Russia as I remember it.

Before the revolution I always looked forward to traveling home to welcome the new year with my sister. Leaving the Academy I took the train from Petersburg, changing onto a small branch line at Pikalevo where a much smaller, slower train filled with peasants and their packages took me to within 30 versts of our family estate. 

At the small halt with its overgrown, deserted station house, Elsa always waited for me with anxiety scribbled on her face. She settled me in the troika, fussing round me like I was a sick child, covering my knees under blankets of fox pelts. She always sat close beside me, holding onto my arm and dragging information about Petersburg and my studies from my travel-tired head while Grigori spanked the horse with his whip sending us speeding smartly across fields of crisp snow and on into the eeriness of the winter forest.  

It was only when we crossed onto our own land that Grigori showed any mercy to the horse and let it slow to a trot as we emerged from the forest, and my heart always leapt when the familiar shape of the house came into view on the far side of the small, frozen lake. 

Servants were always on hand to bring in my luggage and take it up to my room that Elsa had made sure was well heated, a fire roaring in the fireplace. The bed sheets and my linen would be smelling of pine gathered from the forest. As soon as I arrived a bath would be drawn for me in front of the fire. Elsa always withdrew when she saw that I was about to undress, leaving one of the servants to stand by with towels for when I was ready to emerge from the scalding water pink and steaming.

Christmas at Capri

December, Naples 1976. I was alone, staying in a pensione out by Mergellina. I was sharing a room with an Australian who asked if I wanted to go up Vesuvius with him. I looked at Vesuvius across the bay and said no because there were dark clouds swirling around the mountain and I didn’t want to get wet. He went on his own and the clouds became a storm and he was struck by lightening and didn’t come back.

Instead of climbing the volcano I agreed to buy a ticket for the boat out to Capri from a girl who was also staying in the pensione. She was called Helga and she turned up at everywhere I went. I met her first in Genoa then in Rome and now she was in Naples. After that she turned up in Igoumenitsa, Athens and finally Belgrade. I don’t know what happened to her after that.

Anyway I bought the ticket she said she couldn’t use and during the thunder storm that finished off the Australian I set out for Capri. It was a small boat carrying mostly stuff rather than people although there were a few old ladies in black there too with bundles of ….. stuff. There was a small truck with a pig tied up in the back of it, and it sat on one side of the deck with nothing to balance it on the other side.

As soon as we hit the open water with the boat sitting low and lop-sided in the water I started to panic. I concluded that this was the end of me but the old ladies looked unperturbed. The wind picked up as did the waves and we pitched and the pig squealed a bit but the ladies just moved their tongues around their toothless mouths a bit, gumming rather than on plugs of tobacco, and spitting it over the side.

The rain blew straight into my face as did spray from the sea each time we plunged down into it. Clouds came down to obscure the island we were headed for till eventually it disappeared in the grey, dismal mist. Thunder rumbled and I got uselessly angry with Helga and wished I’d gone up Vesuvius instead although I didn’t know that one of those thunder claps was a follow-on from lightening that had struck the Australian.

From the Memory Bank of Italy

I really must get round to making myself a few new memories. There’s nothing wrong with my old memories of course, and I’ll never throw them away or give them to a charity shop; I just need to start making some new ones. While I wait however, this old one is worth another spin. It jumped out at me as I was sorting through my underwear drawer and I thought I’d share it; I don’t know what it was doing in there. It was in 1977 that a lot of good things happened with me. I got a ride from Genoa town centre out to a hostel along the coast. It was late November but early in the day so the hostel was shut, or at least it wasn’t open and wouldn’t be until late in the afternoon. I sat on the steps and let the sun bless my face for a while and looked about the grounds with their trees and flowers and bits of old cars. The edge of the garden dropped onto rocks and on into the sea. Soon another traveller came along. She was called Yolanda, a Canadian, and had enough luggage for six of us and a guitar. We left our stuff behind rocks and went in search of food. We found a café but it had no food so we didn’t eat. At five the hostel opened and we ate then and met up again later. I found her on the steps in the dark strumming in the quiet night. By then we'd both had some wine. We wondered on down to the rocks along the shore. I lay back on a slab of smooth rock under the big moon and my nose got all filled up with the smell of sage and the sea. The girl from Montreal played and sang weird songs that got me thinking and wondering about how weird and sensible the world is. One song was called Suzanne. I’d never heard of Leonard Cohen before and I’ve never forgotten him since

Melancholy and nostalgia at the Krasnapolsky.

It’s the way it was back in the day when anyone looking for our Jimmy knew to check out the bar in the Krasnapolsky hotel on Dam Square, Amsterdam. They’d find him there all grey-looking and hunched up over whatever drink someone had bought him but he could never tell you who or what or why. He was a fixer, the oil that greased the cogs that turned in the hush of the Grand Café off the hotel lobby where diplomats, generals, monied folk and other ne’re-do-wells met people they weren’t supposed to meet, hiding in the depths of leather high-backed chairs positioned behind giant indoor palms, and early each morning the political, military and economic secrets of the western world were bought and sold there over breakfast after a night that started in the basement bar but ended in one of the luxury suites in duplicitous though fairly comely company. Jimmy didn’t care for military secrets but he seemed to know everyone’s personal secrets and indiscretions, hence some of the furtive, reluctant meetings at the Krasnapolsky. The happenchance that put me in possession of the above information was a mixture of family connections, unemployment and an affair of the heart. Jimmy was the son of a family friend. I went to school with him when we were both teenage wild colonial boys in Africa. My girlfriend (though I’m not sure that she knew that’s how I saw her) was a dancer in the hotel night club, and I had nowhere else to be having just been fired from my job in an aluminium smelt oven in Barendrecht outside Rotterdam. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this dated information, but the memory of Jimmy and those days at the Krasnapolsky came to me as I got lost among the pages of Amor Towles’ ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’. Nothing to do with Towles’ excellent tale, just an atmosphere thing. It’s a day for melancholy and nostalgia and whiskey after all, a day like all the other days.

The Nun and the Gardener

Fiacre gets down off his bike and leans it against a bench to watch over the beginning of another day, the making of a morning. Not even the slightest, quietest breeze rises to stir the mist that hangs lightly in strands among the branches, and the river flows sluggishly, its murmuring waters dark and deep and dappled, but mostly cold. The sun has yet to climb up from behind the low, distant mountains, but it has already brightened the sky with its influence and scored the underside of the few, scattered clouds with an intense orange border. Mornings are for reflection, for reconnecting with what lies above and beyond, a time when, before any other person can intrude upon the day, Fiacre leaves his room at the orphanage ahead of the tears and shouts that greet and spoil every perfect new beginning. His thoughts aren’t always clear, aren’t always good, but he tells the Sisters he needs to go to re-establish some kind of contact with God in the early morning, to make sense of orphans’ tears and broken hearts, to let God’s good earth honey his heart with love for the unloved. That’s what he tells the Sisters. Sometimes that’s what he tells himself, but his heart sneers at his sugar-coated lies and they make him feel ever so slightly guilty about taking a head-long plunge into the beauty of the morning. He remains instead the cynical observer, the outsider, embarrassed before the God he mocks as the one who was not, is not, and nevermore shall be. That’s what he tells himself. That’s what he feels. When the sun finally slips up over the horizon Fiacre returns to the orphanage ready to hear and hopefully heal the tears, to make children laugh and to help them to ready themselves for the futile task of finding love in a loveless world. He spends some of his days preparing the convent ground to receive seed that will grow and bear fruit. From time to time he prepares the same ground to receive the wizened, twisted, wasted body of a dead Nun that will decay without having borne fruit. But unknown, and probably in spite of himself, he daily prepares the hearts of young orphans to be receptive to love if it ever comes their way. Sister Mary slips out of the convent door and climbs the low hill that lies between the orphanage and the river. From the bench under the tree she notices Fiacre leaning on his bike and doubts again the pose of his nature-inspired devotion. She finds his distant presence rude and intrusive, something to spoil the beauty of God’s morning, something that interrupts her precarious, unstable serenity. Fiacre had been a difficult boy during his time at the orphanage. “Thran” and “unteachable” where the words she used in the reports she wrote on him at the end of every school year. “No liking for learning”. Against her advice the Monsignor had kept Fiacre on as a handyman when he passed his sixteenth birthday. He was someone the older children could look up to and it was probably a good idea to have a man they knew well always at hand to help with the heavier work that the aging Sisters were no longer able for. With a supreme effort Sister Mary concentrates on the spiritual discipline prescribed for that early hour but as usual it is fruitless, and the dread and futility of the morning’s English class weigh heavily in her heart. As she watches Fiacre the unbidden thought comes to her mind of the day when his rough hands would lift her dead, never-loved body into a coffin. She imagines him arranging her arms and legs and nailing down the lid, of lowering her unceremoniously into the grave he will have dug for her. She shudders at that thought, partly from revulsion, but also with a strange subconscious delight as she half recognises that being moved from her death bed will be the only occasion in her sixty or so years that the hands of a man will have touched her in so intimate a way, to do for her what she will never be able to do for herself

Yerevan remembered fondly

Right after the Crimean war we used to hang out in Salvo’s bar in Yerevan, me, Nana Mouskouri and Marco Polo. Nana was old enough to be my mother back then; now she’s old enough to be my grandmother. The bar was on the second floor of the Hotel Philosophe and we always took a table over by the window where Russian soldiers couldn’t overhear us: they were everywhere back in those days, and they were none too subtle in their eavesdropping. Hemingway usually had a table in the back where he could smoke and nobody noticed him, or so he liked to think. He was the only one of us who carried a gun. Most afternoons we talked poetry, with good Georgian wine to get us started, while April thunder clouds gathered around Ararat just over the border in Turkey then drifted down the snowy slopes to drop the coldest rain onto Republic Square. None of us had jobs or even the right (or inclination) to work, but we had a book running every weekend taking bets on who would arrive at the opera house on Saturday night on the arm of the French ambassador’s wife, and who would go home with her husband who always left right before the curtain fell with some beauty or other.

Rent an Irish cottage.

How do you know you've seen the "real" Ireland when you go there on holiday? That questions goes for any country of course, and it seems that tourists generally believe that they've seen the real thing only if what they see matches their pre-conceived assumptions of what the place ought to be like, Even Irish people have different ideas and experiences of what constitutes genuine Irish living, and even foreigners who come to live here for a prolonged period of time only get insights into some aspects of Ireland, not Ireland in its entirety.

One misconception is that the Irish are all Catholic, heavy drinkers, red-haired and hate the English - personally I've never met anyone who ticks all those boxes. Nor have I ever seen anyone in the street dressed in what is thought of as "traditional" Irish clothing, whatever that is. Everyone's experience is different. Am I not genuinely Irish if (as is the case) I never get drunk, don't like potatoes, have no interest in emigrating to America and speak fluent Irish which most Irish people do not?

So If you are tempted to come to "do" Ireland you are welcome, just expect us to fit anyone's stereo-typical view of what it is to be Irish, and be done with any romantic nonsense about travelling in a jaunting car.

Much better is to come and live (quietly) not in hotels but in a private house for a week or two. Renting an cottage has become big business, and they are available all over the island and all year round at reasonable prices. Rent one in Donegal or Mayo, in a rural area if you can to experience the feel of isolation, and take one for a day or two in Dublin before you fly back home.

But be warned, there are some things to watch out for:

• It WILL be wet.
• TV reception is not good outside larger towns
• Sheep get everywhere
• It's expensive to eat out
• Signposts on country roads are not to be trusted
• We drive on the LEFT hand side of the road
• Don't order Budweiser by referring to it as Bud - bod (pronounced bud) is Irish for penis.

Have a great holiday.

Sleeping rough.

An empty back street just after midnight in a broken part of town. It could be anywhere - Genoa, Marseille, Hamburg - in the winter of 1977. I’m nineteen. Fine, dirty rain drives past closed up offices with broken windows and the sharp wind explores the depth of every sheltered doorway in a way that discourages drifters and tramps from sleeping there. One doorway is angled out of the wind. I find it, I have a nose for such places. I drag in cardboard boxes that I flatten into a thick, springy mattress and I prop up a bin that’s been left lying so that I feel like I have walls all round me. The only street light that works is more than a hundred metres away. I’m safe. I have a blanket, and when I pull it over my head and breathe my breath can’t float away into the night so it warms my nose every time I exhale. I hear trains shunting, sirens, cats and I’m desperately hungry.

Melancholy in Turin.

What better place for a spot of spring melancholy than a seat in the cold sunshine at a table outside Turin's Caffè Elena. It was Cesare Pavese's favourite bar, frequented also by Nietzsche and me, but not at the same time. Just to sit there looking out over the empty Piazza Vittorio with an espresso and a newspaper in the morning, wrapped up in a heavy coat and a scarf. The lonely figure of a priest walks across the emptiness of the piazza and scares off pigeons that swirl around his head as they lift off the dry, dusty cobbles ..... oh sweet melancholy. I imagine it was on a morning like this that Pavese decided that when he returned to his room in the Rocca and Cavour hotel he would feed himself on barbiturates and depart.

Death between Berlin and Vienna.

Chords are played on a piano in Berlin. They are played with a slow, melancholic touch, late on a cold night. The apartment is quiet and the sounds travel through an open window and echo around the empty square below. The music and the brittle light of the stars ricochet off the walls of buildings gleaming with sleet, though ricochet seems to be too harsh a word to use for chords of melancholy piano music, though I cannot find a more appropriate word to use. I could say instead that the music bounced off walls but perhaps bounce would be too frivolous. So we will leave it that when the music was played by a slow, despairing hand the sounds flowed out of the open window to be redirected out of the empty square when they touched the wet walls. Some of the music along with some shards of broken light slithered down the walls to dissolve in puddles of snow melt.

The melancholic soul of the pianist was transmitted through the quiet atmosphere into hallways and attics of buildings all the way to Vienna where they disturbed the dust in one particular closed-up room where generations of my family took their turn at dying over many decades. I heard the music arriving in the rustle of an evening newspaper. My grandfather heard it also and it disturbed his sixty year sleep and he paced around the room for a long time, fretting over pictures that had hung on the walls since before he was a boy, photographs that had been faded by age and revenge.

*

Now the light of the moon is glinting off the wet cobblestones in a small town in Umbria. The world has fallen silent, or just about. The only sound to disturb the cold peace that has blown in from the countryside is the occasional squeal of a cat roughly mated by a passing Tom. The back street I walk along is narrow; in places I can touch the houses on both sides at once when I stretch out my arms. In the near distance I can see wooded hills on top of which the moon seems to be balancing. The smell of pines and cooking drifts about on the night air. A door opens quietly onto the street, letting a wedge of light fall onto the cobbles. A women puts her head out into the street, holding her dressing gown tightly around her body. She looks around but doesn’t notice me standing in the shadows. A man pushes out past her, takes hold of a scooter that he pushes down the street away from me without responding to the woman’s wave, and soon in the quietness I hear an engine kicking into life and the scooter zips away into the night, buzzing like a demented wasp at the end of summer. The woman stands in the doorway for a while looking up at the stars. I can smell the smoke from her cigarette and hear a slow melancholy playing on a piano from inside her house.

*

And so to Syracuse. By the time the music arrives the moon has moved away. I have an espresso on the terrace of a café opposite the cathedral where the early morning sun glints off the wet, white marble forcing me to hide behind sunglasses. No-one else is about, or almost no-one. A priest comes out of a tiny dark door in the side of the cathedral. Black, ankle-length soutane, black hat, green scarf. He sneezes in a loud, uncontrolled fashion almost losing his balance and his hat. He looks embarrassed and pretends it never happened, he never filled the quiet piazza with a vulgar sneeze. A nearby dropping of pigeons is startled and lifts off the white marble pavement in a flap of dry, dusty feathers to roost on the roof of the cathedral, and as they and the sneezing priest leave the piazza it returns to its melancholic quietness to make room for the piano music pouring into the morning out of an upstairs window above the café.

Brasserie Federal, Zurich.

While I’m waiting in Zurich (watching the spy in the mirror who is wearing a hat just like mine) I’ll take a seat in the Brasserie Federal. I’ll have the peppered venison with red cabbage, chestnuts and apple, with a Falken schwartzbier to drink and fried apple rings with vanilla sauce to follow. Then coffee, after which there’ll be just enough time to board the 21.40 to Prague. We’ll pull out of Zurich train station precisely on time and before long the seats will have been turned down into beds and I’ll be able to watch Switzerland, Germany and the Czech Republic zip past my window under a clear, winter sky full of crystal and pearl.

Peaches, but not so fresh.

 We sat on a rock in the smoke of a hot afternoon. The sun beat down hard but the trees around the stream used their thick-packed leaves to filter out most of its merciless rays. Only a little direct sunlight managed to penetrate the leafy canopy so not much grew beneath the trees making it easy to find a good spot on the river bank to spread out the picnic blanket. There were squirrels, and the only noise was of the fast river pouring over rocks. And there were birds. I don’t remember much else about the day, but I do know that it was the day that Peaches died and after that there were no more picnics and we moved away to live in the city.

An over-active imagination helps.

This is the kind of night when I'd really like to be at sea. It would be late at night, well after midnight; the boat would be a cargo vessel without the frivolity of holidaying passengers. I'd be on deck, well wrapped up and with a full hip flask of whiskey on me (not rum, even though rum is more commonly associated with the high seas) and the sky above would be like a bubbling cauldron with clouds surging and spilling in all directions, obscuring the moon and the stars. I'll have spent the evening in my cabin reading something deep and unsettling and the spray from the ocean will refresh my eyes without dissipating any of the melancholy that will have accumulated around my heart as plaque accumulates around improperly brushed teeth. I peer out through the mist and the spray knowing that there is nothing to see, knowing that the coast of Panama is still three days sailing away, but the smell of the land has already begun to arrive on currents of warm, wet air.

Too much Proust perhaps.

Under the influence of too much Proust I became sluggish of mind and bowel. I was just nineteen. I spent most mornings in bed, unable to bring myself to face the day till my bladder was about to burst. Once it had been emptied I returned to bed unless the smell of warm buttered toast persuaded me otherwise. Or a freshly baked Madeleine.

My sense of self worth became so low that when I thought of my name I couldn’t see it written with a capital letter. My sister was convinced that it was a case of unrequited love. She pestered me for information, a name, and concluded that it was an older woman who had been disappointed by romance during some war and still thought that she too was nineteen.

My brother coaxed me on the occasional warm, summer afternoon down to the river where we used to swim as children, hoping that the fresh air and exercise would claim me from the clutches of despair. Once or twice I ventured reluctantly into the cold, slack water under the bright sun, but the feel of wet clothes against my skin was unbearable and the new road that ran alongside the river bank prevented swimming without clothes. Till the previous summer there was no road, no drivers and therefore no need for modesty.

At the beginning of that autumn my father lost patience with my torpor. He declared that I had become so apathetic that even growing a moustache would be too much of an effort for me. So he arranged with Doctor Carduso (with whom my sister was having an affair) for me to be admitted to a sanitorium to be treated with frequent doses of vigour, vapours and purges.

Possessions were forbidden at the “Hôpital Purgatoire “ and after just a few days sans Proust I began to revive. I even fell in love with a young nurse but Doctor Carduso’s jealous nephew found out and she was fired. I thought I would descend again into the depths of stupor once Nurse Collette had gone, but her replacement was just as acceptable, and I concluded that the problem all along had just been too much Proust.

Death in a huff.

Death sat gaunt and unloved at the piano in Alice's drawing room. His coattails fell almost to the floor behind him. Light from candles threw shadows on the walls as his fingers raced over the keys releasing shivers of Tchaikovsky that transported Alice to some place where she believed love could never touch her. Leonard came in after midnight. He sat on the recently reupholstered Voltaire in the corner of the room and watched Alice start to sink into oblivion and gravitate  towards Death's clutches. He blew blue rings  of cigar smoke towards the dead roses that were looking in at him from the patio on the other side of the French windows. From the air he grabbed hold of the floating notes of Tchaikovsky as they passed under his nose. Alice was already starting to dissolve. Leonard mixed the black notes of Tchaikovsky in the bottle of Chablis that Death had left to chill on the hearth of the unlit fire. As he poured the adulterated wine into a pewter goblet the musical notes were rearranged into a waltz-like version of "Knees up mother Brown". The spell that Alice had fallen under was disrupted. She swooned; Leonard caught her and laid her limp, feeble body on Daphne's chaise longue. Death put on his overcoat, wrapped a white scarf round his scrawny neck and took off in a huff.

Apologising in advance for bad poetry.

It's cold today and the winter home is full of sweety mice, the rabbit beat the butcher at a game of magic dice; I fiddled at the corner where the fancy ladies pass, but they called a big policeman and he made me move my ass.

At Bristol university the sand was running out, the hourglass tangerine fell down and no-one heard her shout; my captain pirouetted as the whiskey made him numb, so he didn't feel the consequence of landing on his bum.

Can you tell that I've been drinking more than ketchup laced with rum? Does my docile constitution speed you up and make you hum? The little Robin red breast shared his apples and his cheese, so I'll follow your example and I'll get down on my knees. And say sorry.

Cold River Bath.

 

I climbed up into the hills today, the same hills I used to camp out in many years ago, sometimes with friends and sometimes not. It wasn't camping with a tent of course, just finding somewhere sheltered and then lying there till morning looking through the trees at the stars, confident in the vague hope that there were probably no strange characters wandering about. In the morning, stiff and sore from lying on the hard ground, the best remedy for the aches and pains was to jump into the freezing cold water of the Shimna river and stay there as long as possible and hope no-one was about to run off with my clothes. I've never felt so clean. Breakfast was fruit and the promise of coffee when I got back down out of the forest into Newcastle. I thought today of suggesting reliving that part of my youth to my wife and then thought better of it.

Church bells and kidney stones.

I've just set myself up for a fall. On this little afternoon with its thin light and the suggestion of approaching spring, I read yet again Camus' devastating little story "L'Envers et l'Endroit", the title that he gave also to the collection in which the story appears. I've never read anything so shocking, tender, depressing, sweet and uplifting in all my reading days. It makes me want to lie on my bed smoking a cigarette (even though I don’t smoke) and contemplate life with all its vague deceptions and uncertainties; to watch it through a net curtain on the surface of which the soft, shy sun throws down the shadows of a tree whose heavily-leaved branches sway gently but hypnotically in the heatless, sunny quietness. Through the open window the strains of a Church bell announce a death; from the flat below a howl and a squeal announce a birth and I'm caught in the middle. As dear Albert asks, "One man thinks, another hollows out a grave for himself: what's the difference between the two?" Surely we all need to be both, this side and that, but I'm no good with my hands. And what about the university graduate with the bitter soul who served me up this coffee that's now gone cold? Where does he fit in? But now that I’m able to read again maybe my recent depression is beginning to lift after an unreasonable length of time. Maybe I expelled it along with that kidney stone. On the other hand I might descend into the depths and ponder hollowing out a grave for my bones.

Getting Married in Prison.

The night before Jim got married the other inmates on his wing of the prison poured buckets of water over the small exercise yard knowing that the heavy freeze would turn it to ice by morning. As soon as the cells were unlocked, and while it was still dark, Jim was dragged out of bed, stripped and bundled along the corridor past the kitchens and out into the full, searching glare of the spotlights that rained down on the yard.

In no time he was on the ground being dragged by the ankles over the rough ice to the cheers of the whole wing. Prison warders changing shifts watched the prank being played on the groom from a distance, amused: although the perimeter of the jail was as tight as a drum the regime within the walls was relaxed. Politics, Irish prison politics.

When Marley thought Jim’s butt had been slid about on the ice for long enough he called time on the pre-wedding entertainment and the men went in for breakfast laughing and shouting and leaving Jim to pick himself up off the wet, bloodied ground and drag his numb, lacerated ass in after them.
He ached all over, but the pain didn’t really kick in till the hot water of the shower started to thaw his frozen cheeks. Some of the other men started to think they had gone too far when they saw the damage but most just laughed. Someone tried to turn his shower tap to cold. He spent the next hour lying on a bed in the sick room with the two nurses picking gravel out of the wounds that ran from his shoulders to his ankles, wincing with every drop of antiseptic they poured into them. He was to be married in a few hours.

At 10 o’clock the bridal party arrived at the prison gate along with the permitted 10 guests, all bundled into two minibuses. It took from then till noon to put them all through security, checking out the flowers, wedding cake, top hats and the frills and flounces of dresses for drugs, knives and whatever else might be smuggled in.

The over-excited sniffer dogs, the searching hands of the guards and the smell of the tiny search rooms each honoured guest had to pass through on his own soon dampened the party spirit, but the sense of anticipation revived as the appointed hour for the wedding drew near and all was in place.
The guests at most weddings are usually anxious to get to see the bride as she makes her entrance, but at this wedding it was the groom everyone waited eagerly to see; most of the guests hadn’t seen him for a few years.

When the wedding party was settled in the small chapel and the flowers had been stuck in a vase, the music Carol had brought along with her started playing through a speaker at the front. Prison guards took their places at the back, and a door at the side opened letting a nervous-looking Jim into the room accompanied by a minister. He was limping and seemed stiff and uncomfortable, but Carol thought he looked good in the suit she had bought for him and had brought along when she visited the previous week.

 Fifteen minutes later it was all over, they were married. Fifteen minutes was all the prison allowed for the preposterous frivolity of a wedding, and fifteen minutes was all that was needed. A quick prayer, a hurried reading and two almost inaudible “I do”s and the deed was done, but there was still the reception.

Filing out past the prison guards, Jim, his bride and their collection of family and friends all looking ridiculous in their finery were given one small plastic glass of non-alcoholic champagne. A prison guard cut the cake, neither bride nor groom being authorised to hold a knife within the prison grounds. Fifteen minutes were allocated for greeting and congratulations then one of the guards, the only one with a sense of humour on display, lead the couple through a door into what he announced as the honeymoon suite. Everyone strained their necks to get a peek through the open door where they saw a bed and nothing else under the dim glare of a flickering fluorescent light. The door closed, leaving the guests on the other side of it along with the guards.

This was the moment Jim had been anticipating. With no marriage there had been no conjugal visits allowed but now he had a wife, and after today he would get to have sex six times a year, and today was to be the first of those times. The anticipation however soon evaporated when the door banged behind him and he was alone with Carol for the first time in three years, with his own family and Carol’s parents on the other side of the door not four feet away. How could he perform under that kind of pressure?

It didn’t seem to inhibit Carol in the slightest. In no time her wedding dress was lying in a heap on the floor so he added all his clothes to the pile, but when she ran her hand round to his back and down onto what she always said was his finest feature - his butt - he let out an agonised yell.

Carol jumped back grabbing her dress off the floor, covering herself with it, shocked and bewildered, not knowing what she had done wrong. The gathered family on the other side of the door fell silent. One of the guards burst into the room giving everyone a ring side view of Jim’s lacerated body, the wounds freshly opened by the putting on and taking off of his wedding clothes, blood trickling down his back and thighs onto the floor, the wedding bed still unused.

Another date had to be set for the consummation of the wedding of Carol to prisoner 123456/789.

Murder at the Quacking Duck.

The Quacking Duck was a night club in the basement of a hotel in Beirut till a shell landed on it on New Year’s Eve at the turn of a year back in the seventies. Magda had just finished a set with the band shortly before midnight and was stepping down from the small half-moon stage. I had been waiting for her at a table at the back of the smoky room along with Zainab and Nabil. That’s when the shell hit.

The lights were dim; the applause was weak and half-hearted at that time of night before the main act came on to see in the New Year; we were all tired after the long bus ride up from Latakia where Zainab and Nabil had arrived by boat from Alexandria the previous night.

The shell must have hit just as I turned my head away from the stage to see if the bar was clear enough to let me go and order more drinks. There was a confusion of noise and light and sudden movement. In an instant I realised that I was lying on my back with a small, round table lying on my stomach, its legs sticking up in the air inelegantly, but I couldn’t figure out why. Why had the world been re-arranged without me seeing it happen? Why was I looking through swirling dust at the ceiling? Why was Zainab lying on the floor with her skirt pulled that far up? Everything was wrong but there was no-one to tell and I didn’t know exactly what it was that wasn’t right.

“I’ve fallen into a coma”, I thought, “I’ve had a stroke. I have to break the spell”.

So I tried to speak and move. That worked. Forcing air and sound out from between my dry lips was the first act of rehabilitation, the start of the long process of putting things right, bringing order back into life, but it was only the first tiny step.

Bit by bit reality sunk in, pieces of a jigsaw started coming together turning chaos very gradually into order, but many pieces were missing or in the wrong place. Some bits got moved round in my brain as other people joined in. Someone started to moan, then another. As the reality of pain kicked in moans turned to screams, but Zainab wasn’t making any sound and she didn’t move. Sirens blared. Water gushed from a fractured pipe. Noise began to build and men started walking around the room, taking long strides to avoid standing on whatever was in their way, and the world was sitting at an odd angle.

Someone bent over Zainab then straightened again and came over to me. A weight was lifted from my chest, dust poured into my mouth. Some dark, towering figure kneeled beside me and I could feel hands running up and down my body. I was rolled over. I was on my feet. I had grit in my eyes. There was shouting. I was standing in the cold night air in a wonderhell of sirens and flashing lights and the moon made the sea all starry with tiny, yellow pinpricks of light.