From White Raven by Andrew Spacey

 The Alchemist

The problem, most might say, would be getting back out of the mind of a cat. I happened to be sitting under the tall palm tree across from our apartment on Maria Callas, listening to the sound of the large leaves in the midnight wind. The sound was similar to that of waves folding onto a beach. It was soothing, aural medicine. 

I was there for a good while, relaxing mostly but also thinking about a conversation I'd just had with my partner Isabella, a pharmacist. We'd talked about chemistry and chemicals and electrolytes and what not, and that awful moment in my school laboratory when the chemicals misbehaved and Miss Fallas the teacher swallowed a load of toxic fumes. 

There's a formula for everything I remember her saying before the chemicals made her collapse. Even the dreams you have. The thoughts in your head. 

And the whole class believed her, save for me and Augustin Gongora who was more or less ineducable. Every decision you make, each second you're alive; all you are is one great big chemical experiment ongoing, masses of formulae jostling for first place. 

It was at about that time I began to smear the walls and spit feathers. I was a typical teenager yes but I was also having to fight off a highly personal demon with a liking for indoor turd graffitti. I was the victim and the cause of uncontrollable reactions in my head and heart. Disgusting things ended up on bedroom walls, like the worst. Augustin Gongora ran a mile when I invited him into my room one time. I was too anal, even for him. He never spoke to me again. My mother couldn't cope, my father had long disappeared over the hills. I knew I was destined for a special home, courtesy of the state. 

Later on, when I was able to handle criticism and bad news, various people told me it was my mother's craving for the bottle that had affected my growth in the womb. I had to trust their thinking. I had to take their drugs. With a lot of help and a hundred thousand pills I turned it all around and now here we are - life with my love, without a mother, life in the mind of a cat. 

Each day to me is godless and timeless. I wake, I stretch, I move, I face the window and look out, through you and myself and into the world of Calle de Maria Callas. Before the big change there were things that I was scared of, for sure. Loud noises had me leaping up on all fours, like a silly lamb. The garbage men clattering a big bin at 6am for example. Someone dropping an empty pan on the hard wood floor. 

But not now, I welcome sounds, elemental sounds. I can't resist those thunderous summer storms when they come sweeping down from the mountains for example, bound for the city, distant lightning streaks purple and metallic blue, instant snaps of colour on the slopes; threatening hordes of heavy doom-ridden cloud with silvered underbelly. 

You sometimes dive for cover from the storm but I'm always drawn to the palm tree. I hear you shouting as I dash down the stairs: ' 'Who in their right mind goes out to welcome a storm?!' 

But eventually you always call me in and I always respond to your call because your voice has something essential in it. It's carried on love like a bird is carried on wings. That may be true but I also detect an enigmatic core not easily articulated. Let me add - when you call, my whiskers tingle. Is there a formula for whiskers tingling on a wintry night in Madrid, blue frost in the air, a sprinkling of snow on Peñalara? 

In a big city having a young woman suddenly call your name from a third floor open window cos there's a bowl of food waiting makes some passers-by look up. I'm grown-up now so I don't care what they might be thinking.

Once, I had to sit for months in a stinky city centre rescue shed waiting to be adopted. Next door to me was a prince, Amadeo, a thoroughbred. Siamese, Burmese? He would pace up and down in his cage for days on end crying out for his former life. I am royalty, I am next in line, I demand to be homed in a palace. I'm used to being pampered, I who once slept on silk cushions and had many people working for me. I who ate only fresh fish and chicken. I who never knew mice, I who seldom looked at a bird or a greasy discarded takeaway bone. 

Unlucky for you my friend, but you ended up shitting in a concrete box just like the rest of us urchins. 

I was chewing on a spider at the time. Amadeo had a look of bottomless horror on his face when you appeared and stopped by my cage door a few days later, not his. What made you stop I wonder? What attracted you to me? A subtle, invisible kind of chemistry was at work I guess. I gave him a sideways glance as you popped me into your luxury cat carrier. Don't worry I said to Amadeo, Herr Schrödinger's coming for you, then again he might not. 

You haven't been on this earth long, barely nineteen years, but as the old woman on the bench who plays fiddle near the palm tree says 'Your friend's voice, special no? When she calls your name it is more than your name. It is your life isn't it? But she has fear too. Fear that you'll stay out too long in the storm under the palm one night and be beyond recall.' 

I like the old music teacher, despite her weird thoughts. Despite her being part of my ultimate nightmare in which she carries me away in a zipped leather bag one thundery night and I never get to sit at our window again. Where she takes me God only knows. Into an invented past, out through the wormhole, round and round the mythical fish market. 

She has a timeless way of humming a melody. She wears only woollen clothes, cast-offs, and I think there have been many changes in her brain chemistry over the years. I think she means that you're somehow still clinging on to what is wholesome in life despite all the pain you've had to endure. 

Under the palm tree as a cat I simply sit. I know. I have dense fur that grows right up to the edge of my eyes. I can stare myself into a deep trance when the storm arrives and return from that otherworld people pass through blindly, the world beyond formulae. Some children have the gift and join me from time to time because they have no limits within, or concept of, so called real time. The seconds are ticking yes, but the feelings last forever. 

Human adults are often unbearable. That's why I'm often indifferent. They know they're fallible so they go searching for soulful ideals, like manic shoppers. They go wanting all manner of things, the sweet smelling donut bar on the remote Himalayan trail, not knowing that propaganda fuels their will and weighs heavy and that there is no formula for a happy life, there is only the theory and the experiment. 

Warm, fine rain cools the wind, crosses my face like a moist breath. The leaves turn and twist and dance, shaking shaggy-dog-soaked style when it picks up speed. It will smack against things then travel on, caress surfaces then change course. It's about contact, the eyes smarting, the whirlwinds in the car park, the whispers, the fabulations. 

That conversation means everything to me but the fiddle player always knows when to stop bowing so it's time for me to move on. I doubt I'll ever get back out. 

You're calling my name. Only I know what that means. Formulate my dreams when I'm twitching on your luxurious sofa. I'm no Pangur Ban, I'm not the cat that got Don Quixote's nose. I am what you make of me between the lead and the gold.

The Fisherman 

The four woke late that Thursday morning because Pete, confused in the hellish black of night, unable to locate the bathroom, screaming out 'the walls are comin' in man, there's no escape!!', attempted with foul breath and futile palms to keep the walls from crushing them to a pulp. 

He had to retrace his steps back to the bed and start again for his pre-dawn piss, feeling the walls for guidance, an idiot victim of his own subconscious. Those new blinds shut out all known light and as they were on the fifth floor, much of the street noise. He couldn't recall being in a dream. All he knew was panic and emergency. 

Eleanor his girlfriend blamed it on the chaotic nature of their hitch-hiking route back to Madrid from the Picos de Europa. Rough camping in Asturias. Three nights on the floor of an abandoned cabana near Cazo, four nights in a sodden tent looking for brown bear scat, then truffles, in the Pelono forest, and the final two nights in a grim hotel room above a 3am bar in the claustrophobic Calle Velarde in constricted Malasana, followed by the sirens at 5am and the pimp show in between. 

Their hosts, Nico, Pete's half-brother and Luciana his wife, knew what they were taking on, inviting them for a few days 'respite' Nico mused. Pete is a great guy, he'll do anything for you, I'd do anything for him but he's a bit, how should I say, feral when it comes to living a normal life. Eleanor just puts up with it, goes along for the ride. Mind you, she's no chartered accountant either. 

Pete had a history of sudden wakings and sleepwalking whilst deep in sleep. As a boy he would stay at his aunt Florinda’s cortijo weekends and summer holidays high in the Alpujarras. He had the freedom of the woods and mountains. He could just exit the front door and go. There was a whole stretch of river to explore. Big rocks and barrancos. Eagles and vultures soared overhead. Keep an eye on the hunters today, they're after jabali again, wild boar. If you have to, run and hide in the old chestnut tree by the acequia. And don’t forget to shout your head off. Aunty had the mountains in her blood and sensed that her nephew would always survive a scrape intact.

The wakings started there, in that whitewashed stone house one November night. Florinda! Florinda! I can't move. My body's gone. Aunt Florinda! 

When she died and the cortijo was sold off he missed those lone adventures in the sierra. The wakings stopped too, for a few years. They returned when the family moved to London. Sleepwalking became a weekly occurrence in that big Victorian house in Tufnell Park. He'd often be found downstairs sitting at the kitchen table as if waiting for a meal or a person to arrive. Let me take you back to bed Peter his mother would say. 

Pete would wake up the following morning none the wiser. As far as he was concerned he'd been asleep the whole time. His mind was a blank, impressionless. When the family spoke of the night before at the breakfast table Pete would listen incredulous, laughing and shaking his hairy teenage head. 

It was already past noon. Patatas bravas Luciana suggested as they raced down stairs through the cool shadowy marble hallway. Outside, the sun, partly veiled, made Pete and Eleanor squint and the warm air welcomed then made their throats itchy, the fabulous drains offering wave after wave of stench, real madrileno stink lurking on most street corners like a diabolical yet reassuring perfume. 

Nico and Luciana exchanged thoughts on a suitable place to eat and relax, rolling out rrrs, sprinting through syllables and assorted vowels in a low key rapid fire as only the Spanish can. Mister Flyn, too expensive, La Paloma, grubby with dubious clients, Los Alpes, cheap and nasty, but with unmatched patatas bravas. OK it's got to be Los Alpes!! Just for you Pete!

The best in Madrid! Where would we be without the humble potato! added Luciana vaselining her lips again. 

They turned the corner, heading for Los Alpes, passing a high concrete wall of colourful graffitti, cartoons, logos and folk slogans. The giant profile of a deceased American rock and roll star glared out over road and pavements, the words las tetas y cervejas below. Here Eleanor stopped to admire the artwork. Buses roared past, a group of passengers hurried up the steps to Villaverde rail station. She couldn't quite put a name to the heavy, dark features of the rock star. 

A man with a metal pole from which was hanging a long line and large hook came up behind her, attached the barbed hook through her five ear-rings on her fleshy left ear and began to play her as if he'd caught a big fish. She thought it was some zany act of street theatre to begin with. For a few seconds she seemed to accept being a large catch as the small Venezuelan down and out dragged her some way up the street, across the zebra crossing and onto the opposite side of the road before any of the others could react. The man expressed a steely, fixed determination. 

'Canada Real Galiana for you!!' he shouted,' the road with no signposts in or out.' She tried to remove the metal hook, but it was awkwardly angled and sharp. 

Pete would soon sprint across the busy road and quickly unfasten the hook, bloodying two thumbs in the process. The fisherman would run off full of crazed laughter, later to be seen fishing in one of the deep recycling bins, angling for children's toys and trinkets, anything of value. Pete was too busy looking after Eleanor to chase the culprit. Eleanor was trying to make sense of it all. There was a similar looking guy painted on the concrete wall just to the right and above the large nose of the American rock legend. 

If it was the same person on the wall and now in Eleanor's fuzzy imagination, she wasn't going to tell Pete who was running towards her, horrified at first then relieved, still apologising for the broken night, telling her how much he respected her as an artist, hugging her, lifting her up, taking her over the road to Nico and Luciana. Her ear was bleeding. Pete changed completely when he saw the amount of blood. He was just playing, said Eleanor, no big deal, let's forget about it. 

The fisherman was small and quick. He legged it up some worn steps and on across a car park into the station cafe, looking for someone else to hook. Pete was on his tail in a jiffy, yelling obscenities as bystanders and customers looked on in shock and amazement, one or two desperately dodging to avoid being knocked over in the chase. Eleanor, Nico and Luciana were shouting after their friend, to no avail. 

In no time they were both sprinting along the station platform then jumping down onto the railway track. Officials were gesturing, remonstrating; a rail worker took a photo on her phone as they headed south. A few commuters stood looking, puzzled. 

The ballast was hurting Pete's feet as he pounded on. He tried to step on the smoother concrete sleepers but kept hitting the larger chunks of dry stone. The down and out was much faster and was about to head off down the grassy bank and away over a fence when he lost his footing and fell. Pete leapt on him like a wrestler and put two hands around his thin, brown neck. The man was trying to hook him with his line and rod, squirming and struggling under Pete's greater weight. There wasn't a drop of sweat on the man. Pete was dripping. It was getting into his eyes. 

He kept his left hand around the man's neck, put his right tight across the small mouth. The man was trying to bite, twisting his head whilst kicking Pete's back.After a few minutes the fisherman went limp and Pete rolled over off his body. There were two people in a car on the flyover above who had witnessed it all. They braked hard and the front passenger got out, then the driver. They leaped over a barrier and sprinted towards Pete who was sitting next to the track. 

I'm not a violent man Pete said. I was chasing a criminal that's all, cos of what he did to Eleanor. I ran after him, the little shit. He wasn't getting away with that. You'd do the same. Any decent person

would. 

Nico and Luciana were there explaining in Spanish to two armed guardia civil officers. There were several railway officials standing by. It was hot, heat waves like liquid flames were blurring off the track. Pete hadn't noticed an express train stopped a few metres away. The Venezuelan fisherman was stretched out under a canvas, the fishing rod to one side. 

You should've called the police, simple, not gone chasing him down. You should've lodged a complaint with them and the legal side would've been triggered. Now you see what's happened, what you've done. And we have to find your friend Eleanor. She seems to have got left behind. 

Pete was up in a flash and running again, down the dusty railway bank and over a flimsy fence. Nico and the armed officers in green were shouting, starting to run after him. A fast train blew its horn as it sped past. Luciana screamed. Pete thought he heard a bullet zip through a nearby road sign. They don’t do that in Spain, he thought. He could die without ever really knowing what had happened to Eleanor. Another bullet ricocheted off a stone pillar. He was running like he'd never ran before. Why were they shooting at an innocent man? 

They would be partners for life, Pete and Eleanor, they would return to England and settle in a quiet village somewhere out of the way, where locals placed orchard apples in a wheelbarrow and passersby could just take them and bake a pie and share it out. Church bells would mark time, swifts and swallows bring the world of journeying to their backyard. But they would still ache for utopia whilst having impromptu quickies on the unkempt lawn on still summer nights. After their first unexpected miscarriage Pete would take the embryo and bury it under their favourite oak tree down Cat Lane holloway, and never tell. Even when the acorns fell and tiny saplings sprouted from the corpse, the secret was theirs alone. Politics would diminish then enhance their sense of self-worth. The earth would finally shake somewhere else far away with the accumulative greed of it all. 

And empty wine bottles would collect on warped shelves in their out-house, and cobwebs drape over garden tools that hadn't been used for years. They would wander off one day like refugees on and on on an endless pilgrimage. 

Around the corner from the graffitti was a big recycling bin. The same fisherman was there, with Eleanor. She looked fine. He was leaning in over the edge, lifting something out with his rod and line. Pete arrived gasping and desperate. He went straight for the fisherman, dragging him out of the bin, shaking him, slapping his face. I know what to do this time Pete shouted. The down and out had a look of sheer horror, trying to avoid another slap with a raised arm. Eleanor was loath to intervene. The blood seemed to have dried up on her ear. 

When Nico and the officers caught up Eleanor was trying to pull Pete off the top of the bin. Shouting from inside was the fisherman Pete had dumped unceremoniously following the altercation. There was a shopkeeper and his assistant watching intently from Casa Coko, a tacky shop selling things for a euro or less. 

Armed police! Put your arms above your head and get down from the bin! Slowly. Now! Both officers had their pistols drawn, pointing at Pete's head and legs. They asked Nico to open the bin lid. Luciana had arrived by then and helped him get the fisherman out. He stood between them, looking afraid. 

I'm not a violent man Pete said. I was chasing a criminal that's all cos of what he did to Eleanor. I ran after him, the little shit. He wasn't getting away with that. You'd do the same. Any decent person would. 

A police car with blue lights and siren pulled up. A uniformed officer got out and went over to

the two guardia civil officers to talk about the whole thing and what to do next. 

Pete was going to reiterate his version of events but was told to stay quiet. Don't tell them a damn thing the fisherman whispered. You never saw nothing. Please. Don't speak. It's best. 

Eleanor joined Nico and Luciana. The fisherman was handcuffed, then Pete. 

Pete was looking at Eleanor. All for you he mouthed. He then glanced into Casa Coko as an officer told him his legal rights. The female assistant had opened a fresh box of tack and was handling each item one by one onto a display rack. Occasionally the young woman would glance over and take things in as best she could. Always something going on with those stupid fishermen on her street, she knew. 

A police van arrived with two more, stronger looking officers. Pete and the down and out were put in separate spaces in the back and the others were driven to the police station for statements. 

Pete never could convince himself that he'd murdered the fisherman. Years later in his prison cell following a visit from Eleanor and his step-father the evening previous he was at his table with a brew. It was just before dawn. A seagull floated past his small barred window, head turning this way and that. A tentative blackbird could be heard some way off beyond the high wall. Summer was almost here. An hour extra for recreation was due to start the day after next. 

He sat with unblinking eyes. He could go back only as far as the box of tack, each pair of cheap, mass produced spectacles glinting in the light as the assistant placed them on the rack. I'm not a violent man. You'd do the same. Any decent person would. The singing faded then stopped. The seagull came past a second time. Pete's day would be spent sewing canvas and listening to old rock music. He might make it to the laundry some day. 

He was always in bed by nine at night. Being in solitary he was free to walk the confines of his cell early mornings. On the odd occasion he could be heard running on the spot deep into the night, as if he were chasing some imaginary thing.

The New Romeo 

Juliet, you somehow survived the poison and the blade and the family, you're now a freelance psychotherapist with your latest profile photograph splashed all over the lampposts near Plaza Mayor and the shadowy doorways of Calle Nuncio. You're big business. You were never more strange. 

Here I am woken up at an unknown hour, stomach churning & heart burning; unknown the reasons how I exist. The empty gossip of useless poets and failed students who like me sleep rough outdoors in soiled pants, fills my life. Dung flies are far happier. And they will never go hungry. 

It's funny how time plays tricks with memory and feeling. What I did on Tuesday last for example, or even yesterday, is way beyond me when it comes to recalling any of the small details we survive by. Yet I know exactly what clothes you were wearing at the club that night when we first met 35 years ago. Faded black jeans with holes torn across your upper leg, baseball boots and a tie-dyed T-shirt with flappy arms. On your head was an Italian army cap, Briganti 77, with a green and silver star. 

You were seventeen. Your older sisters were chaperones. I was between jobs, between girls, between broke and the pawnbroker. The flashing lights took vivid snapshots as you danced. Slender, shy, something hidden, not quite ready for the real world. I thought, What the hell. Why wait for the dating agency? 

Turns out you were a lawyer's daughter on a university gap year. Drunk on freedom alone. I was your moth, a neglected rustic. Forget about her I told myself when I waved you off in a midsummer taxi, still not knowing your name. Rascafria, I heard your giggly sisters tell the driver, the place where a wanton's bird went to die, forever free of its silken thread. 

Love, Juliet. Love doesn't care where or how it's born. It demands to be fed the milk of the moon, the promise of the stars, the rhythms of the rasgueado. We pursue or it pursues. We don't know each other in the present but we share this dry blue sky and early light that can't yet touch today's details but highlights the memories of San Pedro, San Pedro el Viejo. 

Our mutual grasping of that single loose electric wire hanging down from the hole in the ceiling, its attractive copper that night we broke in with carnal intent, the way synapses are torched, the way we ground and bear the shock. Your description of Jesus el Pobre astounded me because he had real human hair, thick and matted, on that golden altar above our heads. Wet your hands and tighten your grip you encouraged as you finally lay there and I partied on imagined virginity. We both should have died of cardiac arrest. 

I wanted out, having smelt the meaty blood of his thorny wounds. Resist, resist the flow and its certain cure but no - you were with child and the fates had me by the short&curlies. Your elder sister's late night premonition haunted me for years - he’ll be dead before he’s reached thirty - but I'm still compos mentis and breathing free air. 

And Juliet, we were never two trees growing as one in the story of the gods come down to fix humanity once and for all. I could only ever look at your reflection, travelling into a million nether worlds in those Melia hotel mirrors one May Day morning. I was destined not to be your old murderer. We lived sonnet 18 and quit at 129. 

Our love was vast, you said, like an ocean, unfathomable. We had our own constellation, forming each night into an endless, blazing story of cosmic glory. You sent me loving messages every day on little bits of paper. How I wish I’d kept them. How I wish I’d shown them to your mom and dad when I met them both at your place for the first time. They would surely have been impressed by the romantic edge of your sweet ditties. How I wish I’d given up my Kantian principle of always telling it as it is when they asked about my latest employment situation, as a medical research volunteer in a pox clinic. Their faces dropped in a manner unknown to any hall of mirrors. I knew I'd blown it. 

And Juliet, this morning I see your initial consultation is free, thereafter payments can be tailored individually to a client's knees. That's a joke right? I'm intrigued as to how you work out a client's future. 

Could I pay with pomegranates? Will your theories of displacement fit my ultimate sacrifice? How far could we get for 100 euros, the amount your father gave me to leave Rascafria forever? 

Your love is now compassion and empathy used for the benefit of an anxious, apathetic society. But I wonder how much you pocket each month? How many directorships you hold? What price the entrails of a modern mind? 

Where are the meteors when you want one? Where are the larks praising the lifestyle of lizards up there behind the gleaming windows of high-class civilisation? 

Do you and my child live in a squeaky clean bubble where morning's poached eggs and avocado accompany the best of family chit-chat? I long to be boiled in a pan and savoured by you. I yearn to be your chit as well as your chat. Oh God, I forgot to take my amnesia tablets. 

I wonder if your address is still valid? No 1, Avenida del Amor, Como Locura, Triste Historia, Tumba del Corazon. I wonder if a single line of my last communication can be recalled? All doubt is mine. I wonder if you'd still recognise the misshapen chaos that is my face?