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February 3, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Uncategorized

Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio

Nottingham Loves

by Bridie Squires

I rise to the sound of the City Ground chanting,
runs and Raleigh bike rides,
riverside gathering
festivals and hissing geese,
rowing blokes’ megaphones,
the prickling of summer heat.

I get to the bus stop,
funds a bit low, so
I tick a quid off the shop
until tomorroh.

I clock Notts bop by,
hear cars rockin’ beats
from the cracked window
that causes all the beef.

Old biddies titter about
tram works and price drops,
we pass the back of Broado and
‘Ooh! This is my stop!’

We swing
down
the
green
pole
vines
of the jungle bus,
say ‘Cheers!’ to the driver
because we are a humble bunch.

Outside Viccy Centre,
gotta cross the road,
red man signals us to stop
but we don’t do as we’re towd.

A mum tells her kid to ‘HARK IT!’
while eating cobs on Viccy Market.
I skip the fish and buy some ham –
I get me cockles from Dave Bartram!

I make my way down Clumber Street,
shout ‘Ayup’ to maybe two or three
mates whose face I haven’t seen
since Macy’s.

I visit a few places:
The Corner, Confetti, Laser Quest, Library.
From Wilford Pond to Wollo Park,
it’s clean and it’s tidy.

The phone rings,
my mate’s been tryin’
to meet at the left lion
so we dip toes in the square’s fountain rain,
remembering the good old emo days.

We go Arb to take in the scenery,
the budding, fresh-cut greenery
packed with sounds of laughter laced
with love that comes quite easily.

We visit Forest Rec,
it’s filled with ducks and youths,
Goose Fair and the carnival
have joined to set the mood.

with toffee apples and live art,
rides and local music.
We’re churning creamy talent
so we nurture it and use it.

Even Whycliffe pops along
to sing a little tune
of how our city whispers ‘Nowt
is impossible to do.’

We make tracks to the Olde Trip,
sing songs among the caves,
when a text message shares tips
of a ‘CLIFTON TUNNEL RAVE!’

It’s the final hour of the eve,
I nip and see me mam,
drink cups of tea while eating three
Yorkshire puds with jam.

We talk brash, but warm and honest
from West Bridgford to Sherwood Forest.

From Silverdale to Hyson Green
and all the places in between,
we’ve built a city full of treats
on grounds of creativity.

For Nottingham, I’d pinch the throne
’cause there’s just no place like home.

Writer’s Bio:

Bridie Squires is a Nottingham enthusiast who loves to put pen to paper. As a family member of arts and culture magazine LeftLion, and of the spoken word collective Mouthy Poets, she enjoys brandishing a big gob all the same.

January 31, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio

We’re featuring three poems by Pippa Hennessy, Project Director for the Nottingham City of Literature campaign and director of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.

My Garden, Sixty Miles From the Sea

this is the wrong island

the MS Oldenburg bounds across the Bristol Channel

my stomach churns

an old man wearing blue dungarees

and a dishevelled demeanour

waves binoculars at a pair of guillemots

dolphins fold the waves like silk

the Rat Island oystercatchers shout

welcome, welcome, look at me, look at me

hammers on the hold door reply

we’re here

red wine swells nine voices to climb

torch-beams to the glass-captured moon

a burnished beetle follows me

from the seals’ playground at the tip of Brazen Ward

to Long Roost, where ten thousand razorbills

and eight puffins nest

a dunlin trips over my feet

on its way to the next puddle

skylarks, invisible, fill the sky

five adults and seven children picnic

by the concrete engine block

of a WWII German bomber

I wish the gulls would hush

as a newborn lamb takes its first steps

two puffed-up pigeons huddle and grumble

by the one-roomed cottage where I shiver

and can’t sleep for laughing

I am never more than half a mile from the sea

the sea which is always flat and grey

when I return to the wrong island

Author Bio:

Pippa Hennessy has published poetry, short fiction, graphic short stories and creative non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies. She is Development Director at Nottingham Writers’ Studio, Project Director for Nottingham’s UNESCO City of Literature bid, and works for Five Leaves Publications. In a past life she was a software developer, but she’s feeling much better now.

January 30, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio

We’re featuring three poems by Pippa Hennessy, Project Director for the Nottingham City of Literature campaign and director of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.

In Old Light Cottage

A threadbare armchair enfolds me

the flue howls back at the gale

that portrait of Wellington gazes

out of the window at the lighthouse.

Handwritten scrawls fill the log book

not mine, not yet.

June 28^th 2000

Saw a puffin. No time to write.

Boat leaving soon. Sad to go.

August 13^th 2000

Another lovely stay. Did lots

of walking.

Then twenty-three and a half pages

in one hand.

October 23^rd 2000

…The electricity went off at 12:23

tonight. I had to get up to go to the loo

at 2:14. The flue kept me awake for 3 hours

and 47 minutes altogether…

That October, when he wrote that,

we were here for six days

and another

because of the storms.

Slipping and sliding

down the Clovelly cobbles, our pink labels

matched his.

Hello. We’ll be neighbours

he said, standing too close.

I turned away to laugh with my friends.

We drank and tied our tongues in knots

in the lighthouse, for six days

and another.

The girls won all the games

and I fell in love

with this peat-topped block

of granite, glued by the Gulf Stream

to the Atlantic’s edge.

We celebrated the extra day,

he complained

his train ticket would expire.

Now I know too much of what he did,

when the flue screamed.

He didn’t write that he asked me for

a safety pin

to hold his trousers up

so he could get to North Light

on schedule.

He didn’t write

that our singing woke him up

when the boat was cancelled.

His review of the garlic bread

served in the tavern

was detailed

and informative. He didn’t mention

that we sat at the long table

playing bridge

loudly while he ate, alone.

He wrote:

7:58am, I washed up.

8:13am, I took the rubbish

out to the bins.

He didn’t see

the oystercatchers digging for worms

just behind the cemetery wall

or the gravestones

of medieval chieftains standing

where they had stood for centuries.

He didn’t hear

the seals singing as they rode the storm.

He didn’t feel

the spindrift skidding like rabbits

across the heather.

A threadbare armchair enfolds me

the flue howls back at the gale

and I write

18^th April 2002

I am here.

Author Bio:

January 29, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio

Over the next three days we’ll feature three poems by Pippa Hennessy, Project Director for the Nottingham City of Literature campaign and director of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.

Quarry Beach

Do you remember the old ladder?

its broken step halfway down,

thorns scratching hands that clung

to ropes

and rotting wood.

We climbed down anyway

to where great granite eggs

make thunder under the waves.

Our bare feet took us over seaweed

and limpets

to see orange beaks

flash past, crying look at me

and we wished we could fly.

A seal swimming southwards

as usual

stopped briefly:

why do beasts with such long flippers

refuse to play with me in the waves?

One stone on another, we built

a tower to remind the sea

we were here

for a while

I sat, warming my back, hatching

an image

of the sun and the sea

and of you

Author Bio:

January 20, 2015 Transportation Press Uncategorized

The Chair

by Shreya Sen-Handley

1 am, December, Monday, Nottingham

I wake with a start. This is not my bed. As my eyes adjust I realise I am in our spare room; my Calcutta Room. That’s OK then, I am just across the hall from my sleeping family. Not far. But as I turn towards the window, I realise why I had woken with such a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. Silhouetted against the half-darkness of the frosted pane is a man. He is not my husband and yet he seems completely at home sitting in the chair I had brought over from my old bedroom in Calcutta. I can only see him partially in the grey light but he turns to smile at me. There should, my groggy brain tells me rather feebly, be no other man in this house. But there is something so familiar and reassuring about him, I slip back into sleep.

9 am, Monday, School Run

I have dropped the children off at school and can now think. Did I really see a man in the spare bedroom last night? When the kids tumbled in this morning to wake me, he was no longer there. He’s clearly a figment of my (perpetually) overwrought imagination. But as I let myself into the house, I find myself drawn to the Calcutta Room. I sit on the bed and scrutinise it. This is my history room. The Rathin Mitra scroll over the calico-covered bed is from the artist himself. The Ganesh Pyne pictures sitting higgledy-piggledy on the window sill bring back snatches of conversations I had with the man. The cushion covers are made from Ma’s old Dhakai saris which would have met a less dignified end otherwise. And in ceiling-high bookshelves and on the rickety round table beside my childhood chair are books that bear the imprint of having lived and been loved in Calcutta – dog eared, yellowed, with a ‘cha’ stain or two but only because they are so well thumbed, and by so many. Unlike my hometown, it is the quietest of rooms. And he is definitely not here.

If I slept, would he come back? Why do I want him back?

9 pm, still Monday

The kids are in bed and my husband snakes his strong sinewy arms around me, pulling me down on the sofa beside him. These few hours till midnight are our only ‘couple’ time. I sink into his embrace happily, as always, but tonight I am distracted. Where is The Man? I am thinking of a story I might write, I tell my husband, of the chair in the spare room. “The Calcutta Chair?” he asks trying to look interested, but he is tired, very tired, and drifts off.

1 am, Tuesday, still December, still snowing

I went to bed with my husband, how am I in this room again? I know The Man is there too even before I turn to look at him. He is sitting in his chair by the window. No, he’s lounging; he’s tall. I am in a silky wisp of a slip and should feel embarrassed, but when he sits on the bed beside me and runs his long fingers down my leg, it feels like the most natural thing in the world. Brown skin against brown skin; quite a departure for me. He leans over and kisses me. I’m thinking, I hope there won’t be any beard burns in the morning, when I should be thinking how could this be happening? How does he get in here? I don’t think for a moment, who is this man, because I know him well.

10 am, Tuesday

I have two free hours in the day to get my story written. What started as an excuse to explain my distraction to my husband has become a real project; a story about my Calcutta Chair. It is an antique armchair that once lived in my mother’s great-grandfather’s house. Many literary lights of Bengal have graced that chair. One in particular, made it his own, scribbling bits of poetry as he chatted.

2 am, Wednesday, December, snowing still

But to write this story well, I have to get to grips with my visitor. Literally. That tired old excuse we writers trot out to cover our tracks. And to convince ourselves we have to be amoral for our art. Soon, I am in so deep I can’t seem to extricate myself.

Our encounters are made somehow more exciting by the fact that he talks to me in my own, barely remembered mother tongue. The poetic turns of phrase make his descriptions of what he wants to do to me, more- no, not refined, quite the opposite- deliciously shocking. Whispering heart-stoppingly dirty Bengali in my ear, he traces the curve of a breast with one sensuous finger, he bends to take my dilated nipple in his mouth but the words are lost and I pull away. I want to hear the words of love more than I want his love (and anyway the beard tickles). His hands cup my rounded cheeks while his lips and darting tongue trail their way down to the mound. Satisfyingly, he intersperses the curlicues of tongue with murmurs so rude, I writhe with both suppressed laughter and unfettered pleasure. The flesh-muffled whispers find their way, just as surely as his creaming tongue, into those hidden places which signal my readiness. I arch my willing body into his.

2 am again, Thursday, December, sleet storm

I awaken when he slips into bed beside me in the Calcutta Room.

I am discomfited by the memory of last night. But I am clearly here for more, though I cannot for the life of me remember walking into this room. He grins, “E deshta boddo thanda”. His practised hands find their way into me again. But even as I give in to the pleasure once more, questions haunt me; this man would be welcome in any Bengali woman’s bed, how many has he had? How many does he flit between, from night to night?

But most importantly, how do I tell my Bramho mother that I’m fucking Tagore’s ghost?

Writer’s bio:

Shreya Sen-Handley is a former television producer and journalist who now writes and illustrates for the British and Indian media when she’s not looking after children and home in legendary Sherwood Forest. She has written for The Guardian, The National Geographic, CNN India, The Times of India, The Hindu and other publications and sites. A children’s book she illustrated for Hachette was published in April 2014 and her first book of writing, a memoir meets social satire, will be published by HarperCollins in 2016. She also writes fiction and teaches creative writing and illustration.”

January 14, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Cochineal

by Rosie Martin

Without any effort or intention, without willing it to be so, an image of a glass of water appeared in my mind. It thrills me when visual metaphors shimmer into place, for I have learned that they explain me to me in some surprising way.

Into the clear water dropped a bloodied tear of cochineal – bomb-like, turbulent, and spreading thinly, evenly, rapidly – forever changing the whole. This is what happened to my mind. In prison.

I have been doing some work in the prison. You see, I know how to teach people to read. I realise this sounds ordinary, but there is a lot of science to know, about what’s going on in the brain and mind of someone who doesn’t learn to read in the usual way. It’s anything but ordinary. I pour and pour into this work.

Two years ago I was sitting in an auditorium in which a plea was being made for volunteers to work at literacy tasks with prisoners. My colleague, who likewise pours and pours, was also there. At the end of the event, as we walked toward each other looking into each other’s faces from across the room, we knew simply what the other was thinking – we know how to add quality for these complicated souls unable to respond to regular methods of learning to read, we have the skills, we ought to be gifting this knowledge to these vulnerable men and women. In the moment my eyes met hers, I felt in my depths, a breathless sparkle like bright flow between river stones – vivacious élan which I have come to recognise as my herald of heart action.

Now, it’s a practical world that we live in and impetuous dash and ephemeral sparks have less to offer once an idea has a shape, for then of course, there is work to be done. So I rang the prison, and asked if I could come, bringing with me the skills splashed and filtered in through time in my craft, to tell about what I can do. Well – my hat is off and my shoulders are bowed – I have nought but respectful admiration for the workers in that place who consistently enabled me and showed gratitude. ‘Come, show us, tell us’, their instant reply.

Now, I’m a newcomer. Not to the work, but to this environment and this cohort. The principles to teach reading to those who have been unable to learn it are sure. Analyse each individual’s configuration of processing skills, set a plan designed for that configuration and direct-teach a hierarchy of skills at the just-right level of challenge. And all the while, honour the soul of he thus configured with warmth, patience, humour and the dignity of no judgment. These principles work. Skills can be grown. And I saw myself unfazed by the hand scans, magnetic locks and clanging doors, for a mind is a mind and a heart is a heart, no matter where they are housed. Or warehoused.

This was the glass of water in the image of my prison experience – all this, clear and contained.

But I’m a newcomer to working at the prison and it’s not dream and sparkle and vivacity for they thus housed. For many – for most – the way of things has not been like the way of my things, but more like this: I can’t read, can’t access education, can’t get work – I’m poor. And another axis: what is tender communication(?) it has touched me so rarely(!), language is weak, vocabulary and knowledge diminished, can’t get work – I’m poor. And there are many other axes of disadvantage. Smashing, shattering axes of disadvantage shocking with tortured horror and foisted upon men and women when they were but sweet and soft-cheeked boys and girls. Through no fault of their own. Ergo, therefore – made poor.

I am reminded that miserable souls were transported to Pt Arthur bound in body and mind with the chains of events sprung of poverty. I’ve imagined those cold and wretched men. And all these years later, I stand in the gaze of souls transported to Risdon, also bound in body and mind with the chains of events sprung of poverty.

And here bombed the bloodied tear that suffused my mind in prison. Not enough had changed in two hundred years. Souls born into crippling vulnerability were then transported behind bars – and they are still being transported behind bars. These bars, the materialised versions of those already built into their minds and lives through too little of the salve of society’s tenderness upon their developing beings and impoverished stations. Bloodied poverty. Bloodied lack of compassion. The ruddy tear swept through me.

Yet I note that time settles and changes the discernment of murky waters. For I see that my community now imbues the wretched of Pt Arthur with esteem and affection – a response of compassion two hundred years too late for those lives. Their odour and base mouths are not so much now forgotten, as that without the revulsion of sensory impact, these unsavoury qualities are not even considered when convicts’ stories are told. Judgement of their crimes, likewise, is not now forgotten, but rather is barely considered; for absent now is the unclad emotion of the perpetrated and the foaming of the virtuous. Now, only the mistreatment and the humanity of those hapless are left for us to see. And they are found wretched, and heroes; revered for their human worthiness.

Time does indeed settle and change the discernment of murky waters. For I also note that the respectable of old London and Hobart towns have not withstood the judgement of time quite so well. Popular hindsight now finds heartless fault in these of the ceiled and comfortable houses, clean and cologned, sending wretches to the end of the earth for the loss of a fop’s handkerchief. Now, as we appraise, their humanity seems to have been absent and their stories are imbued with stony hardness; the London cold upon their hearts.

But it is me I see surveying the glinty image in my mind. Bloodied tear to rosy clarity. My standing and my Chanel are respectable in my era. My insured wide-screen, the fop’s handkerchief. My aversion to human pungence, the pharisaic disgust. My lack of compassion, the lock upon the chains.

Tenderness, compassion, warmth and forgiveness are in the full-blooded cochineal concoction to pour and pour upon poor – to recolour with beauty the crippling abhorrence of smell, filth and profanity; and eventually even to ease the slicing agony of the pared and naked emotion which rises in the anguish of offence. Poverty to the end of the earth I say, not the poverty-stricken. Lest we all be destined to poverty in the wholeness of our beings.

This rosied glass is not new. I’m just the newcomer who teaches people to read. Yet I’m clear that I know this: the tools of my craft – warmth, patience, humour and the dignity of no judgment – are amongst the simplest tools of the empowerment of humankind. They and their stable mates, some with much loftier names, have been written of for centuries. Many shimmering images in the minds of many have brought forth wise words pointing toward these strong and gentle tools, well-oiled. We know how they are used because we have felt them at work in our innermost beings. They are the underrated means with which large change must be crafted. If we can be courageous, and feel their weight, their fit within our hands; and use them, even when it takes grit of the heart to do so – for love is a verb. A doing word. And a mind is a mind and heart is always heart – no matter where housed.

Writers’ bio:

Rosie Martin is a Hobart-based speech pathologist specialising in intervention and support for people of all ages with literacy impairments and social communication impairments. She has recently founded a benevolent organisation, Chatter Matters Tasmania, to assist with bringing these supportive services to the most disadvantaged in our communities.

January 13, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

London

by Adonis Storr

London is the Great Beast; and through the injection of an aeroplane one is swept up into her blood stream, losing the identity of the individual to be a single blood cell, one part of an enormous creature. And one is pumped through tunnels underground – the veins underneath the skin; coursed through lines like biological systems and, churning in the swell of the other cells, bubbling up further to erupt! Gushing out through tube station doors and swept onto steps worn down by millions of steps over hundreds of years.

And you are born onto the streets looking up – into the light that peaks through the gaps, of peaks that dwarf you in their shadows as they reach up to the length of their stretch. And below, on the ground where we are, there is chaos from all sides as the hordes of suits and tourists blunder passed curbside salesman spruiking incomprehensible town-crier pitches. And there are a thousand signs – you can’t read them all, all bright and loud and demanding that you need whatever it is that is on them.

And you wonder if you lived here would you become one of them – would this define you? This city? For being a traveller I see people totally absorbed by this place; and I am superfluous to their requirements; London appears often indifferent to one’s presence and from all sides confidently reminds one that you need London; and London will most certainly survive without you.

And there’s a thousand accents and languages and dialects and incomprehensible colloquialisms and funny people and sad people and animated people and shy and rich and lavishly boisterous and poor and begging and lost and homeless and celebrity, lawyer, policeman and prince. They could be sitting next to me, some sort of royalty, but I don’t read the newspapers, nor do I watch television; and I treat everyone equally; and my occasional online glances are for conversation only.

And through the deep surges of passion and apathy echoes a warm glowing sensation occurring within – this feeling of being apart of something large, grand even, the feeling that one might heave on an axis and turn millions of people into a different direction entirely; being at once almost inconceivably small and magnificently important.

London. Her body divine – of bricks, cement, metal and glass. Shot up from the ground – buildings like flowers. London. Your old skin speaks without words – of the years and bodies and stories. London. Whose epitaphs – obelisk-esque – stand tall, elegantly iconic, endlessly inspiring, yet still – looking up, then looking down, one can not unnotice the wondrous gap between the dirty old stone floor; and the glorious and golden shiny peaks.

And the mirage is three hundred and sixty degrees wide; and it forces you around chasing your tail, coming back to similar places – the old haunts.

London. All your roads are full. All your doors are open. You’re Sinatra’s New York. You’re a place to make it. To be somebody. You’re a one hundred year old lemonade and there’s only one left. You’re a restaurant that specialises in mashed potato. And there’s the thought that the longer you walk the more roads become large rivers of cars and doors, one-by-one, close forever. Almost like you might wander round London, only to one day look in the shiny reflection of a shop front window and notice that you’ve become old; and wonder how it happened.

And you make a loyal friend at the Society Club, surrounded by the portraits – all leather-bound paper and ink, of Burroughs, Joyce, Wilde, Woolf and Bacon. And you write yourself in here, over a latte; and the background chatter, minimal dance, the coffee machine and staff. And we’re all here – at the Society Club; and everyone is reading, or writing, or planning. And the girl making the coffees gives you a look.

And you know as you sip your coffee, these moments will pass into eternity and will mean nothing at all very soon. And in the Society Club it could the 50s, or the 60s, or the 70s, but not the 80s, 90s, or now. We exist in a past tense – here, now; and we drown sweetly in Vintage, and Retro, and Nostalgia.

And as the dogs fight in a dance in the middle of the room, you think that the floor tiles should look like a chessboard. And you sit in a brick building that was constructed a hundred years before you were born; and you wonder at the history and stories the walls could share. And my coffee and the words come closer to the end. But the coffee will flow forever, and the words will never stop.

London. You beautiful maze that has a thousand million masks, that is a mirage upon each corner, who holds ghosts in your leather-tough hands. London, whose magic I found, whose feet brushed history, whose mind mingled with royalty. London. My city, my capital, my friend.

Writers’ bio:

Adonis Storr is an English-Australian Poet, Author, Event Organiser, Master of Ceremonies and former Radio show host. He created Tasmania’s ‘Silver Words’ which has hosted an incredible array of literary talent and has been published by the Society Club in London. He toured regularly in Australia including venues like the Cygnet Folk Festival, The Festival of Golden Words and Passionate Tongues Poetry.

January 11, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

Meta Gray days

by Stephen N Johnstone (Poet Musing)

I am caged,
locked up for thinking
Thinking without speaking,
I have been tailed.

Too many leaked ideas,
Synaptic exchanges,
I could not refrain,
My mind has been read.

the voices say
a cracked cranium
a pneumatic drill
Unresolved problem

It’s there of course.
Next to Truth.
The truth will out.
It must.
To ease the pressure.

That’s when they nail you,
Aah, We thought so?
Your thinking is banned!
Inside and Out
Understand !

Stay in your cave and behave.
My cave is too small and I am too tall

So I go, round in circles,
Jumping through hoops
waiting for the fuse to detonate.

Dance around the walls.

Talk out loud,
As my mess climbs.

Time to be clear.
Again ?
I am always clear.
Inbetween gray.

What do they want ?

Shakespeare ?
RP English?
A hidden code,
for moral censors ?

Pain is clear,
Angst is clear.
Hurt is clear.
Social Justice is clear.
Being human is clear.
Gray is clear,
The truth is here,
The truth is clear

A cathartic purge does not cross the t’s.

See between lines,
Write as you Speak.

Look between gray.

Good day.

“They are coming to take me away

Stephen.N.Johnstone (Poet Musing) is a professional , who works with Wood,Words,People and Plants in caring,resourceful and creative ways. He likes to stretch boundaries, metaphors, vistas and understanding and is committed to Social Justice and the plight of the disadvantaged. He is always ready to help.

A critical analytical thinker who strives for understanding yet, comic, quirky and funny. Quack.
Facebook name – Poet Musing, also has videos on You Tube.

January 5, 2015 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

lines from the underground: writers respond to Tony Thorne’s illustrations

COUP

by Darren Lee

He was a Sentinel.

The Sentinels didn’t have names, at least not in the human sense. If he could have picked something for himself he would have settled on “Metro”; a name he kept seeing on the masthead of the free newspapers that the humans liked so much. The word stood out on the front page, bold and constant; he aspired to these attributes.

It was with the newspaper that Metro found a kindred spirit; like the strange, papery object he too spent most of his days loitering on the tube. This was his beat. He sat for most of the day, absorbing the rhythm and rattle of the carriage, observing closely the behaviour patterns of his fellow travellers: aloof, restrained and noncommittal. The humans hid behind their sheets of newspaper, hungrily devouring it with their darting eyes, before throwing them over their shoulders to litter their vacated seats. A fickle bunch, thinks Metro. Ripe for a takeover.

He coughs and a small specked feather escapes from his mouth. He had been briefed about this: nothing

to worry about, Control told him. The disguise had yet to be perfected. The rest of the Bakerloo passengers conform to type and don’t register anything untoward.

Metro is learning the Humans’ reading habit, but he mostly looks at the pictures: glittering people waving as they walk into a cinema, a plastic-faced man holding a battered briefcase aloft, a bloodied child crying amid rubble. As a Sentinel it’s Metro’s job to learn what he can and these abandoned items are good tidbits for his report; all nourishing breadcrumbs for a curious intellect.

On the way to Charing Cross he puzzles over a picture of a human female; he has seen her image before and is aware that she has elevated status within human society. She is showing her posterior to the camera. Metro doesn’t understand this and ponders if the backsides of the rich do not fulfil their original purpose; are they purely ornamental? He makes a note. This is something to brood over later with Control.

There is no danger of Metro going native. Control had warned him about that too: previous expeditions had turned and lost their avian nature. Metro thinks he saw one once in Regent’s Park. She was in the form of an old woman who sobbed openly as she tore up hunks of stale bread which lay uneaten at her feet. Her former brethren watched indifferently from the trees, forbidden to descend and peck at the tainted crumbs.

Metro is quiet and unmoving for most of the journey. It’s best for him to sit still; the disguise chafes his breast and his folded wings regularly cramp. There is some release when he reaches Charing Cross and he settles into the task of piloting his human shell to Trafalgar Square. His steps are tentative at first, but he eventually settles into a pattern, a stroll which syncopates with the bustle around him. Of all human activity, it’s walking that puzzles Metro the most. How did they cope with being
so earthbound all the time? Maybe this was why they distracted themselves so much with the rear ends of the great and good?

Metro bounds up the stairs to Trafalgar Square two at a time. He is showing off, trying to make a grand entrance. The crowds, too absorbed in taking photographs of themselves, fail to notice him. The birds sense his presence straight away; they immediately land and a silence spreads. They all look towards the corner where Metro is waiting.

A fat pigeon descends from Nelson’s hat and circles it’s way down the column, swooping over the silent brood. The pigeon gracefully lands at Metro’s feet.

Metro bends down and offers Control his hand. The pigeon rests upon his palm and is slowly elevated level to Metro’s face. The Sentinel launches into his latest report. After being confined to his disguise it feels good to revert to the old language once again.

Control listens patiently, processing all he can, hoping that among Metro’s theories on celebrity and transportation may lie the seed that grows into the humans’ final destruction. His flying army is ready, stationed on rooftops everywhere throughout the capital, ready to swarm as soon as the chink in the armour is revealed. Until then, the Sentinels arrive and share their knowledge.

Metro finishes his report and goes back to the tube.

Control flies upwards to his perch and defecates on Admiral Nelson. He continues his watch, making sure the world ends not with a bang, or whimper, but a bloody coo.

Tony Thorne’s illustrations, sketched while in London, travelling the iconic underground rail system will feature throughout the upcoming publication Islands and Cities, a collection of short stories by Tasmanian and London based writers. To celebrate this cross-cultural exchange, writers from the publication have each been assigned an illustration by Tony Thorne to respond to, for publication on our website.

December 15, 2014 Transportation Press fiction, Transportation

lines from the underground: writers respond to Tony Thorne’s illustrations

by Ian Green

About the size of a packet of cigarettes, the cheap plastic of the Buddha machine fits snug in my palm. It is simple- a speaker, a volume wheel, a switch, a red LED, a headphone port. A few basic circuit boards sit encased in what was once pristine white. I turn the wheel of the Buddha machine to its full volume and a loop begins to play in my ears. I close my eyes. Thirty seconds of gentle tones expanding and contracting, and then it repeats. I could turn the switch and another loop would come, but I am lucky. My breathing synchronises effortlessly with the ebb and flow of this first loop. I open my eyes.

It’s close enough to winter that the trees past the train windows are gilded with ragged leaves. People are wearing jackets, but not yet scarves or gloves. Everyone is too hot in this carriage. Past the noise of the Buddha machine, I can feel the train vibrate, I can almost hear voices. The loop is ambiguous- every noise that sidles past the headphones is incorporated until the train is breathing with me. Across the aisle men gesticulate and smile and talk. A girl is reading a book. A grey haired man looks pained as he casts his eyes around, oppressed by the weight of life pressed into the carriage. Beyond him in the gloaming I can see lights burning in office buildings.

We stop. We accelerate. We continue. We decelerate. We stop. We accelerate. We continue.

It feels as if there is a larger pattern, as if the loop is changing, as if it draws out – there is not. The change is in the train and in the passengers. This loop is thirty seconds long. The man next to me is reading a free newspaper. I am tired.

We reach my station and I step out onto the platform and the train keeps going, and the loop repeats.