Secret Fragments #6

The song was beautiful.

 ‘This is your 30^th year / Now you are dum-dum-dum …’ Even the words he hadn’t heard and those he couldn’t now remember were perfect and thrilling to him. How wonderful it had been! And how wonderful they had been! The singers, and musicians that was. But looking at it again, sinking back into the evening, the guilty heaviness he had felt soon bloomed in his stomach. Bloomed in the place where his guts had turned as he listened, and the beginning of a cough scratched at his throat. Bloated from the beer and sickly from all the food he tried to listen as hard as he could to the song; and sing along though he did, and smile, and keep his eyes fixed on them all, he felt he was missing part of it. He smelt the smoke that clung to his jumper and couldn’t get past feeling how fat he was. And beyond that, he thought to himself, why wasn’t he in that circle singing to Marseille? Not actually that circle, but another one, somewhere, another time. Their ruddy faces and clear voices rang clear and had made him shudder at his evening of shoving more and more in to himself. He needed to get involved somehow. He knew he had smoked too much to take any pleasure in that, and besides, thick smoke sat around him anyway, clouds trailing from the cigarette Pest held in her fingers.

The trip home from the party turned Pest grouchy and he melancholic, and the gloomy thoughts of the song accompanied him the entire journey. He longed just to be there and warm so he could forget about it all. His spirits instantly rose as they ascended the stairs to her flat and he remembered Buda’s stash of weed.

He was rolling a second joint when Pest fell asleep. Now he was utterly content. What he loved about getting high, he thought to himself, was that it made everything else feel so good. Any chair would bring him warmly into its fold; a swig of beer stung the edges of his tongue and cooled his throat. A cigarette would comfort, and then he would put one of the chocolates from Ghent whole into his mouth and smother it under his tongue and crush it with the roof of mouth. It would spread out in thick rolls to line the warm wet little grotto, and he would feel the sharp edges of the nuts cut into his check and squash into the grooves of his teeth, the sides of his check pulled inwards by the gloop.

‘You are enjoying my birthday chocolates are you?’ Pest had snapped at him. ‘Ye you enjoy them!’ He had felt himself shrinking inside and he despaired for a moment that she had ruined everything by exposing his gluttony. But the feeling thankfully fell away and now she was asleep so he continued to enjoy the chocolates. He would assess and reassess how many more he could have before she would realise in the morning that he had kept on eating after her chastisement.  

This is what he was missing at his grandfather’s he thought, but then reflected, with his grandfather’s port and cigarettes it wasn’t so different. These were the real joys of life he thought. As he was prone to do now, his mind floated towards Lady Baxter-White and the Baron, and wondered if they had enjoyed themselves like this. Had Bobo? And if she had, had it been before or after her eighteenth birthday? He settled back into the past and brought the visage of his glamorous ancestor in front of him. Loosing none of her beauty back in London she had darkened, his grandfather had told them. No longer the face of a dandelion but instead a lilac snowdrop standing in shadow. His grandfather had gone to his study to collect an envelope of old photos and he showed them how his mother’s expression had hardened into a steel pout. The lines already forming over her face were evident in the dusty pictures. Against a silent hysterical current that flowed faster as her birthday approached, Bobo challenged their caution with silence, and her coldness sent all into disarray. Because she hadn’t been enjoying herself.

‘One time, two days before her birthday, when my father took her hand in his, as had been demonstrated by the handsome wives, she withdrew, stood up and bright red in the face screamed at him that he was presumptuous and had no right and left the room. For a moment the juggernaut screeched to holt, and my father found himself flung down from the crest of the wave to a floor he hadn’t previously been aware existed. But the places were already set, and the machine steadily in motion. My father had no more power to alight, or halt the engine, than Bobo did. The train ran itself. And that, I believe, is where it began. I don’t know the exactitudes. Bobo found a quiet resolution that she was to keep as long as I knew her. And my father, well … All I know is that he got through Bobo’s eighteenth with Bordeaux, the eighteen months of their engagement with a few crates, and was half drunk as she walked up the aisle.’

Marriage at eighteen … and him drunk. But older than her. Thirty or so. Imagine marrying a thirty-year-old …  Imagine being married at thirty. They would all be thirty soon, and then what … It wasn’t too bad because times are made just to enjoy ourselves. And we don’t know when the next time we truly, ignorantly enjoy ourselves will come. And this feels good and that can’t be bad. And there were other times and even if he let this time slip past, let the circle of song fall into the mist of things missed, this had sharpened his search to touch the map and really feel next time. It had been beautiful. Squandered, nonetheless.

He wondered what Buda and Vienna really were getting up in that dingy old flat in Pecham. Buda would have enjoyed the song, as she listened to all the songs that he later loved. It had been that way at school, with Pest and the others as well, and they had stumbled upon a band they had loved, but no-one else knew them.

His limbs felt solid and regel, and he was aware of the cold blue streams running through them.  His toes were little pebbles at the end of his bonny little feet that spread out on the sequenced carpet below him. The beer that slopped around the bottom of his glass was now warm and flat but it was trusty and refreshing nonetheless.  All he really cared for now, all he needed for, all he really willed to have was a playful breeze to dance past his feet and over his arms and chest and up to his neck and face. And to listen to that song.

The effort to find it was awful and he almost toppled over an empty beer bottle.     

Where was the laptop?

He fell asleep before the end.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

Secret Fragments #5

            A few days before he had gone to Pest’s apartment in Tower Hamlets. Weeks before Pest and Buda had invited him to come along to the birthday party of a girl called Marseille who they had met in Cornwall on Buda’s eighteenth and he had subsequently met a few times in London. Buda was no longer going and Pest had said she wasn’t sure if she was but would let him know. She hadn’t let him know but he turned up at her flat on the day of the party anyway. In the doorway her lips tightened as she sucked her teeth but she let him in without a word.

            Sitting in her sitting room, tidy and précised as it has never been when Buda has been there, they drank coffee and he confronted it to break the silence.

            ‘I hear Buda has a new friend.’

            Pest looked at him sharply trying to gage from which angle he was approaching. She raised her eyebrows, turned away from him to look out the window and said, ‘Yes, they are certainly good friends.’ He watched her façade of indifference crumble as she turned to look out the window.

            Clouds lined the sky in white and grey clumps but through a parting bright sunlight streamed into the apartment and flooded Pest’s face. The blotches and faded make-up lines were lit up in sordidness. She looked exhausted. Neither her nor Buda had been looking well for weeks. Three years of living together in London with no parents and no boyfriends and no school they had hit the streets hard. While Buda had hollowed-out Pest had grown plumper, having left her father’s home cooking and farmer’s market vegetables for fatty Italian food and beer. But whereas in the past he had believed that the degeneration of her teenage good looks (blonde, short and rosy cheeked with blue eyes and a babbling laugh that flattered) had a kind of daredevil caution-to-the-wind glamour about it, all the wildness had now settled, crusting over and turning her tired in face and heavy in step. When not hanging loose, about the coffee machine or in the cupboard searching for sugar, her hands skittered over the mugs and plugs like blind rodents with determined spirits of their own.

            ‘You could invite yourself around,’ she said, fingers fumbling with the lighter. ‘You could just go round there, like you came here. They have all sorts of people there. Vang Vieng is always there with all her friends.’

            Vang Vieng was Buda’s sister, five years older than them and therefore when at school had appeared to them, with her dark eyeliner and tattoos, as a sparkling beacon of a life that could be after school. Between rows, with Pest in tow, Buda had tiptoed closer to Vang Vieng and made out a place for the two of them in this new thrilling world. Weekends when Buda’s parents were away she would frantically call Pest and gabble the news down the telephone line. At the party besides the cider and rosé that the two of them sipped in the corner of the kitchen and upstairs on Buda’s bed, flasks were handed round of unknown contents. A spliff was lit up in the shed and a stubble-chinned boy called Sam stole a hockey stick. On one occasion Pest had been taken into an empty room of the long haired brother of Vang Vieng’s boyfriend. Buda had sat on the sofa with the boyfriend and clenched at his wrist hanging loosely over her flat left breast and squeezed it and asked in giggles what he thought the two of them were doing in there, and when they would come out.

The others at school weren’t sure what happened in this new world, at this country brothel, but gazed with envy at their faces Monday morning.  Their faces soaked in glee, revealing that the morbid beacon could be found outside of school, not just after school.

            ‘Yes Vang Vieng’s lot are already there,’ Pest said as she sucked on a cigarette. ‘Sam and Carl too, always there. You know them, you could easily go round. We need to go.’ For a second he thought she meant to Buda’s, but then he realised it was already 7, and Marseille’s had already begun. After a last deep drag Pest stubbed the cigarette out viciously, grimacing into the ashtray.

            She lit another at the bus stop and then dropped it in angry sparks when the bus arrived.

            ‘Have you got a present?’ she barked at him as the bus roared away behind them.

            ‘Er no, I thought it would be OK? That I just came? Should I get one now?’

            She made to answer but the breath caught in her throat and she let out a spluttering cough, hitting her chest with her face shaking her hand at him. ‘No. I thought Buda had said to you to bring some chocolates or something. Never mind.’

            There were plenty of chocolates at the party. In exchange for the collage Pest had made for Marseille she received a small box of chocolates from Ghent, for her birthday that had been two months before. Pest shoved them deep into her bag and the two of them went to sit at the corner of the long wooden table, picking at the crisps in bowls and now and then made a little conversation with the jovial people either side of them. His enthusiasm for the party had dissolved at Marseille’s welcome which although warm was brief, and equally given he noticed to every other guest that arrived. He spirits rose each time his hand dived into the bowl of crisps, but evaporated again as he swallowed. He felt a little ill.

Pest drank the beer on offer at a faster rate them him. He started getting anxious that were being unsociable and that he was drawing askance glances for the mopey dollop he was sitting next to. Someone Swedish asked Marseille if he could smoke. When the singsong affirmative came Pest dived for his pockets. Her stubby fingers writhed about in his pocket, rubbing and pocking into the little flesh of his groin. He thought how he would have loved her finger to be down there when they were at school. In fact they probably had at one time. He felt nothing now but the memory of heroic times past but this was enough to lift him a bit. He grabbed himself another beer and opened himself to the table.

Seeing no other opportunity, he broke into the boys’ conversation next to him. It was a bit about politics and a bit about London and it was easy for him to find things to say. After a while he found he was enjoying himself. He took a cigarette from them and they laughed easily. Later, turning to Pest he saw that she was deep in conversation as well, with a short haired apple-cheeked couple. He tried to catch her eye but they skated over him.

            He turned back to his own happiness which became exuberant when biscuits began being passed around. They were covered in chocolate and inside between two slaps of biscuit was a caramel mesh, and when you bit into the biscuit this mesh held it fractured pieces together in stringy gloops. They all had plenty of these, smiling at each other and at their greed, and when they were gone the apple-cheery twins talking with Pest said there was some crumble in the kitchen which they could have. They found a bottle of cider here too. The couple were held up in the hallway and his friends had moved on. He was gloriously happy and in a moment of bubbling contentment he put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her check hard. She pushed him away instantly but he saw she was smiling.

            There was then a tinkle of glasses from the other room and some shouting. There was lots of swivelling of chair reaching for glasses and phones. Marseille had situated herself in the centre of a circle of people holding guitars and sheets of paper that had formed at the other end of the room.

            They started to sing. 

 

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

 

 

 

 

 

Secret Fragments #4

This song, you know this song! He hadn’t but soon came to as it became an anthem to all the best things that lay outside. The parties of Vang Vieng especially, and everyone who went to those parties knew that song. He must listen to that song again. That song with such ease would bring all that once been sliding back in front of him: the sunny bus journey to the costume warehouse, drinking vodka walking through town, building up courage to buy cigarettes. In those days he had been sure he was faking it. But now, looking back, the cold bare truth of it all had been there, climaxing in the sloppy drunkenness of his eighteenth birthday. In their phoney house parties and failed attempts at taking drugs they had been living much closer to what they envisioned on the sparkling horizon than they ever would have believed. Or so he came to believe.

And as he listened to that songs again, what came back was not a longing for what he desired, but for what before he had been living in ignorance.

He took himself back to the table.

‘And that, I believe, is where it began. I don’t know the exactitudes. Bobo found a quiet resolution that she was to keep as long as I knew her. And my father, well … All I know is that he got through Bobo’s eighteenth with Bordeaux, the eighteen months of their engagement with a few crates of the stuff, and was half drunk as she walked up the aisle.’ His grandfather was still talking. He remembered that he had asked the original question, but whether that question had been answered while he daydreamed, whether this was the long-winded answer, or whether the question had been cast aside entirely, he was unsure.  

He surveyed the table in front of him with languid eyes. Like soldiers there was a row of three green wine bottles down at the corner of the table between where his father and grandfather sat. Speaking to them, the old man looked into its centre, resting his head on one white and gnarled fist that punched into his chin. His father was next to him, straight backed and still, looking at his grandfather, gently but with indifference. After a minute or so he would turn to the china shelf opposite behind Sofia, and then to his wine glass, and then back to the old man again. He was circling the wine in his glass as a steady tempo and occasionally this grabbed the gaze of their old storyteller. The rising and falling waves of wine attracted the drooping eyes into an uneasy flicker before returning to the centre of the table once more. Apart from this involuntary shifting of his gaze his grandfather was still. His face had fallen into unconscious exhaustion. Only his mouth moved up and down, sluggishly and heavily between each sentence where it rested dead shut. In the longer pauses between words his eyes-lids began to fall before the spinning wine caught his attention again and the mouth was roused once more into speech. A sonorous flow, now impossible to follow, just words and phrases here and there that he comprehended a couple of seconds late each time meaning he missed what then came next. 

‘Did Aunt Margaret know Lady Florence?’ That had been his original question. Where on earth were they now? His grandfather was talking about his parent’s engagement. Though Bobo was only approaching her eighteenth birthday, upon the return to London, everyone was poised for what must surely follow after the events of that summer. The incident with the stallion had changed everything, or rather, his grandfather said, it had crystallised what had been growing in the wings for some time. Margaret, Bobo’s sister, had speedily extracted herself and this was a relief to everyone. With delicacy, the pleasure taken in this was unspoken. Such was the utter fullness of the sister’s departure - complete with all souvenirs that she had sown together to begin her life and the last shadows of her memory on the faces of either him or Bobo - not even an absence was felt when she left. Just a never been. The other parts of their little group and their little lives sunk into the space she had vacated, and they found themselves up against each other a little too close, like the last few in a game of Ring-a-Roses. But that which pulled them together, that which had forced Margaret to extract herself, that presence which hovered amongst their little society and each felt at the back of every thought, was tiptoed around, and not looked directly at, and certainly not mentioned.

His father was spinning the wine again.

Chocolate wrappers were strewn across the table, as were a few plates and saucers that had escaped his father’s earlier after dinner sweep, and there were a couple of ashtrays, one by his grandfather and another by Sofia. Around his father’s place it was tidy. He had smoothed and folded his chocolate wrappers and stacked them into a little pile on his plate in front of him. His eyes weren’t glazed like his grandfather’s but neither were they engaging in what was being said. They were quiet, calm eyes, disconnected by choice and deigned to look at other things, a collection of spittle in the crook of the old man’s mouth, the coast line in the background of a photograph on the shelf, at the shimmering veil of alcohol sliding down the inside of his wine glass. Comfortable and relaxed, those eyes had long ago ended taking any real interest in his father’s face.

He stretched out a hand to grab a chocolate from the box in front of him. His arm sprung up faster than he expected and almost knocked over his blooded wine glass. His hand fell into the box of chocolates and his fingers writhed about in search. It was full of the wrappers Sofia had thrown back in. He could not see inside from his position and unwilling to shift himself up he fumbled blindly. Fear swept over him as he realised there might be none left. 

            He was too drunk to even wonder at the eloquence of his grandfather at this time of night. ‘The spectre, brought shinning into centre stage, at this distance, and without the backdrop that had been, lost a definable brilliance and became a vague cloud of unease. At rare times it flashed into indubitable existence – perhaps in the corner of the drawing room one afternoon – but then disappeared again. Leaving the sunflowers and returning to London, and the breaking up of their tight little party, what they had been dancing around appeared to dissolve in the city’s smog, and though each caught a scent of it now and then, noticed a glimmer of sparkle in the evening light, none could now grasp on to what they had been sure was coming before. Having not recognised its storming approach to each other when it had been clear, having kept their dignity in refraining to comment so soon, back in London, any certain trace of it that’s groove might have been carved in their collective memory was absent. Soon each began to doubt themselves and disbelieve that it had ever been.

            ‘As summer finally set for another year the promise would have perhaps disappeared forever if it hadn’t been for my father whose gigantic sunny optimism and acceptance of what was, what always had been, and what certainly ever would be, propelled him to the peak of the wave that towered about them, over the sunflowers and through the streets of London. Of this wave the little currents of Bobo’s circle were only a spitting whirl of froth on the enclave. As my father’s personal bubble swooped up the curve of the wave so he brought with him the other strings of froth, and became their shining helmsman leading them forward. Unsure whether now to look up at the promise that had been resurrected or to be discreet and risk disappearance again, all were in a nervous tense expectancy right up to the week of Bobo’s eighteenth. With hair sprouting thinner and more frantic from their heads, each received the news of the engagement with excitement and exhaustion spinning in their eyes.’

 

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

 

 

Secret Fragments #3

Do you realise,’ his uncle said, slowly, ‘…she was born exactly one hundred years after Bobo ... Now that’s a thought, isn’t it!’

‘Good Lord, is that right?’

That summer, away from London to the sunflowers he had gone with his uncle and Alma and their children. Sofia had come too and everyone had said how much their cousin looked like Sofia, and Sofia smiled and their cousin smiled; she shyly, Sofia indulgently. He had thought that there was more of Sofia then in her now than in Sofia now, and he wondered how much of Sofia now would be in her then. When she spoke gently to her brother or her face was startled into a little ‘o’ and her black eyes grew, or silently at breakfast when her shoulders caved about her Coco Pops, yawning, and she refused to be goaded by uncles.

‘We can only imagine what we would find in that book,’ his grandfather said, grizzling, and placing tobacco in his rolling machine. His eyes flickered over his hands at work, and ten rested still, his voice quiet. His sons were silent either side of him and looking steadily at nothing.

He rested his head back and wanted to close his eyes. The room was running around them. For a moment the wind picked up outside, rattling the window in its frame just for a second, and a draught ran cold over him. His grandfather looked asleep. Tired, he tried to imagine him a little boy like Lutino. At first gambling, like a twinkling cub but quickly became a great, old snowbearpolabear pawing a landscape of white rock. He looked about the horizon, out over the flat white ocean and over the sprawling iced beach embedded in dark cliff leading up to an empty sky and the dark lip of cliff where the wind howled.

He looked upwards, hitting the ceiling, and thought of Pest and Buda, with whom he had spent the night earlier that week. The twins hadn’t look well. One was getting fatter each time he saw her. The other was wasting away, slurping at her drink and sucking cigarettes.  In Angel they had planned to go to the funfare that weekend at Battersea Power Station. When they arrived it was already closing down. Only a small selection of the smallest, and squeakiest, and brightest rides were still in operation and they were scowled at as they approached and asked for a go. They retreated to a bench at a beer tent that was half packed into a van.

They sat amongst employees of the funfare morosely celebrating the end. They sat and drank and he tried to keep the twins talking, or at least listening to him talk, and because he wouldn’t stop they did and the three drank cheap beer fast. Later, as the last of the sun shone, multi-coloured on the tarmac he had gazed up at the sky and watched as the planes flew past. One by one they came, one always following upon the other; in straight lines they flew, black, geometric birds.

He left still unsatisfied and so kept the girls walking with him, speaking loudly and holding hands and swinging their arms. And although Buda’s dyed red hair was faded as her dark brown roots took hold, and although Pest’s shoes were tattered and splitting they still clung to her feet, and so they flowed into a quiet but full pub and ordered drinks and laughed and shouted raucously and discourteously as they drank them and the other punters made mute sign language behind their backs.    

Afterwards he had gone back to Buda’s house and they had bought a bottle of wine, and, crept around the back of her building passed the bins to the swimming pool. They had uncovered it, and taken off their clothes and slipped in. They took their glasses of wine with them into the water. They drank and whispered and chuckled and he looked up to the sky and heard the train rolling past. Each train sounded thunderous and brought drama into their little quiet world in the water. He was smiling into the sky when Buda said that they should go in, and their white dripping bodies scrambled out of the pool.

Walking home along the river he had stepped up on to the ledge to pee into the Thames but couldn’t. Voices gave him quiet juddering startles and one person amongst goads and squeels slapped his ass as he went past. Buda and Pest hadn’t texted him since that evening – one had stabbed herself on a metal railing; the other just went silent.  

But now, sitting at his grandfather’s table, he returned, as he often did, to the sunflowers. On the final days he had walked with Lutino up a long road to a park full of bushes and plants and great trees. They walked up to two great pillars at the entrance; upon which crouched a fierce dog, puppies straining up to her dripping dugs while she turned to the other pillar, snarling and spitting at a wolf, as large as the bitch, legs spread and hair bristling. Under her belly there were also puppies, but dog-puppies not wolf-puppies. He was unsure whether they were dead or alive, writhing or frozen below her bridged belly. Looking up at them, Lutino’s eyes expanded for a moment, into smooth black buttons, and then his head turned back to the other, and he looked straight forward and stumbled into the park, leaving behind a cloud of dust where he shuffled his small legs forward.

He walked up to one of the pillars, looking up at the snarling beast above, and scratched upon one pillar the words liebe luxus anarchie.

Alma followed with her camera.    

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

Secret Fragments #2

 ‘My aunt was thirteen years older than Bobo. She was already crawling out of her youth as her sister was emerging out of childhood and into her beauty. My father was engaged to my aunt first, you see. But one summer he fell in love with Bobo. Over card games and chess. She would slink up to him and ask if they could play a game and he wouldn’t be able to say no, and they would play, and she would ask for one more, and he would lose on purpose until he realised he could no longer win. I can see him at it now, twirling a circular counter in his hand under the table, while attempting to raise her eyes to his …’

‘He used to do it to our nannies and young waitresses on holiday in Portugal-’

‘But my mother’s eyes would be fixed on the ball, the board, the table, watching his hands. It’s how she always was.’

‘Yes I remember her teaching us Poker and it was just like that: eyes on the table, on the cards, on the chips, only looking at us for a moment to check we were paying attention-‘

‘But it was over chess that Dad fell in love with her. And after chess he would chase her in the garden or try and catch up with her in badminton … and it was perfectly obvious, to my aunt at least, what was happening.’

That which was perfectly obvious to his grandfather’s aunt was hidden from his father. Bobo didn’t see it either, lost behind the wonder of her own ascendency and the world it brought. And because it was perfectly obvious, it was only a matter of time before the loser, without a struggle, gave up trying to find reason or compensation for the perfectly obvious, or look for what lay beyond the reflection, and joined the great multitude who pass gently from reproach to lament to submission.

The food had been set down. He had already finished his wine and now he swallowed the last of his water. He picked up the bottle and filled everyone’s glasses up as they had also finished. He then did the same with the water jug.   

‘The Book of Secrets was a book owned by a lady called Florence Baxter-White. She was a great lady of society in London between the wars. She was also a great friend of Bobo’s. She would host these fabulous parties, and at these parties, when the guests would be leaving, she brought out this great book in which she asked them to write a little remark or impression of the evening, or a snippet of gossip perhaps. Because it was like a visitors’ book apart from that no-one would be able to read what the others had written-’

            

‘A cloth,’ his grandfather said, ‘with a circle cut out of it was placed over the pages when someone was writing in it so they could only see their own blank space and their own words.’

           

‘And there was absolute trust that Florence would show the book to no-one-’

            

‘When Florence died, hit by a taxi on Marylebone Street, she left the Book to Bobo. But –‘

            

‘It never reached Bobo-’

‘Why?’

‘Years and years after that summer it was …’

‘Fantastic chicken, Dad.’

Years and years after that summer, working on the dry banks of the Thames, Bobo’s sister found herself forced by unhappy circumstance to seek her sister at one of Lady Baxter-White’s fabulous parties. Waiting, she stretched her neck like a stalk’s through red curtains to the dancing beyond.

‘Her ersatz presence at Florence’s attracted the attention of a guest by the name of Hoogerwerf, who on discovering her identity, subjected her to a celebration of her sister from great purple lips …’ 

‘I am yet to pin that little tyke down in a game of tennis! One of these days … Tell me, was she so delicious when she was younger?’

And it was only a few months after that-

‘Could you pass the potatoes, Dad?’

'The elder holds the secrets of the younger! My aunt was entrusted to pass on the book to Bobo but on the day Florence died she spirited it away. It was only a few months later when-’

‘Are you finished here Dad?’

Only a few months later, as men in black and white shuffled about the Baxter-White house, a young girl, a favourite of Florence’s, hid the Book of Secrets in an old stone oven in the garden kitchen while she attempted to reach Bobo.

But no-one knew where Bobo was. The house was filling up with more sweeping black coats and jackets and they young girl began to panic. Just as she was about to shriek to the other young girls that they ‘simply light the oven and let the Book burn!’ one of them said that she had recently seen Hoogerwerf with a woman who claimed to be Bobo’s sister. They hadn’t believed Bobo to have a sister but Hoogerwerf, who was holding his hanging head in one of the long corridors of the house was brought forward and consulted and irritably assented that there did indeed exist ‘a tall, dry giraffe of a woman’ who called herself Bobo’s sister. Enquiries were made and the reality was verified and before midday the dry giraffe with the weak flutter of a resurgent heart was being hustled down the back passageways of the Baxter-White house and then presented with the Book of Secrets with the fierce instruction that it was to be delivered to the hands of no-one but Florence’s ‘Darling Bobo’. Little moist hands pushed her down the garden: ‘Tell her to send a note when she has received it. To Victoria!’ And then with a desperate nod the door was slammed shut.

Cut off from the garden, standing still, amidst a damp, charcoal alleyway Bobo’s sister clasped the Book of Secrets to her bosom. Summer was ending and the chill morning, with clouds overhanging, held the essence of decay. Her long trembling fingers stroked the black leather and played at the while linen cloth that poked out of the Book’s white lips.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

Secret Fragments #1

Up against a stone pillar, the light shone down upon his head and chest like a halo or a Tudor ruff, or a large, translucent bib, as white as his skin and the flower of hair that sprung at his temple. At his mouth, about his chin, a stain sat; mud or muck or chocolate, like the scruffy goatee of a middle-aged Parisian artist.

‘Alma took it. Not a bad snap eh?’ His uncle sported neither beard nor ruff but a speck of red chilli dip – conspicuous as a black mole hair or white-head – hung to the crevice of his mouth. He smiled at his father and him and put the picture back on the shelf. His uncle’s voice fluttered about his ears and he hoped that a smile would suffice as a response.

‘I sent this to Dad last week. He has pictures of the other two when they were the same age. Hmm? Yep, two.'

His father reached for more crisps and chilli dip and smeared it over his own mouth. His blackberry blinked on the table. ‘Two already! Good Lord …’

‘Young Lutino two already!’ His grandfather entered the room, grinning, the skin about his mouth stretching out in wrinkled folds. He walked briskly with the stiff edge of a decommissioned rocking-horse. He saw that a drop of urine had formed on his grandfather’s crotch and also spotted a speck of green caught between two of the old man’s teeth. He drew his tongue over his own teeth and put a hand up to his mouth and chin and felt only the dry beginnings of the scruffy goatee of a middle-aged Parisian artist. 

His father and uncle were up in London. Just for a couple of days, his uncle said. And his father too, ‘Just for a couple of days.’

‘Then back to the country.'

The three of them had come from different corners of the city and met in a pub, a five minute walk from his grandfather’s. It was fun and they were very content to stay but resisted a second round and got up to walk around the corner. His grandfather had greeted them all heartily and fixed them drinks.

Now standing around his table, his uncle said, ‘You know Spangle told me the funniest thing the other day. He said that years ago when he came to stay at weekends and Alma stayed behind on walks after lunch, he had thought that she had been smuggling lovers in behind our back. Because she always insisted so vociferously that we should go out on a walk, but would never come herself. Each Sunday he had imagined her hurrying them all in as soon as we crossed through the trees into the field!’

They laughed and he thought of the raised eyebrows and meaningful looks that would pass about Alexandria’s table. Sofia would laugh with them and drop a little remark that ripped the seal the others dared not pick at, and they would cackle in a spurt of relief, howling and clawing at the table. This table was as long and light, as his grandfather’s was dark and squat, and sitting around it earlier that Summer, Sofia had said:

‘I’m giving up in the autumn. As soon as I can. It’s disgusting. It’s just not worth it.’ Alexandria silently nodded along, and the girls looked up at Sofia and her cigarette with eyes content to believe in the autumn and she nodded down at them. ‘It’s not worth trying in the first place.'

‘How old were you?’ Alexandria asked.

‘How old were you?’

His grandfather lit a cigarette and passed the lighter.

‘I remember the first time they met. We went on a walk and the two of them were lagging behind and he was telling her all about the books he had read and his favourite jokes and stories from school. Funny to him but awfully dull to poor Alma. But she laughed and listened and asked questions and I remember looking back and saw him allowing her to help him over the style, the silhouette of them as she cautiously guided him over ...’

Once, on a walk with his grandfather, blackberry picking, hanging back to pee into the bush, he had spotted a voluptuous blackberry amongst the thorns. As he reached out to pluck it the mole hill he was standing on collapsed and he tottered into the ditch peeing over his trousers. For the rest of the walk he stayed back from the others so they wouldn’t see. Later he would hang back and try to surreptitiously smoke one of his grandfather’s cigarettes. Walking with his uncle and Alma in the sunflowers that summer he noticed Spangle hanging back and wondered whether he was smoking or had peed on his trousers.  

‘It kills us. I know it kills us; we’ve just finished burying Dad after it killed him, and look at me!’ That is what Alexandria had said while she smoked in the fireplace and he and Sofia wished to smoke crouched in the fireplace themselves, but couldn’t so she had gone to the bushes at night and he to the bins in the warm sleepy moments after lunch. But then Alexandria had woken up one morning and recognised it as the foulness it is and that was that and Sofia now really wanted to stop and that would be that, and he now loved not going to the bins but went to the flowers instead and thought of his grandfather’s curt cough and his rolling machine.

He offered him another drink saying, ‘He should try some of mine. You boys’ feet never grew to my size I think. Though I think they are now beginning to shrink …’

‘-I haven’t told Alma. I don’t know what she’d think! …’

            

‘-It’s funny actually I was talking to someone at work …‘

            

Alexandria was giggling somewhere while Sofia gave him a gesture as she had earlier. ‘She will probably have a rosé but go and check.’ He had gone out to try and find Alexandria and hadn’t found her but found the sunflowers and he had sat and in the end she had found him on her way back from the bins and he had offered to get her a drink and they walked back together, him helping her over the gate and back towards the house, and she told him stories that hovered about his ears and didn’t require a response.  

            

‘She was having her nap of course,’ his uncle said. ‘That’s all it was.’

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013