Too Cold For Snow

just the single word ‘Megan’, the name of his wife, drifted down to them as they all watched open-mouthed as his body floated high above the smoke stacks and drifted east. The crowd was silent now, witnesses to an event that some would attack as being the devil’s work and historians would see as the extraordinary seed of the strike that followed.
     
    ‘Cut,’ said the first assistant director as the camera crane reached its full height and the thin wires from the other crane became taut after slinging the stunt man skywards.
    Louis and Larry had been transfixed by the sequence as they viewed it on the monitor. A childhood verse, learned in Sunday school, had flashed across Louis’ brain. Something about the meek, he thought, struggling to remember the religious cliché. The phrase escaped him.
    ‘It’s a wrap,’ said Louis. ‘Clear the set. See you tomorrow, bright and early. We’re doing Renoir, so all you smokers get some Gitanes and we can save a small fortune on dry ice.’
    The stunt man was lowered down, but he was changed somehow. There were twin candles of wisdom burning in his eyes. He went home a changed man, so much so that his wife accused him of seeing someone else. And in a way he had, hanging there in his harness, looking up at endless space.

Taste Bud Alert
     
     
    High overhead, a swarth-backed gull flew to its island roost. By now too late in the day to fish, it ignored a turmoil of mackerel in the sound beneath, its metronome wings purposeful as it flew towards an Apache sun. It was a one-off sunset, a backdrop for lovers’ trysts. The gull diminished in the hushed air as the horizon magnetised the silver Christmas-bauble which hung on invisible threads.
    In the prison ship, the S.S. Madagascar, the summoning bell for dinner was greeted by the groans of close on three hundred wannabe Epicureans, who knew that once again they were going to be badly let down. Tony Redbone, the cook who warmed the slop, didn’t bother with taste, concentrating on volume instead. His face was a little off-putting as he had what could be mistaken for hygiene issues, with a vivid skin condition that verged on the tropical, something wrong with his blood that made it a veritable harvest of pustules, which made his skin resemble subcutaneous minestrone soup.
    Tonight’s desperate menu was themed around potatoes: a cheese and potato part-bake with added mashed potatoes on top. It wasn’t meant to be part-baked , but that’s the way it turns out if you forget to ratchet up the ovens, so that the potatoes were crunchy and cold. To make matters worse, the inmates weren’t allowed salt cellars after the incident when a nonce called Pippy Evans had a cellar implanted by a pair of Old Time gangsters called Scissors Eddie and Morris the Gimp. So salt had joined the list of prison barter items, along with aftershave, smack, wacky baccy, pornographic comics and various pills. And the phrase ‘Pass the salt, Morris’ entered the fearful ledger of prison legends, invoking images of Pippy the child molester, his eyes wide open with fear.
    The prisoners hated Tony Redbone for never investigating the pages of a cook-book. They dreamed of crème brûlées, Thai green chicken curries and Caesar salad, all just out of reach, like Tantalus’ bunch of grapes. In a vision, serried ranks of waiters appeared to one inmate, bearing an array of silver salvers from which he had to choose one. He chose badly, choosing potato part-bake. Luck of the draw. Other prisoners simply had nightmares about spending fifteen years eating their way through nothing other than Tony’s bill of fare. They’d been to other nicks, and this was by far the worst. By far the most indigestible. The food at Dartmoor was Michelin standard by comparison. A common dream involved a conveyor belt along which passed an array of foodstuffs. Macaroni cheese. Fresh apple tart. Roast lamb with mint sauce. Jesus!
    They complained to Mr Snee the governor, who wrote down the names of the complainants and said he’d see to it that the menus would be changed. The ravenous prisoners set their taste buds on yellow alert in preparation for an expected cavalcade of flavours, but nothing happened. As the governor reasoned, this was prison after all, not the Dorchester. The men weren’t here for their health.
    A plot born of resentment and grumbling stomachs was hatched on the Madagascar. One night the Morse code tapped out along the pipes dispersed a message to