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.