All There Is
by John McGroarty
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: When the usual diversionary tactics fail.
_____________________________________________________________________
The cold came and me and Alma could finally walk down by the sea in our big coats and boots without the sweating and the worrying about the death of the planet to heat destruction and het up cancerous cosmic rays. To the melting of the ice caps and the rise of the Mediterranean to flood our flat just as we finished paying our murderous mortgage. Alma stuck her finger in her ear, swished around, and complained of liquid. She looked worried. I told her it was water on the brain. The first sign of a tumour and that it’s brought on by thinking too much. Her brain was melting under the strain. Leaking out through the head’s orifices. Alma laughed nervously at this and told me that she had been dreaming of the Portuguese circle of hell for the last week and a half so I had better watch it. I scoffed at the Portuguese inquisition and told her about Candide’s experiences with the Lisbon clerics. Perhaps you and Voltaire are haunted by the same archetypal fears, I mused, but it was too late as Alma had moved onto the new mattress. She was now fervently adamant that the future of our lives depended on a latex mattress. Spring or open coil or at the very least pocket sprung. It’s a fetish. A thousand Euros it would all cost. That’s my fetish. I reflected that this was one foe Candide didn’t have against him. Well, François, we’re all tending our gardens now. And it’s getting harder and harder by the day to keep the roses fresh and the Portuguese inquisition at bay. I tried to distract her attention with a conversation about westerns, which I knew was always a good way of avoiding speaking about expensive mattresses. Why wasn’t John Wayne in “Cheyenne Autumn”? I wondered aloud in a speculative ignorant tone that I knew Alma could never resist. It was the least Wayne could have done after all the Indians he had killed on screen over the years, I threw in as further bait. He let himself be Richard Widmark, she said, and, of course, he was a fascist. And he had lung cancer at the time. She had stopped and was staring mystically out to sea. Feeling I had her, I ventured further; and what was James Stewart doing as Wyatt Earp? To bring in the public as John Wayne wasn’t there, she said softly, her face lightening and the Portuguese receding. Their torture implements disappeared beyond the horizon somewhere up over the big dipper. She was there now in Monument Valley, riding free once more. I then went in for the kill: and wasn’t the film a failure, though? She looked back out to sea. After “The Searchers”, I clarified. Yes and no. Well, she went into critic mode, in “The Searchers” John Ford finally accepted the idea that the Other was all of us. Natalie Wood was us and the Other at the same time and the door which welcomes Uncle Ethan at the beginning is closed on him and his ways at the end. Of course they’d killed all the Indians by then! “Cheyenne Autumn” was further acceptance that we all suffer, though it’s silly, the Karl Malden figure. The Americans didn’t annihilate the Indians, God no, it was the Germans, the Prussians even, just following orders and finally defeated by good old US pragmatism in Edward G Robinson. It’s as if Ford could sense a link between what had happened in Germany and in the US but couldn’t go the whole way. All this liberal stuff was too much for that white supremacist Wayne. El muy hijo de puta. And now the daughter’s with Trump! Well, the Indians got some sort of last laugh. That’s why they don’t translate their dialogue; they’re mocking and cursing in gibberish about the size of the American penis of civilization! She spat out sardonic fire. That was more like it, I thought. That’s my girl. Fighting spirit. There was a row of menacing seagulls sitting on the beach wall. I felt spooked. You never see seagulls at night. It was like an omen. They might even have been albatrosses, whatever that means. I saw on the news that the seagulls are taking over the Coliseum in Rome, I said to normalize the situation but it wasn’t about mattresses or John Ford so Alma let it pass. Her madness is different from mine. We walked on towards the circus tent at the beach head. Let’s go to the Circus, Alma, I enthused, suddenly gripped by childish abandon. Run away with them. Volunteer. You can grow a beard and I’ll spin plates. We approached to look at the prices. My money fetish insisted. My ardour dampened when I saw. I hope there aren’t any lions or drunk crazy clowns, I said, holding on to Alma’s arm firmly. It was dark and the tents and the little circus caravans were lit sparingly. Zennee Zucker’s Circo de Magia was emblazoned on the entrance. There was a woman in a tiger coat and high heels chatting on her mobile and sucking deep on a cigar. That’s probably Mrs Zucker, I whispered to Alma, talking to her mother, bitching about Zenee. Zenee is in the caravan in his vest eating a pizza and watching videos on YouTube. It was a little scary so we didn’t venture further. Do you remember Charlie Chaplin in the lion’s cage? She burst out laughing in a girlie way and we ran out across the motorway and moved up towards a ghostly Diagonal Mar. Two guys jogged past at speed with beagle dogs at their heels. I don’t think that the beagles fancy jogging much, said Alma angrily. She’s a big dog lover. Voted for the animal rights party at the last election. Seemed like the only reasonable choice. I speculated that maybe every night at eight thirty the beagles were waiting at the door with their trainers on. One never knew about these things. What goes on in other people’s houses, I added. This image seemed to get Alma. It got me too and we laughed a lot. But then Alma’s face darkened again. Is it the Portuguese circle? Up this way, she said cryptically. There’s a shoe shop in Besós I want to look at. The beagles in sneakers had transmogrified into knee length high-heeled boots. But it didn’t last. Montserrat Balaguer, she said suddenly, stopping. I sent her an article over a week ago now and she doesn’t even have the decency to reply. I tried to get her back onto John Ford. I watched “Is That All There Is?” the other night on the Internet, I said. Remember the film with Lindsay Anderson, the guy who wrote that great book on John Ford. The director of “If”. Remember, Alma? Why doesn’t she send one little email, just to say she’s received it; that they’re thinking about it? It’s Lindsay Anderson in his sixties, I go on. About his boring banal life in London. Like us. I raise my eyebrows and I smile bravely. That’s all there is. He goes to Tesco’s, meets friends, actors, drinks a lot of wine, at the end he goes to the funeral of two actresses on a boat on the Thames. They scatter the ashes over the side. They drink champagne and sing “Is That All There Is?” I think I was trying to make Alma feel better. Put it all in philosophical perspective. But why doesn’t she even answer? Maybe she’s busy; she’s the editor of a big magazine. Give her time. That’s a good idea for a story, I say. A young journalist sends her book to an editor and waits and waits till she has nothing to pay the electricity or go to the hairdresser’s with and finally snaps and enters the building rabid-mad. Imagine, she goes up to the security guard and says “Miss Montserrat Balaguer, please” all business-like, raps her fingers on the desk impatiently, and the security guard calls up and Montserrat Balaguer says tell her I’m not here, in a nasty superior tone. Not here screams the girl indignantly and then socks the guard on the chin and sprints through the barriers and into the lift and up to her office. She bursts in on Miss Snooty knickers Montse Balaguer and grabs her by the throat and makes her promise her a good job that only people with contacts and money can get and then forces her to give her a thousand Euros from the safe. She makes her escape and later when the police catch up with her she’s….. what do you think? But Alma just smiles a weak smile. She’s buying a latex pocket sprung mattress, she says dead-pan. Exactly! I don’t think it works beyond you and me, she says, but maybe we’re just one of a hundred million out there. She’s laughing and I know it’s good, though I’ll never write it. Another couple of joggers with beagles run silently past like absurd ghosts. Or maybe it’s the same ones. Cada loco con su tema, I say. As we approach the shop a fleet of police vans and ambulances sweep by heading for La Mina. It’s probably a raid, says Alma. Susana knows all about it. We were having breakfast one morning there in El Gallego when the police surrounded the place and dragged out a couple of gypsies. Goes on all the time. I wouldn’t like to arrest a gypsy, I say, bring you a lot of bad luck. And while I’m pondering the gypsy curse following some poor traffic cop and ruining his life Alma has started to sprint towards the shop which sells the knee-length boots. Alma, Alma, wait, I cry. The shop is next to the raid and we seem to be walking right into tonight’s local news report. I catch up to Alma. Oh, don’t be a coward, she cries, and charges ahead. A woman will sail any sea for a pair of new boots. We go into the shop and she tries on different pairs of boots while all around us the police march up and down in packs, crunching up the asphalt. There is noise and flashing lights and gypsies everywhere. Finally they march out five young gypsy guys and put them in a van. Alma pays for the boots and we make it back down to the Diagonal safely. Alma has completely recovered her poise. The Portuguese circle of hell and Montserrat Balaguer’s indifference don’t stand a chance against retail shock therapy. What did you think was going to happen? Maybe they could have burst into the shop and taken us hostages. We want a helicopter and two million in unmarked notes or the guiri dies. They have a big scimitar sword at my throat. Then when the police finally rescue us they ask me for identification and I don’t have my passport and they say I’m East European and deport me to Kazakhstan or the Iraqi desert and I’m captured and tortured by ISIS. We’re still buying the mattress, says Alma. I smile stupidly and assent. It’s Saturday night, what else can I do? When are you going to write the best seller anyway? Never, I say, a little miffed about how everything has gone. We get a Chinese take-away and go home. Alma tries on her boots and struts up and down the hall. She then gets the mattress she wants up on the Internet. All there is. Just these little moments of strange happiness. From which all our dreams and stories are woven. I get to choose the film we’re going to watch. I don’t choose John Ford. A woman can’t always get her own way; it makes them think that they’re not in total control of everything all the time.
Swearwords: None.
Description: When the usual diversionary tactics fail.
_____________________________________________________________________
The cold came and me and Alma could finally walk down by the sea in our big coats and boots without the sweating and the worrying about the death of the planet to heat destruction and het up cancerous cosmic rays. To the melting of the ice caps and the rise of the Mediterranean to flood our flat just as we finished paying our murderous mortgage. Alma stuck her finger in her ear, swished around, and complained of liquid. She looked worried. I told her it was water on the brain. The first sign of a tumour and that it’s brought on by thinking too much. Her brain was melting under the strain. Leaking out through the head’s orifices. Alma laughed nervously at this and told me that she had been dreaming of the Portuguese circle of hell for the last week and a half so I had better watch it. I scoffed at the Portuguese inquisition and told her about Candide’s experiences with the Lisbon clerics. Perhaps you and Voltaire are haunted by the same archetypal fears, I mused, but it was too late as Alma had moved onto the new mattress. She was now fervently adamant that the future of our lives depended on a latex mattress. Spring or open coil or at the very least pocket sprung. It’s a fetish. A thousand Euros it would all cost. That’s my fetish. I reflected that this was one foe Candide didn’t have against him. Well, François, we’re all tending our gardens now. And it’s getting harder and harder by the day to keep the roses fresh and the Portuguese inquisition at bay. I tried to distract her attention with a conversation about westerns, which I knew was always a good way of avoiding speaking about expensive mattresses. Why wasn’t John Wayne in “Cheyenne Autumn”? I wondered aloud in a speculative ignorant tone that I knew Alma could never resist. It was the least Wayne could have done after all the Indians he had killed on screen over the years, I threw in as further bait. He let himself be Richard Widmark, she said, and, of course, he was a fascist. And he had lung cancer at the time. She had stopped and was staring mystically out to sea. Feeling I had her, I ventured further; and what was James Stewart doing as Wyatt Earp? To bring in the public as John Wayne wasn’t there, she said softly, her face lightening and the Portuguese receding. Their torture implements disappeared beyond the horizon somewhere up over the big dipper. She was there now in Monument Valley, riding free once more. I then went in for the kill: and wasn’t the film a failure, though? She looked back out to sea. After “The Searchers”, I clarified. Yes and no. Well, she went into critic mode, in “The Searchers” John Ford finally accepted the idea that the Other was all of us. Natalie Wood was us and the Other at the same time and the door which welcomes Uncle Ethan at the beginning is closed on him and his ways at the end. Of course they’d killed all the Indians by then! “Cheyenne Autumn” was further acceptance that we all suffer, though it’s silly, the Karl Malden figure. The Americans didn’t annihilate the Indians, God no, it was the Germans, the Prussians even, just following orders and finally defeated by good old US pragmatism in Edward G Robinson. It’s as if Ford could sense a link between what had happened in Germany and in the US but couldn’t go the whole way. All this liberal stuff was too much for that white supremacist Wayne. El muy hijo de puta. And now the daughter’s with Trump! Well, the Indians got some sort of last laugh. That’s why they don’t translate their dialogue; they’re mocking and cursing in gibberish about the size of the American penis of civilization! She spat out sardonic fire. That was more like it, I thought. That’s my girl. Fighting spirit. There was a row of menacing seagulls sitting on the beach wall. I felt spooked. You never see seagulls at night. It was like an omen. They might even have been albatrosses, whatever that means. I saw on the news that the seagulls are taking over the Coliseum in Rome, I said to normalize the situation but it wasn’t about mattresses or John Ford so Alma let it pass. Her madness is different from mine. We walked on towards the circus tent at the beach head. Let’s go to the Circus, Alma, I enthused, suddenly gripped by childish abandon. Run away with them. Volunteer. You can grow a beard and I’ll spin plates. We approached to look at the prices. My money fetish insisted. My ardour dampened when I saw. I hope there aren’t any lions or drunk crazy clowns, I said, holding on to Alma’s arm firmly. It was dark and the tents and the little circus caravans were lit sparingly. Zennee Zucker’s Circo de Magia was emblazoned on the entrance. There was a woman in a tiger coat and high heels chatting on her mobile and sucking deep on a cigar. That’s probably Mrs Zucker, I whispered to Alma, talking to her mother, bitching about Zenee. Zenee is in the caravan in his vest eating a pizza and watching videos on YouTube. It was a little scary so we didn’t venture further. Do you remember Charlie Chaplin in the lion’s cage? She burst out laughing in a girlie way and we ran out across the motorway and moved up towards a ghostly Diagonal Mar. Two guys jogged past at speed with beagle dogs at their heels. I don’t think that the beagles fancy jogging much, said Alma angrily. She’s a big dog lover. Voted for the animal rights party at the last election. Seemed like the only reasonable choice. I speculated that maybe every night at eight thirty the beagles were waiting at the door with their trainers on. One never knew about these things. What goes on in other people’s houses, I added. This image seemed to get Alma. It got me too and we laughed a lot. But then Alma’s face darkened again. Is it the Portuguese circle? Up this way, she said cryptically. There’s a shoe shop in Besós I want to look at. The beagles in sneakers had transmogrified into knee length high-heeled boots. But it didn’t last. Montserrat Balaguer, she said suddenly, stopping. I sent her an article over a week ago now and she doesn’t even have the decency to reply. I tried to get her back onto John Ford. I watched “Is That All There Is?” the other night on the Internet, I said. Remember the film with Lindsay Anderson, the guy who wrote that great book on John Ford. The director of “If”. Remember, Alma? Why doesn’t she send one little email, just to say she’s received it; that they’re thinking about it? It’s Lindsay Anderson in his sixties, I go on. About his boring banal life in London. Like us. I raise my eyebrows and I smile bravely. That’s all there is. He goes to Tesco’s, meets friends, actors, drinks a lot of wine, at the end he goes to the funeral of two actresses on a boat on the Thames. They scatter the ashes over the side. They drink champagne and sing “Is That All There Is?” I think I was trying to make Alma feel better. Put it all in philosophical perspective. But why doesn’t she even answer? Maybe she’s busy; she’s the editor of a big magazine. Give her time. That’s a good idea for a story, I say. A young journalist sends her book to an editor and waits and waits till she has nothing to pay the electricity or go to the hairdresser’s with and finally snaps and enters the building rabid-mad. Imagine, she goes up to the security guard and says “Miss Montserrat Balaguer, please” all business-like, raps her fingers on the desk impatiently, and the security guard calls up and Montserrat Balaguer says tell her I’m not here, in a nasty superior tone. Not here screams the girl indignantly and then socks the guard on the chin and sprints through the barriers and into the lift and up to her office. She bursts in on Miss Snooty knickers Montse Balaguer and grabs her by the throat and makes her promise her a good job that only people with contacts and money can get and then forces her to give her a thousand Euros from the safe. She makes her escape and later when the police catch up with her she’s….. what do you think? But Alma just smiles a weak smile. She’s buying a latex pocket sprung mattress, she says dead-pan. Exactly! I don’t think it works beyond you and me, she says, but maybe we’re just one of a hundred million out there. She’s laughing and I know it’s good, though I’ll never write it. Another couple of joggers with beagles run silently past like absurd ghosts. Or maybe it’s the same ones. Cada loco con su tema, I say. As we approach the shop a fleet of police vans and ambulances sweep by heading for La Mina. It’s probably a raid, says Alma. Susana knows all about it. We were having breakfast one morning there in El Gallego when the police surrounded the place and dragged out a couple of gypsies. Goes on all the time. I wouldn’t like to arrest a gypsy, I say, bring you a lot of bad luck. And while I’m pondering the gypsy curse following some poor traffic cop and ruining his life Alma has started to sprint towards the shop which sells the knee-length boots. Alma, Alma, wait, I cry. The shop is next to the raid and we seem to be walking right into tonight’s local news report. I catch up to Alma. Oh, don’t be a coward, she cries, and charges ahead. A woman will sail any sea for a pair of new boots. We go into the shop and she tries on different pairs of boots while all around us the police march up and down in packs, crunching up the asphalt. There is noise and flashing lights and gypsies everywhere. Finally they march out five young gypsy guys and put them in a van. Alma pays for the boots and we make it back down to the Diagonal safely. Alma has completely recovered her poise. The Portuguese circle of hell and Montserrat Balaguer’s indifference don’t stand a chance against retail shock therapy. What did you think was going to happen? Maybe they could have burst into the shop and taken us hostages. We want a helicopter and two million in unmarked notes or the guiri dies. They have a big scimitar sword at my throat. Then when the police finally rescue us they ask me for identification and I don’t have my passport and they say I’m East European and deport me to Kazakhstan or the Iraqi desert and I’m captured and tortured by ISIS. We’re still buying the mattress, says Alma. I smile stupidly and assent. It’s Saturday night, what else can I do? When are you going to write the best seller anyway? Never, I say, a little miffed about how everything has gone. We get a Chinese take-away and go home. Alma tries on her boots and struts up and down the hall. She then gets the mattress she wants up on the Internet. All there is. Just these little moments of strange happiness. From which all our dreams and stories are woven. I get to choose the film we’re going to watch. I don’t choose John Ford. A woman can’t always get her own way; it makes them think that they’re not in total control of everything all the time.
About the Author
John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story Rainbow, his novel The Tower and his short fiction collection Everywhere are McStorytellers publications.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.