Photo by Berlinofx via Pixabay
Visitors from Japan
The Frog and Cat – Part 1 At the Restaurant
I’m in Indonesia and we’ll eat over in the restaurant district. But before I leave my small single room for the restaurant, I notice that I have a cut on my belly. It is on my right side, just above the joint of my hip but I won’t have any time to do something about it.
Read moreWe have arranged to meet at a small restaurant, the near side of the pedestrian zone, the one with the large inviting red trestle table outside.
As we finish our drinks, we notice on the other side of the street, on the second floor, there is an unlit neon sign for another eatery, two lowercase letters either side of three larger Kanji. We are trying to decipher it before we move on to get food. Only it’s already night, and late, and maybe we should just eat here after all.
We go inside and up some stairs to a small room with two bare Formica tables hastily pushed together. The waiters first cover them with white tablecloths, and butt the tables up against one wall; but there is not enough room until we shift the tables back away from the wall and open up the head of the table.
“Reed or Cameron can squeeze in then,” I suggest.
Elaine is already sat down as well as Mum, and Siobhan. And I sit on one side with two others there but I am complaining that I should be opposite.
“It won’t make a difference,” says Elaine from the head of the table.
“But our elbows will knock,” I reply, spreading out my arms to illustrate the point.
There’s an ache in my stomach that I brush off. Then I get up to squeeze into the space on the other side of the table. I can sit the other side of Mum as well, I point out.
As I sit down a group of Scottish dancers come into the room. They are prancing in a highland fling, legs with heavy stockinged plaid socks swirling, arms high. They troupe into the room as part of the entertainment. I can join them, I suggest, but I stay sat while the sound of bagpipes from the other room urges the dancers in.
A Chinese girl sat behind us on a chair flat against the walls, knees pressed together, is talking to a boy in the chair next to her.
“Shhhht,” and I motion to her, forefingers snapped across my mouth, Zip It, before pressing an index finger to my lips. My gesture feels unintentionally harsh.
And when dinner is done, and I return to my room and close the door for the night I return to my cut and notice how the vein underneath now traverses my belly and down to my groin where, on the right side, there is another cut. My groin bleeds slightly, a bright red star.
Then I pull up my shirt and the vein continues in the opposite direction, up from the cut on my belly, across and over towards the left side of my chest. It throbs purple and I daren’t pull my shirt up further to see where the engorged vein ends.
I pick up a glass that I left lying in the small sink by the side of my bedroom door and think to drink the water left in it, but there is a frog is in the glass partially hidden in its purple liquid. There are flecks of white mould as well, and I am about to put a lid on the glass to stop the frog bouncing out but I am too late. The frog jumps from the glass and splashes, a soft rubbery shape onto the linoleum.
“Damnit!” Then I begin to pour out the liquid from the glass, into the sink. But the liquid is already congealed into a messy white shape, another frog just in the nascent stage of growth. It’s a patchy white congealing shape, legs, torso and head barely discernible from the primordial goo, and it too splashes out onto the floor.
Quickly I open the hotel room door to get the frogs outside and kick them with a little poke from my foot until they hop into the hallway.
Of course, Artie is sitting waiting outside. In he comes at first until he notices the frogs crossing his path. And he is about to slip out again when I block him with my leg.
I shut the door, the frogs still outside, Artie inside, but he’s sniffing under the crack in the door, pawing underneath to get to the frogs on the other side.
Image created using Midjourney AI on Discord
Getting to the Party on Time (via the Angels)
We are going to a party at Siobhan’s friend’s apartment on the south side of the Embankment and are taking the train. So we get on at the Angel and take the lift, an old wooden box, down into the Underground.
Read moreThe platforms we walk through are dark and grimy, brown muddied walls and hidden tunnels, and the service is running slow.
We wait on Platform 2 of the Central line, it seems like for an age, before a train finally arrives, but when it comes to a stop it is already full, people crushed together, all the way up to the ceiling.
The bodies are pressed flat against the glass and there is no way we are getting on. We will wait for the next one.
The next train is a flat bed, cargo only, with a thick plain white rectangular box which covers the deck. It speeds through the tunnel, and we continue to wait.
And the next train will be a passenger train but it will be a long time coming. We wait in anticipation but by the time it arrives the train is ill-lit from the inside and it speeds through the tunnel and disappears the other side without stopping.
It seems we’ll never get there.
“We’ll take the Circle or the District line,” I suggest. Only you have to exit the station and cross the road to the other side of the roundabout to get to the platform.
So we leave, ascending once more with the lift and cross over to the entrance of the Circle and District.
“We can take either line,” I say as we enter down into a dark corridor, intersecting rail line tracks to our left, cavernous walls dark and dripping with sweat. We have to hurry as the District line carriages clank across the lines and past us, towards their stop.
But when we arrive at the platform the problem is the same; though at the start, there were only a few passengers waiting, the crowd begins to pile up. People in dark clothing, faces barely discernible.
“We are meeting at The Kestrel,” says Siobhan. She means Reed’s place.
“But that is nowhere near the Embankment,” I say. “That is in Hammersmith.” I pull out a piece of paper to work out the directions, but it is too small to write on.
“I need something bigger,” and I turn back to her. “Have you got something?”
But Siobhan is distracted, she doesn’t reply and I have to repeat it. And only then does she pull out a larger piece of paper, the size of my hand, that I can use.
“We should go back to the Central line,” I continue. I am getting frustrated that we wasted all this time waiting for the wrong train.
We are exiting the station, onto the road that leads away from both stations, when I suggest we can take an Uber. The greying light of dusk is in the distance.
“Why didn’t you suggest that in the first place?” she says, spitting the words at me, but it was her who got us lost in the first place.
“I’m not going,” I respond, “I’ve had it!”
And I walk away, to the right of me a chain link fence, a construction site behind the fence, both stations further behind me.
“I’m not going,” I reiterate. I walk slowly.
And she follows me, she too is going the wrong way.
But this is it. Where we will really part.
I circle even slower back round the roundabout, time and fear crawls, me slightly ahead of her, until we are back on the Angel side.
I am practically at a stop when Siobhan comes up alongside, to my left. She has thick pale blonde hair and a slightly pudgy face, thick lips like Becky Farmer, unvarnished, and she is attractive at that very moment; it is eating me up.
“I want to fly around naked,” she says and she smiles.
We cannot do it. Part. I don’t want to.
“Will you do that for me?” I ask her. And then I kiss her full on the lips.
Photo via Wallpaper Flare
Hiking the Spanish Trail
We are staying at one of Lizzie’s friend’s houses in Turkey, a person who identifies as they/them. And once we are settled in, I think to wander around. The others want to hang so I go off by myself, climb the rocks round back of the house. And at first it is quite straight forward, a path clearly laid out through a pink translucent landscape, going up into the hills.
Read moreI pass through an opening into a ravine, where carved into the rocks is a graphic of two pairs of hiking boots. The carving shows them neatly lined up, one pair above the other, and they will make a good marker for when I return.
I keep on climbing until I hit a village and a church, and then I continue on confidently, strike out across gentle slopes with rose colored rock faces.
Then the road forks and at first I take the lower road, steep sides, waist high walls, grey shale, narrow path. I can always double back before I get lost. But as the sun falls and the light turns yellow across the high plain, I notice that the villages are shutting up for the night, and I think to turn back.
And as I turn around I realize that I have become disoriented and am now unsure of whether I need to head east or west.
In the next village I step into the first church I encounter and I am trying to ask directions but the people there only speak Spanish and cannot help me. For a moment I will step out and look up at the sun. But by this time I know that I will be late and my parents will be concerned for me… It is what it is and maybe it is better that way. They can always call someone to fetch me.
I looking at the drooping sun, I think it was always to my left when I started out, so yes, now I can keep it to my right. Yes, the sun sets in the west, so I just need to head east.
Once more I enter the church with its stone white washed walls and in a portico there is the same man and also a map, pinned to the wall that shows the whole island. I try the man once more and ask him to name some villages, pointing at each of them on the map to give him a clue. If I point at the right place I might recognize the town I started from, but again he does not understand me, and I turn away, knowing that there is no way I will make it back for dinner.
Main photo by Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels. Church photo via Wallpaper Flare.
Death of the Journalist
He was only visiting for a short time but it was always a dangerous junction where the car accident occurred.
People crossed there all the time, under the Brentford overpass, at the cross walk; even though you were hidden in the shade behind the thick grey concrete supporting pillars of the freeway.
Read morePedestrians were not supposed to cross there.
He was visiting from France and we were going to a party when the accident happened; when he was run over and killed.
I went on to the house, where the party was being hosted, where he had a friend in Michael M, and his friends were mourning his loss.
A woman was talking in French, explaining how Michael’s friend was ‘un journaliste’, but she used the diminutive form of the word. And I understood what she said, even though my French was rusty, even though she explained it for my benefit anyway.
She sat opposite us on a stiff backed chair and held out a magazine in which he’d written some articles. She showed us the front cover. It was white. And on it was large black cursive lettering.
Then we lay in a huddle on the floor of her apartment though I wasn’t sure of her relationship to Michael or his friend.
We lay, the four of us more or less on top of each other, by the side of a 50s style coffee table, angular pine varnished top, with smooth curved edges and 3 tilted legs. And I held out my hand and stroked her cheek in sympathy; or was it the other way round, did she stroke mine?
But I wanted to be out of there, really. I felt uncomfortable as a bystander to her friend’s tragic death.
Photo of Victor Noir‘s tomb by Neil Howard via Flickr