Writing – Short Stories

I have always written but hardly ever submitted by writing for publication. However, the wordpress blog site gives me the opportunity of doing so now, and so I shall start with a short story, which I finished a few years ago.

THE PRISONER

It did not take them long to get me to the prison complex. I arrived in darkness.  The soldiers pushed me into a stone dungeon with a single electric light bulb hanging from a flex in the centre of the ceiling.  The electric light gave a painfully dim atmosphere in which it was impossible for me to see clearly.  I was alone in the dungeon.

     The walls and the furniture, beds and chairs, were built out of grey concrete blocks. There was, as I suppose as you would expect, no art in the building of them.  The blocks were of poor quality, with some bits worn away and other parts broken.  Scattered around the dungeon I counted five piles of blocks made into flat high beds. My prison dungeon was windowless. A small barred hole in the door did not let any light in because it was covered from the outside, so that, I imagined, the guards could spy on me.   I figured out that I should choose one of these blocks for a bed. I could not sleep on the floor because it was wet and filthy. The beds were at least dry and relatively clean.  It was not going to be luxurious.

     The guards slammed the door shut and left me alone. They did not throw me to the ground. They did not beat me. Prison doors always close loudly.  Alone again. My eyes became a little more used to the dim light given by the electric bulb in the ceiling and I saw a steel door in an opposite wall.  Of course, it was, like the main door, locked.

     For a long time, for many days, I stayed alone in that place.  They, whoever they were, pushed my food to me through a hole in large door.  Just before dusk they opened the steel door by a mechanism that I did not understand.  It led to a circular high walled courtyard, also built from grey blocks, which was entirely featureless save for a primitive walled toilet.  At least I could see a disk of sky above me where I escaped for precious moments from the dull light of the bulb.         I was to exercise in this yard and did so for many days. Before it became completely dark I had to get back into my prison, before the steel door closed, otherwise I would spend the night freezing in the yard until the steel door opened the next day.

     I could hardly distinguish the clouds in the sky. There were no colours to see.  Every evening I walked around the yard for some relief and used the toilet. I decided not to count the days. Counting days in prison is simply counting your life away. I did not want to know just how much of my life I was losing.

     I always find it tempting to think of any change as improvement but change simply involves difference. When I had been in the prison long enough to develop a routine and harden myself to my loneliness there, the guards opened main door and ushered in limped four other prisoners. For a brief moment I thought that freedom or death had come but when I saw hollow faces, grey with pain I knew that there would be no freedom. I was not even sure of death just the opportunity to share this misery with other human beings.

     Now there were five of us, all broken men together a hand whose fingers did not work. My new companions were captured pilots, highly trained and skilful in the arts of war. Their flying machines had flown fast and brought death to many people. Our captors hated my companions for the death that they brought. Death is the old man’s friend but not the death that does not come in the early hours of a winter’s morning or the sedated compassion of an opiate filled end. These men brought death from the skies upon the young as well as the old and the healthy as well as the ill.

     In flight, in fearsome flight, a flying machine would be shot down. Sometimes the pilot died in the flames; sometimes as his body hot the earth, other times upon the weapons of his enemies as his parachute brought him close to them. Sometimes soldiers captured pilots and some of them brought into my prison to rot there with me.

     I was not part of this war. It had nothing to do with me. I was in prison for other reasons, not crimes, just reasons.

     We shared our lives.  We needed the comfort of company.

It is strange how nature and circumstances throw people together. Your first friends are your family. They all want a bit of your soul.  Your family teaches you how to behave and how to give up bits of your soul. It shows you how to use the scraps of soul you inherit or shake out of them.

     Then your neighbours create more people around you and you form a community with them. Then schools, colleges, work they all surround you with people each taking from you and giving to you things that you do not want.

     It gets harder. Your own soul aches for company. You are sad when friends reject you so you dance to please them. You move your body in patterns to amuse those who surround you, forestalling their rejection for several precious and delightful instances. You mingle and blend, fit in and join, calling your own dance, created for acceptance, your own individual personality.

     Friendship out of necessity is a slow process but I found two especial friends, two souls that I could nibble at. We shared small events, as we killed some cockroaches, found ways to keep our beds dry, found ways to sleep. Our guards moved so silently that I could never hear their footsteps outside.  The noise that my companions made was my music.

     Over the next few days I discovered that my friends were named Raineater and Skydance; they had proudly killed many enemies.  They explained the war to me and how they fought it and who was winning it. They told him about their experiences in the sky, how they were selected for training.

Their tearful eyes told of their happy parents who said goodbye and saw them no more until training was finished. They confessed that their trainers had given them drugs to build their bodies strong with lightening reactions so that they could catch a fly in flight. Then they had different drugs to stop their bodies growing further so that they could fit into a flying machine, which fitted like a glove built centimetre perfect like another skin. I would have loved to have seen it real.

     The machines were designed so that they could take off with a loaded bomb, but could not land with the bomb. They had to discharge the bomb within a designated period of time otherwise it would blow up. They were not trusted. It was a nightmare. I was glad not to be part of it.

     I loved Skydance best of all.  Skydance was beautiful even in his starving beaten face. We had no glass, no mirror, nothing to reflect our image back to us. We could only see each other and Skydance was beautiful, I could see him.

     I spent the days talking to Raineater and Skydance.  I found out about their families and I told them about mine.  I became close to them, so close that we could communicate almost without talking. This is friendship.

     Friendship is a marvellous thing, better to observe than experience.  Friends can be together, never speaking, simply enjoying each other’s company.  Everyone can see it.  Sometimes the friendship is so strong that it brings joy to those who observe it.  Thus it was with us.

     After a while we did everything together.  We walked around the exercise yard together, side by side, and we stared at the circle of sky together. Our eyes nearly became impervious to the painful light together. We ate our food dipping our fingers into our bowls at the same time and chewing and swallowing in synchrony.  We fell asleep at the same time we woke at the same time.  Our rituals became increasingly important and we held to them. Our ritual was good; we ate together, Skydance, Raineater and me.

     Our finest ritual was our morning ritual, when each of us took turns to tell our stories. That way we understood our friendship better. We concentrated hard mostly closing our eyes as we described our lives or listened to our friends describe theirs. Our eyes could picture. Closing our eyes blocked out the painful dim light. With eyes tightly shut we listened one day as we told of our dreams.

     Skydance spoke first.

     ” I make pictures in my mind.  When I close my eyes I fall asleep and when I fall asleep I dream.  When I was younger I dreamed a dream many times.  It was a blank dream.  There was no scenery and I was in no place but suspended high, infinitely high. I knew that if I fell I would die.  There was a rope, an infinitely long smooth rope.  I was travelling along it being so careful not to fall.  I became an expert at running along the rope keeping increasing perfect balance.

     “I do not think I had any sense of purpose.  I think I was simply doing what I had to do by running along the rope.  I was so good at running the rope that I was given a bicycle somehow, the details are indistinct.  I bicycled along the rope making even better progress than before.  This was easier than the running and I was travelling much faster.  I realised that I would reach the end of the rope soon and that I would be happy when I reached its end.

     “Happy, and singing to myself I watched over rope at the point where the bicycle’s front wheel was about to travel over it.  This happy rope, this perfect rope.  I was delighted at how clever I was to bicycle along the rope.  And then it happened.  A knot appeared in the rope.”

     With this picture of a bicycle about to hit the knot clenched firmly in my imagination I opened my eyes and looked at Skydance tearful in his beauty.  If, at that moment, I could have untied the knot in the rope so that my fine friend could progress, I would have done it, and if not, I would have killed the man who made the knot.   

     “That knot meant that I could not reach the end of my journey, I could not fulfil my purpose. Just when I learnt how to cycle along the rope and was making good progress, the journey came to an end. It must have ended terribly, I do not know, I always woke up before I knew. I dreamed this dream many times; I always woke up before the end in a cold sweat. I tried to pretend an ending in the half sleep half wakefulness to camouflage the horror from my mind. I failed.”

     Raineater spoke.

     “I have never dreamed.  Each night when I close my eyes I sleep.  I do not dream.  When I wake I come from nothingness where nothing is.  When I sleep I die until I am wake.  I can nearly picture what you say.  But it is hard.  You are trying to share a taste with me by describing it. That cannot be.”

     I told my friends what passed for my dreams. I do not know if they understood them as well as I understood theirs; I think they understood enough.

     I suppose that we were bound to share things, all five of us were so bound, perhaps like fingers in a glove.  Some things were possible to share.  When we received our food Skydance and Raineater gave their bowls of food to me and I poured the contents of their bowls into mine.  I then carefully divided the food so that everyone got an equal share of hot grain, meat and liquid. They trusted me to be fair. I was particularly fair; we all eat the same, we all drank the same. Later the other two asked me to share the food equally.

     We tried to keep each other clean and free from lice and ticks, like a family of primates.  The parasites that covered us bothered us badly.  It was easy to infect our skin by scratching; infected skin took ages to heal.  We had no medicine or bandages.  We spent hours pulling the lice and ticks off each other and crushing them between our fingernails.

     We needed razors, combs, soap and water for washing.  We had no soap, razors or combs. The little water we had was for drinking, to keep us alive, or what passed for being alive in that prison.  We did not get water every day; we were happy when we got a small cup of muddy green water in our rations. We drank greedily it as though it were the finest wine.

     I became skilled in sharing food equally. I was responsible for the division of our precious food. All of my friends trusted me to do this properly and their trust was not misplaced or abused.

     Dirty, sharing even dirt, we passed the months away.

     It might have been our diet, I cannot be sure, but the light seemed to grow a little dimmer each day. It became harder to see thing clearly. I felt aches behind my eyes, a constant nagging near pain that never went away.

     While we established our friendship and our rituals we also marked out our own territories, like dogs.  My bed, or rather the blocks that comprised it became my exclusive domain.  No-one touched it and I did not touch anyone else’s bed. Beds were sacrosanct, an exclusive territory that would never be invaded.

     It can be very difficult to personalise something that everyone else has got that is exactly the same without any possessions but every prisoner made his own bed his special home.  Some arranged their clothes as pillows during the night; others used their shoes.  Every man had a different way of lying on his bed and slept for different lengths of time.

     And each evening when exercise was finished (some men were at first caught out by the self closing door and learned that they must come out of the yard into the room after exercise or spend nearly a day in the cold outside), each man in walked into our prison room and sat on his bed.  In the ever increasingly dim light and in the room looked more frightening each day.  To relieve the boredom I developed the habit of being first back into the dungeon after exercise.  I used to rush straight to my bed, sit on it and enjoy a brief moment of solitude sitting alone. As much as I hated the prison room, as frightened as I was, I preferred to sit there alone missing that circle of sky, giving up the decent light outside for my private moments.  There was no other chance to be alone.  I used to sit on my block bed, half close my eyes in the dim light, and imagine that I was walking in fields and across hills of another far off country, where there was no war, where I had come from.

     Sometimes I would sit on block in gently kicking my heels against the side of his bed.  Sometimes I would lie on his bed and stretching his arms under my neck exercising my ankles by rotating them together.  Sometimes I would just lie very still.

     My friends (they were now all friends) respected my feelings and I am grateful to them for that.  They knew I was different. They allowed me these a few moments of solitude every day.  I was very grateful to them for this. 

     The third prisoner, Firemaker, told the others that they must allow me these private moments and not rush back fro exercise until the last possible moment, not until the door was closing, so that I could have some time alone.

     “You must remember”, explained Firemaker, “that he did not have our upbringing.  He did not go to school.  He did not play our competitive games.  He did not debate with our teachers.  He has not killed any of the enemy.  We must respect him and allow him these a few moments every evening to be alone and we must not be hurt when he wants to be alone.”

     I was very grateful to Firemaker.  I made a special point of thanking him for expressing so well what I found hard to put into words.  These prisoners were much better with words than me. I had nothing that I could give him but my thanks, which is all that I had to offer Firemaker. I vowed if ever I had a chance to help Firemaker then I would help him far beyond all reasonableness, I would lavish gratitude upon him ten thousand fold. 

     I think that Firemaker liked the way I moved. He watched me as I almost dragging the soles of my feet along the ground. I thought I got some energy from contacting the floor.

     I got accustomed to the routine.  There was something pleasing and logical about being a prisoner.  I wanted my freedom, of course, but until I was free I could manage.

     One evening (in these days I regarded evening is as the beginning of a new day) after exercise I ran back into the prison room ready for my moments by myself.  After the freshness of the yard, the atmosphere in the dungeon was stifling.  The dim light penetrated my skin.  And as entered the room, the light showed the shapes. I saw there was a new shape.  On the bed belonging to the fourth prisoner – what was his name – Windholder?- lay a simple wooden open coffin.  I was frightened to go near to it, so I stood at the doorway wondering what this meant.  Eventually the other four prisoners stood beside me. We were all frightened at this terrible sight.

     Windholder walked towards the coffin.  The lid of the coffin was missing and he peered inside, carefully so as not to touch its’ polished wood.

     “It’s empty,” he said, “it’s completely empty.”

     As he spoke the main door of the dungeon opened quickly for the first time since these prisoners had been admitted. Half a dozen guards marched in.  They seized Windholder as he looked at the coffin on his bed.  Holding him at right angles to the open coffin his face pointed towards the ceiling the guards stretched his neck.

     “Now” said one of the guards, so silently that I strained to hear him.

     While my friend, my fellow prisoner, was being held eyes to the ceiling neck stretched, one of the guards pulled out a long knife and slit his throat; his blood dripped into the open coffin in bursts, each throb a last vain effort of his heart to pump blood around his body, blood that brings oxygen and food throughout. But the heart pumped in vain; the life giving blood could not reach his brain. The heart pumped in the way that a chicken can sometimes run around when you have cut its head off. And then the pump slowly stopped. It had drained its sticky fluid into the coffin.

     We were horrified.  The whole thing happened so quickly and so unexpectedly.  The poor man died before our eyes thrashing is blood into a highly polished box, his limbs tightly held as the life was squeezed from him.

     When the blood had finished pouring from the neck of the dead man, (he was no longer Windholder, just messy dead meat and bones) the guards pushed his corpse into the coffin.  The body was too tall for the coffin so the soldiers chopped his legs at the ankles of the newly made corpse until the feet were severed.  The body now fitted easily, the soldiers lay the feet by the side of the body, closed the lid of the coffin and carried it away without a word.  They did not even look at us, as though the whole exercise had been carried out in front of no one.   

     We walked from the corner where we fled to witness this murder to our beds, careful to avoid the dead man’s bed.  Each prisoner lay on his bed and wept, wept for the dead Windholder, wept for the man who was a friend.

     When death strikes it is at first very shocking but you get used to it as a fact, as an accomplished fact.  You get to treat it as a long lost friend, a friend who you are glad to see again.  All of the prisoners, except me, had seen death strike.  I was in a state of virgin death.  They had dealt in death, killing thousands with their bombs.  We shared the horror between us, as evenly as if had divided it like one of our wretched meals.

     The days turned over and things almost returned to normal.  The death had brought us closer together.  We discussed it endlessly.  And the most commonly held opinion was that he had been killed as retaliation.  This was punishment visited upon a captured flying man.  There was no alternative except continue in our acquired routine.

     After that day although our routine continued nothing was normal. Every time I returned from exercise at dusk his stomach tied itself in a knot end his throat struggled until he saw that there was no coffin on any bed in the dungeon.  He had some relief until the next day, when as the time grew closer to the end of exercise, so my heart beat faster and I felt apprehensive of death of being helpless when I was killed.

     From the moment Windholder died four of us knew that we were all dead men, men who only had precious days of the life left and no more.  We talked hardly at all. We no longer shared.  No one wanted me to divide our food – what was the point? We no longer shared experiences.  We had to live the limited life that remained alone.  We stayed on our beds or close to them and we all avoided the beds of the men who were dead.

     Some of us spent hours in prayer.  Others stared vacantly into space worried, rubbing fingers or foreheads so consistently that open wounds and sores appeared.  Some prisoners of us kept beds tidy; others did not

     Of course I did not know how long it would take for me to lose my life and join my comrades in coffins but I knew that it would come and that worried me.  My stomach was in a perpetual knot, I felt as though I would be sick.  I wondered how I could continue to breathe.  Walking, talking, eating and breathing became an incredible effort.  Even the simplest things in his life became dreadfully hard and the expectation of the sight of a coffin on my bed when I returned from exercise made it difficult for me to think at.

     More weeks passed and we became ill, listless and vacant.  And then it happened again just as I knew that it would happen again.  First back I saw a coffin lying on Raineater’s bed.  It was Raineater’s turn I thought, quite lucidly.  I walked a few steps into the prison and gently half closed the door behind me to give Raineater a few more moments of peace.  I looked at the coffin.  It was very plain with no carving no design and no metal.  It was made of a light coloured wood.  It was well made, as though made by machines by the thousands as indeed it was. It was polished so highly that I could see, for the first time in many weeks my face in its reflection. At first I did not recognise the old gaunt thin man that I saw, bearded, filthy, weak like a twig that could be snapped apart and discarded lightly into the wind.

     The door eventually opened and the remaining five prisoners walked in.  Raineater walked up to his coffin he opened it.  He laid his head back across the open coffin with his eyes staring at the ceiling.  He closed his eyes and climbed inside. The door of the dungeon burst open and those familiar guards, those figures of death, walked in to the dungeon and cut Raineater’s throat as Raineater lay calm in his coffin. Raineater, who never dreamed, was despatched to a dreamless death.

     That night as I sat on my bed, too frightened to look at Skydance, I thought about Raineater and the times we had together – those times would not come again he knew.

     I had no time to say goodbye to my friend Raineater, just the hurried moment when Raineater pushed past him to jump into his coffin and wait for his death.  I did not know whether Raineater had decided how to face death.  I guessed that Raineater had made his decision as to how he would die as soon as he knew that he would die, as soon as he knew that we were all going to die.  Raineater would not hide plead or struggle for life.  Raineater would die with dignity.  And so Raineater had died.

     When people are very ill, perhaps with a cancer gnawing at them, growing tumours perhaps, they go into hospital, perhaps for an operation, perhaps for treatment. The ward or room might be bright and light but it is not home. It does not contain things that you want near you. When you die in hospital you die without the things that made your life. When you go into hospital to die, you go there knowing that you will never see the outside again. Thus it was with us.

     I expected that they would leave us alone for several weeks. I expected that the guards would have followed their previous system and that I would have a few weeks of certain precious life. I would use those weeks, I decided, in some magnificent purpose.  I spent hours that night trying to think of a magnificent purpose to which I could devote my life. I was not successful and resolved to think some more.

     The very next day, my head clear after the short exercise in the yard, but not yet decided upon a magnificent purpose for my last weeks of life, I came in for my moments of solitude that my two good friends still allowed me. There it was. I saw my coffin on my bed.  Firemaker and Skydance had not seen it yet. It was my turn to die. 

     I quietly rushed to the coffin and picked it up. I did not pause. It was light, much lighter than I imagined it or else my fear gave me great strength and purpose.  At first I thought I should carry it to Raineater’s bed but I knew that would not do.  There was no time to delay.  I could hear the other prisoners preparing to enter the prison from the yard, their slow feet shuffling.  Firemaker’s bed was nearest to mine.  I carefully placed my coffin on Firemaker’s bed and then stood by the doorway so that when it opened I was pushed aside.  When Skydance and Firemaker saw the coffin on Firemaker’s bed, I feigned their horror at seeing it there.

     Firemaker did not face death like Raineater.  Firemaker struggled and shouted and screamed as the guards held him.  He called to his friends to help but they did not.  They were too weak and too scared to help Firemaker.  They simply watched as the guards collected Firemaker held him over his coffin slit his throat and pushed him in.  Firemaker was a not tall man.  It was not necessary to mutilate his body to make it fit in the coffin, but they did. Firemaker’s blood lay in puddles on the floor, evidencing his struggles and the fact that this coffin leaked the blood on the floor festered for days until the cockroaches had gorged themselves fat with it.

     And so Firemaker was dead.  It was a simple as that.  Firemaker had been kind to me and I had determined to help Firemaker whenever I could.  Firemaker screamed for help but I had stood and watched, as he died, as he died in place of me, an unknowing sacrifice. I had finessed a few more days of precious life.

     I had, I supposed, placed my coffin on Firemaker’s bed purely out of some kind cowardice and fear of not knowing with any certainty what it would be like for me to die, from a selfish point of view.  I did not want to die because dying would likely cause me pain and take me where he did not want to go. It would likely be a place of nothingness and although I suppose that I would not know if I were on a place of nothingness so it would not make a difference when I got there it was the knowing that I would go there that was so hard to bear.

     Did I do the wrong thing? On any understanding of what was happening to us, we were being executed one by one. It would make no difference to me if Firemaker had another day or one hundred days of life, but it would make an difference to me if I had a hundred days of life.

     My whole life has been pushing me towards death, early death probably.  There I could not the pleasure of a woman; he growing old. My line, started from the very first piece of life on earth would stop with me. I would become a dead end, a knot in the rope of history beyond which the bicycle could not travel.

     Skydance and I took to sitting on our beds, not moving for fear of contravening some unknown rule.  I could at least look at his beauty then. All that I could think about, despite his great beauty, was death and the means of death.

     When a slaughterer kills animals it is his kindness to sharpen his knife. A sharp knife with no blemishes, no nicks or abrasions is a gentle end for a calf or a pig. With great care the butcher of animals (we eat animals) creates a perfect blade. Steel is best, not stainless steel, but fragile thin steel that the sharpening stone can hone and grind into a wicked fast death. Some slaughterers stun the food before they cut the throat, they deem it kinder. Others hold that making the animal senseless is less humane and nothing kills more sweetly than a sharp knife pulled around a neck in less than a second.

     There was no time to mourn; I did not know whether I should be first or last when I came back from exercise.  I believed that my death was inevitable and so I took to entering from the dungeon from exercise last of all. Skydance let me do this and hurried to end his exercise first allowing me precious moments alone in the yard. There I found it more precious. There the death of my friends became less important; all that mattered was the circle of sky in which I tried and failed to distinguish the clouds.

     One dusk, upon returning from observing the sky one evening, looking forward to observing Skydance, I saw a coffin in the arms of my friend Skydance. He was carrying the coffin from my bed to his own. He told me that he thought it should be his turn to die. He said that he believed the guards put coffin on beds at random.  He would now test his theory, he told me smiling. I did not tell him that I had already had the proof of it. To admit to killing Firemaker would have educated my friend but for what purpose. He now had no use for the knowledge I could impart to him. I thanked him for my life, such of it as I had left. Skydance whispered to me, gently, and kindly, “Don’t be sad, I have had my life”.

     Skydance’s eyes held mine and as we heard the sound of the prison door opening, the march of the guards, the sound of the other prisoner’s throat being cut. I held his eyes as I watched Skydance’s blood spilling.

     Then I was alone.  I sat on my bed, like a child playing a game.  I sat on home. No one could touch me when I sat on home. I rocked on my bed. I thought about my friends and knew that I had reached the end. I would die soon.

     It was a relief that Skydance had died. It gave me relief. No one need ever know what I had done. Even though I had done it for the best motives, for the best reasons it was possible that not everyone would see it the way that I saw it. The prisoners who died were not from my country; they were no fighting my war for my benefit. Every possible witness that mattered had died. It was fine.

     The door opened again. I stayed on home, safe on home and turned my head to look at my executioners as they entered. It was my turn to die unless against all possible hope something had happened to change that.  The eyes of the guards were not cold and they did not now move quietly. I faced them. It was time to face my death. I could imagine their very shapr balde scratching slightly as it slit my throat and then I expected that I should lose consciousness very quickly, the heart pumping my life away into a coffin.

     But there was no coffin. There was no receptacle of death. There was nothing to catch my blood and yet the guards entered. There was no knife, no machinery honed for my death. The guards were not adhering to their rituals, which, while not my rituals, was not pleasing.

     I feared some other means of death. I had been planning to lie still and relax as they dragged the blade across my neck – that had seemed the best way to die and a way to atone perhaps for my crimes by submitting to death at their hands. But if I did not know the means of death it would be hard.

     Most executioners distract the condemned mad just before he dies, fooling him into thinking that he has still a few minutes more of life. At a hanging the hangman releases the lever just as soon as the rope is around the hooded neck, but as he puts the rope around he whispers to the condemned that it will only be a minute or so more and then he instantly kills him.

     I did not want to die like that. I wanted to die knowing how I would die, knowing exactly how many seconds were left to me. I hoped to read the seconds in the eyes of the guards but I could not.

     One guard spoke with kindness perhaps, or perhaps with resignation.

“It is not death. You have been reprieved. The war is over. The killing is over. You are free.”

     They opened the door to my prison. Outside as I walked into the light my eyes hurt with its incredible brightness. I was free for the rest of my life, however long that might be.

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The next story was published in a Canadian journal, the Hippotamus, edited by one of my friends, in 2004

 

THE CONVERSION OF PAUL

 

The new school was next to the old church. He had taught for many years in the old school and when the school moved he went with it. He taught me in the old school. It was quite hard to find somewhere to park my car, because he was a popular man. I think that he was popular because he had no delusions about his weaknesses. He cared for the kids that he taught. He first taught Latin and classics, but changed with the times as the times changed him and ended up by teaching politics and sociology. I saw, as you do, old school chums whom I had not seen for years, older, fatter, and grey now in some cases and in other cases the blond locks had turned to shiny pates. I picked my way through the pews until I found a space next to someone who had been in my class.

            The church was very crowded. I had never been in it before. I always thought that he was Jewish, but you can be surprised about stuff like that. He had nominated this church for this ritual. You never really know people. I would have expected that.

            I think, and I am pretty sure that I am right, that he converted from Judaism to Christianity before he became a teacher. I never knew the reasons and I suspect that his conversion was more a matter of emotional convenience than belief. I do not accuse him of being hypocritical or playing the main chance. He was a dedicated teacher who had inspired thousands of us.

            I was very interested in his family. He was, I thought, a private man. I never knew how many children he had, but most of all I wondered what his wife looked like. He had an eye for the girls, I remembered. In those days the fashion was for them to wear their skirts very short. The girls left home with knee length skirts but by the time they got to school they had rolled the waist of their uniform high so that their skirts became mini and they allured teachers and boys alike with the beauty of their legs.            He could never take his eyes off them. He studied their legs (as we boys did too, but we were young) extremely assiduously, in fact even more carefully than I studied the legs and breasts of the pretty young teacher in the French class. I thought, as did the girls, that he was a bit of a dirty old man but a fine teacher for all that. Although at that age boys like me are not noted for their observation, even I could see his eyes light on the pretty face of a young teenage girl, study it, move down to examine her breasts and then her thighs, all without breaking his exposition about verbs or grammar or whatever was the subject of the day. He never touched them, never patted their heads or put his arm around their shoulders as some teachers did in those politically incorrect days. But it was clear that he liked the ladies.

            He took it personally if a pretty girl gave up the subject he was teaching in favour of some other teacher’s subject. I think that he wanted them around for scenery, in some strange way. Now, I, like most men, know all about looking at the ladies. We spend most of our time doing this and the ladies spend nearly as much time making themselves fit to look at.

            For some reason, this made me wonder about his wife. She never came to school functions. I never saw her. What did she look like? I wondered if a man who liked the ladies so much had married a very beautiful one. I thought that he must have found a very special wife. Someone told me that his wife had come from Geneva and that she was pretty and petite so as the coffin was carried in I looked out for who she might be in the procession that followed it. There were four people of my generation – his children and in laws I guessed, and several of his generation. They stepped behind the coffin and filed to the front pew.

            After some of the usual ceremonial nonsense, one of the younger family members stepped into the pulpit to address us.

            “I am honoured to be able to talk at Paul’s funeral”, he said, “although of course deeply sad.”

His next words were the usual stuff about celebrating Paul’s life rather than mourning his death. I slumped back in my pew, ready to be bored but his next sentence was the stuff of dreams, strange dreams.

 “I should say straight away,” the chap was a good clear speaker, “that Paul’s wife, Yvonne, would have come here today; she wanted to come here today, as she made clear to me, personally, but she had to look after the grandchildren, so she could not come. She specifically told me that she feels no bitterness and to make that clear to you all.”

“Shit, I thought, I still won’t see what his wife looks like.”

“Today, our thoughts have to be with Paul’s loved ones, his daughters, his grandchildren and of course his partner, George.”

And then I saw. In the front pew I saw an old bald weeping man, slightly crumpled in his clothes. Paul, who had spent his teaching life examining young ladies, had after years of study, converted. He left behind a partner, George. He spent the last years of his life with another old man. Perhaps the studies of the teacher had drawn him to a particular conclusion. Now I could never look at his wife.

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