He heaved, sweating, and pulled another door from the wreckage. Crouching down behind it he hoped to gain some respite from the carnage that surrounded him. The curly-haired man closed his eyes and breathed deeply hoping to recentre himself.
When he eventually opened his twitching eyes he spied the remains of his guide a few feet away.
Carefully dodging every spike and shard that threatened his feet below, he eventually reached the guidebook and with trembling hands scrambled to find the right page. It was useless; he already knew he had gone too far and there was no turning back at this point.
Maryam could not quite pinpoint when love turned to loathing. She just couldn’t get her hands warm however close she held them to the small wood burner in the canal boat. Her stomach growled, her skin felt dull and was turning an odd shade of yellow. Nothing to do with her diet of bread, cheese and beer…
Maryam’s income from peripatetic English teaching and occasion au pair gigs seemed to disappear on wood, tram fares and hot chocolates consumed slowly in warm cafes. And the odd bit of hash to warm her lungs.
Avril Morgan, a slender woman with a handsome face, opened her front door in anticipation of her little totem pole. She was greeted by a man dragging a large coffin-shaped tree trunk up the garden path Her jaw fell, it was supposed to be six inches, not six foot
Huffing and puffing the red-faced driver arrived, delivery sheet in hand, thrusting it in her face.
“There must be some kind of mistake,” Avril’s voice quavered.
No mistake and I’m not taking it back; sign here. “
After she signed on the dotted line, the driver made a quick exit.
What the heck do I do with it now. Adrian is going to go mad.
‘Pass us a Carlsberg’, Brian grunted from his recliner.
Stella hauled her heavily pregnant body back to the kitchen and grabbed her husband’s beer and her own TV dinner.
‘Move – I want to see the beginning of this!’ Brian said in an irritated tone, as his wife of three years passed by his seat. There was no way he would be missing a moment of Crimewatch.
As the now-familiar theme tune began to play, Stella crossed the great divide to the floral, velour sofa that was fast-becoming out of fashion. She sat down, finally resting her swollen feet. Nick and Sue appeared on-screen and started discussing a woman who shot dead her husband.
At Jane’s gesticulation, Shelley lifted her gaze to the hilltop. The forlorn skeleton of the banqueting hall had once pulsated with bacchanalian pleasures. Then rescanning the high-tide line, “At least we’re more than these empty shells”
“Some of us not much more” Jane batted back acidly.
It is notoriously difficult to swim through pancake batter, so Emmie settled for floating on her back. Her eyes opened briefly after a staccato rattle, followed by a piercing whistle, a loud bang and a cascade of spitting bright star fragments. A war must have started. Emmie was dimly conscious of being shot in the middle somewhere; blood everywhere, lots of pain. Best get back to the pancake batter. She re-submerged.
Her eyes crept open again on hearing voices.
‘She’s coming round. Are you OK love? It’s Mum here. You had us worried’
Emmie was pleased to hear this because she too was starting to be worried.
‘What’s the fighting about out there? I think there’s a bullet in my belly. It really hurts a lot and I keep falling into a thick lake. And…’
If you see this, just know that I held down the fort for as long as I could.
I scrunched up the letter in my hand, letting it squeeze through the gaps between my fingers. He’d been gone so long I wasn’t sure he was coming back, and my hope was draining. I decided to look after the shop while he went out for more supplies, although I doubted there was much left outside for us.
The shop, once bustling and filled with guests every fifth of November, was now empty, with only me and a few mice that scuttled from corner to corner for any sign of food. Its rich history cemented those bricks together, lived in the floors and lived in me.
Click, click, click of the invigilator’s hard-soled shoes on the gymnasium floor. Bob’s head full of clicks and empty of ideas. Cursing Philip Rees for their back row antics in maths. Both sending notes to Amanda in the front row, while on the board algebra was explained one last time. The clicks louder as the invigilator approaches, and then silent, as she looks down with a smile at the blank answer page in front of him, pristine as freshly fallen snow. Phillip in town with Amanda watching Star Wars. London Calling, lost in the supermarket, heart of glass, and the years pass. The sound of shock and awe on the news, the territorial trumpeting of ducks on Regent’s Park lake, Theseus nearby proclaiming his greatness from the Open Air Theatre, and then silence, as Titania sleeps, and dusk falls over London. Tick, tick, he waits 59 seconds for the next tick. Tick and he waits again. He looks away and looks back at the question. It hasn’t changed. He writes a paragraph, tears it up, writes the same paragraph again and tears it up. He waits for the tick. The sound of muffled traffic along the Strand, the tick louder than ever. Trisha, the environmental lawyer from Boston, queuing for the photocopier in the basement. Standing behind her with blank sheets of paper turned downwards. The clunk, clunk, clunk of the copier. Spending the next morning in the queue, getting to the front and starting again, front to back, back to front, more reliable than the machine, which splutters to a halt. Just as she steps out of the lift. Sitting together in the pub, her dark hair draped over an unfamiliar pint of bitter, Simply the Best on the jukebox, old guys in the corner looking on with grumpy or wistful eyes. Book marking that moment in time and portending the future. Decades pass. His grandmother wheezing, pouring him a tot of whisky in her toothbrush mug from her secret bottle that all the nurses know about, asking him if he thinks she will get better. Telling her she will outlive them all. The ensign draped on her coffin, the sound of Santa Maria sung in a beautiful soprano, the priest hurrying after the secular congregant who has pocketed the host as a souvenir. The silence of her room. The whisky bottle gone. Years pass. The gentle snore of his wife. The day time sound of his neighbour playing Bach on the piano. It could be worse, he thinks. Drugs parties, feuds, not fugues, the acid sound of blame. Then one night, another sound. Not from next door, but upstairs. And so it begins. Months pass and the past unravels. The present vanishes. A box there in the middle of the room. He peers into see if hope still resides there. Something at the bottom stirs. The sound of wings flapping. It circles the room twice and then out through the open door. He looks again into the box. It’s now pitch black. Like a black hole which allows no light to escape and sucks in all around it. Pitch black and bottomless.
I feel the air in the room change suddenly, like the slightest breath of a breeze on a summer’s day. The candle flames flicker briefly, almost imperceptibly.
He’s here. Soft, silent, catlike, he crosses the floor, and I pretend to ignore him, pretend he’s not there. After all, I’m not expecting anyone today, least of all him, who I sent off to The Great War many months ago.
He’d promised to come back, in that way that young soldiers often do, filling the hearts of those they leave behind with love and hope. Hope that, sadly, is all too often dashed on the rocks with a letter from whichever Government minister it is these days who’s happy to send others out to die, whilst he sits in restaurants with carefully curated menus spending public funds.
It brought tears to my eyes when the hospital staff clapped my Dad’s discharge from hospital. My Mum and I clung onto each side of the wheelchair as the porter wheeled Dad out. As we neared our house, all of our friends and neighbours had turned out to welcome Dad back, cheering our return.
It was a moment that Mum and I didn’t think would happen. The last two months were our private nightmares, each of us afraid to answer the phone, expecting the worst. But now, finally my Dad had come home.
Mum and I would never forgive ourselves, blaming his symptoms on man flu. It was Dad himself who had phoned the doctor in the end. I was surprised they even had his medical records, I don’t ever recall him seeing the Doctor. The ambulance had been at the door within twenty minutes. They took dad off leaving the two of us bewildered on the doorstep. I didn’t see my Dad again for twelve long weeks.
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