KK Fiorrucci
Short Fiction
The Difference
It is possible to walk from the south-east tip of Guernsey at Fermain Bay to the lumpy promontories at Vazon and Cobo in the north-west – a distance of seven or eight miles – without coming across a single pub. This is the first major difference I notice between the Crown Dependency of Guernsey and the British Isles at large.
You would leave immediately if you lived here and stay forever if you did not.
The Flowers
Guernsey is the island of flowers. Like thoughts, they present themselves in special abundance at the wayside. The greatest thing in the world is to double back.
The elderly, too, are everywhere on this island. Their heads droop in the wind and their limbs are pallid stalks.
Thinking this, I double back to a hedge and am nearly run over by a weird Guernsian half-tractor.
The Spice
Guernsey is known for a kind of Franglais, and for a local language, Guernesiais, which I listen out for – spice for the article, perhaps.
It feels impudent, at first, to speak English in earshot of Brest, Granville, Cherbourg.
The place does a good impersonation of France. The meat, for one, is grilled so perfectly, in fact, that it would be quite proper, and indeed hardly surprising, for the slaughtered animal to rise from the dead and congratulate the chef on his method (as French cows are known to do). Most of the countryside dips and tilts without charm. There are long-haired ruffians strutting around the quayside in St. Peter’s Port on their way to murder wives with at least a working knowledge of Hegel.
You are always steeling yourself for the discomfort of the French language, those taut exchanges where you get no help.
Investment professionals issue confidently from bars like so many bounced cheques.
‘Lost?’ shouts a taxi driver, pulling up from nowhere, and this settles things.
English has special attention here, a heightened value. Ordinary words, ‘toast’, ‘grass’, ramshackle’ are swirled around the mouth, savoured, like a Sussex Pinot Noir.
There are German words, too, all over, with a history of insinuation on this island; sudden clusters of hard blue sloes.
Mystery of The Little Chapel
A man has built a tiny church entirely out of pottery. The sign outside says it is in dire need of repair and will fall down imminently. We look at it for a moment. Somehow, it hangs in mid-air, as though buttressed by foundations and recently restored thanks to the benefactions of visitors and Friends of the Little Chapel.
In the café toilets, I stand for three minutes over the bowl without urinating, a regular feature of my recent bathroom practice, and a consequence of being absurdly and remorselessly over-hydrated. Someone has already relieved themselves and failed to flush.
There are few churches not built for decorative purposes, and very little evidence of piety anywhere. I thank the seeds in the plants and the salt in the sea.
E. buys me a (recyclable) bottle of water for the journey to Castel.
The Waves
At Jerbourg Point, a tree-covered (male) giant lies flat on his back and looks up to the sky. The thought bubble above his head takes all the force out of the waves so that, by the time they reach the crags of his cheek and the caves of his ear, they are gentle, playful, pliant.
The Temperament
Places have temperaments, tendencies, feelings. Is it wrong to visit places with temperaments that match one’s own?
The taxi drivers say nothing, even when pressed. Have they failed to understand me? I rejoice!
I am so exhausted most of the time it is hard to know whether I have a temperament continuous with earlier imprints of myself. Certainly, I cannot recall another time when my thoughts were so often blotted.
The island’s serenity feels new-found too. Being here reminds me of a bunch of feelings I gathered once; rather, that accrued to me, over time.
If an island can change a man, perhaps a man may change an island. As I stifle a cough, thunder rattles a far-off headland. Does my trespassing breath infect it with a worry-virus of old?
Scrambling up the path, with a hand on each knee, the sea reveals itself through a whirl of green. Some of the stones are growing blue and yellow beards. My hands are still sore from grappling barnacle-stubble on the brutes at Saints Bay.
The Undulations
The island roads are long, smooth, and twist away from one rather languidly, like ropes disappearing up some milky fastness.
Just when a slope has begun to pull at the calves and upper thighs for a little longer than is comfortable, the island spreads out a glorious descent, flanked by golden meadows. The muscles bound and spring again, for a while.
The Not-Island
There is a small outcrop on the west of Guernsey, Lihou, that is home to a puffin colony, a ruined priory, and the ghosts of a few old monks. It sings Matins and Evensong as an island, but in the middle of the day a length of mud and bladder-wrack starts to protrude from Guernsey, and Lihou fails to be an island, or to put it more positively, becomes a not-island, an appendage.
E.’s National Geographic has a long spread about sleep that she reads to me over breakfast. There is a diagram showing that testosterone spikes mid-morning and just before bed, and that this rarely crosses with the more meandering path of the female libido. This seems like a good reason why men and women often fuck each other and fail to enjoy it.
Next time we make love, after dinner on the second night, E. looks so unhappy that I adjourn matters and, connecting my laptop to the hotel wifi, minimising, re-opening, re-reading, and finally closing down my Guernsey article, avail myself thinly while she showers and a Spanish-language programme about miniature submarines smuggling huge shipments of cocaine blares on in the background.
E. re-enters in a towel, wearing a complimentary shower cap, scrubbing her teeth with a tiny complimentary toothbrush, and hugs me, sympathetically. I swipe off the drops that have gathered in a point at her chin.
‘You’re all wet too’, she says, pointing at my chest, and lashing me with her towel.
‘Did you know the hotel wifi password is ‘haveanicestay!’
‘Have a nice day?’
‘No, have a. Nice. Stay.’
‘Oh’.
A dissident monk in search of an island woman would, at desire’s highest tide, have found his way barred by the sea. In other words, research does suggest that God had a good reason for constructing a priory on Lihou.
We arrive too late for the causeway, and the ferry does not run at this time of year.
The Houses
Are a tubby white or blobby pink like porridge concealing a berry or two.
The Weather
The third day hurries by like a coatless man caught in a rainshower.
The Tunnels
The revival of German on the island continues as we pace the dank tunnels and mucky stalactites of the underground hospital. An accountant from Munich is listening earnestly to the man at the ticket office tell a story about meeting former inmates of the hospital in the eighties.
The hospital took three and a half years to build and was a working hospital for around three months before the war ended. This is a kind of shame?
E. begins to complain of her lungs. It’s hard to imagine that a place like this could have been good for anyone’s health.
Are ghosts less spooky if you don’t speak the same language? Some awkwardness must creep in bringing it closer to comedy than terror. But then, not all ghosts are great talkers.
Tunnels 11 and 12 turn out to be much like Tunnels 1-10. ‘Ach ja’, croons a woman, or man, from Tunnel 9, or 13. Suddenly, there is no way out and the Germans are all back.
The Newspapers
When the Germans invaded Guernsey, they also took control of the local press. Front pages of the Guernsey Herald published during the Occupation are spread around an ante-room to the tunnels. The propaganda is completely mundane. ‘Of 220 suggestions for technical improvements put forward by the workers in a German factory, 90 per cent were found to be practicable’. I wonder about the other 10 per cent.
Writing
Francis Bacon says writing teaches a man to be exact. I have a fantasy of being asked for my opinion on this subject and giving a pat answer that has something to do with thinking better or self-discipline. I crave attention.
At dinner, the subject of fantasies comes up. E., who is a good talker, has been having a dream that she is having a baby whilst dying of cancer. In particular, her father, brother, and certain work colleagues, come to realise that they have radically underestimated her tenacity.
I try to explain the difference between narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths, but E. is not convinced I am explaining it correctly.
I really am a poor talker. Perhaps I will make a better ghost, or at least a better talker qua ghost, given reduced expectations.
I am always surprised that so many ghosts seem to be clothed. Exposing oneself constantly would surely be a perk of this otherwise dull and indeterminate state.
One (or less) of everything
There is one athletics track. One half, too, of a world-class athlete, a 2:11 marathoner who splits his time between the island and Kenya. There is one pub in the village. There are two Costa Coffees. There is only one truly beautiful woman, and she stays on at the stop for St. Martin village. There is one breathtakingly compact backside that I do not notice. There is one ghost, who used to haunt mirrors in pubs and ask tourists whether they had seen her husband, hasn’t been since for a while, and may, in fact, have been a demented old woman. There is one appalling poem by a member of the public inside a bus where an advert for a product or service could have been. ‘Milton Keynes’ is in parenthesis after the author’s name, as a sort of disclaimer.
The Truth
E. asks whether I feel the need to carry out research before embarking on literary projects. Not the article, she explains, kindly. How else, she asks, will I determine what kind of berries grow in the brambles?
E. should be aware, though I don’t care to repeat myself just then, that the residents of Angleland are currently going through the hardest winter in twenty years. This is, in fact, a major plot point. Nothing, apart from a few root vegetables, and the anxiety-dreams of the inhabitants, is sprouting, and no research was necessary for these particulars. I am beginning to spend more time in Angleland than the other world, which some call ‘this’ or the ‘real’ world. It would be good to split my time equally, to get the full benefit of both. Perhaps, in future, I should do more research in Angleland before setting off on a trip like this.
The Dream
The dream is a gigantic cottage on Guernsey, all the fruit you can eat, and no profession to speak of.
E.’s dream incorporates a charming family who wave to us on bicycles as we round a country lane. In this dream, I am windswept and about 6”1.
In addition, for reasons known only to my dream self, I have swapped my racing bike for a new one with baskets and a bell; aerodynamically less than superlative. We have also acquired a scruffy boy of about ten – blonde and fair due to some confusion of alleles – who is chasing after a naughty spaniel named Wilson. This seems like a perfectly acceptable dream to me, and Wilson is a fine name for a dog.
As they pass us, I catch the father’s eye. He smiles at me. Looks at us both. Then smiles again, but this time languidly, mournfully, like a man in front of a sole-blistering fire who sees the rain easing off. Having brooded for half a second longer, his face clears and back comes the carefree smile of old.
Later, in the hotel, I wonder which of us he pitied.
The Magic
I am a weekday illusionist, never more thriving nor magniloquent than when I intend to deceive myself completely. A person needs to live, and so a person needs money, and so a person needs work. And, if a person must work, they should take a job in keeping with their talents. In fact, if at all possible, they should take a job just beyond their talents, and be grateful.
I am a writer. Writers, if they are any good, teach themselves to think better. And what better opportunity, in conclusion, than a fair-paying job in reasonable proximity to one’s talents? My single complaint over the last five years has supposedly been ‘breadth’ at the expense of ‘depth’. Yet those five years were yanked out, one after another, until finally they vanished up a stained shirtsleeve, never to be seen again. And what were they, anyway, but cover for a bigger, more diabolical trickery? Ladies and gentlemen, I am no conjuror, but a common liar; swindler of my own time.
On the first night, I dream of standing on a hill, watching trees sink into a deep fog sent from the sea. By midnight, the forest has disappeared, and I cannot turn away.
The Give and Take
I write three times a day, skimming a couple of hours from my employers, and only forty or fifty minutes from E., who has a proper job and comes home pretty late most evenings, though still in time to knock up an unattractive repast of meat substitute, coloured and shaped like flat, featureless turds and usually accompanied by beans, cauliflower or cabbage; and which, after a dusting of herbs or sprinkling of spice, quickly acquire the imprimatur of some proud cultural tradition – in return for all of this, I am as emotionally available as a naturally taciturn insomniac who spends all day on his own can learn to be, and so, like husbands and wives from the Channel Islands to Bayswater, we have come to understand each other better through the daily ceremony of preparedness and willing rapprochement.
At breakfast on the second day, I overhear E. telling her mother that I am a good listener.
In the morning, while E. is onto her second meeting and coffee is still getting fingers to the various strands of my brain that have balled up and knotted overnight, this can be a strain. The key thing is to get something down, however drab and turd-smelling, and that is something they tell you in the creative writing magazines distributed exclusively to the doctor’s waiting rooms where real writers, who are all hypochondriacs, hang out, and so you know is true.
The lunchtime spell is usually a little easier. I expend a little ink scoring out the words I wrote at breakfast, then take a walk around the park or along the canal, where all kinds of peculiar words, lines, images, are waiting for me.
The Characters
I am writing a book that I will never finish, which pleases me, since endings are temporary, and always imaginary, as everyone knows. The only thing that matters is cutting open a portal to another world, like a cave on the beach with a thousand tunnels, no light, and no exit. Yet these tunnels are also tranquil country lanes, of a sort.
Everyone knows that a second world exists but knowing is a different thing to entering – to shivering on the threshold, forcing one’s eyes to adjust to darkness. To be led to an opening by someone else, that is reading, and can be bracing or boring, depending on your guide. Which is to say your choice of guide. Burrowing a new way in yourself, while the night and the waves vie to close the fresh hole, is more taxing. But that is writing. It requires tools, and endurance.
I appear to offend a taxi driver by asking if he is ‘our taxi’. The man replies that he is a taxi-driver and that the taxi is parked outside. In the man’s defence, there are not many situations in which it would normally be acceptable to confuse a workman with a machine or principal tool, as anyone who has asked a cleaner whether he is ‘a toilet’ or a ‘thick pair of rubber gloves’ may testify. Perhaps one must be especially careful to avoid this error when speaking to people whose professions will shortly be replaced by machines. I think about this for our whole journey, which proceeds down a ‘ruette tranquille’ with a maximum speed of 15 and a requirement to give way to horse-drawn carriages.
The taxi driver – note to self – remains utterly tranquille despite my best small talk. He reminds me of one of the residents of Angleland, though I cannot decide which. Dronk, perhaps, with a moustache, or Wold himself, so forgettable and yet such a pervert.
I fantasise about climbing on the man’s back and forcing him to carry us to the airport, in the enduring belief that he is, in fact, a taxi.
The Difference
The heat has drained from London and the colour gone from its cheeks. I notice that E.’s lips, too, are parched and white.
I never dreamed of living here and would not dream of leaving.
There are caves here too, if you know where to look, and trees, and winding passages that lead nowhere. There are long, lilting downhills and you can always turn around if things get too easy.
Endings are mainly imaginary, as I have said.
Beginnings, well.
E. was quiet on the flight. I have not seen her for a day or two.
KK Fiorrucci’s fiction and essays have appeared in a number of UK and US publications, including L’Esprit Literary Review. He won the La Piccioletta Barca Prize 2024 and can be found at kkfiorrucci.com
Photo Credit: Jay Shifman believes no one is free until we are all free. When he’s not creating beauty on the page as a poet and writer, he’s photographing it in the world. His photography style features vibrant colors, stark contrasts, and overt messages. You can regularly find Jay documenting protests and the often-brutal response from the police. He lives in South Philly with his primary partner/ wife, Lauren, and their dogs Nell and Crash.
L'Esprit Literary Review 