This is a short story from my archive. A few will have read it already. It would not be wise to hold your breath while waiting for new posts on this blog, but I will populate it bit by bit, now I have embarked on a major project to use what is in my attic, both literally and metaphorically. This will take me more than a month of Sundays and is perpetually at the mercy of outside interruptions. Please feel free to interact.
The Strong
Two heads drew together. One blonde, fragile on its stem rising out of a rough jersey. A buttoned placket had been fashioned, allowing the remarkable cranium an easier passage. A manly fringe slanted high across a huge forehead. The other head gave off a pinkish glow from a bowl-cut of that hue politely called strawberry blonde. Its owner, though, frowning beneath her heavy fringe knew it with precocious social anxiety to be ginger, whatever the euphemism.
Both heads met at a low level in front of their plates: a perspective that spread the tea things
in a small town-scape across a cream and blue afternoon cloth. The paper lampshade hung
low like the evening sun.
The girl fiddled with her knife, trying to make Pegasus fly, but it was too late in the day for the
dancing reflection to spring off onto the ceiling and divert her conker-haired sister enthroned,
robed in a Harrington square and peevishly grizzling at the end of the table.
Mummy was clattering in the kitchen; the Welsh Rarebit finishing off under the grill while she had a
cig and ran water into the cheesy saucepan.
The boy squirmed onto his knees and reached across the table for a sticky green and gold tin.
“Not yet,” said the girl, deputising.
But they looked at the tin together, turning it around for the unfathomable image to show itself.
“Why’s there bees?”
“There are bees coming out because it’s dead,” she said, knowledgeably.
“Why is it dead? Did the bees kill it?”
“ It just died,” said the girl, privately processing a more adult narrative of massacre by larger beasts
– or perhaps by angry Uncle Walter, trophy-hunting with his gun.
“Read what it says.”
“Out of the Strong came forth Sweetness”.
“What’s a Strong?”
“Well, this is a Strong, isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t, it’s a lion!”
“I know it was a lion when it was alive, but it says here it’s a ‘Strong’…”
“…Is it because it’s gone smelly?”
Now both heads pull back sharply at the thought; a visceral flinching from the rank, metallic
dead-animal smell that their life in the undergrowth of hedge and ditch has already made familiar.
“The bees went to live in that hole in the lion’s chest. They put some honey in and made it nice and sweet.”
“They made some treacle too.”
“It’s not treacle, it’s Golden Syrup.”
“Like honey.”
“Yes, and much nicer than honey. P’raps they made it stronger to cover the smell of the
dead lion.”
“It’s a Strong, you said.”
“Yes, the Strong I mean.”
Hot and blackly blistered Welsh Rarebit is slid onto plates, cut into fingers and blown on for the
impatient youngest. This flushed royal infant is mollified into mumbling and fumbling. The
other two draw apart and disappear below table level.
“Euck! It smells. I don’t like welsh rabbit. It smells of cheese. Rabbits smell of fur.
Can’t I have some treacle?”
A sigh gusts across the tea table in their direction. “Eat it all up, both of you, then you can have
some Golden Syrup.”
“Mummy, why is this lion lying down? Why is it on the treacle tin? Can I lick the spoon? Did the
bees kill the lion? Did the bees make the treacle? Did they eat the smelly lion? ”
“The Strong,’” corrects the girl to herself, adding the hollow, dark and massively stinking word to
her private hoard.
“Just eat up, both of you - do,” sighs their mother again, subsiding weakly into her chair; half-dead
herself at sunset.
