Tag: romance

Wellspring of Love

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excerpt

She’s not a bad person. The kids from church call her fast, whatever
that means, but she’s not what they make it sound like.”
“If you say so. Anyway, you were at her graduation ceremony yesterday.
Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s not the same thing, Ronnie, and you know it. The party
tonight is at her place and it’s just for special friends.”
“Well, you’d just better forget it.” Ronnie picked up his mug and
got to his feet. “I’ve got to get to work. Morley’ll be ready to start the
cutting. And listen, Rachael, give your mom a break and don’t make
things harder for her. She has enough to worry about with Aunt
Millie being sick.”
Rachael’s look changed from one of self-pity to a worried frown.
She stood up. “Ronnie, do you think … that is … is Aunt Millie going
to make it?”
A cloud passed over his face. “I hope so, I really hope so. But only
God knows that, and all we can do is pray for her.” He put his mug in
the sink, retrieved his cap and went out.
Rachael stood for a minute longer staring at the closed door, then
she went to the phone to call Lyssa.
ͣMorley and Ronald were sitting at the kitchen table when Tyne walked
in a little before nine o’clock that evening. Both men turned quickly
to look at her. The aroma of coffee drew her eyes to the stove where a
pot hissed and bubbled an invitation. Responding to their greeting, she
bent to kiss Morley’s cheek. Sensing his intention as he started to rise,
she murmured, “Don’t get up, honey. I’ll help myself to the coffee.”
“But you look worn out, Sweetheart.”
“And you have been working all day in the fields.” She filled a mug
with coffee and sat down at the table.
Both men spoke at once. “How’s Aunt Millie?”

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Water in the Wilderness

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Tyne held her breath, partly from anxiety, partly to avoid breathing in the stale, musty odour coupled with an even stronger smell of cigarette smoke than she had detected in the lobby.
“Here it is,” Arthur said suddenly with a slight tug on her arm, “room 312.” He rapped lightly on the door and waited. When there was no response, he raised his hand and rapped louder and longer.
They heard the creak of bed springs followed by a low groan. Arthur rapped again. A muffled voice from inside the room rasped, “Whatdaya want? Go away.”
“Corky Conrad,” Arthur boomed, “is that you?”
The answer was drowned out by several doors along the corridor opening simultaneously. Tyne swung around to see three grizzled heads peering out. A woman from the room across the hall pulled a threadbare dressing gown around her and whined, “Why don’t you shut up? It’s enough to wake the dead. Whatchadoin’ here, anyway? It’s the middle of the night, and you won’t get any response from old Corky for hours yet.”
Arthur ignored her and banged on the door again. “Come on, Corky, open up. There’s someone here to see you.”
From inside the room they heard a shuffling sound accompanied by angry muttering. “Can’t ya even wait till a man gets his pants on? All right, I’m comin’, I’m coming.”
Tyne felt weak in the knees. She longed to lean against the wall for support, but one glance at the greasy, peeling paint changed her mind. She wanted to yell at Corky to hurry up; she could stand the suspense no longer.
Finally, the door opened a crack, and Tyne saw an unshaven face with bloodshot eyes below rumpled graying hair. Corky Conrad had deteriorated even since she saw him in December. Holding tight to the door with one hand and the waist of his pants with the other, he glared at Arthur, then squinted hard at Tyne.
“Wha … Tyne? What’re ya doing here?”
Tyne started to answer but Arthur took her arm and propelled her through the door. “We’d like to come in if you don’t mind.”

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Jazz with Ella

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“Just close your eyes and think of something else,” he told her.
Paul’s a good buddy, she thought, and he stuck with me through all of the Michael years. She realized she was already thinking of Michael in the past tense and wondered if that was a sign of healing. The last time she had been on a plane she and Michael had flown to California for their first wedding anniversary. That had been just one year ago.
As instructed, she shut out the sight of the storm clouds and retreated into her thoughts. She wondered for about the fifth time why Paul had not been selected to assist Chopyk in leading this Soviet Union trip. It meant prestige and academic advancement. Paul was at least as well educated as she was with all the same qualifications: experience as a teaching assistant and going for his Ph.D. Besides, he was a man and the department favoured men in positions of authority. The graduate women often got no farther up the tenure track than lecturer. Jennifer was a loose cannon; she knew that was her reputation around the department. She was not one to toe the party line—or to sleep with the chairman to improve her grades.
Could it be, as her women’s lib friend had told her, it was because she would accept less money for the job? Just the cost of the trip and a small daily stipend—that was all she was receiving. Paul would have held out for a real salary, she thought uncomfortably. But she had to take this trip. It was ridiculous to think she could continue as a University of Vancouver graduate student in Russian Literature without actual exposure to the Russia of today—the Soviet Union. The department had been trying to organize this language immersion tour, a first for any Canadian university, for years. It was time to damn the expense and go.
This plan had seemed pretty clear until a warm day in May when the departmental chairman, Dr. Hoefert, summoned her to a meeting at Professor Chopyk’s office, and he had hinted to her on the phone that he might have some good news regarding the language tour. It turned out that she had been summoned not so much to Chopyk’s office as to his adjacent waiting room. She spent three quarters of an hour glued to a sticky orange vinyl chair, feeling her hair frizzing wildly in the humidity of the overheated building, one foot bobbing in time to the tapping of the secretary’s typewriter.
Occasionally, Chopyk and Hoefert had glanced through the glass panel as if to determine that she was still there. At first she mentally railed at professors who expected papers to be turned in on time but couldn’t be bothered being punctual for appointments…

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The Qliphoth

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He still won’t talk about Nick, he won’t talk about Tanya, his own dear
mini-model girl, his lost dream. He is fatter; and insists on wearing a regulation
striped shirt and one of Her Majesty’s grey jackets. Pauline chides him for
showing off.
“They’re good, these porridge-jackets. Cult collectables, as soon as I get
back in the business. ” But he won’t say what business, or discuss concluded
business, except in general terms. He smiles wrily at the thin brown curtains,
the broken Dansette record player, a chaos of books and one small picture, a
last retrieved treasure, on the damp wall —an ancient engraving of a bearded
man holding a complex structure, like triangulations of spherical retorts, radiating
light. She asks him about it —an old alchemist, a cabbalist or whatever?
She has to say something. He forces a hollow laugh and taps the dusty glass.
“I’m told it’s by Paulus Ricius, Augsburg 1516. Beautiful, isn’t it? God
knows what it means. All my alchemists turned to fool’s gold. At one point, I
had a guy with a PhD. brewing pure acid for me, I had two guys specialising in
THC oil, and they all turned rotten on me, turned Queen’s Evidence. You
wouldn’t believe I had a gold Ford Thunderbird, and whole wardrobes of
money . . . I could have given you enough bread to ransom Lucas three times
over.”
But in Larry’s professional opinion, Lucas hasn’t been kidnapped. The boy
might be on a little caper, perhaps, he’s at an age when the nerves are good. But
he’ll be back, give him a chance. Larry believes that Lucas is more stable than
Nick.
“It’s your civilising influence,” he says softly, with a slow smile that transforms
his rough-cast mock-up of a face. She wonders if he’s remembering
their distant dark-age act of hurried unbuttoning, A tiny moment swirling into
non-being. She’s let go. But has he? “That’s the trouble with inside—no
women. Just piles of demented men.”
She hopes he’s going to say more about Nick and Lucas but he’s back to a
re-run of prison life. It was a monastery with real mediaeval penances. This
vicar was a nonce who spanked young choirboys, so they made him run
around barking on all fours with a burning blue paper up his arse. Branded on
the bum, as old Geoffrey Chaucer puts it.
“Larry, I really need your help . . .” She goes into explicatory overload, the
whole construct sounding more and more implausible as her words fill the
dingy room and the clock ticks.

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In Turbulent Times

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‘Yes, Nora. Yes, I honestly do.’
‘I wish I could share your optimism.’
‘You’re becoming cynical in your old age, Nora. You need cheering up.’
Nora looked behind her towards the door. ‘I don’t know what’s keeping Janet.’
‘I wouldn’t even like to hazard a guess,’ Clifford said with a smile. ‘Would you like me to order drinks for you now? What were you and Janet … ? Ah, here she comes.’ He stood up as Janet rushed in.
‘Sorry I was so long, Nora,’ Janet said, ‘but I kept meeting people. Robert Purdy’s here with his fiancée. And the whole Morgan family from Clondarragh.’
‘Janet, you know Dr Hamilton, don’t you?’
‘But of course I do. How are you, Dr Hamilton? We haven’t seen you down in our part of the world for ages.’
‘I’m fine, thank you, Janet. It’s a pleasure to see you again. I hope your mother and father are well.’
‘Hale and hearty, Dr Hamilton. I’ll tell them you were asking after them.’
‘Yes, please do,’ said Clifford. ‘I actually came to invite you and Nora to join us at our table. My wife, my son, his girlfriend, and some friends of ours are there.’
‘That would be very nice,’ said Janet. ‘We usually have more company with us, but they all had other things to do this evening.’
Clifford led the way to his own table and made the necessary introductions. Nora and Janet sat down on two extra chairs that John had already added to the group.
Nora sat between John and Ian, Janet between Ian and Clifford.
‘Now, what is everyone drinking?’ Clifford asked.
Fiona and Susan had had enough, they said. Janet and Catriona asked for lemonade. Julian a Macallan single-malt Scotch—‘If they have any.’ Nora ordered gin and orange.
‘Mother’s ruin, Nora,’ said John. ‘Make mine a John Powers, Clifford.’
‘Julian’s choice of Scotch for me too,’ said Ian.
‘Do you ever drink anything else, Ian?’
‘Only Drambuie, but not now.’
Clifford smiled. ‘You’ll have Coca Cola in your whiskey, I suppose.’
‘Get away with you, man,’ Ian scolded. ‘Even though I know you’re joking, you should still be horse-whipped for a crack like that. In Scotland we don’t joke about our Scotch.’

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The Qliphoth

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In any case, she suspects that in recent months he became bored with the
whole techno consumerist thing, because she no longer heard the all-night jingle
of marathon game-play with Doom Wizards of Gorm, he abandoned his
painful experiments with sampling and sequencing old guitar riffs, he now longer
nagged her for a loan to buy a faster modem or a bigger hard drive. And
he’d play the drawling media philosopher over breakfast, displaying a growing
impatience with the digitised world-picture. “The trouble, you see, with Virtual
Reality, Pauline, is that it will all be designed in Tokyo. You’re going to
walk around in a Japanese executive’s dream helmet . . .” She’d ignored such
performances—typical of his late night TV manner, which she’d found so irritating
when she was trying to cope first thing in the morning with lesson plans
and job applications, an overdraft and and mental overdrive. But discs and cartridges
are littered all over the table, the floor, the bed, as if he’d tossed them
away in disdain, packages of memory that had somehow failed him.
His books are stacked on the sagging shelves behind the bed. Many were
actually hers, donated to help him with A levels, like all those Pelicans on sociology
and history. Of course, he never opened them. And he’d only done half
the literature coursework properly, and then perversely he’d concentrated on
a few obscure corners, like symbolism in Yeats, while flippantly trashing
George Eliot or Jane Austen in random bursts of invective, not for any clearcut
ideological reason. Lucas wouldn’t read systematically, he’d rather drift
around CND jumble sales trawling for dog-eared things like Colin Wilson’s
The Outsider or those poems of mad skinny Patti Smith, or coffee-table books
on Salvador Dali.. Here’s Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. ‘These metaphysical
detective stories take the reader through the forking gardens of Time and
Space!’ Forking hell . . .
She sprawls across the bed for a closer look, across crumpled paper tissues,
yellowing vests, that horrible black shirt with eagles on the buttons, his broken
sunglasses . . . She never bought an ex-library copy of The Rosicrucian Mysteries.
Or The Ufo Encyclopedia. And what’s this disintegrating edition of Morning
of the Magicians doing in her flat? A signed copy. ‘Nick Beardsley, London,
1966’. She can hardly bear to touch it.
‘The black tide of occultism.’ That’s what old Daddy Freud called this yuck
stuff. This is a residu, a glistening slug-trail excreted by Nick, and it looks as if
it’s sticking to Lucas. She’d thought she’d got rid of all Nick’s ticky-tacky rubbish.
And here she goes again, hurling it across the room, any moment now
she’ll find some more lurid trash. They’re all the same, stupid schoolboy men.

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Wellspring of Love

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Jeff straightened up and took a deep breath. “Maybe you’d better
go in now,” he said hoarsely. “She was asking for you earlier. She’s in
room one.”
Tyne patted his hand and got to her feet. “I’ll let you know what
Dr. Dunston says, Dad.”
A brief nod was the only sign that he heard her. She turned away
and headed for the corridor leading to the two private rooms in the
building. She was not surprised her aunt had been put into a private
ward; after all, no one deserved it more. Millie Harper had been a
tireless advocate and worker for the hospital since before it had been
on the drawing board. Tyne remembered her own brief stint on her
aunt’s committee during the building year. She had come home from
Calgary to nurse her dad back to health following his stroke, and
Millie had recruited her for the Building & Furnishing committee.
Since then Millie had been a fixture on the board of the Emblem
hospital, at times serving under Morley’s chairmanship.
Tyne stopped before the door which bore the room number and a
plaque with the name of the donor who had furnished it. She could
hear low voices which stopped when she tapped lightly. The door
opened to reveal her mother, an anxious look on her pale face.
“Oh, Tyne, come in. Dr. Dunston is here.” She stood aside to let
Tyne enter.
Grant Dunston raised his head. “Hello, Tyne.” Then he turned
his attention back to Millie Harper who lay quietly in the bed, her
eyes closed.
Tyne was conscious of two disturbing thoughts, the first that Dr.
Dunston had seldom greeted her in any other way than with his usual
cheery, “Hi, sis.” Her second thought was that the woman in the bed,
frail and ashen-faced, was hardly recognizable as her beloved aunt.
Her heart in her throat, Tyne made her way to the bedside and
gently took hold of the cool hand that lay motionless on top of the
covers. Millie opened her eyes and a flicker of a smile made her lips
twitch.

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In Turbulent Times

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‘This has been a splendid day.’ Clifford Hamilton pronounced each word separately, distinctly and with obvious satisfaction.
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said John Simpson, a prematurely balding colleague of Clifford’s at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. He was an English-trained heart specialist who had come to Belfast from the Royal Army Medical Corps after the war.
‘I think we can all drink to that.’ Clifford’s wife Fiona displayed her prominent teeth. ‘And to your fiftieth birthday, darling. What a wonderful way to celebrate.’
A chorus of ‘Hear, hear’; ‘Happy five-o, Clifford’; ‘Great day altogether’ responded to Fiona’s remarks.
The five members of the jovial party had spent the day in Clifford’s new Bentley—a birthday present to himself—driving around the countryside of the Drumard hills and visiting places that Clifford had known as a boy. He had amused his passengers like an Irish jarvey with stories and histories and half-remembered ballads about drumlins and dolmens, outlaws and rebels, murders and massacres, big houses and castles, and their restless ghosts. The sun had shone all day from an unblemished sky; the road had shimmered in front of them; the sea glimmered and sparkled; and the mountains languished in a lavender haze, like a herd of huge animals sprawling in the sun at noon. The journey had ended at the Drumard Strand Hotel, a large red sandstone building on the green foreshore at Carraghlin, where Clifford and Fiona’s twenty-year-old son Julian and his girlfriend Catriona had joined them.
‘I admit it’s not my favourite bit of architecture,’ Clifford had said of the hotel. ‘But here we can dine in a manner befitting the mood of the day—splendidly. A grotty little cafe on the main street just wouldn’t have been right.’
‘And what can you tell us about this place, Clifford?’ asked John Simpson’s recently married wife, Susan, a short, slim, sharp-featured young woman from a wealthy, landowning politician’s family in Oxfordshire.

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Water in the Wilderness

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Rachael didn’t answer. Maybe if she kept quiet Mrs. Milligan would keep quiet, too. Didn’t the woman know she didn’t want to talk?
“Rachael? Did you hear me, honey?”
It was too much. She turned an angry face up to Auntie Tyne’s mother and shouted, “I don’t want a candy bar, an’ I don’t want to walk with you. Why don’t you just leave me alone?”
Turning abruptly, she took off at a run, slipping and sliding on the snowy sidewalk as she ran back to the house.
She had seen the hurt, shocked look on Mrs. Milligan’s face but she didn’t care. She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her. She didn’t want anyone to be nice to her, because she didn’t deserve it. What she should do is go back to Harrison’s and take her beatings, and work herself to death for Aunt Ruby. Why should anyone care about her, anyway? She wasn’t worth it. She never deserved a Shirley Temple doll in the first place, so what did it matter if Lyssa had gouged its eyes out? Lyssa should have got the doll – or Lark should have. They were both better girls than she was. They didn’t drag their young brother around in a blizzard. In fact, they didn’t do any of the bad things she had done.
Reaching the back door of the house, Rachael looked around. Mrs. Milligan was coming behind her, walking so fast that she was sliding on the path, almost losing her footing. Rachael hurried to get inside. Without removing her heavy coat and boots, she ran to her bedroom, slammed the door behind her, and fell face down on the bed.

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Hear Me Out

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All Cities are the Same at Dawn
“All the cities are the same at dawn; they’re all alike” you told me once and I didn’t believe you.
When day break arrives to their beds they all sigh the same way. And the night lovers whisper things or embrace each other before they get up and at the first light walk away with heavy footsteps.
They wear clothes half undone some inn their underarm when they kiss a soft silent kiss not to awaken the one sleeping next door.
And the door closes behind them most carefully, silently.
The car is turned on, a sound that seems very loud in the quietness of the night and even the gas petal seems to be half asleep and heavy from being asleep or exhausted from making love all night.
And the home they return to is always empty and cold.
Only the blackbirds chirp in the garden.
Half of the sky is lit and the day commences when you enter the shower to let the water run over it and take away the breaths and sweat of the night.
All cities are the same you told me once and I didn’t believe you.
Because I saw you leaving and I still wanted you in my bed, to take you in my arms, to breathe your breath one more time and to go back to my dreams.
And you kissed me softly and closed the door behind you.
How long has since gone?
I don’t remember.
How many times I closed the door behind me after I kissed someone softly on the cheek and whispered good night?
How many empty streets have I driven to reach home?
You were so right!
All the cities of the world are alike at dawn…they all sigh, they toss and turn in bed, some empty and others full of the all night long lovemaking.
Each day break one door closes slowly and one other opens and welcomes the loneliness of the traveller.
Only blackbirds chirp in the garden always the same way like the day break.
People change.
Some leave others come. What difference does it make in which city you are?

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