Long ago (#1)

I walked to the stone steps along the short winding lane by the abandoned railway siding, past the hole in the chain-link fence where we used to dump our bikes and clamber through on our way to the park, and I wondered if I was retracing your steps. We hadn’t spoken in several years and when I saw that the postmark on the letter you sent was from over a year ago, I realized I had no way to find you.

The underpass was one of the first places I checked, remembering that it was a refuge for us and your battered nylon-string guitar when we were at school. It was empty, of course. No-one went there save for people cutting through the park on the way back from the train station, so after rush hour we would sit on the steps opposite the ramp and you would strum the strings, only occasionally hitting on something resembling a tune. We would share any Silk Cut 100s that you had managed to steal from your mother’s pack and we would hide the lit ends away if someone walked past, burning small holes in our blazers that we could never adequately explain.

I went up to the roundabout to see if you had been in the middle of the oak trees there, hidden from traffic and sight, resting cool in the long leafy shade or dug in by penknife-bitten bark. We had sat there throughout the long summer of 1989 waiting for results that seemed to never come, drinking from bottles of cheap white wine bought from an old classmate who worked at the Londis next to the church. Your sister joined us sometimes, telling us stories from summer camp and on one afternoon when you had to go and wash cars to earn extra money, she asked me to be her boyfriend, and I said yes, and you were mad at both of us for weeks.

Sitting under that shade for a while, I thought about where else you might have gone: behind the bowling clubhouse, or by the cricket screens, or in the small clearing by the upper field gate on the other side of the stream. I decided that I would try the patch of ground between the mechanic’s workshop and the observatory car park, where there was the low brick wall against which we would kick a football. You would pretend to be Marco van Basten, and I would always have to run and find the ball when you kicked it too far towards the motorway, because you could never score a volley.

When I went to our makeshift pitch, I found that a block of new flats had replaced my memories, and where the goal posts of the low brick wall had been, bicycle railings stood rusting and unused, with the tarmac beneath starting to crack and flake. The warm dark material stained my fingers as I picked it up, reminding me of chewing gum, and I considered how many times we had played around the neighbourhood barefoot in summers, oblivious to the dirt or sharpness or stains.

I looked in at the local library, a building now more ivy than brick where the creepers and runners were several generations thick and the textured wire-glass windows looked like incomplete crossword puzzles from pre-war newspapers. The small excuse for a reference section had been a place we had first visited as part of an Easter egg hunt when we were little, and over the years we had used the shelves to hide notes to each other when we had been forbidden from playing together by our irate parents.

I pulled out some of the old volumes of 1987 Britannica that had served the library for decades, to find a slim-ruled scrap of paper. As I read the pencilled words of your almost illegible handwriting in the silence, it became so very clear that you had long ago disappeared.

Intention (#4)

She stands by the platform, holding a ticket loosely in her left hand. The tip of an umbrella pokes out from her worn messenger bag, prompting thoughts of rain. The frayed edges of uncool, unkempt jean legs wisp around the grimy plastic heels of her trainers like an octogenarian’s straggly grey beard. She taps her feet repeatedly against the raised bumps of the floor while her right hand absently strays up to her lips, touching them as though they are unreal, a texture unfamiliar.

She stands with a well-intentioned man. He has known her for over two weeks and in that time they have slept with each other eight times, lied thirty-one times, omitted embarrassing or damaging facts twenty-eight times and while he has been diverting all calls to his voicemail, as well as blocking four separate caller IDs, she has selectively thinned out her medicine cabinet and fridge. He has taken three afternoons off from work claiming to be unwell and she has missed a doctor’s appointment and a job interview. On four occasions, they have nearly referred to each other by a previous partner’s name but have stopped just in time.

They met through a mutual friend who has not been able to contact them since, and while their first night was fuelled mainly by bulk-bought red wine and ill-advised whisky, their morning after was less unpleasant than they had anticipated. She was concerned that they were at her place and he was concerned that she wanted a relationship. She looked around for her bra while he struggled to disentangle his socks from the embroidered hem of the secondhand bedspread that she had bought from Oxfam during a particularly hard-up stage of her student life. An uneasy coyness descended on the room until the subject of coffee was broached, releasing the tension and providing a neat segue into the topic of paracetamol and their mutual need thereof.

He stands slightly behind her now, to one side, staring across at the tiles on the station wall, idly counting the black squares as islands in a sea of reflective white. His thumb rocks against a signet ring he was given by a former girlfriend, loosening and tightening it on his finger until he has mashed the pale flesh from pressure-pounded white to bitten red in minutes. He does not move to touch her shoulder, nor to tidy a snaking tendril-curl of hair, nor to run a thin soft nail down her cheek where a razor might shave his own. He stares blankly out instead.

They have spent their two weeks ablaze. Flicking the corner of her train ticket lightly, she is unaware that he thinks they have already burned out, a firework spark in a midsummer evening show, and that every new minute will destroy his picture postcard memory of perfection. She wishes for herself that solitude would arrive once more. Although she welcomed the interruption of a warm body, she wants to return to her previous please-yourself life of quiet self-destruction. The train arrives and she gets on. He stands by the platform, waiting for the doors to close before he walks away. Neither looks back.

Miles

Passing the seventeenth floor, Miles M. Lemon reflected upon the poor quality of the eggs Florentine he had eaten but not enjoyed for his breakfast that day, the fact that his dry cleaner could never starch the cuffs of his shirts properly, the irritation of the small sweat stains that accumulated on his previously pristine blue shirt during the long subway ride in the midsummer heat, and that his assistant, Marsha (on whose behalf he had sought promotion in her most recent appraisal), had pointed a gun at him that very morning. Although he felt that the eggs should have been seasoned better and that he should also change dry cleaners, it was the incident with the snub-nosed revolver grinding against the bridge of his bloodied nose that preoccupied him most.

Passing the twelfth floor, as his right shoe worked itself loose, he realised that while he was not expecting anything other than a routine day when he awoke this morning, it had proven to be quite different. He had reached his office antechamber where his secretary was normally seated to find a short man with a wispy moustache and grey Homburg, sitting down in Marsha’s chair and playing inattentively with the volume dial on her ergonomic keyboard. Behind him, in the filing cabinet alcove, a tall, tanned man stood with one hand rifling through the confidential files (cabinet A-C, drawer Av-Be) and the other hand holding a rifle. He turned to leave the room only for the door behind him to be slammed shut by the third presence in the room: Marsha.

Passing the eleventh floor, the thought struck Lemon that he did not need to change dry cleaner, but rather should just paper-clip instructions to the cuffs he desired to be more starched. What had also struck him earlier was the barrel of the small gun Marsha held in her left hand, while she shouted at him to give her the combination. His cheeks were still slightly damp from the tears that each abrupt, pain-laden metallic bash to the nose had caused, as well as the blood marks and smears across his lips, neck and shirt. The two men had neither acknowledged him nor moved at all while Marsha, whose annual review forms he had personally submitted to head office three days prior, held his matted hair back to give herself a better chance at breaking his septum.

Passing the seventh floor, he remembered that he had pleaded with Marsha to stop hitting him and that he would give her whatever she wanted in exchange for a continued, sustained and lasting lack of hitting. She repeated her desire for the combination, displaying the very tenacity he had praised in her review, and he repeated that he didn’t know it, didn’t know what she was talking about, and perhaps that they could work something out. The short man produced a briefcase from behind Marsha’s desk and turned it with the combination locks facing Miles, then looked up at him expectantly. Miles explained slowly and in quite some agony that he did not know how to open the case and would they please, please stop.

Passing the third floor, his spectacles dislodged themselves and flew away from him, making his vision of the last few seconds of his life somewhat incoherent, appropriately matching his understanding of the situation. He had not been able to convince Marsha of the truth in his words and so she had instructed the tanned, tall man whose name had never been mentioned to throw him, Marsha’s line manager and potential mentor, through the east-facing window of their twenty-third floor office.

Passing the second floor, he remembered the combination.

Miles M. Lemon did not pass the ground.

Contraption

The rusk swung from side to side, its crumbly edges writing an invisible arc in the air several inches above the pram-bound infant whose small, outstretched arms were too far away to grasp the suspended treasure. The thin filament line above the rusk ran through an overhead pulley that had been mounted in the ceiling, with the cord stretching horizontally fifteen feet to a second mounted pulley where the main apparatus had been assembled. Both mounts had been reinforced.

Some distance from the suspended rusk, a Bunsen burner was lit under a beaker of water. As the water reached a rolling boil, the steam that was emitted over a sustained period was slowly melting a candle that connected two slim bamboo legs, each of which had a small lead weight on its exterior side. Once the candle was melted sufficiently in the middle, it broke apart, allowing the bamboo legs to fall away from both beaker and burner.

The lead weight on the right leg fell directly onto a miniature plastic seesaw, propelling the small blue rubber ball that had been resting there into the air, where it performed a parabola curve before it eventually fell through a makeshift basketball hoop and bounced on an electronic scale. The brief registration of weight switched the scale on, diverting power from a blocking circuit that had prevented the current from reaching an electric light bulb.

This light bulb now slowly lit up, providing light to a photoelectric cell nearby that, in turn, powered a small saw to move backwards and forwards to cut a piece of string that held a wound-up toy soldier, restraining it from marching forward. Once the string was cut, the soldier lumbered towards a series of black-and-white dominoes, arranged in a S-bend pattern, and knocked the first one over, causing the others to fall in a cascade towards a small section of half-assembled Lego bricks within which a switch and engine had been placed.

As the final domino fell, it knocked into the switch, turning on the engine, which began to unwind the filament line that ran from inside the Lego blocks up to the ceiling and then all the way along and down to the suspended rusk. The small dry biscuit began its shaky descent towards the hungry infant, signaling the beginning of breakfast for the baby W. Heath Robinson.

Boroughs for Beginners: Manhattan

The borough of Manhattan (or ‘Mannatthans’ from the original Dutch), also known as New York County, is the most densely populated state county in the United States, with an estimated density of 25,850 people per square kilometre – with a total land area just above 60 square kilometres, that represents a population of roughly 1.5 million. Astonishingly, approximately 6% of this population have never seen a single episode of Seinfeld; less astonishing is the statistic that only 21% of Manhattanites have seen more than one episode of CSI: New York. Around 14% have never used the phrase “I’m walking here!” other than as a parody and, despite the borough’s name, only 2% of the population are tanned hat-wearing men.

Legend holds that the island was bought from an Algonquin tribe who were paid approximately $24 for the land, disbursed in beads and other knick-knacks. Although the dollar value has been disputed by many serious historians (and some hilarious ones) who estimate the value to be far closer to $34 and change, elements of this story have pervaded into modern New York culture, one key example being the name of the New York Knicks basketball team, who were originally called the New York Knick-Knacks until the ‘Knacks’ were dropped in 1961. Also, it has been rumoured that this is how the Taxi and Limousine Commission decided on their initial fare charges, basing estimated ride duration on percentages of the value of New York as paid by the first explorers. This theory has no basis in fact, but is widely accepted to be true.

The geography of Manhattan’s streets is relatively simple for the newcomer or tourist. All streets and avenues are numbered, with streets (1st Street through to 220th Street) running from east to west and avenues (First Avenue to Twelfth Avenue) running from north to south. There are also some ‘virtual’ streets and avenues in New York which allow for more unusual routes: Pi Street allows time travel for 3,141 years into the past or future, Nineteenth Avenue can only be reached if you are in the company of Paul Hardcastle, N Street increases the value of your MetroCard exponentially the further you travel along it, while Infinity Street is the least popular place to live in the entire borough as it operates a non-stop ‘other side of the street’ parking policy.

The cocktail which bears the borough’s name is perhaps one of the most famous in drinking history. It is made from rye or bourbon whisky, vermouth and a dash of Angostura bitters, stirred with ice and then poured into a Martini glass, garnished with a Maraschino cherry; it can also be served on the rocks. The origins of how the Manhattan cocktail came to be invented are disputed: some claim it was invented in the 1880s by the bartender at the Manhattan Club in honour of Governor Samuel J. Tilden, others credit a man named Mr. Black at a bar on Houston Street and Broadway in the 1860s. However, others claim that looking carefully at the design of the recipe shows it to be too complicated merely to have evolved into its current form, and that there must have been a ‘prime mover’/‘prime shaker’ who first created these individual elements, allowing them to combine later naturally. This latter group’s philosophy, originally formulated to describe champagne cocktails and which is more popularly known as ‘Intelligent Fizz-Wine’, has been widely derided by the oenological and mixological communities, who prefer to focus on the mixing of the ingredients over time to form the cocktails we currently imbibe.

Manhattan’s pace of living in is reputed to be absolutely frantic and it is here that the term ‘New York minute’ was originally coined. A standard minute consists of sixty seconds, whereas in New York, a minute consists of approximately twenty-seven seconds. Although most of the world uses time and date conventions which call this year 2005, Manhattanites prefer to use their own ‘New York minute’-based calendar system where the year is in fact, 3417. Evidence of flying cars, interstellar travel, peaceful co-existence with alien species, a robotic slave underclass and genetically augmented superhumans has yet to be discovered on the island, although these different calendrical calculations may explain why Mayor Bloomberg is seeking to raise the retirement age to 120.

Did you know?
Greenwich Village’s street system is different from the rest of Manhattan because it declared its independence from the United States in 1901 and the federal government reclaimed all the numbers that had been used to mark the street signs. When the Village re-entered the United States, due to the devastating effect of America’s economic sanctions, those street numbers were not returned, instead being put on display at the Smithsonian Institution as a warning to other neighbourhoods who might contemplate secession.

Boroughs for Beginners: Brooklyn

The modern-day borough of Brooklyn, named after the Dutch town of Breukelen, was originally a part of New Netherland and consisted of the six towns of Gravesend, Breukelen, New Amersfoot, Midwout, New Utrecht and Boswijck. Between the English conquest of the area in 1664 and the successful vote in 1898 to join the other four boroughs to form the City of New York, the urbanisation and annexing of local towns in the area proceeded at a frantic pace, giving rise to today’s characterisation of Brooklynites as marauding conquistadors, drunk on blood-lust, savagery and an almost unholy yearning for all the Gouda in the land.

During the organisation of Brooklyn’s community boards – the political entities that run different neighbourhoods – advice was sought from many of the leading political thinkers in America, and the borough government eventually decided to adopt policies from the visiting Fellows at the Kennedy School of Government at that time: Big Bird, Ernie and Bert. Applying graduate research they had undertaken at U-Sesame, they decided that the borough should be brought to the people of New York by the letter ‘B’ and the number ‘18’. This explains why there are 18 community boards, and why so many of the neighbourhoods’ names begin with B: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bay Ridge, Bergen Beach, Bensonhurst, Brighton Beach, Brownsville, etc.

The borough is renowned for having the highest number of Star Trek fans (as a percentage of the 14+ population) in the entire United States. Indeed, the borough motto ‘Een Draght Mackt Maght’, while allegedly in Dutch, is in fact a Klingon phrase which translates roughly as ‘May the Sons of your Enemies burn in an Eternal Fire while their Honour is Purged from the Ballads of the Gods by Vengeance’s Blade’. Each year, the Trekkie population of Brooklyn makes a pilgrimage to Keyspan Park on Coney (also known as ‘k’Neh’) Island for a day of gladiatorial-style combat between key figures from the shows’ histories. The Good Kirk/Bad Kirk smackdown of 1979 lives long in these residents’ memories.

Brooklyn is renowned for its sportiness, with the Brooklyn Cyclones baseball team in the minor league, the Brooklyn Kings basketball team and former teams such as the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mutuals, Americans, Eckfords, Atlantics and a host of others. Currently, the number one sport in the borough is roller derby, represented by the Brooklyn Bombshells who are led by their captain, Anne Phetamean. With new pivot/blocker/jammer Mae Hemm due to join their roster in 2006 (boasting 7-4-67-41 stats for ’05), the BBs are looking good to gain bragging rights over Gotham Girls competitors Queens of Pain, Manhattan Mayhem, Staten Island S.I.-chos and The Bronx Rumblers. New fans of the sport should be aware that although ‘jam’ is a technical term here, it involves neither preserved fruits nor the extensive playing of the lead guitar for hours on end by David Gilmour.

A popular neighbourhood in Brooklyn is located between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, known as DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and it was here that the Ferrari-driving scene was filmed for Pacino’s Oscar-winning 1992 film Scent of a Woman. Other popular neighbourhoods in Brooklyn include BAMBI (Beaten and Attacked at the Manhattan Bridge Intersection), PLUTO (Pumping Lead Under The Overpass) and PUMBAA (Pissed Up by the Manhattan Bridge And Angry). Reports regarding the development of Disneyland Brooklyn are currently being kept in strict secrecy, although CEO Robert Iger, who was born in New York, is understood to be taking personal charge of the project.

Did you know?
Williamsburgh in Brooklyn is named in honour of Col. Jonathan Williams, the U.S. Army engineer who surveyed the area. While confused by his readings and lost, despite his rudimentary compass, he stopped for a quick burger, providing the ‘Williams’ burg(a)h’ name for the area all New York hipsters now know and love!

Boroughs for Beginners: Staten Island

Although the first European contact with Staten Island was made by Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524, it would be nearly another century until the island was colonised. While Henry Hudson established trade with the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century, renaming the island ‘Staaten Eylandt’, there existed an indigenous people called the Lenape, an aboriginal North American tribe, who called the island ‘Aquehonga Manacknong’. It was for precisely this reason that the native islanders were wiped out by the conquering Americans, as they clearly could not be trusted to name their own island in a sensible fashion.

The island played a significant role in the American Revolution, being used by the British as a strategic base in 1776 for General Howe’s troops to invade New York. The soldiers deployed from the island were victorious in their first encounter with George Washington’s troops, defeating them at the Battle of Long Island. Between that battle and the British forces’ withdrawal in 1783, Staten Island became thoroughly anglicised, to that extent that even local flora and fauna were heard to speak in the King’s English, often requesting tea, crumpets and laudanum. It would be many decades before Staten Island’s plant and animal life were heard to speak in the New York dialect that is common in all five boroughs today.

Modern Staten Island is primarily known for its dwarf colony, established on the east side of the island. Following the dwarf pogroms of the early 1930s, dwarves from all over the world flocked to the island to create a place where they could exist free from persecution and Disneyification. Fearing for their way of life, they established settlements on Staten Island where they could pursue their dreams of a repression and tallness-free existence. These dwarves are an important part of New York’s economy, providing skilled expertise in the construction of Empire State Building miniature replicas for tourists, as well as being winched from hovering helicopters to clean the spire of the Chrysler Building for the annual Dwarf Day celebrations.

The borough also includes several smaller islands which were believed, until recently, to be uninhabited. Further investigation into these islands in the 1990s revealed Shooters Island to be inhabited by nomadic barmen, Swinburne Island to be filled with poets, while Hoffman Island is, in fact, the exclusive residence of independent cinema’s premier character actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who guards his privacy jealously by using other established character actors such as Chris Cooper, William Fichtner, David Morse, Brad Dourif and William H. Macy as guards to prevent the legions of fans and casting agents from pestering him.

Staten Island is one of the most conservative of the five New York boroughs, generally favouring Republicans over Democrats in local and national elections. In presidential elections since 1952, they have only voted for three Democratic candidates: Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, William J. Clinton in 1996 and Albert A. Gore Jr in 2000. No resident of Staten Island has ever been President of the United States, although the 19th Vice-President, William A. Wheeler, once visited the island under the mistaken impression that it was Tahiti, possibly giving rise to the island’s preference for electing flattering Republicans, however moronic.

Did you know?
Famous Staten Islanders include Valery Giscard D’Estaing, ‘Sir’ Les Ferdinand, Ben Reilly, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Kermit the Frog, although all of them have been too ashamed to admit to their origins, apart from the Clan who, reputedly, ain’t nuthing ta f wit!