f laxbooks

This edition published in Great Britain by flaxbooks, Storey Institute,

Meeting House Lane, Lancaster, LA1 1TH. Tel 01524 62166.
www.litfest.org

All works © their respective authors

Square Cuts (flax001) © flaxbooks

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted, by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the
publisher and individual creators.

flaxbooks is the publishing imprint of litfest

Lancaster and District Festival Ltd. trading as litfest.
Registered in England
Company Number: 1494221
Charity Number: 510670

Editor: Sarah Hymas

Design and layout: Martin Chester at litfest

f laxbooks
 oreword
Lancashire and Cumbria, synonymous with some of the best-known names
in English literature, are vibrant literary regions today. They are home
to many talented writers – some published, some unpublished – but all
producing exciting new work in a variety of genre.
In a publishing industry that suffers from being London-centric, with the
vast majority of publishers, scouts and literary agents based in the capital,
it is vital that good writing from the regions is showcased and celebrated.
Square Cuts is a very positive step in the right direction.
Mollie Baxter offers a glimpse of love remembered in Thinking in Slices;
Andrew Michael Hurley provides a snapshot of a relationship in Guns and
How They Work; there is a tempting first chapter from Lynne Alexander’s
novel Whale, and Hendryk Korzeniowski offers an expertly dry comment
on commercially-bought immortality in Sleeping with Walt Disney. From the
sparseness of Ian Seed’s short pieces to Peter Wild’s moving The Other Side
via Jane Eagland’s unsettling Wind, this anthology gives us an idea of the
breadth of writing from authors in Lancashire.
Whether authors have been born and bred here, or have arrived in
the region from elsewhere (is it surprising that writers are drawn to its
landscapes and its towns?), Square Cuts shows that this part of the country
enjoys a robustly healthy literary scene that includes some of the best that
British writing has to offer.
Jane Smith
Managing Director, Jane Smith Literary Agent Ltd.
October 2006

f laxbooks
ontents
Mollie Baxter
Thinking in Slices 1
Ian Seed
Consequences 7
Andrew Michael Hurley
Guns and How They Work 9
Ian Seed
Shadows 14
Peter Wild
The Other Side 15
Ian Seed
Mine Before Night 20
Jane Eagland
Wind 21
Ian Seed
Until We Die 27
Lynne Alexander
The Whale 28
Ian Seed
All Kinds of Dust 33
Hendryk Korzeniowski
Sleeping with Walt Disney 34

f laxbooks
Thinking in Slices

Click here to hear Mollie read

from Thinking in Slices

Click here for Mollie’s profile

Mollie Baxter
1
 slice tomatoes in the kitchen, 50p from the kids’ stall down the road. It is
the summer holidays, they are bored, so they sell their father’s vegetables.
I chose the hard fruits, tight on their stems, and watched the girl put them
solemnly into a bag.
“Have you plans?” you say and I jump, the blade slithering through
peppery tomato guts on the wooden board.
“Just supper.”
You drift round to my side, your face sharp, your body in soft focus.
“You taste of garlic,” you say. This is a kiss. This is how you speak:
through phrases I remember from when you were alive. Over time, as I
forget, your vocabulary gets narrower. One day, I suppose, you will be silent.
You will have to speak through your eyes again.
“Have you plans?” you say softly.
You are asking what is wrong.
“No plans. Going to relax.”
“You need to focus on the exams,” you command, confidence returned.
You are blocking the way to the patio door, so I walk through you
carrying my plate and glass. A sensation like the moment I watched you
stop breathing.
“No, I don’t. I passed them. Years ago. I have a job now. I teach.”
“You need to focus on the exams,” you say, full of concern. I run out of
movement, correct the slope of my plate and watch liquid circle.
“I will. I promise.” I slug my wine.
They took photos of your head, looked at it slice by slice, went back and
looked again. Your brain was as cluttered as your desk, it took too long

Mollie Baxter
2
to find the problem. Perhaps if you’d been tidier you’d still be here. But
this wasn’t something that could be argued out on paper, referenced and
sourced. When you died, part of me thought it served you right.

I sit, my back to the patio step, and start to eat my tomatoes. The dressing is
sharp. You bumble out like an old carrier bag and snag against my back.
“You taste of garlic,” you whisper lovingly. I can’t feel you, even though
part of your blur has settled like an arm around my shoulders.
“Have you plans?” you ask, tenderly, from a great distance. You want to
know how I am, what’s wrong. Drops of oil float and slosh around in the
vinegar and I wish I’d brought some bread.
“No plans.”
“You should focus on the exams,” you reply. I look at you then, straight
into your dead eyes, like those in the head of an old man in a Victorian
photograph and see you looking past me, back to over eight years ago.
I remember the conversation. You were in the study, reading. I was
looking down the sweep of strings to the bow, trying not to tilt, and
suddenly feeling a shriek in my finger. Gut had worn through skin and
bright blood smeared the wood.
“Great!” I spat, setting the bow down roughly, hobbling to my feet, stiff
and clumsy, the cello slumping like a prudish dog. Your head lifted in a
silent question. I held my fingers up. “That’s the exam written off.”
“Can you not still play?”
“I’ll have to.”
You’d put your book down, slid in a marker, and said something that

Mollie Baxter
3
I now can’t remember. Another phrase lost. I wanted you to say or do
something helpful. You just sat there looking troubled, with your palms on
your knees. Gentle, preoccupied, but alive. I held out my finger. You wiped
it clean with your handkerchief before looking up at me with a questioning
face that I’d learned meant “kiss me”.
I kissed you. It must have felt like something.
“You taste of garlic,” you said and I shoved you.
“Alright, you were right, little cloves are stronger.”
We rocked a little and I looked out of your window. That night I had
cooked for us and you, a picky eater, had finished everything.
“I want to cook more,” I said. “I think I’ll find some recipes. Try them out
on you.”
“You should focus on the exams,” you said.
“What’s the point?”
“Because you could do it. You could go professional.”

I shiver a little and look down at my plate. All the tomatoes are gone, I need
bread. If I get up, you’ll drift away, and I don’t want you to go. Your cheek is
close to my ear. I tilt my head and whisper “I passed the exams.”
You are silent. I wish I could hear your breath. I lower my voice further,
all my senses reaching. “I need you to listen and try to understand,” I say,
slowly. “I took the exams after you died and I passed them, but I couldn’t get
in. Do you understand? I teach kids to play violin. It’s alright. That’s where I
am now.”
The heads of lilac bob and the lanterns rock.

Mollie Baxter
4
 “You should focus on the exams,” you say after a pause, with self-
assurance. My fork slides off the plate.
“Why, Richard? Why should I focus on the exams?”
“Because you could do it. You could go professional.”
I have no breath left. You’re an old record, a loop, an empty airwave.
You don’t exist. We’re not really having this conversation. I don’t mean
to, but the plate flies off my lap and through you. It lands, clattering and
upturned on the patio. It spins noisy little figures of eight, the oil and
vinegar caught, like dew on a web, on your shadows. I pull up onto my feet
and you sink down.
“Forget it!” I yell, but your body is starting to pull apart. I look
down, see vinegar and oil drip onto the flags; you are a flameless, burning
photograph, your face calm, benign, but odd, like a video caught on pause. I
see a blue mist rise up into the night, like one of the sublimated solids you
liked to write about. It tumbles into itself, rising, then the wind catches it.
In a few seconds you are gone and I sink back down.

The weather changes and I find myself nursing a cold, trying to remember
the winter routine. The school is still in the builders’ possession when I park
in a dusty space between the skip and a baffling new sculpture on the lawn.
The school is quiet. The kids are still away, it’s just us grown-ups and we
rustle about timidly like insects in leaves. We barely have enough presence to
fill the staff room. I clean out the music store, a once-yearly job, that usually
doesn’t get done even then, but I’m quiet today, have been, actually, ever
since you left. I feel like I am listening.

Mollie Baxter
5
 I stack the brass in the corridor, dust the cases off with an old bit of
curtain. Go through all the sheet music, manage to fill two binbags with
rubbish. Find an old student cello at the back. Full size, basic. I hold it
lightly by the neck.
I pick at a dot marking off the fret, small and green like a tomato
seed. I don’t need another hobby. I’ve got to take the floor up in the
bathroom, get a shower put in. I stroke the fingerboard with my thumb,
remembering the pull of notes. What would happen if I picked up the bow?
I hold my breath and wait for you to walk through me.

Mollie Baxter
6
Ian Seed
Ian’s contribution to this anthology consists of five prose poems.
The first of these is on the next page. Follow the navigation after each
story to find more of his writing.

Click here to hear Ian read

Consequences and Shadows

Click here for Ian’s profile

7
Ian Seed
 onsequences
A stone dislodged, running through grey light, the clatter of an unseen train
to our left. We stop at the edge of the forest. I can still see us, strolling down
the main thoroughfare of the pink town by the sea, latticed sunlight across
our faces, winter forgotten. Such kids then, spirited out of the business up
north, as if a promise were for a lifetime. Now afraid to negotiate beyond the
sound of our own breathing in the dark.

Click titles below to read

more of Ian’s work

Shadows
Mine Before Night
Until We Die
All Kinds of Dust

8
Ian Seed
Guns and How They Work

Click here to hear Andrew read

from Guns and How They Work

Click here for Andrew’s profile

Andrew Michael Hurley

9
 find Chris in tears on the floor of the garage. He is surrounded by parts
of my guns. He tells me that he was trying to find out how they worked and
had taken them apart and got the parts mixed up and thought he might find
the missing parts in the other guns and so on.
He has a system, though.
All the parts are laid out separately on the floor and he is trying to match
them up to the exploded diagrams in the manuals he has open next to him,
their pages oily from his fingers.
“One at a time, Chris,” I say and he starts crying again.
I look at his T-shirt, which has a large number 73 on it and the word
Brooklyn arching over the top. His mother brought it back from Greece last
year. It was too big for him then and now it rides up his arms and onto his
shoulders.
“Let’s do this one first,” I say and pick up the handle of a Browning.
Chris smiles and he sits down in the armchair and looks tiny again. His
feet do not reach the floor and the magazines sticking out from beneath the
seat cushion are scratching his calves. He sits cross-legged instead and I look
at the battered soles of his trainers. When he is settled he takes an inky-
looking sandwich off a plate balanced on the chair arm and bites into it and
then reaches for the glass of milk on the workbench.
“What’s in the sandwich?” I ask, and Chris opens it for me to see. He
offers to make me one and, stuffing the rest of the bread into his mouth,
goes off to the kitchen with a copy of Guns & Ammo under his arm. I look at
the Browning and begin to pick out the parts I need from the scattering of
metal on the floor.

Andrew Michael Hurley

10
 There is a bee tapping on the window and getting caught up in a spider
web. I watch it for a while and after going mad it seems to settle and then
remains very still.
Chris comes back in with the sandwich and a glass of milk and I notice
that he has washed his hands which means I am on my own now. I have
taken over.
“Do you know what this is?” I ask, and he shakes his head and hands me
the sandwich. “It’s a Browning. A GP35,” I say, and bite into the sandwich,
which is thick with ham and red onion and cheese. “It’s American,” I add
through a mouthful of bread. Chris nods and puts the milk on the worktop.
He watches as I reassemble the gun and asks me about the bicycle that
is hanging from the ceiling. He wants to fix it up so that he can come and
see me more often. He squeezes the tyres and spins the back wheel, which
shudders and grates against the mud guard. All it would need would be
some new wheels, he says. We could fix it up, he says, when we’ve put the
guns back together. I tell him to put out his hand, which he does, and I lay
the Browning in his palm. His wrist bends with the weight and he brings up
his other hand and holds it steady – tiny fingers wrapped around the handle
and cupping the underside of the barrel.
“Try and aim it at the back wall,” I say, and Chris holds the pistol out in
front of him. It shakes and he lets it fall, laughing. He hands it to me and I
hook it onto the rack.
He picks up the frame of the Beretta and asks me about the writing on it.
“1942: that’s the year it was made,” I tell him, “and the letters are Roman
numerals for twenty-one. That means it was made twenty-one years into the

Andrew Michael Hurley

11
reign of the Fascists.”
Chris asks me about the Fascists and I tell him while I put the Beretta
back together and then move onto the others – a Mauser, a Luger PO8 with
the long, sleek barrel and the Webley which, when complete, I give Chris to
hold.
“That was your great-granddad’s,” I say. Chris weighs it in his hands and
puts his finger on the end of the hammer. “Here.” I take hold of his thumb
and together we pull back the hammer until the gun is cocked. Chris smiles
and I let go. “Pull the trigger,” I say. He looks doubtful. “It’s alright,” I tell
him, “there’s nothing in it.”
Chris aims at the back wall and pulls the trigger and the hammer snaps
down. He tries it himself but can’t pull the hammer back with one thumb
and clamps the gun between his thighs and uses two. He pulls the trigger
again and the snap echoes flatly under the corrugated iron roof.
“Look at the handle,” I say and Chris turns the pistol over in his hands.
He looks puzzled. “See the bit cut out of it?” Chris nods and runs his finger
over the gash in the handle. “A German attacked him with a sword.” Chris
asks if his great-granddad killed the German. “I don’t know, Chris,” I reply,
“I suppose he must have done.”
He looks at the pistol again and says he is sorry for taking the guns apart.
“It’s alright,” I say. “It’s traditional.”
All the guns are fixed and on the rack on the wall. Chris asks me about
bullets. He asks me if I have any. I go to the cupboard on the back wall and
unlock it and take out a cardboard box. I show it to Chris and he opens it
and stares at the bullets inside.

Andrew Michael Hurley

12
 “Take one out if you like,” I say, and Chris puts in his hand and takes one.
He rolls it between his thumb and forefinger, then presses the pad of his
thumb against the tip and says that it is sharp.
“They used to be flat in the old days,” I tell him. “They were called man-
stoppers.”
He wonders why they were flat.
“Well,” I say, “they weren’t exactly flat; their tips were dented inwards.”
He asks why.
“When they hit you they exploded outwards,” I say and demonstrate with
my hand, starting with a fist against his chest and opening my fingers into a
star. “They were meant to knock you down, not kill you outright.”
He looks at his reflection in the surface of the bullet and I continue.
“If you get knocked down and injured then other soldiers have to help
you, and if they’re helping you they can’t fight. It’s quite clever really.”
He asks me how fast bullets go.
“Depending on the gun,” I reply, “they can go twice as fast as sound; faster
than anything you could say.”
Chris puts the bullet back. He asks me if a bullet can be used again if it’s
fired but doesn’t hit anything. I say no, but I’m not sure of the answer, it’s not
something I’ve ever thought about, and I try to picture a bullet coming to
rest on the ground like an aeroplane.

Andrew Michael Hurley

13
 hadows
Brushing the dust from your clothes, you make your way into the town, as if
it has been waiting for you all your life, but the town knows nothing of your
existence, even after you have spent years wandering its streets. Footsteps
clump past your tiny room each night. The same door slams shut at the end
of the corridor. Someone calls your name. The voice is always behind you,
no matter how many times you turn around.

Click titles below to read

more of Ian’s work

Consequences
Mine Before Night
Until We Die
All Kinds of Dust

14 Ian Seed
The Other Side

Click here to hear Peter read

from The Other Side

Click here for Peter’s profile

15 Peter Wild
 t is as if they are strangers who have stopped alongside each other on the
street, one of them perhaps asking the other for directions. Only in the
time it takes to ask and be answered, they have lived together and married
and almost raised a child. The evaporated street frightens them, its sudden
lifting striking them like the base of a carbon black frying pan. They find
themselves surrounded by books and furniture and clothing and memories
– memories more than anything else. Where did all these fucking memories
come from? How do I have memories of you, when you are a stranger?
This was how she looked at him. Her bitter look accused him. It was rape,
what he had done. The time they had spent together, the time they had
spent becoming strangers together, the time they had wasted loving each
other enough to make a child, all that time made useless.
Each of them was burned out. Each of them was a burned out husk,
the remains of a body, life after life has gone. Crucially, that burning
– the burning of everything that made each of them an individual – left
them strangers. It took what they were and left only grief and pain and
unfocused rage.

2.
For a long time, they slept alongside each other. The death of the child
altered the way they were with each other. Where once she had curved
within the S of his body – the pair of them seen above, an ear covered
by blankets – now they remained apart, exclamation points on the left
and right side of the bed. The middle of the bed became an uncharted

16 Peter Wild
wilderness that neither dared broach. Each lay listening to the clock tick
away the hours and minutes of the night. Neither slept, or slept for very
long. Occasionally, she roused him, when exhaustion had proven so great
he did sleep, accusing him in her rebukes about his snoring, of not loving
the baby enough to stay awake throughout the rest of time.
What he intuited from her pinched stings: how could he sleep when
sleep was the enemy that had stolen their child? What he read in her face
provoked him beyond all countenance. He wanted to rage in the face of her:
I can sleep because in sleep I forget. I can sleep because sleep is like death
and I want to die. When the rage gripped him, his entire soul crippled
crisp upon the tip of a white hot soldering iron, he could reduce everything
down from abstract pain and complex grief and civil mourning to nothing,
to wanting to die. He never told her, but inside, over and over and over
again: I want to die.
Sleep became a kind of admission. I am guilty. It was my fault. Take it
out on me. Accuse me. My grief is not great enough to keep me awake. I am
a terrible man. I am the worst father. I cannot pretend to attain the lofty
heights of true grieving.
He wanted to tell her. In his head, the words confused themselves. Was he
angry with her? Did he blame her? Did he blame himself ? Did he hope they
would make it through this awful black tumour time? Or was it time to walk
away from all of the cancer shadows? Was it time to call this a day? He wanted
to tell her that her grief lacked honesty. He wanted to tell her that she was
phoney. He wanted to tell her that the thought of his little girl weighed upon
him throughout the magnified seconds of every day.

17 Peter Wild
He wanted to tell her that he had never felt pain like this. He wanted to
tell her that what he was feeling was not pain, was so beyond pain as to be
psychic torture, as to require a new word (wanted to tell her that this – the
desire to find a word to express the sheer scale of his pain – felt like vanity,
felt like dishonesty, felt like the exact thing that the silent voice in his head
accused his wife of ).
He wanted love then, more than anything else. He wanted each of them
to have the movie reconciliation. She would break down in the kitchen.
Perhaps she would stab him or throw a plate at his head, wounding him
in some obvious direct way, blood – actual blood (the blood their baby
never spilled) – coming between them. They would be standing in the
kitchen in the first direct sunlight of the day, neither of them having slept,
screaming, and suddenly the screaming would break (the physicality of a
tide turning), and they would weep. She would hold him as he howled. He
would hold her through her silence (because he expected her final, great
period of mourning to be silent, noble, ridiculous). It would not be over.
It would never be over. But, in that instant, each of them would recognise
that they had crossed the blistered desert and reached the other side.
He wanted each of them to reach the other side. He thought he wanted
each of them to reach the other side together, but he wasn’t sure and that
debate raged alongside the greater debate of how you cope with the loss of
a part of yourself (a part that was greater than a limb, that combined the
physicality of an arm or a leg with something else, some sensient part like
memory or taste).

18 Peter Wild
3.
The rest is like a battle pitched in the pocket of a wet overcoat. He looks at
her and he is confounded by the look of her. She is a stranger. He looks at
her and he is wiped clean like a classroom slate. He looks at her and thinks,
who are you? Just who are you? How did I get to know you? And she’ll stare
back with a face only the mother of a dead baby could love and say, just die,
will you? Dig a hole in the ground, lie down and suck the ploughed earth
over your body and take a deep breath. Take a deep breath, suck the earth up
through your nose, take a hunk of that dirt in your mouth and swallow, keep
on eating until you’re full of dirt and you’re made of dirt and dirt is your
name and dirt is all you remember. And I’ll say fine, and she’ll say good, and
we’ll stand back to back walk ten paces and fire and it’s as good as over.

19 Peter Wild
 ine Before Night
Come to the trick of avoiding touch, wandering through Sunday afternoon
crowds by the river Po, obliged to come to a sticky end. Sudden warmth
under the sheets, skin against skin, afraid for a moment she would repulse
him. Power could not reside all in one room, whatever their illusions.
There is another circle, unseen, behind this one. A shirt takes the shape
of the chair it hangs on, the time of vacancy where we worship winners.
Granted, but what can replace the heat of your hands, playful at the crucial
moment? Roles crumble, delve to a deeper set.

Click titles below to read

more of Ian’s work

Consequences
Shadows
Until We Die
All Kinds of Dust

20 Ian Seed
Wind

Click here to hear Jane read from Wind

Click here for Jane’s profile

21
Jane Eagland
 he library windows rattle in their frames. My new suit was a mistake:
far too thin for this February night and the heating’s gone off, of course.
The doors swing open, bang shut. All evening a branch has been tapping morse
code on the pane.
I glance at my watch. 9.25. Everyone else will be at home by now, in the warm.
Five more minutes then I’m off. I look at my list of appointments again. All ticked
apart from one. Where are they?
A shadow falls across the desk.
“Miss Gibson?”
A coat in a cruel shade of pink fills my view.
“I am the mother of Anthony Brunstein.” Slight accent, difficult to place.
Somewhere Middle European.
She eases her bulk onto the plastic chair. I have a momentary vision of the
chair buckling, sending her sprawling onto the carpet, like an uncontrollable
blancmange…
“Oh yes. Hello.”
Anthony’s dark eyes in a fleshy face, chins resting on swathes of crimson scarf.
Something sharp hits the window.
I check my mark book then set off. “Anthony seems to have settled in well.
Most of the time his work is very good but just occasionally –”
She puts out her hand to stop me. “Anthony is very upset.” Her voice is deep,
emphatic.
“Is he? Why?”
“The last essay. You gave him a poor mark.”
“Yes, the analysis of Ted Hughes’ poem ‘Wind’. That’s what I mean – in class

22
Jane Eagland
he’s perceptive but sometimes –”
The hand waves again. “He worked very hard at that essay. He was very
disappointed.” Her eyes are moist with emotion.
The tapping on the window is more urgent, threatens to break the glass.
I pick up Anthony’s essay. Aim for sympathetic but brisk. “I’m sorry
to hear that. But it illustrates perfectly what I’m talking about. Look, this
is what Anthony’s written: In these lines, the wind symbolises the potency of
the male, his thrusting virility. The earth symbolises the female. The hills are her
breasts and the wind is described as a knife, an obvious phallic reference … You
see what I mean?”
She has been listening with her eyes shut, smiling and nodding her
head. “Yes, very good.” Her eyes snap open and fix on me. “So why you not
give him a good mark?”
I choose my words. “Anthony’s ideas are interesting, but the examiner
will be looking for his understanding of style and structure –”
Mrs Brunstein frowns. “The meaning is not important?”
“Well, yes, it is, and it’s impressive that Anthony has such … original
ideas, but it might be better if he was more … speculative. We can’t know
that Hughes intends all this symbolism. Perhaps he’s just describing the
wind. He’s exaggerating its power, of course, but –”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. In this poem he is describing an act of sexual congress between
Mother Earth and Father Wind.” She illustrates this with a sweep of her
arm, her expression daring me to contradict her.

23
Jane Eagland
 It takes me a moment to respond. “I don’t think –”
“Yes. It is very clear. As I told Anthony.”
I swallow. “You’ve discussed the poem with Anthony?”
“Oh yes. I also am studying. For a degree with the Open University.”
The doors bang shut, making us both jump. Outside a low thrumming begins.
I take a deep breath. “Mrs Brunstein, I’m glad you take an interest in Anthony’s
work. But it would be better if he did it by himself so I can see how much he’s
understood.”
“But he needs my help. I thought so before and now it is clear. You are not a
good teacher.”
“I –”
Her eyes flash. “You think the poem is just about the wind? Why would the
poet write just about the wind? He is not a weather forecaster.”
I try to keep my voice level. “No, of course, he isn’t. But, you see, in a way the
wind is not important. What matters is the poem. It’s a literary construct, a pattern
of words and images and Anthony should focus more of his attention on that
pattern and not worry too much about interpretation.”
A silence as she surveys me. I force myself to meet her gaze.
Finally, she says, “you do not understand the spirit of literature. Obviously, this
poem, like all poems, has a deeper meaning and you do not see it.”
“Now look, Mrs Brunstein –”
She leans towards me, and her body seems to swell. “I came tonight expecting
an apology from you. I am not satisfied with your attitude.”
“But, Mrs Brunstein, I –”
She rises to her feet, majestic. “You know nothing. I wish to see the

24
Jane Eagland
Headmaster. You will please show me to his study.”
“I’m afraid he’ll have gone home.”
Plucking at her scarf, she thrusts her chin forward. “Very well. I await your
apology. For now, that will have to do. But that is not the end of the matter.” She
sinks onto the chair again, challenging me with her stare.
A flush of annoyance rushes to my face. I open my mouth to speak and all the
lights go out.
“Oh!” Startled, I drop my pen. The darkness is absolute. In it, the thrumming is
louder, closer, and the back of my neck prickles; thick blackness presses in on me
… I can’t breathe…
A low moan near at hand brings me to my senses. “Mrs Brunstein? Are you all
right?”
No reply.
“The wind has blown down the power lines, I expect.” Even to myself, my voice
sounds thin. “Mrs Brunstein? We’d better make our way to the front door.” I try to
sound encouraging.
A gasping sound as if she too is struggling for breath. Something skitters
across the window and I jump, my heart knocking in my chest. We’ve got to get
out of here.
A flickering light appears. “Anybody there?”
“Yes, it’s me, Bill. Sue Gibson. I’ve got a parent with me.” My voice is quavery
with relief. I have to stop myself from grabbing hold of the caretaker’s reassuring
bulk, looming behind the candle flame.
“What you still doing here? Time you was off home, never mind the
power cut.”

25
Jane Eagland
 “Yes, we’ll have to stop.”
“Here – see your way out.” He strikes a match and a second flame appears.
“Thanks, Bill.” I turn back to the table. “Mrs Brunstein? Time to go.”
She is still sitting, hands clasped to her chest. In the smoky light her eyes are
glittering, but her breathing is steadier.
I pick up my papers. “Shall I show you to the door?”
“Yes, I will come.” Slowly, with difficulty, she rises from the chair.
“Night then, Bill.”
We make our way along the corridor past the vibrating windows. As soon as we
reach the front door, the candle blows out.
I stop in the porch, leaves eddying about my ankles. “Can you find your car,
Mrs Brunstein?”
“I think so. Outside is not so dark. I do not like the dark.”
“No. I don’t either.”
A pause then as if there be might be more to say.
After a minute or two I break the silence. “Good night.”
She sets off across the yard.
I step out from the shelter of the porch. Immediately the wind tears at my
jacket, tugs at my hair. I pick my way to the car through fallen branches, swirling
crisp packets. The door whips open. After I’ve tumbled in, it takes both hands to
pull it shut. The car shakes, gusts buffeting it from side to side.
But there is no wind in here.
In the calm space I take a deep breath. Then another.
When I feel steadier, I turn on the ignition.

26
Jane Eagland
 ntil We Die
All kinds of freedom. Two figures approach each other across a distance,
then pass without a word or a nod of the head. We keep trying. Being poor,
we are at the mercy of others. A final word, a last-ditch attempt to make us
see sense. You’ll be useless one day, too. Threats and obscenities in our ears.
Yet there is still a dream wondered by friends. Who will be the first to speak?
Silence is an unauthorised gift. All kinds of monsters are possible, and new
births with them.

Click titles below to read

more of Ian’s work
Consequences
Shadows
Mine Before Night

All Kinds of Dust

27 Ian Seed
The Whale

Click here to hear Lynne read from The Whale

Click here for Lynne’s profile

28
Lynne Alexander
 hapter One
For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying
– the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring...
Moby Dick: The Dying Whale

Wallis stood onshore with the others. The group tried to get closer but were
kept back by a shore guard: “Official autopsy taking place, instructions not
to disturb.” The creature they were there to witness was beached on the
rocky skia about a quarter of a mile out into the estuary. “Looks like an
overturned boat,” someone said. Wallis agreed. A guy with a high powered
telescope offered her a look: “Try that.” She plugged her eye to the lens
socket, steadying herself. She saw not an animal but a shape in space.
The thing was far too big.
She thanked the telescope owner, peeled off from the group and headed
south towards the Point, over rocks and washed-up tide-junk: a turquoise
Lynne Alexander
plastic frog, its fingers so like the tendrils of dried stagshead seaweed;
several red spent cartridge shell cases; miles of orange and blue shiny twine;
a Premium and a Diet Coke; an 1851 marmalade pot too broken to salvage;
a mauvey-pink Tupperware lid; half a blue Thermos. Most of a mammalian
skeleton was scattered among the feathers and limbs of driftwood and semi-
rotted weedstuffs.
All this, she thought, our gaudy currency, thick underfoot.
She picked up a small chunk of blue-on-white china. As the shore was
being eroded, more and more fragments could be found among the rocks:
the remains of a Victorian pottery dump. The piece fit her palm. It showed

29
Lynne Alexander
two blue people: mouse-delicate, wearing tall buckler hats and bibs;
puritans, perhaps, on their way back from America. What, she asked them,
was it not so great over there after all?
At the next bay she found the remains of a fish. She knelt beside it.
Now this had potential. Originally three feet long, she calculated, it was
now reduced to its midsection. Who swiped your head, fish, eh? she asked
it: your tail? Its skin was orange, pitted and dull, like the rind of a smoked
cheese. It didn’t stink; no obvious blood. A collection of torn-off veins
and arteries extended out of the fish’s jagged front opening like so many
unfinished freeway flyovers; while one trumpet-like valve announced its
once-connection with the heart, that organ presumably having been swiped
along with other choice innards by herons and oystercatchers and any other
seabird that could get a look-in.
Wallis scrabbled for a pencil and paper but found only a petrol receipt
and a furred-up pen. Never mind, a doodle would remind her. Already, she
could imagine it as an installation arranged among whitened stones, its
viscera reaching out to disturb the airy, tasteful space of a gallery and its
even more fastidious visitors, barely identifiable as ‘fish’ in its head-and-
tailnessness. She almost thanked it for a find but then thought: no, too
realistic, do-able: boring. Forget it. A fish couldn’t swallow a man or a giant
squid whole. But then a fish was not a whale.
She could still hear voices plus clankings and revving noises, then a
chainsaw. The show was over. Late afternoon, a turning tide. Maritimers
talked of it as the moment when the waves reconsidered. What did it take to
perform that joined-up backflip? how did they get it together? But the tide

30
Lynne Alexander
was lapping at the rocks so she too had to reconsider.
Wallis made her way back towards the shore carpark, then swung left up
the path. She didn’t have far to go. Home was the end cottage in a row of
former fishermen’s dwellings looking smack out across the estuary. Behind
the cottage was her studio, an A-frame she’d had converted from the former
garage.
Wallis stood inside her porch watching as a pinwheel of knots flew over
the Bay. The sky turned black or as near-black as cloudy sky can be; and
then the sun, bulging out from below and laying its famous golden finger
across the Bay, retracted and was gone, leaving a matt black background with
only the dregs of an English glow. And the people with their telescopes, the
cops with their barriers and bullhorns, the Oceanographic Institute’s Land
Rover, all packed up and skedaddled, leaving the shore to Wallis and her
dog-walking neighbours. The whale was the last to take off.
They called her an artist with ‘an admirably focused focus’: a euphemism
for small beans. But – if she had to defend herself – surely it was about
limitation rather than timidity, of making work that was possible for you, on
a modest scale if necessary. Otherwise, what? You’d lose it. You’d become
another inflated idiot, another Turbine Hall blockhead. The whale was a
waste of time. But then she had plenty of it to waste.

A sandwich board outside the newsagent’s shop read: ‘Beached Whale

Found Washed Up In Bay’. It had made the front page, around ten times
the size of the man pictured standing beside it. “I’ll take two.” She rolled
the copies up, stuck them under her arm and walked back downhill towards

31
Lynne Alexander
the shore.
The thing about finding the thing you’re looking for without knowing
you’re looking for it is that, for a while anyway, you have to look away. She
flung the papers face-down on a chair and didn’t pick them up until later
that night. First she took a bath, lit a fire, drank a pint of cider and wished
she hadn’t. The photographer had shot the whale from below, half rolled
onto her back and away from the camera, belly fore, the underside of her
jaw smeared with blood, as if she’d been drooling in her sleep after a night’s
bingeing on schools of menhaden: bloated blousy, mottled, the great belly
blooming from a delicate to a dusky pink.

The sands on which she lay appeared in the photograph to be blank.

But look more closely – Wallis did – and you see they’re silvered with a
greenish tinge and textured like an acid-bitten etching plate. As for the
whale herself, here you’d be forgiven for thinking, what with her slackened
jaw and three-quarter incline, her general roll-me-over-and-do-it-again
look, that she might just be resting, a temporary hiatus in the busy life
of a large sea mammal until, say, the next tide comes rippling under her,
relieving her dried out pores and nearly collapsed lungs and thus inspiring
her to new life. Not so.

‘The female sperm whale was seen swimming up and

down the channel but, after the tide had gone out, was
washed ashore. Soon afterwards the whale died.’

32
Lynne Alexander
 ll Kinds of Dust
Music was our first love, but there was little time for that. For years we
assembled our ideas cautiously as we travelled from land to land, compiling
our survey. One day we were drawn to a tavern by the sound of singing.
A fatal error. The tune of the gipsy fiddle gave us glimpses of a reality we had
long buried deep beneath the surface. All kinds of dead people came to life,
an old skull, lain long in the snow, abandoned in search of something more
exotic and otherworldly, whatever could be lifted and turned slowly to reflect
the light coming from the next room. A fat man smiled behind the counter,
shelves of impossibly coloured bottles just an arm’s reach away. A girl with a
dark wing of hair across her temple approached our table.

Choose titles below

for Ian’s stories

Consequences
Shadows
Mine Before Night
Until We Die

33 Ian Seed
Sleeping with Walt Disney

Click here to hear Hendryk read

from Sleeping with Walt Disney

Click here for Hendryk’s profile

34
Hendryk Korzeniowski
 he cough sounds like cancer and doesn’t stop. The smoke would like to be suggestive of
seedy sixties strip joints, but it only manages to reach the level of an industrial town pre-
clean air act, 1956. The cigarette shakes and the interviewer nods sympathetically.
“Go on…”
“They turned me down you know. Turned me down. Had it all you know.
Everything. Know it don’t look like it but had a good job, family, respect,
especially respect, and wealth. And I’m southern. Newport Pagnell may not
mean a lot to you, but I would’ve put it on the map. ‘Local boy done good’. Yeah.”
The interviewer nods through the smoke and tries not to breathe in.
“I won the lottery you know. Despite all the petty jibes and jealously, I won
millions. Millions and people sneered. Wot ya gonna blow it on? Mansion? Football
club? Private island? Slags and illiterates, the lot of them. Common as muck.
After I took the wife and kids to Florida” – he stops, seeing the reaction on the
interviewer’s face – “well, it’s the done thing, innit? And before you say a word
they had a lovely time. Gorgeous. How life should be. But I had bigger plans, oh
yes. And the bastards turned me down.”
The cigarette is stubbed out in an overflowing ashtray. With a shaky grace he
lights another.
“I did complain you know. All the time. Letters to Citizens Advice, letters
to MPs, letters to the media … and I kept up my pressure on them. Oh yes.
Ringing ‘em up at all hours. Once, they kept me on hold for five-and-a-half
hours, yes: five-and-a-half hours! Most people would’ve hung up, but not me.
Determined. Despite it being premium rate, I stuck in there, for the principle of
the thing.”
He pulls on the cigarette as though his life depends on it. Not anymore.

Hendryk Korzeniowski
35
 “And when I did finally get through, and past the robotic voice with the
useless options, I complained about the wait. And this tart with one O level
reckoned that because their service was so unique and very, very popular with
the rich and famous, delay was unavoidable, and that if I had trouble waiting for
over four hours, how could I possibly be happy waiting for eternity? Cheeky
bitch. So I said I could easily wait for eternity, but not if eternity meant hold
music consisting of ‘Candle in the Wind’. The 1997 version. And d’you know
what she said? She said, sarcastic slag, she said that the company based their
choice of music on a Gallup Poll on ‘Hits That Should Last Forever’. Just goes to
show people have no taste. Know nothing about inherent music value.”
He sniffs his own smoke, doubling the carcinomic certainty. “ The music should’ve
been Michael Jackson.” He sucks through the cigarette, its thin paper disappearing like
health.
“Despite these obstacles, I kept complaining. I wanted to know why they
had turned me down. You know, like when you get dumped. You keep asking
‘why?’ At the interview, they mentioned places were ‘subject to status’ and I just
laughed. If you can’t buy status, influence or close friends with lottery winnings
what good are they, eh?”
He pauses, pointing at the interviewer.
“Imagine how I felt when they said ‘No’. No. No, no, no. Their only answer.
Didn’t think I was ‘suitable’. And that was their last word.”
He shakes his head, all lank hair and dandruff, and contemplates the end of his
cigarette, now almost a butt. Looking for an answer in its end.
“Found out about data protection, didn’t I? Went along to their offices in
Putney, demanded to have access to what they’d said about me in their files,

Hendryk Korzeniowski
36
the jumped-up little undertakers. And d’you know the main reason why I was
unsuitable? Can you guess? Because of my bleedin’ occupation!”
Anger seems to animate his pallid face, as he selects another cigarette from his packet,
his hands shaking more violently than before.
“I told them they could fuck my occupation, being then ‘of independent
means’, ‘a man of leisure’, a gentleman. But they said all that was irrelevant. Skills
they were looking for, skills, achievements and personal qualifications. Denied
immortality because I couldn’t countersign a bloody passport form.
Can you believe that?”
He punctures the smoky air with his cigarette as though it were a sword of truth.
“I would never be cryogenically frozen for future generations because I’d only
been a team leader.”
Shaking his head, he continues to stab at the world with his cigarette.
“Bollocks to the lot of them! Of course I’m bloody important! Civilisation
will always require the middle manager! I was an official. I delegated. I often
said ‘functionality’. And I readily thought up convincing, but not necessarily true
statements for the general consumption of the staff below me.” He shakes his
head. “Those jumped-up Saint Peters just couldn’t understand,” gazes heavenward,
“there will forever be the team leader.”
All that can be heard is the soft, crinkling burn of cigarette paper using up its final
moments, unwitnessed.
“My family went against me too. Can you believe that? My age wasn’t in my
favour either. Too young. Too young! How can you be too young for something
like this? To be young is to be one of the immortals!”
He doesn’t light another cigarette, not this time. Just gloomily stares at his hands,

Hendryk Korzeniowski
37
which still shake.
“Mid-life crisis my arse. So I took the company to court. Argued this was age
discrimination – barring the young from living forever – but it fell on deaf ears.
Came out that I’d tried to bribe one of their staff. Lost everything.”
He pokes around the ashtray with his finger and points.
“But I did catch a glimpse of heaven. I did see the promised land. This lad
that worked for them took me down to the vaults to let me see their miracle
for myself, for a small fee. Showed me the oldest client, holding on for some
forty years now. I must admit I was expecting polished chrome cylinders – real
hi-tech equipment, gleaming rooms, highly antiseptic. It was this dank cellar in
Putney. And this old fridge, the kind they used to warn children against playing
with. Anyway, he slowly opened the door, and this light blazed out, heavenly
light, lots of smoke and a strong smell of plastic. When the smoke cleared
… I saw the very first cryogenically frozen head. God, it was so unreal. Even
had a sort of halo. I was in awe. He had no hair, granted; pipes coming out of
everywhere, true, but still with the grin of a kindly uncle, albeit a bit … severe.
I mentioned to their lad that those lips had tasted the last ten seconds of life.
‘Yeah’ he replied, ‘tastes like anti-freeze’. What would he know? But then he
really surprised me. He flicked a switch … and the eyes opened! They actually
opened. And he actually spoke! He was still hanging onto life. Sounded a bit like
a dalek, but he spoke!
“‘Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Zip-a-dee-ay…my, oh my, it’s a wonderful day…’
“I was gobsmacked. On my knees.
“The lad nodded. ‘Yeah, not very animated, is he?’”

Hendryk Korzeniowski
38
f laxbooks