2 TALKING BOOK CANDIDATES BY BUD CRAIG

[Bud Craig]

WALKING THESE BLUES

One foot in front of the other.  Steady away, talking to Fats Domino.  Courtesy of MP3 technology, Fats, your huskily caressing voice sings in my ears about someone ‘walking these blues.’  That’s what I’m doing, I suppose.  Why did you record a song called Walking to New Orleans when you live there?  Mind, I’ve no room to talk.  I’m just finishing the Lovendale Way - 49 miles in 4 days – and I’ve lived in Lovendale all my life.  The North East of England’s the best place this time of year, plenty of daylight. 

You’re probably wondering why I’m walking on my own, Fats.  My mate, Rob, isn’t well.  Rachel, my daughter, has just started a new job in London.  My wife, Carol, has got another bloke.  I thought the walking might help, as well as keeping me in shape.  Maybe I’ll write a book:  Fitness for Cuckolds. 

The steep sides give the valley an intimate, self-contained feel as though the rest of the world doesn’t exist.  The Lovendale Hills, millions of years old, roll into the distance, melting into one another like lovers.  Kind of puts things into perspective, Fats.  Or maybe not. 

The good news is I’ve no money worries– I banked my redundancy cheque on Friday.  Sod Valley Engineering, I think to myself, and sod Carol, as the sun gradually nudges aside a bank of pale cloud.  The honey smell of cut grass mingles with the fragrance of May blossom.  A lark warbles up above, harmonising with the quee-quee of a curlew in the distance.  Lovely. 

Getting to the top of Swanny Fell was the hardest bit, but it’s worth it for the views.  Now it’s an easy stretch on the level before a stroll down a gentle gradient back home to Bentley in Lovendale.  I expected my life to be like that.  I thought I’d done all the hard work.  It was meant to be downhill all the way from now on.  Shows how much I know.

Now, as I go through the flowering meadows, I can see my cottage in the distance.  It reminds me of Carol and Rob.  Did I tell you I caught her and my lifelong pal on the living room floor?  At it.  I don’t know what was the worst part: the otherworldly noises coming out of her mouth, the eczema scar on his arse or the Girl of My Best Friend corniness of it all.  Will I ever be able to listen to Elvis again, I wonder. 

            What next, Fats?  Go home and face the music?  Someone must have found the bodies by now.  They could catch up with me any time.  Or maybe I’ll do the Lovendale Way again, the other way round this time.  Just keep on walking.  Walking these blues. 

 

464 words

 

THE SCOTTISH PLAY

 

I knocked on the door and waited.  And waited.  Take your time, love, I muttered to myself.  I’ve got nothing better to do than trek across five centuries to stand on your doorstep.  Not to mention the rush hour traffic in Stratford on Avon.  Suddenly the door opened.  A tall, Middle Eastern looking woman stood there.  Her jewelled headdress didn’t really go with her tartan trouser suit.

“Will Shakespeare, Mrs,” I said.  “Bespoke Playwright, no job too small.  You wanted an estimate.”

She was older than me, I reckoned, but well preserved.  Age had not withered her.   

“Cleo Macbeth,” she said in an Edinburgh accent, making a hand-washing motion.  “Do come in.”

As we went into her living room and sat down, I smoothed my hair down at the back.  Well, there’s hardly any left at the front.  She smiled at me, said I could call her Cleo.  I reckoned she was a woman I could do business with.  Full o’ the milk of human kindness sort of style.  Still, you never can tell.  There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face, is there, know what I mean? 

“What can I do for you then, ” I asked, taking out my notebook.

“Well, my husband, Tony, and I are wanting something for my uncle’s 80th birthday.”

“What sort of thing did you have in mind?”

“The main thing is it has to be a Scottish Play.”

“Don’t say that,” I almost shouted. 

I nearly walked out there and then, but I needed the money.  I had to balance on my left leg for seven seconds, chanting ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’ under my breath.  Talk about toil and trouble.  I had all sorts of horrible imaginings, I can tell you. 

“But my uncle,” she said. 

I sat down again.

“But me no buts,” I replied, “uncle me no uncles.  Sc… what you just said is unlucky.  I thought everybody knew that.”

“Sorry.”

“You can call it Hibernian Half Hour,” I continued, “or Macbeth or Tony and Cleo if you like but not… the other thing.  That way madness lies.”

“OK, calm down,” she said. 

Then she went into this great, long list of stuff she wanted in her Caledonian Cavalcade.  Infinite variety about sums it up.  I’d be working tomorrow and tomorrow and to-bleeding-morrow at this rate.  Aye, to the last sodding syllable of recorded time. 

“Hold, enough!”

I thought that would shut her up but she tried to say something else.

“We’ve got plenty to be going on with,” I insisted. 

“Just one more thing,” she pleaded.  

I shook my head in disbelief.

“What?”

“If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.”

Well, that baffled me.  My head buzzed as if quills upon a fretful porpentine were having a go at it.  It’s hardly gonna be done when it’s not done, is it?  I mean, it stands to reason. 

“Cleo, no offence, but what are you on about?”

“Well, it will have to be ready soon.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.  Made me fair infirm of purpose, it did.

“OK, tell me the worst.  When do you want it by?”

“I’ll need it by the 17^th.”

            That was direst cruelty, that. 

“The 17^th?  You’ve got to be joking.  That’s less than a fortnight.”

            “You mean you can’t do it?”

            “I’m not saying I can’t do it; I’m not saying I won’t do it,” I said, stroking my beard and letting out a long sigh, “but if you want it that quick you’re talking silly money.”

            “You mean it will be expensive?”

            “Bound to be, Cleo, I mean I’ll have to bring Butty in for a start.”

            “Butty?”

            “Yeah, Francis Bacon.  He helps me out with the writing when I’ve got a rush job on.”

A few minutes later I went into the garden and lit a fag before dialling Butty’s number.  Of course he told me how busy he was.  Playing hard to get as per usual.

            “She’s paying well over the odds,” I said.

            “Oh, well in that case…”

            It’s not that Butty’s mercenary, he just loves money. 

“She wants a dramatic enactment set North of the Border,” I explained.

“One of them, eh?  Anything else?”

“Childbirth has to be in it,” I went on.  “If possible it should be by caesarean section but that’s not the be all and end all.”

“Go on.”

“Main themes,” I said, “ambition, death, relationships, jealousy.”

“Don’t want much, does she?”

“That’s not all, Butty.”

I looked through my notes, struggling to decipher my handwriting.  The bit about lots of action and power struggles we could take as read. 

“Two weird sisters, she’s asked for,” I went on, “cos she’s got a couple of strange ones herself.  And a teenage boy with pimples like her grandson.”

“Yeah,” said Butty, “we could give him a catchphrase.  Have him going round looking in the mirror, saying, ‘out, damned spot’ or something.” 

“Brilliant.  We need to squeeze in a reference to the recession.”

“Very contemporary,” he said. 

“And someone coming back from the dead.”

“You could put them two things together,” he said, “have a scene with a banker’s ghost or something.”

“Nice one, Butty,” I said, “like it.”

“He could be covered in blood and the young lad says, ‘what bloody man is that?’  You know, play on words sort of thing.”

Once Butty gets the bit between his teeth there’s no stopping him.  He has wisdom beyond his years. 

“Now, then, what else was she after,” I said.  “Let’s see.  Oh, yeah, she wants dramatic irony.”

“Dramatic irony?  Well, how much?”

“Yards of the bloody stuff.  It has to be ‘running through the whole story’ to quote her exact words.”

When I’d sorted everything out with Butty I made my way back to the house, remembering a session in the Mucky Duck last year.  It was the night Butty and me admitted to one another we were time travellers from the sixteenth century.  Of course we’d had a few, otherwise we’d never have opened up like that. 

As the lovely Cleo was showing me out after the hurly burly was done, her phone rang in the hall.  As she dashed over to answer it, I glanced at a picture of a sixties rock star on the wall.  I thought it was that bloke from the Rolling Stones but couldn’t be sure.  Is this a Jagger which I see before me, I wondered as I opened the door and went outside.  I could still hear her voice from the telephone.  

“I’ve just had that writer chap here, Ophelia,” she said, as I went down the front steps, “about the Scottish Play.”

“What’s done is done,” I chanted as I hopped on alternate legs back to where I’d come from. 

1138 WORDS