Material Collection No. 2
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MATERIAL
Collection No.
Thanks to our writers: A selection of the new talent in
Newcastle
Special thanks to Nick Christie for his Illustrations.
A little hello from us:
Dear all,
We just want to give a big thank you to
everyone who has taken part in our second
issue. We got so much good feedback for our
debut and it is lovely seeing the submissions
keep rolling in.
A big thanks to Nick Christie for taking the
time to do some fantastic illustrations to go
with some of the pieces in this issue. We think
they work really well, if you fancy giving it
a go for one of the collections please get in
touch.
Enough from us, give this collection of local
and contemporary literature a read, you’re
bound to find something you like and then
afterwards pass it on to someone else. We have
limited copies and would really appreciate you
helping us to get these little things read.
Thanks again,
Material.
(4-5) Ass J. Maddison
The Long Count
(6-9) Philip Swann
The Coop
(10-11) Oliver Jeggo
Keep Dumb and Carry On
(13) James Lindsay
Religion Roulette
(!4-16) A Drive and a Stop
(17-19) George Royle
Untitled
(20-21) Craig Tucker
Too Much to Ask
(22-27) Neil Campbell
Hadrian’s Wall
Asa J. Maddison
The long count.
1. crash.
2. Eyes open
3. but not awake.
4. Silhouettes of shapeless shadows
5. menacingly hover over me. Numbers
6. countdown in echoes, with your finger
7. conducting the audience as the shadows sway.
8. Eyes long to close, as the light fades.
9. The roar of the crowd muffled behind cauliflower
lugs.
10. The counting finger stops and mimes the words,
‘You’re out.’
I remember Mrs Collison. Nobody else in the
store could recall serving her though.
One day, she came to the check-out with a
newspaper rolled under her arm and a chicken
held to her chest. Mrs Collison was not the kind
of lady to push a trolley around the floor, nor
was she the kind of lady to sling a basket over
her forearm. No. Mrs Collison managed just with
her two hands and the angles her body.
She lay the chicken on the counter and
handed me the paper. She knew the man on the
front, she eyed the picture but she didn’t say
anything. It was all too horrible to speak of.
‘You know,’ she said fingering her handbag,
‘chickens like that one, they’re dead within
Philip Swann
The Coop
forty-eight days. Just imagine.’
‘Forty-eight, really?’
‘Oh, I’m quite sure yes.’
I looked at the shrink-wrap packaging of
the chicken. Its flesh gave way to my finger-
tips and I couldn’t help but think I had become
a part of its inevitable demise. I flipped the
chicken in my hands but I couldn’t see anything
about how it had been reared, how it had lived
or how it had died. I passed the chicken be-
neath the scanner and slid it into a bag for
Mrs Collison.
‘They go from this size,’ she said, holding
her cupped hands before her, as though she was
collecting water from a tap, ‘to that in seven
weeks. Just imagine.’
I added the price of the newspaper to the
chicken and asked Mrs Collison how she wanted
to pay. She handed over a note and told me not
to bother with the change.
‘And just think of the life they’ll have had
in those seven weeks.’ She gripped the han-
dles of the bag as I pushed it across the
counter. ‘They won’t have seen any sunlight
and they won’t have had room enough to spread
their wings. They will have danced in their
own excrement and sucked water from a rusting
pipe. They will have grown steadily until
they were entirely choked, until the shed was
fit to burst and then,’ she said, leaning and
lowering her voice to a stark whisper, ‘then,
when there is no more growth to be ringed
from their bodies, they’re zapped and cut and
bled-white and plucked while still-twitching
and half-warm.’
With that, Mrs Collison said good day and
turned on her high heels. She clicked from
the store and slid through the slow automatic
doors. She was only slight, a slender lady;
perhaps the doors could not detect her movement.
Anyway, it came as no great surprise the next
morning when I arranged the newspapers. I saw the
headline and the picture and I wasn’t so shocked
to see that Mrs Collison had killed herself, bled
-white in the bathtub and found by her child,
sodden and half-warm.
Ollie Jeggo
Keep Dumb and Carry On
The T.V. crackles
with the voice of
some new speaker.
Words, desperate, tell
All will be fine.
And across from here,
in a distant place,
another dies.
The woman with the bags
hurries by, and
His voice is left
on the wind.
The headlines talk of something
but she’s got enough already,
and she doesn’t want to know.
“OLIVER P. JEGGO studies English Literature and Creative
Writing at Northumbria, and spends most of his time
hunched over his notepad, chain-smoking and muttering to
himself about the general state of society. He enjoys
drinking, and does not enjoy talking in the third person.”
I look at this, and calculate.
Some dark spots
to this place.
Erase the generations,
and lead them to their fates.
Next year it’ll be better.
But still you have to wonder:
How can we go on?
SEE THIS BOX? (Look for a thicker line close to the edge of
the page. Got it? Good.)
We have one identical to this on our front
cover (well done to those who figured that
out) and we want to fill that one with an il-
lustration for each upcoming issue.
If you fancy it send us in a black and white
illustration in the theme of the word
“MATERIAL” or in the overall theme of our
magazine.
THINK INSIDE THE BOX
Can’t draw? Send us in some stories for us to
read, you can type can’t you? GET TO IT!!
SUBMISSIONS of any kind to:
material.newcastle@gmail.com
DEADLINE FOR ISSUE 3: AUGUST 31ST
James Lindsay
Religion Roulette
A smell of Faith is unique.
Bookies and Churches, it’s the same.
The suddenly aged congregation, gripping their
creeds
with gnarled crumpled fists, eyes never leaving
those pearly gates at the three forty-five at
Lucksin Downs.
The horsemen of this apocalypse clear the first
furlong
with Last Hope starting strong; my whispered prayer
begins, an urgent mantra-
“First. First. First.”
In a flash, Judgement.
Most slips fall whilst a bless’d few shuffle to-
wards the altar to collect.
Last Hope lost.
The Drive and The Stop
His door clicks shut first, hers following loud soon
after.
“This is mental.” He says as he messes around
with the radio. He finds nothing, so opts to play the
CD that had been jammed in there now for months. The
CD makes three seconds without jumping.
“Why should I make effort when people don’t
bother doing the same for me?” she says. She straps
her seatbelt around her and the suitcase she has
pressed to her chest.
“I don’t have to take you to the station, I
can just drive you.” He says. The girl considers
this five-minute journey stretching instead into
an hour.
“Just take me to the station.”
He drives on. The girl’s eyes are fixed on
the road blurring past her outside. She should
have been seeing the estate with the women
standing around, wearing clothes too small to
suit the winter months, followed by the road
that winds down through the town to the station.
Instead, they were on the motorway.
“I don’t want you to take me the whole way,
seriously.”
“Ok,” he says. He doesn’t pull off to turn
back. Soon the motorway delves into smaller
roads and then those trail off and all the girl
can see is sand fading out to muddy skies. She
checks her phone for the time. Ten minutes until
the next train.
He pulls up and parks outside the ice cream
parlor he used to take her to when she was
young. The shutters are pulled halfway down and
there’s one light on, but it was muted by the
smudged windows and closed doors. He parks the
car on the double yellow lines and gets out. The
girl doesn’t move.
Ten minutes tick away and the girl sits,
looking anywhere but left at what the man was
doing. The girl checks her watch again and she
pictures the train conductor deciding to skip
checking peoples tickets on the one train she
misses. The man taps on her window with his
elbow, two 99s in his hand.
She exhales hard but opens her door anyway
and follows the man over the road to the empty
beach. The girl’s hands shake against the wool of
her gloves and she clings on to her ice cream.
She waits for him to speak. He never was good
with words.
“Seems like the right time to get here, it’s
like our private beach” She says.
He smiles but says nothing. They stand there
for a time, the girl forgets to check her
constantly buzzing phone and has lost track of
how many trains that have been and gone.
“I got extra raspberry sauce on yours.”
“I know.”
Ice creams gone, the man takes the girl in his
arms and hugs her until she feels her arms
thawing. They go back to the car, huddling close.
He drives her to the station.
The girl stands outside the station and waits
until the car pulls away to light the cigarette
that had been tucked away in her pocket.
Looking through the window to check she wasn’t
too late, the girl catches the sight of her re-
flection and sees the left overs of vanilla ice
cream that have dried on her nose. A smile pulls
on her lips. She wipes at her nose with the hand
she holds her tab in and with the other she takes
out her phone, dials a number she knows off by
heart and presses the green button to call.
George Royle
I am in a bath full of cold water. My eyes
are sore and the tiles of the bathroom shimmer
out of focus. Looking around; everything is
simply what it seems to be, no more no less.
I’m wearing a tuxedo which feels heavy from
the weight of the water. It doesn’t fit me
right and nothing is happening.
That’s something of a lie, something is
happening, I’m just not there to see it. I
can only assume that everything on the other
side of that door is going to plan. From what
I can hear, the people outside are enjoying
themselves. There is music, talk, merriment
and other whathaveyous. Many sounds are blur-
ring into one.
I reach for the pack of cigarettes inside
my inner pocket, and inside there is one left.
One cigarette is sadder than no cigarettes.
Not that it matters, as it is soaking wet.
Where did I put that beer down? Maybe I
finished it, maybe there’s more somewhere
else. I’ll go grab one later. I’m in no rush
and I’m not going to lie to you; I have no in-
tention of moving. I loosen my tie and
“- sponsored by capitalism. if you don't like joy division I
don't like you. definitely not in anyway possible whatsoever
self-indulgent.”
the sides of the bath.
I hear a knock on the door, and I grumble
back in response. I meant for them not to en-
ter, but the door opens and a girl walks in.
She is maybe my age but I find ages hard to
tell these days. She is wearing a white dress
which I am staring at as she closes the door
behind her.
“What are you doing?”
“The fuck’s it look like? I’m having a
bath.”
She is holding a cocktail glass in one
hand, out of which there is a red glow. She
shifts her body weight onto one side, tilting
her head at me. “Well I need to piss, do you
mind moving on?”
“Just go.”
“Why should I be the one to go away?”
“No, you don’t understand. You don’t have
to leave the room, just piss in the toilet.”
“You’re fucking joking.”
She looked annoyed and I shrugged my shoul-
ders. She went on; making noises about me hav-
ing to leave but I tuned out. My tinnitus act-
ed up and I could only hear a high pitched tone
screeching from all sides. The noise numbs my
head. She just keeps talking.
Interrupting her I say, “I ain’t leaving.”
She crosses her arms and looks annoyed.
While talking on and on she had started to
jitter from one side to the other, getting
more desperate. There is a long silence and
then she walks over to the toilet. She puts
her cocktail glass on the floor. I turn my
head away as she raises her dress and pulls
down her underwear.
When she started to piss I leant over the
side of the bath and grabbed the glass.
“Hey!”
“Sorry.” I speak to her in-between drink-
ing. “Toilet-tax.”
She sighs and rubs her face with her
hands, smudging her make-up here and there.
My tinnitus fades away and I can now hear
her pissing next to me. It is the only clear
sound that can be heard. She finishes, wipes
herself, stands up, and looks at me. She does
not know what to do with herself and I pass
her drink back.
“Thanks.”
She does not respond and we look at each
other for an achingly long amount of time.
Craig Tucker
“I am an English Literature and creative writing student
and I've just completed my first year of study. My main
hobbies and interests are football, music, reading and
writing. Poetry is something I have always had trouble
getting my head around but I've realised this year that
just because I have difficulties understanding poetry it
doesn't mean I can't try to write it”
Nick illustrates the Northern skyline for Craig’s poem.
We can hear the chime of the town’s clock
and see the smoke rings fill the air,
I breathe in your stale perfume
as I run my fingers through your hair.
You say thank God for Strawberry Jam, the Full
English
and Yorkshire tea,
that Northern sky you hold so dear
and the things we see, that they’ll never see.
So tell me,
would a kiss be too much to ask?
When you fit me,
like a cold November morning fits the thermos
flask.
Too Much to Ask
Neil Campbell
Hadrian’s Wall
They live in a rented house with single glazed
windows and solid fuel heating. It is on a farm
estate, with a view at the back of pine
plantations and fields of sheep and highland
cattle, and a view at the front of fields of
sheep leading up to the Carlisle to Newcastle
road. The military road runs beyond the next
ridge of hills and above that is Hadrian’s
Wall. Plenmeller is bisected by a road that
runs from Whitfield, on the other side of
Plenmeller Common and down to the A69.
John and Ian are watched by their mother
Sarah as they skip and run down the very edge
of the road past the farm and more rented
houses, beyond RC Containers that covers over
the colliery closed in the 1960’s. They run out
of her sight and down the hill to the A69 and
wait patiently to cross the road. A lorry
passes with POLLOCK SCOTRANS on the side,
followed by a logging truck. Crossing the road
they follow the path of the old Alston to
Haltwhistle branch line and then go over the
fast flowing South Tyne via the Alston Arches
viaduct, criss-crossed by blackbirds as they
run down the gravel path where trains once
headed for Slaggyford and Alston.
In twenty two years of living there Sarah
has never really walked anywhere other than to
Haltwhistle and back. There she does her
shopping, or care work when the boys are at
school, delivering food to pensioners or going
out with them through the town. Often she sits in
a cafe called La Toot to talk with friends over a
coffee, or better still, sit by herself for some
peace and quiet. More often than not she avoids
any kind of introspection. Having devoted herself
for so long to others, she can no longer find a
way back to herself.
She spends a lot of the day in winter
keeping the house warm by attending to the fire,
heaping coal on coal so that the chimney pot
sends out thick smoke all day and the house is
warm enough for her and the boys. Even so, some
mornings they all wake from under their multiple
blankets to see solid sheets of ice covering the
inside of the windows.
It is John, the eldest, who first starts
exploring the farmland and hills by walking
through them much as his father would have done
during his time as a shepherd on the Unthank
Estate. Moles hang on barbed wire fences, put
there by the gamekeeper to mark his tally.
Different lines show different stages of
decomposition, some moles plump with thick fur,
others decayed into muddy string.
As he walks the footpath towards Broomhouse
Common he looks through forests of pine. As the
path takes him higher he can see over towards
Greenhead, turn and see great stretches of
Hadrian’s Wall in the distance, mile castles at
Walltown Crags and Cawfields, Hotbank Farm, and
on towards the fort at Housesteads. When he gets
home he asks his mother to get him a map and
when she does he traces the route with his
finger. At school in Haydon Bridge he gets books
from the library about the Romans.
The family get a Border collie pup from a
farm in Shap and when it is old enough John
begins to take it on walks across Broomhouse
Common. Sarah looks up the hillside from the
kitchen window and watches as Sooty drags John
along in spurts and jerks towards running away
sheep and slightly puzzled highland cattle, some
with horns pointing up, some pointing down, and
all looking slightly comical with their fringes
covering their eyes. John diverts off the path
and out of her sight to stand and gaze across
the lake, sitting with Sooty on a large rock
near the tiny wooden jetty that reaches out into
the water. Blackbirds like those on the branch
line criss-cross them. He hears the calls of
buzzards echoing around the amphitheatre and
watches ducks flying in formation before landing
in a splash that excites Sooty, who jumps and
pisses and barks. A grey heron sits on a rock in
the middle of the lake.
John follows the path up to the common where
pheasant cocks pursue hens and the sunlight
glints on rivulets and burns through the orange
brown of the moorland. The calls of curlews and
lapwings fill the air. Below them the South
Tyne Valley is covered in mist so that only the
ridge of Hadrian’s Wall can be seen above it. A
strip of rainbow light that doesn’t seem part
of a rainbow hangs among the mist as the
morning sun warms a rowan tree on the moorland.
John explores inside a derelict building called
Warren House with Sooty sniffing madly. There
are great gaping holes of sky lit roofing,
skirting boards still there, old stone
fireplaces and a smashed Belfast sink. John
sits in the stone settlement beside the house,
looking at the shapes of stones and thinking
he’ll ask Mrs Moss about them when he gets back
in school. Rabbits run all around them, in and
out of the warrens that give the house its
name. John looks across past Park View and over
towards the hills above Featherstone Rowfoot.
Ian sits on his knees before the TV and
plays a computer game, and looks through the
window as a boy racer from Haltwhistle comes
flying through the hamlet of Plenmeller. They
speed along the road from Whitfield where they
know there are no police cars or speed cameras,
and their tyres can hug the tarmac on tight
bends that if missed will only plunge them into
soft moorland bog.
Ian passes his driving test first time. The
desire for a car leads him to go straight into
work from school. He gets a job as a fork lift
truck driver at RC Containers in Plenmeller. He
saves up his money and later on parks the Golf
in the car park, in sight of reception.
He takes Helen from reception out for a
long drive through Northumberland, up the A68
towards Otterburn and then back down the B road
through Bellingham. Another time he parks on the
crest of the moorland above Plenmeller, sunsets
in the big skies flooding the car with pink as
he takes her in his arms for a kiss.
It is the summer holidays when John sets
off through Plenmeller, past the container plant
and across the Carlisle to Newcastle road, then
up and over the South Tyne via the Alston Arches
viaduct. He walks along Main Street in
Haltwhistle, through the Sainsbury’s car park
and then through a housing estate before passing
an old mill tower and joining up with the path
beside Haltwhistle Burn. He follows the path up
to the military road which he crosses before
bearing right and joining up with the path again
near Cawfields Quarry.
At Milecastle 42 he begins the first of his
climbs up the escarpments of the wall, a wall
that he has read about as being ten feet tall in
in Roman times, but that now had been reduced to
about three or four feet, thanks to many years of
locals taking the stones for house building, road
building, all kinds of building nearby. John looks
over the wall at the broad expanses of cow dotted
moorland on Melkridge Common. He passes Winshields
and Steel Rigg and walks above Crag Lough and
looks over the cliff edge of the Whin Sill, way
down to the white dots of swans on the water. Two
men fish from a rowboat by the shore. He sees the
wind rippling across the lough, sending shivers
through it, in his sweating wonders about swim-
ming. He carries on walking beyond Sycamore Gap,
up steep stone steps and back up onto the wall,
up, along, down, past Hotbank Farm and Cuddy’s
Crags and on to Housesteads Fort.
From Sewingshields he sees Broomlee Lough,
the long stretch of grassland leading to it dotted
with black cattle, white cattle, highland cattle,
tiny china figures with specks of sun on their
backs. The lough itself shimmers and ripples like
Crag Lough but looks different from this distance,
bluer, bigger, more isolated, wild, dating way
before even the wall alongside of which he walks.
The Pennine Way path leads over the wall from
Cuddy’s Crags and off to the left, beyond that
Wark Forest and Kielder Water and the Cheviots. He
walks back along the wall to Cuddy’s Crags and
takes the Pennine Way footpath and carries on
walking until he gets to Bellingham.
SUBMIT TO US:
material.newcastle@gmail.com
Next deadline: August 31st.
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