The garden was crowded with love-me, love-me-not floss-top weeds, some already half-headed by the fitful breeze. Jack had ventured out to be alone, but the sound of distant children playing was a reminder of other people's livestock.

The voices of pain and joy were neither to Jack. Today there were no gnats on the tiny thermals that shifted with his body's warmth. The sun was hot but the air strangely cool. His thoughts shorted. He had just murdered his baby daughter. But she had not been bawling endlessly in the makeshift cot, not revealing her crude pre-human passions.

Quite the opposite, in fact. The reason for Jack's focussed child-cull was the coldness coming off her, a meek sleeping and waking. Too peaceful for its own good, some old women had said, choosing 'it' with the unselfconsciousness of people too long in the tooth to care about sex.

Despite loving his daughter in the only way he knew how, Jack had imagined all kinds of goings-on in her head. He dreaded her alien ability to see without looking, to hear without listening, to feel without touching. The baby was a horror, the mother herself an abandoned child who had been taken in and out of care like a dose of salts on incalculable tides

The old women had come in like Nursery Rhyme witches - ever ready with the ancient remedy of herb and untried gossip. The Authorities had agreed that Jack could be given a trial run. Fathers were not particularly famous for making good mothers but nobody would be allowed to accuse Authorities of being sexist. Jack had accepted all the suspicions attached to his demeanour. Worklessness tantamount to worthlessness showed in every movement he made: unmechanical ditherings with olden hippy locks; never owning the right screwdriver for the screws that held the real world together; staring at blanks of paper with the nonsensical aim of retrieving poems he'd never written but somehow remembered; misfiling important documents upon the roller-file of existence; cleaning the bath more often than he got in it himself, as if this would impress the Authorities who visited him to inspect the cleanliness of the sink but not the cleanliness (or otherwise) of his private parts; and, finally, the purchase of disposable nappies which he never pinned on his daughter for fear of spoiling such expensive throwaways, using instead his own underwear in rucked wadges.

Jack had tried to live up to the images that others wanted him to assume. Yet now he could relax. The Authorities could no longer accuse him of lacking care. In such a cruel world, murder was a pure moment of love, the only love, as opposed to lust, he'd ever felt for any human being. His daughter now had a reason to cry without feeling it and the old women mustered in the garden around him, blowing upon the floss-top plants, each intoning: he loved it, he loved it not, he loved it, he loved it not, he loved it ... until someone fetched out a crimson bundle of Jack's smalls from the house - followed by a noisy swarm of gnats.

The bizarre buzzing smacked of his own childhood. He knew the sound would come back one day ... ever since his mother told him that you could never lose the sound of Nursery Rhymes. At the age of listening, he enjoyed those tasteless ditties of the Victorian playroom. But later, at the age of doing and thrusting and having and wanting, he forgot the smaller pleasures of childhood and the delights of wholesome hunger.

As soon as Jack could talk, in fact, all those years ago, he asked his mother to explain the nuances of the senseless ditties she used to intone with the pretty under-her-breath voice during the late winter afternoons around the nursery fire.

"Just feel their sound, for the meaning will come out later."

That foreboding statement always intrigued him, until he reached the age of not worrying...

He did not care. He went out into the big wide world like a BIG I AM. He did not witness his mother shrivelling up into a mummy. He made LOADS OF LOOT. But, as the evenings drew in again, this time they did so in earnest, with the coming of age rather than those childhood curtains closing upon now forgotten Christmases. He drank himself stiff upon hard broads. Then, as a BIG I WAS, he crept back to his mother in the gathering dusk of twilight. The street looked much the same, save that the street lamps were taller, supposedly brighter, the terraced houses narrower, the back alleys barely sufficient to take men sideways, bay windows overhanging the pavements like sagging breasts, porch extensions almost big enough to kiss each other across the street with their inner doors flapping.

He recognised his own childhood house despite the uncanny angle of age. The same number and a letter-box large enough to admit visitors without the door opening. But he decided to knock, out of sheer politeness. Business life was full of such pretend consideration for others.

A shrunken housebound figure with stitched wrinkles creaked open with the door. The mouth was full of itself. She could hardly spit out the mindless delight at seeing her long lost son. Both stood on the doorstep for more time than it would take for just normal small talk. They had a lot of weather to catch up on.

However, once inside, he opened his holdall of presents.

These were: a Christmas card for her to sign; trinkets for her to wrap; cheap yuletide finery for her to hang on the scrawny tree which seemed to have grown from the floorboards, through the ceiling and out the chimney like a Victorian sweep's tousled mop. There was also a ghost story of an evil father, old witches and Little Red Riding Hood snuffed out even before she was old enough to own the hood.

The best item, though, was an unillustrated book of Old Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes which Jack's mother was supposed to have bought for him. How did she know he was coming? Indeed, how had he known she was going to give him this very book which he had fetched for her to wrap? He put it all down to synchronicity. She put it down to something far more insidious, far more uncontrollable, of which she was far more unaware. More sound than soundness.

Pity it was already Boxing Day.

Wanderers do return. They have no option. Jack lay awake at night, waiting for the turning year to sound out, or was it Old Father Christmas? But, surely, Santa didn't buzz but chortle.

Too late for Christmas, by half. Jack was back in his own old cot. This had grown narrower, too, with the turning of previous years ... like the alleys. His window creaked in the frost. His mother shuffled up the stairs, croaking a good night amid the bad.

She had always slept in the next bedroom, mainly because it was a "twoup-twodown", and Upstairs People they had always considered themselves to be. Only slummers slept in downstairs parlours.

Tonight (or for countless nights) they had spent the last hours before midnight poring over the new Nursery Rhyme book, rediscovering old favourites. And some new wordless ones that spread from page to page like a library stain. Haunted by their meaningless sounds, he closed the book with a slam, thus muffling the sounds' feeble pleas to be read aloud. Then to the john for a pee, last thing before bed. He wondered why he still needed nappies.

His mother had good as died during his grown-up jaunts for filthy lucre. Only her body was left, kept moving by the compost of hope and love: stumbling into the late night truckle: the excuse for a mind out of kilter with the bones: sharp bitten-off bones that'd've skewered if she'd anything soft enough to skewer. Even her heart was a leathery wrinkled foetus which barely pulsed.

He waited for the sound. And when the sound came, the sound smacked of those gutroaring, brainscreeching monsters of modern night, when prehensile youths would stuff their ears with deadphones: all noise archetypes knotted as one, bloodknitted and disfigured with hopes that the new year could hardly tote in its craven, crumpled mitts.

Jack tried to fend it off with the old well-tried rhymes. He stumbled over the stuttering words, but they were not words at all, but became melted mutter, then tongue-twisters streaming his innards out on a corkscrew of cancerous gristle across the counterpane like like like like the missing contents of Old Mother Hubbard's bare cupboard. Old Dame Dob and Mother Goose and Mrs Bond and Mrs Sprat and Mrs Horner and the Ugly Sisters and the Evil Stepmother and the Woman Who Lived In A Shoe hustled down a momentarily widened alley, to see who could first chop the tail, chop the tail, chop the tail of The Man Who Had Killed His Baby Daughter. But Jack had been stuck fast down a disused chimney for longer than Santa Claus had existed.

As the belly grew even emptier, the silence filled with extreme terror. There was only one thing to eat - and that rose from his lap, all gristle and very little meat. All lean and no fat. Sprat spirting spirit-spores for swatting.



(published 'Sackcloth & Ashes' 1998)