Judith

The wind blew at the gate as Robert Flanagan walked towards the farm house. Past the worn, broken concrete of the road, he travelled down the drive that led to the inner gate of the front garden. Robert pushed open the gate, the metal felt cold, and he brushed away bits of disintegrated paint from his palms. The night was grey, and full of bruised cloud. Some light shone through the canvassed sky and lit up the meagre primroses and tall fir trees, but caught them in such a way as to warm their colours. They looked like they didn’t belong rooted in the earth; they were alien, but beautiful against the harsh, dull sky. Robert made his way to the front door, which was sunken into the wall of the house. It was a very shaded place. The path he was standing on was overcast by the crazed shadows of the perambulating branches of the fir trees moved by a wind.
Robert had stopped, just before the door. He had spotted the outline of a small building on the patch of grass to his right. He crouched on his haunches and touched the wooden planks that comprised the walls of the structure. They were hard and rough, but spattered with small mounds of soft moss, or an insidious lichen that disguised the building’s door handle, making it hard to pick out. Eventually, however, Robert gained the small, flat disc of wood in his hand and wrenched the door towards him. There was a muffled knocking sound as something fell between shelves and out onto the dewy grass. Robert snatched the door closed to avoid further misplacement and picked up the object from where it lay. It was covered in a kind of lace, but felt very hard beneath that. He turned it around and discerned a little doll. He gave a quiet shirk of his shoulders and smiled, then took himself underneath the orange haze of a streetlamp to study his find more clearly. The doll was made of white porcelain, but the face was painted with two inky pools to mark out the eyes, and a thin red curve, forming a mouth. The little woman – for it must have been a woman, on account of its makeup, and its blue lace dress – belonged to Judith’s childhood.
The sound of barking dogs came from back door of the house, they were probably getting fed by the old man. Robert placed the doll on the short wall that supported the entrance gate and passed again to the front door, and knocked. He was greeted by the mother, who was a polite woman, but had never seemed able to be fully conscious of amiability. Robert felt this again as he asked for Judith. The mother smiled, but it was not a whole, full smile. It was much like she’d overheard the punchline of a joke without understanding why it was funny.
‘She’s up in her bedroom at the moment, I think she’s reading. Do you want me to call her down? – you can just go up if you want?’
‘Oh, no bother. I’ll just fetch myself upstairs. Cheers,’ Robert’s voice faded to little more than a whisper at the end of this exchange, he’d got his meaning across, there was no need to properly enunciate everything. The mother moved aside into the dining room, to the immediate right of the front door.
‘Now Rob! Y’alright?’ called the father. He was sitting in an armchair before the fire and teasing one of the kittens with his thick, hard fingers. Robert asked him about the farm.
‘Way! Same old bloody shite, man. But ye-es, still trundlin’ along – but, the old man’s in a one. He’s sick of not bein’ able to do anything, but I don’t know. It’s a pity, it’s a pity. Nevermind!’
Robert laughed quietly, he felt uplifted by the warmth of the room and the farmer’s game with the little cat.
Up the stairs he went, with a great surge of expectation rising in his front. The stairs were carpeted with diamonds of deep red and blue, and each step was worn away at the very edge. Robert felt an overwhelming sharpening of his faculties, as though he were about to defend himself in a fight as he turned at the top of the stairs and moved towards Judith’s bedroom door. He closed his eyes and almost punched at the door when he knocked.
‘Hello? Hello-o! You can come in, you know!’ Judith was sitting at the foot of her bed, painting her toenails in the amber lamplight.
The room felt extremely cosy. The blankets that held Judith were thick and woolly, incredibly inviting after the glass-like coldness of the outside night.
‘Oh – thanks.’ Robert shuffled in and sat on the deep windowsill, looking at Judith all the while.
‘Need a hand with them nails? Here – I’ll fetch this lamp closer. There you go, much better! Hey, they look lovely.’
‘Well,’ she laughed, ‘A’m no artist, but A can do these alright – you like ‘em do ya? Hmm, I’m still makin’ ma mind up – A’m not sure if A actually like this colour …’
‘A clearer light then, maybe? Do you want me to turn the big light on?’ Robert was already on his feet.
‘No, no, don’t worry! Sit back down this instant, boy!’ she scalded him, and the two laughed.
Judith became still as she concentrated on guiding the little wet brush against her nails. Robert looked out of the window and tried to find the doll he’d left outside on the wall. He had to squint and his head involuntarily nodded towards the glass of the window which bore a light film of condensation.
‘What’s outside?’ Judith had sloped off the bed and now leant over Robert’s shoulder. She knew she had startled him slightly, and a little flame lit up in her chest as he muddled together a few words in explanation. He wasn’t instantly sure he should tell her about the doll, it was probably not entirely appropriate to do so. It was a form of trespass after all. So, Robert lied that he’d been watching the wind blow the big fir trees around.
‘The old man reckons they’ve bin ‘ere since the farm started, they’re goin wild now, though,’ returned Judith. She held herself steady with one hand on the windowsill while she looked outside. She still loomed over Robert and he buried his heart in her scent. It was like a mixture of hay and sweet perfume and Robert found it an incredible tonic. He became immersed in memories of the two as children and the games they used to play together. It all seemed an infinite cosiness, a period of ecstasy in an unspoiled childhood. He became settled and easy in his gestures and words as the two discussed the night ahead of them.
Off, off and out they would go, tonight, to a gathering in the largest of the farm’s outbuildings – the topshed. Robert had already drunk at his home, but felt a tenacious lust for another. He, being so utterly impassioned towards Judith, resolved to share his evening entirely in her company. So, with a ‘Cheerio!’ from her mother and two slow nods from the father and the old man – for he had returned from the feeding – the pair set off from the front door, and Robert marched ahead to knock the doll from the wall and out of Judith’s sight.

The topshed was decked with a few tables to hold drink, but most of the guests sat around on flat bits of rusted, defunct machinery, and upon a few hay bales strung together with twists of blue twine. Judith soon separated from Robert for a short while to talk to her sister, Katie. She was younger than Judith and Robert had come to dislike her on account of her emotional slowness which came across as a calculating reliance on the opinions of others to compose her own attitudes. She lacked the cutting, decisive qualities of Judith, who knew so definitely her own mind and was very much aware of the acute demands of her body, and – crucially – could govern her life through an instinctual ability to act on the requirements of her great, emotional centres of being.
Robert drank a third glass of beer alone. It wasn’t that he disliked, or even that he was not familiar with the majority of the people around him, he preferred to share his own company because he was waiting for Judith like an inevitability. Yet, he found that the ephemeral rush of alcohol around his body only surmounted to a feeling of impotence within himself, a veritable dulling of his own faculties, which, from experience, he knew did not make him able to engage in the emotional moment. The drink, rather, shut his mind off from his body, and blocked the proper judgement of his blood. He experienced a disintegration of his will, which he hastily tried to remedy with a large quantity of water. Some splashes sank into his clothing and the water touched the skin of his chest. He felt ashamed of himself, ashamed of his ridiculous clothes and of the unexpected chilling on his skin, as though his body should not have had to become embroiled in a crisis he saw as being purely a grasping for order from within his head. He patted his clothes with miserable hands and turned away from the gathering.

Judith, however, had been watching him. She felt quite bored with the chatterings of her sister, and made no qualms about her desire to leave. Katie then wandered off and mingled amongst the growing crowd of party-makers whilst Judith stepped outside. She found Robert sitting in the passenger seat of the cabin at the head of the horse-box. He had been there before, they both had, when Judith’s father, or – back in those days – the old man would ferry them around to the cattle markets of Corbridge, or Hexham. She gently eased open the door on the driver’s side and slipped into the squashy black seat before pulling the door to.
‘LCL lager, Rob, that’s what some of the lads have been drinkin’ she nudged his knee away playfully with the flat of her hand, ‘they’ve been sayin it stands for ‘lose control lager’, but A dunno!’ She chuckled to him gaily.
Robert meekly cracked a smile and drew himself up to look at her. It was easy to see he had been crying. She grew gentler, now, and told him not to get worked up; ‘let’wah not put wrinkles on that bonny face, eh?’
‘Oh, A don’t know, A don’t know’ he exhaled thickly and pressed his eyes ferociously to purge the tears. ‘A’m sorry for never lettin’ you know, I feel like A’m not doin’ what A should be, especially with you,’ Robert felt exhausted and slightly faint. In a way, he was unsure he’d actually said the words just spoken. Yet, Judith was alive, and she was tingling in her chest for him, she felt a soaring pain as she lent and kissed him, a voluptuousness in her very tingling being. She pushed her hand across his front then surged out from her seat and met him before the blank headlights. Robert, revived of his torment, still felt a lingering foolishness within himself, which became usurped by an overpowering desire to take Judith in her room, to impress his triumphant masculinity into her.
Judith dragged Robert towards the house, possessed, as the wild animals are, with the need to complete their unity as an exploding fire overruns all. As they achieved the front gate, Robert looked briefly to the ground by the short wall. He could see the doll, though its fragile dress was ripped utterly from the fall and there, in the warm, amber streetlight, glimmered its exposed and complete form.

The End Is Nigh

They say I am a prophet, brought down on this Earth to speak unspeakable things. I find this odd. This is certainly something I had never considered being. But there is no use in complaining. The great task of my life has been set out in the stars, painted in the heavens, and must be carried out. So I speak to a man passing by. I am a prophet, I say. You must listen, I say. The man appears not to hear me and instead walks faster. I try to keep up with him but his pace is quick. I am prophet! I shout. In response he drops a coin which bounces across the pavement in a glittering frenzy. I give up chase and bend over to pick it up. It is silver and cold and not round as I expected, but bumpy. I hold it up so the sun illuminates its brilliant surface. For my toils, for my troubles and hardships, this is my reward.

A Poor Man's Keats

Sunrise on frosted grass,
Crystal stillness broken; warming,
Wisps of mist curl upward,
A new day awoken; forming.

Flowers flourish colour,
An infant world reborn; yawning,
A gentle breeze on tired leaves,
The first breath of dawn; morning.

Foundations

All that morning I played the Tin Woodsman. But the day was not wonderful and this was no Land of Oz. In the audience of strangers, I could only make out the space where my father should have been, and a deep sadness came over me. It was an emotion the Tin Woodsman himself was incapable of feeling; heartless as he was. That afternoon I had stolen away from school and by searching for him in the places I knew well, I found my father at last. My brother was there too. They were digging foundations.

Rain had begun to fall and cracked violently like broken eggs upon the wet sand, cement and gravel of the building site. I shouted out so that he would hear me above the tumult, ‘Where were y’, Dad?’ I was not crying then, but to stop myself a part of me needed to hate him. Another part of me wanted to pick up a spade and get to work with him. The other workmen crouched nearby under the plastic canvas of the scaffold looking glum. They sniggered from behind their flasks when they saw me.

‘You should be at school,’ my father said. He did not shout, but his voice was clear enough to the trained ears of a son. In hearing his words my feet almost took flight automatically. Then I remembered the Cowardly Lion from my play and found the courage to stay; maybe because I needed an answer.

‘I asked you ages ago to come. You said you would.’

‘I said I might,’ my father returned, and dumped a spadeful of slop into the pile.

‘It’s not fair Dad, everyone else’s mum and dad came. They were all there except you. They made the effort—.’

My father took me by the wrist and led me across the sodden planks until we were under the great canvass of the scaffolding. He set me down while I made a great effort to brush the muck from my skin, letting him see that it was a piece of him I brushed off. He scratched his stubble for a time, dried his hands on a rag and began to roll himself a thin cigarette using the tobacco from his tin. I noticed that two of his fingers had plasters on, the fabric ones that do not come off very easily and leave your skin a sickly white when they eventually do. A couple of black nails peeped through the top. I shuddered with the damp and felt the water in my shoes. He looked me in the eyes and told me that he was sorry he hadn’t come to my play. He said they were laying people off. That he and my brother needed to work, to put food on the table.

‘You’ll understand one day,’ he said. ‘Now go back to school. I’ll see you at home.’ He made to leave.

‘I can help you,’ I said at once, and noticed then a silver smear across my hand. It was the face paint from the play. I had forgotten that I was still the Tin Woodsman and saw my father smile on either side of his cigarette. Then he lit it within a cave made with his big hand.

‘No son.’

‘Dad!’ I let my eyes do most of the begging. I wasn’t scared of going back to school but would rather stay and do something for the family, since we needed the money so badly. Outside I saw my brother look up and across at us from his spade and scratch his eyebrow furiously.

‘I can be just as good as him, if that’s it.’

‘Sit down. That’s not it. Now you listen to me, listen. You’re not going to use these,’ he said, putting up his hands whilst leaving the cigarette in his mouth, ‘you’re going to use this’ he said, tapping my head. ‘You know why, don’t you? I don’t want this for you. I don’t want you working outside like me in the pissing rain. I don’t want you working with your hands and I don’t want you missing school. You’ll get a good job. Earn lots of money. Because you’re not like me or him. You’re my son, you’re smart.’ I nodded, felt as though I was smart simply because my father had said so. I felt guilty at having hated him and might have began to cry then because he avoided looking at me. After that he went back to digging foundations and I went back to school.

That afternoon I returned home the long way, thinking about all that my father had said. I resolved to go and wait with him to finish work and get a lift back to the house afterwards. When I arrived, I saw that he was stood inside the hole he’d been digging. The wind blew his short black hair all over the place. My brother was bent low in the trench with a trowel. Unseen, I decided to sit and watch them work. The sky had rinsed itself of the day’s rain, yet from the gathering stains it would need another rinsing. I saw that my brother was getting muscles like my father, which made me wonder as I tensed my arm when I would get mine. Or whether, now I had brains, if would miss out on muscles altogether.

My father had the trowel now. He scraped up some cement and in one or two flicks it was all transferred onto a waiting brick. The brick was then applied firmly to another brick in the not so tall wall. My brother had a go and all the cement dropped clumsily from the trowel and plopped onto the floor. He rubbed his eyebrow in frustration and I couldn’t help laughing at him. I was too far away for them to notice me. My father scooped up the fallen cement and gave the trowel back to my brother. The second time he did it properly and I decided to go home without them.

When my father came home his van bucked the broken curb, and the curb was always broken because he did so every day. I heard the engine gasp for breath and die into silence a second later. My father, the Bricklayer, shined in the terraced street, shining with the rain and the sweat, with muscles hardly contented to be the meat on the bone of this man. He stomped the floor on his approach to rid his boots of the hardened cement and tapped his spade lightly on the ground. He entered the house through the back door and wanted a wash and shave before we sat down for tea. This is where I found him at seven that evening. We always ate late. He was at the tiny sink in the outside toilet and through the corrugated plastic roof sheltering the yard I saw the sky as dark bubbles. He dabbed his face with a soapy brush then carved the razor through the stubble.

‘I want to get a good job dad.’

‘Good. Done your homework yet?’ He was always short with me after work.

‘Yes. Here.’ He bent back and looked at it for a few seconds, ‘Right. Ok.’

‘You don’t want to read it?’ I said, ‘I’d like to know what you think.’ I craved, perhaps for the first time my father’s insight; I was his smart son after all and we were in this together.

‘I think you misspelt different. How do you spell it?’

‘D-I-F-F-R-E-N-T’

‘No.’

‘D-I-F-R-E-N-T?’

He shook his head and I felt foolish. I was annoyed that he should pick out such a trivial thing from my work. It was meant to impress him.

‘I’ll just change it.’ I said.

‘D-I-F-F-E-R-E-N-T’ he said, ‘there’s your word, you missed the E.’

I stomped straight up to my room. Who was he to play with me like this? He did not think I was smart and probably wanted nothing more than for me to fail. I had asked for his help and he’d thrown it in my face. As my mind boiled over with these thoughts I caught my brother leaving my room scratching his eyebrow. He smiled, pushed past me and went downstairs leaving me to wonder what evil he’d done. My room was lit only by the grey sky which threw patterned light from the net curtains here and there. The rest was shadows.

I looked about until I saw the thing under my pillow. There it was, peeping out, a dirty brick. How could my own brother do this? How could they do this? And all of a sudden I remembered his face earlier that day, the half smile and itchy face. So I sat down upon my bed, my fingers shaking. I reached out blindly towards the brick. My hands groped the sheets and the pillow all the time feeling for the thing that squatted there so unnatural in the dark. But when I touched it, I could feel that this was no brick; its brown leather was as warm as the room. My brother had left a book for me underneath my pillow. A simple note upon the top said:

Son,

This is to get you started. Read this and I’ll get you another.

We’re both very proud of you.

Love Dad and Daniel.

I could not bring myself to cry then, but realised something that they, perhaps, had already known. I realised that I was in this alone; that I was to build things which they could not. My father had picked out that trivial spelling mistake because he would not have understood the content of my homework. After all, he was the Tin Woodsman with the heart and I was now the Scarecrow with my brain. Then I knew looking at the book, that whatever I became and whatever happened, I was my father’s son and my brother’s only brother. My father was a Bricklayer, and I was a Bricklayer’s son.