All stories

Ellie knew she’d be in serious trouble if her parents found out where she was. She also knew that if she could pull this off, she and the others would be literal heroes at school on Monday.

What she didn’t know was where the others actually were.

It was cold now and so dark that the blackness seemed to seep in through the smashed windows of the carriage to reach inside. She shivered and knelt forward to poke at the dying embers of the fire.

Something rustled outside. Ellie sat still, listening. The fire was nearly gone, but it was still hard to see anything outside of its diminishing protective glow.

Silence. Ellie sat back and crawled back into her sleeping bag trying not to panic. Becky and Daniel had gone for more wood. She thought they must be up to some kind of hijinx in the woods, because they had been gone for more than an hour now and Ellie was starting to get frightened.

But, she reasoned, if they’d been hacked to death by Old Joe she would have heard something - screams, spattering blood, the infamous shuffling of the legendary gammy leg. But there was nothing. Ellie sat in a silence that deepened and grew louder with every beat of her heart.

Old Joe had stalked the train graveyard in the rough bit of town forever. He dragged the bloody stump of his ruined leg behind him as he circled his broken trains at night, looking for anyone foolish enough to trespass on his territory. His left hand was clawed with hooked and bloody nails six inches long and his right clutched a rusty carving knife.

Legend said that Old Joe was a train driver driven mad when his beloved engines had been decommissioned and dumped here in this wasteland. Where he once drove the trains, the trains now drove him.

He wore a string of wisdom teeth around his neck and had sold his soul to the devil for the sake of these rusting bits of metal. His lungs were ruined by endlessly chain smoking cheap tobacco and he moved with a wheezing, retching, straining rasp.

They laughed at Old Joe in school, made fun of anyone who seemed nervous about him. But no-one had ever dared to spend the night in his graveyard.

Until tonight, Ellie grinned.

There! She heard it again. It was definitely outside but nearby. Was it footsteps? Was it...shuffling?

Becky and Daniel hadn’t bottled it, had they? Stupid, thought Ellie. She’d tell everyone at school and they’d never live it down.

As the city clock tolled the first of its twelve chimes far away in the distance, Ellie felt a surge of elation. She had made it. Fuck you Becky. She leaned down to open the last can of pop and the last packet of crisps in celebration. Becky and Daniel had forfeited their claim when they went off to snog, thought Ellie, vaguely miffed.

When the last chime was swallowed up by the night Ellie heard it again, nearer this time, just outside the broken window beside her. Something heavy dragging across the concrete - stopping suddenly - waiting.

As the hair prickled on the back of her neck Ellie heard the sound of a ragged, rasping retching breath in the darkness.

‘What are these?’

She’d opened my laptop while I was in the kitchen grabbing drinks. I wanted to be furious but I couldn’t because she might, y’know, leave.

‘Just some things,’ I deliberately avoided saying ‘stories’ or ‘writing’ because, well, I did.

‘I didn’t know you wrote stories!’

I handed her a beer, she barely looked up. She sat cross-legged on the floor, her eyes buried in the glow of the screen, two fingers sweeping across the pad.

‘There’s a lot!’

‘Well, yeah,’ I didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t what I’d asked her to come back for. It was way too soon to be exposed like this. ‘Shall I put some music on?’

She nodded just as the bottle entered her mouth. I was impressed, I’d have chipped a tooth trying to pull off that manoeuvre. She put her arm out and bobbed her hand to confirm I should go ahead. She looked like a nazi dribbling a basketball while going down on a beer bottle; it was a confusing image for me. I walked over to the records and started leafing through to find the exact right combination of cool and cheesy. The Right Said Fred album I’d been playing before I went out was not going to cut it. Was it? No. Maybe? No.

I felt the room shift and turned my head. She’d looked up from the screen and now fixed me dead in the eye with an expression that made me feel immediately guilty.

‘Hijinx?’ she asked, eyebrows raised.

Fuck, she was reading that one. My engine of seduction wasn’t only running out of steam, it was being retired to rot in a train graveyard.

‘I was just trying something,’ I tried to dismiss it, looking back to the turntable and chastising myself for that horrific train analogy. Metaphor? Jesus, what did I think I was doing trying to write? In my distraction, I clipped the tonearm and heard the needle scratch-land before the opening beats of Deeply Dippy filled the room. I had no choice but to pretend it was deliberate. I walked over and sat in front of her, grabbed my beer, and wondered if I could push the laptop shut and try to get us to the kissing before it was lost completely. As I opened my jaw my wisdom tooth protested, so now I was uncomfortable in two ways.

‘It’s weird though,’ she was back to the screen now. I was a spectator in my own ruin. Finally, she looked up again, her shoulders fell as she took another swig of the beer. ‘Why are none of them finished?’

‘Sorry?’

‘All of them, they just... run out. Some of them, like this one,’ she pointed, I didn’t look. ‘Mid-sentence. You just ditch them. You give up.’

‘They’re not finished,’ it was obvious to us both that wasn’t a temporary state. I rested my hand on the computer’s lid, not closing it but adding enough weight to make it dip.

‘You’re not the kind of guy who sees things through are you?’

I sighed, swigged the last of my beer, and searched for the Uber app on my phone. She saw what I was doing and closed the laptop.

‘How about you get me another beer?’ she smiled.

Fat and squat like a docker’s shoulders. Askew like a wisdom tooth left in a mouth too long. Weathered but reflective like the aged shell of a giant tortoise.

Out of time like the tortoise inside that shell. The marine bollard is comforted today.

It gets comfort from the indistinct monosyllabic shouts of workmen on the wind.

Shouts that remind him of dockers.

Shouts of earnest sweat and toil.

Shouts that fill him with hope that he is about to become useful again.

In truth he has felt like a tourist trinket for some years now. An “original feature” but not a useful one. Looking nice is too feminine a fate for an object cast by hard spitting men with poison in their lungs. Perhaps these men have come to wrap coarse ropes and heavy chains round him.

“Bring it on” he thinks “I can take it. I’m as tough today as I was the day I was made!”

A black headed gull alights upon his shiny top.

It is frustrated. Under the water are fish. And molluscs. And all the other things it would like to eat.

But it can’t dive. It is a scavenger, reduced to harrying the dwindling band of tufted ducks trying to startle them and make off with what they have dragged up from beneath the surface. Like the bigger types of seagulls do with children and chips.

It shouts to friends “go on, one’s just come up over there” but like the builders on the wild and windy air its cries are just vague shrieks.

What is under that water? What makes the soup?

Layers of sediment, reeds, coot poo, twigs, coke tins, takeaway cartons, tiny snails and fish.

There are layers of invisible sediment too.

The decision to demolish an old fisherman’s hut, the planning process involved in moving the Norwegian Church, The interviews that employed the people who staffed the tube. The effort made in acquiring of objects for the Cardiff Bay train museum. (in 1989, I posed here for black and white publicity stills with Railroad Bill). A unique community. The Cardiff three, a dozen pubs,. that gig by Prince Buster and Desmond Decker, The Harbour Festival, and one day in the not too distant future, Mermaid quay and Hi-Jinx Theatre and Cardiff Council and the dock itself.

Will they all become the expensive heating system in luxury flats? Will they stand empty as assets or at best be used by people who only use the wharf to run round in expensive lycra? Will they become indicative of Cardiff’s over reach and inevitable decline?

The bollard hasn’t thought about it.

The crane looks like it knows, looks like it can see more, but the crane has not talked to the bollard since 1982 and is still sulking.

I came to stand by the bollard on my lunch hour in February, on the day I was made redundant.

I tried then to imagine a future. But could not have guessed this one. And that’s the point. You never can can you?

For like the bollard I have very much less effect upon history than I thought I did and like the black headed gull, I’ll always be frustrated by my inability to ever get beneath the surface.