Fiction

Here’s something Jen would never, ever have dreamed of doing, back in the days when she was married – listening to relationship advice from her barely teenage son.

Under the rusty annexe that must once have belonged to something else, that is held together with cobwebs and ribbons, we don’t mean to mention dead mother but we do. Dead mother, who aren’t in heaven, we say in unison, in deep voices as if we are truly solemn, as if we don’t know it should be our father who art in heaven. Then we laugh and one of us whispers, Hallowed by thy name. Hallowed be, the other says. Then we laugh together again as though we are little hyenas.

Peace, she worried, might have even more intractable dangers than war. All the people wondering about what they should do, filling the spaces of peace, rather than war, with danger. This person that person saluting, pointing, as if when you weren’t wearing a uniform, you were wearing a uniform. With this in mind she looked both ways before she stepped out of her house to go check the forest.

Remember I was born in 2010 so that by 2022, when ChatGPT went to its debutante ball online, I was 12. Cherry, ripe for the picking. I would in fact say (or whisper) that I was therefore on the crispycusp of every thing-thing. I have always loved my name: ‘Alice Ingleton’. I link ‘Alice’ to the Carroller who invented the pop-popular rabbit hole. Please note that ‘Ingleton’ means ‘settlement of the wolf’. So it is strangely satisfactory for a girl-person who trucks (rhyme?) with AI.

The man who wanted to eat a flood goat came from a faraway country where goats were eaten on feast days, roasted for hours over a fire, with only the legs cut off. The head was threaded onto a long metal pole along with the rest of the body – the length of it – even though no one in the man’s country had ever heard of head-to-toe cuisine. The man had never heard of the flood town either before he came to live in it, nor of any place where the rain never stopped. For months it did not cease, until the earth was sodden, the very air the townspeople breathed saturated with moisture.

If this land was made by anyone, it would be you. You always had a crucial role. Woodend is the beauty of your making. Our mountain is grey like the freshwater pearls you wore just in case he came home. The wet mud looks like one of your letters to Dad, dropped in tea by accident. The clouds are whipped and ready for him to come running down the track. But it won’t lead the walker and rider through the valley and past our mountain, to you, sitting on the porch and reading.

When my son was small, I used to listen from the next room as he tried to draw the godlike eye of whatever movie he was watching away from the plight of its people. Hey, Movie, look at this, he would say, waggling a blue plush dog in front of the screen, while the people of the movie clung to one another in desperate terror as the ship’s hull was torn open by submerged sea junk or the de-extincted megalodon broke loose from the underwater laboratory or somebody sneezed and the bad guys discovered the secret hiding place.

On TV last night I saw a man with a cigarette in his mouth bend down and dismantle a roadside bomb in Ukraine. The road was grey and the trees dismantled by winter. On world cinema I watched Mads Mikkelsen put a hunting knife through one of the two men who raped his wife and cut the throat of their son. I was hoping Mads would – and he did. A satisfaction like warmth passed through me. Revenge. How sweet it is. A motorbike accelerates up the road. The camellias. The poor camellias in their trembling pink.

On a spring afternoon in 2018, the man leaves Tretyakovskaya station in Moscow unable to remember why he’d come. His backpack, light on his shoulders, contains Dostoevsky’s The Double and a change of clothes. He hadn’t planned a long stay. He has no official business, no friends to visit.

Carl’s got a problem. The problem, he’ll tell anyone who asks, is that the International Olympic Committee is about to cut the most entertaining sport in history from the Games.