He looked at her round red face that had once suggested an arse. Then he had fallen in love with it, and all he could think of were apples, strawberries, ripe fruit, things sensuous to the tongue. Lately though a falling off, and rotting and withering slithered about his brain.
‘There was a man who considered his life was like a jigsaw.’
‘That it?’ she said.
‘You want more, Rebecca?’
‘Have you got more in you?’
‘A couple lunched out on a death anniversary. He, Bren, was thinking of a childhood conversation with his late mother. “That’s Nanny in Ireland,” she’d said as a sound like a distant earthquake rumbled in her belly.
Celebrity biopics sell movie tickets, although it’s never a guarantee that any particular superstar has led an interesting life. So, if you’re a Hollywood scribe, you can squeeze your subject into a readymade template. Celebrity had a career decline? That calls for a Citizen Kane style rise and fall. Your famous figure OD’d? Great! Turn it into a tragedy, driving home some point or other about addiction. What if their life involves an unsolved mystery on par with the Mary Celeste? Dream up a solution.
Norma Rankin, twice grammy nominated singer-songwriter from Chicago, comfortably slotted herself into category three by vanishing off the face of the earth in 1992. Thus, esteemed director Ivan Shanks, auteur of such classics as “Your Mother and a Cow” (1985) and “Die Slowly and Painfully” (1988) made the acclaimed, highly speculative “Rankin Vanishes” (2000), which nabbed three Oscars, and a golden globe.
She heard a low rumbling as she walked along the cliff top. It sounded like thunder, but came from deep below, a guttural sound, almost like the Earth was groaning. There was a shudder and a loud crack as rock splintered. Grass twisted beneath her feet and the pathway crumbled to nothing. She stepped onto icy air, then she was falling; her backpack scraping against rock, its straps catching on roots and jagged stone. Wind snatched her hair. The sandy shore, littered with clumps of rock and jumbled shells, drew closer. She wondered if it was the last thing she would see.
When she was a child, she collected shells like treasure. She remembered a queen conch that she’d carried from a distant beach. Every time she wanted to hear the waves, she’d held it to her ear, comforted by the gentle swish. Her bedroom held shelves filled with glistening razor clams, ridged limpets, pretty cockleshells and periwinkles in different hues, olive-green, deep red, primrose yellow and delicate pink. Cockleshells were her favourites. She distracted herself from the drop, trying to remember every tiny detail of them; their delicate fan shape, the pattern of fine lines etched in burnt umber on their backs, and the smoothness of the inside where she liked to rub her thumb. If only she was safe in her childhood bedroom now, admiring the cockleshells and conjuring the roar and hiss of the sea with the conch shell.
The immediate situation facing us was frightening. Dank weather summed up the predicament perfectly. On the way to collect Melanie I knew with certainty that both our lives would dramatically change. Whether we could endure the physical and mental anguish was questionable. Could we overcome such an event? It would test our love for one another to the limit.
I arrived near the entrance to the room but was afraid to enter. What could I possibly say to her. Someone in authority caught sight of me and came to chat. Her words were powerful and I felt more at ease. ‘Come in Mr Thomas, you’re both going to need all your strength to recover from this. Melanie is extremely fragile at the moment but with time you will both get through the ordeal. It’s not going to be easy but you can give each other great comfort and support’. My hands trembled as I entered, palms sweating, eyes focusing on her. She was dressed and ready to leave. Her face tearful with unhappiness.
Consuela Edda Luisella Maria Beneventi always wanted to be a councillor, and not just for the amusement of being Councillor Consuela either. Although, in inebriated moments at the pub after a tiring branch meeting, she admitted it had a bearing. But mostly it was because Consuela thought she could “sort things out”.
She was, everyone admitted, a bloody fearsome woman, and quite capable of sorting things out. But no-one ever thought it would actually be a good idea to let her play with council powers. Far too dangerous.
A little cafe in the centre of a large park was popular with the locals for its friendly staff and cakes you could die for. Amongst the regulars was an elderly gentleman, always smartly dressed in shirt and tie, trousers with a crease you could slice bread with, his shoes shining, not a smudge on them. He would arrive promptly at 10am and leave at 2pm and was always popular with the more mature ladies. The staff would watch amused as he charmed them, the ladies simpering at his flattery.
It was assumed that he was just lonely, enjoying the company. Over time the staff learned his name was Gerald and his wife had passed away some time ago. He had recently moved into a retirement complex. During the summer months he would sit on the bench outside talking to an old drunk, buying him a sandwich and drink. They would sit and chat for a while till the drunk disappeared off into the park. Wondering why he took the time, Gerald replied to his questioner that it could easily have been him .
After long years of working on tedious and inconsequential office tasks, Bob was still rather puzzled about the end purpose of his job. He realized that he was a cog, but it was much harder to grasp which wheels he was helping to turn. So when the all-staff email asking for volunteers for redundancy slid into his inbox, Bob was uncharacteristically jubilant. He was first to volunteer.
‘What am I waiting for?’ he mused, ‘even if the deal leaves me a bit shorter than usual, it’s a relief not to do another 200 years on the same treadmill with no prospects’
I can’t finish the game on my tablet. Usually I rattle through Patience, but tonight I’m flustered and keep putting the cards in the wrong place.
My mind is at the pier where two fifteen-year-olds scan the stars. ‘Way things are progressing that might be you and me one day up there in a spacecraft, Jade,’ he says. I feel again my shuddering at the thought of darkness, of being eternally lost in the void.
There’s a clicking noise. The monitor’s coming on.
Such patience tests us, but this interlude is worth it, especially considering the prize on offer.
You barely even acknowledge us; we are the passing glance in the morning, the image used to check that makeup is applied correctly, or your necktie is straight, before you head out of the door to your dreary, coffee-fuelled, miserable, worthless lives.
We are your reflection in more than just the shallow sense of the word; we mark the passing of your years, day by day, second by second. Yet it is only in moments of occasional lucidity that you see us, shake your head critically and wonder where the twenty-eight-year-old that still lives in your head has disappeared to.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
A 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 GoogleMaps 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?
“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.
Jack 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.’
They 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.
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.
“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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