Daddy's Return 2

The knock came again. Louder, more insistent. At the other side of the door a throat cleared.
Before anyone could speak an engine revved in the avenue. Mammy. He descended the stairs at speed. Granny and Kai both listened. Kai listened so hard he heard the static moving in the air. The backdoor rattled. He held Granny’s hand, the skin dry as an autumn leaf. Voices rumbled and gurgled below like air in a locked radiator. Granny and Kai sat in silence. Shadows lengthened across the room. The lights were not switched on, the curtains were not drawn. Kai’s neck was stiff from sitting; he was bursting for the toilet. Granny’s breathing became rhythmic and deep. He heard a grunt, she had fallen asleep. The thing that Kai had been waiting for didn’t happen. Instead the backdoor banged and rattled. An engine ignited and gravel crunched as a car pulled away.
Kai snuck with his back hunched to the window. He didn’t drown. He forgot to. He watched as Daddy’s car disappeared down the drive. He watched until its taillights were extinguished by distance, until the lane was black again. He waited. There was no noise from downstairs, just Granny’s breathing and the tick-tocking of the clock. It was dark except for the light of the Sacred Heart which shines perpetually.
In the bathroom he relieved himself in a steady stream that seemed to last forever. Downstairs was darkness too. The kitchen range fired. Kai jumped. He went about turning on lights and pulling the curtains closed the way that things were supposed to be. Mammy was gone. He looked in all the rooms. There was no note. He walked about the house, then he ran about the house. He opened all the doors; the wardrobes and under the stairs. She wasn’t there. He made a terrible racket. No one gave out. When he had looked everywhere, the shed and in the yard, he sat in the Daddy’s imprint on the armchair by the range. There was room enough for two of him. He swung his legs and imagined he was back from driving a lorry on the continent. He cleared his throat and tried to hock the phlegm up. He dropped his voice and said ‘Well Kai,’ from as a deep in his chest as he could manage.
His voice was an echoey embarrassment to the empty kitchen. He examined the contents of the ashtray on the range top. There were eight roll-up fag ends in it. He picked one up and put it to his mouth to take a drag. He spat. One had lipstick wrapped around it. She was back smoking. He tore apart the roll-up with his fingers to see how it was made. He didn’t like to sit on his own in the sitting room without the fire on. The hands of the kitchen clock dragged stubbornly across its face. Mam-my, Mam-my, Mam-my, Mam-my....
 He’d never made the dinner before. Toasted cheese sandwiches and milk. One for him and one for Granny. He turned on the grill. It hummed. Gently. Not like the phone when he’d picked up the receiver to practice calling the guards. A fast and steady beeeeeeeeeeeep, he’d dropped it down again. The guards were Plan B. He only burnt the top corners of the sandwiches.
He scraped the burnt bits into the sink. He carried Granny’s up the stairs to leave on the locker by the bed. He made a lot of noise but she didn’t wake up.
He whispered ‘Granny’ but she didn’t wake up. He went right up to her ear and he hissed ‘Granny’ into it. She didn’t stir. He tipped her arm but he didn’t shake it. The house was very lonely. He turned all the lights back out. Except the outside lights on the back and front doors so Mammy could find her way in. He double checked the grill was off. Fully clothed, he lay on his bed. He wanted to be ready in case. For what he wasn’t sure. He looked out the window for cars approaching the house. He saw cars driving far away on the road and he used all the power of his mind to will them onto the lane with Mammy.
Kai liked to read. Tonight he could read as much as he wanted. There was no one to put the light out. The print moved, he blinked, the words swarmed together on the page like insects. The sentences wouldn’t make sense. They were jumbled up and stupid. The book was stupid. He was stupid. He slammed it shut and threw it across the room. He crawled under the blankets. He wasn’t going to bed. It was cold. He wasn’t going to sleep. He was waiting up for Mammy. He was closing his eyes a minute. He wasn’t going to sleep. He was resting his eyes. He wasn’t going to sleep. He fell asleep. The waiting was exhausting. When he went downstairs in the morning Daddy was eating his breakfast. ‘Well Kai,’ he said.

'Well Daddy,' said Kai.

Daddy's Return 1

It wasn’t a new car or a posh car, it was beat up and rusty and when he looked in the window he saw the ashtray was full of stubbed-out roll-up ends. His stomach flipped like a fish at the end of a line. His thoughts were woolly. There was nowhere else to go but into house. He went to the back door with dragging steps and a heart that clanged.
 Slowly he raised the latch and cocked a shy head into the kitchen.
‘Well Kai,’ said Daddy.
‘Well,’ said Kai.
He shuffled inside. He stood stock-still for a second before slinging the bag off his shoulders. It landed with a thud on the floor. No thud had ever been as loud. He froze. Two bright balls of colour burnt up his cheeks. It was difficult to look or not to look at Daddy.
‘You’ve grown a couple of foot since I seen you last,’ he said.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, neither made a move towards the other. Kai examined the patch of floor at his feet. Daddy whistled; his eyes roved the kitchen. Kai glanced up, he saw the grey in Daddy’s hair, the stooping of his shoulders and the wrinkles that had deepened around the mouth that drew on roll-up ends.
‘The old place hasn’t changed much,’ said Daddy, catching his eye.
Kai blinked. ‘Where’s Granny?’ he asked.
‘Sure sit down and have a chat with your old man.’
‘I better go and let her know I’m home.’
Before he could instruct them, his legs hurried him past Daddy through to the dining room. Granny wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the hall or the sitting room either. He didn’t want to call out. He didn’t trust his voice. He thumped up the stairs.
 ‘Granny?’
 He opened her bedroom door softly, fearful of the surprises that lurked around each corner. She was in the bed. Her hands fidgeted smoothing invisible creases in the cover. They went to her head, distractedly patting the tufts of hair. They waved through the air disturbing it for the sake of disturbing it. Her thin shoulders rose and fell visible through the transparent material of the nightgown. Her fret was working itself towards a fever.
‘That man.’ ‘That man,’ she said and she could hardly hack out her indignation as a cough wheezed and barrelled through her.
  Kai poured her a glass of water from the jug on the bedside locker and her hands shook as she lifted it to her mouth so he placed a hand on hers to steady it.
‘That man showed up today and he hasn’t been heard from in years.’
She had breath enough to get the words out. Her eyelids drooped. The eyes were pink and tired. He could feel her bird bones through her paper skin. In her nightgown, short sleeved, she was withered and defenceless.
‘Does Mammy know?’ he asked, part croak, part in a whisper.
‘I tried calling her in the shop but he wouldn’t hear of it. Told me I’d be upsetting her with her having to work the rest of the day through. I suppose he had a point. She’ll find out soon enough. If the shock doesn’t kill her,’ said Granny and she made the sign of the cross.
Kai didn’t want to leave Granny. He sat beside her on the bed. Their whole world was this room. The bed was an island. The carpet around the bed was an ocean. No one could cross from the door to the island bed without a boat or else they would drown. He and Granny were safe on the island. The drawers opening and closing downstairs, the footsteps pacing the kitchen, the sound of a throat clearing and the radio switching on were far away things, like things that happen in space. Where stars explode all the time but no one on earth can feel it.
Granny’s tablets were on the dresser beside the bed. That was another continent but one he could reach at a stretch. There were lots of tablets. Orange and yellow capsules in a brown container, bright pink ones in a foil packet, chalky looking blue ones that were too big to swallow. ‘One to be taken two times daily’ He spilled them onto the white bedspread and organised them into her pill boxes – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Granny told him what each and every tablet was for and how often she had to take them. They were all to make her better. Her heart, her chest, her shaky hand.
The stool in front of the dresser would be a boat if they had to escape across the ocean. Out the window, not down the stairs, they couldn’t risk passing the kitchen. Kai knew the tablets were not sweets, he’d heard it often enough. He could taste the chemical zing in his throat, they were colour coated poisons. He looked from them, to Granny, to the Sacred Heart above the bed. He sighed, Granny would never make it out the window and down the side of the house to escape even if their boat didn’t capsize.
The clock beside the bed ticked towards the time Mammy was due home. He wanted to warn her. But he didn’t know how to do it. He hadn’t started his homework. He thought of his schoolbag abandoned on the kitchen floor. She was going to be cross with him. There was a strange man in the house. The ghost of Daddy.
His tummy was rumbling but he wasn’t starving. Besides, there was no dinner. The wood on the stairs signed softly like someone was coming up them who didn’t want to be heard. There was a quiet knocking on the bedroom door. Granny’s eyes met Kai’s. Both sets turned to the lock. There was a key in it but it had not been turned.



What happens next?

Daddy Day Care

No babies were injured in the taking of this photo

Rimini Riddle & Chocky

I've been thinking about this a lot recently.  For those of you who don't know it, it's an RTE 'kid's' show from the early 90's about three children - Ellen, Leo and Rory, who are sent to live with their mean Aunt Vera at the Rimini Guesthouse after they are orphaned.

Strange things happen at the guest house.  There is a talking stuffed toy called Otto with murderous intentions, a cracked painting of two girls in Victorian bathing suits that leads to another dimension and a freaky weird band that has something to do with the older brother.  I didn't watch the show.  It just happened to be on occassionally when I turned on the tv.  They possibly did a repeat on a Sunday evening in some scheduling vacuum. 

I think I was too old to be it's intended audience, the puppets were ugly-ass , wrinkly yokes, difficult to look at, I could never tell if they were girls or boys, the clothes were horrific, and they had mad Cork accents that annoyed the hell out of me.  Plus, it unnerved me.  Even as a casual viewer I could tell something wasn't 'right' with it.  That it really had the potential to be genuinely perturbing, hair-rising on the back of the neck stuff (if only I could have gotten over the Cork accents), the best RTE children's production since Fortycoats talked backwards under the sea. 

But it wasn't, it never quite cut it, maybe the scripting wasn't right or there was too much going on (that band).

 



 

 

There were imaginary friends, inter-dimensional portals, high stakes of good and evil and the sense that something catostrophic is at work just beneath the surface of your domestic setting and all the other things that matter to a child.  Much like this gem, Chocky, that resurfaced in my mind today.  I must have seen it when I was 2/3 years old (I shit you not) but remember still.  That intro music floods me with anxiety.  His voice.  Even the font used in the credits.  They were communicating without speaking.  No one else could heard him.  They were best friends but he was somewhat evil so their friendship hurt them.  No one believed him even though he was telling the truth (the injustice of that one really got to me as a child.)  There was a lot of distress mainly around separation and abandonment I think.  They did maths.  My mind was blown.

 

I hadn't seen Chocky since then because I thought it was called Chalky, I was pretty illiterate at the time.  And the English accent would have confounded my little bogger ears. 

 

 

 

I didn't even know it was about aliens. I didn't know it was called telepathetic communication.  The fact they were English was probably disconcerting enough for my three year old self.

 

Anyway, it appears I have subconsciously incorporated aspects of these shows in my novel - inner voices interpreted either as madness or the presence of an 'entity', talismen, portals, time on a loop, predestination, children telling the truth and not being listened too, a savage world thinly concealed beneath a layer of domesticity.  And so continues the cycle of scarring the impressionable psyches of children (i hope). 

 

 







Animals of Winter Prism

There are only a few people in my novel
But there are tons of animals

 

Its wings were orange, marked with black eye-like ellipses, tiger wings for bog safaris, the texture of a paper lantern when lit from behind by the sun. 

There they were, the foxes.  Three sets of eyes watching him through a veil of rain. 

 

 

He told the spider how secondary school is hard with all the changing rooms between classes for different subjects, how he gets lost because all the corridors look the same. 

 

 

The next morning the cows were restless in the shed, Daddy hadn’t gotten up for milking.

 

 

A blubbing mess of kittens spills out before her. 

One, two, three, blind kittens sopping in a puddle.

 

 

 

The walls were crooked in places.  The chickens would have to mind the draft. 

 

 

When he was big he was going to make a house for the birds out of wood, so the robin that lived in the yard, that Granny said was Granddad, who had died before he was born, could live there. 

 

 

‘Goodnight moon, good night owl and goodnight rabbit,’ he said, to the rabbit from his porridge bowl who was in the middle of the lawn and had thrown him a blinking wave.

 

 

He crawled into the wardrobe to hide in the dark dark.  Under Granny’s fur coat that hung there for storage he howled to his pillow with all the anguish of wolves and for once it was the monsters that trembled at Kai.

and of course

 

 

A rook cawed in the tree.  Kai stared up at the treetops, rooks, jackdaws, ravens, corbies along with other birds he didn't recognise were gathering there together.  The branches of the trees were crowding with them. Their wings rattled and shook the leaves.  Their black beady eyes peered down on him praying.

novel excerpt
outtakes
 

Bridging chapter

Trying to edit a bridging chapter all morning, the passage of time is quite clunky.  Granny has just died and Kai is still innocent, but not for too much longer...

All February long the house kept itself as quiet as the hills.  No one except Daddy bothered much with making noise.  Kai was sad even when the sunshine came.  Mammy looked like a line, drawn straight with a ruler from head-to-toe.  Grown so skinny she was sore to look at.  She welcomed the spring birds back to the garden through the window over the sink.  Her rubber gloves were yellow like the daffodils that had begun to flower.  They talked of Granny and how she loved the springtime.

He was waiting, for March winds to come and blow the grief out of the house.  For a morning when he did not wake up happy to remember Granny had died.  

He checked her room every day to make sure it was the same.  Her clothes still hung in the wardrobe.  The Sacred Heart still burned above the bed.   He picked her perfume up off the dresser and sprayed a squirt into the air.  Granny was a gap in a day made longer.  She was a name that had changed columns in the nightly roll call of prayer.

Lent was easy, nothing left was difficult to give up.  On St. Patrick’s Day they went into town to watch the parade and eat green ice-cream.  Tractors with banners on their sides and lorries with trailers advertising local businesses slowly circled the square.  It was a traffic jam dipped in bunting. 

There were cheerleaders with bayonets who didn’t look American.  Kai stood on the bottom rung of the barrier rail to see if Jimmy was in the crowd.  The town was thronged.  He smelled a chip van.  

Some faces were painted, everyone wore green.  A stage was set-up in a giant trailer at the top of the square.  Mammy tugged his elbow to get down before he fell.  She was frozen and shivered in a denim jacket.  They were leaving.  Daddy was like a cat on hot bricks all day waiting to get into town.  They were leaving.  Before the parade was even over.  Daddy had disappeared, so he got to stay.  He was gone to wet the shamrock, god-knows-where.  He could find his own way home.  They were leaving.  Before the band came on stage, before he found the lads, before getting chips from the van.  She had had enough of it.   

Kai said ‘Thank you,’ for the Easter eggs.  The count was one short without Granny’s.  The stretch in the days made the farm bigger.  There were further away places to explore before coming home for the dark.  The calving was over and the lambing had begun.  There were three new calves; Kai fed one with a bottle.  Daddy got up in the night time to lend John-Jo a hand.  He was in charge now, making the decisions.  They were going to keep chickens and grow potatoes and lots of other vegetable that weren’t potatoes.  Like rhubarb and carrots, and tomatoes and lettuces that grew under glass.  They cleared the weeds and the high grass from Granddad’s old glasshouse.  Part of the frame was held together by twine, that didn’t matter.  It did the job.  

Kai hoed and weed.  There wasn’t much talking just the distant purr of tractors on a slurry scented breeze.  Warmth bounced from the soil onto his face.  Daddy rolled cigarettes leaning on a rake.  He shielded his eyes from the sun with a flat palm to inspect Kai’s work.  Kai liked the dirt. He liked discussing how the cabbages were doing and talking about the weather.  He learnt when the best time to spray for greenfly was.  He picked a caterpillar off a leaf and set him to the side.  He shook his head to scold him so he wouldn’t come back.

Granny and Granddad had kept vegetables back when they could manage.  Watching them grow was exciting.  Daddy said they would save money.  He wanted goats as well as chickens.  To whitewash the shed and mend the walls.  To make it one of those open farms, which wasn’t proper farming just taking school kids around on tours.  It was easy money with a grant for keeping old rusty machinery and planting apple trees.  Mammy wasn’t sure.  He had no experience, children drove him nuts.  But that wasn’t the point, nothing she said about it was.  

‘That’s where we found you,’ said Daddy pointing to a cabbage.  He laughed and so did Kai.  It was one of his funnier jokes. It made Mammy happy to see them out working together.  It mattered less then when he fetched messages from town and took his time in coming back.  

She sat at the table with her face in her hands, exhausted -  they’d been talking about the farm. The wind banged a door shut.  She jumped.  Daddy, waving his arms about the room, with his projects and plans, the new ideas, the ones he never stopped from having.  Her shoulders bunched around her ears.  Her feet under the table shifting.  She reached for the cigarettes.  She’d shaken her head against the talk but still she’d said ‘yes.’  Conceded and agreed as he blustered and blew.  The more animated he became the more she seemed to fade.  

The forms for the bank loan were laid out on the table.  Along with the solicitor’s letter making him executor to the changes. The big changes.  The ones that would change everything.  The loan for improvements for an open farm to get the free money from the grant.  The loan against the farm.  Her lips moved word-for-word as she read and her finger underlined the sentences.  ‘You’re sure?’ she asked him later.  Her signature scratched slowly across the line, she stopped, she looked up, ‘I’m sure,’ he said.  ‘You’ll like goats on the farm, won’t you Kai?’ he said. He winked.

‘Yay!’ said Kai to Mammy. 

She preferred the calm of letting things alone.  Of leaving the dust to settle on the farm like it had on Granny’s dresser.   But the forms had to be signed for the changes to go ahead.  ‘Yay!’ Kai said, excited about the goats.  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Daddy.  His hand on her shoulder but he didn’t smile.  She stood up from the table, ‘I don’t think…I just think…I.’  But it was too late; he’d stormed out the door.  

He stayed away a long time until the tock tick of the clock was worried.  Until the television finished saying its ‘Prayer at Bedtime.’  Mammy’s nails tap-danced on the arm of the chair.  No one told Kai to go to bed.  The door hadn’t opened, no matter how much they didn’t looked at it.  He had had a fine evening drawing pictures of the goats.  He stayed up until he could stay awake no longer.  In the morning Daddy was back and happy.  The forms had been signed so the goats were being ordered.  ‘Yay!’ Kai smiled.  Mammy’s smile was watery.  ‘Of course I trust you,’ she said. 

Daddy’s humour was as predictable as the weather.  Which meant Kai never knew if he was in good form or not.  His jokes weren’t like Jimmy’s jokes, they weren’t always funny.  Kai was learning how to tell the different jokes apart.  There were the jokes to make you laugh and jokes to make you cry.  ‘She’d never win the Housewife of the Year, would she Kai?’ as Mammy served them up the dinner.  Kai knew it was a joke because he laughed.  Kai laughed too but wasn’t very funny.  Mammy un-laughing found the ridge of the scar on her chin with her finger.   She traced the pale crescent like there was something she had to remember.  Kai ate-up the grey dinner as an apology for the laughter.  Mammy’s knife pushed the food around her plate, piling it from one side to another.  Kai wasn’t allowed play with his food like that.  They were waiting to hear back from the bank. 

Daddy’s jokes could be mean or they could be embarrassing.  ‘An arse on her like the back end of a knacker’s pony’ and Kai sniggered because it was funny picture but not a very nice thing to say about Theresa.  At least she had plenty on top.  Not like Mammy, who was ‘like two Disprins on an ironing board’.  Kai blushed eyes fixed on the middle distance.  He was in good form because the loan had been approved.

They could be warnings or threats.  ‘We’ll end-up in the poor house if she has her way,’ with a wink to Kai while he explained to Mammy everything she was doing wrong with the books.  It wasn’t different ways of doing things; it was her way was the wrong way.  She was addled by the figures.  A mind like a sieve, so she went to lie down. ‘Women eh?’ said Daddy.  Kai shrugged. They’d been fine for years before Daddy came back but he didn’t want to say it. ‘A man doesn’t want to come home to a face like a long streak of misery,’ he bared his teeth with a smile.

They were two hardworking men who had been out in the garden all day the least they deserved was a clean house and a decent dinner.  It was time for her to move on, to pull herself together.  If not for Daddy’s sake then for Kai’s.  ‘Yeah!’ Kai agreed, they were getting goats and the free money. 

Mammy looked different now he say her through Daddy’s eyes. 

Mammy’s sleeve was zigzagged with snail trails from her nose when she asked him where he’d been.  A man needed a reason to come home in the evening so Daddy went to the pub.  Kai was glad it was time to move on because he wanted bars for his packed lunch and his uniform laid out in the morning the way it used to be.  They laughed that she wouldn’t know how to cook the vegetables once they’d grown them.  ‘The mice will run away,’ said Kai because the cupboards were bare.  He and Daddy shook with laughing, but inside Kai didn’t laugh, he knew it wasn’t funny.

The next Sunday Mammy smiled and put on lipstick.  ‘We’re going to have a roast,’ she said, ‘the way Granny used to make it.’  Mammy’s teeth were lipsticked too, as if they’d bitten on the tube.

Granny didn’t use as many pots.  Granny didn’t let the spuds boil over.  Mammy transferred them from one pot to another, they were overcrowded.  She scalded her thumb, ‘Feck,’ she said and shook it.

‘Feck!’ she said again, because the oven wasn’t switched on. 

There was no tinfoil for over the chicken.  She forgot the lemons.  She put the gravy through a sieve to try to get the lumps out.  The greens were turning floppy.   Kai wished it was dinner from the freezer like pizza and chips.  It was well after dinner time.  He had set the table. Daddy sighed behind his newspaper.  Mammy’s face was shiny with steam.  It would ‘Just be a minute.’  Kai’s stomach was growling.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Daddy as he left the kitchen.

‘Where you going?’ asked Mammy

‘To get something decent to eat,’ he said taking his coat from the rack in the hall

Mammy’s hands dropped to her sides.  She watched his back leave.  He didn’t turn to see her watching.

The spuds were soupy in the pot and the meat bled under its black skin.  Kai picked about the chicken.  He didn’t touch the spuds.  He put six green beans on his plate for Mammy to count.  The gravy tasted good.  There was ice-cream out to defrost, lots of ice-cream because there was no one there to share it with.  Mammy sat at the table with him smoking while he ate.  She didn’t touch her dinner.  She smiled when he said it was lovely but the rest of the time she sat there her forehead was creased with thinking.  He did all the washing up until his fingers were shrivelled and smelly.  She smoked another fag and went to bed.  It was too early for Kai’s bedtime. 

He was shy to go into the bedroom since Daddy had come back.  It smelt different.  But he went in and he left her a glass of water.  It was dark with the curtains closed and she lay on the bed in her clothes.  Only her eyes acknowledged him. ‘Goodnight’ he said, setting down the water. ‘Goodnight,’ she blinked with her eyes. 

It was a treat having the television to himself and the ice-cream.  He watched Satan climb on top of a lady and they had a baby who was Satan’s baby in New York.  The farm outside was still, he drew the curtains, the quietness scared him.  She had short hair and her name was Rosemary.  He flicked the channels when the bad stuff happened with the neighbours.  He guessed how long it would be each time before it was safe to flick back.  He had to read for a long time after before he could fall asleep.

The next morning the cows were restless in the field, Daddy hadn’t gotten up for milking.  A bellow echoed the farmyard as he left for school, the cows were in distress.  Mammy wasn't up either. 

That week a timber frame was erected for the chicken coop.  Rolls of wire netting rested against the wall of the shed.  There were plywood planks in the shed to be sawed into shape for the walls.  Kai’s job was going to be painting them.  Sheets of galvanising would be screwed down for a roof. Chickens lay eggs in nesting boxes.  

Three weeks flew by. Mammy eyed it each evening for progress.   Some hinge or nail or stable was missing so he couldn’t get it done.  Mammy nodded.  She understood.  They did it all on the Saturday, the one the chickens arrived, John-Joe lent a hand.  Kai’s paint was drying on their new home when they got there.  The robin had watched him work.  The walls were crooked in places.  The chickens would have to mind the draft.  

Kai did his homework; he kept out of the way.  Daddy gave him a spin in his new car.  No goats had come.  All the trees had leaves and the flowers were in bloom.  The world was full of life again.  Mammy hardly went out anymore, only to go to work.  If the phone rang, Kai had to answer, ‘She’s just gone out,’ he said, ‘I’ll get her to ring you back.’  But she didn’t ring back and the phone rang less.  

His evenings were for birdsong and for walking.  Confirmation was coming soon.  Daddy rubbed his hands together, Kai was going to clean up.  

‘Do you remember that time we went to the beach in the summer, the hottest summer ever?’ Mammy asked.

‘No I don’t remember,’ Kai replied, he said it with a swallow.   

Writing Inspiration #3

Nature

It was still early morning. The sun blazed baldly like a lie its heat only beginning the journey down to earth. He stretched his arms up so his fingers tipped it in the sky.   Daddy smoked a cigarette and sipped tea from the flask.  They had a bar each even though they hadn’t done any work yet.  Daddy screwed the wrapper into a silver ball and flicked it on the ground.  Kai picked it up and put it in a plastic bag that was now their official bin. 

A lone call of distress came warbling across the bog.  It bubbled and wavered, spooky and sad. ‘That’ll be a curlew’ said John-Joe, Kai strained into the distance without seeing it.  He jumped on the spot to stop from shivering.

Then later

 Insects skated lazily across the scum surface of the ditch water. He poured water from his bottle to disturb the stagnant film.  It broke to drifting islands of filth. He examined his callouses, his split and bleeding finger joints and his blackened nails.  Sandwiches tasted better in the bog. 

Not Nature

Then the city, not its redbrick and cobblestone centre but its ring roads and tunnels, auto dealers and factories, storage depots and cranes, the giant containers strewn along the roadside to the docks.  The air was tangy with salt, not fresh like at the seaside but astringent, corroding the iron of the man made monsters bleeding them in rivulets of rust.