Malcolm Hardcastle is a writer.

Malcolm Hardcastle is a writer who delivers clear, dynamic and efficient copy for a wide range of prestige clients.   Malcolm Hardcastle creates stunning copy that delivers inspiration, action and results. Malcolm Hardcastle is a member of the IAA (International Authors Association), frequently delivering keynote speeches on the subject of Business-to-Business communication.

Malcolm Hardcastle doesn’t fuck about. Malcolm Hardcastle rises each morning at seven am, clears his bowels, and sits down with a copy of the Daily Mail as he takes tea and toast. Malcolm Hardcastle lives in a prissy little cottage overlooking the prissy village green of a prissy little home counties village. Malcolm Hardcastle often wonders why that arsehole next door insists on parking his fucking tonka-toy builders car at such a stupid fucking angle.

Malcolm Hardcastle is renowned for the clarity and punch of his business reports, with many global clients remaining with him for many years.  “The key to a good bit of business writing”, says Malcolm Hardcastle, “is in keeping it authentic and simple”.  Malcolm Hardcastle has won numerous awards for his copy over the years.

Malcolm Hardcastle walks Jethro, his arthritic Labrador, across the prissy green and peers into the glum drizzling air.  Malcolm Hardcastle briefly remembers being twenty one, out in Sheffield one night, when a girl walked past whose very proximity drew every last molecule of his masculinity into a sharp and urgent focus. Malcolm Hardcastle will sit at nine this morning and write business copy for prestige clients and move ever so slightly nearer to his death.

Poem: Wax

why desire is so wrong;

shame forms all hearts' candles

from clumsy overblown fuel

and the wax rolls down in tears

as it cools.

I never knew my father.

When people say “I hardly knew my father” (a lot of people say this, I promise), is this cliché worth responding to? I’m often tempted to reply that perhaps he preferred it that way, seeing as how to him, you might have seemed a bit dull. Perhaps your father had different tastes, standards you couldn’t possibly meet or a short attention span. Maybe he was pre-occupied by something more meaningful to him, something to do with money or collecting something else equally dull.

That’s just me being horrible. Forgive me.

There are other more complex reasons as to why people hardly knew/know their fathers. Perhaps you just didn’t get on. That’s simple enough and needs no explaining, no apologising. You hardly knew your father because until you were twenty seven years old and having your first baby, he just didn’t seem that interesting or interested. Maybe this stranger who slept with your mother was a foul and selfish idiot, who had only ever given you a surname and your sticky-out ears. Perhaps your mother had developed a way of ensuring that you and your father had never shared the same physical space, as doppelganger legend demands that were you two to ever meet, you would instantly be obliged to fight each other to the death. This does happen.  

I though, am allowed to say “ I hardly knew my father “ without hesitation or self-analysis. I have my own watertight qualifier; because I only met him once. 

But this is not watertight really, I’m referring to meeting him once post-babyhood. I think that as a baby you can’t really claim any significant experience of emotional, social or psychological relationships, people were just those fleshy puppets that swung into view from time to time, dangled a toy or shoved a spoon of tepid pap into your mouth. There was an animalistic comfort in recognising the same puppet there every day. Vaguely amusing. Always useful. Some of them smelled nice which helped you sleep in their arms. Apart from that, nothing of any note to a baby.

So I met my father once post-babyhood. He gave me a huge plastic machine gun, which caused a massive ripple of respect for me in the school playground. The machine gun had “real” plastic bullets, which you placed into a spring-loaded cartridge, although they never actually launched from the gun, you would simply take them out to reload them again. It was a huge and multi-featured gun, probably the most up-to-date toy machine gun on the market at that time.

Was there a Freudian message there? My father appearing to me as a complete stranger, handing me a gun, and then disappearing again forever. Was this to arm me for the long fatherless future ahead of me? No. It was just a bit of plastic cack utilised as a kind of pay-off. Nice one Dad. The gun broke within a week, and so did my gun-based status in the playground. In Freudian terms, I was back to square one. Only the bullets survived, and I swopped those for a few sweets. Clearly, I had abandoned an oedipal penis envy for infantile oral gratification. That’s the story of my life.

Excerpt: Handsome Red Hobgoblins: The photographs on the internet.

There was a picture of a baby on the internet. Nothing unusual there, because the internet is awash with pictures of babies. But this picture was of a premature baby with its father.  The father was a jolly chap, very robust-looking and his smile suggested a person who rarely baulked at anything. In fact he looked like the kind of person who didn’t even know the meaning of the word baulked. He definitely looked like the kind of person who had never used the word baulked, in any context. He appeared to be a man living in a baulk-free universe.

This baulkless chap was looming over his premature baby in its incubator; the shiny red hobgoblin fast away in its usual morphine dream-world, with splayed limbs and a face full of ventilation tubes. The father was grinning as he held a credit card next to the baby’s head. To give it some scale. He held the credit card inside the incubator, as if it were the most normal thing to do in the world.

The photograph was probably taken to give the people in his local pub some kind of reference point in terms of size. What I found unnerving was that the photograph had the same triumphal quality of a fishing photograph. If this father had had a hook-slung set of scales on him, that baby would have been on them. It was a photograph of stunningly inappropriate pride and achievement in the face of prematurity’s huge trauma.

Part of me wanted to say “ Hurrah for you and your amazingly small baby!”. But that’s the side of me that makes people feel uneasy. But this guy wasn’t alone. In another photograph a similarly gurning father, who this time looked like he had baulked at something, namely ironing his shirt before going to the hospital, was holding up a fifty pence piece next to his premature baby’s head. Talk about a cheapskate. He couldn’t even muster up a credit card. Or a tenner. It was loose change for this proud father. He’ll need that silver for the car park machine. If he has a car, that is.

Honesty time out. I was tempted many times to find some way of showing people just how utterly miniscule our boys were. How their shiny red fingers were the thickness of a liquorice bootlace, or how indescribably shocking it was to see their legs emerging from the postage stamp nappies, legs that seemed more suited to a frog than a human baby. I did manage to refrain from filling their incubators with everyday objects like oranges, bunches of keys or kitchen roll. Apart from the lack of taste, there’s also the matter of hygiene too.

Excerpt: The Ghosts of the Red Lightship

As the Coventry laid at anchor, awaiting the arrival of her sister ship the Daventry, Edwin busied himself at his watch, without distraction or dereliction, attending to all the commands and duties assigned to him in the engine room.  This was a place where Edwin understood everything.  The tall chamber that sited the huge engines, with the sequence of gear housing, main pistons and combustion panels, this was his domain.  The drive that impels forty thousand tons through stormy seas, here in the hands of Edwin Cotton. The pipes and pistons, gauges and boilers, all immaculate in the hands of Edwin Cotton.  His work was silent, focused, efficient, and reliable. There were no shortcuts, or dawdling, on his watch.  Tiny erroneous details were harried and chased back into perfection within Edwin’s mute performance.

The noise in the engine room was on a scale that defied measuring, or controlling. It was a million screaming metal transactions that ranged from the highest falsetto to the deepest sub-sonic kidney-bursting thrum. The sound seemed to quicken the air through which Edwin moved, everything vibrating with power meeting demand. Edwin waited by the gauges for the crossing-over of engine power, watching the synchronised swapping of pressures and temperatures, for the moment when he could shut an engine down for it’s daily routine maintenance.  Once shut down, the silent engine would surrender its innards to the dipsticks and wrenches as Edwin revived the engine’s performance and certainty.

The first torpedo left the U-boat with a recoil kick that sounded throughout the metal tube, submariners call this kick, “the knock on the door “.  And this torpedo was calling on the Coventry.

The klaxon horns sounded on the upper walkways of the engine room, so harsh that they even cut through the horrendous noise of the auxiliary engine. Edwin paused to look up as men scurried through the hatches that led to the upper decks, abandoning their duties. The klaxons spoke of incoming attack. Here in the Norwegian Sea, that could only mean U-boats with their torpedoes and a very high chance of being sunk. In the Atlantic these klaxons sometimes signified the lone strafing of a keen young German pilot, or the distant sighting of an unidentified war vessel. But here the klaxons would cause immediate bowel-emptying flight. The engineers were leaving in droves, pulling on lifejackets as they ran, taking the steep stairs upwards four at a time. A lone figure strode righteously between the engines, pausing to flick at a gauge here and there, taking no notice that the rest of the engineering crew had fled for their lives. It was a matter of honour for Edwin, as he had not been formally released from his duty. 

Edwin placed a waste bucket under the tappets sump panel, and pushed the sump plug release key into the slot. Being oily, it slipped from his hand and fell to the walkway. It made a sound. Like no other sound. He could taste this sound on his tongue. There was no more sound.

Excerpt: Ghosts of the Red Lightship

The oppressive self-regulations of the upper middle-class that had so far informed, educated and dressed Pearl Linster, were the very things that she was trying to shake off the night she first met him in the dance hall.  An impossible industrial-scaled haze of cigarette and cigar smoke hung down from the ceiling to just above the large round tables. On a miniscule stage, decorated with the latest ragtime designs of strung-out black men making fiery love to trumpets, an anaemic-looking band squiggled its way through a furiously good-time jazz stomp.  Pinioned by her drunken elbows to one of these tables, Pearl was being aggravatingly loud and opinionated during a risque discussion on pre-marital morality, when Geoffrey Risley-Shaw leant over her shoulder and asked her for a light.

That Geoffrey was holding a bow tie instead of a cigarette between his lips wasn’t what Pearl had first noticed. As she turned, proferring a taper that she had lit from the table’s candle, Pearl looked into his eyes, eyes that held a fascinating hue and depth.  They weren’t brilliant eyes by the usual standards of male beauty, but they were so looking right into her that she dropped the taper.  Picking it up again and relighting it gave her the chance to compose herself, and then she saw the bow-tie held between his lips.  She laughed functionally and immediately regretted every drink that she had downed that evening, recognising that these invasive eyes were well worth a considered and sober appreciation.  Recovered, and with her sanctuary of sarcasm back around her, Pearl waved him off with a disdainful staged derision.  Geoffrey left and became just another black suited shape amongst the sloshed crowd.

A Town Called Ramsgate (After Town called Malice by The Jam)

tuesday night at churchills
the old men have a jam
they can't manage quite so much these days
so they play just what they can

the crowd are there to sink a few
and forget their daily grind
they soon forget and pretty soon
they'll completely lose their mind

in a town called ramsgate
ye-a-sh
town called ramsgate
ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh

when shopping in that waitrose
you always see a face
you stand and talk about whose life
is becoming a disgrace

you tut a bit and snigger at
how publicly they've failed
thank goodness that the both of us
have life so firmly nailed

in a town called ramsgate
yeah eah eah.

i look around and wonder
just what brought us all down here
there's no rhyme or reason
for these lives to so adhere

could it be the sun and sea
that english channel smell
i don't know i'm just really glad
i'm not a dfl

in a town called ramsgate
yeah yeah yeah.

Excerpt from "The English Call it Patience" - The Airport

She shuffled around the airport terminal under the unlikely weight of her costume, as a Masai woman she wore the traditional heavy broad necklace, a good twelve inches of metal. In her tight red and gold Kanga she took small, deliberate steps and flung her hand out with automaton repetitiveness at every passing traveller,or airport worker, or other beggar. She had been gaunt even before the AIDS. This skeletal woman, whose black skin shone less and less by the day, begged at this airport every day for a living. Flights from Europe were the best as the Europeans weren’t used to seeing the deathly sick walking around smiling in bright costume. In Europe the sick are usually hidden away and told to keep quiet. But today was the day of the big televised game, and she was busy earning her stake, her bet on the game. She had to win for the baby.


The baby had been on his own for twelve hours in the tarpaulin “house”, lying on the carpet tiles that she had bought from the proceeds of her last trick. His breathing had been wracked and tiring for the last week. She was three quarters of the way to getting the money for the treatment that would return him to a healthy babyhood and drive the AIDS from his blood. Today she would bet on the opening sequence of cards, relayed through the television in the smoking lounge at the airport. Today she would get the money for the witch doctor, and he will send the AIDS from her son. She had decided already, red, black, red, red would be the colour sequence of every third card turned over from the pack. That would be her bet. That would pay the witch doctor. That would save her baby.

Please. Take note.

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This Week

I’ve had a week of it. I’ve had.

A week. Of hard having it.

Hard on myself. Harder on others.

A Week. Count those days.

Not in numbers. But in Numb.

How much of this week I’ve shut down on.

Watching my fortunes rise and fall

Without any compulsion.

To interfere. Intervene. Invest.

My attention is a hostage.

Not due for release.

I’ll have another week of it.

Then I think I’ll call it a day.

Northern France

In northern france the trees are young

And scarcely hide their nests

The sightline’s clear to the north to the south

To the east and to the west

Nothing’s hidden

Nothing’s gained

That’s northern france explained

Proud

I am infinitely proud of how brave we all are
we take on love like bringing in the shopping
knowing that lovers, family, friends and mistakes
all contain enough anguish to cauterise our soul

we will still keep stepping up to it
stubborn proud and brave in our fiction
to catch sight of ourselves in love
would drive us to extinction

and so we adopt the veil of hope
to look out onto the dance floor
in the street or loose @ the party
browsing the passing shades on the tube
looking for the iridescence and the true

I am infinitely proud of how brave we all are
we take on love like bringing in the shopping.

Excerpt from "Handsome Red Hobgoblins"

I was called to London for a meeting with my literary agent to discuss the idea of publishing a book based on the blogs I had written on our twins sons premature birth. We walked from his office to a nearby restaurant. We had a reservation. Most people were drinking at the bar on tall stools, not eating. It was not posh or pretentious, but it was obviously an established Soho literary venue for writers and hacks, here for the gossiping, back-stabbing and above all, drinking.

The restaurant that day held a gnarled parade of grizzled and suited Soho literary veterans. I recognised one particularly haggard and resolutely-miserable face, a newspaper editor who I had seen once on a television show in which he had been promoting the view that “people are generally stupid”. In the flesh he looked like an illustration of “grimly they went into battle knowing that they could not possibly win” from a Lord of The Rings-type book.

But here I was with my shiny new literary agent. He was an intensely swish young operator at a Booker Prize-winning agency, all waistcoat, impeccable education and pre-war hairstyle: I was the chubby limp-with-desperation provincial wannabe writer. It was an unfair contest before it had even started.

My agent and I briefly discussed the internet blog I had written, a blog on the subject of our twin sons’ severely premature birth. The blog was written as a genuine piece of journal-keeping, to offload and share the tortuous process of watching our beloved sons fight for survival. It had begun a year before, on the very night that my partner Julie was first rushed into hospital to give birth three and a half months too early. I was just trying to let people know what was going on at first, but it then turned into a heartfelt expression of despair and shock. This blog had eventually found its way onto the national newspapers’ front pages and television news programmes.

For a week we had been the hot “real people’s lives” story across the United Kingdom and beyond. We achieved a “dong” on News At Ten. We sat exhausted on the sofas of breakfast television shows being interviewed by people with lovely hair, them with their cruel early starts. We had two-page spreads in right-wing tabloid newspapers that I loathed and despised. Our home had never been so tidy, as press photographers arrived and tried to pose us in a way that disguised both the stains of domestic chaos and our odd ordinariness in front of the camera. We were made to look photographically normal. And tidy. What a con.

copyright martin holdcroft 2008

Excerpt from "The Journals of the Flea"

The boy’s head circled in unison with the revolution of the bachello’s front wheel. Wooden, twelve feet across, six feet thick, bearing thirty tons and pulled by a creature weighing that again, the boy danced alongside the cart and giggled as he ran. He watched everything, his head just feet from the rolling, pitching wheels. The travelling and stasis of a wheel, the pins and bolts, the strengthening panels around the axle, he watched it all and laughed to himself. He saw the rotations from every perspective, from the ground, from the axle, from the edge of the wheel, he saw it all. The wood straining, the expulsion of water from the grain under pressure and how the cracks and knots wove a tapestry of faults in the wheel. He saw the trees from which the wheels were carved, the circles of trees within the copse. He saw the circling sun that greened and browned the leaves in the steady cycles of the seasons. He saw the drops of rain laying on leaves that would eventually run in rivulets down to the roots of the tree that would grow ring by ring to make this turning, staying still, wondrous mechanism. He visited all the wheels of all other carts, of toys, of spinning machines and clocks. In his mind the ground pulled the wheel round, driven by the bigger mechanics of space and time, the boy saw it all. Then the boy heard Hurris’s anguished scream, even through the harsh rain. He stopped running and just stood grinning, watching other wheels in turn as the landtrain carriages passed.

copyright martin holdcroft 2009

Bones of Birds and Leaves

Bones of Birds and Leaves – First Draft – Martin Holdcroft

FX/ WIND/RAIN/TRAFFIC/CHURCH BELLS

They’re all at mass. It’s the only time I ever get to go round in peace and quiet and check that everything is in order. Not that there’s much to worry about these days, it must be…let me see…five years… since we had a really noticeable movement.

Down there, things move so slowly. 

I’m kidding myself of course, there’s no way I can do anything about the mess. But I suppose I’m only here to watch, to watch and comment. Some of them need to have things explained, described. Again and again and again.  

Louie always makes me cross, he’s so adamant that he knows everything that’s going on, but I just know that when he does find out that he’s lost more of himself to the ground, he’ll suddenly cry out and disturb the young ones into a frenzy. The problem is that Louie just can’t stomach being told what’s what by a woman. He was head of his family and now he can’t even keep his few remaining bits together. Poor thing. Good job those miserable years with that feckless husband of mine prepared me for this kind of thing. I’ve learnt, as all married women do, that sometimes you have to deliver information as if it were a surprise to you too, to keep the peace and all.

And if there’s one thing that I’m here for, it’s to keep the peace.

We don’t do so badly here though, for peace. Fifty eight marked graves, and one unmarked one, and there isn’t a truly bad one amongst us. We’ve learnt to get along, to keep ourselves to ourselves when we need to, and to make the best of our situation.  I know that pride is one of the seven deadlies and all, but I do consider myself a pretty good.. now what would I call myself? A housekeeper? No, no, you don’t call it that, I’m not here serving tea and blacking the fireplaces. Ah! I know, that French thing with the auld woman who sits on the doorstep interfering in the lives of her neighbours, a concierge!

Sometimes my interference is welcome, most welcome, and that’s the most satisfying thing about being in my….position. Other times, of course, my interference is resented, ah well you can’t keep every pig in the sty happy, as my old father used to say. What bothers me most though, is when my interference isn’t understood, isn’t responded to. That always leaves me barer and colder than a birch in January. When you can’t help, it’s a sin I tell you.

You see, when you first come here you can’t see it, can’t see what it is. You’re still filling up and emptying with ideas and feelings that have nothing to do, nowhere to go. It’s only after a while, sometimes years, that you see what it is you’ve become, how you are and all. We call that “the staying”. When you reach “the staying” you accept that you’re staying and stop waiting for something….something new.

Some of the young ones here, God bless them, they never arrive at the staying. They sit there looking out for their escape, their rescuers, their relief. They won’t be told, they won’t be consoled or helped. Young Gudrun, for example, hushes me the same way every day, to listen out for her dear daddy’s carriage on the road. She doesn’t hear the traffic on the road just beyond the wall, or the aeroplanes that pass overhead filling everything with horrid noise. But she tells me that the sound of my gentle whisper makes it impossible for her to hear. So I leave her be. When the snowdrops bloom above her, she never leaves her watching and listening to appreciate the sunlight dripping through the blossom, she’s always waiting.

But heavens! It’s not all gloom! Listen to me, anyone would think that we didn’t know how to conduct ourselves socially, well don’t you go thinking that at all. There are times here when the conversations babble and flow and it’s busier than a Lyons tea room on a Saturday lunchtime! We have six families here and they’re always engaged in some drama or other. Fine bunch of people, the best, I tell you.

The very old ones are the sweetest, they made me feel so welcome when I first arrived here, me in my situation and all, but they still made me most welcome. I can’t possibly remember how long ago it was now, so don’t go asking me that one! I can’t remember much at all before the staying, it wears me out trying to remember other things, other times. I don’t bother anymore.

Anyway, I’ve got plenty here to keep me occupied, plenty. There’s always somebody in some kind of hoo-hah about something, and I’m the one to settle them down and stop the terrors and the despairs taking over, oh yes, got to keep those under control.

You see, it’s too easy to just think, “oh they’re all dead and buried and there’s nothing left to worry them “. But we do worry, you see. And we might be dead and buried but things still bother and still get in the way.

Honoria, bless her saintly self, she must have been in her nineties, and she’s not at all able to handle all this. She keeps asking me to come down and sort out her accommodation. She claims that it’s full of the bones of birds and rotting leaves, and that they need clearing out. How could I tell her? What would be the point? How would you feel? Being told that bird bones and rotting leaves were your last remains.

That this woman who once couldn’t cross a room without a marriage proposal, whose children and grandchildren are now spread across the world, that she was now just little groups of litter wedged between the collapsed walls of her casket.

I don’t know how I could tell her that, it would break my heart.

Don’t go taking me for some soft ejeet though, I’m as practical and as clear-headed as anybody. I see the caskets and the bones, I see the way that the earth closes in on them, inching down on them over the years and years. I have first-hand knowledge of what happens down there. Nobody sees it like I do. Not anybody. When the rains took half of the far side of this place, when everything over there became soft and lost all shape, I was there to settle people down. I took the rains on, and won. We didn’t lose one, not one. I suppose that’s why I’m here. I suppose that’s my job. It’s what makes me different to the others here.

They can’t see what I see, they can’t do what I do. Sometimes I stand on the side of the road and watch the cars going by. I never look inside the cars, it’s too awful. Once I did look, by accident. There are things which you should never see once you’re dead, and living people is the worst of them. There was a man. In his car. I was out there one morning when I looked at him. I couldn’t say what it was, but it was like looking at everything that is the most wrong at the same time. He was concentrating on the road ahead, and his eyes were terrible, terrible. For weeks afterwards I could see him and his road-ahead eyes, it was awful.

But that was an accident and I’ve no intention of making that mistake again. Now when I’m out on the road I keep my eyes away from looking at the living. But I can still shout at those awful cars, and the trucks, they shake the ground and that really gets me every time. In the summer there’s a carnival which passes by our place, I’m out there after it’s over, shouting and screaming at the rubbish and the filth which is just waiting to be blown over to our little corner, I can barely stop myself from running out there during the carnival and screaming at the top of my voice, “TAKE YOUR FILTHY PACKETS AND STREAMERS HOME WITH YOU!”. It’s not funny, having your grave made filthy by this stuff.

Go on say it, you’re a miserable old dead woman, Well I’m afraid that’s what I’m reduced to and you’ll just have to accept it.  Anyway, there’s worse things to be, I promise you. Sometimes we have visitors, no, not real visitors. We have things visit us who aren’t so lucky, aren’t so settled. I can’t let them stay here, they just wouldn’t fit in. Apart from that, they bring such a lot of disturbance. They need something we can’t provide. They need their answers and we have none for them.  They can’t be helped. All we can do is ignore their rambling and their fidgeting and their dashing about.

Real visitors are most welcome though, oh I tell you the days of real visitors are a real joy, real joy. Even the ones who don’t bring flowers, the ones who never pick a weed up, most welcome. I’ll tell you how good real visitors are, even the ones who turn up to take pictures of their girlfriends in those little leather bikinis, or to smoke their drugs, they’re welcome too. We like the feeling of their feet on the little paths between the stones, it makes everything more forgiving, more bearable.

Louie, you know, the one who drives me mad, he gets lots of visitors. Italians you see, ever so dutiful, ever so. They all turn up, children and all. Louie’s place is a big expensive one, all marble and photographs and columns,  and I suppose they want to get value for their money, so the whole family turns up and they have a right good visit. He’s so proud of them too.

There’s lots here though who don’t get any visitors. Some of them haven’t got anyone left to visit. Some of the visitors end up here as well, but that’s life I suppose.

They’re still down at mass, oh how I miss it so. Apparently there’s candles too, which are warm and shine on like the sunlight. But I miss the songs of mass most, those beautiful songs. I’m not allowed down there, not even allowed near there. It’s my curse, that’s for sure.

I’m the unmarked grave here, they didn’t know who I was. I was washed up on the shore with just my rosary, so they gave me a plot and a little stone marked “ A good catholic woman perished at sea “. I’ve had a few visitors myself you know, nosy parkers one and all, trying to work out who I am.

The point is, I’m not one of them, and I’m not one of them either. I’m flaming stuck in-between, forgive my language. So for now I’ll have to carry on keeping an eye on everything, keeping the peace. Making sure there’s none of that despair creeping in and setting everyone off. It’s my calling and I’m not one to shirk my responsibilities. If I were a good catholic woman as the stone says, then I should behave like one. That’s all there is to it. That’s all there is to it.

BREAK- RAIN HAS STOPPED - BIRDSONG

It’s all going to be over now. There were visitors, and even the priest, the one with the briefcase, they all came down. Apparently they found out who I was, they found me on the internal net or something, these Americans.

They’re putting a new stone on me. They’re having a service and all. It’s tomorrow morning. I’m scared. What will happen? Doesn’t anybody think about me? Will I end up with the rest of them, just shuffling around my little patch, soaked and squashed to smithereens? Oh but I shouldn’t complain, mustn’t complain. I’ve had my time here as a free one, had all that time. Maybe I’ll get to attend mass again. I’ll like that, to hear those sweet songs, voices that make everything beautiful for a while.

But who will be there for me? Who will see off the travellers with their endless fidgeting and wailing? Who will calm me when the earth comes pressing down?

Here they come now, and they’re laying flowers on my ground. I hate lilies, when they go off they attract the slugs so. Mind you, if I’m not going back up there again when this is all done, the slugs can have their lilies. It won’t be my business anymore.

SOUND OF PRAYERS, SEAGULLS, TRAFFIC, CHURCH BELLS.

The Mattress.

For six hours now, she had been sitting on the slatted wooden bench in the back of the truck, passively swaying with each snatch of rut and dip in the desert road. She sat in her chador and handcuffs, twisted around to look out through a rip in the canvas sides of the truck. It was little more than a ribbon of pure light in the gloom. Through this slit came flashes of incandescent desert glare, burning painfully into her tired eyes. She drank in this shock of light, the blur of horizon, rocks and sand. The soldiers opposite slept sitting, using their rifles as stabilisers. The truck never faltered in its speed as it went onward towards the prison.

It held no fear for her, the prison. Not because she was a brave human being, not because she had built an ideological fervour staunch enough to cauterise herself against feelings of fear or dread. The prison held no fear because it was better than watching the few remaining filigree vapours of her life disappear.

Six months ago they had been troubled only by the strange conjoined temperaments of a couple who lived so closely together. She could never understand why her husband insisted on spending so much money on fancy western goods, like the time when he paid almost half their yearly earnings for a king-sized mattress. He would bring the neighbours round and throw off their sheets with a flourish, as if he were revealing the face of Buddha. The arguments, at the time, had felt like trouble. But when the troops came and rounded up half of the town, had them standing in dusty formations in the town's decrepit square, she knew that this was real trouble, tangible and deadly.

The first group of men from her town went away in the soldier's trucks, but those who remained were reassured by the officer's calm diction. She remembered how the officer had sweated in the rural heat, his cap slowly darkening with the soaking up of all his soft city sweat. The officer had spoken in a slow and exaggerated calm, of how they had nothing to fear, nothing to lose, he spoke of the men’s return as if it were a foregone conclusion, only obscured by some petty form-filling. And then he left.

The men never returned, and in place of the softly spoken city officer, they had his antithesis, the sergeant. He didn't speak, he shouted. He shouted the most foul and brutalising obscenities at anybody within eyesight of him. He beat everyone with his riding crop, his own soldiers, old women and children. More and more people disappeared under the sergeant, until there were just a few families left to furrow a groove between each other's houses.

They survived by bartering, they bartered for food, water and news. They bartered their wine and the virtue of their sisters, for the return of relatives. Many deals were never honoured, or became devalued by the inflation of abuse. One soldier obtained from a family every possible combination of vices, and then in return delivered only a single bullet to the head for each family member.

She had fallen asleep, sapped by the soporific mixture of the desert oven and diesel fumes from the truck that streamed through the gap in the canvas. A sudden lurch had thrown her against the upright boards that lined the truck. Her mouth bled, and a metallic taste, her blood, felt beautiful to her mouth, a mouth that had not been kissed since the day that the sergeant had taken her husband away.

She was dragged, still clinging to his nightshirt hem, her voice a klaxon of shrill horror and refusal. The soldiers tried grabbing her arms, to disengage her from her numbed and mute husband, lost to his own shock. But like a child she simply relaxed her grip just enough, to clamp again from another angle. Rifles were poked at her ribs, but she curled herself up until the barrels were deflected. They eventually reached under her yashmak and grabbed her hair and savagely ripped her from her husband. The moment of separation was final. He was gone. She lay on the street, clutching at his footprints, and wailed like a baby. Clumps of her bloodied hair lay on her shoulders and chest, separate and ugly and forlorn.

The next day she waited until she heard the thrum of their cars, on their daily excursion into the town, and then raced to plead with the sergeant. She composed herself enough to recite the litany of pleas that she had rehearsed all night, her appeal to his humanity on the basis of her practical need for her husband. He didn't even falter in his quota of shouted orders, abuses or threats. She hung onto his arm for about two seconds, before he shrugged her off as if she were a horny street-dog. Determined, she walked behind him as he strutted around the latest looted acquisition, she demanding justice from the back of his pneumatic neck. He ignored her. From within her shawl she pulled out her husband's knife, took a second to line up her hand with his rolling walk, pulled on his forehead with her free hand, and tried to slit his throat. He span, clutching his nicked throat, and headbutted her.

The truck slowed and through the gap in the canvas she spied signs, buildings. They had arrived at the prison. Ahead of her lay the cell and the final suck of death, the death of a woman who only ever wanted to go back to arguing about the cost of the new mattress.

You Drive

Lashed to the passenger seat of your car
by the steady exhaustion of getting on with it
outside the twilight has turned
the world into a cinema foyer

how would these streets these houses
that roll by beyond your focussed driving
be to me if I were newly arrived
my lapsing strength
makes me a stranger everywhere

even in these streets fused together
by the knowing of them for thirty years
I travel the conduits
of my history my meaning

the roofs I never look up to
the turnings off I never turn into
here is where I journeyed variously
heartbroken half-witted broke
drunk tired and stoned

there was a lover there was a thief
my cartography
on a human scale
locates me and is located in me

and you drive and I love you
and the cinema foyer
is warm and quiet

Stand and Stare

 

We can only stand and stare

Into the clinically controlled air

Behind the pristine plastic wall

The incubator does it all

Tubes that disappear into a vein

Of a thin-ness that’s insane

Your breath is automatically assigned

And measured and aligned

As phantoms hurry to your side

And take your bloods off on a ride

Intrusions that do not abate

While we can only cry and wait

Just how are we supposed to cope

When we’re not the centre of your hope

The teams and machines and regimes

Are both our nightmares and our dreams

Why don’t I just run in and roar

That I can’t take it anymore

Disconnect those tubes that chafe

And scoop you up and hug you safe

Isn’t this the miracle cure

That beats the charts and the apgar score

That puts the science all to shade

Isn’t this the life we made?

Instead a nurse or doctor smiles

make inches gained look so like miles

we’re learning fast as each day flies

it’s not just babies

that have a need for lullabies

Anthropomorphica

Anthropomorphica

Is there a creature more Brueghelian

Than a pelican?

The round and  startled eyes

The unlikely thighs

The sight of a Manta Ray

And I conclude Man Ray

Not so tenuous a bridge

Manta Rays are art deco

That lives

On the sea floor plains

On the pristine volant sand

The side-eyed flounders

Carry their Jackson pollocks

Around

If you put some Nike caps

On meerkats

You’d see the watchful youth

Who burrow into the dense

Clay of streets

copyright martin holdcroft 1996

Some Poems. Read now.

That house.

In the garden of that house

The pegs no longer hold

the washing to the line

Outside that house

The husband’s BMW

Is only there

from time to time

From that house

We hear screams

Of unimaginable scorn

In that house

The welcome mat

In the hallway

Is looking rather worn

------------------------------

Saturday morning bath at your place.

you have a bath in your kitchen

but it’s pegwell bay not paris

I sit at the table and type

but it’s more Barstowe than Byron

The water doesn’t refract your

spine into a broken straw

and my silence from the keyboard

does not flinch at all

you tell me that you now think

I cottoned on quite fast for a man

to your attention seeking ways

nothing you’ve said is strange so

we take a plunge and coldly spar

the washing up shall we have kids

whether our sex life skids along

I push you too hard to study

and not hard enough for song

the argument takes an hour

and is full of sad concessions

but I warm the towels on coal

and wrap to mend your bones

when you emerge into the weekend

purged exfoliated and burned

waxed smooth of burrs and guilt

I flick my ash into the vacant bath

and the flakes of oxidised paper

sink so slowly like the tumbling

of an argument that is talking 

in its sleep

now.

----------------------------------------

Excerpt from "The English Call it Patience"



The English Call it Patience



There wasn’t much talk about the craic surrounding the televised game of Patience here in the Mullen house. Last time it had seen an end to the money for the holiday, Mary Mullen's tooth had been knocked loose and she’d been pulled out into the street by her hair again. He was up for the craic as always, that was certain. By the way he’d swung in from work, barely touching the sofa before he was up in the bath, this was going to be the craic from hell, for her.

In the Barrack Bar he’d be there gurning up at the television again, talking the talk as the cards flew to their various homes, making with the bonhomie and raucous charm even as he lost, for the benefit of the others in the bar.  She’d just have to wait until he appeared hours later, crumbling under the ordeal of his happiness at having lost the pot, pissed the lot and having sung every predictable song in the book. It no longer mattered to her if he had won or lost, this was the position that she was forced into. If he won, he would find another way to lose it, and quickly. If he lost, he’d be spouting alternating chevrons of bitterness and stoicism, guiding him round the angry blind bend again, to hit that “silly bloody whore” for daring to talk to him. She would wait, and greet him with a stern face, providing all the excuses he needed, because at least it cleared the air quickly, and they could go back to being the kind of people that enjoyed the craic.

But tonight he had arrived home early, and sober, and deadly concentrated. This was unique and a troubling state for him to be in, at any time. When she heard the turning of the key at half past ten, she was so sure it wasn’t him that she was expecting the appearance of one very louche burglar. She sat on the sofa and adopted a waiting position with all her body, eyes and opinions in place. His head appeared round the corner of the door, with an almost shy hesitancy. She ran through all the permutations, he was about to tell her of his new affair, of leaving her; he hadn’t even got to the pub before losing every penny they owned and he’d been sitting in the park with the pigeons pecking at crumbs of guilt inside himself. But it wasn’t any of these.

He fell into the dip that was his dip in the sofa. His hands travelled to his head and then he leant forward and spoke in a tone slow and heavy with implication. They’d won. The lot. A seven card prediction topped up with the first column decision of the game. The odds were so huge they were written in the starched cuneiform of algebra.  Right now he was the heir to all the losing tickets for two hundred miles or more, a fortune. And this was a tragedy. It meant the end to all that lovely detail in petty losing, petty winning. It meant that he’d won so much that he could never lose it again even if he knocked up in a consortium with a professional albatross hunter. As a man in love with scraping the barrel, he was ruined. The money would interfere once and for all with his concrete justification for all this shite.

copyright martin holdcroft 1998

Short Script Example

Little hand on the Seven

by Martin Holdcroft

Sept 1993

Night in an american city, late sixties or early seventies.  We are in  the two rooms that comprise a tattoo parlour; An entrance lobby, several chairs surrounding a low table on which sits an ashtray and an untidy pile of biker magazines. There is a water dispenser on a stand with sign next to it which reads: “ CUPS 5 cents “. The walls are covered in tattoo design posters. There is a curtain of plastic ribbons which fills a doorway to; the inner sanctum, two chairs facing each other, a trolley full of inks and needles, a long black leather couch. There is a lamp on a long extending arm which illuminates whatever the tattooist is working on. On a shelf next to the couch sits an ashtray and a radio, the radio is constantly tuned to a soft country and western station. The tattooist, RAY, sits with his back to the audience and is leisurely wiping his tools clean, one by one. RAY wears a sleeveless leather jacket and jeans. His arms are suffused in a welter of colour and bold patterns.

VICTOR enters the lobby, brushing the rain from his suit. He puts his briefcase down and sits heavily on a chair, wiping the rain from his forehead using the sleeve of his jacket.  He is in his early thirties and looks tired on it. His suit is of some quality but dishevelled and creased. Victor looks around for about ten seconds, then rises and crosses to the ribbon curtain. He listens. There is a pause of twenty seconds.

VICTOR(quietly)

Hello?

PLEASE NOTE THAT RAY’S DIALOGUE IS NOT HEARD AT ALL. VICTOR’S REACTIONS ARE ALL WE KNOW OF RAY’S WORDS. RAY’S BACK IS ALL WE SEE OF HIM.

VICTOR

Yeah sure. Shall I leave my things out here? Or bring them-. Yes, okay.  

Victor picks up his briefcase and enters through the ribbon curtain. He puts down the briefcase and takes his jacket off and hangs it on a hook on the wall. Victor unbuttons and rolls up the left sleeve of his shirt. He takes his watch off, lays it on the trolley.

VICTOR

I want a watch tattooed on this wrist and yes, I know that it will be painful - I know, I know. Just the outline of a watch. Single colour ink, black. A design like this watch - No, I don’t have any blood diseases, venereal diseases or anaemia - on the face? Oh, right, the big hand on the eleven, and the little hand on the seven.

Ray begins delving into his tray of tools and gestures for Victor to lie down on the couch. Victor approaches the couch warily, he sits, and then lies down. Ray stands and brings the extending lamp arm down to just over Victor’s left wrist. Ray pulls at a swab of cotton wool, tips a bottle up against it, and dabs at Victor’s left wrist.

VICTOR

I’m quite drunk, well to be honest, really drunk. I was trying a little self-anaethesis, huh, you know - I heard it would be painful having it on the wrist so- no, no, go ahead. I’m happy to go ahead, no problem.

The tinny whine of the tattoist’s needle is heard, Ray applies the needle gun to Victor’s wrist. Victor squirms for ten seconds, staring madly  at the sight of the needle on his wrist.

VICTOR (Through clenched teeth)

It’s okay. Kinda ticklish but deep in there, know what I mean?- Yeah. Yeah. Relax.

VICTOR

I guess drunks like me must be just about your biggest customers, huh? But not many chickenshit lawyers wearing creaseproof pants I guess

Victor looks down at his crumpled clothes.

VICTOR

Well, I left the court this afternoon and the mood just got me, you know? I just wanted to lose the rest of the day before it became just like all the others that end up in the same dead end, I got drunk because it was there, waiting to happen. (He brightens up) Hey Ray, I must be the first member of the DA’s office to use your services eh? You could put our department crest up there on the wall, next to death in a top hat and the spider’s web.  The buffalo of wisdom and the eagle of justice, all hail America!

Ray pauses to light a cigarette and looks intently at Victor for a few seconds, then returns to his work on Victor’s wrist. Victor sighs heavily. His eyes wander to the tattoo designs on the walls around him.

VICTOR

I’ve probably seen your work before, like when I’m standing in court number three.  There they’ve been, wearing your..your stuff, on their way down to a five to ten for robbing a 7-11 of thirty dollars or such. They’ve usually carried a knife or a small piece, and they have dragons right across their shoulders. You can see the tails running right down their arms. Now I’m not saying that having a tattoo means you’re a criminal. But I’ve seen so many down in the court that they’re like part of the scenery, there’s the judge in his big black dress, there’s the people with tattoos, and there’s us, the lawyers.

Ray takes a wad of cotton wool and rinses it in a chemical, dabs daintily at Victor’s wrist, he turns it this way and that, under the light. It looks medical.

VICTOR

I only ever had the small change to deal with, which suited me, the shop robbers, the auto thieves, the exposers, the drunk drivers.  Drunk drivers are the worst, they always whine and cry, always. Do you remember the Manolo kid? - Yeah, the very one, you got it. I was dragged into that case, right at the end. Remember all those appeals? Last minute reprievers? The anti-capital punishment demonstrations? More exciting than the superbowl, that’s what the papers said. It was on TV just as much.  On channel eleven, did you see that? No? They had a mock up, get this, a life-sized model of the electric chair, it had a dummy sitting on it, when they pushed the button, Wham! The screen went black and then good old George Sangster was standing there, with his sad old face on and they had stuck a big black cross on the dummy’s chest, like he was cancelled out. Stupid. Stupid.  Then straight to a commercial break.

Victor lies back, breathing heavily. The whine of the needle intensifies and wavers up and down, up and down. Victor covers his eyes with his right hand. On the radio a lively bluegrass banjo tune.

VICTOR

Well I was there. At the execution. A goddamn cert-ee-fied witness. The DA must have thought he’d do me a great big favour. Hey. Let’s give that schmuck Victor Jankowsky a wonderful thing, just what every DA’s assistant needs. A good old fashioned technological American execution. The kid had shot his pusher, then his landlord. Holy shit! They should have given him a citation, the order of good sense and necessary action. But after he had admitted to it, with no special circumstances, there was no way he was going to escape the chair, no way. I knew it.

Victor watches Ray at work, studying the needle and the blood and the ink.  Ray turns Victor’s  arm around to check that the lines meet up. In the distance we hear the banshee wail of a fire engine.

VICTOR

And so, therefore, to this tattoo, this watch. I don’t know how it came to me, never thought of it till this afternoon, hell, you’d never ask. If I came in here, said put Abe Lincoln on one cheek of my ass, and George Washington on the other, your only question would be, whose on which side? But I’d put Nixon right between them.

Victor looks at Ray and  laughs a little, as if they were sharing the joke.

VICTOR

Anyhow. On the day of execution, six a.m and I’m in the office, I’d been up all night drinking enough coffee to float the Brazilian Navy.  That last, pointless appeal. We heard first , down town. We called the Mayor who was in some hotel balling his girlfriend.  The mayor called the Governor, The Governor called the DA, who made the call to us in the first place! Everbody acting like its an extra fourth of July. It was   “ Thank you Governor, we hate your miserable guts day in day out, but not today, no sir. Today you earnt your money, you finally did something”.

Pause

You know they put these things together weeks in advance? A whole team of people spending their working days together for weeks, thinking, talking, planning, rehearsing. All for the death of one dumb schmuck, that’s what I call scary.  You want to know the sickest, most mind screwing thing? When you’re in jail, you don’t have late nights, it’s lights out by ten. So in the morning you feel really awake, no hangover, plenty of sleep cos it’s your biggest escape, and then just when you’ve woken up and you’re really alive. They put you to sleep forever. That’s why executions happen so early in the morning, because by the time night comes around, you just might end up wanting it.

The whine of the needle stops. Ray shakes a bottle of ink and drops it in the bin. He picks another up and loads the needle up.  The radio now hosts a slow, sweet mix of slide guitars and mournful cowboy voices in sickly harmonies.

VICTOR

And then it stops being a punishment. So the Manolo kid is scheduled to die, I’m at the pen by quarter to seven as a representative of the DA’s office. Well I’m sure not there representing the so-called human race, shit, I still don’t know to this day why I didn’t just run, check out there and then. But there was no time. I had all these things to go check, to see that everything was, uh, proper. All the names had to be checked, the guards, the door lockers, the door openers, the button pushers, oh yes, and the padre. He looked like he was having a little problem with it too, he kept looking at the floor, or his shoes, any goddamn thing, the whole time.

After I had done my checks I had to go and sit in the witness’ gallery. It was like a tiny little cinema, a tiny cinema for the creme de la creme of sadists. All the seats were numbered and allocated. I guess I got lucky, the front row.  Between us and the chamber was a blind, a thick grey blind, so the kid wouldn’t see us as he went in, or maybe it was the other way round, anyway, we couldn’t see a thing at that moment in time.

After a long wait I heard them approach the chamber. A lot of heavy feet, all in time, couple of voices. Then I heard the kid, this kinda..shout. It could only have been him, sounded like he stubbed his toe or was hit by panic or something. I heard the straps being put on, they creaked as they were tightened. Then footsteps leaving the chamber.

They lifted the blind. Jesus Christ. I nearly screamed. I tried to shrink down into my seat, he was so fucking small in the chair and he was less than twenty feet away from me.  He was wearing a short sleeved shirt and they had cut the trousers so that the straps on his shins made good contact. He looked about twelve. Jesus.

The mask made his head look bigger. You couldn’t see his face, not one part of it was visible. Then he pissed himself. For crying out loud, this kid, this man, I’m sitting there with this human being so scared, so dying, that he pisses himself. His breathing was so loud, so fast. Then the lights flickered as they prepared to do it, the door to the chamber closed. There was a bell ringing, like a bell for recess at school.  And then they pushed that electricity through his body.

At first you couldn’t see any difference, he just stiffened. Then the kid seemed to be trying to stand up. He really started to burn, around the mask came this smoke, and spit and blood started to run down his chin. Somebody behind me said the tongue was trying to force itself through his shut teeth. They sounded like somebody pointing out their favourite scene at the movies. Then I saw the watch.

I kept my eyes and my mind on the watch so that I didn’t have to actually see, see the death when it came. It was sliding down his arm, a sports watch, way up here, it came down from his shoulder, from under the short sleeve. He had smuggled in a watch for the last three minutes of his life, what good is a watch then? Anyway, it caused quite a stir in our little gallery, they said it was against the regulations, personal effects were not allowed. Somebody’s balls would be on the Governor’s carpet.

The watch had slid all the way down to the kids wrist. It came to rest against the strap that held him still. A couple of long minutes later,  they decided that he was dead. You could tell, his neck was stretched back, real far, frozen in a spasm. They cut the juice, some guards went in, pushed the kids head forward.  The doctor came in next, looking for signs of life, he gets to the wrist with the watch on and he has to remove it, the regulations say so. The warden signalled to him to break the watch, the doctor pulls and pulls on the expanding strap until it’s stretched out nine or ten inches, then SNAP. The strap broke and a piece of it hit the gallery window, I think we all jumped. Where the watch had been on his wrist, there was a perfect shadow, a bluey-black burn in the shape of a cheap sports watch. 

That’s the reason for this Ray. The tattoo. It’s been six months since that day, I can’t sleep, I can’t screw, all I can do is drink and remember. I reckoned that if I was going to be so messed up remembering something this bad, I may as well stop keeping it a secret and let my skin do the talking.

Ray has finished work for the last few minutes. He starts taping on cotton wool over the tattoo. Victor stops him, and looks at the tattoo. Ray finishes taping the tattoo. Victor stands, puts his jacket on and fishes in his trouser pocket for money. He hands a couple of bills to Ray.

VICTOR

Twenty dollars. Thanks for the tattoo and everything.

Victor picks up his briefcase and goes through the ribbon curtain. Ray dissembles his needle gun. The door of the shop closes silently as Victor steps out into the night. The radio is playing a happy country hoe-down as the stage is released into the dark too.

The End.

copyright martin holdcroft 1996