gordsthoughts
It was a grand three storey house, five bedrooms, and even a master hallway. It was his. Beautifully decorated, and his children had their own annexe in which to play with their friends and live a more independent life to themselves, away from the watchful eyes of grown-ups.
A chill draught made him shiver slightly, and reaching out, he pulled his son's sleeping bag a little tighter around his head to keep him warm, and huddled himself deeper into his own bag. The icy breeze blowing in from Lake Michigan funnelled in between the bridges, and rasped noisily against the tent's side. They were dry under the bridges, at least, and the soporific effect of the cold made the nights thankfully shorter. As the low din of rush hour traffic woke them shortly after dawn, his children could make the long trek in to school again, and find food they gone without the night before. Maybe with an education, they would find a way out of this tent.
He had risen to his position with a ruthless gaze and unarming charm which, depending on his audience, varied in their proportions. Underneath this cool exterior lay a dragon. From ancient depths, and prehistoric loyalties and divisions, had grown this political juggernaut, steamrollering those in his way with callous disregard, while lifting up those moving in his direction, from the turbulence of his own speed of ambition, and with the weight of tribal self-belief that made him a force that had to be reckoned with.
He would not concede. He would control. He would decide. He would bring death where there is life, if so he chose to. And his new wish to bring life where there was death, would be difficult, but not impossible. Indeed, the scientists working for the state department would be forced to find a way, now he himself was ageing in years. He may have been filled with a sense of arrogant immortality, but a glance in the mirror soon convinced him otherwise. Mirrors did not lie. Unlike the attendants around him.
Charged with the duty of finding a way of preserving their glorious leader, they would come up with a solution, or face the ultimate penalty. not just them, but their families too.
In this way, he hastened his own demise. As the pressure weighed too heavily on the chief scientist in charge of the task, he requested an audience with the great leader to discuss the latest results of their research. His answer was that there was no method known to science of preserving life indefinitely, nor of bringing life back from death, and handed him the sheet of test results to look over for himself.
The leader was unconvinced of the results. "Science is never certain of anything" he replied. And he raised his gun from the coffee table to shoot the scientist - an appropriate reward, he felt, for failure.
As he readied himself to pull the trigger, an action which would take only a fraction of a second, his hand refused to collaborate. He willed it, but it would not move. Uncomfortably, he stared at his hand, and felt his arm also begin to stiffen.
A look of surprise, anger, and growing horror appeared in sequence in his eyes. The chief scientist, who knew very well what was happening. The bodyguards who stood at the far end of the Great Hall of the palace, looked on the scene without moving. To them, they could see nothing unusual. Their leader appeared to be lost in thought, and the scientist was on the other side of the table. They had searched him before he had gone in. No weapons. Searching everyone had become the leader's latest paranoid insistence, the usual act of a dictator convinced that his grip on the people was weakening, and that usurpation would be at any moment.
The scientist, however, watched, empty, and without emotion. By now, the neurotoxin he had coated the sheet in had penetrated the great leader's fingers and was working its way steadily up his arms, quickly to the throat muscles, and soon the whole body. After a mere twenty seconds, he would be locked in to his body, unable to move anything of his own will.
"You see" the scientist said in hushed tones, so as not to alert the guards "the great quantity of money you pumped into finding a cure for death, we instead pumped into a different area of research - a drug which would control both body, and mind".
The leader looked on at the scientist, effervescent with rage, but quite unable to express it.
"For years, you have controlled your people, for better or worse, usually..." he added with a sigh, "for worse. Now it is our turn. We considered killing you. That would have been easy. But it would not have been effective. We could have imprisoned you, but that would not have been so easy, and, well, there is always a chance you might have escaped, or spent your time raging, as you would not get to see, or experience, the horrors of being under your own regime." He took off his spectacles, and gave them a brief wipe on his white coat before replacing them. He felt it added something to the gravity of the scene.
"The drug we invented, you will be pleased to know, was very, very expensive. It consumed much of the costs of funds you pumped in, so none of your money was wasted. And I think you may, through this, experience life beyond death in a way you would not have done otherwise. It locks you in to your body, and gives us the power to control you...order you about, if you like. And no one would know differently. You will find yourself unable to oppose these orders, and unable to express your own feelings. Your body, my great leader, is no longer yours, but ours. Through us, and the good actions we will cause to occur through you, you will come to experience living in a way you never thought possible."
The look in the eyes of the leader glittered with denial of the reality, horror at its consequences, and finally settled on a dull resignation when he realised that none of these feelings could he express by shouting, shooting, or generally having his own way. He decided to ride it out, until the drug wore off.
The drug, however, never wore off. The great leader went through a change of heart on the world stage. His actions became bizarrely more benevolent, and some, such as firing his whole cabinet, and having them arrested, while appointing as their replacements, the compendium of scientists, seemed unusual, but within his rights to do. The things he said, the things he did, had seemed out of character for a while, until, eventually, they became normal. the country began to prosper once more, tourists came back, the people grew happier, and the lot of the people improved considerably.
The final grey hairs had fallen from the leader's head some fifteen years later. Completely bald, and almost ninety, the illness which had threatened to finish him off some years ago had subsided long before, and now it was simple age that had taken its toll. At this fifteen year mark, the signs of the drug began to wear off. One morning, on his way to cabinet meeting, as he had been ordered over the phone, he fet his hand jerkily come to life. As he thought about this unusual occurrence, the other hand did the same. Gradually, feeling began to seep across his body, like a sunrise flowing across the countryside. Unlike fifteen years ago, his body felt more comfortable than he had remembered it being. Warmer, more relaxed. While his previous nature had been one of anger and destruction, he found it difficult to summon those feelings once more. As he stepped from the car, a passer-by in the street paused and paid him a small homage, thanking him for what he had done for the country.
This had happened a lot in recent years, but now he had full control of his body once more, he could not decide what to do. Such spontaneous outbursts never happened before he had had the drug. They felt good.
The chief minister approached. "Let us go inside" said the minister, his tone a mixture of greeting and the necessary order to move.
The leader nodded, and for a moment, paused briefly, leaving the minister feeling slightly alarmed. He had forgotten that fifteen years would be up today. He looked openly, and expectantly, at the leader.
The leader looked into the eyes of the chief minister, the same man who had issued the drug to him all those years ago. The armed bodyguard closed the car door and joined them. He waited equally expectantly for something to happen, watching the two men look at each other in silence. It was as if they were conversing telepathically.
The leader broke this eternal pause with a simple smile, the first he remembered experiencing. This fact alone took him a little by surprise. He reached out his hand to the minister, who in turn reached out his, and they shook hands warmly. The leader nodded. "Yes, I'd like that."
He settled down to try and sleep, hiding himself as tightly as he could amongst a cluster of old cardboard boxes on the edge of the runway. Away from this, and all around, was flat, expressionless wasteground, with a high wirelink fence all round. In this, the only safe place he could find, and away from the security personnel, he tried to find comfort in the warmth of boxes. From his left, he heard a terrifying scream, growing in volume, and coming out of the dark. It became so loud that his brain shook inside his skull, and the very ground might open up because of it. He was suddenly knocked sideways by an unseen hand, and as he struggled to get upright, a box was thrown up into his face.
And suddenly, as the scream subsided, the unseen hand vanished, and all was calm again, save for a low, increasingly distant drone of engines.
He watched a giant, fading black object disappear off to his right. It screeched to a halt almost a mile away.
It had taught him a valuable lesson. Choose your sleeping quarters with more care.
This was going to be a long night.
First timer
"Fifty!" Terry cried with a heave of breath.
Slowly, and as obviously as he could, he lowered the barbell gently, hoping to get the attention of the slender, lycra-clad girls at the other side of the gym. Yeah, he thought. They've gotta be impressed by this.
Day four at the gym, pressing weights, no, pumping iron. Yes, he had to remember his lingo now. No point in sounding like an amateur. Bench presses were the ultimate exercise he had been told. Nothing impresses the chicks more than presses.
He had high hopes. In six months, he would be the next Arnold, according to the new fitness regime he'd just ordered from the internet. And he'd have washboard abs in just a fortnight. Six easy steps, it said. Though apparently it required he purchase some more add-on things to complete his workout 'plan'. He'd yet to wade through the rest of the promotion materials before he got to the exercises themselves.
For a moment, he flexed his muscles while sat on the bench, admiring them, while recovering from his exertions. He hoped this flexing, just him being natural, of course, would catch the eyes of those same girls at the other side of the gym.
No, no luck he thought. He prepared to stand up, but as he did so, he saw one of the girls point in his direction, and two of them started heading towards him.
"Oh my God", he thought, "this is it. The muscles are finally doing their job". And he tensed and flexed a little more, again, trying to look natural while he was doing so. It was something he hadn't quite perfected, and instead took on the visage of someone on the toilet trying to deal with too much food from the night before. Still, the the girls like a vascular man, he was told.
The thinnest of the two girls approached first. "Are you finished on this bench, He-Man?" she asked.
"Er, yeah" Terry replied, fumbling a little for a smart-ass reply. "Yes!" he repeated, this time trying to sound a little more gruff. The girls like a gruff voice, he was told. Gives him an air of authority. Even if he was only nineteen.
Still, he was caught a little off-guard by the moniker she had given him. Was it a compliment? He couldn't quite work it out.
"Yep, all yours," he continued, "if you can lift it off there." With a broad smirk, he stood up to head towards the next bench, leaving a wet patch of sweat on the bench padding as a mark of his territory.
"We can only try" replied the second girl, trying to cover a smile.
Terry sat down at the next machine, preparing himself mentally for some more shock to his muscles.
Before him, his dreams, his ideals, and hopes, all fell away as he watched the first girl pick up the barbell. With one hand. "Hold this, would you, Julie?". Julie obliged.
Terry sat in an awkward, stunned silence, feeling as if the entire gym was watching this mockery take place.
Julie placed the bar back on its supports, and it was only at this point, that Terry had realised his error. He had been lifting a bar with no weights on it. He thought it was heavy enough on his own. For the last four days, he had been showing off to the rest of the gym, that he was able of knocking out fifty reps of an unweighted bar. Oh, the shame. His face reddened.
The first girl kept eye contact with him as she began adding weights to the bar, four, five, six enormous discs. She lay on the bench and started lifting. Terry quickly made a few token pushes on the machine at which he was sat, and clamly, but with a distinct air of hurrying out, made for the exit.
As he reached the gym door, he heard a chorus shout "fifty!" followed by a fit of giggles from the two girls.
The frost crunched loudly under her bare feet, crisp and even, as stiff grassblades simultaneously bent, snapped, and melted as her warm skin bore onto them. Behind her slow footsteps were silent, foot-shaped shadows in the white of the dawn-lit garden.
After twenty paces or so, she stopped. Looking to her left, she could see the fountain.
From it, a small trickle of water continued to fall, down one side, the only remaining passageway open to it among the icy waterfall which the rest of it had become, over the last week.
To her right, was a wooden fence. It was a high, solid fence, frost-licked until it had become a creamy brown, and deep red cycladias gathered in a crowd at its base. The dawn light, now growing stronger, allowed the early sun's rays to catch the very top, melting the frost to reveal the darker wood underneath, leaving the fence as a whole appearing like a gianthneopolitan ice-cream.
Her feet could now feel the cold, the warmth of the bath she had just had was fading, and the chill brought out goose pimples across her body. She shivered momentarily. She stayed the shivers with a thought of something warm - hot chocolate. An enormous mug of it, thick, dark, and indulgent. It warded off the cold air for only a few seconds. Again she shivered.
In less than an hour, her footprints in the lawn would have faded, and in the silence of her leaving barefoot, she would not be missed by anyone for several more hours.
Continuing carefully, gently, and as quietly as she could, she stepped towards the high fence, and finding an overturned barrel, climbed up, and with a small jump, her fingers found the top of the fence, and she hung there briefly, considering her next move. Still holding there, she waited and listened.
A blackbird broke the silence with a euphoric chorus, quickly answered by a distant rival. This chorus quickly grew as others joined in, and within a minute, smaller songbirds had woken up and were announcing their survival of the coldest night of the year.
With the sudden onset of their clamour for attention, she scrabbled her feet against the fence, struggling to pull herself up to the top.
With some effort, a little out of breath, and beads of sweat that quickly turned frosty against her cheeks, she made it. She sat there, briefly admiring her victory, savouring the chorus of birdsong and the warmth of the dawn sun.
Then she slipped over the other side, and was gone, wearing nothing more than her regulation hospital dressing gown, and holding tightly to a twenty pound note she had kept safe under her mattress, away from the nurses.
Without life, there would be no oil.
Yet, with oil, there might be no life.
After all the New Year's partying and drinking, I passed out and woke up in estate. Somewhere north of Romford.
Frank and Ted stared at each other over their half-pints of beer. Frank had insisted, not too much booze, as they had a job to do tonight.
"Priceless, you say?" said Ted.
"That's right - Ming - ancient. A million years, or something like that."
"But surely something like that is going to be looked after, isn't it?"
"Nah - this is the thing, right? It's New Year's Eve - I've got it on very good authority, someone who knows someone, if you get my drift, that for a quarter of an hour tonight, the security guards will be upstairs joining in the celebrations. They're of the opinion that no one would be callous enough to break in at such a time of festivity..."
"Little do they know, eh?"
"Little indeed, my friend" and they chuckled to each other in a gravelly, smoker-induced half-coughlaugh. "Time to go."
Half an hour later, at 11.30, they were in a blue van parked at the end of the alleyway they would be carefully negotiating in a few minutes' time. They watched as the lights went out on the ground floor, and the stairwell lights came on. The guards had evidently decided to leave a little earlier. This was too good to be true. Talk of new beginnings - a priceless ming vase would certainly bring that for old Frank and Ted. Two decades of 'jobs' had brought them a miserable income, muted success as valuable artefacts had been undersold to private buyers, their own misunderstanding of the markets to blame, and naiivety for the good word of bad men.
Almost blindly, they m,ade their way down the pitch black alleyway. No light crept in from the surrounding streets, and with cameras watching the alleyway, they couldn't afford to light even a cigarette. They had heard about new light-sensitive cameras that could trigger an alarm at the very sight of the unusual.
They didn't know, however, about the infrared cameras that were also installed. These tapes would later come to light in the footage presented at court just three days later, when Frank and Ted would receive a sentence from both the judge, and from the media, the former a fairly light one, and the latter a fairly harsh one, mainly for their stupidity.
Frank reached the end of the alleyway first, and almost immediately yelped as he groped against something sharp, and painful.
"What the hell is that!" he cried.
"Shut up!" hissed Ted. Briefly, they were silent again, Frank clutching his hand in an invisible agony and Ted rummaging his way amongst old cardboard boxes and dustbins.
A raucous laugh emanated from the upstairs floor of the building, which covered a brief clatter as Ted send a dustbin lid clanging to the ground. Their teeth were on edge. They hadn't done anything illegal - yet - but this wasn't helping. The laughter died down, and quiet resumed in the alleyway.
"Is this the door?" asked Ted.
"Yes" replied Frank, "But be careful of the..."
Too late, Ted, reaching forward, yelped as loudly as Frank had and jumped back clutching his forearm. Again, there was laughter from upstairs which they were glad had drowned their own noisemaking.
"I told you..."
"Shut up! What is it?"
"I don't know, but it's bloody painful."
"We'll need to shift it to get inside." Ted reached into his jacket, and pulled out a cheap lighter, and under the shade of his hand, rolled the flint.
Before them, was the mother of all pot plants - a six foot cactus, as thick as your waist, and probably as heavy as a man. Carefully, Ted leant through the spikes, and prodded it. It was as solid as a tree.
"This is not going to be easy. Is the door locked as well?" Frank replied that it was, and the two stood in puzzled, flamelit silence until the lighter scorched Ted's hand. For a moment, all was dark.
"We have got our lock picks, haven't we?"
More silence.
"I've got it!"
"Not so loud!" whispered Frank.
"Sorry. No, I've got it - we could use one of the spikes as a lockpick."
All was still silent upstairs. With the lighter as his guide, Frank picked out the choicest two spikes he could find, broke them off with an audible snap, and in the gap that remained, tried to fiddle the lock open with one of them. It broke off, unfortunately leaving the rest of the spike in the lock itself.
"Well, that didn't work. I thought you said this would be easy? You didn't say nothing about some daft plant guarding the place."
More puzzlement in the dark starlight. Time was pressing on, and only ten minutes remained for them to complete their evening's task.
"You ever heard of a bed of nails?" asked Ted.
"Yeah - something thos fellas in India do, isn't it?" replied Frank, wondering quite where this conversation was going. It seemed a random point to bring up.
"Well, I got an idea. We could use this cactus - if we could both lift it, the pressure, dispersed like, we could use it as a battering ram. It's solid, just feel."
"Lift it? Are you insane? That thing's bloody painful." snapped Frank.
"Yeah, but if you disperse the pressure, like a bed of nails, it doesn't pierce your skin. Like those fellas in India."
"Ohhh yeeeahhhh...." Frank said aloud to himself, the concept of using a cactus as a battering ram slowly becoming a valid one in his mind.
"Let's get to it" said Ted, and in the darkness to which their eyes were gradually becoming accustomed, they arranged themselves to pick up this enormous pot plant by one tipping it over, and the other supporting it on the way down.
It was a painful business, despite Ted's promises, and by the time they were arranged, several spikes were protruding deeply into both their arms. Just think of the money, Frank had said. New beginnings they could have.
More laughter came from the upstairs rooms, and at this point, they both made a charge for the door, instantly aware of the cover it would provide for the noise they were about to make. They had given themselves a good run up, and the laughter grew as they ran up to the door.
Three days later, the judge passed down to them a relatively light eight weeks suspended prison sentence. The two men were looking worse for wear - their faces and hands covered in pockmarks of needles, and in Frank, two needles were still stuck fast in his flesh. They would have to work their own way out, the doctor had said. They were just lucky if they didn't come down with an infection given the number of wounds.
It transpired that they were not aware of two important things. First of all, that their 'tip-off' had been a fake. The guards in the building knew of Frank and Ted's reputation, and had managed to pass on a 'secret' about the guards leaving the post. There was no Ming Vase. In fact, it wasn't a place with anything of any value to them at all - it was simply a storehouse for plants. And at that time, it had been filled in the downstairs basement with desert plants, in particular, large cacti. And for good measure, the guards had stacked them close up to the door.
Second, when Frank and Ted came to charge the door, they did not actually bother to check beforehand, whether the door was actually open. Since it was open, when they came to charge it, it only took a mild push for it to be flung open and they carried on charging right into the wall of upright giant cacti in front of them.
It was an ugly sight, but all, for their misfortune, caught on the infra-red cameras in the alleyway, which were, as it happened, monitored from the upstairs room. The guards knew of Frank and Ted's rashness when it came to radical solutions to problems, and had invited a lot of their friends around to the uilding to enjoy the anticipated practical joke on film as it happened. Frank and Ted had not failed to please the crowd, their laughter inadvertently helping to keep the joke moving along.
They avoided jail, but they hadn't avoided the teasing by the media. Now, with their faces well known to the public and security guards everywhere in London, there was little chance of any further jobs for a long time to come. On the upside, the internet video of their escapades was viewed four million times. So they were famous. But not for the reasons they hoped for, nor with the wealth to accompany it.
Frank had a narrow escape from an early grave after his cac tus-induced wounds turned septic, and determined to make a new go of things, he found work as an apprentice carpenter.
Ted, in a move with no small sense of irony, opened a gardening nursery.
Robin came home with the new tree. He had spent four hours, driving round town, but like Joseph and Mary, he found nothing. Wherever he arrived, they had just sold the last one.
He had had to rationalise - Christmas trees were six feet high, spikey, and shed needles. You needed to be able to hang decorations from them, and stick an angel on the top.
Robin had never been the most artistic of people, not the most creative. But as he drove into the final Homes and Gardens Store, he would have to get something, anything, to keep the children happy.
And so it was that the family celebrated unwrapping their Christmas presents under the watchful gaze of a giant seven foot Saguaro cactus from Mexico. Decorating was both easier, and more painful than before. Decorations could simply be pinned to it, with care, until complete with tinsel, it had the appearance of a debutante coming out at a royal flower show. The angel on the top clearly had the most painful experience of all, something mirrored by the dog who was considerably less reluctant to take the risk of weeing against its side after a first abortive attempt.
And at least the needles did, for the most part, stay on. Except for four of them - at least, Robin had discovered the fourth while walking barefoot across the carpet later in July the following year.
The only problem remained that of removing the decorations - not at all easy, since in the warmth of the fireside place it held, the slow-growing cactus had experienced a spurt, so now the decorations were protected by an additional inch of spines, something Robin tried to turn to a positive by emphasising that the children could now enjoy Christmas every day, or at the very least, be less interested in it the next year so they might save on having to make so much of an effort next time.
The Saguaro Christmas never took off as a fashion elsewhere, though it did make the local news, when it was discovered this bizarre family was celebrating Christmas in August, with a giant cactus.
In September, returning from work to an empty house, Robin found a window smashed as he approached the front door, which was also ajar.
He rushed in, fearing the worst. Strangely, nothing was missing. He ran through the house, his worry palpable, but eventually, he relaxed. nothing was gone.
Except the cactus. In its place, was a note from the Mexican Society for the Liberation of Desert Trees - not a particularly well-staffed operation - who had burgled his tree to free it back into the wild. And shame on him for capturing the cactus in the first place.
The children were heartbroken, it felt like a family member had gone, the remaining memory of its time with them being occasional clutches of pain as they retrieved yet another fallen spine as they walked barefoot across the carpet before bed.
Ludwig van Beethoven sat grumpily at the piano, unable to concentrate. Inside his fine mind, and behind those silent ears, a melody - perhaps the most captivating he would ever write - was aching for escape onto paper, sealing its glory for all time. But it could not get out. Those hands simply would not bring themselves to pick up the quill, and write the notes down.
Perhaps there was something wrong with it - some infirmity in its structure that would force him to improve the melody's education before he would allow it to be released into the world.
For a full two hours he struggled, now standing up and storming round the room swiping the air in irritation; then sitting down, on the brink of playing, but his fingers refusing to touch the keys of the pianoforte.
As the clock chimed three hours later, he resigned himself. The tune must be written. It wasn't perfect. In fact, the more he had wrestled with it, the more it had seemed like a momentary lapse of judgement to get so carried away with the idea that it was anything more than mediocre. But after spending so long thinking about it, it would seem more of a waste of time not to write it down.
After which, he could always seal it up, and hide it in a drawer somewhere, never to be found again. He might always be wrong, and if he forgot the tune, then it would be entirely lost.
So he sat down and calmly applied quill to paper, and filled the staves with black dots of a simple tune that, unknowingly to him, continue to influence generations beyond. It was catchy. Irritatingly so. A tune like this wuld be best written and destroyed, if anything to give it life before its certain death.
He gave it a title, folded the manuscript, and sealed it with wax, locked it in his 'for later' drawer of his study cabinet, and went to lunch, and promptly forgot about his intentions to destroy the manuscript. It remained hidden at the bottom of sheaves of other manuscripts that piled up on top of it, over the following months.
One hundred and sixty years later, in 1972, this manuscript found a new owner. An assistant at Sotheby's, London, was attempting to fix a faulty drawer, in an antique cabinet from Germany. In his enthusiasm, he prised the door of the cabinet too violently, ejecting a manuscript (which had been holding the door shut through its position) was flung into the air. It hit the assistant's chest, and dropped heavily to the floor, breaking the thick wax seal.
Staring at this assistant, was a tune which he could read, despite its aged appearance, and in spite of comments written in German along the margins, suffixed by plenty of exclamation marks and heavy underlinings. Reading the tune, he could sense why - it was catchy, but mildly irritating.
He had no suspicions as t the origin of the paper, and since no one knew of it, he pocketed it and went home.
The manuscript sent the assistant mad. Round and round it went, in his head, leaving him sleepless, and unable to work. The tune had to be written down again, released into the new world it had found itself in. He quit his job, and spent a month in the isolation of his bedsit, surrounded by sheaves of new manuscript paper, trying to deal with this tune that played so much violence on his mind.
It was a year after its discovery, in December, of 1973, that the tune found its way back into the world. Having sent its reader mad, it intended to do the same to the population as a whole. Through him, and his new band, it would unite minds, and then terrify them, as familiarity with it preyed on their sanity.
The ghost of Beethoven would surely have screamed from his grave as he saw the rising popularity of that tune through the hit single 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas' and damned the day he ever decided to write it down for posterity.
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