We've been having a bit of trouble from an uninvited visitor in the house - holes gnawed in the kitchen cupboard, droppings scattered like wild rice and the occasional bump in the night. Setting a trap resulted in victory of the most hollow kind. It reminded me of this poem.





The noises that we make are quite predictable--
the mouse is so ill it can only judder
in its tiny pain.

You said it was so pretty and ran upstairs.
You must have heard the iron on the step,
the lifting of the dustbin lid.

And I was so shocked--
on my fingers the little shame of urine,
the silent bravery of blood.



From Selected Poems.

Martin stopped the rented Mazda in the visitors’ parking lot at Khao Yai national park. He and Frank got out of the car, stretched after their drive from Bangkok and began to prepare for the afternoon hike. As Martin packed water bottles, camera and a map into his back-pack, Frank hurried over to a group of food stalls and returned with a large bunch of bananas. Tucking their trousers into their socks to discourage jungle leeches, the pair set off up the gently sloping road. A number of paths into the jungle began along this route, each with a sign pointing into the mass of trees.

‘I always feel very primal when I set out on a walk like this,’ confessed Frank.

‘Primal? You always were the imaginative one.’

‘Yes, don’t mock. We’re going back into the jungle, back to where we started from.’

‘I thought we started on the plains of Africa.’

‘Don’t be pedantic. Anyway, the African plains may well have been covered with jungle in those days; I don’t see how we could have survived long on a bit of grassy veldt. These pathways into the deep forest, they’re taking us back. They’re doorways into nature itself.’

‘Perhaps into our nature.’

‘That’s better. Now you’re getting the hang of it.’

Before starting on their hike proper, Frank wanted to feed the bananas he’d bought to a troupe of monkeys he’d seen from the car. They pressed on along the surfaced road for half a kilometre or so until, on rounding a bend, they spotted the monkeys ahead.

The troupe was made up of about 20 animals of various ages. The monkeys’ backs were covered in olive brown fur while their undersides were white. A dark brown furry skull-cap made the top of their heads look flat. They held their short tails up as they walked. They were being led along the road by an adult, though their progression was by no means orderly. The other adults, some of them bigger than the leader, followed each other more or less in single file, while the younger animals skipped and jumped about, tumbling and wrestling with each other and dashing to and fro among the adults. Two or three of the smallest babies, black in colour, clung underneath their mothers and watched the antics of their elder cousins closely, their dark, inquisitive eyes as shiny as buttons.

Frank stopped to take the bananas out of his back-pack and tore one from the bunch. He was the shorter of the two friends, with sandy curls and a classically handsome face that some called poetic. Quickly, the monkeys gathered near him, though they remained nervous. The adults bared their teeth and chattered at the two hikers. They were clearly accustomed to encounters with humans though they couldn’t be described as tame, maintaining a safe distance and, while appearing nonchalant, keeping their eyes fixed on the pair. Frank threw the first banana carefully into the midst of the troupe and a number of monkeys dived for it. After a lot of noise and baring of teeth, the leader established ownership of the fruit and sat down to eat it.

‘Hey, come and have a look at the tackle on this one,’ Martin called to Frank, indicating one of the largest animals sitting at the edge of the group. Martin was the older of the pair and more down to earth than his friend. With rather severe straight black hair, he often took the role of parent to Frank’s irrepressible child.

‘Oh yes, he is a big boy, isn’t he?’ Frank observed. ‘I suppose he’s the troupe leader. Are you?’ Frank teased as he distributed the rest of the fruit to the other monkeys. ‘Are you the leader of this troupe of monkeys, big boy?’

‘Seriously, though, he has got colossal balls,’ said Martin.

‘Not as big as yours,’ noted Frank, who then turned to address the large male monkey: ‘You may have enormous balls, old fellow, but they’re not as big as Martin’s, are they, eh?’

‘I don’t see how I could possibly know,’ replied the monkey, clearly tired with this line of conversation.

‘What? Did you hear that?’ exclaimed Frank, laughing in response to the shock. ‘That sounded like speaking. “I don’t see how I could possibly know,”’ he mimicked. ‘I didn’t know monkeys could copy human language, did you?’

‘No, I had no idea.’

‘Here, pretty Polly, pretty Polly,’ Frank continued to taunt the old male. ‘Let’s hear what else you can say.’

Another adult, the one that had been leading the troupe along the road and had claimed the first banana, ambled over to the big male and sat down in front of him. She was clearly a female. As the old male casually picked at the fur on her shoulder, she said to Frank: ‘Just listen to yourself, human: “Pretty Polly, pretty Polly.” You sound like some daft parrot. Show some respect, please. And, since you asked, I am the leader of this troupe, not him.’

‘My god, Martin, this one’s really speaking. I mean it; she’s actually talking; it’s not mimicry, it’s language.’

‘It’s really not that surprising,’ responded the female haughtily. Her voice was high and soft but easily understood in the quiet of the jungle fringe. ‘Nine-tenths of our genes are the same as yours, and I have to listen to your incessant babblings every day along this road. I’ve done it for years. It would be odd if I hadn’t picked up a smattering of your language in that time, don’t you think?’

‘You learnt English from the tourists?’

‘Of course, if that’s what they are. We call them hikers or walkers; sometimes they’re carrying books to identify the jungle species. “Pig-tailed macaque,” they’ll say, “Look, over there, those monkeys are pig-tailed macaques.” Is that the best you humans can do, compare us with pigs just because we have short tails? Which are, I hardly need point out, nothing like pigs’ tails anyway. I mean, I don’t really care; it’s only a name after all, but I’d like a bit of respect for the sake of the young ones.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t actually know you were pig-tailed macaques. I agree it’s not a very dignified name,’ said Martin weakly. ‘What do you call yourselves?’

‘We’re the noble monkeys,’ said the leader. ‘It’s because of this brown patch on our heads. It makes us look noble.’

‘I think you’re right,’ agreed Martin.

‘We don’t even know what macaques are, do we, mate?’ observed the old male. Another male had shuffled over to sit with him and join in the conversation.

‘No idea, mate,’ replied the other male. ‘Sounds Scottish.’

‘You call yourselves human beings,’ the female continued. ‘Beings? What’s that supposed to mean? You’re so up yourselves you can’t even bear to describe yourselves with an ordinary noun. “Beings” means no more than “things” or “entities”; it’s nothing. You’re apes, is what you are, apes with a noticeable shortage of fur. You should be called the thread-bare apes.’

‘Or pig-eyed apes,’ the old male suggested with a throaty chuckle.

‘Right, mate. Pig-eyed apes,’ agreed the other male. ‘The blonde ones, especially.’

‘It sounds as if you’re not that fond of us—of humans, I mean,’ said Martin.

‘Us old guys, the grandpas, we’re for reconciliation, aren’t we, mate?’ said the old male.

‘We’re for what?’ asked the other male.

‘Reconciliation. Letting bygones be bygones, forget the past, peace and harmony, all that.’

‘Peace. Yeah, mate.’

‘You pig-eyed apes have done some bad things to us, you know, that’s what we’re trying to forget.’

‘I’m sure we have,’ began Frank. ‘I’m sorry about whatever...’

‘Ha! No point in being sorry. We’re safe here in the national park, but over that hill there the humans still steal our young ones and take them away.’

‘Why do they do that?’ asked Martin.

‘For pets,’ replied the old male, ‘and for medical experimentation. Nasty, that.’

‘Coconuts,’ chipped in the other male.

‘I was getting to coconuts,’ the old male snapped testily. ‘Also for getting coconuts down out of the trees. They train our young ones to distinguish between a ripe coconut and an unripe one. That’s a laugh.’

‘Ha ha,’ said the other male.

‘That’s easy, knowing a ripe coconut,’ explained the old male. ‘We can all do that. The young ones that get caught pretend they need to be trained. It’s to put off the day when they have to start work.’

‘Hard work, climbing trees, mate,’ agreed the other male.

The female leader continued: ‘Here in the park humans mostly just want to throw bananas at us. Why is it always bananas?’ She looked behind at the old male who shook his head sadly. She went on: ‘We may be monkeys but we’d prefer some variety. It’s not good for our young ones to eat so many bananas. All that potassium. I like bananas, don’t get me wrong, but at every meal? I don’t think so. We prefer a balanced diet. Can’t you humans understand that? Sorry if I sound ungrateful.’

‘Not at all,’ said Frank. ‘What should we bring next time we come?’

‘I’m quite partial to kiwi fruit,’ said the old male lugubriously.

‘Some of the ladies like watermelon,’ said the female. ‘It’s sweet and very refreshing, but we very rarely get it. Mango’s good too. Durian’s OK if you peel it first; otherwise it’s hardly worth the bother.’

‘My wife likes papaya,’ said the other male. ‘She says there’s nothing like a nice ripe papaya.’

‘Your wife’s got no chance,’ said the older male dismissively. ‘They never bring papaya.’

‘Where is your wife?’ the female asked Martin suddenly. ‘You humans generally go around in mating pairs.’

Martin laughed at the observation. ‘I’m not married. Neither of us is,’ he explained, indicating Frank and himself.

‘Girl friends?’ asked the female.

‘No.’

‘Gay, are you?’ asked the old male.

Frank’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment as he turned and smiled at his friend and blurted out: ‘Yes, actually, we’re gay.’

‘Thought so,’ said the old monkey matter-of-factly. ‘Of course, I was gay for a time, when I was young. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?’ The other male scratched his head and nodded thoughtfully, as if recalling some enjoyable experience from his youth.

‘When I first joined this troupe, from another one over that hill, I had absolutely no luck with the girls here, not a glimmer. I’d check they were on heat; it wasn’t that. I’d try to mount them but they weren’t having any of it. I thought, what is this? Have I got bad breath or something? But we’ve all got bad breath so it wasn’t that. Anyway, I was horny as a rabbit on Viagra, as you’d expect with balls the size of mine, so being celibate wasn’t going to be an option.’

The humans laughed at this reference to their earlier indiscreet teasing.

‘So I spent the best part of a season with the boys—we have a few superfluous males in the troupe, as you can see. We were a sex-starved bunch, full of beans and, you know how it is, one thing led to another. I don’t need to tell you two. I didn’t turn completely queer, don’t get me wrong, but you humans would certainly describe our rough-and-tumble games as homoerotic. For us, being gay is definitely second best, not something you’d do if you had the choice. You wouldn’t go with a boy if one of the girls would have you but for some reason they wouldn’t, not that first season, so what’s a boy to do? I expect it’s the same for you two, is it? Neither of you manage to get a girlfriend?’

‘Ah!’ said the female sympathetically. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘No it’s not like that,’ said Frank. ‘I didn’t want a girlfriend. I never have. I only like men.’

‘Oh, it’s a lifestyle choice then, is it?’ asked the female knowingly.

‘No, it’s not a choice at all, it’s in my nature.’

‘Oh, it’s in your nature, is it?’ she repeated. ‘What about your friend here?’

‘I was married before,’ Martin confessed, trying not to look sheepish.

‘Married, eh? To a female? So what happened?’ asked the old male. ‘Did she die or get stolen?’

‘No, she didn’t die. We discovered we had different interests and decided it wasn’t going to work out.’

‘Different interests, eh?’

‘Yes, I was more interested in boys than I was in her.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said the female, with an intake of breath.

‘Oh, she wouldn’t have liked that,’ agreed the old male.

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘Probably in your nature, like your friend here,’ mused the female.

‘Probably,’ Martin agreed.

‘So anyway,’ continued the old male, ‘after a season of monkey business with the boys, I decided to give a couple of the girls another try and was accepted straight away by quite a high-caste female.’

‘She was,’ confirmed the female. ‘He was quite a catch that second season.’

‘And she banged like the clappers. That was a few years ago now, more years than I care to mention if I’m honest. Now I’m one of the oldest in the troupe. We do security, we big males, to keep the troupe safe and sound. It’s mostly snakes and eagles but we deal with all sorts, don’t we, mate?’ He looked around at the other male who nodded in confirmation. ‘External security and a bit of internal discipline, when it’s needed. We prefer to use a light touch with the little ones, though, don’t we, mate? Nothing too violent. Sorry to go on about it but I have to say, if I’m honest, keeping order in the troupe would be a lot easier if you humans didn’t insist on always bringing bananas. Our respected leader here gets it in the neck from the kids when she brings us along this road and all we get are bananas. Then the old grandpas like us have to wade in and sort out the ruckus. Still, can’t complain. It’s a good life, isn’t it, mate?’

‘Yeah, mate,’ said the other male as he pouted, nodded his head and scratched his testicles thoughtfully.

A smaller female approached the leader with a young baby clinging to the fur of her belly. ‘Shouldn’t we be making a move?’ she said softly. ‘Some of the little ones are getting tired.’

‘Yes, quite right,’ agreed the troupe leader. ‘We got caught up in conversation. Anyway, it’s been good talking.’

With that curt farewell to the humans, the female got to her feet and began to walk slowly up the road, keeping safely to the verge. One by one, the adult members of the troupe fell into line behind her, followed by the young monkeys, still more interested in play than in the journey ahead.

Frank and Martin watched the troupe as it slowly disappeared around the bend in the road.

They found themselves alone again.

‘I thought the bananas went down well,’ observed Martin. ‘That was a good idea of yours. Aren’t monkeys fascinating?’

Frank looked at his partner skeptically: ‘That’s funny. I had the impression they weren’t that keen on bananas.’

‘They ate the whole bunch though.’

‘It was just that I thought they were trying to tell me something, something in their eyes perhaps. They’re very expressive, don’t you think? Almost like humans.’ Frank paused and then said plaintively: ‘You are happy with me, aren’t you, Martin? You don’t regret leaving her?’

‘Of course not. I love you and it feels right, so what could be more natural? Now, don’t forget we’re supposed to be on a hike,’ said Martin as he led the way off the road onto a narrow path between the jungle trees.


This short story is taken from my third collection Sweet Song of the Siren.

I came to Crete because I was blue.

I married my husband Giannis Galanakis in 1997. I remember the first thing he said to me. It was ‘Giannis, but call me GG’. I had asked him his name. That was always the first thing I asked. When I enquired where he came from, I didn’t understand his reply, and anyway the music was too loud. I made him repeat it twice, then let it go.

I was working as a dancer in a bar in Pattaya. The bar was called the Dollhouse-A-Go-Go and was located in Walking Street. It probably still is, though I haven’t been down that street for years. My job was to dance on a small stage—a bar really—for which I was paid a small amount. I could augment my earnings by appearing topless, by sitting with the customers and persuading them to buy me drinks, or by going with them to their hotels for whatever they wanted.

I never knew that not to involve sex.

That was OK; the bar attracted a reasonably well-behaved set of customers. I could sit with anyone I wanted to and be bar-fined by anyone I chose. If a man was too mean with the drinks, I’d quickly pretend that I was needed on stage. If he wanted me to go with him and I had a bad feeling—if he was drunk or smelt bad—I’d fast-forward to my period or, if that didn’t work, tell him I had herpes. That always did the trick.

This flexibility put me in control of my career. The ones I didn’t turn away became my boyfriends. The relationships I had with my boyfriends were very varied. Some lasted half the evening, others all night. Occasionally, a boyfriend would take me to Ko Samui for the weekend, or to Chiang Mai for the week. We’d go elephant-riding or white-water rafting and take photos of each other smiling against the scenery like young lovers. Some would later send me money from Amsterdam or Rome, others would write soppy emails in terrible Thaiglish, some of which I would show to my friends for a laugh.

When Giannis Galanakis walked into the bar, I was 23 years old. I had been working at the Dollhouse-A-Go-Go for three years and was close to giving up and going home. I had a dream, encouraged by my mother, that I would find my husband in Pattaya, but nobody I met in the bar came close. I worked seven days a week from evening to early morning so I had no other opportunity to meet men. The rest of the time I slept in the room I shared with a girlfriend from the bar. When I wasn’t sleeping I was washing my clothes or eating from street stalls. I had no time at all for a social life. My only chance was to find a customer who could see me as more than a quick fuck or, at best, a temporary wife.

Giannis was sitting with his brother Emmanuel. While I danced in front of him, he looked at me tenderly. I went to sit with him. After a while he spoke to his brother and then he took me for dinner in a Thai restaurant on Road Two, after which we went dancing at Hollywood disco. He was a very gentle lover for a man of his build. The next day we climbed up to the Big Buddha to look down on Pattaya. The buildings appeared so ordinary from up there; it was hard to imagine what went on inside them. A week later Giannis hired a car and we drove to Surin where I introduced him to my family. I cried when he left. When he came back the following year, we were married.

Many men come to Thailand to live in paradise and abandon the duties of home. GG wasn’t like that. After we were married, we lived together in Isaan largely out of our combined loyalty to my family. We settled in Khorat—as Nakhon Ratchasima is known to the locals—close enough to my family in Surin and far enough away to allow us to lead an independent life. Also, we thought the schools would be better in the big city.

All the time GG would dream about the beauty of the Mediterranean and the glories of Crete—its mountains, the encircling sea and its turbulent history. In the evenings, we would sit outside our house, with a few lights on around the garden, and he would speak to me softly from his heart about his boyhood in Almiridha, playing football with his three brothers, teasing his two sisters. The sky in Crete would be bright with stars, he told me.

It made me look up.

As a young boy he went to sea with his father to haul up the octopus pots and lobster traps, but only at the weekends as his parents were determined that all their children would benefit from a proper education—an opportunity that had been denied most of their generation in the poor village. Crete was his distant paradise; Khorat was where he started his own family, so the foreign city became his home. Isaan was in his head, but Crete stayed in his heart.

GG felt a strong need to come from somewhere, not only a place but also a time, preferably long ago. If someone asked me: ‘What are the experiences that have shaped you?’ I would mention the births of my children, my marriage, possibly the evenings I spent under the house with my mother, debating family crises and the various rows that were taking place between my brothers and sisters about land, planting and the harvest. Giannis would say, ‘Driving the Turks from my country.’

Or it could have been the Germans or the Venetians; there was always someone to be driven out.

My husband defined himself in terms of history, thousands of years of it, stretching back like an unrolled carpet. Over this time, the people of Crete have endured repeated invasions, occupations and battles for independence. This communal experience had been distilled into a precious liquor which was dripped at birth into GG’s veins. He was who he was not because he was an accountant, a football fanatic or even a son or a father, but because he was a Cretan, an inheritor of a legacy of struggle and suffering.

When I took my children to the aquarium near Iraklion, we learned that an octopus can control its eight limbs independently. It can show emotion by changing colour and has eyes very similar to our own—an example of parallel evolution. Like other molluscs, it has blue blood. GG’s father Christos caught octopus off the rocky coast of Almiridha in the way his father had taught him, and countless fathers before that, by dropping earthenware pots on to the seabed, tied together with rope like gems on a necklace. A pot makes a good hiding place for an octopus and it will stay inside even when it is hauled up to the surface. Christos would land his catch and pound the animals against a rock to tenderise their flesh. He would hang them on a rope to dry, like starched laundry on a clothesline. The Minoans caught octopus in the same waters in exactly the same way thousands of years ago. There’s something in the sea, GG would say, that endures and cannot be denied.

Giannis was surprised about how little I knew of my own country’s past. I hadn’t a clue about Thailand’s kings, apart from the present one and perhaps Rama V, who is well known to all Thais and revered to the point of worship by many. ‘What were you doing in school?’ he’d ask. Really, I couldn’t remember. I suppose we must have been taught Thailand’s history, but none of it sank in, not deep enough for memory. At home, there was never any talk of the past. We lived for the present, not the past and not particularly the future.

My parents didn’t save, they lived from day to day, sure that in the years that the rice harvest came up short we would be helped by my uncles and aunts who lived nearby. It was the same for all of them. They would assist each other at times of planting and harvest. They charged for their labour, but the money was quickly repaid when the favour was returned. The agents who bought our grain were fierce negotiators with eyes like knives, quick to criticise the slightest drop in quality, though my father worked hard to achieve the best crops of jasmine rice, the hom mali for which Isaan is so famous.

Even at times of bountiful harvest, when my father would come home with great wads of 1,000-baht notes, even this apparent wealth didn’t lead to greater security or a better life. There were five children to feed and clothe and all the expenses of running the farm. The next payday would be 12 months off. It’s only recently that my father has tried to squeeze a second crop from his fields, but the later yield is invariably smaller and less dependable than the main harvest. When I was a small girl, the box where my father kept his money was always empty before the next payday came around.

Part of living only in the present is that I didn’t have GG’s appreciation of old things. For me, a modern house, purpose-built, is preferable to a second-hand one. It’s clean and undamaged and you don’t have to think about breathing the air of others. GG saw things very differently. For him, a new house or a piece of modern furniture had no patina, no accumulation of experience. An old house, he argued, showed the wounds from the generations of families who had lived there. How could you look at the scarred skin of a whale without wondering about the fearful threats it had seen off in the ocean? It took him a decade of gentle but repetitive encouragement before I came to realise he was right.

[Continues...]

The Night is a Starry Dome is included in The Last Boat to Samui, now available in bookshops in Thailand, and in Mist on the Jungle, available as a paperback and e-book from Amazon.

Dave and Daisy are visiting the Mountain Beverage Company on the planet Kalista-mm. Daisy, who works for a whisky firm back in Scotland, discusses the ethics of marketing alcohol with Tick, their host, while Dave samples the local drinks at the company bar. Now read on...

Back in the highland village of Frough, Tick had taken her honoured alien visitors to the company bar. This was an attractive and well-appointed area, used by employees and their guests, which showcased the MBC brands in a prestigious yet relaxed setting.

Dave sat at the bar counter opposite the company’s resident drinks mixologist who juggled bottles like a demented version of Tom Cruise in Cocktail. He examined the cocktail menu and decided to start at the top.

‘I’ll try a Mud Bucket, please.’

The bartender began his alchemy using a huge array of bottles, syrups, fruits and garnishes. He added crushed ice, made a bit of a show about shaking the ingredients together and delivered the ordered drink in a frosted, conical glass with a shelled ijijik on a cocktail stick.

‘I quite like that,’ said Dave, ‘except perhaps the baby crab on the stick. It’s still alive.’

Meanwhile, the women, on high bar toadstools nearby, were comparing notes on the social issues involved in marketing such a potent substance as alcohol on their respective planets.

‘Drinks manufacturers are really in the firing line these days. We seem to get the blame for so many of society’s ills,’ said Daisy.

‘That is so true. Here in Nation 2 it seems that every promplem in the community is somehow down to us.’

‘This is very exciting; I’m so glad we met, Tick. We could definitely learn from each other. Let’s go through all the issues.’

‘OK,’ said Tick. ‘First and foremost is overage drinking.’

‘You’re so right,’ enthused Daisy, ‘only on Earth we call it underage drinking.’

Bored by the women’s conversation, Dave studied his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, smoothed his hair, finished his cocktail, consulted the menu earnestly again and ordered a Scud Missile from the bartender. That cocktail was green and came with a dack, slit and balanced on the rim of the glass.

‘Really?’ asked Tick. ‘I suppose I can kind of see a reason for that. Anyway, here in the Mountain Fortress we call it overage drinking because it’s illegal to sell soft drinks to anyone over the age of 60. But of course the old dears get hold of alcohol anyway; their children buy it for them. This can create all sorts of promplems. Being doddery anyway, when they’ve had a few bracers they forget their appointments at the clinic, leave their teeth on the bus and drive their codger-carts over cliffs. And of course we get the blame. Is it the same on Earth?’

‘It’s similar,’ admitted Daisy hesitantly, ‘except we get blamed when children drink. In most countries on Earth, you’re not allowed to buy drink under the age of about 18.’

‘Really?’ said Tick, surprised. ‘How odd. I don’t think my 12-year old could make it through the school day without a couple of powerful snifters at breakfast.’

‘But our old people are allowed to drink as much as they like,’ continued Daisy.

‘So there’s no law to protect the old folks? Huh! And they call us irresponsible!’

Further along the bar, Dave was getting into his stride: ‘These cocktails are excellent, really very tasty. You have a good man here, Tick. You hear that? You’re a good man, Bartenderman. Next, I think I’m going to go for a Splitting Headache.’ The mixologist began his work.

‘Perhaps our markets aren’t quite as similar as we thought,’ mused Daisy. ‘What about another issue? Take drink-driving, for example. That’s always a hot topic on Earth and puts us in the firing line yet again.’

‘Now that issue is exactly the same here. Don’t talk to me about drink-driving. As a company we do accept that a golf ball can be a lethal projectile, and when a few friends from work meet up for 18 holes on a Sentiflax morning they do tend to get thoroughly wasted in the clubhouse first. But, when the neighbours start complaining in letters to their local papers about broken panes in their greenhouses and dents in their nice new cars, all of a sudden it’s our fault, which we don’t accept at all.

‘Do the papers blame irresponsible golfers driving down the fairways? No, it’s the poor old drinks industry again. But how is it our fault? We’re not forcing them to drink any more than a dynamite salesman forces terrorists to let off bombs.’

‘When you’re ready there, my good man, I’ll have a Diesel Locomotive,’ Dave called to the barman. ‘Thish time, make it a bubble. Bubble! Ha ha ha. I mean double, make it a double. Daisy, I said bubble!’

‘Actually, I wasn’t really thinking about driving on a golf course. I was actually going to tell you about the problems we have on Earth with people driving cars while drunk, but I’ve just remembered that your cars don’t have drivers,’ said Daisy weakly.

‘Right, cars aren’t a promplem for us at all. As a matter of fact, most of them come with a cocktail cabinet as standard so they’re a great sales opportunity.’

‘On Earth we have strict rules about how alcohol is marketed. We mustn’t suggest that it might increase a consumer’s sexual attractiveness, for example. Do you have similar restrictions here?’

‘Oh yes, tell me about it,’ said Tick, ‘but, come on, get real! You’re never going to sell a single bottle of hooch if people don’t think it does something for them. Take our easy-drinking but lethally strong club brand, ‘Big Boy’ snoffratan. We don’t say that it enhances your libido, improves your attractiveness or puts a couple of inches on to your trouser sausage.’

‘That would be irresponsible,’ said Daisy.

‘Yes, but the point is that it’s unnecessary. We put so many male hormones into that drink we don’t have to advertise the fact; the guys discover that after the first gulp! Stand back, girls. Watch those fly-buttons pop!’

Daisy was wondering if she had anything in common with her Kalistan-mm opposite number at all. But she’d come a long way, and she was determined to learn all she could.

‘On Earth we like to push the blame on to the consumer,’ she said. ‘The problems are their fault for being irresponsible. So how do you tell your customers to wise up and adopt a responsible attitude to drinking?’

‘We advertise a lot. We find responsibility advertisements promote our brands very effectively and make us look like the good guys. As an example, our Stalin’s Gulag vodka brand has a very successful campaign running at the moment with golfers. We gave out golf bags printed with ‘DON’T DRINK STALIN’S GULAG VODKA AND DRIVE’. They’ve become the must-have accessory on most of the courses around the country. We printed the word ‘DON’T’ in very flaky ink, so that after a couple of weeks and a spot of rain, it washes off, leaving a very effective promotional tool.’

‘Very clever,’ said Daisy.

‘Now I think I’ll go over to the other side of the menu,’ Dave told the bartender as he struggled to get the card the right way up. ‘Whassis? A Claw Habber. Gimme a Claw Habber, my good man. Ha ha ha.’

‘Dave, you’re just supposed to be tasting the brands, not necking a skinful,’ Daisy chided his colleague.

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ said Dave as he missed the bar with his elbow and slipped off his toadstool on to the floor where he thrashed about uselessly. Daisy and Tick helped him to his feet.

‘I think the drinks here must be a lot stronger than we’re used to,’ Daisy remarked.

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Tick. ‘I mean, alcohol is alcohol isn’t it? You can’t get stronger than 100%.’

Here's a treat for all Polish-speaking visitors to my site. I don't speak the language myself but I recently came across a number of my poems here which have been translated. In Polish I appear to be called Williama Pesketta.


Gwiazda i morze

Ta gwiazda, którą widzę teraz
wmieszaną w jasny telegraf nocy,
dawno się wypaliła
i wybuchła.
Powolna wędrówka oparów jej światła
przez przestrzeń pozwala
na moment zajrzeć w przeszłość.
Radosny podróżnik w czasie
zapominam, co dzieli mnie od prawdy.

Chłodna woda z południa
wytapia się mrocznie
z połyskliwej czapy.
Siedem lat minie, zanim prądy
płynące z wolna na północ ochłodzą mnie,
dosięgną swoim pradawnym osadem
z dna oceanu: dość czasu
by zmieniło się morze i skóra;
nowy człowiek czytający stare informacje.
.
napisał William Peskett
tłumaczył Jarosław Anders