GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2021/22

ALEX ASPDEN
‘Jamboree’ 

I’VE BEEN ON THE PHONE to the housing department at the council for an hour. I’m eighteenth in the queue. I’ve been listening to the same smooth jazz track on a three minute loop the whole time. The blackbirds on the tablecloth in front of me are beginning to dance.

It’s hot so I’ve got the back door open. I fetch myself a beer from the fridge. All beers drunk at midday taste perfect. I sit back down and plan my attack. Hello, I’ll say, my mother has a problem with her mould. I won’t say her mould. It’s not hers, it’s theirs. Hello, due to the inhospitable conditions in which you keep your tenants, this heap of a flat that you’re charging her out the arse for is slowly but inevitably poisoning her.

I could go further. Hello, your failure to provide adequate housing is part of a longstanding campaign to cause a respiratory condition that will eventually kill my mother, clearing the way for her replacement with new tenants on a higher rent band, or to sell off what little remains of your social housing stock. She would like that one. Or, there’s blood on your hands, not just from the impending murder of my mother but from the wholesale mass murder of many of your tenants, both firm and infirm, from various preventable diseases caused by the inhuman conditions you keep them in, or from starvation resulting from your unjustified rent increases.

She isn’t infirm and she’s not starving. She’s told me before that I’m prone to hysteria when dealing with the council.

I’ll need further evidence of the council’s crimes to deploy in support of these accusations. I put the call on speaker and google the words mould, respiratory disease, corporate manslaughter and state murder alongside the name of the south London council I’m gunning for.

I’m thirteenth in the queue. They’re experiencing high call volume.

She didn’t want me to call them. I’m going to call them, I said. Do your thing, she said. I’m going to call them and get this sorted, I said again, a few hours later. Go for it, she said, stand your ground. Then after a pause she said, it’s not bothering me at all, but if you want to.

The mould doesn’t bother her at all. But it bothers me that a huge patch of mould can be growing in the corner of her bedroom without bothering her. She isn’t entirely blameless for the situation. The flat is like a steam room with all the cooking she does. Always jam, all day, sometimes all night. She never opens the windows and the steam from boiling all that fruit just fills the place.

The cupboards are full of jars of jam with handwritten labels on them, all different flavours. I asked her once why she makes such huge batches of jam. She replied that when she lived in squats in Deptford, Notting Hill, Kennington and Battersea in the sixties and seventies with her comrades she was always making huge batches of pasta and sometimes bombs.

She likes to work with her hands. It was a different time.

She still keeps herself busy. She’s in the living room now taking pictures with her 35mm camera. Earlier she was cooking up a vat – always a vat – of apricot jam. She writes letters to her many friends. She has stitched quilts in the last month for a multitude of babies, all unknown to me.

I’m eleventh in the queue.

What to do if the conversation doesn’t go my way? It’s happened before. I’ve exchanged some harsh words with the council in my time, I admit. I’ll grouse about it afterwards. She finds it funny when I grouse. She said once that I’m the sort of person who has run-ins with the council, I’m exactly that sort of person. She likes to contrast my grousing with the grand political gestures of her day, although that was a long time ago, she says.

As the jazz loop begins again, I find myself thinking about grand political gestures. Like covering the council offices with blood. Where could I get hold of quantities of blood? They must be swimming in it at the butchers. Tons of it out back. But how to transport it? I’ll need gallons. Many trips. Containers. A flatbed lorry. But I’m not on speaking terms with the butchers. Actually, I’ve never even been to the butchers. Or any butchers, ever.

And then how to spray it? Not easy. Instead, I could cover myself with blood when I’m there. I wouldn’t need so much then. It could even be my own. But where to make the incision? No, I don’t want to invite psychological intervention. Alternatively, I could cover myself with jam. Go wild at the council, covered with jam. Jam everything, jam the housing department, the printers, the tenant records, the air conditioning, the housing managers, the security guards, jam everyone.

But it wouldn’t be the same. And then what about mother and her mould?

She would never phone them herself. She says she has no dispute with the council or any problem with the mould. In fact, she says she likes it. She finds the patterns fascinating. The organic growth, she says. More than once I’ve found her sitting on her bed sketching the patch, even knocking up a green-black mix on her palette and pulling together a couple of abstract paintings.

She does it to annoy me. She’s even wiped messages in the mould for me to find, like hello darling, or the mould’s still here, or ☭. She does it to rankle me.

I remember seeing the mould when she first moved in. There was a lot less of it then but it instantly bothered me. The state of this place, I said. She didn’t care. she said it was only a bit of mould. Then she made a beeline for the cooker, already thinking about all the jam she was going to cook up on it. By the time I had looked over the rest of the place and brought in the first couple of boxes she had already dug out a saucepan, a wooden spoon and a punnet of plums and had them on the boil without stopping to take off her coat. Light my fag, she said, I’ve got my hands full here.

She sends her jam all over the place, to people she’s just met and others she met fifty years ago.

She always gave jars to my fathers when I was growing up. She never introduced them to me as potential fathers. She just said this is Sergio, or this is Hank, or this is whoever. They were always men from the radical scene she had known for years or who had reappeared in her life after long absences. They weren’t really fathers. I only referred to them as fathers to myself. Because they were so cool.

They would sit me down and tell me all sorts of stories. Sergio once tried to assassinate Franco by filling the boot of a Volkswagen Passat with fertiliser and parking it up next to the El Pardo Palace in Madrid, but it went off too early or too late and there was a bullet in his shoulder where a Guardia Civil had shot him while he was fleeing across the Pyrenees into France. Hank came from El Paso and had shot a cop back there, in self-defence, he said. He didn’t seem proud or regretful but always had a philosophical look on his face under his ten gallon hat. When Sergio and Hank crossed paths, always with much delight on both sides, they would have a few drinks and solemnly say that they had made a fair exchange in their interactions with law enforcement officers.

Always voices coming from her bedroom at night. Mi amor. Lil lady.

Sergio liked marmalade. Hank liked damson.

There haven’t been any Sergios or Hanks for a while but they all still write to each other. She reminisces about them sometimes, not at length, just the odd aside. When she’s sitting in the garden in the evening with a glass of wine, she might reminisce about hours spent with them outside pubs along the river on hot July nights.

I’m seventh in the queue.

I imagine the walls of the borough all slowly collapsing under the mould that sweeps across this city whenever it rains. Thousands of people ringing up every minute to pledge vengeance on councils and housing departments. Thousands of wheezing grannies trying to make themselves understood.

Before I rang up this morning she reminded me yet again of the autoreduction movement in Italy in the seventies and the rent strikes she witnessed in Turin. Bins burning in the streets, she said, people torching their own cars to use as barricades. Alessandro at the forefront, throwing the first brick. Alessandro was my father too, all tousled.

They didn’t phone up the council to moan about things, she said. That doesn’t help us, I replied. Statements like that always disappoint her. For her, it isn’t just that I don’t have strong political beliefs one way or the other, more that I’ve never made a grand gesture of any kind in my life. I’ve never thrown oil on the fire.

I take a sip of beer from the bottle on the table. The table is sticky with jam. Everything is sticky with jam. The surfaces, the floor, the stove, the walls. The beer is delicious. All beer drunk at midday is delicious. I’m third in the queue.

I get up to grab another beer from the fridge but I find that she’s drunk it. I look at the photos on the wall above the table. Kurt standing on a homemade barge, topless in a pair of short shorts, super blonde, drinking a bottle of beer. They spent a few weeks that summer sailing down the Rhine on that barge. My German father. It looks like a hot day. I want that beer in his hand. Beer in photographs of hot days always looks delicious.

Hello?

The birds on the tablecloth are dancing frantically but suddenly stop. It’s them.

Hello, I say, belying the thousand hurricanes inside me.

How can I help?

I let rip, sort of. I tell them all about the mould, emphasising the rapid growth and how long she’s had to put up with it. I tell them that she’s an elderly lady, but that’s as far as I go when it comes to putting the wind up them. I can hear her laughing from the living room when I use the word elderly. I neglect to mention words like murder, negligence or respiratory disease.

I’m so sorry to hear that. Could you confirm your mother’s full name? I tell them her name, prefixed with Mrs, which causes another laugh from the living room. I hear typing in the background as they bring up the information.

I can see we’ve had problems with your mother’s building before, they say, let me send a maintenance team out to patch things up for now and then we’ll carry out a survey to see if we can come up with a long-term solution.

This lack of resistance is unexpected.

Actually, they say, I can see that the building is down to have double glazing fitted later this year, which should solve the problem.

They couldn’t be more obliging. I don’t know what to say. I’m stumped. I say the first words that come into my head.

Praying hands, I say.

I say it out loud. I don’t know why I say it.

Okay, thanks, they say.

I hang up, horrified. I get up from the table and go through to the living room. She’s taking pictures of the empty beer bottle with her 35mm camera and there’s an unfinished poem she’s been writing on the coffee table.

My retirement won’t be spent so productively. My life hasn’t been spent so productively.

I tell her it’s all sorted. She says that’s good. She turns and snaps a picture of me and then goes back to snapping the bottle. I return to the kitchen. It’s boiling now so I take off my clothes. I open the cupboard and take out a selection of jams, one of each flavour. I open the jars and begin to jam myself up, using a different flavour for each body part. Marmalade for the head (Sergio), strawberry for the arms (Alessandro), raspberry for the torso (Kurt), damson up the Hank.

I’ll jam the housing department. I’ll jam everyone.

When I’m completely covered I go out into the garden through the back door. I stop before I open the gate into the alleyway to remind myself of the route to the council offices. It’s not far. Left at the bus depot, right at the Ladbrokes.

It’s hard to shift the bolt on the gate because it’s stiff and my fingers are slippery but I eventually get out into the alleyway. Before setting off at a run in the direction of the bus depot, I smear jam all over a parked car, an expensive one. My first victim.