It was a tragic sight, comical yet tragic.
As Harry waited by the bus stop, he gazed across the road at the crowd of hunchbacked goblins slumped in battered chairs, looking lost and bewildered.
Men in white coats walked amongst this sea of dithering heads, when one wrinkled nonagenarian cried out for her mummy. That soon set off the rest of those ancients, as they all wailed in incoherent distress.
God, it was a sin to keep them alive.
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Him
The waiting is the worst thing.
Worse than police officers knocking on your door while you’re having dinner with your wife, informing you as the steak in your stomach liquefies, that you’ve been accused of rape. Worse, even, than the look in your wife’s eyes when you admit that, yes, you slept with someone, but it meant nothing.
Worse than protesting your innocence to a bunch of strangers, like that stuck up old woman with the pearls. Her lips curled into a sneer when I called that bitch out for what she is. When I said she’d been pestering me all night in a slutty outfit, then jumped into my taxi uninvited and took me back to her place. When I described her saying she loved me afterwards, and going hysterical when I said I’m married.
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The day that Sergei became a soldier, Ivan felt the same fierce foreboding that he’d felt the year before when he watched his brother hurtling towards what looked like certain death.
Ivan remembered a snowstorm so heavy and ferocious that all that could be seen was a blinding sheet of white. During the whiteout the two boys spent time in the basement of their building cobbling together a few pieces of old wood to make a rickety toboggan. When they could finally go out, they’d carried it along a path flanked by piles of gleaming snow to a slope nearby. Ivan rode first, screaming with laughter at the freezing air slapping his cheeks as he careered downwards. Sergei did the second run, but the flimsy cart shattered halfway. Ivan watched as his brother was tossed in the air and catapulted to the bottom. Fear driving him, he ploughed frantically through waist high drifts to get to Sergei. By the time he got there Sergei was already standing up and brushing snow from his clothing. He shrugged away Ivan’s concern. ‘Nothing has happened. Wait before fearing the worst.’
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Dirty needles, paper cups and cigarette buts lie strewn across the cold concrete floor. The pungent stench of urine hangs heavy in the air. Nausea rises and I quickly move away. Tramping the streets in search of a place to rest my weary body, I settle inside a doorway for an hour or so on the edge of a seedy street with many empty buildings. I sit alone inside my well-used grubby sleeping bag and wait, waiting for a kind stranger to spare me a little change for a hot cuppa. I stare vacantly into space with nothing to occupy my mind. A few people scurry by occasionally throwing the odd penny or two onto the surface of the bag and I thank them for their kindness in a gruff voice. Strong feelings of loneliness combined with tiredness and fatigue weigh heavy. I am hoping that tomorrow might be different. Tired of the daily fight for survival, I begin to wonder if there’s any hope. I soon get moved on by the police. “You can’t stay here. You’ll have to move on”. I’ve become desensitised to this sort of treatment.
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I’m standing on the corner of East 125th and Lexington, just as I did all those years ago. It’s still a shithole. There are too many people, streaming ant-like from the Metro, where the 4, 5 and 6 lines rumble in from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There’s no glamour here, just the press of humanity in its pointless pursuit of gratification. Each lump of flesh dotted on the broken pavements scurrying to unknown nirvanas, what’s left of their minds calculating, planning, seeking – all hidden behind frozen masks of hate. They don’t like what they are. They don’t like what they do, or say, or the music they listen to, or the food they eat, or the beer they drink. It’s all senseless.
Continue readingA miracle; no other way to describe it. After the washing-up of Sunday lunch, she and Freddie had either taken a left out of the front gate and walked towards Mam’s parents, or turned right over the railway bridge to Dad’s. Attempted recall techniques had included a retracing on Google Maps of as much of the route as could be remembered by a failing 90 year old brain and cajoling her granddaughter to drive her on their weekly car trip along every exit of every roundabout in the town. Pris was giving up hope. There were over a hundred roundabouts and at least five hundred possible exits. Some she recognized; some not. Road realignments, estate clearances and the ripple-out expansion of shopping centres, had remodelled the once familiar. Every now and then something – the sight of an old industrial chimney, a stretch of stone wall, the metallic nose of rusting industrial archaeology blasting through the car’s air vents – promised to tug a distant memory chime, only to muffle, return into the unrecognisable and remain silent. Did she have 10 years?
Continue reading“Fantastic imagination your kid’s got,” the emergency plumber said. “Reminds me of my two when they were ‘is age. Always makin’ things up. Really convincin’ too, told our vicar that the people next door was wanted by the coppers! That took some explainin’, I tell you…”
I smiled, mostly to hide the grimace at the amount it had cost to get him out on a Sunday morning.
Continue readingJack was woken up by the sound of his mobile’s bleep. Bleary eyed he raised himself off the bed. His mother’s voice message jolted him awake.
‘Jack love, I know its early but I thought I’d better let you know, we’re coming home a day early, problem with airline strikes tomorrow. Just giving you the heads up. Put the hoover over will you. Bye love.’
Continue readingThey say curiosity killed the cat, well my curiosity is well and truly dead. Here I am standing in a multi storey car park looking at a patch of wall with an orange stain on. The whole place stinks of human waste, petrol fumes and damp .What brought me here you may well ask.
Having lived a comfortable life with my grandparents, I quickly learned not to ask about my real parents. All they ever said that was they were dead to them. Years passed and, as with all things, the grandparents passed away. Now I was the owner of the house and with sufficient money to keep me in comfort, I set about making the place my own.
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Reticent is a good word to sum them both up. Not shy, not shy at all, yet in each you could sense a certain unwillingness to reveal more personal information than necessary.
When the pair, Ellie and James, arranged a meal out in a smart Italian restaurant, it was cause for some mirth and speculation amongst their small circle of friends.
‘He’s bound to slurp his spaghetti and get it all down his front,’ someone suggested.
And this wasn’t an outlandish idea, because James was well known to be rather clumsy.
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“Go into business with your twin,” they said. “It’ll be fun,” they said.
If you call sweating in a café, cleaning up after customers while your twin sister’s gallivanting overseas in pursuit of new teas and coffees to sell, “fun,” then they were right.
I sigh. Where to start with this clean-up operation? I watch the stain spread across the pale wood floor, seeping into the grain. It was her idea to get wooden floors, of course. Wood the colour of her platinum blonde hair that she insists on bleaching to look as different from me as possible. “Mousey,” she calls our natural hair colour. “Classy,” I always reply.
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Cold seeped into her limbs as the breath from her sobs erupted in clouds of vapour curling under her hanging head. She wasn’t sure if she could take any more, but going back meant facing him. An icicle stabbed through her.
“You okay, chick?” A woman’s voice. Jian looked up. Standing opposite the bench on which she sat was a tall white woman. She seemed to be made of shadows, all darkness and shifting folds of fabric, except her eyes, which were gas-flame blue. The woman stepped forward into the light cast by the row of takeaway shops on the other side of the low railings surrounding the park. “Hi, I’m Lucy. You’re Jian Zhang and I’m here to help.”
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The cardigan with the paint stain on the elbow that she could never wash off: why had she kept it so long? She remembered touching up the sitting-room door, brush in one hand, Sylvie in the other, when a blob of gloss had attached itself to her sleeve almost as firmly as her baby’s fingers.
The uncomfortable wooden armchair that guests sat on, or rather, hovered above as though it were a large hedgehog. The enormous ghetto-blaster like a plastic-armoured beetle squatting on the windowsill. Rachel’s drum: memories of a small child marching around the sitting room like an infant platoon, noisier than a massed military band. She ought to let all this stuff go.
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It was a national shame. A blot on the pride of the land. The symbol of their strength and unity was ruined.
The wall. Their wall. That grand monument was smeared by the stain.
Allow us to explain, in the City of Derleth there lay a white wall. Five miles long and a thousand feet tall. Impassable, thick, smooth, and clean. It had stood for seven hundred years and might stand until doomsday.
When sunlight radiated off its surface, the wall glowed like very heaven. And the tales of older times spoke of its practical purpose as a brilliant defence. Of how barbarian hordes tried and failed to penetrate this angelic barrier, leaving the city protected and unconquered.
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Pilot Gamma-Tau 453 personal log: birth offset date 4067, relative time +220637.1.
Security code: <redacted>
The Navy’s always had a weird sense of humour, at least that’s what I’ve been told, even going back to the days of seafaring vessels in the Sol system. Lots of in-jokes lost to history, obtuse terminology, and language designed to exclude civilians and make us feel like part of a family, even as we sacrifice our personal humanity for the greater good.
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Michael closed the door of his adoptive parents house for the last time. Now was the time to make his way in the world.
He was to transfer to his firm’s sister company in South Wales. It was a long way from Scotland but he felt that he needed his own space.
As far as he was aware, he had never been to Wales before, but he felt that he had come home. He knew that he was adopted when he was three. His birth parents had been killed in a car crash, which he had survived, but had been left with both physical and mental scarring. He couldn’t remember anything else.
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Investigating Officer Cooper removed his topcoat, derby hat and gloves, stroked and twisted the waxed wings of a luxuriant moustache, examined the end result in the hall mirror, then satisfied, entered the drawing room. He cast an experienced eye over the crime scene. The sinking fire flashed, illuminating the agonised death mask, its heat accentuating the smell of blood welling in an advancing surge over the dislodged curtain pole, across the silk kilim, and towards the hearth.
“What was the deceased’s name?” he asked
“Dribbs, – a nickname,” Sally elaborated. “His real name was Driscol but due to a facial malformation since birth he had a tendency to well, you know….. dribble.” Her sentence trailed off in a sob.
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We’re ‘familiar strangers’, you and me. Each morning, we board the 6.28 to Paddington at Swansea train station but never interact. Have you noticed me?
Familiar strangers don’t speak. If you wanted to double-check what the announcement just said, you’d ask that guy over there, who’s not a regular.
The reverse is true out of context. Say I saw you in a bar, you’d be more likely to talk to me than you would a perfect stranger.
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You wake up, tied to a tree in the middle of the woods.
Tugging at your restraints, figuring out that some bastard has bound you with a rope. You kick, you scream, and nothing happens.
Last thing you can recall was riding the school bus back home, looking forward to wading the night out curled up on the couch, high on paracetamol, on account of one motherfucker of a migraine.
You’re trying not to panic over the fact you’re totally powerless, so if you starve, freeze or a wondering bear decides you’d make a good snack then Christ, there’s not a lot you can do.
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In his mother’s bedroom, Christmas Day. He puts the cup of tea and mince pie by her. She stirs. ‘Thank you, son. You look after me, don’t you?’ Then she’s asleep again. Worn out, she lays there like an old sack, split, on the verge of falling apart.
His mind shifts. Boxing Day races tomorrow, eleven venues, seven races at each. Kempton, 2.30pm, Energy Supply. That boy’s a flyer. He opens the top drawer of the dresser, takes out the credit card, hesitates. Guilt like a barbed wire suit pricks him. He hates these tricky moments.
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