{"id":99,"date":"2012-03-10T10:45:06","date_gmt":"2012-03-10T10:45:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=99"},"modified":"2012-03-27T09:36:16","modified_gmt":"2012-03-27T09:36:16","slug":"ashley-stokes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/ashley-stokes\/","title":{"rendered":"Ashley Stokes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Iguanadon<\/strong><\/p>\n

A mad woman was squatting in the outer office. I\u2019d unwittingly let in a mad woman. She\u2019d shivered, twitched, looked me up and down and then insisted Johnny Havelock appraise the contents of her battered flat case.
\nI\u2019d been standing at Johnny\u2019s \u2026 Mister Havelock\u2019s desk for a good few minutes now, in a kind of limbo, unable to speak but anxious. I\u2019d left the mad woman in the outer office with the confidential papers fanned out on my desk.
\nRecently, Mister Havelock had taken to making me wait. If I needed to ask him something he\u2019d first raise his eyebrow, the facial equivalent of a holding e-mail, and then finish whatever he was doing. The building might be on fire. It didn\u2019t matter. I\u2019d have to wait.
\nSince the last company rationalization, a new formality had characterized our working relationship. He liked to call me Miss Merton now.\u00a0 I addressed him as Mr Havelock, not Johnny. He\u2019s such a Johnny, though.
\nHe glanced up and blinked as if he\u2019d only just noticed me.
\n\u2018Miss Merton?\u2019
\n\u2018There\u2019s a Selima Gayler to see you.\u2019
\nHe threw his pencil so hard onto the desktop that it bounced off and clicked on the rim of the wastepaper receptacle.
\n\u2018Jesus of the Tits,\u2019 he said. \u2018Not again.\u2019
\n\u2018She has shoulder pads,\u2019 I said, spreading out my arms to indicate their width.
\n\u2018Still? Do me a favour, will you? Petty-cash it. Take her to lunch. Don\u2019t be too mean.\u2019
\nI pressed my hand to my heart.
\n\u2018Me? Mean?\u2019
\n\u2018Not Elba\u2019s or The Top Floor. And the answer\u2019s no, whatever she says.\u2019
\nAn old man was peering through his face again. Over the last six months or so I\u2019d noticed him age. The groove across his chin had deepened and his ears had started to purple. He\u2019d had a good run, though. He couldn\u2019t complain.
\nI turned on my heels and rehearsed the speech about a plane waiting on a runway, a business trip to Bahrain.<\/p>\n

I decided to take Selima to Tabouki and described the menu as we took the stairs. They do a delicious but reasonably priced meze with frankly superior spicy lamb sausages and wonderful haydari. At first she seemed keen. Outside the office, though, she parked the case between her gym shoes.
\n\u2018Are you certain he can\u2019t spare five minutes?\u2019 she said.
\n\u2018Departure is at two-thirty, I\u2019m afraid.\u2019
\nShe lit a cigarette and leant sullenly against the building as she smoked. It was difficult to judge her age. Somewhere between Johnny and me, I supposed. If she dyed the grey in her hair she would have looked younger. If she\u2019d let her dogtooth-check jacket share a hot tub with Mr Dry Cleaning, and if she\u2019d worn tights with that red leather miniskirt or tanned her legs she could have made more of herself. She\u2019d once had a golden age, though. She used to turn heads. I could tell.
\n\u2018It used to be a much bigger building,\u2019 she said. \u2018There was a huge, wonderful foyer, a terrific space.\u2019
\n\u2018Before my time,\u2019 I said.
\n\u2018There were hundreds of you.\u2019
\n\u2018I\u2019m sorry?\u2019
\n\u2018You used to be in Endell Street. Then Rotherhithe. It took me so much asking about to find him again.\u2019
\n\u2018Are you warm enough, Selima?\u2019
\n\u2018I\u2019d rather go to a pub, if that\u2019s alright with you.\u2019
\nAs we walked her case kept scraping on the pavement. There was little traffic. Hardly anything passed us.<\/p>\n

The lunchtime clientele in the Eustace Arms reminded me why we usually imbibe at Elba\u2019s or The Top Floor. At least here I\u2019d get triple points for pacifying her with nothing more expensive than a bottle of house red.
\nShe worked her way through the bottle. I let a cup of wet caffeine go cold. The table needed mopping. She slid the case around on her knees and unzipped it. She reached deep inside it and then rummaged so frantically that the workmen at the bar stopped talking. When she started to curse and hiss they turned away. Papers fell out onto the table: sheets of graph paper covered with pencil diagrams; a recurring pyramid that rose and fell over a series of drawings; pages of scrawled notes in watery brown ink; versions of a man and sketches of some sort of animal that distorted and bled as the papers soaked up the beer-spills on the tabletop.
\nEach of the pages had a date scribbled in its top left-hand corner.
\nSome of the dates went back as far as when I was still at school.
\nI didn\u2019t like it.
\nI didn\u2019t like watching her distress mount when she couldn\u2019t find whatever she wanted to show us.
\n\u2018Voila, maestra,\u2019 she said.
\nShe produced a laminated board. It was a photograph of some sort of sculpture standing in an untidy, oily place, spare metal limbs and plaster body parts strewn on the floor and sheets tacked to the walls.
\n\u2018You must pass on my apologies,\u2019 said Selima. \u2018You will pass on my apologies to Johnny, won\u2019t you? It\u2019s so late, you see \u2026 well, I\u2019ll tell you, but you can\u2019t tell Johnny. I had some problems. Don\u2019t tell Johnny this but six \u2026 seven years ago I had another child. A gift, I suppose, but he was slower than the others. One day you might understand what that does to you, sister. And then I got even more behind, because Johnny changed from Knight to Mammoth Holdings, so it couldn\u2019t be a knight anymore, and then he wasn\u2019t Mammoth, he told me last time, so I had to start from scratch, from scratch you see. You do see that, don\u2019t you?\u2019
\nIf I\u2019m quite honest, the sculpture looked like a dinosaur made from random bits of other dinosaurs.
\n\u2018I don\u2019t understand,\u2019 I said.
\n\u2018It\u2019s for your foyer, to stand beside the fountain. Running water and a sentinel image, that\u2019s what he asked for.\u2019
\n\u2018Selima, you\u2019ve seen our premises. We can\u2019t possibly accommodate this. Mr Havelock says he\u2019s sorry. I\u2019m very sorry.\u2019
\nI tensed. She looked like she was going to burst into tears.
\n\u2018But it\u2019s for him. I made it for him. He wanted it. He said. He used to be ever so appreciative.\u2019
\n\u2018Really? Was he?\u2019
\n\u2018Ever so. Ever so appreciative of me. When we first met.\u2019
\nA cold feeling hardened around my shoulders. I let her go on. I tried not to listen while she told me a romantic story. I kept thinking about the dates on the sketches. I\u2019d been at school, the very first few years of secondary school and not yet held hands with a boy when Selima first started to date the stages of her construction. I pictured Selima in her room, with her pieces and parts, trying to anticipate what he\u2019d want and what he could do for her.
\nAfter her story fizzled out with not much of an ending she collected her papers and returned the laminate to the case. She zipped it up and shrugged. She shrugged like an aunt might shrug, an aunt at yet another wedding, another doomed mismatch.<\/p>\n

We said polite things to one another, and then parted at the crossroads between the office and the station. I watched her fade into the glistening street. She was keeping the case up now. I wondered if she\u2019d accidentally-on-purpose lose it on the train.
\nI had done my job.
\nOutside the office I found myself leaning against the building in the same place Selima had stood, minus the gasper, unable to go in, unable go back.
\nOh no, I thought, oh dear. Those dates on the pages. The things on the floor. The time in that room. The dates on the pages. The limbs on the floor. The pieces. The parts.<\/p>\n

*Ashley Stokes’s<\/strong> fiction has appeared in a variety of journals and
\nanthologies \u00a0and he won a 2002 Bridport Prize for The Suspicion of Bones.<\/em> His first novel, Touching the Starfish<\/em> was published in February 2010 by www.unthankbooks.com<\/a>.\u00a0 He has recently completed\u00a0The Syllabus of Errors: Twelve Stories of Obsession, Loss and Getting in a State<\/em> and is working on a second collection Forever Breathes the Lonely Word.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Iguanadon A mad woman was squatting in the outer office. I\u2019d unwittingly let in a mad woman. She\u2019d shivered, twitched, looked me up and down and then insisted Johnny Havelock appraise the contents of her battered flat case. I\u2019d been standing at Johnny\u2019s \u2026 Mister Havelock\u2019s desk for a good few minutes now, in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1778,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/1778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}