He sat on the sofa clutching his gin and tonic in grim death, staring glassily ahead of him, like a zombie about to get its brain back.

I squatted in the opposite corner of the room. It had just passed midnight between one year and the next, and I wondered if the world was going to turn over a new leaf for me, too.

But still as facile and farcical as it ever was.

I bit on my tongue to see if I was still alive and realised that the General, now perched further forward on the sofa, as if on the point of rising to get something from the refrigerator, was doing the same; there was a red droplet at one corner of his lips.

The TV flashed wildly, both holds lost at once evidently, leaving the star turn on a sea of picture dropout.

God! Who was knocking at the front door? The first footer with a lump of coal as big as his head?

The General got up, shook his head and torso like a dog fresh from an invigorating swim, and waddled to the door, waving a signal to me behind his back with one arm, a bit like a tail. Obviously, I was meant to hang back and wait for trouble.

On getting up, the General had inadvertently broken wind, leaving a trace of his presence in the room after he’d gone. I heard his shambling step in the hall and, after the opening click of the outside door, I heard an extra shuffling coming back with him. No words had been exchanged, as far as I could tell.


As far as I could tell, the rest of the night was quiet. Whereto the General and his newfound friend had dossed down for the period was a mystery to me for, search as I might the dark rooms with hands that I had last used at some children’s party, I found neither hair nor hide of them, bar a soggy Caramel Whirl on a Z-bed in the guest room.


The New Year dawned behind schedule at about 8:45 a.m. (the authorities had told us to move the clocks on an hour towards British Summer Time three months early, for a reason that I could not then, nor now, understand at all.) I found the General back on the sofa whereon, if he could have managed to speak to me, he would have maintained he had spent the whole night. As it was, I learnt a lot about death and its effect - by closely examining the General’s body. I discovered that, even hours after the death process had taken its course, his back passage was still capable of bearing sizeable lumps as hard, and as black, as coal.



(published 'Cloth Ears' 1990)