[Fiction]

From the Prologue of Glove Puppet

By Neal Drinnan

At seven, Johnny Smith's mother dies and he lets a stranger carry him away.

I wandered slowly past the handsome man again, flaunting my pie crust as if it were worthy of envy, a priceless coronet plucked and flaunted from our family jewels. I squeezed the coins in my other hand, hoping Mum would forget about the change. I was hoping maybe he'd talk to me some more.

"Was that a nice pie?"

"Nah, it was bleedin' cold."

"Are you sure your Mum's okay?"

"I told ja, she's jus' a bit sick."

I headed back to Mum, annoyed by all these questions. I remembered what she'd said back home about police, social workers and the like: 'World's full of nosy bloody Parkers.' I looked at the man again. No one understood about when she got sick; soon she'd be up wanting a cup of tea. I looked in my palm and closed it again. I didn't know how much a cup would cost but it didn't look like enough in there to buy her one, not enough for chips or anything.

I finished the pie and sat awhile watching Mum. she looked like a doll, no colour in her face except the make-up she was wearing. She was sweating and cold. Since I'd been away she'd vomited onto the ground. I was very tired by then, so I curled myself near her, my back against the cold drafts, my head near the vague warmth of her lap. I didn't like our chances in London so far.

"What's that you got, Johnny?" It was a hot day, warmer than the warmest day on Brighton Beach, and Mum was all better. She had on her dressing gown, the silky summer one with big flowers on it. She was smiling and squinting in the sun's glare. 'It's a flower Mum, a big white 'n' yellow flower, smells nice 'n' all. I went to give it to her but she shook her head. 'You keep it Love, there's plen'y 'ere.' I looked around and she was right; flowers just like it were everywhere. 'You'll be awright ya hear?' She was going somewhere I couldn't follow. I looked deep into the flower and breathed its perfume. A warm smell, a clean smell.

I woke with a start; the TV man was lifting me in his arms. "We've got to get your Mum to hospital. I've rung for an ambulance," he said.

Mum was cold. I tried to grab her leg as he lifted me but it was limp. As he drew me to him I smelt that same warm, clean smell.

Real things, by then, had taken on a dreamlike quality. Ambulance men came and a stretcher was wheeled in while a couple of bleary-eyed hobos and the crazy bag lady I'd spotted out on the concourse had begun to gather for what promised to be a show. The bag lady began to shout, "It's drugs what does it to 'em, I've seen more 'n' one go that way with the drugs."

She sidled up to us like some pantomime dame, her bottle of sherry ready to fall >from her open bag, her vile breath silencing me in the man's arms.

"Ere, don't you let your littl'un look at that, 's not right at his age, all them tarts come to same end with drugs nowadays, not like in the war."

His brow furrowed and he whispered something to me, something that kept me quiet, about getting out of there safely, about being saved and about a game.

"Just imagine we're on a bridge miles above a cold and stormy sea."

I thought about Brighton Beach in the dead of winter and shivered.

"I am the bridge, my arms are the supports and when I put you down again you'll know we're safe, so keep quiet and I'll get you across."

I wasn't scared. In some way the bridge seemed to make sense. I knew something very bad had happened but I didn't move. There was magical strength in those arms, a benevolence in his eyes that hypnotised me, inspired hope somehow. Perhaps he really was my father; he'd already paid me more attention than the thousand other men who might have been my dad. I half wanted to yell out to Mum, but think I knew she was dead. The muscly arms formed a parapet, a real protection from all that strife, from all those waiting freaks, which I would have been forced to join had he not picked me up.

An ambulance attendant came over and asked the man if he knew Mum.

The bag lady interrupted, "I was just saying to the nice gent'y'man he shouldn't let his boy see that, them tarts fillin' 'emselves wi' drugs, I 'spect you've seen it all before, but 's not for kids to be seeing." She was coming at me, trying to touch my face. The man kept turning so I wouldn't have to endure he inquisitive prods.

"No," he said calmly in answer to the ambulance attendant. As he did so the bag lady sent her sherry bottle smashing to the ground. "We were on our way to the tube when I noticed the state she was in." The man gestured towards Mum, not to the bag lady, who was now on her knees assessing the shattered bottle.

I was distracted by the woman, who had managed to salvage a small quantity of sherry in the jagged remains of the bottle and was trying to work out which angle was safest to drink it from without cutting her lips.

The man was holding my bag, a plastic one from Sainsburys with spare clothes and a toy lorry in it. It suddenly dawned on me that 'we' meant him and me. I asked whether on the bridge I was safe from witches. He told me that I was. I asked if the woman was a witch. "I fear so, I fear so very much." The bag lady eyed me suspiciously and I decided I'd stay on the bridge a while longer. I felt if he dropped me, I would fall into a coldness and blackness from which I could never return.

The ambulance attendant seemed relieved this was a straight pick-up. No lifesaving required; just midnight in the meat wagon, another dead junkie. "All aboard -- let's move 'er out." They hauled my Mum onto a stretcher. I watched, silently, and wondered who this man was and what he might do to me. Would he be like the man in the black anorak who gave the other boys on the estate a whole pound one day? He'd gotten cross when they wriggled. What had made them wriggle, I wondered, and was it worth a pound? This man seemed different. I might like him, and as the moment for me to yell out came and went I thought about myself without a mother. There was no reason to think I was any better off with those ambulance attendants than I was with this nice-smelling man. Besides, I knew everyone had to wriggle somewhere along the line if they wanted to survive. Mum taught me that much.

I wasn't until after they'd loaded her onto the trolley, strapped her onto a stretcher, pulled the sheet over her and wheeled her off into the night that my sobbing began. The man carried his tearful child and his suitcase down into the tiled, eerie silence of the London underground. I felt so tired and weak a breeze could have carried me off. Crying never did much good with Mum -- why should he have been fussed by it any more than her?

Sound interesting? Read some excerpts and an interview:

Glove Puppet: Find out what people are saying about this exciting, sexualy-charged novel.
Cure: Johnny, newly rechristened "Vaslav," escapes with his new father to Australia.
Changling: Vaslav explores the highlights and lowlights of his new life in Sydney.
Melting Ice: After Shamash's parents die in a plane crash, things begin to change.
An Interview with the Author: Find out what gets author Neal Drinnan pissed off in this candid conversation.

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