Quiet Words

Graham started at Royal Mail sometime in the nineties. New recruits came and went but if they lasted the first three weeks, they usually stayed for at least another couple of years. Graham immediately made an impression, if not necessarily a great one.

He was about my age, late twenties to early thirties, and cut a peculiarly slight figure. He was small without being either short or seeming necessarily weak. It wasn't that he was feminine, but neither was he particularly masculine. He seemed like a small, slightly fierce Charles Hawtrey without any of the camp. There was a suggestion of upper class heritage, or at least equivalent delicacy. He had short dark hair and pretty eyes, like a male Sinéad O'Connor, and naturally we all assumed he was probably gay. I imagine that being homosexual in a blue collar profession as was ours must be a pretty tough gig, but probably not so tough as people might imagine.

We were postmen, and of course postwomen, predominantly working class. We liked a pint. Many of us were into football, and not actually that many of us were into performance art or tone poetry. Of those of us who were into football, a few were in it mainly for the joy of kicking someone's head in after the game. Some of us read the Sun - but not everyone - and many of those who read the Sun did so in the knowledge of it being mostly complete bollocks. With one or two exceptions, the shit thick, xenophobic generic Sun-reading working class you may have heard about never really existed except in the imagination of a terrified middle class. Everyone at Royal Mail knew somebody who was gay, and mostly we were past caring because we all had our own shit to worry about; and those few suffering from raging homophobia presented a much bigger, weirder target than the actually homosexual. Gay people were easier to get along with and would even joke about uncomfortable particles of sweetcorn trapped beneath the foreskin, just for the sake of getting a reaction.

No-one knew whether or not Graham was gay, but in any case, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that he was quiet, and quiet to the point of being rude. He didn't speak to anyone. He didn't engage in small talk. If you asked him a question, he'd answer with three or four clipped words or he wouldn't answer at all, wouldn't even look at you. Most of us took offence at one point or another, but no-one acted on it because he seemed kind of intense and he did his job, which was all anyone could ask. Maybe he was just pathologically shy.

Years passed, and those clipped three word responses gradually blossomed into sentences, even exchanges which, if not exactly friendly, at least suggested there was a human being in there somewhere, just one who tended to keep his mouth shut unless he had something to say. He did his job, and no-one had any reason to complain, excepting one summer morning so hot that he went out on delivery wearing just shoes and a pair of shorts so brief that locals phoned the office to complain that their postman was walking around in just hotpants, and it was weird. Whatever Graham's thing might be, we guessed that being shy wasn't really part of it.

Another year passed and Graham volunteered to be our union rep on the grounds of no-one else wanting the job. To everyone's surprise - now that he had something to say - he revealed himself as erudite, fiercely intelligent, and riotously outspoken. He went to all of the union meetings and made many enemies, not least being Jim Cunningham, our area manager, the individual charged with shuffling in all of the changes to which the union and particularly Graham as our representative, were opposed.

I am hopeful that I never again receive correspondence from you written in the manner of this letter, Cunningham wrote in response to one of Graham's missives. Graham was amused, apparently enjoying sparring with upper management types, most of whom were unfortunately nothing like so sharp or canny as they believed themselves to be. Graham made copies of his exchanges so that we could all enjoy the spectacle of him going full Paxman on the mealy-mouthed tosspot who was doing his level best to make our working conditions that much less bearable in the name of savings.

If a man gets in the habit of dealing out blows, Graham told our common enemy, sooner or later he ought not be too surprised to receive a blow in return!

We were impressed, and I found in Graham someone with whom I was able to have an actual conversation. He remained a private person, disinclined to give away too much about either himself or his upbringing, but he was clearly educated and had read books. We talked a little bit about Mexico as it turned out that he had spent six months in South America, apparently in an effort to find himself although he didn't seem to regard the expedition as a success. He hadn't found whatever it was that he'd been looking for.

We sort of became friends, in so much as that one can become friends with anyone so private. We became close enough to laugh at each other's jokes. I asked about the apparent change in his personality from when he had first arrived at our sorting office.

'I think it would be fair to say that I was having a nervous breakdown at the time,' he told me with a confessional smile.

His parents hadn't wanted him, he told me, and so he had been raised by nuns. This seemed to explain almost everything.

He took an interest in my first attempts to write, notably an article on indigenous Mexican music proposed for Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector magazine.

For a start, a mythological figure who disputes the necessity of human sacrifice has as much place in pre-Colombian Mexico as a sped-up Benny Hill comedy chase sequence in the Bible. The very notion is completely inconsistent with indigenous thought of the time. The rest of the tale provides a good example of the Nahua propensity to explain and justify the present as the conclusion of a predestined past, even if that predestination only occurred in retrospect. The fact of the story of Quetzalcoatl disappearing on a raft appearing in no native record until a long time after the events it explained is clear indication that the tale is of interest more as an example of the Nahua attitude to history than as something worthy of consideration as a literal historical occurrence.

I was not accustomed to writing long articles with academic aspirations, but felt I was doing fairly well with this one. My writing style was significantly influenced by the strident and often sarcastic tone of Andy Martin's writing in SMILE magazine and on the covers of various records by the Apostles.

Somewhere on a Pima reservation two families are enjoying a civilised evening meal to the delicate accompaniment of Traditional Songs and Chants of the Millwall Wrecking Crew. Glasses are refilled and a second course approaches as the earthy and mysterious refrain of you're gonna get your fucking heads kicked in rattles the speakers.

Having effected what I considered to be a reasonable impersonation of Andy Martin's tone, I asked Graham to take a look at my most recent draft of the unpublished article. I asked for his feedback but didn't really want it. What I wanted was for him to confirm that my borrowed wit was indeed as sharp as I imagined it to be, perhaps even to join me in laughter as we considered all those unenlightened people quaking in fear as I set them right on a few of their silly assumptions regarding indigenous Mexican music.

He took what I'd written, and then came back with a response, mainly taking issue with the tone I'd adopted, and my tendency to switch between sarcastic funnies and po-faced self-importance. He quoted Cervantes in illustration of his point, and at the time I had no idea who Cervantes was, or even what Graham was trying to say beyond that he had apparently failed to recognise my genius.

You may have made the mistake of thinking that, as an 'expert', you can cry sanctuary, and be exempted from the ordinary rules of successful communication. Or, you may be thinking that, unless your subject is made to look suitably complicated, even gloomy, you won't win the respect of fellow experts.

I was stung, but above all I was embarrassed because I knew on some level that he was absolutely right. I recognised his criticism as both valid and helpful, but couldn't get past the idea that I'd written something which was essentially ridiculous, even if that hadn't been what Graham was suggesting.

Things became uncomfortable between us, and our tenuous friendship seemed to dissolve, vanishing like mist on a warm summer morning. At some point he left the job, and then I left the job, and that was that. He has no internet presence that I am able to trace, because more than anything I want to be able to tell him that he was right, and to apologise for having taken his criticism so personally, and I would at least like to know that he's still alive and is approximately happy, but some stories simply don't have any tidy ending. Clearly this has been one of them.

Another One of Those Days

It's August in Texas and therefore fucking baking, but so far I've just about managed to avoid my annual psychological meltdown arisen from ordinary daily pressures amplified in the heat. I've found that the twenty daily miles I cycle from Monday to Friday helps to keep everything nicely balanced - mentally speaking - and this year I've managed to get out each day before the heat gets too much, although it hasn't been easy. I cycle along a local greenway called the Tobin Trail which runs a circuit around most of the city but for a few places where different stretches are yet to fully connect. I cycle the Tobin Trail because Texas roads are frequented by shitheads in trucks the size of fucking houses who believe that running a cyclist off the side of the road represents a blow struck against the forces of both communism and anyone who ever laughed at your tiny penis.

Sometimes it can be difficult to cycle along the Tobin Trail due to repair work. For example, the end of Holbrook Road has been impassable for at least this last year, possibly two or three. This is due to renovations being made to the city's drainage system. I watched as a massive hole was dug in the road opposite the Black Swan Inn, a hole of volume sufficient to conceal a truck. Reinforced metal sidings were lowered into the hole, then pipes of the kind along which rebels traditionally flee for their lives in dystopian science-fiction movies, and then they filled it all in. About a month later they dug it all up again and repeated the exercise about fifty yards along from the first hole. They're now on their third hole, and it's beginning to look one hell of a lot as though they just can't decide where to bury the fucker.

I lived in London for twenty years and I saw a lot of road works in that time, but I've never seen road works which suggest that someone got the map upside down, necessitating whatever they buried being dug up, then reburied a little further on. It's almost as though fucking idiots are in charge. Some mornings in London I'd walk to the shops, passing workmen just getting started on a hole in the road, and the thing would be all done with tarmac being rolled flat by the time I came back the other way, heading home.

Part of the Tobin Trail runs along Salado Creek, which is dry at this time of year. This stretch comprises nearly a mile of raised wooden walkway named Morningstar Boardwalk. A few months ago I noticed a sag at one part of Morningstar Boardwalk, presumably where the supports had given way underneath. Then last week temporary signs appeared at each end informing us all that Morningstar Boardwalk would be closed for repair from Monday to Friday. The damage really didn't look like five days work to me, but then what do I know?

So it's August in Texas and therefore fucking baking, but I'm doing okay. I'm due to fly back to England in a couple of weeks time but I'm not thinking about it. I don't like flying. I don't really like England that much. I don't like my connecting flights being cancelled, distending the misery and discomfort of long-haul travel to forty-eight hours or more, and my connecting flights tend to be cancelled two out of every three times.

Like I say, I'm not thinking about it.

I deduce that I can exit the trail before I come to Morningstar Boardwalk, head through the subdivision along Astronaut Drive, then out onto the common land following the electricity pylons at the end of Luzon Drive. My theory is that I will be able to get my mountain bike down to Salado Creek from there, then across to rejoin the Tobin Trail at the other end, bypassing Morningstar Boardwalk altogether.

Monday is a bit hairy. The land across which I end up pushing the bike on foot is dry but overgrown with reeds and the like. I go slowly so as to be able to hear rattlesnakes, having seen at least one in this general vicinity. Then I recall I've also seen a wild hog down here, thankfully from the safety of the boardwalk at a distance of several hundred yards. It was too big to make sense. I couldn't tell what I was looking at and was momentarily reminded of interviews with people who claim to have seen Bigfoot. I'm told that wild hogs are to be avoided in the same way that mountain lions are to be avoided.

Nevertheless, I make it to the other side and I'm back on the trail. I can't quite face more of the same when coming back, so I wheel the bike parallel to the boardwalk, half suspecting that the promised workmen won't yet have turned up to effect the proposed repairs and that my detour will have been for nothing. There are a couple of trucks parked as I come to the damaged section. I expect someone to tell me that the boardwalk is closed and that I'm trespassing, but they only look at me and shrug.

I follow the same route on Tuesday, albeit later in the day. I explore the creek along the cracked, dry beds of water courses, eventually finding one which, if longer, seems less hazardous with less places which might conceal a rattlesnake; but it's way too hot so I turn around and head home, making up the usual mileage by doubling back on myself at certain points.

Wednesday is better - across Salado Creek and then back again as planned, although I still have some trouble remembering which dry stream to follow and end up getting lost in the reeds.

Boris Johnson suspends Parliament, and I add it to the other stuff I'm not thinking about right now - the Amazon in flames, the probability that Donald almost certainly will get a second term, everything turning to shit.

My sleep is restless and I dream about getting back somewhere or other, and I'm racing against the Beatles in their moptop incarnation in the matching suits with weird collars. I'm puckering my mouth and giving McCartney the thumbs up, mocking him by singing nursery rhymes. You know that Bah Bah Black Sheep - that's one of your songs, that is…

People I don't know are defending Boris Johnson's decision to suspend Parliament on facebook, proclaiming that he's a guy who gets things done, and I remember how much I'm not looking forward to whichever Sun opinion column my dad will be recycling for my benefit when I return to England in a couple of weeks.

I try to feed the cats as usual. Grace won't come in because Gary terrorises her. I pick Gary up and try to take him inside but he scratches my face, drawing blood. I'm really beginning to tire of his bullshit.

I hit the trail, then Astronaut Drive, then I cross Salado Creek. I'm cycling across rocks and dried mud. The ground is uneven, so I'm in first gear. I notice the bike has slipped into third for no fucking reason as I attempt to scale a particularly annoying mound, so I flip back to first and there's an agonising crunch. Everything stops.

The entire gear array - the derailleur as it's known - has somehow chewed itself up between the chain and the rear wheel, consummating damage first implemented by Ian the arsehole back in November. I dismount, which isn't easy on this ground, and make an inspection. The thing is beyond immediate repair and will need to go into the shop. I'm fucked. I'm about six miles from home and I'm fucked.

I push the bike towards the boardwalk, planning to follow the route I took on Monday. It's still closed off for repairs. The repair team is one fucking bloke sat in his truck, which doubtless explains why the work was estimated at taking a full week. I pass the section of boardwalk currently under reconstruction, at least in a general sense. Unless I'm missing something, the work is such that it should have taken a morning to complete, but maybe it's special wood which only grows on the planet Venus and the one fucking bloke sat in his truck is waiting for the next shipment.

I have 2Pac's posthumous Better Dayz playing on my Discman, and now I turn it off because I'm irritable and it's begun to get on my tits. I've been listening to a lot of 2Pac over the last week, mainly because I've realised that I have all of his CDs and I'm only really familiar with a couple of them; and now I realise that this is because, truthfully, he was a bit of a berk. In the wake of his undoubtedly tragic demise, 2Pac has somehow been held up as the black Noam Chomsky on the grounds of having read a book or two, even if one of those books happened to be Linda Goodman's Star Signs; but if his heart was in the right place, he still had some way to go, and simply repeating wisdom and understanding over and over whilst pulling a wise face is not the same as having depth. This is the man who decided that NIGGA was an acronym for Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished, who insisted on a new, more positive meaning for the word thug, and so Better Dayz is all thug life, thug nature, thug passion, thug this, thug that, and by the time we get to the thug hot water bottle* I've really had enough of this shit

Once past the section under repair, I haul the bike up onto the boardwalk. I call my wife on the phone but she can't get away.

'Never mind,' I say. 'I just needed to vent. I don't mind walking home. It's all exercise.'

A trail steward stops as I reach Ladybird Johnson. 'You doing okay there, buddy?'

'My gears are knackered.' I point to the scrap metal wrapped around my rear axle. There's nothing he can do, and I can't be bothered to have a conversation about either bicycle repair or how I'm from a different country.

'Sorry,' the steward says.

'It's okay.' I tell him. 'It's not your fault.'

My phone pings with text messages. It will be Bess, but I can't be arsed to go through the rigmarole of stopping, finding my glasses, finding some shade then reading a text, whatever it says. I call her back once I reach Los Patios.

'My co-worker says she could pick you up,' she suggests.

'It's okay,' I say. 'It's only another couple of miles.'

I stop and take a look at the derailleur. I manage to unscrew it so that it's at least no longer wrapped around the chain. The chain now hangs loose, but I am able to cycle. Unfortunately I can't go much further than twenty feet without the chain slipping from the cogs and jamming, so I freewheel or walk the rest of the distance. I wonder if I'm sufficiently stressed to resume smoking again.

'You doing okay?' the black dude asks.

I've seen him enough to nod some vague greeting. He's about my age and is usually walking five or six dogs of various shapes and sizes. I can never tell whether they're his dogs or that's just his job.

'Yeah,' I say, and a minute later I notice that I've launched into a barely coherent summary of my life up to this point. I'm waving my arms wildly like Suzanne from Orange is the New Black and have made an embittered reference to the one fucking bloke sat in his truck.

'Well,' says my audience, 'I hope the rest of your day goes better.'

He means it, but you can tell I came across like a crazy person.

I'm less than a mile from home and I guess I feel better, having sobered up on the viscosity of my own mania.

What a fucking day.

*: This stands for Brothers Only Try To Live Excellently, y'all better recognise.

Another Funeral

We are standing in a field in Texas, about fifteen of us gathered around two holes recently dug in the ground. There's a priest reading out something approximately Biblical, although under the circumstances it feels as though I should probably refer to him as a preacher man.

I met Daniel, my wife's father, on only two occasions, neither of them particularly happy. The first was at Lena's Quinceañera. He'd recently recovered from a stroke and was having difficulties, one of which was with recognising his own daughter, so there didn't seem to be much point trying to explain who I was. I briefly spoke to Charlotte, his wife and the mother of the two children who aren't Bess, and we left it at that. Our second meeting was at the veterans' hospital. He'd had another stroke and was in a coma, following which, that was pretty much that.

His funeral was mostly people I didn't know. He'd separated from Bess's mother a long time ago, back when my wife was still in her infancy, and the two of them had since maintained a loose familial connection mainly because Bess made the effort. He'd lived a separate life. Charlotte, who went the previous year, was the daughter of Kenneth Cash - a cousin of Johnny Cash, whose name should require no introduction. Half of those attending the funeral bore a striking resemblance to the famed country singer, the hawkish nose, the eagle eyes and sweep of raven hair. It was difficult to miss.

That was 2015, and now here we are stood in a field in Texas doing it all over again in 2019. Both Daniel and Charlotte's ashes were kept at the home of their daughter, Bess's half sister, Christina; and when a third urn of familial ashes came along, it seemed like time to think about burial.

Catholicism is a mostly foreign country to me, but I'm told that what happens with post-mortem remains is informed by the belief that the departed will eventually be resurrected on the day of judgement, so there should probably be something physical left to resurrect, and if couples can be kept together, that will also save a lot of time and trouble in the long run. This is what I've been told, and my own thoughts on the subject are neither here nor there. So four years after the first funeral, we're having a second one, this time concluding with a burial.

Daniel's brothers are both present, which is nice because Johnny is one of the few people I've met on this side of the pond whom I would unreservedly describe as sane. You can have a conversation with Johnny and be fairly certain that it won't go anywhere stupid, weird or pointless, and I'm beginning to appreciate this as a rare commodity. We really don't see enough of Johnny.

Here we stand in a field in Texas. The urns are lowered into the ground, and then various members of the congregation - I suppose we're a congregation - are invited to take up the spade and add the initial servings of crumbling orange soil. I decline on the grounds that my contribution would feel inappropriate, at least to me. Johnny and Carl both step forward and take turns. I look around at Charlotte's people and recognise only her brother, six foot at least, skinny as a rake with his hair flowing and white. Charlotte's sister passed a few years back, so it's just him now.

To my eyes, he very much belongs in this landscape. I suppose, eventually, we all will.

Djinn'll Fix It

It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that there was a child beggar named Azzam who did toil that his family should eat, and so in this way his life was without pleasure. His father had become overfond of wine and so did spend much of the day sporting with himself in a manner which would have greatly displeased Allah had he known, peace be upon him. Azzam's mother was no better, for rather than buying meat and fruit at the market, which in any case she could not have done for all their dinars went towards the purchase of her husband's wine, she idled away the day with entertainments of a low sort whilst puffing away on her pipe with such devotion that their home was referred to as the Alsafhat Alrayiysiat hayth Tusbih yd Wahidat ghyr Maryiya which means the home where a man cannot see his own hand in front of his face.

One day Azzam was fishing from the bank of the great Khabur river, hopeful of catching something that his family should not go hungry that evening. As he sat he saw a procession of camels on the bank opposite, decorated in fine materials of blue and gold, and each one carrying a minstrel or a singer or an acrobat or some other entertainer. These personages were a troupe who were on their way to provide delight for the Caliph, and Azzam knew this for it had been the talk of all his friends. The troupe did sport gaily as they passed, one plucking upon an oud as his fellow gave voice to song, and it seemed as though they did not have a care in the world.

'It is all right for some,' said Azzam as he frowned and considered his lot in life. 'O that I might sport gaily on top of a camel such as those I see before me.'

His wrath caused his mouth to become dry and so did he pull the stopper from his pitcher of water, but before he could drink, a great smoke seemed to fill the air, and at first he looked around as though expecting to see his mother come to visit him and puffing away as was her habit. He then looked at his pitcher and saw that it lay on the ground at a little distance, and that which he had unstopped was an unfamiliar vessel, one from which a great creature had sprung to fill the sky, a terrible Afrit with hair uncovered and worn at length like that of a temple girl, but the colour of the sun. The Afrit's garment shone like polished copper but in blues and golds and made a crinkling sound as the Afrit moved. Around his neck and arms he was decorated with ropes and chains of gold, and jewellery studded the fingers of his great hands. Held before his eyes were circular windows the colour of dawn, and he inhaled upon a great medwakh packed tightly with aromatic dokha as he beheld the young man which had brought about his summoning.

'Now then,' the Afrit said, and he did say it thrice before speaking further, but with a curiously stilted delivery arranging his words into groups of three or four. 'I do believe what we have here is a young man who would very much like to ride upon one of those camels. Is that correct?' The Afrit then made a noise, a pitch which ululated like the call of a certain type of bird, which he followed with a question, enquiring, 'how is it which is about that then?'

'I do not understand your second question, sir,' Azzam replied, 'but it is true that I am envious of those fine men on their camels.'

As he spoke, he found himself miraculously seated on top of the largest camel, and he could feel it roll beneath him as it walked forward across the sand, moving like a great ship on the ocean. It seemed to him that the hours of the day were disjointed, and he experienced himself, once again back on the ground taking instruction from one of the herdsmen who instructed him with all of the regulations of camel health and safety; and then again he was riding, and experiencing great happiness.

At length he found himself back at the river bank. The procession of camels was no longer to be seen, yet the Djinn remained.

'Now then, young Azzam,' the Afrit began. 'Goodness gracious me - was that really you up there on that camel?'

Azzam found the question strange, for his camel ride had not seemed to him very much like a dream, and yet there was the possibility that it could be so. As he puzzled over this conundrum, he realised too late that the Afrit was now before him, holding a great medallion of gold with a ribbon of finely woven silk. The Djinn held the cord, clearly meaning to bestow it upon Azzam as though it were an award, and although made of but spirit and smoke, the Afrit did smell of men's bathing rooms and other unsavoury places. Azzam knew this only because the terrible creature had come so close.

Upon the medallion was carved the inscription:

العفريت الثابتة لك

It was then that Azzam noticed how the Afrit's eyes had grown wider behind the rose lenses, and that his breathing had become uneven.

'Oh my goodness gracious me,' exclaimed the Afrit excitedly.