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Hmm… this time of year tends to call to mind themes of new beginnings and fresh starts, but that’s a bit of a cliché, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been done before. So let’s look at it the other way. New Year also marks the end of the old year, so please give me up to 500 words on whatever the phrase ‘the end’ calls to your mind.
ODDS AND ENDINGS IN MY LIFE, INCLUDING THE STICKY ONES. .
For me the phrase ‘the end’ invokes a variety of feelings.
Some, such as the end of a candle or bit of soap are not memorable. Those endings flash out of existence in a blink of thoughtlessness, never to be recalled again.
However, dancing along the polar opposite to that, there are many times in my life that flicker and shine like stardust trickling away into memorable endings. You know what I mean, the end of a memorable movie, a long anticipated kiss, the physicality at the end of schooling, of childhood, of a relationship either good or bad. Those events I can cope with, as well as the more ethereal ending of each day, or of extraordinary conversations, because those things I am able to mull over with the practiced consideration of memory and can revisit them whenever the mood takes me.
There are, of course, those other odds and endings that can make you jut out your jaw and huff with frustration. For example, that last ball of wool ending with a mere three rows still needed to complete the item, or that gifted and distinctive pen spluttering out of ink on some half-finished piece. Those events dip in and out of my thoughts for minutes, possibly an hour, but certainly not more than a day, unless I am required to recall them as a learning curve of life.
Then there are those endings which vex me.
These would be those times when the product I’m using is almost at its end and I’m struggling to extract the very last bit out. You know the stuff I mean; the end of a tube of toothpaste, the creams and lotions you can’t seem to empty.
I admit I have a neat little tool, best on metal tubes, you roll up from the bottom squeezing out everything, but the smallest bit, of what they contain for use, but the endings that create the wasp in my underpants, the twitch in my eyebrow, and send me silently screaming ‘WHY’ at the universe are those cardboard cartons of passata, custard or juice and the plastic ketchup and similar condiment, bottles you often struggle to open the seal of and, most definitely, can’t roll up, or get a spoon, or knife, into to scrape out the remainder.
These are the blight of invention, the tormentors of all that exists in the product container world and lamentations about their unyielding structure and unwillingness to give up ending their habitation of my cupboard space are becoming the stuff of legend in my kitchen.
My feelings about those endings are – ‘sorry, you stiff, unnatural, oddities of nature but I paid for the product so I’m jolly well going to get every bit of the item I’m owed.’
Yup, you guessed it, I let my evil, mad-scientist, persona out of her box, don the apron and gloves and cut them open with relish (pun intended) so I can get at their unseen and treasured innards . Mwahhahhah…
(500)
impromptu
you’ll come to a bad end, said my dad in our hallway, in his pyjamas, hands at his sides, knuckles curled, though – as far as I know – he never raised his fists, and what’s more he was too clever for cliché most of the time, but that evening when I came home from the gig with a scent of sweat and beer, I was grinning, shifting from foot to foot, nerves bouncing, still mentally seated at the kit, playing a storm, and could have told him there’s quiet beauty in the light reflecting off a high-hat, an image which might impress him, but after his remark I held my silence about the gig though every synapse still fired because, for the first time, I’d really made the beat swing (hours and hours of practising) but Dad who’d never sat at a kit was holding forth, pompous as an old sod, blinded by his generation, me on my toes, foot to foot, while he was a pillar of stillness in our hall, a man who finished cryptic crosswords and loved my mum, Mum who’d created the problem though I couldn’t and never did say this: how her piano playing in our living room had started it, her practising of scales on the new upright Dad had paid for, the beat on the first note of each four in an octave, up and down, down and up, regular, loud – systematic: that was what caught me, in an unintellectual way, the young teenager in me hearing a structure and the sometimes flexing of it, which I tried to work out by watching Mum’s hands, wrists bending, relaxing, as if taking a breath when she lifted them from the notes for a moment, and all this she was doing because she was in awe of the Schubert Impromptus she learned from sheet music and from Alfred Brendel, Brendel who played them through our record player and Mum repeating them on the piano: da-da-da-dah-dah, said Mum, speaking the rhythm ’til it came right, improving, better, best, just a hobby she’d say and then, as if an apology, Brendel, she’d say, has such lightness and elegance; so when I started playing the drums seriously Dad said why not play a proper instrument, a piano, like your mother – the piano from his salary at the food laboratory where he tested for bacteria, keeping the public safe, a good job well done, and now here I was that evening, still messing about on drums, crashing around, and it’s true that later I never did earn much money but good, I got good, better than Mum who never could play swing though she tried, she tried for me, swing, my favourite then and still is, light and elegant, I can hear it but can’t play it, not properly, joints sticky with arthritis, an end in sight, not to life, but to a kind of religion
(486)
UNTITLED – 350 words
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Lumpy pillows in torn, unidentifiable protective fabric, stuffed into too-small pillow cases. A saggy, foam mattress, plastic-coated and marinated in dilute bleach. A side-room with a window looking onto the whitewashed wall on the other side of the hospital and a door that opens directly opposite the nurses’ station. The rattle of beds and trolleys; the incessant ring of a never-answered telephone and the strident alarms of the central monitoring system. Nurses with sympathetic smiles and too-loud voices. A cocktail of Alfentanil and Midazolam trickling into your system through a subcutaneous needle in your abdomen.
No, my love. It definitely wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Nor will it be.
Today, we will close the door to the ward – and to regrets – and infuse the room with the sound of the ocean kissing the shore. The nurse and I will ditch the baby bath in your disposable cardboard basin and gently wash you in soapy water with the scent of papaya. We will leave the Zerobase and its paraffin foundation in the bedside locker and smooth Hawaiian Tropic after-sun onto your skin. I will blow fine play sand onto the moisturized skin of your feet so you might imagine the feeling of sand between your toes. Beneath your body, as we change the sheets, we will unfurl a beach towel infused with the scent of Lenor’s Citrus and White Verbena, and your head will rest on a soft pillow from home. We will swap your lemon and glycerin mouth-care swabs for ones dipped in rum punch – or mojito, sharp with lime.
I will lie on the bed beside you, holding you close. I will smooth your hair back and kiss your forehead and we will both inhale the warm, diffused scent of Sex on the Beach essential oil, which you laughed at and said it smelt of no such thing. I will smile as I remind you of tangled limbs under a blanket of stars, and you will slide your hand out of my grip and walk purposefully into the dawn.
Oh Sea, cleverly written, this really tugs at a range of emotions: Well, it did mine.
I hope ,when I walk into the dawn, someone does this for me .
I’ll come back tomorrow
I’ll come back tomorrow to look at the clear space between the Co-op and the Santander Bank. The fresh morning sun will light the glistening concrete and the unexpected birds taking baths in puddles where carpets have been carried off. Men in hard hats and hi-vis vests will bundle drills about and smoke their cigarettes and laugh together as their predecessors did a hundred years ago and more, when gathered all together on this spot they shuffled newly polished boots with mingled fear and optimism before they headed off to boats which carried them, now sober, to the downland and marshes about the River Somme.
Today I stand and stare at slabs of masonry. This was the Castle. This was the public house where, too young by many years, I supped my first beer, guided by the reassuring ministrations of the landlord, John. I stood, uncertain at the bar, disconcerted by the dishcloth draped across his massive forearm, all too aware there was no place to hide. Then came that voice, those practised tones.
‘What’ll it be, sir?’
That “sir” had no doubt, no irony, no jocularity for the other patrons.
‘Many people enjoy the bitter here. I can recommend a pint of that.’
So, a pint of that is what I had.
And many more over the years to come. Sometimes too many more. And later I recalled that first beer with wonder. How little it had cost to be initiated into this society. How much better it tasted with the passage of time, and how this building welcomed me back and with so little judgement.
Other prices were higher.
The Castle was a place of education as much as entertainment. Here in its flock-wrapped embrace, I learned to keep company with those like and unlike myself. No more a child, I mixed with low and high, the mighty and the weak. Here I first became acquainted with that old trickster Death, when I came in one evening and the public bar stood silent. There was an empty space where Cyril, a man so ancient that they said he was a second cousin to Methuselah, should be. His absence packed the air so tight that none could bear to breathe it. All abandoned that sticky floor for the lounge.
It taught me about love as I kept trysts with Marys and Susans while old men at the bar exchanged glances full of knowing and I wondered what exactly they knew. It was Nancy who finally taught me that, not the Castle, although the Castle set the scene with a firm push in the right direction.
All this I left behind, and, like an ungrateful son, did not return for years. There was a new landlord, and though I looked, no faces lit with recognition. One drink and then, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’
Too late. No Castle. Just a sign for some demolition firm. They didn’t tell me my old life was ended, and it broke my heart.
Oh, my. Four entries, all excellent, all completely different from each other. For such a small community, whar a range of talents we have.
Terrie, your gallop through the various endings we meet in life was entertaining and thought-provoking, with a nice humorous squib at the end to round things off.
Libby, I applaud your courage in essaying this free-form, stream-of-conciousness style. It’s so easy to fall flat on your face with this, but you carried it off with panache. And then that pang of sadness at the end, the drummer who’s had to give up a life-long passion.
Seagreen, I quite expected this subject to arise considering the brief I set, but not that it would be dealt with so lyrically, so evocatively, so heart-wrenchingly. A beautiful piece of writing.
Athelstone, your piece struck chords with me, not just as a regretful celebration of a vanishing part of British life (I’ve always liked the ambience of the traditional pub), but because it reminded me of the time in the dim and distant past when they demolished the pub in which, a couple of years before, I’d fallen headlong and disastrously in love.
Ah, what a choice! It’ll have to Seagreen, for the way her piece pulled at my heartstrings.
Apologies for being late back to this.
Richard, thank you for the comp and for your kind words. I did try to steer clear of that particular subject matter but, ultimately, it was the only thing that remained front and centre when all the other ideas had scarpered.
Strong field this month and all so marvellously different! 🙂
Late, Seagreen? Not really. It’s only the second of the month, and I didn’t post my judgement yesterday until the middle of the afternoon. No apology needed.
A strong field indeed.
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