Stories from: Sara Maitland, Yorgos Trillidis
Michael Spring, Tessa North
Cherry Potts, David Mildon
Alan McCormick, Paul Lyalls
Welcome to issue 96 of From the editor
LiTRO
Nobody wants to be alone: everybody wants to belong. Sociability is part of what makes humans such a successful species, but it’s when groups become gangs that the fun stops and the trouble starts …
You’ll find plenty of gangs in the following pages: some you’ll want to join, some you’d run a mile from – and maybe even some to which you already belong. In this month’s issue of Litro we’re going to intrigue, move and unnerve you with tales of chain gangs, street gangs and old-fashioned gangsters. From the mob instincts of the lads on the lash in Yorgos Trillidis’s Sunday, to the swashbuckling adventures of a pirate crew in Michael Spring’s brilliantly surreal Narky Jack, we’ve got gangs in all their glamour and glory.
Sara Maitland’s atmospheric jungle-set Watu explores the power and vulnerability of being an outsider in a tribal society, whereas David Mildon’s Red gives us a glimpse of tribes closer to home, when football fans clash. Meanwhile, Tessa North brings us the Deep South, and a prisoner desperate to shed his chains, while Melissa Katsoulis’s true account of a daring literary hoax shows just how far one middle-class white girl went to feel part of the gang.
But that’s not all – not by a long shot. We’ve also got a brand-new, prizewinning translation of a Verlaine poem about a gang of harlequins and pierrots, a mobster hoist by his own car-yard, and a shoot-out in a cinema. So, it’s up to you. Do you wanna be in our gang? Just turn the page.
Katy Darby Editor
litro is brought to you by
editor in chief and Publisher – eric akoto
editor – katy darby
contributing editor – soPhie leWis online editor – laura huxley
events editor – alex James design/Production – anastasia sichkarenko
Art: Gillian Ayres High Summer World
© Gillian Ayres, Courtesy Alan Cristea Gallery
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Watu
sara maitland
here is death in the pot for the living’s food.’
Watu is in the jungle.
Watu is in the jungle, alone. It is strange in the jungle.
Despite the humming of life, the music of energy, power, growth, greed, the jungle is fragile. There is no depth or richness to the soil. Each dead leaf is stripped of its goodness by new growth so quickly that nothing sinks down into the earth.
Because it is fragile, it is competitive and cruel. The strangler vine entwines itself around the huge ficus trees and squeezes them to death in its desire to reach up through the canopy to the sun. Then insects devour the dead wood and the vine is left, a vertical spiral with an empty core. Down on the floor young trees grow to about the height of one of us and then they wait; they wait with infinite patience; they wait for years. They wait for a larger tree near them to die and make a hole in the green roof. Then the small trees make a wild dash upwards, growing twice their own height in the time it takes the moon to come back to the full, fast, faster than the other trees around them, for there is only space for one in the sun. The jungle is stirring with energy, with life and power; if we can get it, if we can win.
In the jungle it is hot and sweaty. In the jungle there are insects, so many biting feeding insects. They cling closer than a lover by night and by day. They need our blood to live on. In the jungle there is a deathly intimacy of need and desire. In the dark the jaguar carries his silken beauty, his great heavy tail and flaming eyes, to the killing grounds and the night is alive with the screams of death. In the jungle it is beautiful and deadly. Watu is in the jungle. Alone.
Colombina Paul
verlaine
ierrot who on cricket’s legs legs it through thickets— one leap— Cassander (old hoodie), Leander the goodyshoes creep, and Harlequin (Domino’s eyes have an ominous look: the outfit’s so natty it’s positive that he ’s a crook)
are all thumping guitars an’ pretending they’re Tarzan, beguiled in a pile-drive entreaty of Little Miss Pretty, this child
whose eyes are a message denying her undressage with such a defense of her fair butt as says “You may stare, but don’t touch!”
Ye planets whose motion can scupper an ocean of ships!!
She grants them a shocking wee glimpse of her stocking, and skips
away to My previous could tell you I’m devious as cats.
And the rosebud in hair-do inciting her ne’er-dowell prats.
Translation by John R.G. Turner
John R. G. Turner is an Emeritus Professor in the University of Leeds, where he practises evolutionary biology and ecology. He won the John Dryden Prize in 2009 for translations of Verlaine, and has twice been “commended” in the Times Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation. Some of his translations and poems have appeared in Comparative Critical Studies, Litro, Poetry and Audience, and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and on www.brindin.com and www.stephen-spender.org.
Sunday yorgos trillidis
it’s three o’clock in the morning and I have just left the club on Prince of Wales. I am crossing the street heading to the nearest kebab house. I am not drunk though I have drunk. I enter. Three sweaty, dark-skinned men are watching closely a sizeable piece of lamb rolling on a steel plate. I place my order, pay in advance and head out for a quick cigarette. I take a stand just outside.
I stare at the people who have just exited the nightclubs. It’s closing time, yet the street seems less busy than usual. Maybe because it’s August and the students have gone back to their homes; maybe because most of the locals are getting a tan somewhere in the Mediterranean. I take long drags and can’t wait to replace the butt with some meat. Then I see them on the other side of the road, ready to cross the street.
It’s a group of five. They wear stretched t-shirts, baggy jeans and white sneakers. They look particularly drunk – but again, who doesn’t? They are coming towards me. It’s a popular fastfood joint, I say to myself, no need to worry. They are talking loudly and they spit out the vowels and the consonants with casual violence.
I look the other way. What I see is the future coming swiftly towards me, aiming at me. The future enters through my nostrils, rides the appropriate neurons and gets carried all the way to my brain.
They are going to come near me. One of them will ask me something I will not be in a position to grasp. I will shake my head. Another one will feel obliged to rephrase it. Although I will understand, more or less, what they want from me, I will refuse politely. Then the one who was the first to talk will start cursing. I will repeat as clearly as possible that it’s my last one. Then a third one will try to get it out of my fingers. I will let him. They will start laughing and cursing me with words I will not fully comprehend. After that I will say something stupid, something like ‘you must think it’s quite a brave thing to do, five picking on one’, or something equally stupid – the
Narky Jack
michael sPring
the pirates are inconveniently situated for the harbour, and this spring, they have begun to let everyone know. The situation, when the wind from the mountains sweeps the scent of pines over their cabins, gets worse day by day. The pirates are restless. They need the salt tang of the sea.
No one is sure what to do. Their swaggering is unnerving. The bars and supermarkets run out of rum.
They spit at the feet of the townsfolk, most of whom are upstanding individuals, apart, that is, from Tess, the beautiful, dark-haired prostitute who has a flat above the dry-cleaners with en-suite facilities.
The pirates, with their lack of sea-faring adventure, seem to have an unnatural quotient in terms of desire.
Tess’s business is booming and she thinks she might have to bring in help. There is talk of her taking over the lease of the dry-cleaning shop below. Ron, the owner of the dry-cleaners, is doing well too. The pirates, when visiting Tess, find it convenient to drop off their silken ruffs, nankeen trews and waistcoats heavy with embroidery to Ron. For payment of a substantial premium, Ron agrees to rush the cleaning through, ready to collect when they leave. Heaven forfend though, that he should scratch a silver button or pull a silken thread.
Tess is sporting more jewellery these days. She has very full breasts and the low-cut gypsy tops she wears reveal much. Pearls, the size of plovers’ eggs, nestle snugly in her décolletage. She has a jewel in her navel the size of a musket ball. It sparkles when she laughs, and the soft brown skin of her belly ripples like the surface of a tropical inlet when a silent zephyr rustles the beachside palms. There is a heavy gold chain with what looks like a regal crest around one of her shapely ankles. Her long dark hair hangs in unrestrained, glistening ringlets, cascading over her shoulders like a bolt of silk. It is a dark, flowing mass. It is like sin.
Someone suggests that she might be prosecuted. What for,
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Cross over the river, rest under the trees*
tessa north
the slender branches of the box elder shaded the thatchy grass outside the prison yard, but didn’t stretch as far as the fence. It was the only tree visible from the prison, and Derrick Edwards, five years into his sentence for murder, could see it from his window only if he twisted his head at an awkward angle and squeezed his face up tight between the bars. Despite the discomfort, Derrick looked at the tree every day for as long as he could, thinking of Willamette Johnson. Derrick spent a lot of time in jail missing Willamette. A thin ache was always there, below the rest of his feelings. He heard her voice like a constant radio announcement in the back of his head. At night, under his single dirty sheet, he closed his eyes and imagined her looking at him, her lips on his, her eyelashes brushing his cheeks, her skin under his fingertips. She was the prettiest girl in the county, the smartest, the best shot. And she had promised to wait for him, as long as it took.
In five years, Willamette had not visited or written, even once. But at Derrick’s trial, on the day he was convicted, she had been so shocked that she fainted over the rail of the viewing gallery and broke her leg falling; this was enough proof of her love. Derrick’s only snapshot of her was propped on the tiny shelf above his bed. Her image winked from beneath the ancient Johnson oak. Derrick had taken the picture the day they swore their eternal love for each other, the day she married John Dewitt. Though John D.’s death was the reason he was in jail in the first place, Derrick found it hard to get too angry at him. Willamette had been promised to John D. from a young age, but when he was called up she began making eyes at Derrick; by the time
*These were the last words of Stonewall Jackson, killed by friendly fire in Virginia, 1863: ‘Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.’
Out of Darkness
cherry Potts
Out of darkness, a flash and then the retort. The twentyfoot high images behind me loom incoherently – I can’t hear them, what they saying? My ears ring with the crash of the concussion. Everything slows, the guy beside me, who’d been mouthing off, on his feet, gun waved, arm extended, him, Gary – I heard his girl call him that, yes, Gary – he falls back, arms spread, his white t-shirt fluorescing in the light of Gotham City.
Blood:
Black in the half-light, splatters in an arc across the row in front, not me, thank God, not me: no bullet, no spilt brains.
The popcorn spills from the bucket in his left hand.
His girl screams, an ugly guttural noise like she might throw up. Not like the heroine on the screen.
Gary falls and time speeds up, the dead weight of fourteen stone crashes into the plush upright of the seats behind him, his skull bounces on the edge, silently; I stare openmouthed, and automatically supply the bonk in my mind. The gun falls from his hand, skitters under the seats.
I look at Jeannie, who is thinking about screaming, she hasn’t decided whether that’s appropriate yet, but she is certainly thinking about it, her mouth experiments with an ‘O’ shape … too prissy; then a gaping letter box – no, a recycling station. I expect a deep noise from that gaping square of darkness, but she is as high pitched as a kettle.
I begin to laugh, an equally high-pitched giggle.
No, no, I say to myself, this ain’t no thing to laugh at …
The fool in the projection box hasn’t shut off the movie, but the lights go up.
Gary is lying across my lap. The giggles turn to gasps.
This ain’t funny man, this ain’t entertainment, knowwhatImean?
Red
david mildon
May 29th ‘85.
The phone is ringing. Footsteps on the stairs. Mum whispering. Silence. Footsteps on the stairs. My bedroom door opening and Mum’s on top of me, tears on her face and in her curls and on me. Holding me too tight.
When I catch my breath, I ask “What was the score?” She pulls back, looks at me, looks at Kenny Dalglish above my bed, the scarves and the rosettes, all red.
“Dad’s safe. The rest doesn’t matter.”
*
February 17th ‘87.
It’s cold by the Cutty Sark, the wind finding ways through my duffel-coat. Mum is fiddling with the camera, trying to get a photo. She likes to do this. My Dad always asks why she can’t just remember things. As he’s not here yet, I make the familiar observation in his place.
“Because I want a photo.”
“It’s cold.”
“And? Look, just stand still and try to smile for once.”
“Why should I? It’s …”
And suddenly I’m rising through the air, a hand under each armpit. My legs draped over my father’s shoulders.
“Are you gonna stop making your mam’s life a misery and smile? Eh, monkey boy?”
Of course, now I’m beaming.
“Give us the pamphlets Paul.”
Reluctantly my father hands her the red and yellow leaflets emblazoned with “DEIRDRE WOOD FOR MP”. As Mum turns to put them in her bag, he slaps a sticker with the same message on my lapel, giving me a confidential smile.
alan mccormick
W Mister Biggies Swims and Eats with the Fishes
hy wasn’t the hand in the cloud enough to stop the car from diving into the canal? Perhaps it just wasn’t seen; people are in such a rush these days. The car dived head first, its chassis submerging in the goo of a midsummer swell, swirling and sucking it down.
Now ducks bob by, a coot flippers on the windscreen wipers and a couple of geese try the horn. Fish, luminous pollution scalies, nip in and out of the open windows and lie teasingly on the seats, smiling as if they’re on ice-display at the fishmonger’s.
From the boot, the back-end of the car not yet submerged, comes a furious tapping. Inside, a local snarlface scrapmerchant by the name of Big Biggies has woken up to find he has been claustrophobed in a Cortina tomb wrap by a pickie local gang known as the NosePick Boys.
‘Those pesky nosepickers have picked on the wrong guy!’ exclaims Big Biggies.
Just then he senses the car slip further down, and smells pongwater seeping into the boot.
‘What the feck am I going to do?’ he shouts.
Then there is a scraping and compression against the sides of the car. He feels the car being jerked up at high speed from the canal and his head bangs against the rim of a spare tyre.
When he comes to, he can hear the sound of shouting machinery and shrieking metal. He senses the car being held like a conker at the end of a giant string; underneath lying only destruction and bigtime squashing.
‘I’m in me fecking scrappers. Oi, John, let me out!’ yells Big Biggies.
But John can’t hear, and the coffin-cask-Cortina drops and is
Margaret B. Jones: Gang Fake
melissa katsoulis
if the LA gang memoir Love and Consequences had been for real, it would have been a very significant book indeed. For the first time, a mainstream publisher would be enabling a female gun-runner and drug dealer for the notorious Bloods to tell her story. At times, Margaret B. Jones’s memoir of growing up a hustler was almost too painful to read: it told of how she, a half Native-American, half-white child from a very poor family had been removed from her parents as a five-year-old when she had turned up to school bleeding from sexual wounds. Then, under the auspices of her overworked foster mother ‘Big Mom’ in South Central LA, she had fallen into the gang culture, seeing it as a way to gain money and respect in a fractured and abusive community. In interviews prior to the release of her book, Jones told – in an African-American lilt, and peppering her speech with words like ‘homies’ – that ‘the first thing I did when I started making drug money was buy myself a burial plot’. She also spoke movingly of her fosterbrothers Terrell and Taye who had also fallen into the thug life.
As soon as review copies were distributed, America’s literary press began heaping praise on the brave young writer who was risking serious retributions by exposing the intricacies of gang life. The Oprah Winfrey machine got behind the book too, praising it in O Magazine as ‘a startlingly tender memoir’; the New York Times called it ‘humane and deeply affecting’ and Entertainment Weekly recommended it as a ‘powerful story of resilience’. This was exactly the response the book’s publishers, Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin, had anticipated, and it seemed that the first print run of 19,000 copies had not been so ambitious after all.
Jones’s editor, Sarah McGrath, had been working on the
ÒIn
Watu by Sara Maitland page 7
High Summer World of Light by Gillian Ayres, part of the Royal Academy of ArtsÕ Summer Exhibition 2010