Jack Cox - Dodge Rose

as long as we stay on gold.

gold! with a money market this tight and the price of wool in this house itll be wealth riding on the

dad smiled at mr harwood who had been bending towards his ear, though mr harwood stopped short and said they havent been in the fires have they. no said dad and ran his hand over the top of his mouth and put his other on my shoulder and said shall we see if we can fit on the balcony, a breeze seems to be coming on and i think these ladies might enjoy the relief of our company a moment. you two have had quite an excursion for such a scorcher.

naturally i snuck into the hall and pushed up the lid of the hallstand and stuck my head in and poked around until i found the box of californian chocolates. is that right. i may be jumping ahead. they came in a lovely large cedar box. they were called starck chocolates and had the shape of umbrellas and cars and coins and cigarettes. the umbrellas had little plastic handles. mother who was coming back in from having laid on the kettle grabbed me by the back of the neck and beat me quite savagely with the first rod she could get her hand on. later the heat really broke up and there was an electrical storm. that was the year the biggest hailstone fell in potter, nebraska. there were electrical storms in those days. we used to put away all the silver and cover the mirrors with sheets. sometimes there was a fireball, which was really a luminous ball that appeared where the lightning was going to strike and travelled slowly in a horizontal line with a hissing noise and then exploded but there was no fireball that time.

for a while on the days mother went out alone i was minded by miss fox. look she would say faking to draw an egg from behind my ear. she cracked it into a bowl. from the bench where i sat i tip the milk jar until i am satisfied. what need all this cookery. the smell of sulphur and a piece of butter frothing in the pan can still recall to me those evenings. scent the persistent reminiscent. her omelettes were hell but you have to be bought up on something.

miss fox was attending chartres business college on liverpool street, opposite hyde park. we went walking there sometimes after lunch. we fed the birds. saw shapes in the clouds. the clouds have shapes. miss fox sees animals. i see clouds. animals. what motion. her devergondage. look she says, theres one just like your monkey. get a taste for higher things. but ice cream cone and cathedral must be kept separate. most times after eating she just laid on the bench a sheet of paper with a grid drawn on it that had irregular sides like the periodic table and in each square a letter or a punctuation mark. i watched the white arcs of her index fingers fly up and down on the tables sometimes her hands would stop and fall in her lap and she would frown for a moment at the pummelled sheet then begin again. her cheek quivered when the fingers hit home. your hands she told me are machines, and finer calibrated than any typewriter. all it takes is to train them up to the capacity of a typewriter. i dont have one so i practice on this.

how will you know.

know what, that im at capacity. i wont till i try on the machine. when it jams ill know ive exceeded it. wouldnt that be something, to type impossibly. im rather slow now and make mistakes. she takes to it.

what are you typing i ask. robinson crusoe she says.

wybalenna. she played the piano just as punctually. now i could follow a a b a but i couldnt wrangle anything yet from o t o f t h a c o u n t damn. excuse me. you wont repeat that to your mother. other times we went walking in the park but that isnt worth telling you about.

mother will say the pilot is coming to tea and until he does i cant sit still. i watch her kid shoes back and forth over the carpet resentfully, as if she were keeping time with her steps, keeping the pilot from coming. when he does he brushes his mouth over mothers cheek and shakes the hand dad has unwound from his pipe and newspaper. there may be others to whom to say hello, aunt constance on the sofa, salting or langley, miss fox. and where he will say and i catch my breath up. he will begin beneath the sofa, then the coffee table and the olive armchairs and in the space between the maple paws of the dresser, rifle in the coats, add his, squint in the china cabinet. it does not take long. what i wish he would do is look everywhere, open the oven, lift the stuff on the beds. but i dont dare leave the living room and if im behind the curtains he finds me and same for the dog basket. he grabs me hard beneath the armpits and swings me up. no there was no dog now i think about it say the laundry basket.

the rest is disappointing. he drops one leg on the other and the words run over his lip like the evening news, crackling deafly on to anyone. he is bored. his glaucus pricks would not be here. iunkes of the see. his photo was in the newspaper for flying i dont remember where. very fast, or so it seemed at the time. those were the real high flying days with parer and mcintosh and goble and macintyre and ross and keith and kingsford smith and harry hawker all making records and breaking them and barnstorming and the rest of course it was pretty much a boys game. phyllis arnot got a license later but she never used it. uncle jim was a fanatic and didnt think people really got it. he would never have been given a license now. dad asked about his following. to tell you the truth peter, many people still dont see it for what it is i bet you dont even remember william hart. why when lindbergh left roosevelt field for paris last year most of the americans were too busy watching their stocks rise to notice, if you dont mind my saying.

not at all, jim. and you might thank them for it too. you need someone to keep your head in the clouds. your gypsy moths wont fly without a turn over, ha.

and so on.

do you remember when cobbam had that trouble coming over here wasnt that frightening, all those mixed up messages coming out of where on earth was it i believe rangoon. couldnt find him. and before that when the engine blew out and his poor copilot bleeding into his handkerchief and none of us here could make head or tail of it. elliott is dead. elliott is not expected to live. we gave him such a party when he touched down. you ever have dangerous trouble jim.

no rotten luck yet he said tapping the woolly towel on his head. then i havent taken any real risks. once. well. but it was nothing hardly mushing. lost my bearings over java one time because. i couldnt. make out, i couldnt see.

ash plume.

no it was, fine. had been. just couldnt seem to get above the. wasnt a shadow anywhere. like turning up in the stratopause. not that it would be like that.

ive seen the hyaline the colour of his eyes. they are like mouldy mirrors, brilliant in spots. he cant find his tongue. he held up his hands. took them right off the wheel and theyre all eaten around by. i. only lasted a moment. he coughed. darn i dont know how to say it so it doesnt sound silly. inside you it just sinks all of a sudden. you get. he made a vertical movement. if it wasnt for the plane thered be nothing between and a few thousand feet and then actually the strange thing is you forget for a moment to worry about the mountain as if. es uns nur so scheint. it can be a horrible feeling weather. of course you know well enough where you are and suddenly youre quite lost breathes mother from the window where she leans her shoulders on the glass. it is ravelled with water. outside the rain falls before the shop windows and in the beams of the cars. a hush fills the room. aunt constance moans. i think i can imagine it and shut my eyes. frankly the pilot is best when lifting me so the air comes up. he smells of leather standing at the doorway dressed to leave, when he pats my head through a shining glove and winks his yellow teeth at the room for goodbye. all nerves says aunt constance when he has gone. it was like an electrical current in the sofa. did he marry that girl. not for this world says dad from behind the newspaper. he is in the habit of reading columns aloud. tragedy at stalybridge. panic broke out among the crowd of spectators. mr howard carter has discovered a jar containing the kings viscera in an antechamber to tutankamens tomb. horrible day says langley, they wont be racing. mother is humming something from the radio without realising it. i am tapping my foot because i cant wait to fart, but now why wait, i am not so well brung up. could be the age.