Books:

 

Crump by PJ Vanston (Matador, 2010). Sold out of paperback; available in e-book format.

 

A Cat Called Dog by Jem Vanston (Matador, 2013). The original and the best. My favourite of all of my published books. The title came to me in a dream. Where the journey started...

 

A Cat Called Dog by Jem Vanston - illustrated child-friendly version, but also for adults (Austin Macauley 2015). Hardback ISBN: 9781784559618; Paperback ISBN: 9781784559595; ebook ISBN: 9781784559601

 

Illustrated sequel: A Cat Called Dog 2 - the one with the kittens (2017) by Jem Vanston. A very cinematic quest tale for kids and adults (and 2 chapters feature dinosaurs and the first ever depiction in fiction of T=Rexes hunting as a pack/team!).

 

Rasmus - a television tale (October 2016), by PJ Vanston. Paperbook and ebook. Predicting the future of TV and BBC. Got interest from the largest film agency in the USA in LA (and who knows, it may even have inspired Squid Game...)

 

Santa Goes on Strike (Rowanvale, 2018), by Jem Vanston. Perenially Popular Poem Picture Book for both kids and adults. Word of mouth breathes life into the poem every Christmas...

 

Somewhere in Europe (Matador, 2020), by PJ Vanston, sequel to Crump (2010), ten years on...

 

Thinking Time: 365 Inspiring, Amusing and Thought-Provoking quotes to get you through the year (Two Fat Cats, 2021) by Jem Vanston. My only non-fiction book (ever!)

 

The Loved Ones: A Collection of Pandemic Poems about Love and Loss (Two Fat Cats, 2022) by Jem Vanston. A very special book of poems by turns funny, moving, warm, sad and joyful.

 

The Nine Lives of Summer (Two Fat Cats, 2023), by Jem Vanston. A diverse and international Middle-Grade Children's Book about a cat living 9 lives in 12 countries, and one for all cat lovers of all ages.

 

 

Short stories:

 

The Prague Violin (joint 2nd prize 2012 British Czech and Slovak Association Writing Competiton; 1st prize Inscribe Media Global Story competition 2013). SEE BELOW to read the story.

 

The Last Shark. A futuristic short story inspired by the scandal of shark-finning and set in south-east Asia where demand for shark fins as a status symbol in soup is high (and why 90% of sharks in the world's oceans have gone in 30 years. Thanks, China). On the SHARK TRUST website for years. SEE BELOW to read the full story.

 

Tusk. (Published on the Care for the Wild International charity website for years before the charity merged with the Born Free Foundation to create a new one!) A longish short story set in Africa (Kenya) about how the demand for ivory from the cash-rich Chinese not only corrupts Africans who live in a land of elephants, but ends in the slaughter of those elephants. SEE BELOW to  read the full story.

 

Chill. Unpublished but nifty morality tale story (see below) with revenge of a bullied bloke against an enemy of old. With a twist in the tale.

 

@Death (short story for published in Pop Cult magazine [page 12], but suitable for younger/teen readers + YA too). This BBC3 'Red Rose' is original? Nope - I was there first. (see Below)

https://popcultmag.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/popcultspringsummer2011.pdf

 

A Cat Called Dog at Christmas (TheDailyMews.com):

http://www.thedailymews.com/articles/other-mewsings/1364-a-cat-called-dog-at-christmas-by-jem-vanston

 

The Hand published in BCSA magazine

 

The Beast of Brandy Cove and Mother's Little Helper published in local Welsh lifestyle magazine.

 

Songs:

 

A Selection of my demo songs are on SoundCloud here: https://soundcloud.com/user-217675148

 

Here's my Christmas song, Happy to be Home this Christmas (words and music by Jem Vanston). On the track, vocals are by Bobby Cole who also engineered the track in his studio. I play piano. Enjoy! Feel free to share and sing along!

 

The Prague Violin

The snow came early that year.

From his apartment window, Petr watched the small white flakes floating like feathers on the air, fluttering and dancing up and down and round and round like tiny butterflies of ice, before swirling with a final flourish and settling to stillness on the dark cobbles of the streets below.

He loved the snow. Some people thought that snow was just snow, but they were wrong. There were so many different types of snow, from the dry frosty dust which was usual in Prague during winter, to the heavy, wet flakes that were perfect for building snowmen but which, to the annoyance of children, would only fall on those rare winter days when the Bohemian weather was not cold enough to freeze lakes.

Each snowfall was different, as was each individual snowflake. Always, when he saw the snow falling, he would think of music – and he would identify each style of snowfall according to music and assign a composer to each type.

That evening, the snow was definitely Mozart – playful, clever and young, and a joy to behold. Sometimes, on other days, it was Tchaikovsky or Beethoven, exquisitely beautiful but brooding and melancholy; sometimes, it was Puccini or Verdi; occasionally, especially when the air was freezing cold, it was Debussy, or Grieg or Mahler perhaps, or sometimes Smetana or Dvorak; and, sometimes, on really dark, dismal and perhaps better-forgotten days, it was Wagner, doom-laden and frightening.

But the snow was always music to Petr Svoboda; it was the only way he could really see it, make sense of it, understand it – or anything else in the world, for that matter.

The snowflakes to the scientist are merely raindrops frozen to ice high up in the clouds; to the tram driver, the worker, the widow, they are but a slippery and slushy annoyance; but to the musician, to the artist – to him – they are something else entirely: to those who destiny or providence has blessed with imagination and the gift of music’s mysteries, snowflakes are like the very notes of music themselves, whether playing waking melodies in the wind of winter mornings, or serenading the darkness of night with their sad and silent songs.

It was at such moments, watching the snow fall, that Petr felt himself almost leave his body, almost break free from the chains of history that bound him and every other soul in that little city to the place and the time in which they lived. At such moments, he felt free as the snow itself as it danced wildly in the dark air of winter in the squares and lanes and passageways of Prague – a fleeting freedom of the kind he only usually experienced when he was playing his violin and the music that was, to him, life itself. Without it, he would have been as trapped as a broken bird in its cage; without the magical movement of music through his veins, his heart would have stopped pumping, blackened and shrivelled to nothing, and his life would have been a living death, cold and colourless as a stillborn child.

There was a time, not long before, when things had seemed to be changing, when the springtime of Dubcek had seemed the future, and the very air had seemed to hum with possibility; when the old, cold cobbles of Prague had seemed to come alive and give a spring to the step of her people; when Petr’s youth was almost bursting though his skin and he was ready to be a part of building a new future in this, his city, for her warm, worn people. That was a time before the Russians came, with their tanks and their orders and their disgusting tea.

Now, all that was nothing but a barely remembered – and probably best forgotten – past, nothing more than the tiny bright light of a candle glimpsed in the gloom before being snuffed out by an unseen and sinister hand, a tiny fragile ember of hope utterly extinguished and spent.

Now it was a different time; now it was almost as though all that had never happened. This was not nineteen sixty-eight, after all, but nineteen eighty-one, and no-one was going to give anyone any real freedom anymore. The full force of oppression had returned after The Prague Spring, worse than before, like a dreadful poisonous fog in the air, choking and stifling everything and everyone it touched. Petr was only thirty, but looked older; everybody did, in those days.

But Petr was lucky – he knew that. The way he lived, the success he had enjoyed. It wasn’t every young man who lived in such a beautiful apartment in Prague Castle, after all; it wasn’t the workers in the factories, or even the petty bureaucrats at their desks, who were able to enjoy, to the same extent anyway, the imported goods he could afford, or have the freedom to travel to foreign countries. Who else did he know who had been to London and Paris, to Vienna and Rome? Some people had been to Moscow and Leningrad, of course, or other Eastern Bloc countries and cities – to Budapest, Warsaw and Sofia, perhaps to the Black Sea resorts. But who had been to ‘The West’?  No-one at all, except senior party members – none of whom could ever be trusted, as everyone was well aware. Even an idiot knew that most of them were spies and would report anything and everything you said to them to their superiors. So Petr never expressed an opinion, certainly not a political one, and only talked through his music, through the Mozart and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky he played on his violin.

It was safer that way, especially when Western visitors visited Prague: many of them were politicians or academics sympathetic to the ideals of socialism or communism, and had been invited to Czechoslovakia by The Party, so you couldn’t just think they were safe to trust because they were from the ‘West’. These were ‘useful idiots’ indeed, granting a legitimacy to the regime by their presence and approval. When he met such people, Petr always pretended he didn’t know any English; he just stayed silent, smiling pleasantly as he had always done, and played his violin – performed for the crowds like one of those dancing dogs at the circus. And they loved him for it. He didn’t really mind. So long as he could play his music, he could cope with anything – any humiliation, any pain, any suffering, so long as he could play his violin and feel it at his fingertips and in his heart.

Sometimes, he thought about leaving for good, staying in London or Paris, not returning to Prague at all – and he could have done it, he knew. Easy to think of doing such a thing, and perhaps easier for a man like him without a wife or children. But to leave Prague? To leave it forever and never go back? How could he do that? It was unthinkable! Prague was his city and his home, where he’d been born and where his mother was buried – and where he would be buried too, in time. So how could he leave and never return? And, even though his city and his country were now ruled by traitors – by the awful Russian puppets of Czechoslovakia – he knew that this was where he would live for the rest of his life.

To be a professional musician was all he had ever wanted since childhood, and the tuition given to him by his father, God rest his soul, had ensured that he could play to the requisite standard from his mid-teenage years. But it was more than that: he had a rare talent – a talent which, when he played the violin to an audience, could touch their hearts in a way that was special. Unique, even.

His father could see that, could hear his talent – a talent that he, in his own fine musicianship, had never possessed to anywhere near the same degree. True, he was a professional violinist in the Prague state orchestra, but not all musicians were special; competent, yes, and excellent too, but not special. It was rare indeed for anyone to play like his son; to play in a way that could, through the mysterious power of music, those little twitches of air and vibrations, seem to make the world more beautiful, to make the colours of life richer and deeper, to touch each and every emotion almost effortlessly – to make the hardest of icy hearts melt in the warmth of a mere violin’s melody. His son had the gift, and his talent was a blessing from the angels.

When Petr was fourteen, in the mid 1960s, Pan Svoboda realised that his son was not just going to equal him, but to exceed his talent – and he knew exactly what he had to do.

‘An artist always needs proper tools to do the job,’ his father would always say and, even though young Petr already had a violin of fine quality which was on loan from the state, his father would demand better. It would be the best for his son, and that would mean asking them for the violin: The Prague Violin itself

This violin, talked of in hushed tones by the few who knew of its existence, was rumoured to be guarded by the StB – the state security police – themselves. It was apparently over two hundred years old, with a tone so pure it was said to have been the very last violin its Italian master-maker ever made – he had reached perfection, and, so the legend goes, never made another. There were other, sadder, stories too, tales of suicide and of suffering, of the violin maker deliberately blinding himself so he would no longer have to see his creation, or of his pouring hot molten wax into his ears so he would no longer have to hear it, not after he had heard the perfect sound of heaven itself, for he had insulted and mocked God himself by creating such a perfect thing.

But the only tale known to be true from contemporary accounts was that the violin’s unusual and perfect sound was created by accident, by the neat serendipity of coincidence. After he had finished fashioning the violin and polished it to a mirror shine, and carefully strung the strings, the violin maker had played it. His face fell; the tone was dull and disappointing, bland and lacking richness – good enough for a good-enough violin, but not for the something special he was aiming to create. After so many weeks of work, so much effort and love, the frustration and pain was unbearable; a terrible anger raged inside him like a storm, before exploding in a wolf-like howl from the violin maker that could be heard throughout the town, they said. With raging contempt, the master-maker hurled the violin out of the open window of his workshop and onto the hard cobbles of the street outside.

Whatever happened, whatever knock or fortunate flaw the shock of that violence caused, was a complete mystery; but when its creator had finally retrieved the instrument, whose neck and body were now twisted and bent, he decided, for some reason he could never fathom, that, instead of burning it to ashes in the furnace, he would try playing it again. He could never say why, but when he did so his instinct was shown to be correct; for there, in the dull air, he heard the most perfect, most beautiful, tone that his ears and heart had ever heard, and he knew then that this violin was going to be his last.

Petr’s father knew that there was only one way to convince the authorities to consider the request for his son to play that great violin: Petr himself would have to play before the whole committee – for all the officials and party apparatchiks, and even the Minister for Culture himself. Then they would hear what he could hear and be convinced that his boy was special enough to be allowed to play The Prague Violin.

Pan Svoboda wrote letters and made enquiries and, eventually, after a great deal of persuasion and manoeuvring, as well as certain ‘gifts’ being given, he convinced those in charge of state culture into allowing his son to perform an audition before them.

The day came, and Petr stood in front of the committee, which consisted entirely of old, grey men; the Minister of Culture, who was very fat and had huge bushy eyebrows, sat in the middle, frowning. Everyone seemed to be smoking. His father nodded to his son, who, after taking a long, deep breath held his old violin up to his neck and began playing.

Soon, even the sternest, greyest member of the panel seemed to have colour blushing in his ashen cheeks, as the warmth of the music filled the smoky air like sunbeams. It was always the effect Petr had on people when he played – even though he was just a skinny fourteen year old boy, small for his age, with a thick mop of chocolate-coloured hair, and a face as smooth as an egg, who didn’t look as though he would be able to lift a violin, let alone play it.

But when they heard the music this scrawny boy could make with his old violin, those old waxworks and bureaucrats, whose utilitarian and statistical brains sternly ruled and regulated their hearts, were immediately and completely convinced that here was a young musician of rare talent who deserved nothing but the very best.

Naturally, his talent would also impress visitors from the USSR and elsewhere, and would thus reflect well on the success and health of the Czechoslovak socialist system, which produced young people so much better, so much more refined and cultured, than the crude youth of the capitalist West. Here was a boy who would show all the people how lucky they were to live in their successful and productive socialist republic.

When Petr had finished playing, the members of the committee applauded in the Russian manner, and at least one of them seemed to be rubbing his eyes, which was no doubt because of all the tobacco smoke in the air. Petr looked at his father, but he wasn’t smiling – he could see that the smiles of the suited men were small and non-committal. An official then led father and son out of the room, down a corridor and to the waiting area, where they were asked to sit and wait.

Some time later, another official came and led them back to the committee room. Petr and his father entered the room again, not knowing what to expect. But what they saw delighted them.

For there it was, on the table in front of their wide eyes. The Prague Violin – the glorious instrument that Petr’s father had seen but once in his whole life, whose veneer seemed to glow golden-red with age and beauty, and which was treated almost like a holy relic by the state. Neither Petr, nor his father, could keep his eyes off it. It seemed alive: a beautiful living thing.

The Minister of Culture nodded solemnly at an official, and soon The Prague Violin was resting perfectly balanced in Petr’s hands. Slowly, and with great care and respect, he lifted the violin to his neck and began to play.

The music that filled that room was of a tone so rare, and of such richness and beauty, that the very air itself seemed to bow in its presence. It was a music that soothed and moved all the room’s occupants in ways most of them had forgotten existed, if ever they had been able to feel at all.

For Petr, the experience was more special still.  When he played that violin, he felt as though he were coming home, as though he were being reunited with a part of himself, as integral to his being as his flesh and blood and bone. He had been born to play this instrument; it was his destiny. When his small hands eased the bow over its strings, the violin almost seemed to be playing itself – or, perhaps, it was as though the instrument was playing Petr, rather than the other way round. It was, quite simply, perfect.

When he had finished, there were tears of joy and pride swimming in his father’s eyes; he felt as though he had now heard the angels sing.

And so it was decided: Petr’s would have the right to play The Prague Violin at the concert hall practice room three times a week, and perhaps more in future. Pan Svoboda had complete confidence that his son’s extraordinary talent would impress all who heard it and would lead to the kind of admiration and success he himself could only have dreamed of at his age. And he was right.

Within months, his son – this gawky and awkward teenage boy – was the talk of Prague. That was in 1964, and Petr Svoboda had, since then, become the most famous musician in the whole of Czechoslovakia and his fame had spread to most other Eastern Bloc countries too.

Petr and his father had lived together in the early days, but throat cancer had killed Pan Svoboda a few years later, when Petr was twenty-one. Since then, Petr had lived alone at the state apartment in Prague Castle that they had shared.

Both he and his father loved the view over the city from there – the red-roofed mosaic of its streets and houses, with the Vltava snaking through its middle to the small grey tower blocks in the distance. That was where Petr practised, every day, on The Prague Violin, which now lived with him in that apartment like a lover as it had done since he was sixteen, even though it was still officially owned by the state.

And the more he played the violin, the more it seemed to grow with him, from youth to maturity. It was, in Petr’s eyes, alive – growing inside him – and its beautiful music was all that kept Peter alive during those dark days too. It was all the company he ever wanted or needed.

In April 1981, Brezhnev himself was due to visit Prague for a few days to attend a conference of Communist party leaders, and to open the newly built concrete-clad Palace of Culture where all Czechoslovak party conferences would now be held, and a concert was being organised especially in his honour. Petr would of course be expected to perform; indeed, with his reputation, he would be the star musician, and everyone would be expected to start rehearsals months before too. This was nothing unusual – whenever any significant foreign visitor, such as a VIP from one of the communist states, came to Czechoslovakia, they always put on what Petr referred to as a ‘circus’: a classical concert, or an opera, or perhaps some dull, worthy play by some dull, worthy comrade playwright or other.

And Brezhnev was as big as they come – he was, effectively, the leader of the whole Soviet Bloc so was treated like royalty, and without a hint of irony too. No expense was spared in preparation for his visit – in sprucing up the city and making everything look ‘as it should’ for such an honoured guest. Despite the fact that Brezhnev had been responsible for crushing the Prague Spring, he would be given the warmest of welcomes by her citizens, partly because it was only he who could give the order to reform anything at all, and partly because anyone saying anything against him would most likely be arrested or diagnosed as mentally ill and sent to an asylum somewhere, drugged up to the eyeballs: no-one needed reminding that one in six of Prague’s population were party members so, in effect, spies for the State.

For Petr, it was just another concert; he cared not if he played to princes or paupers – what mattered was the music, not the supposed pedigree of the audience. Politics and rank and hierarchies were not his interest. So long as he had his music, he was happy.

It was a just a few months before the Brezhnev visit when it happened.

The snow came early again that year.

Petr had just been in rehearsal with the orchestra, and had decided to catch the tram home, rather than accept a lift. This was mostly because Petr disliked the orchestra secretary, a small rodent-faced man with a permanent supercilious smirk on his face, whose nose seemed to be permanently twitching and sniffing at the air. But it was also because he liked taking the tram, especially at that time of year, with the first, crisp snow of the winter nipping the air.

Petr loved Prague in the wintertime; he liked the city at any time of year, but he loved it in then. He often walked by himself through the Old Town Square, past Tyn Cathedral and St Nicholas Church, past the Old Town Hall Tower and the Astronomical Clock, past the statue of Jan Hus and all the patient people waiting for friends on its steps, and across through the little lanes to the Charles Bridge, where lovers and others held hands as they watched the river, the dark statues of the ancient saints watching their laughing and love-making and whispering bitter conspiracies into the wind for no-one to hear.

The StB often followed him, of course: that was to be expected for someone as well known as Petr Svoboda. But, because he had been used to this shadowing from his teenage years, it didn’t really bother him that much at all. In fact, it once even saved him in his younger days when a loud and desperate drunk jumped out from a doorway, grabbed him, hugged him close and refused to let go. The StB man saved him then, freeing him from the drunk’s grip. A ‘pervert’, they told him later. Petr never found out what had happened to the drunk.

On the day that it happened, the snow had started to fall fresh and crisp that morning, but had become heavier by the afternoon, with large, lazy flakes almost blocking out an eerie electric-yellow sky. A looming and ominously tense sort of darkness had hung in the air since morning. It was less cold than usual for the month of year, and the wind was blowing up: a storm was definitely coming. The sky itself, yellowing like an old eyeball, looked ill. Definitely Wagner snow, evil and threatening, thought Petr as he left rehearsal and started to walk through the blustery wind towards Wenceslas Square – not really a square at all, but the main commercial boulevard of Prague.

That evening, he decided to walk back from the rehearsal rooms, down Wenceslas Square, and to the Old Town, before crossing the Charles Bridge and catching the twenty-two tram on the other side of the river, which would take him up the steep hill to Prague Castle and his apartment.

The snow became heavier as Petr set off that evening, violin case in hand. He buried his chin in his scarf against the sharp wind and the heavy flakes which now were being blown almost horizontally along the wide streets, though they still stung the skin on his upper face like angry white wasps as he walked along. There was a charge in the air – some kind of ugly electricity that made Petr shiver, as twitchy and nervous as a puppy. People were everywhere scuttling about like little insects, as if seeking sanctuary from a coming menace and shelter from the storm.

The man who was following him had a long, horsey face and was as thin as an icicle, which was unusual for well-fed StB men. He smoked cigarettes constantly, which wasn’t. Petr recognised him immediately as one of his usual ‘bodyguards’, though they had never actually met or spoken a word to each other – that just wasn’t the way these things worked. He hurried down past the sausage stands and kiosks of Wenceslas Square, and made his way down the narrow streets towards the Old Town.

For some reason, Petr felt tense; it was getting colder now it was dark. Walking faster and faster, with his violin case held tightly in his hand, he hurried through the Old Town Square, paused to look up at the Astronomical Clock as he always did, and then turned left into the maze of narrow streets towards the Charles Bridge.

Before long, Peter found that he was running, and when he reached the bridge, he started to run across it too – he didn’t know why. Halfway across the bridge, he looked back and could see that the horse-faced man was running too, some way distant; he looked exhausted, his breath a constant smoky cloud on the freezing air.

Petr was running faster now, his feet occasionally slipping on the cobbles. On the other side of the river was the tram stop. He could hear the tram approaching from somewhere to his left. He  knew that if he was quick he could get on and watch the doors slam shut before the StB man had caught up with him.

The number twenty-two tram clank-clunked round the corner. Petr decided to run across the road and beat it to its stop, like he used to when he was a boy. Still running, he looked back over his shoulder at the StB man following him some distance behind. He stopped and turned round, and stood squinting through the snowfall. He couldn’t quite make out what he was seeing, but through the gloom the figure’s face seemed to have changed somehow.

No longer was there a thin figure with a horsey face running towards him, but the strangest thing – the face he saw was that of his father. There – right there – in the snow-speckled sickly-yellow glow of the street lights.

Petr blinked and squinted his eyes so they were almost closed. “Father?” he said. And then it happened.

The tram squealed to a halt in the snow; one or two of the passengers screamed. People ran from the pavements to where Petr lay. An ambulance was called. The StB man stayed with him until it arrived.

The violin. Where was it? The thought suddenly occurred to the StB man as he knelt by the boy. He looked around but couldn’t see it, so asked the bystanders; they couldn’t see it either, though he wasn’t sure they weren’t lying. That could mean one of two things: either, some anti-social element had made off with it, or it was under the tram. It turned out to be the latter.

The thing didn’t look too badly damaged – for something that had gone under a tram, that is. Fortunately, it had not been sliced it in half, as was common to human limbs that fell under those steel wheels – which, like all trams in the Eastern Bloc, had been built by sweat and toil of the noble workers of Czechoslovakia (though Hungary had the buses – and so all buses in Prague were Hungarian-built, which is why they always smelt so bad, the StB man always thought). But the violin case did look a bit dented and crushed, like the face of a difficult suspect, and it was partially coated in a layer of black grease and dirt too.

The StB man knew what he had to do – (as StB men always did) – and immediately took the violin in its case to the orchestra secretary.

When the orchestra secretary saw the violin case, he sniffed the air, his nostrils twitching wide, like a pet dog smelling its own arse. He opened the case, lifted out the violin and examined it. True, he was not a violinist, or a string instrument specialist, but the thing didn’t look quite right to him, even though it was clearly not too badly damaged – it wasn’t in splinters, after all, which had happened once recently to an unfortunate cello that accompanied the cellist in his final jump off the ‘Suicide Bridge’, next to the new Palace of Culture. Lifting it up, he could see that the neck was a bit bent and the body rather warped too, and he thought of the Brezhnev visit that everyone knew was coming in the Spring of the following year, and the trouble he’d get into if it was decided that his negligence had caused such an important instrument to be damaged.

He knew what to do. While Petr was recovering in hospital, the violin would be sent to be repaired and cleaned. No-one would then be able to accuse him of being negligent, because no-one need ever know the violin had been damaged at all or sent for repair, because he would never report what had happened. The StB man agreed with the orchestra secretary and The Prague Violin was duly sent away to the best violin restorers in Czechoslovakia.

Petr couldn’t recall much about the accident. He remembered running across the Charles Bridge and through the snow towards the tram stop, and then – nothing. He was out cold for hours, they said, and his mind was fogged with concussion for days. They told him he was lucky to just get cuts and bruises, but he’d be in hospital for a while yet, just in case.  Petr didn’t question their judgement or ask why he had to take so many pills.

The first thing he asked about when he came round was his violin. The doctor told him it was back in his apartment; this was what the StB man had told the doctor to say. It could have been worse: the doctor knew other doctors who had been asked to inject bacteria or viruses into perfectly healthy patients, or diagnose people who opposed the state as mentally ill and inject them full of drugs so they could be wheeled off left to rot in some asylum somewhere.

When, after two weeks, Petr left hospital, the orchestra manager was there to drive him home. It was a bright and cold winter’s morning, and fine flakes of snow were sprinkling like icing sugar on the windscreen; Mozart snow, thought Petr. The Skoda growled in disappointment, or perhaps envy, as it crawled its way up the hill to Prague Castle.

The orchestra secretary insisted on staying with Petr as they took the lift up to his apartment. Petr could tell something was wrong – his guardian was unusually friendly and respectful. That was most odd; usually, he was irritatingly smug, supercilious and disapproving.

They entered the apartment and went through into the living room. There, through the window, Prague was a frosty jewel sparkling in the golden sunlight of a bright autumn morning, and the Vltava was a river of silver flowing through the city. A dusting of fine snow made the red roofs glitter and glint like jewels in the sun. And there, before the window and the view, and sitting on a table, was The Prague Violin in its case.

Petr approached the table. He paused briefly and closed his eyes, as if in prayer. Then, tentatively, he opened the case and looked inside. A strong and sweet smell of new varnish made his nostrils twitch in disgust. His heart felt as though it had momentarily ceased beating.

What had they done? What had those damn fool idiots done?

Silence. Petr couldn’t speak. His face was as white as broken ice.

Petr closed his eyes. Opening them again, he looked at the violin in its case before him: its colour was lighter than before where those idiots had ‘cleaned’ it, and rubbed and scraped away the patina of two centuries’ use. It was no longer the rich, golden reddish-brown of before, but a light shade of brown, like newly cut wood. It was the same colour as cheap, badly made furniture.

The violin seemed different in another way too; before, the neck of the violin was slightly bent, twisted at the tiniest of angles in relation to the body, whose frame was similarly warped. Somehow, and in some way, these flaws had disappeared, as though a hot iron had straightened and flattened everything and made it regular and standard, like a crisp newly-pressed police uniform.

But worse was to come. With some trepidation, and a heart beating as quick as a rabbit’s, Petr lifted the violin to his neck. He took a deep breath, picked up the bow, and started to play.

No noise in the world, no matter how harsh or ugly, how base or brutal, could have sounded as painful and terrible to Petr as that which filled his ears that morning. As he played, his fingers were reluctant to continue their careful work, and his hand almost refused to rub the bow over the strings.

A bystander would have heard a violin being played proficiently: a beautiful sound actually, played by one whose talent was only to be envied. But to Petr, it was different, because he could hear – he could feel – the difference.

There was no doubt about it – in rectifying the tiny flaws of the violin, its uniqueness, its purest of tones, had been utterly destroyed; the instrument had been made correct, had been cleaned and mended to a state of conformity, which made it just like all the other well-made violins in the world. But its beauty, its very heart and soul, had utterly gone. It was now, essentially, dead.

Petr stopped playing and replaced the violin in its case. And then he wept; he knelt down on the carpet of that room and wept as he had never wept before, not even when his father had died. What had those bastards done?

The orchestra secretary watched all this from the doorway, his scalp itching in the sweaty warmth of the apartment. He knew he could not lie to Petr now.

“It was taken to be cleaned,” he said casually and matter-of-fact, “and repaired – after the accident. You remember? The tram? I don’t need to tell you how lucky you are to be alive...”

Petr continued weeping, and his weeping would soon become sobbing. It came from his core – a deep, ancient howl of grief and anger as black and inevitable as death within him.

“The violin has actually been improved by its restoration, of course. We want to sound our best at the concert for our honoured guest, don’t we?” said the orchestra secretary, in the manner of a matron scolding a lazy schoolboy.

But Petr was not listening. He knew that the violin had been ruined – bent into a rigid, standardised shape which had killed its soul and the very quality that had made its music special in the first place.

The orchestra secretary made sure that two StB men were on guard throughout the night on the street outside Petr’s apartment.

*

April 1981. The day of the concert came. Brezhnev was there, with all the other comrades, in the ‘royal’ box.

Petr had never, not in all his life, been nervous when he performed; off-stage maybe, but not on – once he had started playing he was transported to a place far above and away from where he stood on the stage watched by the audience.

Now, however, he was nervous on stage too. Since the previous year and the violin’s ‘restoration’, the music it made no longer made his heart sing, was no longer beautiful and soothing to his mind, and it no longer transported him to a better and more beautiful place; instead, it was ugly – a cheap, deformed, ruined sound of despair full of pain and suffering and loss.

That evening, the audience applauded after he’d finished playing, but they could hear it too – not any inferior sound from the violin, not to their ears anyway, but the seeming loss of confidence of the exquisite talent that had made Petr’s playing so special. He even fudged a couple of notes – and none of the orchestra had ever heard him do that at a concert before; or, at least, not before the violin has been ‘restored’ anyway.

Of course, Brezhnev didn’t notice anything wrong. But then, to his cloth ears all violins sounded the same – he very much preferred the sound of tractors and factory production lines. And anyway, for majority of the concert he was thinking of the state dinner that would be enjoying when this diplomatic and cultural nicety was over, and the pretty, young Czech girls who would, he was sure, be serving him later too.

“What were you thinking!” demanded the orchestra secretary after the concert, “and in front of Comrade Brezhnev too!”

Damn Comrade Brezhnev, thought Petr, and damn you – you traitor to your country, you traitor to Prague, you traitor to music itself!

“I’m sorry,” said Petr, “but...it’s your fault!”

There was an audible gasp amongst the other musicians in the dressing room, who stopped what they were doing and looked over.

“My fault?” said the orchestra secretary, “What on earth are you talking about?”

“The Prague Violin...”

Petr could not bear to look at where the instrument sat in its case on the table of the dressing room. He closed his eyes.

“You should have left it alone, left it as it was.”

The orchestra manager frowned and sniffed the air defiantly.

“The Prague Violin was damaged, so we had to get it repaired and cleaned. Its restoration was a complete success, as all experts agree.”

“But you ruined it – you destroyed it. The sound – the tone – it’s so different now.”

“Nonsense! Its sound and tone were improved by the finest craftsmen – its neck was always a little bent, for example, and now that fault has been rectified.”

Petr held his head in his hands and groaned a sigh of despair. He had tried to play the violin as normal over the preceding months, to ignore the horror of what they had done to it, but now, after the concert for Brezhnev, he could lie to himself no longer.

“You ruined it!” Petr groaned, and put his head in his hands.

The orchestra secretary was not smiling any more. The tips of his ears were red and his hands were shaking slightly – with anger, probably.

“It is not the wonderfully restored Prague Violin that is at fault. It is you Petr Svoboda who needs to practise more!”

Petr didn’t look up – he kept his head in his hands. The other musicians were shocked at the orchestra secretary’s reprimand – Petr was the star of the orchestra.

“And I do not want to see and hear a performance such as the one you gave this evening ever again!”

“No?” said Petr, looking up at the orchestra secretary – who, at that moment, looked like the ugliest little rat of a man Petr had ever seen, “Or what?”

Silence engulfed the room. It was so quiet that they could all hear the wind blowing outside. No-one had ever talked to the orchestra secretary like that before.

The other musicians bowed their heads so as not to meet the orchestra secretary’s eye as he surveyed the dressing room – they knew he had the power to make their lives difficult if he wanted to, to remove them from the orchestra and take away all privileges they enjoyed.

The orchestra secretary walked out of the room. Petr sat with his head in his hands and thought of the past while the musicians gossiped like little mice whispering about a cat.

Over the next few weeks, Petr’s behaviour became more and more erratic. He started drinking – beer, at first, both at home and at the local ‘hostivar’ every day; and sweet white wine from Slovakia; then slivovic, the sweet plum brandy; bitter Becherovka, which tasted like cough medicine; and, finally, Russian vodka. He had started drinking in the mornings too, and at any time of day or night.

More than once, Petr was drunk when he turned up for practice with the orchestra; more than once, he was actually under the influence during a concert too – it was the only way he could deal with the terrible stage fright that now started to afflict him, and calm the shakes caused by his daily diet of alcohol.

But Petr knew what the real problem was: shame. Shame at what he was doing – shame at playing a violin that had sounded so beautiful but which now sounded like any of the violins to come out of any production line anywhere in the world. He never practised at home anymore; he just drank and drank and drank, and watched the weather change outside his window.

One winter’s evening later that year, Petr could stand it no longer. After spending the day watching the snow fall on Prague from his apartment – thick, wet snow falling like flakes of diseased skin from the yellowed flesh of the sky – and drinking glass after glass of vodka, Petr grabbed the violin from its case, opened the dining room window, and flung the instrument out into the winter air like an escaped convict hurling his chains into the ocean. The violin turned and twisted in the air like an acrobat, snowflakes seeming to separate in awe at its trajectory, before it fell like a dead bird to the ground and smashed and splintered like dead bones on the cobbles below. Today, Petr decided, the snow was definitely Wagner snow.

When Petr did not turn up at the next rehearsal later that week, the orchestra secretary visited his apartment, accompanied by two StB men, just in case. The concierge for the whole apartment block, an old grandmother, had recovered the violin on the day he had thrown it out of the window and returned it to Petr, wordlessly and not even waiting for any explanation, but she had informed the authorities about what had happened, though not straight away, so had done her job correctly. She was the one who let them into the apartment.

Petr had placed the violin on the dining room table, where it now lay like a corpse, its neck broken and twisted, its body dented and split. He himself spent every day and night getting drunk until he passed out, before waking to resume his drinking once again.

The orchestra secretary stared in horrified amazement at the wreck of the violin. He hadn’t expected this. How could he, Petr Svoboda, the best violinist of his generation, smash his violin to pieces like that, like a spoilt child breaking an old unwanted toy? Had he no feeling whatsoever for that violin, the one he had played since youth? Had he no feeling for the instrument? No respect? And as Petr well knew, that violin was special, and was worth a small fortune too. It was The Prague Violin for goodness sake! And now it lay broken and smashed on the table before him. The orchestra secretary would get into serious trouble for this; he was already thinking about how the violin could be restored again, though perhaps ‘rebuilt’ would have been a better word.

Petr was drunk, lying on the sofa laughing to himself and looking up at the orchestra secretary. Empty bottles sat on every surface around the apartment. The StB men were expressionless – they had seen it all before – but the orchestra secretary could scarcely believe his eyes.

“Why?” asked the orchestra secretary, “Why did you do this awful terrible thing? The Prague Violin is ruined!”

Petr did not reply at first. But then he mumbled something about how the cleaning and repairing and ‘restoration’ of the violin – (Petr spat a snide laugh at the orchestra secretary at this point) – had ruined it forever; about how it was his decision to make and that he had made it: he had decided that he would never ever play that violin, or any other, again.

“Nonsense,” said the orchestra secretary like an old woman, “you’ll do what you’re told and that’s an end to it!”

With that, Petr jumped unsteadily to his feet and, in front of the security men, said exactly what he wanted to say. He no longer had his violin to speak through, so now he had to make do with the poor substitute of the next best thing: words.

“I’ll never play again – and you can’t make me!” he said like a truculent child, “Never! Never! Never!”

Then he told the orchestra secretary with his supercilious face just what he thought of him, and said exactly what he thought of the state security service too, and the government, and communism, and that stupid uncultured pig Brezhnev who wouldn’t know the difference between a beautiful piece of music and a cat farting through its ears, and much else besides.

The men left. But, sometime later that night, Petr was woken by the sound of people entering his apartment. He heard them first, but then his drunken eyes squinted in pain at the electric light bulb as they entered the living room where Petr had fallen asleep on the sofa, as usual. He could see that one of the men had a hypodermic needle. He could remember nothing after that.

After several months in the hospital – time which had been mostly erased from his memory somehow – Petr was taken to a small apartment in Prague 10, near where he had grown up, which was to be his new home, they said.

Of course, all his privileges had been stopped and he would now have to get by on the state salary paid for his new job – the job they gave all those who caused trouble for the state, but not enough trouble to warrant something worse.

It was an easy job, sitting down there in the boiler room, stoking the fire, watching the flames dance and feeling the heat on his face. He was alone, all the time, all day every day – but found he didn’t mind it at all. Sometimes, he saw faces in the fire; sometimes, he even saw his father’s.

All his pay went on drink – beer usually, like any good Czech, but anything else he could afford too. One thing he never did again was play a musical instrument, or even listen to music. He didn’t even own a record player, and hadn’t played a violin since that last time, when he had wept at what they had done, before he had hurled the fully restored and utterly ruined Prague Violin out into the night and put an end to it all. His world was now a world of utter silence, and he knew it would all be over soon as surely as he knew things would never change.

Sometimes, on his free day, he would catch the tram to Prague Castle, where he would look out over the whole city, over the red-roofed mosaic of its streets and houses, with the Vltava snaking through its middle to the small grey tower blocks in the distance.

He especially loved to watch Prague in the snow.

 

 

 

The Last Shark

“A shark? Are you sure?”

Kai could hardly believe what he was hearing.

“Are you absolutely sure?”

Li Ying said he was. It looked about two metres long, he said.

It was incredible news: not only had the fishermen caught a shark, but it was still alive and being held in a tank at the docks.

“What species?” asked Kai, high and excited. He was perched on his chair like a hungry crab at the edge of a rock pool.

Li Ying said he thought it was a blue shark. The image he emailed over a few moments later confirmed it.

Kai smiled as wide as the ocean.

“I knew it!” he said, “I knew there’d still be one out there!”

And if there was one, then there could be more; and if there were more, they could be breeding. Perhaps the blue shark was not extinct, after all.

“Tell them... just to keep it where it is...in the tank...until I get there.”

Li Ying said he would, though Kai heard doubt in his voice.

“Tell them we can pay them good money for it.”

“I’ll try,” said Li Ying, “I’ll try my best.”

“Enough for a new boat perhaps...Good money! Tell them! Tell them that!”

There was no time to lose. Kai knew he had to get to the Shanghai docks as soon as he could. He wasn’t the only one who’d be interested in that shark.

Grabbing his briefcase, into which he had placed some bundles of cash he kept in his office for just such occasions, Kai made his way downstairs to the exit as quickly as he could manage. His damn leg! It always slowed him down. If only he could grow a new leg back like a crab or a lobster.

He limped out onto the street and waited for his cab.

Kai was a marine biologist and senior manager in charge of sharks and rays at the largest aquarium in the world in Shanghai. If there was one person in the whole of the city who would know how best to look after that animal, it was him. He was the shark’s only chance now.

Blue sharks had been declared completely extinct twenty years earlier. Although most sharks were extinct in the wild, some species survived in aquariums around the world – but not the blue. The blue was a pelagic shark, so swam huge distances in the open oceans. Unlike the bottom or surface feeders which were easy to keep in captivity, pelagic sharks always became ill and died of infections eventually, despite the best efforts of experts.

The taxi arrived and Kai got in. He promised the driver that he’d pay double his fare plus a good tip if he got to the docks quickly. The streets would be clogged with traffic – they always were – but there was nothing else he could do. The cab swam out into the current of slow-moving cars.

It was almost unbelievable: a blue shark caught in the open ocean. All species of large shark had been thought extinct in the wild since at least 2040. Sometimes, a dogfish or a smaller shark would turn up, and there were still some rays out there, but apart from that the only sharks left were in captivity. Some species, the ones that couldn’t be kept in aquariums, were thought to be completely extinct: the great whites, hammerheads, tiger sharks – and the blue.

The last time a large shark had been caught in the wild was over two decades before, so for a fisherman to catch one and bring it alive to the Shanghai docks was nothing short of a miracle. They must have been fishing in the deepest waters, either using mile-long lines with baited hooks or giant nets for the squid and jellyfish that made up the vast majority of their catch these days.

Kai was sixty five years old, with a small, round head of short-cropped silver hair, and you could see the European blood in the shape of his nose. His skin was the colour of seashells. He had white catfish whiskers sprouting from his cheeks and chin which seemed to twitch when he spoke, as though they were searching for words swimming past in the air. The small, thick lenses of his glasses sat like two little glass jellyfish in front of his bright inquisitive eyes. He looked through them at the unmoving traffic all around him.

“Please hurry,” said Kai.

“I do my best, but...” shrugged the taxi driver, “this Shanghai! World number one city! What I can do?”

As the cab sat still as a limpet in the line of traffic, Kai began to think of the past. He remembered when he’d be taken fishing by his father as a young boy, almost sixty years before.

They’d been catching a fair number of fish from the boat that day. It had happened when Kai was reeling in a smallish tuna – he could still almost feel it tugging on the line like the memory itself! Just as he saw the bright silver flash as the fish’s solid body surfaced, a dark triangular fin appeared in the water and the torpedo body of a huge blue-grey shape rose under it. He realised that his recollection of the event may well have been embellished by his imagination over the years, but he could still remember the look of unblinking terror in that tuna’s eyes. In his memory, they were expressive eyes that looked almost human – almost like his own.

The shark grabbed the fish in its huge jaws. But it didn’t bite straight away – it held the flapping tuna delicately in its teeth, much like Kai’s mother would hold a needle in her mouth when sewing. At that exact moment, the shark was actually pulling on Kai’s fishing line through the body of the tuna. He could feel the magnificence of that big fish in his fingertips, see the row of triangular teeth bared white and red as the tuna bled a little trickle of blood into the sea like a long red tear. For the longest of moments, Kai and the shark stared deep into each other’s eyes, like lovers.

Then, with a single, quick, inevitable bite, the shark bit the body clean away from the head as if taking a bite out of a sandwich. Kai fell backwards as the tension of the huge weight disappeared from his fishing line, and the bloody head of the tuna, still biting on his hook, flew through the air like a flying fish; it bounced and skidded across the wooden deck before coming to rest by Kai’s feet. The tuna had the shark’s crescent-shaped bite-mark on its neck, and a stunned look of amazement on its face. So did Kai!

How his father laughed! He said it would’ve been better to catch the shark – at least they could sell the fin to one of the fancy restaurants downtown. Kai heard another shh-tock – this meant his father was opening yet another bottle of beer.

His father hurled the tuna head back into the sea, shouting:

“Eh! Shark! Show some manners and finish your meal!”

Then he then told the shark to take good care of his fin, in the same way he told Kai to take care of his fishing gear.

“Good luck, shark!” his father said. He then gave a long sad bow of his head and toasted the ocean with his bottle of beer.

Kai wasn’t sure whether he was joking or praying – though it did seem just like a prayer – but from that day onwards Kai had been hooked on sharks.

On another day, his father had steered the boat up the Yangtze specifically to show his son the Baiji white dolphins. Eventually, they saw two playfully skimming the brown soupy surface of the river. The water looked dirty and it smelt bad. His father said that soon these dolphins would be extinct. He was right – they were declared extinct two years later in 2006.

“What does extinct mean?” Kai remembered asking. He remembered the look of sadness – almost shame – on his father’s face as he told him. It all seemed so long ago now.

“Good luck, shark!” he said, and he meant it.

“What you say, mister?” said the taxi driver.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Kai. But it wasn’t.

The walkways of Shanghai were crawling with commuters, all so busy and preoccupied, all scuttling to and fro like little land crabs, all off to work so they could buy the products that shimmered and winked at them from the shiny shop windows and which they thought would make them happy.

Kai looked at the people outside the taxi in the same way that he looked at specimens under his microscope, as though they were another species, different from him. Perhaps they were. They all looked so young – young enough to be his children, or even grandchildren. Kai knew that none of them – not one of those youngsters he saw passing by – would ever have seen a white dolphin and probably not a shark either, except in his aquarium or on a computer screen. Kai felt more alone than ever. He closed his eyes and thought of the past. He remembered his parents’ faces.

Of course, his father had been killed in the first war with America. His mother – (who was half-American) – seemed to die then too, though she stayed alive for eleven more years. Kai acquired his limp after being injured during the second African uprising – which was the precise moment in his life that Kai decided he definitely preferred sharks to people. Now, in 2061, there were over seventeen billion people in the world and very, very few sharks. Kai often wished it was the other way round.

These days, the Yangtze was a dead river and the big predators of the oceans had mostly gone, hunted to extinction by fishermen eager to catch what their customers wanted to buy, whatever the consequences. It was just bad luck for some species that they tasted so good. Kai hadn’t eaten some of them since he was a child, though some did survive in very limited numbers in the world’s marine conservation areas or aquariums.

These days, the seas of the world mostly squirmed with jellyfish and squid, plus a few smaller species of fish that human beings, in their insatiable hunger, were seemingly prepared to make extinct too. Kai knew it wouldn’t stop until everything was dead.

They had found ways to flavour flavourless jellyfish so it tasted like real fish, and even processed it to have a similar texture and shape, so most people made do with that because it was all they could afford. But there were many who still craved the real thing and a few who could – and would – pay any price to taste tuna or swordfish or cod again. For those with money, anything was possible.

But the sharks had not been fished to extinction for the taste of their flesh – it was their fins that had been their downfall as a species.

Kai remembered when he was a boy and had watched the grinning fishermen come ashore with hundreds of shark fins piled in their plastic crates – perhaps even thousands. ‘Golden triangles’, the fishermen would call them. He rarely saw a whole shark’s body back then because all those beautiful animals, having had their fins sliced off, had been thrown overboard like junk, to sink and twitch and spiral to the bottom of the sea to be eaten alive by the fattening, scavenging crabs.

The great irony was that shark’s fin, being cartilage, actually tasted of nothing at all; in fact, so tasteless was it that the delicacy of shark’s fin soup only tasted of the seasoned chicken broth that the fin was boiled in.

Yet still people demanded it – they wanted to eat their shark fin soup to show how successful and sophisticated they were, and because old traditions and superstitions die hard. This got even worse as sharks became scarce and the cost of fins rocketed – some people would pay anything to eat that dish, which made the fisherman try to catch as many sharks as they could, however small and immature, which meant many did not get the opportunity to breed before being killed.

That one dish – shark’s fin soup – had been responsible for the extinction of most sharks in the wild. There was also a huge demand for fins in traditional medicine.

And even when fishing for sharks was finally made illegal, long after most of them had disappeared anyway, people still craved the illicit pleasure of eating shark fin soup – and that appetite was satisfied, if the price was high enough.

Since his boyhood, Kai had watched the numbers decline and plummet. He had researched and monitored the populations; he knew the facts of the shark’s annihilation as well as he knew their anatomy.

But there was always a hope – a small but real hope – that somewhere out there in the vast and unknowable oceans there were still populations of sharks: small, isolated populations that could have somehow escaped the sonic location devices and the all-devouring deadly nets and hooks of the fishermen. If Kai could establish that, then maybe it would be possible to really protect them – to start again. Maybe even one day to introduce sharks from aquariums to the open oceans.

Kai knew he had to be quick. He’d have to arrange to buy the blue shark from the fisherman, then take it back to the aquarium and consult every expert he knew around the world to keep it alive. It had always failed in the past but there was a chance, albeit a small one, that this shark would survive in captivity, especially with the improved technology they had now. And then they could search the oceans for more blue sharks – in the same place the fisherman caught this one – and they could even start a worldwide breeding programme. The blue shark, as a species, could perhaps be brought back from the dead, after all.

The traffic was gridlocked, as it so often was – despite all the regulations on cars in the city, it was always like this. The taxi driver said that they would just have to be patient and would be there soon.

If it wasn’t for his leg, Kai knew he would just get out and run to the docks, like he used to race along the beach when he was a boy. He watched the crowds of people swarming around the taxi on all sides, like blowflies around the corpse of the washed-up whale he had once seen. He tried calling Li Ying; there was no answer. Why?

Kai’s mind pictured all the species that were now gone, on land and sea. Even when he was young, these animals were not extinct; endangered, yes, but now they were gone forever. So many species were gone – some completely extinct, some extinct in the wild. And it had all happened in his little lifetime.

Finally, at long last, they arrived at their destination.

As the taxi entered the docks area, three black Mercedes with mirror windows glided past it on their way out, followed by a large and dirty white van. It was an incongruous sight, and it was unusual to see such luxury cars at the docks – as the preferred car of government officials they were more usually seen parked outside the fashionable department stores and restaurants downtown.

Kai got out of the taxi and limped as quickly as he could towards the quay. There was still no answer from Li Ying’s phone.

Two fishermen were standing by their boat, shouting loudly and sharing swigs from a bottle. They stopped talking when they saw Kai approaching.

“Shark?” one of them laughed, soon followed by the other – they sounded drunk, “No shark here – only jellyfish and squids. Very nice. You want buy?”

Kai walked across the quay. He called Li Ying again; he could just about hear a faint ringtone. It was coming from behind one of the buildings on the quayside.

The ringtone led him to a pile of plastic crates behind one of them. That was where he found Li Ying, sprawled on the ground. There was blood on his face and in his hair. His lip was split and there was the first dark shadow of a black eye. He had clearly been beaten up badly.

Kai knelt down and spoke to him. Li Ying opened his eyes.

“I tried,” he said, groaning, “I tried... my best, but...”

He told Kai what had happened. It was too late – the shark was gone. Li Ying’s eyes were swollen with pain and blood and tears.

Kai helped him up when he was ready. The young man then led him to the plastic tank where he had seen the blue shark. Kai could still smell it there – could still feel its presence somehow, like an ancestor. But now it was gone and there was nothing they could do.

“Good luck, shark,” he said, his voice breaking with sorrow. Then he bowed his head as if in prayer, as did Li Ying. They were both crying like rain.

They both knew that the shark was already dead. It had disappeared into the city like a ghost and its fin – as well as the rest of its body – would be eaten as a delicacy, or perhaps dried and used for traditional medicine or as an aphrodisiac.

No wonder the fishermen looked happy: they would have sold the shark to some businessperson, or perhaps some government official with bottomless pockets and limitless funds. That single fin had probably bought them a new boat – or two – or more. Perhaps a whole fleet. Maybe even a new house – maybe several houses. Maybe they’d never have to work again. And nor would their children.

Kai looked out at the sea. It seemed so vast and limitless, but he knew that it wasn’t: it had its limits, as did the whole Earth, and they had been reached and exceeded long ago.

He thought of the shark he had seen when a boy, the big fish that had beheaded his tuna, and the way his father wished it good luck – they were all long gone now. They were never coming back.

Maybe the shark the fishermen had caught that day was the last blue shark, he thought, as he stared at the sea – or maybe there were more, somewhere out there in the vast dark waters of the world. But it would be the last shark the fishing boats of Shanghai would ever catch.

The photo that Li Ying had taken and sent to Kai’s computer would, some years later, be internationally recognised as the last recorded image of a blue shark. The species was now, officially, completely extinct.

 

 

Tusk

No-one in the village was particularly surprised when Tambo Chalinga became Minister for Conservation in the new government.

They all knew Tambo would go far – he had been the star student at the local school and then at university in the city, where he graduated with the highest marks in his year. They also knew, however, that he was not cut out for a career in banking or business – because, from the earliest days, it was clear that Tambo had only one interest in life: elephants.

This was hardly surprising: in the village it was said his birth was accompanied by the singing of elephants who stood waiting patiently for two days until he came into the world, and then marked his arrival with a celebratory chorus of trumpeting not heard before or since.

From boyhood, Tambo had a special relationship with the elephants. Where they lived near the National Park, there were always elephants roaming the savannas. Sometimes, they wandered onto their fields and flattened their crops, but not to any disastrous extent – everyone in the village respected and loved the elephants. So if occasionally a young bull made a mistake by trespassing where he was not wanted, he was always treated with understanding, in the same way a wise village elder will always show leniency and guidance to a wayward youth.

It was always Tambo who led the young elephant back to the herd – a dangerous thing to do for anybody else, but Tambo knew he would be perfectly safe, even with the big cow matriarch he had nicknamed ‘Tusk’, who had a scar on her forehead and the broken-off left tusk jutting out of her huge head like an ivory dagger. She was Tambo’s favourite elephant of all – she had spirit as well as raw power, and controlled the herd as sternly as any Kenyan mother.

His close relationship and affinity with the elephants was why they jokingly sometimes called him Tembo – Swahili for ‘elephant’.

Tambo studied hard at university and was headhunted at graduation to work as a researcher in the Ministry of Conservation – a job which allowed him to break free from his desk for a couple of days every week to liaise with wildlife wardens and conservationists, and elephants. They needed all the help they could get to tackle the enormous problem they had with poachers – a problem that was getting worse, due to increased world demand for raw ivory.

He knew these elephants and they knew him. And the elephants he knew best of all, the ones Tambo Chalinga regarded as his family as much as – or perhaps even more than – his many cousins and uncles and aunts, were those that lived on the plains around the village, although they could also roam over great distances. Every time he returned home, they came to greet him – as if welcoming home a much-loved family member. Even the big cow elephant with the scar and the broken left tusk celebrated Tambo’s return, and even allowed him to approach and touch her. Sometimes, one of the young bull elephants would be there too, briefly rejoining the herd, possibly out of homesickness and remembering how his life used to be, before returning to a life of solitary wandering in the bush.

Tambo Chalinga had big plans for the Ministry of Conservation. It broke his heart to see how poachers were still killing elephants in Kenya, and how the rampant corruption in his country meant that it went on despite the law. Tambo was absolutely determined to stop this corruption, because that was the only way to protect the elephants, especially now the Chinese were in Africa – and everyone knew how much they loved their ivory.

‘They will bring nothing but blackness and death to this land,’ his great aunt Mwamini said when she first saw their engineers building the new road to the city.

Tambo had been a junior minister at that point, nothing but a glorified secretary really.

‘They will kill all the elephants, these yellow devils!’ his great aunt said.

‘They are here to invest,’ said Tambo, ‘just for business – not to rule us in an empire!’

His great aunt Mwamini had scoffed at this, mumbling and chuckling to herself as if enjoying a private joke.

‘Everyone have his price. Government man, ‘specially.’

‘But I am not just a politician; my main interest and concern is conservation – the elephants. You know that.’

His aunt said nothing; she just shook her head, and closed her tired old eyes to the world.

Tambo knew that Mwamini was a grumpy old lady, and that she rarely saw good in anything or anyone, so her reaction was only to be expected – and tolerated. The changes she must have seen...

Tambo, by contrast, was an optimist: he was not against incomers – they brought wealth and investment, not to mention new ideas and ways of thinking. Just like the British when they were here – but different.

The Chinese did not have any moral or ‘civilising agenda’ like the British Empire, or any religion to promote either: they only seemed to care about money. But was that such a bad thing? Money was important, and so was business – it would improve the lives of his countrymen, and ultimately of the elephants and wildlife too.

‘It’s got to stop,’ said Tambo to his wife on the evening he was appointed Minister of Conservation, ‘the corruption, the bribes, the turning a blind eye to poaching – all of it! And I am going to stop it!’

Muraty nodded at her husband and smiled patiently.

‘We have become so corrupt in this country that nobody believes honesty can even exist.’

She served them dinner: spicy pork with ugali and githeri, the popular porridge and bean dishes.

‘But I will show them! I shall clean up the department of conservation like a big bull elephant in a water hole!’

It was on that very day that Tambo first saw Mr Wu.

At first, Tambo thought he was just another Chinese official in Kenya – an engineer or a negotiator, hungry for African minerals at any price. There were so many these days, in all industries and ministries, everywhere. It was only later that Tambo found out he was actually the representative of the Chinese government in Kenya – a man responsible for a great many investments. Mr Liu, his predecessor, had been recalled for reasons unknown.

Tambo would invite Mr Wu to a meeting soon so he could get to know him; he would try and persuade him to act to stop all tolerance to the illicit ivory trade and the demand it was both satisfying and creating in China, which in turn led to poaching throughout Africa.

First, however, there was business to take care of and, as he had informed his wife using the language of Western politicians he had seen on TV, he intended to ‘hit the ground running’ in his new job – and he did.

Kenyan politics had never known anything like it. Within a month of Tambo Chalinga becoming Minister for Conservation, more than thirty government officials – as well as four junior government ministers – were languishing in prison, having been arrested for corruption and embezzlement.

The President was delighted at this progress, as he stated in a TV interview, and so were many other senior ministers who publicly berated those who had been arrested whenever the opportunity arose. Tambo knew they were probably all just as corrupt, if not more so, but he couldn’t go for the big fish – not yet, anyway. That would have to wait; otherwise he could threaten his own position, or even – as he well knew – his life.

Of course, Tambo was only able to clamp down on this corruption by bribing the police – not with money, but with the promise that none of them would ever be personally investigated for corruption. Tambo knew this promise was enough. He also knew that if he broke it both he and his wife would be killed, and the Chief of Police knew he knew this too – it was a system that worked, in its own little brutal way. That was just how things were: Tambo had to work within the system if he was to achieve his goal – he was doing what he was doing for the elephants. Everything he did was for them.

As luck would have it, Mr Wu’s secretary contacted the Ministry of Conservation with a dinner invitation for later that week before Tambo had had a chance to make contact.

‘Welcome to Kenya,’ said Tambo to Mr Wu, who bowed low in thanks. Always bowing, these Chinese, even when they knew they were the masters.

During the meal – which was served in a backstreet Chinese restaurant Tambo didn’t even know existed – they discussed at great length the ivory poaching situation in the country. Mr Wu, whose English was excellent – (though he always had several aides with him including an interpreter, who occasionally whispered a word in his ear) – listened patiently as his guest expressed the hope that progress could be made with the ‘ivory situation’.

Perhaps it was because Tambo thought the food so delicious, or perhaps the numbing effects of several bottles of beer – (or the fact that his host was paying the bill) – but by the end of the meal he felt warm towards Mr Wu and optimistic as to how they could work together.

At the end of the evening, as they all stood up to leave, Mr Wu handed Tambo a small wooden box. It was clear that this was a gift and Tambo should accept it with gratitude, which is what he did with a little hesitant bow, as diplomacy dictates.

Tambo opened the box. He frowned.

‘Is not the new ivory,’ said Wu. ‘Is ivory figure of emperor of China. Ming Dynasty. Five hundred year old”

Tambo held the little statuette up to the light. It was absolutely beautiful – exquisite in its workmanship – about six inches high, though more with the small stand, and so delicately carved by what was obviously a masterful hand. There was real humanity in the emperor’s face, a special quality in his smile, like the Mona Lisa. Enigmatic.

It was ivory, yes – but it was old ivory. Very old. Made from ivory from an elephant that had lived and died in Africa half a millennium before, probably from one of the ‘big-tuskers’, as they were called. These ‘big-tuskers’ were all gone now. They had been the first to be wiped out by hunters, so their DNA had been deleted from history well over a century ago. No-one alive today had ever seen a ‘big-tusker’: they were already extinct.

But Tambo always liked to think that the elephants he knew, those he had grown up with, might well be descendants or relatives of the unlucky big-tuskers – maybe even of the elephant whose tusk had been carved into the object in his hand. How long the ivory trade had gone on! And how many elephants had been slaughtered just so their teeth – those elongated incisors which had evolved to dig the earth for roots – could be sawn off and turned into trinkets, letter openers, ornaments and piano keys for the amusement of more advanced people far across the oceans in more civilised lands.

Tambo invited Mr Wu and his colleagues to come with him to his village, to meet the elephants themselves. It was all arranged for the following week.

Muraty did not like the statuette – she didn’t like old things, preferring the fashionable designer furniture and clothes she saw on TV – so she was pleased to hear that Tambo intended to keep it at the Ministry.

That evening, Tambo decided to look up the Ming statuette on the internet – just for interest.

‘Oh my God,’ he gasped when he saw it, immediately apologising to his wife for the blasphemy. ‘Sorry sorry – but Muraty, look – please. Look!’

On the screen was a figure similar to the one sitting on the desk in front of Tambo, but this one was in the British Museum. Another website had a similar Ming period ivory figure too – it was to be auctioned in London with a guide price of £100,000.

At that very moment, if Tambo had been an elephant, he would have made a deafening trumpeting sound with his trunk.

‘It is not a bribe, said Tambo, somewhat defensively, when he noticed Muraty’s glare. ‘It is a gift to the people and government of Kenya, not for me personally.”

His wife said nothing; she started clearing the table.

Tambo sometimes wondered if he had made the right decision in getting married. Maybe he should have stayed solitary, like a bull elephant, only occasionally visiting the opposite sex when his needs demanded. It would have been less complicated, that’s for sure. Tambo really didn’t understand women; but, bizarrely – and he really did not understand this at all – he absolutely understood female elephants.

He held up the ivory figure to the light, admiring its beauty one last time, before placing it back in its box, which he put into his briefcase, ready to take into the office the next day.

*

Mr Wu loved the elephants.

It was an exciting day for the villagers: their son Tambo, who had risen high and become a government minister – and who had even been on TV – was now bringing an important guest to their home. A Chinese guest – a rich guest who could do good things for Tambo’s people.

Tambo showed Mr Wu around the village – which did not take long, it was true. He showed him the little schoolhouse where he had studied, as well as the hut where he was born. But he did not want to invite Mr Wu into one of the huts: the cramped and cluttered residences were an embarrassment to Tambo, and he was sure the Chinese would look down on anyone who lived this way. He didn’t know how the Chinese lived, but he did know that some had lived in palaces in the past, and he had never heard of Chinamen living in huts. So, instead, he guided Mr Wu back to the four-wheel drive so they could make their way out into the plains to see the elephants.

As they left, Tambo saw his great aunt Mwamini watching them suspiciously from outside her hut. Tambo met her eye then looked away quickly, as though his not acknowledging her would make her disappear from view. But her eyes would always be there, he knew, watching the world like God, no matter whether he looked back or not.

Before long, they had found the herd.

Mr Wu watched as Tambo approached the elephants on foot. There were about a dozen, including three calves and the matriarch with the scar on her face and the broken-off left tusk. The rumble and snort of the herd seemed to greet Tambo like an old friend, with every elephant extending its trunk in welcome.

Tambo greeted his old friends too, though he was always wary of the aggressive matriarch – the oldest and biggest elephant in the herd. She had been a young two-tusked mother when he was a child – then, one day, she had returned from the bush with only one, which had probably been broken off whilst fighting, maybe when defending the herd. She had apparently become even more bad-tempered since, but then, she was left-tusked – (elephants, like humans with hands, had one dominant side) – so to lose her left tusk had been most unfortunate, making life more difficult for her as she had had to learn to use the right from scratch.

There was no danger, however: Tambo knew Tusk well, so he would be able to tell from the flap of her ears, the movement of her feet and the tone of the deep guttural growling and rumbling noises she made when she’d had enough.

Tambo gave the signal. Slowly, vigilantly, nervously, Mr Wu and his aides left the jeep and approached the herd, their suits and ties looking incongruously surreal in the savannah’s bright African sunshine.

The elephants seemed curious and excited at these new strange-smelling visitors. They crowded round, extending their trunks to touch the hands and heads of the Chinese guests. Tambo explained to Mr Wu how he had known these animals since boyhood, that they were in effect his family, and that he would do anything to protect them. Mr Wu smiled and bowed, admiring the long tusks of the elephant whose trunk was caressing his sweaty scalp.

Suddenly, Tambo sensed that the old matriarch had had enough and led his guests back to the four-wheel drives. As they got into the vehicles, the old she-elephant gave a deafening blast of a trumpet: this was unusual and Tambo thought that this probably meant that she was still unsure about the strangers. It was then that Tambo noticed that the face of every single member of the Chinese entourage shone with a big, broad ivory-coloured smile.

When they returned to the village, Tambo’s great aunt Mwamini was still watching from outside her hut. What was that expression in her eyes? Tambo wasn’t sure. Was it anger? No. Accusation? Disappointment? Maybe. It was weariness, yes, but it was more than that. It was the look an elephant had in its eyes before it lay down to die. It was a look that saw everything and nothing at the same time.

The President was delighted at the close relationship Tambo was forging with Mr Wu. As he mentioned more than once – ‘China is the new America’ – and he was keen to do business with these new colonialists.

Over the following months, Tambo built up a strong relationship with the Chinese delegation, and they met several times a week. His wife didn’t complain, but sometimes she joked that he was spending more time with Mr Wu than with her! She was probably just joking; after all, Tambo did give her plenty of money for clothes, and they were now wealthy enough to employ a maid to do all of the housework and cooking, so Muraty had plenty of time to go shopping in all the best boutiques. She even went on shopping expeditions to Paris and London.

So what if they were spending lots of time apart, or even living mostly separate lives? Lots of married couples did – and wasn’t that what elephants did too? Tambo was behaving perfectly normally for a bull elephant: solitary, proud and confident in what he did. It wasn’t as if there were any children to worry about – yet.

The anti-corruption campaign went well that year, with yet more minor officials being arrested and Tambo being interviewed on TV about the progress they were making in tackling both the corruption in Kenya and the ivory poaching that had increased so much in recent years, as well as in forging important trading and business links with the Chinese.

Then, one day, Mr Wu invited Tambo out for a meal at the same restaurant at which they had first got to know each other. After the meal, Mr Wu handed an envelope to Tambo; his expression when he opened it was similar, if not identical, to the one he had had on his face when he had first made love to his wife.

In the village, the news was bad. Mwamini was dying, so Tambo was summoned.

He arrived from the city that evening, directly from that dinner with Mr Wu, dressed in an expensive designer suit and wearing the gold watch he always wore these days. He sat with his great aunt a while as she drifted in and out of consciousness, like clouds across the moon. Clearly, the end was near.

She was mumbling something too, which Tambo thought at first was his name. But it wasn’t ‘Tambo’ that she was saying, it was ‘Tembo’ – ‘elephant’ in Swahili.

Mwamini muttered it over and over again, like a chant. Then she turned and looked at Tambo, looked into him, her eyes as small and black as a rat’s – and he knew she knew. He could see it in the blackness of her dying eyes. She knew what he had done, knew that it was all his fault, knew that he had brought nothing but death and destruction and shame to his ancestors’ village.

No-one expected Mwamini to last the night, but last she did: by sunrise the next morning she was not yet dead. Tambo had been with her all night, and as she seemed to be sleeping, he decided he would take a break – go out onto the plains and see his old friends, the elephants. There was nothing else to do in the village: it seemed so small and alien and boring to him now.

One thing puzzled him: since he had arrived back in the village he had noticed people treating him strangely, keeping their distance as though he had some strange disease, or in the way that certain individuals were treated who had been in trouble with the police. Even his old friends and cousins were wary and unsmiling in his presence, their faces as dark and hard as the masks of his tribe.

It was envy, of course – at his new-found wealth. Yes, that must be it – the suit and the watch and his government position. People were often envious, jealous of others’ success, frightened of ambition.

Well, Tambo wasn’t and he had proved it. He was becoming one of Kenya’s best known and most popular politicians, so much so that he was even being talked about as a possible future presidential candidate.

Imagine that –  him, Tambo Chalinga, President of Kenya! He could go to America on a visit and meet President Obama: two sons of Kenya – two black men – in the White House. Imagine that!

Tambo walked for a few minutes onto the plain but could not see or hear any elephants. He went back and got the four-wheel drive – he knew all the places the elephants frequented and where they roamed, and if anyone could locate them, it was him. He drove for almost an hour before he found them.

He smelt it first – the unmistakeable sweet stench of death. Tambo stopped the four-wheel drive and got out. The smell led him to a ridge by some trees, and as he climbed it he could hear the drone of blowflies buzzing. The birds were silent in the skies as he approached, as they were before thunder storms. Though alone, Tambo felt somehow that he was being watched.

There they were – all of them: more than a dozen elephants, the whole herd, all dead. They had been shot – machine-gunned – the calves too; and the tusks had been severed from their heads, no doubt sawn off with chainsaws in minutes. Quick and efficient: the modern way. Tambo retched and covered his nostrils with his sleeve.

When had this happened? Yesterday perhaps? The body cavities were now crawling with maggots and flies, but that kind of decomposition could happen quickly in the relentless heat. The old way of death was the same as it ever was: Africa eats its own.

He looked at them, one by one, recognised each individual from the ears. And then he saw Tusk. The matriarch lay surrounded by the others, her eye sockets black with flies, her solitary tusk sawn clean off, like a tree branch that had got in the way. There was the weathered shard of her broken-off left tusk still sticking out of her skull – the poachers obviously hadn’t thought it was worth taking that.

‘Tembo,’ whispered Tambo at the matriarch’s corpse, and the wind seemed to echo a reply.

‘Tembo,’ whispered the voice of his great aunt Mwamini.

He looked around, but there was no-one there.  

How could she be there? She was in her hut, in bed, dying.

But Africa always makes noises, he knew, for those who could hear.

He should have felt sad – angry – something. Anything. But he didn’t. He just felt numb, his heart deadened by a head full of money. He knew he had changed, and knew there was nothing he could do about it now.

When he got back to the village, they told him that great aunt Mwamini was dead.

Tambo paid his respects briefly, as he was expected to, though he was reluctant to gaze upon his great aunt’s corpse after the look she had given him the night before. Then he informed the members of his family that he had pressing business in the city and so, sadly, could not stay in the village for the funeral or the traditional period of mourning.

Nobody seemed surprised – though Tambo knew what he was doing would be considered offensive and disrespectful.  But he was a modern man now, not some African village peasant worshipping the ways of the witchdoctor, even if his fathers’ fathers had lived like that since before memory began. Now, things had changed.

Tambo climbed into the four-wheel drive with the briefcase he had kept with him since he had arrived and which he had never let out of his sight during his stay. In it was the envelope from Mr Wu, and inside that was the banker’s draft for five million US dollars which Tambo had insisted was the minimum he would personally accept to allow the Chinese – and the poachers who supplied them – access to the ‘ivory resources’ of Kenya.

They had drawn a line on the map, him and Mr Wu, when they had negotiated the deal in the restaurant: the Chinese would be able to kill all elephants on one side of that line, but not the other – the line went right through the middle of the National Park, which was vast enough to ensure that no poachers working for Mr Wu would ever be caught. Unfortunately for the elephants of Tambo’s village, they had crossed over that line whilst roaming, and so Mr Wu’s poachers had, according to their little illegal agreement, the right to machine-gun them and harvest their ivory.

Tambo thought of the elephants he had grown up with, their corpses now rotting in the bush, and closed his eyes, trying to delete the unnecessary memory from his head.

He opened them to the sight of unsmiling villagers crowding around his car – the look in their eyes was something he could not explain. It seemed – though how this was possible Tambo didn’t know – that they knew, just like Aunt Mwamini had known.

Tambo looked away. He started the ignition of the four-wheel drive and drove back to the stinking dirty city where he knew he now belonged.

He would never touch, or be touched by, an elephant again.

 

Chill

The hot stones sizzled. Small white clouds of steam hissed into the air.

James breathed in the wet heat; he felt the walls of his lungs burn and melt. He coughed like a smoker.

All his instincts were telling him to poke his tongue out and pant like a dog, to suck as much oxygen from the air as possible. But no – he couldn’t look as though he was struggling in the heat, not with Big Tel sat there beside him.

James had never really liked the stifling heat of saunas, and this one was oven-hot. He so wanted to run outside and gulp the cold dry air outside deep into his body, to force the oxygen bubbles back into his blood and breathe. Instead, he closed his eyes and listened to his lungs swell and shrink with every slow breath. His heartbeat thump-de-dumped in his ears. He’d get through this, he knew he would.

But he really didn’t feel all that well. It was just so hot in there. He’d have another long swig of his energy drink when he left the sauna and get rehydrated; he’d feel better then.

“Nuffink quite like it, eh Jimmy?” said Big Tel, a big slick grin on his face.

James hated being called Jimmy.

“Nuffink like it at all!”

Well, perhaps being boiled alive like a lobster would be like it, or being shoved head first into the spout of a giant kettle, or perhaps being lowered into a giant geezer until it scalded the skin off your face and body so it hung off you in shredded strips like pink, bloody slices of ham.

“No...nothing quite like it at all...” James agreed, mouthing a ‘phew’ and mock-wiping the wetness off his brow in that matey, jokey way some men liked.

Big Tel laughed a large, wet laugh and slapped his stomach. The rolls of belly fat wobbled and rubbed against each other; sweat and condensation mingled in the folds and trickled down his hairy belly towards the solid black triangle between his legs.

They were sitting next to each other – Big Tel and James – on the pine seat, pink and naked as newly hatched chicks in some strange volcanic nest.

“A sauna sweats out all the impurities,” said Big Tel, like he was reading it straight out of the manual, “it cleanses the body, inside and out.”

Though perhaps there was rather more ‘out’ than James would have liked to see. A long, browny-pink sausage of a penis lay limp against Big Tel’s thigh. Like the rest of him, it was fat – and thick. It seemed to be the only part of his body that wasn’t covered in a layer of thick, black hair.

It seemed to James that he was sat next to a huge hairy baby, naked as an ape at a zoo. He would probably have preferred it if the ape-baby had been wearing a nappy. James closed his eyes, bit his lip and concentrated on not laughing. He tried to flush the image out of his brain like a stubborn stool.

Sitting beside Big Tel, James looked small and hairless – rather like a young boy beside his dad, though he was no more than ten years younger. He was much fitter though, as a personal trainer should be: there was no extraneous fat at all on his body, and his skin was stretched taut across his impressively muscled torso.

Big Tel might not have been as pretty, but he was bigger than James in every way. Scratching his dark sweaty balls, he glanced over to the modest limpness between Jimmy’s legs, before sitting back with a smug and satisfied smile on his fat face.  Anyone could see the difference: Jimmy’s thing sat there limp and blind like a little white worm; Big Tel’s, by contrast, was a big pink snake coiled to strike.

His hands too were twice the size of Jimmy’s. There was lots of flab on him, sure – but there was muscle under it all too. James knew Big Tel’s strength; in fact, he knew all his bodily measurements and readings, from his BMI to his fat ratio to his heart rate – it was part of his personal training service. He knew all the measurements of Big Tel’s wife, Maria, too.

A chunky gold chain hung down around Big Tel’s thick neck. That was one reason he always looked like a stereotype of an East End gangster or someone working on a market stall. He came from a poor East End background and was a market trader of sorts, except these days he gambled with derivatives in the City of London. Last year, he had earned five million pounds; James had earned less than twenty five thousand as a self-employed personal trainer.

Like a lot of the City boy traders and bankers that made up most of James’ clients, Big Tel had a permanent look of pleasantly surprised satisfaction on his face, rather like a little boy who had just done a warm wee in his pants, as if amazed at being allowed to get away with so much for so long and making quite so much money from doing so very little.

“No wonder all them Scandinavian birds are so fit eh, Jimmy” said Big Tel, “what wiv all them saunas”. That big flabby laugh again. James nodded and smiled at his client.

He looked at Big Tel’s thick wet lips; there was something white foaming at their corner. He looked at his fat red face, those little piggy eyes and all that black hair sprouting from everything, and his sleeping eel of a penis curled there on his thigh, greasy and wet in the heat. It was a disgusting sight. No wonder Maria spent so much time away, shopping. The thought of it being near her – and inside her – made James feel defensive and repulsed at the same time.

“Don’t you go tellin’ the missus I said that or nuffink though!” Laugh laugh laugh.

Another City client had recommended James, and he’d been personal trainer to Big Tel and his wife for almost a year now. It wasn’t what he really wanted to do – but then, acting jobs were always thin on the ground. So it was either this or something worse.

But he did feel bad about not using his education at all – it had been very expensive. And there’s Big Tel beside him, successful City trader and multi-millionaire, who liked to boast about never having read a book all the way through! Not one without pictures, anyway. It wasn’t as it should have been; in fact, it should have been the other way round, with Big Tel working for James, and James owning that great big house in the country. As it was, James was almost thirty and couldn’t afford to buy even the tiniest of flats in any half-decent part of London. The world he lived in was a world turned upside down, for sure.

James knew he was nothing more than a servant really: a reasonably good looking, slim and under thirty servant who was selling all those fat City boys an unattainable dream. He was a mother to nag them into cardiovascular activity, an ear to listen to their moans and complaints. They would never be like him and he would never be like them either. To get and keep clients, he just had to smile and sell himself to them, nod when they aired their stupid bigoted uninformed opinions, laugh at their coarse unfunny laddish jokes – and leave their wives and girlfriends alone.

When Big Tel asked if Jimmy would like to come and stay for the weekend. Well, how could he say no? It would be perfect. More so because he knew Maria would not be there and Big Tel had given the staff the weekend off too. ‘Sorted’, as Big Tel might have said.

The mansion was in the Kent countryside and had twenty rooms, extensive grounds, an indoor swimming pool and a sauna in the basement.

Big Tel leaned close towards James till they were eye to eye, like lovers:

“Y’know, me and Maria love to come in here...and...” he paused, “Chill...”

“Chill?” said James, trying to look surprised and interested, and chuckling at the irony. Big Tel laughed a dirty loud laugh.

James already knew what Big Tel liked doing in the sauna. Maria had told him all about it – about how they would ‘chill’, about how disgusting she found Big Tel’s body, about how he grunted like a pig when he was on top of her, and how she sometimes hoped he’d have a heart attack and die when he was coming. James almost felt sorry for him really – almost, but not quite – though thankfully, he didn’t suspect a thing.

“Yeah,” said Big Tel, rolling his foreskin in his fingers like a fifty pound note, “Chill...”

He grinned at James and slapped him hard on the thigh. Then he gave that gravelly cockney laugh again, like a cement mixer crushing skulls.

“You was good today,” he said, “wiv them exercises we was doin’...”

He looked down at his pregnant belly before grabbing it in his big hands and shaking his head sadly.

“Problem is, I likes me dinner too much! I ain’t never been slim an’ pretty... not like you Jimmy...”

“Oh it just takes...a bit of...will power...” said James.

“Just a bit?” said Big Tel.

James nodded weakly; he didn’t want to be seen as suggesting Big Tel lacked willpower. These City types could be hypersensitive about macho stuff like that.

The look in Big Tel’s eyes was strangely blank, not envious at all of the slim and attractive young man next to him. No wonder, with all his cash. James would have gladly traded his smooth taut body for just one of those millions.

“Still, least I’m big ‘n’ fat all over, innit!” said Big Tel, weighing his penis in his hand before looking between James’ legs and winking at him. James looked away quickly. Big Tel laughed his laugh again.

“Y’know, when I was a boy,” said Big Tel, “I ‘ad this crackin’ bird once...nice personality, she ‘ad...an’ the biggest tits you ever did see...”

Oh here we go again, thought James – more boasting about conquests and virility. Big Tel probably didn’t even know what the word ‘misogyny’ meant; he probably thought it was a type of Japanese soup in one of the expensive restaurants he took Maria to when he wanted to show her off to other City boys.

James laughed with Big Tel, as if he enjoyed listening to fat slobs talking about big tits.

“At it like rabbits, we was – day and night, anywhere we could...we was workin’ together, me and her, down the local supermarket.”

James didn’t know that Big Tel had done any other job before he worked in the City; he couldn’t imagine him taking orders from any boss, really.

“Crap job, it was – I done all the shelf stackin’ an’ I sorted out all the store rooms, frozen food an’ all.”

The word ‘frozen’ floated there in the air like a snowflake; James breathed it deep into his burning lungs before it melted.

“We was only teenagers – little ‘oiks’ you could say...”

There was something snide in the tone of Big Tel’s voice now. James usually referred to Big Tel as the ‘Big Oik’ when he was with Maria. Surely, she couldn’t have told him?

“Now, course – bein’ a stupid kid I didn’t know nuffink back then...” said Big Tel.

He wiped the wetness off his face, like tears. Or blood. James watched him.

“But I loved her – I really did love that girl – well, s’much as a randy little oik can...”

James didn’t know where all this was going, and didn’t really care. All he was thinking of was when he’d do it – when exactly he’d get up and go out and get some fresh air. There was a queasy sickness in his stomach now, what with all the heat, and he felt faint.

“We screwed anywhere in them days...used to ‘ave a quickie round the back in the storerooms, and even in the big walk-in freezer where we kept all the frozen stuff...”

James felt so thirsty. He’d like to jump into that freezer right now, roll around in the frozen peas and fish fingers and oven chips, get right up close to the Findus crispy pancakes and French bread pizzas, and breathe the ice crystals deep into his lungs. The heat was becoming unbearable and his breathing shallow and laboured. He felt sick and really needed to go outside.

“We was at it so much, I didn’t fink she’d be ‘avin’ it off wiv anyone else...Well, you never fink that, do yah?”

Big Tel looked at James. James looked at the hot stones hissing. Big Tel couldn’t know, could he? How could he know?

“But see, fing is, this bird, well...she was...” he coughed, “getting her brains shagged out by some uvver toe-rag an’ all...I followed her, see – I saw her...”

James felt tepid liquid trickle down the inside of his thigh.  Weirdly, his legs felt cold in the heat.

“Course, she never knew I followed her...an’ course, she’s finkin’ I know nuffink’...”

Big Tel turned and looked James straight in the eye.

“So thass when I fought to meself – I gotta take care of fings...”

“Really?” said James, calmly, as if commenting on the weather.

“Yeah,” said Big Tel, “Really. So, next day, we was in the walk-in freezer down at work, just after we closed up for the night, an’ I’m shaggin’ the bird’s tits off as per usual...”

James’ breathing was laboured now and his face felt odd, as though it were melting in the heat.

“An’ then, ‘fore she knows whass goin’ on, I runs out the walk-in freezer and locks the door behind me...”

James looked at Big Tel. He seemed even bigger than usual – a big, fat toad squatting beside him on the bench.

“They di’n’t find her till the next mornin’,” whispered Big Tel, “And yer know what? She was frozen solid... like an ice lolly...”

Silence. Big Tel had a dark look on his face and was staring at James. James swallowed and said nothing. Big Tel had just admitted to murdering an old girlfriend, hadn’t he? James wasn’t sure. Was this some kind of threat?

But he couldn’t know about him and Maria, could he? How could he? They were always so careful.

Then, Big Tel threw back his head and laughed that huge coarse laugh of his.

“You didn’t fink I was serious, did yah?” he said, “Ain’t you never ‘eard no-one tell you that old urban miff before?”

It’s myth, you cretin – urban myth! Not miff! Learn how to speak properly you common and vulgar fat-headed barrow-boy City banker bastard!

James felt very ill now and had to get some fresh air. He could feel his heartbeat stuttering with palpitations, and his lungs felt cold and hot at the same time, as though they were filling with fluid.

“Relax,” said Big Tel, like a pimp breaking in a fresh whore, “I’m only ‘avin’ a laugh...”

“I...I...just have to...”

“Chill out, Jimmy!”

James eased himself up from the bench, slowly and carefully. He was a bit unsteady on his feet, like a drunk or a toddler.

“...toilet...” he said, gesturing. His throat was so parched that he could barely form the word. He was burning up.

Big Tel had a fixed grin on his face as he watched James leave.

“OK Jimmy,” he said, “Ta-tah”.

Big Tel leant back against the pine seat, puffing out his cheeks as he closed his eyes and enjoyed the moment. He felt sure the stuff he’d spiked the energy drink with would have taken effect more quickly like they said – but so long as it got the job done! That was the main thing.

After some considerable effort, James was outside in the basement area. He could breathe, at last. He closed the sauna door behind him. He had to do it now.

There was a large, heavy table against the wall next to the sauna door – it was where he had left his bottle of energy drink. James pushed the table so that it was in front of the sauna door, as he and Maria had practised doing a couple of weeks before, and leant forward onto it. There was no way even Big Tel could push both him and the table out of the way now.

Then, also as planned, he reached out – (his arm felt so heavy and cold!) – and turned up the sauna setting up as high as it would go on the dial. He didn’t think it would take long, not in that heat.

When he was sure the door was secured, he unscrewed the bottle of energy drink and took a long slow swig. He was so thirsty. The drink didn’t seem to quench his thirst at all; if anything, he seemed to be getting hotter. He felt like one of those cartoon characters who gets shot, then has a drink and watches the water pouring out of the bullet holes in his body – the liquid seemed to be leaking away somewhere, to be seeping out of his body with his strength. He gulped in deep mouthfuls of breaths, trying to cool himself down.

Soon, there was the sound of Big Tel coughing coming from inside the sauna.  James felt a light nudge on the door. Then another. Then more pushing – harder, this time.

“Oi! Jimmy!” said the voice from inside the sauna, “Oi! Open this door – I’m warnin’ you!”

Then the knocking and banging started. But even though he was feeling sick, and the burning in his lungs was getting worse, James leant hard on the table against the sauna door with all his body weight. He would not budge. Not until it was over.

Big Tel was swearing and cursing now, calling him every name under the sun, saying he knew what had been going on, threatening him with imaginative deaths. And then he started rambling about some energy drink. James ignored him. The noises soon became one in his ears – just a buzzing drone of voices and screams. His eyes were closed; he was concentrating on trying to feel better.

When it was done, James would put everything back the way it was and call the emergency services, say that Big Tel had just seemed to wilt in the heat of the sauna – that he had gripped his left arm and collapsed on the floor like a damp towel.

Another fat overpaid City boy having a heart attack. It wasn’t unusual. And anyway, who’d care?

After the noises had stopped, he’d open the sauna door, check Big Tel was dead, and then call the ambulance. When the paramedics arrived, they could take a look at him too.

He really was feeling very ill now – his insides were burning and his hands and legs were starting to go numb. His headache was like the worst hangover he’d ever had – it was as though something were burrowing inside his skull, burning and stinging his brain. He started to shiver and shake, hot and cold like ice and fire. Everything in the world around him seemed to be melting into a pale blur, as if something were bleeding it dry.

James leant forward further onto the table and propped his head against the sauna door. He closed his eyes and waited for Big Tel’s screaming to stop.

There was absolutely no way James was going to leave now, not until after he was well and truly dead.

 

 

@Death

 

Dead lucky really that they found it before it rained.

 

It had just been lying there face down on the grass verge next to the dual carriageway. Maybe someone had chucked it out of the window of a moving car? But who’d want to dump a laptop?

 

A laptop wasn’t the kind of thing you accidentally lost, like a pair of gloves – unless you wanted to, that is – and it wasn’t as though they’d found it on a train or a bus either. And laptops didn’t just fall out of car windows or off roof racks either.

 

Maybe someone had nicked it from somewhere, then dumped it – like kids chuck shoplifted sweets and stuff so their mums don’t find it and get suspicious. Possible. But unlikely.

 

It couldn’t have been there for long, nestling half-hidden in the long grass, or else one of the other local kids would have been on it for sure. Also, it had rained heavily earlier that morning, and the laptop was completely dry, so it must have been dumped in the last hour or two.

 

Joe was the first to see it – the glint of something metallic in the grass. He thought it was a hubcap at first.

They’d been skateboarding along the pavement when Joe suddenly flipped his board up into his hands and ran over to the grass verge of the dual carriageway. Ollie followed him.

 

“Well cool!” said Joe, picking up the laptop

 

“Cool!” said Ollie, “It’s a laptop!”

 

“Derrr!” said Joe, sarcastic as always, “But wrong – it’s not a laptop, it’s my laptop.”

 

Ollie didn’t argue. He hadn’t been the first to see the laptop, after all – though he knew that if he’d been the first to see it Joe would have claimed half.

 

He stood behind Joe, watching him and waiting for his reaction as he slid the chrome catch on the front edge of the laptop, and opened it up like a book.  The keypad and screen looked intact, and the way the machine opened smoothly suggested it was both undamaged and good quality.

 

Joe smiled. Ollie saw this and smiled too. He always copied Joe, like one of those birds that squawk what you say to them back at you. They looked at each other like they did in class at school, conspirators speaking a secret language to each other, congratulating each other on their telepathy.

 

The laptop was in great condition: the metallic silver-coloured casing didn’t have a scratch on it. In fact, it looked brand new. The wet grass must have cushioned its fall. That meant it probably wasn’t damaged on the inside either.

 

Joe pretend-weighed the laptop in his hands. It was pleasingly heavy. This find could be worth something.

“Heavy means expensive,” he said.

 

“Yeah, we can sell it!”

 

“No,” said Joe, “Better to check it out, see what’s on it.”

 

“Yeah,” said Ollie, nodding; “Maybe it’s like from M15 and stuff!” he said, his voice high-pitched and excited.

They were fourteen, nearly fifteen, but Ollie was by far the smaller of the two, and looked much younger. His mind was more a child’s than a man’s too.

 

Joe rolled his eyes at Ollie and tutted like a teacher.

 

“You are such a knob,” he said, matter-of-fact.

 

Ollie looked down at the grass and said nothing.

 

The sky was glowing a sickly yellow and an electric smell of rain was tense and metallic in the air. Joe decided that they should go home and try out the laptop. He jumped off the grass verge, slammed his skateboard on the pavement and skated off. Ollie followed him, like a puppy.

 

It began raining hard soon after they’d got in. The rat-tat-tat of raindrops on the corrugated shed roof in the garden was like machine gun bullets in war films.

 

They were in Joe’s bedroom. They usually hung out there. Ollie lived nearby but he had to share a bedroom with his annoying little brother, and his house wasn’t as big as Joe’s either. He envied Joe his own bedroom, and other things.

 

The laptop was sitting open on the desk, its screen dead and dark as a grave.

 

“What if it’s...sort of like...dodgy?” said Ollie, “illegal and stuff...?”

 

“Dunno,” Joe shrugged, “What, like child porn and shit?”

 

“Dunno,” shrugged Ollie.

 

“Whatever,” said Joe, “S’not our problem.”

 

They spent a lot of time looking at porn on Joe’s computer, but didn’t want to get into trouble with their parents or the police for anything really sick.

 

They’d looked all over the laptop for marks of any kind, scanned every square centimetre, but there wasn’t anything: no Dell, Sony or Mac or any other logo anywhere.

 

“Could be a prototype of some kind,” said Joe.

 

“Yeah, a secret model!”

 

“Could’ve been nicked,” said Joe.

 

“Maybe from M15!” said Ollie, wishing he hadn’t. Joe rolled his eyes.

 

They sat on the bed and looked at their warped ghostly reflections in the black laptop screen.

 

Ollie thought about saying that perhaps somebody had lost it so they should hand it in somewhere because there could be a reward, but decided not to say anything. He remembered that it wasn’t actually his laptop anyway.

 

Then Joe pressed the ON button. Nothing.  He pressed it again.

 

“It’s knackered,” said Ollie.

 

“Or... battery’s dead,” Joe said.

 

He went over to the desk, unplugged his own computer, felt for the port on the new laptop and put the cable into it. A perfect fit.

 

Joe pressed the ON button again. Nothing.

 

Joe starred at the screen. He clenched his teeth together repeatedly, making the muscles at the top of his face spasm and twitch, as though insects were struggling to escape from under the skin.

 

If the laptop wouldn’t work, they’d smash it up later, perhaps set it on fire and film it with Joe’s new mobile.

Suddenly, there was the faint sound of something electric stirring, like a static spark of a Van De Graaff generator, deep inside the machine.

 

“Shhh!” said Joe, before Ollie had had a chance to say anything, “Something’s happening...”

 

Then a small green light below the laptop screen came on.

 

“It’s working!” said Ollie. He looked more than ever like a little boy.

 

The black screen faded in to grey; a little worm of a timer moving left to right showed the laptop booting up.

“Cool,” said Ollie, admiring Joe’s skill.

 

Joe smiled and kept his eyes fixed on the screen, which flashed blue and asked for a password.

“It wants a password,” said Ollie, stupidly.

 

Joe said nothing; he was thinking. He’d cracked passwords before.

 

He tried the usual common passwords: 

 

‘Password’ first of all. It was really incredible how many people used that one.

 

Nothing.

 

Then 12345. Loads of people used that too.

 

Nope.

 

54321. Another spazzy password.

 

Nothing again.

 

He’d have to work on getting the password later. There were programs available online that could help – he’d check them out later when Ollie had gone – download something.

 

Then, Joe sensed something odd – a sort of dark whispering deep within his skull. His thought he felt his brain bending into a new and strange shape – it was like a headache, but not painful at all, just... It was like when you come out of a dream but are still half asleep. But different.

 

Then, for some reason – he had no idea why – the password popped into his head. And he knew – he just knew – it was right. It was the letters of his name.

 

He typed the word into the laptop, in capitals – just like he’d seen it in his mind’s eye:

 

J

 

Ollie watched the careful and deliberate movements of Joe’s finger on the keyboard.

 

O

 

Then, finally:

 

E

 

The password was accepted with a tinny ping from the laptop. It began whirring into life.

 

Joe grinned like a perv.

 

“How did you...?” asked Ollie.

 

“Dunno,” said Joe, “Lucky guess?”

 

He wasn’t going to tell Ollie about the weird mentalist stuff.

 

The screen cut to black for a split second before displaying a standard deep blue coloured background.

 

“HELLO JOE!” said the box in the middle of the laptop screen.

 

Ollie’s mouth fell open. Joe smiled. The cursor was blinking in the reply box.

 

“Cool!” he said, and typed ‘hello’ in the reply box.

 

“Cool!” parroted Ollie.

 

Then, the laptop screen went black and its whirring faded to silence, like something dying. An instant later, the screen came back on showing a range of icons, just like Joe’s own computer.

 

‘Well weird’, thought Joe. How could that happen?

 

“Get us a coke from the fridge Ollie, yeah?” said Joe, not taking his eyes off the screen.

 

Ollie stood up and walked to the door, like a servant.

 

“Oh and some peanut butter sandwiches – no crusts.”

 

Ollie nodded and left the room. He was used to this – it was the price he paid for being Joe’s friend.

 

Joe opened his email account on the laptop and looked at his messages. Ollie clumped down the stairs – a final thud told Joe he had jumped the final four or five steps. He was such a child!

 

He deleted the usual pervy spam, and flicked through some messages from mates. But there was one email that jumped out at him – it seemed to be brighter than the others, somehow, in a strange way he couldn’t understand.

 

“HELLO JOE!” it said.

 

He looked at who the email was from. It was from a sender called @Death.

 

It had to be a wind-up. Joe frowned, then laughed and opened the email.

 

There was no message in the email box, just a link, in the usual electric blue lettering, to a website called @Death. Joe hesitated slightly, then clicked on it.

 

A window opened on his laptop screen: a webcam image. He could see someone sitting with their back to him, in a chair at a desk, by a window with rain outside and...

 

Joe gasped. He realised it was him on the laptop screen. A sharp chill went up his spine.

 

He looked behind him. He couldn’t see any camera– there was just the wall, covered with Joe’s posters, where the camera would have to be to show the image the laptop was showing now.

 

He lifted his hand up slowly – the image on the laptop did the same. Then a shadow came into view on the screen, spreading like a dark puddle of blood towards the seated figure on the screen.

 

Joe looked round quickly. He couldn’t see any shadow.

 

He turned back to look at the laptop screen – this showed the shadow was still there. Joe turned round again.

 

Nothing.

 

Then, for a final time, he looked back at the laptop and screamed.

 

Ollie was just finishing making the peanut butter sandwiches when he heard it – a high-pitched gurgle of a scream. It had to be a wind-up – some recorded podcast or video clip coming through the computer speakers. He’d never heard Joe – or anyone else – scream like that before.

 

“Joe?” he called as he bounded up the stairs, “You OK?”

 

There was no reply.

 

Ollie rushed into the bedroom. Joe was sitting in the chair, the laptop open in front of him, its screen black and lifeless.

 

“Joe?” said Ollie. He felt a freezing cold sensation, as though a ghost had walked through him.

 

Weirdly, there was a mouldy smell in the room, like spores and fungus in a dark wood. Something earthy; an ancient smell.

 

“C’mon, stop kidding!”

 

Joe still didn’t turn round.

 

Ollie moved towards the desk.

 

“Joe?” Ollie said, quietly. And then he saw him.

 

Joe’s eyes were wide open staring at the black laptop screen. There was a look of sheer terror on his face. It was as white as an ipod.

 

Ollie tried to scream but found he couldn’t.

 

He didn’t know why, but Ollie reached out his hand and touched Joe’s face. It was freezing cold like old stone walls in churches. Joe was dead.

 

Ollie ran out of the bedroom and phoned for help.

 

‘Sudden death syndrome’ was what they said had killed Joe. It happened to young healthy people for some reason, or no reason. Ollie didn’t tell anyone about the laptop.

 

After the funeral, Joe’s mum told Ollie that she’d like him to come round to the house later. Ollie thought she was coping quite well. He thought of telling her that when their dog had got run over he’d got over it in six months, but decided against it.

 

To Ollie’s surprise, Joe’s mum offered him a memento. She said this is what people often did when someone died – people who knew the deceased could take something that reminded them of that person. She said she knew Ollie was Joe’s best friend. Ollie’s heart swelled with pride at this, despite not really believing that to be true. Joe was so popular he could have any friend he wanted.

 

She stood there as Ollie looked around Joe’s bedroom. He’d love to have a bedroom like that – there was so much stuff! But he understood that he could only choose one thing. He saw it lying under some exercise books at the side of the desk, which was where he himself had put it that day when Joe died.

 

Later, back in his own bedroom, Ollie connected the laptop. It was so cool to be using his own computer instead of using the ones at school or someone else’s. And they’d both found the laptop that day by the dual carriageway – him and Joe – so it was sort of half his anyway really.

 

Ollie pressed the ON button. The laptop buzzed and whirred and the green light came on under the screen, as before. It asked for a password. Ollie typed J then O then E as before.

 

“PASSWORD INVALID”, it said.

 

Then, for a reason Ollie couldn’t explain, the password came into his head, like an image in a dream:

 

O he typed.

 

Then L

 

L

 

I

 

And finally, ‘E’.

 

“HELLO OLLIE”, the laptop screen said. Ollie smiled wide, amazed that it had accepted his name as a password. The laptop – his laptop – was actually working! Then it died for a moment before coming on again, displaying a selection of icons like before with Joe.

 

The first thing Ollie did was go to look his email account – the one he used at school and on other people’s computers.

 

Apart from the pervy spam, there was just one message in the inbox – from a sender called @Death. Mad name, Ollie thought.

 

It had to be a wind up, or perhaps a virus of some kind – but the security software was saying it was OK.

He clicked the email open. There was no message in the email, just a link in the usual electric blue lettering.

Ollie’s finger hovered over the touchpad, unsure whether to click on it. He tried to think of what Joe would do.

 

The link was to a site called @Death.

 

 

The End

 

 

Author’s Note:

I wrote this story a couple of years ago and it was published in an arty magazine called PopCult. This is my first – and, so far, only – story foir teenage/YA readers, and possibly my only horror story too (though some would say my novel ‘Rasmus – a Television Tale’ is full of horrific scenes). I really wanted to use new technology in the story too.

As is often the case with me, I started with the title – in this case, just the title before I knew anything about what the story was going to be. The title ‘@Death’  just looked and sounded good – and that’s usually enough for me. A title has to sound good.

The inspiration came from where I grew up in Heath Lane, Dartford. I used to walk over the grass verge at the junction of (Upper) Heath Lane and Princes Road every day on the way home from school. I was always finding all sorts of things there – usually bits of cars like hub caps and wing mirrors, which I’d sometimes take home and hang on my bedroom wall.

I just wondered what if some 21^st century kids found something more interesting in that very spot…

Jem PJ Vanston

 

 

The Hand

‘But the hand has been here for centuries...’

‘All the more reason, comrade, to cleanse our Socialist homeland of such out-of-date and irrational nonsense, is it not?’

František Tenzer looked as small and neat as a cat next to the enormous besuited bulk of Eisenreich, a man whose huge, thick-lipped head made him resemble nothing so much as a rather large and lumpy species of toad.

They were standing in the Baroque Church of St James in Prague’s Old Town. High on the wall above them, suspended from a chain like an old-fashioned shop sign, hung ‘the hand’.

Everybody knew the legend. One night, centuries ago, a thief had tried to steal jewels from the statue of the Madonna on the altar. But as he reached up to unburden her, she sprang to life and grabbed his arm, before turning immediately back to stone, leaving him trapped. When the monks arrived the next day, they tried in vain to free the thief, but eventually realised that they had no option but to lop the arm off below the elbow.

The grisly limb, blackened and wizened, had hung in the church ever since – though, these days, responsibility for it rested with The State. Tenzer was the museum curator with direct responsibility for it – hence the State Official’s visit.

Tenzer accepted that he was not living in The Middle Ages. This was 1962 – a modern, civilised and enlightened age – and so such superstitions should not be considered historical fact. However, such artefacts were part of history, infused in the memory of Prague; they should thus not be discarded or destroyed.

The fact that Tenzer was the youngest curator in the museum’s history suggested that he rarely did anything as stupid as saying what he thought; however, that did not mean he couldn’t ask gentle questions:

‘Perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘the hand can act as a useful reminder to all citizens that criminal behaviour will not go unpunished. It could be called educational.’

Eisenreich’s croaky laugh echoed through the aisles like ghosts.

‘Educational?’ he snorted, ‘A silly superstition like that? Comrade, please! Fairy tales have no place in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. I have my orders. Now take it down.’

Tenzer climbed the step ladder and, using wire cutters, obeyed: he knew he had no choice.

Later, Tenzer watched the shrivelled hand hiss and spit into ashes in a furnace, Eisenreich’s bulging bull-frog eyes widening in wonder as it disappeared forever into the dancing flames. The hand was now invisible, indeed.

*

          Two weeks later, Tenzer was surprised to find Eisenreich waiting for him at the museum one morning.

‘But you told me to burn it – you were there.’

‘I merely observed, comrade,’ insisted Eisenreich, ‘it was you who cut the hand down and placed it in the furnace, was it not?’

‘Yes, but...’

‘And you – not I – are the museum curator directly responsible for such relics.’

Silence.

Eisenreich explained:

‘There has been a change of policy – at senior level,’ he said, nibbling his bottom lip as a toad would a worm.

Tenzer sat down. He felt as weak as a kitten.

‘It can’t be that difficult to find another one. This is a museum – it’s full of old bones.’

Tenzer looked up at the squat form of Eisenreich: that suit, that smile, those lips.

‘But to steal a museum artefact, put it up in the church and say it’s the same mummified hand as before...’

‘We don’t have to say anything.’

‘People will notice.’

‘How? I’m sure that one old dead hand looks much like another. Anything can be changed – improved – these days, comrade. Photographs, for example.’

Tenzer knew what Eisenreich was referring to: the doctored images from which out-of-favour politicians sometimes mysteriously vanished. He knew that history, these days, was whatever The State wanted it to be.

The toad licked his lips into a smile.

‘And besides, what alternative do you have?’

Tenzer noticed that he had said ‘you’, not ‘we’: it was always ‘you’ with men like Eisenreich.

‘If it were to be discovered that a museum curator had wilfully destroyed the hand from the Church of St James, well....’

Tenzer did not need to hear the end of the sentence, and Eisenreich knew it: he exited, leaving the curator alone with his thoughts in the half-spoken silence.

What on earth could Tenzer do? After all, he had seen with his own eyes the mummified hand consumed by the furnace flames.

But then, Eisenreich was right: the museum was full of old bones.

Tenzer walked to the Prehistory Department on the top floor and stood in front of a glass case.

Bones. Hundreds and hundreds of bones. Bones that dated to the Neolithic era, bones of his ancestors – and Eisenreich’s. Bones of all parts of the human body – bones of many bodies.

Could he perhaps take some of these bones and fashion a new, old mummified hand? Maybe using papier-mâché? Old newspapers and glue and...

No no no! What was he thinking?

These were priceless artefacts – part of the history of his homeland. It was his job – his duty – to protect and preserve them!

He would just have to find a human hand somewhere else.

But where?

The medical school? Too official – they’d never give him access.

A mortuary? Possibly.

A graveyard? Maybe he could dig someone up?

A claw of horror – sheathed in shame – gripped Tenzer’s heart as he realised, with a shudder, that he was seriously considering becoming a body snatcher.

No, he couldn’t do that: he wouldn’t desecrate the innocent dead. For the sake of the families, if nothing else.

Tenzer worried himself home thinking about hands and bodies and bones.

Then an idea struck him – (he remembered a former school-friend who worked up at Žižkov) – and it was an idea that grew like mould in his mind.

He couldn’t do it, could he?

Could he?

But then, what would happen to him if he didn’t?

*

‘Y’know if I had my way I’d feed him to the dogs myself.’

Tenzer winced at the image; his old friend Honza barked a laugh.

‘Only joking!’ he said, then under his breath: ‘I could never be that cruel to dogs.’

‘Why is he so bruised-looking and black?’ whispered Tenzer, with a reverential hush – they were, after all, in the echoing bowels of the mausoleum, at the National Memorial at Vítkov, high above Prague.

‘Stomach-churning, isn’t it? Such is death,’ smiled Honza, taking a bite from the sausage he took from his pocket.

‘And that smell!’

‘Formaldehyde – old stinky here’s leaking as bad as the plumbing in my apartment.’

The embalmed body of President Klement Gottwald (deceased 1953) lay before them on a slab of marble, where he had been taken from his tomb to have one of his regular ‘flushings’ – whereby fresh embalming liquid would be forced into his veins, in a somewhat futile attempt to stop the process of ‘progressive putrefaction’.

‘The Russians used to say that a true saint would never rot,’ said Honza, through a mouthful of meat, ‘but then, look what happened to them! Touch his leg. Go on!’

Reluctantly, Tenzer reached forward. Honza grinned.

‘But it’s – ’

‘Fake? Course it is! Just the legs though – we had to chop ‘em off when they started to get really whiffy. There are limits to what even Socialist embalmers can do.’

‘So, what are...?’

‘Mannequins. Department store dummies. Best quality too – imported.’

Tenzer stared at the blotchy, mottled body of Klement Gottwald, grotesque and literally legless, on the marble slab.

‘We were gonna sort his arms out later this year anyway – so I can’t see any harm in doing it now. It’s armless, after all! Geddit?’

Honza guffawed loudly at his joke.

‘I...I just need one arm, severed below the elbow.’

‘Oh no – you can’t take all the best bits and leave me the gristle! All or nothing, comrade!’

*

The noses of little dogs, and not a few fellow citizens, twitched at Tenzer on the metro. The smell really was atrocious – meaty, chemical, odd.

It was this that attracted the attentions of the yappy little animal that belonged to his neighbour when he arrived home.

‘Shoo,’ said Tenzer, knowing that the old lady tended to leave her apartment door propped open for the air (and perhaps the gossip too).

But the little pooch didn’t shoo – it yapped and snapped at Tenzer. And then, as he was struggling to put his key in the door, the brown paper parcel dropped to the floor and fell open.

Within an instant, the terrier had fastened its jaws around its prize, refusing to let go. It snarled, it growled, it tugged – then it ran back into his neighbour’s apartment crunching, in its hungry teeth, the little finger it had ripped from one of the embalmed hands.

*

At last, it looked passable.

Tenzer had roasted the arms for hours, interrupted only by a knock on the door from his elderly neighbour enquiring about the recipe for the spicy pork dish he was cooking.

Then, with varnish, paint, glue and a very sharp knife, he fashioned something which, if you squinted from a distance, looked more or less like the original mummified hand. The next day, Tenzer would go with Eisenreich to the Church of St James to re-hang it, and everything would be back to normal.

But what on earth was he going to do with the rest of Klement Gottwald? It wasn’t as though he could just put the leftover limbs in the outside rubbish – there were dogs to worry about, for one thing.

And if he just dumped them somewhere, he might be seen. Then someone might find the body parts and report a murder.

But what can you do with one and a half human arms? Where to dispose of such grisly reminders of history?

Then, he had an idea...

*

Later that year, the putrefying body of the former President, minus legs, minus arms, and very definitely minus dignity, was cremated at last.

In 1963, Tenzer himself was awarded ‘The Order of Klement Gottwald – for Building a Socialist Homeland’. He had apparently been recommended for the honour by Eisenreich, whom he noticed at the ceremony, a knowing smile licked onto his big wet lips. It was the last time Tenzer saw him.

Nobody ever noticed anything unusual about the hand hanging in the Church of St James, much to Tenzer’s relief; they probably just assumed the old one had been taken away for a while for restoration.

Of course, he never discussed the hand with anyone. As ever, Tenzer remained as quiet and self-contained as a cat.

*

If you visit The National Museum in Prague today, and make your way to the top floor, you can sometimes see an old man standing in front of a glass case.

And if you peer with him into that case, you will see a collection of ancient bones, excavated from the Czech lands and dating back many thousands of years. If you look closely, you will see that some bones are just that little bit whiter than the rest. And if you look very closely, you might also see that one particular skeletal hand is also missing its little finger.

You may then notice the old man standing next to you smiling slightly. You may even recognise him as Professor Tenzer, well-respected and retired head of all Czech museums – though if you ask him why the little finger is missing, the chances are that he will not say a lot.

And he would certainly never comment on the rumour which circulates from time to time that some of the bones are those of Communist President Klement Gottwald, a man voted the worst Czech in history in a 2005 TV poll.

‘Fairy tales have no place in museums,’ the old man may mumble – though, most likely, he will nod at you politely before walking off towards the exit, with a smile as silent as his secrets, alone.

 

 

 

 

Mother’s Little Helper

 

It always came down to money in the end.

If they’d had money, then there wouldn’t have been a problem: Gwyneth wouldn’t have had to spend her life caring for her elderly mother – something she did willingly, and with love; but it was hard sometimes. Her mother could then have gone into The Glades, the exclusive care home on Gower. All it took was money – but they didn’t have it; not that kind of money anyway.

Gwyneth sat in the kitchen and sipped her ‘cup of tea’ – a brew made with a generous helping of gin, plus tonic, and with no tea in it at all. Just one large one wouldn’t hurt, even though she was just about to go for a drive. Without her little car she’d go completely barmy stuck there in the house in Mumbles – she loved going for walks on Gower: it cleared her head.

Caswell was beautiful that day. The beach stretched to the sea in the distance, where Gwyneth could see tiny wet-suited surfers splashing in the waves. The sky was large and blue, with steam train puffs of cloud chugging across it, chased by something sinister: the electric darkness of a thunder cloud, bursting over the sea far off to the west. But it would be a good hour or so before it reached them.

The hills around the bay were sprinkled with gorse flowers, newly minted coins glinting yellow and gold in the spring sunshine. Wild flowers were gorgeous in the woods at this time of the year too – so, after her walk, Gwyneth decided to explore Bishop’s Wood, next to the car park. The chirruping of birds welcomed her as she climbed up into the wood. And then something else chirruped, from somewhere to her right.

The sound was unmistakable: it was a mobile phone. Intrigued, Gwyneth walked towards the sound of the ringtone, and soon she found its source, nestling under the shrubbery: a black holdall. At that very moment, the mobile’s shrill ringing stopped.

Gwyneth felt like one of those characters in the detective dramas she watched with her mother on the television as she lifted the bag out from under the bush. Maybe the holdall was full of money? More likely it belonged to a student and had been hidden there as a prank. She only hoped it wasn’t body parts or an abandoned baby.

She took a deep breath and then, in one steady assured movement, unzipped the bag. When Gwyneth looked inside, she gasped.

For there, in the holdall, the mobile phone she had heard was sitting on a cushion of little plastic bags, each of which was filled with white powder. Gwyneth wasn’t stupid – she knew what it was straight away: drugs. It had to be. Well, it was hardly likely to be flour, was it, unless someone was planning a baking day in the woods? What kind of drugs though? In the television detective dramas, white powder always meant heroin or cocaine, so presumably the bags were filled with one of those. A sudden chill of wind made Gwyneth’s heart flutter like the leaves of the trees above her. She looked around; there was no-one there.

Then Gwyneth did something that she thought only other people would do: she picked up the holdall and walked back to the car park with it – as though that were the most normal thing in the world.

A white flash of lightening and clap of thunder heralded the hammering of raindrops on Gwyneth’s car as she left Caswell. The tarmac of the road hissed and fizzed in the downpour. It was just as she was nearing the top of the hill that Gwyneth heard something behind the whoosh-click-swoosh of the windscreen wipers: a siren. Then a black car came round the corner heading for Caswell, so close to Gwyneth’s car that she felt it sway; soon after, a police car screeched in pursuit.

Gwyneth blushed when she thought of what she had in her boot. She thought of stopping – of telling the police that she had found the bag and was on her way to hand it in – but it was raining so hard and the police car seemed in such a terrible rush. No – it would be far better to take the holdall home; she could hand it in at the police station in the morning.

That evening, after dinner, Gwyneth left her mother watching television and went upstairs. She pulled the holdall from under her bed, opened it and stared at the contents. Even though she had brought the bag home with her, she almost didn’t expect it to be real. It was all just so peculiar: a woman like her doing such a thing. What was she thinking? Gwyneth felt a pang of guilt which was fast developing into shame when the mobile started ringing. She looked at it in horror.

What should she do? Answer it? But who would be calling? The owner of the holdall? And presumably they would want their bag  back. Gwyneth hadn’t thought of that when she’d taken it home. The drugs would be worth money, of course – maybe hundreds of pounds – and people tended not to like losing money. Or what if it was a customer? Someone who wanted to buy drugs from the dealer who owned the holdall?

Without knowing why, Gwyneth picked up the mobile, pressed the ‘call answer’ button and held it to her ear.

“Davo? That you?” said a youngish male voice. Well-spoken too.

Gwyneth clicked the call off and put the phone down on the bed. What in God’s name was she doing?

Downstairs, she made herself a very large ‘cup of tea’ and drank it down in one.

The next day, Gwyneth took the holdall to the police station. Except she didn’t – although she had meant to. She had even put on her coat and gone upstairs to retrieve the holdall. It was just then that the mobile had rung. Gwyneth answered it.

“Davo?” the voice said.

“Davo isn’t here, I’m afraid,” said Gwyneth. Well, she might as well say something.

The caller ended the call. Immediately, the mobile rang again.

“Who you?” said the voice; Gwyneth thought she heard Cardiff in it, and private schooling.

“Mary,” said Gwyneth, spontaneously settling on the pseudonym as her eyes glimpsed a religious print on the wall.

“So when can you deliver?”

Gwyneth thought, and the thoughts crunched in her skull like cogs in old machinery.

“Anytime you prefer,” she said, startled at her words.

The man wanted two bags – twenty grams – of ‘charlie’, he said. Gwyneth said she’d be there within the hour.

She had no idea why she was doing this. No idea at all. But a few minutes later Gwyneth found herself driving along the Mumbles Road with two bags of cocaine wrapped in a handkerchief in her coat pocket. She turned into the Marina and found the address. She rang the bell. For a moment the thought of turning and running away entered her head – but she didn’t. The intercom squealed and she was buzzed into the apartment block. A man of around thirty was standing by the opened door of his apartment, dressed smartly in a slick suit; he looked like a solicitor.

“Mary,” he said.

Gwyneth nodded. She didn’t smile; she was too busy trying not to show how nervous and scared she was. The man took the two bags and examined them. Then he produced a wad of cash from his pocket, handed it over and closed the door.

The first thing Gwyneth did when she got home was to count – and recount – the little bags full of white powder in the holdall. One hundred and ninety eight bags left now. The man at the marina had paid her £800. For two bags. That meant two hundred bags were worth £80,000.

After making herself a large ‘cup of tea’ – with ice and lemon – Gwyneth knew what she had to do. She had one hundred and ninety bags left, so she could always spare one.

Copying what she had seen on the television, Gwyneth sprinkled the powder from one of the little bags onto her dressing table mirror, held a crisp fifty pound note to her left nostril, and snorted. Her immediate reaction was to sneeze, then sneeze again:  the cocaine tickled and fizzed in her nose – or was it her brain? She repeated the procedure with the right nostril, then lay down on her bed and waited. At first, nothing happened. And then she could feel her brain changing – becoming both fuzzy and clear at the same time. And she could feel the energy – presumably that was what they called ‘the buzz’ on the television. She felt twitchy and nervy, but also had a feeling that she could achieve anything: she somehow felt physically taller and more confident too – it was a type of arrogance she disliked. But she had so much energy! She felt she could run to Caswell Bay and back – but what if someone saw?

Then it occurred to her: cleaning. She had been meaning to do it anyway. So, after hoovering the house from top to bottom, Gwyneth cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, and dusted every surface in the house too: she just couldn’t stop.

So that’s why they take it, she thought, when the effects of the cocaine started to wear off. That was the buzz they were after – all that energy and self-belief. But as Gwyneth stood admiring the sparkling cleanliness of her home, she decided that it wasn’t really her kind of drug. No – she’d stick to her gin: it may well be a bit depressive sometimes, but it was better than the twitchy mania of cocaine and a brain buzzing as though flies were hatching in it. On the plus side, Gwyneth and her mother were perhaps now living in the cleanest house in all of Swansea.

That evening, Gwyneth got two more calls – orders for addresses in Langland and Limeslade – and it was after returning home that Gwyneth realised something strange: she was actually enjoying what she was doing. It was as though her life had acquired some kind of purpose, although perhaps not a morally acceptable one. Maybe her new-found energy and optimism weren’t entirely due to the cocaine, after all.

In the next couple of weeks, Gwyneth made deliveries every day. She was kept so busy that the drug-dealing almost became a full-time job, and the increased activity meant that she now only had one or two cups of ‘tea’ per day too: she had to keep a clear head when dealing with so much cash.

She delivered to apartments in the Marina and the Meridian tower, and to Sketty and Uplands and Gower – and was always careful to wear a hood so as not to be recognised, just in case. She even got orders from Cardiff, mostly from media types in Llandaff, near the BBC, so she drove up twice a week. She had always wondered why these days she could make neither head nor tail of much of what was on the television. Now she knew.

Most evenings, she didn’t get home until after seven, and things were so busy that she hired a part-time care worker for her mother – a retired nurse who lived locally. Under her bed, in the holdall, she stashed the piles of cash, in neat wads, next to the shrinking supply of little plastic bags. When they were all gone, she would relax – but not now, not when she was doing so well. It was just so hectic and tiring being a drug dealer!

In fact, so preoccupied was Gwyneth that she didn’t notice the brand new Mercedes with blacked out windows that was parked opposite her house when she returned home that evening, or the two figures lurking behind her front door as she put the key in the lock.

“C’mon in,” said the smiling man, “Join us.”

Gwyneth did as she was told. Behind her, on either side, were two of what they called ‘heavies’ on the television detective dramas – one black and one white, like chess pieces – the ones who had grabbed her when she’d opened the front door. She sat down on the sofa, and the two men then sat either side of her, squeezing her in. The smiling man, who was clearly their boss, leaned forward in his chair.

“I been telling yer mum, we’re friends o’ yours, Gwyneff.”

The man smiled wide – a gold tooth, or perhaps two, glinted in the electric light. He was dressed in a sharp suit – as were the heavies – and had closely cropped greying hair. He also had a lightening-shaped scar that stretched from the top of his lip to his left ear.

“Would you care for some more tea?” Gwyneth’s mother asked the smiling man. It was only then that Gwyneth noticed the delicate china cup and saucer on the table next to him, plus an arrangement of biscuits on a small plate – from her mother’s best tea service, she knew.

How long had he been there, with her mother? The home-help would have left just over an hour before. Had these thugs been there all that time?

“Fankin’ you,” said the smiling man, “but I’m gonna ‘ave to say no. Ain’t nuffink quite like a cuppa chah though, eh?”

“That’s what my Arthur used to say,” said Gwyneth’s mother – though he certainly had never said it in quite the same Bill-Sykes-style Cockney accent.

“Right,” said Gwyneth to her mother, trying to seem calm, “I just have something to discuss with...my friends...”

She stood up. The two heavies either side of her and the smiling man stood up too.

“Lovely to ‘ave met you,” he said to Gwyneth’s mother, much to her delight: she was always a stickler for good manners.

He followed Gwyneth out to the hall, and they stood looking at each other, like cats.

“We been watchin’ yer, Gwyneff,” said the smiling man.

“But I...I didn’t see...”

“Nah, see, that’d be ‘cause we’re, like, professionals, an’ we don’t like bein’ seen.”

Just how long had these men had been stalking her? Days? Weeks?

“Course, we coulda stopped yer any time, but when we sees yer doing what we sees yer doin’, well...” he turned and smiled at the two heavies, “we di’n’t ‘ave the ‘eart.”

The smiling man’s gold-toothed grin glinted at Gwyneth in the dimness of the hallway.

“Where’s the money?” he said.

Gwyneth was aware that she was standing next to three men who had probably done some horribly violent things in their time, but she just couldn’t help herself, not after all her hard work:

“The money’s mine,” she said, “I earned it by selling the...charlie...so it’s mine – some of it, at least.”

Silence. Gwyneth had no idea where she got the nerve, but if these men wanted to hurt her then they would, and there was nothing she could do about it. 

The two heavies turned to their boss for instruction, but he was so stunned that his face bore the startled rigor mortis expression of a day-old corpse. He was not used to being challenged. Gwyneth just hoped they’d leave her mother alone. Oddly, she felt absolutely calm.

Suddenly, a huge roar bellowed into the air and the boss was laughing so hard he was wiping the tears from his eyes.

“The charlie!” he chortled, “She knows the lingo, don’t she!”

Soon, both of the heavies were emitting bass-tone laughs so deep they could make window panes rattle. But Gwyneth did not much care for being laughed at in her own home, no matter who it was:

“Well, I did, didn’t I? Sell the... charlie, I mean – all over Swansea, and Cardiff too?”

The smiling man, who was recovering from his laughing fit, nodded in agreement.

“Oh yeah, yer did – can’t take nuffink ‘way from yer, girl,” he said.

Gwyneth did not much like being called ‘girl’ either, but decided not to make an issue of it.

“We want our dosh – just what we would’ve got off Davo.”

He saw Gwyneth’s recognition of the name.

“Davo’s...err...busy...at the moment,” he said.

“How much?” said Gwyneth.

“Forty grand,” said the smiling man.

“Wait here.” The heavies’ boss nodded approval and Gwyneth ran upstairs. Within seconds she was handing a wad of cash to the gangland boss.

“It’s all there,” she said.

“Fankin’ you,” said the smiling man, weighing its heft in his hands, “Sorted,” and he  turned to leave.

“No,” said Gwyneth.

This was not a word much heard by any of the men present, but the heavies didn’t want to do a woman unless their boss ordered it personally.

“I mean...I want some more.”

There, she said it. Well, what was the worst that could happen? They could just say no, so there was no harm in asking, was there?

“More?” said the gangland boss, astonished.

“Yes,” said Gwyneth, “More.”

“This ain’t Oliver Twist’s din-dins, darlin’ – this is hard drugs. Coke.”

“I know.”

“You’d end up doin’ time if yer nicked.”

“I won’t get...nicked – I’m good at it. Drug dealing, I mean.”

“Yeah, s’pose you are – better than Davo, the snotty little toe-rag.”

The smiling man shook his head, then his scarred face twisted into a grin.

“If we gives yer more, on a reg’lar basis, you’s gonna be needin’ our services. You can’t just be spendin that kind o’ cash – people got such suspicious minds these days.”

“Alright,” said Gwyneth: she knew she’d need the money laundered before she could spend it – on care home fees, or anything else.

“We’ll open a little account for yer down in Switzerland.”

“Switzerland?”

“Yeah, y’know: big mountains, cuckoo clocks, an’ cheese wiv ‘oles in it.”

Gwyneth nodded: she knew.

The smiling man smiled. They shook hands. The deal was done.

It is highly likely that Gwyneth would not usually have agreed to such a thing, but in the past three weeks she had found out all about cocaine on the internet at the library. One website said:

Cocaine benzoylmethylecgonine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant (Erythroxylon coca). It is a stimulant of the central nervous system, an appetite suppressant, and an anaesthetic.

All very interesting, as was the fact that cocaine was available freely in chemists in the early part of the 20^th century, and was used often by students at Oxford: so no change there then. It was even available in Harrods until 1916 and was also an early ingredient of Coca-cola.

Another website warned:

Although its free commercialization is illegal and has been severely penalized in virtually all countries, its worldwide use remains widespread in many social, cultural and personal settings.

So, illegal but popular, like speeding on the M4 – but Gwyneth knew that about drugs already, from watching TV detective dramas.

Other websites went on to say that coca leaves had been part of Inca culture for centuries before Europeans arrived in the Americas, with traces dating back millennia.

But who exactly profited from the cultivation of cocaine? It seemed that most of the crop was grown in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia by peasant farmers, who processed it too. For this, they’d earn twice the average monthly wage to support their families, though that was still a pittance. Here, then, was the first link in the chain – the start of the journey which ended when Gwyneth found that holdall in the woods and started selling its contents.

She knew it would be the big criminals – in South America and here – who would make most of the money from the cocaine trade, so she resolved there and then that she would donate half of her profits to help those poverty-stricken peasant farmers who actually grew the crop. The morality of what she was doing was questionable, she knew, but if it wasn’t her supplying cocaine to the drug-hungry masses, then it’d be somebody else – and they wouldn’t be donating anything to anybody.

However, there was one incident that made Gwyneth realise the seriousness of what she was doing, and led to her decision to leave the day-to-day dealing to others:

“Excuse me,” said the policeman.

Gwyneth had just collected another holdall containing two hundred packets of cocaine and had lifted it out of the boot of her car and onto the pavement in readiness for carrying into the house. When she turned around, she was so horrified to see the bag firmly in the hands of a policeman that she almost fainted. He carried the holdall into the hall, then left with a cheery wave, happy at the help he had given a member of the local community. Gwyneth’s heart drummed like dance music as she closed the front door behind her.

At first, she thought it unusual that the policeman hadn’t asked any questions, but then, she thought: who would suspect her of anything criminal? She looked more like a librarian than a drug dealer. The incident did give her a fright, though, so she resolved to work hard to ensure she was not so exposed in future: she would have to make direct links with dealers in South America, with the full knowledge of the gangland boss, of course – so that is what she started to do.

The sea was beautiful. Gwyneth had always wanted to travel, but had never had the time or money. Now she had plenty of both.

So here she was, six months after finding that holdall at Caswell, a woman of means strolling on the deck of a cruise liner, watching dolphins dance in the blue waves as they neared the coast of South America. She was so looking forward to exploring the region and meeting up with some of the people she’d been talking to by email. There were several charitable projects in Colombia that Gwyneth wanted to go and have a look at: it would be nice to see where her donations were going, especially the new school she was funding.

She was surprised at the attention of several eligible gentlemen on the cruise, and was perhaps even more surprised that she found one of them rather attractive too. He was a retired lecturer in ancient civilisations at Oxford and was simply fascinating to talk to – though he did seem rather surprised at Gwyneth’s extensive knowledge of Inca coca production. Better still – though sadly, of course – he was a widower, and was considering retiring to the Gower Peninsula. For the first time in decades, Gwyneth felt her heart flutter when talking to a man for reasons other than indigestion.

Gwyneth’s mother loved her new life in The Glades, and had made some firm friends with whom she watched detective dramas on television, betting biscuits on every unfortunate victim’s demise.

Gwyneth, too, looked happier than she had for years, as though she had managed to access a long-hidden well of energy from deep within herself. Soon she found that she no longer needed her regular cups of gin and tonic ‘tea’ at all, though she still enjoyed the occasional tipple – but that was to enhance her life, not to blot it out.

As for how long she’d keep doing this, she didn’t know; but at least now she wasn’t supplying drugs directly to the public but dealing direct with producers, which just felt less grubby somehow. And the money just kept on rolling in: thousands and thousands of pounds of it, all clean and sparkling in her bank accounts in Switzerland, with the mountains, the cuckoo clocks and the holey cheese.

“Shall we?” asked the gentleman.

“Yes, let’s,” said Gwyneth, a soft smile on her face, and the couple strolled off together arm in arm to dinner – at the Captain’s table, no less.

How different Gwyneth’s life was now from before.

And it all came down to money in the end.