All stories

Blearily Tom opened his eyes. His body cold against the stone wall. “What the hell?” He mumbled trying to see through the dim light. He was naked. His wrists were sore from handcuffs, chained above his head to the wall. “Daisy?.. hello, anyone?” He shouted into the dark unsure if he wanted a reply. His throat burned with thirst. Worst of all he could remember nothing. Someone must be looking for me. Daisy would come find him. Surely.

He jerked awake again. What was that, he thought? A distant torch flickered across the wall and eventually on to him.

“Darling”, came a cry. “Oh thank god.”

“Daisy, thank you. Help me. Quick get me down” he cried in despair and delight.

“Are you ok?” Daisy asked, concern in her voice.

“I’m fine. Just hurry up and unlock me.” He replied desperate to be free. Tom breathed a sigh of relief as he saw Daisy pull a key from her pocket.

“Do you love me?” Daisy asked quietly.

“What? Unlock me Daisy quickly my wrist are in agony.” Tom replied confused.

“Do you love me?” Daisy asked again, firmer this time.

“Yes of course I love you.” He laughed, still confused. “But please get me out before whoever did this comes back.”

“Strange then really.” Daisy said, turning her back on him. “You know the garden has been looking so nice. But needs must and Gardners can be replaced.”

“Look Daisy, what’s going on. Where am I and for Christs sake get me out of here.” Tom’s confusion turned to anger as he spoke.

Daisy turned to face him. “You know the funny thing about you Tom? You have this image of what is is to be a Man; strong, proud always in the right, always thinking you can take what you want. But i’m afraid being a real man, well there is more to it than that. You! You can’t even tell me you’re not ok when your chained naked to a wall.” She laughed at this then continued calmly. “You think being a man is just about one thing. But there’s more to it then sex.”

Tom was frantically wriggling, as useless as a hooked worm. Pleasing now to be released and that he knew nothing about any of this. Daisy dissapeared into a dark corner of the room., where her voice drifted back to him. “She tripped and you fell? It just happened didn’t it? She is a gorgeous Gardner to be fair to you. Well she was anyway.” Her voice sounded as beautiful and as barbed as a rose.

She walked slowly back into the light and he flinched back as he saw what was in her hand. She scraped the grey metal along the floor, the teeth sang as they danced along. And their song was hungry and sharp.

“Oh dear.” She said looking down at him. “Your rose seems a little wilted.”

“Look darling this is all just a misunderstanding, if you can just unlock me.” Tom grovelled.

“And you know what happens to wilted roses” Daisy continues unhearing. “they need to be dead-headed.”

Tom froze, disbelief in his eyes. “Ok look calm down. I’m sorry. Is that what you want from me? This is insane. You can’t do this. This is crazy Daisy.” His words gushed out like dirt from a fallen pot.

Daisy gripped the saw tightly. “You know I don’t think you are ok Tom. In fact i don't even think you are worthy to be a man anymore.” And this time the saw sung out a different song. And Toms voice lifted and joined it, echoing endlessly in the cold and dark.

“In fact I would go so far as to say that the right honourable gentleman is a fucking wanker!”

Pandemonium had broken out in the House Of Commons.

Again.

“Order! Order’” the speaker shouted.

“The honourable member for Grimthorpe North will withdraw that comment immediately. And according to some little known tradition I will now have to invoke a suitable punishment chosen by the Right Honorable member for Casterbridge South before she can return to the House!”

That’s why Julie Eckerslike MP, firebrand and Occasional Lonnie Donegan imitator, was making the long journey from banjo practice down the corridors of power to office of Everard Twislington D’ascoigne, Co-founder of the ERG and notable wanker, to apologise.

It was like being back in school, always in trouble for outspokenness.

She knocked his door, feeling rather surprised that it didn’t have a moat around it. The thought of having to apologise was only making her angry all over again.

“Enter” came his familiar plummy tones from within.

His office was like the library of a stately home. Not like her tatty affair which she shared with the 92 year old mp for Fochriw Central in the Welsh Valleys.

On the walls were thousands of volumes of Hansard, several stags heads and a coat of arms. In the middle sat Everard wearing an ermine lined dressing gown and pyjamas and playing a musical saw.

“Ahhh there you are” he drawled “would you be kind enough to take tea with me?”

“Blenkinsop, do the honours please!”

A butler emerged from the shadows carrying a large tray piled high with ptarmigan sandwiches and earl grey tea in china cups. “We have mugs and, er, meat pies if you’d prefer ma’am” said Blenkinsop snootily.

She sipped politely unsure of the necessary etiquette

“I .....am.......sorry......I ....was.....rude” she stammered reluctantly.

Twislington waved her away! “All part of the heat of battle” he said. “Now tell me, I hear you play the banjo rather spiffingly but do you like skiffle music by any chance?

I wonder if you’d lbs so kind as to join me in a song?”

He struck up on the musical saw again “Oh Wilted Rose, what can I do

Can’t you see my love for you?” He crooned. He didn’t have a bad voice.

It was one of Julie’s favourites and despite her reservations on skiffling with the enemy she couldn’t help getting her banjo out and joining in.

“I caught a train”

To Kalamazoo

Just to stop from feeling blue.”

Timothy Peasebody, Lib Dem environment spokesman mp for Wavering Endlessly and a dab hand, at the tea chest bass shared the office next door with “washboard Joan” McConelly , MP for Ballystubborn and the DUP. They had barely spoken in 20 years but now they heard the clattery din from Twislington’s office they rushed to join the fracas.

And so it was that a skiffle coalition came about, learning and playing songs together and at the same time, finding solutions to some of the biggest problems of Brexit.

Within an hour and between tunes they had hammered out a new brexit deal they agreed on called “Rock Island Line plus”. The deal would allow both a hard and a soft border in Northern Ireland depending what lines you shouted to the customs officials as you passed.

( eds voice: you’ll have to listen to the song Rock Island Line to know what the writer is on about here readers but anyway)

Things went swimmingly until they came to discuss the peculiar jazzlike chord sequence of “My Jelly Roll”. Sadly as skifflers, agreeing this proved beyond them.

The next morning the four MPs were even more vociferous in their lambasting of each other than usual and the speaker wondered what on Earth could ever be done to stop grown men and women squabbling like children.

Sadly, Rock Island Line Plus was never commended to the House and Brexit negotiations continued for another 28 months.

A slash of red velvet; the curtain rose and I saw them in the hazy glow of the gas lamps. My audience was waiting!

Well they’d have to wait a while longer. Before us was the male impersonator Stephen/Stephania in her trousers, moustache and false eyelashes, then the idiot playing songs on his musical saw; a trapeze act, (all sparkles and cheap thrills), the acrobatic dwarf troup and then us.

There we were on the bill - the headline act: Sybil & Sam! People were beginning to give us the recognition we deserved. We were on the cusp of something huge, I could feel it.

Well, the recognition I deserved. She hardly earned her keep. It was me who did all the work; writing the gags, hours of practising, honing, refining to make ours the perfect comedy double act.

I had to hand it to us, we were funny; a little slapstick, a little bawdiness - just enough to titillate. I lived for that moment when we stood, bathed in the glow of the footlights, savouring the smell of greasepaint and burnt hair, dust and sweat and exhilaration. The smell of the theatre!

I looked into the darkness of the wings and caught her eye. She was flashing that insolent smile, mocking my shabby stage costume while she sat resplendent in her sparkling evening gown. I reminded myself that was why we were funny. I had written us like that! But her mockery hit home.

“I know what you’re doing” I hissed “and it won’t work. You can’t put me off. Tonight is my night.”

She was planning to upstage me. I knew it - to go off-script and throw me off balance. But we still had a little time.

“Come with me. Now. We need to talk.”

We went into an empty dressing room and I wheeled to face her.

“Why do you want to spoil this? You think you could do this without me?”

Always that niggling fear. Would she use my hard work to get to the top and then leave me with nothing? Did I need her more than... no!

“Who do you think you are? If it wasn’t for my writing, my performance you’d still be on your knees behind that public toilet where I found you. You were nothing before me.”

She said nothing, just tipped that crimson cat smile at me.

Too much. I lashed out, striking her hard, knocking her to the floor. And then I was kicking, punching, tearing. Screaming at the witch I had rescued and who was now plotting my undoing.

And then there were hands on me, pulling me from the spilled sawdust and rags. I saw what I had done. Her perfect porcelain face, smashed, a gaping hole in one white cheek; one eye gone, the other staring sightlessly ahead. Stuffing spilled from rents in her stomach; one arm stretched hopelessly forward.

The other performers stared. I had their attention now, alright. I dusted down my jacket and executed a perfect bow. One dwarf threw the tribute of a single, wilting rose at me, which flew to land on poor, broken Sibyl, our act in tatters on the dressing room floor.

I wake. Keiko is standing by my bed. She wears a prim white lab coat that brushes the floor.

‘Good morning,’ she says brightly, and sweeps the covering from my naked body. She helps me from the bed and ushers me through the door leading to the shower stall. The water is hot and invigorating, but I slump, this wilted rose watching petals of himself washing down the plughole.

Keiko enters the shower stall nude. I feel nothing. I am sixty-three, sixty-four, something like that. I don’t know, are they getting younger? They replace my attendants every few months. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m getting older. She joins me in the shower to wash me. There is much body contact between my wrinkles and her firm young skin, and my body begins to wake.

I want breakfast. Food is what I look forward to these days, but no. We enter the booth. Suspended from the ceiling is the dull black dome of the simulation helmet and I don it eagerly, leaving this sterile box for the pleasant warmth of a grassy meadow. In the real-world Keiko is carefully attaching the sensors to my body parts. As a boy it would turn me on, but now, all I wish for is this moment of peace before the program begins.

I stand in a barn, a row of cows watching me, lowing gently as they await their turn. A milkmaid is squatting low on a milking stool. Clasped between her thighs is a wooden cylinder. She enthusiastically raises and lowers the plunger of the button churn, breasts jiggling from her woefully inadequate top until at last they dance free.

A few moments later we are having sex.

She writhes beneath my prowess, matching the cows bellow for bellow. Time was and they used to put some thought into this stuff. Now it’s wham, bang, and thank you, sir.

But it does not matter how theatrically the milkmaid dances. Nothing doing. They can pump my body full of drugs, they can cram in millions of pleasure sensors per square inch. I’ve had thirty-three years of this shit.

The barn door is suddenly flung back with a bang. The milkmaid screams.

A man is silhouetted in the doorway. He enters the barn, levels his shotgun and fires. I hug the naked girl beneath me, leaning back up just in time to duck as he swings the shotgun wildly. I punch him in the gut, I punch him in the face, then seize the gun and wield it as a club. The milkmaid does not stop writhing.

This man staggers to the wall of the barn and pulls down a rusty bandsaw.

And I know his face. I know his puce skin and I know those temples with those bulging veins. You don’t forget your first time, and this is the husband of my first time. Yes, it was for the good of the species, and yes, he was sterile, but he could not take it, his wife paired off with a fourteen-year-old boy.

He stalks closer, and the saw murmurs with the rumble of summer thunder as it enters the back swing.

The barn dissolves into black. The helmet is pulled from my head.

‘Good job,’ Keiko says. ‘Time for breakfast.’

Pirates know how to ransack, they know how to deliver Black Spots and cut throats. They can sometimes sail a ship in the right direction. However they aren’t great at valuing treasure. Left alone with a treasure chest they are likely to try to fry to a Faberge egg whilst gazing in wonder at a plastic toyshop crown.

This was why, of all the parrots Bradleigh Salterton had owned, “Henry Sandon, Pottery Expert from the Antiques Roadshow” (as it liked to be addressed), was by far the most useful. Within six weeks of coming into his possession the avian antiquarian had made Salterton, hitherto a minor figure in piracy circles, the envy of the high seas.

The bird’s powers of assessment attracted the envy and fury of Salterton’s rivals whilst making him rich.

Their mood darkened further when they heard he’d somehow captured The Esmeralda, flagship of the Armada near Okracoke Inlet. He sent each of them a painting of himself, a “sailfie”, standing upon it’s prow dressed in fine new silk threads.

They rushed to their ships each vowing to capture the brilliant bird for themselves.

Fakebeard the female pirate was having a luxuriant and convincing new beard fitted when she heard. She’d been meaning to rebeard for years as her old one was obviously just a brown flannel. They hadn’t got the mouthhole cut when she rushed from the shop mid-fitting determined to capture “Henry” for herself.

Cap’n Salterton stood on deck feeling very self-satisfied, blissfully unaware of the angrily hirsute pirate captains converging upon his idyll.

From the hold he could hear the fruity tones of Henry Sandon.

“A marvellous piece of Clarisse Cliffe” it declared “where did you come across it?”

“Over there in the chest” said the confused crewman in charge of Treasure. “At auction this would be worth 400-500 doubloons!” concluded Henry confidently before assessing a musical saw, a Moderniste snuffbox and a repulsively ugly pewter owl. Just then, as the crew member was bringing him an unprepossessing flowery bowl, a rough voice shattered the peace outside.

“Avast behind” shouted Bluebeard.

Salterton turned, stung at this slur on his posterior size, only to see 30 ships arraigned before him.

“Your parrot or your life” Roared Eggbeard ferociously.

“Gnnrarhhhhhghcol!!” shouted Fakebeard through her uncut hairpiece.

A crew member mistook this for the word “Fire!”

A furious battle ensued.

With cannon to the left and right Salterton bellyflopped into the sea and scrambled onto the deck of Fakebeard’s ship where he lay whimpering and asking if he was dead.

“Never mind that idiot” barked Blackbeard “where’s the parrot?”

The buccaneers looked across at the sinking Esmeralda as the cannon smoke dispersed

and the noise of battle subsided. They could hear an excited voice in the hold

“The Wilted Rosebowl, I’ve waited all my life to see it!!....Quite ......literally..... priceless….!” Henry Sandon was quite overcome.

Then, as the pirates watched sadly, ship, parrot, crew member and Wilted Rosebowl disappeared beneath the waves, never to be seen again.

Mcloud looked at the faint markings on the dusty trail. Cheyenne perhaps or plains Sioux. Anyway mostly harmless. Mostly worthless. Killed a dozen of em in his time.

Not a bad place to camp up before crossing the Big Buckle and making it to Fort Cleever by sundown tomorrow.

A coyote howled.

He set up his camp, watered the horses and lit a small fire . His companion , known only as Carpenter, was a queer fellow, a man of few words. Surly demeanour, voice of an angel. Mcloud didn’t mind the quiet fellow chawing silently at his pork n beans, he had enough talk in him for 6 men.

“Fort Cleever. Damn full of dirty whores ” said Mcloud sipping a tot of whiskey and the spitting venomously. “Ain’t worth the breathing of gods good air so they ain’t!”

Carpenter said nothing

“If any o them whores cheeks you or answers back jes cut em down I say. I done dealt with a hundred or more that way. Ain’t no one who cares about em anywise. now, why don’t you get out that goldarn metal fiddle you are so good with and sing me a sweet sweet lullaby to send me to sleep. Never heard someone play that thing with such feeling! Never knew a saw could have two such different purposes, one beautiful and one so sharp and cold!”

Carpenter took the musical saw and bow from a saddle bag and started to draw the weird and wonderful almost otherworldly musical notes from it. The effect on Mcloud was immediate, he became drowsy and guileless.

“Sing damn you, send me to sleep good and proper”

Carpenter began to sing, a strange hypnotic melodic voice filling the whole range with a restfulness that caused wolves to lie down with buffalo and Cheyenne and Sioux to momentarily cease their timeless rivalry.

Do you still remember her? my lovely Wilted Rose

Why she had to die that day the devil only knows.

She was like a prairie fire

That burns inside me still

She fills all my dreams at night I guess she always will.

She was just so beautiful the mountains would despair

We had plans to move back east and live together there.

She would never hurt a fly but someone cut her down.

Now I’m like a tumbleweed that drifts from town to town

Carpenter looked across at Mcloud whose eyes were already closed.

She’s the purpose of my life, my darkness and my light

That is why I sing her name into the eerie night.

Recently I met someone who’d say the name out loud

Of the knave who cut her down

Carpenter stopped playing and looked once more at the snoring figure nearby.

The voice dropped to the softest whisper you’ll ever hear, spoken, almost inaudible,

“That name it was Mcloud!”

Then singing again

Do you still remember her my lovely Wilted Rose

Why she had to die that day the devil only knows

She was like a prairie fire that burns inside me still

And now I wander day and night her murderer ......to kill!

The next day the coyotes and jackals and the Cheyenne and Plains Sioux were amused to discover a human head near the white man’s fire, it had been sawn at the neck and was being held in the hands of its own body which sat bolt upright by the charcoal embers.

In fort Cleever Carpenter packed her trunk to head back East to take up her job offer as a village school mistress. She looked at her dead lover’s faded photograph.

“At last I have avenged you Wilted Rose.” She said softly with a tear in her eye knowing that the revenge would never fill the void.