Mia on radio, can be heard now.

http://www.breakthruradio.com/

On Planet Beet - with Mr. Jason.

Balloon

Sometimes Mia stuffs a hangover into the basket of a hot air balloon and lets it float away over lush valleys. The shadow licking the land shrinks until it is but a prick in the pastures. It was a method taught to her by a voice on the end of a telephone when she called a helpline. “Let your worries float away,” said the do-gooder. The method brings to mind comforting middle-aged ladies with knitting needle tongues that click words into cosy pullovers. This can be enough to master the blues.

(Balloon image taken from the graphics fairy: http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.com/)

Wopsnut

It's looking less likely this is the right beginning, so it's ripe to post on the slag heap. Who am I kidding that anyone will read it anyway! But posting little bits of fiction at least makes me feel like I'm moving forward.

Tears of hot wax dripped on daughter Alma’s tiny toes.
“Wop!” she squeaked.
Reba is a picker, snapper, peeler-offer. A tough coil of sea grass refused to snap away from the fruit bowl and her jerky hand knocked the candle over.
She picks flowers, twigs, kernels from corn, seeds from pomegranates; makes things to pick them apart again. Luckily Alma is skin and life or Reba might fidget her to pieces. She enjoys fiddling with the eaves of the girl’s ears but wouldn’t dream of plucking them. It’s because she is so puffy with love that she can’t leave off Alma’s peachy person. To spill wax on that foot pained Reba dagger-deep and she kissed up the yow of it like mums should.
“Let’s peel it off together,” she said, and Alma admitted, “Wax is fun when it isn’t scalding.”
Their evening had been spent getting wine glasses to sing, sweeping fingers along rims. They experimented with different levels of liquid – wine in Reba’s and elderflower cordial in Alma’s. Reba didn’t stop imbibing after the wax incident because her daughter knew very well how to check the oven, blow out candles, sweep stray embers into the fire and take herself up to bed. They’d made a self-sufficient child.
“I’m going to call Daddy,” said Reba, following an hour of grave thought.
“Don’t, mum,” said wise little owl.
“No, I am, because I want him to stop me jumping in the river.”
Alma curled up like a kitten with head on mummy’s lap.
“Not tonight,” she said. “We need one another.” Her face is a benevolent white heart.
“Not tonight, then,” repeated Reba. “I hope not ever.”
They were solemn, but the younger girl reanimated with a jump up and announced they’d play a game where one closed eyes and the other held herbs or spices under nose. “We’ll have to guess what’s what, using our snuts,” she said. She wound a Hermes scarf around Reba’s crown, tying it in a delicate manner that reminded the mother of how her own father used to plait her hair.
“You feel like Granddad,” she said, and didn’t need to explain. Alma was born with Reba’s memories in her fibres.
The first smell was reminiscent of Scandinavian peasant bread – the pungent spice of caraway that sits so well with fennel in a rye loaf. Alma stayed close to her Grandmother’s home with cardamom next – the key ingredient of the delicious pulla rolls Finns eat with coffee. The twosome spoke of saffron spider legs, how delicious sugar is when infused with vanilla pods, why sprinkle curry powder on chicken soup, and lastly, of nutmeg.
“We have to be careful with nutmeg, don’t we?” said a stern Reba. “Because it makes us think about death.”
“Mum, you are so dramatic.”

They tired of the smell game and Reba opened another bottle of red Rioja. Rioja was for wallowing. When she finally convinced Alma’s father to go out with her, he ordered some in a carafe, and she’d exclaimed, “Oh, you ordered a cravat.”

The darkness outside had turned the window pane into a mirror and Reba avoided meeting the eyes of its sad guardsman when tossing the bottle opener back into the drawer. She could make out the wisteria eyelid of the window, but beyond that, nothing. Back at the small outdoors-indoors garden table bought because it was cheap and kitsch, Alma blew the empty bottle with flautist lips. “I can taste the wine,” she said, when the last note had fallen.
Reba poured a little Rioja into the elderflower cordial and after a few gulps Alma’s eyes were shining with clarity. “I feel like I’m drinking blood,” she said, and let a trickle journey from corner of mouth, down chin.

G’s awkward features were repeated on his daughter but sculpted with more artistry. Already hints of beauty could be seen in a landscape curved over well-placed bones. How open her face always seemed; so Reba would bend to it and inhale white flower indoles that stuck happily to the back of her throat. She had cut her daughter’s blond hair into what she fancied was a wartime bob, pinned to the side with a humble Kirby grip.
Alma cupped her own face with her hands – shells around a pistachio nut. She often assumed this position at a table, sometimes out of boredom – the ‘I’m fed up’ flag, simply to think, or as a worn out busy bee. Reba thinks of her baby like this, with lips tugged wide because of the pulling back of cheeks. Then it muscles in, the red line, lacerating angel skin. Intimations of doom: a thwack of metal against tissue; organ soup in the body; bone shattered by rock; a last, silver-lined cloud of almond breath – and Reba can’t bear it and groans, grunts, grumbles, shakes head violently to dissolve the picture as if it were fashioned with an Etch-a-sketch.
She yanked the Hermes scarf from where it rested, loose around her neck, and mopped the wine from Alma’s face. The blood bloomed across the nautical scene on the silk; death by shark bite, perhaps. She noted how magenta the stains were, as though Alma had been chewing raspberry bubble gum. How unlike her own blue Rioja lips, sullied by inner tar and slag.
“Clean it away!” shrieked Reba. Out damned spot. She rubbed little face once, wet the scarf in soapy sink water and rubbed again.
“Stop it, mum,” begged Alma. “You’re scaring me,” – and this, Reba could only half hear because of spreading words around the girl’s chops. It was Reba’s turn to hold little head like a pistachio, forcefully and firm between clumsy hands.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” said Reba.
“I didn’t do anything.” Alma’s aquamarine eyes were big and fearful. “What did I do?”
She began to cry – the watery gemstones now pregnant with sorrow. And this made Reba desperately sad and in love with her daughter, for shouldering mama’s heavy wheat sack.

Later that night – and there was room in the clock for later, even after the wax and wine – they sat in the snug to take stock of all they had. The picturesque shed of a home: compact kitchen with linoleum floor and miss-matching cupboards, utensils hanging from ceiling and fairy lights around doorframe.
The snug, hardly three metres squared and lined with rugs, oversized cushions and a grubby, tattered sofa.
Up the wooden hill, one large bedroom with a double bed, a single bed, a wardrobe that looked spirited away from a Canadian hunter’s lodge and a tapestry on the wall made by grandmother.
A spearmint blue bathroom adorned with shells and entomological finds from car boot sales and shops selling bric-a-brac.
A loft they’d never opened.
“Look at what we have,” said Reba, feeling glad for a while. The duo fell asleep by the electric fire like pups in a basket.

No matter how hard she cleaned, dust skittered out from cracks in the walls to be illuminated by morning sun. Little twinkling motes flashed in a golden beam above her head. Friday had arrived, so different to Thursday. Thursday was a day of storms – Thor’s day, torstai. As the day of Venus, Friday gave her the strength to be light-hearted and coquettish. She thought with anticipation of seeing G; monkey-fingering his hair for grey threads. That would be later. There were things to do, like go to work, where she occupied a chicken’s share of a large office. Their floor was a big bar of chocolate – brown carpeting, brown wastepaper bins and glossy luminosity from the computers. Reba dressed accordingly, in staid suits and low Mary Jane shoes. She carried a briefcase because it made sense to keep her papers neat.
Reba liked to wear stockings she hand-washed at her sink each night using hosiery detergent. Pointing her toes into the gathered sock told of French girls who did ballet and the gnarled bunions of the madams that taught them. Years ago, on the French exchange, she’d visited the dance school of her partner, and, crossed legged against a mirror, had chasséd and pas de bourréed in her mind along with the class. This is what it must be like to be oppressed, she had thought, desperate to leap, turn, and reach her fingertips to the walls. I know why the caged bird sings.
The neat pink and red leather cases holding the girls’ ballet slippers seemed to be the best objects in the world to own. So far were they from the PE bag with the drawstring slung under the telephone table a week earlier, where trainers clotted with hockey pitch mud festered and flaked beside a purse of tampons and a pair of gym knickers.
The girls’ lean leg muscles had looked so strong – as tight as salami. The room smelt of lily face cream, vetiver and sweet, warm knickers. She sucked on the experience for a long while after.
Reba clipped her stockings to the suspender belt and washed her face and torso with a damp flannel. She saw in the long mirror that her body was changing, as she planned it to. Her body shape went in and out from month to month like very slow, deep, diaphragmatic breathing. The Reba in the mirror had flints for hipbones and tits like teabags. Her stomach was still doughy, and she’d allowed an arrow of black hair to creep from belly button to bush. It was uncertain whether G had noticed; lately Reba fancied he could fall in love with earthy girls who wore long floral skirts, boob tubes showing off olive-sized nipples and gladiator sandals. He didn’t need to tell her who he could love; she felt she knew.
The Spanish woman who worked in the bar that sold pizzas a foot long. Enigmatic and passionate, he’d think. She was as beautiful as a rocking chair, with her turned mahogany limbs, and this is how he’d see her – a place to relax into whilst listening to foreign words that curled up at the ends.
Making her way to the wardrobe where a selection of shift and shirt dresses queued patiently for use, Reba held her breasts to feel how heavy they would feel in G’s palms, if the evening went that way. Frustrated with herself, suddenly, for being neither ballet dancer nor Spanish barmaid, she squeezed aggressively, digging in her nails.
Usually, Reba would pull on a shift dress, a tailored jacket, pin a broach to her breast from the collection swimming across the curtain in a jewelled shoal. She’d spray the perfume in the gravestone shaped bottle – L’heure Bleue, The Blue Hour – which she favoured for work, go downstairs and put some toast and coffee on, listen to the radio. This wasn’t to be the case that Friday, because a visitor was opening the gate. It needed oiling and the creak sent a handful of sparrows flying from the bird table, to rustle the leaves of the plum tree, to drop confetti of white blossom on a squirrel who shot into the spinney at the end of the garden. Perhaps the chain continued further, but another chain was beginning with the rap rap of thick knuckles on door.
Where had the man come from and where would he go next? What a coincidence it was that he was passing the picturesque shack framed lopsidedly in its overgrown but glorious garden. Something had stirred him from his gobbledygook reverie to pursue an avenue outside the wild tunnels of his own mind. The claret door struck him – an unusual colour, but as fitting on the cottage as lipstick on Jean Harlow.
Any of the neighbours would have managed the visitor with more brusqueness, sent on his way without tea and biscuits, without leaving boot prints in the kitchen. Mrs. Saltwaver, whom Reba found reassuringly matronly, would have shooed him from her homestead like a hornet, and elderly Piper Smith might have given him a bag of worn clothes and rusty bolts, mistaking him for a rag-and-bone man. Reba did neither of these things but accepted him in with the sinister realisation that in some way the planets had aligned to deal out her fate.
We can learn things about Bill Clipper that Reba will never know. He was the youngest of five boys and the runt. His brothers held him underwater for nearly long enough to kill him, which had made him so petrified of water that even in his adult life he’d struggle to gulp down air when he saw a stream or pool, drowning in imaginary depths. It was a game to the Clipper boys at first, and then became an obsession, and later something to feel remorseful about as they realised their brother’s brain had failed to develop properly.
Bill Clipper had nothing to do with kismet as Reba supposed, and hadn’t soldiered into her life to topple a house of cards. He wasn’t a mirage, nor servant, nor Death in guise, but actually lived at Hellesdon hospital in a room decorated with highlighted maps to warn where water was. He’d hopped on a random bus, flashing his free pass at the driver, not knowing where he was going or where he’d get off, but noting he’d caught the number 43.
When she heard the knock, Reba put down the bottle of perfume, and, catching a pleasing whiff of heliotrope, iris and anise, sprung lightly down the stairs in her dressing gown, anticipating the delivery of a paste broach.
“I’m here,” said Bill, in a thick Norfolk accent. “Bill is here.”
Bill recognised the girl as a similar type to the nurses at the hospital – fresh and pretty with oil lamp hips. He was popular with them because he didn’t spit or leer, put cigarettes out on his own arms or give off an odour of rancid fat. They said kind things to him like ‘hello muffin’ and ‘what’s been happening on channel Bill?’, and even if he didn’t always catch their meaning, their voices were soothing. “Ah,” said Bill, pleased with what he saw.
Reba felt instantly afraid of her creped and grey visitor, who had an ‘S’ shaped back and wore a ripped baseball cap and long Macintosh. He seemed to know her already and this put the willies up her because she’d never seen him before. He must know something I don’t, thought Reba.
He wouldn’t have requested entry had innocuous cumulus clouds not been forming the anvil of a heavy raincloud overhead. Pregnant shadows plunged the road into darkness.
“Ah,” said Bill again, this time apologetically. “Water. Must come in.”
Reading the terror on his face and fancying it to be a road sign of things to come, Reba stepped aside, for perhaps she could intercept her Grim Reaper with wit and conversation. She poured him a glass of water from the kitchen tap but he appeared horrified by the offering.
“It’s not acid,” said Reba. “Okay, do you want some tea then?”
“Tea, please,” smiled a happier Bill.
Then came the rain.

The heavens cracked whilst Reba was on the phone to her work, explaining that an uncle had been taken ill and she needed to be around should she have to drive her mother to the airport. She spoke quietly into the receiver and wanted to ask Simon, ‘Why am I not like you? Why can’t things be normal for me? What is the secret?’
Simon actually thought Reba a very together kind of girl and was recovering from a breakdown of his own. These are the things colleagues at Reba’s work kept from each other.
Reba crept past the kitchen where the man stood looking out of the window, and climbed the stairs to her room to unearth a pair of jeans and T-shirt. She tied a clean scarf around her hair – if she was required to make an appeal for her life, she wanted to at least look pragmatic.
“What do you want?” asked Reba. Bill was unable to answer because the rain slammed into the glass with such force it winded him. He contorted his face into silent shapes, mouthing the alphabet or some other nonsense at the clouds, rectangular donkey teeth gnashing on nothing.