Litro #119 Ghosts Teaser

119 Ghosts Sabrina Mahfouz Daniel Knauf Helen Mort Sam Hawken A.J Kirby Giles Anderson

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Litro Magazine Ghosts

Editorial From Shakespeare to Stephen King, writers have long plundered the memory of ghosts past and present to inject fear into the hearts of their readers, and this fault line of human existence has conjured up some of the most memorable moments in English literature.

And what are Ghosts, if not the dark residue of memory? Their form is shaped by our own, their fears our fears grotesquely inversed — they mirror our own lives, a warning, or a promise, of how things may come to be.

But take them away from the occult and into the realm of the living and they become freakishly sinister, and even familiar. They become the moments that slide between wakefulness and dreaming, that gnaw away at the soul of human experience. From Daniel Knauf’s eerily unsettling and nightmarish horror fable Bye, Bye Blackbird to Flat Pack Pirate, Sabrina Mahfouz’s slick and chilling tale of domestic paranoia, there’s something to chill even the hardened ghost lover.

And if you want your shot of horror laced with a hint of violent realism, we have an exclusive extract from Sam Hawken’s Tequila Sunrise to see you through into the morning hours.

It’s been a blast mixing this collection together and we hope the issue disturbs and delights.

Mohsen and Alex Editors

ADVERTISING Durham University’s Oriental Museum is the only museum in Northern Britain devoted entirely to the art and archaeology of the Orient. Founded in 1960 to support teaching and research at Durham University, it is now open to everyone and welcomes thousands of tourists and local visitors each year. Learning remains central to its role however, and the museum and its collections continue to be used to support research and teaching at university level, as well as being a hugely popular destination for the region’s schools.

The museum is home to an extraordinary selection of artworks and archaeological artefacts from Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Near East, the whole continent of Asia and the Islamic cultures of North Africa and the Near and Middle East. The collections contain more than 23,500 objects, including over 6,700 from Ancient Egypt and in excess of 10,000 from China. The date range covered by the museum stretches from prehistory to the present day. Visitors can see finely carved Egyptian stone vessels dating back to the 3rd millennium BC, headhunting swords from Borneo and contemporary Japanese graphic art.

The museum is currently part way through a major redevelopment project.

This started in 2009 with the creation of the first of two new Ancient Egypt galleries, designed to provide an appropriate setting for the display of the highlights of the Egyptian collection. In 2011 the second Egyptian gallery opened, this time with a strong emphasis on supporting our work with schools and engaging with visiting families. Two new Chinese galleries have followed.

FEATURE Marvels of China offers visitors an introduction to this amazing culture through thematic displays exploring topics ranging from symbolism in Chinese art to festivals, scholarship and agriculture. The newest display space is the Malcolm MacDonald gallery, which focuses on the museum’s internationally important Chinese ceramic and jade collections in more detail, providing detailed information for those with a specialist interest as well as the general visitor.

China has also been the theme chosen by young people working in the museum this year as part of Stories of the World, a London 2012 Cultural Olympiad project. As their contribution to the Cultural Olympiad these young people, aged 15 to 25, curated the exhibition ‘Made in China: exports and experiences’. This exhibition explored relations between Britain and China over the last 500 years, drawing both on historic collections and on the real-life experiences of members of the North East’s vibrant Chinese community.

The young curators chose to use not just the Chinese collections housed at the Oriental Museum, but also the local history archives housed in Durham University’s Palace Green Library and ceramics exported from China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and subsequently discovered during the course of archaeological excavations conducted in Durham’s historic core. In this way the exhibition explored local links to China, the kind of Chinese objects that were owned by local families in the North East of England in the past and how these objects were used.

Sabrina Mahfouz

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Daniel Knauf

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FLAT PACK PIRATE

BYE, BYE BLACKBIRD

Helen Mort

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Sam Hawken

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KEITH

TEQUILA SUNRISE

A.J Kirby

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Giles Anderson

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Events

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JELLYFISH

The Ghost in the (Fruit) Machine

Sabrina Mahfouz Yes. He knew he’d put them there. The bunch of keys had been on the side. Where they were supposed to be.

He wasn’t going to lie. No, nor forget.

Well, maybe they were gone now, but what did she want him to do about it?

She slammed the bathroom door and the rushing sound of water followed. He swallowed the rude words that had formed at the edge of his tongue and instead begun to light candles around the open plan living area, in an attempt to make the Wapping river side, new build, shared ownership, bargain, mid-recession, third floor, generic cream-painted, luxury-fittings filled flat seem atmospheric, romantic.

He planned it so that when she came out of the bath, all squeaky clean and warm, she’d smell the Waitrose marinated chicken and rosemary new potatoes he was about to get out the oven and all would be forgiven and forgotten. Half-hour later, it worked a treat.

She even kissed him on the nose and she hadn’t done that since they’d signed the Land Register. But even as he ran his fingers down her soft, curved back, it pestered him still. Where were the keys?

The next morning, as usual, she left for work earlier than him: pinstriped skirt suit and Nike Air running trainers on black-tighted feet.

Rucksack packed full of nutritious flaxseed sprinkled salad. He was expecting a goodbye kiss, a peck at least if his morning breath was too much to bear. Instead, with a dramatic swoosh of blow-dried hair she threw the ‘lost’ keys at his head as he was enjoying his late-start lie in (a big benefit of being a media creative).

She told him he needed to give his life a really good think; the keys had been in the Hulsta tray they’d got for Christmas from her step-mum.

The tray was right by the door. How could he not have seen? Idiot.

She left, leaving him pretty sure that all his dirty talks that had made her moan and clench the sheets last night would be erased from her mind before her first profit margin meeting. He’d better get to Waitrose.

He rose from bed, hair scraggly and boxers saggy, went into the bathroom. It was humid in there like the greenhouse at Kew, where he’d asked her to marry him. His view was actually affected so much he took tiny steps to find the shower, afraid of bumping into anything, causing a breakage and her bad temper to flair. Before he got there, he glanced at the mirror and the mist seemed to miraculously clear a little.

There was still some mirror-stuck steam obstructing a view of himself, and wait! Something else as well. Writing. Wobbly writing like a child.

And a smell. A smell like the sea. Picked up pebbles and webbed feet.

He looked at the wobbly writing, read it and almost fell over.

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Daniel Knauf 1.

Dale was eating breakfast, reading the Times. About halfway down the front page, he sensed something wrong. He peered over the paper and almost choked on a swallow of coffee. Across the chipped Formica table was a second plate of sausage and eggs, a second cup of coffee going cold. Bleary eyed, he looked at his own plate, wondering vaguely why he’d prepared breakfast for two.

“You idiot,” he said aloud in a bored tone.

He scraped the dish into the garbage, set it in the sink and sat down to finish his eggs.

2.

“Maybe you’re getting lonely,” said Frank, packing brake shoes into a cardboard box.

Dale glanced at the clock. Ten minutes to quitting time. “Maybe,” he said, “I’m going nuts.”

Frank smiled knowingly and shook his head. “You need a woman, Dale.” He held up his left hand, pointing at his wedding ring. “A wife.”

Dale snorted. “Gimme a break. What do I want with a wife?”

3.

Several days later, on his way up the steps to his apartment, Dale heard a woman singing. The tune was familiar, but it took him awhile to peg it: “Bye Bye Blackbird.” He moved down the dark hall, a sack of groceries cradled in one arm, absently humming along. He was outside his door before he realized the singing was coming from inside his apartment. Dale gently set the bag down on the floor.

“Pack up all your cares and woes…”

Holding his breath, he pressed his ear to the door. Yes. Definitely inside his place, the wood vibrating minutely against his cheek. “…here I go, singing low…”

He pulled out his key ring. “…Bye Bye Blackbird.”

Slipped his key into the deadbolt, turned it slowly, quietly. He cranked the knob, threw his shoulder to the door and burst into the apartment.

“Where somebody waits for me—”

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Helen Mort Each night, the voice miles down the line was soft. It’s Keith I want.

Keith from Black Diamond Garages.

The broken clock, the lean-shadowed settee and me. Sorry, there’s no-one here.

The only Keith I knew could run the mile.

He’d sprint out of the playing fields come back wearing a crown of frost, once with a gang of horses chasing him.

When they hung up, I’d take my walk behind the house to where the village’s excuse for woods becomes the backs of terraces.

The ground cut deep with tyre marks and there, facing the trees, a row of moonlit cars, their bonnets wide, like mouths in song

and him ducking between them in his evening-coloured overalls, his thin Alastian rising from her blanket

as I stopped, not close, but close enough to see the small black diamonds of their teeth his oil-spill hair, the way he looked at me.

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Sam Hawken In the summer it was hot, in the winter it was cold and all year round the halls and cells of Coffield Unit were busy with the business of incarceration. This day it was not so bad, teetering between two extremes. The ceiling-mounted fans did not turn and the big heating units that blew and blew, but did little to chase away the chill, were silent. Flip lined up with the convicts, dressed in their white cotton uniforms, waiting for the COs to open the door and let them out onto the yard. Barred windows let in sunshine to compete with sallow fluorescents. It would be good to be outside. When the door opened the COs counted them off. Already they had been counted before getting into line and they would be counted again when it was time to go back inside. Counting was a constant and if ever the numbers didn’t jibe everything stopped.

They went out mixed, but as the cons distributed into the yard they broke into their component parts. White boys congregated by the weight pile, blacks by the half-court basketball blacktop and the Latinos by the handball court. Within each division were individual cliques, but the most important grouping was by race. The colors approached one another’s domains only when certain dictates had been observed.

In this way the facilities could be shared without it coming to blows.

Flip was not the youngest Latino on the yard. That honor went to Rafael Perez, eighteen years old, doing four for sexual assault on a child. He was shunned, and when anyone took notice of him it was bad news. The other Latinos didn’t even let him find a corner to hide in; he was forced to stand away from the walls in the no man’s land between handball and basketball courts, exposed to everyone.

He seemed smaller now than when he came.

Today Flip stood with Javier who was doing thirty-five and Omar who wasn’t ever getting out. Both men were old enough to be his father. They kept close and they let no one touch him, not on the yard or on the inside, because he was one of them. Flip was an Azteca.

They called each other Indians. Javier was tattooed from his navel to his collarbone and on his arms, too. The marks showed on his wrists where his cuffs pulled back. He had his initials over his left eyebrow.

Many of his pieces he had done on himself. He did good work. Flip hadn’t ever gotten anything from Javier, though Javier offered more than once. None of Javier’s marks were a gang patch and he didn’t do gang patches. They were Aztecas, but no one could prove it. That’s how they all stayed out of Administrative Segregation, where gang members went and never surfaced again.

If anyone asked, they were all just good friends. Old-timers watched out for new fish and new fish did favors for the old-timers. There was nothing the COs could say about that. No Indian would give up another Indian. From time to time one of them would be picked off, sent to Ad Seg, but that was just bad luck. In all there were two hundred and fifty men out of four thousand in Coffield on the yard. They were watched on the ground and from the towers. Double rows of thirtyfoot cyclone fencing and yards and yards of densely coiled razor wire 18

A.J Kirby You can become blasé about almost anything. Walking back through the verdant grounds of the hotel, I pass monkeys, monitor lizards and vultures and yet I barely eye a batlid. The ghost of heat haunts my peripheral vision.

Let me try and explain the heat. You know that first blast of hot air you get when you first step off a plane and into a foreign country? Here, it’s like that all day long. It wrings you out. Especially just after lunch, when you’re at you’re meltiest anyway and there’s really not much else for it but to head to the room, flop by the fan, and wait it out.

Outside, the air doesn’t feel natural. There’s something manufactured about it. As though it’s part of some process; the bi-product of some work of filthy creation in some sweat shop or factory in the arse-end of the world. It thrums like an engine.

This is my first proper beach holiday and I’ve skipped the middle of the road stuff like Greece or Spain. Headed straight for the centre of the sun, it seems. Thought I’d do something completely different this year.

Clean break from the past and all that. Mark and I took winter holidays.

Skiing. Snowboarding. The like. On account of him being ginger with the complexion of biscuits.

Clean break, she says. Like anything could be clean here. Wriggle a toe out the shower and already you’re sweating like you’ve spent a day toiling on a farm.

Can’t even think clean. Think in, like, these weird phrases. Phases.

Can’t quite maintain a train of thought without it being baked out of me. Like I say, heat haunts me.

I thought here would give me time to reflect on some of the choices I’ve made over the past couple years. Choices which have led me to, well, here. But here I’m just as confused as I ever was back at home. Only here, I can’t scurry around at a hundred miles an hour busying myself like I do at home and so it feels as though I’m wasting time, lots of it.

I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m depressed — seen depressed every day in my job. I’m not it — but I’m something. Not me, I suppose. I’ve lost something about myself and I thought being here would help me rediscover it.

It hasn’t.

I’m uneasy. The heat’s haunted me into something transparent. Anybody could just look at me from their balconies and see my mistake inside me; something rotten and diseased. Heat’s made me uneasy too because of the rolling news they showed in the dining room over lunch. The kidnappings in Kenya. It has crossed my mind that there is nobody in my life would stump up a ransom for me like the man did for his mother… It has crossed my mind Kenya’s not that far away.

Right continent.

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Giles Anderson I think my brother writes computer games for Jesus because, for a long time, he thought, and maybe still does, that our father was a fruit machine.

You may have heard of some of his games; Exodus, where you take the character of Moses; in each level you gather objects to visit a plague upon the Egyptians. The main character resembles a pixelated Rock Hudson, since the digital rights to Charlton Heston’s likeness were deemed too expensive. His other top seller is a first person shoot-em-up, you play Jesus, fighting your way through Romans, using special move combinations to turn water into wine (press A then B on the console), produce fish from nowhere (C,D & X) and heal the sick (A + R1).

Whilst the gameplay is fast and the character of Mary Magdalen is voiced by a former pornographic movie star, the games (and others in this stable) are not meant to be fun. They have a Purpose. Evangelism first, entertainment second, in the twenty first century the battle for young minds and their imaginations is fierce and the road to salvation is rendered with digital distractions.

My brother is a convert; a true believer in the faith of ones and zeros, heaven and hell, the binary state, but if there was any form of baptism it was not in the sea but rather above it on the south coast of England.

We lived with our mother just outside the peeling seaside resort of Hastings. Under the unblinking eyes of a mournful, black statue of Queen Victoria, as she presided over offerings of last night’s salty vomit and rancid chip wrappings, Hastings had expanded from a fishing village to a poorer man’s Victorian Brighton, and over the twentieth century had continued to decline gently as a refuge of last resort. In the nineteen sixties the central government paid increased benefits to those who chose to move to Hastings to not look for work.

In the eighties it became the suicide capital runner up for England, narrowly beaten by Manchester in the young male category. As one letter writer wryly observed in the local Rye Observer, ‘why can’t we ever win anything?’

It was this blend of economic hardship, depression and the trappings of a decayed Victorian holiday camp that had made the place.

Nowhere was this more obvious than on Hastings Pier. It had been half closed for two decades and the chief adult attraction amongst the local cognoscenti was a three bar portable gas heater, advertised by word of mouth and a cardboard sign proclaiming in black felt tip the legend, “Free and Warm.”

The twin aims of human existence were here, available to anyone. The prime positions, right in front of the heater were always reserved for local dignitaries, of which my father was one. Three deck chairs were in permanent residence, the central position of honour was kept for Len, the pier manager. At his right hand sat our father, who notionally 30

EVENTS THIS OCT. David Nash at Kew

The Royal Botanic Gardens, 09 June 2012 - 14 April 2013

David Nash, one of the UK’s most pro­lific sculptors, will pro­ duce and exhibit his work across the Gardens. The exhib­i­tion will open to mem­bers of the pub­lic, with sculp­tures, install­ a­tions, draw­ings and film in place through­out the Gardens, glass­houses, and exhib­i­tion spaces. Nash will work at Kew on a ‘wood quarry’ - the first he will have done in ten years, cre­at­ ing new pieces for the exhib­i­tion using trees from the Gardens that have come to the end of their nat­ural life.

Dickens and the Artists

Watts Gallery, 19 June - 28 October 2012

Dickens and the Artists will explore the sig­ni­fic­ant con­nec­tion between Charles Dickens and visual art. Dickens was inter­ested in both con­tem­por­ary artists and the art of the old mas­ters which he viewed and com­men­ted on in his tours of Europe.

Bob Hope: A World of Laughter Greenwich Heritage Centre, 13 July - 28 October 2012 The Heritage Centre will be the third insti­tu­tion to host the tour­ing Bob Hope exhib­i­tion which has been pro­duced by the World Golf Hall of Fame & Museum with the sup­port of the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation.

Tino Sehgal to cre­ate Turbine Hall com­mis­sion for London 2012 Festival Tate Modern, 17 July - 28 October 2012 Tino Sehgal has been com­mis­sioned to cre­ate a work for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall as part of London 2012 Festival, the finale of the Cultural Olympiad. The artist’s new work is one of two pro­jects which are part of the Cultural Olympiad, the other being the Tate Movie Project, sup­por­ted by the Legacy Trust UK, BP and CBBC, the nation­wide film anim­a­tion pro­ject for chil­dren which will cul­min­ate in the pro­duc­tion of a fully anim­ated film. The Tino Sehgal 2012 com­mis­sion is part of The Unilever Series.

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EVENTS THIS OCTOB Bob Marley - Messenger

Mezzanine Gallery, 24 July - 24 October 2012

Following a suc­cess­ful run at The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, where it was on dis­play for over three months, the exhibit will now be avail­able to audi­ences from Britain and around Europe. Visitors will wit­ness Bob Marley as a private, spir­itual man, as a power­ful per­former who used his lyr­ics to give a voice to the dis­en­fran­chised and as a legend who has inspired legions of fans in the years since his death.

Designed to Win

Design Museum, 25 July-18 November 2012

An exhib­it­ion which cel­eb­rates the ways in which design and sport are com­ bined, push­ ing the lim­ its of human endeav­our to achieve records and vic­tor­ies of increas­ ing sig­ni­fic­ance and won­der. From the design of F1 cars to run­ning shoes, racing bikes to car­bon fibre javelins, the quest for enhanced per­form­ance and func­tion is end­less.

By examin­ing cel­eb­rated sport­ing moments and the sense of shared cel­eb­ra­tion and spec­tacle, the exhib­i­tion will look at not just how design can influ­ence sport but also how sport has influ­enced design, art and cul­ture.

Designers in Residence & This is Design Design Museum, 29 August 2012 - 27 January 2013 The pro­gramme includes a series of events, offer­ing the design­ers the oppor­tun­ity to inter­act and engage with the pub­lic, whilst using this plat­form as a test-bed for ideas, designs and innov­a­tions. Using key items from the col­lec­tion, the dis­play will also be sup­ple­men­ted with high-profile loans and new acquisitions.

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Entertainment, theatre and film

Summer at the National Theatre National Theatre, June - October 2012

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The National theatre is present­ing two very spe­cial per­ form­ances. Timon of Athens: World Shakespeare Festival, dir­ ec­ ted by Nicholas Hytner, with Simon Russell Beale in the title role, will run from July - October 2012 and The Last of the Haussmans: a new play by Stephen Beresford, dir­ec­ted by Howard Davies will play at the Lyttelton Theatre from June to September.

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‘It’s a load of bollocks, wonderful!!’ Fergus Henderson ‘Something to cook not just to scratch. The recipes may bring tears to your eyes.’ Shaun Hill ‘For those who love offal, this handbook is written for you.’ Gilles Pudlowski

  is a small publisher that only does books about food – cookery books, books about food history, the food and cookery of distant lands, facsimile reprints of old English cookbooks. This winter has been something of an offal season: another title is  –    .

Testicles has been well and widely received, it explores not just how to cook the things, but the language, the lore and the mythology that surrounds them. And it does all this with wit and sophistication (not something often encountered in cookbooks). Look further at https://prospectbooks.co.uk

LITRO IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY EDITOR IN CHIEF AND PUBLISHER: ERIC AKOTO eric.akoto@litro.co.uk EDITORS: MOHSEN SHAH & ALEX GOODWIN editor@litro.co.uk CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: KATY DARBY katy@litro.co.uk CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: SOPHIE LEWIS sophie@litro.co.uk EVENTS EDITOR: ALEX JAMES listings@litro.co.uk POETRY EDITOR: IAN PARKS CULTURE & ARTS culture@litro.co.uk CREATIVE DIRECTOR: KWAKU design@litro.co.uk PUBLICITY & PRESS: BECKY AYRE becky.ayre@litro.co.uk SALES & MARKETING: ANGELINA WANGSHA angelina.wangsha@litro.co.uk CHAIR WOMAN: CATHY GALVIN Twitter:@cathygalvin1 LITERARY ADVISORY BOARD: KRISTY ALLISON INTERNS: LAURA HANNUM & NATASHA LEVY

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LITRO | 119 Ghosts

Late that night when the river outside was black like octopus ink and inside the only noise was the low buzz of the boiler, he heard a scratching sound and found that she was not next to him. Her clothes were abandoned on the floor by the bed. He followed the scratching, got closer closer closer‌ Flat Pack Pirate

by Sabrina Mahfouz page 05 www.litro.co.uk ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

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