Story

Winnie the Pooh meets William Blake, with apologies to Blake and A. A. Milne

Things not looking great for the Conservatives. But is anyone measuring public confidence in creative swearing? https://t.co/2LYC8pT1Ma

— Phil Cain (@philcaincom) January 24, 2024

This is fiction written in an hour with the Sunday Writers’ Club at an exhibition of work by abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell at Vienna’s Kunstforum with the prompt. “While wandering the gallery you notice another visitor who is crying. They stand, transfixed, staring at a painting as the tears stream down their cheeks. You approach this person to make sure they’re OK.”

It seemed wrong to intrude on what was clearly a painful and private moment when I first passed. But she was still there as I was about to leave the gallery twenty minutes later, alone, rooted to the spot, visibly upset.
It seemed wrong not to at least ask if she was okay. That plus she was somewhat attractive. I did my best to approach the painting and stand beside her, as if by accident. She turned to me sharply, as if to ask what I was doing standing there. I was clearly not very convincing.
“A very moving picture. Very moving indeed,” I said solemnly.
“Moving? What the fuck do you mean? It’s not moving anywhere, it’s a fucking painting.”
Her voice did not match my expectations. How could someone so rough hewn be so affected by a painting. It must be a working class pretence she had adopted at art school and not shaken off.
“I-I mean, you know, moving, it’s emotionally affecting, it stirs the feelings, moving in that sense,” I warmed to my theme. “Is the viewer not compelled to feel a deep pang of sadness for the heroic patch of brown so vainly fighting against the prevailing blackness? Are there not echoes of the dark chaos engulfing the ochre earth of the Iberian peninsula only two decades before?”
“Oh, right, yeah. That kind of moving. I had never really thought of it like that,” she said, angling her head to try to see what I was talking about.
“You didn’t? How can you say that when you’ve been observing the painting for so long, weeping?”
“Oh, yeah, that. That’s a bit, well, complicated. I work in the caff here and can’t be seen talking to customers. But buy me a coffee round the corner in ten minutes and I’ll tell you.”
This meeting seemed unlikely to be the exchange of artistic sensibilities I had been in search of, but I agreed.
She told me that years ago her mother had given her an old painting on board. It was a picture of a cottage surrounded by trees with a woman picking apples in the sunshine. Two children in white smocks were playing with a wooden toy in the long grass.
Her granddad, Sid, had picked it up at a flea market. Then her mum had passed it on to her as a parting gift when she first left home to start work in a London department store.
“Here you are, love. This’ll keep you feeling nice and snug in your new place,” her mum had said. She did her best to look grateful, but she hated it. It was so twee and saccharine, not at all her thing.
“What the fuck does a 20-year-old do with an old painting? At that age you’ve not got a clue.”
Still, she had packed it into the back of the car with her pots and pans, to please her mum.
Then her mum phoned to say she had seen a picture just the same on one of the antiques programmes. It had gone for a little short of £50,000. And she was right, it did look just the same. On her way to work in the gallery cafe she had seen Iberia No 2.
It reminded her of the night years ago when she and her flatmates had taken a spatula and white spirit to the picture. Laughing they had scraped away the thick layers of cracked and flaky paint. There was just a bare board where once there was a country cottage, a woman and two little children. ■

This is fiction.

Watching the little people milling like ants below his snugly-slippered feet brought the reassuringly delicious combination of pity and scorn. “A certainty in an uncertain world,” mouthed the serial entrepreneur Ken Midas, tucking his signature long grey hair behind his ears as he prepared for his daily trance.

The scurrying, bug-like people below were not like him and never would be. He was the inventor of the revolutionary silent fridge. He alone discovered a novel way to suspend an electric pump in a way which almost completely eliminated vibration, so minimising ambient noise. Those little people had not. Hardly any of them even had the first idea about the way vibrational noise radiates into the environment from poorly suspended pumping devices.

Not only that but he, not they, had for 43 years successfully defended the patent on devices using his revolutionary method. He had beaten every challenger. Not for nothing was it that he was called “the undisputed champion of the world defending his intellectual property” by the Wall Street Journal. None of the little people below, who barely even looked like proper people from the 27th floor, had been described as the undisputed champion of anything, let alone in defending intellectual property. Doing it was really hard, nobody could deny that, not if they knew what they were talking about.

Nobody to the horizon he could see stretching away as he looked over the city skyline could take any of his achievements away from him. Law prohibited it and quite right too. They could not legally take away the billions of dollars, sterling, yuan and yen in bank accounts across the globe, managed by a well-drilled legion of tax accountants. As a second line of defence he had assembled lobbyists, political aids and spokespeople to defend the fundamental principle that every penny should be his and his alone.

 He closed his eyes now, standing, raising his arms to shoulder level palms up, belly breathing, as his life coach Angelo had shown him. He pictured himself as first as a rocket, then blasting off, rising, slowly, accelerating fast, pushing hard through the vibration propagating atmosphere, becoming viscous at this speed, sticky, holding him back. And then into clear, freedom of weightless orbit, beyond the selfish grasp of gravity, floating free, gazing down on his world. This is where Angelo was dead wrong, and his wife, about the need to ground himself, which was why they both had to go. Hanging there, free, alone, and taken into orbit thanks to his massive achievement.

He wavered for a second in the excitement and had to peep through his eyelids to steady himself, before closing them again, rocking his head back. Nobody could threaten the power and satisfaction he had from control of his empire, this army, this treasury of intellect, the backup of billions, together with the recognition and respect that went with it. He had had his ups and downs, for sure, but invention had meant refrigerators–and heat transfer devices in general– had entered a new era, opening massive new commercial opportunities. And with these commercial opportunities had blossomed something little short of a social revolution.

Thanks to him people were no longer afraid to have fridges in more intimate spaces, disrupting their sleep or making an annoying rattling sound while they watched a movie or meditated, like he was now. People now used endless variants of his patented Phrygia device. Some used them even to near-silently cool their bed on hot days. Phrygias were built into the arms of sofas and cars, for cooling drinks and ice creams for a non-stop sensory barrage of chilled food and beverage items.

The industry had found the public unexpectedly receptive to ice-cold smoothies or a protein shake in bed. Midas Research, part of the marketing department, encouraged this habit by commissioning research to show that cold nutrition taken lying down helped reduce anxiety, boost mood and potentially improved cardiac function. It got little traction in the scientific community, but since when did they change anything? Success in the real world comes from telling stories people want to hear, not from getting bogged down in facts and figures. It was no coincidence that the last few James Bonds impressed their conquests by pulling chilled food and beverages from under the bedcovers. That was how you changed the world.

The wall behind the standing, swaying Ken Midas contained a gallery of press cuttings, all neatly preserved behind glass. His eye caught the headlines “Meeting Ken Midas, the king of cool”, “More than a morning smoothie”. The centrepiece of all of them was one from the mid-2020s in bed with one of his early Phrygia fridges.  The photoshoot had coincided with the well-publicised breakdown of his marriage during an unusually spectacular midlife crisis.  His above average looks and far better than average bank account were enough for a half-way done beano of epic proportions. It became a well-worn joke that Ken Midas would sleep with more or less anything including household appliances.*

The refrigeration breakthrough that first made him rich was thirty years ago now but it remained the centrepiece. He never matched it, despite having far greater resources. The EatMan, a pocket toaster and microwave, fell victim to a class action lawsuit brought by those who had suffered pocket fires in which Midas Inc settled for damages of $1.7bn. He had been quoted as saying that the reason for the problems was “not the fault of the device but the fucking idiots using them”, he had said in and interview with the Financial Times. “It’s not the EatMan that’s the problem, but the fact that the people using them are completely stupid,” he said during an interview with Newsweek. The company ultimately had to recall the entire production run of 190,000 EatMans. 

Thoughts of this episode buzzed through his head forcing him to lower his now aching arms, moving back to his large empty desk. The EatMan was the disaster which ultimately brought him to this fabulous office of the President Emeritus. The Midas share price had plummeted and his statements had only compounded the problem. Nothing was clearer than that customers–some singed–were unhappy being called stupid by a man famous for sleeping with a refrigerator. The popular outcry led by those burnt by the EatMan led the board to tell him the only way to save the company, and his fortune, was for him to step aside. 

Midas sank into his high-backed office chair covered in supple white leather all kept at optimum sitting temperature by Phrygia. He pressed a button on the desk, “I am not taking calls,” he said. He lowered himself into his heat controlled supple leather sanctuary to think of a follow up, while picturing all the people beetling aimlessly below him.

“Idiots,” he thought, closing his eyes. ■

*This joke was first told by a little-known stand-up called Brian Murray in the Frog and Fly pub in Luton, but statistics suggest it has since been told by around 54% of the world’s population.