Tales of Sorrow and Wonder

By Nicholas Oddfellow

This collection of seventeen tales - moving, funny and wide-ranging - explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious. These stories give readers the chance to encounter a world brimming with both sorrow and wonder. They will take you deep into the jungles of Latin America to meet the Tribe of Eternal Laughter or whisk you off to an English fishing town that seethes with lust. You will emerge from these tales shaken, seduced and wide-eyed with fascination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nicholas Oddfellow
• Release date: Apr 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311125552

Nicholas Oddfellow

Ugly Head Press was founded by the writer Nicholas Oddfellow. We like books that fill you with wonder one minute, make you weep the next and leave you giggling helplessly in your seat.

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Tales of Sorrow and Wonder

Nicholas Oddfellow

Copyright © 2016 Nicholas Oddfellow

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Nicholas Oddfellow was born in Reading, England, in 1980. He has since been unsettled.

Contents

More Fruitcake, Sir?

Under the Guayacán Tree

The Scythe

A Sad Tale from a Hillside in Berkshire

She Puts Up with My Little Willy

The Tribe of Eternal Laughter

Decapoda

A Song of Entrapment

Indecision

The Day the Last Condor Was Killed

The Cloudologist

Senna

The Maharajah

A Tale of a Village

Two Tribes

Voices

A Trip to Whitby with Mother

More Fruitcake, Sir?

Many years ago, I spent a winter in Falmouth on the south coast of Cornwall; and there, in a dingy pub on a stone stairway that lay steeped in perpetual shadow, I met Thomas Sands. The name serves him well; I still remember the sandy colour of his eyebrows and lashes, and the freckles like splashes of wet sand across his cheeks. The name is also apt because I cannot think of that long winter without smelling the damp sand of Gyllyngvase Beach, where I slept on a thin bed of broken boxes under the pale wintry sky.

I liked the pub for several reasons: nobody looked at me strangely to see me shaving in the washbasin; the barman didn’t mind me sitting alone, nursing a single pint for several hours; and because in the evenings they set out pâtés, cheeses, cakes and crackers on the bartop. I had seen Thomas Sands there many times before. Without fail, he would arrive at the pub at noon and, an hour later, at one o’clock, he would be bar-slumped drunk. He drank double whiskies in quick succession as if it were simply a means to an end, the end being absolute drunkenness.

And having fallen victim to the disease of alcohol myself, if the tourists had been kind, I too arrived at the pub at noon. And once, only once, I managed to steal a moment of quasi sober conversation with Thomas Sands. During that hour-long chat, he seemed somewhat jovial – even fun – though a little self-regarding. He told me that when it came to getting drunk he liked to do just that; and, with his comfortable pension, he did just that every day.

‘I do everything the same way. Thomas Sands,’ he said, extending a shaky hand. ‘Get it over and done with. Take getting up in the morning. I bet you lie in bed, half-awake, for hours.’

‘I don’t have a bed.’

‘Well, he,’ pointing at the overweight barman, ‘he likes to lie in - sometimes till after twelve - but not me. When I wake, always at five on the dot, I spring out of bed straightaway. Never lie in. Never have. You see?’

‘Not really.’

‘What do you mean not- You have to get out of your warm bed and into the cold at some point. It’s an inevitability, is it not? So without a thought, I just leap straight up and within five seconds of opening my eyes I’m steady on my two feet. You see now? I like to get things over and done with. Like that.’ He clicked his fingers.

‘Well, good for you.’

‘And I drink in the same way – another please, Stu – you know when you’re in the bath and-’

‘I haven’t had a bath for-’

‘Okay, okay. Well, with that reedy voice of yours, I’ll bet you had enough baths in your youth. I bet you could wallow in a hot soapy bath for hours. Not me. No sooner do I fully recline in the hot water, I get out. I can’t enjoy it, you see. I know I’ve got to get out, all wet and dripping, at some point, so why not just get out straight away? I haven’t had a good bath for, orf, more than ten years. Get it? I can’t help it, but that’s the way everything goes with me. Take listening to music. I used to love the Bee Gees. But the problem was the same: the track was going to end in three or whatever minutes so I would just skip it, and skip the next, and the next. If I didn’t skip it, I would be trapped in a sort of suspended state of apprehension. Two more - and whatever this man’s drinking. Orchids! I had an orchid collection, had it years, but this morning I had to throw all the plants out, even though some were in flower, while others were beginning to bud - cheers Stu, fantastic fruitcake- well, they would lose their flowers anyway, and I hate waiting for them to brown and clutch themselves and fall onto the graveyard of the sill, and at some not too distant point they wilt, wither and rot - so, why not just get rid of the lot now?’

I listened, eating the very good fruitcake, as the sandy-freckled stranger went on. He told me he loathed skylarks. They flutter higher and higher, shrieking, as if desperate to escape or reach some point just beyond the gossamer of the eye, and then - snap! (he clicked his fingers again) - they parachute back down to earth. ‘Why don’t they just stay on the ground in the first place if it’s going to happen anyway?’

‘Tasty insects high up?’ I suggested.

‘Good man, good man. Don’t even ask me what happened to the wife! I’ve just kicked her out, though she was half out the door anyway. Of course, you see the pattern: it was going to end at some point, at the end of a battle with some foul disease - either mine or hers - an inevitable, pitiful end. You follow? Sex! Sex life was on the rocks, smashed to smithereens; I used to skip foreplay and race along for a minute until orgasm, which suddenly struck me like that,’ he clicked his fingers, ‘as pointless. What are you left with? A soggy tissue and tired quads. Can’t see the point in it; it all ends soon in a grunt and a judder. And don’t talk to me about sunsets! I just want darkness to fall immediately - send the sun plummeting into the sea as it does in the tropics - none of this lingering pink - oh, the fuchsia! - hanging around in the sky. God, I can’t take all that, the tensions not good for my diverticulitis. No, grant me night, like this.’ Again, he clicked his fingers.

‘I quite like sunsets.’

‘You bloody would. You hippy. You bum. You’re the kind to like holidays - don’t even go there. I get off the plane fully aware that two weeks later I’ve got to get back on, so you know what I did in Kos? I turned round and got straight back on the plane. Who can enjoy all this temporary crap? Cigars! So fleeting - give me a cigar that lasts a lifetime.’

It was one o’clock. He soon became incoherent and limp, his head, suddenly too heavy, was propped up weakly by his freckled hand. I bid him farewell and a murmured bubble of saliva burst forth from his wet lips.

I left Cornwall - it’s far too solitary a place - but my meanderings brought me back down a year later, seeking warmer climes. Even in winter I could sculpt a huge sand dragon on the beach and get twenty-odd quid a day for my efforts. One noon I popped into this very same pub, half-hoping to find that peculiar talkative drunk, Thomas Sands. But of course he wasn’t there. And upon seeing the empty barstool, I already knew. I sat at the bar and ordered a double whisky in the gentleman’s honour. I turned to the barman. ‘What happened to the man, who used to-’

‘Thomas? Thomas Sands? He’s dead, sir.’

‘Yes, but how?’

‘He knew it would come at some point, sir, so he just got it over and done with. A shotgun, sir. Aimed

at the heart.’

I ordered another double whisky. ‘Well, maybe he’s got a point.’

‘It’s about the journey, sir. Fruitcake?’

‘Right, thank you. Enjoy the skylarks, the sunsets, the orchid that’s slow to flower.’ I sipped my whisky and enjoyed its smoky burn in my throat and the warmth spreading out from my stomach. ‘I think I get it. Make the most of getting there.’ The barman looked sincere and watched my mouth move. ‘Enjoy the foreplay,’ I went on, ‘but in some ways, come on, can’t you see he’s got a point?’

‘More fruitcake, sir?’

Under The Guayacán Tree

In Guayaquil, I used to like sitting on a bench on the malecón at dusk, watching the water hyacinths float by, drifting inland in the opposite direction to the river’s flow. I used to like watching the huge tropical insects at this hour too. They would rush out from the darkness of the river and orbit the small orange globes that flickered on as the sun fell away. The bench lay beneath a guayacán tree, a tree that quivered then, in September, with bright yellow flowers, which seemed undiminished by the onset of night, glowing all the stronger, while everything else along the malecón drew back into shadow. It had been planted, I like to think, for those of us who feared the night in that crime-plagued city, teaching us something about courage and standing strong. I used to go there, to my bench, and watch the water hyacinths floating upstream, the insects and the shifting yellow petals of the guayacán as a means to rid myself of the anxiety and sense of guilt that intensified in the heat of day.

I had been sitting very still watching these things when I noticed a small figure approach. I glimpsed the wraith-like man in a hazy shaft of light cast by an orange streetlamp, then he disappeared, merging into the shadows only to reappear, closer and in finer detail, under the next lamp. I could see clearly now that he used a cane and wore a narrow-brimmed hat. His back was hunched, his legs bowed, but he didn’t move slowly. His sickle-shaped figure was a little like the sliver of the waxing moon in the sky. He looked like a very old man, as indeed he was, and he needed a rest.

‘Magnificent tree,’ he said as he sat down, leaning heavily with both hands on his cane. ‘They cloak the hills around my village. Just looking at them is like listening to a quick song or throwing yourself under a mountain cascade, don’t you think?’ He smoothed the crease in his white trousers. ‘Come, look! The guayacanes are in flower! the children shout. The guayacanes are in flower! I have heard that the children in your country get excited in such a way when the first snows fall. Where I’m from it is when the guayacanes are in flower.’ I remember little about his face except that it was an old face under a hat, and the eyes were a dark brown, the colour of hardwood. They were delicately ringed and patterned like hardwood too; these were not the rheumy eyes of the defeated. We sat in silence for several minutes watching the water hyacinths and kamikaze insects, listening to a warm wind stir the guayacán’s bright yellow flowers, and it was during this strange stillness that I noticed a yellow flower fall, drifting slowly downward like a beautiful parachute, while at the same time rotating as if spinning on a fine thread, and fall silently onto the indented top of the old man’s hat – and I had a funny feeling the hat might burst into flame. This, he never knew, but sensing it may have got him talking again.

‘We say it is the tree of truth. One night of the year the elders sit under an ancient tree just like this one and we say to the children,’ he spread his hand indicating a sea of interested boys and girls, ‘ask us anything. We are old. We are wise. So ask us anything, and as long as we’re under this tree we must only speak the truth. In this way we pass on the wisdom we have gained throughout our long lives. Now I would like to say the same to you, seated as we are under the tree of truth. Ask me anything, anything about anything about anything.’

It was as if I already had a question prepared for such a situation. Perhaps it had something to do with that thick sense of guilt that seemed to flow with my blood around then; a guilt that, even with the perspective given by time, was well-earned.

‘That’s very kind, and I thank you,’ I said, speaking in the most formal Spanish I knew. ‘A rare opportunity indeed, to sit under a guayacán with such an old man’ - in that country such plain-faced observations were not considered rude – ‘You must have done a lot of things in your life, a lot of good things and