As I sit with tears flowing down my face a small hand touched my arm, looking up into the face of my six-year old son his eyes troubled.
” Are you sad because daddy has gone to prison?”
What do you say to a boy who has been abused by that man he calls daddy. That man has taken his innocence and his childhood. I nodded.
Continue reading“Wake up Joe, come on, wake up.”
“What’s a matter, what’s going on.”
“Come on Joe, I am sorry to do this but we have had a complaint.”
“What do you mean, what sort of complaint, I ain’t done nothing wrong, let me go back to sleep.”
“Joe, you need to move on, I can’t turn a blind eye anymore.”
“What am I suppose to have done?”
“It’s not about that, I just have to make sure you clear off from this shop front.”
Continue readingThe locals call her “Eighties Kate.” She drives a Ford Cortina, her hair a tangle of permed curls and her clothes the ultimate in retro-chic.
But those who know Kate Archer will know the sad story behind her vintage style. It isn’t a fashion statement. Kate is frozen in time because she has been waiting for her husband to come home for thirty-two years.
Tom Archer has been missing, presumed dead, since he drove out to buy a late-night kebab just as the Great Storm of 1987 was gathering momentum. His car was found wrapped around the railings above the arches of Brighton beach. His body was never recovered.
Continue readingI ran here, pursued by shrieking ghouls. And it took several years to arrive. Even longer to decide to bolt in the first place.
There’s a word – bolt. I bolted doors, windows, cupboard doors and all to keep the ghouls at bay. This became my bolt-hole and later, my place of sanctuary. Later still, well I’ll get to that.
At first I was a live bundle of nerve endings. Afraid, exhausted, relieved, hurt, someone with a past but no discernable future and certainly without a plan. The new GP I signed on with was happy to offer a medicinal route out of my troubles. But I wanted to face the ghouls, not reach for their temporary suppression. I was grateful for sick notes to allow me a couple months off work. ‘Anxiety’ it said on the note, by way of explanation to my employer. Ha, and the rest, I remember thinking.
Continue readingHe placed the offensive thing upon the chopping board, the garbage guzzler was set to shred and the stove, piping hot, should sizzle closed the bleeding wound. He held a butcher’s knife in his hand and was ready to cut away his shame.
“If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.”
Lust. The short coming of all men. Drooling gluttonous, shameless lust, caused by the enemy between their legs. Even the strictest monks still fell victim to the tumour.
Continue reading“Your numbers up” said Gypsy Rose, “if you want to know more you have to cross my palm with silver, or in your case, make it a twenty.” I’d heard enough, I knew exactly what she meant. I collected my belongings and hurried out of the caravan.
How much time did I actually have? Word on the street was that Mac the knife was out and trying to find me. He had had his sentence reduced. That must have been some bribe as it could never have been for good behaviour. I’d left the neighbourhood as soon as he was sent down, now it would seem that it would be best to move again, just in case. Mac was not known for giving up.
Continue readingStrange things started happening in our estate. People started waking up to find envelopes stuffed with money on their doormats with a message ‘ENJOY’.
Ours wasn’t a posh estate but a bog standard council estate, lots people elderly or unemployed families living on the breadline. So any money was a godsend to most of them.
Continue readingMr Smith of the local newsagents sells hundreds of lottery tickets every week. It was on one particular week that he happened to sell to a few big winners one of which was me. I Veronica. I put my ticket in a coat pocket and for a few weeks I forgot about it. On the particular week in question Veronica had so much on that she was rushing everywhere and she had no chance to check her ticket until on the news it said that fifty million had not been claimed. She had no idea that her ticket was the remaining ticket, she could not believe her eyes when she heard about the unclaimed money. The big question was what had she done with the ticket as she had moved it several times since that fateful day? Veronica searched all the usual places she put things but the ticket was not there.
Veronica needed to find the ticket fast and soon or she would not be able to obtain the vast fortune she deserved and it would not be fair on the others who shared her ticket they would want their cut.
Continue readingIt was the day I bought a lottery ticket. It was a problem because I was in a coffee shop and I had no change. So I said to the lady, ‘If I give you a lottery ticket, I will come back with the change.’
She said, ‘If you win, you pay me then.
‘No,’ I said, ‘because if I win, you can have half because I’m paying you for my coffee with a ticket, so you own that for the moment.’ I went and got money, I paid her for the coffee, and I had the ticket back.
She said, ‘So if you win, do I still get half?’
Continue readingThe alarm sounded and Lisa’s hand shot out of bed to silence it. Why, she pondered, did people use the snooze button? An ex had argued about this, at some length, in fact more than one ex. The shower was hot and acoustically kind. Downstairs she made toast and coffee, black, the stronger the better. This was the cause of another disagreement. But, honestly, how was she to know other people didn’t take it that way?
She wrote her Morning Pages. There were now over 100 notebooks stacked on her shelves, containing streams of consciousness. This also seemed to be a major topic for discussion.
Continue readingJason Solomon has few items eliciting appreciation from his even fewer visitors. A single brass menorah and a fine, velvet kippah alongside it on the mantel drew the eye before being wiped from that memory segment marked “fleeting”. Otherwise his apartment was plain, but noticeably clean and, unusually for a recently divorced man in his fifties, exceptionally tidy.
His cleanliness was a tribute to his thirty-eight-year career as a baker in his father’s shop, a man for whom the godliness of cleanliness was visited upon his employees with a wrath of scriptural ferocity.
Continue readingIt was love at first sight at the Tesco checkout. “Magdalena,” her name badge said. As she scanned my ready meal for one, she looked at me with her huge doe-eyes like she was peering into my soul and cleansing it at the same time.
Every Friday night, I passed through her till. It became our little conversation piece.
“It’s Ready-Meal-Friday, yes?” she would say, flashing me a dimpled smile.
It wasn’t until the fourth week that I finally plucked up the courage to ask her out.
To my surprise, she said yes. She walked into my flat after her shift, all wide-eyed and waif-like. We ate two ready meals. That was a year ago today. The rest, as they say, is history.
And now, six little numbers threaten to ruin it all.
“Check my lottery numbers for me? It’s a Roller this week”, she said, on her way out this morning.
“Rollover,” I corrected.
It was only when a text message popped up on my computer just now, from Magdalena to her work-mate, Adam, that I remembered to check for the ticket. “I need a lottery win” she joked in the text, declining an invitation to drinks tonight with her work-mates.
It was the whoop of joy that sent a perplexed and curious Celia trotting down to the living room. Julia was in high spirts, maybe her son had proposed, maybe her daughter was finally pregnant.
But as Julia leapt around the room Celica heard the TV throb with the bombastic hum of the national lottery. She then saw the jackpot numbers flash on screen and spied the grubby ticket clenched in Julia’s fist.
Continue readingHe’d told them no publicity. But the news had leaked out. Leaked? Gushed more like it. Three phone calls this morning. ‘My wife needs a lung transplant and fifty thousand will enable her to…’ ‘Our donkey sanctuary desperately wants funding to the tune of…’ ‘Good morning Mr York, I’m calling on behalf of the local women’s refuge and if you can find your way to donating…’
How long before they began calling round? And if he opened the door, how many would put a foot between door and doorstep and craftily intrude into the house, one pace at a time along the hall, until daily callers were lasering walls and nooks, and shining searchlights into hollows and corners?
Continue reading