cold

We saw it coming in over the water. Moving slowly. Something that looked old and heavy. A plane, obviously, flying low, lower than you’d usually expect to see something of that size flying.

It scudded above the clipped waves from Dungeness Point towards Folkestone, leaving a fat trail of dark exhaust like a radiation leak. It wasn’t until it drew near that we realised it was a military craft. Too big for a fighter, though it had a bubble cockpit mounted a little way back from its nose, it wasn’t large enough to be a transport or operational support plane. We watched it haul itself across the waves, almost lumbering like a tired old boxer too many years in the ring. It passed by and we watched it with some wariness, but the sound of the sea and fast winds from the West covered any engine noises.

It wasn’t until it tipped on its edge to bank over the port and we saw that thick profile of its swept-back delta-vee wings that we realised what it was, and why we had felt an involuntary shudder at its appearance.

This was a Vulcan Bomber we were watching, a highly symbolic part of the dark seam of preparations for death in the 1980s.

If you grew up in the 1980s, you’ll remember the warnings, the pop culture immediacy of nuclear war, from some of the highest selling records of the decade – “99 Red Ballons”, “Two Tribes”, “I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” – to the big selling popular books of the age – Domain, Warday, Einstein’s Monsters – and to teenagers like us back then, it wasn’t a question of if there was going to be a nuclear war between the East and West, but simply a matter of how soon it would occur. It was the decade of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, and you can bet we were convinced of it and a little bit mad ourselves because of it.

We watched the Vulcan, made to carry nuclear bombs and flatten cities and lift poisonous clouds to cloak the world, disappear from view and realised it wasn’t just the wind that had left us cold.

That night we saw on a regional news programme that the plane we’d seen was the last flying Vulcan in the world. It’s decommissioned, an artefact of the past, kept going by enthusiasts. We could ask, “enthusiasts for what?”, but I think I understand. For all the uncertainties of the certain end we were threatened with in the 1980s, in its own way the Cold War was as clear-cut a confrontation as the one between the Allies and Axis powers of the Second World War. Now we stand in conflict again, perhaps decadently apart from it all, but with foes and supposed friends sometimes all but indistinguishable. This is no Cold War, and it’s too soon to tell what will come from the Arab Spring, but whatever the future is now, it seems to waver and shimmer above desert sands like a mirage. Whether it’s a real oasis or a deception made of seeing what we want to see, we’ll eventually find out.

little boy, little girl, lost in the woods

I have a new short story, "Little Boy, Little Girl, Lost in the Woods", in the latest edition Midnight Echo, published by the Australian Horror Writers Association. The one and only Geoff Brown did the business editing things and generally improving my story, and has worked hard on the layout of the entire issue too.

Here's the first paragraph:

So Helena is dead as well, and
although she is so by her own hand, I
know in any sense that matters that the
act is murder. Put plainly, it is for want
of, and thus because of, them. Oh, I grant
you they may not have tied the noose
and looped the rope over the rafters;
they did not invite my new wife to dance
her last desperate jig alone in our bridal
room. Yet it is true that they did all else
but swing from her legs to hasten her
end.

The journal is available as a print copy here, as well as across e-reader platforms here (actually, if you buy it from the guys themselves, you get epub, mobi, and PDF files all in one transaction).

bending and breaking and bearing up

It’s not dissimilar to when the sun breaks through an overcast. One of those gliding sails of illumination floating your way. At first it’s quite shocking. The brilliance of all that information – the colours and contours of the land in sharper focus – can unbalance you.

That’s how I felt. Something had shifted, the world I was familiar with had altered. And all with a simple diagnosis from a German doctor working in the UK because she prefers the informality of the dress code for consultants. “Ach, we wear the white coats in my country. Here, here I am allowed to dress nicely.” Followed by a smile of deceptive charm and penetrating sharpness after she had examined me. “This is your problem,” she told me gently . . .

. . . and then, somewhat less gently, told me to Google it to find out more.

So. Hyper-mobility syndrome (or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome stage 3, as it’s more commonly known in the USA). It sounds deceptively innocuous. But it’s not. It’s complicated. And it makes life much harder than it needs to be.

At heart, the simple complaints are extreme muscle aches and apparent joint pain coupled with widespread double-jointedness. As a kid, I was able to wrap my ankles around my neck, fold my legs into impossible positions, and twist my arms around backwards. It seemed like fun. I didn’t know it was hurting me, or that the reason I naturally fell to standing in strange positions was due to a lack of proprioception: I was pushing myself into extreme angles and outré stances so that I could sense where I was in relation to myself. An arm here. A leg there. A foot twisted over thus. It was all feedback in a system that was too often numb to feeling, though I wasn’t consciously aware of that, or of what I was doing and why I was doing it. The immune system isn’t good with the complaint, either. I won’t list my childhood illnesses, but it was a rare month that went by without me being bed-bound for at least a day or week with some cold or flu or other.

A boyhood memory, sharp and aching to this day: high summer and I am in my warm bedroom that captures the sun. The window is open, I am in bed, probably reading, and in the distance I hear the sound of children playing during the first break of the school day. Laughter and screams and fun, rising and swelling on the heated breezes, then abating altogether and falling silent as lessons resume. I feel disconnected, at a loss, left out and left behind.

The pattern that marks my school life continues that way. A week off, then exhaust myself trying to catch up on missed work, succumbing to further illnesses and missing more time in school and catching up again.

It couldn’t continue; I couldn’t continue to operate like that; I dropped out of school earlier than I should have done. I wish I’d known what was wrong with me; it might have helped; I might have been able to find a way through my disabilities.

Hyper-mobility syndrome is a genetically inherited condition. My mother probably has it, and probably her mother before her had it too. There’s a problem in producing collagen. It isn’t top quality stuff, and leads to stretchy skin, an impaired immune system, digestive tract issues, lax joints. Generalised anxiety stems from this. Tiredness. The brain has to work so much harder to make the body function correctly, so concentrating is hard, systemic structured learning is difficult. At the end of a tiring session of work or play, I often find it impossible to keep my eyes open. The weight of my eyelids are so overwhelmingly vast that sleep is impossible to resist. But sleep isn’t a curative. You wake as tired as when you went to bed. You’ve just had a bit of a mental break from the pain.

I am diagnosed over thirty-five years since I was hospitalised as a five-year-old with a mysterious hip problem. Coming out of hospital just after Christmas, I had been strapped up in bed and had had to learn to walk again. Part of me feels that I have never quite overcome the fever that I knew from that hip pain. It’s always there, a fire flaring every so often in my blood, sending streamers into my mind.

But now I have a diagnosis, and it explains in a way I’ve never known before, the track of my life. It’s a scary journey ahead, and when I look over my shoulder I see that I’ve been wandering through marshy fields and tangled forests dappled with shafts of light and gathering darkness. It’s been a clumsy progression so far, with many trips and falls, bruises uncounted, and strange diversions along the way.

Yet I’m here. I’ve got this far.

And I have a little knowledge now.

Even if I don’t quite know where I’m going.

what was also said about

And this just caught my eye, another brief but considered review of my In the White of the Snow short story.

It is of course a pleasure to be mentioned alongside the work of Neil Gaiman, however tangentially.