After a busy week of politics heaped on top of more politics, today we’re happy to launch the first issue of our new Saturday creative editions. These will be coming to you on some Saturdays in a manner that, alongside our Sunday interviews, is something akin to a broadsheet’s culture magazine or a Medway ‘New Yorker’. This first edition is free to all subscribers but these will broadly be behind the paywall in the future. These editions will feature a mixture of art, music, photography, poetry, short films and stories from Medway creatives, demonstrating the breadth of talent in our towns.
This edition features the poem ‘John Says He’d Drive’ by Sarah Hehir, the first pastal of Wolf Howard’s Death series, the short story ‘Levan Strice’ by David Cramer Smith, and an excerpt from the comic book ‘Echoes of Steel’ by Nadia Perrotta.
These editions are under our Medwayish banner. If you are a Medway creative and you would be interested in submitting work to a future edition, please email medwayish@gmail.com.
Medway has a strong tradition of poetry. To start us off, we have an original poem by Medway writer Sarah Hehir.
John Says He’d Drive…
by Sarah Hehir
In Gillingham Park,
nothing is really wrong.
There is a slow dance of sycamore leaves
in burnt orange
and falling greens.
Even the dog has no reason
to be hangdog today.
There is space :
a lungful of air
that could be gasped as happiness.
But my boots are stuck in mud.
On self destruct,
I choose that sad,
stupidly sadder-than-sad,
Ed Sheeran song to play.
...then put his hand on my cheek
and wiped a tear from the side of my face.
Sarah Hehir is a poet from the industrial north. She lives in Medway and writes for radio, stage and TV.
Stuckism is an international art movement started in Medway. Taking his style of bold figurative images in a simple, vigorous style, we present the first in a series of pastel images from Wolf Howard.
Death
by Wolf Howard
Wolf Howard is a Gentleman Amateur from the Medway Towns, a punk and garage drummer in a variety of bands, a pinhole photographer and a founding member of the Stuckist art movement.
From David Cramer Smith, the author of Medway: A Novel, comes the first in a series of short stories.
Levan Strice
by David Cramer Smith
Ed, a squirrel, stepped out of the shower and immediately crouched down because it was that cold, even though his dad had deigned to put the heating on for once.
He reached behind to grab his towel from the radiator, clumsily draping it over himself, lightly squashing his tail against his back in the process.
The towel was warm and good. Ed remained crouched and covered by the towel until he could bring himself to stand up.
Once he was dry he wrapped the towel around his waist and brushed his teeth – the visible, rodenty ones at the front, anyway.
He examined himself in the small circular shaving mirror and checked his face fur, then flipped the mirror over to its magnifying side and moved his head about, grinning malevolently as he warped his own reflection. He thought he resembled Aphex Twin on the cover of the Richard D. James Album. He felt sexy.
He left the bathroom. He climbed up the wall of the landing and scurried across it to his bedroom. He put on Shadowplay by Joy Division and did twenty push-ups – almost-proper ones. He got up and squeezed his little biceps, then flexed his tiny pecs in time to the music for a few seconds, doing so with a serious facial expression.
He sprayed Lynx Africa under his arms and took out his Ben Sherman shirt that cost his dad thirty five pounds, which he knew because his dad had reminded him of it more than once.
Ed wished that he didn’t have to wear this Ben Sherman shirt again. Wished that he didn’t have just the one Ben Sherman shirt, because, he thought, Murphy and Kev are going to take the piss out of me, as usual, for wearing the same Ben Sherman shirt I wear every weekend.
Ed’s spirit was not broken, however, since he owned a decent duffel coat that he probably wouldn’t want to take off given the time of year; thus, he thought, I might actually evade the ritual abuse tonight.
In fact, Ed felt good. He was literally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and he felt like he was going to have a successful night.
He felt…capable, or something.
*
He stuck his head round the door of the living room. His dad was sitting in the dark watching something utterly shit.
“Going to Kev’s,” he said.
“I don’t want you out there walking the streets tonight,” his dad replied, still looking at the television.
“You can phone Kev’s mum if you don’t believe me.”
His dad ignored him and sipped his beer.
Ed left.
Ed was not going to Kev’s house.
He was meeting Murphy and Kev next to the post office and from there they were going to Levan Strice woods, behind the library, to get a little drunk and maybe to take acid if Murphy was able to get some.
Ed pulled out the packet of cigarettes he’d nicked from his dad’s duty-free stash. He slid one out and smoked it, feeling good walking through his neighbourhood, past his old primary school, past his old scout hut, past Wigmore Park where he used to have tennis lessons before his mum died.
He got to the post office and Murphy and Kev were already there.
They bumped paws by way of greeting and Ed offered them cigarettes, which they each duly accepted.
Murphy was grinning. “I managed to get some stuff from Jay.”
This meant it would be good stuff. Stuff from Jay always was.
“Sick,” said Kev, lighting his cigarette.
“Ed, did you complete your mission?” said Murphy.
Ed nodded and confirmed that he’d got up early that morning and stolen a crate of
French beers from his dad’s garage, then gone and buried them among some bushes right by the entrance to Levan Strice.
“And what about you, Kevin?” said Murphy.
“What about me?” said Kev.
“You were supposed to bring torches.”
Kev looked sheepish and shrugged.
“Typical,” said Murphy, shaking his head. He rubbed his hands. “Well alright then, what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
They went to dig up the beers and then set foot in the woods. They made Kev carry the crate because he’d forgotten the torches. Before long they could hear voices coming from deeper within. Despite being only seven thirty it had been dark for a couple of hours. They couldn’t see anything at all past the first line of trees in front of them.
The voices sounded aggressive to Ed, so he suggested they go somewhere else. He wanted a chilled evening, no hassle.
“Chances are they’re from the Parkwood Lot and will wanna fight us and take our shit,” he said.
Murphy and Kev agreed.
Murphy looked at the crate of beers that Kev was resting a foot on. “Those beers aren’t gonna carry themselves, Kevin.”
Kev groaned and lifted them up, and the group exited the way they came in. Back atthe entrance to the woods Ed paused to look at the National Trust sign, which had information about the flora and fauna of Levan Strice.
Ed focused on the words ‘Levan Strice’, which were engraved along the top of the sign’s wooden frame. He whispered them to himself a couple of times.
It gave him a weird feeling to do that, as though the words were from an evil invocation and just mouthing them would cause bad things to happen to him.
Ed used ‘willpower’ to banish this feeling from himself.
The consensus was to go to Darland Banks instead.
It was no Levan Strice, but it would still be a good spot to drop the acid.
It was always a little bit spooky there after dark, and once they were all coming down they could lie back and look at the night sky, maybe even sleep under the stars if they could handle the cold.
To get there they had to walk down the Love Tunnel, the long, steep underpass that takes you from the suburb of Wigmore to the suburb of Hempstead.
Its walls were almost entirely covered with graffiti, some of which Murphy, Kev and Ed had contributed to over the years.
They tried to spot their work as they went.
Ed couldn’t see any of his stuff, but Murphy found a piece of his own, one of the first he ever did: a giant cartoon skull wearing a Rastafarian hat and smoking a comically massive joint. Kev wasn’t sure but thought he might have done this illegible scrawl of purple and green bubble writing, though he was 100% certain about the multicoloured acorn below it.
Murphy motioned for Ed and Kev to join him. They huddled in a group and decided to drop the acid then so that it would kick in by the time they got to Darland Banks.
Murphy pulled out the little packet and handed out a tab to everyone. Each tab had a picture of Barack Obama on it and the word HOPE. They stuck the tabs under their tongues, grinned at each other, then resumed searching for their respective artworks.
It kicked in before they got anywhere near Darland Banks.
“Jay you beautiful bastard, you’ve outdone yourself,” said Murphy.
Kev started giggling.
Ed went to say something but got distracted by a particular section of the wall, where the graffiti had become rhapsodic before his eyes. He was staring at some sort of gang tag, which was surrounded by other gang tags, as well as declarations of love (‘AW 4 DT 4EVA’, etc) and an assortment of catchphrases and aphoristic statements of varying degrees of wittiness and profundity, including, ‘Darren woz ere’ and, ‘Whoever dies with the most stuff wins’. There was a rendering of Maggie Simpson with the caption ‘Maggie Simpson sucks’, and a motivational imperative sentence, ‘Do it anyway’, which Ed took as a sign of validation for the present moment and, by extension, his entire life. His paws were tingling. He started to feel a strong sense of synchronicity, like everything was connected and that everything was beautiful and sad, even the grey tarmac path beneath his paws, even the stale piss smell of the Love Tunnel, even the wall writings, which had all become sort of 3-D and floaty and were vibrating at the edges. Ed felt noticeably warmer, like his blood was heating up.
The fur along his spine stood on end, making him shiver despite the warmth he was feeling.
Every colour in every piece of graffiti had become luminous and intense, and the 3-D writing started to fly past Ed’s head, each letter peeling off the wall like a sticker and shooting behind him. Out of nowhere he had this dummkopf moment as he realised that there’s no such thing as 2-D, because you can’t have just two dimensions on their own; their existence is predicated on the third dimension’s existence; all three are interdependent and can only exist if all of them exist simultaneously; the idea that they can be separated is an illusion created by language. He was having this intense epiphany, seemingly understanding the Zen koan that his Religious Studies teacher had shared with the class that week about the sound of one hand clapping, because it strongly linked to what he was thinking about the impossibility of having only two dimensions without the third: We all know the sound of three dimensions clapping, but what is the sound of two dimensions clapping?
And then for some reason he started to think of his mum, and the tone of Ed’s experience suddenly shifted. The graffiti that had remained attached to the wall was becoming more and more animated: the colours were saturating to a sickly, unbearable degree; all the cartoons were moving about in a jerky, slightly menacing stop-motion way, making him feel somewhat nauseous and uneasy. He tried to get back to the gentle euphoria he’d been feeling just prior. He turned to look at Murphy and Kev. Kev was still giggling, and so was Murphy now, and this should have helped, but Ed couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling. He felt the fur on his cheeks. It was wet because he’d been crying.
They continued through the tunnel, slowly, feeling the walls as they went, exploring the augmented haptics the drug was giving them, the new textures now unlocked, and were about halfway down when Ed noticed some figures at the bottom end, though he couldn’t make out their faces. There were perhaps three or four of them, but before he was able to count them to make sure, the tunnel warped and curved and swirled like a vortex for a few seconds and Ed had to steady himself against a wall. He nearly vomited but didn’t. He was ahead of Murphy and Kev and turned to locate them, finding that they were quite a few metres behind him because they’d stopped walking. They were standing still. There were some figures forming a circle around them and one of them had relieved Kev of the crate of beers and was handing bottles out to his associates. There were several more figures creeping along the walls, edging closer. He could see yet more figures up at the top entrance, leaking into the tunnel from outside. He looked back the other way: the first figures he’d seen had moved up to the middle, impossibly quickly it seemed, and they were approaching him, and all of a sudden were right there with him, in his space, too close.
One of the figures – the leader, he supposed – started talking to Ed, but it sounded to Ed as though the figure was underwater. Ed also felt like his vision wasn’t focused properly because it seemed like this figure didn’t really have a face, just blank, grey fur stretched from his little forehead down to his chin with some minor contours: small bumps which were cheekbones and shallow recesses where eyes should have been. Ed tried hard to focus his sight but he still couldn’t make out this figure’s face, and when he looked at the other figures who were with the leader none of them had faces either – just the blank fur. The leader pressed his forehead against Ed’s, which pushed Ed backwards a little, and then he shoved Ed hard in the chest which forced an involuntary squeak out of him and caused him to fall to the floor, which seemed to absorb the shock of his landing like foam.
Ed was then in the foetal position, his paws covering his face and his tail flat and covering most of his body, receiving kicks to his legs, his arms and his ribs. He was aware that he should have been feeling pain, but wasn’t. The kicking abruptly stopped and the underwater voice of the leader moved away from him, behind him, towards Murphy and Kev. Ed uncurled himself and lifted his head, peeking through his tail to see what was happening. Kev was on the floor being kicked, there were broken beer bottles around him, and Murphy was being held by the throat against a wall of the tunnel. Ed couldn’t hear anything clearly; any sounds he was picking up were heavily muted and incomprehensible, but he could see that Murphy was highly distressed and that he’d pissed himself. The runnel of urine was leaking out from his trouser leg and rilling like oil in Ed’s direction. Maybe the figures were laughing at this but Ed couldn’t properly tell.
Ed tried to say something but it was as though the power of speech had been taken from him. He could feel his vocal cords vibrating but this wasn’t translating into sound, so he merely looked on helplessly. Murphy was temporarily released and left to stand where he was for a moment. Then one of the figures gestured to another figure to come forward. This figure collared Murphy and led him a little further up the tunnel. He made him get down on all-fours. The whole group seemed to be interested in Murphy right then and they huddled around him, some of them closing in from the ceiling above, others dropping from the walls to get closer. The figure who’d collared Murphy stood behind him and pretended to sodomise him, then he stood up, raised a foot and stomped on Murphy’s back, which shunted him to the floor onto his stomach and splayed his front legs.
The figure now fell upon Murphy and maniacally tore at Murphy’s trousers, managing to yank them down and off his legs in three or four forceful tugs. He ripped Murphy’s boxer shorts off and swung them around above his head with one hand like a lasso, then discarded them. The figure got up and dropped his own trousers and underwear to his ankles. The figure pissed all over Murphy, matting his fur and causing steam to rise from his back. Ed watched some of the urine bounce off Murphy’s body in slow-motion and splash on the floor either side of him. Murphy had his eyes closed and emitted little squeaks and broken sobs throughout.
The figure shook off any drips and pulled his trousers up. He and a small group took turns to kick Murphy for a few seconds, then they returned to Kev, whose body was completely limp – weirdly so – while another group came for Ed, who lost his front teeth in the frenzy that followed. When they were finished Ed found there was something seriously wrong with his front right paw, which was throbbing with pain.
Upon inspection he saw a shard of bone poking through redded fur.
Shouting.
Sounds were still distorted for Ed, but less so than before, and he could pick out a man’s voice, and a woman’s, both familiar.
The shouting seemed to be enough to scare the figures off. They rapidly swarmed away, some of them along the walls, others via the ceiling or along the ground, chittering down the Love Tunnel and out of it, out of sight, leaving each of the three squirrels motionless on the floor, stunned, in shock. The shouting stopped and there was mostly silence, with only an occasional, incidental sound from far away, like a car, or the cry of a nocturnal animal, which to Ed, sitting very still, seemed like non-sequiturs. And he couldn’t really discern whether the sounds were coming from the top or bottom of the Love Tunnel, which confused him, and then his own confusion itself began to confuse him.
Ed eventually crawled towards Murphy and Kev to see if they were ok, taking care to protect his broken paw. Murphy was pulling his trousers up, quietly crying.
Ed crawled closer to Kev’s supine body. Kev wasn’t moving and had his eyes closed.
Ed checked for a pulse under Kev’s chin. Relieved to feel one, he rested his head on Kev’s stomach.
Then there were rapid footsteps, and he realised that the man’s voice had belonged to his father, and the woman’s to Kev’s mum.
Kev’s mum attended to Kev, sitting him up and hugging him, rubbing his back, touching his face, saying, “Darling, darling, my poor darling.” Kev was awake now. A bit dazed-looking, but Ed could see that he was going to be okay.
Ed’s dad helped Ed to stand up. He examined his broken paw. “You bloody idiot, I told you I didn’t want you walking the streets.”
Ed was at the peak of his trip now, and his dad’s face was huge, then small, then huge again, and it was rapidly shape-shifting, taking on all sorts of forms, which might have been alarming except that a palpable benevolence was radiating from him in the form of a pinkish-orange aura. His dad hugged him and Ed buried his face into his shoulder and wept.
The ordeal was over.
Ed’s dad released him. “Let’s get you down to A&E.”
He went over to the others and spoke to Kev’s mum for a bit.
With his good hand Ed brushed off his duffel coat and adjusted the collar of his Ben Sherman shirt.
He looked over to a heavily graffitied part of the tunnel wall, and something caught his eye. He could see the words ‘Levan Strice’ drawn in simple block lettering, isolated from the other graffiti by an enclosing bubble, each letter about a foot tall with a silver border. He cocked his head in disbelief. He couldn’t focus on anything else, just those two words, which he began to whisper to himself, just as he had earlier in the evening. He said them again, a little louder this time, then louder still, increasing the volume until he was shouting the words, over and over, finally screaming them, his voice occasionally cracking with the exertion:
‘Levan Strice!
‘Levan Strice!
‘Levan Strice!
‘Levan Strice!’
David Cramer Smith is a Medway writer who has since moved to Australia.
Also by David Cramer Smith…
Jamie Sinclair is a bipolar ex-chav, an impostor knocking at the door of the middle class. On a whim he decides to leave his toxic relationship and move back to his parents’ house in Medway, to see if his hometown can fix him.
Medway: A Novel by David Cramer Smith is available from our Medwayish store.
Finally, we have a preview of a new Medway-inspired, steampunk graphic novel from Nadia Perrotta about a cyborg time traveller.
Echoes of Steel
by Nadia Perrotta
Nadia Perrotta is a Medway-based multimedia artist.
Be seeing you.