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.