Steve Elliott
The Treehouse and other stories

© Ellicott S.

For Rory

The Treehouse

The house boy tumbled out of the gate of the compound attached to the main house and sprinted down the path along the back wall. Sam heard Lydia, one of the house girls, call something after Johannes in Zulu. Sam was in the melee meal patch, being an explorer in an impenetrable jungle. He pulled some ears of corn aside and looked out at the street through the gap in the tall hedge that bordered the 1.5 acre grounds of the house on the 1st Avenue side. He saw a police car idling by. A policeman was looking suspiciously out of the patrol car. The lawman had a long sour face. It was only a glimpse and then the sour face was gone. Sam let the ears of corn fall back into place and continued his perilous journey through the forest.

On the far side of the forest lay Rork's Drift, and the cave in the mountain where the great Chief Shaka of the Zulus kept his treasure – diamonds and gold! Sam had to get there before sunset. When he got to Rork's Drift, he stood on a mound and scanned the surroundings. There was no one down at the tennis court or up at the swimming pool (sometimes Lake Victoria, or the great Limpopo River). Sam wondered where Johannes had run off to in such a hurry. He thought about the treehouse they were going to build. They had selected the tree but Johannes had said that one of the branches would need a support pole; they would organise that soon, on his day off. The treehouse would have a tin roof, floorboards, a window, and a rope ladder leading up to an entrance big enough for small boys to enter. Sam had always wanted a treehouse. It would be his lookout post, his crow's nest, his very own inviolable space.

His treehouse daydream was rudely interrupted by his mother calling from the house. She was probably on the warpath about homework, or something equally tedious. Sam decided to disappear and deal with her later, at supper. He opened the small trapdoor in the back wall that led under the house, and crawled into the three-foot high space that lay under the floorboards. The ceiling was far too low for it to be called a cellar. Furthermore, there was no access to the space from the house. It was a dark place – the mysterious cave of Zulu Chief Shaka.

Sam had found some interesting treasure in the cave during the months they had been living in the big house on Central Street. They had moved from London to Johannesburg the previous spring, in 1967. He had come across some old comics dated 1964. He had blown the dust off the comics and read them with interest. But the best find, a truly exciting discovery, was a Zulu warrior shield and some statuettes of African heads. These relics were now displayed on a shelf in his room: real booty for an 11-year-old boy from Blackheath in South London.

He crawled towards the centre of the space. He didn't like to go further to where it got the darkest at the far corner of the large house. Who knew what demons might be lurking there? But that was probably where Shaka kept his best treasures and artefacts. In the deepest darkest part of the cave. On this occasion, Sam decided to be brave and crept on. Then he heard movement and his heart leapt into his mouth. He saw the whites of someone's eyes, staring at him in panic. It was Johannes, looking as though he were in fear for his life. 'Go, go! Foot-sack!' he hissed, making frantic shooing motions with his hands.

Sam was terrified by the anguish in the house boy's voice. He scuttled out, came panting round the side of the house, crossed the brown grasslands of the veld that was the front lawn, and sidled up to the entrance, hoping to avoid his mother. He stood listening on the wide stoop, amid the cane furniture, which might provide cover if he was threatened with interception. He looked at the front door and glanced back at the circular drive and Central Avenue beyond the two iron gates to the property. The drive was lined with mature jacarandas in a riot of purple blooms. A beige Mercedes turned into the drive. Sam waved at the car which seemed to be coming round the curve faster than usual. It came to a halt, throwing up gravel. Sam's father jumped out and ran up the steps of the stoop. 'Hello Sam,' he said, hurrying by. 'Had a good day?' He didn't stop. 'Tell me about the cricket match later.' Sam followed his father into the hallway and watched him sprint up the stairs and disappear into his parents' room. At a much slower pace, Sam climbed the stairs and made his way to his own room at the opposite end of the house. Two large guest rooms, three bathrooms, a spacious airing-cupboard and a box room separated him from his parents. The arrangement suited him just fine.

He couldn't concentrate on his homework – 'Arithmetic! Yuk!' He went to the window and looked out at the jacarandas. The cricket news wasn't too bad. Father would be pleased to hear that he had batted at Number 5 and scored a creditable 27 before being caught in the slips. And in the opponents' innings he had fielded at second slip and taken a fine catch to gain revenge for being caught out in the very same place. He was annoyed about it though; it was a stupid error: the ball was wide, why dab his bat at it? But Father should be reasonably pleased. Then he thought about Johannes. What had frightened the house boy out of his wits? The Zulu warrior reduced to a mouse!

Sam had had to get used to many confusing things since his arrival in South Africa. He recalled Johannes' crouched body and wild fearful eyes under the house. Was it some kind of bantu custom? They had a lot of those. The family hadn't been in Johannesburg a year and it was a far cry from grey, drizzly old London, which was a familiar place in its customs and traditions. Africa was full of surprises and a huge contrast. Sam had come with misty-eyed, Tarzan-inspired expectations of the continent. His friends at school in London had been envious, thinking his life would be one long safari. However, his first school had been a disaster and he didn't think his friends would envy his experience there. In the hullabaloo of leaving London and arriving in Johannesburg, his parents had taken temporary accommodation. After their triumph in the theatre, and all the publicity, they moved to a smarter residence in salubrious Lower Houghton.

At first, they enrolled Sam in an Afrikaans school, a big mistake. Literally everyone hated him, or at best was supremely indifferent. He learned fast what it meant to be ostracized, to be held in utter contempt. No one tried to make friends and help the new English boy orient himself. At the end of the fourth day of his harrowing ordeal, he was approached by a small group, whose spokesman was a ginger-haired Afrikaner of about 12 or 13. Sam never actually learned the boy's name. 'My opa was murdered by you lot. Englander!' said the boy, poking Sam in the chest. 'Englander!' His gang's murmurs were laced with hostility, ominous as a Greek chorus. Sam had no idea what the boy was talking about. He knew nothing about the Boer War that had ended 67 years previously: the English versus the Afrikaners. The boy went on about the 'murdering English invaders', and the group closed inexorably around Sam. He was saved by a teacher who happened to be passing. The teacher dismissed the muttering, belligerent group, telling them to 'Foot-sack! Now!' The teacher, a tall, athletic-looking man, watched the grumbling group of boys depart and turned to Sam, who was standing there ashen-faced. He had been sure they were going to give him a good thrashing. 'Go home, son,' said the teacher, curtly. 'Tell your parents, you're in the wrong school!'

It was the only kind thing anyone at that school ever said to him. Sam took the teacher's advice and told his parents that he flatly refused to return to 'that place!' His parents were aghast. They got on the phone to some people they trusted, who revealed the political nuances, and explained their horrific blunder regards their choice of edcational establishment for Sam. Some strings were pulled and they got him into another, 'less extreme' school. He heard them say it was 'more Europeanized, and liberal in its outlook.' He was confused that there appeared to be two kinds of white people in South Africa. And many of them had servants, or if they didn't, they treated people of colour as servant-class.

The most confusing thing about his new life in Johannesburg was what Sam called the 'No Blacks!' The signs were everywhere – in English and Afrikaans; everything was segregated: buses, trains, taxis, cinemas, theatres, schools, and even park benches! The signs said: 'NO BLACKS!' There had been no such draconian rules in London. Sam thought it was daft. He himself had a friend who was black: Pete from Trinidad & Tobago. They used to go on the bus together to the Oval cricket ground, where black and white cricketers played against each other. Here, however, he was forbidden black friends. Except Johannes was a friend, wasn't he? Okay, he was 26 years old but he was still his Zulu 'friend'.

Johannes had mended Sam's bike. He had shown him how to make a slingshot. They had cut the V-shape from a branch of one of the trees in the garden. Johannes had shown him how to light a fire with just twigs and dry grasses. Johannes was strong, supple, lithe, and full of energy. He could throw a cricket ball with amazing accuracy.

Johannes was the gardener. He mowed the lawns, kept order at the pool and tennis court, and left certain areas more jungle-like, overgrown, thicketed with bamboo and other exotic shrubbery – a playground for Sam. And he could run like the wind. He would give Sam a good headstart but still beat him from the tennis court up to the pool – a serious dash across a wide lawn and up a winding path through the rockery. Johannes would be standing by the finish, the deep end, and Sam would come running up and leap into the pool. They had done this race a number of times. On a hot afternoon, after a taxing foot from the court, it was the best feeling to plunge into the cool waters. Sam remembered the first time they held the Race and he had leapt into the pool.

'Come on in, Johannes,' shouted Sam. 'The water's great!'

Johannes stood at the edge. He was barefoot, wearing brown khaki shorts and a white singlet. His arm muscles were sharply defined, dark ebony, glistening with sweat. He was lean, spare, fast and agile as a cat. He clapped his hands together and said: 'No Sam! I can't do it. My business with the pool is to clean it and make sure the filters are working.' And he remained standing pool-side, with the sun behind his back casting him into a silhouette, in the attitude of a servant, waiting, while Sam splashed about in the pool.

His mother and father had told him that Johannes was the house boy. Sam thought this an odd title since Johannes was never actually in the house. He looked after the grounds, and there were a lot of them to look after. The house (the cleaning and cooking) was the domain and responsibility of the house girls: Lydia and her young cousin Sara. All the 'natives' lived in the compound, an outhouse of four rough rooms that was attached to the main house by high walls but separated from it by a spacious courtyard. The back entrance to the house was in the courtyard, up a flight of stone steps to a stoop that led to the kitchen.

Sam went back to his desk and looked at fractions and a tiresome arithmetic problem: If an army of 10,000 ants lost 43.7 percent of its forces in a battle with another army of 15,000 ants which lost 33.3 percent, how many ants would be left on the field after the battle? Suddenly, he realised how to solve the problem; it wasn't so hard. You had to know that 33.3 % was one-third, and that sort of thing. Decimal points and fractions loomed large in his education. He polished off the problem and there was still 20 minutes until supper, after which his parents would go to the theatre.

The ants reminded him of how he had recently come across Johannes doing something odd on the back stoop. It was dark and Sam had just come in, stumbling from the garden, after some jungle adventure involving a lion, encountered in a clearing, and a desperate getaway up a tree. He had fallen out of the tree when he overestimated the strength of a branch. The lion had vanished and Sam limped home through the gathering darkness. He went via the old oak tree and visualized his treehouse up there in its stout branches.

It was dark when he finally got to the house. He stood in the gloom of the courtyard assessing his condition. He tried his leg. It hurt a bit but he would be okay. The cuts on his knees were nothing, a perennial feature, anyway. He felt the lump on his head and then noticed Johannes scooping stuff into a skillet. The stoop, a kind of stage in front of the dark auditorium of the courtyard, was lit up with a reddish golden light from the kitchen. Johannes cut a fantastic figure in the dramatic lighting. Sam forgot his bruises and stared. He walked forward a few paces and saw that Johannes was scooping ants into the skillet. They were large flying ants, which had just lost their wings, and were now crawling all over the stoop, wing-less and vulnerable.

'Why are you putting ants in a frying pan, Johannes?' asked Sam.

'To fry them!'

'What?'

Johannes grinned. 'And have them on toast. They're delicious,' he said.

Sam was horrified. That wasn't baked beans on toast by any stretch of the imagination! 'You eat ants! On toast?' he squeaked.

'Of course, they're nutricious, and tasty,' said Johannes simply, as though it were obvious. Sam was impressed but decided he wouldn't try eating ants on toast just yet. The diet was another confusing thing about Africans. Johannes said they also ate other insects and worms. Apparently, you could buy them like a packet of crisps for five cents in the black townships. Sam was thrilled that he had a friend who ate ants and worms, although he himself decided he would stick to stuff like baked beans on toast, sausage and mash, Shepherd's Pie, and so on, for now.

After a quick review of his treehouse plans, Sam went down to supper. He wondered if Johannes was still cowering under the house. Peter, his two-year-old brother, was being fed by Sara. She would soon bundle him off to his cot, singing Zulu lullabies and clicking away at him in the strange, percussive articulation of the Zulu tongue. He could see his mother at the end of the dining-room table. Her head was in her hands. His father intercepted him at the bottom of the stairs. 'Sam, a word, man to man!' he said, urgently. 'Your mother's had a bit of a scare, a nasty moment down near the village. So behave, be kind to her… And don't ask any difficult questions about this bloody country!'

'What happened?'

His father looked tired. 'Your mother is an actress,' he said. 'She will of course have to tell you all about the drama herself, and relive the experience for all our benefits. Let's go in.'

They went into the dining-room and sat down. Sam was given to understand by his mother that she had been mugged while strolling back from the village, where there was a small shopping mall, a café, a dentist and a chiropractor. She had been to the dentist for a filling and was feeling a bit woozy. She was walking back home round the golf course, and suddenly, in a shady spot, a black man appeared from the shadows, snatched her purse and ran off.

'Imagine my shock,' said his mother.

'What did you do?' asked Sam.

'I screamed, of course!'

'Of course!' said his father.

'What would any woman do in such circumstances? I screamed at the top of my lungs: STOP THIEF!'

It so happened that his mother's practised dramatic projection managed to conjure up a nearby police car and the thief was apprehended. 'My God,' said his mother. 'What those two white policemen did to that poor black man…' She suddenly burst into sobs. Sam looked down at his plate. He didn't like to see his mother crying. He didn't know what to say. At last, she dried her eyes and continued her narrative. The black thief, 'a dirty kaffir', according to the policemen, was severely beaten in front of her eyes and then bundled, bloodied and bruised, into the patrol car.

'I feel so guilty,' she said. 'I would gladly have given him the 20 rand I had in my purse. What a paltry amount to get beaten to death for.'

Sam was interested. 'Did he die?' His father glared at him. His mother ignored the question and went on, 'If only he had asked. Instead, he received a brutal beating that I brought down upon his head. I told the police that! I told them I would've given the poor man the money… gladly… I would have given it!'

His mother complained strenuously to the police before they drove off that their arrest methods were far too robust. The senior policeman looked at her strangely. 'Thank you, Mrs. Green,' he said. 'If we need to contact you about this case, we have your address.' Then the police car drove off.

'I told them I'd complain about their brutality to a higher authority. You should have seen the look that policeman gave me! He said: “We don't encourage love of kaffirs round here.”'

The conversation that followed didn't interest Sam. It was funny how his parents talked about things as if he wasn't there. Of course, he didn't understand everything they spoke about. It seemed the gravity of the situation precluded his regaling the family with his exploits in the cricket match. His parents usually discussed the Civic Centre Theatre, which his father had been managing since their arrival in Johannesburg, and where his mother acted. Sam didn't usually listen to their dramas, back and onstage, but his ears pricked up when he heard his mother mention Johannes' name. She told her husband that Lydia and Sara were worried about Johannes' papers and could the 'Baas' – i. e. his father – kindly do something about it. What papers? wondered Sam. Then the subject got changed. His father began ranting about some critic who had written in an Afrikaans newspaper that he was a 'political undesirable', and that the 'pornographic liberal filth' he was pedalling at the Civic Centre had no place in a white South Africa. His father was indignant. 'Philistine!' he roared. 'Well, he obviously doesn't like Harold Pinter, does he?' his mother remarked, studying her eyes in her compact and powdering her nose.

All of this went over Sam's head. He finished his dessert – apple crumble and custard – and asked to be excused. Tension was in the air. The apple crumble and custard hadn't tasted as good as it usually did. Lydia cleared the table and gave her mistress an imploring look, but her mistress was too busy staring at herself in the mirror of her compact. Sam said good night to his parents, donating a peck on the cheek to each. About twenty minutes later, his parents got in the Mercedes and drove to the theatre.

The next day, after school, Sam was dying to ask Johannes what the pantomime the day before in the space under the house had been about. He also wanted to ask him about the treehouse, but the house boy had made himself scarce. He asked Lydia and Sara, but they were vague about his whereabouts. 'Some errands, Master Sam,' they told him. Perhaps it had something to do with materials for the treehouse. Johannes had gone off to get them. That was it! But Sam crept into the gloom of Shaka's cave just to check that Johannes wasn't there, engaged in some secret rite, under the house, protecting it with special Zulu spells and charms. Then he wandered around his domain, through the apricot trees, and past the grapevines where he stopped and plucked a small bunch of red grapes. He chewed the grapes, spat out the pips, and surveyed the sturdy oak where his treehouse would soon be lodged. He moved across the lawns, the vast sun-burnished grasses of the veld, and felt the baking afternoon heat on his back. He crept stealthily through the corn and circled the jackarandas. They made long shadows across the front lawn. He studied the dark red earth for signs – the hunter in his element, near the great Limpopo. The pool shimmered in the sunlight and he looked at himself and the reflection of the sky in its waters. Where was the Zulu? He sighed and trailed back to the house to do his homework.

When Sam came home from school the following day, he found out why Johannes had been so frightened. He turned into the gate and stopped, abruptly. He stood in the shadow of one of the gate pillars. He was startled and alarmed by what he saw. There were two police cars in the drive and two young white policeman stood stiffly by one of the vehicles. An older policemen was sitting on the stoop, talking to his father. He saw his mother come out and stand in the front doorway. She lit a cigarette and listened to the conversation between her husband and the police officer.

Sam decided to make a discrete entrance. He crept down the wall along the perimeter of the property. The jackarandas and the thick, luxuriant shrubbery hid his careful hunter-like progress. On his way to the house, he glanced to the right and was horrified to see Johannes sitting in one of the police cars. What was going on? The house boy's face looked as if he had received a beating. He had a blank expression and a far away look in his eyes. Sam stepped on a branch. It cracked sickeningly. He looked quickly at the policemen but they hadn't heard anything. He continued creeping through the foliage, and soon managed to get within earshot of the serious conversation on the stoop.

'Officer, I am terribly sorry for the mix-up, the hiccough with Johannes' paperwork,' said his father, lighting a cigarette from the one he was smoking. 'I'll fix it and gladly pay a fine for my… erm… administrative negligence.'

The policemen smiled a thin, mirthless smile. Sam was watching the scene, concealed in a bush near the stoop. He knew all the garden's strategic hiding places and how to get to them stealthily. He saw a cruel glint in the lawman's ice-cold eyes, and he knew from his heavy accent that he was Afrikaans. 'Mr. Green, there will be no fine,' he said.

'Ah, right,' said Father. 'Just get the paperwork sorted and stamped, then, eh?'

The policeman stood up. 'Mr. Green, I don't think you quite grasp the gravity of the situation, how serious this matter is.' He paused for dramatic effect and pointed an accusing finger. 'You, Mr. Green, were responsible for this kaffir. And it transpires this native has no right to be here at all. He has no pass! The kaffir girls are legal. They have their passes. But this kaffir, Johannes, has no pass.'

'No pass, and so?' said Mother.

The lawman looked round and took notice of the woman standing at the front door. 'Mrs. Green,' he said. 'Your husband has committed a serious crime. And by the way, we've had our eye on him for some time. We're putting a stop to his liberal and subversive tendencies. He's going down.'

'Going down?' said Father.

'For TEN YEARS,' bellowed the policeman.

'Prison!' gasped Mother, and then she fainted. During the ensuing fuss Sam melted into the house via the courtyard and the back door. Lydia and Sara were in the kitchen. They were crying. Then Peter, who had been having a nap, started yelling. Sara rushed out with Sam on her heels. They ran up the stairs together, Sam right behind the house girl, like two children racing up a hill. At the top, Sara stopped and said to him, coldly, a little out of breath, 'You didn't get Johannes a pass! It's very, very bad for Johannes… and the Baas! Prison! Lord save us! Very bad… Shocking! They beat Johannes!' She wiped a tear from her eye and went off to deal with Peter.

Sam drifted into his room, feeling numb, confused, and frightened – a helpless bystander at a calamity. Tears welled in his eyes and there was a tight knot in his stomach. He stared out of the window, out over Rork's Drift and across the burnished grasslands, at the sturdy oak that wouldn't be housing any treehouse any time soon.

The Russian Teacher

Summer blazed in Moscow – late August, a couple of months after his mother's funeral in Blighty. It was a sultry day in the Russian capital with blue skies and high cumulus clouds over the Kremlin. John Stevens was walking fast from the metro at the bottom of Tverskaya Street towards Red Square. Looming to his left was the massive block of the Four Seasons hotel; on the right a series of semi-circular domes caught the eye. They reminded John of flying saucers. They were, in fact, light sources for the huge subterranean Okhotniy Ryad shopping mall: retail outlets on three underground floors. Streams of shoppers were going in and out, like ants to and from an ant hill.

He passed the statue of General Zhukov and strode into the shade of the slope leading up to the Resurrection Gate and into Red Square. The heat rose from the molten asphalt. The sun flashed in the Kremlin's windows. But, despite the humidity, he felt energized; he was glad to be back in Moscow.

John enjoyed his status as an Englishman in Russia. He felt like an actor on a stage in a brand-new production of himself – a reinvention, like the hero of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence. Here, he was an exotic person, with new possibilities and opportunities – a new man. Adolescent excitement gripped the foreigner when he wandered the city's streets. He was still relatively fresh off the boat and the novelty of being in Moscow made every outing unfold in a spirit of adventure and romance. He discovered the city and uncovered its charms and hidden places by taking long walks. He remembered the thrill of strolling in Patriarch Ponds for the first time and seeing where Bulgakov had set the first scene of The Master & Margarita; and being on Red Square on his second night in Moscow, marvelling that he was actually standing in this iconic place. His walks were not the lacklustre plods he used to take through his hometown's familiar streets. Even the bleak areas on the outskirts of the city with their grim blocks and wide windy boulevards were fascinating, bold, and impressive in their utilitarian starkness.

John took care to be well groomed and dress well when he was out and about. He ate modestly and his marathon walks kept him in shape. Looking at the slim 55-year-old figure wearing a well-cut summer suit, slipping through the Resurrection Gate, you might have given him forty-five years, or perhaps a little younger. Near the entrance to the History Museum, he saw Stalin and Lenin, milling about – plotting in a huddle! John was hurrying to a rendezvous with his new Russian teacher. They had arranged to meet near the statue of Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky outside St Basils Cathedral.

When he got to the middle of the square, with Lenin's Tomb on the right and the ornate sprawling façade of the GUM shopping centre on the left, he stopped and looked at the crowds. He lit a cigarette and observed the scene. He saw another Stalin and Lenin having their photo taken with a trio of excited Chinese tourists who wielded their selfie-sticks like swords. Red Square was a photo opportunity, and many people were snapping away. He saw a couple kissing, passionately. The girl was trying to hold her mobile at the required angle to catch their snog. She looked at the result but was dissatisfied. So, they had to do it all over again; the boy didn't seem to mind. John looked towards the cathedral, wondering if he would be able to pick Natasha out. He had only seen a poor passport-type photo of her on the language school's website.

Then he saw what he thought must be her: a small figure, in a light grey jacket, out in the sun, looking towards the river that flowed behind the Kremlin. A slim slip of a girl wearing sunglasses. She looked tiny next to Ivan the Terrible's brainchild with its garish confection of coloured domes. He glanced at the big clock on the Spasskaya Tower. He was on time. He stopped about 25 paces in front of her. He had an odd feeling that he would remember this moment forever. The scene was a picture, a postcard, a poem: a girl standing in a pool of sunlight next to Saint Basil's Cathedral, its iconic candy floss domes etched like mad balloons against a clear blue sky. Boats were going by on the river. They were filled with sightseers gawping at Moscow resplendent in the late-afternoon sunshine.

Natasha wore her black hair in a bob. She had a Slavic cast to her chiselled face, the high cheek bones of an eastern European woman. She was standing still, (in John's fancy, a statue of a small Russian girl), processing the people coming and going. She was looking for him. He noticed she was wearing a red blouse, buttoned to the throat. A pendant with a silver cross caught the sunlight – a slanted Orthodox cross. She wore a light grey skirt to match her jacket. Her slender brown legs were bare. On her feet she wore stylish open-toed sandals with a high wedge. John noticed that her toenails were painted black. He thought that a little strange. Natasha looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties, certainly not some agonised Emo teenage girl. Didn't women usually go for brighter colours?

She looked in his direction, scanning the people until her gaze fixed on him. She took off her sunglasses and waved. A man selling ice cream from a stall winked at John as he went forward to greet the girl. Perhaps the ice cream man thought she was his lover.

'You must be Mr. Stevens!' said Natasha, speaking Russian, looking up intently into his face.

'Yes,' he said, showing his passport, stabbing a finger at the gruesome photo. 'Here! Believe it or not, that really is me.'

'I don't need your passport!' she said brusquely.

John thrust his passport back in his jacket pocket. 'And you're Natasha Blishko from Donetsk, a post graduate student specializing in Russian literature, aren't you?' he said. There was a pause in which Natasha looked speculatively at John. He spoke Russian correctly, if a little formally. 'It's okay,' he continued. 'I'm not clairvoyant. It's on the school's website.'

'Yes,' she said. 'I am from Ukraine, eastern Ukraine – Donbass!' She emphasized 'Donbass'.

They stood in silence for a few moments. Some monks hurried with odd hopping steps into the cathedral. They reminded John of crows. He recalled that crows were ill-fated creatures in Russian folklore; in English, of course, it's a murder of crows! Perhaps an inappropriate image for a benediction of monks! He didn't know what to say. It was too complicated to explain in Russian. He shook her hand. 'On the phone, you said you'd recognize me.'

'Of course! You don't look or carry yourself like a Russian man. And you shook my hand. A dead giveaway.'

'Was that a bad thing to do?'

'No. it's nice. Respectful, I suppose. But Russian men don't shake women's hands; they only shake other men's hands.'

'Yes, I've noticed that, but I don't see why hand-shaking should be restricted to one sex.'

Natasha sucked on the temple-tip of her sunglasses and looked him up and down. Her expression was serious and critical, like a casting agent. 'And you look very English,' she said, with a note of sarcasm. 'Quite tall, good carriage, an immaculate tailored suit, white shirt, crisp and clean, nice shoes, and certainly not a Russian face.'

'Well, I try to look alright,' said John, lamely.

'You look like you're out on a date,' said Natasha curtly. 'How clean-shaven and how sweet-smelling you are! What aftershave is that?'

'What?' said John, taken aback.

'It smells expensive.'

'Expensive?' he echoed stupidly.

'Look, you should understand, Mr. Stevens, I am not your date – I will possibly be your Russian teacher.'

John stared at her. She had wrong-footed him. Natasha looked stern, almost hostile. 'Horosho? Ponyuli?' she said.

'OK, understood,' he said holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. She smiled and thawed a few degrees. Natasha wasn't used to meeting someone who looked and sounded like a character in a foreign movie. And he spoke Russian well, a little stiffly and deliberately, but with a charming British musicality to his pronunciation. She was in truth a little overawed by this suave Englishman, so she had gone on the attack, accusing him of something predatory and male. Also, Natasha Blishko was somewhat prejudiced when it came to Westerners these days.

'I teach English here,' said John, breaking the awkward silence. 'To business people. So, I suppose I dress like them.'

'Were you going to bring me a rose?'

'What?' said John, landing on another wrong foot.

'I thought that was what a British gentleman did.'

'But you're my Russian teacher,' he said, regretting that he hadn't brought a rose, carried a copy of The Times and sported a black brolly with a decent rosewood handle. Natasha had not answered the question: 'Will you be my Russian teacher?'

'Perhaps, I will agree to be.'

They started to walk back across the square. Natasha wondered how old John was. Forty-three, perhaps? Again, he broke the silence. 'Is it customary to bring a rose to one's Russian teacher?'

'Only on the first of September. And probably better a bunch, not a single rose.'

'It's still August,' said John.

'Yes,' she said, looking straight ahead at the red brick heap of the History Museum. 'Flowers must be given to school teachers on the first day of the school year, which is on the first of September.'

'Does every child bring flowers?'

'Yes, it's compulsory. God knows what they do with them all.'

'Open a florist?'

'Don't you think there are enough of those in Moscow?' said Natasha, without a trace of irony.

'I suppose so,' said John, laughing. 'They're on every street corner!' The number of florists in Moscow was one of the first things John had noticed about the city. Flower shops, dentists and beauty salons were ubiquitous. If there wasn't one on this corner, there would be one on the next. What had also struck him about Moscow was the number of stunningly beautiful women there were. He played a game in the metro, on the escalators, to see how many beauties he would spot – whether he was going up or down. The count often got into double figures. It seemed you couldn't walk ten paces without encountering a goddess who looked as though she had stepped straight from the pages of Vogue. Perhaps the proliferation of florists and beauty salons was in direct proportion to the abundance of beautiful women in the city.

As they strolled along, they discussed the terms of his lessons and what his precise requirements were. John had thought about it: improve his speaking, extend his vocabulary and get to grips with some Russian poets. And some recent Russian history, events in Ukraine and so forth. He was happy to be back in Moscow. The last few weeks in the UK had been wearing with the funeral and the general atmosphere of the place; it had left him feeling exhausted.

'How long have you been living here?' asked Natasha.

'18 months and three days,' said John.

'So precise! Are you a spy or something?'

John stopped and looked her. She met his gaze with an even look without a trace of irony. Staring into those dark, inscrutable Slavic eyes caused John's throat to tighten. He couldn't tell if she was joking. He decided she must be and responded: 'A spy?' he said, coughing a cigarette cough. 'Yes, I am! I'm spying on you right now, here on Red Square. And you know what? – the man over there selling ice cream is really my contact. That flower in his lapel is actually a camera. If you like, we could have our picture taken with Lenin and Stalin, and you could use it in evidence against me.'

'Lenin and Stalin?' said Natasha, seriously, scanning the square for the notorious duo. Was there a flicker of a smile? She turned back and fixed John with piercing eyes, which he felt himself being drawn into for just a fraction too long. Natasha smiled. 'Are you teasing me with your British humour?'

John pointed out Comrades Lenin and Stalin who were shambling about their iconic station, waiting to have their picture taken for posterity, an image that would possibly be framed by the proud owner and which might sit and gather dust on a mantelpiece in Shanghai or Stockholm. John said he thought it strange that such towering historical figures were reduced here, on this fulcrum of history, to posing and strutting for tourist snaps. The same happened in Saint Petersburg in the great square in front of the Winter Palace, where a number of Peter the Greats were a perrenial feature, stalking about in high black boots and three-cornered hats, hunting down tourists for photo ops.

'Even Lenin has to make a living,' said Natasha. A shadow of a smile hovered like a reticent break in the clouds on her face. John was glad that behind her apparently steely exterior there was a hint of a sense of humour. 'Lenin lives!' he said.

'You speak Russian well, Mr. Stevens.'

'Just call me, “John”, please.'

'Alright. You speak pretty good Russian, John!'

'I'd like to speak it better,' he said. 'That's why I came to you.'

John told her that he had studied history at university. He had always been fascinated by Russia and particularly its past 100 years or so. He had also been a student of the language for more than 25 years. And he was a poetry addict. English poetry, mainly, but also Russian verse. He fumbled between translations and the originals. He recited his loves: 'Pushkin, Blok, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Akhmatova, Pasternak…'

'And etcetera,' said Natasha, cutting him off. 'So, you understand something of the Russian soul?' There was a hint of derision in her voice.

'You will have to be the judge of that.'

They had reached Manege Square. They turned left through the great wrought iron gates into Alexander Gardens. John stopped and looked to the left, at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Kremlin's walls. There was a guard standing stock-still in that frozen attitude only guards and certain street artists can achieve. For something to say, John explained that the remains of unknown soldiers killed in the Battle of Moscow in 1941 were relocated to the Kremlin Wall in 1966 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the battle.

'History is a bitch!' said Natasha, interrupting him sharply.

John nodded, agreeing that it was indeed a bitch. Natasha said she was more interested in the history of recent dark events, which, she added, were 'a fucking bitch'. John was surprised by her sudden use of mat, a curse word: fuck – not in super polite use. Otherwise, she spoke very clean and articulate Russian with few of the parasitic phrases that are common in everyday speech: the taks, the vots and the kagbes.

They turned right and ambled down towards the Neglinka, a subterranean river that surfaced in the gardens. Along this stretch there were a number of statues of characters from Russian fairy tales, culminating in an impressive ensemble of horses and a fountain representing the four seasons. There was a lot of shrieking coming from youngsters messing about in the spray near the horses. They were static, yet potent and impressive statues caught by the sculptor in bold leaping attitudes.

'Ah look,' said John. 'Pushkin's magic golden fish!'

'You want to study Russian fairy tales?'

'Not particularly. I've read a few of them.'

'In Russian?'

'Of course!'

'Good,' said Natasha. 'But these are difficult times and I doubt fairy tales will help us.'

'Actually, I'm more interested in Russian poetry, and you're an expert on the subject.'

'It's a big subject. There's a lot of it. What have you read most from your list?'

'Pushkin, I suppose. Although I speak Russian well enough, the language of poetry is another matter – it's difficult. The syntax is dense. Translations can be awful. Usually pale imitations of the originals, like a cartoon of the Mona Lisa!'

'OK,' said Natasha. 'Choose a poem you like and we'll talk about it next time.'

'So, you agree to teach me?'

'I suppose I do.'

They strolled on in silence through the fragrant gardens. A warm breeze blew through the chestnut, magnolia and acacia trees. A bride and groom were cavorting on the lawn near one of the magnolias. They were having their picture taken by an harassed photographer who was shouting at them to stand still, and pose. How charming, thought John. Natasha eyed the scene and clicked her tongue dismissively. She again resorted to a curse word and said something that might be translated as: 'Fucking brides, what are they like!' John was about to say that the bride would be… by the groom in a few hours, but thought better of it – not the sort of the thing for a middle-aged English gentleman to say to a young Russian woman during a first meeting. And, anyway, he would not stoop to using mat – curse words in Russian.

They stopped in front of a huge flower bed, where a kaleidoscope of astra, gardenia and jasmine swayed in the breeze. Natasha was pocket-sized – about five foot two inches tall, slender and frail-looking as the flowers, but John sensed steel beneath her petals: a dymovuska with attitude – a small lady who packed a punch. Her face was beautiful but not in any conventional, sweet and soft feminine way. She was no ethereal nymph; there was a hardness in her face that implied a steely pride. Her dark eyes telegraphed melancholy. And she was forthright: what was on her mind came straight out of her mouth, undissembled.

'You have to go now,' she said, breaking the silence. She sounded brusque, like a schoolteacher.

I have to go?' said John. 'Where to?'

'How should I know where to? I'm meeting someone here in a few minutes.'

'Oh, I see,' said John. 'Well…'

'Meet me here on Monday at 11 am and we'll begin our odyssey through Russian verse.' She made shooing motions with her hands. 'Off you go!'

John left her by the flower beds.After walking 60 metres or so, he stopped and loitered near Pushkin's famous fish. He was looking in the direction of Red Square, but then he couldn't resist turning his gaze to where he had just left Natasha. He saw that a large, untidy-looking young man with a wild mane of hair was talking to her. He was gesticulating violently, shooting his arms up in the air, as if imploring some implacable god who remained deaf to his pleas. John couldn't hear what he was saying but the young man seemed agitated. Suddenly, Natasha hit him hard in the stomach, at which the man picked her up and swung her round as if she weighed no more than a bag of flour. He put her down and they started walking off, still arguing, in the direction of Christ the Saviour. John watched them go. They made an odd couple: a large man and a small woman receding in the hazy light of the gardens, arguing. And then it struck him: it was very possible that, during the course of a brief stroll and short conversation with his new Russian teacher, he had fallen or was falling in love. He idled a while longer in the gardens and then headed towards the metro. There are just too many pretty girls in this town, he thought.

The Guitar

The guitar stands in the corner, in shadowed gloom. A venerable old lady. Sad and neglected in her widow's weeds of dust and cobwebs. He hasn't touched her for months, not since the accident. Her strings have oxidized and gone black. The frets are as dusty as old railroad tracks. Sometimes he picks the guitar up and cradles her as though he were embracing a woman. He goes to her now, plucks a desultory, out-of-tune chord, sighs, and stands the guitar back in its corner.

He has left his soul in that beautiful box. God knows! He has shed blood and pints of sweat on its steel strings. Not to mention tears. He remembers they had to live on baked beans for months when he bought her. 4,000 bucks! Hells bells! It cleaned him out. But Marie had encouraged him to buy it, wanted him to buy it, needed him to buy it.

'You got to have a good guitar, Mike,' she said. 'The tone on that Japanese thing kind of sucks. It's too thin and jangly.'

'Yeah, you're right. But 4,000 bucks?'

'You like the guitar, right?'

'Honey! I love it. The tone is so rich and she plays real nice. She's a dream machine, almost as beautiful as you.'

Marie smiled at that and flashed her eyes at him. 'Buy it!' she said, emphatically. 'In fact, I order you to buy it. We need a good instrument for recording our songs.'

So he bought it and they lived on baked beans for a while. Marie kidded him that he paid more attention to his beloved guitar than to her. But she was pleased. She loved to listen to him picking, and his playing really blossomed on that guitar. Furthermore, she needed a professional tone to sing to, one that would complement the golden phrases she conjured out of her mouth. And she had that in Mike's new guitar – a thoroughbred that became a workhorse.

She is indeed a magnificent guitar: a Martin D-28, a big bodied acoustic, known as a dreadnought: solid spruce top, turned a rich orange colour with age, with sumptuous East Indian rosewood back and sides. A richly resonant beast of an instrument. She made a hell of a noise in his hands. This noble machine, built by C. F. Martin & Company of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, would resound with gorgeous bursts of fingerstyle that blossomed from his fingers like wild and wonderful flowers; but now, she is reduced to the status of a dust-blown ornament.

Sometimes, at night, when he is lying in bed, the silhouette of the guitar catches his eye. She looks so lonely there, cast off in the corner, as if she were saying, 'What happened? Why have you forsaken me?' While his guitar was gently weeping, he would turn over and think about Marie and life on the road. At one time, they were going places. Literally. Tonight, Abilene, tomorrow Kansas City, the next night St Louis, and so on. And the guitar went, too, of course. Without her, it wouldn't have been possible. After all, Mike had to speak through her to make the music.

He has hardly played the Martin for almost 18 months now. When he picks her up, all he can hear is a golden voice soaring in his mind in perfect counterpoint to the plucking and strumming of the strings. He used to play everything on that D 28: ragtime; old country tunes; the blues; a little bit of jazz; neo-classical; Irish and English folk tunes; the Beatles; Bob Dylan, and their own songs.

He goes to a shelf and pulls out a CD. He stares at the cover: a boy and a girl. The boy holds a Martin D-28, trying to look cool, like Johnny Cash, in front of the camera; the girl wears a black cowboy hat and blue jeans like the boy. She is slim and beautiful. Her long hair cascades from her hat in luxuriant chestnut waves over her shoulders. She is smiling at the camera. Her eyes are the colour of desert sands. The legend on the CD reads: Mike and Marie.

He remembers the recording sessions they did for a small independent label in Nashville. Half the songs were their own compositions and half were standards, such as Somewhere Over the Rainbow. He recalls Gerry the sound engineer weeping when he was mixing. She has the voice of an angel! Gerry kept saying that as he mixed the tracks.

They launched the CD to some critical acclaim. One writer repeated what Gerry had said. It was published in black and white for all the world to read: Marie Shines has the voice of an angel. They began to get radio play. They trailed round the country singing their songs, promoting their album. It was an adventure out there on the road. They were young, in love, and in the groove with their music. A repertoire and a reputation were being built. Mike and Marie had a bright future.

He is sitting on his bed looking at the guitar, remembering her rich, ringing tones: solid bass response, bell-like trebles and clear, mud-free mid-tones. The guitar is staring back at him. The sound hole resembles an agonized rictus, a mouth screaming. Suddenly, a blackbird flies in the open window. Strangely, it doesn't flap about the room, panic-stricken, like birds normally do in confined places. Instead, the bird alights straight on to the Martin's headstock. It stays there for a few moments, calmly regarding Mike. It seems like the bird is appraising him. A musical reflex starts him singing, Blackbird singing at the break of day… The blackbird cocks its head and flies out of the window.

He lies back on the bed, hands clasped behind his head, and ponders this startling event. Was it a sign? An omen of some kind? Was the universe trying to tell him something? Perhaps there was no significance to it. A blackbird had simply flown into his room and back out again. Just a random, meaningless event.

However, the next thing that happens makes him think the universe is actually yelling at him. The radio is playing. One song finishes and another begins. Instantly recognizable, it stabs at his heart, sharp as a thrust from a dagger. He picks up the guitar and hugs it tight to his chest. There are tears in his eyes. Somewhere over the rainbow… The voice of an angel swells from the radio, an achingly beautiful soprano that touches his heart and ravages its strings.

He grabs the Martin, and quickly tunes the old dreadnought into some semblance of order. On the dull and lifeless strings he tries to play along with himself and Marie on the last verse. He realizes he is rusty and out of practice – as dull as the strings from which he is attempting to coax some tone. He plays the final Ab chord and tears splash on the rosewood. He gets up and puts the guitar back in its corner place.

But for one bum piece of ice!

It was a refrain that kept going round in his head – a needle stuck in a groove repeating the phrase over and over. In a minor key. Plangent and bleak – Black ice. It was a song title. Marie would have written the words and he would have set her poetry to music. For it was poetry she wrote, not silly pop lyrics. The words she sang so sublimely could be read as poems without any musical accompaniment. They were caviar versus bubblegum!

We were headed for Paradise
And the blacktop rode so nice
But for one bum piece of ice

On a winter's night, after a gig in Buffalo, he lost control of the pick-up, and slid off the road into a tree. And that, as they say, was that. He survived, and he suffers the guilt of the survivor every single day. For some fool reason, Marie hadn't been wearing her safety belt. Why hadn't he paid attention and forced her to wear it? But he hadn't. So, she and her angelic voice departed on the spot to join an angels' choir. For Mike, that was the day the music died.

For a few moments, he stands by the window, gazing at the park across the street. There are some kids clustered round the ice-cream stand at the entrance, jabbering their orders in excited squeals at the ice-cream guy. Mike watches them stream into the park, listening to their chatter and laughter slowly fading away. There is something infectious about their joyous enthusiasm. His face cracks into a broad grin, a rare thing these days.

It's a lovely spring day with fluffy flotillas of cloud drifting down the blue lanes of the sky, and a warm breeze is blowing, teasing the thin green curtains into a gentle sway. Too nice to stay indoors! Life was happening out there, exuberant, vital and bursting.

He leaves the small apartment and goes for a walk in the park, down to the pond with its willow trees wilting like mourners along its banks. But he doesn't feel like weeping with them. Not today! Yesterday, he might have. Today, he has a different feeling. He remembers that he and Marie would often stroll down to the pond and feed the ducks, speak duck language to them, quacking like fools, and then shriek with laughter. On fine days, they would bring the guitar and a picnic. They would gaze into each other's eyes and play a few tunes. On the way home, the universe whispers, and he stops at a music store to buy some new guitar strings.

Critical Murder

An old adage has it that you can't please all of the people all of the time. This is particularly true of critics, whom one is hard pressed to please any of the time. Reviewing my latest novel, one member of this irksome and dogmatic brigade accused me of writing the most 'rancid garbage' it had ever been his misfortune to come across. He denigrated the novel, (as he has flagellated all my other novels), with other choice epithets: 'maladroit', 'graceless', 'obscene', 'vulgar' and etcetera. Well, of course! The prose is 'rancid', but that is by design since the novel is about the lowlife of the fleshpots of London's Soho district. If a writer is dealing with rent boys, druggies, dealers, whores, kleptos, pimps and whatnot, it follows that the prose must be rancid and embellished with a thousand sordid images. The manicured and exquisite narrative of, say, Brideshead Revisited, would be out of place.

The work in question contains 297 uses of 'fuck' (and its creative variations), and 134 instances of 'cunt', plus a great number of other less than drawing-room-approved expletives.

It is interesting to ponder, for a moment, the etymology of that most earthy noun, 'cunt'. It originated in India through the goddess Kunti, and evolved from the Old Norse kunta. So, you might argue that 'cunt' has a divine origin. At any rate, it goes back a long way. Apparently, it first appeared in English in the 13th century. Believe it or not, it was the name of a street in Oxford, rejoicing in the wonderfully incisive Gropecunt Lane, presumably some kind of medieval redlight district. I argue that my use of these, to some, offensive and taboo words, is not in the least gratuitous because this is how my fictional characters, based on real people I met and observed, actually speak. And, by the way, 'rancid garbage' is tautological because garbage is by its nature putrid. You wouldn't say, for example, 'wholesome garbage', would you?

So, you see, novelists write and critics criticize because they can't write, and take great pleasure in savaging those who can. The critic in this case has one of those fustian and effete English Christian names: Aubrey. Rhymes with strawberry. To me, he is forever Aubrey Cuntsworth! An unbiddable juxtaposition of vowels: his name is, in fact, Aubrey Cantsworth. And by God he comes out with some egregious cant for the ghastly right-wing rags he is paid to carp for. He has a great distaste of the demotic in modern literature, his preference being more Margaret Drabble than Irving Welsh. He gives talks about it, and sometimes gets his sour coupon and glib tongue on TV to rant about 'the decline of the English novel, sunk in a morass of ungrammatical depravity'.

Is that so? I have a good mind to act the part of a wild, drunken, hell-raising writer, in the Hemingway mould, and give the reductive Cuntsworth a black eye when I see him next. This bone-headed reactionary who wishes to arrest the progress of the English novel. Who does he think he is? I shall be sure to administer Aubrey a real, eye-popping shiner at some public event. On television would be ideal. For example, during one of those self-congratulatory talk shows the British and Americans are so fond of. It would create a scandal, and the notoriety I would accrue would be good for my book sales. Bad boy author socks critic in the eye on TV! Indeed, a socking good headline!

Now, I suppose, I should tell you about the novel and its 'rancid garbage'. I originally titled it Cunts of Soho. My publisher thought it daring, but the American counterpart had a fit and so the title was truncated and became the abbreviated Soho. My British publisher cravenly acquiesced in the matter of the title to the puritanism of the Americans.

Inspite of or perhaps because of Aubrey's damning and vituperative criticism, the book is doing rather well. My agent informed me just this morning that she is negotiating a good figure for the film rights with the Coast. That is what Margot said: 'The Coast.' Being somewhat hungover it took a few seconds to interpret the Coast as Hollywood. So, ya boo sucks, critics! 'The most disgusting book I have ever had the misfortune to read' (Aubrey Cuntsworth), will apparently be a major motion picture. The producers will probably fuck it all up and anodynize the narrative beyond all description. Never mind, they will have paid me handsomely for the right to butcher my work.

The novel follows the fortunes of a rentboy called Gary Osmond who hangs round the Dilly selling hash and/or his arse to whoever is buying. To give you a flavour of the 'rancid garbage', here is a short extract from chapter one:

'Gary did as instructed and came in the client's arse. Also, as bidden, he took a snap of his spunk oozing out of the still twitching gape. The client's name was Henry, actually a real hooray Henry who had fond memories of being buggered at Harrow. Gary used Henry's smart phone for the pornographic purpose, and together he and Henry admired the spunky masterpiece.

'I say,' said Henry. 'What a splendiferous shot.' Lying naked on the bed and scratching his wobbly, disgustingly albescent belly, he seemed unaware of the pun. Gary lit a spliff and handed it to Henry, saying, 'Yeah, it'll look fucking wicked over your mantlepiece in Sloane Square.' Henry guffawed. 'Not sure the wife would approve, what!'

I realise that this kind of in-your-face realism/smut/filth, whatever you want to call it, will not be to everyone's tastes. But that is a matter of supreme indifference to me. The fact is, you don't have to read it. You can rip the novel up and use it for kindling for all I care. Or, perhaps, use it to level a wobbly table that has one leg shorter than the others. In fact, the leg would have to be a good deal shorter because the tome is Dickensian in length. The story, not of course the prose and vocabulary, is also Dickensian in sweep; it is a social commentary on the depravity of London, involving a large cast of reprobrates and unsavoury characters – modern day Fagins, Artful Dodgers, etcetera.

I reserve the right as a writer to shock, disgust, discombobulate, and, by any means possible, ruffle the feathers of luddite complacency. I am talking about literary evolution, progress, innovation, originality… a moving forwards so as not to become tedious and derivative. Stuck in a rut of accepted style and structure, and so on. Writers need to come up with new ways to whack unsuspecting readers upside the head, otherwise we would still be writing the kind of pleonastic and florid prose found in Victorian novels. I am not bashing Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austin, the Brontes, et al; they were of their time, and they wrote appropriately for it. I am a great fan of the Brontes and Charles Dickens, but to write like them would, naturally, be unnatural. I also admire more recent writers such as Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, but what would be the point, other than it being a purely academic exercise, to emulate them? It would be prose by facsimile; in other words a complete waste of bloody time.

So, when writing about rentboys, tarts, dealers and other denizens of the street, the writer must necessarily employ the appropriate vernacular, unpleasant as it may be to the delicate ear.

By the way, I detest people who pass their appalled, poker-up-the-arse judgment without actually having read the work they so vehemently denounce. Oh yes, a lot of that goes on. Well, at least, Cuntsworth appears to have read Soho, or skimmed it at least. In some ways, I suppose, I must be obliged to him for fanning the flames of the novel's notoriety. His niggardly appraisal and final conclusion that it was the most depraved book he had ever read (he can't have read any Charles Bukowski!) no doubt helps the book's sales. A prurient and voyeuristic tendency among a great many readers today is something that can be counted on. They want sex, violence, and lashings of dope to titillate them, to enliven dreary commutes to and from their offices and work places. To quote a popular song: 'Sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll is [sic] very good indeed.'

Allow me to digress a little here. In the seventies, there walked among us a hysterical harpie of righteousness, the personification of primness and propriety. Her name was Constance Mary Whitehouse, and she became something of a celebrity in Great Britain. She spent her life being disgusted and bewailing the depravity of the permissive society and its loose morals. Constance was constant in this. She decried television with its parade of promiscuous demimondaines and louche commentators of all stripes. She sent blizzards of complaints to the BBC on a regular basis; her cries of outrage were clarion calls to conservative decency and decorum. But her attempts to bowdlerize anything and everything that smacked of the lewd were akin to King Canute trying to command the waves of the sea to turn back. The times had changed, after all. Sex was in demand. The risible irony is that a well known porn baron of the day decided to dub his candid and gynaecologically focused mag, Whitehouse. A dubious honour, and I am sure it must have maddened Mary to blood-vessel-bursting point, but it really served her right for being such a crashing bore about sex.

Mary was squeamish to the point of delirium about what the Americans call cuss words. But sex was the real bugaboo. According to Mrs. Whitehouse and her cohorts, sex was something you couldn't possibly talk about, or, God forbid, depict or disseminate in any shape or form. Presumably, sexual intercourse could only be indulged in for the purpose of procreation – of course, with the lights out, in the missionary position, and 'thinking of England', although why one would want to think of Blighty when having it off has always been a mystery to me.

Back to Aubrey: a more literary, more astute version of Mary Constance Whitehouse. I know what I would like to do with that canting, mealy-mouthed tosser. Murder him in public! Don't be alarmed – this is a fantasy homicide, and not an original one either; I saw a disgruntled author do this to a critic in a film.

So, I envision a glittering literary event taking place on the rooftop of a very high building. Champagne is flowing and erudite conversation is cascading like clever sewage from a pullulation of publishers, critics and authors – the self-aggrandizing literati of London. I am there with my writer colleagues, Martin, Julian et al, insulting them whenever possible, but in a more or less jocular fashion because I admire them; indeed, I am in awe of their exquisitely woven plots, and formiddable skill at stringing together sentences of immaculate syntax. Perfectly rythmic and balanced. Blown away by their mastery of le mot juste.

Then I spot Aubrey Cuntsworth who is holding forth in a nasal whine about the 'debauched and regrettable prose' of certain writers. I hear my name mentioned and I sidle up to the unsuspecting hack. By the way, I am a fairly hefty chap, blessed with preternaturally strong biceps, while Aubrey is a nauseating little twerp wearing rimless glasses and a florid bowtie. I rip his preposterous polkadot neck adornment from his throat and dump it in a nearby bowl of dip. This causes some consternation but nothing like the consternation that is to follow. There is an altercation, naturally. Aubrey is vociferous in his condemnation of my sullying his beloved bowtie in a bowl of Guacamole.

'You'll pay for that, you odious man!' he screeches.

'Shut the fuck up, Aubrey,' I retort, sharp and nasty. 'It's time you came down off your pontificating high horse.'

'What on earth are you talking about, you pathetic, sewer-talking excuse for an author?'

'I am talking about the fall.'

'The fall of what? Your book sales?'

Aubery smirks at his witticism which really gets my goat. I allow a slight pause for dramatic effect, before screaming at the top of my lungs, 'The fall of yourself! You canting cunt!'

And without further ado, I drag the wretch to the safety wall at the edge of the rooftop and heave him over the top. Yep! Just like that. Aubrey Cuntsworth has 40 floors to fall, and a very brief time to consider the grave error of insulting homicidal authors, before he becomes strawberry Aubrey on the unyielding tarmac below – a sanguinary and satisfying conclusion to his blithering career.

There is, as might be expected, shock and awe, hysteria among the gobsmacked and distraught assembly. I ignore their plangent cries and march to the bar. I demand gin with menaces, and sit back to await the inevitable arrival of the men in blue. I imagine that I shall be going down for some time, but console myself with the fact that I can write in the nick, and that my murderous notoriety should ensure substantial and lucrative book sales for some time to come.

Yes. Don't worry! It is, after all, merely a fantasy murder. But I do think that when I next come across the canting toad, I should give him a good sock in the eye. It's what Hemingway would have done.

Shirt Story

'My God! That shirt is louder than the band,' screeches a voice above the cacophony. We are at the hop. The boys are thrashing away: the drummer pounds a jack hammer in counterpoint to the wailing of electrified guitars. Pummelled by the Pentatonic and Blues scales – 12 bars with a turnaround. Rock 'n' Roll! Each time the lead guitarist launches into a solo his face twists into that contorted look people get when they're trying to eject a troublesome turd. The squealing of his Fender is as intense as a chainsaw.

The shirt squeezes through the sweating, writhing crowd, but it is four years ahead of its time, a riot of colour repudiated for its ludic impudence. And the shock and surprise will shortly turn from simple shirtiness to outright savagery. In a small town in 1962 (never mind where), shirts comply with the prevailing colour-code. Or else!

To begin at the apex, there is the stuffed shirt: pristine and white, sartorial apotheosis for the man about town. White shirt, black tie. The gentleman's choice. For those who tend to expound conservative and overarching views. Theirs is a ruling class, a milieu of suave killers with insincere smiles and fat bank accounts. A regime where the moral philosophy driving their economics attempts to exonerate greed.

There are also the fascist shirts – brown as tobacco, dismal as Death's-heads. They are often seen in ranks, hypnotized, shouting slogans out of harsh throats in a chundering blind delirium.

The Black Shirts are the daring ones. They conduct their politics in the street, at a shady nexus, where justice is frequently dispensed from the end of a barrel. They blend into the shadows, doing deals in back rooms, and appear sleek and appealingly dangerous in the clubs. Their chrome horses gleam in the parking lots. And make no mistake, there are white and yellow assassins who wear black shirts. The skin of the Black Shirts is not always ebony. Ask the Cosa Nostra and the Triads.

The Grey Shirts are those in-betweens, squawking like impressionable school boys. Insipid and powerless. They follow the leader, the one in charge. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir! In terms of allegiance, there is no grey area here because, in awe of their prefects, the Greys look up to the Whites. They follow their every precept and custom – uncritical and credulous. An inculcated and fanatical belief in exceptionalism and primacy are the dominant characteristics of the White Shirts. The Grey follow like sheep in a grey mist, bleating for the Great White Shepherd to herd and gird them. The Grey fear the Black Shirts but are tolerated as long as they don't step out of line.

But this catastrophic and kaleidoscopic shirt that is ahead of its time is reviled. It is in the dock. Rebuked. A shirt of colour! How dare you, sir! Pistols at dawn! A horse-whipping is too good for a cur like you!

In fact, it is a shirt of many colours. Too many colours, as it turns out, frothing in the homogenous stew of Black and White shirts. It is loud, with red, yellow and blue swirls; impressions of palm trees and yellow sands, and a sea-green ocean rippling through its seams. In short, a psychedelic shirt, which joyfully proclaims: 'The spectrum in all its vivid glory is yours to assume and celebrate.'

It is a shirt on lysergic acid, accessorised with bell-bottoms, beads and bangles, and lemon-coloured sandals. Hallucination. Disturbance. 48 months ahead of its time. This is not the Summer of Love!

'Hey man! Turn it down!' That from the Black Shirt. 'Are you a pansy?' says the White, accusingly. 'What kind of shirt is that?' barks the Brown, belligerently. Prejudice spills like dirty water from minds rusted by injurious bias. From the darkest recesses there is jeering at the shirt of many colours.

I forgot to mention the Blue Shirts. They are the spiritual ones, the brave and the free, the immaculate cowboys and sailors. The former ride under azure skies; the latter sail the wide blue sea. Into sunsets and sunrises. They are not present in this den of vice. Nature's boys! Their habitats encompass the neutrality of salt and sand, wind and rain, deserts and oceans.

Prejudice is a predilection, a choice that entrains the inevitable syllogistic clash between the White and the Black shirts. The blood that spills blemishes the White with an incarnadine mark; it is taken as a sign of honour, like a duelling scar. The Black, of course, hides the spillage better. But they both revel in the sight of blood. The syllogism is complete.

One more advantage for the White Shirts in Sodom and Gomorrah is that cocaine doesn't show up on the shirt. Thus, the White Shirts preserve their corrupt dominions, their fleshpots. Their power is money. They dominate the markets, sharking in with sharp suits and winning smiles. They get results: more kills on the stock exchange as they dish out salutary lessons from the pulpits of profit. No religious fervour can exceed their enthusiasm for gold.

'That shirt is louder than the band!'

The voice is a woman's. I don't know her although she looks nice. She is white but her dress is black. She fingers the glittering rocks around her neck for a moment and her eyes appraise with sly prurience. Then she laughs hysterically and dances away with a White Shirt, one of the dominant and princely potent breed. Predators from boardroom to bedroom.

A posse of White, Black, Brown and Grey Shirts has descended. A democratic beating is now in progress in the alley, only witnessed by the moon and an alley cat dozing with one yellow eye warily open. Brutal it is! Fists and bats wielded viciously in the bespattered moonlight, relentlessly smashing into bone; the scene is silhouetted against the grimy walls – a gruesome flicker of shadows. Savage punishment is meted out for failing to conform.

The face is now a kind of mush. Texture of watermelon: soft, pulpy red flesh, with black pips for eyes, the lids of which are livid and swollen. The body lies bleeding from a truly Roman battering: a decimatio. The blood coagulates, an immaculate splash across the shirt of many colours, which is a little torn but still intact.

Diamond Geezer

There was an hour to kill.

Edmund Lyons studied his lean, still fairly good-looking face in the bathroom mirror. He was gratified that he had all his hair, admittedly receded a bit, but basically still all there. It was a reasonable mop. True, at the temples it was silvery grey, but it was a glistening chestnut brown on top, with no bald spot, so far. His normally docile and compliant grey-blue eyes were looking back at him with a look of steely, go-for-it determination.

He walked back into his study and sat down at his desk to write the letter. He looked at his watch. He would be 60 years of age in precisely 60 minutes – a diamond geezer. He sighed. It wouldn't be so dreadful being 60, he thought, if he had actually done something with his life. What had he achieved? A big fat zero. He had always barked up the wrong tree, opened the wrong door, turned left when he should have gone right, and so on. And that was because people had always told him to go and open all the wrong doors and turn left when he should have turned right! Edmund had played a subservient and submissive role all his life, letting other people dominate him and tell him what to do.

He envied those who heard their calling at a young age and went for it with purpose and conviction, regardless of the cold shoulder of criticism and disapproval. At the age of 17, he thought he heard his calling but his father had crushed his 'infantile dreams' of 'playacting', and denounced his absurd and unrealistic ambition as 'stuff and nonsense!'

Edmund had been programed to obey and never, God forbid, have the courage of his own convictions. It had been drummed into him by a succession of grim authority figures, none of whom had loomed larger than his father. Now, after 60 years of lukewarm and compliant living, it was time to warm things up. Tonight, he would do what he felt was necessary, what he needed to do to complete his liberation, post Dorothy.

He had spent his adult life, working for the local council, sitting on his arse, shovelling bits of paper around, attending tedious planning meetings presided over by pompous nitwits and nonentities. It had been a vanilla-flavoured existence. Frankly, in his eyes, a slow, uneventful, creeping death, with insipid and uninspiring flavours. Now he wanted paprika, saffron, cumin, fenugreek, tumeric, grains of paradise, galangal, mace, annatto, lemongrass, juniper berry… the works; all the flavours thrown in – all the spice of life possible. He even planned to go to Morocco for a holiday. He wanted to ride a camel in the dunes, camp under the desert stars by an oasis, and sip mint tea in the beguiling souks of Casablanca. Dorothy would never have gone for that sort of thing. Far too foreign!

As a youth, his big dream had been to become an actor. He acted in school plays and many said how good he was as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. His English teacher, Mr. Witherspoon, pronounced the production – a collaboration between the local girls grammar school and his alma mater – a triumph. There were notices in the local paper. It was whispered that he had talent. Mr. Witherspoon endorsed this appraisal and advised Edmund to apply to go to drama school after doing his A-Levels.

The argument Edmund had with his father about acting at breakfast one summer morning after he had sat his A-Levels was a vivid and painful memory. On that fateful day, he plucked up the courage to inform his parent that he wanted to become an actor, and that according to Mr. Witherspoon he had a reasonable chance of getting into a good drama school, perhaps even RADA. Actually, what ensued between father and son wasn't so much an argument as a brief one-sided conversation that ended with a paternal edict and a dream mercilessly crucified and summarily dismissed.

Mr. Lyons was a prim, soullessly sensible and correct man, a solicitor by profession, with a mournful demeanour and a tendency to irascibility. He listened to his son's ridiculous and impractical proposition with a less than enthusiastic expression on his dour, bespectacled face. He put down the Times, took off his steel-rimmed glasses, examined them critically against the light, polished them assiduously, and finally replaced them. He regarded his son who was looking back at him, hoping for parental approval of his star-struck dreams. But the parent said nothing. He buttered his toast and applied marmelade. Edmund waited on tenterhooks, hypnotized by the knife spreading back and forth, like a pendulum of fate. Mr. Lyons was fastidious in everything; the process of buttering and applying marmelade was done with patient rigour.

'Well, Father?' said Edmund, unable to hold his tongue. 'What do you think?'

'What do I think?' said Mr. Lyons, taking a leisurely bite out of his toast. After chewing thoroughly and taking a sip of tea, he said: 'I think it is a preposterous notion, an idiotic delusion, an infantile dream. Acting is no sort of profession. Stuff and nonsense!'

'But Mr. Witherspoon says I have talent and you know I got good reviews for my Puck.'

'I don't give a tinker's cuss for what your Mr. Witherspoon thinks,' growled Mr. Lyons. 'Or what damn fool reviews you received for being a fairy! I will neither countenance nor pay for you to go to a so-called school for playacting. It is out of the question. Young man, you will do something solid and practical, and get this absurd folly out of your head. At once, do you hear?'

'But…'

'But me no buts, Edmund!' thundered his father. 'That is the end of the matter. Case closed!'

And that indeed was the end of the argument. Father had spoken. Mr. Lyons gave his son a fierce look, and with a truculent snap of broadsheet pages, disappeared behind the Times.

So, Edward toed the parental line and became a bureaucrat. A rat in a bureau, so to speak. Flailing around in a cage, a slave at a wheel of monotony and drudgery. Desk-bound, 9–5, weekdays. For decades. Two-weeks' break in Clacton in the summer.

He was rushed off his feet, mostly. Never had time for a hobby what with his wife Dorothy clamouring for constant attention and his unquestioning obedience. She had been like a sergeant major issuing non-stop orders for things to be done around the house and in the garden. Commands that brooked neither refusal nor malfeasance. He never had any peace. Especially at weekends. There were always errands to be run. Tedious visits that had to be made to maiden aunts and deaf uncles. All the family rituals they were enslaved to were observed. Religiously. Such as church on Sundays, and a walk in the park after lunch on Sunday afternoons, which was compulsory, come rain or shine; and harrowing shopping expeditions on Saturdays, when every other damn fool was also out shopping, jamming the shops and thoroughfares with bags and packages, and all with the plangent din of Saturday afternoon in the high street jangling in your ears.

Edmund had always obeyed the domestic curriculum and the timetables imposed on him. Dorothy would have had words if he hadn't. He had invariably taken the path of least resistance; it was the Chinese idea of a reed bending in the wind. It had been easier that way.

But Dorothy was six months in the ground. He had nursed her through breast cancer during the 12 months prior to her death. It had been a terrible time. He was sad, naturally, when she passed. They had been married for 35 years. He had got used to her, and it's hard to let go of what you're used to. He had grieved as he could. They had married young but hadn't been blessed with kids. Something to do with her tubes. Anyway, he had always complied with her wishes. In everything. And with no complaints – just a mild wistfulness for how things might have been different. Edmund was, essentially, too kind to be jaded and bitter.

But things were different now. He was alone and what was known as 'footloose and fancy free'. And he did feel freer, lighter, less encumbered, less pressured and put upon. It was time to do something, time to suit his fancy – time to act decisively, and with conviction. To do what had always been a dream: retrospectively, to defy Father, and now, Father Time himself!

Edmund had often wondered over the years how his life would have turned out if he had disobeyed his implacable parent and pursued his ambition of treading the boards. Who could say? It had always saddened and frustrated him that he had blown his chances by not having the courage of his convictions, by being lily-livered and allowing himself to be browbeaten by conservative tyranny. But whose to say you can't redeem your ambitions and overturn fate? It's not over, he thought. No fat lady has appeared. The final curtain has not fallen. There's life in the old dog yet, etcetera. He felt resolute. Tonight, on the cusp of his 60th birthday, Edmund Lyons had found the courage of his convictions.

As the minutes counted down to usher in his sixth decade, he wrote a letter to his bosses at the council informing them that he wished to take advantage of early retirement. He felt he still had at least 20 good years in him. But there was no time to lose. Seize the day and all that. After he had written his letter of resignation, he looked with satisfaction at the entry in his diary: Rehearsal, Friday 7 pm, The Importance of Being Ernest, local AmDram Society.

Edmund smiled. He felt elated and had a sense of great personal triumph. As the clock chimed in his 60th birthday, he lifted a glass and toasted his new role as a footloose, fancy-free diamond geezer.

The Early Life of Sisyphus Sykes

They called him 'Phus the Wus' at school. Later came a crueller variant – 'Sissy Pussy'. A sissy and a pussy rolled into one! Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes was a gangling four-eyed nerd, a problem from the get-go. To start with, he had been reluctant about being born; they had had to cut him out of there. Strangely enough, he had appeared with two inchoate front teeth, and his first act in the world, after they had swabbed off the blood and gore, was to give his mother a nasty nip on the nipple. He went on the bottle after that.

By the age of 11, he was 5-foot 7, and his two front teeth had grown to Bugs Bunny proportions. He was pallid and resembled a malnourished stick. But by far his strangest feature was his huge head from which sprouted a tangle of bedraggled blond curls. He found it hard to keep his head up, which hung down over his chest, causing the upper part of his spine to bow a bit, similar to the way a sunflower droops because its stem is too weak to support the weight of its head.

His mother had named him Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes because she thought it sounded 'classy'. She chose the middle name when she remembered, vaguely, that there had once been some very clever man called Freud who was a Sigmund. And it was operatic sounding, too. But Betty Sykes had never attended an opera; she was mixing up her Sigmunds and Siegfrieds. To her Wagner was an outfit that made brake pads, and Figaro were the olive oil people. The Italians certainly knew their onions when it came to olives: 'For more than 100 years Figaro has, and continues to be, committed to quality and health.' They should write an aria about it and get some famous tenor to sing it. Betty swore by Figaro olive oil. Its gospel was written in brochures and on bottles, so it had to be true.

Betty Sykes came from 'wop stock' (as she said herself, always with a giggle), up near Woodstock. She liked to boast 'I'm the wop with a lot!' 'A lot of what?' people would ask. 'Intelligence,' replied Betty. Folk were mystified; she was not exactly what you would call 'intelligent'. Even her father said she was 'dumb as nails, but a swell gal.' Before she married Tom Sykes her name was Betty Brown. She thought Betty Sykes was a slight improvement on the prosaic Betty Brown and its annoyingly alliterative folksiness. She deemed the naming of names an important process, a sacred responsibility. She was determined her son would have a great name, a name that resounded, a name to conjure with.

'How about, Tom?' her husband suggested, plonking an oily spanner on the kitchen table. This was a couple of weeks before Betty gave birth. She was getting desperate to hit on a name; time was running out.

'Idiot! That's your name,' snapped Betty. 'And get that darned spanner off the table!'

For some reason, neither of them had considered girls' names. They were convinced they were having a boy. Tom retorted that it was not uncommon for sons to take their father's and even grandfather's Christian names. He pointed out that his father had been Tom, and so his kid could be 'Tom Sykes the Third'. Tom reckoned it lent an air of importance, 'kinda like royalty' – Tom Sykes III. He said people were impressed by that sort of thing. Betty thought about throwing a plate at her husband. Tom smiled gormlessly, retrieved the oily spanner and shoved it in the breast pocket of a garment that had once been bright blue but was now an oil slick. Betty demurred, and being a woman of some determination, she got her way in the matter of naming the kid.

In point of fact, Tom couldn't care less. More than anything in the world, he was interested in transmissions, and tuning them. Everything else, in his mind, was secondary to the Holy Grail of a perfectly tuned transmission.

And so, indeed, it came to pass: 10 days later, Betty and Tom had a boychild, and he ended up being christened Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes! Betty had been dusting when she heard the name 'Sisyphus' waft out of the radio. A talk was being given on Greek mythology by a man with a German accent. Betty hadn't paid much attention to the Greek mythology part. In fact, the German professor, who rejoiced in the name of Adolf Wolfschlegelsteinhausenberg might just as well have been talking Greek. She simply heard the name – Sisyphus! And what a name it was! Three serene syllables tripping felicitously off the tongue – Si- See-Phus. Betty was in ecstasies. It was as if she had struck gold in the Klondike, or discovered the cure for cancer. It came to her as a revelation, a real Eureka moment. 'Praise the Lord,' said Betty, crossing herself, for she was a religious woman. She danced around the house like a ballerina with a bump, twirling her duster coquettishly at the lamps, trying out the name 'Sisyphus… Sisyphus…' Yes, a perfect triplet of tongue-delighting syllables. Si. See. Phus. Betty was sold. She thought Professor Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes sounded 'real classy'. Or maybe Dr. Sisyphus S. Sykes, the famous brain surgeon. Or perhaps a great spy who would sign his name mysteriously – S. S. Or did that have Nazi overtones? Betty knew the Nazis were bad guys and the good old U. S of A had won the war with chewing gum, Luckies and pantyhose. John Wayne had said so. What a rugged fellow!

Betty's mind veered in all kinds of weird and wonderful directions. She was a simple woman, an ex-pom-pom girl. A big fan of manly types, such as burly John Wayne. But she had ended up with Tom Sykes! Big Betty Brown… Great jugs, poor student! She lost her virginity to a quarterback, who became an optometrist in Syracuse. Incidentally, soon after setting up shop in Syracuse, the ex-quarterback got killed in a spectacular train wreck, and hence became an ex-optometrist who had once been a quarterback. His new Cadillac came off badly against an express train that came hurtling through a badly lit crossing. What a mess! The ex-quarterback/optometrist (his name had been Brad) was not a pretty sight when they recovered the bits of him from the wreckage. He didn't look so square-jawed and handsome anymore.

But Betty had moved on and become religious. Jesus had saved her. Apparently. 'Saved you for what?' one sarcastic boyfriend inquired. 'Are you the leftovers?' Arnie, for that was the caustic wit's name, instantly became an ex-boyfriend. And he got a slap in the mouth for being fresh, followed by a kick where it really hurts.

The truth is, Betty never got to hear about Brad's mishap with the train. The magazines she read didn't cover train wrecks. They had to do strictly with fashion, perfume and female agony. Betty Brown was not a great reader. Period. She dated a number of men before selecting Tom. They were desultory affairs. The men, being idiots, were after only one thing! They drank beer, farted, talked rubbish about 'beaver', and couldn't piss straight into a can. In a word – useless.

Then, at the age of 23, she discovered Tom. And, frankly, he did take some discovering. Sometimes, Betty wondered if she had married Tom Sykes out of pity. He was a sad case. All he could talk about was transmissions. He bored people to death with transmissions… transmissions… solid engineering… blah, blah, blah… Cummins engine… smooth transmissions… etcetera, ad nauseam…

Normally, he was as docile as a pig in shit but when it came to transmissions he became intense and voluble. His eyes would bulge out of his head and the veins in his neck would stand out and pulsate like hideous blue worms, as he babbled on about the tremendous world of transmissions. Tom Sykes could have made a fortune as a one-man House of Horrors. He did have his uses though. The thing about hang-dog Mr. Sykes, the thin guy with the turkey neck (diametrically opposite in the Brad Pitt Handsome Stakes), was that he was hung like a donkey. True. Although, his true amour was transmissions; sometimes he got a hard-on listening to the purr of a perfectly tuned transmission.

Betty Sykes was a good woman in many ways. A God-fearing woman. She liked her messy and transmission-obsessed husband to be out of the way until the evening. At least, transmissions paid the bills. And there was enough for shopping, an undertaking Betty was dedicated to. She was also very proud of her ample chest, which she referred to as 'her intelligence'. No one quite knew why her 40 D cups equated with intelligence. A foible? A vanity? But she did try hard to be a good mother of what turned out to be a challenging child. A walking Greek tragedy. However, the sum of Betty Sykes' knowledge came out of catalogues and fashion magazines; and they didn't cover Greek mythology in those. At any rate, the boy wound up being called Sisyphus. And so began the uphill struggle of his life.

* * *

People said he was an odd child. 'His head's too big.' 'My, my, isn't he thin?' And, 'What a queer fish!' All kinds of less than complimentary remarks were tossed around about Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes. But he absorbed the slings and arrows with quiet fortitude. The boy was prone to misfortune, but persistent in the face of adversity; he would always rise before the count of 10, struggle on, and continue riding life's punches.

At the age of three, he began delving into the very few books his parents had, straining to decipher the hieroglyphics – the A B C. Unfortunately, Betty and Tom didn't buy him any children's books; all they had was an illustrated encyclopaedia (1953 edition), a few cook books, piles of literature about automobile transmissions, his mother's extensive library of catalogues and fashion magazines, and the Gideon Holy Bible.

On one occasion Sisyphus discovered some interesting reading and pictorial matter on a shelf in the garage next to: 'Automotive Transmissions, Fundamentals, Selection, Design & Application'. The periodical next to this was called Playboy; it exercised greater pulling power over young Sisyphus than 'Automotive Transmissions Fundamentals, Selection, Design & Application'. Playboy was revealing: some ladies in it weren't wearing any clothes at all, and there were others in swimsuits sporting funny bunny ears and tails. In the centre of the magazine, which folded out, there was one bunny who was obviously the most important bunny of them all. Her name was Cindy.

Sisyphus, who was nearly four, tried the word out: 'Puh-lay'… 'Play'… That sounded good. He liked playing. Next: 'Muh- ate'… 'mate'… 'Playmate!' Sisyphus was triumphant. He had deciphered the word. He liked this word and wished he had a 'playmate' of his own. Not necessarily one with 38-inch breasts. Any friend, really. However, he had been told many times that he was 'too odd to have any friends'. He looked at the playmate again. Would she make a good friend? She had long blonde hair, blue eyes and an interesting arrangement on the front of her body. But this was marred by an oily thumbprint slap in the middle of one of the protruding parts. The things on Cindy's chest reminded Sisyphus of two lovely round sandy-white hills that rose and ended in a beautiful pinky brown peak.

In the picture, Cindy was smiling. White teeth sparkling in a perfection of gums. Her mouth, luscious cherry lips parted slightly, pouted at the camera. Sisyphus was rather taken with her. He wondered if she would like his collection of dead beetles. He had one particularly fine specimen. Cindy would surely be staggered by his stag beetle. Sisyphus was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the magazine open on his lap. His too-big-for-his-body head loomed over Cindy's image beaming like a sunflower. He thought the stag beetle would look smashing posing on the topmost pink part of one of those hills that stuck out of her chest. He reflected that his mother had big sticky-out bits, too, but his flat-chested father didn't.

Tom stole up from behind. 'I'll take that,' he said, snatching the mag away from his startled child. Unfortunately, Cindy's head got ripped in the process. Tom went and found some tape and fixed Cindy's lacerated hair-do. He tried to wipe the oil off but failed; Cindy now looked like a tar baby. He stuffed the mag back on a high shelf – way back. Satisfied that Cindy and her fellow bunnies were out of reach, he turned to his son. Tom, who had been wrestling with a tricky transmission problem, smiled stupidly and said: 'Now, Sis, you won't tell your ma about this, will you?'

He called his son 'Sis'? He did! Like Johnny Cash's A Boy Named Sue, it was wildly inappropriate, as Sisyphus was not female and couldn't be Tom's sister. But Tom wasn't a great thinker. It was just convenient, a linguistic short-cut that saved some breath. He couldn't be bothered to come out with 'Sis-see-phus'. This annoyed the hell out of his wife Betty, who would cherish the name until her dying day.

'Did you hear me, son? Don't tell Ma!'

'Why not? The ladies are funny. With bunny ears, tails and all…'

'Yeah, they're kinda cute,' agreed Tom.

There was a long silence, during which Tom was distracted by a transmission detail.

'You made a mess of Cindy,' said Sisyphus at last.

'What?'

'Cindy! My playmate. I was going to show her my stag beetle.'

Tom had figured the problem must be with the differentials. Then he remembered that he had to apply himself to convincing Sisyphus not to talk about those cute, scantily-clad bunnies with his mother. 'I can tell you, Sis, that Cindy won't take no interest in no stag beetle. No way!'

Sisyphus was incredulous. 'Really?' he gasped.

'You betcha! Now, PLEASE DON'T TELL MA!!!'

'About what?'

'About the bunny girl stuff!' Tom fished a grimy rag from his pocket and wiped the sweat off his forehead.

'But why? Ma has the same things on her chest as those bunny ladies. Wouldn't she like them?'

Tom was getting desperate. His mind was reeling in this titanic intellectual struggle with his nearly-four-year-old son. He tried again. 'Look, it's a man thing. So, let's keep it man to man, Sis. OK?' said Tom, hopefully, winking at his son.

Sisyphus like this idea. 'OK,' he said.

Tom heaved a sigh of relief and went back to dealing with the transmission problem. Even at home, after work, and on weekends, he was obsessed with transmissions.

Betty was the general of the household. The dictator of everything domestic. She gave the orders and wore the trousers. And she selected the trousers and clothes that were often either too small or too big for Sisyphus and Tom from her voluminous 2,000-page catalogues. Betty was also a scourge with knitting needles! Her 'boys' were obliged to wear her nightmarish creations: hideous scarves 10 yards long, and sweaters made for the average gorilla. But Betty was a great cook and fed the family well from her ample kitchen that was notable for having probably the largest domestic fridge in the galaxy. It was a tank, truly massive – a tank full of food! She was, 'the wop with a lot' (as she said herself), and she produced pizzas and pasta in industrial quantities. It was a mystery how Tom and Sisyphus remained so svelte, while over the years Betty grew quite rotund. Even her breasts put on weight and her brassieres were staggering feats of cantilevered engineering.

Mrs. Sykes was an avid follower of fashion, a determined shopper, especially if there was a sale on anywhere within a 50-mile radius. When he was little, Sisyphus was compelled to be her companion on these marathon retail expeditions. They looked a strange sight out and about. Betty was becoming a little too buxom around the hips, while Sisyphus made a garden rake look overweight. From a distance, when mother and son were walking side by side, you might have formed the impression that a rather large lady was dragging a thin bundle of twigs along.

Some of the places Sisyphus got dragged to were dire. His least favourite was the barbers. He had to sit on a plank because he was too small to sit in the chair. The place was called Benny's Barbershop; the proprietor bore a resemblance to Adolf Hitler and had the same toothbrush mustache. He wore a brown coat and stank of tobacco and whisky. The dominant colour in the place was brown, and there were those heavy tobacco-brown seats that went up and down by means of a foot-pedal. The barber himself was colour-coordinated with the establishment: from his sallow face and sour expression, down to his yellowed fingers. And he behaved somewhat Nazi-like. 'Sit up straight, Junge!' This would be preceded by a clip round the ear, or a painful pinch. Benny's Barbershop was a gruesome experience, a feared and hated venue.

Many years later, via the newspapers, Sisyphus came to learn more about the barbarous barber. The proprietor of Benny's Barbershop that he knew wasn't called Benny at all. The original Benny had died in 1932, five years after he had set up Benny's Barbershop. The ghoul who cut Sisyphus' hair was a man named Horst Richter – born in Heidelberg, in Germany. He appeared in the 'land of the free' after the war, and later bought Benny's Barbershop from Benny's son, Lenny.

Sometime, much later, it turned out that old Horst was indeed a Nazi, although he assured everyone that he had been a completely insignificant one. He had once shaved a high-ranking S.S. officer – a proud moment for Herr Richter, and he had Heil-Hitlered enthusiastically. Apart from being handy with a cut-throat razor, he had also been a lowly guard – somewhere or other! He protested that he knew nothing about the gas ovens, and that he was a simple barber. 'Go ask Herr Topf,' said Horst, cryptically. Nobody knew who the hell this Topf fellow was. Then, some bright spark looked him up and discovered that Herr Topf (und Sohn) was the guy who owned the company who made the ovens for Auschwitz.

By the time they busted him, Horst was a decrepit old man. The strain of all the unwanted attention brought on a heart attack. At the time of his death, Herr Richter was standing on a platform in a subway station in New York. His old Nazi heart stuttered and he felt dizzy at precisely the moment the metro rattled in: Horst fell headlong into its path and came off badly. It wasn't clear whether the heart attack would have been fatal; the train certainly was.

* * *

By the age of seven, with no internet anywhere near on the horizon, Sisyphus Sykes had arrived at the reasonable assumption that the world and most of the people in it were against him. His world, in fact, was a small American town, a conservative place with 'Christian' values. It was a narrow milieu, where the liberal and avant garde were regarded with deep suspicion. Sisyphus had noted that folk were often at one another's throats, despite their 'church' values. He had first noticed this tendency at home, in the kitchen – a dangerous place with sharp things and blunt instruments, such as saucepans, knives, rolling pins, plates and saucers, which sometimes flew.

He once saw Betty, his mother, hurl a dinner plate, like a frisbee, at his father. Tom ducked in time and the plate smashed on the wall behind him. At the time, Tom had been droning on about transmissions – the love and obsession of his life!

'If I hear the word 'transmission' again, I'm going to scream,' said Betty; and with that she screamed and threw another plate.

'Missed!' said Tom, walking out, leaving Betty Sykes to clear up the mess.

Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes would try to console his mother at trying times such as these, when she was weeping with frustration at wreckage and mess. A lot of things did get wrecked around the place. But Betty was the main culprit at breaking stuff. While doing the washing up, glasses, tumblers, cups, saucers, plates… basically, anything that was breakable, got broken. And Tom had the exasperating habit of leaving oily handprints, spanners and wrenches on pristine tablecloths. However, one day, Betty had the bright idea of using plastic alternatives. Eureka! She could at least wipe the oil off. And you could get them in so many different pretty patterns and colours. She had been inspired by one of her catalogues.

In other words, they were a pretty normal family; that is to say, normally dysfunctional. Betty didn't often throw plates at Tom, and they weren't at each other's throats all the time. It was just that the pressure in the family's emotional boiler would grow steadily, and niggle up to boiling point, occasionally. Then things would explode, and stuff would fly, such as saucers and plates. At least Betty didn't throw knives. Her husband infuriated her most of the time, and despite calling him an idiot a dozen times a day, she did love him, really. He had his compensations!

In the world at large, Sisyphus was used to being called a dork because of his odd appearance. He was thin and gangly, wore glasses, and his head was too big. And there was his ridiculous name, and all its spiteful variations. Very few people called him 'Sisyphus', including his father who, idiotically, had elected to hail his offspring as 'Sis!' – to the constant annoyance of his wife.

Sisyphus was often called 'Sissy Pussy'. Thin as a stick, a four-eyes with an overlarge, droopy head, and wearing the ill-fitting clothes Betty selected… Sisyphus was jeered at and kicked about like a rotten old parsnip. But he was beginning to become defiant about his name and derisive of conventional Christian names. The nomenclature (a word he learned when he was 9) was boring: Fred, Betty, Tom, Dick, Harriet, John, Jane, Susan, Harry, Mary, Rose, Ron, and so on to the nth degree of standard Christian names. Nevertheless, it was still unpleasant to be called 'Wus', 'Dork', and 'Sissy Pussy'.

Sisyphus sought solace in an interior world, where he was Flash Gordon, or an heroic knight turning adversaries' heads into water melons with a big mace; or a spy, a double 'O', embarked on desperate espionage capers. And he became a voracious reader. He read everything from the backs of detergent packs to Dickens. He even read some of Tom's transmission manuals, when Tom, thinking it his paternal duty to dragoon his son in some useful direction, cornered him and kept him captive in the garage for a couple of hours – usually on Sunday afternoons. The focus was, of course, on transmissions. Tom hoped his son would inherit his small transmission empire, a reasonably successful garage in town called Tom's Transmissions. Slogan: 'Our mission – a perfect transmission!'

But Sisyphus had no appetite to become a grease monkey. He immersed himself in the world of books and literature where he found he could lead, vicariously, a multitude of lives. For birthdays and Christmas, he only wanted reading matter. He didn't crave a 'Johnny Seven' machine gun (a replica for blood-thirsty boys of some death-rattler used in Vietnam), or a Meccano set, or a baseball bat, or a catcher's mitt, or a football helmet… Just books, please, or anything he could read.

Betty was proud that her son was such an avid reader. In her fantasises, she saw the letters on some fancy calling card: Dr. Sisyphus S. Sykes. But Tom was easy. It meant he didn't have to think too much – just go out, buy a birthday card and stuff a few bucks in for books. And sometimes, he even went and bought Sisyphus a book. There was a bookstore three doors down from his garage. Tom ordered all his books about transmissions from them.

Sisyphus spent his allowance on books, saving up for the more costly items, such as a handsomely bound collected Shakespeare. He procured the weighty tome when he was nearly 9 (8 and three quarters to be exact), and could make head nor tail of Shakespearean syntax. He had done it because he had read somewhere that it was okay to buy books you weren't going to read just yet; that way you built up a treasure trove of literature, and you would never be starved of something good to read.

Books piled up in his room. Pillars of literary wisdom formed precarious stacks around his bed. Then, one day, when he was 11, (a Saturday morning after his mother had broken a cup while stumbling over his books and Tom had ruined another tablecloth), Betty blew her top and ordered Tom to build Sisyphus a bookcase. Tom had to drag himself away from transmission matters, but he knocked up a decent and capacious pine bookcase over the rest of the weekend. Sisyphus was thrilled; he liked seeing his books on display. The array of spines with their intriguing titles and authors' names was a beautiful and inspiring sight.

What with all the reading, and all the time he had without any friends to bother him, Sisyphus learned stuff. He would read almost anything he could get his hands on, and he developed the knack of finding and acquiring knowledge, fast. When he was 8, he read Tom Sawyer, imagining he was Tom smoking a home-made corncob pipe with his buddy Huck. He read A Christmas Carol and felt empathy for poor Bob Cratchit, and genuine sorrow for the plight of Tiny Tim. Sisyphus haunted the local library on Main Street, where he was great friends with Mrs. Beatty, the librarian. He loved going to the library. It was more or less in the centre of town, a red brick building with a massive clock that clanged on the hour. Inside was an Aladdin's Cave of books and periodicals. Sisyphus felt at home there, and Mrs. Beatty never called him 'Phus', 'Wus', 'Sissypussy', or anything like that. She even turned a blind eye when he returned books late, which was quite often.

Sisyphus wasn't some kind of Mozartian genius, one of those kids who can do integral calculus and spout string theory at you when they're five, but he was a very smart lad (considerably above average intelligence), and he had an enquiring mind coupled with dogged determination. He spent a lot of time on his own, consuming books and periodicals, voraciously. History began to fascinate him: the blood and guts, death and destruction, treachery and intrigue, the politics and the endless calamity of war… It was history that led to an early downfall and marked Sisyphus for life.

School was a trying experience. He was teased, cajoled and bullied, constantly. The fact that he was extremely bright isolated him even further. His classmates knew deep down that he was the cleverest, and they resented him for it. Even his teacher, Mrs. Jean Weathervane, became ill-disposed, after he corrected her in a geography lesson. He pointed out that Mount Everest was not in The Alps. Jean Weathervane was a spinster of moderate intelligence. Enough to be a school teacher but she had to cover a number of subjects in junior high, and so she messed up, occasionally. Sisyphus spotted her gaffs and sometimes had enough diplomacy not to correct his teacher. For instance, she had once asserted that General Custer had been killed at Gettysburg, whereas, in fact, the overconfident Custer copped a deadly custard pie from Crazy Horse at Little Big Horn. Sisyphus knew that! And unwisely, Sisyphus stated in public that he thought Custer had deserved it!

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