What you know is there
David Gaffney
If he was serious about finding someone to share his life he should take up some pastime. ‘And one,’ his therapist added sternly, ‘that a woman might share,’ referring, unfairly he thought, to his collection of electric and manual drills.
The card was in Chorlton post office. A new therapy for a new age. Registered practitioner.
‘It’s a mixture of dance and acupuncture,’ the lady on the phone told him. ‘We call it dance-upuncture. The tutor is very very intelligent, very very sensitive, very in the moment, very evolved; more than her linear years.’
‘Sounds like a laugh,’ he said. ‘Book me in.’
The police made him draw a picture. The girl poised delicately in an arabesque, the trip on the stool, the collision, the fall, the blood. But he couldn’t draw the needles. Always draw what you see, the police artist kept saying. Not what you know is there.
Enclosures
David Gaffney
I saw him every day, sucking on a tube of superstrength or curled up like a foetus in his tattered sleeping bag, and I thought about our armadillo munching his vegetables, our pumas tearing into slabs of glistening steak, our zebras in their warm straw beds and I called him over and said come with me.
I placed him in an empty orang-utan unit and told him to stay out of sight during opening times. I put two solvent abusers in with the giraffes and the muttering shopping-trolley woman onto gibbon island.
But the shopping-trolley woman kept showing her bottom to school children and the boss called me in. He was pleased with my intervention but could the new guests be given educational classes like art, music and dance so that the public could watch? This would be the zoo finally putting something back into the community.
All mod cons
David Gaffney
Jake invented a prescription glass windscreen for his car so that he could drive without wearing his corrective lenses. He enjoyed the feeling of freedom – no plastic pads digging into his nose – and it had the added advantage that car thieves couldn’t drive the vehicle unless they happened to have the same degree of myopia.
Jennifer needed a lift. However, she soon began to complain. She couldn’t see, everything was blurred, and to stop herself being sick she had to stick her head out the window like a dog.
‘You idiot,’ she said to him when he dropped her off.He wouldn’t ring her again. A permanent relationship would mean grinding the windscreen to suit two different people and he could imagine the arguments – it would be the self-cleaning bed-sheets saga all over again. He went to bed, turned up the shipping forecast and drifted to sleep.
You know, quiet
David Gaffney
The room he was given had seven wardrobes. Seven. At night the wardrobes oppressed him. Dark brooding figures shuffling closer to his bed, faces glowering out from the whorls of polished grain. The landlord wouldn’t let him get rid of them. They were classic. Solid. So he had to think of a way to use them. The TV fitted into one, hi-fi in another, cooking equipment in a third, and various bits and bobs in the rest. But he couldn’t think of anything to do with the last one. Then one night he dragged his duvet into it and had the best night’s sleep ever.
He decided to stay in the wardrobe. He would move in a radio, and would eat there too. Eventually he would get six more people to live in the other wardrobes. Because he was the last person to keep himself to himself.
The way you say park
David Gaffney
He had been listening to her voice for years; the percussive, slightly guttural approach to Newton-le-Willows, the gorgeous ripe burr in the vowels of Hazel Grove, the absolute absence of sarcasm when she apologised for cancellations. Today he was singing along in his head as usual when he heard her inject a new enunciation into Eccelston Park, giving the word ‘park’ greater emphasis and putting a little suppressed laugh at the end of it.
This was significant because it was his name. Parker. And each time she said park she made the same little flourish.
He decided not to go in to work and instead stayed at the station, listening to the way she said park. The staff wouldn’t tell him where her office was, but tomorrow he would discover her name and shout it on all the platforms. That way she would know that he loved her in return.
Server farmer
David Gaffney
It was the three a.m. walk round and I had finished checking the data feeds when I looked back at the servers squatting in the dim aquarium light. They seemed to be mocking me with their beady glittering eyes. These Daleks belonged to all kinds of companies – a nuclear plant, the Benefit Agency, a vehicle breakdown company. I imagined them swapping stories when I’d gone – about caesium spills, dodgy claims, flat batteries in howling gales. I knew for certain that they talked about me.
A spangled map showed the live server connections and when I flipped the switches a thousand winking stars went out. I sensed a body go limp, thought I heard a sigh as the last breath of data escaped. Sirens howled, lights flashed, Doc Marten’d feet pounded down the corridor.
I knew what it was like to kill and I had to have more.
Happy place
David Gaffney
He hated grocery shopping, hated the time it took. But he came up with a method. People bought the same things, more or less. So he would look for someone of his type, sneak up behind them and roll their fully-laden trolley off to the checkout.
It made life interesting. Often there were things he would never have bought; once there was a fat orange pumpkin.
But today he was in trouble. He had been stealing mostly from women because he liked the sense of order to their selections, but his victim had spied him and was stomping over. There were women's products in the cart, so it was going to be difficult. He decided to pretend he knew her.
'Darling, I'll just get eggs.'
'We’ve got eggs.' The woman chirped. 'Listen, do you want to go out to the car? You look stressed. You can listen to your tape.'