lacks. Ecstacy from lips to sac.’

‘That’s what I feared,’ the Fool declared, at which the Angel’s heart despaired. ‘Don’t get me wrong, temptation’s strong, for after all my blood runs red. Yet I feel the same in death as with my every living breath: with only they who I did wed, would I ever share a bed.’

‘Well then you will have to wait,’ seethed the Angel, quite irate. ‘For we cannot take a soul, who’s life still burns as white as coal. What then, Fool, have I to proffer? Tell me what you’d have me offer?’

Fool looked Angel in the eye. ‘I understand I had to die, and that to host me you must try, in Heaven’s pleasuredome. But if I can’t be happy here, the answer then to me is clear, and for this path I volunteer, you’ll have to send me home.’

At that, the beaten Angel sighed, and swallowed down its holy pride, and to the Fool softly replied, ‘Well played, my friend, for now, goodbye.’

Ragweek. 1974. Aberystwyth University.

Photographs . 1. Stanmore, Droop, Emily and Keith. 2. Emily and Stanmore. 3. Emily and Droop. 4. Emily and Keith

How important they’ed seemed.

Stanmore was “the legend”. He had the best traffic cone to statue ratio of anyone on the committee. Emily had first seen him in Fresher’s week, being wheeled down Pier Street in a hospital bed dressed as a St Trinian’s schoolgirl.

On the coach back from collecting in Coventry he’d thrown Emily a knowing leer as the gang bellowed out rugby songs; “A very fine lawyer is he! All day he facsimile, facsimile, facsimile” leaving her to the last line alone, “And when he comes home he facs me” amidst gales of laughter.

But he was a bad, self-regarding lover, too drunk to stay hard. She didn’t mind this but his bragging in the rag office the day after was designed to humiliate her for knowing. A valuable lesson in the weird ways of bitter men and casual sex. Served her right for shagging Chairman of the Rag committee just for the status boost she thought it would give her.

Droop was an altogether worse lesson, Dark-eyed and arrogant, there was something lupine, threatening and dangerous about him. Half way through their date she decided sex was not going to happen.

He’d raped her anyway in the woods by the golf course at 2am.

The next day in the rag office there was a nasty cartoon depicting her as a bicycle covered in rag office badges and flags.

For weeks after Emily’s confidence was shattered, so that she almost willed her public image true. Drinking till her liver ached and allowing poor, virginal Keith to fumble nervously at her bra straps. Twice managing something akin to sex.

But he was the safe space she needed. Helped her to start fighting back and valuing herself again, Buoyed by puppy-dog adoration.

Keith was dull, plodding and sweet. He suited her fragility while she worked out how to crawl away from her nightmare and swerve men like Droop and Stanmore. As her confidence returned she started to make friends with people in her halls and on her course instead.

She was soon able to dispense with Rag altogether, at which point she packed Keith in and enjoyed months without the dubious prop of coupledom.

When she saw them on Constitution Hill, the nasty boys communicated their disdain, feigning cold indifference whilst Keith trailed behind them and gazed after her longingly.

By 1980 she was happily married. She was pleased to hear that Stanmore’s post university life had unravelled and dismayed that Droop (now known as Rupert Ellcock-Jones) had become a Conservative MP. She’d heard nothing of Keith.

Until this morning, when his weird undying-love type letter had arrived in the post sent on by her parents.

Keith’s letter took her back uncomfortably to those stricken first two terms when she’d had no idea who or why she was, forcing her to remember how weak she had once felt. She wrote back the kindest letter she could and hinted that he too should try to find his way out of his memories and into adulthood. She opened the possibility of staying in touch by letter but, to her mild relief, he never wrote back.

When a small creature considers another even smaller creature, energy is created. This energy is a powerful sense of dominance and agency. The spider believed itself to be a mighty thing, with its swollen sac of legion baby spiders. By its own reckoning it was the harbinger of life and bringer of web death to smaller animals. As William Cocka’snoop observed the spider, however, he was infused with his own strength and might, seeing it only as a tiny thing. Placing his crooked thumb on the spiders engorged body he pressed very lightly, but that was all it took for the spider to pop and many lives to extinguish. William felt the energy in his body as a tingle. He picked up his cup of beer, poured it down his throat and with a manly flourish wiped his chin with his raggedy sleeve.

William Cocka’snoop wore a wooden crown on his straw hair and a red cape made of the remains of a lady’s dress. He had two legs, which is always a bonus, but one of them was withered and so he used a knobbled stick of ash as a crutch. With his tiny frame, ruddy cheeks and blue eyes he was the very essence of a jester, his Kings favourite fool.

William did the Kings bidding at all times of night and day. He danced for him when the King was sad and sang for him when the King was happy. When the King was angry William was pummelled and when bored he was teased and berated.

Wherever the King was, William was not far away. When the King was impotent, which was increasingly often, William fed him liver and oysters and rubbed the royal groin with lard. The King was of the belief that this was effective and brought about a sufficiency of erection to tup his mistress. His mistress was not so sure but valued her neck and moaned as per requisite, whilst William sat at the foot of the bed as still and quiet as a mouse.

William had been involved in just such a session this evening. On returning to his room a small translucent girl had scuttled toward him and whispered a summons in his ear. William was required on the hour at the Queens chambers. Overwhelmed with fear, he partook in the afore mentioned quaffing of ale and arachnid murdering to gird his loins. Two hours later William Cocka’snoop returned to his room, laid down and slept a dreamless sleep.

The next day the King kicked and pinched him, screamed and bawled at him, demanded song after song and dance after dance. William span, jumped, whistled and quipped with an unrelenting twinkle and a “hey nonnyno” that the King could not extinguish, until eventually he sent William away to the kitchen, with orders for him to be fed on swan and quince.

Nine months later the Queen, aged forty and hitherto barren, gave birth to a prince and heir. The tiny baby boy had bright blue eyes – “all babies have blue eyes”, ruddy cheeks – “all babies have ruddy cheeks” and one crooked thumb.

Balm for inflammation of the skin - twelve pennies

Compress for rheumatic joints - ten pennies and a skein of yarn

Tincture to cleanse wounds - one loaf of bread

They don’t look at her in the market or acknowledge they have met, though she can pick out their individual faces in the crowd, faces that had only ever looked at her by firelight. I cured your rheumatism, she thinks staring into the face of a woman who won’t meet her eyes. I saved your marriage, her glance conveys to a red faced man who looks aside from her stare.

They always come in the darkest part of the night, creeping through the back alleys to be certain that no-one sees. Smoke curls seductively from the chimney to beckon them to her, filling the air with woodsmoke and hellbrew.

The creak of the old wooden gate as it swings open, penetrating the heavy silence. The furtive footsteps. Then hurried tapping on the door, looks cast over shoulders, quickening breath and pounding hearts.

The resonating click of the door as the latch swings closed behind them.

Rickety shelves groan with the weight of jars and bottles plastered with peeling, yellowing labels in a spidery hand: Dragons Liver and Bat wing and Ox Sac, some in a mysterious, illegible script from far off lands that they can’t read.

She watches their eyes flit around the tiny room, taking in her stove and her books, her bottles and workbench, her coloured inks and dried herbs. The gutted hare dangling from the rafters and the kettle of something dark bubbling over the fire. She watches them take it in and steel their resolve.

It all would spill out there, among the potted herbs and jarred entrails, their wishes, their secrets, their pains, their desires. She lets them speak, lets them bare all and she would listen in silence until their speech fails and, finally, they ask her for help. For many, this is the hardest part.

She feels the heat of their fear as they speak, senses their desperation in seeking her out. The restless shifting of eyes that settle anywhere but on her face in the glow of the fire.

She is always astonished that more of them don’t run into each other on the way - on a very dark night she is certain of several visitors, maybe more if there is a storm. She supposed they thought it was witch weather, though it makes no difference if they come on a light summer evening or a wretched wintery one.

More often than not, all she had to do was listen. Sometimes she takes a compound of crushed herbs from a Dragon’s Liver jar, or a floral tincture from a bottle labelled Toad Warts and instructs them to take two with a glass of beer at the next full moon. They thank her, maybe slip her a coin or a loaf of bread and hurry away again, into the night.

Then the door swings open and they leave. In that instant her home changes from a terrifying witch's hovel, to a cosy, firelit cottage with a pretty garden and a well-stocked library.

And when they come for her in fire and fury, hypocrisy is an ailment her Dragon’s Liver can’t cure.

Another library lunchtime for Johnny, and he loved this place, holding court at the comfy chairs to all the fools playing hooky from their dole office training course or the worn out old men who came here to snooze. To them he was a big shot computer guy who came to the library to escape the stir crazy four walls of his home office.

It was perfect, except for the baseball cap wearing know it all they all called The Prof. He arrived and opened up a monster tome awkwardly upon on his knee so that everyone could read the title. king of the Thicks – Kenny - squinted at the book, and then haltingly said, ‘Bal-zac?’

The Prof smirked and his mouth to deliver one of his lectures.

Johnny cut in. ‘Yeah. Honoré de Balzac. It’s a French book about respecting, you know, your non-lady parts. Balzac is French for ball-‘

The sharp crack of the Prof’s book slamming closed cut him off. Kenny gazed at Johnny with wide eyes. The Prof e smiled thinly at Johnny.

‘With what do you hope to tax me today?’

Johnny waved his newspaper crossword. ‘You won’t get this one.’

‘Try me.’

Yep, The Prof sodding got it, and the next. He opened his mouth to reply to clue number three, then paused, hand going to the pocket of his jeans. He showed them his mobile phone. ‘Sorry, must take this.’

Kenny watched him leave, shaking his head in admiration. ‘He knows everything. He should be on TV.’

Johnny sank back in a huff, arms crossed, his crossword discarded. It didn’t matter what newspaper, The Prof was never stumped.

Kenny said, ‘That Prof, he must have the biggest brains in all of town.’

One of the snoozers – Bill - rolled to face them. Through lidded eyes he murmured to them. ‘One time I was doing up a pub, near the river. The landlord, Two Shits they called him.’ He opened his eyes to better check that Johnny and Kenny were interested. ‘He was the kind of man, if you took one shit, he’d take two, you get me?’

Johnny nodded. Maybe the problem was the standard of mind he was hanging about with. Excepting The Prof, this was what he had to work with.

Bill continued. ‘Anyway. The plans called for concrete blocks, with a compressive strength of fifteen kilo-newtons. A kilo-wotsit? I said to old Two Shits. Course he knew what that meant, only it would take a while to explain, and he had a phone call to make…’

Bill waited expectantly, but Johnny was saved from this sparkling anecdote by the return of The Prof. He finished his call just as he arrived and stowed his phone as he sat. He showed his smug smile, and said to Johnny, ‘Oh yes, that word you were after: Haemochromatosis. It’s a liver condition. Too much beer probably.’

Kenny shook his head in disbelief. Bill was shaking his head too, and staring at Johnny. Then he closed his eyes once more, and then quietly, almost ruminatively, he murmured, ‘Waiting for old Two Shits for ages I was. So I asked his wife, and she told me he was upstairs, with every single book he had, open on the floor.’