Gandalph Cohen

& The Land at the End
of the Working Day

Peter Crowther

Introduction by Ian McDonald

“Talk Time”

Introduction by Ian McDonald

Listen now. Not a lot of people know this, but in some alternate (and more honest) Earth, Pete Crowther is the man who shot Quentin Tarantino. When archeologists a thousand years up the line excavate the remains of late twentieth century society, they may well conclude that ours was a society that worshipped excrement. Trash, in every manifestation, was sacred. People were defined by what they threw away. The disposable was eternal, and the cultural middens of previous decades were dredged for ‘retro chic’ and ‘ironic cool’. Which is why, in an age when American culture—and that’s Planet earth culture, for good or ill—strip-mines its past and canonizes the ephemeral as ‘camp’, Pete Crowther is the nemesis of the ‘kitsch-cool’ of Quentin Tarantino. Quentin sneers at this stuff; Pete genuinely loves it.

Listen now. You can hear it in every word on the pages that follow. Pure love for those concrete canyons, those salmonella hotdogs, those step-down bars and cheap hotels. For Pete has seen the true America beneath the neon, the one which defines itself not through cultural ephemera and tiresome jigs of ‘cool’, but by words. For this is how the world is constructed: not by the objects we buy and dispose of, but by the words we speak. People, talking to people, build the world we know and maintain its existence from moment-to-moment. And Pete understands, as do all the true mages, that if ever the Babelogue stops then the world disappears.

For the true irony is that material things are un-enduring, while words—spoken, heard, blown away in a moment—are eternal. So listen now to the stories we tell ourselves. Nothing deep, nothing profound, no philosophical truths and dazzling insights, certainly nothing cool or ironic, except this: that people, talking to people, keep the world turning.

That’s what this story—and this bar—is about: words. Words and melancholy.

There’s comfort in melancholy. Who hasn’t looked at an Edward Hopper painting and imagined themselves at the end of that diner bar, at that table by the window, visible to the world through that sheet of glass and yet utterly private and enclosed? Who hasn?t enjoyed that prospect? For an hour, an evening, maybe a lifetime?

We’re taught to fear melancholy. In our relentlessly ‘up’ age of creative visualisation and self-help psychobabble, if there’s a single moment of our days when we’re not radiating positivity, then it’s a sign of major personal failure. Let me tell you: melancholy matters. It’s old, it’s a fine vintage. Melancholy allows us to savour the small joys.

The Land at the End of the Working Day is a place of beautiful melancholy and small joys. It’s that great New York bar where everyone knows your name. Of course it’s downstairs. People wear hats. There’s beer by the pitcher and martinis so dry on the vermouth they’re homeopathic. There’s soft jazz on the pa system and in the corner Tom Waits is practising scales.

As writers we vainly imagine our words drive the world. We’re not far from the truth, but it’s not the recorded, imprisoned word on a page. It’s the ephemeral word, the spoken word. Words blowing from life to life; our conversations, our jokes, our witticisms and observations, all of them here for a moment, then gone. Can you remember that crack you made yesterday, that great one-liner than came out of nowhere, that simile, that sweet riposte? They’re gone. You throw them into the wind and they blow away. Conversation is perhaps the keenest of small joys. It is much more like a life than a book is. Conversation is one of the things that the Land at the End of the Working Day is about. The truth is another. And those small joys, those tiny moments of communion with another, must be savoured because they are so short and, like spoken words, they blow away.

This is an urban fantasy. Let me explain that a little. In this time when urban fantasy is a sub-genre in itself, the hoary old medieval dreads and archetypes moved into town with credit cards and driving licences. This is a fantasy purely of and about the city. This is a fairytale of New York. The city is a super organism, the sum and more of the lives and activities it contains—and this is New York, goddammit: the city content about not being the capital of the United States, because it knows it’s the capital of the whole world instead.

What might be the dreams and fears of the world’s greatest city? Go down to a place like The Land at the End of the Working Day and you just might hear them. We ride a wave of words a million years deep and that wave shows no sign of breaking? yet or ever.

—Ian McDonald

Gandalph Cohen

& The Land at the End
of the Working Day

Waiting for his drink, thinking about Tom ‘Ankles’ Talese—an epithet (of sorts) earned over many years as a result of the fact that Tom spends so much time so far up the Chairman’s ass that his ankles are usually the only parts of his anatomy visible—McCoy Brewer watches himself in the large mirror propped up behind the bottles on the back counter at The Land at the End of the Working Day, playing back the events of the past few hours.

The Working Day is a two-flight walk-down bar on the corner of 23rd and Fifth that not many people know about, even though it’s been here for almost eight years and is just a block away from ‘The Dowager of 23rd Street’, the Chelsea Hotel. It’s there that the tourists go with their Nikons and their Pentaxes, capturing each other’s vacuous smiling face on cheap film—a strangely talismanic process that somehow imbues their empty lives with a little art and, maybe, just a little history— to take the shaky and badly-cropped results home to bore their friends at the end of interminable dinner parties for which the level (not to mention the sheer invention) of last-minute cancellations never ceases to surprise them … strange illnesses and bizarre accidents, such as obscure relatives (from equally obscure out-of-state towns) who have cut off their feet with a lawnmower.

In the early hours of a clear morning—spring or fall, summer or winter—when Jack Fedogan’s booze has been flowing and the conversation has been just right, you can walk up the Working Day’s steps and out onto the waiting street, and you can maybe hear Dylan Thomas eternally whispering to Caitlin that he’s happier here than anywhere else, and her telling him she feels that way too, their voices drifting on the Manhattan breeze the way only voices can drift, moving away for a while and then moving back, saying the same things over and over like cassette ribbons, proving that no sound ever dies but only waits to be heard again.

So, too, do the voices of James Farrell—who really was the hero of his own book, Studs Lonigan … and don’t let anyone tell you different—and Arthur B. Davies, Robert Flaherty, O. Henry, John Sloan, Thomas Wolfe and Edgar Lee Masters, all of whose names are recorded forever on a plaque fixed to the red brick wall of the Chelsea, the ancient echoes of their soft words wafting up the ten storeys past ten little cast-iron balconies, there to drift around the gabled roof and maybe roost a while, watching the sun come up across the East River and the distant smoky towers of fabled Brooklyn.

There are other voices, of course, and if you strain real hard maybe you’ll even pick up Martha Fishburn, a native of Des Moines, telling her husband Garry he drinks too much as he stumbles up onto the sidewalk of many months past … or Nick Hassam, a British would-be writer of American detective fiction, telling both the street and his wife of one week, Nicky, that he’s having the greatest honeymoon anyone could ever have, that this is the most magnificent city and she the most wonderful wife.

The people who come to The Land at the End of the Working Day are no strangers to the voices that ride the currents around 23rd Street. Just as they’re no strangers to the voices inside Jack Fedogan’s fabled bar.

Most nights, the ambiance in the Working Day is just about right: not too many people so that it’s crowded but enough so’s you don’t feel like a single coin shuffling in a lint-lined pocket, bereft of old friends and realizing you’re the next one to go. But no matter how many people, there’s always laughter in the air, and talk, and company.

Tonight is different somehow.

It’s different because the place is just about empty and it’s different because the night itself is different … hesitant and expectant, its cosmically existential heart as alive to the myriad possibilities that confront it as a lightbulb is to the eternal promise of a daily dose of electric current.

McCoy Brewer watches the reflected world through the big mirror, accepts his dry martini and nods to Jack Fedogan, who grunts obligingly and then shuffles along the bar trailing his towel down the polished surface while McCoy takes a slug of almost pure gin. Almost pure because Jack Fedogan’s dry martini means he simply immerses a glass pipette into the vermouth, waits until most of the liquor has evaporated or dripped off onto the waiting tissue, and then briefly submerges the now little-more-than-scented implement into the waiting highball glass of iced gin. Strong but good.

It’s a little after six pm and McCoy feels the winter in his bones.

The drink helps some, but only some, managing to dispel the memory of the darkness of the early evening streets but failing to touch the greater ebony gloom in McCoy Brewer’s soul. He feels it course down his throat and he slides sideways onto a barstool, already thinking of the next martini and the one after that one. While he thinks, he watches the people in the mirror-world behind the bar.

Over in back, in one of the booths, a woman sits against the wall, a lady lifted straight from the musty dog-eared pages of a Jim Thompson paperback original, her nylon-stockinged right leg propped up along the length of the mock-plastic cushioned seat, the high-heeled shoe hanging from her foot and swinging to and fro in the narrow aisle that gives onto the ornately carved three-foot-high balustrades separating the booths from the tables. She’s sipping a cocktail, her fourth since five o’clock, and she looks as though she’s nowhere near finished yet. Almost as though she can feel him watching her, the woman glances up and looks across the tables into the big mirror, sees McCoy looking at her through the glass, sees his eyes, and smiles briefly.

McCoy nods, lifts his own drink and raises it in salute, watching his own reflection and that of the woman lift their own glasses in response and in the silent camaraderie of drinkers, two characters in a lost Edward Hopper painting, swimming the dark seas of nighttime and solitude.

The woman’s name is Rosemary Fenwick—a fact which McCoy will learn later—and she is drinking Manhattans to the memory of a husband and son she left behind in Wells, on the New England Atlantic coast, almost a year ago, seeing their faces in her mind’s eye superimposed on the face of the man in the barroom mirror, never having heard from them in all that time, silently wondering, now, this night, what they’re doing.

Only one of the tables has people sitting at it. It’s a quiet night in the Working Day, unusually quiet. But maybe it has something to do with the mood of the streets outside. Sometimes the streets have a frenetic quality, a nervousness that splashes up unseen from the pavement and the sidewalks and seeps into the people of Manhattan like radiation, giving birth to uncertainty and a need to consolidate and re-group, maybe around a cocktail or two or a couple pitchers of beer.

The streets disguise this activity under a cloak of subterfuge … worries about money, about health, about work and about the faithfulness of partners. But it’s the city and, deep down, most people recognize this, though only a few acknowledge it. For nothing that ever happens in the city happens without both its knowledge and its approval.

At the table midway between Rosemary Fenwick and McCoy Brewer, two men sit hunched around a pitcher of beer. They’re exchanging stories, telling jokes. Telling them in the slurred tone that comes with the temporary abandonment only liquor can give, laughing as they recount and sometimes even before they hear the punchline.

Jim Leafman works by day in the City’s Refuse Department, collecting garbage … sometimes picking up broken and discarded memories thrown out along with the ends of greening cheese and bacon rinds. His wife, Clarice, is having an affair with a salesman who sells office furniture, wood-veneered desks with pull-out work surfaces, and who lives one block away from their 23rd Street apartment. She thinks Jim doesn’t know about it, but Jim knows. He’s smelled the cologne that isn’t his and he’s imagined the hands that aren’t his traveling around his wife’s body, imagined Clarice whispering No …  no, but really meaning Yes … oh, yes! … something Clarice hasn’t said to her husband in a long time, a time that Jim has measured only in gained pounds, thinning hair and punishing credit card bills.

Jim has parked up outside the man’s apartment building, sitting out on the street in a ’74 Oldsmobile that’s two parts yellow and eight parts rust, its muffler held in place with hope and Scotch tape, watching the doorway, nursing his old .38 in his lap like it was a baby, waiting for the traveling salesman to show. Jim has seen this guy, seen him a couple times now, watched him strolling along the sidewalk like he didn’t have a care in the world, strolling along in his Gucci loafers and his soft-woven plaid jacket, pants with front creases that could cut meat, immaculate hair swept back and held in place like Cary Grant or an underworld hoodlum out of a Scorcese movie. Then, on these occasions, Jim has glanced in the rear-view, seen his own jowly face and pasty complexion, and he’s decided that a guy doesn’t deserve to die simply because he looks good any more than a guy deserves to die simply because he looks like a small-town department-store-window mannequin, its plastic skin worn and dented by the years and the constant magnified sunlight.

After some thought, on one of these occasions, Jim has also decided a woman doesn’t deserve to die simply because she wants to do better. But these decisions have taken their toll and Jim Leafman is now in need of a joke.

So, too, is Edgar Nornhoevan, one-time-big but now slimmed off some, slimmed off a little too much some … like the guy in the Stephen King book who just keeps on losing weight and can’t do anything about it no matter how much chow he puts away. Edgar Nornhoevan, bearded and full of bluster, even though it feels like he’s passing broken glass when he pees, a thin trickle that falls from his penis in drops instead of powering against the back of the stall the way he hears other men pee when he’s standing there, concentrating on his flow the way his doctor has told him. This same doctor has told Edgar it’s a problem with the prostate and he’s having Edgar take pills that seem to help a little. But Edgar has also had some tests, one of which involved the doctor running a tiny seeing-eye down his penis and then staring, one eye closed, into the end as he twisted the thing around inside Edgar.

Lying there with his dick feeling like it was on fire, feeling like he needed to pee worse than ever before in his whole life, all 53 years of it, Edgar watched the doctor, saw him frown, twisting the tiny seeing-eye back and forth in his belly, heard him let out a tiny groan, an Oh, dear oh dear groan, like the doc was seeing something that he didn’t want to see, something that didn’t ought to be there in Edgar Nornhoevan’s stomach, something maybe like the thing that burst from John Hurt’s guts in that Alien movie a few years back.

The doctor told Edgar, as he was pulling his pants on—Edgar, not the doctor—still feeling like his dick was on fire, that he was going to send off a swab for analysis but that, certainly—that’s the word he used: certainly—the prostate seems unusually large. The results came back two days ago, since which time Edgar has been hitting the juice … drinking for two, is how he tells Jim Leafman.

So, yes, Edgar needs to laugh right now.

“Hey Mac,” Jim Leafman shouts across to McCoy Brewer, “you too good to sit with us these days?” Jim has just been told a joke about a guy with a bad flatulence problem which ends with the line ‘You’re wrong about the smell’ and he’s still laughing. Jim laughs a little louder and harder than he needs to do mainly because he’s covering up the fact that until a few minutes ago he didn’t know ‘flatulence’ was just a two-dollar word for ‘farting’.

McCoy turns around and beams a big smile, raises his glass and moves away from the bar, moves a little reluctantly, reluctant because he doesn’t really want to talk to anyone right now. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone because he’s just lost his job, this very day, his job with the Midtown & Western Trust & Loan, the only company in the city with two ampersands in its name. Right now, staring in the big mirror, McCoy Brewer doesn’t care squat about ampersands—he just wants to come to terms with corporate speak, words like ‘downsizing’ and ‘outsourcing’, words he doesn’t know whether they’re hyphenated or not.

As he walks across, McCoy hears Jim Leafman keeping the fart joke rolling with a few one-liners, schoolyard rhymers like, “He who smelt it dealt it,” to which Edgar Nornhoevan says, pointing his finger in mock accusation, “Hey, you do the crime, you do the time!”

McCoy pulls up a chair, says, “Hey.”

Jim waves him and carries on chuckling, shaking his head as he pours another glass of beer from the pitcher.

“Hey, listen up now,” Edgar says, leaning across the table, resting a hand on McCoy’s arm by way of greeting. “You ever wondered why a man’s dick is shaped the way it is?” He looks at Jim, sees he’s not about to get anything reasonable by way of a reply and turns to McCoy. “Mac?”

“Uh uh,” McCoy says, truthfully.

“I mean,” Edgar goes on, looking around to see if anyone is listening, forgetting that, apart from the woman, the woman who always seems to be in here, so regular she’s almost like one of the chairs or a pile of beer coasters, “you know-” He draws the shape of a penis in the air in front of him, accentuating the large end of the shaft. “—Why it’s wider at the end than it is on the shaft?”

“Uh uh,” McCoy says again, just as truthfully.

This time Jim Leafman shakes his head, too, getting into the yarn.

“Well,” Edgar confides, twirling his fingers around the rim of his glass, “it’s something that’s been bothering folks in the medical profession for a number of years.” He pronounces it ‘perfession’, slurring the first syllable and pulling it out it so it comes out kind of like a belch, waving his left arm with a flourish. “Particularly the French, the British and … the Poles.”

“Yeah?” The way Jim says that, he could almost be believing it and, just for a moment, both Edgar and McCoy consider telling him, ‘Hey, Jim … it’s a story, right? It ain’t real’, but neither of them does. Instead, Edgar goes on.

“Yeah,” he says. “See, the French, they conducted their own research … took ’em eight months and a couple million francs and, at the end of it all, they come up with this: the reason a dick is shaped the way it is is to give maximum pleasure when the guy’s dipping his biscuit in the gravy. You know what I mean?” Edgar pushes his finger in and out of the hole made by the thumb and forefinger of his other hand.

McCoy smiles and leans forward on the table, reaches for the pretzel dish and lifts a couple to his mouth, crunching them.

“Okay,” says Edgar. “So, the British … they been wondering about the same thing and they conduct their own research. They are not convinced by the French, nosiree. You know what I mean?” McCoy and Jim decide they do know and they nod. “Hey,” Edgar says, “fuck the common market, you know what I mean?” He laughs and watches them both nod and smile before continuing.

“So,” says Edgar, “they spend … oh, a half a million pounds, something like that, and after another six months they agree that it’s to improve, you know—”

“Dipping the biscuit?” Jim ventures.

“Yeah,” says Edgar, repeating the stunt with the finger going in and out of the hand-hole, “only this time, they decide that it’s for the woman’s pleasure. That’s why, you know, why the dick is shaped that way … it’s so it gives a little flick on the vulva as it goes in and out. You know what I mean?”

McCoy frowns. “The vulva?”

“Yeah. Is it a vulva?” Edgar says, suddenly unsure.

Jim Leafman shrugs, looks first to one of the men and then the other.

McCoy says, “Vagina. I think it’s called a vagina.”

Now Edgar shrugs. “Vulva, vagina … who the hell cares.”

“Right,” agrees Jim, taking a hit of beer.

“Yeah, right,” echoes Edgar, the debate over anatomical correctness clearly having put him off his stride … and he also now feels like he needs to pee. “What are you,” he asks McCoy Brewer, “some kind of optometrist?”

“Uh uh,” says McCoy, “I’m a mortgage clerk, you know that. Only I lost my job today … so now I’m nothing.”

“You lost your job?” says Jim, his face slack and concerned.

As McCoy starts to respond, Edgar bangs the table with his right hand. “Hey, we telling stories here or what?”

“Sorry,” says McCoy.

“Sorry,” says Jim Leafman.

“Can you believe this guy?” Edgar asks McCoy, nodding in Jim’s direction.

“Just tell the story already.”

“Okay. So, where was I? See, I can’t even remember where the fuck—”

“The British,” Jim says softly. “They decided it was for the woman’s pleasure.” He looks like he’s about to do the trick with the fingers and the hand-hole but instead he reaches for his glass.

“Yeah, right,” Edgar says, and he chuckles. “So, the Poles …” Now he gives a real snort. “They decide they want to do their own research, cos, you know, they don’t agree with either of the other two.

“So, they start their own survey study, you know … and they spend … they spend a couple of days and a few …” He pauses and looks across to the bar, sees Jack Fedogan polishing a glass while he watches them.

“Jack,” Edgar shouts across, “Poles. What do they spend?”

Jack Fedogan squints and shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “What do they spend?” For a second he wonders if Edgar is having him on, asking him something so’s he can make him look dumb. He rubs one callused hand across his chin and, with the other, carefully sets the glass down on the bar counter.

“Yeah, what do they use for money?”

Jack shrugs, says, “They use the same as everybody else does, leastways they do in my bar.”

Edgar waves his arm. “No,” he says, “in Poland for Chrissakes. What do they use when they’re at home in Poland?”

“Pesetas?” Jack suggests.

McCoy sniggers.

“Is it drachma?” Jim ventures, looking first at McCoy and then at Edgar. “I think I heard something about drachma. I thought maybe it was rubics but that was the guy that made the cube. Did you ever have one of those?” Jim Leafman says to McCoy.

McCoy nods. “When they first came out I bought one.”

“Me too,” says Jim. “Almost did it one time. Two squares out.”

“Okay,” Edgar says, impatiently, “we’ll go for drachma. So, they do this research, right, takes about two days and costs around 50 drachma—” He shrugs and raises his eyebrows. “In other words, not very much, you know what I’m saying here? Anyway, they come up with the answer.” He leans forward and lowers his voice a little.

“The Poles, they figure a guy’s dick is shaped the way it is so that your hand doesn’t fly off and hit you in the face.” He slaps the table in tune with the word ‘face’ and leans back in his chair guffawing.

McCoy laughs in spite of himself, feels some of the pressure lifting from the back of his head, unsure whether he’s laughing at the joke or whether he’s just starting to feel the effects of the martini.

Jim Leafman has a big dumb smile on his face, wants to laugh but just can’t quite tie everything up to allow him to do so.

Edgar repeats the last line, making a jerking-off movement with his right hand and then hitting himself in his face with it.

“Oh, right,” Jim says, laughing now but the laughter sounding a little forced and unreal, echoing around the empty room.

Outside on the street the sound of this merriment distills the intensity in the air and wafts along with occasional exhaust fumes and the smells of roasting chestnuts and hot dogs and catsup, wafting and diminishing with each foot and each yard it travels until, a few steps either side of The Land of the Working Day, it fades completely as far as normal people are concerned, normal folks hurrying home or rushing out on dates or to dinner parties, moving through the drift of silent laughter like it wasn’t there, arguing about this and that or lost in thought cultivated and even approved by the City.

But though it is now silent, this laughter, still it exists and still it moves, drifting in all directions… up towards the Empire State, down to Washington Square and Greenwich Village, and east across Madison Square and on to Gramercy Park. It will continue, this sound, moving across all barriers, fading and fading until it is the ghost of a ghost of bygone laughter, but it will continue to retain some residue of itself and of why it came about. For though there is always something special about any laughter, there is something doubly special—almost divine—about laughter that needs to be, laughter that, through the simple process of coming into being, releases and repairs.

And out in the nighttime City, out there amidst the trees and the trashcans and the lonely alleyways, beneath the ever-present hum of siren, engines and human breathing, there are people closer to the Heart of the City than everyday normal folks. And one of these, a man, hears the sound on the breeze like tinkling bells, wind-chimes fashioned out of coral shells and plastic cord. This man on this night is closest of all to the Heart of the City. He is the custodian of its welfare, though this is not a post he has sought.

On other nights and at other times there will be others, men and women, boys and girls, whose unsought and un-asked-for responsibility will be to restore the balance of the streets. But for some nights past and for some nights still to come, it is this man’s responsibility and his alone.

As he hears the sound he chuckles to himself, sitting on a bench in Gramercy eating the remains of a tuna nicoise sandwich that someone has discarded earlier in the day, cocking his dirty head to one side and lifting the earflap of his conical hat, he discerns the direction from which the sound has come to him, then turning, almost as though he can see it traveling on away from him, away to Stuyvesant Square and then to the East River and then across to Brooklyn … which some might say is in most urgent need of the ministrations of laughter (but only those who do not live there).

He wraps the remains of the sandwich in the dirty greaseproof paper and thrusts it deep into an old coat tied colorfully around his waist. Then he lifts from the floor by the bench an old satchel fashioned out of soft leather and upon which are strange runic symbols that he has carved over the years, and he faces diagonally across Park Avenue South, sniffing the air and smiling.

Then he starts to walk.

Back in The Land at the End of the Working Day, the jokes and the stories are coming thick and fast, thicker and faster as the drinks are replenished. And, strangely—strangely because Jack Fedogan’s bar is a popular establishment—no more people have come in on this particular night and no one who was already in the bar has left, as though the single room, with its softly whirring air conditioning and a steady stream of faint piped jazz music put out from Jack’s CD player, had become the room in the old Bunuel movie where people simply cannot leave, though for what reason they are never sure.

“Okay,” says McCoy Brewer, sensing that it is his turn and taking advantage of the natural lull in story-telling, “so, the Pope comes to New York, right? Pays the Apple a visit.”

Edgar Nornhoevan nods, playing the table-top like it’s a piano, joining in with the sound of Bill Evans playing ‘My Melancholy Baby’ out of the old speakers on either side of the bar, shaking his head like he’s living the notes and the chords, forgetting for a while that he needs to pee.

Jim Leafman nods too, and takes a drink, whispering the punchline from Edgar’s last joke, “‘No thanks I’ll smoke my own,’ … heh, heh … I like that, I really like that …  heh, heh …” He dribbles beer down the front of his shirt because he’s still talking as he drinks.

“So,” McCoy continues, “the Pope, he’s finished his visit—he’s done all the touristy things, you know, been up the Empire State, got mugged in Central Park, bought a slice to go from Ssbarro … the full works—and now he’s about to head home for Rome and the Vatican. Anyways, this huge limo picks him up from the hotel—he’s staying at the Waldorf, right?”

Edgar nods his head, half-closing his eyes in agreement and momentarily giving in to an increasing feeling of disorientation and general drunkenness. “So where else would the Pope stay?” he says, pronouncing it ‘elsh’ and ‘shtay’.

“Right,” says McCoy. “So, the limo picks him up and they set off for the airport.” He takes a sip of martini, savoring the taste, and then continues.

“So, as they’re driving, the Pope picks up the intercom to the driver. ‘Hello driver,’ he says,” says McCoy, holding his empty right hand up to his mouth like he’s talking into something. “‘This is my first time in the United States and I have never, I mean ever, been in a car like this before. Do you think it would be okay if I drive it for a while?’ Well, the driver, he’s a little taken aback. I mean, nobody has asked him this before, right?”

Nods from Jim and Edgar. Glancing to the side, McCoy sees that Jack Fedogan is leaning across the bar trying to listen, having shuffled closer and closer during the last couple of stories. “You with it so far, Jack?” McCoy asks.

Jack stands up and, for a second, looks a little hurt.

“Whyn’t you come over, Jack,” Edgar shouts.

“How about me, too?” shouts Rosemary Fenwick, the lady from the Jim Thompson book, who, McCoy thinks as he turns around to see who’s asking, looks like Barbara Stanwick from the old movie with Fred McMurray where the two of them get together and throw Barbara Stanwick’s husband from a train. “I could use a little laughter tonight,” she says, the words blending in with the clickclack of her heels as she walks to the table without waiting for an answer.

“Sure,” says McCoy Brewer, “let’s all of us gather around this table.”

“I’ll bring some more drinks,” Jack Fedogan shouts, looking happy now, like a child who’s just been allowed to play with the big boys. “On the house,” Jack says.

“Then I’ll have a double,” says McCoy.

“Make mine a double Bud, bud,” shouts Jim.

And everyone laughs while Jim Leafman pulls over another couple of chairs, and stands while Rosemary Fenwick joins them.

Pretty soon, they’re all at the table, fresh drinks lined up in front of them, five lost people in the greatest city in the world, enjoying life unexpectedly.

“So, where was I?”

“Hey,” says Jack Fedogan, “this table feel strange to you?”

“How’s come strange?” asks Jim Leafman.

Jack places his hands palm down on the table. “I dunno … strange like … like there’s some kinda current going through it.”

“Current like in electricity-type current?” says Jim, pushing his chair back a ways.

Rosemary Fenwick places a hand on the table and lifts it quickly, then places it down again, leaving it there this time. “I can feel something,” she says. “Like some kind of vibration.”

McCoy Brewer says, “Didn’t feel anything before,” saying it carefully, considering the validity of the statement.

“Until there were five of us,” Edgar says around a hiccup, pronouncing it ‘ush’.

“Until there were five of us? What the hell—pardon my French,” Jack says, glancing across at Rosemary Fenwick, who has now introduced herself to the others who have, in turn, introduced themselves to her. Rosemary shakes her head, and Jack continues while Rosemary smiles and uses two slender fingers to pull a cigarette from a crumpled and sorry-looking pack of Marlboro Lights.

“What’s that got to do with the price of beans?” Jack asks, feeling like it’s his fault that the table is shuddering … because, dammit to hell, it is shuddering.

“Must be the subway,” Jim says, nodding slowly at his own wisdom.

“Right!” says Jack Fedogan, relieved.

McCoy places his hands gingerly on the edge of the table. “Doesn’t seem so bad now,” he says.

“Prob’ly a train passing,” says Edgar.

“Okay.” McCoy takes a long slug of beer and then a sip of his martini. “So back to the story.”

“The Pope just asked if he could drive the limo,” Rosemary says, lifting her Manhattan in salute to Jack, who nods like it was nothing but who flushes kind of pink around the gills.

“Right,” says McCoy, “so the driver considers who’s asking and he decides, hey, what could be the problem, right? The car will be safe enough and so he agrees. The Pope jumps into the driver’s seat and straight away floors the acceleration pedal throwing the driver onto the floor at the back.

“The limo screeches up Broadway like you wouldn’t believe, running red lights, scaring the bag ladies and the muggers and the pimps, doing nearly one hundred miles an hour. Anyway, pretty soon this prowl car sees them come by and pulls out in pursuit. After a lengthy chase that takes them almost up into Harlem, the prowl car flags the limo down.”

“One hundred miles an hour up Broadway! Shee,” says Jim Leafman. “Can you imagine that?”

“That’s fast,” says Rosemary Fenwick.

“That is fast,” agrees Edgar, saying ‘fasht’.

“So,” says McCoy, “the cop gets out of the car—there’s only one cop in there—and he knocks on the driver’s window. The Pope sheepishly lowers the window … at which point the cop takes one look and then goes back to his own car and radios the precinct. ‘Er, this is Car 16,’ the cop says, ‘I think I’ve got a problem.’

“‘Problem?’ says the guy at the precinct. ‘Yeah,’ says the cop. ‘I’ve pulled over a VIP.’ ‘Who is it?’ comes the reply, ‘not the Mayor again?’

“‘Nope,’ says the cop. ‘More important than him.’

“‘Not the Senator?’ says the precinct house.

“‘Nope, more important than him,’ says the cop.

“‘The President? Tell me you haven’t pulled over the President,’ says the precinct.

“Nope,’ says the cop. ‘It’s even more important than him.’

“‘More important than the President of the United States?’ comes the reply. ‘Who could be more important than that?’

“The cop says, ‘I dunno, but he’s got the Pope as his chauffeur.’”

The laughter mixed in with Herbie Hancock’s ‘Maiden Voyage’ and the hybrid sound of cymbals and piano and pure good times rings out in the dimly lit barroom and washes against the walls and over to the steps leading up onto the street, spilling out into the night air like a beacon.

And it is a beacon, of sorts anyways.

And it has been noticed.

For out in the wintry night sidewalks of New York City there is one more soul adrift in the night. And he is following the sound like it’s a clarion call and, staring into the dark skies awash with reflected colors, he senses the direction of the sound and adjusts his own path—not by much … maybe by only a few feet—and he crosses over the street.

“Yeah,” says Jim Leafman, “I love a good joke.”

Jack Fedogan nods and glances towards the stairs.

“Jack?” Edgar Nornhoevan follows Jack’s stare. “Something wrong?”

Jack shakes his head like he’s coming round from a punch to the face. “No, just thought … just thought I heard something.”

McCoy looks around at the stairs and sees the darkness of the streets lying at the top, curled up away from the overhead lights on the stairs and, for a second, it reminds him that the world is waiting for him. Reminds him that the funny stories are only down here, down here in Jack Fedogan’s bar, and that up there he doesn’t have a job. Up there, funny stories are strictly for people who are in work. “Can’t see anything,” he says and looks back down at his beer and his highball.

“Hey, you’re thinning down, Ed,” Jack says, changing the subject. “I hadn’t noticed that before,” he adds, patting his own stomach and nodding to Edgar Nornhoevan’s. “You lost a little weight. Looks good on you.” He nods and takes a slug of beer. “You working out?”

Edgar pulls in a long sigh. “Tumor,” he says, letting out the air.

“Tumor?” says Jim Leafman. “That some kind of diet?”

Grimacing, Jack says, “It’s cancer, you dumb fuck,” hissing it. He turns to Rosemary Fenwick and adds, “Pardon my—”

“I know,” Rosemary says, “pardon your fucking French.”

McCoy Brewer reaches across and pats Edgar’s arm. “Where?” he asks.

“Prostate. Me and Timothy Leary.”

“Turn on, tume in and drop out,” says Jack.

“Oh, that was awful,” says Rosemary.

“Leave him be,” says Edgar. “He’s just trying to make me feel better.”

“He’s just a comedian, he don’t mean nothing,” says Jim Leafman, filling his glass from the pitcher, filling it right to the brim and watching the froth turn into beer and slop down the sides onto the table.

“I guess we’re all comedians tonight,” says McCoy.

“Yeah,” Rosemary says, “it feels special alright. You feel that? Can you feel something special about everything?”

“How special?” Jack slides his hand across the table and shakes one of Rosemary’s cigarettes out of the pack, then lights it.

“I thought you quit?” says Edgar.

“I did.” Jack takes a pull on the cigarette and blows smoke, smiling.

Rosemary shrugs. “Dunno. Just special.”

“It’s cos we’re telling jokes,” says Jim, “cos we’re comedians, like Mac said.”

Jack Fedogan says, “What was it Lenny Bruce said about comedians?”

Grunts from everyone. Nobody knows what Lenny Bruce said about anything.

“He said something like a comedian is someone who makes up his own material, not someone who just repeats other folks’ stuff,” says Jack, remembering hearing Lenny interviewed by Studs Terkel on WFMT back in ’59, when he lived in Chicago. “They’re just echoes.”

McCoy turned to him. “Lenny Bruce said that? Echoes?”

“No … well, I don’t recall him actually saying that, but that’s what he meant,” says Jack. “He meant they’re not the real thing.”

The sound on the stairs happens right then, McCoy, Rosemary, Jim, Jack and Edgar pulling themselves back from the table like they’re resting on an oven surface or a barbecue grill, staring at the table, feeling those same vibrations again, like the granddaddy of all trains is moving right under where they’re sitting, but they’re unable to take their hands away, each of them holding their hands flat on the table’s surface like they’re trying to stop it rising into the air. And then they all glance across at the stairs, from where the unmistakable sound of feet descending can be heard.

“Now that’s the real thing,” says Edgar, saying it quietly, like he’s saying it only to himself.

Coming down the stairs, looking around the room like it was an Aladdin’s cave of treasures, is a man. At first glance the man looks to be old, but then the assembled patrons of The Land at the End of the Working Day see that the man’s long hair and beard are probably only discolored by the city, made gray by the traffic exhausts and the cooking smells, and that they don’t actually relate to his age. For his face is completely unlined. It’s dirty, sure, grimy and greasy-looking, but the man’s eyes are bright and wide open, taking everything in. He stops a couple of steps from the bottom and puts his hands on his hips.

In one hand he carries a dirty leather satchel, its contents bulging the sides out though there does not appear to be anything of any significant weight in there as it swings by his side effortlessly. He stands around five eight, five nine, a long black coat coming down to his shins, its sleeves rolled up to make thick cuffs which even then, with his arms bent, cover most of his hands. On the coat, either pinned into place or stitched—he’s standing too far away for the quintet at the table to be sure—are a series of signs and shapes, some of which are clearly moons, crescent moons, and stars, the kind of stars you see in children’s story books, five points and a fat center. The only thing that’s missing on these are faces, though McCoy wonders to himself if they weren’t there, once upon a time, and have merely been stolen by the city and the night.

Around the man’s waist is a makeshift belt which appears to have been constructed by several neckties of various designs and colors, its knot lavishly fashioned into an elaborate bow. Beneath the coat hangs a pair of trousers, gray and flecked, which culminate in a series of ruffles at the man’s ankles, resting on a pair of scuffed training shoes bearing the unmistakable motif of Nike on the side. But it is his headgear that makes for the most striking item of his clothing.

For on top of that veritable explosion of lank and matted hair sits a cross between a tall, conical hat and an old leather flying helmet, its tapered end bent so that the point hangs at a right angle to the rest of it, ear-flaps hanging loosely at the sides of his face and the whole affair similarly lavished with symbols and drawings, all of which are faded and scuffed and somehow altogether tired looking.

“Bon soir, mes amis,” the man’s voice booms, and he lifts his hands as though he is a benign ruler addressing his people. Taking the final three stairs onto the floor of Jack Fedogan’s tavern, he sees the five people all holding their hands flat on the table and says, “Hey, don’t tell me … ‘Seance on a Wet Afternoon’, right?”

They stare at him in silence.

“Okay, maybe you’re enacting one of those shlocky slice’n’dice features … like maybe ‘Evil Dead 7’ or ‘Halloween 24’, something like that?” He waves his hands in the air and looks to the ceiling. “Is there anybody there?” he says in a deep wavering voice, dragging the words out to three and four times their length. “Aunt Jemima, tell Uncle Frank I’m gonna look after his stamp collection.”

Jack stands up from the table and starts towards the man, waving his hands slowly in front of him. “I don’t know what you’re looking for pal,” Jack tells the man, “but you ain’t likely to find it in here.”

“Me?” The man’s face frowns and he places both of his hands on his own chest. “It is not I who am looking for anything, but you yourselves.”

“Us?” Edgar manages to say the word correctly and almost surprises himself that the drunkenness seems to have passed, at least for a while.

“For sure,” says the man, turning to Edgar Nornhoevan. “For is that not why I have been summoned?”

“We didn’t summon nobody,” says Jack. “And, like I say, we don’t allow no bums in here,” he adds, reaching a hand out to take hold of the man’s arm.

“Ah, fear not friends … that is quite normal,” says the man, and he lifts a hand to straighten his hat. “Rather it is the City itself that seeks my help on your behalf,” he says, imbuing the word ‘city’ with a strange significance. He looks to the upturned faces and says, “It does that all the time.”

Shifting around in her chair, Rosemary Fenwick asks the man who he is, something that most of the others have also been wanting to find out.

“Me?” the man booms, “I am Gandalph Cohen.”

“Gandalph Cohen?” says Edgar.

“What kind of a name is that?” asks Jim Leafman.

The man turns a withering glance at Jim and says, softly, “It’s Jewish.”

“I think he meant ‘Gandalph’,” says Rosemary.

“Ah, of course, an unusual name I grant you.” The man smiles at Jack and shakes his elbow free. Pointing to the table, he says, “Might I join you?”

Without waiting for a response, the man pulls a chair from one of the other tables, drags it across to sit between Rosemary and Edgar, and plops down with a sigh. Jack shrugs and walks across to the bar where he pours a fresh pitcher of beer which, along with a clean glass, he brings back to the table. The man accepts the glass and McCoy pours the beer.

“My parents, God rest their souls, were Tolkien freaks,” he says, slurping the froth from his beard loudly. “The saga of the Ring and of the hobbits’ epic journey figured largely in their lives. When I came along, almost 39 years ago, the choice of a name was of no concern. The only problem was that the Rabbi misspelled it, so I’m Gandalph with a pee-aitch instead of with an eff. The full name is Gandalph Aragone Fordo Cohen. The man was a Philistine where fantastic literature was concerned but at least he spelled Cohen correctly.”

The man takes another drink and, resting his glass back on the table, lifts his left side—the one next to Edgar—from the chair and lets rip a loud fart. “Pardonez moi,” he says.

Astonished, Rosemary Fenwick bursts into uncontrolled laughter, quickly joined by Jim Leafman, McCoy Brewer and Edgar himself, though, placing a hand across his nose, he backs away from the man.

“Jesus Chri—” Jack Fedogan begins before he too starts to laugh.

“Why did you say that?” says Rosemary, still sniggering.

“What?”

“That ‘pardonay mwah’ stuff?”

The man shrugs. “Just being polite. It’s always polite to excuse yourself when you pass wind in public.”

“No, I mean saying it in French,” says Rosemary, unable to keep the exasperation out of her tone.

Another shrug. “I used to be French.”

“Used to be?” says McCoy.

“Uh huh. I’ve been all kinds of nationality—French, German, Hindu, Russian …  you name it, I’ve been it. The French has stuck, though. Hard to shake off.”

“I thought you said you were Jewish,” Edgar says.

“Nope. I said my name was Jewish.”

“So what are you? What are you now?” asks Jack.

“Jewish. Been Jewish all my life … this one, anyways.” He takes another slug of beer.

“You just said-”

“Sorry,” Gandalph Cohen says to Jack Fedogan, “playing the old semantics game. The other nationalities were other lives … existences before this one. This time around I am most assuredly Jewish … but a little French here and there never hurt anyone.”

Jack, Edgar, Jim, McCoy and Rosemary sit looking at each other, exchanging frowns, grimaces and rolled-up eyes, side-glancing at the new arrival as he leans on the back of his chair and scans the interior of the Working Day.

“Nice place,” says Gandalph Cohen at last, turning back to face the others but nodding at Jack Fedogan. “Bet it’s expensive to run, yes?”

Jack regains his composure and nods. The truth of the matter is that it’s very expensive. Jack is currently fighting a foreclosure order from the bank, something he tries to keep to himself. But not for long. He figures he’s got one week.

“Ah, well,” says the newcomer, “it’s only money, yes?”

He turns to Edgar. “And you need to urinate and can’t do it so well, yes?” He leans forward and sniffs. “Cancer of the prostate, if I’m not mistaken.” He nods to himself, satisfied with his diagnosis. “Invariably fatal, I believe but—” He sniffs again. “I think this one will respond to treatment. A few visits to the radiography area will put it to rest … plus you’ll be able to start up electrical household objects from twenty paces.”

Turning to Rosemary, he places a grubby hand on her knee and squeezes once before removing it. “And you, my dear, are worrying about your husband and your little boy …” He pauses and closes his eyes. “New England?” He opens his eyes and sees Rosemary staring at him, her mouth hanging limply open. “Nice place … but terrible winters.” He pats the knee again. “You’ll see them again, my dear … but leave it until the spring.” He glances away quickly, trying to convince himself that one lie might ease a burden where the truth would only increase it.

“And you, sir,” he says across the table to Jim Leafman. “Woman trouble, I believe, is what ails you.”

“Who—” Jim’s voice sounds about three octaves too high, like a choirboy’s, and he clears his throat before continuing. “Who said I was ailing?”

Gandalph Cohen laughs. “Ah, we’re all ailing, mon ami,” he says to Jim, “it’s only the reasons that are different. Your future lies away from your wife—is it Clarice?”

Jim nods.

“Yes? Nice name. Well, your path goes in another direction from hers. But be happy with it. It’s a good path.”

“What about my bar?” asks Jack Fedogan. “You never said. You just said, ‘It’s only money’.”

“No, you’ll never lose the bar,” says Gandalph Cohen. “But you’ll lose its present location. And it won’t be the same.”

“Shit,” says Jack, and then, “pardon my French, Rosemary.”

“French?” says Gandalph Cohen. “That would be merde surely?”

“Of course it won’t be the same,” says Jack, annoyed. “But where will it be if it ain’t here?”

“There’ll always be a Land at the End of the Working Day,” comes the reply, “just as there will always be a proprietor. Right now, it’s here and it’s you. A few years back, it was a Laundromat in Queens. Before that, a hot dog stand down near Battery Park … a video store in Jackson Heights—that was the one before you …”

“A Laundromat, a hot dog stand and a video store all called The Land at the End of the Working Day?” says Jim Leafman.

“Mais non, my little garbage collecting friend,” says Gandalph Cohen. “‘Squeeky Clean,’—with a double ‘e’— ‘Frank’s Franks’ and ‘The Big Picture’. The name isn’t important.”

“Never mind the name,” says Jack, “what do you mean ‘before me’? I don’t think I’m following you? Just who are you?”

“I told you,” says Gandalph Cohen. “I’m Gandalph Cohen.”

“How do you know so much, I think is what he means,” says Rosemary, pulling a cigarette out of her pack.

Gandalph Cohen shrugs. “I just know, that’s all. I know that the City creates its own amusements. It’s like an offshoot of the Gaia theory … you know? Where the planet is a thinking entity that looks after itself?”

Edgar nods and takes a drink. Suddenly he’s feeling a whole lot better than he’s felt in days. In fact, he’s feeling downright good.

“And,” Gandalph Cohen continues, “it needs something to appease the people who live in it. Kind of like a pressure valve, through which temperatures are allowed to cool off. But it moves it around.”

“It moves it around?” Jack Fedogan shakes his head. “What moves what around?”

“The City,” says Gandalph Cohen. “The City moves its pressure valve around. On a whim,” he says, brandishing an arm theatrically, “for no good reason other than sheer caprice. And tonight’s the night it goes from here.”

McCoy has been silent for a while, thinking over what has been said. He clears his throat now and says, “Where does it go from here?”

The man in the strange hat shrugs. “Don’t know yet. Don’t ever know. Thing is, I don’t need to know. People only need the valve when they’re close to bursting. Some folks are close to bursting most of the time and they become regulars … kind of like therapy, you know? Some folks are so very close to bursting they never find it—like not seeing the wood for the trees?—and they end up blowing away a couple families in their local MacDonalds or decapitating their neighbors for not returning a half-used carton of barbecue-lighting fluid.

“Me, I’ve been at 14 of these handovers over the years. I suspect it was someone else before me, someone the City picks.”

“What … you know, what do you actually do?” asks Jim.

“You believing all this?” says Jack, slapping Jim’s arm.

“I don’t actually do anything,” Gandalph Cohen says, ignoring Jack Fedogan’s remark. “I’m what you might call a conduit. It’s through me that the necessary levels are attained so that the … the force, I guess you could call it—though I am aware that someone else already thought up that particular usage of term—so that the force can be freed.” He drains his glass and pours some more beer. “Where it’ll go from here is anybody’s guess. How long it’ll stay there, the same.” He reaches into his coat pocket and removes the sandwich.

“You never said,” says Rosemary, grimacing as she watches the man take a bite out of the soggy-looking baguette, “how you know so much about us … our names … and everything else.”

“And you never said what was going to happen to me … you ‘did’ everyone else,” says McCoy.

“You,” Gandalph Cohen says to McCoy Brewer, speaking around a mouthful of sandwich, “you are out of a job. Tomorrow you will still be out of a job. But a job is just a job, yes? Tonight, mon ami, you have a mission … a quest, even … and a quest has always been more important than a job. More than that I cannot say … though I will say that you will be immensely helpful to Jack here, over the months and years ahead. As, it must be said, he will be to you.

“And in response to your question,” he says to Rosemary, “the rhythms of the City are complex.” He offers her a huge smile which exposes brown teeth. “But it is possible to follow them. Those rhythms are the people that live here … like fleas on a dog. It’s too difficult to explain any more than that.” He takes another slug of beer and wipes his sleeve across his beard.

“The people know that the force is moving on,” he continues. “That is why there are none of them here tonight. They wouldn’t say that if you asked them, of course. They would simply say that they had other things to do … like dinner parties, movies, bowling—do people still go bowling?”

Everyone shrugs.

“No matter. But the point is that the City is keeping them away.”

“Why?” McCoy asks quietly. “Why does it want to do that?” Even as the last word of the question leaves his mouth, McCoy Brewer wonders whether he has had too much to drink.

“It doesn’t need them.”

McCoy says, “But it needs us?”

Gandalph Cohen nods. “It needs them that need it the most. Tonight, you five need the City in the worst way. Tomorrow night, it’ll be other people; last night it was others still. And so it goes on.” He slaps the table. “But, enough talk … we have work to do.”

“What work?” asks Jim Leafman.

“We have to enjoy ourselves and perform the handover.”

“Hey,” says Rosemary, holding her hands palm out above the table. “can you feel it?”

“Feel it … I can see it!” says Edgar.

And, sure enough, the table seems to be shuddering, tiny, infinitesimally small vibrations that make it seem as though it’s alive, alive with expectation.

“What do we do?” asks Jack Fedogan.

“Well, mon ami,” says Gandalph Cohen, “I suggest you get us another couple pitchers of beer—and maybe a few pretzels or nuts? that would be good—and we’ll just sit around like the friends we are and we’ll make each other smile.

“Tell me,” says Gandalph Cohen, leaning onto the vibrating table in The Land at the End of the Working Day, “has anyone heard the one about the guy from the mid-west who goes on holiday to Scotland? He goes into this bread and cakes store and he says to the assistant, pointing at this cake-thing in the display case, ‘Is that a donut or a meringue?’ And the assistant, she says—” He puts on a Scottish accent. “‘Och, no, you’re right—it’s a donut.’“

Jack exchanges a quizzical expression with Edgar, and then his eyes light up and he starts to laugh. Then Rosemary starts to giggle, her eyebrows raised high in sudden understanding … and then McCoy Brewer. Only Jim maintains a frown. “I don’t think I get that one,” he says quietly.

“Doesn’t matter,” says Gandalph Cohen. “Keep it going. Every joke you ever heard … every funny story, every anecdote.”

“Okay,” says Edgar. “How about this one …”

As the night wears on, and the beer flows thick and fast, the stories come out …  some stories the teller heard just the other week and some are dredged up from their deepest memory. Sometimes the stories get a laugh and sometimes they don’t … but the City accepts the laughter from all of them, drinking it in gratefully like a man lost in the desert drinking in droplets of soda from a discarded can. Eventually, a little after 11 pm …

Resting his hands on the table and sensing something has changed, Jim Leafman says, “The table feels different. Has it happened?”

Gandalph Cohen nods and places his empty glass on the table.

“It feels sad,” says Rosemary. “It feels like I just sat up all night with a sick friend and now … now she’s gone.”

“Not gone,” says Gandalph Cohen. “Just moved on to where she’s needed more. Ecoutez…” he says. Out in the darkness, outside the two-flight walk-down on the corner of 23rd and Fifth, a wind seems to have gotten up.

“So tell me,” says Jim Leafman, watching the others cocking their heads to one side, listening … smiling to themselves … watching them get to their feet and stretching, seeing them embrace and shake each other’s hands,  “what is a meringue? Could someone tell me that?”

Gandalph Cohen & The Land at the End of the Working Day

Copyright  Peter Crowther 2008 & 2011

The right of Peter Crowther to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form in The Land at the End of the Working Day by Humdrumming.co.uk in 2008. This electronic version is published in March 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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