There's a Woman with a Cactus Instead of a Head (1994)

After it had been written, I remember submitting this story to various magazines without success. Every editor claimed to like it but deemed it too weird. It eventually appeared in my limited edition chapbook The Skeleton of Contention. Since then it has only appeared in certain ebooks, such as THE MILLION WORD STORYBOOK. I hope to include it in a future print book.

There’s a woman with a cactus instead of a head. She has no children. She must be barren. Every morning I climb onto the bus and take the seat just behind her. I am forced to stare at the back of her head — her cactus, rather — and this annoys me. I am needled by it. I would like to curl my fingers into a fist and strike out at that woman. But I will do nothing of the kind. I would be pricked by more than just my conscience. My knuckles would sprout spines.

So I sit there and stare and dream of tequila and tortillas and sweat trickles down my brow. It is always too hot on the bus. Great clouds of steam drift down the aisle. It is difficult to perceive why anyone should want to catch such a bus and sometimes my own actions mystify me. But then I remember why I must catch this bus: it is because I must travel to work every morning. And why do I work? It is because I need money for the bus-fare.

My life is mundane and sour; this is true. But the bus-driver has a much harder time of it than I. Unlike his other passengers, he travels to work every day but never arrives. And then the following day he has another attempt. But all his attempts are as futile as each other. I have never seen his face. It is always bathed in steam. Truly this bus is more like a sauna than a bus; and there are too many windows. But pedestrians rarely peer in. So it does not really matter. Nothing matters.

When the bus arrives at my destination, I jump off with a sigh of relief and make my way to my place of work. To be honest, my place of work looks no different from any other place on the bus-route. The same old houses, crowded like starving toads around a lame bluebottle, with the same crumbling chimneys and the same coughing fits of dense black smoke. Even the people are the same: flat caps squashed down on heads as lumpy as a mug of mushy peas; curlers in blue-grey hair; whippets on strings, trailing behind in the air like kites; kitchen-sink dramatists and noir poets, pacing naturalist paving-slabs in a socio-realist manner, hand-rolled cigarettes cupped in grimy hands, with a left-wing nod at all.

The factory where I toil is a large, hollow rusty building, completely deserted save for a few pigeons and a three-legged dog who lives up in the foreman’s office and howls to be let out. How he came to be locked in the foreman’s office is a mystery to me. I can only guess that he fell through the ceiling while pacing the corroded roof in search of cats or the bones of long-dead roofers whose ladders collapsed behind them in the distant past. Possibly he fell out of an aeroplane or was fired from a cannon in some banned circus or other. Perhaps he was generated spontaneously from the piles of rotting reports and chits in the filing-cabinet. Almost certainly he sustains himself on chocolate bars from the automatic vending-machine, which dispenses one bar a day and has enough in reserve to last at least another decade.

In general appearance, the factory is identical to the one near my own house, which is also deserted. I wonder why I have to travel across half a city to work in this factory, when I might as easily stroll down to the one at the bottom of my road. But then again, I am not paid to be curious. I am paid to make chain. Note that I studiously avoid the plural here. I do not make chains, I make chain; a single continuous length that I have been adding to these past thirty years. This chain passes through a small hole in the wall and out into the grey day. Link by link, with my little hammer, I am binding the world.

Where the chain goes to is anyone’s guess. It stretches far away over the horizon; another cord to fool travellers who seek to escape this labyrinth called life. I once took the notion into my head to follow it, but I was perceptive enough to restrain myself. Wherever it leads to will be a place no different to the one from whence it came. A pointless quest. The maze has no real beginning and no real end. There are only the occasional picnic-areas to give the illusion of rest. I would rather hedge my bets. I will stay where I am and make chain.

Funnily enough, I am never at a loss for materials to make this chain. Through a hole in the opposite wall, a length of redundant chain trails into the factory. This chain stretches over the other horizon. I reel this chain in and remove the links and then add these links to the new chain. When I tug at the old chain, the new chain moves out into the world. This is a phenomenon I have yet to question. Indeed I will not question it. At lunchtime I sit and gnaw at my sandwiches. Every day my sandwiches are the same: anchovy and egg. I loathe anchovy and egg. Every day I make the same vow: if today’s sandwiches are anchovy and egg I will kill myself. This, I believe, will teach my wife a lesson. When I prise open the lid of my sandwich-box and spy the inevitable, I sigh and climb a nearby gantry. I am fully prepared to hurl myself into the rusty void below. But then I remember that it is I who make my sandwiches.

My wife, who does not speak to me, has never made anything for me in all the years of our marriage. And I have never made anything for her. We have what you might call a modern relationship. The reason that my wife does not speak to me is because she does not know how. She is an immigrant whose country of origin I have as yet been unable to ascertain. Her language is comprised entirely of the use of violent gestures and impulsive actions. Despite many hours spent at the local lending library I have not yet found a phrasebook that will enable me to communicate with her. Sometimes when I lie on the bed and watch her climbing the walls and ceiling, I wonder whether we are really right for each other. But she has nice legs.

I once contemplated having an affair with the woman who hands out my pay-packet every Friday. I have never actually seen this woman, but I know that she must exist. Otherwise who is it that leaves my pay-packet on my desk? Admittedly I never touch the thing; I have just enough money left in the bank to keep me going. My needs are simple. No, I leave the pay-packet where it is, in the hope that this woman will seek me out and demand to know why I have not picked it up. But she never does. It does not seem to concern her very much. Nonetheless, a new one is waiting for me every Friday, so she must worry about me to some extent at least. She is so considerate in this respect that she even tries to make the new pay-packet look identical to the old one, right down to the grimy thumbprint on one corner.

Something happened three decades ago, when I took that summer holiday in Luton. I cannot put my finger on what exactly, but I know that before that holiday I seemed to be happier. I had friends, colleagues, hobbies. When I returned, everything seemed subtly different. My house had shrunk to the size of a shed and was full of spades and other rusting garden tools. Also work had became a lonely place; completely deserted save for me, the pigeons and the three-legged dog. Even the journey to work had altered in some almost imperceptible way. Instead of boisterous workers and clamouring children, the bus seemed full of women with the heads of exotic plants. And suddenly I discovered that I had a wife.

I do not dwell on these matters too closely. I know my station in life. It is one of those small rural stops without so much as a waiting-room or a place to buy a cup of tea. But I am content. I work hard, eat a frugal tea of lettuce — there seems to be a great deal of wild lettuce in the vicinity of my house — and listen to the news on my portable radio. Sometimes a thought creeps into my head totally unlike any other that I have ever had. It whispers that my whole life has been founded on a mistake, a misunderstanding that occurred shortly after I returned from that fateful vacation.

That first morning back — always a disorienting experience — I had somehow forgotten the way to the nearest bus-stop. So I asked a passerby for directions. He smiled back at me and said: “Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three rights make a left!” I duly thanked him for this and set off. He must have been a very friendly man indeed, for as I walked away I could hear him laughing merrily behind me, obviously pleased that he had been able to assist another human being. I found the bus waiting for me, boarded it and sat down. And that was the very first time that I saw the woman with the cactus instead of a head.

But what if he had given me the wrong directions? This is the thought that occasionally troubles me. What if he had misheard me and had directed me not to the bus-stop but to the local greenhouse? This would explain why the bus is usually bathed in steam. I know that it is an absurd idea, but at least it proves that I have a vivid imagination. I wish there was someone I could share the joke with. My wife is always too busy spinning webs or eating flies. No matter. I will savour the jest alone. I will retire to bed and dream of tequila and tortillas. I will turn the thought over in my mind more slowly. It is too far-fetched to be worthy of serious consideration, but it continues to obsess me. At the very least, it would also explain why the real greenhouse is always full of shopping-bags and gossiping old ladies.

Degrees of Separation (2006)

This is another Borges-influenced story, very brief and another attempt at writing a tale in which the geometric shape of the plot absolutely determines the content. The shape is a loop but more than that, for the dimensions of the loop are reduced to zero through a series of consequences that contract the whole as they increase in number. As I have said many times before, I am an avid devotee of paradoxes. It appeared in my collection Bone Idle in the Charnel House, published by Hippocampus Press.

When the cigarette and glass of whisky were finished, all that was left was the knife. Clute turned it slowly in his hands as he sat in front of the mirror. Then he studied his reflection carefully. The face of a man planning revenge stared back at him. It was no different from the other faces he pulled on any random day.

He wanted to kill Bradman because of what Bradman had done. But to use this knife against that vague and terrible enemy would not be easy. Bradman was difficult to reach, living in a mansion protected by a high wall, guarded by huge dogs. Clute read the newspapers. Bradman had even posted armed guards on his grounds.

If Clute made a direct attempt on the life of Bradman he certainly would fail. He had no accomplices, no influence, no money or power. His vengeance would amount to nothing tangible. He had to seek some lateral method of scoring a strike against his adversary. Bradman’s family were no less secure than he. What next?

There was Frost, Bradman’s closest friend since childhood. Unlike Bradman, Frost travelled without bodyguards and lived in a house with a low wall and only one dog. But Frost was popular and rarely seen alone. How might Clute get close enough for the plunge? Again he probably would fail, his blade remaining thirsty.

Frost often went to the theatre to watch Cosimo perform. Cosimo was an accomplished singer and actor who was intimate with Frost but hardly aware of the existence of the less cultured Bradman. Ending the life of Cosimo would cause a deep wound in Frost, and if Frost was hurt, Bradman would also feel a measure of pain.

This was the answer! Clute reached for the newspaper on an adjacent table and flicked the pages until he found an advertisement for Cosimo’s latest play. The show began at nine the same evening. If Clute turned up early, he might be able to slip backstage and murderously encounter the actor in his own dressing room.

No, it was unlikely he would get past the doormen. They would grow suspicious and perform a search on him. The knife would be uncovered and the police summoned. Then opportunity for revenge against Bradman would become even less likely. Better to forget Cosimo. Clute remembered that Cosimo was connected to Kingsley.

Clute had read about it in the papers. The two men frequently went to restaurants together. In fact Kingsley taught Cosimo everything there was to know about fine wine and good food. All Clute had to do was book a table in the same place as Kingsley at the same time. Halfway through the meal, the deed could be done.

But what if Clute failed to kill Kingsley outright? Stabbing is not always effective. In a public place such as a restaurant, his time would be limited. If Kingsley recovered from his injuries, Cosimo would not be racked by grief, and so Frost could not be damaged in any way, and thus Bradman would not suffer at all.

Running the fleshy part of his thumb gently along the serrated edge of the blade and smiling slightly, Clute silently listed the restaurants frequented by Kingsley in order of excellence. The best was run by a man called Whitlam. A hole cut in Whitlam’s chest would be no less a hole in Kingsley’s life, an irreparable hole.

Yes, he would seek out Whitlam, perhaps in one of his kitchens, or better still during one of his frequent trips to the market to buy fresh produce. The glint of steel among the vegetables, the crash of trays of fish preserved in ice, and the chain reaction of vengeance would be set in motion, all the way to Bradman.

The problem with tackling Whitlam was that the man was an expert in the use of blades and always wore a knife or cleaver at his belt, even when shopping in public. Whitlam surely knew how to defend himself and strike back. Clute would be the one left dying among the tomatoes, his life blood a sauce on the cobbles.

Whitlam had once taught cooking at the local college. He had taught Malevich for a year and even announced Malevich as his star pupil. After Malevich abandoned the culinary arts and went into finance, Whitlam did not fail to keep in touch with his protege. Malevich was perfect for any sudden death, slow moving, trusting.

The big advantage of killing Malevich was that Clute knew him very well. In fact they were close friends. It would be simplicity itself to invite him back to this room on some pretext and then commit an act of righteous violence on the fat dupe. Clute nodded once. He picked up the telephone and dialled his number.

Malevich agreed to come within the hour. Clute simply told him that something important needed to transpire between them. He mentioned few details, only that it had something to do with Bradman, a person almost unknown to Malevich. Clute chuckled. He imagined the expressions on the sequence of faces, the transmitted pain.

Shortly before Malevich arrived, Clute suddenly remembered that new neighbours had moved into the apartment directly below him. They were a bothersome couple, extremely sensitive to the slightest noise. Malevich was a bear of a man. He would knock loudly on Clute’s door, roar out his greeting, stamp across the floorboards.

Long before Clute could force his knife into Malevich’s heart, the neighbours would be hurrying up the stairs to complain. There simply was too little time for the operation to be performed efficiently. Scowling, Clute abandoned his plan. His need for revenge must remain unsatisfied. Bradman had escaped without a scratch!

Or had he? Clute pursed his lips. Malevich had a friend that Clute could certainly assault. This friend would not even struggle or make an appreciable vocal fuss. He was the perfect victim! Bradman might shelter behind walls, dogs and bodyguards but here was a chink in his armour, a chink that soon would spurt crimson juice.

Clute almost felt pity for the poor defenceless Bradman as he moved quietly across his room to unlatch the door. Now Malevich would not have to knock before confronting the balancing scene of carnage. Returning to his chair and the wise mirror, Clute raised the knife and savagely drew it across his own unforgiven throat.

The Gunfight (2009)

This story was inspired by the ultra-brief tales of Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) which I was devouring at the time. Writers are always influenced by the authors they choose to read, but this influence is often subtle. Kharms' influence on me was forceful. His absurdist fables, violent, peculiar and funny, were supreme acts of aesthetic and political resistance against the totalitarianism of the era and place he lived in. Not having to face the difficulties and dangers he did, my own 'Kharmsic' style is perhaps less urgent and crisp than his, but nonetheless we can all acquire counter-intuitive insights from his methods. This following tale was published in my collection THE JUST NOT SO STORIES.

“The English are coming,” said Hopkins.

“Following us, they are,” confirmed Jones. He frowned and tapped his commander on the shoulder. “I thought you said we won the battle?”

“So I did,” responded Williams, “and so we have.”

“Then why are the English chasing us?”

Bullets zinged into the undergrowth on all sides. The moonlight streamed through holes in perforated leaves. The spores of shredded mushrooms floated.

“And firing at us!” squeaked the other Jones.

“Because we didn’t win the battle in the right way. Instead of winning it in the style of a victory, we won it in the style of a defeat,” explained Williams. “That’s why.”

“Daft, that is,” commented Hopkins.

The first Jones said, “If that’s the way it is, we’re done for. Here’s a bloody ravine with no way across.”

“Doomed, we are,” agreed Hopkins.

“Not at all, boyo. Look here!” cried Price.

“An abandoned cottage is what that seems to be,” said Williams, “and maybe we can knock on the door to see if anyone’s at home?”

“What fool would live in an abandoned cottage,” wondered the first Jones, “on the edge of a ravine?”

More bullets pinged around his head, striking sparks from the stone wall. He was about to speak again but Hopkins interrupted him:

“Maybe we can live there? At least until the English go away. What do you think about that?”

“Perfect place for a redoubt,” said Thomas.

“What’s a redoubt?” asked Price.

“Something that is doubted more than once,” ventured the other Jones, but Williams clucked his tongue and shook his head.

“Don’t be daft. A redoubt is a kind of stronghold or sanctuary.”

“That’s clever,” commented Thomas.

Bullets continued to whiz. Williams tried the front door and realised it was locked, but Hopkins noticed that a window was open. “Someone help me and I’ll climb through,” he said.

“That’s smart,” said the first Jones.

Hopkins stood on Price and clambered inside. “Dark in here. Come and join me. Hurry up!” he hissed. Williams sighed and said:

“Don’t be daft. Pull us through. Give me your hand.”

One at a time they were drawn into the interior of the deserted cottage. Williams groped with outstretched hands but the room was bare. Then he remembered his electric torch and turned it on. There were no furnishings of any sort but a broken lightbulb dangled from a cord in the middle of the ceiling.

Williams rummaged in the pocket of his jacket for a spare bootlace and used it to suspend his torch from the lightbulb cord. He had to ask for a volunteer to crouch down on all fours so he could stand on his back and reach. It was Thomas who finally agreed to do this. As Williams jumped down he said:

“A fine bloody pickle we’re in! We can’t retreat any further and if we make our last stand here, a few grenades chucked through the window will finish us all off. We’ve only gained a few minutes of safety, so we must counterattack!”

“Why don’t we just surrender?” asked the first Jones.

In the cone of dim light Williams displayed an ugly grin. “Don’t take prisoners, the English. Heard all about it from my dad. He told me what they were like. No quarter is what we can expect from them. Blot us out, they will! We have to go back out and take the fight to them. But we’ll prepare ourselves properly. Make ourselves immune to their bullets. I know a way of doing that!”

“Is it a magic dance?” asked Price.

“Daft, that is,” commented Thomas, but Williams spoke over him:

“Not a dance, no, because there's no such thing as magic. Science is the only way to make things work. My uncle went to college to learn medicine, he did, and he brought back lots of those oblong things called books. I remember them well. I was only a child but I knew how to read because my mam taught me. Uncle Dewi let me read his college books and I learned secrets from them. Such secrets!”

“That’s lucky,” said Hopkins.

Williams nodded. “One of the secrets I learned was called vaccination. Sounds like a magic word but it’s not, it’s a scientific word. It means curing a disease in advance by being infected with a weaker version of that disease. The body fights the weaker version and beats it and in the process develops the ability to take on and defeat the bigger disease. We can vaccinate ourselves against the English, see?”

“How will we do that?” blinked the second Jones.

Williams smiled faintly. “Listen carefully and tell me what kind of ammunition the English are using.”

The bullets continued to hiss and clang outside.

“I think it’s .45 calibre,” said Price.

“That’s correct. Fired from semi-automatic pistols. And now tell me what kind of cartridge we use in our own guns,” continued Williams.

“The size is .22, isn’t it?” answered Hopkins.

Williams nodded and reached for his holster. With a deft motion he drew out his pistol and waved it in front of his men. “The English have got the bigger ones. So we can vaccinate ourselves against them, but how can they vaccinate themselves against us? They would be daft to try. One shot of this for all of us and we’ll become immune to their bullets. Then we can go out and kill the lot of them. Easy when you know how…”

“That’s logical,” said Thomas without any conviction.

“Come on, form a queue. Not a request but an order. Want to beat them properly, don’t we? You first, Jones.”

“Not me!” cried the first Jones but Williams shot him anyway.

“Daft!” objected Hopkins but he also got a bullet in the face. So did Price, Thomas and the other Jones. Williams licked his lips. His men sprawled on the floor in ungainly postures. Blood trickled.

“A bit sore, I suppose,” he said sympathetically.

He waited a whole minute, then he frowned. “Come on, get up. We have to go out and face the English. No need to be scared, you’re immune now. What’s the matter? Having a rest first, are you? Fine, but don’t make it too long. Be here soon, the English will.”

His men still didn’t stir. Their eyes held a glazed look.

Williams sighed. “I’m going to vaccinate myself now and the moment I’ve had my shot, the time for resting is over. Serious, I am. You must be ready to leave when I’m done. Supposed to be fighting the English, we are. The bloody English. Do you hear me?”

He jammed the barrel into his open mouth and pulled the trigger. He fell down. His own blood poured out of his head and joined the spreading puddle on the floor. It might have been nice if that puddle had formed a significant Welsh shape, a red dragon perhaps, or a daffodil, or even a fully-grown leek, but it didn’t.

Cats’ Eyes (2012)

The very short story, commonly called a 'flash fiction', is one of the most enjoyable kinds to write. The challenge of creating a coherent narrative with an extremely limited number of words is amply rewarded by the opportunity to try out ideas, styles and approaches that may work better on a small scale than in a longer work. This tale just appeared in my head one day and I quickly wrote it down on a scrap of paper while sitting in a garden. It appears in More Than a Feline along with other cat-themed stories and poems.

We were on the right road. The presence of cats’ eyes told us that nothing had gone amiss, that no errors of navigation had been made. In the darkness of a remote rural region during a moonless night it was a comfort to know that this line of glass studs would reflect our headlights and be a most reliable guide to our ultimate destination.

     But something went wrong anyway. It was hard to explain why this should be so and I suspect I would decline the opportunity to know the reasons even if they were available. We must have taken an unintentional turning somewhere along our route. I said, “The cats’ eyes have gone,” and she nodded in the gloom and answered, “Dogs’ ears.”

     It was true. This new road clearly had different rules to the old. The reflective glass studs had been replaced by flexible triangles that echoed every sound our vehicle made, including the conversations we held inside it, and threw the audio signals back at us, horribly amplified. “Turn off at the next junction,” I advised and she did so.

     But this new road was even stranger and more disturbing and certainly of less practical use. Lips puckered at us and we tasted afresh the meals we had lately eaten. “Weasels’ mouths,” she said, her frown so deep that it changed the outline of her face in profile when I glanced at her. We found another road and became more than hopelessly lost.

     My nostrils were flooded with the bittersweet aromas of nostalgia, the pangs like vanilla, the regrets a new kind of smelling salts. “Aardvarks’ noses! Who builds these roads?” I muttered. Every muscle in my body was tense. She maintained a steady speed but we both knew that morning would never appear in time. We took another detour.

     This road was the most harrowing of all. Have you ever driven along a narrow country lane festooned with lemurs’ fingers? It is a tricky and ticklish challenge. We laugh in despair while the men who invent these things sit alone in uncarpeted mansions, a dead television in every room, counting and recounting their own senses.

Putting Things Off (2011)

This story forms one of a series featuring the character Thornton Excelsior. Most of the tales that comprise his complete adventures appear in the book THE LUNAR TICKLE. Thornton is not a traditional fictive character, and his stories are not bound by empirical logic but by the logic of wordplay and ideas-association. In fact it is better to say that there are many Thornton Excelsiors and they all have their own different paths in the multiverse. What follows is what happens to just one of his avatars, an avatar that comes to learn it is not really a single individual even in its own cosmos.

Suddenly, with one mighty bound, it was a dark and stormy night! Hold on a moment… How did that sentence end up in this story? I always pick clichés out of a text before I publish it with a special fork designed for the task. This one in fact: Ψ. Any isolated cliché that resists forking can be destroyed by reversing its polarity; but that’s easier said than done. More often than not, attempting to reverse the polarity of a cliché is like trying to get magma out of a heart…

Thornton Excelsior finally stabbed himself in the back once too often. Not with a fork but metaphorically. He has absolutely no loyalty to his future self, feels no empathy at all for the Thornton of tomorrow, his chronological successor, in the same way that his previous self, the Thornton of yesterday had no loyalty to the Thornton of today. He regards his future self as a being completely separate from himself, as little more than an unlovable neighbour.

This doesn’t mean that he ever bears him malice: he simply has no particular interest in that fellow’s welfare. “I don’t care about the man I’ll be tomorrow,” he would say, “and why should I? Does he care about me? Of course not!” And so he lived in a manner that might be regarded as reckless or irresponsible but which in truth was perfectly consistent with reason and logic. For we aren’t the same person tomorrow as we are today: this is real philosophy.

Everything about us that makes us what we are is mutable and transient. Our atoms, memories, location in spacetime: all are subject to constant change. Thornton Excelsior was no exception. But he acted in accordance with this insight, rather than simply acknowledging it as an intellectual fact that had nothing to do with his daily routine. Whenever he considered his situation in the world he realised it was the fault of a stranger, an unfriendly individual.

And that individual was his previous self, the Thornton of yesterday, who had unloaded onto him, the innocent Thornton of today, all the worries and responsibilities that he should have dealt with himself. Why should the Thornton of the present accept this burden? It was nothing to do with him. And so he too would pass it on: to the fellow in the following day who shared his name and identity but wasn’t really him, the Thornton of tomorrow, an unsuspecting fool.

In this manner, Thornton kept putting things off.

Unpaid bills, awkward confrontations, relationship problems: they were passed onto him from someone else, his earlier self, even though he never asked for them and didn’t want them. It was only fair that he, in turn, pass them on again, to his later self, also a separate individual. Otherwise he would be taking responsibility for issues that weren’t his. And the moment he did that, he would become a pushover, a fall guy or patsy for all the prior Thorntons.

And yet he knew that one day it would be impossible to pass the buck further. The very last Thornton in the sequence, the Thornton who was living through the final day of his life, wouldn’t have anyone else to unload the accumulated burden onto. He would be forced to sort it all out himself. Poor fellow! But why should the Thornton of today care about that? The Thornton of that final day didn’t care about him. Unreciprocated sympathy is degrading.

But something had gone wrong. It turned out that the Thornton of today was the last one after all: this was the final day of his life. He was dying rapidly. Extreme old age was the cause, and the stress of worrying about dealing with all the problems that had been put off until now made a tangible pain in his chest, a clenched fist that throbbed and burned inside him, a displaced hand of doom. Those other Thorntons were traitors, ganging up on him!

He considered his predicament frantically but carefully.

There was only one way for him to avoid the accumulated responsibility and that was to stay alive until the next day. It was almost eleven o’clock, one hour to midnight. If he could only survive those sixty odd minutes, his present self would be safe and free: the Thornton of tomorrow would have to deal with the crisis, not him. With grasping fingers he picked up the telephone and dialled the local hospital. “I need a doctor! Send him immediately to my sickbed!”

“No doctors are available at such short notice, unless…”

“I am a man of great wealth and dubious taste. I can pay millions, do you hear? Millions! But he must be an ethical doctor. Ethical. This is very important. Your best ethical doctor!”

“Very well. We will send him by powerful motorbike.”

And so they did, bless them.

The doctor arrived five minutes later; he pulled off his goggles and hastened to Thornton’s side, checking the dying man’s pulse, respiration, blood pressure and bank account. “Are you an ethical doctor?” mumbled Thornton during this process. “I once had dealings with two members of the medical profession, a pair of rogues, Vaughan and Frazer they were called, and they were most unethical. I don’t need the kind of attention doctors like that can offer me. What are you?”

The newcomer stood erect and saluted smartly. “I am Dr Heelsnap Pinktoes, the most ethical doctor this side of bashful modesty. No doctor in history has been quite so ethical.”

Thornton was satisfied. He explained his predicament and bewailed the landslide of tasks and responsibilities that had crashed down onto him from the past. Then he indicated the clock on the bedside table, uttered the words, “Until midnight!” and fell back exhausted on the pillows. Dr Pinktoes clucked his tongue, opened his medical bag and pulled out a contraption that resembled the collision of a thousand giant metal spiders. “Will that thing really prolong my life?” rasped Thornton.

“Prolong your life?” Dr Pinktoes was bewildered. “I don’t know anything about such matters. I don’t deal with health but with ethics. I’m an ethical doctor, which is what you asked for.”

“Yes, but…” Thornton was too weak to protest properly.

Dr Pinktoes lowered the contraption onto his patient’s bare chest. It adhered there, held firm by some strong electromagnetic or gravitational field. The multiple mechanical arms uncurled: they were extendable tentacles. A control was adjusted and the device hummed.

“The circuitry has been attuned to the frequency of your soul. These arms are operated by thought alone. Use them wisely.”

“But my health…” wheezed Thornton.

Dr Pinktoes answered primly, “I am not here to fix your health but to cure your ethics. I am an ethical doctor. There is no time to lose: you know what needs to be done. I suggest you do it.”

Thornton grimaced. Then he made a decision. The arms waved like the legs of an inverted beetle. Suddenly they speared through the open window, diverged out into the world, reached over houses, snaked out of the city and over the moors and oceans to other cities, entered rooms and offices. They paid unpaid bills, soothed mistreated girlfriends, cleaned dirty dishes in sinks, picked up dropped litter, wrote letters to neglected friends. An entire lifetime of deferred tasks. And then—

The clock struck midnight. Thornton Excelsior was dead.

Thirty thousand previous Thorntons, one for each day of his life, stared hard from the past at this moment. Then they pointed at the corpse and laughed, billowing the mists of time.

“I can’t believe he fell for it. What a loser!”

The Mouth of Hell (2013)

This story appeared in my collection MIRRORS IN THE DELUGE published by Elsewhen Press in 2015. The title was 'borrowed' from a David I Masson fiction, although the plots of the tales are different in every way. Stories of doomed expeditions have been a favourite of mine for many years. This particular adventure is on a more domestic scale, though no less dangerous for that.

On the evening of the Summer Solstice the brave explorers finally set off on the expedition that had been planned for so long by the university. When I say ‘so long’ I am referring to a subjective feeling they shared rather than any precise measurement of time. Anxiety had made the days seem long and unbearable but now the dramatic moment had arrived.

The longest day of the year had been chosen because there was less night and this was regarded as a comforting fact by most members of the team. Not that any moonlight would penetrate far into where they intended to delve. The date was purely of psychological benefit, for they were still human beings with the superstitious instincts of their ancestors.

I say ‘they’ but in fact I was also part of the expedition. However my role was to stay behind and wait for their return, so I barely consider myself to have made a real contribution to the mission.

Collins, Fumble, Rigby, Lister, Ripple, Masson and Blister were their names. Seven heroes willing to risk everything in order to add just a little to the universal store of knowledge that belongs to us all. I admired them then and I admire them even more now. And I recall with acute feelings of bitter nostalgia the last sunset they ever saw as it reddened their faces in a cosmic blush on the steps of the university we all worked for.

Then we walked slowly out of the town and over the landscape and soon the entrance of the mystery loomed ahead. This was the portal of fame or doom, depending on what destiny decided, but I do not believe in fate and it seemed of no great menace to me as I approached.

We stopped before it and made final preparations.

The idea had originally been to tether the explorers securely so they could be hauled back out in the event of an emergency, but unmanned probes that had already been sent in indicated that ropes would snag on the superabundance of objects that crammed the enigmatic space.

None of the probes had returned, by the way, but they were designed for a one way trip, so this fact did not worry us. Farewells were brief and every team member shook solemn hands with every other, Collins with Fumble, Rigby with Lister, Ripple with Masson, Blister with me, and so on. The explorers were equipped with food to last several months.

“Switch on your torches please!” cried Collins.

The group had no official leader but I guess someone had to give orders at certain points during the perilous mission. Beams of powerful but oddly unconvincing light appeared to emanate from every hand and a complex mesh of insubstantial girders was suddenly created. Then the beams swivelled to point in one direction only, namely into the mouth of the anomaly.

“Good luck!” I called to them, wiping away a tear.

“Don’t cry in public!” someone said.

I stiffened to attention, but who was there to witness my dishonour? What shame is there in weeping anyway? My tears glinted very faintly in the starlight and only the moths knew anything. They fluttered past and tickled my ears and the powdery sensation of their wings on my lobes made me sob harder but with an unhealthy and involuntary mirth. And then—

They were gone. Not the moths but the explorers.

They had entered the object.

I did everything that was required of me. I sat on a portable camping chair and boiled milk for hot chocolate on a little gas stove. I twiddled my thumbs. In the morning I began reading the first of the books I had brought with me. That is how I passed the time. Every so often a university official would come to check but I never had anything to report.

No journalists ever arrived to interview me.

The story simply had no value for them at this stage. Only if the explorers returned blinking, arms loaded with mementoes, from that undoubtedly hellish region, would the press care about the mission. And they never came back out. That is the thing that needs to be stressed.

None of them ever emerged. The days and weeks became months and the months eventually joined hands into a year.

The funding ran out at that instant. I was required to stand up and fold the chair and take it back to the university. Everything felt heavy, especially a vague feeling of guilt I had, and I walked as if through molten lipstick, wearily and in despair of my shoes. The town seemed unfamiliar to me when I reached it and I entered the campus grounds like a stranger.

Collins, Fumble, Rigby, Lister, Ripple, Masson and Blister already were statues on the steps leading to the main entrance. Skilled masons had been busy in that year of etiolated ambitions. And I had a statue too, but it was of a pigeon with my face perched on the head of Collins, who somehow had posthumously acquired the status of leader. I shuddered.

Nothing was ever the same after that. I started drinking. Not to excess but to a lack of success, which is nearly as bad, and now I am here, in this bar, and you are the first journalist to care about my story. I know I met you by accident here, that you didn’t seek me out, that we started talking randomly, but at least I have had a belated opportunity to tell the tale.

The journalist in question frowns and drains his brandy. His frown is imperfectly symmetrical. “A handbag!”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“How extraordinary! Lost inside a handbag!”

“Indeed. It is terrible.”

“They were your colleagues?”

“Yes and my friends.”

“Were they little men? I mean, to fit inside a handbag they surely must be tiny figures as small as thumbs.”

“They were of normal size. I knew them well.”

“In that case, the handbag must have belonged to a giantess! Was it an enormous example of the type?”

“It was a perfectly ordinary handbag.”

“I don’t understand...”

“What is there to understand? It was a woman’s handbag, no more or less, and they were men! And they will never return, never, and who knows what they are doing in there? Who outside can guess what inexplicable things they have found and are still finding? A woman’s handbag! Now you must go away and leave me alone. I will say it one last time. They were ordinary sized men and the handbag was a typical handbag. They were men like me. That’s all you need to know. The conversation is over.”

He departs and I finish my whisky. Then I too get up and leave the bar and walk home along the dark streets.

And just in case the events of this true story seem no more than a jest based on chauvinism, let me put your mind at rest by declaring that before I reach my front door, both suspender buttons spontaneously pop and my black silk stockings slide down around my ankles.

Less is More (2001)

The work of Jorge Luis Borges has been a profound influence on my taste in literature and indeed on my thinking in many other areas too. He is, in my view, the most important writer of the 20th Century, one who changed the focus of what fiction could be about and opened up the landscape of the imagination to deeper and more startling feats of cerebral exploration than had hitherto been possible. Enormously inventive and unpredictable, yet logically rigorous, his work is enormously influential; but very few writers have been successful in attempting to emulate his approach. Of my own 'Borgesian' stories this is one I am especially pleased with. It was published in my collection, STORIES FROM A LOST ANTHOLOGY.

Private empires are a luxury of the past, but Belperron was determined that he should have one too. Every night since moving into his isolated house beyond Gualeguaychú, he dreamed of his previous lives. He had been a hero in every incarnation, fighting in battles from the dawn of recorded history to a time just before his birth. It was clear he was destined for greatness. But he wished to surpass these earlier exploits. He imagined a domain with his name stretching from the Pampas to the Serra do Mar. To achieve this he needed to rely on his own myriad initiatives and innumerable muscles. He planned to summon his other selves into the present. They would serve him, for he was them, the next step in their mystical evolution. He had read enough on the subject to know that the law of karma is logical and progressive. They had led marvellous lives and so he had been reborn as the finest of all. His present incarnation must be the highest self he had ever attained.

His house was large and lonely with many rooms. He planned his campaign in a chair on the patio. An army made up of all the heroes he had ever been would march right across Uruguay to Rio Grande do Sul, seizing every town on the way and establishing garrisons there. Once he reached the sea he would turn back. He would fix his capital in Artigas or Quaraí at the centre of his kingdom. It would be interesting to inspect his troops in chronological order. Any man who died in battle would have a memorial in the grateful bones of his successor. The situation would be strange. And yet Belperron believed the philosophical difficulties might take care of themselves. He was a man of action and preferred dangers to doubts. He owned a long knife with a wavy blade which he liked to toss in the air and catch by the handle. This was just a method of killing time before he could employ his talent for aggression in real combat. When he cut his hand, he never bandaged the wound.

He knew a man in Montevideo who was a dealer in rare books. He wrote a letter to this friend, reminding him of a favour owed, a trivial matter concerned with a false passport. Herr Otto Linde had contacts in India who in turn knew of obscure manuscripts in temples in Bali. Within a year, Belperron had the secret in his possession. He opened the parcel with his long blade and held the parchment in his scarred hands. He had already taught himself the tongue of the Majapahit scholars. Because he did not want unexpected visitors, he locked every window and door in his house. Even out here, an occasional rider might pass and decide to beg a cup of yerba mate or spoonful of dulce de leche. Belperron washed his face before conducting the difficult ritual. He was quick to learn secrets and mysteries. His sharp mind and talent for business were rewards for so many generations of heroic life, the product of centuries of good karma, accumulated through past deeds.

But the riches he had already won, and those he had spent buying this vast house, were nothing compared with what awaited him. Thoughts of his empire swam in the candlelight before him, washed on the tides of flickering orange as he spoke the ancient words over the flames. The spell was done. His cleverness and determination had pulled all his other incarnations from their own ages into his present. He had focussed the broad waveband of his cosmic soul to a point no larger or longer than his house. There was a sound of inverse thunder. The hundred empty rooms were now full. The displaced air rushed through the keyholes and chinks in the walls. The candles extinguished themselves. Belperron stood, but he did not need to move to understand his fatal mistake. It was all around. It pressed tightly against him from every direction. He cursed Herr Otto Linde and all books and empires, but there was too little free air to carry his words. Soft bodies absorbed the sounds, even as they made their own noises. And most were not men.

The spell which lurked in the crumbling manuscripts was less specific than he had assumed. Once chanted correctly, it summoned to one place and time all the incarnations of the operator. Not merely those of the past but also every future self. Possibly it was a sin to conduct the ritual. More likely Belperron's crime was his ambition, his desire to create a private empire. The brutality of this scheme was so great, its evil so deep, that it negated all his previous good karma. It returned his soul to the bottom of the evolutionary mound. His next incarnation, the one destined after his death, was far below the merely human. And all the subsequent incarnations were gradual improvements on this lowest being, a slow return to the long climb back to fish, reptile, dog, ape, barbarian. Recorded history is not so very old. All the past heroes he had ever been were with him in the house, but so were all the base creatures he would become. There were only several hundred of the former, but millions, even billions, of the latter.

The future of Belperron was longer than his past. But only for his soul, not his current body. During the hour which followed the successful implementation of the spell, the past heroes who formed his invincible army were devoured, stung, bitten, strangled or crushed to a second death by the enormous variety of beasts also present. There was no escape. The exits were locked. A rider who passed the house saw it shake on its foundations and assumed he was witnessing a tremor. He did not pause. The shadow of a crocodile passed across an upper window. The wicks were out and smoking, so this hideous profile must have been cast by a more surprising source of light, a knot of fireflies or glow-worms. Much later, when looters came to raid the house, they found only a jumble of rotting carcasses in peculiar combinations. The stench of millennia chased them out. Belperron himself had died of the plague. A single germ had entered his bloodstream and multiplied. It was an almost infinitely debased version of himself.

Three Friends (1993)

This simple little story was dashed off very quickly in an idle hour but has since been published in many different places and several languages. It now forms one of the sixty linked stories to be found in my book TALLEST STORIES and it was turned into a play in Finland.

The three friends were mountain climbers who had trekked to the roof of the world. They had encountered many dangers on the way and each had taken it in turns to plunge down a crevasse. Bound together by ropes as well as friendship, it seemed they had all escaped death by the narrowest of margins. One by one, they had praised their luck and had agreed that teamwork was wonderful.

     After the end of one particularly difficult day, as the crimson sun impaled itself on the needle peaks of the horizon, the three friends set up their tent on a narrow ledge. The first friend, who had survived the first crevasse, boiled tea on his portable stove and lit his pipe. Stretching his legs out as far as the ledge would allow, he blew a smoke ring and said:

     “The wind whistles past this mountain like the voice of a ghost, shrill as dead leaves. The icy rock feels like the hand of a very aged corpse. Those lonely clouds far away have taken the form of winged demons. Everything reminds me of the region beyond the grave. I suggest that we all tell ghost stories, to pass the time. I’ll go first, if you like.”

     Huddling closer to the stove, the first friend peered at the other two with eyes like black sequins. “This happened to me a long time ago. I was climbing in Austria and had rented a small hunting lodge high in the mountains. Unfortunately, I managed to break my leg on my very first climb and had to rest in the lodge until a doctor could be summoned. Because of a freak snowstorm that same evening, it turned out that I was stuck there for a whole week. The lodge had only one bed. My guide, a local climber, slept on the floor.

     “Every night, as my fever grew worse, I would ask my guide to fetch me a drink of water from the well outside the lodge. He always seemed reluctant to do this, but would eventually return with a jug of red wine. I was far too delirious to wonder at this and always drank the contents right down. At the end of the week, when my fever broke, I asked him why he gave me wine rather than water from the well. Shuddering, he replied that the ‘wine’ had come from the well. I afterwards learned that the original owner of the lodge had cut his wife’s throat and had disposed of her body in the obvious way…”

     The first friend shrugged and admitted that his was a very inconclusive sort of ghost tale, but insisted that it was true nonetheless. He sucked on his pipe and poured three mugs of tea. Far below, the last avalanche of the day rumbled through the twilight. The second friend, who had survived the second crevasse, accepted a mug and nodded solemnly to himself. He seemed completely wrapped up in his own thoughts. Finally, he said:

     “I too have a ghost story, and mine is true as well. It happened when I was a student in London. I lived in a house where another student had bled to death after cutting off his fingers in his heroic attempt to make his first cucumber sandwich. I kept finding the fingers in the most unlikely places. They turned up in the fridge, in the bed, even in the pockets of my trousers. One evening, my girlfriend started giggling. We were sitting on the sofa listening to music and I asked her what was wrong. She replied that I ought to stop tickling her. Needless to say, my hands were on my lap.

     “I consulted all sorts of people to help me with the problem. One kindly old priest came to exorcise the house. I set up mousetraps in the kitchen. But nothing seemed to work. The fingers kept appearing on the carpet, behind books on the bookshelf, in my soup. I grew more and more despondent and reluctantly considered moving. Suddenly, in a dream, the solution came to me! It was a neat solution, and it worked. It was very simple, actually. I bought a cat…”

     The second friend smiled and sipped his tea. Both he and the first friend gazed across at the third friend. The third friend seemed remote and abstracted. He stared out into the limitless dark. In the light from the stove, he appeared pale and unhealthy. He refused the mug that the first friend offered him.

     The first two friends urged him to tell a tale, but he shook his head. “Come on,” they said, “you must have at least one ghost story to tell. Everybody has at least one.” With a deep, heavy sigh, the third friend finally confessed that he did. The first two friends rubbed their hands in delight. They insisted, however, that it had to be true.

     “Oh, it’s true all right,” replied the third friend, “and it’s easily told. But you might regret hearing it. Especially when you consider that we are stuck on this ledge together for the rest of the night.” When the first two friends laughed at this, he raised a hand for silence and began to speak. His words should have been as cold as a glacier and as ponderous, but instead they were casual and tinged with a trace of irony. He said simply:

     “I didn’t survive the third crevasse.”

The Golden Fleas (1995)

This story was written on the island of Corfu, a rather idyllic summertime mostly spent walking on the beaches at sunset, hiking in the hills, puttering around on a moped, visiting the house of Lawrence Durell, reading books, drinking Retsina and taking the occasional boat trip to Paxos, Antipaxos and Albania.

The girl in the wood is playing her pipes. I want to chase her down the hill to the sea. My nature compels me to run after any woman who places lips to reed. But there is a haunting quality to her music, a spirit I have not heard for a long time. So I watch in mute appreciation, peeping at her from the depths of the olive grove.

     My fleas are troubling me again. "Hurry up, old fool!" they snarl. They make me dance; not to melody which would be welcome, but to pain. "Hurry up, looks like rain!" Sometimes they call me names. Their satire is always biting. "Somebody got your goat?"

     Once, like Marsyas, I challenged Apollo to a music-contest and lost. Rather than flaying me alive — the usual punishment for defeat — the archer-king cursed me with sentient fleas. I have to consult them on all topics. A condition of the curse is that I am not allowed to rid myself of the pests. I have to avoid water and take shelter in a cave when clouds knock together.

     Rain is sweet on Kérkira, as infrequent as the willing kiss of another man's wife. But I have to huddle under rock and wait. No dew must splash my legs, no juice dribble down my chin. Created by the god of light, my parasites are burnished gold. Water would wash the colour out of them. If this happened, Apollo would be displeased. My skin would make a rug for his burning feet.

     Yet I know I will be rescued one day. In dreams I see my saviour. He comes from a distant land on a fast ship. He combs the fleas from my fur and takes them back with him. Not even Apollo can oppose him. But his actions are founded on a misunderstanding. This life of ours is a harmony of mistakes, each blunder a note on the stave of reality. What my saviour does for me is not what he ought to do.

     I will say nothing, I will not betray my luck. On the slopes of my islands's highest peak, I gaze at Illyria's distant shore. The city of Butrint, full of cool stone and heated baths, nestles just beyond the range of my slitted eyes. There are only villages on Kérkira, the rude dwellings of a pastoral people. But we do have shrines where shepherds leave offerings to the nymphs and satyrs. The gods are given wine and honey, but we are content with milk and flowers.

     Apart from my fleas, I am plagued by another entity. A bronze man called Gnathon shares my domain. He tells me he was forged on Crete by Daedalus. Unsatisfied with the result, the great inventor cast him into the sea. For nine years his hollow body was buffeted by the waves before being washed onto one of our beaches. A crack in his mould means all the truth has leaked out of him. He can only tell lies. I am suspicious of his true origins. He talks to my fleas. "What a generous host you have!" And they, knowing his condition, appreciate the sarcasm.

     Gnathon insists that the girl in the wood, the lithe musician, is named Chloe. This means she is not. However, I have nothing else to go on, so I also decide to call her Chloe. Gnathon is as bewitched as I am. He is too ugly for her, I tell him. In return he praises my mild odour. Coming from a bronze liar this is a deadly insult. We wrestle in the dust, near a stream. My fleas warn me not to fall in. We are equals in strength and our struggles come to nothing. Exhausted, we lie back and pant our mutual hatred.

     Where does Chloe come from? She is too dark to be a native of this island. I think Egypt, where men worship cats and herons. Gnathon says from under the sea. He is a liar of little imagination. I want to burst into tears with the force of my emotion. I have never shed a tear, it is difficult with my eyes. But I hope one day to defy nature and drown my cheeks with the globules of feeling. Only after my saviour has removed my fleas will this be possible.

     It is difficult to follow Chloe after she has finished her music. She vanishes between the trees, slippery as olive-oil. I try to keep up with her. Always she stays ahead. It is like chasing your shadow. I fear I will never know anything about her. She is destined to be an enigma. I believe she has no home at all; perhaps she circulates around the isle like a cool breeze, never settling.

     I wonder what would happen if I caught her. Would she be repelled by my form? Every morning, Gnathon makes a new statement about her. He never tires of speculation. "She is celibate," he ventures. "She is a woman-lover." I am able to dismiss such possibilities as he raises them. If Gnathon claims she is celibate, she is not. I have made a list of her non-qualities; I lack only the truth.

     One afternoon, sitting on the long beach in the south-west of the island, I spy a distant sail. I jump up and dance on my hooves. It is my saviour! He is coming at last! I watch as the ship grows larger. Soon it is anchored in the shallows. My saviour leaps from the deck and wades towards me. I throw myself at his feet. He is wearing only one sandal. His limbs are the colour of bronze.

     "My name is Jason," he cries, "and I seek the golden fleas." There is a nobility about his bearing. For some reason I do not answer. What is wrong with me? Why do I not show him my parasites? He will comb them from my body and take them away. But I find it difficult to deceive him. His face is too trusting. Quite against my better judgment, I clasp him around the shoulder and whisper in his ear.

     I tell him he has made an error. I give him directions to his real destination. He is grateful. "What can I do for you in return?" he asks. I whistle the music of Chloe, a melody which burns my lips. Jason nods and strokes his beard. "That is not a real melody, but a ghost made of echoes. Someone has been playing music for too long. The new notes have entangled themselves in the old. Now they seek to escape each other and their struggles are poignant."

     I bow my head in shame at this. He is right; Chloe is no more than the phantom of my lost talent. This is why I will never be able to hold her in my hairy arms. Jason returns to his ship and disappears back over the lip of the world. I am left with nothing. I have missed my chance to rid myself of my fleas. They are relieved. "Blood is thicker than wine," they sneer. While I sit on the sand, arranging patterns of despair with driftwood, Gnathon comes up from behind.

     "You smell sweeter than ever," he says. "Chloe is sure to find your odour appealing." This is the final reed. Suddenly I am up and running. The howl at the back of my throat struggles to keep up. A woodsman's hut lies close. The fellow is enjoying an afternoon nap; his double-headed axe is left unattended. Before he can open his eyes, I have snatched it up and am racing back to the beach.

     Gnathon has followed me a little way into the wood. We meet in a glade. He lifts his bronze eyebrows in creaking bewilderment. "What are you doing?" He has little concept of anger. Bronze men are more familiar with disappointment. In his own dashed dreams Gnathon can dance all over the island. He is too heavy to pirouette. This impossible yearning is his one genuine desire.

     My first blow smashes a hole in his chest. Salty water sprays out into the scented undergrowth. I realise at once what has happened. I have already mentioned his crack. That nine year buffeting filled him with ocean. As I raise the axe a second time, he holds up a hand. "Do not do this. Your fur will be drenched with brine. Apollo remembers your sin." At this, my fears fall away. Then the archer-king has forgotten! I am free. At last, I burst into tears. This is the long-awaited prelude to real refreshment.

     My second blow widens the hole and the cold water washes away the grime of years. Even though this is a world of misery, things sometimes work out for the best. Gnathon is made lighter by my actions. Now he is no longer clumsy; his bronze legs have less weight to bear. He can skip and dance in the way he has always wished. And I am consoled by a rare metaphysical thought. If Chloe is just an echo of my talent, then I am a pre-echo of hers. Our minims can entwine, if not our limbs. Remember too that I have learned to cry.

     More importantly, at the instant of my dousing, the fleas jumped from my body onto Gnathon's. Because he is bronze and they are gold, they suit him more than me. And he is untroubled by their presence; he is too tough to bite. Indeed he welcomes their company, the sardonic conversations. As for the fleas, the situation is less pleasant. They know hunger and the loss of power.

     Out of the crying Pan and onto the liar.

The Salsa Raft (2015)

I started salsa dancing in the spring of the year 2014. Having left it rather late to life to indulge such an activity, I am never going to be truly proficient. However I am slowly getting better and it's certainly one of the most enjoyable forms of exercise I have ever attempted.

Hector was a teacher of the dance style known as salsa. Four times a week he would give a class to beginners and always he would call out the timings of the steps, “One, two, three... five, six, seven...” and he did this to stress the fact that there was a pause on the fourth beat in which the dancers weren’t really expected to do anything.

For so many years did he call out the numbers in this way that he finally forgot four existed at all. And so he went through life unable to cope with anything related to that particular integer. Thus he had to increase the frequency of his lessons to five nights a week. This made him richer and more popular but worsened his problem with fours.

His four-blindness or fourophobia intensified and deepened to the extent that even the words ‘for’ and ‘fore’ were affected. Hector never did anything for any reason now, but only because he felt like it. He refused to acknowledge his forebears and gave up the art of foreplay, much to the dismay of his wife. He no longer had any fortitude.

Aware that he had changed in a way that put him at a disadvantage when compared with other men, Hector decided to do something remarkable in order to regain his feelings of self-worth. Dance instructors were nothing unusual and even those who put on big parties and spectacular events weren’t uncommon. His approach had to be devastatingly original.

It occurred to him that maybe he could find a way to harness the energy expended by salseros and salseras. All those movements were an outpouring of physical force and it was a pity this force couldn’t be captured and used to do positive work rather than be wasted through dispersal. His first thought was to modify the dancefloor in order to generate electricity.

This might be accomplished by connecting the sprung wooden floor to levers and gears below that turned a dynamo. The electricity produced could power the sound system, so the dancing would enable the music that accompanied the dancing, a perfect loop. But after giving the matter a little more thought, Hector realised that this arrangement wasn’t really so unique.

Something more ambitious was required. One night the idea came to him as he lay awake in bed. Because the time 4am was one he was unable to accept as real, the night was always one hour shorter for him than for a normal person. To compensate for these missing sixty minutes, he went to bed an hour early, before he was properly ready for sleep.

Thus he often tossed and turned not only his wakeful body but ideas in his lucid mind. And now he constructed in his imagination a curious vessel, a huge raft that was actually a floating dancefloor, with a rudder and a propeller that could move it along on still waters and without obtrusive sails that would flap in the faces of the crew and passengers, who would all be dancers.

The more he pondered this peculiar marvel of maritime engineering, the more excited Hector became, to the point that he leaped out of bed and ran about the house on a quest for a pen that worked and paper that hadn’t already been written on. When he found what he was seeking, he sketched the design with a few bold and deft strokes. The salsa raft!

A vessel powered by the vibrations of the feet of those who danced on its deck, these vibrations being converted into electricity that powered a motor driving the propeller. And he, Hector, would be the captain and navigator with his hand on the tiller, steering a course to their destination, for a destination was another essential component in his glorious vision.

What more appropriate destination than Havana? That steamy tropical hive of vibrancy that forms the ultimate pilgrimage for all serious salsa dancers was the only viable option. The end result of such an amazing voyage wouldn’t merely be to bolster Hector’s somewhat battered confidence but to also provide a solution to a riddle that had long bothered him.

This riddle concerned the haunt of the best salsa dancers in the world. A fine teacher, Hector had nonetheless on his travels to clubs in other cities often been awestruck and intimidated by the quality of the dancers who thronged the dancefloor. Some of them were truly astounding. The spins they did were more complicated and elegant, the styling more stylish.

Yet these dancers, when he went to praise them after the music ended, always insisted they weren’t as good as the dancers in some other club. So Hector had gone seeking and had found and entered those other clubs, but the dancers who frequented them also insisted the best could be found elsewhere. Always there was a better club with better dancers.

But the process had to end eventually. Somewhere in this wide world of ours there must be the best club of all and in that club must logically cavort the most stupefying dancers that had ever moved or could move to salsa rhythms. And he, Hector, naturally nurtured a dream of locating that club one day. His best guess was that it was probably in Havana.

It might not be there, of course, but it was worth finding out. The raft would take him together with his regular class of learners and once they reached Havana he could begin his explorations and investigations. Even if he was unsuccessful in finding the ultimate salsa club, the remarkable and unusual journey itself would make him famous.

He shared his scheme with his pupils at the earliest opportunity and they were enthusiastic. They even contributed donations to the building of the raft, which he had expected to fund entirely from his own savings. The vessel was constructed in a couple of months and its launching was attended by television reporters and journalists from many newspapers.

The raft set off from England one morning in summer and Hector pointed the rudder towards Cuba. For the first few days everything went well. The dancers danced and their dancing made electricity that kept the music playing and also turned the propeller. It was going to be a long voyage but that was part of its appeal. “One, two, three... five, six, seven...”

Unfortunately, the island of Cuba lies just south of the Tropic of Cancer and to get there the raft had to cross the latitude line 44ºN. The two fours in that number were like the double barrels of a shotgun to Hector and his frenzied attempts to avoid them led to him capsizing the raft. It is not easy to capsize a vessel as stable as a raft but he managed it.

Or maybe huge waves were responsible and no effort was made to avoid the storm because he was unable to check the weather forecast. It was an insane mission from the start and the authorities should have prevented it, but how could anyone forbid anything to Hector? All the same, he lacked tremendous foresight and it is time now to forget all about him.