Feeling vaguely sophisticated, Janelle sipped her chilled Chablis in Sydney Airport’s business lounge.
Life is good. Basically it’s just a series of decisions… and consistently making the right ones, she mused, recalling the roller coaster of the last six years.
Continue readingMum’s crying again. That’s how my days go now, thinking she’s talking to her comatose son, but in reality I’m right here, locked inside my own body, fully conscious but unable to move or speak. I braced myself for her routine onslaught of confessions as she wiped the tears from her eyes and adjusted the stiff hospital chair.
“Oh, Danny, it’s just so hard,” she began, her voice cracking. “I’m working night and day, and when I’m not working I’m cleaning. I love Mark dearly but I wish he would just once take something off my shoulders.”
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.
Continue readingWhat with the encircling memories crowding in, Engineer Ozob completely forgot to recalibrate the composter. The consequences, cataclysmal, are well-documented in the journals recently unearthed, an appropriate descriptor, given the tons of earth mixed with meteor fragments that had entombed the Obmil Annals. 110 year-books, carbon-dated 5630 AD to 5740 AD, then silence.
The previous evening, prior to Ozob’s dream, Deputy Toidi had reported, “Composter one’s out again.” with that smug look that said “You must have it done it wrong again.”
“I’m onto it. Good timing; a new rubbish cloud is orbiting.”
Continue readingBefore she died and came back to haunt me, I lived with my mother for two years. They wouldn’t let her out of the hospital bed until they knew she was coming home to someone, and my father had the foresight to die a decade prior. I asked her doctors for a care package. No result. When they told her this, she took it to mean that no one cared.
Behind the dusty velvet curtains in my mother’s spare bedroom was a streetlight bright enough to seep around the edges and keep me up all hours of the night. At four o’clock I’d stand in the window and watch the rain fall like knives and write descriptions in my head of the garden, four metres square of concrete jungle. To the song of her snoring I’d walk along the landing and trace my fingers along the bannisters, planning how to photograph the woodwork for the house listing. When I spoke of my mother, the neighbours’ mouths gaped, horrified at my exasperation, and I made a mental note to warn the next owners they could never be honest.
Continue readingHe put the advert in the spring edition of the estate magazine. Kind heart for sale, middle-aged, male, one previous owner. Offers?
The day the mag went through people’s letter boxes the new woman in the flat above knocked.
‘I’m Liz. Just introducing myself.’
‘Jed.’
‘Some nice people round here.’
‘Some.’
‘I mean look at this in the community circular. He sounds a proper decent sort.’
‘You think?’
‘I might answer that meself!’ She laughed, a nice laugh, like a tickle.
‘Save yourself the pen and paper, Liz.’
‘Oh? Do you know him? Is the bloke no good?’
He told her.
/
Liz and Jed, hand in hand, picked over the pebbles to the sand fringing the wide bay which simmered in the summer sun.
‘How do you think we’re doing?’ she asked.
‘Doing?’
‘Us. Doing.’
‘Alright.’
‘You really are the most understated guy. But then I like a quiet fellow.’
‘My wife said I was too quiet.’
‘She’s wrong!’ she insisted, a little too loudly. ‘And, look… if you ever want to tell me more about the crash, I’m a good listener.’
He shook his head.
‘When you’re ready, I mean.’
He grimaced, as though she’d punched him.
‘If you’re ever ready, you know.’
His expression became fearful.
Talking with him about feelings was like walking on the pebbles beneath her feet. Had his ex had similarly frustrating conversations with him?
/
She swept up the autumn leaves from the front of the drive. Dead. Same as Jed? Sex with him was OK but he never kissed her before, after, or during it. It was if he were anaesthetised. He told her, once only, details of the school bus accident. Three children had been killed, one being his sister, to whose limp hand he’d clung till they cut out the survivors. Blood was trickling down his head, into his eyes, so he couldn’t see his leg. Nor could he feel it: it was broken. He remembered a claustrophobic feeling, as if he were buried alive. His parents had never stopped grieving for their daughter and passed the infection onto him. He’d become withdrawn, reticent. ‘They treated your leg but not your trauma,’ she’d said last night. ‘You need therapy, Jed.’ He’d not replied. Did he have survivor’s guilt too?
She tipped the leaves into the recycling bag. When would he kiss her?
/
Snow was falling on an unusually cold December day. The estate was white, asleep under its shroud. Liz had called it off. ‘You’ve got to get off that bus, Jed. You’re trapped on it. I can’t help you, see. I just can’t.’ He’d be alone this Christmas. For the best really. Nothing lasted, did it?
He stood outside the flat. Snowflakes settled on his head, melted, ran down his cheeks. When the bus had skidded on the ice and turned over, he’d had bodies on top of him. He’d never been as close to anybody since. He went in, closed the door, shook the snow off.
He put the advert in the spring edition of the estate magazine. Kind heart for sale, middle-aged, male, one previous owner. Offers?
The day the mag went through people’s letter boxes the new woman in the flat above knocked.
‘I’m Liz. Just introducing myself.’
‘Jed.’
‘Some nice people round here.’
‘Some.’
‘I mean look at this in the community circular. He sounds a proper decent sort.’
‘You think?’
‘I might answer that meself!’ She laughed, a nice laugh, like a tickle.
‘Save yourself the pen and paper, Liz.’
‘Oh? Do you know him? Is the bloke no good?’
He told her.
/
Liz and Jed, hand in hand, picked over the pebbles to the sand fringing the wide bay which simmered in the summer sun.
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Rees’ Motorpark, out of town industrial estate, 8am.
They begin to arrive, hand their keys over the counter to Jed – I’m here to help – then sit down at plastic tables in a foyer overshadowed by a vast showroom where new electric Fords gather before them like a row of tanks.
‘Annual service,’ explains a skeletal old boy, leather jacketed. Former biker? Jed ponders. ‘Aye, down here on the paperwork, Mr Holland. Can I give you a token for the coffee machine?’ ‘Door latch,’ says the next in the queue, a woman in a trouser suit that is nearly as creased as her face. Jed nods politely.
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I sense their presence before I open the door, despite their lack of scent. What’s the point of flowers without a scent? Just as I feared, I enter my kitchen to find it full of them. Asters. I hate the things.
They spill from vases and peer out of pots on the table, the floor, the windowsill. Some appear to be growing directly from the ceiling, strangling the light fittings and creeping down the walls. It’s a floral nightmare. Where have they come from?
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The chair’s voice droned on.
‘Agenda item number 12.2’
This had been the longest day of my life, and we were barely halfway through.
‘All in favour?’
There was a unanimous show of hands.
We had all learnt from previous meetings. Any dissent to his proposals would mean even more procrastination, and would mean an all-nighter.
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Billy Thomas was excited. His parents were going to a posh dinner in Swansea, this meant he was going to sleep in his grandparents’ house. A rare treat, they went there every Sunday for tea but rarely did he stay.
Carrying his bag of clothes he set off, his mam’s warning ringing in his ears to behave. Nan was waiting at the door and ushered him in, hugging him. She smelt of lavender and she was tiny – Billy was almost as tall as her – and she reminded him of a small bird.
Grandad was ensconced in his armchair; he had a ruddy complexion thickset with hands like shovels. ”Alright our Billy.”
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‘Are you in some sort of trouble love?’ asked the taxi driver.
Nishi squirmed in the hot vinyl hugging her toddler closer, her free hand tightening on the chubby leg of her five-month old.
‘Please… if anyone asks… you never made this journey’ she pleaded, hiding her black eye.
Nishi glanced back at what had been her home, nestled in the verdant hills, diminishing out of view.
The picturesque village with the 16th century church, weekly fete and mother’s group epitomised a rural idyll. Yet the dream was never Nishi’s, and the othering was relentless. The playgroup mothers asking her where she learnt English. Same place you did, from my parents, when I was a baby she thought but never retorted. The barely hidden speculation on what colour her unborn Indian-English child would be. The titters about their house ‘smelling funny’. She had tried so hard to fit in. Eventually exhausted by Murray’s hostility, she had given up.
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Alyria stood, tears pricking the corners of her eyes.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
All the sacrifices she’d made to get to this point, all the favours traded, the coin expended, the hard graft… it was all for nothing. Before her, the ruins of the gateway taunted, its rubble strewn over twenty square metres. With a wordless, throat-ripping howl, she sank to her knees.
Even the breeze through the dusty ravine seemed to mock her, whispering “too late, too late, too late” over and over until it became almost torturous.
Three long Earth years she’d travelled to get here, following rumours and sotto voce conversations in bars she thought she’d never get out of. The laser pistol at her hip had seen more use than she’d hoped – slavers, kidnappers, and perverts had all stared down the barrel, and more than once she’d barely escaped with her life.
And all for this. For nothing.
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“Three ruins at an older ruin.”
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.
Continue readingClarence had been a disappointment to his mother from the day he was born. He had been expected to be a she, to fulfil the prophecy of the seventh daughter to the seventh daughter.
Throughout his life, she had never forgiven him for spoiling her dreams. His sisters on the other hand, were delighted that they didn’t have a sister who would rule superior over them. He grew up, being showered with their love and also all the things they didn’t want to undertake themselves.
Continue readingMother and daughter, Dilys and Martha, sat around the kitchen table. Sian and Gareth were playing in the other room. An argument broke out. Martha sighed and, calling them into the room, gently chastised them, explaining they should love each other not fight.
Dilys snorted, watching them leave the room, pinching each other out of sight of their mother. She was thinking she didn’t approve of this soft love, as Martha called it. Loving her grandchildren, she realised that times had changed but in her opinion not for the better.
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This morning, my algae soup tasted even blander than usual. Lifeless. Flavourless. Purposeless.
“Seems familiar,” I mused, granting myself a rare indulgence – not washing the bowl. Why bother? It joined the stack of unwashed dishes, each marking days of the same hollow thought.
Outside my house, I stood before the only soul who would have cared. She would have made me wash up; she made me a better man. Kneeling, I placed a small metal flower upon her makeshift grave. Its subtle blue hue was a stark contrast to this monochrome underground world of dirt and metal.
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‘Which one of us would do it?’
‘He targeted my daughter. It should be me.’
‘You’d really…?’
‘Could I actually just go in there and…? Let me think. Smother him? Yes, yes I could.’
‘We might not need to, Natasha. I’ve not been feeding him.’
‘You’ve been cutting back on his meals?’
‘I’ve not given him any food in seven days. Just water.’
‘He’s looking very gaunt, Annette. Do you mean you’ve been deliberately…?’
‘I want him dead. I hate him. This way we just say he wouldn’t eat, we say he…’
‘Refused food… we say he didn’t want to live any more with the pain of the cancer… we…’
‘We wait two more days. He can’t last out if we starve him.’
/
In his studio they looked at the paintings, many of them of themselves in the first flush of puberty, thin, uncomfortable, unhappy, all naked. Natasha remembered him painting Annette many times, then her turn came. She didn’t quite know what was going on. It’s art, darling, her mother insisted, keep still for Daddy and stop complaining. Her mother had practically pimped her. Creation from exploitation? That wasn’t art. Post-Jimmy Saville his reputation had crashed. Now he was reviled by many, his works removed from galleries. Quite right. Burn them all. A vile paedophile.
His sister though believed they had aesthetic value, said each haunted portrait revealed her mixed feelings: fear of her father and her unbreakable connection to him.
/
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The wind bayed relentlessly as it had for the last three days. It forced its way through the cracks and crevices to send darts of ice through the cottage.
Megan huddled under the blankets cuddling up to her siblings on their pallet in the rafters. Her grandfather lay shivering on his bed in the alcove besides the hearth. Their fire burnt low as the peat was running out. They would soon be dependent on the droppings of the animals in the byre.
Mother and father spent most of the day trying to clear a way through the snow to provide water for the animals before the water froze over again. Desperation was etched in their faces. They would have to slaughter some of the animals if the snow did not stop soon, something they could ill afford as they kept food on their table .
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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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It had been very kind of him to take us in during a raging snowstorm on Christmas Eve, but I wish Joel would shut up about it. We’d been travelling along the edges of Białowieża Forest, trying desperately to get home to see family, when the car had broken down.
There was no mobile signal, of course, so we’d sat in the car, after the inevitable argument, shivering. Then, like the light of the Angel Gabriel, twin beams of a 4×4 had sliced through the blizzard, and Joel had been out in the road, waving his arms, trying to get a lift. Fortunately, the driver had stopped.
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