Alice

Last time we argued, something inside me broke. I don't know what it was, but I know it hurt when it broke, and it made me do something really stupid.

I proved you wrong.

I took the photograph album out of the cupboard you keep it in, stood neatly alongside the notebook that holds the autographs of all your university friends, and the calendar from 2006, the year we met. You'd ringed the day you first saw me, standing drenched in the rain waiting for the lightning to find me: June 17. I opened the album, turned the pages and found the picture. Then I showed you the picture, and that proved that you were wrong.

I keep dreaming of it, over and over again, and it never changes. In my dream though, you sit next to me on the couch, and open the photograph album yourself, and turn the pages for me. Each page turns so slowly, and I'm desperately trying to stop you, to hold the pages down or close the album or throw it away from us, but I can't move. As we get closer to the page that matters I go cold and I find it hard to breathe, and then you turn the page once more, and I wake up.

And in the mirror across the room from me, I see your eyes glittering with tears, and then you turn away and go again.

I lit a candle for you and left it in front of the mirror in case you changed your mind when you went back to the other side and can't find your way back. When I woke from that dream, you'd blown the candle out. I could smell your perfume.

I've tried a hundred different ways to say I'm sorry.

I'll try a hundred more.

Airs and Graces

"You look very smart," said Terry's mum, straightening my tie and flicking at some invisible speck of dust on my lapels. I was wearing my only suit, the one I'd last worn to a funeral, and it seemed rather more strained than smart to me, as it had clearly shrunk while hanging in the wardrobe. Terry, stood next me so that we formed an abbreviated police line-up, was also wearing a suit, but his looked as though it fit, and was very definitely smart. His expression suggested he'd rather be upstairs looking after the exchange student manacled to the bedroom wall however.
"Thank-you again for coming with me," said Terry's mum, "it's very good of you boys to give up an evening to chaperone me." Her eyes twinkled mischievously, and she turned in a swirl of silk and taffeta and picked her sequined handbag up from the kitchen table, and led the way out to the car.
"Do you think mum's overdone it a bit?" asked Terry in a low voice. "A bit of a... well, a painted jezebel?"
I dug him in the ribs and heard the fabric on my suit stretch warningly. "No, Terry," I whispered back. "And let her have her fun, it's a society ball. How often do we get invites to things like this?"
"Mum gets them all the time," he said, still sotto voce. "Normally she just sends something inappropriate back, like a Get Well Soon card."
I shrugged, and hurried forwards to hold the car door open for his mother.

The society ball was being held at Foxworth Hall, 'a stately pile' as Terry's mum described it, not far from Richmond. Terry was driving, and being chivvied on by his mum who felt that he wasn't being aggressive enough on the road. I'd found it funny until she'd grabbed the steering wheel to swerve the car close enough to a cyclist to force them off the road and into a ditch. She turned round in her seat to look at me, and said,
"One of those bastards nearly ran me down during the war!"
"That's a long time to hold a grudge, Mrs. M," I replied.
Terry drew up the gravelled drive too fast, with sprays of gravel flying out from under the wheels and onto the manicured lawns, and had to execute a hand-brake turn in the turning circle at the end of the drive. Gravel spattered against stained glass windows and antique brickwork, and Terry's mum giggled girlishly. A slightly startled looking footman in brick-red livery with gold and silver frogging approached the car cautiously, his hand held protectively in front of his face, and opened the door for Mrs. M. She got out, somehow contrived to take his arm, and marched him back up to the Hall and the grand entrance. Terry and I followed, a valet appearing from out of nowhere to take the keys and park the car somewhere out of sight.

The ball appeared to be in full swing when we entered; the room was full of elderly gentlemen and ladies of a certain demeanour. The tall, saturnine gentlemen at the doors announced us as "Mrs. Mossbrook and gigolos" which made me double over with laughter and Terry's jaw drop as far as his knees, and then we were in and expected to be socialising.
I worked my way slowly around the room; at the far end was a seven-piece band at the side of an inlaid dance-floor (to distinguish it from the expensive parquet of the main floor). A few couples were dancing slowly to a rhumba. Just far away enough from the band to be tempting but still out of reach were the long buffet tables laden with appetisers, and amuse-bouche. A couple of ice-sculptures slowly melted, and a couple of butter sculptures melted faster in the middle of the dishes. I laid some vol-au-vents and cocktail sausages on a small bone-china plate and used this an excuse to refuse to dance with anyone. After the buffet table was the bar, with a couple of red-liveried barmen mixing cocktails to order, and on the other side of the room were some small tables and high-backed chairs, mostly filled by the most elderly of the guests.

Terry appeared at my elbow, looking a little dishevelled.
"Have you seen mum anywhere?" he said.
I frowned, and scanned the room. I couldn't see her anywhere. "She was talking to the bloke with the walrus moustache," I said, and then pointed. "But he's over there now. And before that she was with a tall bloke with black trousers--"
Terry sighed, as most of the men there were wearing black trousers, and only a handful were noticeably short.
"Every time I see her," he said, "she's leaving the room with another bloke on her arm. I don't know what she's up to."
I almost asked him if it mattered, and then I realised that it might just, especially if we had to leave in a hurry.
"You look a bit scruffier than when you arrived," I said instead. Terry looked harried all of a sudden.
"Yes," he said. "This ghastly woman keeps pursuing me and trying to show me the guest bedrooms. Apparantly they're just through that door over there." He pointed, just as the door opened and Terry's mum came in, with a short, military man limping behind her.
"Good grief," said Terry.
"Quite!" I said. "Isn't that Viscount Finchley?"
"Oh dear gods, what is she up to?"
"I don't know," I said, watching as she abandoned the luckless Viscount and swept up another man, this one wearing a sparkling white jacket, "but unless I'm seeing things, she's just managed to pick up Lord Fullhame."
The crowd moved and swirled like smoke in a gentle breeze and Terry's mum and the Lord disappeared from our view again. Terry suddenly looked panicked and managed to disappear himself, and a tall woman that made me think of a Great Dane strode past me with a determined set to her jaw. I smiled to myself, and wandered back to the bar for another Pink Lady.

"Nobody is to leave this room!" announced a stentorian voice suddenly, and a Rottweiler the size of a sheep pushed past me and raced to the buffet table. At the entrance to the hall stood a tall man wearing a police uniform, with a shorter, attractive woman at his side.
"Miss Flava will be taking your details from you, and no-one will be leaving until they have spoken to her."
The man was clearly Inspector Playfair, but what on earth was he doing here?

The room erupted into motion, with ladies screaming genteely and fainting wherever they could be sure of being caught. Some of the men were clearly more worried about the presence of the police, and so more than a couple of the ladies ended up on the floor, their saviours having already headed for the bedrooms and the toilets to lose the incriminating evidence.
"There's a bear at the buffet table," brayed a young man with Oscar Wilde hair, pointing at the Rottweiler.
"A bear? Where?" yelled an older man with a silver goatee and a slight shake that made me think he had Parkinson's. "Fetch me my gun, there's ladies in the room!"
"Anyone who shoots Calamity will be answering to me!" shouted Playfair, but only the people closest to him could hear him over the noise. Meanwhile, silver goatee had found a couple of kebab skewers and a toasting fork on the buffet table and was arming himself ready to tackle the dog.
Miss Flava stalked across the parquet floor, her three-inch stiletto heels stabbing down into the wood leaving expensive holes, and seized silver goatee by his neck and pinned him against an ice sculpture.

"Time to go, dear," said Terry's mum at my elbow. "There's a back way out, through the butler's pantry."
We hustled through, Terry's mum in front of me, pushing Terry along, having found him somehow as we crossed the ballroom, and found ourselves in the gravelled car park at the back of the hall.
"What the hell?" I managed as we piled into the car, and Terry started it.
"Oh, it's like that every year," said Terry's mum happily. "But I think I've had my fill of Heirs and Graces now."
Terry drove off, and I pretended I couldn't see the tears in his eyes.

Silent Spring

Thirty years ago
The workshop is long and narrow, each wall lined with benches, which are covered with body-shells, boxes of gears of various sizes, springs, screws, and much smaller boxes of tiny gemstones. Tools, sized perhaps for children, are gathered together in soft leather pouches, each held separate from its neighbours so that they don't damage each other. There are anglepoise lamps at regular intervals along the benches, and natural light comes into the room through skylights. There are no windows in the walls, instead there are corkboards mounted on which are pinned schematics, delivery invoices, and other paperwork. There is a metallic smell in the air that you can taste if you spend long enough in the room, with notes of old wood and hot oil forming a background.

At one of the benches sits a young man wearing a long white button-up coat with no collar over a grey shirt and matching trousers. A nearby lamp is angled over the part of the bench where he is working, and its bright, actinic light casts his face into harsh relief. He is using the tiny tools to bend and hammer a strip of glistening bronze into shape, making a repair to the body-shell just in front of him. This shell is that of a turtle, its eyes glinting rubies and its open body revealing detailed clockwork within. Surprisingly the clockwork is functioning, springs winding and unwinding against each other, gears whirring and ratchets ticking away counting time in a steady, if alien, chronology.

Another man comes into the workshop from a door at the far end which leads out to the shop. He is older, his hair is white at the temples and the sides, and there are deep lines etched into his face. He too wears a white, collarless, button-up coat, but there is no clue as to what he wears beneath it. As he walks the length of the workshop to his apprentice, the clockwork in the turtle sudden stops, and the only sound in the workshop now are his footsteps.

The apprentice turns and looks at the older man, his face pale with shock, and the hand holding the tiny pliers shaking.
"I never-" he begins, but the older man shakes his head and the apprentice shuts up.

"You didn't," says the older man. "Mr. Ethward was struck by a falling tree this morning and has been with the doctor since. It is no fault of yours."

The apprentice starts to put the pliers down, the relief on his face as visible as his nose, but the master stops him.

"You must still complete the repairs," he says. "Burying Mr. Ethward without that would be like taking out his organs and burying his without them."


Twenty-four years ago
The workshop has not changed much in six years, but the apprentice is now a journeyman, and has in front of him on his bench his first commissioned piece. A clockwork raccoon crouches, waiting to be started. Small yellow gemstones create the eyes of the raccoon, and a line of even smaller gemstones run down its belly and catch the light oddly, seeming almost to flicker independently of where the light is. A tiny hole in the back of the head is where the key would go to wind the clockwork, but there is no sign on the key.

Footsteps again, and the master walks up the workshop carrying an infant in his arms. When he reaches the bench, he gently pulls the child's arm up and holds out its hand, and the journeyman quickly pricks the child's finger with a bradawl kept sharp for just this purpose. The child is too startled to cry at first, and the droplet of blood that wells up is quickly wiped over the keyhole of the raccoon. As the child starts crying, the clockwork inside the raccoon starts ticking, and the raccoon turns its head, almost as if it trying to look at the child.

The journeyman picks the raccoon up and places it on the child's chest, who stops crying and seizes it in both hands. The master turns to leave with both child and artefact, but the journeyman asks a question:
"When will I learn how to make the keys?"

"When the need is greatest," replies the master, and walks away.


Fourteen years ago
The journeyman, a talented craftsman now, has been away from the workshop for four days exhibiting the clockwork that the workshop produces at a regional fair, and now he returns. He enters the shop, which is locked and quiet at this early hour of the morning, and walks through past shelves of clockwork. All that is sold in the shop are toys for children, and the occasional labour-saving gadget for busy people, though these are most often commissioned. He goes into the workshop, and stops still in the doorway. A bird, disturbed, flutters noisily up through an open skylight.

His master is slumped across a bench, unmoving, with his neck at an unnatural angle. When the journeyman can bring himself to approach, he checks for a pulse, but the coldness of the skin tells him before he has given up trying to find one that the master is dead. A little way along the bench is the master's clockwork familiar, an elaborately beautiful dragonfly, and held loosely in his dead hand, is the key to the winding mechanism.

The journeyman's hand tremble as he fits the key into the dragonfly and turns it. The mechanism is smooth and turns easily as though it had been made and oiled only yesterday. When the key has made its fourth turn the dragonfly quivers and the clockwork starts ticking.

"Every craftsman must see this for themselves," says a voice, and the journeyman turns, knowing the voice as that of the master. The master is sat up again, pushed now away from the bench. His face is almost as the journeyman remembers it, but his eyes have been pecked out by the bird that fled when the journeyman entered. Foetor spills from the master's mouth, and the journeyman knows that he has probably been dead since he left.

"This is why the key is only made when there is great need," says the master. "This is not a life for the living, this is only undeath. The mind rots away, and though the key will animate whatever remains, it will not last long, and it will be a most imperfect tool."

The dragonfly shudders and the clockwork stops, and the master's corpse falls heavily back to the bench. The journeyman takes the key from the dragonfly and locks it in the safe beneath his workbench. He knows that he has been granted mastership, but somehow it is not the joyous occasion he had hoped it would be.


Yesterday
The master looks up as a short woman enters his shop and smiles at him broadly. Her teeth are mostly yellow, though a few are black and possibly rotting.

"I want you to make a clockwork penguin," she says. "One of the special ones."

Pyramid schemes

The horse's head arrived in a large, plastic-lined cardboard box labelled Corsican Confections. I opened the box, and discovered to my relief that it had been refridgerated for the journey and so was still fresh, if a little cold. I patted it once, feeling a little sentimental. I'd bought the horse only a few months ago for my youngest daughter to learn to ride on, and now her lessons would be interrupted until the insurance came through and paid for a new one. However, business was business, and even family couldn't be allowed to get in the way of that. I picked it up out of the box, slightly surprised at just how heavy it was, and tucked it into my second son's bed.

In a way I'd started off the whole chain of events myself by leaving the kids with Shark Timmy for the evening so that I could pop down to the dog track to do a little doping and make a little cash. The kids are fond of Timmy, who they call 'Uncle Spacker' for reasons I've not bothered to go into, so I figured they'd be safe enough. Only while I was watching Gracie's Favour and I can't believe it's a whippet stagger round Wimbledon dog track Timmy took it on himself to tell the kids all about pyramid schemes and how they make money.

The first I found out about this is when I overheard the neighbours laughing because the kids had been round trying to sell them a pyramid. I laughed a little myself and made a note of their names; I'd send the boys round a little bit later to put the mockers on their mockery. And I thought nothing of it, just youthful exuberance and hijinks.

Three days later I noticed that there was a twenty-five foot high pyramid in the back garden of the house three doors to the left. I was surprised that they kids had made a sale, all the more so because it took up pretty much all of the garden.

It turned out that the kids had hit on a real way to make money from their pyramid scheme: they were installing the pyramid overnight and then charging to dismantle it and take it away again. Not a bad little racket, if a touch unsophisticated in its approach. And it probably would have worked rather well if a rainstorm a couple of mornings ago hadn't inconveniently revealed that they'd fashioned the pyramid 'stones' out of cardboard and pretty much melted their pyramid into a soggy mess.

The neighbours complained, and I found it convenient to pay them to keep quiet. But business is business, even when it's family business, so I passed the debt onto the kids. So far they've not paid up, so this horse's head is a little reminder that a debt must be serviced. I have an idea that the kids are putting the thumbscrews on Uncle Spacker, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that works out.

Import, Export II

It's been a busy few months, what with the tax year ending and have to sort out the rebate we'll be getting this year from the IRS. Thanks to the financial wizardry of my accountant this is the third year we'll have received money back from the government instead of having to pay any to them, but I know it can't last forever. I've got my contingency plans in place, and although my accountant thinks he's going to drop me in it and skip the country to South America, I know better than him. But it's business, and that's all part of the fun.

We had a bit of scare earlier in the week though when a clockwork penguin waddled into the loading yard and stood there, rocking from one webbed foot to the other, buzzing and clicking to itself. I immediately suspected that one of the zoos we'd been shipping 'giraffes' to had sent me a warning message so I sent a kamikaze nun out to check it over for bombs. Neither of them exploded, and a routine EMP failed to disable it (although due to an accident of positioning we did fry all the electronics in a nearby tax office; I sent them a commiseratory bunch of dead daffodils). I have the penguin securely locked in a bomb-proof safe for the moment while I try to figure out what its purpose is.

My secretary is looking no better than last time I wrote, though I have now found out what the issue is -- she's been diagnosed with cancer of jaw. As I've said before, I can't afford to lose her really, so I've made provisions to assist her treatment, but so far it's not looking great. I did manage to catch her in the EMP when we checked the penguin out, but that doesn't seem to have helped.

Business is looking up though: we're processing low-level nuclear waste into luminous paint for childrens' toys and shipping the end product out to China, complete with the faulty Geiger counters that I picked up for a song at a recent 'auction.' Since we're getting paid for everything but the Geiger counters, we're turning a healthy profit there. We're using the same facility to irradiate food intended for nursing homes as well, which is even more profitable now we've worked out that we can cut the slaughter houses out of the loop by using sufficient irradiation! This has co-incidentally caused a drop in our line of boil-in-the-colostomy-bag pre-digested foods, but that's a job for sales and marketing now.

Things are looking up!

People like us

The kids were outside, lynching the goldfish. I was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for the Sunday roast, listening with interest as they tried, and failed, to drown it in the paddling pool. Finally the eldest, Jimmy, came in and tugged at a corner of my t-shirt.

"Daddy, can we have the toaster and the extension cord please?"

I sighed; although the toaster is only a cheap'n'nasty Tesco toaster, I'd only bought it a couple of weeks ago and thought that I'd a get a few more months out of it first. However, ransacking my mind quickly I couldn't think of anything electrical that we had that would be cheaper to replace, so I nodded.

Jimmy ran off to dig the extension cord out of the cupboard under the stairs, and I finished peeling the potatoes. I'd got them on the hob in a pan of just-boiling water when the power went off and I mentally kicked myself for forgetting that the kids would have used the first power socket they found, and so would have tripped all the fuses. I went out to the fusebox in the hall, and before resetting the switches, decided I'd better check that they weren't still playing with the toaster.

The kids had, in fact, got bored and run off over to the park to play kneecappings so I fished the toaster out of the paddling pool, unplugged it and dropped it in the bin. I looked at the pool, with Joey the Goldfish lying half in and half out of it, his arms and legs spasmed and his face blackened, and tsked to myself. If people were going to make promises to the kids they couldn't keep then they had to be prepared to take the consequences.

Notions of Convexity

When I was younger I was kept locked in a empty room for weeks on end. The walls were painted beige, and the floor was a soft, dark green, plastic-like substance that indented gently wherever I walked on it, and slowly returned back to it's original shape. At some point I started thing of the flatness of the floor as its normal form. Food was provided for me, and liquids to drink, but always while I was asleep. I saw no-one in all that time, heard nothing other than sounds I made myself, and had only my own thoughts to entertain me.

I worked out after a while how to create self-sustaining dimples in the floor. It wasn't perfectly elastic and would initially overshoot when trying to return to its original state, and I could use that to set up a cycle that would retain dimples for what felt like long periods of time. That allowed me to write, in a primitive fashion, and helped me put my thoughts together.

And slowly, my mind became more convex. I think it became star-shaped from the centre at first, and as my thoughts turned more and more on themselves, the set of all star-shaped points expanded. Because that set is necessarily convex, so my whole mind became convex.

There are odd things in my mind that I found there, that seemed to have always been hidden behind corners before. I wrote down how I'd found them using my floor notation so that I wouldn't forget, and then I came back to them as often as I dared.

The problem with convexity is that it's not the highest level notion. I soon found myself increasing the sophistication of the floor notation, and realised that my mind was becoming subharmonic. And the odd things I found in my mind no longer seemed so odd. When I successfully applied the maximum principle to myself, something inside me seemed to turn through 90 degrees in a direction I'd not seen before, but which had surely always been there, and then there were whole new things to look at.

I used the fork that came with my next meal to prick my fingertips and draw on the floor in my own blood. The design was found in part of my mind that now lived in that extra direction I'd found, and even as I drew it on the floor, parts of it seemed to move by themselves. When I was done there was something organic on the floor. I punched the obvious spot in the design, and the floor rippled, and kept on rippling, the energy for it being supplied from outside. And with the energy came something else.

My subharmonic mind stepped up another level and became plurisubharmonic at that point, and yet more unsuspected directions opened to me, and the something else that I had summoned took up residence in the new directions and helped me see things that hadn't been visible before. This time when the food came I was only feigning sleep. My captor, a woman wearing a pale grey veil, dropped the tray of food as I moved, but my helper had moved faster and was invisible to her, and she became physically completely convex very briefly, and then was no longer my captor.

But the world outside seems so limited and convex, and I long to find a way to enhance its dimensions and show everyone the potential that it has. My helper will then be able to bring its friends and families through to live in this world as well, which can only be good for all us. I am sure of that.

This whole world needs a new, convex, normal form.