The Speyside Battery

Die schweigsame Frau read the banner flapping madly wildly from the flagstaff pole. Overhead, tailed to the rudder of a silver gold plane the Braslia Distrito Federal Bank heralded the arrival of lower interest rates, the pennant splashing in the blue watery sky. A Rapa das Bestas’ shout the men dressed in boxwood shorts, the horses gibbeted to the stay-post neighing. Not far, brattled to the backdrop of the sky, the congregants pined for home, Woodchurch parish laying 7 miles from Ashford and 5 miles from the Cinque Ports, Tenterden. Not far, overlooking the Speyside Battery, the men of Guadalajara Jalisco draw the cover of night over the dead body of their friend. Over his gravestone was written ‘Biganos Aquitaine, Bombay Maharashtra, Milton Keynes, Milton Keynes the poor man never having made it past his back door’. The men kicked bootfuls of dirt onto his grave, caviling over who would punt the lid and say ‘The Man’s Dead, By God’. The man in the hat found the dead man too haughty for his liking, his jawbone mulish, his demeanor peevish and uncorrectable. When he was alive the man in the hat had avoided the dead man, crossing over the blacktop when he espied him coming turtle-like down the sideways, scuttling into the alleyway, or rerouting his trajectory, the day being ruined by a man in whom he had no practical interest.