Tag: Short Story

The Chains He Forged

I’m reposting an old story and podcast so that new followers will get the alert. It’s a Christmas Ghost story

A ghost story for Christmas by The Old Grey Owl

Click the link below to listen to the podcast of this story:

https://anchor.fm/old-greyowl/episodes/The-Chains-He-Forged—a-Ghost-story-for-Christmas-en747n/a-a3q6q6i

Marley was alive, to begin with, but that’s not how it stayed. After a while, he died. This is how everyone’s story turns out, yours and mine, in the end.

They discovered the body when they finally unlocked the door to the loft, expecting to find a decaying rat or pigeon. The smell, which had steadily grown stronger over the previous weeks, was like a punch in the face when the cold, stale air billowed through the open doorway.

The old building was full of musty smells, creaking floorboards and hidden, disused rooms. They had been promising to refurbish it for years: the addition of a new block here, replacement windows there. There was even talk at one stage of razing it to the ground and replacing it with a plate glass, chromium and cedar-clad cathedral of prize-winning architect design. Staff had joined focus groups to talk to the architects and builders and pastel coloured plans had been drawn up and displayed with much pride in the old library. When the crash pulled the plug on all of the planned public sector investments, the grand schemes were quietly forgotten and the crumbling pile slumbered on undisturbed as the occasional tile or stained piece of plaster flaked and fell to the ground, as if the building was an ancient sleeping behemoth suffering from psoriasis.

It was the thing that Marley was most looking forward to about his new job. A Headship in a new school, in a gleaming new building, fit for the 21st century. Like him, he thought smugly. Fit for the 21st century. A Headteacher who had jettisoned all of those tired, ridiculous practices so common when he had started teaching. Learning styles, group work, discovery learning, thinking skills. What on earth had they all been thinking of? Marley had sniffed the way the wind was blowing early. He’d read the right books, gone on the right courses, networked on Twitter with the right people and had adopted the right poses.

The head he had first worked under, Richard Fitzwig, seemed like an exhibit from a museum now. Yes, it had been a happy place, but it’s easy to be happy when the Head lets you do what you want. Wiggy wouldn’t last five minutes in a school today. How happy would those kids be now, applying for jobs and courses on the back of crap grades? At least now, after three years of relentless focus on results and behaviour, they had something to show for it. And of course, there had been casualties on the way. Collateral damage, as he liked to think of it. Exclusions, “arrangements” for off-rolling, the endless detentions and uniform checks and silent lines and mobile phone battles. Not to mention the set piece assemblies to humiliate the ring leaders. What were they called again? “Flattening the Grass” assemblies, yes that was it. He smiled grimly at the memory.

And if many of the kids and more of the staff resented what he had had to do, then so be it. No-one had said it was a popularity contest. But, in his more reflective moments, usually alone in the small hours, he wondered. Part of him envied the easy camaraderie some of his colleagues seemed to have. And the same part was relieved he was leaving. The headship was just reward for hours of thankless work turning the school round, but more than that it was an opportunity to start afresh as the coming man in a shiny new building.

He looked around his bare flat, magnolia walls hardly troubled with pictures, shelves untouched by photos or books. A kitchen littered with a week’s worth of pizza boxes and foil trays. One Christmas card, from his mother, a bleak accusation of the lack of personal success to match his professional achievements. Not even a jokey card from Bella, for old times sake. Her poetry was for someone else now. Not that he’d ever understood it, mind you. He was a scientist, a rationalist, who chose the minimum number of words to communicate exact meaning, not nuance. She’d tried to explain it to him one day, when he was newly qualified, and it had sort of made sense then, but not any more. Nuance was for losers. Once he’d settled into his new job, the salary would mean he could buy somewhere bigger, somewhere more appropriate to his new status. And maybe then it would be worth investing something of himself in it, so it became his home, rather than an extension of his office. Whether it would be worth investing anything in anyone else was a different question. He had been badly burned last time. People always let you down, he thought, and the only way to guard against that was to keep everyone at arm’s length. Easier that way.

He roused himself, making a deliberate effort to shake off this dangerous introspection. Through the window he could see the blurred grey light of Christmas Eve ebbing away. There was a gust of wind and a flurry of thin snowflakes swirled across the pane. He shivered. Maybe this run was not a good idea after all. He could always leave it until January. But no, he needed to get it out of the way so he could leave the school and that life behind him, and the run would do him some good. Once he got going, he wouldn’t feel the biting wind. He reached for his rucksack, checked his laces and grabbed the keys before heading downstairs to the front door of his block.

There was already a thin dusting of snow on the pavement, and the knifing wind blew it up into dancing clouds and the beginnings of drifts in the corners. He took one final look at his watch underneath the gloves. One o’clock. He should be back in a couple of hours if all went well and the building was empty. He’d unlock and disable the alarm as usual, collect the last of his stuff from his office and most importantly, remove a couple of things from his computer, just in case. He’d intended to do it on his last day, but there had been too many people milling around, so he had resolved to wait until now, Christmas Eve, when he could be sure that he’d be the only human being in the building.

Fifteen minutes later, he rounded the corner, and saw the familiar turrets and towers of the sprawling, dirty red brick institution where he had worked for the last ten years. When he told people where he worked, they would invariably gush about how amazing it was. Hogwarts they called it. He had tried to explain the first few times it had happened that, close up, it was a dirty, crumbling, inefficient, fire hazard, but gave up when it became clear that people didn’t want their gothic fantasies to be spoiled. After a while he just smiled and nodded and agreed with them. And then, inevitably, they would move on to what a shame it was that the school had gone downhill so far and so fast, and how it was all down to the sorts of children that went there these days. He’d be glad to leave that behind as well.

As he pounded the last few metres, his breath steaming into the darkening sky, he noticed with a start that the gate was open. Turning into the car park, his worst fears were confirmed. There were half a dozen cars parked in front of the school, and the yellow lights blazed out into the gathering gloom. He pulled up, and leaned forward, his hands resting heavily on his knees, his breath coming in laboured pants and gasps.

“Shit,” he thought, “It’s open. Who the hell is in there?”

The poster on the plate glass of the entrance answered the question. The Longdon Players production of “A Christmas Carol”. Damn. Of course, how could he have been so stupid? And, yes there had been an email about it to all staff, but he had been so caught up in his leaving that it hadn’t registered. The local amateur theatre group had a two-week run at the school, before and after Christmas. They must be in doing some last-minute tweaking before they went again on December 30th.

He removed his headphones and pushed tentatively at the main entrance door. There was no-one behind the desk on reception and no signing-in book. Gary, the site manager, must have come to some arrangement with the Theatre group. He’d be hunkered down somewhere watching the football, and he’d re-emerge to switch off the lights and lock up when they had all gone. He looked up. Beyond the harsh neon lights that flooded the foyer, all was in darkness, but he could hear the distant noise of people, from the small theatre space in the far corner of the building. Good, he thought. If he slipped in and up to his office, he could avoid anyone noticing him and get away without any awkward conversations. If it took longer than he thought, he had the keys to be able to lock up again after he had set the alarm.

He switched on the torch on his phone and crept up the main staircase. If he turned on the main lights that would bring someone running, so he followed the eery, silvery light from his phone, occasionally catching his breath at the strange looming shadows it conjured up as he made his way to his office on the second floor. He had been here late at night on his own many times before and there was no doubt about it, it was a creepy place. In the wind, the building emitted the full panoply of creaks and groans and whispers, and with no lights save for the shimmering, unsteady beam from his phone, the shaky pools of darkness would have tested the most determined rationalist.

Still, that had worked to his advantage many times in the past. Being a key holder, and often on call for building and alarm issues, he had had to unlock and have a quick check many times in the past. And once in, on his own, he was free to do a little sneaking around. Hacking in to the passwords of every member of staff was child’s play for someone like him. He had never done anything criminal. He wasn’t stupid after all. But information was very powerful and he had information on everyone. He was conflicted about leaving all of this behind. One the one hand it would be something of a relief to not have that capacity in the future. As a Headteacher, he would have power of a different, more respectable kind, and it would be a triumph of sorts to have got away with some of his deceptions. But then again.

He unlocked his office and switched on the light, blinking as it pinked into life. There was a chill in the air as the seasonal shut down of the boiler had begun to take its toll. Those people down in the theatre must be freezing, he thought. He could just about hear the strains of one of the songs from the show, floating up from the rehearsal.  The office was stripped down to the bare bones, with just a few reminders of the previous five years. He went over to his computer and switched it on. There, on the key board, was a Christmas card. It was sealed and addressed to “Ben Marley”.

He sat down and shook his head. What a waste of money. People were so stupid. Why on earth didn’t they just send a group email to everyone? The virtue-signallers could link it to some charity thing if they really felt the need. And the Greens could feel smug about cutting down on waste. He just didn’t want to spend money and he didn’t feel the need to dress that up in any finer motive. Christmas was just one big con.

Still, he could take it home with him and it could join the one from his mother. He ripped open the envelope and pulled out the card. A bog-standard holly and robin snow scene. At least he was spared the sanctimonious Christian nonsense. He opened it up.

“Dear Ben. Thanks for all of your hard work and support over the years. Enjoy your well-deserved promotion. Now you will really find out what it’s all about! Here’s some advice from someone who knows. Take some time and trouble nurturing relationships with your colleagues. It will help in the long run. Regards, Margaret.”

His pleasure at getting a hand-written card from the Head, who normally got her PA to do all of that for her, was soured by his annoyance at the thinly veiled criticism of her advice. Relationships indeed. She should mind her own bloody business. Maybe he wouldn’t take it home after all. He picked it up and looked at it closely again. With a flourish, he ripped it into pieces and dropped them into his bin. He’d like to think of her finding it on her return in the New Year. That would show her.

And then he saw it, just to the side of the monitor. A neatly stacked pile of what looked like more cards, all identical in white envelopes. There must have been about twenty-five of them all in the same pile. Who the hell were these from? He took the top one from the pile and examined it. In black biro in capital letters on the front of the envelope was a single word: MARLEY. The card inside had a simple message: “Fuck off and Die, you miserable bastard.” It was signed “Jack, 10B4”.

He grabbed at the second card in the pile and ripped it open. It had exactly the same message, this time signed, “Sophie, 10B4”. He didn’t bother with the others. His heart sank. All of them, every single one, hated him with a passion. Yes, he had been very harsh with them since September, but that was necessary to knock them into shape for their GCSEs. Yes, the exam specification and the league tables demanded that everyone be drilled to within an inch of their lives, and he wasn’t paid to be an entertainer or a social worker. It would be him that would get it in the neck if they didn’t get the results that the school needed. People got the sack for that kind of poor performance. There were no second chances these days.

The first flush of pain he had felt converted steadily into anger. How dare they? What cowards, to wait until he was leaving the school before they were brave enough to put their names to this outrage, after months of lessons with sullen faces brought on by screaming and shouting and eventual compliant silence. In a fit of rage, he swept the pile of cards from his desk onto the floor, before turning his attention to his computer and memory stick.

He worked steadily for a couple of hours, deleting files, copying them, and getting rid of emails. Finally, he stretched and yawned and looked away from his computer for the first time. The window was a dark square now and to his surprise it framed a blizzard of thick snowflakes. It was time to go. He rubbed away at the condensation on the window and looked outside. The show had settled and there was a couple of inches laying in the car park. There were no cars there now and, strangely, no tracks. They must have all gone before the snow had really got going. Now he came to think of it, he hadn’t heard anything from the theatricals downstairs for some time. He shivered at the sight of the snow swirling in the darkness outside. His run back home was going to be a lot more challenging than the one earlier.

He took one last look around the office, the cards still strewn across the floor, and locked the door, fumbling with his keys in the darkness. The corridor was heavy with darkness, but right at the far end, a thin yellow light leaked from the doorframe of the last classroom. This high up he could hear the wind moan and the walls creak, as if the old bones of the building were flexing in the aches and pains of accumulated years. And then, just as he was about to feel his way to the staircase, there was another noise.

He stopped and listened. There it was again. But it couldn’t be, surely? He narrowed his eyes and bent his head down towards the far end of the corridor. Yes, again. The sound of a distant child softly crying. Using the torch on his phone again, he navigated his way to the end of the corridor and flung open the door of the lighted classroom. A small boy, sitting at a table at the back of the room, jumped out of his seat in fright, shocked by the violent entrance.

His face was tear stained and he was wide-eyed and staring. He was about ten or eleven years old, and he was wearing a shabby, old-fashioned looking uniform. He held a cap in his hands.

“What on earth are you doing here? Who are you?” Marley demanded.

“Please Sir,“ stammered the boy, “I’m Ignorance. Or was it Want? I can never remember which I am. Maybe I’m both.”

He wrung the cap between his hands and wiped his runny nose on one of his wrists.

Marley looked utterly baffled. “Ignorance? Want? What are you talking about lad? And what the hell are you doing here? Who else is here?”

He scanned the four corners of the room, as if a gang of the young boy’s accomplices were about to spring out and attack him.

“No-one Sir. I am quite alone. Quite alone in the world.”

Marley looked more closely at him. He was filthy. His hands and finger nails were black with accumulated grime, and his clothes were threadbare. Marley’s frown deepened and then suddenly broke into a smile.

“Of course!” he exclaimed, “The production. You’re from the Theatre thing, aren’t you? Do they know you’re up here on your own? They’ve all gone, I think.”

The boy wiped the tears from his face. “Beggin’ your pardon Sir, but I dunno. I dunno nuffink about no theatre group.”

“What are you talking about? You must be from the production. Don’t play games with me lad. Otherwise, where’ve you sprung from? Who are you?  What are you doing here?”

The boy looked up at him, his eyelashes jewelled with tears. “But I’m always ‘ere Sir.  Always ‘ave been. Always will be.”

“What do you mean, ‘Always here’?  I’ve never seen you before.”

“No, Sir, you ain’t. I’m always ‘ere, but you never seem to see me. No-one sees me. I sees you and I hears yer shout at the kids. Always shoutin’, never listenin’, that’s you. Not that you’re the only one, Sir, oh no. There’s plenty like you. More in the last few years, if anyfing. But you’re the worst.”

The boy pointed a bony finger at him and fixed him with his beady eye.

“You’re the worst,” he repeated.

Marley stared at him, mouth open. The chill in the room had started to bite and he shivered involuntarily.

“Is some kind of a joke?” he demanded. “Did someone in 10B4 put you up to this? “

The boy’s eyes flicked to the back of the room. There was a set of rickety stairs leading to a tiny landing in front of a door. Marley’s eyes followed the boy’s. The door led to the loft, a kind of attic space under the eaves. It had been used for storage before Health and Safety regulations prevented it. Nobody went in there now.

“They’re in the loft, aren’t they?” he demanded, a triumphant smirk on his face. “Aren’t they?”

The boy simply smiled without answering. In the silence that filled the gap came the moaning of the wind outside. It was really starting to blow hard now, and the rafters creaked and groaned as the gusts of wind battered them. Marley stared again at the door. Slowly, the handle started to turn.

“I knew it!” Marley exclaimed. “We’ll soon settle this nonsense.”

He strode up to the staircase, leaped up the five or six steps to the landing and grabbed the handle. The door would not open.

“Locked in, are you?“ he shouted through the door. “Shall I leave you in there? Wouldn’t be so brave spending the night in darkness locked in the loft, would you? You know what they say about it don’t you? Haunted it is. Haunted.”

As he was shouting these threats through the door, he fumbled with his keys. He found the right one, unlocked the door and opened it. It was pitch black inside.

“Come on out,“ he called into the room, “ You’re caught. You might as well give up now before you make things worse for yourself.”

He reached for the light switch which was outside the loft on the balcony and pressed it. The loft space was suddenly flooded with white-bright lighting, revealing the cobwebbed beams and dusty floorboards inside. There was a sound of scuffling, as if a rat had scuttled away into a distant corner. Marley stepped inside.

“I know you’re in here,” he said in a raised voice. “Just come out from where you’re hiding so we can get this thing over with.”

There was a sharp chill to the air inside and the wind in the darkness beyond was howling steadily now. He took another step inside. There was a sudden noise behind him. He whirled round to see the boy, still holding his cap, out of his seat and standing just outside the doorway on the landing.

“What are you doing? You’re not helping, you know” Marley said. “You kids, you’re your own worst enemies sometimes.”

The boy smiled at him, his tear-tracked, dirty face lit up like a beacon.

“Sometimes,” he repeated.

There was a sudden gust of wind and the timbers of the loft screeched and shifted. The door, caught in the blast, slammed with a tremendous bang. The boy turned the key in the door, reached for the light switch and the loft was plunged into inky darkness.

*

In the darkness outside, all was still and the sky was full of fat snowflakes gently floating down. The wind of earlier had subsided completely and the thick layer of snow on the ground muffled all the sounds of traffic. Gary drew the entrance gates shut, pulled off his gloves and fiddled with the padlock and key, cursing against the cold.

“Bloody theatre company. A no show on Christmas Eve. That administrator bloke must think I was born yesterday, saying he hadn’t sent any email booking a rehearsal.”

He paused, struggling to get his gloves back on over his frozen fingers. “Still,” he smiled, “It’s not all bad. Double time is double time, whether anyone showed up or not.”

*

Several weeks later, Gary was in his office taking the detectives through the CCTV footage of the holidays. They finally located Christmas Eve, and there, in grainy black and white, was film of Marley walking across the car park. Walking next to him was what appeared to be a young boy, from the theatre group, dressed as a Dickensian urchin. From the moment the camera picked him up until he entered the building, Marley didn’t turn or appear to talk to the boy. It was almost as if he did not know he was there.

They ran the film on, hoping to see someone, anyone, leave the school later. There was nothing. “That kid must still be in the building, “ said the senior detective on the case, a balding, corpulent man who gave the impression that he’d really rather be back in his warm office tidying up paperwork.

“But who is he?” asked Gary. “I’ve never seen him here before.”

The detective raised an eyebrow. “I think the question is, ‘Where is he?’”

In the months that followed, there were several TV appeals, posters all over the neighbourhood, and an extensive search of the school. The boy, whose blurred image stared out accusingly at anyone who chose to look, was never identified, nor found. Eventually, they were all discreetly taken down, discoloured and tatty by this time, as if people did not want to be reminded of the harsh realities of the world for which, somehow, they felt they were unfairly being made responsible. More comfortable to take them down, rather than look away.

When the police left, with cursory thanks and platitudes, Gary was left alone in front of the screen. He scrolled back to the point when Marley and the boy entered the school, and, on a whim, switched to one of the other cameras on the feed, pointing out from the main entrance, towards the front gate. There they were again, together but entirely separate, walking through the steadily mounting snow. And then he stopped. He froze the final shot. There on the screen, stretching back from the entrance to the main gate, like a line of punctuation marks, was a track of footprints.

One line for two people.

He stared, and shivered, as the wind rattled the panes of his window and the bones of the building creaked and groaned.

The Old Grey Owl

@OldGreyOwl1

https://growl.blog/

oldgreyowl.57@gmail.com

Don’t Take Me Alive

A short story by The Old Grey Owl

“Take a look at this. This here is what we’re dealing with”

He clicked the mouse and a window burst into life on the screen in front of them. It was a young man, about twenty-five years old, his pasty white face ghostly beneath his pale whiskers and bright red MAGA baseball cap. The background was grainy and poorly lit by an overhead bulb with a dirty yellow shade. It looked like every cheap motel room from New York to LA.

Becker snorted. “Jeez, look at this guy, he’s like a ghost. He ain’t been out in the sun for a while, that’s for sure. These kids need to get offa their computers and get outside and throw some ball.”

“Ssh, listen up. He’s startin’…”

Becker bristled at the rebuke, but mentally filed it away for later. The MAGA cap on the screen loomed large as the young man lent forward to adjust his settings. Satisfied, he leant back and began.

“I ain’t a great one for writing stuff down. I can do it, but why would ya? But this needs to be recorded. I’ll post a link on Parler when it’s done, so everyone knows the truth of what happened. I was gonna just leave it here on the side, but then I figured that the Feds and damn CNN would just pretend like it wasn’t even there. Before you know it, they’ll have told their lies and everyone’ll think I was just another psycho. You know, one of those guys that plans sumpin, and racks up a load of guns and ammo and then sashays into school live on Facebook and blows away all the damn teachers he can find, with a few of the black kids thrown in. That’s not who I am. Even goddamn Fox don’t tell the truth now, but trust me, the truth is spreading and nothing can stop us. Soon enough, everyone’ll know and then the crap really will start to fly. Anyways, I can’t be bothered to write it all up. Those days are long gone.

When I was a kid, I believed every goddamned thing my daddy said to me. I guess it’s the same with the news. One day, you realise that all that stuff you’ve just gone along with is just a pack of lies. It’s like waking up after an operation or sumpin, on your eyes, you know. And when they take the bandages off, it’s like you can really see things the way they are for the first time. It kinda all falls into place. First, I was amazed, I couldn’t believe it, y’know? Then I was angry. And then, in the end, I was kinda thirsty. I wanted to make up for lost time and find out as much of the truth as I could.

Oh boy. You wouldn’t believe the things I found out. 9/11? A complete hoax. The damn CIA did that, baby. You can see the smoke if you watch the video right, down the sides of the towers. Those school shootings and all those bleedin’-heart parents asking for everyone to hand their guns in? Communists and Washington wanting to strip us of our guns. Our guns, man. This is America, these are our rights, the right to bear arms, you know? Freedom, yeah? Those parents? Well, it’s been proved that they were actors. I seen the video. And all the stuff about landing on the moon? Come on. There’s been stuff about that sucker on the internet for years, like Kennedy’s assassination, and yet they still try and get away with it. I love the internet man, I really do. The Fake News guys thought they had it all stitched up but social media. Twitter, facebook, the web, they can’t keep it all secret anymore man. It’s over. And they’re scared. Oh yeah, real scared.

I guess you don’t need me to tell you about COVID. That mother is the biggest load of crap of ‘em all, ‘cos like they are literally using it so that they can inject everyone with a so-called vaccine. How dumb can folks get? What’s in it? How can anyone possibly know? It’s gonna be some kind of a chip, man, that they can use to control everyone and everything. No way am I falling for that shit, man. But everybody else does. You see ‘em in the street and at the Mall, wearing their pussy little masks, staying indoors, creepin’ around to grab their groceries. That ain’t what made America great man. And everyone just literally rolls over and swallows this shit.

My Daddy believed all of this shit too. I’m real angry about that, about what all of these lies made me do. I didn’t want to, but shit happens. I guess they’ve probably found him by now. I’m real sorry about it, but he just wouldn’t stop. He’s an accountant see. Or he was. Well, not really an accountant, that was what he called himself to make him seem like some kind of big shot, when really, he was just some sucker like the rest of us, working his butt off for nothing. He was nothin’ more than a book-keeper. He kinda did the books and some of the chicken shit payments and bills and stuff at the old Quarry back home in Oregon. Kimberley, Oregon. See, I knew there was dynamite there, for the business, and I knew it would be easy enough to drive in there when it was dark, with my daddy’s keys and just kinda help myself.

I woulda gotten away with it as well, but I left my damn laptop up and he saw all the messages, man. I’d been plannin’ it for a long while. Eventually the other guys went along with it. I guess they just had to make sure that I was for real, and not some goddamn nutjob, y’know. Anyways, they and everybody else will soon see I’m serious. Hell, yeah. You’ll all know who the other guys were soon enough too, but I’ll be the one everyone is talking about.

My Daddy lit off down to the quarry as soon as he saw those damn messages. He came flyin’ in, runnin’ his mouth. At first, I tried to reason with him, man. I tried to explain what it was about, tried to open his eyes, y’know, but some folks just don’t wanna see. We’d had these arguments over and over again, and he wouldn’t listen. Just kept talkin’ about democracy, and the Law and all. He’s a goddamn Republican and everything, but those old school guys are the worst, y’know? They’re as big a part of the problem as the damn Antifa Socialist Democrats. And he was gonna ring the Feds. On me, his own son. Not that he ever thought I counted for much, yeah, I knew that alright. A big disappointment, that was me. But, first and foremost, I’m a patriot. So, I guess, I had to do it. And I did.

I drove East that night. That was part of the plan, see. And now, after what we did to The Capitol, everyone knows we’re serious. And they all think that, because of that, the National Guard and all have been warned and that they’ll be ready for us this time, with the heavy-duty body armour and assault rifles and shit. But the thing is, see, they knew about it last time, and half of those guys are bigger patriots than me. When the shit hits the fan, half of those guys will just turn around and point their rifles the other way. It’s gonna be awesome, man. So now it’s time for the big one. Biden is gonna get the inauguration he did not plan for, ‘cos it’s time for another Revolution, man. It’s 1776 all over again. And if it don’t work, its civil war, part 2. The Empire strikes back, man….”

At that point in the video, the speech was interrupted by a hammering on the door and shouting. The red MAGA cap twisted this way and that, but before he could react, the door splintered open and heavily armed riot police burst into the room, guns held high in front of them. In seconds, they wrestled the young man to the ground, sending his baseball cap flying. There was a lot of shouting and the picture span around wildly and then died as the laptop was sent flying in the scuffle. Then the screen went black.

Fagen shook his head and whistled softly.

“This guy is one fruitcake. I guess we had intel on him. Surveillance and shit. Just as well, seein’ as how he was gonna press the button. Where is he now?”

Becker lit a cigarette.

“Interrogation. The whole nine yards.”

“Hey, Walter, I ain’t sure you can smoke in here.”

Becker raised an eyebrow.

“Jeez, dude. Next you’ll be asking me to wear a mask and keep my distance.”

Fagen shrugged. “Yeah. Sorry, bro.”

There was an awkward silence and Fagen felt he had to make up some lost ground.

“So, he’s getting’ the treatment, huh? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was bein’ waterboarded right about now, man. Just like we did with the towel heads in the good old days.”

Becker smiled through the smoke rising from his Marlborough.

“Nah. He ain’t nobody. We knew all about him. They might make it look as if he’s the main guy, but that’s just to keep everyone quiet. He’s another Lee Harvey Oswald, man.”

Fagen looked nervously around him before coming to a decision.

“Say, Walter.”

“Huh?”

“What do you think about what he said about The National Guard and all? I mean. It was kinda weird that they had no one there defendin’ The Capitol. I was expecting a show of strength, man. Shock and awe, y’know. Like the goddamn BLM marches, with the Antifas.”

Becker though for moment and took another deep draw on his cigarette. “Come on, Don, the guy was a nutjob, you saw the video. There ain’t no conspiracy goin’ on here. Just big-time losers.”

Fagen smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

He glanced at his watch.

“Hey, we’d better get going. It’s fifteen after.”

Becker shook his head.

“You go on down there, man. I just got to finish this report. I’ll see you there later.”

When the door closed behind Fagen, he turned back to the laptop and checked his watch again. He switched on the TV set above the desk and found CNN with its usual busy cacophony of text boxes, live film and scrolling updates. Then he turned to his lap top, stubbed out the cigarette and began to hammer away at the key board, his eyes flicking occasionally up to the television. After a couple of minutes there was a ping to signal an incoming alert. The cell phone lay on the desk, still sleeping. He reached into the laptop case, and fiddling with zips, extracted a second cell. He punched in a number, waited for a second or two, and then spoke.

“You watchin’ this?…… All Good………The next phase is about to start.”

He was in a hurry now. He fumbled with the laptop, closed it down and packed it away, along with the hidden cell. Taking a quick last look around the room, he gathered up his phone and keys, hoisted the laptop over his shoulder and left.

The door clicked softly closed and the windowless room gathered dusky gloom in its corners. The television, volume low, cast a blue, flickering pall over the empty desk as the presenter’s voice continued, talking to no-one.

“News is just reaching us of a serious incident at the White House. We hearing reports that the outgoing President, Donald Trump, is barricaded inside The Oval Office and that shots have been fired. Large numbers of unidentified masked intruders, all heavily armed have been seen inside the building. In a separate development, we are receiving reports of gunfire at the inauguration of President elect Joe Biden. Let’s go first, to our correspondent….”

In the growing darkness of the far corners, untouched by the pale blue flicker of the TV, monsters began to stir.

Mr Stringer’s Snow Day

A new short story by The Old Grey Owl

The sky was still dark, with flurries of snow carried in fitful gusts of the wind that knifed through him. He crunched his way along the footpath to the main road.

Sam Stringer was on the verge of something, that much was obvious to everyone. It wasn’t clear to anyone who came across him  whether it would be  a nervous breakdown or greatness, but it was definitely something.

At first glance he had it all. He was good looking, with a generous covering of hair on his head and he dressed as if he vaguely knew what he was doing. At work he was amicable, witty and warm. Someone who the rest of the staff had an instinctively good feeling about, though they would be hard pressed to say exactly why. He was effortlessly impressive in the classroom. The kids loved his enthusiasm and knowledge and care and lightness of touch. The staff loved his self-deprecating comments, the fact that he was the go-to-guy on SLT who never let anyone down, his ability to switch from seriousness to sarcasm without anyone ever mistaking that as a sign that what they all did, every day, for the kids, didn’t matter.

And yet there was an unmistakeable air of detachment about him, a coldness and a sadness that seemed the essence of him, unreachable and alone. He was not in a relationship and most of the staff could not remember a time when he had been. He had friends, but they were more like acquaintances, like those university groups that allowed for companionship without intimacy, conversation without revealing. No one knew a thing about his family, and in idle conversation in the pub after work, or in the staffroom over lunch, no one would have been able to answer the questions, “So, where is Sam Stringer from? What does he do with himself? What happens to him at Christmas?” The fundamental question that these more trivial queries masked was, of course, “Who is Sam Stringer?” And to that unasked question there was no ready answer.

And so, people stopped asking, stopped wondering. And his life at work went on, in the flurry of frenzied activities that characterised life in a busy, inner city Secondary school, where one reached the shores of the next weekend, the next holiday, in an exhausted daze, never quite being able to remember how, exactly, one had made it through. This unexamined life went on apace, until one day, Sam Stringer found that he had reached the dizzy heights of Deputy Head, almost without realizing it. It had not been the next step in some carefully considered Machiavellian plan, nor the logical outcome of ruthless careerism, it was simply the place and time and position the conveyor belt of his life had taken him to. At the age of thirty-eight he had earned the respect of his colleagues, the affection of his pupils, a significant and welcome pay rise, and a rather nice, spacious office, with his name on an acrylic door sign: Mr Stringer, Deputy Headteacher.

One of his many responsibilities was Snow. It wasn’t mentioned in his job description and it did not figure at his interview, but as far as the staff were concerned, it was, by a country mile, the most important. The closure of the school because of snow was officially his call. This was partly because he lived ten minutes walk away from the school, so he was the only member of Senior Team who could make an informed judgement based on local weather conditions early enough to set in motion the text and telephone tree, announcing the closure. The real, unstated reason was that Elizabeth, the Headteacher, could trust him to make the correct decision, resisting all pressures from the staff to close at the fall of the first snow flake. She knew that Sam had so little else in his life apart from his job, that a day off was something to be avoided at all costs. He had only ever had to do it once, in his first year as a Deputy, and he had resolutely kept the school open, notwithstanding the traffic chaos and misery that staff and students had to endure. This had garnered Elizabeth valuable brownie points with the local authority, and took her to the top of the league for local headteachers’ macho posturing. It had cost Sam some of his popularity, but he did not seem to notice and carried on as before, charming and effective in equal measure.

And so it was, one Tuesday evening early in December, the Senior Leadership meeting closed with a discussion on meteorology.

“So, are we all clear about the procedure?” Elizabeth scanned the members of her team around the table with her familiar, raking glare. “Sam, as usual it’s your call, but the earlier the decision, the better. We don’t want any complaints about people getting stuck in traffic only to find the school is closed after all. When do you think you’ll be able to get it on the website?”

“Definitely before six. The weather forecast seems pretty certain. The beast from the east is back, with ten feet of snow and freezing temperatures, or that’s what is said when I looked before we started tonight.”

Elizabeth frowned. “Hmm, whatever you do, any of you that is, don’t give the rest of the staff the impression it’s already decided. Weather forecasts have been wrong before and no doubt they’ll be wrong again. I want everyone going to bed tonight thinking that they are coming to school  tomorrow as normal.”

The assembled team were suitably poker faced, controlling the sense of disappointment they all felt. All except Sam who, deep down, knew he would find a snow day at home rather dull in comparison with a day managing the fall out of a snow day at school.

Hesitantly, a voice broke in.

“Do the staff just have to look at the website then? Sorry, this hasn’t happened since I’ve been here and..” Caroline, the newest member of the team, trailed off, feeling more than a little silly.

Elizabeth forced a smile. “Of course, Caroline, forgive me. I forgot, this is your first time.” She looked over at Sam. “Sam, could you?”

“Yes, of course. It was actually in the email I sent out to everyone. There’s a mobile telephone tree and an automatic text message cascade, with some back up calls to key members of staff, so they can ensure everyone in their section of the tree is informed. I thought that everyone would have read that, but…”

The minute he said it, he felt it had come out wrongly, as if he were annoyed at having to explain something he had already dealt with. As someone who loved getting more emails, and felt a little cheated and out of the loop if there was nothing new to deal with, he was genuinely baffled whenever he came across someone who hadn’t checked their own inbox. The expression on Caroline’s face, a mixture of annoyance, embarrassment and incredulity, just confirmed it.

She glowered at him, her eyes stinging. “Sorry,“ she said, “I haven’t been in my office. Teaching all day.”

An awkward silence spread over the meeting and people were left shuffling their papers and looking down at their notes. Thankfully, it had been the last item and the meeting broke up, the various members of the team drifting off in different directions to offices spread strategically in all four corners of the school. Sam hung back to make sure that he and Caroline were the last to leave.

She sensed that that was what was happening and at the last minute she tried to scuttle ahead. Sam called out to her. “Caroline, sorry, can I have a word?”

She turned and forced a thin smile. “Yes, sure,” she said, “What is it?”

He looked around to check everyone else had left. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it to sound critical at the end there. I was just surprised you hadn’t seen the message. It just came out a bit wrong.”

“You should have said that in the meeting, “ she replied curtly and turned tail and left before he could reply. As she walked down the corridor towards her office she wondered if she had been a bit rude. “At least he apologised,” she thought, “Not many men would have done that.”

Back in the meeting room, Sam was left alone, mouth open. He felt a little crushed. Was it him? He went over what had happened in his mind, knowing that he would do the same thing over and over again before the end of the day. Despite appearances to the contrary, Sam was a worrier. He hated for people not to like him and to give them any reason for doing so. Even worse, he always thought the other person was right, and that he had behaved badly, regardless of the situation. It was made even worse by the fact that it was so unusual. Most people warmed to Sam. But that just served to make Caroline’s obvious dislike of him so grating.  She, a newly appointed Assistant Head, had only been in post since September, and no matter how hard Sam tried, he couldn’t seem to hit it off with her. There had been a series of awkward encounters, of misunderstandings and, at times, open arguments. They always ended with Sam apologising, vowing to himself to be more careful next time. But, apparently, he never was.

In the midst of these repeated bouts of self-recrimination lurked something even more disturbing. A feeling so unfamiliar to him that he struggled to keep it buried and whenever it surfaced, which was far too often for his liking, it left him feeling even worse. From the first moment he had seen her, when she had arrived in the school foyer for her interview in the summer term, he was overwhelmed with the strangest, strongest feeling that he had ever had for anyone. She wasn’t stereotypically attractive, but she had something. A warmth, a spark, something indefinable but definitely there. There was no doubt about that. Short, glossy dark hair, green eyes, lovely golden skin and long, long legs. And she dressed well. He wasn’t sure about that last thing. He didn’t really notice people and certainly not their clothes. He would not have been able to describe anything that anyone at the Senior Team meeting that had just finished had been wearing, but he knew, with a painful and insistent certainty, that Caroline Taylor looked just right in whatever it was she had chosen to wear.

He also knew, with equal certainty, that Caroline thought that he was a bit of a joke. Whatever he had managed to do to fool everybody else, Caroline wasn’t falling for it. She could see right through him and obviously recognised him for what he was. An imposter. A charlatan. A phoney.  And for Sam, that merely served to increase her charm. Judgement as well as Beauty.

 With these thoughts churning around his brain, he collected his stuff, locked up his office, and made his way down to the car park. He sighed as he opened his car door. He knew he couldn’t go on like this and had made a sort of decision to look at Headships in other schools, ready to start applying next Summer. He shivered as the car fired into life, a blast of cold air shaking him from his thoughts back to the here and now. He looked up into the sky through the side window. Dark and cloudless, the stars glittered with an intensity unusual in the city sky. He could feel the gathering hard frost, but as yet there was no sign of snow. Maybe the clouds would roll in later, direct from the Siberian plains, with their gift of plump, feathery snowflakes.

Caroline had lingered in her tiny office for longer than usual, just to make sure she didn’t encounter Sam in the car park. She couldn’t bear another awkward conversation. God, what was wrong with her? Why did she always snap at him? He was perfectly OK as a Deputy Head. Better than most actually. He didn’t pull rank and didn’t mansplain. He was sensitive and respectful, without seeming horribly pleased with himself for being so right-on, so PC. It was just that everyone liked him. He was so popular with the staff, foot soldiers and the powers that be, that there must be something wrong with him. No-one could be that perfect. And, even worse, he was breathtakingly good looking. Men like that are always insufferable bastards in the end, she told herself, remembering an unfortunate dalliance with an equally chiselled and toned master of the universe type who had been big in the city. His sensitivity, worn like an Armani suit at the beginning of their fling, was soon cast aside to reveal the sixteen carat bastard lurking underneath, as she was unceremoniously dumped for someone creative at the BBC at the beginning of the summer holidays. Six weeks of self-pity had not repaired the damage caused by her innate suspicion of handsome men.

The worst occasion with Sam, the one that made her feel hot and uncomfortable whenever she recalled it, was back in September, just a couple of weeks after she had started work. She had popped to the local shop on Sunday morning, looking an absolute fright in tracksuit bottoms and no makeup. When she could make herself face the truth of it, she remembered that she had been in such a rush that there was a breakfast stain on her top. Oh God, how embarrassing. Because out of the blue, Sam saw her across the road and waved at her. Mortified, she had turned away hurriedly, and had blanked him. She had marched away down the road, not stopping until she had shut the door of her flat firmly behind her. Blanked him. Oh My God, she thought. How uncool is that?

It had never been referred to since, and Caroline had discovered in conversation in the ladies’ staff toilet, that Sam had a flat round the corner from her, in Mountcastle road.

“Do you know Mountcastle road?” Samira had asked her. “You know that big posh road with all of those massive Victorian villas in them. The ones that back on to the woods. He’s got a lovely flat there. Got a massive garden.” She lowered her voice. “Beautifully decorated, actually”

Like many of the conversations she had so far had in the staff toilet, this one was not making her feel any better about the worst social gaffe she had ever committed. She had put two and two together and had come up with a number nearer infinity than four. “So,” she thought, “Mr Stringer is a bit of player as far as the female members of staff are concerned. Well not me, oh no.”

She looked at the pile of marking on her desk.  She had dug it out purposely so that she could work through it on her snow day at home. It was an ideal opportunity to catch up, from the depths of her duvet, but, somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to put it in her bag. At the doorway, as she turned to switch the light off, it stared back at her, until it disappeared as the darkness flooded the room and she closed the door, relieved, with a click. Tomorrow, the duvet would be enough to sustain her.

*

The alarm jolted him awake. He scrambled in the heavy darkness, pawing at the table for his phone, and finally managed to turn it off, jabbing frantically at the illuminated screen. Five forty-five am. A thick silence flooded the room and he lay back, enjoying the quiet stillness. After a minute or so, the silence began to weigh heavily on him and he swung his feet around and out of the bed. Jesus, it was cold. He inched his way over to the radiator to check and was puzzled to find that it was on full blast, pulsing heat into the air, yet it seemed to have made little impression on the room. There was a strange silence, as if he had cotton wool stuffed in his ears. He continued to the window and opened the curtains a crack. The window looked out onto the back garden, and beyond the fence at the back, the beginning of the woods. He gave a sharp intake of breath. The sky in front of him was full of swirling heavy flakes of snow and the garden was blanketed in a thick covering, blurring all of the familiar shapes. Already, the perfect layer was marked with animal tracks, criss-crossing the lawn.

His heart leaped. Even at this hour, in this cold, with his breath steaming in front of him, it was a beautiful, strange, otherworldly sight. Clearly, this was one occasion when the snow closure would not be controversial. Nobody would be making much progress in the world in that, not, by the look of it, for a couple of days at least.

Fifteen minutes later it was all done: notice of closure on the website, texts sent via the telephone tree, a message left for the Head, local media contacted and the Local Authority alerts system triggered. He spent the next hour on a leisurely breakfast, enjoying the film of snow Armageddon on breakfast news, before rousing himself to get dressed and ready to brave the world outside. The woolly hat, thick scarf, gloves and padded coat seemed to dissolve into gossamer threads as he made his first tentative footsteps down the path from his front door. The sky was still dark, with flurries of snow carried in fitful gusts of the wind that knifed through him. He crunched his way along the footpath to the main road.

The road was eerily deserted, and the yellow cones of light from the street lamps bathed everything in a mysterious wash of amber. He passed a couple of abandoned cars, left at crazy angles to the kerb, buried and undetectable under the volume of settled snow. There were just a few other people out and about, their breath steaming into the dark skies as they laboured through the snow, preparing for their stories of heroic attempts to get to work that would dominate the news for the next few days.

It took him an hour to do what normally would have been a twenty minute walk. The school was suffocated under a thick blanket of snow, and as he struggled with the lock to the car park entrance, he could see the thickly mufflered figure of Ray, the site manager, his breath steaming outside the main entrance. Sam crunched his way towards him through the untouched snow.

Ray looked up and flashed a broad smile, enjoying the camaraderie of pioneers. “Mornin’,” he called from a distance, “Nice day for it.”

“Good morning, Raymond. What’s it like inside?”

“Boiler’s buggered. It’s freezing in there.”

“What do you reckon?”

“A couple of days at least. Maybe more. Weather forecast after that is a bit hazy. And even when the snow clears, there’s no guarantee of when the boiler’ll be fixed. If ours has gone, you can bet your life they’ll be swamped with callouts from loads of others.”

“Oh well, at least it’s a clear call. I’ll put it on the website after I’ve spoken to Elizabeth.”

“She’ll be tucked up warm in deepest Surrey somewhere no doubt.”

“The privileges of high office, Raymond, my good man. The privileges of high office. Not for the likes of you and me.”

Ray snorted. “You’ll be there soon, sunshine, you’re not fooling me. Another couple of years and you’ll be El Presidente, ordering everyone around from under the duvet.”

Sam was momentarily taken aback. Was that what everyone thought, that he’d be a Head somewhere? And soon, from Ray’s tone. He roused himself and the flicker was gone.

“Listen Ray, I wouldn’t bother with clearing the grounds, not yet anyway. Give it a day or so and keep an eye on the forecast. There’s no point shovelling it all up if there’s a ton more snow on the way. If we keep in touch, then we can manage it from this end. You concentrate on the boiler. I’m just going to do a bit of work while I’m here. I can lock up if you want.”

Ray didn’t need telling twice and strolled away whistling. His snow day had just started to look up.

It was about ten o’clock when Sam finally called it a day. He locked the gates behind him and leant into the knifing wind that had sprung up, whipping thick, fat snowflakes into his face. He gasped in pain and shock. The journey back was clearly going to be harder than the voyage out in the quiet darkness of early morning.

An hour later when he finally turned the corner onto the home straight, he had lost all feeling in his feet, his cheeks were red and numb, and all thoughts of the charm, beauty and romance of the snowy landscape had disappeared. For the previous fifteen minutes he had sustained his spirits by fantasising about the bacon sandwich he had promised himself, with coffee and the paper. This was the thought in his head, as he peered through the swirling snow over the road to the blocks of flats on the other side. He did it every time he walked past, and the extreme conditions of the morning made no difference. Caroline’s flat.

He was about to press on, head down into the wind, when his eye was caught by a huddled figure in the entrance hammering on the door. Defeated, the figure slumped to the ground and sat, head in hands and began weeping. He stopped and stared, shielding his eyes from the driving snow. He took a step towards the kerb, almost indistinguishable now from the road surface and kept on going, picking his way gingerly over the compacted snow on the road surface. Halfway across he called out.

“Caroline? Is that you, Caroline?”

The figure leaped up as if stung, or caught guiltily in the middle of some heinous act. She wiped her hand across her face. When she recognised who had called out to her, her face fell.

“Caroline, what the hell are you doing out here? Are you alright?”

“Sam, er ..Hi, yes, yes , I’m fine. I’m just…”

She hesitated, as if deciding what to say next. Her face was red and blotchy and streaked with tears.

“No, you’re not,” Sam insisted, “You’ve been crying. What’s the matter? You look terrible.”

A wry smile creased her features and she started again.

“Yes, terrible, I can imagine. It’s just that my boiler’s broken down, and I came down to go to the shop and I…er..well, I got locked out. And I haven’t got my phone with me, or my keys and there’s no-one else in the building and I, er.. I didn’t know what to do and I..”

The sentence collapsed into a further outbreak of sobbing. Sam reached out instinctively and took her hand.

“God, Caroline, you’re freezing. How long have you been out here? You need to get inside.”

“Oh, I dunno, half an hour maybe. It’s just that I don’t know what to do and why did you have to come along again and I’m looking a state and being pathetic and, oh, I don’t know, I..”

The words tumbled out in an incoherent torrent until the heaving sobs came again and she wrenched her hand away.

“Look, come on, come round to mine. It’s only five minutes away. You can get warmed up and sort yourself out and we’ll work out a way through this.”

She hesitated. The use of the word “We” was suddenly hypnotically alluring, the idea that someone could help her manage this. But not him. Of all people, not him.

He reached out and took her hand again.

“You can’t stay out her, you’ll freeze to death. Come on.”

Gently, he pulled her hand and she took her first step, and annoyance was gradually replaced by relief as she allowed herself to be led towards a solution. The two figures, hunched against the wind, melted into the blizzard as they made their way slowly down the road.

*

By the time she woke up, the grey light outside had begun to fade. After they had arrived at Sam’s flat, he had made her eat and drink and then insisted she get some sleep in the spare room. Her blank, red-eyed silence, as she methodically chewed her toast and drank the coffee he had handed to her, had convinced him that she had been exhausted and had been outside for longer than she had said.

She got dressed and tentatively made her way out of the room and into the hall way.

“Hello?” she called out, “Anyone here?”

The nearest door opened.

“Aha, Caroline. You feeling any better? That was one hell of a sleep. You obviously needed it.”

Sam smiled at her and ushered her into the room.

“Come in, come in. Come and have a seat.”

The room was not what she had been expecting. It was beautifully proportioned. Elegant, with high ceilings, polished floor boards and Persian rugs. She almost gasped when she walked in, her eyes wide and bright. There were three sofas arranged around an open fireplace, which had a gently flickering log fire. She stopped herself from telling him what an amazing place it was. She suspected that many people had told him that over the years.

“No, I won’t thanks. I really had better be getting back. Thanks, though, you’ve been very kind.”

“Getting back? Getting back where? Have you found your keys then? Or your mobile?”

“Well, no obviously, but..” She trailed off unconvincingly.

“Come on Caroline, I know you don’t really like me and you feel a bit uncomfortable here, but  there’s not much else you can do, is there?  Just give in to it and stay. You’ve already sampled the spare room. You can spend most of the time in there if you prefer. I’ve got loads of work to be getting on with anyway and so have you, I imagine. I’ll even lend you my laptop, how’s that?”

He couldn’t work out whether he was more annoyed or disappointed at her evident eagerness to leave, so he straddled the two. He thought himself rather bold for naming the fact that he clearly made her feel a little awkward, but there was little point in being overly polite. At least it was out in the open now. And she couldn’t go anywhere else, that was undoubtedly true. The weather was getting worse, if anything. Even if there were hordes of friends or family in the area, it would be impossible to get to them, unless they lived next door. Public transport, as is the custom in Britain in the bad winter weather, had closed down, and the country had returned to somewhere in the nineteenth century. Like it or lump it, they were stuck together for the foreseeable future.

Caroline submitted to the inevitable and perched on the end of the sofa furthest from Sam. She felt that she had to make some kind of attempt at conversation, at least for a while before she could take up his offer and retreat to a separate room with a laptop. She looked again around the grand living room, and took the least line of resistance.

“This is an amazing flat. It’s like a stately home.”

Sam gave an embarrassed laugh.

“Hardly. It’s the ground floor of the building.”

He saw the expression in her face and admitted, “It is very nice obviously. I’m very lucky.”

“Are you rich then? People who say that they are very lucky usually mean they were privately educated and daddy is something in the city”

“Rich? God, no. I, ..er.. we bought it a long time ago when it was a dump and we did it up, a bit at a time. So, yeah, lucky.”

“’We’? Are you divorced then? Didn’t you have to divvy it up after you split up?”

A pained look flashed across Sam’s face and he stumbled over his words.

“Well, no, not exactly. Umm, I , er..”

Caroline immediately interjected. “Sorry, none of my business. Just putting my foot in it as usual. Ignore me.”

“No, no. It’s me. It’s just that…” He stopped, as if uncertain about how to go on.

“What? What’s the matter? Can’t be that terrible, can it?”

“I was married, but I’m not divorced. My wife died. Yes. She died.” He pronounced the words, awkwardly,  as if it were the first time he had ever said them out loud.

Caroline looked horror-struck.

“Oh God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I would never have asked if I’d known. Sorry, that was a terrible thing to say.”

Sam’s blank face shivered into a near smile. “It’s alright. It was a long time ago. A very long time ago. So, yes, not rich, just lucky.”

A silence hovered and settled on the room. The thick snow had dampened down what little noise there was in the streets outside. There was virtually no traffic, just the occasional gust of wind that whined through the window frames and rattled the panes. Caroline looked up in the direction of the noise, grateful for any distraction. At the far end of the room, a pair of French windows looked out onto a long back garden that disappeared from view in the gathering darkness. The garden melted into the thick trees of the adjoining woodland.

“Goodness!” she exclaimed, a little too eagerly, “What a great garden.”

She sprang up, went over to the windows and peered outside. Sam followed her and looked over her shoulder. There were a few flakes of snow drifting down form the grey skies. This was probably the mildest the weather had been all day. Soon, when the sun completely sank beneath the horizon and darkness settled, the temperatures would plummet again. Outside the blanket of snow across the lawn was untouched, thick and even. Only a few lines of bird and animal tracks criss-crossed the canvas.

“Look at that,“ she breathed, “It’s perfect. When I was a kid and our garden was like this, we’d spend hours in it building snowmen.”

She looked back at him, over her shoulder, and smiled. The memory was real and alive for her. Their eyes met. And then Sam, gestured out into the garden with his eyes and back again.

“Well, shall we?” he asked, grateful for the distraction.

“What, go outside? Really?”

She stopped and thought for a moment. “Yeah, come on. Why not?”

The next hour and a half flew by, as they constructed a family of snow people with accessories, stopping occasionally to discuss tactics and take part in an ongoing snowball fight. When they finally came back inside, it was it was velvet black in the garden, the icy darkness shrouding the mysterious group of snow people who were huddled together as if posing for a family photograph at the back by the woods. Their fingers were numb and wet, their cheeks red, their breath steaming into the night air.

He thought of that moment, many times later over the years that followed, as the moment his second life began again. By what a slender thread our lives hang. Choices made, corners turned, things unsaid. Even in the later contemplation of it, its randomness, its chance, its serendipity, brought fear as much as joy. For who knew when similar happenstance would unravel all that had been tightly woven?

Much later that evening, in front of the dying embers of the fire, when two bottles of wine had softened their defences, they sat on the floor side by side wrapped in a filmy gauze of wonder and disbelief. They had talked for hours, discovering on the way, a shared love of The Strokes, The Arctic Monkeys, The Wire, The Sopranos (with a guilty pleasure of The Gilmore Girls admitted under pressure), William Blake, Patti Smith, lower league football, The World Cup, roses and clematis. At one point in the evening, when it seemed to both of them that this had all been supernaturally prearranged, they discovered that they had both taught English as a Foreign Language in Spain at the same time, Sam in Madrid and Caroline in Barcelona.

Before they knew it, it was 1.30am, the last bottle was empty and the embers had ceased to glow in the grate. A sudden awkwardness descended from nowhere.

“Well,” said Sam finally springing up to gather the glasses and bottles, “That was nice, but it’s probably way past bed time.”

“Oh“, stammered Caroline, taken aback, “Yes, of course. Will you have to do the snow thing again tomorrow?”

“No, thank God. The message this morning made it clear that we’d be shut for at least two days, so at least I’m spared a 5 am start. Might be different the day after though. Forecast is for a big thaw.”

“Nothing good ever lasts, does it?” she asked, looking directly at him.

He looked away. “No. No, it doesn’t.” he muttered and busied himself with clearing up. When Caroline followed him into the kitchen with some token clearing, he said, “Oh thanks for that. I’ll do the rest. You know where everything is, don’t you?”

She looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know, toilet and bathroom. You can use the room you were in this morning.” He stole a glance at her. “It was alright, was it?”

“What was?”

“The room. This morning,“ he explained patiently. “The room was alright?”

“Yes,“ she said finally, “The room was just right. Like the three bears.”

She turned to go, so he couldn’t see the look of absolute humiliation on her face. The three bears? What was she like?  “Ok, good night then,” she said to the wall and carried on walking. Sam stacked the dishwasher.

Later, in the strange snow -dampened silence of his room, Sam lay rigid under the duvet, eyes wide open, mind racing. There was a full moon outside, and it silvered the far end of the room through a crack in the curtains. Why had he mentioned Donna? Why hadn’t he made a move or done anything about it? Anything at all. She was wonderful, there was no doubt about that. And she quite liked him, or was she just a great actress? Liked him? Not any more, he thought bitterly. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I just reach out to someone? Will it always be like this, for years and years and years? The questions raced through his mind, over and over again, and not for the first time, his eyes were wet when he finally slipped into sleep.

When the knock came at his door, gently, he woke up, instantly alert. The door opened a crack and there was a rustle, as a soft breath of wind passed through. The kiss, when it finally came, was everything he had been waiting for, for such a very long time.

The next day, whenever it started, was centred on that room. It was for hours and moments the centre of their universe, with the outside world a memory or a distant rumour, a story told by children but not believed. Occasionally throughout the day, noises came from the other world: a distant train, children playing a few doors down, and when the sun fell, the hoot of an owl and the bark of a fox, but they paid little attention to anything other than the adventure of discovery in front of their eyes.

In the silvery moonlight of the next night she turned to him. “Will we have to go in to school tomorrow?“

It felt warmer and the noises outside their window had included a steady dripping of the promised thaw.

“I don’t know,” he replied, “I think maybe it’s going to freeze over again before morning. Sleep now. I’ll sort it out.”

They both knew he was lying.

*

He lay back under the plump clouds of duvet, her arm across his chest, and looked at the clock. 5am.

He thought of marking 11C’s Mock exams.

He thought of planning the INSET day for the first day back in January

He thought of how he could link performance management with teaching repertoire.

He thought of her arm, its downy golden hairs individually picked out against her warm brown skin.

He thought of how he could encourage teachers to observe each other

He thought of the end of term reports he had to write for the trainee teachers and how he could make them sound a little more positive.

He thought of her smell, like vanilla and caramel.

He thought of the paper he had to finish, to present to SLT, on coaching for development.

He thought of her eyes, strangely green with little grey flecks. And white, white, white, like her sparkling teeth.

He thought of the way she wiped away the crumbs of her toast from the sides of her mouth, moist with tea.

He thought of her lips…..

He swung his legs out from under the duvet, perched on the edge of the bed and reached for his phone.

Sam Stringer was on the verge of something. It was not a nervous breakdown. It was not greatness. He stood on the edge and peered over the sides, dizzy and breathless. Finally, he scrolled down, hit the send button, and slipped back under the creamy warmth of the duvet.  The school would be closed again that day.

Sam Stringer was on the verge of falling in Love.

If you liked this story, try my first novel, Zero Tolerance, available from the following links:

www.growl.blog

https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/zero-tolerance/

Thought for the Day

A short story by The Old Grey Owl

“It’s ten to eight and time for Thought for the Day. The speaker from our Cambridge studio is…”

“A smug, patronising bastard,” continued Ollie automatically, his left hand flicking out to jab the mute button on the radio.

Some days, he added his own ending to the familiar link in his head. Other days, when he travelled to work with a tightening knot in his stomach, he voiced it. Saying it aloud, with a mannered delivery, added to the pleasure and invariably came accompanied by a wry smile of appreciation for his own wit. In the last couple of months, that had become a daily event.

He talked out loud regularly in the car on his journeys to and from work. He often thought that it was a good thing that the dashcam was a device only configured to look out at the other traffic, not in at the driver, but in his darker moods he thought that it was only a matter of time.

Playback of footage taken inside his car would reveal some uncomfortable truths. A man who would randomly shout at other drivers, pressed into action by a range of motoring misdemeanours: not indicating, driving too fast, driving too slow, straddling lanes. The M25 was a rich source of examples of this kind of incompetence, bad manners and stupidity.

The rest of his repertoire was not provoked by any activity outside of the car, but by the entertainment he had selected inside. Mealy-mouthed, vacuous Government Ministers, desperately straining to fill their allotted time by describing what was already known so that they could not be pressed to give a direct answer to the original question, drove him to fury. He would bang the dashboard and shout at the top of his voice, hurling foul-mouthed abuse at the blatant lies and distortions the disembodied voices were peddling. Favourite songs from the treasure trove of Spotify and Bluetooth inspired lusty singalongs, swaying and headshaking in time to the beat. Occasionally, in town streets, he would find himself intoning a Test Match Special type commentary, or shrieking a Match of the Day style soundbite as he described the antics of the people on the streets.

Outside the car, walking through a shopping centre, or pottering aimlessly at home, solitariness was always accompanied by silence. It was invariably a comfortable silence, a silence that fitted him snugly like a familiar pair of old trainers. So why the change whenever he got in his car and pulled away from the kerb?

The solid clunk of the driver door closing, the rolling pull of the seatbelt and the ensuing metallic click as the buckle engaged, all signified a retreat into a private, protected, invisible world. Despite the wrap around plate glass windows, it was if he were invisible once strapped in, in the same way that those who populated television screens were detached from the viewer in their front room. They were there, but not there at the same time. He imagined it was the same feeling of anonymity, of invisibility,  that internet trollers wallowed in. In the shadows, they were emboldened to spew vitriol and bile, confident that no-one would ever know who they were.

“Oh look, there’s another one,” he thought as he had to brake to accommodate the Nissan Micra that was serenely hogging the middle lane at fifty miles an hour. Too scared to mix it with the articulated lorries in the slow lane, relentlessly nose to tail from Prague to the Midlands, and resolutely refusing to contemplate the outside lane, where people actually broke the speed limit, the Micras of this world provoked the purest form of his fury.

“Moron!” he muttered at the windscreen, as he swerved around him, like a stream in flood surging around a rock in the middle of a river bed. He glanced back in the rear mirror as he pulled away from the Micra, just to check. Yes, there it was, another “Leave means Leave“ sticker, slightly obscuring the driver, squat, low down in his seat, flat cap seeming to float in the air above his head. He bellowed curses at Micraman, who just for that moment became the target for all of his frustrations with stupid Brexiteers and their little Englander small -mindedness. A little unfair, he knew. For all he could tell, Micraman might have principled, reasoned objections to the Europe that went beyond the outright xenophobic. And he would never voice this level of anger in the staffroom, where some people went quiet the second it came up as a topic of conversation. The only safe ground was to blame “the bloody politicians”, which everyone seemed to agree with. Everyone except him, that is. Blame the Government, certainly. But MPs? No, they were doing their jobs properly. If he saw one more bloody Vox pop on the news giving air time to someone saying, “They’re all the bloody same, that shower. I’m never going to vote again”, well, he didn’t know what he would do.

Still, the guy in the Micra couldn’t hear him, so he reasoned a foul -mouthed bellow at the rear-view mirror wouldn’t harm anyone and provided a healthy release for him. And God knows, he needed some kind of release at the moment. Particularly today. Another bloody lesson observation, another evening spent tweaking a lesson plan and polishing his PowerPoint, another troubled night’s sleep, worrying about whether he would get into school early enough to do the photocopying he really should have done on Friday. And to add yet more pressure, he’d been asked to bring in his identity documents because his DBS clearance had run out. That had been another forty -five minutes wasted the night before, ransacking filing cabinets in his study, trying to remember where he usually kept his passport, birth certificate and proof of address. Pressure, pressure, pressure.

He glanced up ahead. Shit. The signals that straddled the M25 blared their amber numbers. Just as he clocked the row of 50s, the car crested the brow of the hill and there laid out below him, in that familiar descent towards the Dartford crossing, was the beginnings of the banked -up lines of traffic, the red stop lights spreading back towards him like an incoming tide. He slowed, checked his rear-view mirror and indicated to move into the left-hand lane, ready to leave the motorway and join the A2. There was a grim satisfaction to be had from deftly slipping in between two gargantuan lorries, into a space barely big enough for that Micra he’d seen moments before. He smirked to himself. Micraman would need a space the size of three cricket pitches before he dared to change lanes. The smirk died on his lips almost as soon as it had formed, as the line of traffic he’d just joined slowed to walking pace and then stopped all together. The knot in his stomach tightened.

“Come on, come on,” he shouted at the windscreen, slapping the steering wheel and then gripping it white knuckled. He looked across at the car to his left and just caught a glimpse of the driver, a young blonde woman looking at him horrified, mouth agape. Their eyes met and she looked away, embarrassed. She began talking into her phone and her eyes flicked across at him a couple of times. His mouth set into a straight line. Now he was an object of fear and ridicule. How much worse could things get. The last time this had happened on the way to work, he had ended up sitting in traffic in this very spot for about two hours

He couldn’t be late. He couldn’t walk into his lesson without that photocopying. Maybe he could just explain and apologise and reschedule. “Sorry, dreadful traffic on the M25 this morning” Even just trying it out for size he knew what the response would be. Excuses were letting the kids down. They’ve only got one shot at their time at Secondary school. If you had any kind of moral purpose, you’d get up an hour earlier and make sure you got in on time. It’s not as if it’s a surprise, the traffic on the M25 being bad. His heart pounded against his chest and that familiar tightening behind his eyes began as his head started to throb.

Deep down, he knew that it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. He knew he was going to fail the observation. It was his third in a row after all, and according to their Performance Management protocols, it was three strikes and you’re out. Each one had come up with different reasons why his lesson was unsatisfactory. The first time he’d been baffled and then confused and then angry. It had never happened to him before. He’d always been a Good or Outstanding. He was so used to being good at his job, being the member of Senior Management who could hack it in the corridors and the classroom, the expert, the person that others sought out for advice or help. And now, suddenly, when he wasn’t that person anymore, he was adrift. He didn’t know who he was.

Back in the day, on the rare occasions when something went wrong, he would have talked it through with Helen. Her calm, rational reassurance would have made everything alright again, but now, since the divorce, he didn’t really talk to anyone, well, not about big stuff anyway. And so, he was left with the growing understanding that he was yesterday’s man, whose views on how to run schools and deal with “challenging” kids, were deemed old fashioned and unfit for purpose. He had, almost overnight, turned from being part of the solution, to being part of the problem.

And so, he knew that he could have spent all night perfecting his lesson plan, could have photocopied the entire contents of the schemes of work filing cabinet, could have slept overnight in his classroom to ensure he was there in time on Monday, and they would still have found a reason to fail him. And from there it was a matter of weeks to competency procedures, union representation and a hush-hush deal being offered to him to resign for a pittance.

This analysis was already there in the murky depths of his consciousness, fully formed, but it was only now, in the strange stillness of a choked and stationary M25, that it revealed itself to him and that he accepted it with a calm, zen like feeling of inevitability and release. The knot in his stomach eased slightly and the pounding behind his eyes relented. He would do his lesson, whenever he got into school and they could say what they liked. Just an ordinary lesson, one of those that over the years had generated hundreds and thousands of excellent exam results, one that he could churn out without spending hours of agonised preparation on. And then, what would be, would be.

The sun peeked through a sudden gap in the bank of clouds above, bathing the lines of cars in a warm, golden glow and he felt himself caressed by a gentle wave of relief. At exactly the same time the traffic began to move. It was not just one of those five-yard crawls that resulted in another forty minutes of stasis, it was proper, genuine movement. All around him, in cars, lorries and vans of all descriptions, drivers broke into smiles, tentative and hesitant at first but then as the traffic accelerated, broad and strong. Some even laughed out loud.

As Ollie pulled on to the A2, he couldn’t remember a time when he had felt happier. The birth of his children, perhaps? Meeting his wife? The surge of the traffic, blue sky above and bright sunshine all around kindled an almost alchemical reaction. Base metal had turned to gold, somehow, and his spirit soared. The silence in the car suddenly seemed at odds with this feeling of euphoria and his finger automatically jabbed out at the volume button.

He knew even before the first word reached his ears. Something in the tone, an uncomfortable agglomeration of vibrating air patterns, a dog whistle like scream, whatever it was, it announced itself to the world. Thought For The Fucking Day.

“…. and so, although Jesus exhorted us all to turn the other cheek, there are times when we must make a stand, no matter how uncomfortable that might be. We too, must be prepared to throw the money lenders out of the Temple and be prepared to face the consequences of our actions, no matter how daunting those consequences might be.”

His initial instinct to scream at the radio, so strongly embedded, suddenly faded as he listened to the words. He never listened to the words. He didn’t have to. Whatever it was, it would end up with some God or other telling all of the sinners to be nice. Comfort for the simple -minded, he always thought. But this morning of all mornings, the words caught somehow. The moneylenders in the Temple. He frowned and hit the mute button again before the pantomime of political debate started up again.

Looking up, he realised that he’d taken his eye off the ball and his exit was fast approaching. For some reason, maybe the volume of traffic that had build up on the M25, maybe the return to school of the Private school kids in their massive pretend off-road vehicles, the lane of traffic to his left was full. Full and fast. He indicated to move left and waited for a gap, or for someone to slow a little and let him in. His eyes flicked rapidly to rear view mirror, then side mirror and back again. Nothing.

“Come on, come on, come on. Let me in you bastards,” he muttered.

He looked ahead, checking the road ahead. It was then he noticed. Right in front of him, also signalling left and trying to squeeze into the exit lane, was Micraman.

“How the hell have you got there?” he wondered aloud.

Maybe it was a different Micra, he thought. But no, there was the “Leave means leave“ sticker, and there, bobbing up and down around it, was the flat cap. Unless Micras were always sold to aging Brexiteers, it was definitely him. And he was in some distress, if the behaviour of the car was anything to go by. It veered and wobbled alarmingly in the lane in front of him, and the flat cap was frantically moving left to right like a set of demented windscreen wipers. Framing the picture in his own windscreen was the traffic signal above, indicating the road options on the A2 after his exit. Canterbury. Car ferries. Ramsgate. Dover. The Channel Tunnel.

The road was running out for him to make his manoeuvre. He was going to have to go for it in the next couple of seconds, or he wouldn’t make it. The nose to tail lorries closed ranks, like roman centurions forming a shield wall. Suddenly, up in front of him, a tiny gap appeared and he prepared himself, clenching and unclenching his knuckles around the steering wheel. Just as he was about to dart into the gap, the Micra swerved at the last moment, and by a miracle, managed to insert himself in the chink they had left. Micraman had either had his eyes closed or had nerves of steel. The lorry at the back of the gap blared his horn, the driver’s hand jabbing down at it in fury, and there was an accompanying screech of brakes.

Ollie had watched the whole thing unfold in terrible slow motion. He instinctively flinched as the Micra jagged across the lanes, waiting for the impact that would surely follow, but apart from the horrible, accusing vibrato horn screaming, there was nothing but the smooth flow of traffic. The last thing he saw of the Micra, as it disappeared off to his left, was the sign in the rear window, “Leave means Leave”, being swallowed up by the chasing pack of lorries.

His own car sailed on down the A2, the signs for Dover, Ramsgate and The Channel Tunnel now a comforting reminder of where he was headed. He looked down at the passenger seat. The burgundy cover of his passport peeped out from underneath a folder of his documents, its gold lettering catching the sun pouring through the windscreen. “European Union. United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.

“Yes,” he thought, the beginnings of a smile playing across his lips, “Leave really does mean leave.”