Time to Unite Against Fascism

The Road to Blackpool Pier:

Stopping the BNP in the North West

Nick Griffin is likely to appear on your television screen. Dressed in the black suit and white shirt of a politician it might seem ordinary - acceptable even - to hear his voice in the middle of a Sky News broadcast. He speaks in the same tone and manner as a Labour backbencher or Conservative MP, and his presence will probably not immediately conjure images of the National Front or Combat 18. Indeed, just this morning he was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about an online publication that gives full details of members of the British National Party (BNP). There is, however, something important we must all remember whenever we see him.

Beneath the mask of respectability and legitimacy he has attempted to drape over the BNP there remains - stronger than ever - the despicable actions and offensive attitudes of a fascist organisation. In public Griffin presents himself as a well-dressed Cambridge graduate, family man and protector of the British way of life. Sadly, it takes very little research to realise the full extent of what 'Britishness' means to both the man and to the party of which he is chairman.

Griffin himself has a 1998 conviction for incitement to racial hatred due to his involvement in a far-right publication that denied the Holocaust. Now, ten years on, the policies of the BNP move openly against a multi-racial, multi-cultural Britain, and threaten our national sense of equality and acceptance. Why, then, are the BNP an increasingly dangerous concern? Surely people can see them for the offensive, ignorant and harmful collective they really are.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Like all manipulative fascist organisations the BNP operates on a largely grass roots level, targeting traditionally white working class areas in order to formulate and exploit tensions that have arisen as a result of complex global issues. It is not uncommon to come across people canvassing for the BNP. They appear quite like any political activists, going from door to door with pamphlets, pin badges and - most worryingly - a 'solution'. So, what exactly does the BNP offer?

Firstly, it must be understood that their entire manifesto, mission statement, list of policies and much-fabled 'answer' to the problems faced by people living in Britain is built on lies. One need only pay a short visit to the Refugee Council website to realise the information presented by the BNP on the issue of immigration is an unhealthy mixture of propaganda, misinformation and twisted fear. Their belief that Britons are gradually being turned into 'second class citizens' through 'positive discrimination schemes' is hyperbolic nonsense - not to mention totally unfounded. Equally as untrue is their promise to 'clamp down on the flood of ‘asylum seekers’, all of whom are either bogus or can find refuge much nearer their home countries.' Why is it untrue? Because no such 'flooding' exists. Despite a wealth of BNP literature claiming that native British people are headed towards being an ethnic minority in their own country, it is not difficult for any of us to seek out the facts and dissect such an ugly myth.

History has taught us how far-reaching and disastrous the effects of an economic crisis can be. The National Socialists, under Hitler, gained support by exploiting German people when they were vulnerable; by using Jewish people as scapegoats for the deep well of completely unrelated problems facing the country at that time.

We cannot let this happen again.

'Oh, all right, give it a rest,' you might be thinking. 'Surely death camps and genocide will never happen again - not in this country.'

Perhaps not. Nobody believes Nick Griffin has the ability to be as politically successful as Hitler, largely due to the fact Mr. Griffin has absolutely nothing of worth to say to anyone. He does not speak to us, and he certainly does not speak for us. This does not, however, make the unwelcome presence of the BNP any less real.

In Barking, Dagenham, Stoke, Derby, and throughout the North West, they are forcing the politics of division into our communities in order to incite racial hatred. This is a crime and we must work to stop it. We must look beyond the Islamophobic, xenophobic, homophobic lies presented by the BNP, and expose them for what they are: racists, bigots and bullies.

It is ridiculous, misinformed nonsense to blame recession, inflation and unemployment on immigration. You might as well blame envelopes, or tennis balls. It is a dangerous and unprecedented assumption, as clichéd as it ever was. It's hard to believe that in 2008 - the first decade of the 21st century, a decade in which America elected its first black President - one still hears the phrase, 'they come over here and they take our jobs...'

What lunacy.

In September 2004 the American television series 'Lost' appeared on our screens for the first time, grabbing the attention of viewers all around the world. It tells the story of a group of people washed up on a mysterious desert island after their plane - for a number of reasons, some plausible and some seemingly impossible - crashes into the ocean. After a while they realise they are not alone. The island is already inhabited by a community of people we rather unkindly come to know as The Others. As a result, a society of fear and suspicion quickly forms. Who are these Others? What do they want? How do they live? What are their rituals and traditions? And most importantly to the crash survivors: Are they a threat to us?

It is perfectly easy to see why the survivors feel this way. They are vulnerable, confused, out of their comfort zones. Whether they are under threat or not is secondary to fears for their survival. Modern Britain, it seems to me, is much the same. The majority of people recognise, understand and accept multiculturalism as a necessary condition for the continuing existence of a healthy society. But what happens when things go wrong? What happens when global food crises, recessions, unemployment levels and financial instabilities begin to affect everyone? What happens when people suddenly become vulnerable?

Put simply, we look for causes and solutions. It is at times like this that the BNP prosper. Instead of addressing the real issues, they add fuel to the fires of division and exploit tensions they themselves have helped to create. They push racism as a way out of hardship, targeting those members of the public most affected by worsening socio-economic conditions. By appealing to us with twisted facts and false statistics they seek to promote narrow-minded fascist opinions wrapped up in a disfigured and abhorrent version of the Union Jack. What we must do to stop them is dismantle this desert island mentality of Us versus Them. There are no 'others’; there never has been. At the risk of sounding too much like a wannabe political speaker, we are only ONE race: the HUMAN RACE. When Nick Griffin and the BNP talk about the indigenous peoples of Great Britain they are defending nothing more than fanatical far-right viewpoints that have no place in the world of politics.

On Saturday 15th November, the BNP staged a conference at the New Kimberley Hotel in Blackpool. Their decision to congregate there was part of an ongoing campaign to target the North West in an attempt to gain support for Nick Griffin, who is likely to stand in the 2009 European Elections. This is a major threat to democracy. Consequently, Unite Against Fascism organised a demonstration that mobilised people against the BNP and sent a clear message to everyone inside the hotel:

Fascists are not welcome in the North West.

More than 200 people marched through Blackpool at the weekend. We walked in unison from the Winter Gardens, past cars full of people along the promenade - many of whom beeped their horns, cheered and gave us the thumbs up - down to the grotty, run-down hotel itself. Outside, a number of key anti-fascist figures made speeches, followed by united chants that really summed up why we were standing out in the cold on a Saturday afternoon:

The BNP is a Nazi party: Smash the BNP.

The wonderful thing about a protest is that it takes politics out of its usual arena and puts it in the hands of ordinary people. It works once again on a grass roots level (literally - we were stood on a stretch of uncut, wet grass). A peaceful demonstration removes exclusivity and elitism; it abolishes a seemingly 'out of reach' political language in favour of making an honest statement of intent. Wherever the BNP seeks to divide and conquer, we will fight back. Students, teachers, workers, trade unionists - people from every corner of the country - will continue to stand up against the swastika, the jackboots and the tyranny of the BNP.

In 2005, at Nottingham Trent University, I found Oscar Wilde. Pursuing the ideas put forth in his plays, novels and children's stories, I found myself reading about the essayist and art critic, Walter Pater, and the notion of 'Aestheticism.' At its most basic, the aesthetic movement of the late Victorian period stated that one must live their life in pursuit of Beauty. It is not the place of this writer - or perhaps any writer - to describe people as 'good' or 'bad', 'moral' or 'immoral'. We ought, instead, to adopt this Wildean distinction of things as either 'beautiful' or 'ugly.' People are capable of doing things that belong to both of these definitions, but what is important to remember is that it is our choice as to which path we follow.

The BNP are an ugly organisation. Its website, campaign literature and beliefs are ugly. The violent attacks on people carried out in defence of its arrogant lies are ugly. Its exploitation of people living all across Britain is ugly. And, most harrowingly, the threat it poses to equality, democracy, peace and harmony as a result of divisive, racist, white supremacist policies is ugly.

We cannot allow Nick Griffin to secure a position of influence in Europe. Now more than ever we must unite against fascism, dispel the myths flaunted by members of the far-right, and fight to keep Britain beautiful. Saturday’s protest in Blackpool is an example of how we can do it.

(All quotes regarding British National Party policies are taken from their official website)

The Saturday Boy

Today is a contradiction. Henry realises this when he finally stops walking and takes a seat at the top of the steps. Beneath congregating rainclouds, his particular part of the world seems awash with silver. In front, the twisted, unpolished tin can frame of the Lowry looms, its rotrousse nose stretching skyward as if in sick desperation. Henry, perhaps strangely for a fellow of his sensibilities, admires the building intensely, but still he wonders whether this is because of the structure itself, or as a consequence of some inexplicable adopted sense of civic pride. Even the name fills him with excited curiosity.

He removes his jacket and curses himself for wearing it at all. The air hangs heavy and warm in Salford this evening and, despite the heavenly threat of summer rain, most of the folks ambling back and forth around him are in tee-shirts.

He glances across the water and is once again cast into a tender silvery orb. It has been nearly half an hour since he stepped out of the Imperial War Museum, back into the present, but he cannot shake the feeling he is somehow trapped inside.

Even from this distance, with gently glistening water dividing them, its jagged, unconventional carcass both exhilarates and terrifies him. If the Lowry is symbolic of a deeply hidden national pride, the museum exists as a beacon of personal guilt and despair; a slanted, fragile, distorted globe that expels the unity of the sphere and instead points accursedly and triumphantly at the sky. It is a deafening reminder of oppression and liberty, a joyous exclamation of the way things were and the way they are now, and Henry finds himself playing over familiar statements, clichéd but pure, in his mind: Not in MY name; Stop the BLOODY war; Your Country Needs YOU… Each war, he figures, requires a different word to be emphasised.

The quays are getting quieter now, and the sun is beginning to sink. He checks his watch, finds it is only twenty past six, and pulls himself up from the stone steps. Hushed voices are replaced by the tranquillity of early evening birdsong and the quiet exchanges of Saturday night couples.

Descending the stairs he passes a group of six holidaymakers, four of whom are in hysterics over something Henry will never know about. This pleases him and as he strolls alongside the water, away from the accusatory eye of the museum, he becomes excited at the thought of all the conversations he will never hear - those belonging to young lovers, old friends, inspired children and world-weary adults.

He settles on a bench directly across the water from Old Trafford. He has always had an affinity with the Wharfside and now, stationed centrally between two trees, he thinks he understands why. For Henry, this place is emancipation from urban existence. It resembles, at Sovereign Point, a kind of Northern Berlin. Here one can sit and inhale the people as they move over deep red bricks, not under the Linden trees, but beneath modest, beautiful replicas that – if you angle yourself correctly – entirely mask a ghastly sign for the Outlet Mall. It is here that one can gaze upon the elegant brown glass of Quay West and know that behind them stands a run-down roundabout directing people away from a picturesque island of wealth and taste, and towards poverty-stricken council estates. It is not the division of these landscapes that fascinates him, but rather the simple evidence of their co-existence.

He is torn from fumbled contemplation by the sound of a young couple arguing. They pass by, oblivious to Henry’s mounting interest in their quarrel, and each take a defiant seat on a waterfront bench. He watches them covertly for a few seconds before they slip into secretive debate and he can no longer hear.

That’s when the thought returns. It has had a grip on him all day and, although the War Museum has altered his mood in an as yet indefinable manner, Henry knows it will not be easily disposed of: today, like hundreds of days before it, is a contradiction. Alas, it had felt that way long before he decided to make an increasingly familiar pilgrimage to Salford. He remembers now the strange, burdened walk from the Lowry to the museum, still hung-over, left foot leading right across the blue and white footbridge, dragged onwards by an incredible overwhelming energy.

Since childhood he has been utterly infatuated with, perplexed by, and guiltily voyeuristic of war. When he was thirteen, his grandfather – a proud, intelligent man, both handsome and stylish – had given him a Pandora’s Box of wartime memorabilia and, with it, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. In those days, war, to Henry, meant 1939 – 1945, and everything that followed with it: hideous, alien-looking gas masks, ration books, Anderson shelters, powerful propaganda. It was then – and remains now – an entire universe of microscopic stories waiting to be unlocked and unleashed. His mind continues to oscillate between the major events and the minor significances. By the time he was sixteen he was reading books that examined the state of Europe in the early thirties and discovering, perhaps belatedly, that war does not necessarily begin and end with specific dates. Now, as he slides towards thirty, he is finally savvy enough to know that everything – every assassination, declaration, attack and conflict – is a consequence of the tiniest detail and a spellbinding occurrence unto itself.

But life can be beautiful too. He knows this by sitting here, untouched and uninterrupted, whilst the couple argues, the water rolls, and a self-obsessed world of polluted consumerism stretches out across the dockland. Regardless of its imperfections, Henry feels privileged to be a part of it - albeit from a mocking distance.

There are scores of photographers around and Henry admires every one of them. Like all beautiful places, the Quays inspire a fundamental human desire to capture the present. Some, he figures, do it purely for aestheticism; others for art. He is envious of the latter. A sensitivity to the virtues of Art has pervaded his existence since childhood (he looks at the world and experiences a private, subjective wonderment), and there is little doubt in his own mind that he can comprehend and even respond to an artist’s work. But still he cannot create it.

He first learnt this through music. At fifteen, having acquired a taste for Carl Perkins, Eric Clapton and BB King, Henry borrowed an acoustic guitar from his school’s music department and set about teaching himself to play. Just shy of fifteen years later, he is able to jam with the best of them. Sometimes, in the dusty yellow candlelight of his apartment, he catches sight of his left hand as it unconsciously frames a minor seventh, or stretches across the fretboard to conclude the resonation of some century-old blues riff, and is set alight by his ability to replicate the heartbreak, pain, misery and loss conjured up by the song’s creator – but this is as far as it ever goes.

Even as a teenager, devoid of the perilous insecurities that go hand in glove with trying to create, and in his early twenties when alcohol succeeded in temporarily liberating him from these shackles, he found it impossible to transform a love of music into inventive outbursts of his own. For six years he envisaged himself as a tortured composer: he could hear music everywhere and knew innately how its peculiar science worked, but any attempt at songwriting of his own sounded flat, diluted, troubled and uninspired.

Then he met Jenny, his first real girlfriend, and she introduced him to the music of Johnny Marr. It was unlike anything he had encountered before: sweet, subtle, melancholic notes weaving in and out of one another to form modern day concertos exploding with life. Henry turned his hand to learning these records, spellbound by the crashing cacophony of major and minor chords, and realised that by playing them he could lose himself, however briefly, in reflective sadness and swelling joy. A guitarist born only a few miles from where he is sitting now had saved his life.

Henry shifts his attention to a man of Eastern descent who is setting up a tripod. His movement as he takes aim behind the viewfinder carries a delicate professionalism, and there is grace and intelligence in the way his fingers glide and hover over the camera’s aperture controls. Henry would give anything to trade places with the photographer for a few moments, if only to see what an expert sees in that small rectangular box as he mentally divides the world into thirds and frames a shot that will transport whoever sees it in the future back to this precise point in time. He keeps his eyes fixed on the tripod, engrossed and anxious, suddenly sure that when the camera clicks it will sound like a gunshot resounding off the water. Weighted seconds pass and then –

‘I know you.’

It is not the sudden closeness of the voice that surprises Henry, but the sweet, softly spoken certainty of its tone. Only later, forced by the dying of the day to light a candle, does he recall those opening three words and understand their full importance. How different the statement might have been; how expansive and varied the connotations of the English language – ‘Do I know you?’ and ‘I recognise you’ resigned to the blacklist in favour of an honest, soulful declaration of assurance.
Henry turns to find a girl standing beside him.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I know you,’ she says again. ‘From the museum. I saw you by the nuclear warhead. You looked lost.’

Henry smiles. Indeed he had felt lost, stood before a small television screen while a 1976 government film explained what to do in case of a nuclear attack; and, below, the black, slender, shark-like exterior of humanity’s most devastating scientific achievement. To look upon such a vile creature, so Henry believes, is to witness the struggle between Oppenheimer’s moral consciousness and the dark psyche of the American government.

‘I don’t know what’s worse,’ Henry starts, fumbling for the right words. ‘The bomb itself or that bullshit office-training-video excuse for a film.’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ the girl answers. ‘The bomb is much worse. It pretty much wins out against everything in terms of disaster, destruction, distaste…’ She trails off, steps out of the light, and takes a seat on the bench. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Not at all,’ he replies, without thinking. Despite a natural inclination to greet confidence with a pathological shyness, and presently set somewhere between intrigue and apprehension, Henry cannot help but look at her. Without the sun obscuring her, he can make out green eyes and pink, thinly-pursed lips. She is beautiful, charged with an unconventional desirability that many would recognise but few understand.

‘So, is that the first time you’ve been?’ She asks, looking, for the first time, directly into his eyes.
‘Yes, but it definitely won’t be the last. Already I feel compelled to return.’
He considers holding back his full arsenal of feelings about the museum, partly because he does not want to erupt in flashes of hyperbolic nonsense, but mostly because he wishes to protect his own mind from dealing with the intensity of his experience inside.
‘I watched you while the show was playing,’ the girl says. ‘You passed me twice and there was a look on your face like… like you couldn’t get out.’ The girl is sincere – this much, at least, is obvious. When she speaks it is with the delightful insight of a comedy writer and not condescending self-confidence. Henry immediately likes her. He recalls entering the museum, penniless and at odds with his state of mind, convinced that beyond the gift shop, just up the darkened stairs, something illuminating lay in wait for him.

The World War 1 exhibition had been fine, and apart from a dehydrated shakiness in his limbs, Henry had floated around like all the others, distantly appalled by suicide in the trenches and lice-infected boots. It was when he arrived at the gates of the unsteady thirties – those years plagued by a gathering sense of disharmony and betrayal – that he began to withdraw. Powerlessly, unwillingly, he slipped into a world enveloped by twenty-foot black and white photographs: women from the home front stared down at him; tremendous film projections of Holocaust survivors set to a soundtrack of childish pencils scratching and scribbling words onto discoloured paper climbed the walls. A disorientating darkness prevailed and his chest grew tight. He pressed on quickly, his heart heavy, his will surrendered, shamelessly following small black arrows in the same way he had once excitedly followed former girlfriends across crowded dancefloors. Before long he had lost sight of the directions and found himself alone. Breathless and consumed by panic, he fell obliviously past windows boasting a wealth of curious artefacts, desperate to be near someone. It struck him then that he was operating on some primitive level, pre-historic in its purity, longing only for another of his species, craving nothing more than blind, unspoken belonging.
He turned a corner, the noise of the show solemn and deafening, and was confronted by an armoured tank. Totally in awe of its size, the extended gun barrel bearing down on him, all he could think about was Tiananmen Square, and that solitary figure facing down a demon similar to this one, motionless, unmovable, trapped forever in celluloid.

‘I don’t remember seeing you,’ Henry says, unevenly.
‘Oh, I didn’t expect you to.’ And then: ‘Wine?’ She fishes a glass bottle from a plastic bag Henry had not seen at first, and smiles. ‘It’s red. I can tell you’re a Communist.’
‘Thank you.’ He is unsure about which part of her statement he is replying to.
‘I’m a forward thinker.’ She says, and fiddles with the neck for a moment. ‘Screw top, see?’ And with a flourish she removes the lid. ‘No cups though, so we’ll have to have at this like a couple of winos.’

For the next minute or so nothing passes between them except for the wine. It burns pleasantly in Henry’s throat and he feels as though he ought to offer words of gratitude. Equally, it is a silence he does not wish to interrupt. He has experienced this kind of feeling before: a dizzying wave of connective awareness that occurs when you meet the gaze of a stranger on a passing bus, or catch the heavy eyes of somebody on a loveless nightclub dancefloor. There appears, in those moments, a fleeting glimpse of the self reflected in the uniqueness of another. It is comforting to have solid evidence that vulnerability is not without its virtues.
‘I’m leaving here tomorrow,’ the girl announces.
‘Leaving Manchester?’
She nods, coyly. ‘Forever.’
‘Do you feel sad to go?’
She considers this before answering. ‘Giddy. I feel giddy.’
A smile forms at the corners of her mouth and she glances at Henry very briefly as if in need of validation. She does not strike him as socially inept but he knows that those who truly are sometimes polish off the Wildean mask and become somebody else entirely. It is not easy to do, neither is it a particularly life-affirming role to play, but it does possess a reticent charm.
‘Why are you going?’ He asks, inwardly troubled by the premature loss of this curious stranger. One of the imagination’s primary beauties is its ability to race impatiently and vividly ahead of itself when it comes to other human begins. Though he cannot rationalise it yet, Henry already knows that he wants to be around her. By the time the question is out, friendship – or perhaps even a romantic relationship – is no longer a stretch of the cognitive faculties.

The girl – still nameless in his world, though it matters very little – gestures for the bottle and when it is back in her grasp she explains: ‘I made a pact with myself when I was sixteen never to live in the same place for more than two years.’ She takes a good gulp of wine, glances at the couple sitting by the water (who have given up talking in favour of a silent, passionate embrace) then continues: ‘Between you and me, I cheated. I’ve been here closer to three.’
‘This city will do that to you.’
‘And then some,’ she agrees. ‘I lived in Mile End before. Musical association aside, I couldn’t wait to get out.’

The bottle returns to Henry. He does not know how or why is here, let alone his reasons for remaining on the bench. Standard British etiquette dictates that when confronted by strangers one is to make their excuses and get as far away from them as possible, thus avoiding pity, sympathy and lengthy unwanted conversation. Today that is not the case and he feels elated to be rejecting his usual manner.

This morning he had been awoken by the sound of the Electric Light Orchestra harmonising over ‘Mr Blue Sky’, only to find that Emma had slipped into bed beside him sometime during the night. In spite of an indefinite, unromantic hiatus in their relationship, she has done this a lot over the past few weeks and Henry, constitutionally bound to believe that when the sun comes up all his love is wasted, finds it difficult to deal with. He has friends that have, in the past, continued to sleep with their lovers in the months following a supposed break-up, but it has always struck him as an unhealthy vice in which to indulge.

Not anymore.

Throughout the two and a half year tenure of their courtship Henry has become accustomed and, worse, addicted to sharing a bed with her. He enjoys the way they fit together: the tried and tested point at which their bodies meet, the curve of her breasts, an arch of the back that allows comfort and ease when they sleep. It is a synchronicity two people perfect over time and he is not yet ready to relinquish it.
How then did he come to be sitting here? He is - to his own mind - angry, ill, and ugly as sin; unapproachable to those who do not know him, aggravating to those who do. But there is something that burns within him – not the bright, illuminating spark of an artist – but something that draws human beings to him, and he to them. He both loves and hates people, and this is not based entirely on the flippancy of mood. Deep within Henry there is a contradictory soul - genetic, natural and true - that enables his feelings to fluctuate from day to day. Long ago he had believed - even longed for - it to be the building blocks of Genius; an exceptional ability to see a little further down the road, to read people in the same way he read Hemingway, Orwell and Blake. Later, when adolescence crossed the road into early adulthood, he questioned his faith, began to see it as hopeful arrogance, and contemplated instead the plausible absence of some pleasure-inducing biological reaction in the brain.

‘Where are you going to go?’ He asks, mindful of the prolonged silence.
‘Canvey Island. Then Brighton. At least I think so.’ She pauses. ‘And you? Are you going to stay here?’
Henry laughs. ‘I don’t know. Freedom is wasted on me.’ He swigs a huge amount from the bottle, a little too much to enjoy the full spectrum of flavour on his tongue, and passes the baton. She takes the wine - still nameless, still charming – and asks:
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘The museum,’ he replies. ‘How terrifying it is, and what my sort-of-is, sort-of-isn’t girlfriend would think about it all.’ His honesty surprises him.
‘And?’
‘I have no fucking idea.’ They laugh, in sync and in harmony, and it feels genuine. ‘There’s this thick grey cancerous wall of silent deception when it comes to that girl. Just when I think I understand how she works, or what we’re doing together, or whether we even are together anymore, the cloud descends and I’m screwed all over again.’
‘Sounds like the L word to me. Better to have it than to not. That’s a fact, and I should know.’ Her words are drenched in what could be sarcasm or bitterness. Either way, Henry wonders what has brought her here, to this point of existence, evidently versed in love and life, clever enough to make fun of them both. He tries to imagine the boy that broke her heart and his motivations for doing so. Was he inwardly beautiful, perhaps raised on jealousy, resentment and insecurity? Or pretty, cool and insincere? Had he been unfaithful? Did he crumble completely when she cried? Henry dismisses speculation, startled by the miserable pain he feels for a fictional infidelity.

That’s when she grabs his hand.

It is a familiar sensation: the reassuring touch of another person, made fresh by the unfamiliar softness of the girl’s flesh. At first he dares not look and, seemingly triggered by his lack of reciprocation, the girl squeezes tightly. It is everything he needs and Henry lets his palm flow into her grasp, their fingers entwined in a manner usually reserved for shy, nervous lovers. She does not know him and he knows nothing of her, but it feels right. Today the world is nothing more than a swirling contradiction and yet to be here, locked intimately into a person he may never have encountered if not for the bloody celebration of a thousand years’ conflict, is to welcome a dulling of the senses and the onset of an evening’s peace. The arbitrary nature of strange hands coming together for no reason other than to feel something injects him with a bizarre happiness.

They sit like this for a long time, not speaking or looking at one another, preferring instead to keep their eyes fixed on the diminishing glow of the Salford evening. Henry, his thoughts introverted and private, is somewhere else entirely when the girl speaks again.
‘And now you know,’ she says, turning towards him.
‘Know what?’
‘That in amongst the confusion and the dark clouds, for one day in June there was somebody else in the world that understood what you’re about.’

He takes a moment to consider this and feels her hand fall away. She downs the last of the wine, sets the bottle on the ground. He wonders if she feels light-headed now. He most certainly does, and he quickly remembers he has not eaten today.
The girl roots around in her pocket and removes a small black notepad. It strikes Henry that she is going to write down her name and telephone number, something he previously believed happened only in Hollywood.

Emma’s face does not need to spring into his mind. It has been there all along, waiting for this moment, the physical personification of his conscience.

The girl scribbles onto the first page of the book, and he can tell by the movements of her hand that she is taking time and effort to make it readable. She rips the sheet out, folds it in half and gives it to him.
‘Don’t lose it,’ she says, getting to her feet and collecting the wine bottle. ‘Bye.’
‘Bye,’ Henry says, but she is already walking away. He watches her, a little spellbound, and soon she is gone.

He does not read the note right away, happy in the knowledge that whatever it says will not match the infinite number of life-changing statements he is currently imagining.

Without her next to him things become hazy again. Alone on the bench, his mood lightened somewhat by the wine, he thinks about W.H. Auden’s immortal definition of what constitutes great art: ‘clear thinking about mixed feelings.’ This, Henry feels, is easier said than done, and very rarely do people uncover insightful truths about themselves without an element of blissful surprise.

With this in mind, he unfolds the note and reads what the girl has written. In dark pink lettering, the words:

This Day Will
Never
Happen
Again

And, beneath, a drawing of a heart.
Henry smiles, elated by the sentence’s shameless relevance, and when he stands to leave he is sure of only one thing:
He won’t let it get lost.

(Tim Woodall, 9th June, Manchester, 2008)

The Weeping Pumpkin

(a story for Halloween, 2007)

Once Upon a Time there was a happy, fun-loving Pumpkin. He spent his days sitting in the sun watching the people as they passed by. He saw children playing in the fields and adults driving cars and talking on mobile phones.
One day, when October was nearly at an end, three kids came to his patch of land.
"I want that one!" The young girl shouted, pointing excitedly at the happy Pumpkin. Suddenly the Pumpkin was surrounded. Two other kids ripped him out of the ground and placed him into a brown paper bag.
"I've got him!" Shouted the younger of the two boys. The girl - who happened to be the two boys's sister - cheered, and all three made off with the Pumpkin.
When they got home they carved eyes and a mouth into the happy Pumpkin's orange skin, and placed him onto the windowsill. The pumpkin felt every cut of the knife and began to weep.
How can children be so cruel? He thought.
But, as he sat silently in the window, he thought about something else too...
He thought about Revenge.
Night fell and the Pumpkin looked all around himself. There were photographs on the walls and portraits on the mantle. He soon realised that he was in a family home and that it was Halloween.
He'd heard about Halloween. When he was younger the older pumpkins had told him scary stories about Giant People who came and took pumpkins from their homes to decorate with candles in celebration of All Hallow's Eve.
A long and terrible night passed and the Pumpkin felt and alone and afraid. He longed for the open air and for familiar surroundings.
The next morning the kids set out for school and their parents went to work. The happy Pumpkin wept for hours, wondering whether he would ever see his home again, and plotted his revenge.
He decided he needed to teach the children a lesson. A lesson they would never forget.
That night, as dusk fell and the darkness loomed like a bird of prey, he watched as the family played games and ate sweets. They bobbed for apples, the children dressed as ghosts and vampires.
After dinner the young girl came into the living room, lit a candle, and placed it into the Pumpkin's hollow body.
"Little girl," the Pumpkin said as the girl was walking away. She turned uneasily toward the Pumpkin in the window.
"You... you spoke," she said, a little scared.
"Why did you take me away from my home?" The Pumpkin asked.
The girl stooped a little so that her face was level with the Pumpkin's.
"We needed a pumpkin for Halloween," she said. "This is your home now."
"But I was happy," said the Pumpkin, and a tear fell from his carved out triangular eye.
"You're crying," the girl said.
"I weep because I miss my home," said the Pumpkin. "I used to be able to watch the children flying kites and chasing each other, and even the adults as they drove past with music spilling out from their car windows. I used to be warm but then your father hollowed me out with a knife and now I see the same things all day long."
"But Pumpkins don't have eyes until Halloween," the girl said.
"I saw with my imagination," the Pumpkin answered. "All the beauty of the world is seen through imagination." Another tear fell nostalgically from his human-carved eyes.
"It's Halloween," the girl cried. "Please don't be sad." Tears formed in her blue eyes.
"I'll make a deal with you," said the Pumpkin. "Remember me in years to come. Remember that I was once a happy Pumpkin, full of life's many joys, and remember that Beauty and Happiness are the most important things in the world. Remember the Weeping Pumpkin and remember that being kind is the purest road to Happiness. If you remember these things my sadness will not be in vain."
"I'll remember," said the little girl.
"Deal?" The Pumpkin questioned, knowing that this, his cunning revenge, a tumultuous tragedy transformed not into terror but into teaching, would live on in the girl’s heart forever.
"Deal," she said.
The next morning the Pumpkin was dead. The young girl was sad and so she buried him in the garden with a sign that read:
Here lies the Happy Pumpkin. May he weep no more.

Rain on Film

It starts in the thunderstorm, just before dawn; a dulcet choir of raindrops at the window. It begins casually beneath dark, swelling rainclouds with the image of a Calligraphy pen scratching blue ink onto a sheet of paper. My eyes are tightly shut, blacking out the friction, but I see words being carved out, words that will eventually tell a tale of sadness, loss and possession in a fictional town somewhere in Middle America. For a few moments the strength of recollection forces me to believe I have woken up in the past; forces me to believe that I am sixteen years old again and being dragged out of slumber by the unwelcome knocking of a cold, winter morning.

I open my eyes and the memory dies. Everything stays dark. All I know is that it is here and it is now: I am 27 years old, hurtling toward 30 at the speed of an express train, and it is raining heavily. This will not be a morning spent walking to school, an afternoon waiting to return home, an evening spent listening to music, watching TV shows and (God, do you remember how you’d always be - ) writing stories.

I lie still for a moment waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and realise I am shivering. It is cold - the kind of December weather one would be accustomed to if one were in Britain – but not cold enough to make the body tremble and shudder, especially when said body remains hidden away beneath the duvet. No, it is not the cold that is doing this, but the memory; the vivid memory of a boy who loved language and found comfort in the page.

I suddenly feel the weight of that old Calligraphy pen between my fingers, and it brings back teenage days of scribbling words (often ones learnt from whichever book I happened to be reading that week) onto A4 sheets of paper, folded across the middle to create make-shift paperbacks.

The pen drops and I am alone again. I look at the clock to find it is nearly five-fifteen am. I summon strength and, despite the cold, find it is remarkably easy to get out of bed.

By the time I step out into the rain, Calligraphy pens and self-published novels couldn’t be further from my thoughts. Crossing the street I am once again spellbound by the realisation that I live in Los Angeles now. It’s been nearly three years since I moved here but waking up in California has a knack of making it seem like you’ve just arrived. I light a Marlboro under the umbrella and head down the street to where the car is parked.

The sky appears a little lighter when I arrive at the magazine offices. I meet a young blonde girl, maybe twenty years old, at the door. I take very little notice as I pass her but step full-on into the trail of her perfume. It strikes a match in the memory box and I find myself in Love again, lying across from (shh, now, don’t say her name) a girl with dark hair and thin red streaks, in an old single bed. Fireworks hang like constellations outside the window and the smell of gunpowder is thick, but the November breeze is too good to expel.
Let’s do this forever, she says, and the boy in bed beside her (that boy seems like a stranger even to me these days), the shirtless boy with long hair and butterflies in his belly, pulls her closer, as if the scented evening air might take her from him. Her eyes are big in the darkness, and the sweet smell of perfume is on the surface of her skin.
Aren’t you cold? He asks.
Actually… no. And she laughs, drawing closer into his arms.

I remember this – all of this – in the time it takes to step out of the rain and into the reception area. The flame goes out (as if it were the weather keeping it alive) and I realise I am standing, umbrella still raised above my head, in front of two puzzled reception workers.
“Don’t worry about me, I’m from the past,” I half-joke. They continue to look utterly befuddled and so I start toward the lift, colour rising rapidly in my cheeks.

I’m still thinking about Anna (ah, now you’ve gone and made it real) and the magical Bonfire Night of 2001 when I sit down at my desk. A couple of lines from Tom Waits’ Martha jump out from behind the curtain.
Those were days of roses,
Poetry and Prose,
And, Martha, all I had was you and all you had was me…

By noon I have edited an article about Auschwitz down to 2,000 words. It is the sixth – and final – part of a series dealing with the Second World War. I wonder whether there are two more terrifying words in the English language than Concentration Camp.

I buy coffee and a sandwich for lunch, and run into a drunk on the way out of the diner. He tries me for money but I respectfully deny him. He slurs a few mostly incoherent words, spluttered out in sickly-sweet alcoholic breath. I imagine him, like so many others, lying lifeless in a coffin, his face contorted and still. It is an image that has haunted me since my father died and it always disturbs me. At his funeral, an overcast day in the autumn of 2002, he went to the ground as drunk as he had once walked upon it. It was raining that day too, and I remember looking down at the grave for hours, as though I were a missing member from the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I shake myself out of reverie and wonder what is wrong with me today.

I spend the rest of the afternoon at work writing throwaway verses about my own life. I guess you can’t really call it autobiography unless you’ve achieved something worth reading about. Still, it is strangely fitting on a day so consumed with nostalgia for times that may as well never have existed. I write about Anna (the Good, the Bad and the Break-up), about University days spent in a smoky bedroom listening to Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald, naturally tripping on the beauty of the songs. I write about my flirtatious relationships with various careers, and about standing in nightclubs with no idea of how to engage with other human beings. I write about torrid, hurtful affairs with women I should never have been involved with. I write about them and experience the same happiness, the same regret and the same longing I experienced the first time around. Each word takes me back and back and back until I am living those days all over again. The memories flash like moving pictures falling out of a strobe light.

I quit writing around five o’ clock, delete every word, and leave. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Best to leave it where it is.

I stop in at a trendy local bar that boasts a good Billie Holiday collection on the jukebox, and start drinking. For a while I mull over various starting points for my next article (a piece about the nature of Genius, of which I know very little) and listen to Billie’s voice. When I hit Drink No. 3 I am full of wonder and already too shaky to drive. I decide to leave the car where it is for the night and order up another beer.
Lighting a cigarette brings Bukowski to the forefront of my thoughts. I consider the life he lived, the literature he left, and the undeniable power of the sentences he strung together. He could have, I figure, written the simplest of postcards and still made it infinitely readable. There was just something there. Something magical in the words he chose that went from the Soul of the writer right to the Heart of the reader.

Midnight descends like a laughing clown and I stumble into the street. I have not eaten. Walking seems like a struggle.

The street is dark, lit only by a single streetlamp. I stagger onward, wondering not for the first time why it is the Heart that is associated with love and not the Liver. The liver, after all, is the organ that has bore the damages of my own love life.

“Excuse me. Are you James Greene?” Someone asks behind me.
I turn, surprisingly quickly, in the direction of the voice.
“I am.”
“The James Greene that writes for Mercy! magazine?” The man is tall, bald, cleanly shaven.
“Unfortunately so.” My head swims with drunkenness.
“You wrote an article, a month ago, condemning Holocaust conspiracy theorists.”
I nod vacantly.
“I read that article,” the man says.
“Oh, and did you - ”
I feel a sudden hot explosion of pain in my chest long before I hear the gunshot. It is an excruciating, magnified sensation not dissimilar to when your head unexpectedly collides with something hard.

I fall backwards, vision blurring. I hit the deck hard, clutching at my lungs and clutching at straws. The man stands over me for less than a second before bolting in the opposite direction. A moment later there are voices all around me. Distressed, panicked voices.

My breath is shortening and I have just enough time to think He. Shot. Me. before the world turns from sickening grey to a comforting black. I drift – not in time, not in space – but back once more to the bedroom on Bonfire Night. The thick, musty aroma of gunpowder hangs in the air (this time from the barrel of the stranger’s gun, as opposed to fireworks long since burned out). Pain slips further and further away, and I am no longer watching my own life but living it all over again. I pull the girl close to me in the same way I did six years ago and hear her whisper those wonderful words one last time:

Let’s do this forever.

It is true what they say: when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. It plays out like a dream-play in your imagination, not in an instant – never in an instant – but from dawn until dusk. It wants you to know the joy and the pain, the bliss and the burden of your years. Some people believe you go one way or the other - up or down. All I know is that in the moment when the voices fade and the present recedes, there is no Great White Light leading to Paradise and no Ferryman waiting to take your soul across the river into Hell: there is only what is done. And what is done can never be undone.

Not even in Death.

Rain on Film appears in Aesthetica Magazine Issue 21 (Feb-Mar 2008). It is available to buy at WH Smiths, Borders, and various independent establishments (including the Cornerhouse, Oxford Road, Manchester).

You can also order it online at http://www.aestheticamagazine.com

The Obituarist

The obituarist sits in an old chair on the balcony of his third floor office, with a glass of red wine in hand, as the light burns quietly out over Salford. It is just after eight when the sun sinks behind the Liverpool Warehousing Company building across the quay and reduces the sky to a dark, faintly ominous blue. Summer, a season he once despised for its climate, has finally arrived: the air hangs heavy and close, injected with the alluring scent of pollen, and it is warm even at this hour. Later it will cool and, as always, he will be forced back inside to sleep or call a cab.

The doors to his office are open wide, and he shoots a look inside to the clock on the wall. It is later than he imagined which is good because it has been a private rule for the past three of four years that he does not touch a drop of liquor before eight o’ clock unless he has company. Such company calls less and less these days.He lights three candles and sips from the tumbler of wine. He holds the liquid in his mouth for a few seconds, lips tingling in excitement, tongue swelling with flavour, then swallows. If the first cut is the deepest then the first swig is certainly the sweetest.

It has not been a difficult day. He wrote for three or four hours, drank a variety of teas, read nearly an entire chapter of a Hitler biography, ate lunch, and even found a little time to start on the Times crossword. It is a newspaper he cannot bear to read (he has only ever bought the Guardian as a news source, even before he began working for it) but its cryptic clues are too much to resist. He figures he will return to it in an hour or two, but for now he is content with gazing out over the beautiful Northern oil painting before him. London, with its interminable rush hours and expansive arrogance, seems like a dream now. For seven years Manchester has been his life. Sometimes he misses the dirty fingernails and filthy cough of the underground, or window shopping for instruments he can neither play nor afford on Denmark Street; and occasionally he longs to embrace once more the capital’s smoky, electric topography of culture, but aside from this he is – in utterly relative terms - ‘happy’ here. Each day in the North West is a fantastic replication of the last. In the summer he awakens to find the weather grey and dull, only for a glorious sun to climb through the clouds at midday. In the winter it simply stays grey, punctuated only by buckets of rain and the occasional hailstorm.

The phone rings. Once, twice, three times… Somebody – a notable Princeton lecturer perhaps or a member of the British parliament – is dead. He knows this without moving, without leaving his chair to cease the incessant, interfering alarm bell on his desk. They only ever ring on the off-chance. The editors and the deflated-voiced men and women at the newsdesk know he stays in the office until late, but tonight he is jaded and his bones seem to be groaning at the outside world.He does not answer and eventually the ringing stops.

Time was, he’d have torn himself apart, pondering desperately the identity of the ill-fated human being he would soon be writing about until he had battered, bruised and beaten himself into submission. Then he would call them back and start work. Just like his desire for the company of others, that nagging feeling seldom knocks anymore.

He is thirty-eight, and he worries about his health. Every headache is a belated hangover, each chest pain a testament to the atrocities of having once been an over zealous smoker. He does not miss cigarettes. They are a youthful, not quite so innocent habit, just one of the many perks of being young. Even with a fag clamped between his teeth he had known that one day he would quit. Now he finds solace in writing angst-ridden, should-know-better poetry; tea leaves have replaced tobacco in his life and he relishes each variation on the form in the same way he had once relished each blissful inhalation.

The obituarist enjoys what he does. At University he had fantasised about becoming a Writer. In essays he would spell the word with a capital letter, as if it was the noblest of all professions, suspended with the gods. It wasn’t until he was twenty-five that he realised he wasn’t good enough to forge worlds, create character arcs, write sub-plots and, ultimately, make any kind of money from doing so. The world was alight with authors, and every single one of them was, to his knowledge, far more blessed than he.

He wrote his first obituary at the age of twenty-two when his girlfriend was killed in a car crash in South London. He didn’t have to think about the words; they just spilled out of him one dark, alcoholic night in Soho.

Since that day he has written thousands of obituaries - for writers, poets, footballers, MPs, physicists, historians, actors, even royalty. Sometimes he cons himself into believing it is the truest form of storytelling. Each life has a beginning, a middle and an end; moments of ecstasy, of heartbreak and of pain. He has never suffered from writer’s block. It simply doesn’t happen.

The obituarist endures the burden of his existence (if he can call it that) in a kind of self-imposed reclusion. Away from the page there is only Julia, a political columnist at the paper. She is twelve years younger than him, bright and funny, and sometimes she calls him, or he calls her, and they walk nowhere in particular together, inhaling the people. In the five years since they first met they have been almost everywhere, from the red bricks of Salford housing estates to the bright lights of Oxford Road. They only ever walk after dusk, and know nothing of each other’s past lives. It is self – and, by proxy, a mutual – validation their meetings serve. It is love, friendship and distraction.

The streets are quiet tonight, the roads less so, and the water looks black and cold. He imagines bringing Julia here, to the cosy comforts of his office balcony, and wonders what it would be like to enjoy the comforting frame of another human being beside him, not speaking or holding his hand, but just enjoying the world. This will never happen. The obituarist long ago resigned himself to the philosophy of George Bernard Shaw: there are two great tragedies in life – one is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it. It is one of life’s simpler, but nonetheless heartbreaking, truths that fantasy wins out over reality every time.

One day the obituarist will change his life. He knows the words will dry up; if they don’t, he will put them to flight by his own hand. Soon he will be forty, the age of crisis, of consideration, of reflection, and he will use this to his advantage. He is not too old to return to University, to get his PhD, maybe even lecture. It is something he has always wanted to do; something he continues to attribute to a future, less inept, possibly even fictional, version of himself.

And so tonight he simply embraces the growing darkness in the company of the Mamas and the Papas, and Bruce Springsteen, and the ghosts of all the people he has ever had the privilege of getting to know through pages of black and white print.

Tonight he is once again alone with the dead.