“Whisky Gamma zero-niner,” the comm said. “Hopkins, it’s time. Go shake that moneymaker.”
“Copy that,” I replied, nosediving into the canyon, a grin spreading across my face. “Let’s go fuck up E.T.”
This was the bit I loved, where adrenaline and training kicked in, asI dodged and jinked my fighter at incredible speeds in a space barely wider than the wingspan. Above me, the cruiser started laying down covering fire as I ran a few fast delta rolls and let loose with the cannon.
Continue readingYoung Tommie Lewis was the apple of his mother’s eye, always a dainty boy with short dark hair, a little snub nose, large spectacles and a skinny build. School days were hard for Tommie. Sports day he would run, his arms and legs spinning as fast as he could, but he always came last. Nobody ever picked him for football. He usually sat on the sidelines wishing he could be first at something. In the juniors gymnastics became the bane of his life. Once he was made to climb the monkey bars. Getting to the top he froze. A teacher had to climb up to fetch him, handing him the rope to lower himself down. Poor Tommie just slid down the rope, causing blisters on his hands and legs; his mother played merry hell. So Tommie was forced to join the girls away from hazards.
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“Tell me how it started, Doctor Frost,” she said, leaning close.
“It was the winter of ’57 when I first opened my new eyes and saw the world as it really is.” I replied. The garlic on her breath irritated but I would not give her the satisfaction of knowing my objections. “Of course, I would not have been able to process the wealth of visual inputs I then had, but for the expanded processing capacity I’d installed two years previously.”
“But why go so far?”
I decided I hated her face.
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“Do you remember… our games?” the old man struggled to speak. “I used to call you… Miss Fortune”.
On his first night at the casino, he was eager to play with the money his father gifted him. That’s when they first met. That night, as all nights that followed, she wore red: a slim-fit dress, high heels, and vibrant lipstick to match it. She was the goddess who joined them, mere people.
“Sure,” Miss Fortune replied, sitting beside his bed in the hospital. “And you were right.”
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Carmichael’s curse came true.
She proclaimed in her base voice that Angus, Sean, and Ian would never see their twenty first birthdays.
“You’re all going to die,” she cackled.
And sure enough, they did.
Angus was the first to go, dropping dead in Spain, whilst partying with his college chums, Sean meanwhile died during his missionary work in China. Both croaked at the stroke of midnight on the eve of their birthdays.
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It wasn’t so much that things had gone wrong, more that they were never right. So it was a great relief to get the metaphorical cards out and lay them, face down, on the table. Let us take a seat at this table, the better to understand the situation.
The first card to be turned up was Tom’s: ‘ I’m so afraid of hurting you that I tiptoe around things. I mean, I’d really love to play 5-a-side on a Saturday and have a few jars with the team afterwards. But it wouldn’t be fair to you, leaving you alone at the weekend.’
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Driving from Cardiff to Swansea, Lloyd found a passenger in his car.
‘Who are you?’ he said, slowing.
‘Your inner self,’ came the reply.
The guy certainly looked like him: older, more haggard, greyer. It could be him.
‘You’re on the wrong road, Jim,’ the passenger said, ‘every day commuting a ton of miles to that vehicle licensing hole.’
‘It’s a job.’
‘So’s being a galley slave. How about jumping ship?’
Port Talbot steelworks skittered by, its Meccano limbs tangled against the grey sky as if in agony. The other Jim had vanished, gone in a spurt of yellow steelworks gas.
Work went badly. Workmates faces resembled those of ghouls. The phone calls, a hundred ways of asking the same thing about car tax, lapped in his brain with a disturbing echo. He felt outside everything.
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“Hello Madge, I haven’t seen you round here for ages, popping back to see your folks are you?”
“Oh, hi Ange, something like that.”
“And how’s that gorgeous hubby of yours, keeping well is he? Still playing his guitar?”
“I presume so, I don’t really know, the fact of the matter is that we’ve split up.”
“Oo, sorry to hear that, trust me to put my foot in it. How you coping then, fancy a drink?”
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