The wind howls around the hospital towers. I squint through the rain, and for a moment the birds overhead look like tiny witches on broomsticks, swooping unpredictably in all directions.
‘Meadowside Child and Adolescent Mental Health Unit,’ a sign announces. Like everything else up here, it is wonky, madness seeping into any semblance of order.
I shudder. I need to get Emily out of here.
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Reluctantly I made my way to bed. I ask you, bed at 8.00 at my age, how archaic is that? My mother believed in the outdated style of nurturing, feed, bath and bed. My sister tried to reason with her, explaining that that was meant for infants, not young people of our ages. That was the last time I ever protested at having to go to bed, listen carefully and I’ll let you in on my eternal secret.
That night I drifted off to sleep quickly, a wonderful sense of peace washed over me as I realised that I was leaving my body and slowly floating, towards another dimension. Soon I approached the impressive entrance marked “visitors only”. I glided calmly through the gates and was reassured by a silent and gleaming white world full of serene souls where all communication was done by a sophisticated means of telepathy. As I navigated around my new world, I saw that the central square was where souls went to find answers from the wise and knowledgeable. Elders to our worldly problems. Eventually I was brave enough to approach them and unburden the secret of my sister Gails’ behaviour, only to be told that it was too late. She was obsessed with fire, given the chance she would set fire to anything. Matches, lighters all had to be hidden from her, which was very difficult because both my parents were regular smokers. Gail was a very sad and confused soul, resenting me. I was the youngest child and her nemesis; she was constantly accusing me of stealing our parents love and attention.
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“Hey Harv!” a voice boomed as a foot kicked the front door “I’ve got a hog sized keg! You got a few mugs?!”
Harvey groaned, knowing that yes, tonight was the night.
His better half was visiting her mother, taking with her their two little ones. Weekends like these, Harvey got some quiet “me time” which usually meant falling asleep on the sofa. Good enough for him, but since he had mentioned the free weekend to his old college buddy Jules, the man had insisted on coming over.
“Hello Jules,” Harvey thinly smiled as he answered the front door.
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The knock was singular, but loud and resonant. The knock employed by people familiar with visiting the unsuspecting. Craig put down the London Literary Review and padded barefoot to the door of his SA1 apartment.
“Who is it?”
“Mister Hutchens? Police. Can I have a word?”
Craig slid the door chain into place and opened the door. A large man in a short-sleeve shirt showing thick muscular arms and a tooth to tattoo ratio of one-to-one stood in the hallway.
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Nestling deeper into her bedding Valentina sighed pleasantly tired. It had been a busy day but she was sure the end of her journey was at hand.
She remembered the stories her mother had captivated them with as babies. Ivan the terrible was a folk hero to them. Fighting for the territory around them, often returning bloodied from battle: that was her great grandfather. Romance of how he met his wife in the tunnels they inhabited, love at first sight – so her mother told them. How he fought for her hand, paying a heavy price, losing territory but Ivan was elated to have his beloved Sasha by his side.
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Finally, I type them. There’s a feeling of closure, of melancholy, of… what? Is bereftness a word? One for me to look up in the battered dictionary that sits on the shelves upstairs, still preferred over search engines. There’s an immutability to a printed definition, far more difficult for every copy to be edited in one go by one individual. It’s the same reason I still buy paperbacks – for me a story should stand of its time, faults and all.
Speaking of stories, I’ve clearly not finished with the novel I’ve just written; there’s my beta readers to look over it, and doubtless a myriad of corrections. I’ve got to go back and check the timelines and continuity. Make sure that everything adds up.
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“That’s,” Mrs Lupin said in her soothing tone, “the end.”
Five faces of varying comprehension looked up from their slender copies of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, rewritten for the under fifteens. One kid was interested, two were indifferent, another was confused, and the last was… well…
This classroom was nick-named the Retard Ward, or Spaz Town by the normal kids, and to be sure, some pupils were hopeless. Jake Mears, for instance. Fourteen years old but already in trouble with the police for hot-wiring a motorbike.
Other kids were struggling with Asperger’s or dyslexia, and a few were… not that bright. They’d probably slide through the school system to start work at the local firestone factory because who else would take them?
Continue readinga tale foretold. ‘The crowd’s on the pitch. They think it’s all over. It is now.’
Touch, a so missing after trauma, so they tell us, and so I must consider you know don’t you too my mind latched on to but was it ever anything else. and indeed There is something to be said that our contemporary lives invest too much into being ‘happy,, by showering ourselves with happy smiles and emojis that become addictive self smugness of, of well of loony-bin Reality Shows for a start, making us believe that is all there is to life. and STOP us imagining alternatives. and well is writing and engaging with it – literary fiction that is – does this. So, am I here writing this to resolve and maybe dissolve lies I have told myself.? Can I then ‘face up.’, create my and your better life. Give us integrity, enabling skills, perhaps like literary devices, eh Joe?
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I hadn’t meant to do it. I guess I’d just had enough.
Looking back over the years we were married, it’s hard to pinpoint when it all started. He’d always been a bit of a moaner, it’s just that I didn’t know that he would turn into a professional one.
Nothing was ever really good enough for him. That included anything and everybody. He could find fault where there was none.
I really don’t know why I went along with it for all those years. I suppose I thought I could change him, eventually bring him around to my point of view. I was wrong.
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A blur of trees framed his crumpled reflection. Pete turned away from the window as the coach stopped.
“Jamie!”
“Hey Pete.”
Jamie buffeted along the aisle and crab-walked a lanky frame into seats 4A and B in front.
“A bit iffy at one point. Paypal not going through, Visa card not in the usual place. Found it here.” With a jagged inhalation he patted his back pocket. “Hadn’t eaten in 10 hours; must have put it back after Pret. Real fuck of a journey altogether. Still, made it in the end.”
Jamie passed a paper tissue over his dewing brow and dripping end of nose.
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It will be a parting gift. Something to remind him of “us.”
Clouds skid across the darkening September sky, nudged along by an insistent wind. “It’s time,” it seems to hiss as it whistles around the rooftops.
The swallows have heard it too. They gather on the telephone line overhead, their slit-throats lined up and their tails criss-crossing in different directions like scissors, ready to cut ties.
It’s a time for bursting out of the summer haze into vivid autumn colour and activity. A time for new starts and sowing seeds. I prepare the soil, loosening and enriching it.
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Thursday the 21st of April, my 6th birthday. A day indelibly etched on my brain. It was the day that I received 2 tickets to go to the circus with my friend Susan.
On the morning of that momentous day I was bubbling with anticipation at what my gift would be. My curiosity was soon satisfied when I opened my birthday card and discovered the tickets.
That was the beginning of an arduous but long and exciting journey that led me all over the world.
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That time in the quays when his da had gone to the toilet. O’ Flaherty, his smirk as big as the froth on his stout, had put his hand on his knee, then moved it higher to his genitals. Keegan had had the sense to stand up and follow his father.
‘Full bladder, son?’
Keegan told the old man what had happened. The latter’s face became hard, dark like the exterior of Kilmainham jail. ‘And him a priest!’ On returning, he said, ‘There’ll be no more welcome in our house for that bastard.’
Now Keegan was the sole mourner at his burial. Why had he come?
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Phil tugged at his beard and grinned at Jim, who sat to his right cradling his Epiphone. “You know, I think I ought to stand up for this.”
“Stand up, stand up for Jebsus,” warbled Jim, “you do what’s right, Phil. Just make it good. INTRODUCING mister Phil McSnorty on the vocal banjo.”
“What’s a vocal banjo, Jim?” Greg – dark eyes and darker demeanour.
“It’s like a Jew’s Harp, only with very little harp and not much Jew.”
“Okay, are we rolling, Graham?”
Graham Jimson gave a thumbs up from the control booth.
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Julie: We always thought it was funny to dress the same and pretend to the guys that we were sisters. We used to have great times together, we were always in each other’s homes.
Now it just seems that she is stalking me. Since I’ve been going out with Brad I find her presence unsettling. I wish she would find someone special for herself and leave me alone.
Samantha: Julie always seems annoyed at me these days, I just don’t know what I’ve done. That Brad is a right creep, she deserves someone better, and she just can’t see it.
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Sol Western blanched as he regarded the display cabinet’s shattered glass. The outer strongroom door with its array of locks and tumblers was intact, the silken white cushion still there, but the pea had gone! Probably his job as well. After three decades in the Corps of Commissionaires, concluding his working life in The Museum of the Pea had promised an effortless journey towards a comfortable retirement. Now all was in question.
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A DIALOGUE
Persons: Gilbert and Algernon. Scene: the drawing room of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking Green Park.
Algernon plays the piano; Gilbert reads a book.
Algernon: Gilbert my dear fellow, what is that book that has you so absorbed?
Gilbert: Oh, I’m just reading the latest from Christopher Crouch. Sorry, as I understand it, seeing anyone enjoy an author you thoroughly detest is torture.
Algernon: You like Crouch’s work? That’s fine, you’re perfectly entitled to bad taste. Although I find that getting angry at Christopher Crouch is rather like being enraged by a blank sheet of paper, what’s there to hate?
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As a writer yourself, you will know that lots of writers have given accounts of their craft. This doesn’t tend to progress much beyond the foothills of rocket science. They shut themselves in rooms without distraction, they stick to strict schedules and they eavesdrop on unwitting people. As someone slightly lacking in discipline for the first couple of points of writerly consensus, I embraced, for a while, the eavesdropping advice. And I have to say, this doesn’t always end well.
Like other writers wishing to capture ideas and observations, I too carry a notebook and pen everywhere I go. Get a small notebook – not so small you can’t fit much on one page – in an unobtrusive shade of beige, plus two biros. When I started out, I bought a pack of bright pink notebooks with ‘Britney is fab’ – reduced in Lidl – and a pencil with a pink feather on top to match. This may have seemed lacking in seriousness, and so many people commented on the pencil that it kind of blew my cover. Plus I didn’t have a sharpener. So beige and biros is the way to go, I think.
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Your two-up two-down is in a row of terraces on a scratch of land between Manchester and Stockport: a molehill overlooked by high-rise concrete. A secret pleasure is flicking through channels while he’s out at his club. A hundred stations yet nothing on. Then you are held by a figure, grey hair, less a face than a tombstone resting on a neck. An air of gravitas in that stony apparition. You pay attention.
The figure, well-spoken, a smoker’s cough like brown smog, is talking about his ‘artistic evolution’. The Slade, the teachers and influencers, the bohemian friends: names are dropped like Pollock paint splashes. A commitment all his years to art and sculpture; up at six a.m., seven days a week. He mentions the well-off family he’d rebelled against. They’d come round when fame’s sprig had bedecked him. He could afford to rebel, of course. Opportunities in his palm like a purse of ducats.
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Jackie sighed as she heard the tap-tap of high heels approaching her office door. Forewarned by Lisa in accounts, she waited as her door swung open. Leoinie crashed through sobbing, “They all hate me. I’ve never been anything but generous to them; now they call me names and snigger behind my back.”
Passing the tissues, Jackie told her to sit. “Why do you think this is happening again, Leoinie? You had the same problem in two different offices. I thought you had made friends with Dawn and were happy there?”
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