The first I knew of our money problems was the day I went home early from work, suffering with a migraine. It was unusual to see mail on the doormat, as John would normally deal with it before I came home. As bad as my headache was, I could not help noticing the words “Final Demand” were peeking out of the window on one of the envelopes. My curiosity got the better of me and I opened it.
Continue reading
Bowens’ wife was surprised when he volunteered to take the laden bags to the charity shops. Usually, evenings, a tugboat couldn’t pull him out of his East Enders and Coronation Street engrossed armchair. He put two bags each in the foyers of the Air Ambulance and Tenovus, and two more in the dog charity lobby. The hated brown corduroy jacket was at the bottom of the last bag, under the Woody Allen dvds and Jean Paul Sartre books. Susan had bought it new a month back, and it had been disdain at first sight. It was the sort of quasi-academic garb she liked and he detested.
Most of her pals worked at the university, and their braying confidence made him feel inadequate, a block of mental concrete. The men were all togged in corduroy jackets and, for all he knew, some of the women too. Tomorrow he’d tell her it’d been stolen from the car, when he’d inadvertently left the window open. R.I.P. hated jacket.
As he drove off, drop done, a fellow in his fifties, rat eyes and as crafty as a lair of foxes, gathered up the six bags. Two days later half of their contents were on his ‘Animal Welfare Charity’ stall at the margin of the monthly Mumbles farmers’ market. No animal had ever benefited materially from his sales, but the foxy fellow himself copped a nifty ten pounds when a woman purchased the jacket. ‘Pristine,’ he said to her encouragingly. She heard ‘Christine’, and wondered at his familiarity.
Act 1: Childhood
Princess Pollyanna slides on her ruby slippers, the light dancing across the sequins. Maybe they will transport her home if she wishes hard enough. No, not home. To a castle, in an enchanted forest. With pet unicorns and glittery rainbows and trees that bear sweets. And parents who are kind and doting.
“Pollyanna, come on! What are you wearing, you idiot? Get your wellies on!”
Ugh. Why do her parents always have to interrupt her daydreams? Still, at least this time they’re not screaming at each other. Not yet, anyway. Until they start drinking later.
And why do they have to come camping all the time? If only they could afford exotic holidays like the other children at school.
Second-hand silk ribbons trail behind her in the mud. Maybe next year, Paris? A girl can dream!
Continue reading
DI Alice Cauldwell looked through the mirror at her suspect as he sat with his solicitor, pinched the bridge of her nose, and willed her tiredness to recede. At the fag-end of a long night, all she wanted is to get this settled.
“Okay, Kev,” she said to her DS, “let’s get this done.”
The officers strode into the room and sat across the table from Todd Greenwood, their prime suspect.
Kev flipped open a folder and looked Greenwood in the eyes.
“Do you understand why you’re here?”
“Tell me,” Greenwood responded.
“We have not charged you with any crime,” Kev said, “you’re helping us with our inquiries.”
“I don’t want to,” Greenwood said, “can I go?”
Continue reading
Pat and Dan had bought their house a few years before. They loved the quirky house even though it seemed lonely and unloved, spending their time renovating it a room at a time.
Their final job was decorating the landing area. Stripping the wallpaper and paintwork at the end of the passage, Dan found that there was a portion fitted with hardboard. Prying it off a door stood behind it.
Cautiously they opened it shining a torch around. It was a nursery. Everything was dusty and faded, such a sad room. Walls were covered with murals of animals, there was a crib with pink lace, a nursing chair, and a sideboard on which sat a book. Picking it up Pat wiped the dust off. Opening it up, there were happy family photos and towards the end were news reports of a tragic accident. A mother and child had been killed. Pat’s eyes filled up. Looking at Dan, she could sense he felt it too. Now they knew why their house was so sad. Expecting their first child, Pat hugged her stomach, promising the child that they would make it a happy home again.
Continue reading
Although many will have heard of necrotising fasciitis, the dreadful disease caused by bacteria which devour living flesh, far fewer will have heard of dead flesh-eating maggots used by doctors to debride wounds. However today we are celebrating a new advance in animal technology: animals designed to eat unwanted manmade objects. Enter the worm, tiny 4 cm long worms with a single purpose, which have been genetically modified by Swansea University Genetics Department from Dendrobaena worms, small 30 gram ones normally used as live fish bait . These minute hermaphrodites spend their brief lives eating plastic. They were developed jointly by Swansea University Departments of Nanotechnology, Biochemistry and Genetics.
Why worms? Basically worms are very simple creatures with a simple genetic structure. Because they are hermaphrodites they can reproduce themselves very fast and retain the same simple genetic structure without variation. They are well suited for research in nanotechnology.
Continue reading
It was out! Marius had finally admitted his greatest fear, – being “cancelled” on social media. The finality of the word frightened him. Not so Errol his line-manager cum press officer whose antennae for company advancement,-and thereby his own,- were finely tuned. The press release on World Autism Day proclaimed Brigham Enviro-Solutions’ enlightened consultant apprenticeship programme whilst showcasing the solution to oceanic pollution by plastic single-use PPE, face masks and testing kits.
“We at Brigham’s value the spectrum of neurodiversity. You won’t find any room given to Time-Pass Occupational Therapy at BES. By developing and harnessing each apprentices’ detail-oriented abilities in analytics, mathematics, pattern recognition and information processing, our “special” employees can advance to full consultancy status within 3 years. They receive a competitive market rate based on successful outcomes. Everyone benefits, – apprentices, investors, clients.”
Continue reading
My vision of hell is a high-ceilinged, octagonal room with eight doors. The room is exquisitely panelled in oak and all the doors are closed. Each door would open onto paths of opportunity, were it not firmly shut.
One feature of this beautiful room (in my imagining) is that one of the doors is always slightly ajar. There is the prospect of teasing it open to experience things to do, people to see, scents to smell, tastes to savour.
Quite why the room is eight-sided I really can’t say. Perhaps it adds to the grandeur and authority of hellishness. And quite why the hell-dweller so routinely returns to this world of diminished choices is also difficult to tell.
To explore these matters, I’ve started to try and represent elements of confinement. Not that I’m an artist or anything, but it sometimes helps to try and make models of things you can’t put into words.
Continue reading
‘Hey Mo! I got a table. Carried it all the way here.’
‘Where’d you get it?’
‘Other side of the city. Riots going on.’
‘You looted it?’
‘I had to fight another woman off. Like an octopus, all tentacles. She had a chair. She wasn’t getting the table.’
Mo studied the pine table. ‘Anybody else see you?’
‘Everybody was taking things.’
‘The police…?’
‘… were nowhere.’
‘You did good, Saf. The house’s pretty bare.’
Continue reading
She slides another item into the pile, packing it in like she’s stuffing a turkey. This time it’s a discounted multi-pack of kitchen roll. There is no kitchen to put it in anymore. Nor a lounge. Only storage space, filled to the brim, narrow corridors running through it like clogged arteries. There are already six-packs of kitchen roll squeezed into my bulging cavities.
But to her, these are not kitchen rolls. These are softened sheets of grief, flattened and neatly bound up. They cushion her in a comfort blanket of safety. Her heart empties itself of pain by filling me up.
I heave under the weight of it all. The monster inside me is growing, slowly suffocating us. No light can get in any more. Darkness smothers us, the air thick with dust and the smell of rotting food. Rats scuttle through the cracks, floorboards creaking, threatening to send everything crashing down.
Continue reading
I was delivered there like a package, now I was expected to go in. I was being watched carefully in case I tried to escape.
My hands felt clammy, and I was rigid with fear.
“Do I have to come in there with you?” I was asked.
I shook my head, this was something I had to do on my own. I straightened my back and took one step forward before twisting the doorknob and entering the room. My eyes darted about frantically, searching for a corner in which I could hide. I squatted down in a chair and tried to make myself invisible. My knuckles turned white as I gripped the ends of the armrests, but there was no controlling my trembling legs. My feet danced across from side to side, much to the annoyance of the other people trapped in the same room.
Continue reading
The trouble with British Summer Time, apart from it being a misnomer that is, is it takes Joel Bloom nearly a week to catch up with the lost hour. Mornings are difficult: a constant struggle with his body clock, which point-blank refused to accept the evidence of his eyes when looking at his bedside clock.
“Can’t be eight already,” he would murmur in his fractured oddity of a voice. Since Becca said she was leaving, he formed the habit of talking to himself. Good company and intelligent conversation, he joked, but the reality is, he is lonely and affronted by her betrayal. The bloody postman, he thought, how much of a cliché is THAT?
“Maybe it’s time to look again,” said his head.
Continue reading
His habit on the permitted daily walk was to scan the evening arc of the bay. Today was no different. From the three islands off the rocky headland, the gorse swathed cliffs, the conurbation of Mumbles seafront, alongside the dotted houses at West Cross and the lone pub outlined stark in its whiteness, Gareth panned the curve of the prom, so intent on the visual feast, that the preceding click in his cerebral cortex only vaguely registered. With a whirring like interconnecting cogs, the malfunction embedded. Then came the shock of a shadowy presence occupying his own footsteps recently vacated. Gareth spun around…..and round and round again…. like a tail-chasing dog yet the shadowy outline remained out-of-focus fringing his peripheral vision. The tide was on the turn; the imprints were momentary,-quickly filled and obliterated. Like the “ghost,” no trace.
Continue reading
Death is one of the few (maybe the only) binary oppositional states we can depend on. It is just inarguable. You are, or you are not (although Schrodinger’s cat muddies the water a little, maybe).
After that, it is a matter of personal and cultural preference. If, for instance, I were asked to describe hearing of the death of a close one (you), it would be something like:
It feels as though a very large, dry log has dropped from a height and landed nearby. Sound and shockwaves reverberate and shake me worryingly. I am stunned to the core. It’s an arid, lifeless log, too big to ignore yet with no discernible purpose but to remind. I curl inwards and try to make sense but the log has sucked up any sense that could be made.
It takes hours to believe in the new state of affairs and to begin to think of the enormity of the loss of you, my dear. If I try to escape these new thoughts, the log lies in the middle of everything as a constant reminder.
Continue reading
Eve popped in to see how her mother was getting on with an old i-pad she had given her. Over a cup of tea Ann, her mother told her how much she was enjoying the internet and Facebook, catching up with old friends and making some new ones.
One man had seemed so nice, living in America and widowed like her. Eve eyed her mother as she chattered on. Apparently, he wanted to hang out. Ann asked him where he wanted to meet. He explained there was an app for a chat room. Not being sure she told him she was just happy to chat on Messenger.
Continue reading
The Government had lost its way. No matter which way it tried to turn, the virus has it in a pincer movement. It is just too depressing to watch the news anymore.
When I received the shielding letter, my morale started to go downhill. Overnight my freedom and my independence had been taken away. It had proved easy enough to order food deliveries online and also my prescriptions, but the human element interaction was missing. How I longed to go outdoors, or hug my daughter and my grandson, or see my mates down the local. I felt that my human rights had been infringed.
Continue reading
They crossed the ancient wetlands before dawn, their feet shrouded in undulant mists diffusing the light from their flickering lamps. Gethin, older brother of his companion, Arvel – led the way with their sister Branwen between them as they trod carefully along the path, its uncertain surface greeting their boots with raised roots and crumbling stones, each impeding their progress as the clock ticked down.
“We need to move faster,” declared Gethin, “in another two hours, the path will shift.”
Branwen, who stood a head taller than her brothers, glanced uneasily at the stocky, leather-clad Gethin, “I’m more worried about the tide. We can navigate a new path, but once the tide comes in, we are lost.”
Arvel bit his lip and stammered, “We WILL make it, won’t we, Bran?”
Continue reading
Martha Somers was feeling upset again. She’d been talking to her dog, which was sitting in a corner of the room, saying to it, ‘Are you hungry? Shall I feed you?’, when this lady had told her it was a toy. ‘A toy? But I heard him barking,’ she’d told the lady. Then a second lady had come in and said, ‘Time to change you,’ and had laid hands on her. She’d begun to cry, then shout, and said, ‘No you’re not! How dare you!’
Next thing she knew she was sitting in an armchair in a large room, and there were strange faces all around, elderly women in armchairs, reclining or sitting upright. Some were asleep, some stared into space, one was muttering to herself. There was a horrible smell like poo.
Continue reading
Alan scans the room, bleary-eyed. Where is he?
Why is he in a single bed without his beloved wife, Eileen? As his vision clears, he sees a young woman standing over him, two pills glistening in the palm of her hand.
“Morning, Mr Clarke,” she says. ‘Your pills.”
He must have been kidnapped, his spy network infiltrated. Yes, that must be it. He has to get out of here and fast before he’s tortured for his secrets.
He pretends to swallow the pills. When the woman leaves, he stuffs them into his pyjama pocket. A rustling sound alerts him to a piece of paper nestling there.
Continue reading
For Kiri, patience had never been a virtue. Never had she subscribed to the view that more haste led to less speed. Her sympathy, when hearing of the fabled race, was with the hare, although she did blame him for a loss of focus during the infamous race.
Loss of focus was not one of Kiri’s problems. She prided herself on completing tasks quickly and effectively. Always diving headfirst into a challenge, she was renowned for her efficiency and accuracy. And yet somehow, she managed to sidestep promotions at work and had gathered few friends – no time to waste chatting in wine bars, she always said when invited for after-work drinks on a Friday night.
Continue reading