The Museum

There are mice in the shed. All of my attempts to catch them have failed. They don't even run away from me now. They just look at me, but I'm determined to have the last laugh. Not that mice laugh, but the laughter is implied in the way they look at me.

My cousin Rachel had a pencil that she liked, and when she wrote with it, light bulbs came on over her head. The lights frightened away the birds who were flying in circles up there. People often complimented the way she dressed, but she never put much thought into it. She often wore bright colours, but sometimes she dressed entirely in grey. She liked standing on concrete steps when she wore grey. She liked standing on concrete steps anyway, but especially when she wore grey. She met lots of interesting people on concrete steps. Some were attracted to the grey, like moths to a bright light. She felt that the words she spoke carried more weight when she said them from a concrete step. She didn't need the light bulbs to tell her that those words represented good ideas.

One day she met a group of people who were lost. They had maps in their heads but they didn't have enough light to see the maps. They were looking for the museum, so she said she'd take them there. When she was off the concrete steps she felt less sure about the location of the museum, but she thought she'd remember the route on the way.

She told them about the history of the city, or what she knew of it. If she'd been on the steps she probably would have known a lot more. They were hungry, so they stopped in a shop to get something to eat. Rachel bought crisps, but they all got apples. They seemed to be admiring the appearance of the apples just as much as they were appreciating the taste. Rachel was having trouble remembering the way to the museum. She thought of the silver apples she saw in the window of a restaurant nearby, so she suggested that they make a brief diversion to the restaurant. She thought that while they were looking at the apples she could use her pencil to draw out the route. She was sure she'd remember it then.

She stood on the concrete step at the front of the restaurant as they looked at the silver apples, but when she reached into the pocket of her coat to get her pencil she just found a crayon and a drawing of soup.

The crayon belonged to her niece and nephew, Daisy and Graham. They had used it to colour in cars and houses, but the colour never suited cars and houses. By chance they discovered that it was the perfect colour for soup, and after that they added soup into most of their drawings. They got tired of the same soup every day, and they wondered how they could introduce some variety to their drawings. Rachel was always talking about her pencil, so they decided to use that instead of their soup crayon. They took the pencil from her coat pocket and replaced it with the crayon and the drawing.

But the soup they drew with the pencil was grey. It looked depressing. They drew a soup kitchen around it, or their idea of what a soup kitchen would look like. There was a budgie in it.

Rachel tried to draw the map with the crayon on the drawing of soup, but it was hopeless. The soup showed a greater sense of direction.

She suggested they get something to eat, just to buy more time. They were yet to have their lunch, so they agreed.

A band called Playthoven were performing in the restaurant. They had a Beethoven CD that they played on a stereo. The lead singer had flowers in her hair. It looked as if the flowers were growing from her hair. She claimed that the flowers grew when she heard the music. The band were there to represent the sounds of a garden, but they rarely did anything. The manager of the restaurant didn't mind because he was in love with both the music of Beethoven and with the lead singer in the band.

While they were having coffee after their meal, Rachel left the table and she went over to the band. She said to the bass player, "Do you know the way to the museum?"

"I do."

"Could you tell me where it is?"

"I'll help you if you help me. I need to get out of here. Just create some sort of a distraction so I can run away."

"How's that going to help me find the museum?"

"I'll meet you outside and show you the way."

Rachel didn't know how she'd create a distraction, but she inadvertantly did the job anyway. She turned around and nearly bumped into a waiter. There were a few seconds of suspense when he lost his balance and tried to regain his balance without losing the plates in his hands. Everyone in the restaurant looked at him, and no one noticed the bass player leaving. Everyone noticed the guitarist running away. He was followed a few seconds later by the drummer.

The lead singer was left on her own. Everyone looked at her. She didn't seem to know what to do, until a flower fell from her hair. She ran away then.

The manager blamed Rachel. "I saw you talking to the bass player," he said. "You did that on purpose."

"I didn't. I mean, I was going to do something on purpose, but not that."

"You'll pay for this."

"I'm really sorry. I'll get them back."

Rachel left the restaurant with the group she was supposed to be guiding to the museum. She found the bass player on the next street. He was with the singer and the drummer, and they were all willing to go back to the restaurant because they were scared of life out in the open, but they didn't know where the guitarist was.

"City streets make him nervous," the drummer said. "He likes to look at a yellow bucket instead. It helps him calm down."

The owner of the bucket was a friend of his who worked in a book shop, so they went to see her. She said, "He hasn't been looking at the bucket lately. A neighbour of mine makes cider, and he started looking at the buckets of apples next door. And then he just started drinking cider."

He could be anywhere in the city if he was drinking cider. They walked around the streets, hoping to find him, and the singer eventually spotted him. He used to be in a country band who dressed up as cowboys. They rarely played country music, or music of any sort, but they loved wearing the cowboy costumes. They always moved in slow motion so people would wonder why they're moving in slow motion and not why they're dressed as cowboys.

He had re-joined his old band, and they were moving in slow motion down the street. Rachel said to him, "I think it's time you went back to the restaurant."

"I'm never going back. I missed the slow movement you get in a country band."

"But you get to stand completely still in Playthoven."

"That's too slow."

"I really think you should go back to the restaurant."

"No."

"Go back."

"No chance."

Rachel looked around and she saw about twenty concrete steps that led to a building on the side of a hill. She climbed to the top of the steps and said, "Go back to the restaurant."

"Okay," the guitarist said, and he returned with the rest of Playthoven.

From the top of the steps she saw a concrete plinth with a bronze sculpture of a ship on it. It might have been a coffin ship, but she saw it as the ship of an explorer, and it suggested a way to find a route to the museum. And the plinth was like a massive concrete step.

So she climbed on top of the plinth, and her plan worked. She realised that the statue was right outside the museum. "Here we are," she said.

The moose's head over the fireplace has an eye for a good shoe, which is odd when you consider the fact that he wouldn't have worn shoes even when he had legs. You don't even have to consider that fact to be able to say it's odd. He always seems to know the shoes I should wear for whatever occasion. He'd be as good as a butler if he didn't look at me in the same way the mice look at me.

The Pig

The tail-end of a hurricane is passing over the country. It's nice to have proper wind and rain again. Of course, not having any wind and rain would be nice too. There's a time and a place for everything. Ireland at the end of September isn't the ideal place and time for the Ryder Cup. The rain is inevitable. Some would say that this weekend in Kildare is the perfect time and place for wind and rain.

My cousin Craig went to see a play, and then he saw a bus, and then he thought about things for a long time. Whenever he thought about things for a long time he always thought about serious issues, like the meaning of life or things that would come under that heading, but the only conclusion he needed to reach was that he needed to be on the bus.

He really needed to come to that conclusion before he started thinking, and he was unlikely to arrive at it through thinking about the meaning of life. When the bus arrived at its destination his train of thought was still nowhere near arriving at anything. He was still standing on the street. He went to a cafe to continue his thoughts in a more comfortable setting.

He drank his coffee at a small table near the wall. The woman in the next table asked him what he was thinking about. He was going to say 'the bus' but when he thought about it he realised that he wasn't thinking about the bus at all. "It's difficult to put into words," he said. "I suppose it would come under the heading 'the meaning of life' and it involves an apple and someone tangled up in curtains."

"The play I'm performing in would come under that heading too, and it involves a table tennis ball and someone in a bath."

"I thought you looked familiar. I was at that play."

"I thought you looked familiar too. There were only about ten people in the audience."

"You were very good."

"You're just saying that. You were very good to sit through that rubbish."

Her name was Eve, and they spoke about other things that just about came under the 'meaning of life' heading, like why some cats are fat, or what they have for breakfast. She told him about the time she saw a cloud shaped like a spoon, and by the time she had photographed the cloud it was shaped like a pig. That seemed like an anti-climax after expecting a spoon.

He told her he could show her a car shaped like a spoon, and she said she'd love to see that. His friend Eric owned it. Eric lived a few streets away, so they walked there. Craig thought she'd never speak to him again if the car turned out to be shaped like a pig, but clouds were much more changeable than cars.

Eric was outside looking at his car when they got there. The driver's seat was at the business end of the spoon, in the hollow. There was a glass dome over it. Someone had poured twenty-eight jars of strawberry jam into the car as a joke, but Eric didn't find it very funny. He knew who had done it too. It was a friend of his called Daniel, but he was known as 'An Daingean'. They used to call him 'Dingle', after the town in Kerry, because he thought it was a stupid name. When they changed the name of Dingle to An Daingean he said that was stupid too, even though he thought 'An Daingean' sounded less stupid than 'Dingle'. They thought this made him more stupid than he seemed before, so they started calling him 'An Daingean', even though it was less stupid than 'Dingle'. As revenge for the jam, Eric was going to write 'An Daingean' on the roof of Daniel's car.

Craig and Eve accompanied Eric on his mission. They walked past the shops. They were all closed, but the windows were brightly lit. They stopped in front of one shop window because a pig was sleeping inside. Craig tapped on the glass to wake the pig, who looked up at them. They saw a woman inside the shop. She approached the window, and she held up a sign that said 'Don't bother the pig'.

Eric got out the black marker he was going to use on the roof of Daniel's car, and he wrote 'why?' on the glass in backwards letters.

She got out a pen and wrote on the back of the sign: 'Because he wants to be left alone'.

Eric wrote: 'He doesn't look as if he wants to be left alone'.

She wrote: 'How would you know when a pig doesn't want to be left alone? And stop writing on the glass'.

He couldn't answer that question, so he didn't have anything to write on the glass anyway, but he felt he couldn't just walk away. It didn't seem like an appropriate way to end their conversation. He rolled up his sleeve and wrote on his arm: 'You look as if you want to come with us to write something on a car.'

Craig thought she didn't look like that at all, so he was surprised when she wrote 'okay' on the sign. She brought the pig on a lead.

Her name was Greta. The four of them went to Daniel's car, and while Eric wrote on the roof, they kept a lookout, but there was really no need when they had the pig to distract anyone who came along.

When the job was done they went to get some ice creams. They got one for the pig too. They walked through the streets, and they looked in shop windows, but they saw nothing as exciting as a pig. The pig wasn't excited by anything. They spoke about this and that, and 'that' strayed out from under the 'meaning of life' heading and into the shelter of 'why is my left big toe bigger than my right big toe?'. It was Greta who spoke about this.

They went to see Eric's spoon car, but when they got there they saw that Daniel had returned, and he had added cream to the strawberry jam. "I don't know what I'm going to write on his roof to get revenge for this one," Eric said.

Craig had been thinking about cars turning into pigs earlier in the night, so an idea fell into place in his head after very little thought. He suggested that they remove Daniel's car and replace it with the pig. Eric loved the idea, and he knew someone with years of experience at 'removing' cars.

He called up this removal man, who got into the car, started it, moved it to a nearby street and was gone within a minute. Greta tied the pig's lead to a streetlight near where the car had been, and she left the sign that said 'Don't bother the pig'. Then Eric rang the doorbell and they hid around the corner.

Daniel looked confused when he saw the pig. He was disappointed when he saw the sign, because he wanted to bother the pig.

He eventually heard the laughter, and he found Eric with the others around the corner. He demanded to know where his car was, and Eric said that only the pig would know. Greta said, "And asking the pig where your car is would count as bothering him."

"What wouldn't count as bothering him?" Daniel said.

"Following him around. Maybe he'll lead you to your car."

Daniel didn't question the fact that he was being led by a pig on a lead. They walked in the opposite direction to where his car was.

They met a woman who had purple hair, and Greta wondered if she knew she had purple hair because she didn't seem to know where she was and she thought the pig was a dog. Her hair was pointing in lots of different directions, and the style didn't come under any one heading.

Greta said to her, "I know where you could see a pig in a shop window." She just wanted the purple-haired woman to look at her reflection in the glass.

They all went back to the shop. A crowd of people were looking at the words written on the glass. Greta scared them away with the pig and the 'Don't bother the pig' sign. The woman with the hair looked in the window, but she just looked at the words too. She said, "In these words I see the absence of a pig, which is just as exciting as seeing a pig."

The pig was starting to fall asleep. He obviously wasn't excited by being a pig.

Daniel said, "When I look at the pig I see the absence of my car, and I can see something exciting about that, but I'd still rather see my car."

"I can think of nothing more wondrous than seeing the absence of a car in a pig, and seeing the presence of a pig in a dog."

"Really?" Daniel said. He noticed that she seemed impressed by what he had done with the absences and the presences. "Well, I can see something wondrous in it myself. I've always been keen on seeing wonder in things, especially in things that aren't there."

"I could show you the absence of a folk band in a pool of water."

"Lead the way," Daniel said, and he left with the purple-haired woman.

Greta said to Eric, "If you're looking for a way to clean your car, the pig could consume any amount of cream and strawberry jam."

The pig was wide-awake after hearing the words 'pig', 'cream' and 'jam'. Eric left with Greta and the pig.

Craig and Eve looked at a billboard on the other side of the street. There was an image of an elephant on it. A bus stopped at the edge of the footpath, and it blocked their view of the billboard. He remembered the bus he was supposed to get earlier. This one wasn't his bus, but it was hers, and she invited him back to her place to see her photos of clouds.

The moose's head over the fireplace is looking forward to the golf. We got him a green golf visor. It was either green or the blue and gold of the European Union flag. It's difficult to think of the EU without thinking of all those men in suits in Brussels, which isn't too far away from what I see when I think about golf.

The Seagull

It's nice to look at the birds around the garden. It's not exactly bird-watching -- it's just looking at birds. They'll come quite close to you if you stand still, until the dog frightens them away. You can look at the shed then, and that's nice too.

My cousin Charlie fell down a stairs once, but he couldn't remember how it happened. He remembered waking up on the ground with a sore head and wondering where he was, and he recalled the party on the previous night. And then as he was walking down the stairs he tripped and fell. He woke up on the carpet in the hall, and a woman dressed in black was tip-toing towards the front door.

She was a thief -- Charlie was able to determine that from the bag with 'loot' written on it. "You're a leper," was all she said to him.

He knew there was a fair chance he'd forget about her, after his fall and the alcohol in his brain from the prevous night, so he got out his notebook and made a note of the thief with the loot. When she asked what he was writing he said, "It's a poem about a seagull."

"The seagull is a leper too," she said.

He promised her he'd mention this in the poem. She suggested 'pepper' as a rhyme for 'leper'.

After she left, Charlie ran straight to the police station. He took out his notebook and read, "The seagull likes salt but not pepper. That could be because he's a leper."

The police said they'd sort it out, and they went to get their guns.

Ten minutes later, when Charlie's head was starting to clear, he realised he'd read out the wrong thing, and he'd put the seagull in danger.

But the police hadn't taken it literally. They asssumed that 'the seagull' was a reference to a man who played the bagpipes. They were just looking for an excuse to do something about him.

The thief was trying to blend in with the crowd as she made her way through the streets. She saw a group of nuns who were walking in formation, and she joined them because at least she was wearing the same colour as they were. But she left the group very suddenly when she realised they were leading her towards the police station.

The nuns went on to the police station to report the woman with the 'loot' bag. The station was empty, and one of the nuns said, "They must be after that poor piper again."

They knew a wrestler who could help the piper, so they went to see him. His name was Fredless, but people called him Fred. They thought he'd be enthusiastic about the prospect of a fight with the police, but he seemed sad. He spoke about a sense of time passing. The woman he loved was a model who posed in kitchens for ads in magazines, but the kitchens all seemed out of date then. He looked at his kettle a lot. It was just like a kettle in one of the ads. He preferred looking at his kettle to driving his sports car. She was in Japan then. He got a postcard from her, and she said she was closing her eyes a lot and smiling to herself.

He liked to look at birds too, and not just the birds who flew in circles around his head during wrestling matches. He found it just as relaxing as looking at his kettle. When the nuns told him about the police and the piper he just wanted to look at a bird or look at his kettle, or just close his eyes. He was in no mood for taking on the police, but he said he'd help because he couldn't say no to the nuns.

They noticed that he sounded very half-hearted, so they called up a comedian they knew to cheer him up. The comedian was called Gog Hope, but a lot of his jokes were about birds and kettles, and it did nothing for Fred's spirits.

Charlie found the seagull trying to choose an ice cream. He tried to be the seagull's bodyguard, but he decided not to mention the police.

The seagull nodded at some things and shook his head at other things. He nodded at most of the things in Charlie's pockets, like his wallet or a battery.

When Charlie saw the wrestler with the nuns he decided to stay close to them because they could protect the seagull better than anyone, but he was able to stop worrying about the bird when one of the nuns told him that the police were really after the piper.

They walked through the streets, hoping to find the piper or the police. The seagull nodded at all of the kettles in a shop window, which the wrestler liked, but he didn't like the way the seagull shook his head at most other birds. He also shook his head through most of a film in the cinema.

They eventually found the police and the piper. They were tip-toing around an information kiosk. The police had a feeling that they were just about to find him, but he kept moving around, and he was always just out of view. The woman in the kiosk nodded at the piper but she shook her head at the police.

Fred said, "We'll just have to wait until they're ready to do something to the piper before I can do something to them."

As they waited, Fred sighed and said, "She taught me to see with my eyes."

"What did you use to see with before that?" Charlie said.

"Lots of things. I threw a cup at someone once."

"A tea cup?"

"Yeah. It was more to do with the fact that it allowed me to express my disgust with the tea cup rather than with the person I threw it at."

"I suppose you get a lot of that in wrestling."

"You do. It's different when you use your eyes."

"I can imagine."

Fred turned around and closed his eyes. The thief saw him when she was passing by, and she couldn't resist the opportunity to steal his wallet. There wasn't much money in it, but it did contain a photo of the woman he loved, and this is why he was furious when he realised it was missing. Most people would go to the police in these circumstances, and so did Fred, in his own way.

His way made the police forget about the piper and run. Fred chased them. When the thief saw them she thought the police were chasing her, so she dropped the loot and ran. The police ran past the bag, but Fred stopped to look in it, and when he found his wallet he was happy again.

The police stopped too. They decided to chase the seagull instead, but he just flew away. That left either the nuns or Charlie, and they went for the latter.

The piper started playing to distract the police, allowing Charlie to get away. They focussed their attentions on the piper again, but the nuns started singing to the music, and the police thought they couldn't do anything then. They felt frustrated. One of them fired a shot at a pigeon. The seagull saw it all from the top of a nearby building. He shook his head. I don't know if he was expressing disapproval at the shot or at the fact that he missed.

Fred said, "I used to fight a wrestler called The Simpleton. He's in a tag team now. His partner is called Blue Blue, and she keeps saying 'use your elbow', and that's all very well and good, but when you use your eyes..." He stared off into the distance.

"You see things?" Charlie said.

"You do, but it's more than just seeing things."

Charlie nodded very slowly.

"And it's not as if you're going to see everything clearly. There's a wrestler called Bory Dully. He uses his eyes more than anyone else I know, and he once said that an accordion was just two guitars."

Charlie was able to give a slightly quicker nod to that.

"His tag team partner, Barry Duly, used to buy cheap perfume for his girlfriend and he used to see O's and F's and K's, and sometimes ABC's in the air around her when she wore it. He used to say, 'We are, will you, you will, we are,' And that was his way of saying he loved the way she smelled."

It all made perfect sense to Charlie. "I fell down the stairs," he said.

The moose's head over the fireplace is rehearsing for another part in a play, after his recent success as an Arctic explorer. He can express a considerable range of emotions, despite the fact that the changes in his facial expression are almost imperceptible. He's a much better actor than the surprised-looking hen in the painting, whose range is limited to looking surprised. The moose's head will be playing the part of a detective. He won't have any lines, but he can say much more through silence.

Penguins

The grass is looking greener after the recent rain. I found some old pieces of timber in the shed and I decided to make them into a garden seat. At least it started as a seat. It might turn out to be something else entirely. My grandfather once started making a table and the finished product was a kettle

My cousin Gary worked in a radio station. One year the station bosses decided to send eight of their DJs on a summer tour. Gary was given the job of driving the DJs and producers around in a mini-bus. Gary could just about manage to listen to one of them on the radio, but he dreaded being stuck with eight of them.

After hours of driving on a hot summer day, Gary just wanted to chase down an ice cream van, and make the ice cream van man give them free ice creams, and one for the fox as well. The fox wasn't real.

That night he sat in the bar at the hotel. He was depressed because he hadn't seen a single ice cream van that day. He told the bar man about it. "Not even one," he said. "You'd think it'd be easy to find an ice cream van on a summer day, but not even one."

"If you were interested in tracking down penguins you'd feel as if you'd just hit the jackpot. There are thirty penguins in the car park."

Gary went outside to see the penguins. He tried to convince himself that he was happier seeing thirty penguins rather than one ice cream van. That was the logical way to look at it. He looked at the penguins walking around the car park. No ice cream man could do that. Thirty of them might be able to do it, but even then they wouldn't have the same appeal as the penguins.

Small villagers from a small village looked on. They seemed to be jealous of all the attention the penguins were getting. One of them played the trumpet, which got the attention of all the penguins.

Gary went back inside to the bar. He still felt empty. He couldn't convince himself that thirty penguins looking at a man play the trumpet was worth seeing.

He met a woman at the bar. Her name was Lucy. He told her about the ice cream van, or the lack of one, and she told him that she had been following a piece of string, but it only led to some chalk. "I'd have been much happier if it led to an ice cream van," she said, "so I can sympathise with your plight."

A man came over to them, and he offered to sell Gary a suit. "It smells of penguins, but it's in perfect condition."

Gary tried on the jacket, and he looked at himself in the mirror in the lobby.

"You look sharp in it," Lucy said. "As long as you ignore the smell."

"I don't know. Suits aren't really my thing."

"Why don't you come with me to a party, and you can wear that suit."

"What about the fox?"

She looked around. "He can come too."

Gary was hoping to relax at the party, and forget about his day, but people were singing karaoke songs and this made him nervous. He had a fear of singing in front of other people, of pulling the strings of a song but getting it hopelessly wrong. He thought she'd try to convince him to sing, and she did. He eventually agreed when she said she'd sing with him.

Lucy had been going out with a man called Robert. When he was getting new glasses he chose the ones with the biggest frames. He met Lucy in a shop. She couldn't stop staring at the glasses. They arranged to meet again on the following evening.

Lucy brought some biscuits when they met again because she wanted to see if the biscuits were bigger than the lenses on his glasses, but they weren't. Throughout their relationship she kept searching for a biscuit that was bigger than the lenses. He didn't think there was anything wrong with this, but she seemed to lose interest after she found a big enough biscuit. He was determined to win her over again. He thought about getting bigger glasses, but she'd just find a bigger biscuit.

When Gary and Lucy were in the middle of their song, Robert arrived at the party. He was wearing the biggest hat she'd ever seen in her life. The hat would sway from side to side at the slightest movement of his head. She stopped singing, and Gary continued the song in a nervous voice. The nerves were clearly audible in his voice when Lucy ran to Robert and started kissing him. Everyone looked at them for a while, until they all simultaneously looked at Gary. His voice faded away to silence. Lucy and Robert took no notice. Gary felt humiliated because of the song, and because the woman he arrived with was now kissing a man in a huge hat. He felt a need to see thirty penguins.

He left the party and returned to the car park outside the hotel. The penguins liked him in his suit, and he liked that. The sight of all those eyes, looking up at him in admiration, erased the memory of the eyes at the party. He forgot about the ice cream van too.

The moose's head over the fireplace has somehow made friends with a barn owl. They're normally very reclusive. The owl often comes to the window. If they could speak to each other they probably wouldn't have much to say. The owl spends most of his time catching and eating mice, which makes the moose's life on the wall seem more appealing. Maybe they can communicate in some way. The moose's head could have deciphered the sounds of an owl when he had a body and lived outdoors. He seems to know German.