Eduardo di Contua

It always seemed cold in the mornings now. And the mornings seemed to be creeping ever earlier in the day. He knew there’d be no lick of sunrise over the trees for some time yet but his bones could lie still no longer.

Shuffling himself upright, Eduardo di Contua wriggled his stockinged feet into the laceless boots by the side of his bed. He reached down and wrapped the shawl around his shoulders to keep out some of the chill.

A few more blinks of waking and he stepped, still crouched, across the floor of the shack to stir the ash in the iron stove. No sign of embers. Taking a handful of kindling from beside the stove, he snapped the twigs shorter and set them on top of last night’s ashes.

The spark of a match and in minutes the stove was flickering with yellow lashes, a prelude to the red glow when the logs caught. He set the blackened iron pan of fish soup on top of the stove to warm and started to stretch his body for another day.

“Man and boy,” he thought. He still remembered the day he had sat under the peach tree, watching his mother and his aunt nailing the sheets of corrugated tin to the skeletal framework of their home. Times pass and new times come, like kindling twigs on last night’s ashes.

The warmth of the soup in his belly and the warm fingers of the sun, snaking uninvited through the faded and worn unclosed curtains, prodded him to work.

Closing the door of the stove, he stamped his feet twice in readiness for his day and walked out of the shack. He mounted the rusty bicycle and began coasting the mile-long, gentle slope down to the commune.

As usual, he would just be in time for the “comrades” breakfast. It was fully morning by the time he arrived and, although the shutters of the dining room were still closed, he could hear the murmurs and clinks inside.

He leaned his bicycle against the tree and unfastened his stick. Up to the window and then, raising his stick high above his head, he brought it down with a clatter against the wooden shutter. Rattling the end of it back and forth across the wood.

“Comrades! Comrades? Lazy ne’er do wells! Good-for-nothings. Revolutionaries? Snot-nosed kids of the bourgeois bastards! Contras! Snivelling dogs of the imperialists! Whimpering cowards! Lily-livers, liberals and layabouts.”

It was a good run. Nearly five minutes this morning before he paused to catch his breath. In the pause, the shutters of the next window opened and a teenager stuck out his head.

“You coming in for coffee this morning granddad?”

“No thanks Jimmy, not this morning, I want to pick up a paper first and then get back to the vegetables. I hear some Watfordshire folk are coming – you’ll see dancing then chap, no mistake. See you tomorrow.”

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Shindira Ferguson

Shindira Ferguson enjoyed teaching poetry – but he relished the days he worked the lathe in the transport manufactory. There was something about the vibrations of the metal, the shake of creation through his fingers. It was poetry in its most physical form. The buzz and the hum, a certain other worldliness behind the goggles, an introspective space where words seemed mere shadows of the vibrancy of life.

Although his colleagues encouraged him to work with a view of the final product, he loved becoming absorbed solely in the shape that was his to create. Yeah well maybe it was a part of a bike or a boat or a bus but never mind that, the single shape he was working was thus, and the shaping of it, again and again, enraptured him. Each shape had its own soul, he thought of some as angels, others were devils, or flowers or hearts, not because that is how they looked but because that is how the working of them made him feel.

The only time he ever looked up from his work was when the girl-with-no-name happened along the path outside the window.

Sure, the others laughed at him, surrounded in his little world of sparks – and he laughed with them and he knew that he really should be working towards the communal enterprise of the finished product, but these shapes sang to him and while they sang, he would listen.

He glanced up at the clock, turned off his machine and wandered into the canteen to fulfil his tea-making duties.

Moments later and his colleagues were crowding into the little room.

“What’s the steel saying today Shindira?” said Ramon, who’d worked in the manufactory for decades, it seemed.

“Today, comrade,” said Shindira, “it is saying - beware of comrades who wish to teach you how to become deaf.”

Ramon roared with laughter and slapped his protégé on the back. “Good answer, good answer. I will be your apprentice poet as you are my apprentice miller. The young are always so full of magic and we olders are so dry! Perhaps our magic seeps into the metal over the years, perhaps you are right with your singing steels!”

And maybe, thought Shindira, there is enough magic in the world for the girl-with-no-name to walk past the manufactory window this afternoon, as she has walked past every afternoon, with the dance of sun on her hair.

* * *

“Bloody hell!” That hurt like a mother, but he wasn’t going to call out, not now, not when she was here. He’d lie back and squint a while into the sun while the doctor tugged at the shard of steel in his leg.

Damn fool he’d been to look away from the lathe. He’d been told a million times about the demons in the metal, about how they waited for their moment and then, when your guard was down, they snapped you.

Well now he was snapped good and proper. It was in deep and the doc was working quick, too quick for comfort, his leg felt like it was being wrenched inside out.

One moment he’d looked over at her, wondering if she would one day look back. Now she was looking alright, smoothing the sweat from his forehead across his hair, his head must be in her lap.

But right now he couldn’t look into those eyes, didn’t want to see her face and feel this pain. Right now, all he could do was squint up at the sun and try to put his mind and body somewhere else, somewhere like they told him when he was in his early learning years.

She must have blood on her, there was blood everywhere. He couldn’t see, didn’t want to see, his blood sticking on the cotton dress she was wearing today. The doctor was all blood, all blood up his arms and chest.

She’d been walking past and he’d just glanced over. One glance and he’d felt the leap of steel and heard the hiss as it struck his thigh long before the white hot shriek of pain.

Someone had carried him outside, out into the air. He could feel sand under his head and back.

Shindira could feel the pulsing in his thigh, felt hands on him, felt the sickness begin to wane, lost interest in the strange sticky feeling of his head in her lap. He felt the rhythm of his breath, the pulses thumping in his ears, heard them, sensed them get softer, until there was nothing there at all.

Nothing but the doctor and the girl-with-no-name looking at each other in the afternoon sun.

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Honey Hill

Honey Hill looked up from the report she was reading and stroked the tips of her fingers over her eyelids to soothe away the blurriness and help her refocus her mind as well as her eyes.

Checking through technical specifications always made her feel a little nauseous. It was the responsibility of the thing and the tidal electric system Canute was a big deal. It was days like this that she yearned for the simple work of mixing and laying concrete, as she had yesterday.

But that was a half-truth and she knew it. She was currently the best engineer the islands could muster and she’d been asked to run the technical deployment of Canute because it was the largest single installation since Goldman Hydro. And it was way bigger than that.

Honey knew that she could call on technical expertise from around the continent, many of the best were already at hand, flown in from far flung “nations” she had barely had time to study. But, despite the international help at hand, this was a Sacco and Vanzetti installation – and that meant it was about more than building something that worked. It had to work in the right way, with the right ethos.

She stood up and walked to the window, looking down at the busy street two floors below. The whole design and deployment of Canute had to ensure that it minimised manual labour but was simple enough to be maintained without people like her having to watch over it. As her old mentor had taught her in the closing days of his life – there are revolutions in the turning of the screws and here we make engines of revolution.

Sometimes, though, it all felt a little lonely. She reached down and slid open the sash window.

Leaning her head out into the sun and, brushing back the greying hair from her face, she called down to the street: “Comrades! Today, let us make a revolution!”

Pinkish, brownish, yellowish and reddish faces looked up at her, caught her tone of both defiance and appeal and suddenly the street was filled with shouts:

- “Revolution today!”

- “Revolution sister!”

- “I’m with you comrade!”

- “Make revolution!”

She waved down to them and smiled. Now, if the turbines were smaller, they could be constructed and replaced more easily but ‘more moving parts meant more mistakes’ as the old mantra said. So, small, efficient and simple was the key. It was going to essential to set the blades on the turbines at an angle that balanced efficiency with load, so if...

Without noticing, she was back at her desk making small pencil marks in the white margins of the report.

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Serina al Habba

She wiggled her toes in the sandy, muddy puddle and watched the ripples lap against her ankles and wobble against the edges of the little pool.

Fishes, she was thinking. Little brown fishes with pink faces smiling up from the water. Fishlets. Baby fishes of the silver moon crescent fish the trawler boats stacked into boxes on the quay.

Serina al Habba wanted one day to ride those trawlers out into the deep blue of the sea and bring back those boxes of shimmering fish.

Today, Revlon was talking about the way buses worked and she wasn’t interested in that. She liked it when Raoul came and talked about making food and everyone liked when anyone came and talked about numbers. Everyone liked numbers. But over there, under the tree, Revlon was talking about buses and Serina wasn’t interested so she had wandered off to find some water to look at. Mostly the other children were happy to listen about buses, so she had come over here on her own.

She’d been on a trawler. She’d helped pick the fish up from the deck when they shimmied out of the nets from the hold on the way to the boxes. But she’d never been out on one. Never been out there. She liked to help Tony mend the nets because always Tony talked when he mended, talked about the fish and the boat bouncing on the waves.

Of course this wasn’t proper water, she thought, still wiggling her toes. She knew from trying it before that if she stuck her finger in it and tasted it, there wouldn’t be that exciting salty bitterness that made your mouth funny like the sea did.

It was hot out here without the shade of a tree, so she went inside the learning place where it was cooler. She took a banana off the food table and looked in the rooms as she ate it. It was all olders inside today and she listened to what they were saying.

But no one was talking about fishing so she found an empty room, fetched a pot of her favourite blue and began to paint a sea picture.

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