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.

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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