All stories

It is half past midnight and the air is stained with sleeplessness.

Time stops. The clock ticks hollowly, marking the empty seconds as you lie trapped in thoughts of unpaid tax and unwashed dishes; haunted by the things you wished you’d never said, the books unread. The other lives you could have led.

And the witching hour holds full sway.

The darkness pools around you like water, swirling through the windswept limits of your mind and washing old thoughts to the shore. You pick and sift through them, a carbuncled crone hunting treasure in the tide.

You clutch only those pieces heavy with regret to your cavernous chest, disregarding the rest as fodder and flotsam. The light, bright things are gaudy and faithless in the moonlit tide; nothing but cheap baubles of frail glass and childish fantasy. The sharp, the ugly, and the jagged to touch are what you pick up and draw jealously close.

The stopped clock beats on, its unmoving hands slowly picking at the intricate embroidery of your sanity. The darkness seeps in; everything has cracks...

Outside the stars glitter gently and shadows sweep wide and graceless across your darkened walls. The blood pulses hard and red and hot over your shut-tight lids and the stiff, stale air pours from your lungs in slow, silent cries, as if to summon sleep from darkness.

In the soft stillness your thoughts are bright and sharp; barbs to catch in your chest as you eavesdrop on the pale sounds of the night; the muted breathing of your sleeping lover; the creaks and cracks of the bones of your house. And the incessant snick of the stopped clock.

These are stolen hours.

In the corner something watches. From the ceiling something spies. Beneath the bed something waits and listens, for this is no man’s land and you are alone here. One slip and you fall to their teeth and their claws with only yourself to save you.

The spring coils tighter, the night draws you in closer and the darkness deepens down before it can fade. You can wait. Sleep has abandoned you. It will not come tonight. And so you wait with them, quiet and still and ready; an uneasy truce falls, but just until the darkest part is passed.

And slowly the hours creep away, hollow eyed and cotton mouthed until the pink slivers of dawn begin to drift into the sky. The shadows recede, slinking back into the cracks. There is nothing watching. There is nothing spying. There is nothing listening. Only you, waiting wakeful, baring your teeth and your claws. And with only yourself to save you.

Bob Marley was dead, to begin with.

Eleventh of May nineteen eighty and so did stop the clock of his life. Money can’t buy life: those were his last words. So dead he was they did him a state funeral back in Jamaica. Buried him with his guitar they did.

Now he’s telling me to chill. Telling me to take it easy. Telling me if he sorted that carbuncle on his toe he could still be rocking stead of chilling with me.

He tells me it’s all going to be all right I will dig up that guitar and bury him a second time.

He wants to know how Janet’s doing. She doing alright?

She has a date tonight. It’s the third date, and she wears the underwear I bought her. I’m still in awe how something so lacy has such tensile strength.

Not cool, man, Bob says, but there’s a wistful look on his face. And then he grins at me, asks me did I join her in the shower again?

The size of our shower? It is not erotic, a woman shaving her armpits and you with a thermostatic mixer valve where your arse should be.

She smiles a lot as she dresses, flitting from the wardrobe to the mirror and back again. Time and time again we never made it past this stage. Holding her softly from behind, my fingers on the zip at the back of her dress. He eyes wide and so innocent: zip me up, or we’ll be late.

Time and time again we texted from the bed. One of the kids is sick, or the car won’t start.

But no one is sick and the car does start and she is gone.

I am alone in the house we once shared, but only for moments. Time has no meaning now. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, and it should be a drag but blink and all of a sudden it is eleven at night and her key sounds in the lock and then it’s the three of us together in the hallway with this awkward silence.

And silence as she takes him by the hand. Silence as they mount the stairs, and silence as they shed their clothes, and silence, so much silence as they commit the act in my bed.

And silence as I scream, and silence as I flail my arms in pointless rage against the makeup ranks and perfume bottles littering her dressing table.

How many times have I tried this? How many times have I scrunched up my mind, trying to move it, just a tiny fraction of one lousy millimetre, nudge that filigree frame of the two of us she put face down on the dressing table before she left for her date. Futility, I am thee. More futile this than arguing against an unpaid tax bill.

The silence broken at last as he snores. Janet lays next to him, naked and flushed, naked breasts heaving lightly. She glows, and there is a lightness to her face I have not seen in months.

And she cries.

Cries in silence. And Bob is right.

Everything will be all right.

He’d taken the keys to the new palace that morning. A modern palace in Hyde Park, for a modern king, centuries of tradition cast aside, an end to stuffiness and pomp!

Designed by Richard Rogers, it’s airy glass mezzanines and sharp modernist angles, which Papa would have so hated, showed that he was finally in charge.

Young enough to make a difference. Too impatient to wait. And it was all tax-free. Things couldn’t have worked out better.

Grandmama had been easy, it had merely been a question of placing her sceptre and mace, above her partially opened bedroom door. Then, when she came in at night – bingo! A wheeze he had played a million times at Eton with buckets of water. It was ironic! Decapitated by her own outdated symbols of power.

Papa was always going to prove more difficult. He’d toyed with giving him a man-eating venus fly trap, or pretending that pater had laughed himself to death listening to the Goon Show. But then the media suspected foul play in the case of Grandmama and a solution presented itself.

Who had the most to gain from her death? Why papa of course, his finger prints were all over the mace and sceptre because he sneaked into the throne-room to practice kinging when no one was looking.

Eventually an angry mob had burst into Highgrove House and trampled papa to death while he was tending his prize begonia.

In a sentimental move the New King moved some of pater’s prized flowers into his own garden, it was what they old boy would have wanted and he was all heart you see.

But as he lay in his bed and the royal clocks struck midnight, a green and ghastly ghostly flower hovered in the ether above his head, it had two giant leaves that resembled the huge ears of….., but no it couldn’t be…...

“This new Palace” said the apparition “is an act of vandalism! Like a monstrous carbuncle on a much loved and elegant friend! Like an assembly hall for the academy of secret police!!”

It couldn’t be but it was…….

The plant continued this way for several hours and was still blathering on when the new king shot a glance at the grandfather clock to find it’s hands hadn’t moved an inch. Time stood still as it always seem to when Pater discussed any of his pet subjects.

Every night for the next month the spirit returned to deliver it’s ghoulish lecture. The new king developed bags under his eyes and quite lost his reforming zeal.

His abandonment of the new palace, abdication and the birth of the glorious new republic has been widely attributed to societal changes and it’s true that Britain’s overlong adherence to a monarchical system now seems antiquated, but there are also some who say that Prince Charles’s prize begonia, that one with ear-like leaves that still flourishes in Hyde Park where the new palace used to stand, also had a role in the fall of the House of Windsor.

In the corner of B ward sat the haunted bed. Over-stretched though they were, the bed remained empty.

Every patient who had occupied it since Carl Roberts had followed in his unfortunate footsteps. The bed had been repeatedly stripped, sterilised and eventually incinerated, but any other that took its place had the same eerie curse. Death by sepsis. Itself not so uncommon, but to happen 73 times in the same bed to patients with completely unrelated symptoms on admission was simply impossible. Even Karen, the poor exhausted intern who had made the mistake of trying to have a little nap there on her first night, a quiet Wednesday, had succumbed. A small pimple on her left buttock has blossomed into a giant carbuncle, her temperature had rocketed, and she’d been dead by Sunday.

Carl’s ghost hadn’t tolerated the removal of the bed either. Attempts to replace it with an equipment trolley had resulted in flying dressings and airborne stethoscopes. So the bed remained empty. Clean. White. Waiting.

The clock on the wall of the ward which had stopped the second Carl died was similarly resistant to change. When the ward sister had changed the batteries and reset it, it had stopped the first time 12:05 came around. Repeated attempts yielded the same results. Replacement had been ineffective, with the new clock stopping at the same time, and removal had resulted in a revolting seepage of putrid yellow-green pus from the vacant nail, much like that which had oozed from Carl’s infected in-growing toenail, or Karen’s festering carbuncle.

….

Suzie was on ward B visiting her mother. Again. Late stage pancreatic cancer, metastasized to her lymphatic system. Treatment would be harsh and unlikely to be effective, so she had declined in favour of dignity. What a joke. Watching her decline from a vital, active 75 year old decline to this emancipated, exhausted, pain-ridden shell was absolute torture for Suzie. And her siblings were no help. Julian was still in prison doing time for some tax evasion scam, and Cath was too busy with the triplets to visit often. So it was down to her, sitting on this death watch, praying for an end and hating herself for doing so.

Spending all this time on the ward, though, she’d made good friends with some of the nurses. They were doing everything they could to keep mum comfortable, but they could do little more than sympathise with her plight. Until today. Sister Alice appeared at Suzie’s elbow. ‘You should go home, get some sleep. It could be weeks’. Suzie started awake from her near doze. ‘You’re right. Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow’, she muttered, gathering her things.

…

The next day she returned to find another patient in her place. ‘Mum!’ She cried, as a nurse rushed over. ‘Suzie, calm down! I’m sorry we moved her to the corner, thought you could have a bit more privacy there’.They crossed the ward to a bed in the corner. ‘Her temperature is a little high today’ the nurse said, fiddling with some dials. Suzie didn’t notice the way the nurse avoided her eye, just settled once more for another 5 hour stint by her mother’s bed. Little did she know that it would be her last.