What Happens When Someone You Don't Really Like Snuffs It

 

We used to think she was all right, but eventually we'd had enough. I say we, but my wife had the worst of it. I was mostly just an irritated spectator. She had been part of my wife's rock group, a rock group in this case being women, or mostly women, who get together to paint decorative designs on rocks and stones. The idea is that the stones are left hither and thither to be found by strangers in the hope of brightening someone's day. It's a random act of kindness.

Some of the rock group seemed decent people, but a few were problematic, tending towards gossip and fixating on things which wouldn't matter to anybody sane. I guess that's what happens when you hang out in a group. There's always one, sometimes two or three.

Anyway, we used to think she was all right, like I said. She was small, round, approximately Mexican, and always with a certain twinkle in her eye. She was distraught when her little dog died, and publicly so on facebook. I took pity and did a painting of the former pooch in the hope of providing some solace. She seemed to like that. I also painted a sign for her rock spot - a patch of garden in the grounds of her local library where people could leave rocks they had painted in exchange for any which took their liking. The sign was in acrylic paint on a large breeze block.

The pattern eventually emerged that she liked to get free stuff, which I only noticed as my wife became more and more irritable. The woman's facebook page was mostly sob stories, pleas for this or that, did anybody have such and such a thing she could borrow, or maybe just have? She had plenty of painted rocks from my wife, even a few of the old vinyl records which take my wife hours to decorate with elaborate mandalas. She added googly eyes and pipe cleaner legs to one of them and sent the photo back.

Look! I made a spider! Isn't he the cutest!

Others she embellished with bunny ears, or in one case, circular mouse ears so that he can be Mickey! My wife said nothing but I could tell she was upset, given all the work she'd put in. My own reaction was closer to nausea. I don't want anything to do with adults who are into Disney, particularly not anyone affecting to be on first name terms with the mouse. Life is too short.

My wife specifically became irritable, as I recall, following the death of the dog. It was perfectly natural that the woman should be distraught under the circumstances, but the figurative daily wailing and gnashing of teeth on social media seemed out of all proportion, and it felt as though she might be milking it somewhat. Personally, I tend to experience grief as a private thing. Wheeling it out on social media, day after day, month after month strikes me as odd, and I've never found heart-shaped emoticons much consolation.

Then there were the private messages, gossip about other rock group people, someone had done this or said that, and you know who has some weird, unsavoury kink, and that terrible woman never pays when you take her to lunch. She's so mean and greedy, and that son of hers, the retarded one, well...

This last accusation was what broke the camel's proverbial back. We knew for a fact that the supposedly terrible woman often paid for lunch, and the comments about her son, an entirely likable young man coping with certain learning difficulties, were simply too far over the line. My wife said so, then immediately became the person spreading hurtful lies about the woman who makes things into Mickey. The entire rock group rallied around, posting hilarious passive-aggressive messages on facebook about knowing who their real friends were, the sort of shite which your average fifteen-year old girl would regard as a bit self-involved. My wife no longer qualified as a real friend to women who make things into Mickey.

Then suddenly she had cancer. We felt sort of bad - or at least awkward - until her facebook page filled up with the gnashing and wailing of teeth, further requests for free stuff, and yet more hymns of praise to those real friends, the ones who had stood by her through thick and thin. It's hard to feel too sorry for someone with cancer when they not only continue to act like an asshole, but somehow get worse. Pity me for no longer do I know the joy of eating, the posts screamed in contradiction to pictures of the woman gleefully stuffing her face with the usual junk food. My wife used to work in cancer research. We've known plenty of people who've suffered and died. Somehow this just didn't sit right so we stopped thinking about it.

Then suddenly she's gone.

Both Bess and I are actually surprised, and yet somehow it doesn't change anything. The weekend comes and we meet up with Leslie and Ernest, another couple who fell out of favour with the rock group because of the woman who made things into Mickey.

Leslie makes a tray of cupcakes covered in fondant googly eyes. We're not actually meeting up to celebrate somebody's death, or at least we're trying not to think about the possibility that we may be, but we meet up nevertheless at the Longhorn Steakhouse. I drink beer and we eat Leslie's sarcastic cupcakes while laughing about the worst, most self-involved excesses of the woman who made things into Mickey. It feels a little as though we're skirting around the famed Mexican attitude to death. It's not so much that we're glad someone annoying is dead, but it's nice to move on with a bit of ceremony.

Tra-la-la Tra-lala-la

There are six of us, and we've met at La Fonda. It's been organised through a website called Meetup which allows you to find persons who share your interests living in the same area, and so Bess and myself are meeting persons who share our love of cats living in the same area. I had my usual reservations on the grounds that I'm not especially sociable and I don't experience any particular excitement at the possibility of meetings with strangers, but I went along anyway.

How bad could it be?

'I thought there would be more of us,' I say, noting how we're around a table with seating for sixteen.

'This is about average for a Meetup group,' explains Fleegle, because I'm naming those in attendance after the Banana Splits so as to preserve anonymity and reduce the possibility of anyone getting pissy. 'There were only the four of us at the Barn Door last month.'

'We were both ill,' says Bess. 'I wanted to come but it was a really rough weekend.'

'I went to this writers' group a couple of times,' I say. 'It was a few years ago and that was through Meetup, but it was always oversubscribed. There were usually about twenty of us, which seemed like too many to me.'

Nevertheless here we are, two men and four women, although one of the women isn't yet here so we're presently five in number. I'm seated next to Drooper, who is a little older than I am with a sort of mullet and as such resembles Ben Dover, the famed auteur producer of independent art cinema. He's very quiet and I don't think he likes me. He introduces himself as a former mailman from Virginia, or one of those states. I tell him I did the same job in England but he doesn't seem to find this interesting.

'I was doing it since 1975,' he says. 'Now I'm mostly a cat sitter. I retired a couple of years ago.'

'What brought you to San Antonio?'

'They were cutting back and they said there was an opening down here so I followed the job.'

Fleegle asks what we do, Bess and myself.

'I work in healthcare,' Bess says, 'and he's a writer.'

'Oh! What do you write?'

I hate this question. 'I write science-fiction,' because it's as good an answer as any.

'That's great! I love Robert Heinlein, and Asimov too!'

'Yeah, I like some Heinlein.' This is a diplomatic concession to a couple of Heinlein books which I enjoyed. I hated his Stranger in a Strange Land possibly more than anything else I've ever read, and have come to associate his name with far-right conservatives on social media, those who genuinely seem to believe that white people are an oppressed minority

'Have you had anything published?'

'There was a novel. It didn't sell a whole lot but, you know, it did a job. People seemed to like it.'

'What was it called?'

I tell her and she spends the next ten minutes fiddling with her phone, trying to find my novel on Amazon. Eventually she tracks it down on the publisher's website. I'm trying to discourage a sale because I don't think she would enjoy it.

Snorky is saying something, but she's three seats away at the end of the table, and her voice is quiet so I can't hear. Her testimony is interrupted by the call of a gruffly voiced moose head mounted high on the wall behind us. 'Uh oh! Chongo! It's Danger Island next!'

Snorky has three cats, she explains. It's the same for the other two, which probably means that Bess and myself are more the sort of people one might expect to meet at a gathering of cat lovers. Neither of us can remember what it was like to have just three cats.

'Where are you from?' Fleegle asks me.

Christ, I think, not this shit again?

I tell her I was born on the farm upon which they eventually filmed Teletubbies, near Stratford-upon-Avon, but lived most of my life in London. I tell her this because I'm trying to keep myself entertained, but even I'm beginning to get bored of this story.

I wonder how long it will take for us to be served. Maybe the waiter doesn't realise we're all here, or as many of us as are likely to turn up. Glancing across to the parking lot I can see a colourful six-wheeled buggy draw up, spinning around in circles before coming to a juddering halt. It is driven by a smiling orange gorilla wearing sunglasses and a fireman's helmet. Minutes later, Bingo has joined us at our table. All of our people are now here.

I order a Dos Equis and we all examine the menu.

'The fish tacos are good,' I suggest to no-one in particular.

'What's an enchilada?' asks Fleegle.

We all stare.

'I've never eaten one.' She shrugs. 'I don't like Mexican food.'

'How long have you lived in San Antonio?' Bess asks.

'I moved here in 1985, but I like the Red Barn. They serve a good steak.'

Bess and I share a look amounting to, well, she came to the right place. La Fonda is okay, but it's Mexican food for people who don't like Mexican food, who would rather not be startled by anything too spicy or flavoursome while they're trying to eat. There's nothing terrible on the menu, but much of it is tailored towards the conservative palates of Alamo Heights and will seem underwhelming if you've eaten at almost any other notionally Mexican place. Thankfully it's fairly difficult to completely fuck up a fajita beyond edibility, and as I say, the fish tacos are decent.

We order, then we eat. The food is okay; not first choice, but okay. Let's imagine we're eating in silence as you all watch Micro Ventures. Professor Carter and the kids pile into their miniaturised dune buggy and spend an educational five minutes driving around beneath someone's fridge.

'He went to the writer's group,' Fleegle tells the newly arrived Bingo, meaning me.

'Are you a writer?' she asks. 'I don't remember you.'

Fuck.

I don't remember her either. 'It was a while ago,' I say. 'I only went twice. There were too many people.'

'We meet at La Madeleine.'

'Were you in the writer's group when they used to meet at La Taza?' Bess asks, apparently attempting to introduce clarity.

'We meet at La Madeleine. What was your name again?'

'Lawrence.'

'Lawrence of Arabia!'

'I meet at La Madeleine too,' Bess says. 'You know the rock painting group? We're there at the same time as the writers on the Sunday afternoon, but you're in the little room.'

Bingo comes over so as to avoid having to shout. 'What sort of thing do you write, Lawrence of Arabia?'

'Science-fiction,' I sigh.

She addresses my wife as Good Queen Bess and begins to describe some movie about Queen Anne which will be of obvious interest to myself seeing as how I'm from England and all.

'Is that the one with Margot Robbie?' I ask.

'No, I think that's a different one, Lawrence of Arabia.'

'You know, that's where my name came from? My parents went to see it at the cinema before I was born. I think that's where they got the idea.' I don't bother to mention that as a nickname Lawrence of Arabia was already getting old by the time I was fucking five, and I now find it quite irritating.

'You must come to our next writers' meeting at La Madeleine, Lawrence of Arabia.'

Later, as we drive home, Bess tells me about a guy who once hung out with her rock painting group at La Madeleine. He wasn't painting rocks but invited his granddaughter to do so, and to use everyone's paint to make the sort of mess you make when you're bored and don't really care what you're doing. He was condescending and an asshole, and he was hanging around because his wife was in the other room with the writers' group. Now we're wondering if his wife just happened to be an orange gorilla with sunglasses and a fireman's helmet.

'That was okay, I guess,' Bess admits, 'but I thought there would be more about cats.'

'Me too.'

Funerals and Santa

I only met Skip Brooks twice. The first time was at a Devo concert in Austin. My wife pointed out a guy who resembled Skip, her cousin Jenni's husband, but we didn't say anything because we weren't certain of it being him. I don't know if that really counts as a meeting. The second time was at a Fixations gig in San Antonio. Skip was playing guitar for the Fixations, who were tremendous, and we spoke briefly after their set. So I didn't really know Skip and now I never will. He was fine this time last year. In April he discovered that he had cancer, and now he's gone. He had forty-seven years and that was it. It seems very unfair.

I know Jenni a little better, and it seemed to be mainly down to timing and circumstances that I never got to know Skip; which is a shame because I'm sure we would have had a lot to talk about, at least with the music. He had two young boys and was a great father and husband, which I know because it was plain to see, and so much so that everyone remarked upon his being both a great father and husband - which seems a rare thing.

The cancer was in his mouth. The operation sounded nightmarish. They had to remove his jaw, clean out the cancerous material, then reattach it. For a while he was doing okay, and then he wasn't. The cancer had returned and spread, and was so located as to cause fractures in his spine as it grew. It's difficult to imagine how his situation could have been worse. The end seemed inevitable. Jenni maintains that he kept his spirits up throughout what might justifiably be called his ordeal, communicating with sign language.

Today is his remembrance service.

We're at Trinity Baptist Church.

Skip was introduced to me as a punk rock preacher - mohican, tatts, piercings, and prone to belting out hardcore thrash numbers at his sermons. Coming from England, this combination took some getting used to on my part. I don't have anything specific against the religious, but belief in the man upstairs does not come natural to me. I refuse to identify as anything so tediously dogmatic as atheist because I don't see why I should have to identify as anything; and if your religion works for you, then I'm probably fine with that. Dealing with the world by means of metaphor is as good a way as any, up to but definitely no further than the point of voices in the head.

As a preacher, it seems Skip was tireless in his work with the homeless, those brought low through addiction, and others traditionally spurned by the more clean-cut - and not particularly Christian, it has to be said - representatives of the Baptist church. He was a guy who spent his life doing good things, and now he's gone.

Trinity Baptist is huge, and is presently full of friends, relatives, and those who probably wouldn't be here today were it not for Skip picking them up and setting them back on their feet. About half of the assembly have studded leather jackets and tattoos. One guy has the cover of the Subhumans' The Day the Country Died album painted on the back of his jacket.

The record came out in 1983 and it's now 2018 in a different country. My own pretend noise band once played on the same bill as the Subhumans, and I hung out with Dick Lucas and Trotsky - respectively the Subhumans' vocalist and drummer - as we watched Opera for Infantry, the other support act of the evening. They were nice people. I feel like I should tell this to the guy in the jacket, but I don't.

Jenni talks for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.

It's tough to imagine what she must be going through, what her kids are going through. She talks about how she met Skip, what he meant to her, and she gets through it just fine. It doesn't seem like she's reading from a script. She expresses herself very well and it's very moving.

Prayers follow, then further testimonials with greater emphasis on Skip the preacher, part of his world which I don't really understand, and to which I don't find myself drawn. It isn't that the sermons are all just words but I honestly don't know what else there is to be said. I barely knew the guy and yet his passing feels like something which had no right to happen, a great wrong which no amount of prayer can ever set right; but I guess it's just me.

At length we leave, Bess and myself, and we head to St. Luke's - straight there without first going home because time is tight. She and the women of her rock group have an event - referring here to a group of women who paint various designs on rocks, transforming them into objects given away in hope of bringing cheer to someone's day. The event is a Christmas rock exchange, the occurrence of which has been publicised through social media.

We are the second to arrive at St. Luke's parking lot. Sandy is already waiting.

'Where do you think we should set up?' she asks.

We gaze down at the St. Luke's rock exchange, a small circle of decorated stones on the grass verge at the side of the road. Members of the public are invited to leave rocks they have painted in exchange for anything which has taken their fancy. We have a table and the rock exchange is on a bit of a slope.

'Over there.' Bess indicates the corner of the parking lot, which is on level ground.

We unfold the table, spread out a table cloth, then set up the Christmas tree. Sandy wraps it in tinsel as the others begin to arrive. Some hang things from the tree. Others bring tins of cakes or cookies. Everyone seems to have brought more painted rocks, but it's still just five or six of us beneath a slate grey sky and it's kind of cold. Bess has told me this won't take much longer than half an hour. We're a sort of festive flash mob, you might say.

Another fifteen minutes pass and abruptly it all comes together. There are twenty or thirty of us now, and plenty of children. Santa strolls across from where he's parked his truck.

'Ho ho ho,' he informs us.

Santa is actually Byron, Bess's first husband. He's a goofball but in a good way, and without really trying. Being a first husband, his deeds occasionally give rise to the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but there's an honesty to the guy that's difficult to resist, and he's consistent, and when you need someone to dress up as Santa, Byron's your man. He's done it before and Bess called in a favour, so here he is handing out candy to the kids whilst cracking jokes about reindeer on the barbecue.

Bess and I watch, impressed in spite of ourselves.

'He's one of life's natural Santas,' I observe.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe - attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, Byron as Santa at the St. Luke's Christmas rock exchange…

The children hoover up all the available candy, and we hang out with gals for a while. Then, once we're done, everything goes back to the trunks of trucks and cars, and we drive home.

'Funerals and Santa,' I say to my wife. 'It's been quite a day.'

Spring

The drive to Houston is about three and a half hours, so we've brought a talking book to pass the time; we being myself and my wife rather than the royal we, and the talking book is the autobiography of the DEA agent who arrested el Chapo, but neither of us finds it engaging. The guy reading the book so that we don't have to sounds like Alastair Cooke, who used to narrate his own weekly Letter from America on BBC Radio 4. He sounds old, stately, well spoken, and a poor fit for the testimony of one of those good little soldiers who became a cop because he wanted to make a difference, someone who has buddies and compadres and occasionally likes to cut loose with a few brewskis. Also, the narrator's Spanish is difficult to take seriously, and we've found - to our surprise - that we don't like to hear people speaking ill of el Chapo because, for all his faults, we're no longer convinced that the guy was significantly worse than any of the politicians currently blocking the Washington S-bend. We have a hunch that he may actually be preferable in certain respects. We listen to about an hour and then turn it off in frustration.

We're heading to a convention in Spring, a town about five miles north of Houston. The convention is for people who make and collect a certain kind of spinning top finely-crafted from wood, metal, resin, and whatever else can be turned on a lathe. We went to one of these things last year, and I noticed a fair few of the guests seemed to be hardcore bikers, hardcore in this instance meaning people with their own workshops in which they've hand-tooled their own bike parts. If you know your way around a lathe, I don't suppose curling off a spinning top is much different to the head of a piston. Accordingly the convention has something of a biker vibe and is to be held at Rudy's, which is a barbecue joint, one of those places with rusty bits of farm machinery customarily hanging from the beams.

Neither Bess nor myself are particularly into spinning tops, but I drew the design which they've used for the Topcon 2018 promotional t-shirt. This means we get a free table at the convention. Bess will attempt to sell her painted stones, and I'm going to have some of my canvases on display. I'd say I'm selling, except I have no faith in anyone buying; but fuck it - it's a day out.

This is what I've been telling myself since this morning, when I woke from a hopelessly literal nightmare wherein I found myself obliged to travel to a place I didn't want to go.

'I don't really want to go,' I told Bess. 'I couldn't care less about spinning tops, and we'll only spend the time worrying about the cats.'

We have a number of cats. We don't like to leave them on their own, but have reasoned that one night in Houston won't hurt, and we can set off early on Sunday, arriving home by mid-morning. Obviously they're not going to starve being as there will be no significant disruption to their routine in terms of meal times, but I still don't like to think of them worrying over where we've got to.

We arrive around noon, two-hundred miles from home. It's a while since I've been to Houston, and I'm struck by how unlike San Antonio it is. The countryside is flatter and wetter with more rainfall coming in off the gulf of Mexico. It's more humid and accordingly feels hotter, more tropical, and the countryside looks peculiarly English to my eyes, which is something to do with the trees.

Rudy's is a big old shack full of people stuffing their faces with pulled pork and the like. However, it's nothing like so big as the photo on their website somehow managed to suggest. There is no large, roomy convention hall, just myself and Bess having to squeeze sideways between tables crammed with spinning top enthusiasts.

'What the fuck are we doing here?,' I ask in rhetorical spirit as we are invited to squeeze onto a table from which we will attempt to sell our wares.

Bess has the wheeled carry case in which she ferries her painted stones. She whips out a black table cloth and arranges a couple of rocks upon it, plus one of the vinyl albums she's painted.

'I'm not going to bother,' I grumble. 'There's no room, and there's no point.'

Bess gives me the look, a sort of pleading disappointment with a soupçon of dude, make an effort.

'Seriously, where am I going to put anything?'

I could prop a single painting up against the wall at the rear of the table, but that's about it. I've bought twelve canvases with me, along with the free standing wooden frame upon which I usually display them. This has been a waste of time even before it's started, but then as we've established, no-one is going to want to buy my canvases anyway. Most are paintings of cacti and animal skulls, and not a single spinning top among them.

Bess wanders off in search of the bogs, and a waitress tells me we can't use the table, and that our setting up shop - such as it is - on this particular table constitutes Topcon 2018 extending beyond its agreed allocation of tables to intrude upon the more spacious dining areas reserved for those who've simply turned up for the pulled pork

'Right,' I sigh.

Being half way through my roughly annual smoking jag, I nip outside for a fag, past caring about how that sounds here in Texas.

When I return, we've been moved to the back room, which is less populous. I realise I just about have space for one of my display frames on the table. I go out to the car and bolt the frame together in the parking lot, then carry it inside and secure six canvases to the two horizontal beams by means of g-clamps. Bess arranges her rocks, records, and Christmas tree decorations on the table top and we settle down for the afternoon.

The guy behind us is telling a fellow enthusiast about his best spin time, which happens to be twenty-four minutes and ten seconds.

I get up and go to the bar. While Texas barbecue is invariably delicious, it sits heavy in my gut and leaves me feeling as though I've been pumped full of cavity wall insulation foam. I've promised myself never again, so I'm just going to have a beer. Happily they have Corona, which is Mexican and therefore drinkable.

I drink from the bottle at our table.

Bess has somehow already shifted fifty dollars worth of stuff, and downplays her commercial superiority by telling me that lots of people have said how much they admire my paintings. Regrettably the bar doesn't seem to recognise admiration as a form of currency.

'Okay, I'm bored,' I announce. 'I'm going to paint my beer.'

I've brought my easel, a couple of canvases, oil paints and so on. It takes about ten minutes to squeeze myself into the space between tables and next to the window. I've drunk about two thirds of the bottle, which I now spend a couple of minutes moving around on the table cloth, trying to get it to look interesting.

The next couple of hours pass quickly as I paint a still life with beer and the jar of thinner in which I stand my brushes. I'm cleaning brushes with an old pair of underpants, but no-one seems to notice. Women come and go, chatting with my wife, some buying a stone or telling me that they love my paintings. One of them is from Baltimore. She doesn't seem to like the place much.

'We've seen The Wire,' I tell her.

'That's how it is,' she confirms.

Another fag break is interrupted when my wife brings Phil outside to see me. He too thinks my paintings are really something and wanted to meet the artist. Phil is Australian.

'We're the ones you lot got rid of,' he jokes.

'Not at all,' I say. 'Sometimes I get the feeling we sent you our best people.'

'Everyone thinks he's Australian,' Bess explains, meaning me.

'I guess our accents sound the same to this lot,' I say, and we ask Phil where he's from, like it makes any difference to us.

'Perth,' he says. 'That's on the west coast.'

'My cousin Dawn lives over that way,' I begin.

'He's going to ask if you know her,' Bess laughs.

I wasn't, but now I'm wrapped up trying to remember the name of the town where Dawn lives. I know it's kind of remote, or at least I have that impression, a mining town.

'We've been watching Wentworth,' I hear my wife tell Phil.

I finish the painting. I think I'm quite pleased with it, although I'll know better in a couple of days. It reminds me of Goya, the artist rather than the refried beans.

'Shall we fuck off?'

Everyone else seems to be packing up, so we do the same as it's nearly six. We drive several anticlockwise miles in a vague circle to our hotel, which is fifty yards from Rudy's in the other direction. We can see the same water park out back from our hotel window. We eat at a Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, drive through the old part of Spring in the name of sightseeing, then fail to sleep in the hotel bed. Somehow we're both too hot and too cold for most of the night, which is weird - the quantum superposition of discomfort. The hotel is okay but it's a hotel, and it seems like everything is the least they could get away with. Breakfast is bread toasted on one side with a sort of hockey puck made of egg.

'Where is baked bean?' I demand gruffly, but no-one answers.

The drive back home is another three hours or so, but without some cop casting aspersions on the character of el Chapo. As we arrive back at the house, cats suddenly appear, the full roster bouncing out of the bushes all at the same time, tails aloft and clearly very happy to see us. It's the single greatest moment of the whole weekend.

Rocks as Cakes

My wife's rock group - whom you may recall were introduced back in February - are partaking in a competition. A sandwich bar - which I'll rename Making Biscuits for the sake of keeping everyone happy - is hosting an event intended to benefit local foster children by providing school supplies. I'm not quite sure how it works, but the idea is that we all turn up and paint rocks based on the pastries sold at Making Biscuits. The manager of the establishment is himself a keen painter of rocks, and the first prize will be a $50 gift card.

Painting rocks is really my wife's thing, but she's recruited me to the cause for this one event in the belief that whatever I paint will blow the other contestants out of the metaphorical water. I'm therefore a ringer - a person highly proficient at a skill or sport who is brought in, often fraudulently, to supplement a team, as Wiktionary would have it; but there are worse ways to pass a Saturday afternoon so I've said yes.

We came along to Making Biscuits last night, checking the place out, how to get here, and to take a look at what sort of cakes they sell. I sat shivering for an hour listening to the women talk about babies, which was actually kind of miserable. Today I've been promised that the event won't take long, and that there will be more people. Also, I've brought a jumper and a jacket in hope of surviving the thermonuclear Making Biscuits air conditioning, which feels weird given that it's August here in Texas and that it presently takes about five minutes to roast a frozen chicken by leaving it out on the sidewalk.

Happily, they don't have the AC jacked up quite so high today, and there are maybe fifteen of us taking part which immediately puts me in a better mood. Aside from the manager, I'm apparently the only male in attendance, so it's probably a good thing that I'm reasonably secure in my masculinity and have never felt the need to drive a red sports car. A couple of tables are covered with pots of acrylic paint, jars of water in which brushes soak, and with freshly painted rocks drying at the centre where you might usually expect to find condiments as the women start anew with fresh stones. I buy a fruit tart from the counter. It's topped with slices of strawberry, kiwi, tangerine, and some sort of berry, so featuring a range of colour which should make it interesting to paint. I grab a coffee, take a seat opposite my wife, and we set to work.

I paint in the rough shape of the tart as a white outline. Some young woman sat next to me chatters away, just general conversational stuff with the inevitable emphasis on art and the country of my birth. I realise to my surprise that she's still in school, being somewhat younger than I am, although this probably means she's at university. After a while she finishes painting a stone so as to give it the appearance of a pastry, and resumes her proprietorial duties over some faux-martial arts attraction because another child has turned up wanting a go. Individual squares of wood are stacked near the coffee machine, presumably having been partially sawn through. Customers are invited to karate chop them in half. This is also something to do with school supplies for foster children.

I know a few of the women, so I ask about Mrs. Darkseid, a conspicuously absent rock painter whom I've renamed after the DC Comics villain in reference to her ruthless one woman war against free will.

'She has her own thing. Didn't you hear?'

I didn't hear. 'Her own thing, you say?'

'She organised a rock painting competition for today at some diner. I guess that's where she is right now.'

'Seriously? Same time and everything?'

'Yup.'

'What an amazing coincidence.'

'Yes, isn't it just?'

We all chuckle darkly to ourselves.

I've only met Mrs. Darkseid a couple of times and she seemed harmless enough, but her behaviour has since bordered on mania. The city now has several rock exchange spots, mostly situated in public parks and the like. The women paint rocks and leave them at the rock exchanges for others to take, or to swap with rocks of their own. It's something with no function other than to bring pleasure to those who take part. Most of this has occurred organically, just opportunities taken, things which such and such a person has decided might be a good idea or worth a try; but Mrs. Darkseid began to take a peculiarly proprietorial interest in what the rest of the gang were doing, telling them where they should have a rock exchange, deciding what it should be named and so on. At one point she issued a decree that no baskets were to be left at the rock exchanges. No-one took any notice, then suddenly rock exchanges were vandalised with baskets pointedly thrown into nearby bushes. Mrs. Darkseid of course expressed her anger at the thought of who could do such a deed, because even her own rock exchange had been hit by these monsters, so she claimed. There have been peculiarly batty text messages sent telling some of the women what they are allowed to post on facebook in relation to the painted rocks. Bess set up a rock exchange at the Mission Branch Library down on the southside of the city at the invitation of library staff who thought it would nicely complement the public garden and play area at the rear of the library; so it was done and I did my bit by painting a sign for it on a breeze block. Mrs. Darkseid involved herself - despite the undertaking having nothing to do with her - and had the library rock exchange moved to the front of the building, specifically to the parking lot, apparently for no reason other than as a demonstration of her mighty power.

In the meantime, we've finished painting our rocks, so we take them outside to spray them with glaze. They look pretty good as they dry, arranged as they are in the presently flower-free flower bed.

'You lot should try and have a rock exchange here,' I suggest.

There are a few nods and noises of concurrence, then we realise that Mrs. Darkseid would have a meltdown and get it moved across the parking lot to the side of the road - so as to share the magic with four lanes of heavy traffic or some other reason she'd just thought of. We laugh, because we still can't believe that anyone could be so screwy as to declare themselves supreme controller of something which was supposed to be lightweight and fun. It's a wonder that she hasn't taken to issuing home-made permits and membership cards.

The afternoon, which has actually been a lot more fun than I thought it would be, draws to a close, and the rocks are judged. My fruit tart comes in second. Bess tells me it should have won, but I really don't mind because I feel a little like an imposter and this isn't really my circus. Additionally, I've painted a representation of a pastry, rather than painting a rock so as to give it the appearance of a pastry - a detail required of competition entries which I somehow missed. The first prize goes to a rock painted so as to resemble a chocolate cake. The rock was one half of a stone which had been roughly spherical, and so the winner painted it so as to make it seem like someone had taken a bite from one side. To be honest, that's the rock to which I would have awarded first prize, were I judge.

Sometimes you just have to write these things down because you feel that otherwise no-one will believe you.

Party Animal

'We're going to a party,' Bess tells me, words which would once have struck terror into my soul. The fear came from the part of the conversation which usually followed, first my objection on the grounds of not enjoying parties, then the customary admonitions of how I need to make an effort to be more social, how I need to make more of an effort to step outside of my comfort zone every once in a while, how I need to make more of an effort to be the person she should have gone out with instead of me. Happily, I married someone who has never played these sort of games, who doesn't engage in that kind of low-level bullying, and who would never make such a suggestion without there being a good reason.

Saturday comes and we pile into the car, then a short drive across town to Laura's place. Laura is in Bess's rock group, specifically an assemblage of women who paint rocks, in case anyone had begun thinking in terms of Judas Priest or the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. They paint rocks and leave them in places to be found by strangers, persons whose day might conceivably be left a little brighter by their having found a painted rock. It's actually a rock painting party.

I find a space in the fridge for my Newcastle brown ale, six bottles. Then it turns out that I'm the only one boozing, so there's no bottle opener. Well-meaning rock artists suggest ways in which I might open a bottle with the kind of inventive enthusiasm you might expect when trying to start a fire on a desert island, then someone realises that a previously mysterious dingus they've been carrying around in their purse is actually a bottle-opener and the day is saved.

We retire to the rock painting room.

I hadn't actually planned to paint rocks but it's not like I have anything else going on, so I take a seat at one of the two tables, sat between my wife and Jennifer's mother-in-law, a lovely woman who moved here from Mexico City and unfortunately doesn't speak much English. Sat opposite are Jennifer and Sandy, Jennifer's mother. The others I haven't met before, but they're all women and there's also a second Jennifer. In total there are about twelve of us, and I'm the only man here, as Joel Grey once sang.

Sandy hands out a few rocks, and we all get to painting. I start on a cartoon octopus, specifically a cartoon octopus with a mustache, bowler hat and smoking a pipe. It will pass the time.

On the wall behind Sandy are three dogs painted on canvas - one seemingly a poodle, another of indeterminate breed, and something like a terrier but without eyes. I guess it was never finished.

I'm using Sandy's pens, a specific type dispensing acrylic paint in liquid form, but they're not really working for me. The table is strewn with communal art supplies so I switch to a brush.

'What's with the dog?' I ask.

Laura explains that she couldn't get the eyes right and left it as it was.

'You could paint a pair of sunglasses on it maybe?'

'Oh! That's an idea.' She considers the proposal. 'How about you paint sunglasses? I think you might be better than me.'

I look at the painting and realise I like it as it is. 'I don't think I could, now that I come to think of it. It would seem wrong.'

'I don't mind.'

'No - I like it as it is. It has some sort of quality er… I just can't stop looking at the thing.'

There is something compelling about the eyeless dog, as though it has special powers and can see into the future.

I finish my octopus and start on Frankenstein's monster, inspired by my recently having been commissioned to produce a sequence of paintings depicting different stages in the career of Boris Karloff. We're mostly yacking away as we paint, because, as I say, I sort of know Sandy and Jennifer, and Jennifer once lived in London so we have that in common.

At no point in my life prior to 2009 did I foresee myself as the only male sat in a room of American women, and I find the realisation pleasing. At the same time I'm usually a little irritated by men who state a preference for the company of women, because it always feels as though they're engaged in some deeply wearying exercise in one-upmanship; but on the other hand it's nice to know that no-one will attempt to engage me in conversation about real ale, motoring, golf, football, sporting activities, science-fiction television shows, or any of the other tedious shit with which so many men fill their bewildering lives.

On the other hand, the women at the next table are all of a certain age with very short hair, and I suddenly have the sensation of finding myself in an episode of Orange is the New Black, the drama set in a women's prison; then I recall that a chapter title in J-Zone's autobiographical Root for the Villain asks Are Men the New Women?

It's time for more beer.

The Road to Nowhere

'Let's go see the painted rocks,' Bess suggests. 'I've never been up there and I've always wanted to go.'

I already know what she's talking about because this isn't the first time we've discussed the trip. The internet has this to say about the painted rocks in question:

On a bluff along the banks of the Concho River in west-central Texas lies the most remarkable rock art site on the Edwards Plateau. The Paint Rock pictographs number over 1,500 and cover nearly a half-mile of a limestone cliff face a short distance upstream from the town of Paint Rock. In tones of red, orange, yellow, white, and black, native artists painted animals, such as buffalo and deer, human figures, some appearing to be clasping hands in a dance or ritual, and a kaleidoscope of geometric designs on the high bluff. Some left their handprints, perhaps as a way of signing their work or merely indicating that they had been there.

The Paint Rock site is unusual in that it is one of only a handful of sites in central and northwest Texas. Rock art is much more prevalent, more ancient as a rule, and better preserved in the Lower Pecos and Trans-Pecos areas. While it is impossible to know the date of the earliest pictographs at Paint Rock, archaeological investigations at the site have recovered arrow points and sherds of earthenware pottery. These artefacts indicate that the site was used at least as early as the Toyah period (ca. A.D. 1300 – 1650), and are reflected in drawings of hunters carrying bows and arrows. Paintings of horses and a church demonstrate that use of the site by native groups continued after contact with the Spanish.

'How far is it?' I ask.

'Two, maybe two and a half hours drive.'

It's Saturday morning, the sun is out, and the boy has gone to Ruidoso with his dad this weekend. It's not like we have anything else on.

'Okay.'

We drive up I-10 so far as a town called Junction, which is about half the distance, getting on for a hundred or so miles; then take the smaller US-83 heading north towards Paint Rock. The strangest thing is that we're suddenly no longer in the hill country. The hills have levelled, the valleys have filled in, and even the plants at the side of the highway seem different. Looking on the map, I find we really are miles from anywhere. We have another hour of driving in a straight line, and we'll pass through a town called Menard, then one called Eden, and that's it, nothing else for miles and miles, just rolling planes on either side. It's not quite desert, but something in that direction with small scrubby trees, cactus, yucca and not much sign of human endeavour aside from the thing we're driving along. It feels as though we're quite high up, and the landscape reminds me of what we saw on the way to Roswell a couple of years ago.

We talk about nothing, or we listen to Lewis Black and Jim Gaffigan on CD. We pass through Menard, which has a population of several thousand, but still somehow seems a bit too small to have been left out here on its own. We're fine for gas so there doesn't seem to be any really good reason to stop.

Eden is about the same, and we make the predictable jokes: so this is where it all happened, and we talk about looking for a garden centre for the sake of a wearyingly obvious photo opportunity.

'I have the Road to Nowhere stuck in my head,' Bess tells me as we're expelled from Eden by agency of internal combustion rather than Himself upstairs. 'Was that the Talking Heads?'

'Yes,' I sigh as the song glues itself to my own internal jukebox.

We're on the Road to Nowhere…
 
Sun, sand, cacti, not much else, and we have about forty miles to go. Eventually we're there. Paint Rock has a population of just 273, according to the sign. I do a mental calculation and work out that this is probably less than the population of my local supermarket on an average weekday. It's a dusty road with buildings and a lot of space, propane tanks behind wire fences and no discernible corporate presence. We stop at the grocery store opposite a building purporting to be a Wool Warehouse. This would strike me as odd given that I've been in Texas since 2011 and am still to see a single sheep, but I'm too preoccupied with trying to imagine what it must be like to live in a town with a population of 273, at least forty miles from the nearest Dairy Queen.

There are two guys sat at tables eating tacos in the grocery store. The cashier is stacking shelves or something. They look at us but don't say anything. I buy tea and some sort of flapjack. The cashier fails to make the usual observation regarding my accent, which is nice. Maybe she realises that you ain't from around here carries a potentially disturbing subtext in a town where only 270 other people can actually be said to be from around here; and by definition almost everybody ain't from around here.

Bess returns from the khazi just as an enormous rooster struts up to the door outside and begins pecking on the glass. We watch him for a couple of seconds, sharing the inevitable jokes about what a big cock. He takes to marching back and forth as though waiting to be allowed in.

'Can you tell us how we get to the painted rocks?' Bess asks.

'Did you make an appointment?' the cashier asks in return. 'You need to call Betty Jo. She arranges all of the tours.'

'Do you have her number?'

The woman looks around herself. 'You know, I don't have it. Sorry.'

We return to the car, Bess fiddling with her phone, looking up a website. 'Here it is.'

She connects the phone to the speaker system by special magic of a kind I don't quite understand, or even see as necessary. Betty Jo answers. She sounds very old.

'Well, I'd just love to show you the paintings but you see I just got back from this morning's tour. I'm so sorry. You see I'm ninety and I can't manage more than one tour a day. I just can't do it.'

We wave our hands in the air as though she can see us. It's an inconvenience, but it is what it is, as they say. We're not going to force a ninety-year old woman into showing us the rocks if she's already knackered.

'Where are you from?' asks Betty Jo.

'San Antonio,' we tell her.

'Oh my - and you came all of this way. I'm so sorry.'

'It's fine. We'll make sure we phone to make an appointment next time.'

We turn around and head back towards Eden. It's been a day out, so we're not complaining. As we reach Eden, we take a left and head down US-87, reasoning that we may as well take a different route back for the sake of variety. The land east of Eden is a little more populous, significantly more farmed, and for the first time ever I see fields full of sheep here in Texas. In fact I see more sheep than I've probably ever seen before in any one day; so that clears up that one particular mystery and explains the Wool Warehouse, although it's only now that I've realised it had struck me as unusual.

We pass through a town called Melvin, which I find pleasing, and then the more familiar territory of Fredericksburg where we stop for something to eat, German sausage in my case. We seem to have had a pretty good day without really doing anything.

My Wife's Rock Group

It's Sunday afternoon and we're in La Madeleine, which bills itself as a French bakery and café. It's a chain restaurant which does a fairly good job of acting like it isn't - in so much as that the food is decent and suggests both human agency and the possibility of someone at head office actually having been to France. I usually have the chicken friand - as it's called - because pastry encasing anything savoury is a novelty in Texas and should therefore be cherished. Instead I have a croque monsieur with a parfait for after. I'm not even sure what a croque monsieur is, but I vaguely remember the name from French lessons at school.

The cashier has a strong French accent, which I find quite exciting. I make a mental note to introduce myself once I've been sorted out with coffee and everything. She will be the first French person I've encountered on this side of the Atlantic, and I will introduce myself as a fellow European. But the moment never comes. My Gallic cashier is busy and in any case, Bess has already spotted the other women of her rock group, which is why we are here.

Six months ago, Bess began painting rocks, decorating small stones with colourful mandalas of acrylic paint. It was something she'd seen on facebook. People have taken to painting rocks and leaving them to be found in public places. The idea is simply to brighten the day of some random stranger. Bess often protests that she has no artistic ability and can barely manage a convincing stick figure, but her recent efforts cast doubt upon such a claim. The first rocks she painted now seem primitive and unfinished, just cheery coloured spots in haphazard configurations; but she's kept at it and developed her talent, and now turns out pseudo-fractal designs of astonishing beauty and precision. They have the look of patterns grown upon the shell of a sea urchin expressed as a firework display. The random strangers who have found them in parks, malls, diners, or on walls have been mostly delighted and have expressed their admiration for my wife's work on facebook. Her fame has become such that the aforementioned random strangers now make specific requests for one of her rocks, even offering to pay. The problem is that such offers miss the whole point of the rock being something found and unexpected, a little bit of magic in what might be an otherwise colourless day for someone you will never meet. Nevertheless, we've now met a few random strangers in parking lots, encounters co-ordinated through social media with me tagging along just in case one of them turns out to be a nutter. Usually my wife will exchange rocks rather than just dish them out because it seems more fair and places the two parties on an equal footing, although those rocks she receives in return tend to score higher for enthusiasm than craft. Society being what it is, we've seen plenty of them decorated with poorly rendered Disney characters. I suppose it's the thought that counts.

Today is probably the next step up from an exchange of painted rocks in a parking lot, because there are five of us and we're in a café. As usual, I'm here for support, although thankfully the other three seem approximately sane, just middle-aged women who like to paint rocks. Examples of our work are passed around, notes are compared about what's been going on in the wider world of giving painted rocks to random strangers, and then they all get out their paints. This is something I hadn't anticipated. My wife is taking a class. She has become a guru.

I hadn't really given much thought to how long we were going to be here, but I didn't anticipate it being for much longer than it takes to eat a chicken friand and drink a coffee. I need something to do because I'm not a middle-aged woman and am as such perilously close to the perimeter of my comfort zone.

'Give him a rock to paint,' one of the women suggests.

Someone hands me a couple of small rounded stones and a brush. Bottles of liquid acrylic are being passed around the table so I take dabs of what I need - yellow ochre, black, cadmium red, a yellow of some description. First I paint the Mexica sun symbol representing the current age of the world by agency of the red and blue ollin glyph at the centre. It's the first thing that comes to me because I've painted it so many times. Next I paint a traditional gnome with beard, boots, and a tall conical cap. I feel that gnomes have been under-represented in much contemporary fiction, so I've written them into a few of my own things and they're never too far from my thoughts.

After twenty minutes or so we all seem to have enough done to show everyone else. Bess has been demonstrating her technique to the others. They seem to be getting it, although their efforts are not quite so polished.

'It's an Aztec sun,' says the woman to my left, and they all coo over my efforts.

'He's an artist,' my wife explains.

Technically it's a Mixteca-Puebla style sun that I've painted, but I'm not a dick so I don't say anything. Thankfully the gnome doesn't really require explanation.