“Gisshoo” he shouts, fixing me with a stare that threatens to root me to the spot. My eyes water, but I’m determined not to be forced into buying. Fortunately another pedestrian passes between us, and this breaks the spell sufficiently for me to engineer my escape.

I’m a bit earlier the next day, and though we pass one another on the way along Deansgate, he’s not on his patch and therefore not yet in gimlet-eyed, transfixing mode. In any case, he’s busy looking for spent fag ends on the pavement, and I hurry past with my head down.

The next day is Friday. As if he knows it’s pay-day, he’s even more threatening than ever. “Gisshoo” he bawls as I pass, making me jump. I avert my eyes, and I hear a “bah” of disgust behind me. My crisp tenners are burning a hole in my pocket, but I owe most of it to friends. It’s been a tough week.

He’s not there the whole of the following week, and I begin to worry. Maybe he’s ill; or perhaps been mugged. I reassure myself that perhaps he’s moved his patch somewhere else, where pickings are not quite so slim. My anxiety is tempered with relief at this possibility.

Then on Monday as I approach his patch, I see a dog sitting on a blanket. A sorry-looking dog, with mournful eyes but, I note with some satisfaction, not exactly skinny. I bend down to pat the dog’s head and it seems pleased. “Gisshoo” suddenly rings out in my ear, and I spin round, nearly falling over the dog, which growls at me. This diverts him so that he doesn’t notice my escape. Close, I think.

I go on a course for a couple of weeks, and the next time I’m hurrying up Deansgate the weather has turned colder and the dog is now wrapped in a sleeping bag, wearing a deerstalker hat with flaps that cover its ears. It looks embarrassed, but I feel comforted that someone cares enough to bother about its welfare, and that the dog is prepared to suffer the humiliation. I surreptitiously feel around in my pocket, but I’ve only got a one pound coin. Certainly not enough to buy a ‘Gisshoo’, and I don’t suppose he sells them in instalments. Maybe another time.

The next time I pass, I unwrap a couple of cold sausages meant for my lunch, and place them on the blanket in front of the dog. The man snatches them both up, sniffs them, and eats one himself, giving the other to the dog, who is drooling profusely.

Before long, I’m dropping a handful of biscuits that I’ve pinched from the bowl belonging to my neighbour’s dog. They’re bone-shaped, so the man doesn’t harbour any illusions about them being for humans and he just glares at me. “Gishoo lady” echoes along the street behind me, and I worry that having acknowledged my gender, we’ll probably be on first name terms before too long.

I know I’m going to have to give in. So the next day I extract a two pound coin from my purse whilst I’m on the bus, and slip it into my pocket. As I hurry up Deansgate I’m glowing with the warmth of my forthcoming benevolence, and the relief that I’m about to give in after all this time. Once I’ve bought one, I can pat and stroke the dog to my heart’s content. At least until the next “Gishoo” comes out.

He sees me approaching and fixes me with that penetrating stare. The dog halts mid-yawn and regards me with bated breath it seems. I feel in my pocket and grasp the coin.

“Gishoo” he shouts, practically in my face.

I hold out the coin with an embarrassed smile, and the dog looks up at his master cautiously, assessing the situation.

“Don’t worry about the magazine,” I say, suffused with self-satisfaction, “sell it on to someone else.”

I drop a couple of digestive biscuits on the rug and carry on up the street.

“Oi!” he bellows after me, “it’s two pounds fifty, tight-arse.”

-

Sandra Crook can write prolifically when the spirit moves her. She’d like to achieve the same effect with red wine; it’s cheaper and more readily available.

The Flash

All Elsie saw that day was a flash, and don’t ask her any more about it, because she doesn’t know. Flashes are blinding, and they knock you from the ground if they’re anywhere near as big as the flash that Elsie saw. So really, you’d probably know more than Elsie about anything else that happened that day, because Elsie was blinded on the floor.

Elsie was in the woods to begin with because she liked to go walking. Her parents, in those hours of desperation when they reported her missing to the police, pleaded help on the grounds that Elsie never went out by herself. Elsie was nine. She was playing in the garden the last time they saw her, disappeared in the blink of an eye. In a flash, as it happens, were the very words they used. But they soon retracted everything after Elsie came back. Elsie went walking by herself all the time. They were overreacting, all in a panic, especially what with that man lurking about. They couldn’t see the woods for the trees.

Elsie was knocked against a tree. That was how she got the bruising down her face. And that was why it took her so long to get home. The flash, of course, was over in an instant. But she was dizzy, so she sat there for a while, recovering, putting quite who Elsie was back together in her mind. Those marks on her wrists, well those were her parents’ doing. So relieved were they when she returned that they clung to her, refused to let go. Elsie was their favourite child, a little pixie of a thing, dark haired and cherry-cheeked. You’d have loved her just as passionately too.

Don’t mention anything at all about the man that walkers found a few months later in the woods. Their dog found him really, sniffed him out, covered over in a ditch with twigs and leaves. Identified by police as the Swynford Wanderer: a homeless man who’d arrived in the village half a year or so before, made a nuisance of himself hanging around the local school. It was decided not to make a big deal out of it. He was hidden there, yes, but who could know the ways of such a man? Probably he thought it would make a nice bed, and that was that, and though people felt bad for him, of course they did, they slept ever so slightly better at night with him gone.

Elsie’s very sensitive about that man. But you couldn’t blame her now, could you, just a child at the time, and something so terrible happening in her beloved woods. Also, because all the children knew him by sight. He used to lean over the wall during break time or lunch, grinning and chattering at them till spotted by a teacher and shooed away. Always worse in these situations when you know someone, however fleetingly. It was a wonder any of them could sleep.

Sleep was always difficult for Elsie from the day of the flash, but no point asking her about that. Nothing worse than hearing someone moaning on about the dark, lonely hours of the night. As it was, she suffered terrible night frights, creatures swimming wildly through the air towards her, hurtling her from her bed towards the light. Any form of light. But a flash would do that to you, wouldn’t it, knock you just a bit. Especially one as big and blinding as the one that Elsie saw.

Some would say that Elsie never left the woods that day. It’s true that she never married, never travelled, never made it far from the earthy grasp of Swynford’s trees. She lives there today, in one of those cabins in the forest’s heart. Drop by if you’re ever passing through. Ask her about her cats, or her collection of china animals, she likes to talk about that. By all means ask her about the weather, she could talk about the weather for days. Just don’t ask her about that flash, which came and then went, impossible to describe really, and then what would be the point? And that has always been that, and always will be too, as far as Elsie is concerned.

He flashed at me

The first thing he flashed was his smile. His teeth were white and even. His lips curled upwards. His moustache was golden. And when he turned his head away the shine on his long curved nose flashed in the sunlight.

On the second day he flashed his smile again and his nose and he shook his jacket sleeve upwards and flashed his gold Rolex wristwatch. “Look at the time,” he said. “It’s exactly tea time, and you are English. Let me invite you to tea at the coffee shop here. They do excellent scones with cream and jam.”

On the third day he flashed his smile, and his long curved nose, and his Rolex, and it was lunch-time and the next thing he flashed was an invitation to a restaurant, where we could eat outside and my dog would be happy.

And the invitation was for the fourth day, and the restaurant was lovely and it flashed too and so did his clothes.

On the fifth day he met me, it had become “as usual,” walking my dog towards the woods where no one can see if you don’t pick up after. But when my dog doodoo-ed, he flashed a shiny blue plastic bag out of his pocket and picked it up and carried it all the way to the next bin, and dropped it in, flashing his golden Rolex again and his smile.

On the sixth day he met me as I came out of the woods. “Let me show you my apartment,” he said. “I will make pancakes for you, the kind that are called crepes. I am very good at making them. And the brandy I pour over them will flash fire into our eyes.” And he flashed his teeth, and his nose and his Rolex, and I forgot I was wearing sensible shoes and the sensible tweed skirt and shapeless jumper which are my dog-walking clothes, and I said, “That will be lovely.” “Yes, that will be lovely,” he agreed. And his flat was at the edge of the Common with views all the way over it in a building that flashed at me in a conspicuously understated way. And in his living room the sunlight flowed through a collection of modern glassware and splashed many colours around the room. “How lovely,” I said. “Yes, aren’t they lovely,” he agreed. So were his crepes.

On the seventh day were walking in that part of the Common where you feel the whole world belongs only to you. No one in sight. No sounds but the birdsong. We were out at the time the light slowly leaves the sky, in late spring, when children are doing homework, and everyone else has gone home to cook or gone out to eat. Still, it was, and golden, and the tips of the trees and the tops of the grasses glinted golden-red. He flashed – no, not what you were thinking. He isn’t that kind of man. He flashed a diamond engagement ring, and turned it so that it caught the sunlight, and he asked me, now that we know each other a little, would I mind advising him, do I think it is it the kind his boyfriend would enjoy?

Our heads were close together as I inspected it. In the week we’d known each other the hairs of his golden moustache had grown a little longer and they glinted in the sunset and so did the stone. “How lovely,” I said. “Yes, isn’t it lovely,” he agreed. And he flashed his curved, even smile at me again.

-

Look out for a competition runner-up on Friday!

Daily you polished their flanks

smooth and narrow as organ pipes,

whistled into the salty shanks

that strained through your hands

like mist, grey air.

They wrote themselves nightly

onto the courses, the supple notes

of new songs – no pauses – while smoking

in the empty enclosure you hummed

old hymns, and ash

shone on the floor round your feet.

The twists of paper

in your pockets not betting slips

but prayers. Only the dogs knew

that it was for you they strived

to hone their lithe bodies

to nibs, needle-points, air -

you, who, singing,

sponged their quivering backs

and against whom

they became slack and calm

as in the van back to the kennels

you sang Thy coolness and Thy balm,

the dogs dreaming

of making marks on the tracks

like semi-quavers launching into flight

from their score, like a glimpse

into the muscular soaring

of the evermore.

I watched as the nurse escorted the tall, old man back to his bed, one supporting hand on his arm the other guiding him at the small of his back. This was the fifth time in an hour that he had had to be taken back. His bay was one of a block of six in the Canford ward at Barsetshire County Hospital; three beds down each side, his and mine the middle units opposite each other.

I said ‘old man’; well he was the spitting image of Methuselah, but probably only about eighty. His beard was a dull grey, dripping with greasy yellow streaks that flowed in long unkempt skeins down either side of his face to well below his chin. His brow was broad and furrowed by deep folds of dry skin, topped by a matting of thin unruly hair. His skin was a dark brown parchment crinkled and cracked and desiccated by age and weather. His staring eyes were deep pools of obsidian as featureless and dead as a shark’s, unblinking in the late afternoon sunshine that bathed his bed in light. His aquiline nose, from which tufts of white and grey hair now protruded, hinted that in his youth he would have been an imposing man. But now, as he fell as if in slow motion onto his bed, his thinness was of prisoner-of-war magnitude. He wore a hospital gown, that piece of unnatural apparel designed by a buffoon to steal the last vestiges of self-respect from the NHS’s unsuspecting patients, that had rode up revealing his long sticks of muscle-less legs. His rib-cage was trying to break out of the paper-thin skin that encased it uncomfortably, mottled and hairless. Apart from on his head and private parts his body was hairless as if some demon barber had shaved him clean from neck to toe.

The nurse tucked him in, admonishing him once again for his recalcitrance, and then pulled up the sides of the bed, horizontal metal bars that were to ensure he did not escape again, checking that the catches, if not padlocks, were secure, and left.

He lay there for some time before an exploratory at least size ten foot appeared from under the thin hospital blanket, the toes running up and down the bars as if they were lunar robots on a reconnaissance mission. A bony, knobbly ankle tried to lever the bars apart to no avail, then a hand, long, sinewy and pulsing with proud blue veins that stretched the calloused skin upwards, grabbed hold of a bar. The whole room seemed to shake as I watched, a voyeur peeking through a forbidden window, as he tested the locking mechanism. His head remained unmoving, his eyes, as if filled with Indian ink, seemed even blacker, uncomprehending, deadpan.

But this was just a ruse. The blankets slowly drifted off the bed revealing his semi-naked emaciated torso and legs (and his tackle) and his right leg began to move sinuously (and in another context might well have been sensually) up and down the side bars before going through between the top and middle bars. Then his hips moved upwards and followed his skinny leg which was in turn followed, naturally, by his body, head, arms and finally, simultaneously with the thud of his meagre frame hitting the floor, his remaining leg. A few bars of reggae music were all that was needed to complete the performance. He had limboed out of his bed with the agility of a Caribbean dancer.

He began to crawl round the end of his bed, a great shell-less hermit crab scuttling towards… freedom, somewhere west of the nurses’ station. As he passed I noticed that his eyes were now focused and sparkling, little flashes of light emanating like shards of mica in round black igneous stones, his chin jutting out and morphing his former features into those of an intrepid explorer. He remained on all fours, his gown nowhere particular, showing his wrinkled, shrunken back-side, his huge scrotum almost touching the floor, as he crawled into…the shapely black-stockinged calf of Matron’s left leg. She stood, a female Colossus, legs apart, hands on hips, with that special superior medical practitioners’ look on her otherwise handsome face.

‘And where do you think you are going to, Mr Moses?’ she said.

-

Adrian Ford is a superannuated sixty-something year old chap who loves writing and seeks to improve his skills.