The wind howls around the hospital towers. I squint through the rain, and for a moment the birds overhead look like tiny witches on broomsticks, swooping unpredictably in all directions.
‘Meadowside Child and Adolescent Mental Health Unit,’ a sign announces. Like everything else up here, it is wonky, madness seeping into any semblance of order.
I shudder. I need to get Emily out of here.
Continue reading
Sitting at his desk Father Time, opening his journal, gave vent to his frustration. Why, oh why, couldn’t people be happy with their lives? Time after time they try to hold back time, or pelt through, as in a race against it.
Mothers wanting their babies to arrive quickly; at months old they wanted them to be walking and talking, and to know what ails them at three in the morning. And once in school wanting them to little again, holding back the natural rhythm of time.
Continue reading
The quaint and characteristic muddle of smells has stayed with me since the earliest of days. I can look back down the years and remember visits to great aunt Violet (my grandmother’s sister): first as duty visits with my mother and then more eager and self-willed visits on my own. I can well recall her face and details of the tiny cottage and surrounding garden, but it is the smells stay in my memory.
Each beam and hook and cupboard handle in the kitchen held drying herbs and flowers. These were later crumbled into jars and packets and used in cooking or medicinal remedies. Herbs were kept perky in jars of water, ready to be freshly chopped into oils, alcohols or distilled into tinctures. Soaps and lotions, vinegars and essential oils filled cupboards and shelves. Sometimes Violet sold her wares to local shops, and she also had postal enquiries and word-of -mouth recommendations.
Continue reading
Alice arrived late for the third time that week. Just my luck, she thought, as she saw the boss talking to the receptionist. She saw him glance at his watch, but to her surprise, he seemed to ignore her. She hurried on up to the office.
Dan heard the door opening and automatically looked at his watch and then towards the door. Noticing it was the new girl, a blush rose up. He quickly lowered his glance and continued his previous conversation.
The office was in pandemonium as everything was behind schedule for the Children’s Christmas Party. Alice redeemed herself by offering to stay late and help out with the colouring sheets packs.
Everything had to be right for tomorrow. It was the first year that Dan had been in charge since his Dad retired, he couldn’t let the firm down. He worked later than usual to make sure that there was nothing that could go wrong.
Alice would have been in tears if her anger hadn’t been so focussed on the Gestetner Duplicator. She swore at it as it gobbled up yet another one of the copies into its internal workings. It was all she could do to stop herself kicking the damn thing.
Continue reading
After the speeches, people drifted away from the demonstration, some still wearing outfits representing the main focus of their complaint.
Having responsibly abandoned their placards, a group of five in search of food and drink settled themselves in the Hog’s Head and placed their orders.
These were veteran activists. They had witnessed mounted police moving through the crowds at the poll tax rebellions; they had collective memories of the ‘not in my name’ protests; they had stood with the miners during the long strike; two could even look back to the anti-apartheid rugby protests in 1969. Between them they had been kettled, abused, arrested and beaten.
Continue reading
Mitzi nudged Helen’s leg, breaking her out of her reverie. Sighing, Helen collected the lead, her coat and the little booties they had bought the previous year to protect her little paws in the icy weather.
The front door opening, a shiver ran down her back as the cold wind hit her. As Helen looked down, Mitzi pulled her out of the door. Everything sparkled, little diamonds shone on trees and hedgerows, houses were all lit up. There were Christmas trees in windows, and families gathered together playing games, and laughing together.
Helen took their usual walk through the village, stopping to sit a moment on their usual bench. The pond glistened and ducks, all warm in their nest, murmured to each other. Mitzi started pulling, jumping excitedly, looking across Hubert who was sat there.
Continue reading
‘It’s day three hundred and sixty of the kids singing and the band playing, and I’m starting to wish it wasn’t Christmas every day,’ I said, my paper hat falling down over my eyes. ‘I’d feel rude sending my family home though.’
Sombre nods spread around the circle, everyone at the Christmas Song Support Group feeling my pain.
‘I hear you,’ said Bethan. ‘When the first partridge in a pear tree arrived, I thought, how romantic. But by day six, my neighbour with the bird phobia had called the police. It was the twelve drummers drumming that got me evicted. I didn’t have the heart to tell my true love that it was too much.’
Daniel was the longest-standing member. Every year without fail, he gave away his heart only to have it cruelly given away on Boxing Day. Despite his resolutions to give it to someone special next time, it inevitably happened again.
Continue reading
The orange-acned teenager read part of the letter to me: ‘Fit to go back to work.’
Fit? Twelve months of depression after being passed over for the headship at Ysgol Milton Friedman. That went to a kid with a face on him like a lamb sucking on its mother’s teat. Not to the school’s deputy head, with proven management skills garnered from thirty years teaching. ‘The successful candidate has more energy,’ I was told. Meaning obvious: Phillips, you’re too old at fifty-four.
Shortly after came melancholy and lethargy. The GP prescribed anti-depressants. She was a kid too, fresh out of doctors’ college.
It got worse. My wife, Sandra, left. Told me my moodiness would try the patience of an angel, plus she’d met a nice, younger man. That word was like a knife in my heart. Soon after, an overdose of paracetamol. They pumped out my stomach and I’m in the bin, sectioned. Four blurred weeks.
Continue reading
Michael Noach was lighting a candle on his hanukkiah in the window of his small terrace when he heard a crash and someone crying out. Instinctively, he reached for the phone next to his window but stilled his hand when he heard a second cry, this time clearly coming from the back. He stood still, stroking his beard, pondering his actions. Another yell. He could not ignore a human in pain, so he picked up the torch he kept by the back door and peered outside.
“Is anyone there?”
“Oh shit,” said a voice. He shone the beam in that direction. There, on the ground, was a teenage boy, his foot at an oblique angle to his leg.
“Hold still,” urged Noach as he hurried across the yard, “I’ll help you up.”
“I think I’ve broken it.”
Continue readingAs the children tumbled onto the coach chattering to each other, boys headed to the rear, jostling each other for the best seats. Off on a school trip to a zoo, most had never been before, each wanting to see the large animals they had only seen in books.
Singing all the way hymns and nursery rhymes, what a day it turned out to be. Billy and the boys had to stay with Mr. Jenkins, the headmaster, mouths agog at the size of the bears, and the temple monkeys racing around. Riding on the elephant, pretending to be hunting lions, what great fun; so too taking rides on the camels, for the younger children.
Lunch was on the lawn at the centre of the zoo, then off again to see the lions
Continue reading“I’m not giving up Hope!” Liz screamed into the phone at her ex-husband, before slamming it down.
Floods of tears drenched her face. She slowly lifted herself up off the floor, his words ringing in her ears. “Unfit mother, child neglect, no prospects.” How could he have said those things? He hadn’t had been that interested in Hope when he lived with them, why would he suddenly want custody?
After she had calmed down, she tried to reason it out. He’d never spent much time with them when he was at home. She doubted if he had even had the slightest idea of when Hope’s birthday was. He’d missed the fact that his daughter was besotted with him. It just didn’t make any sense.
Continue readingThe three hopeful finalists sat in the front row, -a young woman wringing her hands, a guy with pronounced musculature escaping a skinny vest and the staid, 50-something, balding Phil. They had been informed the elimination exercise would follow briefing presentations.
Phil surveyed the cavernous, somehow claustrophobic lecture hall. Wood panelled ceiling and walls reminded him of horror films that in an earlier career-phase he had scoured, researching replicable facial expressions to convey being entombed alive.
Work opportunities as a character actor were becoming sporadic; it was the right time to diversify, to move on. The once familiar minimalist sets of The Grand, – a laden bookcase stage right. a chair centre stage, French Doors with greenery and birdsong stage left, were distant memories since the Catastrophe. How he missed the multiple curtain-calls, the whooping and whistling of an appreciative audience, the after-play drinkies with sound and lighting crews, the informal advice sessions to aspiring drama school students! Commercial Crisis Acting had never been on the radar but what could he do? The mortgage had to be paid, and in order of priority, the dog, 3 children and a wife fed and clothed. That ranking was correct. Phil prided himself in being particularly self- aware.
Continue reading
In the olden days, libraries were quiet places policed by tut tutting librarians with long-distance, laser stares. These days Gwen (who is researching images of disability in nineteenth century fiction) is able to create her own biblio-oasis merely by removing her hearing aids and descending to tranquil and solitary pools of silence. It’s a gift, one of few afforded to those with partial hearing.
A similarly gifted woman, Suzanne, sits nearby (researching the interface of technology and the partially hearing, and currently scouring disability studies journals for references). Time for a coffee. Suzanne engages her chunky NHS hearing aids and makes for the exit noticing, en route, the similar artefacts of hearing loss lying idle on Gwen’s table.
A kindred spirit, perhaps? Suzanne gently taps Gwen’s shoulder, points to her own ears and to Gwen’s idle machines. Then the international sign language for ‘fancy a drink?’
Seated behind their large cappuccinos, the topic of deafness is an obvious starter. Both are considered moderately to severely hearing impaired, (although neither embraces the term impaired, preferring the Disability Rights position that it is society that does the disabling and impairing).
Continue reading
The wind hurried through the village as if on its way to somewhere more important. It blew sand over the squatting men and silent women. The lane, where children peeked at the visitors, was of sand. The buildings were of sandstone. The distant mountains seemed to be towers of sand.
A woman holding a baby approached them. Despair was the lonely inhabitant of her eyes, misery the permanent resident in her exhausted face. She might have been any age between fifteen and fifty. She said something to them.
Continue reading
Hope Appleton has a mind of her own. There’s nothing remarkable about that sentence, until I tell you that Hope is a character in the novel I’m writing.
You could say I only have myself to blame. In a way, you’d be right. But in my defence, you should always create well-rounded, authentic characters with clear motivations. I’ve certainly achieved that.
My agent isn’t very sympathetic to my plight. You see, the deadline for delivering this manuscript has been and gone. Twice. If this novel is not on her desk by Monday, my contract, and therefore my career, is over.
Continue reading
Doctor Silas Mills watched from a promontory near the Southern edge of Palmer Land as the last boat docked at Shackleton Port, disgorging its crates. Adjusting his CO2 filtration mask so he could speak clearly, he turned to his family and handed out three small envelopes, one to each of them.
“Keep these safe,” he said, “I’ll let you know when.”
His wife, Tricia, folded hers into the pocket of her raincoat and looked at him with desperate eyes.
“How long?” She reached out an arm to pull her eldest daughter close.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The phytoplankton is all dead. We probably have a few months’ oxygen left. A lot depends on how quickly the seas turn stagnant and start emitting hydrogen sulphide. January maybe.”
“What about the electrolysis project?”
Continue reading
Billy Thomas and gang set out their new mission – their eyes lit up – to catch a spy. Now that was exciting. Billy had twice seen the foreign man who had moved into a house on the edge of the village passing a rolled-up newspaper to a shifty little man. Once he’d seen the shifty man hand him money
A rota was set up. Huw Parry would watch in the morning as his parents went to work early. Billy would watch after school till teatime. Gwyn Griffiths would then take over, as his parents went to the club most nights and his brother let him go where he wanted. Huw Parry had an army uniform they could share to hide in the woods. Gwyn Griffiths borrowed his da’s binoculars to keep watch.
Continue reading
My mission had been to submit my story by the deadline. I was failing fast.
I had to write something. My head was stuffed with a myriad of ideas, but none of them seemed to work. I sighed as I looked at the pile of screwed up papers overflowing the waste bin.
I reread all the other submissions for what seemed like the tenth time. What did they have that mine lacked? Even my analytic powers seemed to have deserted me.
I tried some displacement activities to look for inspiration elsewhere. My e-mails and You Tube displayed the same as when I had looked before. I came up with no fresh ideas for the story.
Continue reading
What struck Julian were the silvered eyebrows half-way down an oblong face. Most people’s eyebrows are a third of the way down. This displacement, together with a high hairline, left a disconcertingly blank expanse of forehead skin, broken only by a stray wisp of hair escaping diagonally from an oiled and groomed coif to gently caress the outer arch of the right brow.
They had met in Drawing Class five years previously. A common love of philately and the search for the missing, presumed stolen, “Inverted Jennies.” -so named because the stamps’ bi-planes had been printed upside-down, -had propelled an initial halting comradeship into friendship, to them sharing a flat together, then more.
Shane was ostensibly the more extrovert. A favourite entertainment for both was him regaling Julian with colourful yarns of adventures with his “alternative” friends; the “Famous Five” he called them. Sometimes, without warning, “You go out and enjoy yourself. Come back any time after 10.30pm.” Shane would say in his appeasing voice, letting Julian know he had to be out that evening and what time he was permitted to return. Shane would shower, apply aftershave, don his grey and pink checked, 3 piece suit, and complete the “look” so carefully cultivated with a fedora. Julian guessed these evening assignations were with the “Famous Five”, either singly or in various combinations. Him meeting any was out of the question. Not permitted.
Continue reading
It isn’t the kind of building you’d notice on Google Maps. A red brick set amidst terraces of red brick. The Mission is a working, sleeves-rolled-up place, somewhat larger than the surrounding houses, but no more ornate. Like many of its type, set in poorer streets across the land, it is loved with a rough, unsentimental familiarity and relied on to do its work.
In past times, the Mission performed its original purpose as a non-denominational meeting- house with both religious and educational aims. Working children were sent to Sunday school there and, after a modest lunch, spent afternoons struggling with reading, writing and adding-up.
Continue reading