Boating for beginners..a homey’s odyssey

He could tell, by counting the wear through the growth rings on the mast, that he had been at sea for seven years and for too many of these it seemed he’d been trapped in the Doldrums.

The relentless glare of the predictable, equatorial sun had baked him leather brown, and there were livid flares of salt burn in his armpits and groins.

He realised that slowly, exquisitely slowly, he was sinking.

The raft he’d built was sluggish and water logged and there was a faint but unmistakable sweet smell of rot from the reed bundles.

He had thought about this journey for a long time; felt it was something he had to do. It would be a voyage of discovery, the next phase in his life, developing his untapped potential. He supposed, on reflection, he’d known the reed raft wouldn’t last, but he’d told himself that he’d discover new ways to strengthen and waterproof it as time passed; that somehow it would be all right. But he had known now for a long time that he’d been hasty; that his need for adventure had overpowered his common sense.

So he’d started to spend long hours gazing across the turbid breathing sea, watching the other boats in the distance. There were some that looked in worse shape than his so he avoided them, looked the other way feeling slightly embarrassed. There were some that he realized were too well guarded, too swift and elusive to even consider, but he discovered there was another sort, boats that reminded him of what he’d had in mind when he built his own. One in particular fascinated him. She floated high in the water, placid and stable. The reeds were neatly bunched and symmetrical, fat and well ordered, and the ropes binding them were thick and yellow like braids of a Viking woman’s hair. It was everything that he’d wanted his own boat to be. He knew that if he could have her he could safely resume his voyage of discovery.

And yet he hesitated, he felt some loyalty to the craft he’s built and spent so many years on. It was so familiar but it no longer felt safe. He knew all it’s flaws and weaknesses and whereas once he had accepted some responsibility for them and occasionally they even made him smile indulgently, now they just annoyed him.

The new boat looked in her prime, shiny with youth and promise.

He watched it for long time. Sometimes it seemed to recede into the distance, but it only made his longing more acute and he became increasingly irritated with the suffocating mustiness and ominous creaking of his own boat.

He made a decision. He ripped off his shirt and dived. The water was cold, surprising and unfamiliar. It frightened him but he struck out resolutely in the direction of the other boat.

Soon he stopped and trod water to get his breath and his bearings. He looked back at his old boat. It lay motionless in the water, dejected and accusing, and he felt the weight of his conscience pushing him down in the cold shocking water. His goal lay tantalizingly close and the gleaming prow seemed to beckon him.

He swam faster abandoning all caution. He knew he was tiring too soon. His arms were aching and felt like they could tear off but with total commitment he reached the new boat

She sat impassive and welcoming. He ran his hands along the smooth sides and he knew he loved her. He lunged at the reed bundles to get a grip and hauled himself on board, but the reeds broke and tore loose in his hand. He discarded them and lunged again feeling panicky and heaved himself on board. He had arrived. He took his first tentative steps across the tight ordered decking. It felt firm and secure under his feet. Suddenly a reed bundle snapped and the coarse matting scratched and tore at his leg as his foot plunge down into the dark oily water below. The reeds had been picked too dry, packed too tightly, a problem he had avoided when he built his own boat. He recoiled from the sharp pain as he pulled his bleeding leg from the hole and the sea seeped through onto the deck, spreading darkly between the reed bundles. The familiar smell of dampness wafted up from the bundles and the first wave of doubt struck his chest.

He looked back at his old boat. The wind had turned it away and it was drifting slowly towards the horizon distant and aloof.

He sighed and looked around him for something to plug the hole in the deck.

Such is the nature of love.

The rockgarden

It was a few weeks before my 13th birthday that I first developed an interest in the control of oxalis.

It was my first year of boarding school. I had no notion of what to expect there beyond the images I had concocted of lazy days whiled away on a sunbaked hillside, puffing on a Senior Service “Navy Cut”. The origins of these pre-teen fantasies could be traced back to my reading of Kipling‘s "Stalky and Co.”

In fact the hostel was a dingy Victorian pile, once the grand home of a long dead headmaster , (who, nevertheless retained a presence in the form of a lifesize bronze bust in the entrance hall with the eyes hollowed out like seagulls do to baby lambs that they find undefended), The house had been clumsily repurposed to hold sixty boarders, all trying to navigate through puberty without maps or effective adult support.

As the most junior, we, the third-formers, or “turds,” were crammed into a narrow, dormitory containing six double bunks giving us about 1 m2 each of living space to pack away and attempt to regulate our pheromonal surges and to get used to the newly evolving, altered versions of ourselves.

This whole tense, often unkind tribe was supervised by a gaunt, satanic, Brylcream-slick housemaster with large protruding ears that were curiously chewed along the edges.  There was no accepted theory as to what had chewed them but they served him well as he glided round the building silent as a snake. He would appear without warning and glare at captive boarders , sniffing their essence with an invisible forked tongue.

The new intake of turds were a disparate group not notable for their academic achievement, the criteria for selection mostly relating to the attention paid by the family to the Old Boys Association  A few of us had scholarships, supposedly awarded on merit but my dorm-mates seemed to be united only by their hard rural background and our shared struggle with hormonal surges. In most cases this was expressed as a relentless need to compete and dominate that frequently threatened to explode into violence.

Even Saturday cricket, (which I had gathered Stalky enjoyed,) proved to be deceptively difficult and my day-dreams of  exceptional, even match-saving, acts of heroism had been replaced by the reality of howls of criticism from my peers and the stunning pain of that rock-hard ball. Once experienced, a reflexive reluctance to interfere with the flight of the ball seemed like common sense but it spelt the end of my interest in playing cricket.

The only legitimate release from this weekend purgatory was, I decided, to get a Saturday job. My plan was to offer myself as a kind of “Bob-a-Job, “scout ,( non-affiliated.) I began to selectively canvass the less scary -looking houses down the many cul-de-sacs in our area.

My hesitant approaches were mostly greeted by impatient looks that suggested that my potential employers would rather add me to their compost bin than employ me to work and my enthusiasm was rapidly waning, but the desire to avoid the pain of cricket drove me on and eventually, through tall, dark trees, I glimpsed an imposing two- storey house. It was chocolate brown with small almond windows, but the roof was studded with yellow -orange lichen, and the derelict flower beds surrounding the entrance were frosted with moss, giving it a distinctly gothic ambience.

I advanced on the doorbell, which was buried in dense cobwebs,  on the paint-blistered door frame.

The chimes in the hallway were followed by a high-pitched    bark and the staccato clatter of a dog running towards the door. Through the heavily rippled glass I could see the fragmented image of someone coming down the hall. Muffled sounds, a woman’s voice, grew louder as the fragmented images in the glass panes   danced, split and reconnected amoeba-like as she approached.

The door opened slowly and a woman about my mother’s age gazed at me enquiringly, her dark hair, curled unguided over her forehead and shoulders . She swept greying strands behind her ears self -consciously.

“I….was wondering if…I am available…..for gardening, mowing lawns, if you…..ahh ……need help.” I trailed off.

It suddenly occurred to me that she was wearing a dressing gown, flowing brocade with wide shimmery blue lapels. I thought it looked expensive and elegant.

 The dog pushed in front of her, panting, scanned my feet and ankles with a wet nose and looked at me with rheumy eyes. The lower lids had drooped and were rimmed with crescents of red.

The dog’s face was framed with white hair hanging down around its jowls in an untidy beard. I held out my hand to greet her. Her tail began to thrash with pleasure and I scratched briefly behind her ears.

The woman’s eyes flicked briefly over me and her face flushed suddenly into a smile.

“How lovely”, Her voice was resonant and warm. “Someone to help with the oxalis.’’ “ She reached down and gently tugged at the dog’s collar. “Come along, Rosie, good old girl. Shall we show this young man the rock garden?”.

She hitched up her dressing gown and led me firmly by the elbow down to a path of what my mother would have called crazy paving, although the gaps between the slabs were choked with dead leaves and weeds that were sending long stalks upwards in search of sunlight.

At the end of the path there was what had once been a raised circular garden ,walled with rocks. It was carpeted thickly with luxurious dewy oxalis, and after a brief demonstration, she left, followed by the old dog, leaving me alone to work. I was elated. It was my first paying job even if I had not quite got to discussing my fee.

I had cleared almost half of the bed in cold, wet handfuls, when she clicked down the path behind me. She had changed into a faded red dress with an elaborate collar bunched high at the back and a neckline that dipped alarmingly around the shadowy gap between her breasts. Her pale calves swished inside the narrow skirt and she tottered in mud-encrusted black leather-bowed pumps. An unfamiliar excitement grabbed me in the chest, and I looked away. She smiled briefly and gestured towards her dress with the trowel she had in her hand.

“Since my husband died I don’t go out. I decided I might as well get some use out of these in the garden” Her face creased into a frown and she looked suddenly distant. My heart swelled with sympathy. She seemed so fragile.

I glimpsed a future helping this lonely, rich lady with her garden…..looking after her.

She bent forward and grabbed a handful of weeds and her breasts, unencumbered by underwear jostled forwards towards freedom. Her skin was smooth and milk-white apart from one crease which encircled her neck like a string of pearl beads. The gap between her breasts looked warm and soft and comfortable. She worked in silence apparently oblivious to my furtive looks as I foraged opposite her. I was captivated, enslaved. As we plucked the last few strands of oxalis she straightened and wiped the sweat-damp hair off her face with a sweep of her arm and sighed with satisfaction.

"You must come back next week. We can start on the Wandering Jew.” She giggled briefly.

“Or pull the Old Man’s Beard” I suggested. For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to get it. She looked at me intently, and. a smile flicked across her face.

I sauntered back to the hostel, warm with pleasure. The two half crowns she’d given me jiggled in my pocket, and I could still feel the softness of her touch as she had placed them gentle as bird’s eggs into my palm.

Life was transformed for me that week. I barely noticed the demeaning remarks which had confused and hurt me before, and the tedious hours of evening preparation were passed imagining the pleasures of the weekend to come. I could picture us working together…..we’d probably stop for a cold drink and sit on the terrace for a chat.

I wondered what her name was, and the image of her breasts pendulous and hypnotic played before my eyes persistently.

When I phoned my mother, she commented with obvious relief in her voice, that I seemed to be settling in at last. I didn’t tell her about my job.

I woke early on Saturday and anxiously checked the sky. It was cloudy, but didn’t look like it would rain. It would have to do.

I picked lavender and jasmine from a stone wall at the top of the street and trotted up to the decrepit front door, feeling tight chested with anticipation. There was a car in the drive, a red Sunbeam Alpine, small and sporty. I heard the muffled echo of the door chimes and after an anxious pause, her shuffling footsteps. She looked startled and stared blankly at my proffered bouquet.  Her hair was tousled and unkempt. She was holding Rosie’s collar up to her face.

.Suddenly she leant towards me and started talking rapidly in a low whisper. She glanced down the hall behind her then turned back and put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer.  She was pleading with me , her face pushed close so I could feel her breath on my face. There was drying foam at the corners of her mouth.

“Rosie is missing. Someone has stolen her. You can help me find her. We must call the police” She stopped abruptly and turned towards the noise as a young man appeared in the hallway.

“Who’s this, mother?
“ He’s going to help with searching for Rosie..” she said.

The young man looked irritated.. He sighed, “Mum, I’ve told you..what the vet said about Rosie..How she’s not going to recover. You agreed for her to be put to sleep..

“You’re lying.. Don’t say that..!” Her voice became shrill and she yelled out in pain.. a kind of strangled, formless moan. She pushed past her son and stamped away..” You’re lying.. you’ve always beeen against her.

“Mum, I’ve poured you a little sherry to have with your pills”. His voice was thin and tired

He turned back shrugging his shoulders.”Sorry.  My mother is not well. “He hesitated and looked momentarily undecided..probably wondering why he was discussing his mother’s health issues with a school boy he’d never met.

I mumbled something and hurriedly backed down the steps. Before I had reached the gate I heard the front door bang. I threw the bouquet in the rock garden as I left. When I looked back from the footpath, feeling confused and embarrassed, I see her face through a gap in the lace curtains. She was holding the dog collar against her chest which was jerking up and down as she sobbed.

Mrs McC

Open letter to Mrs. McCafferty

“ How are you doctor?“ ..that’s how it always starts… I get it.  Who could trust a sinful priest or a dentist with gum disease .

I feel like I’m choking on your expectations struggling for air under the homespun ,home -knitted  shroud -you wear . I can still smell the woolshed floor on you

What can I do for you today, Glenys?.

Stern father, perhaps..… Peddling the snake oil of Hope from the pockets of a paisley waistcoat, health , wealth and happiness guaranteed, so long as you do as I say.. And be sure and tell your friends you’re under the doctor and I’ll weave kudos around me like armuored pants of dandelion fluff to protect me from your anger and disappointment.

Or how about best friend and confidant; "Ooh I know, oh I know… Have another tissue keep the box and don’t worry, I’ll try not to tell you anything you don’t want to hear…”

Or a lover perhaps… Your secret’s safe with me. What passion could be safer, breathless imagination powered by the slightest, electrifying caress of cold stethoscope on warm breast”

Or will it be that other fate… Worse than love… The one where you are the mother and I’m the victim, of your prejudice and your preconceptions and your largesse… –{“ I’ve left some scones with the girls for your morning tea. I just need my sleepers this time. I went off the pink pills because I’ve been going to the naturopath and he’s  picked up a zinc deficiency and he’s put me on kelp and my waterworks are almost right now

And so I sit flaccid and powerless, doodling arrows, always arrows on my post -it notepad.

“For your heart you breathe in and out of a bag.

   For cramp you put corks in your bed

   Have you ever considered now Mrs. McC

   That it’s just maybe all in your head

I met  an undertaker, once, she told me she liked her job because she enjoyed working with people. Presumably they never asked her how she was

So don’t ask me Mrs McC, don’t ask me how I am. I’m angry and I’m sick of half-truth, artifice and other people‘s expectations…

How many times a day do you suppose can a lounge lizard change it spots before you get down to raw flesh?

Pedro

 Pedro

It seems like you could never relax around Bob Whitelaw. Every few days that winter, you’d see him in the distance floating in the mist, riding the boundary between our place and his, checking his ewes. A tall, thin figure, shrouded in oil- skin, he perched on his horse like a vulture, the wings of his coat flapping wetly against his arms as he moved. The frayed beak of his cap angled down over his eyes as he hunched against the drizzle . And sometimes you wouldn’t be able to see him. You just heard the guttural commands and tuneless, exasperated whistles  flying across the valley as he worked his dogs and the sound of it would hit you in the chest like a knife and make you feel scared and a bit sick. Even down the phone when he rang my father that morning, I could feel it. The whining menace in his voice seemed to pour out of the phone and flood the whole kitchen. I remember how quiet my father was after he’d hung up, avoiding my mother’s eyes and  her anxious questions.

“Why should we stand for it?“. Her voice was defiant, but her restless hands as she paced around the kitchen distractedly looking for her tobacco pouch  made her look frightened and unconvincing.

‘“Just because he’s got a fancy stud farm and more money than the rest of the district put together”… She scanned the back lawn anxiously as she patted the pockets if her apron for matches.

‘’ You know what the locals say… You find a stray dog in your sheep, you’re entitled to shoot it…“ His eyes slipped in my direction “ He says he counted seven dead lambs“

Suddenly I knew. “Who’s dog?” My voice squeaked… I tried to yell it again, but my heart was banging painfully and my chest tightened up  choking me. They were talking about Pedro. They couldn’t be. He was my best friend. We did everything together on the farm. He knew all the best places for rabbits ..and stoats  and eels. After  the cows were in, we built huts down in the bracken by the creek. After school , before it was time to bring the cows in we could lie in the long grass  of the  hay paddock watching the skylarks as they beat their wings furiously into the wind singing continually and apparently never discouraged by making no forward progress, and never getting puffed. Then with no warning the singing just suddenly stopped and they would dive vertically down into the paddock and if you watched where they landed really carefully, you could hunt for the nest, feeling around under the thistles and overgrown clumps of grass . Pedro usually found them first.He would wait for me and never disturb anything. When I rolled down the hill by the pumpshed , he got to the bottom first and when I sat up feeling sick and dizzy he’d be there, his soft black grinning face and sloppy pink tongue spinning in front of me.

‘A man’s best friend, that’s what Johnny Davis had called him yesterday when I had biked up to the store with him to get some stuff for mum and Pedro had run the whole way at my side picking his way along the grass bank next to the road. he never hesitated or showed the slightest interest in the sheep in the roadside paddocks. I knew he couldn’t have been one of the dogs killing the lambs. it had to be someone else’s . And we could keep him chained up during the night and between milkings.

I  ran outside and down to the dog kennel. I could hear the white Land Rover winding down from the road, its engine revving with self_importance and pulled up  by our house.

Pedro was lying in the door of his kennel. He set up panting expectantly and I crawled in beside him, sobbing. It was dark and warm and I buried my face in the long hair on his neck and held him as I cried.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I know you didn’t chase the sheep. I know you don’t chase sheep Pedro. It’s okay. Dad won’t let him shoot you. He won’t…””  The dog whined softly, yawned and started to pant again, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth

Through the door of the kennel, I could see my father and Bob Whitelaw standing together on the lawn. My father stared at the ground, his shoulders stoopēd and his face lined and pale. He looked old. He was not saying anything and the other man was talking fast, shifting his feet restlessly and gesturing occasionally with the rifle in his hand. Pedro  twitched at the sound of my father‘s summoning whistle and he jumped to his feet eagerly and ran up the hill.

I stayed there in the kennel for  a long time after that watching the ants as  they picked over one of Pedro‘s old cannon bones. I remember thinking if I stayed there until it was dark then Pedro would come back. I thought I heard him coming once, but when I looked up, it was only my father stomping down the paddock in his gumboots, shovel in hand. He stopped when I looked up but didn’t say anything , . His eyes looked red and swollen.

I knew for sure then there was no use waiting for Pedro. All that stuff my mother had said and told me about the war couldn’t have been true. My father couldn’t save anybody. He was a coward. He was a coward, and I hated him.

Years later, I came to understand the truth about my father. He was something even less well understood and much less appreciated in rural New Zealand in the 50s. He was an English gentleman, an officer and a gentleman.

The caravan

The first light of the newborn day was breathing through the camp as Wally Hohepa pushed back the inelegantly warped door of his caravan. The damp fog that crept in each night off the estuary had smothered the camp in a white woolly blanket, curled silently around the untidy rows of shacks and caravans and tangled with blue threads of smoke of a dozen makeshift iron downpipe chimneys that poked up into the morning sun. The old man sat on the step and watched quietly as the ground warmed with him. The fog blanket quietly gathered up its edges and began to sneak off into the hills. A few early risers were emerging to fetch water from the tap and forage for driftwood from the beach. One or two smiled a greeting as they walked past.

He scratched gently at the fold of soft hairy belly that hung over his belt and grimaced briefly as he tasted the dry morning scum on his teeth. A woman tottered down the muddy track towards him and he smiled self-consciously and raised his hand. She was dressed in a stained grey gabardine raincoat, holding the lapels together across her throat with one hand, struggling with a battered brown leather suitcase in the other. Wally had spoken to her a few times since she and, he supposed it was her husband, had arrived, just after Easter and he thought she had beautiful eyes. She usually just answered him briefly and carried on. He thought she looked sad.

“Going to town?” he asked. She nodded and lowered her eyes. “It’s early. You’ll be waiting for a while for a lift“.

She glanced at him briefly and hesitated. He thought she was going to say something but she seemed to think better of it.

“See you tonight then,” he said. She looked at him again and then, glancing nervously over her shoulder at the battered wheelless caravan she’d come from at the end of the row, she stumbled on down the path.

Wally shrugged as he watched her go. He was curious about the couple and thought he should make an effort to get to know them better, but they seemed to keep to themselves. Occasionally, late at night, he heard them arguing. Once he heard her crying and he thought he had heard glass breaking.

He heaved himself up with a grunt, pulled on his gumboots and stumped down to the beach to see what treasures had blown up on the tide. He could see the roof of the caravan over the top of the dunes. It stood slightly apart, silent and deserted. He wasn’t sure why, but it made him feel a bit queer, sort of nervous in the stomach. He carried on along the beach, kicking his boots through the soft sand, but when he turned at the end and looked back at the camp, there was still no movement around the caravan and his feeling of anxiety increased. He made a decision and headed back up the beach, puffing against the wind and cold. He called as he got near but there was no sound in response, except the whispering of the wind through the kikuyu grass, where it flowed around the empty axles of the caravan. He tentatively waited a few seconds and slowly pulled open the door. He was relieved to see the man standing with his back to him in the centre of the caravan. Wally opened his mouth to speak, but the greeting choked in his throat as the man pirouetted slowly round, his head angled impossibly by the length of electric cable embedded in his neck, pushing his head to the side as it tracked from the knot below his ear to the ceiling, where it was wound tightly round the light fitting. The eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The mouth hung wide, lips swollen and pulled back in snarl, revealing toothless gums. His face was livid purple.

He backed out of the caravan, steadied himself, slowed his breathing and forced himself to walk slowly back to his own caravan. He felt calmer now. He slowly and deliberately turned over his pudding dish, took two weetbix out of their cardboard box and crushed them, before filling the dish with milk. He needed to get to his daughter’s place down the line, the sooner the better. He turned on his transistor and adjusted the tuning knob deftly to pick up the scratchings and the TAB odds . He found the stump of pencil on the shelf above the fridge and started tomark the races for the day in a folded copy of Best Bets. He’d put a bet on when he went through town.

 It would take his mind off things.

The haybarn

The big man grunted as he pulled himself from her, rocked back on his knees and hurriedly buttoned his dirty woolen trousers, the redness of his face fading to pale purple. His eyes avoided her. Janet sat up slowly, squinting against the hot white bars of light leaking through the boards of the haybarn wall. She loved this place. Once it had been a secret place, a safe haven of perfumed dust where she came to play alone. Now it choked her, threatening to make her retch. She closed her eyes tight. The impassive, protective image of Declan McGann hovered in her mind, comforting her. Her head ached and there was a shrill ringing in her ears. She was needing Declan more and more, and she thanked him mutely. She had discovered him in “Love me tender”, that she read a few weeks after she moved to the farm with her mother. She’d been reading Harlequin books; addicted to them her mother said, since she left school, devouring them slowly and lovingly, but Declan, with his dark good looks and calm, protective nature, had become a special companion.

“Hurry up and get your pants on” The man’s voice was gentle now, whining, sort of cajoling. She remembered that tone well. It was the way he sounded when she was little and he used to come up to town with a bottle of sherry for her mother and toffees with fluff stuck to them loose in this pocket… “Come and sit on your uncle Ted‘s knee”… And when she hesitated her mother, flushed and red eyed, would tell her not to be so mean, so eventually she would go and perch stiffly, waiting for the fingers that she knew would follow, probing between her legs, under the elastic of her underpants, hurting and making her feel confused and somehow guilty. She remembered the smell of his breath then, like a dead rat she had seen once drowned in a trough, and she was hoping that it meant Uncle Ted would soon die. But he had not and now they were all living together. It seemed she could never get rid of that smell or his taste from her mouth.

She knew she could not hate him, that he was not to blame. Almost as long as she could remember he had been visiting them. He used to get her to draw pictures for him on the blackboard in her room and if they had visitors he was always introduced as “Ted Blackwell, a good friend of the family. “ I don’t know where we’d be without Ted,“ her mother would chirp, “such a kind gentle, generous man“

Once when she told her mother that she did not like him, her mother had turned on her, her eyes black. “You owe that man everything, my girl, and don’t you forget it”. Somehow she knew when she left school they would end up moving to the farm. She started taking money from her mother’s drawer and catching the bus into town so she could hang around in the park all day, watching the ducks and the lovers at lunchtime and wishing she could meet someone to run away with. She remembered the day the letter came from the school counsellor. Her mother just sat at the kitchen table, twisting a tissue and her hands and crying silently. It was all her fault. She knew it. It was about then that she started getting the headaches. Her mother took her to the doctor but he said there was nothing wrong. He said it was probably just being a teenager and she hated him.

The tractor ground slowly up the muddy race to the cow shed. The sun was low in the sky silhouetting the man’s head as he hunched at the wheel. Janice watched his broad oil-skinned back and massaged her aching temples with tired fingers. She felt Declan‘s presence beside her on the trailer. She felt his strength encircling her. She made a decision. He would help her to end this. Halfway through milking she realised her headache was gone. She noticed Ted looking at her iintently and realised she’d been singing. She ran back to the house after milking, ran a bath and sat for a long time scrubbing herself with an old nailbrush, its bristles worn to spiky stumps. For the first time since they moved to the farm she felt really clean. She reread the two best chapters of “Love me tender” and then lay for a long time with Declan beside her, feeling excited but peaceful. She listened to the occasional rumble of voices in the living room and the burble of the TV late news and waited patiently for the sound of his slippers scuffing on the old hall runner. Eventually the house was silent . She opened the tall locker in the laundry, feeling in the dark for what she needed, and carefully llifted her Swanndri from the nail,  pulled the back door gently closed and stepped into her gumboots. and Swanndri and stumbled into the dark towards the barn walking awkwardly with her heels raised to reduce the slap of her boots against her calves.

When she woke the next morning her headache was back. It was still there at the end of milking and when they bumped down the race to the hay barn later in the morning, she had to hold her breath to stop herself vomiting. The man had to strain to see as he backed the trailer to the door of the barn. She waited inside. This was when it would happen, what he called their special time. Her head was pounding. She pulled the shotgun from the loose hay where she had left it and kicked off her boots. Declan was beside her. She could feel this gentle touch on her shoulder. The man had heaved himself down and was standing in the doorway. He saw the gun pointing at his chest and stood frozen. She felt calm now. She saw Declan‘s face and felt his breath on her cheek. She lowered the butt of the gun to the ground and closed her lips around the end of the barrel. It felt cold and clean. The man grunted sharply and started to move towards her as she felt for the trigger with her toe.

Jumping Spider

Prologue.

There are estimated, by arachnoidologists, to be 60,000 species of jumping spiders, the vast majority of them not yet discovered. Although New Zealand is thought to be host to at least 150 species  I have avoided specifying the location of this story. Although all the behaviours of the protagonists in this story have  been observed and documented, not all of the behaviours are described in a single species.

Jumping spiders do not build webs to catch prey. Instead they stalk their prey utilising their acute vision  and leap on the unsuspecting victims from several centimetres away, biting them with venom-loaded fangs.

All variations of cannibalism have been observed in jumping spiders; females may attack their mates, mothers may eat their offspring, offspring may eat their mothers, a trait labelled matriphagy.

Chapter One: in which our heroine feels the rapture(joy)? of self-determination for the first time as she approaches adulthood.

In the late afternoon, a well-built male jumping spider, crouches at the entrance of the  web-wrapped tunnel he has built in the crook of a flax frond.  His enormous pair of eyes stare fixedly ahead, like over-bright  headlights. Reflections from the shiny “bug-eyed” lenses flash in the fading light as he scans the horizon.   Although he is approaching middle age he has yet to successfully attract a partner. His abdomen glistens, swaying rhythmically and his long back legs, hoisted above his head, wave like aerials ,telegraphing his longing. He has been preparing for days, going without food, driven by chemical signals he has sensed coming from the nearby undergrowth. All his energy is devoted to impressing and gaining the trust of a young inexperienced female if she ventures from the nest in the bush to live on her own; to attract and engage her before she has the time to make other plans.

The nest is crowded with young spiders , as well as the mother who laid them as eggs and has raised them since with total devotion to their needs . The quickest and fittest of them, like restless teenagers, are preparing to head out to explore their world alone. As the daylight fades and the shadows of the setting sun stretch out, one girl spider looks out from the nest entrance. She looks just like her many sisters, except grown larger than most of them. Since the time of her first moult, she has been a leader, always amongst the first to any food available . On slow days she has even imagined eating one or two of her brothers or sisters, there were so many of them. A couple missing would go unnoticed but she would hate to be labelled greedy.. Her huge eyes , even in the late afternoon gloom, provide  focussed information , hinting at a vast outside world up to a metre away.

She looks West, in the direction of the falling dusk and sets off, full of nervous anticipation. she is a proud arachnid. She knows she will not return..She is striking out ..and an exciting new path is clear in her imagination.. She is going to BE someone..

She stopped suddenly and considered coaxing one of her little sisters to come with her as emergency rations. But she caught herself and dismissed the idea.  She doubted she could be that ruthless.

Chapter 2. In which our girl-hero makes at least two life-changing decisions

The young female is climbing purposefully up the flax stem, feeling strong and confident. She has not eaten since lunchtime and even as night is falling her excellent eyesight picks up the movement of the waiting male. The muscles in his last pair of legs are aching and tremulous. He has held them upright like flagpoles for hours, totally committed to seizing his chance to form a relationship. His spirits leap as he sees her startle at his presence. She freezes. The muscles in her young legs swell and she returns his stare. She can make out her own reflection in the enormous lenses of his two front eyes, but quickly refocuses on the danger that this looming presence , with its grotesque swollen belly, might pose. He smells bad. Anxiety, tightens her thorax and she understands instinctively, as countless generations of her ancestors have done, what that volatile chemical implies.. it was the stench of domination. She gags as the smell percolates through her. She resents it,but she must force herself to confront this stranger ,eye to eye.

He lets his legs relax and they droop slowly as the pressure drops and fold back into position . He no longer seems so threatening. He is sheepishly aware of the smell. It hangs over them both like a cloud. His complex gut cramps in response, and he is suddenly hungry.

He pushes the thought aside, remembering with a jolt his primary intention.  The image that has driven his actions and taken his logic hostage, shines with distracting  clarity.. He must be cool, urbane, put forward the best version of himself.. 

Lonely months of feverish early morning activity, leaf-rolling and leg-pumping, practicing stalking daddy-long-legs in  the dark ..all that planning and training, had been preparation for this climactic encounter.

The young female continues to stare, as coldly as she can manage, into the twin polished globes of this stranger. The images of the outside world, (as described to her by a scaly old cobber, who had crawled into their nest looking for a place to rest,) were burning against the inside of her exoskeleton. The places he had described in the short time they had spent together, before he was shared out with the rest of the family, had planted in her the determination to explore the world outside the rolled leaf that was so far all she had known. The old cobber had hinted at a once -in- a- lifetime experience when he lived in a pre-amp and went on tour for a month. She was a modern spider. She was impatient to know what lay ahead and she saw this lumpen stranger as an obstacle to be worked around.

She had dimly imagined a version of her future, surrounded by copies of herself . Until now that was all of life as she had known it, but for now, she knew she needed to get away and she simply had not thought further than that.

She knew she must try to look calm and confident.. She cautiously released the tension in her knees, forced herself to sway gently and attempted a reassuring head nod. She scanned the information she was getting from the edges of her vision. She noticed, with a curious thrill, his shiny, strong, exposed neck.

The would-be father was feeling the first twinges of self-doubt and disappointment. He’d not been here before. He was increasingly warming to the idea of accepting the option of partial success, rather than persist with trying to persuade this exquisite young creature, who was glowering at him from enormous but unwelcoming eyes , to his view of the future. He had half-expected this outcome. He made a sudden decision- to settle for a shot at immortality through reproduction before even that became unrealistic. After all, half his life had passed without getting even this far before..It was time to cut his losses and compromise.

And, in fact, there was an option for an ambivalent parent- to-be..a “halfway” state they both were aware of. It was something unique amongst spiders; a kind of delayed, suspended development of a pregnancy..a kind of “baby bank”, a deposit now for potential replication should conditions change in favour of getting in the “family way”. It was designed for the spider who may not consider the time  or place is right to be suddenly slowed down by a large family to fend for, when she was on her way to a life of adventure

The would-be father can wait no longer. He feels, with pangs of pleasure, fluid beading and then drippings from the slit in his belly.  This cloudy liquid, he understands, contains his “essence.’ He quickly collects it , and rolls it in sticky wisps of silk with his pedipalps,  ( the outgrowths from his face that spiders use like hands.)

As far as he could tell the young lady-spider looked unbothered.. He bet on the time being right and inched closer, nudging the neat pile he’d made, like floss-covered snowballs down to the slot in her belly where he needed to wedge them in place..  “Nature’s post-box,” -he thought..He and his boyfriends in the nest where he was born used to joke about it.  

Our girl-spider looked outwardly calm, standing very still, but she was painfully tense on the inside, weighing her options. She knew she could store the sperm. What was it they said,? “Your body-your choice-right..?” Supposedly, there would always be aunts and nieces keen to help out if she did decide to keep the babies.. they  were career “spinstas”, (so named because of the time they spent maintaining the walls of the nest with their own spun silk.)  They weren’t cut out for raising families themselves..They otherwise spent their time cleaning the nest and feeding the spiderlings before they could fend for themselves.

But now, as she got used to the novel feeling of stretching of her abdominal skeleton, there was something else demanding her attention ,pushing all other thoughts to the back of her mind.. She realised she was really hungry.. Her mouth flooded with venom, beading at the end of her gleaming young fangs.. The poison tasted unfamiliar. It burned her throat and caused cramps somewhere in the network of her stomachs, momentarily forcing her to curl her abdomen under her and all eight of her legs to feel weak and unsupportive.

The would-be father was fatally distracted.  The secreting of his legacy, his shot at immortality, had left him relaxed and willing to co-operate. He had even allowed himself a short daydream, an image of himself, with several scaled down lookalikes crawling amongst his many legs; he had a creeping feeling of a job well done .

What happened next would have shocked him if he’d had time to think, and he surely would have kicked himself for being so careless if his legs were still working properly and still felt connected to him . The girl, to whom he had so recently felt close and affectionate, had leapt on to his fleshy exposed neck and closed her fangs, surgically hacking  the connecting sinews and nerves and flooding her would-be ex-lover’s body with stinging, paralysing venom. The glimmer of life faded slowly from his enormous bulging eyes, and his pedi-palms waved an aimless farewell, drooped and fell still,

Chapter 3. In which our heroine has time to think;, takes stock of her life and weighs up her options..

 As she feasted on the dissolving corpse, the young spider had time to think through her options. If her ex-partner was as good as he tasted, he would have been a great father., she thought.     She couldn’t deny the attraction of having a family, but she had just never pictured herself to be settling down to raise one so young. Children meant commitment, or so the spinstas used to say. There was so much she’d like to experience.

If she gives in and settles down waiting for her eggs to hatch, she’d never even have seen to the driveway. She remembered what the old spinner had talked about, before they had decided to eat him. Apparently the bush stopped suddenly less than half a day’s crawl away and there was a van parked there.  The old guy had   described fondly, with tremulous gestures how the floor was piled with plastic and paper food wrappers that were irresistible to beetles and even bush-cockroaches… According to him, they came out from under the carpet and from behind the ceiling lining when the van was empty, to eat the crisp fragments and biscuit crumbs.. It was the perfect place for a long weekend away, he said.

Before the sun rose the next morning she had crossed the choppy ocean of tarmac, climbed the wheel arch and squeezed into the huge, echoic floor space through a loose joint in the heater duct. Just as she’d been told, the floor was strewn with “six-leggers” picking through the grit and dead leaves for the abundant remnants of sugary detritus, and plastic wrappers. She killed and ate three, two young weevils arguing over a flake of pastry and a young cockroach . The ‘roach was an afterthought, and she immediately regretted it but she didn’t like the disrespectful way it had waved his antennae and he never should have turned his back on her.

By the time she stirred the next morning, having digested and absorbed the feast from the previous day, she had made a momentous decision. She would claim some space for herself under the car seat, She’d see some more of the countryside when they went riding in the van and, as a bonus, if she ended up keeping the pregnancy, there was an endless food supply available, just a short walk away that she could draw on even when she was slowed down and clumsy because of the eggs she was carrying.

Chapter 4.

In which the child completes her transition to womanhood..

As summer dragged on inside the van, she became a seasoned traveller. She passed the brightly lit days resting in the dark recesses under the back seat and at night wandered the interior of the vehicle, examining the newly deposited detritus on the carpet , redolent as it was with the mixed aromas of curling orange peel and sandwich crusts. Her enlarging eggsac meant she was always hungry and in the cool of the evening she could help herself to a smorgasbord of ants, fruit flies and weevils who were generally preoccupied and succumbed to her attack before they’d even sensed an approaching threat. She developed a craving for dust mites. Although tiny, they were abundant in certain places and she became expert at trapping them and tipping them over with her pedipalps, making an incision in the softer midline of the abdomen and sucking out the contents. She could then discard the empty skeleton and avoid the bitter aftertaste that came with accidentally sucking up jagged remnants of the shell.

It was occasionally intolerably hot. She worried her eggs might poach inside her. She took to riding shotgun on the rearview mirror, from which she could see the detail in the parched countryside racing by. As the weeks passed she found herself thinking more about the events of her first night as a free spider and the potential new life she still carried. As the temperatures dropped she caught herself idly checking out sheltered places she could make a home. Eventually, it was a mundane , random encounter that left her fiercely determined to devote herself to motherhood.

She had been relaxing, immobile on the driver’s seat headrest, where the last of the setting sun still warmed the fabric when she heard the three pairs of footsteps shuffling into view.

 It was an older, female head-louse,. wearily dragging her feet, with no apparent goal except finding a quiet place to rest and recuperate. She was past laying eggs . Her abdomen was flaccid , deflated by her dutiful egg-laying . She had performed her duty with devotion, or at least, without complaint. She stopped abruptly, sensing the danger posed by this immobile creature with the unblinking stare. She was tired, too tired to fight for her life. She met the spider’s two main eyes with impassive resignation.  The spider , with the mute demands of the tangle of new llife developing inside her, did not hesitate. She leapt forward and landed heavily on the other’s back deftly balancing the extra weight of her distended belly,  She wrapped her legs around her catch, immobilized it with her front legs and slit the other’s abdomen along the centreline, scooping  out the contents.The ancient viscera tasted bitter and gritty  and, accustomed as she was to a plentiful diet of fresh dust-mites and juvenile weevils , she retched and spat  the rest of the gelatinous, stringy material.

With a shock she realized she had killed the old louse, without a conscious decision to act, and her cavalier attitude appalled her. She blamed it on the pending arrival of other mouths to feed and realized how this imperative was increasingly driving her. She felt guilty and embarrassed, that she had inadvertently, imperceptibly, surrendered authority to this new life, the novel entity was already demanding control of her moral compass.

. She acknowledged the disgust she was feeling and silently apologized to the crumpled immobile exoskeleton. She would honour the  old louse by being the best mother she could be. She would devote her life from now on to producing a healthy brood and she would teach them right from wrong and to be the best spiders they could be.

She turned her back on the shameful debacle and hurried off in search of the two spinster sisters she’d met behind the glove-box. They had shyly, and politely, offered their assistance when they first met and our spider’s condition could no longer be disguised.

 Chapter 5.

In which the young mother has a transformational experience and realizes some hard truths.

It was just too easy . She rested while the eggs took shape inside her. The spinstas were increasingly excited by their impending role as  nannies and nestkeepers and were attentive to her needs, even massaging her swollen legs, and deftly rolling debris to the nest entrance.      As the time for discarding the egg sac to hatch drew near she accumulated more fluid in three of her legs and, with the help of the spinstas,  managed to stretch out and keep them elevated, so the fluid could drain  and the swelling subside. 

Because she did not go wandering now, she relied on information from the spinstas. They reported that the van had been thoroughly vacuumed and was now parked in a yard, with many other vehicles. They  did not initially seem worried. The carpets had been such a reliable food source, they assumed the supply would soon resume.

In due course, when the spider’s movements had become clumsy and laboured, the  bulging, twitching egg sac was shrugged off and the tunnel of web  that was home teemed with noisy, inquisitive spiderlings, lanky, miniaturized and comical with their outsized front eyeballs wide with wonder..

Nevertheless the young mother had been increasingly fantasising about what more adventures awaited her once this phase of her life was over. Parenting was never part of her future plans but she had resolved to see it through to the best of her ability. She owed that to the memory of the old six-legger.

She resisted getting too close to any of them, knowing their time together would be brief but she felt naturally protective of the smallest most vulnerable of the brood . One of the last to emerge from the eggsac, immediately recognizable because a shortened and deformed back leg, would never be able to jump to hunt effectively. She could not compete for food against her larger, more agile siblings and since the plentiful  fields of crusts and crumbs had disappeared, and with them the legions of scavengers that nourished the spiders, there was no reliable fuel for the  little cripple who took to sitting by her  mother, impassively staring into her  eyes,  beseeching her to intervene.  

 Soon, there would be more sets of eyes; demanding, entitled, querulous , hungry eyes.

The young mother was becoming increasingly restless and easily startled  as she warily watched the spiderlings becoming thinner and more irritable. Some of the more precocious were even attempting to pick out the weakest or most gullible, to soothe their hunger pangs.

 The spinstas watched sullenly from a distance. They had been caught in a calamitous food shortage with a previous family once before and were eventually forced to flee the nest in the middle of the night. They greatly resented the efforts they had made to insert themselves into that project and they had no appetite for taking the risk for a second time of becoming the family’s appointed provider of fresh food , an exercise they would not have survived.  They avoided interacting with the mother who looked tired and seemed to be drained of energy and motivation.

A short time later, the spider slipped away, in the dusk to consider the way forward. She noticed the day seemed to be passing faster and the sun was losing some of its intensity. It had been obvious to her that she had no future to look forward to. That disappeared with the abrupt loss of food supply. As much as she lamented  the lost opportunity, she did not question her responsibility to the starving brood, and did not allow her resentment to divert her from what she had to do. She allowed herself a few hours of peace, watching the other vehicles on the lot appear from the gloom as the sky lightened. She was feeling calm and resigned and meditated to relax and shake the anxiety and tension from her legs.

At last she stirred and made her way, as if in a dream to the back of the nest. The little cripple heaved herself over to her and fixed her with that stare, a kind of pleading that she found so hard to resist.

Silently she reached over and guided her daughter’s head to the soft cleft in her abdominal armour. She gently pressed her daughter’s  head with its opening fangs into the cleft. The cutting edge of the fang met little resistance and popped through the abdominal wall releasing a bead of tacky, clear slime that oozed from her fang and flooded the infant’s pedipalps. She smeared the liquid into her mouth and  probed for more.

Maybe it was the sound, maybe there was a tell-tale smell or maybe the rest of the brood were all awake watching this remarkable act. The spinstas watched on with horror mixed with admiration as the mother became obscured by a struggling mess of legs, shrunken bodies and probing fangs as the starving spiders greedily sucked out the abdominal contents, and with them the life-force of the entity to which they owed their existence.

Epilogue 

As the day warmed, the now deserted, shrunken body, with its multiple puncture wounds, some still moist and glistening when the rising sun caught them,  began to move imperceptibly. The light had faded from the eyes and their was no other sign of life. However,urges were returning slowly to the warming vital pathways. If the spiinstas had not given her up for dead and bolted while the brood was consuming their mother, they would have seen the miraculous, hesitant return of some partially purposeful movement.

While she was unconscious, deliberately suppressing the pain of evisceration, and the horror at her fate, she held on to an image of a better life, a dream life where she would live without needs or the demands of others. As she gradually improved she allowed herself one driving, fixed idea. She shambled slowly and furtively towards the entrance of the nest. She did not allow herself to rest there, but crawled on in urgent short bursts until she reached the gap in the rubber door seal on the front passenger side.

She heaved her shrunken, leaking body onto the footstep and collapsed.

Perched on the top wire of the high mesh fence, a slim, tidily patterned brown bird squatted, dozing in the morning sun. He had flown non-stop from the Marquesas Islands, arriving only a few days before. Although the entire point of the journey was to find a mate, his chest and shoulders still burned with every movement and his only concern at that moment was to eat and regain his lost weight from the trip

In spite of his tiredness, he was immediately aware of the spider emerging from the door frame. He dived steeply and paused only briefly to scoop up the spider in his beak. The tangle of legs waved comically as he heaved himself back up to the top of the fence. He tipped back his head and gulped convulsively,until the mess of legs and body of the spider had disappeared .

Lice Cycle

A hitchhikers progress. 

Chapter 1. In which we confront the miracle of life and our chief protagonist begins her journey

Under a woollen beanie, nestled in a warm forest of tousled blonde hair, a new life is assembling itself . 

Its been a week since she slithered out from her mother’s abdomen,, a moist, silky-surfaced pearl,  Her mother , as she has done several times a day for the last two weeks, deftly coaxed threads of slime from the surface of the egg and coiled it round a hair shaft;  slime, that dried and tightened in the warmth trapped in the forest of hair.  She was tired, drained and dessicated , but her body was relaxed . She has laid the foundation for ongoing life, ensured her legacy. Her life is nearly over. Obeying the laws of nature, the wheel of life turns inexorably.

Chapter 2. In which we celebrate the introduction of New Life.

Inside the hardened coat of the egg, there is a slow confused awakening. A new life begins to shiver, writhe and expand. the embryo-nymph feels around the unyielding walls of the egg-shell. She is growing, and feels increasingly cramped  and constricted. What has been a safe place to develop, she realises suddenly ,is becoming a prison cell.

She urgently explores , probing with her front legs and finds an elastic softening in the end of the shell. With a convulsive heave, she breaks through, hauls herself free and collapses onto the warm soft scalp, 

As she recovers, she guides her short antennae over the contours of her head. Her partially developed eyes are of little use in the gloom. She flexes her jaws and feels ,with a sudden thrill , the sharp edges on the fangs that fold out fluently  from her mouth. The same thrilling sensation floods her whole being and her mouth is suddenly filled with sweet saliva. Seemingly without  thinking she leans forward, and drives the hooks on her front legs into the cushion of dead skin cells on the scalp and, bracing herself, pushes her fangs through the skin. They slide through the surface layer easily but she keeps  pressure on them, boring deeper until she feels a warm flood of salt-flavoured liquid filling her mouth, mingling with the fluid she has secreted.

She squats transfixed until the pleasure wanes and then gently withdraws and folds her bloody mouth parts cautiously in on themselves. It is time to rest. 

The next four days pass quickly. She gains confidence in controlling her six legs, the hooks ensuring grip in the drifts of dead skin. She reaches a clearing, where there is only fine scrubby hairs . It will become her preferred feeding area. With repeated use her fangs have lost their sharpness but ,on skin free of the gnarled hair roots, they slide  in and effortlessly tap into a free-flowing supply of vital, invigorating blood.

Chapter 3. In which our heroine explores her mysterious world and struggles to maintain her contentment with life..

The events of the fourth day remind the little nymph that she has a lot to discover still about this journey she is on. Returning into the forest, her gut is a tense bag of blood. She is suddenly aware of another pair of antennae sweeping her head and chest. In the gloom she strains her eyes to make out 

the looming form in front of her. Exploring warily with her own antennae , realisation dawns. She is not alone in this forest. How could she have been so naive. On her journey to the clearing she had passed several eggs still tightly bound to hair shafts. Probing round the open ends she had established they were empty and wondered why they were there. She realises now she is part of a community. She must be alert to the possibility that, amongst her fellow-travellers, there may be some who are a threat to her

As if to reassure her the looming presence in front of her abruptly turns away and lumbers off into the gloom, pushing past her as it goes.

She is suddenly exhausted. Her gut, still distended with undigested blood, aches. She pushes into the shelter of a knot of hairs and lowers herself onto the warm, cushioned scalp.

She is woken by a stifling pain in her back. The interlocking plates that form the protective shield of her abdomen have stretched to their limit in response to her rapid growth. The rising pressure is crippling. her. She twists then stretches to try and make room and , suddenly, there is a ripping sensation as the horny coat splits from the top of her head the full-length of her body, revealing a pale,  moist replica  beneath, of the torn apart back structures. Relief is immediate and with a series of convulsive wriggles she hauls herself out of the old skin, leaving a golden casing,, a perfect sculpted replica, intricately detailed, down to the hooks on the end of her six hollow ,hinged  legs. The new skin, pale and soft , rapidly dries , hardens and darkens to a bronze gloss. While she stretches her newly minted limbs , she admires the brittle translucent statue she has just vacated . She has no way of knowing that this process will repeat itself twice more before she reaches her adult size. Or that its a process as old as life itself, a process common to all insects ; a design workaround for species born with a skeleton on the outside that will not expand as the owner-occupant grows..

Chapter 3. In which our heroine gets in the “family Way” and thereby answers many of her existential questions.

By the time she has her third moult, it is a familiar ritual and she feels confident and competent and ready to take on a more adventurous lifestyle. In short,  She feels like a grown-up..open to whatever , or whoever, comes her way..

On fresh legs, she hurries to the end of the forest to “fuel-up” in preparation for her new role, whatever that may be.. She is filled with curiosity, and a swelling desire to meet up with her co-residents in the forest… Until now she has avoided them, sensing they were somehow more competent, but now, since the final moult, she is feeling a new confidence.  Her enlarged adult abdomen, with its essential breathing holes, sways elegantly as she walks toward the clearing..

By the time she reaches her usual feeding grounds, she is picking up clues of other fellow travellers nearby. There are  fleeting movements detected at the edge of her vision, even, maybe,  the apparently accidental brush of an antenna tip as she rounds a knot of hair shafts  at the edge of the clearing. She has a weird feeling she is being followed, stalked even but, whereas before it would have frightened her, now, with her new sense of adventure, it feels exciting.

She probes around the base of a hair to find a gap between the roots and expertly slides her freshly unsheathed fangs into a free flowing tunnel of blood.  She squeezes the anti-clotting fluid from the  glands at the back of her mouth cavity and the warm blood suffuses through her so quickly that she fears she might overfill, and has to urgently retract her fangs . 

As she lifts her head she is astonished to see that she is no longer alone. While she was focussed on feeding, a male  has noiselessly approached her from behind, and is standing close to her, his legs stretched and his head raised, as if scanning the area for danger. She knows he is a male, (she has seen them in the distance before, strutting along hair-shafts, looking purposeful  and capable.) Like the others she had encountered, he is smaller than her but neatly turned out, his back-plates burnished copper and the  polished curves of his abdomen painstakingly maintained .,At the tapered tip of his abdomen his maleness confirmed by the grotesque penis jutting from his rear. 

Embedded , ancient connections  are firing rapidly in her nervous networks. Impulses she had not guessed at are now coursing through her, threatening to overwhelm her and all thoughts of caution or shyness desert her. For the first time she feels a pervasive sense of purpose. 

With this awakening has come a realisation, an urgent need to understand the point of her existence, to leave a legacy, to create new life. At the same time it strikes her, with profound certainty that this other living thing, standing so near her, is vital to her success in fulfilling her destiny. It is her role, to produce more and more copies of herself and him?..he has been sent to help.

She freezes, her six legs stiff, rooted to the spot as the male louse slides on his back underneath her. With the soft undersides of their abdomens pressed together, he reaches around her with each pair of legs in turn to lock himself into a tight embrace beneath her. She is wary. As she feels his weight suspended beneath her ,she must clench her legs hard to prevent them both collapsing to the floor. Now he flexes his lower abdomen so that the penis curls upward and pushes into the crack at her back end. She tenses reflexively, at the foreign sensation but   gradually relaxes as she feels herself responding to his flexing movement. Although it is an entirely new sensation for her she does not pull away. She responds to it by pushing gently against him, intensifying the connection between them. The two of them stay locked in this way for some hours, oblivious to their surroundings and the passing time. She is barely conscious of the intermittent pulses of fluid through his penis, that flow into her and bathe her depot of eggs that have been developing in her since she emerged from her final adult moult. 

She does not know that this is an essential process in activating the eggs to start their development. She relies on  her own instincts and trusts in the male she has allowed to attach  to her. Between them there is a sense of certainty : there is a confidence they both feel. They are co-operating for a purpose they do not fully understand except they share a sense that it is essential..in its own way as essential as feeding, essential as breathing..

Chapter 4. In which our heroine responds to the clarion call of nature and learns some more lessons  about the fundamental requirements of life.

Two days have passed since the extraordinary encounter in the clearing. After the male released her from his embrace and withdrew, she had felt profoundly tired. It was all she could manage to drag her exhausted body into the thick cover of the forest and she lay motionless for a full day. She continued to doze , eventually woke feeling hungry and after swallowing her fill of hot, salty blood she is feeling revitalised. Her abdomen is heavy and swollen, limiting the amount of blood she can swallow at each feed.

As she squats, the discomfort in her abdomen intensifies, rising gradually to a crescendo. She fidgets and stretches but the pain returns again like a wave, washing over her and, as it breaks, forcing her to tense her back legs and push down into her back end which is congested and gaping .  She rests between the pains, deliberately forcing herself to relax until the next pain begins. Time means nothing to her. Her focus is inward. Finally, as the pain builds to a climax, the first egg slides from her abdomen, slick with moisture that hangs in strings to the edge of the slit it has emerged from.  She rests momentarily then turns and drapes the strands around the nearest hair shaft.

Chapter 5. In which our heroine fulfils her purpose,, answers the queries brought up by a remarkable chain of events

The head louse has settled into a semi-automatic existence. She is no longer troubling herself with the existential complexities that define her . The exertions of laying, leave her exhausted in the morning. It is as much as she can manage to drag herself to the clearing after laying and securing two or three eggs in the night. She feeds greedily and , re-energised, hurries back to the safety of the dense part of the forest to recuperate.

Although she would , without question, continue with this regime until her egg pocket was empty of developing embryos , there is one more upheaval ; an unpredictable and unwanted adventure to endure. She is resting when it happens. There is suddenly violent shaking of the whole forest of hair, so violent that it shakes her free from the hair shaft she is clinging to and sends her tumbling end over end until she lands on her back with a thump, in an entirely foreign , unfamiliar environment.

She had no clue to what had turned her world upside down but it is a common misadventure for head lice.. The owner of the scalp, on which she was born, grew up and was now positioning her own children had fallen out with his brother.. Some disagreement between them over which channel they preferred to watch on TV had led to a tussle for possession of the remote control and , although they both had a hand on it, neither was prepared to concede to the other, and while they were straining and struggling to win control, their heads had rubbed together causing their hair to be mussed about by the skull-to-skull contact.

The hard-working, ageing mother takes stock of her new surroundings. The hairs in this forest are lighter, less rigid and have a tendency to curl, like a spiral. She can see no eggs, or even empty egg cases. She allows herself a long slow breath in through the spiracles in her, now shrunken abdomen to settle her nerves. It would be a simple task to find suitable hairs to attach the remainder of her eggs. Unless some other adults have been transferred at the same time as her there would be no competition for feeding sites or good laying conditions. The scalp she now stands on, she notices, is significantly warmer than the one she had come from. She would have to remember to position her eggs further from the scalp to avoid overheating them before they are ready to hatch.

As soon as it is dark she sets off in search of a good  feeding ground. The terrain of this scalp is different from what she is used to. It takes her a lot longer to find a cleared area, where the hairs have been shaved off near to the scalp, and she manages to guide her old fangs between the stumps and into a rapid-flowing pipe. The blood when it surges into her mouth is fragrant and sweet, less acidic than what she is used to. She rejoices at the novelty of the flavour and feels a boost to her lagging spirits.

Chapter 9. In which the circle of life is completed and our heroine performs the final act as the curtain falls.

Maybe it was the shock of having to adapt at her advanced age, or maybe it was just her time but within two days of arriving on the new scalp, and laying only four eggs she begins to feel listless and loses interest in making the journey to the feeding ground. Even when she does force herself to feed she no longer experiences any lightening of her mood. She squats immobile, enjoying the effect of the extra heat from the scalp she now lived on. Within a week her babies will be hatching and beginning their own journey to adulthood. In the meantime she is happy to enjoy the peace and quiet of having this sweet-smelling bush to herself. She settles down and folds away her ancient blunt fangs for the last time.. She is aching with tiredness but is content to rest and enjoy the sensation of her body warming in the radiated heat from the scalp. The movements of her abdominal wall that have drawn air into her system to sustain her since she first emerged from her, come less often. sHe does not notice when they cease completely. She drifts into oblivion, feeling nothing.

Its the older brother who complains first, when the babysitter is supervising their bath. She notices him scratching his neck when the hot soapy water, cascades over his shoulders. She lifts up the hair at the nape of his neck and sees the beads of blood forming where he has raked the scabs off with his fingernails. She has seen this before. There is no doubt in her mind. She gingerly parts the hair on the back of his head and soon detects the peppering of brownish cream nits. She debates silently her next move. Their mother has all the gear, the nit comb and the shampoo that kills the lice. She’ll have to deal with it…

“ Guess what”, she announces enthusiastically.. “ Looks like you guys are getting another week off school.”

Fathers Escape from Dunkirk

Copied from handwritten letter, time of writing unknown but it had been kept for I reckon 60-70 y since it was written

It starts abruptly, like a sudden impulsive decision, maybe

I was Brigade Signal Officer, 12th Infantry Brigade and we were holding the eastern approaches to Dunkirk .

In the sand dunes behind Nieuwport, I had heard ,on an old portable radio, the BBC announce the successful completion of the  evacuation.

It was an odd feeling, like reading one’s own obituary.

Now, a final attempt was  to be made to take off the rearguard.

 .

At midnight, the main body of the three battalions  withdrew and  moved off in trucks  followed by Brigade Headquarters.

I was left with four men of my Signals section with one 8.cwt truck and the brigade’s surviving Bren carriers with orders to collect the rearguards of the three battalions who were to continue firing until 2. am

This reduced my personal chances literally to zero because by the time this task was completed, there would remain barely an hour of darkness,

We ate bully beef, dug from  the tin with the point   of a jack-knife ,and a bottle of champagne removed from a French cellar “to  prevent it’s falling into the hands of the enemy” while the guns covered the empty road and the Germans fired the white signal flares in the darkness beyond.

The rear guards came at last In small groups. Walking silently on the roadside verge  and speaking in whispers the last twenty men of the Royal Fusiliers arrived led by their  Colonel, no less, who had elected to stay with his own rear guard until the last. An entire brigade had disengaged in the darkness, without the enemy, discovering  what was afoot . In the circumstances, it was a remarkable achievement

Now speed mattered more  than caution. The clatter of the tracked carriers as they moved off was alone sufficient to give the game away. My responsibilities were reduced to five men and one 8.cwt truck. We drove as fast as darkness, shell-holes and festoons of fallen telephone wires would permit but at La Panne we could go no further. The single street was blocked with burning vehicles; houses too were on fire and German shells were falling in the village. We moved down to the beach. Seaward in the darkness an Aldiss lamp was blinking “Move West” and for perhaps half an hour we tramped westward through the sand while daylight came.

Now our situation appeared desperate . Exposed in the daylight on the open beach, still miles from such shelter as Dunkirk might afford, I knew that some way out of the situation had to be found. Opportunity presented itself in the shape of an abandoned pontoon, a clumsy punt perhaps 20 feet by 8 feet, square-ended. It was half buried in sand near the high water mark and it had a hole in the bottom about  six inches in diameter. It was too heavy for the five of us to move but at that juncture there appeared a party of about twelve Coldstream Guards, under a sergeant and with the addition of this new strength we soon had the pontoon emptied, the hole plugged with a rolled up waterproof cape and the pontoon precariously launched.

We had no oars but rifle butts served as paddles. The craft leaked abominably but steel helmets made efficient balers. Worse we were grossly overloaded and freeboard was a matter of inches but the sea was flat calm, without a ripple and we were able to make perhaps half a mile offshore.

By this time the Stukas were overhead and we attracted a burst of machine gun fire but the aim was poor.

A naval motor launch took us in tow, almost swamping us in the process and soon we  were scrambling up the side of a destroyer, HMS Ivanhoe while her multiple pom-poms fought off the Stukas ,cascades of brass cartridge cases pouring on to the steel decks.

Perhaps half an hour later three things happened in quick succession. A bomb exploded in  the ship’s engine room, all the lights went out below decks and the Coldstream Guards stole my water bottle. This might have been less serious if the water bottle had  contained water. It was filled in contravention of regulation, with brandy.

I missed it quite badly during the next hour while the Luftwaffe booted a second ship, the HMS Havant out from under my feet and made several concerted attempts to do the same with a third..

I found this hand-written account of my father’s escape from Dunkirk, just the other day .. I think it is notable more for what it leaves out than what it describes.

He eventually got back to England forty eight hours or more after the news had been announced that the evacuation was completed. His father, who was a Fleet Street journalist had already been to see my mother to inform her that her husband was “missing presumed dead”  so it was a great surprise for her to get a four word telegram the next day, “HOME SAFE, LOVE GORDON”

He was able to get leave shortly thereafter and returned to London to recuperate in their Bedford Park basement flat. My mother told me he suffered from terrifying nightmares, every night, which were principally full of images of men screaming as they floundered in a burning sea. It is interesting how he avoids, in this account, any reference to the times he spent in the sea when one and then another destroyer was hit by bombs from dive bombing Stukas.

I think it is very likely that he suffered post-traumatic stress and this coloured his life indelibly, including contributing to his death by 58 years, from cardiovascular disease. He never talked about the  war with me…but then, I knew not to ask..I think .

It makes the boy’s own adventure tone of what he did choose to record, especially ..poignant,,