Murray Dreamed a Dream

O Henry was one of the greatest craftsmen of a particular type of short story. He almost invented the type, in fact, and did it so well that no one has quite been able to copy it. You know an O Henry story when you see it, and you read it because it's his. When he died he left this story incomplete. He had written the opening, and left a few notes about how it should continue and finish. I don't know that anyone has tried to finish it before, so I've had a go. The result, for what it's worth, is below. The first half, roughly, is O Henry's. The rest is mine. My apologies to the shade of the great man for taking the liberty:

Both psychology and science grope when they would explain to us the strange adventures of our immaterial selves when wandering in the realm of "Death's twin brother, Sleep." This story will not attempt to be illuminative; it is no more than a record of Murray's dream. One of the most puzzling phases of that strange waking sleep is that dreams which seem to cover months or even years may take place within a few seconds or minutes.

Murray was waiting in his cell in the ward of the condemned. An electric arc light in the ceiling of the corridor shone brightly upon his table. On a sheet of white paper an ant crawled wildly here and there as Murray blocked its way with an envelope. The electrocution was set for eight o'clock in the evening. Murray smiled at the antics of the wisest of insects.

There were seven other condemned men in the chamber. Since he had been there Murray had seen three taken out to their fate; one gone mad and fighting like a wolf caught in a trap; one, no less mad, offering up a sanctimonious lip-service to Heaven; the third, a weakling, collapsed and strapped to a board. He wondered with what credit to himself his own heart, foot, and face would meet his punishment; for this was his evening. He thought it must be nearly eight o'clock.

Opposite his own in the two rows of cells was the cage of Bonifacio, the Sicilian slayer of his betrothed and of two officers who came to arrest him. With him Murray had played checkers many a long hour, each calling his move to his unseen opponent across the corridor. Bonifacio's great booming voice with its indestructible singing quality called out: "Eh, Meestro Murray; how you feel--all-a right--yes?" "All right, Bonifacio," said Murray steadily, as he allowed the ant to crawl upon the envelope and then dumped it gently on the stone floor.

"Dat's good-a, Meestro Murray. Men like us, we must-a die like-a men. My time come nex'-a week. All-a right. Remember, Meestro Murray, I beat-a you dat las' game of de check. Maybe we play again some-a time. I don'-a know. Maybe we have to call-a de move damn-a loud to play de check where dey goin' send us."

Bonifacio's hardened philosophy, followed closely by his deafening, musical peal of laughter, warmed rather than chilled Murray's numbed heart. Yet, Bonifacio had until next week to live. The cell-dwellers heard the familiar, loud click of the steel bolts as the door at the end of the corridor was opened. Three men came to Murray's cell and unlocked it. Two were prison guards; the other was "Len"--no; that was in the old days; now the Reverend Leonard Winston, a friend and neighbor from their barefoot days. "I got them to let me take the prison chaplain's place," he said, as he gave Murray's hand one short, strong grip.

In his left hand he held a small Bible, with his forefinger marking a page. Murray smiled slightly and arranged two or three books and some penholders orderly on his small table. He would have spoken, but no appropriate words seemed to present themselves to his mind. The prisoners had christened this cellhouse, eighty feet long, twenty-eight feet wide, Limbo Lane. The regular guard of Limbo Lane, an immense, rough, kindly man, drew a pint bottle of whiskey from his pocket and offered it to Murray, saying: "It's the regular thing, you know. All has it who feel like they need a bracer. No danger of it becoming a habit with 'em, you see." Murray drank deep into the bottle. "That's the boy!" said the guard. "Just a little nerve tonic, and everything goes smooth as silk."

They stepped into the corridor, and each one of the doomed seven knew. Limbo Lane is a world on the outside of the world; but it had learned, when deprived of one or more of the five senses, to make another sense supply the deficiency. Each one knew that it was nearly eight, and that Murray was to go to the chair at eight. There is also in the many Limbo Lanes an aristocracy of crime. The man who kills in the open, who beats his enemy or pursuer down, flushed by the primitive emotions and the ardor of combat, holds in contempt the human rat, the spider, and the snake. So, of the seven condemned only three called their farewells to Murray as he marched down the corridor between the two guards--Bonifacio, Marvin, who had killed a guard while trying to escape from the prison, and Bassett, the train-robber, who was driven to it because the express-messenger wouldn't raise his hands when ordered to do so. The remaining four smoldered, silent, in their cells, no doubt feeling their social ostracism in Limbo Lane society more keenly than they did the memory of their less picturesque offences against the law.

Murray wondered at his own calmness and nearly indifference. In the execution room were about twenty men, a congregation made up of prison officers, newspaper reporters, and lookers-on who had succeeded in getting permission to make sure Murray got the end that had been ordered for him. They had their own reasons, some of them. Others had none beyond curiosity.

Murray took in the prison warden, the doctor, an anonymous man who he knew would be the one to throw the switch. Some other time he would have found the face interesting, it surely had much to say, but now it meant nothing. The man had a job to do, no more. He thought he recognised some of Ginny’s folks. Not her mother. Poor woman, she had got old very suddenly, but she didn’t hate Murray enough to be there. He wondered if she wanted to hate, for the hate to give her courage so she could watch how it ended. For a moment it stopped him thinking about her father and that brother of hers who would likely be where Murray was some day. They were there, and Murray wondered if he should greet them. He smiled at himself.

The chair was to his left. They turned him and guided him towards it. It was a long time since he’d done anything of his own free will. As he was gently led he accepted the chair as part of all this. His life, the good times, when it all went wrong, what he had done to the girl, Len, Bonifacio, the man who came this way yesterday and whose name he had forgotten, the things that seemed so distant, and the games he had played in the prison, the conversations with those he was allowed to be around, empty talk it was now, meaning nothing; it all led up to this. It all made sense. His life was meant to come here.

Yet suddenly he was filled with horror. No, it should not be this way. He took in again the people and the events around him, he understood what they were doing, but it was not for him. It couldn’t be. He wasn’t the man they wanted. He dimly felt the straps being fastened. This was wrong, thought Murray. He understood that he had done nothing. He should not be there. The scene faded and he no longer saw the guards nor felt the straps nor smelt the old burnt wires within the machine that was meant to kill him. He saw what should have been, what was.

His life was suddenly before him. There had been no fight, no killing, no trial. There was no chair, no straps. He was in a brightly-lit room, where the sun shone on cheerful yellow walls, a warm carpet and wooden furniture he had made himself after his neighbour Pete had patiently taught him how to handle hickory. There are two paintings on the walls, small, framed landscapes, and a series of photos, portraits of men and women looking uncomfortable in clothes they weren’t used to wearing. His family and his wife’s, of course.

Through a curtained window is a garden with a lawn and a resplendent flowerbed, immaculately kept, and beyond it a wood filled with colour. The beauty of the scene was arresting, breathtaking even, and for a moment Murray couldn’t take his eyes from it. The room, the house, surrounded by that garden and that patch of nature, made a picture so idyllic he could hardly bear to believe it was real. And yet it surely was. It was his house. Murray felt a wonderful calm, a great peace. This was his house and his life, and it was as perfect as he could have imagined. Looking about him he could see his father-in-law’s photo, the tie badly tied because he had lost patience with the photographer. Murray smiled as he remembered that moment. There was a mark on the side of the kitchen table where the saw had kept sticking and even a plane and a lot of coarse sandpaper couldn’t smooth it away. They had left it that way and they laughed about how Murray had made his mark on his house. He would run his fingers across it as they sat down to eat.

There was a woman in a rocking-chair under the window, letting the sun play on the face of the baby she held. He greeted her and she addressed him as ‘darling’. She raised the baby’s hand as though to wave to him. She was Murray’s wife, the child was his child. He felt the joy that it caused him to see them and to know that they were his family. He knew that he had always felt and would always feel that same joy. She rose and came towards him. He took them both in his arms and kissed them.

At that moment the warden gave the sign and the current shocked through him. Murray had dreamed the wrong dream.

The Hill of the Apocalypse

Partly inspired by the writings of St John (What he was inspired by is still the subject of debate):

The man had reached the hill by cutting through the bushes with a machete. The last half mile had taken him nearly two hours. As he began to climb his shirt clung to his body and sweat dripped from the brim of his hat and ran down his face into his nose and mouth. The vegetation on the slope was sparser but the track was steep and now there was no shade from the blistering sun. He climbed with a rhythm that never changed, despite the burning in his throat and in his legs. Until reaching the top he would look only at the path in front of him, the next step, the next rock, the next branch which might trip him or cause him to stumble or twist an ankle. He had no need to think of anything at all, as long before he had instructed his will on what it had to do, and it was doing it perfectly.

His reasons for climbing the hill were no longer human reasons. The man had grown with the hill as part of the landscape. He had lived much of his youth, and part of his adult life, not in its shadow, but aware of its presence. He had always wanted to climb to the top, at first because it was there, it appealed as it would appeal to any adventurous child. Then he had created dragons in the thicket and castles on the summit and had wanted to find them and show he was not scared. Then it had challenged him, rising sometimes into the clouds, mocking his dreams with its proud impossibility. Then it had ceased to matter. He had left those thoughts behind and the hill became a landmark so he knew how close he was to home, a view to enjoy when he rested and raised his eyes, something to forget was there.

But all this had changed, because he had changed. The man now knew that the answers to everything he had ever failed to understand, to all the questions he had never thought to ask, the doubts he had not put into words, or had never consciously recognized as existing, were on the mountain. It had slowly been revealed to him that from the summit of the hill he would see such things as would give meaning to his life, to the world and to his place within it. He would no longer care that he was mortal, that he would not be remembered, that he was, in any human sense, a failure.

Once he had climbed the hill he would have knowledge of his rightful place in creation, an understanding that no one else would share, he would see things that nobody had seen or would ever see, and they would make him more important than all of those who were unaware of his existence.

He would know. He would know why he was born, why he existed, why only he was truly conscious, why he, who was obviously the centre of the world, was not recognized as such by the lesser beings, automata almost, with whom he came into contact. He would know this and understand it, and be satisfied.

So he had chosen a day, some time in the future, in early summer, to allow him to prepare everything, he had determined that nothing would stop him from keeping that promise, that appointment with himself. No illness or injury, no circumstance of the weather, no event in his life that others might tell him must be attended to, no act of God or the Devil would keep him from climbing the hill and finding the answer.

He prepared himself physically, walking many miles, always during the heat of the day, seeking out steep rocky paths and losing his way so he had to navigate by the sun and the distant landmarks. He learnt to do whatever he had to do, to observe whatever he had to observe, to think whatever he had to think, no more, no less. To give up, to be tired, to feel weak, was not only impossible, it became inconceivable. It could not happen.

He had eaten the food that soldiers eat when they march, that wrestlers eat when they train, that athletes eat when they run long-distance races. He had made his body sleek and strong, his muscles hard and tough, his skin resistant to the rays of the sun, the biting wind, the chilling rain, the stings of the insects and the rubbing of boots and clothes.

His mind was a diamond, hard and bright and uniform, a single structure, every facet flashing the same thought. It was a pool, clear and blue, rippling and drifting, but every drop the same, and the whole was the same as the drops. Nothing occupied his mind but his task, his dream.

The toughest of machetes had been daily in his hands. He had destroyed a number of them during this period by hours of hacking at the broadest and strongest of branches in the thickets about the village. His arms acquired the power to cut their way through forests at will, without tiring. His legs could carry him for miles up the steepest hills and the roughest rocks. His heart could desire nothing but to climb the hill and observe his life and his fate and his purpose in the context of the entire world.

He knew what he would see from the top of the hill. He could not have described it or explained it until he had climbed the hill, but he knew it. It was unclear in his head, foggy as he tried to make it out, but he knew it. He already knew it. The visions were already in his head, and it was only the meaning of them that was missing. The hill would reveal their meaning.

And so he climbed, cutting his way through and up the thickness of the bushes and trees which had not been penetrated by any creature larger than a rabbit for many years, hundreds of years perhaps. Nobody ever had need to go there, and so no one ever did. The seekers of silence and beauty, the few poets and philosophers the land had produced, the shirkers, the young lovers, all those who climb hills for no reason, had found other places from which to look out over the world, easier places to reach, of comparable beauty, they told themselves. There was no need to fight your way up this impassable hill.

He reached the summit. The world was below him and before him. It was beautiful, it was clear. The purpose of his life was there, clear and certain. The explanation for everything he had been and had experienced, and everything he would be, and would one day be no more, was there. It was perfectly transparent and terribly simple to understand. He welcomed understanding and peace.

He saw what he had been, what he could have been, what he should have been, what Ihenever was and never could have been, and why he did not become those things. You should not need to stand on a mountain to find such things, for they are not beneath you but within you. But the mountain helps you to understand what is too close to see.

He had not opened his eyes; he had not even raised them, and he would not. He had no need to see what he knew was before him. He only had to be on the summit to understand. He knew now that he would never again open his eyes, and that he would not leave the hill. This world had nothing more that he needed.

The Last Leper of...

Where? It doesn’t matter. Of anywhere, perhaps. Are there any lepers left anywhere now? I am the last leper… No it doesn’t sound quite the same. I must belong to somewhere, somewhere you’ve never heard of, of course, but somewhere.

So I am the last leper of Uttar Nishaidhapur. It sounds like a place that would have a leper colony, and that wouldn’t care that there was only one remaining. That’s why I have to tell you my story. In Uttar Nishaidhapur they aren’t interested.

I am old. I was once something other than a leper. I remember my father was a merchant. He travelled with goods for months at a time. Sometimes he came back with a great deal of money and we feasted through the rains and we helped the neighbours to eat and to marry. Sometimes he came back walking, barefoot, having lost everything but his robe. Then the neighbours helped us.

I would have been a merchant too. I would have done what my father did. No one would think of doing anything else. But on one of the occasions when he came back with nothing he shut himself up for three days, seeing no one, not even my mother. Then he went out again, and this time he did not come back at all.

As I had no father, then, I could not follow his profession, so I must go into trade. I became a craftsman of a kind. I was taught by an old man how to make some type of object. I no longer remember what it was I learnt to do. It did not last long, I think. Soon afterwards I became a leper, and that is what I have been ever since.

I have been told many things about being a leper by people who are not lepers. They told me what causes people to become lepers. They spoke of bacteria and sputum and vitamins and minerals and the cleansing of food and the washing of hands. They told me that the Great Prophet of the Christians had a great love of lepers, expressed in their Holy Book. It made me happy to know that, as we are not loved here, but I am not a Christian. They told me that I am called by other names in polite society. They told me that the doctors have found a way to make me not be a leper.

I stopped listening to such people when I heard that. They thought they were good people because they gave me food and did not throw stones or set dogs on me, but there are many people here who do not do that. I attended to them from politeness, but after that I began to fear them. I am a leper. I have always been a leper. I am too old to change now.

We do not work. We cannot work. But we must eat like other men. Thus our daily duties are determined, as are those of other men. I rise early, because I am old, and because I am hungry, and because the places I must sleep are hard and cold and uncomfortable. I can have no bed but the earth, no pillow but the stones. I nightly sleep in my mother’s bosom. I have learnt to make it sound poetic, or pitiful, of ascetic, depending on the ear that will hear it.

I cannot buy linen, and no one can afford to give me linen when it must be destroyed once I have touched it. So my bed is the earth. My home is the road.

When I am awake I walk, with a bowl before me. It is a small bowl, the only thing I have. But I know that a small bowl is good. People will put more in a small bowl than a big one. It is one of the many things I have learned over the years. I do not understand it; I do not understand many of these things, but I have learnt that it is so, and that is good enough.

But enough of what I tell the tourists- oh yes, there are tourists of leprosy as of all things- you want to know of my life.

I live as you do. I seek food and shelter and comfort and company and women. I seek status and power and solitude and health and youth. Exactly as you do. I often have food, but never enough to be satisfied. On rare occasions I have shelter. The other things I cannot desire. You need one in order to desire the next, and I can never go beyond shelter. On those occasions when I have shelter I desire comfort. I can desire nothing further, because I never achieve comfort. Never.

But I am still like you. Although I cannot seek company, or women, or prestige, or power, or health, or youth, I know that I would seek them if I could, and value them if I had them. I know this because although I cannot have them, I envy them in the people who do. I live as you do. I seek what I desire.

This life is not what it was. We were many once, and people gave alms as unthinkingly as they did all the most natural things in life. They gave little, it’s true. The smallest coin they had, to each such as I whose path they crossed. And they despised and feared and pitied you even as they gave. They did not look you in the face, they could not. They were afraid of becoming like you some day. But they gave. Now there is no fear, only contempt, disgust.

The young do not understand. Most have never seen a man like me. They think I am a crazy old man because I shout as I walk and do not come near them, and my clothes are old and torn and dirty from the many roads I travel daily. I was once like them. I can remember how it feels to be a boy, surprised, frightened, amused, fascinated, by everything that he sees and feels. I was a boy once, with a father to teach him. I wish I had a boy of my own now, to teach and to love, but when I was old enough to be a father I could not marry. It is one of the things lepers do not do.

My life is the road. I have no other because I can be nowhere. I belong nowhere. I am of Uttar Nishaidhapur, and this cannot change, but those who share my birthplace wish I were of some other place. And so I walk the roads from one village to another, and another and yet another, and so I keep on along innumerable, interminable roads, until those of the first village are ready to see me again. It is the life of the peddler, of the knife-grinder, of the reddleman. It is the life of the leper.

I see much on the road, but I cannot tell it. I can talk to no one. What I see I turn into stories and I tell them to myself as I walk. Then I tell them again at night as I try to sleep. The stories are better by day. They are more real, as the world is more real. They are a life that I create for myself and it is true while I tell it. While I am seeing what I see and there is light and there are people and the world is before me the stories are true and I am part of the world I walk through. By day I am real, and not only real; by day, I am great. At night these stories are only dreams, and they sadden me with their unreality. At night I know they are false, and they taunt me with their falsehood. At night I am no one, not even the last leper.

I provide a service, like all artisans, craftsmen, tradesmen, professional men. A doctor heals the sick, some of the time, and is respected and rewarded for it. A lawyer achieves justice against neighbours and governments, and is respected and rewarded for it. A potter, a carpenter, a farmer, provides objects necessary to the householder, essential to life, or to comfort, and is little respected for it, but he is rewarded. I allow the poor to attain merit. I can only deal with the poor, since there are ascetics who serve the wealthy, peripatetic men of superior religious practice with whom I cannot compete, but nor do they compete with me. The poor are my clients, because they fear me, and they fear becoming like me. Thus, they obtain merit at the same time as they allay their fear, and the service is more valuable to them.

I survive, as all men must survive. A man with a trade will always survive. He may have nothing, as I have nothing, he may know hunger, and thirst, and cold, and solitude, and the absolute despair of those whom the world has abandoned, but he will live.

Yes, my trade is dying. I am the last leper of Uttar Nishaidhapur, and I am old. It will die with me.

(Very Nearly) Red in Tooth and Claw

There was beauty visible on the hill, and ugliness and strangeness and majesty, and life and colour and darkness, and terror. The valley was beautiful, the trees and the flowers were beautiful, the towering slopes in the distance were beautiful, the city that lay on their foothills was majestic, the factory below it was ugly, the sky was both light and dark, the birds and the insects made aesthetically neutral noises, and the barking of the dogs was terrifying.

Anywhere in the world, any place and any time, is like that, a mix, a mess of stimuli, of responses, of emotions, of sensations, of colours and shapes impossible to resolve beyond a certain level of detail, leaving a confused sense of peace or discomfort or depression, of uplift depending on the dominant tones. If there is a discernible beauty you may count yourself lucky, otherwise you try going somewhere else.

The barking of the dogs was terrifying because it was getting closer and there was still no sign of them. In a few seconds they would appear from over a ridge or behind a tree or a rock and only then would we know what their intentions were and which direction to run in and how long we had to do it. They appeared. There were two of them.

They were long and rangy, light-haired and damp-toothed. Their eyes were not evil, just business-like. They had a job to do, keeping the country free of creatures that smelt as though they didn’t belong. But their business involved fear, and possibly blood.

We kept walking. It would probably have been worse to run. We kept calm and a casual rhythm. They smell fear, it is said, so we tried to control our pheromones, tuning them to essence of confident mastery. The kind of thing you learn in primary school.

We wondered idly- we had nothing else to do, after all- whether they would remain a couple of feet behind us barking until we were far enough from their territory for them to relax a little, or would speed our departure in the primitive fashion of their kind. It was a question of some importance for a few seconds. When you’re 6’2”, you wish the dog behind you wasn’t exactly 3’1”.

I wish we’d been bitten. It would have made a better story. It would have had an ending. But the truth is that after 50 yards or so the dogs fell back, and their barking faded to the distant warning it had been when we first heard them. It was at that moment that a group of roe deer crossed the path twenty feet ahead of us, moving smoothly and silently as though projected on the forest background. The beauty had returned.

Things to do Before I Die

I seem to have stumbled on several of these lists recently, and it has made me think. There are things I intend to do one day, things I should like to do, things that I imagine would be worth doing, and things which, thinking about it carefully, I believe I will be glad I have done when I reflect on my life as it ends. The items on this list make up a collection of aspirations old and new that may be fitted haphazardly into these or other categories.

Some people seem to copy each other, rather than thinking how they themselves would respond to the experience in later life. And some of the things that regularly crop up are surprisingly mundane. Why does everybody want to swim with dolphins? Or eat at the world’s best restaurant, or stay at the world’s best hotel? Or appear as an extra in a film, or just appear once on the television? I expect all of those things are fun if you get the chance, but I don’t see them as justifying existence in the mind of the moribund. But on the whole they show how different we all are, how individual are our dreams and aspirations and fears, and that fact alone makes life a fascinating adventure. So here are my ideas:

Buy a microlight plane (and fly it, because I find the idea of moving around the country by air and seeing it from above very compelling)

Learn to ski jump (because it looks like tremendous fun and I want to feel it)

Cross Siberia by train (the journey must be very beautiful, and the sense of being lost in a place that is far more interesting than you yourself could ever be must be wonderful)

Travel in northern India (because I think there are things there worth seeing, things to learn about what people have been and can be)

Understand Sanskrit literature as well as I sometimes pretend to (a genuinely satisfying intellectual achievement)

Understand the origins of humanity and human consciousness (I rely on other people to provide the information that I will then try to understand, and at the moment they still have a lot of work to do)

Own a shark (not that I need great pick-up lines anymore, but that one takes some beating. And I like sharks)

Open the bowling for England (overtaken by events many years ago)

Have a passionate affair with Goldie Hawn (also overtaken by events many years ago)

Discover whether there is such a thing as spiritual enlightenment

If there is, achieve it (contingent on previous)

Win a Nobel Prize for (preferably) Literature (this is more something to work towards than to achieve. A kind of distant reference point for my little scribblings)

Learn to accept death (useful in itself)

Learn to play a mean game of chess (I used to be a mathematician, I’m supposed to be good at chess, but I have never got beyond not-quite-embarrassing)

Express something worthwhile by drawing (I would discover something about the world that I had not imagined)

Likewise through music/the guitar, for the same reason

Make a parachute jump (because it is the single most terrifying thing I can think off, and to overcome the irrational fear would be very satisfying and beneficial)

Walk around the world (if that is rather impractical, I would settle for walking across Africa from Port Said to Cape Town, or the Americas from The Magellan Strait to Alaska)

Nº 1 on any such list: Live. Many people forget to do this. They are too busy not dying, or doing other things of minor importance.

Comments, additions, ideas, other people’s lists, are very welcome.

This Story Needs a Title

My grandfather remembered the first moon landing. It wasn’t so long ago, you know. He died in a hospital bed, and my mother was with him. He didn’t know she was there, and it was only chance. It could have been any one of us. We took turns. The last one of us he knew was there was probably me. When my mother arrived he was already unconscious.

He never talked about the moon landing. Only a couple of times on New Year’s Eve when he’d been mixing his Guinness with my grandmother’s sherry. My mother said he used to talk about it a lot. When they thought it was a great moment in the history of the world. They thought the moon was the future. It wasn’t their fault. To them it was mysterious. And any mystery must be important. They thought you should die with your family around you. There used to be tribes that ate the bodies of their parents. They thought there was a reason for it.

Then we discovered what the moon was for. It’s hard. A part of you wants to say goodbye, and then, when it’s your turn, you don’t want to go. You cling to the old ways, the old ideas, the things our grandparents believed. It’s easy to understand why they believed them, but now we know they were wrong, and you have to accept it. It’s part of being a person of your time. We know what they didn’t. We know more about how things should be. To reject it is to belong to another time, to live with the dinosaurs. Oh, and to be wrong, of course.

The moon is dead. Geologically and biologically dead. No atmosphere, like a really bad party. It was obvious really. We just took a long time to realize. The Earth, on the contrary, is young. And the world belongs to the young. It’s obvious, really.

There are those who whisper that there’s been a misunderstanding, that the world belongs not to the young, but to the living. There was a time when it was like that, but as everyone knows, it was just a step on the way, a short period while the forces of reaction and sedition got used to the idea or were made to stop confusing the matter. Then it was the dying who were sent here as well as the dead. Then the old, over 80 they started with. But old age is a relative thing. A few people are still young at 90, some are old at 60. It was a matter of judgement. The people who did the judging were often criticised, so in the end they made it simpler. Over 60, because some are old at 60. Those who were still young at 60 had the chance to prove it, and it turned out that most of them were not as young as they thought. The world belongs to the young.

Some of those who came here were not even 60, but age is relative. When you have nothing to offer your family, and no friends to help you, and you’re more a hindrance than a help, and your company is boring, and you smell a bit and talk too much about the past, then you’re old, aren’t you, regardless of the years you’ve lived? And now it’s my turn.

I made it to 58 before they decided I had to go. Not bad really. I can’t complain. I had a good family, but my friends were sent off first, my wife never even made it here, and my children feel that I can’t make proper use of my property anymore, not as much as they could, so they asked the tribunal to review me. All fair and right, just as it should be. But it’s Hell here. Completely alone. The workers receive you, process you, then they put you in your cell and wait for the hunger and thirst to take you. They’re made of clear plastic, the cells, something incredibly strong and transparent. You can see the sky and the Earth. It makes you wish you were back there.

I didn’t know it was like that. On Earth we thought there must be some other way, quick and painless. It’s what they tell you, or what they let you believe, anyway. Now I think about it, I don’t know that I ever heard it mentioned. People don’t think about this place, and the people who come here. We don’t matter anymore, do we? The world isn’t like in my grandfather’s day, when they thought they could talk to the dead, and visit them, and ask them to watch over them. Now we know the truth. I’m not one of them anymore. I’m one of us.

But it’s hard when your time comes, it really is. You want to stay, you say that you’re still young, that you deserve to stay with the living. Old people are selfish, we used to say. And it’s true. Now I’m old I’m selfish myself. I’ll be gone soon. Dead. A few days more, and it will be over. I already feel weak, and tired, and my mouth is drier than I ever imagined it could be, and my head hurts terribly. Just a few days more.

The workers have a hard time here. Lonely and miserable, with no real comforts, and their families and friends, if they still have any, a quarter of a million miles away. They’re paid a pittance, but it doesn’t really matter as there’s nothing here they could spend it on. They can’t produce anything and what we send over from Earth is just the minimum required to keep them alive. They’re only allowed back occasionally, and briefly, under supervision, and permissions are often cancelled at the last minute. In fact hardly anyone on Earth has ever met a moon worker, not until they come here. It’s odd, in a way. At the time we discovered the purpose of the moon, we discovered the purpose of the Welsh.

If they knew I was writing this, they would make me lie here forever, instead of pushing me into space in the direction of Sirius. That’s what they promise to do, so that one day we’ll wake up on the ancestral home of man. You have to believe it, or you’d go mad. If you don’t believe it, if you don’t understand why it’s right, you don’t deserve to go to Sirius, and they just throw you out into the moondust. I can see a lot of bodies out there, there must be a lot of people who don’t believe. But I do. I know it’s right. It’s just a bit hard to take when it’s your turn. A few days more…

Another Return to the Maestro

Yes, I have done this before, but it makes as much sense now as it did then (not a lot, probably):

Four years ago, when I first trespassed on the presence of the man who was to become my blogging Maestro, I was as a schoolboy before his headmaster's study door, or even more like a priest's apprentice, newly rescued from the orphanage, sent to perform sacrifice at the feet of the idol.

A sense of my inadequacy filled me from spinning head to chilly feet, passing through a pounding chest, a face alternately red and white, a stomach churning dangerously, and knees that trembled so violently they could barely keep me standing. I saw myself from afar, an object of horror in my own eyes, appalled that one such should dare to enter that place. I would have turned and run, but my legs weren't up to the effort.

A 9th degree Technoratus, no less, the most highly transcended figure of that great celestial blogosphere of which most of us know nothing, preferring to believe that this poor thing we send our thoughts out into is all there is. A man, a being rather, so supremely pure that he did not blog in the way that we might understand it; he had no keyboard, no modem, no material connection to the world of the mundane blogger whose life consists of tapping out his idlest thoughts in the belief that someone, somewhere, cares what he has to say. No, the Maestro blogged in the purest, most spiritual way, entirely within his own mind, and his web site was the infiniteness of time, the gaps between the stars, the silences we mortals create by our inability to fill them, his readership the perfect and perfected creatures that inhabit those places.

Despite the gulf between us, he received me as great men do, as though I were the one doing him the favour, as though he had waited years for this moment, as though there were something he could learn from me.

'Maestro', I breathed, my forehead to the ground, so overcome I could barely even kneel, 'I would blog.'

The words were spoken; I had violated that place, the purity of the air that man respired, by my presumption that I could, in any way at all, be like him. I awaited death, which I was sure by them was the only possible punishment, with something approaching satisfaction.

'Then blog, my son. To blog is to live. To blog is to be. To blog is to become one with the universe.'

'How can I blog, in the truest sense, Maestro? I mean Blog, not merely blog?'

'You refer to readership, my son, stats.'

'Er, yes, Maestro. For it is written that a blog that goes unread is like a camel's armpit unbitten by fleas.'

'So they tell me, yes. You need a niche, my son, something only you can talk about in a particular way. What do you have to tell people about?'

'Hedgehogs, Maestro,' I replied, 'I am the goto man for reliable hedgehog news.'

'Hmm,' mused the Great One, 'not bad, but perhaps a bit too niche. Chuck in a bit of passionate and crudely analysed politics, and some whimsical humour. It'll help the hedgehogs along. Then go with whatever is making you think, whatever makes you feel strong emotion. Use words wisely and well, and transmit, my son, that feeling to others. Someone will listen. Be yourself, and don't take yourself too seriously because, lets face it, my son...'

Once he'd started he got up steam and went on like this for some time. I took note of everything he said, and have tried to be a good disciple. When he had said what he had to say he stopped and dismissed me, saying,

'Go out into the world and blog as I have taught you to blog. Return in four years and I shall weigh your worth.'

Those four years are nearly gone, and I must make my way once more to the Presence, and account for the use I have made of my Maestro's teaching.

I could lie, of course. Since he lives in a cave near the top of a particularly inhospitable mountain, and communciates only with those beings that inhabit the spaces between the lower level orbits of the hydrogen atom, the chances of him knowing my site stats are fairly slim. Or I could tell him I use the pseudonym Old Holborn or Guido Fawkes. But it wouldn't feel right. So I shall go to him bearing the truth, perhaps the greatest gift there is. And just in case, a box of the finest Belgian chocolates, which melt the hardest of hearts.

Wish me luck. 

Circles and Cycles

This is undoubtedly the strangest thing that has ever happened to me…

One of my little schemes for paying the mortgage is to train people to speak in public. A surprising number of people need this skill, and a lot of them don’t realize until they make fools of themselves. Candidates for the oral part of civil service exams, young employees wanting to impress the boss, salesmen who need to stand out at a conference, people running for public office, they all want help, and some of them call me.

It’s mostly academics and professionals, and it’s mostly in English, although it doesn’t have to be. The techniques are different when you are not using your mother tongue, but the basic problems and skills to be practised are the same.

One man who trains with me is a doctor, who is sometimes required to address congresses and other demanding audiences in English. He is a good communicator in many ways, but his English is not quite up to some of the tasks he undertakes, and  so together we seal a few of the cracks and give him a little extra confidence.

This doctor, who we shall call Santos, for no particular reason, doesn’t live in the small city which I adopted some years ago and which has, in turn, adopted me. He works at a small hospital in a town some 20 miles away, and lives about another 20 miles beyond that. Nevertheless, he thinks it worth his while to drive here twice a week after work to learn and practise with me.

Not long ago he was asked to give a talk, in English, on some aspect of emergency procedure. A gathering of medical and administrative personnel from around Europe had been invited so they could show off our new teaching hospital, and they wanted something didactic, dramatic, bloody, and theoretically useful. It had to be worthwhile for the doctors to sit and listen to it, but it also had to convince them that the non-medical people present would learn from it. It had, in short, to be professional, clinical, smooth, it had to look and sound good. His sponsors were looking for a performance, of which the practical benefit was only a part.

He had decided the topic by the time he spoke to me about it. He wanted to explain how to do an emergency tracheotomy, which is nicely dramatic and bloody. I questioned him in detail about the likely audience, which should be the starting point for any speaker, but is often forgotten. We discussed the language and terminology he would need, ways of structuring the text, styles of presentation, and how to fit it all to the time. And he went away to produce a draft.

The next day we looked at it, I corrected it, we discussed the pronunciation of certain difficult but essential terms, and removed some difficult, non-essential words. You don’t want to spend half the time worrying about whether your attempt at some key word is going to be taken off the bat. We trimmed it a bit, I reduced it to a larger number of smaller conceptual units- the difference would be more in his mind than in the text itself, but it makes a difference- and he went away again to make a final version.

When it was ready and he was happy with it, we did a dress rehearsal, in which I was the audience. Reading from a sheet gives great confidence to the speaker, but it can very easily distance the speaker from the audience. To read as though speaking ex tempore in one of the skills they come to me to learn.

His performance was superb. He is, I am certain, a fine doctor. He brings competence, responsibility and hard work to everything he does. He had practised diction, delivery, interaction, he was aware at all times of the speed and intonation of his voice and he never forgot that he was there to tell people things that they wanted to hear. Even without the slides- he had prepared a bit of visual support, but we decided for the run-through it wasn’t worth setting anything up; pressing a button every so often wasn’t going to affect him in any important way- it was gripping. I pronounced him ready to face his public.

We cut to the following Saturday morning. I was walking in the country, as I do. Just outside the city, as I passed an isolated and apparently abandoned house, I heard a form of screech. My expert ear immediately identified it as a young female Homo sapiens expressing strong emotion. But this was not the strong emotion produced by seeing a friend approaching, or hearing about what A said B did with C in the broom cupboard, or noticing a lovely pair of boots in a shop window. It was a different kind of screech, and it that made my blood run cold. Something was very wrong, and there was no one else about.

I ran around the corner of the building. There were two girls, in fact, both about 12, one bent over, screaming, the other on the ground, twitching horribly. The screaming girl grabbed my arm and managed to say ‘she can’t breathe… she can’t breathe…’ I had expected to find a wild animal, a big dog or a wounded boar, perhaps, or a man attacking her. I would have known what to do. I might have done it badly, but I would have had a plan. This was beyond me.

I dropped down beside her. No, she couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t wheezing, asthmatic, drunk, drugged or anything like that. No air could enter her lungs. None. Why not, I asked the friend. She had been licking a kind of gobstopper when she laughed and sucked it in, and she fell down. I had to do something very, very fast. But what?

I had dialled the emergency number almost as I heard the first scream, and I gave the phone and the GPS I carry to the friend, and told her what to tell them. The girl’s eyes were turning red, and the rest of her blue. The words Heimlich manoeuvre swam before my eyes. I could feel the ball in her throat, it felt big and hard and a long way down. I sat her up as best I could, squatted behind her and tried to squeeze her firmly just below the diaphragm. Even if I’d known where the diaphragm actually was, the sweet wasn’t going to move. It was too firmly lodged.

The word tracheotomy swam before my eyes. I knew how to do one, at least in theory. But does she need one? She needed something. The ball wasn’t coming out and she couldn’t breathe. Oddly enough, it was the face of the friend that cooled my brain to the point where it could do something like thinking. I saw in her face what I should have seen in the choking girl’s: in 30 seconds she would be dead, and I had to save her, because I was there. The logic of children can be compelling. Her friend could not die, because that sort of thing doesn’t happen, and as I was the only adult there I would be the one who would save her. I could see it in her face and so it had to be true. I took the phone and heard a distant, commanding voice which sounded a little like mine that I was about to perform a tracheotomy and the ambulance crew should be ready to treat the consequences. And I went to work.

The principle of the tracheotomy is very simple. If the windpipe is blocked and air can’t enter, and you can’t unblock it, then you make a hole belong the obstruction, keep it open with a tube, and the patient breathes once more. In the rucksack I always carry when out walking or riding I carry a large number of things, on the grounds that you never know. I took out the first aid kit, a small hunting-knife, a lighter, and a ballpoint pen.

I thought back to the lecture I had heard. Dr Santos was a very good performer indeed. When we had done the rehearsal I was more interested in the sound of it, the interaction of the speaker with the audience, the use of the voice and the eyes, the length of sentences, the authority of the speaker, with the performance as a whole, rather than with the content, but it had got over. It was there in my head. Despite the lack of slides, I could picture every detail of the operation as it should be performed. I could see the folds of muscle I had to use to navigate, the cartilage I must avoid, the point I had to find where the bleeding would be minimal and the introduction of the tube easiest. There was also some stuff about severing the flesh in several stages to avoid the larger veins and the isthmal gland, but dismissed it as fussy and irrelevant. I put the blade of the knife in the flame of the lighter and prepared to act.

All of this took much less time than it takes to tell. Disturbing as it is to watch a young girl die before your eyes as you prepare to slice open her windpipe- and believe me it is absolutely bloody terrifying- everything changes when you have a plan, a purpose. You become calmer, at least calm enough to act. You think of nothing else. Time moves slowly but smoothly. Your responsibility is no longer to save a life that is draining away as you watch- a daunting job to thrust upon anyone- but to plunge a knife through flesh. That, you think, I can do. Easy, no problem. This is done and dusted.

The details are blurred, for which I’m grateful. But it was messy. If you’ve ever cut uncooked meat with a knife, or prepared a rabbit for cooking, you’ll know how hard it is. The flesh slides away from you and refuses to be controlled. When you have 10 seconds to make the cut this can be quite nerve-wracking. But the knife went in. It reached the place it had to reach, and went no further. It avoided major arteries and other vital organs. By the purest of chance, I should think. I pushed the sleeve of the biro through the hole, and she breathed.

It sounded like nothing on earth, it looked more like death than the convulsions and the blue skin, but oddly enough it was the sound of life being grasped, firmly, by a hand that wanted it badly and would get it. It became stable, still not anything like normal, but stable, and her eyes opened. She seemed to see me.

Her friend, who had breathed little more than she had in the last two minutes, fell half on top of me, and then completely on her, and cried. A relaxed, uninhibited kind of crying. Her tone told me that her friend would recover. I knew it because she was breathing. The friend knew it because she could read the other’s mind, and understand those parts of the universe that understood what was and what would be. The girl’s face at that moment was beyond my understanding.

What I do know is that nothing I have ever felt in my life is comparable to the moment when I knew she would live. It was simple relief. The obligation to do something so momentous was over, and it been successful. I could relax. No more than that. I didn’t know the girl. If I hadn’t passed by just then I would have read of her death in the paper and not batted an eyelid. But I was there. I did it. And it felt good.

She was conscious when the ambulance turned up, still breathing strangely, but conscious and calm. She didn’t know what had happened to her, and she felt some discomfort, but she could see her friend’s face which told her she was ok, and she was with people who knew what they were doing, so she would be fine. The ambulance crew cleaned her up, stuck tubes in her, and took her away. They wanted to take me with them, to treat me for shock, but I said no. I was ok. I was more than ok. I felt terrific. They even had the courtesy to congratulate me on the competence of my butchery. I knew they were lying, but what the hell.

Which lasted a couple of miles. I had to sit down by the path, call a taxi to take me home, and consider the matter with the help of two large Scotches (in Spain, large means biiiiig). It’s just life, I was managing to persuade myself. The poor girl will have a nasty scar, which she will hate me for, but she’s alive. It all worked out right, because by the purest chance I had just learned the basics of the exact technique she needed. Sometimes life works like that. It ended well. Be happy about it.

That afternoon I got a call from Santos, the doctor, my student. Of course, that was the day he was giving his lecture. He would be calling to tell me how it went. But no.

He never gave that lecture. He was in my little city, at the hospital. He had been about to take the stage when the call arrived. His 12-year-old daughter had suffered some kind of attack while visiting a friend. She had been given an emergency tracheotomy, which had saved her life. I wished him the best, her a swift recovery, and finished the bottle of whisky.

Translator Complains about other Translators

I have a little list, with the excuse that it's useful in teaching and translation, of words and phrases that are often poorly translated in US or UK films shown on Spanish television.
It is common to be shaken out of the little world that the action has created for you by an expression that is quite obviously not the one the character would have used at that moment. As a native English speaker I find it fairly easy to work out what the original line was and what the character should have said, but by then any narrative magic has gone.
This is especially striking because there are many good voice actors in Spain (often much better than the faces) and the distributors take pride in recording the dubbed soundtracks very well. Forget any experience you might have seen with dubbed films in English, as it is rarely done and usually very poor. In Spain the Spanish version is often better than the original, especially if the original was from the US. (The inability of American actors to speak properly will doubtless be the subject of another rant at some point.)
But the budget for translation must be tiny, and the work is rushed through; easy, standardized solutions are used, rather than trying to be creative and seek something smooth and natural. The result is that bad lines are put in the mouths of good actors, which is artistically strange, and if artistic considerations are not particularly relevant here, commercial considerations certainly are, and don’t appear to be well served.
On the other hand, these expressions become so common in the experience of people who watch a lot of American TV series, that some of them have become normal in the Spanish language, and are close to becoming standard. Life imitating art, bad art in this case.
So here is a list of the commonest problems, which won’t be of any interest to most people, but it will serve as a reference for me, at least:

‘Oh, yes’- is usually translated as ‘Ohh, sí’, which may seem obvious, but when it is used to confirm something the other speaker has expressed doubt or surprise about, what people actually say is ‘sií, si’, which has completely different phonology and euphony.

‘Ignore’- the verb ‘ignorar’ in Spanish means ‘to not know, to be ignorant of sth’. But the English meaning has become standard as well, despite the protests of many (I don’t like it much, either). And this particular Anglicism can be traced to the television.

‘You’d better (do sth)’- this is a common, natural and unobtrusive way of giving advice, or sometimes stern orders, in English. When translated as ‘será mejor que hagas…’ it is neither natural nor unobtrusive, as it virtually parks a large lorry across the entire dialogue. Exactly how you would translate it depends on the context, but a direct imperative could work, or ‘por qué no..’, or ‘deberías…’. ‘Ser(i)á mejor que hagas…’ would only work as a translation of ‘you’d be better off doing…it’d be better if you did…’

‘Drawing room’- this is a strange one, because you would have thought someone would have noticed that nobody ever draws in the drawing room, but I have often heard it translated as ‘sala de dibujo’, which is literally a room for drawing in. Very lazy.

‘We’ll/let’s meet/meet (me) in your office at 6’- Again this natural and unobtrusive expression is often rendered by the clanking, unnatural phrase ‘nos reuniremos/reúnete conmigo en tu despacho a las 6’. Why? I scream at the screen. Why? Do these translators ever listen to the way real people speak? Do the actors themselves not complain that their jaws rebel against the attempt to articulate this nonsense? Does anybody care? Normal people say ‘nos vemos en tu despacho a las seis/pásate/acércate al despacho…’ and so on. It really isn’t hard.

‘How annoyed were you when the police car ran over your cat?’- Spanish has no structure equivalent to this (extremely annoying) journalistic formulation, for which we should be grateful. The great minds taxed with rendering it into Spanish are, it appears, unequal to the job of cutting out a word or two and treating it as ‘were you annoyed…’ which usually works fine. ‘Hasta qué punto se sentía molesto…?’ can work once, possibly, but only once. ‘Cuán molesto estabas…’ didn’t even work in Mexico in 1960. No real person has ever uttered that line.

‘Arrest’- the word for what the police do to suspects is ‘detener.’ ‘Arrestar’ has no legal meaning and is not normally used in Spanish, but when it is it just means ‘to stop’. See ‘ignore’.

‘Report’- the verbs meaning ‘to present information in a formal way to an interested party’ or ‘to tell the authorities about some naughtiness’ are ‘informar’ and ‘denunciar’ respectively. The nouns are ‘informe’ and ‘denuncia’. ‘Reportar’ is more or less a neologism in these senses, but is now entering normal use, because of the television. See ‘ignore’.

‘Pity she won’t live, but who does?’- elliptical verb clauses of this kind are a serious problem because they don’t exist in Spanish. Basically the auxiliary verb cannot have an emphatic function. There is no general solution to this problem, and no easy one even in specific sentences. To get the right balance of meaning, emphasis and rhythm requires careful thought and often a complete recasting of the sentence. The example sentence (a lifetime subscription to this blog to the first reader who knows where it comes from) was translated, ‘Una pena que no vivirá ¿pero quién vive?’ I think this was probably the right choice here. Other solutions involve the use of particles or changing the order of the statements, or simply stopping after a sí or no, if there is one, and if the sense allows it. It takes work to get this right.

‘do what’s right’- in Hollywood characters always seem to have the luxury of knowing what is right, and constantly exhort other characters to do it. ‘Ya godda do what’s right, ya know,’ ‘Yeah, I only want to do what’s right,’ with tortured brow muscles indicative of great sincerity. This will inevitably be translated as ‘Sólo quiero hacer lo correcto.’ ‘Hacer lo correcto’ has both a neuter pronoun and a trilled liquid, both of which reek of insinsecrity (look, they just do, OK), and more importantly, that is not what real Spanish speakers, the ones who’ve been doing it all their lives, say in that situation. You may be noticing a theme here. Your ears are regularly assaulted by the sound of people saying things which human beings do not in fact say.

We finish with some paternal advice to fresh-faced translators eager to do justice to their script: if the likely reaction of the character the line is addressed to is, ‘eh, why’d he say that?’, rather than what the director intended, then you need to try again.
And some advice to commissioning editors: sack that fresh-faced crew and hire someone who knows what they’re doing (I’m in the phonebook).

"...I wonder what Jeannie thinks of me now. She didn’t even hate him, she must miss him. She’ll enjoy being a young widow, she’ll be used to it by now. She’ll be good at it. It wasn’t really my fault. Not if you look at it properly. I didn’t want to do it, I hardly knew I was doing it. I didn’t hate him. That really is true. I didn’t know him, and I didn’t hate him. I don’t think I would have done even if I had known him. Jeannie talked about him sometimes, always bad, but she wasn’t trying to make me hate him. She wasn’t interested in making him into a real person, she wasn’t telling me biography, she said what she had to say to make us both feel good. I might have liked him if I hadn’t been screwing his wife. I didn’t hate him, and I don’t hate him now. He may have ruined what was left of my life, but it was going to happen anyway. It was the next step downwards. I didn’t know it was there, I thought there weren’t any more, but it was there and I would have taken it some time. It was bad luck for both of us but more my fault than his. I try to imagine him still alive. He didn’t deserve to die, even Jeannie never suggested he’d be better dead, she didn’t tell me anything really bad about him, something he should die for. I wish he was still alive, then I could forget him. Most things you can walk away from. Most problems disappear if you go and leave them. Most of the bad things we do have never happened once they’re done. If it had only been adultery he need never have known. He would have suspected, he must have realized she was a tart but he need never have known. If he’d let me walk away that night he could have joined in the game and he could have had a faithful wife still if he chose to. Most things we do happen in the past and the mind can make them go away if it wants to. You can’t ignore death. That was the mistake I made. Death is in the present. You can say I fucked your wife, and it goes away into the past and the memory does what it wants, but you have to say your husband is dead, still dead in the present. The present can only be what it is, that’s part of the game, and some of us always lose. He is dead. I can’t remember it the way I want to because it’s still happening, and I can’t make the rules in the present, I’ve never been able to do it. If I could he would still be alive and he’d have Jeannie, which is the way it should be. That’s why he’s dead. It can’t be the way it should be.

Maybe the lawyer was right and there was a chance the jury would go for it. Maybe now if I were a free man, after all the months I’ve had to put it behind me, I might now be glad that I could go on living, and I might have found somewhere to do it and a way to do it. Maybe if I’d given up the way I wanted to I would regret it and wish I’d tried to do it differently. Part of the way he did it was so that I couldn’t blame him if it didn’t work out. I understand that now. And now I don’t care any more about making the truth known than they did. He’s still out there fighting for me, trying to stop them killing me tomorrow. I don’t really care whether he does it or not. If they don’t do it tomorrow they’ll do it in a month’s time, or a year’s, and there’s nothing in here to stay alive all that time for. He says there’s still a chance it’ll be commuted, so I can spend another thirty years here. I understand why he has to do it, but I don’t want him to. The chair is the only way out of here. If they take that away, there’s nowhere left to run to."

Garonda

"The boy’s mind lived on a lake. In a big house on a lake. He didn’t see the house as near or next to the lake, but on it. Not floating, just on it. People lived on lakes, after all. Not people like him, to be sure, but people in stories, or people you heard talked about. Pliny had lived on Lake Como. He wanted to live on a lake. And you had to live in a house, everybody did, so the house had to be on the lake. So his mind lived in a big house on a lake...

It wasn’t really a swimming lake. He swam when it was hot or he was annoyed about something. His favourite place for swimming was in the shallow water near the bank with the short, soft grass, because then he could lie in it to dry. But sometimes he swam in the deep water right in the middle, just to show it didn’t bother him. Swimming in pools, or in the sea when they went on holiday, he didn’t like very much. His body felt heavy and the water powerful. In the lake it didn’t matter...

He fished sometimes because there were fish to catch. No one else ever came to the lake to fish, or for anything else, so someone had to catch the fish. Tom didn’t use a rod and line, he didn’t know how to. He fished with his mind, relieving the lake of its excess and passing the time happily, being part of it all. He couldn’t have given a name to the fish, they were just fish. Silver things about eight to ten inches long. Shiny, attractive creatures, with a bit of life about the eyes, moving languorously together in a group that never took any form but always seemed about to. The colours changed too, when they turned sideways and the lighter belly was visible. At times they all did it together, and it was as though a lamp had been shone on the water...

He didn’t eat the fish. He didn’t do anything with them exactly. He fished with his mind and they stayed there until they were forgotten. They went wherever fish do go when the fishermen have finished with them...

...he liked the house on the lake because it was big and empty. Only his mind lived there, and no one ever came to visit, but the house was always clean and warm, and there was always roast beef and buttered buns whenever he wanted them. It was more or less a low box of light grey stone, with a lot of rooms he didn’t use but liked going into, especially the upper ones which were full of chests overflowing with wonderful objects that you could play with, dress up in or just look at for the sheer pleasure of having them. He found old dolls and cricket bats, lace bonnets and leather trousers, yellowed railway tickets to towns he had never heard of, notes and coins from faraway countries some of which he was sure no longer existed, ornate lamps for hanging on brackets or standing on tables, woollen blankets with initials sewn into them, pocket watches that still ticked if you shook them, hourglasses, single earrings, little tin boxes with pictures on the lid, cases made of calfskin and rubber for keeping things that had now been lost, wooden games that children played with long ago and still had most of the pieces, marbles and conkers, rock cakes so hard they were like real rocks, wigs and false moustaches, dried-up paints and tiny mirrors, plastic binoculars and metal knives with blades for doing a hundred different things, books with stories, magazines with pictures, albums half-filled with stamps or cartoons or newspaper clippings or scribblings in unreadable writing. There was always more to be found, always another passageway, a hidden door, and more treasure beyond.

All the rooms had large windows and a view of the lake. Most had the same view, his favourite one; the foreground speckled with water so close he could see the individual drops, giving way to a more even surface, then just a suggestion of silver-grey and in the background the lively green of the long grass that the birds loved to swoop over and which was always in the sun..."

The Runway Runners

We don’t have much to boast about here, nothing much to put us on the international map. We briefly had the best handball team in the world, but it was sold this summer to a club in Madrid. All we have left is the new stadium which the ratepayer (me, that is) owns most of and can’t find a profitable use for. We like to make a fuss about Don Quijote even though he never came anywhere near the place, and we had the National Treasury and the HQ of the Inquisition back in the 16^th C, but they were sent to Madrid as well. Thus the decline started.

We do, however, have one of the longest airport runways in Europe.*

It was supposed to be Spain’s first private airport (but guess who owns it now). One of the ideas mooted during the long, painful and ultimately still birth of the project was to use it as a depot for intercontinental airliners that have to rest for several days between flights while being thoroughly checked for missing wings and so on. Parking would be much cheaper than at Barajas.  A bright idea in its way, but no one was interested. It did get us 4kms of paved pachydermus leucos, though, and thus the Runway Runners were conceived.

Running is a boring business. Good for the cardiovascular system, great for making a little room for the weekend beer, and excellent at showing you how death is more to be welcomed than feared. But bloody tedious. It needs to be livened up. As I discovered by chance, one foggy evening, climbing the fence and running the entire length of that useless tarmac with a stopwatch in your hand, pursued by salivating Alsatians gives it just that bit of spice that makes all the difference.

I had to share the experience, naturally. It’s not something you can keep to yourself, and it’s much more fun in company. So I told a select few running acquaintances who were looking for a new challenge, and the Runway Runners were born.

Most airports do have actual planes in them, doing the stuff that planes do on airport runways, and they have security of kinds that most normal travellers know nothing of. It all takes planning, timing and the carefully measured assistance of a hipflask. It’s easier at night, and in some ways more fun- most things are at night. Whatever the people who plan the security protocols have in mind- protecting the public, covering their backs, exercising naked power, or just having a laugh- the actual blokes in uniform just want to get paid and go home. Especially the night shift. They put the leaner, fitter, brighter-looking ones on during the day. The fat and hopeless work at night when they can’t be seen and, let’s face it, no one ever breaks into an airport, do they?

Until now. Oh, the exhilaration. The tang of burning diesel and the freshly discharged contents of chemical lavatories in your nostrils, the wind from the exhaust of a 747 in your hair, the pulse pounding in your temples as for a moment the end of the runway seems to be getting further and further away (they are all different lengths and whoever’s turn it is to do the research always forgets to tell anyone else, and so we are running blind, not knowing exactly how our strength should be spent), the happy thought that there’s always someone slower than you (which is why we let Pablo ‘El Cojo’ join the club in the first place, of course) and the knowledge that if the police finally get to you they’ll probably treat it all as a big laugh (or possibly not).

I feel younger since I started the club, fuller of joie de vivre, esprit de l’escalier and moules mariniere. I drift over waters of the deepest blue and seduce diaphanous maidens by the light of the full moon. The club has no rules, except that I am the Law. We shall soon go international, intercontinental, and, when NASA finally builds a landing pad on the moon, interplanetary. We have no limits. We can do what we will.

*This despite the fact that we don’t have an airport in any but the purest technical sense. We have a fenced area with a control tower, flashing lights, terminals, baggage belts, posts for the police and customs to have a quiet fag between shifts- all the paraphernalia you associate with an airport, and the runway, of course. In many ways it looks just like an airport. But there are no staff, no passengers, and no planes. It’s a model of an airport, very useful if you want to show someone what an airport looks like, but it’s not going to let you fly anywhere, which is the defining feature of an airport, I should have thought.

NOTE: It’s possible that some of the above is not entirely accurate.