Over the past year or so I have been selecting photographs I’ve taken on many travels, and put a story to them.
When I reached a milestone of 50, I decided to make them into a book, and, in doing so, I have gone through each and revised them, making some longer, and almost a short story.
50 photographs, 50 stories. I’ve called it, “Inspiration, Maybe”
It will be available soon.
Here’s the thing…
Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.
I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.
But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.
Once again there’s a new instalment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.
I was in the middle of a large building, sitting on a chair, a single light on above me creating a weird shadow in a circle of light. Beyond that circle was darkness.
But I was grateful there was no blindfold or gag.
It had to be one of the buildings on Benderby’s factory site. There were a number of older warehouses on the perimeter of the site, boarded up and in disrepair. I had heard rumours they were going to be refurbished or demolished, no one seemed to be able to decide what to do with them.
It was deathly quiet, but if I strained hard, I thought I could hear the sound of a generator not far away. Benderby’s had their own mini power station in case the main power grid went down, and I remembered that it was round the time for the six-monthly testing of the generators. I was definitely inside the Benderby complex.
So, did that make my captor one of Benderby’s men? Or was it Alex himself, trying to make a bold statement. I didn’t think he had that sort of aggressive behaviour in him, but he was a Benderby, and they all had violent streaks somewhere in their makeup.
“Good. You’re awake.” The distorted voice could be either male or female. I’d know more when I saw my assailant, bit it came from beside me and I tried to look in that direction. It was difficult because whoever tied me up did a good job.
There was also an echo, brought on by the emptiness of the building.
“What do you want? I’m not much good to you if you’re trying to break into the main building. I don’t have night access.”
“I’m not interested in the main building.”
“What are you interested in?”
“You.”
I had expected to hear the word treasure, not me.
“Sadly, I’m not that interesting.”
“So you say. But maybe it might have something to do with that friend of yours, Boggs.”
“Then it’s the treasure you’re after.”
“Me, personally, no. The people I work for, I guess. The word is that Boggs has a treasure map that his father left him.”
This person had to be acquainted with Rico, because only he could possibly know about that particular map, that is, if Boggs had told him, or told his mother, and Rico had overheard him.
Or Boggs had told this person, under duress, that I had the map, holding it for safekeeping. My mind started conjuring up all sorts of terrifying scenarios, all of which ended badly.
“If Rico told you that, then he was only trying to save his own skin. He’s been trying to barter a copy of something to the Benderby’s, a map he didn’t have and hadn’t been able to get off Boggs. If there is such a map, then Boggs has it.”
“I’m sure he told you about it, didn’t he?”
“What are best friends for, but whether I believed him is a different matter. He told me about a map his said his father had in his possession, and I know he’s been hunting high and low for it, but if he’s found it, then he hasn’t told me about it yet.”
I was trying to sound sincere, but fear has a way of making you sound, well, afraid.
My captor took a step forward into the fringe of the light. Dressed in black, with a mask, the body shape looked more like a woman than a man, a figure that could be disguised by the bulky outer clothing.
“Who are you?”
“That’s irrelevant. What I will do to you if you do not tell me the truth, is. Boggs told me you had the map. I believe he was telling the truth.”
So, this person had interrogated Boggs. It would not have taken much. Boggs was not the bravest soul I knew. At school, Boggs had always been the first to capitulate in any confrontation.
I wondered if they had searched him. Of course they had, and he didn’t have the map on him, which made it easier to deflect the onus to me.
But I didn’t have the map on me either. I took the precaution of hiding it away in a place no one would find except me. Now it was a matter of withstanding whatever this person decided was needed to extract ‘the truth’.
The problem was, I didn’t handle confrontation any better than Boggs had.
“And I’m telling you the truth when I tell you I haven’t got the map. But I do have one of those being peddled at Osborne’s bar. You can have that one if you like.”
I saw my captor shake their head. Disdain, or disappointment?
Two steps further into the circle of light, and the two slaps, either side of my face, very hard. The paid was instant and stinging, bringing tears to my eyes. It should have brought acquiescence, but deep down defiance was building. It surprised me.
My captor took a step back and looked down on me. “Don’t make me have to hurt you. All I want is the map.”
“I can’t give you what I don’t have.”
Closed fist this time, and aside from the teeth jarring, possible jaw-breaking, nose bleeding effect, I was starting to consider how long I could withstand this sort of beating.
“The map?” Patience was running thin, anger was building.
“I can’t…”
Several punches to the ribs and stomach, taking my breath away and making it very difficult to breathe. Pains where I’d never had pain before. I’d had beatings at school but never like this.
Once more a step back, I could now only see the black figure through blurry eyes.
Time to plead to deaf ears, “You can beat me to within an inch of my life, but I can’t give you what I don’t have. It’s as simple as that.”
And then I waited for the next round of punches.
A minute. Two.
Then a new voice, out in the void, said, “He doesn’t have it. This is a nothing but an elaborate hoax.”
Not a recognisable voice though.
A final blow rendered me unconscious.
© Charles Heath 2019
How thrilled Harry Walthenson, Private Detective, had been to see his name painted on the translucent glass window in the door to his office.
Located in Gramercy Park, in an old building full of atmosphere, he had a space renovated to resemble that of Spade and Archer in a scene right out of the Maltese Falcon.
His desk had an antique phone like those used in the 1930s, and a lamp that cast eerie shadows at night. Along one wall was a couch, his bed for more nights than he wanted to remember, and on the other a filing cabinet, waiting for the big case files.
Up till now it had been missing cats and dogs.
Then, everything changed…
Starts at episode 1 – The Wrong Place, The Wrong Time
Episode 109 – The end of one case and the start of another
Enjoy
This is Chester. He’s unimpressed with the fact it’s father’s day.
Why?
Because, it seems, we have never given him the opportunity to become a father.
It’s an interesting point, but one that requires an explanation. In fact, the serious expression, bordering on smoke coming out of his ears, demands one.
Firstly, if I let you out the chances are you will become roadkill. We’ve had this argument before, a number of times, and that it is not safe outside the confines of this house.
And if I promise not to stray…
I laugh. A cat cannot promise anything, because, well, you’re a cat. That’s what cats do, stray, wander, play chicken with cars, fight with other male cats for practically no reason at all, and worse, chase after any female cat that’s on heat.
I’m not like those other cats, he says. Also, he seems amused by that expression, on heat.
It’s hard to explain, but you’ll hear it before you see it, I say.
And then there’s that look of recognition. We’ve had a few female cats wandering the streets lately that have caused him to become very restless, and make strange guttural sounds.
So, he says, I’m not likely to become a father?
Maybe, I say, if he behaves himself, eats what is put in front of him, and use the litter properly instead of a general target, and stop using plastic bags as an alternate litter.
Yes, finally, a guilty look crosses his face.
I think I just found some leverage.
On the other side ….
As to what side I’m referring to, I’ll let you make up your own mind …
I’ve often thought that I should have been born in the early 1900s and lived through what might be called the halcyon days of the ’20s and ’30s.
Of course, it is only a matter of opinion if those days were good or bad, depending on who you were.
If I’d been the heir apparent to become Lord of the manor, or from any part of upper classes with a University education, I have no doubt that I would not have been spared the horrors of war along with rest of the young men who went to serve and never returned.
The only saving grace might be as an officer it might have been easier than being in the ranks, but at that age, I doubt if I’d be as cautious as I should be, as of all youth I’d throw caution to the wind.
But in all likelihood, I would not have been part of the aristocracy but more than likely a clerk or farm worker who might by wit and guile have survived the war, if not a little traumatized by what I had seen and done in the name of defending the Empireas it was in those days.
It had prompted Hemingway to use the phrase ‘the lost generation’ at the end of one of his books, but perhaps it was first used by Gertrude Stein who had said in not many words that these people who survived the war were more content to drink themselves to death.
I guess if the first world war hadn’t taken you, and you survived the great flu epidemic that followed it, then you would probably believe you were in some way invincible, and that cigarettes, alcohol and hard living was the least of your problems.
So, in those post first world war days where writers and others congregated in Paris in the mid-1920s, an age some regarded as the halcyon years before the great depression and later on the next world war. I suspect a lot of the American writers left their homeland because of prohibition and wanted the more liberal lifestyle in Paris during these years.
Certainly there was a group of writers and artists who lived that bohemian lifestyle, and perhaps a result of the horrors of war, using alcohol and promiscuity to drown the bad memories. I doubt if anyone could return from a war like that and not be damaged in some way. Perhaps the only way to escape the nightmares that would have followed these people into civilian life was to immerse themselves in a different world, and if I had been living in those days, I know I would be putting pencil to paper making endless notes for later use.
And I prefer to believe if I had survived, it was because my desire to become a writer would eventually be fulfilled. Perhaps, in the end, it might be more likely because I had had a lifetime love affair with words, and to me, it would be more than enough to make a reasonable living from it.
Certainly I would have sought out others like me as mentors and compatriots.
It was a time when the likes of F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, and James Joyce, all of whom I have no doubt would be happy to be the role models one needed. And if you could afford to take a trip to Paris, well, enough said.
I suspect, however, it would require a lot of luck to be included in their group and no doubt hanging out at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, owned by Silvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier might have been a step in the right direction.
But, having not been there at the time, who knows what might have happened.
Perhaps one day when someone invents a time machine, I might be able to go back and find out.
This case has everything, red herrings, jealous brothers, femme fatales, and at the heart of it all, greed.
Coming soon!
A single event can have enormous consequences.
A single event driven by fate, after Ben told his wife Charlotte he would be late home one night, he left early, and by chance discovers his wife having dinner in their favourite restaurant with another man.
A single event where it could be said Ben was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Who was this man? Why was she having dinner with him?
A simple truth to explain the single event was all Ben required. Instead, Charlotte told him a lie.
A single event that forces Ben to question everything he thought he knew about his wife, and the people who are around her.
After a near-death experience and forced retirement into a world he is unfamiliar with, Ben finds himself once again drawn back into that life of lies, violence, and intrigue.
From London to a small village in Tuscany, little by little Ben discovers who the woman he married is, and the real reason why fate had brought them together.
Being a computer programmer, this word had a particular meaning for me, where a part of the programme did something other than expected.
Like unexpectedly stopping and freezing the screen. Some very famous programs and operating systems used to have a lot of these ‘bugs’.
More familiarly for all of us, a bug is an unwanted insect pest like a fly, or an ant, though there’s a host of those pesky ‘bugs’.
You could bug someone by hanging around and asking inane questions.
You could also bug someone by surreptitiously planting a microphone on them, or somewhere in their house, car, or office.
A person could have a bug, meaning there’s some germ or bacteria they’ve picked up that makes them very ill, like a cold, or pneumonia. Or, more than likely, it’s a bug going around. School children are particularly susceptible.
And if you like reading books you might have caught the reading bug.
You could tell someone to bug off, that is, to go away.
I might want to bug out, as in disappear, especially if there was someone I didn’t want to see.
Earlier today, or yesterday now since the clock has ticked over to a new day, I was writing a post about the weather.
Boring as hell, except it gradually turned into a rant about greed, both corporate and government,
There has to be better stuff to talk about than that.
Like today is father’s day.
It’s possibly the most interesting aspect of my life, having never expected as a teenager that I would ever become a father. No, back in those dark and gloomy days I had neither the confidence or the wherewithal to be or do anything.
I guess meeting someone, falling in love, and getting married, pulls you out of the lethargy of youth and forces you to take stock, and become someone, someone who has to have a good job that pays good money so you can get the necessities like a house and a car. You might have these before you get married, we had the cars, but not the house.
Then you realise you need more money because you never seem to earn enough until a baby comes along, and your whole life as you knew it turned upside down and inside out. Bad enough trying to sustain two, it’s now three.
More money, larger house, larger car, a damn good washing machine, and lots of nappies. Wow, I had thought having a baby meant more than a clothesline perpetually filled with nappies.
Until another baby comes along, the cycle repeats, then one has to go to school, and a whole new money pit opens and this costs more than the annual house payments.
Then there’s sport, and extracurricular activities like dancing (though we didn’t have girls, thankfully), then kids get to be very good at sport, so, you guessed it, another money pit. And a steadily growing grocery bill as they get larger and start eating you out of house and home.
There’s never a let-up, from the moment they’re born till the moment they leave home, and that, sometimes, can take a few more years than you expected.
Along the way you hope that your kids will respect you are theuir father and their mother. Sometimes that’s a forlorn hope. Other times children become a blessing and are always there. At least we don’t have to travel to either the other side of the country, or the other side of the world, to see ours, and with any luck, I will see them both later today.
I don’t expect much. My relationship with my father is strained, now, but for many years I was there for him, much more than I should according to my wife. I don’t want for them what happened to me, so I do what I can to make sure it doesn’t happen.
But the unexpected surprise, that one thing that you never expect when this life long journey starts, is the eventuality of grandchildren. Yes, it’s a natural progression in the circle of life, but often it doesn’t quite happen.
We have three granddaughters, and though I know as we get older we will not see them as much or if at all as they make their way out into a very large and far more accessible world than we had at the same time, but I will cherish those moments I have with them now.
I guess today, being the first day of spring, is not such a bad day after all, and it’s amazing that twelve hours later after feeling the gloom and doom of the world, that mood has changed, and that it took so little to change it.
Perhaps that’s what life is really all about.
Family.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 