Through The Tall Trees

Danse Macabre

2011-03-25T12:51:00.010Z

Sean

It's been utter ages since I exhibited these, or had the time or money to produce any more, but I'm still very proud of them and trying to make the effort to promote my art work more. Copies are available to buy for a very reasonable £30 a pop. Send me an email if you'd like one.

I, Calavera

Paul

Alice

Connor

Scottish Lass

2010-10-27T17:32:00.005+01:00

I wrote another story for Quirky Nomads a little while ago and it just aired. It's part of a series called "God's Extras", about the characters editrix Sage Tyrtle sees around Toronto. This one was about a girl she saw on the underground holding a sign that said "Scottish Lass- Just looking for enough for a good meal." I was put in mind of a girl I knew in Paris, but I knew the voice actor would have an English accent, so I had to fill in the blanks. I'm not sure if I'm personally keen on the interpretation of the piece the voice actor made- it's chatty and more realistic, but I think it loses a little of the subtlety of the written version. I'm a concerned that the ending is a bit mawkish. Check out both and see what you think-

Scottish Lass

Romanian boy had nothing else in the cupboards, so we decided to cook up the spaghetti with sugar. We'd bought the spaghetti from a Turkish supermarket so we had to guess at the packet instructions. It's not like pasta is hard or anything. We set it going and sat down to listen to music.

We live in an abandoned bar, which we both think is pretty funny. Plenty of people know we're here but we don't make much trouble so they leave us be. It's only been a week so far though. We won't be here for long. It's cold and the faces are hard. I could have just stayed at home if I'd wanted that. I left when I was 15 and I've been a few places since. This isn't one of the best. All the windows are boarded but the area isn't nice enough to put the metal ones on. We don't need the light to get in, because we keep odd hours. There's not much light this time of year anyway. The city is under a shroud. A shroud of cloud. I like poems.

We have three CDs and a player we found one recycling day which really does work if you give it a thump. We've a TV too but we mostly keep it in the cupboard. Last time we got it out was to watch the hockey. Romanian boy likes it with sports in the background. Today we put on the Belle and Sebastian because I like the lines “I was choking on a cornflake/ You said have some toast instead.” But we have to listen to the whole album before and after that otherwise the words don't work properly.

Words are what got me here, because years ago he told me not to tell and I told anyway and then everyone was angry with me. I thought to myself “what could be worse?” and so far nothing has been. I really mean it. When it's better when they're shouting because at least when they're shouting they're not looking at you like that, you have to get away. I come from Oxford and expectations. I'm the youngest of three. We're usually the youngest, people like us. Romanian boy has three older brothers and a sister. He had a little brother who died when he was small, but I only know that because of the day we found the plastic bag with all the whiskey bottles in it.

I woke up when the CD stopped and started coughing, which woke up the boy. The room was full of blue smoke and smelt of bonfire night. I ran to the stove and threw a cloth over the pan. It caught fire right away. I stood there watching the flames rise higher with my mouth hanging open like a bloody idiot. The boy rushed up behind me and grabbed the pan by the handle and yelled “Open the door! Open it!” He threw the whole thing out in to the snow. He shook his hands shouting “fuck fuck fuck” and plunged them into the drift. When it first falls, the snow makes everything look pretty, but that might be because you can't see anything.

The boy was angry, but I didn't care because it meant it would take him longer to think of what to yell at me. I got in first saying “well, that's fucking brilliant. What are we going to eat now?” That pissed him off. He grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me really hard, so I held his dreds and brought his nose down on to my knee. It started to gush blood. He fell down on the floor and put his hands over it but blood came out between the fingers. I had to say something so I pointed down at him and said “That's how we do it where I'm from, you bastard.” I'd told him that I wouldn't let it happen again.

Last time he'd done it was because I'd spent all our money on hair dye. I've got lovely hair and I wanted to be just the right kind of blonde. Men think I'm pretty and I have to keep it up. My arms and legs are long and as long as I'm sat still they can't see the way I fall over things all the time. The first time I dyed it though it came out kind of green, so I tried it again, but it was still too brassy and not honey-y enough so I had to buy a third pack. When he found out he hit me a bit, not in the face because he's not as stupid as that. He kicked me all over the legs though. I never wear trousers, they're too much hassle in a pinch and I look better without anyway.

I picked up my bag and walked out of the open door. I gave the burnt pan with the burnt sugar-pasta a good kick on my way and walked until I was out of sight. Being here a while you get shoulders from bracing yourself as you walk out of a door. God only knows why we came here. It has to be easier hoofing from one hole to the next in Marbella or Lanzarote or something. It gets in your bones, the cold here. Grubby snow all over the place. I noticed I was crying because it made my face hurt. I thought of the crunching noise of that nose against my knee and I retched by a lamp-post. It hurt because there was nothing in my stomach. There aren't a lot of people wandering around here so no-one could see me. I had to be seen though, so I started walking.

We walk a lot. Today, we had decided to visit every Catholic church in downtown. No idea if we hit them all, but there aren't as many as in Montreal. I like the pictures. I like the flaming hearts and the eyes rolling right up in smooth faces. I like the way they painted silk in pink and blue and the tiny shards of bone. In Europe, you see saints with knives through their heads and the stone is black from all the incense and candles for hundreds of years. Romanian boy likes the smell of candles. He hadn’t noticed the way people looked at us and I didn't care.

My feet are vile. Ages ago, I stayed with some guy at his flat a veterinary college and he made me leave my shoes in the hall. I was so humiliated that I do it without being asked now. I have four pairs of shoes and they all make my feet bleed in a different place. I dragged these bleeding feet along the streets for as long as I could stand. It was late so there was no traffic by out-door spots and I couldn't bear it out there anyway, so I headed to the metro and set up there. All my signs are in my bag but fishing anything out of a rucksack is a chore. A sad girl I met in Paris used to say it was like birthing a cow, reaching in up to your elbow to get whatever you're after. She'd say, some days all she wanted was to be able to reach into a drawer or a cupboard and put her hand on the thing that she wanted.

Nobody cares who I am. This is good, because it means I can be anybody. I like to be an American model lost to smack or a long-lost princess from a Balkan country. It doesn't matter that I can't do accents because nobody wants me to talk. I like to let my signs tell my stories for me. Some signs work better than others, but I won't throw any away because I don't have the stories written down anywhere else. Some people like it if you're funny because they don't have to feel too sorry for you if you don't. Others don't like it, like, if I'm going to be a pest then I should at least feel bad about it. Today I'm hungry, so I use the hot meal sign. The Scottish girl dances, probably.

This metro doesn't move you on as much as they do in some places. In Berlin you might as well not bother. Here I can sit for as long as I choose. I think everyone who sits on their backside for hours at a time makes up stories about the people who walk by.

This woman lost her son to suicide. He drove out to an airfield and put a hose from the exhaust pipe to the window. Her eyes tell hollow tales and her memories are tainted. This guy never told his wife that he could only love a man. I like sad stories best and they are easiest to come up with in the half minute I see the faces for. She heard that Toronto was like New York and didn't understand what that meant. She throws me fifty cents and I give her a lover, someone who writes true things for a newspaper. She looks me over for just a moment, no expression, and walks away. I wonder what story she'll come up with for me.

I Made This!

2010-08-26T09:40:00.006+01:00

Life kind of got in the way of ATSAD. My boy and I are moving at the end of the month and have only just found somewhere to live. Now I have to get rid of a tonne of stuff in order that we can fit in this place. So I've needed a big project in order to keep my mind busy, something I like to call Sewing For Sanity. That one's mine, by the way. You can't have it.

I'd been fantasising for a while about a big embroidery projject to finish off ATSAD with a bang, but I can't remember when I had the idea for this design. Or rather, I can't remember when I saw Patti Smith's "Eat the Rich" T and decided to rip it off in the most painstaking way I could think of. I researched the idea a little more and found tonnes of variations on the theme, this being kind of an iconic punk slogan. Some of them sucked, naturally, as is the way of slogans that once meant something getting appropriated and ending up as cheap nasty transfers in Camden. But I found enough variation to make me decide to do my own take on it.

I bought an embroidery pencil ages ago and found it in the depths of my sewing box recently, so I dug that out and drew a freehand design of my skull, Erica. Not my skull, obviously. That still has the skin on, making it tricky to draw. Erica is an anatomical model that I got for my birthday. And then named Erica, naturally. Anyway, the transfer didn't work and I had to draw the design on in biro, freehand again. Used a steak knife and fork from the cutlery draw as (very slightly wonky) drawing references. I liked the text from the Patti Smith shirt, so I stuck pretty close to that, just made it a bit more cursive like my own handwriting.

Then I got stitching, a process made infitely easier by my remembering that I have an embroidery hoop. Did the writing bit first because I wanted it to be thick and therefore didn't need to seperate the embroidery threads. I've wanted to practice chain-stictch anyway since I saw a woman at Spitalfields who stitches slogans on to vintage jumpers. The rest of the design was done in backstitch, as it made for a neat line. This took about five days. I got through pretty much all of Season 3 of X-Files. My crush on Fox Mulder has been reawakened but by this point it is basically just Stockholm Syndrome. I even took this out to a gig, which was actually a pretty good idea because I didn't feel so bad about being sat on my own, plus it was a good conversation starter.

So now it's done, and I have a big hole in my life. I can't just flump down on the sofa and watch TV anymore because of the creeping feeling that I should be doing something more productive with my day. In fact, I should have been packing these last several days, but this let me pretend otherwise. And apart from the crooked cutlery, I am Well Pleased. The biro has (mostly) come out with the first wash so the stitching is showing up properly black now, rather than a little bit blue like it was before. The cross-hatching works really well and the whole design look bolder in life than it does in this picture here. I'm already planning my next embroidery project. I'm thinking Dana Scully.

A T-Shirt A Day: Day 10- tie-dye

2010-08-16T21:34:00.006+01:00

It all seemed so simple. Photocopy images from really cool book of vintage cigarette advertising found by mum, spread on magic glue, seal to shirt, leave overnight, wet paper and rub off, leaving a transferred image. Instead, photocopy images, realise too late that they will transfer backward, decide to transfer the only one that will work backwards, try to rub off after 8 hours, take off bits of transfer with paper. Leave longe, iron a bit, wet paper then try to remove again. bits of transfer that don't come off dry to a papery finish. Give up and slowly pick off all the bits of nasty papery glue bit by bit.

Curses. So, I went for the direct approach- good ol' dependable tie-dye. If American Apparel can get money for old rope (and lots of it) I don't see why I shouldn't. You know the drill, wrap bits of t-shirt in elastic bands and dye that stuff. The dylon I was using was this bright pink stuff boyfriend was probably never going to get around to using anymore, and was also for use in a washing machine, so I threw in a pair of jeans there too for use in later projects. There's something naff-in-a-good-way about dyed denim. Anyway, it's a nice hands-off approach. I can empty the dishwasher or sew fabric flowers in front of the X-Files, or clean up after housemate's sister's cat or look for jobs. Bascially all the things that I sew to avoid.

I think the washing machine process is a little too intensive. A few of the elastic bands came off in the wash, so it's probably safer just to do these experiments by hand. That way you can dye your shirt all rainbow colours for that "hobo on the Haight who once roadied for Grateful Dead look". Far out.

A T-Shirt A Day: Day 9- corsage

2010-08-13T17:24:00.001+01:00

Now, I was going to post yesterday. I really was. It just kind of went to crap. Maybe. Anyway, we'll see how it works out, if it works out, and I'll tell you all about it when it isn't raining.

I bought a book of fabric samples off ebay for a pitance recently. A few are very nice. A few are good but in hideous colourways that I cannot imagine anyone thinking would look nice. And some are simple awful. Most are pretty alright and it is one of the pretty alright ones that became the subject for today's shirt. In other ebay news, I bought four fabric scraps off some guy and didn't requent that he combine postage, thinking that everyone just did that automatically these days. More fool I! If dude thinks I'm paying £10.50 postage for four bits of fabric...why I oughta...mumble mumble...

The pattern for this is from Eithne Farry's book Lovely Things To Make For Girls Of Slender Means. The title alone is a winner. It's a follow-up to another book called Yeah, I Made It Myself and they are both really fun, non-scary introductions to making your own clothes and accessories. Since I have so many interesting little bits of pattern fabric now, I anticipate spending much of my sewing time to be spent making flowers, purses and hairbows once ATSAD is done with.

I drew 6 circles on the back of the fabric in pencil, 3 large 3 small, and cut them out with pinking shears. Cut slits into the circles stopping about 1.5cm from the centre and stitch the edges together. Stitched the remaining green sequins on for a little bittle extra sparle and sewed it to the shoulder of this vest. The deep pink and turquoisy blue go really nicely with the chocolate brown of the top, I think.

A T-Shirt A Day: Day 8- sequins!

2010-08-11T18:38:00.006+01:00

Have you ever sewn a sequin? Do you intend to? Because before you do I feel I should warn you that this one took me three and a half X-Files episodes (Season 2, Ep 1-4).

When I was back at home, foraging for crafty treats, I found this little tin, full of pins and needles and weird inexplicable metal bits and bobs. It also contained a good number of sequins. Having already considered doing sequins for one of these shirt, my mind was made up. The tin is also really cool. Check it out there.

The sequins were red and green and the only thing I could think to do with those colours that wasn't too Christmassy was an apple. A bit concerned that those stupid vampire films might have spoiled the apple motif a bit, especially on a black shirt. It's ruining a lot of motifs though; moons, chess pieces, blood, the notion that domestic violence is romantic, all that jazz. Turns out that the greens significantly outnumber the reds though, which makes it look a bit more jaunty.

Drew on the motif in taylors pencil, possibly a little high but I didn't want it to look like a pasty. Settled down in front of the TV and got to sewing in concentric circles. Took a few tries and wonky dog-legs to get the hang, but I got into it. just wish it hadn't taken so bloody long. If I'd realised sooner just how far the reds were going to go, I would have done one side of the apple red and the other green. I was expecting to only have to do a touch of green in one corner to fill it out, y'see. But here we have one disco apple and it is only seven o'clock. Laters!

A T-Shirt A Day: Day 7- applique

2010-08-10T23:23:00.006+01:00

Getting a bit close to the wire here. The job centre had me running back and forth most of today. Might be the best t-shirt yet though. Appliqued sun and clouds from scrap fabric I've had for a while, a vintage pillow case and ever-useful jeans. Throw in some emboidery and stitched borders and you've got a damn nice shirt.

Sadly, it's not all good and I have learned a lesson on the danger of short-cuts. I was thrilled to find a tube of fusable interfacing at home. It would have been the perfect thing to hold down those ribbons a while ago. So I was pretty excited to find this stuff and keen to use it on an applique project. Drew the images on the reverse of the fabric and sprayed on the interfacing. I payed close attention to the edges, like it says on the tube, forgetting my plan to applque stitch the edges. Pressed under the iron and voila, imovable stiffened fabric all the way to the edges. But it just didn't look right. I stitched it anyway and it took about forever. I have shredded my thumb nails pushing that needle through the card-like cloth.

It does look nice, but it's lucky I've got more of these fabrics, because I think it's a job worth doing properly- meaning the pieces intefaced only a little in the centre and stitched on again later. My textiles teacher said to always applique using a buttonhole stitch. Forget that. I like my nice little zigzag and a manly movie in the background. Gladiator is the best film to craft to. Experience has proved this.

Taking this picture was kind of funny because there were some kids breaking into the park in the background and I really freaked them out with the flash.

ETA- Stiffness of fabric has also led to one oddly flattened and misshapen boob when worn. Kids, use spray on fusable interfacing with care. And don't huff it neither.

A T-Shirt A Day: Day 6- pocket

2010-08-09T13:42:00.003+01:00

One of these days I am going to start a projects called "things to do with a pair of old jeans." When I was a teenager, I wore these bizzare oversized jeans, the bigger the better, like sails. I'm not giving to throwning away old clothes, and these are all so worn and horrible that I can't give them to charity, so the natural solution is to upcycle. I've so far made a very nice cushion (it's not the neatest piece of work because it was the first time I've tried to make my own pattern) and I have more than enough to make at least one skirt and a bag.

This is a start anyway. A back pocket removed with the aid of my trusty quick-unpick and simply stitched on the front. Might work with a pair of Daisy Dukes and some roller-skates for a wholesome, 70's girls-next-door look. Farah hair optional.

A T-Shirt A Day: Day 5- stencil

2010-08-08T14:25:00.004+01:00

Really fancied making a t-shirt that a Scott Pilgrim character would wear. Love that comic. I joined in at the first book, which gives me the sense of smug superiority only an indie comics fan could have. Mixed feelings about the film. I love Edgar Wright and all but Michael Cera is so laconic and I'm not sure he's right for Scott.

What? T-shirts?

I picked this pretty yellow shirt for the stencil idea because it reminded me of that classic 60's smiley that got on everything. I was going to do that but worried that the irony of of hand-producing a mascot of mass-production might get a little lost. Plus I might just look like a Watchmen nerd, and we have just established what kind of nerd I am. It wasn't a huge leap to update the smiley to its modern iteration. Used a semi-colon rather than the regular just to make it clear what I'm doing here.

Drew the symbols out by hand on a glossy magazine cover (stiff, non-porous) and tried to cut them out with a scalpel. Scalpel was blunt so I went in the old-fashioned way of getting the scissors in there and sticking my tongue out for accuracy. Taped it to front of tee and put a newspaper inside to prevent the fabric paint soaking through. I have lots of this stuff in various colours that I really should get to using someday. Applied paint to stencil via artful use of old sponge. Left to dry and ironed like it says on the bottle.

So this was pretty much the quickest shirt yet, except maybe the holey one. The whole process took me about half an hour, including having the idea and hunting around for a magazine to rip up. If I was capable of having more neat little ideas for graphics like this one, I'd be doing this all the time.

A T-Shirt A Day: Day 4- buttons

2010-08-07T18:00:00.004+01:00

I've been back in the country for my mum's birthday, hence ATSAD's week long hiatus (told you not to hold me to it). But I've been having a heck of a time rummaging through my mum's and my grandma's old sewing stuff, plus the stuff at the charity shop where mum works that they can't sell. There is so much fabric in mum's garage. I took home one large bag full and still barely scratched the surface. Then there's all the stuff I've got here and being looked after at boyfriend's parent's place. I wandered longingly through the haberdashery department of John Lewis for over an hour but the sad fact is that I am not allowed any new fabric until I use up the old stuff. Wah.

But I've brought back so many treats! Bamboo bag-handles, hooks and eyes, interfacing, wundaweb, patterns, sewing scissors, crimping shears, thread, elsatic, shirring elastic, a darning mushroom (!) and more. A good hour was spent yesterday going through my sewing box and making it look all lovely. It looks so lovely, guys.

Back to the task in hand. I sewed on a bunch of buttons. My method was as follows- take a button, sew it on, repeat until all buttons are sewn on. To be fair, these are really nice buttons. I keep buttons that I find lying around, or that fall off my coats, or I buy them on a whim if they're pretty. I kept them within a limited colour-range for the sake of taste, and it took me a couple of tries to get them on in a pattern I like but that's it as far as complexity goes.

But then, tragedy struck. It doesn't bloody fit. I tried it on over a sports bra and tucked my tummy in and it just about looked OK, but I can't say it's the most comfortable thing I've ever worn. I can see why kid sis chucked it out, and she'd even cut the sleeve seams for a little extra room. I can't give it up though, because it's go all these lovely buttons on that I want to keep- check out the tiny scotty dog there! The options are to take them all off and put them on a different shirt or ease off the beer and got for a run. Bah! There is always option 3- stick it in a draw and try not to worry about it for a while. It's always worked for me before.

Extras

2010-07-31T12:32:00.002+01:00

Just a little note, because this is coming down tomorrow, but I have been exhbiting five of my prints in the Leytonstone Arts Trail. My location of choice was my local, The North Star, which is everything you want an East End pub to be and a few things you don't. It all seems to have gone pretty well. Sold my self portrait today for £45, so that's paid for the lovely IKEA frames anyway. Landlord initially smashed the one of Sean on the right here, then went straight out and bought a fresh pane of glass for me. What a champ! He also called me "Spooky", which I like.

A T-Shirt A Day: Day 3- ribbons

2010-07-31T10:54:00.009+01:00

I have a huge snake's nest of ribbons tangled up in the bottom of my sewing box, along side and embroidery hoop, some old fabric glue and a vintage dress pattern that I'm too scared to use. I figured I'd put some on a t-shirt and see what happens. Chose some warm colours to go with the shirt and avoided using wired ribbon under the rare flash of brilliance that told me it would make the shirt hang weird. Maybe I'm learning.

I laid the t-shirt on the floor so I could lay the ribbons on it nice and flat and cut them to an appropriate length, so they wouldn't get in too much of a mess when it came to sewing them. Now came the problem of sewing them on. Pinning and tacking turned out to be an utter pain in the ass- I just couldn't keep the ribbons on straight. So I got creative. That's right. Glue. I PVA'd those suckers down and left them to dry. Class. If I'd bothered to think this through, I might have used some (working) fabric glue, or some Wundaweb to iron the ribbons into place. But this is supposed to be a t-shirt a day. It's a learning process.

With the ribbons held in place, it was time to get stitching. I stitched a neat row on backstitch to keep the ribbons attached along the top edge and cut for neatness. Although the backstitch is nice and small to prevent fraying, the ribbons are starting to fray a little already. A very small zigzag stitch via machine would probably be what I would recommend if anyone else wanted to try this. My machine is heavy and ancient and goes really fast and scares the crap out of me, so I actually hand stitched all these ribbons on with a running backstitch, which was a pain when I had to stitch over the hard gluey bits but it would have messed a machine up way harder than it messed up my fingers.

And you know what? I kind of like the way it looks like this. It looks handmade because it is handmade. When it's on, it hangs just fine and you don't notice those little gaps between the ribbons that are sewn close to eachother because they've been pulled tight. I left some little tails hanging down for extra shabby chic points and once it had gone through the wash on a mini cycle, all the PVA came off so there were no stiff bits of marks on the end result. I really enjoyed making this. Time flies when you're sewing row after row of backstitch in bright red thread, trying to keep your stitches neat and uniform with a cup of tea by your side and your housemates slaughtering zombies in the background.

A T-Shirt A Day: Day 2- holes

2010-07-30T11:46:00.004+01:00

This was so easy that I almost feel bad for blogging it. Almost. Keeping with the deconstruction theme I decided to recreate a shirt I saw in Urban Outfitters for £18 or something ridiculous. Sometime soon I'm actually going to make something instead of ruining it and calling it punk, but this one looks really good on. I just sat down with a pair of sewing scissors and got to cutting almond shapes of various sizes. I pulled them out with my fingers so that the holes looked less raw. I've actually worn this one and can confirm that it looks good on. This is it after it's been through the wash on a normal 40 degree cotton cycle.

A T-Shirt A Day: Day 1- shredded

2010-07-29T19:24:00.006+01:00

Ages ago, my kid sister gave me a bunch of plain vests and t-shirts that she no longer wanted. These went in one of my sewing bags along with the plain Uniqlo shirts, bought in my teens, with the intention of customising. Well, I'm 25 and unemployed so now's the time to get customising. I'm going to breathe new life into 15 plain t-shirts. The plan is to do one a day, but I'm not holding myself to that and neither should you. I'll try to get it close as though.

Day 1, and I fancied getting down with something punk. Somehting, in other words, that wouldn't look too awful if I ballsed it up. I had a poke about on the internet for one idea, but found something different here. So, after a fashion, I ended up with this-

Now, I'm going to be honest with you, this took me a lot longer than five hours like she said in the video. Although it got about a billion times easier once I got a quick unpick on it, it is still pretty hard going. In fact, I'm still going back to it if I feel like doing something while the TVs on. My theory is that the t-shirt was a little too...nice. It's a Uniqlo one and the threads are pretty fine. I've used this techniques since on a holey sweater and works easily with fingers because the fibres are thick and looser-knit. So my recommendation to you if you fancy trying this would be to use a cheaper t-shirt. The threads come apart far easier and it will take you way less time.

I still like this one though. There's a delicate, cobwebby quality to it that I find quite attractive. Plus it's pretty fun to make, even if I did nearly blind myself in the process picking away at it with a pin. I also stretched it out kind of weirdly by pulling it across my knees to get the threads to seperate better, plus the process itself makes everything hang a little oddly, but luckily this sort of shape is in at the moment. Next up: holes.

The Secret

2010-05-26T12:47:00.005+01:00

This was inspired by reading the "self-help" book The Secret over someone's shoulder on the tube and being utterly horrified. Reached a bit of a full-stop about halfway through writing and then started reading "The Lottery and Other Stories" by Shirley Jackson and had the alarming feeling of someone having written my story 50 years ago and everything fell into place. My first attempt at both horror and satire.

The Secret

She had learned at last the reason she was alone. It was simpler than she’d feared and the relief was like a balm on a festering wound. The problem was that she had not made room for anyone else. She had been so concerned with work and friends and a place to live that there wasn’t the space for a man in her life, even if she felt one in her heart. A huge space, growing each day in all three of its metaphorical dimensions until it threatened to take her over. The prospect of a life as a man-shaped hole was unbearable.

The book, however, was practical and optimistic. To create the necessary room, she just had to imagine that it was already filled. If she acted as if she already had that man, then the universe would fill that space to restore the balance. You deserve to get what you want, so start acting like you deserve it.

Had she space in her drive for his car as well as her own? the book asked. Well, she lived in an apartment building with ample underground parking, but she decided to take the initiative and rented the space next to hers. For guests, she informed the concierge as if he cared. I know something you don’t know.

Next she had to stop sleeping in the middle of the bed as if it was just hers. She had to pick a side and stick to it. It was our bed now. It wasn’t easy to choose, since to the one side was her table with novel, alarm clock, pills etc and to the other was the bathroom. She chose the bathroom side so that she would not have to disturb him if she needed the loo in the night. She imagined that he would turn off the alarm in the mornings before it woke her, so he could watch her sleeping for just five more minutes and then rouse her with a kiss. It was hard to get used to. In the mornings she would wake star-shaped in the centre of the bed and flail her arm across where his face would be to press the snooze button. Five days of this put her into a foul mood at work in the mornings. She tried packing the other half of the bed with pillows and soon she’d started to tiptoe on her way to the bathroom and reach carefully for the alarm. She looked tenderly towards a creamy stretch of waffle-cotton and imagined human features smiling in their sleep.

Drawers and wardrobe. What to do? They were half full of clothes bought as if she could already fit into them and lingerie for the long nights together. The rest were mostly work clothes, a wardrobe that had gotten her a lot of compliments over the years. She stood in front of the open wardrobe for half an hour, then went to get a glass of wine. The door was still open when she returned, challenging her to embrace the task or walk away in defeat. In a fit of passion, she pruned back the wardrobe to bare branches- away went the jewel-toned silk blouses, the white lace and yellow knitted mini-dresses of her dancing days, the outsize logo t-shirts, gone before the bottle had been drunk. She considered saving a few special things in the attic. Then, how could she expect the universe to bend to her will if she didn’t cast it in iron? A willingness to compromise meant a willingness to fail. It meant that she didn’t want her reward badly enough. Disgusted, she threw up in the toilet and went to bed hungry.

The next day she felt light and free as she drove around the suburbs to disperse the bin bags among the charity shops and dress agencies. A glorious feeling of balance came over her. Swings and roundabouts, she thought between the British Heart Foundation and the Salvation Army. We all get what we truly deserve. You just have to learn the rules. The power of the knowledge was amazing. She had to fight the urge to slap the grey-faced women who walked beside her. “Be better!” she would tell them. “Why don’t you just be better?”

She stripped back her diary with ease compared to the clothes. Dinner dates with clients and movie dates with friends meant so little compared with quiet nights in front of a rented DVD with a home-cooked meal, just the two of them. But she was smart. Men needed their space, time with their friends to watch football and such and such. She kept a few nights in her diary filled, here and there. Enough so he would feel free, not enough that he would feel jealous, neglected. Emasculated.

Her empty nights were spent picturing these evenings in. From vague movie montages they blossomed into complex real-time events. Her imaginings became so detailed that the experience was almost meditative. Eyes to the wall, she saw everything. The colour and knit of the sweater he would wear became more familiar to her than the view from her window.

She was trying to work out a more friendly salary when he arrived. She hadn’t heard anything, but there was a sense of movement and things disturbed that made her look up from her notepad, towards the front door. There, she was aware of a heavy coat hung on the empty peg. For a moment she felt warm. She shook herself and returned to the TV. At eleven o’clock the channel changed, but she had already fallen asleep on the sofa.

The shower was running when she got up the next morning. She had slept through her alarm or forgotten to set it, but she had only over-slept by 10 minutes. She let the water run and went to put the coffee on. She reached without thinking for the double cafetiere instead of the single. The water stopped running as she spooned sugar into mugs. She showered, dressed, applied make-up and went to pour the brewed coffee. She smiled at the little pink post-it note with a heart drawn on that had been stuck to her favourite mug. She poured in the remaining coffee and drank it straight down.

Work went slowly. She made her excuses and left at four thirty to pick up a few things from the shops. A casserole is definitely what she should cook for dinner. She would never have thought of that before. Once she got home, she saw that the flat was looking rather drab. Probably needed a new coat of paint. A trip to a furniture store together might be fun. The meal was perfect, just like the ones his mother made. She was flattered. She was going to watch her usual programme afterwards, but realised that it wasn’t actually very good, so she watched a different one. She went to bed and he made her happy, like a whole woman would feel.

They didn’t like to go out. She knew the goodness in him, but people were a threat. They judged. They wouldn’t understand their love. It was a rare jewel. Why share it? Better to set it in this golden home. Such lovely words.

Her days began to look much like each-other. Routine is good. It makes for healthy minds. She scrutinised the manuscripts on her desk according only to the set rules. She lost all real interest in them. She had only the effort in her to care about her real life, waiting in her flat. The hours between nine and five passed by as if she’d dreamt them. Dull dreams of stapled reams of paper.

Their understanding was perfect. No aspect of her needed to be hidden. She realised that so much about her was unnecessary. Most of her aspirations were unattainable, most of her tastes banal, most of her interests uninteresting.

She cut them free and let them blow away. She had the chance to be re-born. She was free and naked under the stars. She withdrew from the people who knew her. Most withdrew in turn. They’d never liked her anyway. False friends. They weren’t worth her time. They were the trappings of her old self, stuff that she’d drawn around her like her stupid books and ugly clothes, trying to make herself appear a full person. None of that could make her real. Only love had that power.

But some held on. They told her that they missed her. Maybe it was her weakness talking, but it seemed as though they meant it. She tried to ignore them and put them off by saying she was busy. It wasn’t her they wanted, after all. It was a shell of a person who was lying cold in her grave. But they persisted, these two or three, and she heard suspicion in their voices. So she gave in, and agreed to meet for cocktails on a Wednesday after work.

She asked and he agreed, enthusiastically. Of course she needed some time with her friends. She wasn’t a prisoner. He knew that she knew not to talk about her life at home, that they wouldn’t understand. He knew her and he trusted her. When she got to the bar, she began to have doubts. She didn’t trust herself not to say something stupid or to do something obvious. Perhaps the faith in her was not enough. Perhaps she didn’t deserve it. She spent so much time on these questions that she didn’t have the chance to walk out before her friends arrived, arms wide and laughing.

She had forgotten how much there was to talk about. Fashions had changed in six months and had passed her by, nothing more than window dressing. And there was news about the world and about people she had known and used to care about. Everything had changed and she had played no part in it. But it didn’t matter, surely. She was complete inside, had no need for outside influence. She was happy. She had never been so happy. It was almost eleven and she was drunk. She’d had so much fun. The world was alive to her and full of light and laughter. She was loved and trusted and happy.

She left her car and took a taxi home. She saw that the light was on in her flat on the fourth floor and tensed. She decided to be moved that he had waited up for her. Her heart quickened in the elevator, anxious to see him again. The air was still when she opened the door, but she could sense him sitting and waiting. She offered a greeting to the stillness. What had she been doing that had kept her out so late? Who were these people and what had they talked about? Why were they so important, more important than him?

She laughed. More important? He had made her everything she was. What a silly thing to say. Her laughter dissolved in the air. He didn’t think it was funny and he didn’t believe her anymore. She’d betrayed him after all he’d done. She was a liar. The lamp fell down and the room fell to darkness. She looked around in confusion and tried to explain how much he meant to her. He had changed her life, she was nothing without him. She was damn right she was nothing. How dare she laugh after what she’d put him through? He’d been worried sick and she didn’t give a damn. She fell. Her face bounced off the arm of the settee and then she was on the floor.

As told, she got to her feet, but caught her hair on something and couldn’t pull free. Her eyes watered with pain. She yelped and fell down again with her face burning. She had hurt him so much. How could she do this? How could she?

She decided to go away. They needed time to think. She saw that she had made him angry he couldn’t think. He needed time from her. She ran for the door, opened it and ran through. Her coat snagged on the latch and her shoes slipped from under her. She landed hard on the hallway floor. She got free and moved towards the stairs, aching. She reached the top step and was stopped. She was loved. Loved so much.

She hit every step on the flight. There was no part of her body that didn’t hurt. She’d missed her chance at happiness after working so hard for it. She had deserved happiness. She was owed it. It couldn’t all be over, not like this.

Number 11

2009-07-14T19:01:00.002+01:00

I haven't been posting on account of the fact that I've been entering writing competitions and they usually ask that work not be published elsewhere before it's submitted. I'm not sure if the blog counts, but better safe than sorry. Since the story below recently won me a little prize (£20, which I promptly blew on DVDs at Fopp) I figure it'll be OK for me to post it here. My thanks to the good people at Cazart.co.uk for choosing my story for first place that month. I have no idea how many entries they had, but I'm feeling smug regardless.

This is actually based on a true story told by a friend of a friend of my mother's. I enjoyed it so much that I did what all my favourite writers do and nicked it, embellished it to the point that I no longer know truth from fact and took the credit. I'm hoping that I got the impression of English as a second language without it coming off as some goddawful Inspector Clouseau caricature-

You have a stereotype that French people love to eat snails. Frogs’ legs and snails. I do not like snails. I have had frogs’ legs and I think that they are alright but snails I do not like at all. They are too chewy and taste of nothing. All you taste is the garlic they stuff into them. You can buy snails in the supermarkets here now, I notice. Have you seen them? Nothing but garlic butter stuffed into shells.

When I was a little girl, my mother never cared much for snails either. They have to be specially reared so they are often expensive. I think now that her distaste for them grew from the feeling that the little bit of chewy meat was not worth all the expense. But they are different from the normal snails that you find in the garden or in hedgerows. They are clean. They have eaten only good things. This is not true of wild snails, especially the ones on the farm where I grew up.

My sister and I, because we did not have very much to do, we would pick them up and write numbers on them in pencil. Do you know what we did then? Of course, we had races. We made a course in the farmyard using bits of stick or what have you, so that the snails would not stray from their tracks. It sounds like it should be very boring, because snails are famous for being so very slow. But like I say, we did not have much to do and if you found enough snails it could be quite exciting. Sometimes, I suppose it was inevitable, we would re-capture snails we had raced before, still with their little numbers written on their shells. These ones, it seemed they knew what was expected of them. They kept better to their tracks and headed quite directly for the lettuce at the end.

If they had nothing to do either, the workers from the farm would gather around us and place bets on the snails they thought would win. As happens, I suppose, I fight would break out or a losing competitor would be threatened with crushing under the heel of a boot. Then my sister would start to cry and go running to our mother. Our father would then say “No more snail races!” and we would both cry even louder. After a week, all would be forgotten and we would start over again.

During one of our races, my mother came into the yard to tell us that dinner that day would be tartiflette. One of the workers sneered that he was sick of her tartiflette and said that tonight he wanted snails. My mother replied that if the man wanted snails he could go and catch them himself. Now, the men on the farm, they were very macho, you see. They were always boasting of their drinking or their strength or what have you. So when my mother tells him to go and catch his own snails to eat, this man turns up his nose and says “I could eat them. I can eat anything.” My mother has heard many of these brags so she rolls her eyes and makes a gesture like this.

At this, he gets a little excited because these men secretly love to be challenged. So then he says “I have eaten a roasted snake! I have eaten my own boots in red wine sauce! I could eat any snail, no problem. I could eat it alive.” My mother does not wish to encourage him any further so she holds up her hands and says “Alright, I believe you,” and turns to walk back to the house.

But now it is unfortunately too late. The man pulls out his knife, because of course all the workers then carried knives. My mother turns around at my little sister’s cry because he has picked up one of our racing snails. He looks my mother right in the eye and with his knife, he pulls the poor creature from its shell, stuffs it in his mouth, chews twice and swallows. My mother turns straight to the gutter and vomits.

The worker threw the empty shell back onto the yard in front of me and my sister. I remember that its number was 11.

Daily Picture

2009-05-10T08:06:00.004+01:00

Wanted a Sheffield pic to go with a Sheffield story, but this is the only decent one I have that doesn't have my friends in it. Carved into the stone wall outside the Buddhist centre in Walkley. If you walk across the road there, you get an amazing view of the city, especially at night.

Prelude by a Canal

2009-05-10T07:50:00.006+01:00

I experimented with this character, Katie, on and off for a while with decent results. This is an introduction, written for my Writing Fiction module, so at least I got something out of it. Managed to get quite far with the story before dropping it. Like Through The Tall Trees, this is also about a young girl discovering something awful, but this time I wrote it knowing where the discovery was going to take her. I'll post some more stuff abut Katie later. I'm very fond of her.

She could have been anybody’s coming of age novella. Anyone’s heart-rending epic or kitchen-sink romance. Perhaps she could one day be someone’s girl in the café, The One glimpsed across a busy railway platform, or the friend he had been in love with all along. An array of literary fates skittered minnow-fashion through her daydreams, but never the fact that at that moment she was just a girl by a canal and of little interest to anyone but herself.

Filled with restless energy an hour ago, the girl had stolen her brother’s boots from his bedroom and ridden off down the road at full speed on his bike. Some quirk of logic told her that it would be better than them going unused. But the boots were heavy and far too large and by the time she had reached the lock, her feet were covered in bleeding sores. As soon as she stepped out of them, the blood burnt in her soles and tingled on contact with the grass.

The day was humid, and though the sky was photo-perfect blue and the sunlight dappled prettily through the trees, the stench from the weed-choked lock was overpowering. No breeze stirred the leaves or the rushes that hid her from the bank. No birds sang.

It was cooler under the bridge. The algae cleared in places, enough for her to slip her wounded feet into the water. A powerful throbbing shook her bones as her skin made contact. It felt like an ice-cream headache in her legs. As it subsided, she fell back onto the grass and let go of everything on her mind except the plop of condensation echoing off slimy walls, the whine of a mosquito.

She daydreamed of all the things that little girls are told from birth, but now the cruel fantasies of fairy-princess-hood were giving way to more womanly concerns. Or rather, what she imagined the concerns of a woman to be. Princes no longer rode to her rescue on white chargers, or to wake her with a kiss, but the betrayal of fairy-tales still left her believing that it would take only the arrival of that perfect boy to transform her from the dull 12 year old she was into a very special girl. Life would be an adventure and nothing would be sordid or lonely again. People would be kind and brothers dependable and houses free from draughts and spiders. She would never have to go back to school. Or maybe he would be there waiting when she got back, new and untainted and just a week from now. He would be dark and tanned, probably an American. He would definitely write poetry.

The movement of the sun finally fell across the corner of the metal box that lay submerged a few feet from where she was sat. The glint hit her eye and summer was over.

Her thin sundress billowed around her waist as she waded through the dark canal. The silt stirred around her feet so she lost sight of them. She walked carefully across the weed-slick rocks, feeling ahead for needles or cans, the sad detritus she’d been warned about by her father. The water was deeper than she’d though and a sudden depth would be hidden from her view. The weeds pulled her thin legs down. Torchlight tales of drowned, inevitably Victorian children drifted back to her, pale faces swirling through black mists. She pictured cold hands reaching to her, but the box was close, shining. Another foot and she could touch it.

From nowhere, a shadow passed across the sun and the whole earth shuddered. The glint vanished and a breeze rose up and blew straight through her sodden clothes. Suddenly she was a little girl alone in a grey world, up to her small breasts in filthy water. It felt as if judging eyes were all around her. In a spasm of fear and isolation, her bladder emptied with a nauseating trickle into the water. Tears pricked at her eyes. She tried to catch her breath. The box was just another foot away. She had to find it now. It had become too important to let go. This could be the key to something big. Although the glint of the box had vanished, she was close enough to trace its shape and its hard angles had already etched themselves on the insides of her eyelids from out of the jumble of weed and shifting mud. She slipped her hand beneath the surface and reached out to touch the cold metal.

Minutes later, the girl pulled herself back onto the bank. It took some effort because her clothes were full of dirty water and she was holding a metal cash tin under one arm. Though the sun had come back out, she still trembled and her dress clung to her skinny body. She hardly paid attention. What concerned her was opening her treasure and enjoying her reward.

The lock was warped and easily opened with a rock. She bit her lip as she lifted the lid, but was puzzled when she discovered that the box held nothing but little plastic bags full of powder. Confused and disappointed, she returned them to the box which she strapped to the bike and then ambled slowly back towards the town. She stopped at the local shop for a 20p ice-lolly and sat on the low wall near the church eating it, keeping a close eye on the box in case it exploded on contact with the air, like the chemical powders in science. Her clothes had dried during the ride and her dress had green stripes of slime all over the skirt. Her feet were still sore which was why she reckoned she deserved the ice-lolly, to distract herself from the pain.

The was still the aroma of scum about her as she parked her bike behind the house and stomped up to her brother’s room, removing his boots at the door. She didn’t bother knocking though; she never did, out of the vague, almost subconscious hope that she would catch him at something. He shouted at her, but she paid no attention. Just held out the box to him and asked him to tell her what it was. He went very quiet then. He spoke to her very slowly and told her that he was going to call the police and she shouldn’t say a word to mum and dad and he would take care of everything.

The girl walked back to her bedroom. The new carpet left fluff in her sores and she anticipated picking it out later with her mum’s tweezers. Closing her bedroom door behind her, she walked to her chest of drawers and picked up the little lacquer box her nana had given her. She tipped the old rose petals out of the window, because it felt too horrible to tip them into the bin. She tried to attach some meaning to seeing them float down to the garden on the scant breeze, but her mind was elsewhere. She took the little powder packet from her pocket and stuffed it into the box. She put the lid back on and forgot all about it. After putting on a fresh pair of jeans and a t-shirt with a penguin on it, she went downstairs to watch Blue Peter. The little lacquer box just waited.

Model Me This

2009-05-10T07:42:00.002+01:00

I'm sticking my favourite shots from my modelling shoots on here too, although perhaps this one isn't the best to start with, being both creepy and quite lo-res, because I was scared of my computer exploding if I saved the hi-res images on it. Never mind. Clicky bigger. Copyright Mario Carangi @ fotovation, not to be reproduced without his permission.

Daily Picture (pt 2)

2009-05-09T08:48:00.001+01:00

Seemed kind of weird to post about Barton Springs and have the picture be from San Francisco. This one isn't great, but I think you get the feel of it. This is down river, rather than the top end where you have to pay and it's basically a big outdoor swimming pool. Saw an exhibition of photos taken in that bit. They were like an American Martin Parr. Anyway, this bit was lovely. The water was so cool but burned off your skin the moment you got out. There were little fishes that nibbled at your skin and even turtles swimming around.

Barton Springs

2009-05-09T08:34:00.001+01:00

Travelling around the States in 2007 left me with a few amazing experiences, but mostly I came back with amazing images. This peice was written for Sheffield's creative magazine "Now Then" but wasn't accepted. Or officially rejected. Anyway, this one was written based on a visit to Barton Springs in Austin. I got lost and was shown the way by a 21 year old ex-soldier with skunk hair and ended up sitting with a bunch of burn-outs until I went swimming alone.

“This bird here?” He points at his left forearm. “This one was for my first girl. She was obsessed with dead birds. Saw them everywhere.”

“Uh-huh.”

I’d feel bad, but the dude is phoning it in. His eyes are somewhere on the other side of the pool and he smells of burning plastic. I’m watching a girl with flaming poi swing her hips around and drinking a PBR quickly, so I don’t taste it. We deserve each other.

“Hey, do you read the news?” He’s looking at me with a sudden clarity that catches me off guard. For the first time tonight I feel drunk.

“Er, no.” (I’m just passing through)

“They executed a woman today.”

“Oh.” (We are in Texas)

“She was a friend of my mom’s.”

“Huh.” (This man is baked)

“No, man, really. They used to get high together. She’d been on death row for, like, 10 years. There was a whole bunch of campaigners and news crews round that town, all the fucking time. She got sent down for killing her baby.” He pauses, looks back across the pool. “This woman, not my mom.

“Anyway, I remember her. She’d come over every couple of weeks or something and yell about some dude or another. My mom had a lot of friends like that, y’know?” He laughs. “She wore these gross clothes that just hung off her body. She looked kind of like a chicken like that. You could always see this brown, papery skin between her tits, like broiled chicken skin. I kept staring at it. She’d catch me and give me this big wink that made her whole face fold up and show her teeth. Then I’d run off cos I was, like, eight or something.

“She’d come round and my mom would listen to her yelling and she’d fix her some food, because my mom is cool like that. My dad doesn’t understand why my mom keeps letting all these people come round our house but he lets her because he’s out most of the time and there’s not often much fuss. Although,” laughs, “this one time this dude is out of his head and he thinks the wind-chimes in the yard are, like, in his head or something? And he starts ripping ‘em down off the tree and the roof over the porch and my mom tries to stop him and he stamps on her foot. My dad was drinking with them this time and he sees this and punches the guy in the head so hard he can’t hear for a week. Still let him back though, because he was my mom’s friend.

“So this woman disappears for a few months and my mom’s all, no big deal, because this shit happens, you know? But then she comes back, by herself, except she’s not because she’s got this fucking kid with her. And this was kind of a shock because she never seemed like the maternal type. But she seems happy and she’s feeding it and it’s all good. So they sit around and they have a laugh and it’s like nothing ever happened.

“But a couple of weeks later she comes back and it was bad. She’s got these bags under her eyes and she’s looking around all paranoid. Maybe she said something to my mom about dropping the thing, but they went off to the other room and I couldn’t hear well. I was looking after the baby and I looked in its crib and the thing was, like, frozen. Its eyes were moving but it wasn’t crying or anything and its head was on one side. This kid looked at me, right in the eyes, and I could swear, swear, that it was saying ‘She’s gonna kill me. I’m gonna die.’

“And, yeah, it wasn’t a month later that the baby turns up in a dumpster and they’re dragging her off to jail. It’s really harsh.

“I called my mom to make sure she was OK and I was all ‘Mom, that friend of yours got executed, are you OK?’ and my mom said ‘Yeah, I’m fine. It’s really sad though. It’s sad that they had to execute her.’ And then she pauses and says ‘She was always kind of a bitch though.’” He starts laughing. Big, raking, gutter-laughs. “Can you believe that?”

“No, I can’t.”

On the other side of the pool, the girl with the poi twirls with her eyes closed. “It’s amazing,” she drawls. “I just dropped a load of acid the other night and it came to me.”

Daily Picture

2009-05-09T08:27:00.000+01:00

From my trip to San Francisco in summer 2007. This was taken on Hippy Hill in Golden Gate Park. It's right by Haight-Ashbury, so you can imagine what it smells like. Click for full-size.

Luna

2009-05-08T12:55:00.001+01:00

Short piece from my airy-fairy goth phase. 50 words based on the three faces of the moon in the Greco-Roman/Pagan model.

Luna

The moon rattled. I can’t explain it another way. I turn my face in the lamplight and reveal cheek, chin, nose, forehead, slowly. Looks rather like a new five-pee, don’t you think? The green tickles my legs and the back of my neck, but I’m not scared. I’m ready. Please?

No green slip but full and crimson now. Glow of hearth and heart. I made these things. To the beat of the tide, the moon boomed and back at it I howled and all my children too, grown wild on story books and sandwiches. We let the sunset brand us.

I sit and stitch and stare in silence because the moon is whispering to me. I am black spider and I carry it in my hair, dear. Stay for another. There’s no one here. I would lay in the grass, foolish girl. All done. You’ll catch your death of cold.

Daily Picture

2009-05-08T12:38:00.000+01:00

As well as prose, I'm using this thing to post pictures and photos that I'm proud of. This one was taken on Brighton beach on Valentine's Day 2008, when a large quantity of wood washed up and the locals had a good time playing with it. Click for full-size.

lent writing project #1

2009-05-07T19:20:00.000+01:00

This was the piece that kicked off the lent writing gig. These have been put up on here totally out of order, because I blogged them that way and worked on a few which were then submitted to Route 57, so I've re-posted those versions instead.

Smoking

I find it hard to believe that the engineer who designed the supports of the motorway bridge over the student union concourse did not have a cigarette in mind.

It is evening, around eight. I have been failing to understand the reasons whether or not I can ever know anything. Philosophy foxes me. The threat of exams gives that tick in the neck, nauseous pressure on the temples, that it ever did. So I end up here, in the drizzle, in a concrete hammock and I won't deny that I am indeed regarding the end of my cigarette.

My zippo having let me down, I have had to work hard for the moment and quest for matches. It's rare I'll go to such trouble. For anything. Lazy girl. But now I have my matches. And now, once again, I let slip my focus. Such as it was. I am not known for my concentration. Ideas like pretty moths float by my eyes and I will only snatch out briefly before another draws my attention. Mostly, I will not even raise my hand. But this is not the exercise right now.

A smoke does not occur so often that it no longer makes me a little dizzy. I like that. The queezy power-surge that follows a third glass of wine, or raising one trembling head from the toilet bowl. Control does not appeal. It leads to responsibility, no thankyou. But where is the beauty in dependance? I don't want to need. The effect of a cigarette after a drink can be a terrible thing. The world lolls. I grasp for something solid and meet the eye of the oblivious friend unfalteringly. Lasts about a minute. I need a mint.

I'm floating here. The cold concrete anchors me a little, but I'm gone. Be honest, the cigarette is incidental. Life is good. Rather, for five minutes, I allow life to be good. Unbothered by thought, the very notion of concentration, these solid, earthy things. The rain comes harder, but now I know I'll be alright. I stub out the lucky and watch the little fires die. There's no more now. Just give me five more minutes. Please. Just a moment more.

lent writing project #2

2009-05-07T19:18:00.000+01:00

This is a game that Sean told me about, which I think he got from a chap called anacrusis, but I'll ask him about it. Has the effect of looking much deeper than it is, which is handy.

California Game

Who are you? I don't know.
What do you know? That I want to know more.
How will you learn? By running away.
Where will you run to? Everywhere.

When you run out of places? A home and a family.
What is a family? An anchor, a shelter.
What do anchors do? Keep you still in the storm.
What's the storm? What is two steps behind me.

What else is behind you? Another country.
What is a country? Geography, politics.
What are your politics? Respecting the human.
What is a human? A work of art from a monkey.

lent writing project #3

2009-05-07T19:16:00.000+01:00

Snow Haiku

A bizarre lone flake
Bit my lip before brothers
Made the city ghosts

lent writing project #4

2009-05-07T19:14:00.000+01:00

Emily Dickinson tribute inspired by the tattoo on my lower back. I was bored in lectures.

Because I could not stop for Death,
Instead I ran away,
Ignored him in my every breath
And took a holiday.

Death and I got on a plane,
Flew halfway round the earth.
I watched the sky and did not see
My companion since birth.

With me death lay on a beach,
And with me watched TV,
And when I crossed the road I knew
That Death would cross with me.

So I will stay on holiday
And never kinship lack.
I caught Death in a little box
And wear him on my back.

lent writing project #11

2009-05-07T19:03:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure if someone picked the words for this (weeping doll sign tired lonely) or if I chose them somehow, but I used them as the jumping off point for this lent piece. It's one of the ones I'm most proud of, partly because it actually seems to end for once.

Five Words

The sign at the side of the rust coloured road said Ginsberg, pop. 284. It was covered in hopping crows and their droppings. There were crows in the road and sat on the hoods of cars. Malila looked for eyeballs but was disappointed. Ginsberg was a motel, a garage with a cafe and a space by it covered in giant glistening trucks, a burger bar and a trailer park. She had been warned away from the trailer park. This was all of Ginsberg and this was all of this stretch of vision. She was wearing jeans and a sky blue tank. Her black hair was hair was down and her lips were reddened, but this was being removed by the sandwich. She sat on a fence near the train tracks and watched the freight train cars pass as she ate a sandwich that would fill her up for three hours. It was ham and cheese with something resembling salad and felt like a stone. Behind her, from inside one of those gleaming trucks, emerges a man who is 27 years old, dark haired, blue-eyed. The crows watched him as he passed.

Six cars now. Seven.

Seven cars, I thought, under a sky that extended dusty for all ever. I was too tired to sleep. I thought of hobos with knotted hankies and banjos and more stories in their heads than sanity. Little floating tales. They feel like they should be little bees on strings. Damn I was tired. Driving for hours and no distance run, it felt. Everything smelt hot. Like the metal of the tracks, the dust of the road. The train felt like the only thing moving, slicing through this aching sheet of land, fifteen feet from where I was sat. On a fence, next to a town of two-hundred, eating lunch.

Thirteen cars. Fourteen. Fifteen.

The man's name is Jonah. He wears jeans with only a couple of oil stains and one of chocolate ice-cream. He also wears a red T-shirt with a laughing Buddha picked out in orange. Jonah is a very lonely man. Not the wrong kind of lonely. Jonah is most certainly not given to weeping and he was raised better than ever to hurt a woman. But those empty spaces can take it out of a person. He drives through deserts where those titan rocks are a comfort. Jonah thinks that there could be anything out there in that desert, even aliens or something crazy weird, and we'd never find em. Not less we knew what we're looking for. Jonah walks up to the dark girl by the fence.

Twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine.

The girl shifted on the bench as she feel someone coming nearer. Nearer could mean anything. Inhaling deeply, even the air felt bigger, emptier. He could have been a mile away and she still would have felt a feeling as sure as a slap in the face that someone was growing closer. The sandwich weighted her belly, but the straining at her tank-top, the mustard mayonnaise on her lip, reminded her that these were the good times. This man smelt of sprayed things, sweat, leather seats, a pine freshener, fried food. A splinter had stuck in her hand. She frowned at it briefly and removed it with a pinch and waited.

The cars run out. She watches them shrink into the vanishing point.

"Malila" I said.
"Pretty" said the stranger. "Mean anything? Your names all mean things, right?"
Salmon going fast upstream.
"Not mine"
"You from round here, Malia?"
"Not this place. A live outside Thompsonville, forty miles down the round."
"Local girl, huh?" I couldn't tell if he was being funny. His eyes never stopped smiling. I followed a line of sweat run along his hairline and vanish into the curl of his ear. The stranger batted at flies that I was not sure were there.
I tried to be all places at once. Spread myself out into the horizon and be in its broadness. I saw a storm in the distance and knew it could not touch me.
"Yes I suppose I am"

The crows found an old doll, plastic-headed, cushion-bodied, at the foor of the sign. They tossed it around a little and, realising it was not any sort of food, let it be again. The freight train vanished in the haze. The land looked up did not try to breathe.

lent writing project #12

2009-05-07T18:59:00.000+01:00

This was intended to be the seed of a larger work. I think I added some more stuff to it somewhere. If I find it I'll stick it on. Either way, I'm sure I never finished it. It's the title I chose for the blog, partly because there are very few blog names left these days. I'm not totally happy with it, but it's not awful.

Through The Tall Trees

"Scarred for life" is not a phrase I like to hear thrown around casually. It gives a person images of talk-shows, psychiatrist's couches and playground taunts. I don't believe the things that happened to me ever "scarred" me and that they don't for anyone else. Unless, of course, that is exactly what they want. We all have our problems. I happen to have a terrible knack for disaster.

My name is Emma Clyde. I was born Cambridge in 1983 and my family moved to the Cotswold countryside shortly after. The mention of the place conjures images of cricket greens and thatched cottages in the minds of the people I meet out here, but I don't mind. Even though I simply recall a grafitiied park, a muddy duck pond, a 60's primary school and stone houses decaying prettily into winding hill roads unnegotiable by car. There were few children there. We stuck together in our coloured coats and superhero backpacks and shoes that lit up when you walked, playing at being in wars or space ships. I led all the games. It always seem to be overcast. I'm sure people's childhoods are supposed to seem always sunny when you look back, but the sky always seems grey when I do. It was not a sad sky, just milk-white and swirling with cloud.

Dark haired, stocky and a little short for my age, I felt like every other little girl was a fairy princess compared to me. My mother, who worked at a dress shop on the town square, started looking between my brows with concern when I was nine, every day expecting to see the telling little hairs that meant I would never marry. I was still my father's special girl and the bottom draw of my bedroom chest of drawers was always filled with sherberts and milky bars given with winks and instructions not to tell my mother. My elder brother took after her rake-like figure and angry auburn curls, but was taller than her by a good four inches by the time he was thirteen. I would insist on following him to football games with his friends where I would sit by the posts plaiting grass and waiting for a ball to hit me in the face until I was old enough to be stuck in goal. I was good at it and played for my school team, which didn't get me teased as much as one might expect.

I was ten when I found the body. There are trees on the edge of town called Tanner's Wood. They are a little way out and at the top of some hills. Dog walkers tend to favour the canal at the bottom, but it wasn't the sort of place small girls were generally warned away from. If we were, we ignored them, failing to understand why. I went there with my best friend of that week, who I believe was named Jessica, but I can't for the life recall her surname. Slight, blonde, freckled and distant. We were collecting bits and bobs to mix in an old plastic washing bowl and make spells with and our search had by that point yielded some red berries, bits of fir tree and some sheeps' wool pulled from a barbed wire fence. For some reason, I remember this day sunny. It was the holidays and we wore summer dresses for getting grass-stained and expose our knees for grazing. Sun-burnt ears and noses.

He was hanging from a length of blue rope from a tree near the stream where we went to wash our grubby hands. We could smell something sweet and wrong, like the apples at the bottom of the fruit bowl a short while before we got there. I thought he was a trick, a doll. He didn't look like a real man anyway, because real people's eyes did not stick out that way, there skin was not this bruise colour all over. There was no breeze, none at all, but still he swayed. As Jessica ran screaming back to town, brambles whipping bloody her white cotton anklesocks, I stared at him. This was a dead man. I did not move, but looked from where I stood. I saw his hands purple twisted claw-like at his sides and imagined I could see every bone. The veins in his neck stood out like rope and the skin was worn deep around the noose. At no point did his eyes ever fall on me. Solemnly, I tipped the berries from my pockets on the ground a meter beneath his feet. Then I turned and walked back to town.

lent writing project #13

2009-05-07T18:54:00.000+01:00

I was still getting over my first boyfriend when I wrote this one. The few notes in question were the chord sequence from Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love."

Wondering

Do you still hum those same few notes?
Do still have the same things in your coat?
Are you still reading the words that I wrote?

lent writing projects #23, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32

2009-05-07T18:46:00.000+01:00

These were all based on ideas my friends thought of for me. Number 27 is based on Lucifer, again.

23
The hinged sewing scissors have a grating sound like cicadas or bullfrogs. The kitchen ones smooth, almost silent, until the click. He knew all the sounds by now and heard them when, perhaps, he should have been hearing the human sounds- sobs and gulps and squeals. But these were ugly noises and became as incidental as the breeze in the attic over time. In the dark they could hear him only through the scissor sounds and wished they could put from their minds childhood horrors traded by well-meaning mothers, who were only concerned for their teeth after all. And where was she now? This was not the time for triviality.

In his web sits the corpulent spider, gorged on flies, but something is here with him now. Oh no, you are not alone anymore. They aren't the ones under the soil, but something you forgot. ssssssssss-ck. Shiny smiles. Watch the glint from the streetlight as I move behind you now. I am over there, in the walls where you thought the dust would choke me. The room lives with slipping, clicking sounds. You made these things. The floorboards do not cut my feet anymore, dear heart, and as soon as you blink...here I am. Put the scissors down now. I have come to take you home.

26
The bees I rescued
From the paddling pool never
Stung me till one day

Pablo Nerruda describes his love struck self as a bee drunk on honey. I don't imagine that this would be a very practical state for a bee. I get the meaning though. The way bees weave lazily, effortlessly, around my sun spotted garden, I felt that way too. Floating from chore to chore, things done but not comprehended, my mind small and otherwise occupied. Honey addled. The prospect of nectar to follow.

The bee felt superior to the wasp on the otherside of the invisible obstacle and felt no need to beat himself against it. It seemed to him unimportant and somehow distateful to ponder what it was the wasp was trying to escape from.

27

Why? Because. Or why not? depending on your point of view. I prefer the latter camp, as I am rather a fan of chaos, but nevertheless, I suppose there is something about a meaning to everything that is a little comforting. Must have been the way I was educated. No-one likes to think that they are adrift in an ocean of coincidence. You like to think that you are important little creatures, all special in you own ways and J...s wants you for a sunbeam. Yes that is a nice little thought, isn't it? That there is a purpose for all of us, life set out on rails. The good shall be rewarded and the bad shall be punished and fate shall win out.

I can't really answer the question well as the fact is that I'm not entirely sure. I preferred to keep out of the beurocratic side of things. And let me tell you, it's a blinking mess up there. Yes, sometimes people do slip through the cracks. Mistakes have been made. But do you have any idea how hard it is to keep up with you lot? Morals and standards shifting from day to day, country to country. The system is run by you, for you and, largely, you only go where you think you deserve to go. I say largely. Some things cannot be excused by you thinking you were right, that you were just following orders and so on. Doesn't wash with me. I make my choices and if I choose to remind you what it s to be human, well, that's my look out, isn't it?

Why is there evil? Because there are people. You made it, it is in you, and together you gave it names and you gave it power. I am not it, and I am offended by the suggestion. C....t, if it wasn't for me keeping it in check, G.d knows what would happen. People walking away from the organisations does not make the darndest bit of difference. I am not the boogie man, human. I am your morality. I keep you all in check. Be honest, it's not the prospect of sunshine and flowers for all hereafter that steers you right, is it? It's the thought of what could happen if you put a foot wrong. Some people forget about that. And what thanks do I get, hey? It is a good thing that job satisfaction is as high as it is down there because you would have a rater serious problem on your hands. Not pretty.

You were an accident. A happy one, I think. Of course I would think that because I wouldn't be here without you lot. Thanks again for that. But like I said before, unplanned. No design, no road-map, no fate, children. You choose. Don't listen to the words that H. gets stuck in his mouth, listen to something very deep down that tells you what is right and wrong. We can only do so much. Bad things happen because the world is not a well-oiled machine and we cannot make you do anything in the end. Sorry. That's just how it is. I hope that clears a few things up.

29
Aditya Damree was electrocuted crossing a trainline on his way home. He had been drinking with his friends, who walked on for five minutes before realising he wasn't walking with them anymore. There had been no sparks, no cry. His last thought, through a fine haze of alcohol, had been about whether there would be any good-looking girls at his sister's wedding next month. The ambulance arrived with five minutes of the call from his best friend, who had to be held back from touching him when opening his shirt revealed a fern pattern burnt across his still chest.

Nicola Mann tearfully dragged a razor along the vein of her left wrist, then attempted the same motion again on the right, but it didn't look so neat. The blood swirled prettily in the blue bath water, like a horror movie effect, something stylish from a music video, and the water's heat numbed the sting. Bastards. I'll show them all. When she was finally discovered, over-flowing bath had made her note illegible, but a draft had been saved to her lap-top.

Cleo Ngao was asleep when a mist of carbon monoxide gas from a faulty radiator seeped into her lungs. She was having a dream that she was in a forest, chasing an animal that she couldn't quite see. Couldn't quite tell what it was. Then she realised that the animal was chasing her. She kept trying to wake up, but couldn't, and found herself running around the same trees over and over as the woods grew darker and night fell. Then, a feeling things slipping away, the world becoming softer and looser until she could just let it fall like an old dress, five sizes too big. Her skin was pink when they found her and her three housemates serene in their beds the next day.

James Taverner was knocked off his bicycle by a red jeep and took almost 47 minutes to die. 17 were spent at the roadside, 11 in the ambulance and a final 19 in the hospital with a doctor sat on his chest trying to beat his life back into him, knowing that he was already in another place. He had lost consciousness in the arms of the panicking jeep driver, who heard the words "My fucking bike. What about my fucking bike?" before he closed his eyes.

Amelia Rowlett had been assured by her friends that the pills she was taking were still good quality, in spite of the price. She danced and kissed and laughed and cried and the lights fell only on her and she had never looked more beautiful and neither had anyoneone else. Everything moved. Something higher was controlling her movements, so it didn't really worry her when she fell to the floor. The faces above her had black eyes that sunk into their faces. Her brain swelled against her skull and within an hour, she was comatose.

31
The book was “The Mating Rituals of Algonquin Males” and the title made me laugh. I didn’t know the content, but I was in a mood where “mating” is an extremely funny word. The woman reading it glanced at me before returning to its contents while I contented myself with the breeze from the window on the side of my face. The train smelt of warm bodies and fuel and the young couple beside me nuzzled noses and put their foreheads together to remove the necessity of speech. A pretty child in a blue dress twirled a dirty red flower.

It's strange how the carriage in front of you tilts so much more than the one you are in, like they are an a rollercoaster and you just get to rattle along with the scream in you ears that we are all too polite too acknowledge. Too polite for sorrys. I decided to stop picking at the seat as it felt like vandalism by that point. I remember the need in me to feel real air again. The stuff down there feels synthetic somehow.

32
Sunlight changes my mood. Enough of it, and I get high in the way I have only ever otherwise experienced under the influence. Here's what I wrote yesterday in a field near my village. It's a bit hippy for me, I apologise.

I'm home, and there is something about being back in this place, with the sun filling me with nervous energy and life in purest form, that brings out another me. It is primal and virginal. It is 16 and full of potential and wants to run until it falls down laughing. It feels a little naughty smoking a cigarette. The sky is huge here and I want to fill it with my voice.

Every nerve is alive and I feel...I feel like I need a better word than "natural", but I am close to the earth here. At the bottom of this hill runs the canal and the wind cools my skin and the sun gilds the land. Every element, everything I need is here and what fills me feels like magick, powerful as orgasm. It feels like years since I saw a sky so wide. I look up through my red hair to the blue beyond. If I turn my head towards the woods, I see the dregs of a rainbow pointing out a sacred spot and reminding me who I was. "Here" it says "This is where you changed. This is where you became."

I caught some boys in the church, rifling through the Vicar's office and trying on robes. I stood and stared at them until they left. If they had asked me my name I would have said "Lucy Munks". I have no idea why.

I stood beside the grave a young man whose parents I knew. It overlooks the airfield where one day he ran a length of hosepipe from his exhaust pipe to the window of his car.

The snowdrops are past. The daffodils are in full bloom. The grape hyacinths are coming and the bluebells can't be far behind.

I am too on fire in this light to properly convey the sense of life in me. I laugh like a fool and would strip right here in this field and run until my feet bleed if I weren't so near the village that i can hear the children playing in the park. I feel new. I sense a stirring in everything I touch. I am being charged with something strong and I can't take much more and I wish I could yell it out in one perfect note or release it through my hands.

lent writing project #33

2009-05-07T18:42:00.000+01:00

The Cat

The cat pesters me. As I undress, she rubs against my legs and worries at laces and ties as they drop to the floor. Next, she jumps on my bed, mewling croakily, pathetically and nipping at my bare backside for a scratch behind the ears. Once I oblige, she rolls onto her back and looks at me over her fluffy chin with anxious eyes. She wants me to rub her belly now. She purrs and fawns and flatters until I give in and nestle my hand in her blonde belly fur. Her eyes close and she writhes contentedly, stretching out her paws, flexing her claws. Waves of purrs reach me as I scratch bellow her chin and discover six pin-prick nipples beneath her thick tabby fluff.

I found the cat when I was seventeen, maybe sixteen. I saw her blind and helpless the minute after she was born. I claimed her for my own and named her Little Nell. It was in my own house where she took her first shakey steps, crawled under my covers and nestled next to me for warmth. I was terrified of crushing her. I put a box beside the bed in case she needed to jump down in the night.

Her meow was never the same after she was "fixed". The little shaved patch in her Maori markings seemed to take an age to grow back. She is short and round and stocky, a rustic little creature. Occasionally she plays fetch with little balls made of silver paper, but the cat only does what she's told when she wants to, when it could be fun for her. She has fallen asleep now. I have to curve my body awkwardly to avoid upsetting the furry bundle. She makes little squeaks and twitches in her sleep. A happy little sigh reaches me in the darkness when I stretch my hand down to make sure she is still there, warm and breathing.

lent writing project #37

2009-05-07T18:39:00.000+01:00

Another lent piece, here posted with the blog intro to avoid repeating myself.

I was watching a woman writing what looked to be part of a children's book in a notebook on the bus on the way home yesterday (it involved both spells and skiing). The first sentence I picked up on was "She collapsed on the sofa by the fire". So I decided to take this and put my own perverse spin on it. Compare it with the "My Grandparents, possibly" if that's your bag. It's a little harrowing, my mother has asked me to warn you.

The Mistake

She collapsed on the sofa by the fire, pale and gasping. While the party fell silent to her screaming and pressed forward as one to make it stop, the music continued. Sticky drinks and mistletoe were forgotten and while there must have been more than twenty people crammed into the tiny living room, she couldn't see a face. The voices were on the other side of the wall. The pain shocked her with every heart beat and the room was turning black.
"I'm sorry. Please. Oh God. I didn't mean to"

Everyone makes mistakes.

It had been an occasional thing, a whenever-you're-in-town thing, and it had been fun. They had an understanding. He was damned funny and good looking, in an ordinary way. He might have loved her in another time, but there had been others and that just wasn't the arrangement. She felt a pang whenever he left, shed the occasional tear, but life was too busy for her to dwell. Work and studies and friends and the day-to-day business of living. There's laundry to do and food to get in and so on and so forth. Precautions were taken and life was pretty good. She was looking for love in a casual way. Nothing heavy. Nothing to tie her down.

She decided to ignore it and hope it went away. Probably nothing. Probably flu. Probably just a light one. Life went on. He didn't need to be concerned, he had his own life after all. Miles away with a future ahead of him. She didn't want to bother him with her problems. So she kept her fingers crossed and hoped for the best. She had been feeling quite happy after all. Light somehow.

The blue line had been rather a shock then. It seemed an odd connection, between pissing on a stick and discovering that your life had been changed forever. She spent half an hour in the bathroom, sat on the toilet seat, pacing back and forth, eyes smudged with make-up. She stuffed her knuckles into her mouth to stop the scream. She did not need this. What life could she offer this thing growing inside her? It was no more a baby than a tumour, a cist, so why the indecision? Why the terror? But she felt it, strong and solid and dark and she could see no way around it. She returned to her room and did not sleep that night, only sobbed and shook in such a way that no-one could hear. She emerged with a face red and sore with misery, furious with fate, in mourning for lives unlived.

She hated the thing. She hated herself. She could not bring herself to hate that man though. She needed one thing to cling to. But there were others, of course, and she had to think of her life, the party tonight and Christmas fast approaching. She did not have time for this.

She had created nothing of value. Everything she attempted failed and in all respects she was unremarkable. Everybody left her. In the end, she was always alone. Maybe that would change. This could be her stamp on the world, something to love, something she had made herself. This one would not leave her. A small voice listed first names.

But it would not leave her. She would be left with a thing to care for when she could not care for herself. It would hate her as she deserved to be hated. A sorry creature, regretting its very conception. How could she do that? How could she bare the shame, the cold hands and hearts, the well-meaning friends with their endless hugs and tea and sympathy who for all her love would never understand the void inside her now whether she went one way or the other? She could not think about these things.

So instead she ran a bath almost too hot to bear and slipped her swollen body into it. Three-quarters of a bottle of gin, cut only slightly with coke. The shakey insertion of a knitting needle. Eventually the blood came in thick clots and she relaxed. She washed and dried, blocked the flow, soothed her face and came the evening, she slipped into the dress she had bought especially and walked with laughing friends to the house up the road.

It was the season. Her cup was never empty and the chat was pleasant. She had forgotten laughter, but now it had returned. She was surrounded by the familiar and the fun, the world as she knew it and where she belonged.

As the room grew still darker, and someone dialled the telephone she snatched at the air for something. Nobody could see this. The room was loud with panic. It was killing her back now. She the air she breathed was not enough anymore and it didn't make sense. "Please I'm sorry I never meant Oh God". The shadow spread across the fabric and the thing before her eyes, the thing she couldn't quite reach, vanished in the gloom.

lent writing project #25

2009-05-07T18:29:00.000+01:00

Spring of 2006, I decided I was going to do a lent thing, like a few of my friends were doing. I don't think that I managed to do the full thing, nor did I follow up on a lot of the ones I meant to. But maybe by posting them here and having a reference, I'll have a neat stack of ideas to come back to.

...right?

The Filing Cabinet

The tip was full of old Dysons, which Dave considered odd on account of how they were supposed to have been the greatest invention since the bread slicer. Dave licked his lips a bit at the thought of a bacon sandwich, on thick white, with some thick dollops of tomato ketchup. The trick was to leave it just long enough so that the bacon grease started to seep into the bread, but not so long that it got cold. This was also one of the very few times where you did not, under any circumstances, toast the bread.

The new house was nice. Plenty big enough for four and Gemma was already locked in heated altercations with the landlord regarding how much she was allowed to change it. Dave reckoned that by now the poor bastard would be reduced to a list of forbidden paint colours, which would be shrinking rapidly. Dave smiled. She was certainly wilful, but it was nice that she was so house-proud. One of them had to be. They were still close on broke though. The suggestion that more gainful employment than knocking down the occasional wall could be sort was becoming more emphatic every day. But today, he was going to the dump. To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump, sang Dave to the tune of the "Lone Ranger" theme, in his mind.

Dave had fond memories of childhood tip-trips. There was a certain camaraderie among dump folk. Good sorts all, poor but honest and with an eye for a bargain. He had gone with his Dad many times, usually to drop off garden waste, but always coming home with some unexpected treasure. A battered pink tricycle for his little sister. An enormous gold plaster picture frame with only a couple of bits missing. A petrol lawnmower for two quid that only needed a bit of work to get it working again. When they got home Dave's Mum would roll her eyes, anticipating four Sunday's worth of oil stains on the carpet and swearing in front of the children. Always got them working again though, didn't he?

"Don't pick up anything we don't need" Gemma had said.

"Like hepatitis" had been Jack's contribution, without looking up from shooting zombies on the play station. Dave was blissfully oblivious. Clearly some of life's pleasures could only be appreciated by an elite few.

After twenty minutes searching, Dave had found some pretty decent bookshelves that would look lovely in Gemma's room with a lick of paint. There was a good-sized wardrobe with an age-spotted full-length mirror that caught his eye. He looked at himself in its dusty surface and wondered if maybe he should lose a few pounds. Gem always liked a bit of a bear anyway. Could do with a shave though. "You talkin' to me?" He opened the door and each draw cautiously for the rat check, and then lugged it back to the trailer.

Dave was wiping his dusty hands on the fronts of his jeans when he saw the filing cabinet. Nothing special about it, of course, but that was rather the point of a filing cabinet. Incongruous, purely functional, not what you would call a statement piece. It was the purpose of the thing that interested Dave. A filing cabinet, for filing things in. He did have a few things that could be filed, letters from Mum, letters from the dentist, job seekers allowance forms, things like that. Maybe one day he'd end up with a job that was filing cabinet worthy. That would be sweet. He'd wear a suit that cost more than thirty quid, with a red tie and talk really loudly in restaurants and get to be rude to people. They'd understand, of course, because he's a businessman and they're always in a hurry. Takes up a lot of time and effort, running the world, filing things.

The filing cabinet was in then. First, though, he had to check inside. Like the wardrobe, this was a necessary, but exciting business. After all, it could be a cache of hidden jewellery in there, or it could be a dead cat. Again.

Beep- Wrong Number

2009-05-07T18:17:00.001+01:00

This piece for Quirky Nomads is based on a clip from an old answering machine, so it's worth checking it out to make sense of it, and to check out the other pieces based on the same clip which are by Tim and Tom. I can't record my own stuff on account of never having the necessary kit, so I just send the files to Sage and she has someone else record them for the podcast. It's pretty weird having someone else recite your work, but again the distance is pretty good. It helps me realise what works and what doesn't, but I do sometimes think that they're reading it wrong.

Wrong Number

“Uh-huh.”
Tom looked across the room. At the other desk Maria tapped at her keypad and paid him no mind. He cast his mind back to last night. Jenna had thrown her arms up and walked out of the room after the third “yeah” on his end. She couldn’t understand why he continued to answer these calls. Neither did he; they were strange and distracting and sometimes a little frightening. But he picked up anyway.
The first call had come two weeks ago on a clear Saturday morning. Jenna was in the shower and Tom was eating cornflakes covered in raspberry yogurt in bed, reading a book about Stalingrad. “Hey baby,” she had started, and so he told her she had the wrong number and hung up. The second time, he waited to see if she had heard, but when she started talking about the flooding in her front room, he had had to apologise and ring off again. The third time he asked her where he had found his cell-phone number. She said “what?” Then she thanked him for the night before. This got him interested. After that, he was almost hooked. He felt necessary. He couldn’t possibly not pick up these calls. She was alone and in distress. She needed a man, that was clear.
Tom would listen to this woman talk about her day, every day, without fail. She told him about the trials that afflicted her and how her mother was doing. She would share her feelings about a relationship they didn’t have. He still didn’t know her name. But she never expected anything of him. All he had to do was listen. And he did. Every day. Without fail.
Maria still didn’t pay any attention to him as the mystery woman moved on to the dinner she had planned for them tonight. She was thinking about doing a sweet-and-sour thing she saw in a magazine today but wasn’t sure if she had five spice in and is he eating pork at the moment? because he might be dieting still. She asked him questions that she answered herself until she said that she had better let him get on with his day and hung up. He listened to the tone for a few moments before he put the phone back on its cradle. Tomorrow she would call as if nothing had happened. She would call and talk to him as if dinner had happened. She would talk as if she knew him, but she never said his name. Tom doubted she even knew it. It wasn’t something that mattered to her. To her, they had moved beyond names.
He got back to work. It was easy enough and the day went quickly. He got up once or twice for coffee and the toilet but was still finished by four-thirty and walked for the bus. He got home and played on the computer until Jenna got home. They talked, had sex in the kitchen and made pasta for dinner. They watched a documentary about deep sea life and a French movie about nothing in particular but there were boobs in it so that was pretty good. They lay naked on the sofa under the old horse blanket and Jenna fell asleep halfway through. He could feel her eyelashes beating against his skin as she dreamt.
While he watched her, she was dreaming about green rabbits in front of a pyramid made of shells, like the ornaments on her desk. But as she moved through the desert, she had grown cold and the sun set without her realising. Slowly, she knew that she wasn’t who she had thought she was at all. She was a stranger to herself and as she walked towards the pool, she knew the face that she would see when she looked into it. She crouched down and woke up on the sofa. Tom smiled at her and pulled the blanket up around her shoulders.
The next day, the call came early. He had gone for a bike ride around the park while Jenna stayed in bed. She hadn’t slept well and her cheeks were red, her eyebrows were furrowed. When he had kissed her forehead he noticed that the fine hair by her brow had clung to her skin with sweat. He left without waking her.
When he got to the top of the hill, Tom parked his bike and pulled out his phone a moment before it started to buzz in his hand.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hey, honey,” she said. “The pipes are fixed now. It’s all going to be OK.”
“Oh, cool.” He rolled the name Nina over his tongue once or twice before trying it out.
“Yes?” she said.
“Do you want to meet to celebrate? You’re right. We’ve been through so much shit. We should relax a little.”
“Oh Geoff,” she laughed. “Silly boy. I’m already here.”
He looked out across the park and saw her in her old trench coat, a tiny black shape. Getting nearer.
“Thank god,” he said. “I missed you.”

Free Wish

2009-05-07T17:56:00.000+01:00

Another piece for Quirky Nomads, this time using this craigslist ad-

"Free wish! Anything you like!
Be at 234B Varna St. this Friday at dusk and have any wish granted. Make true that which you desire"

-as my jumping off point. The first version I did of this was written in a fever at 3am and was a) opaque and b) awful, so I re-did it totally. I don't think it ever made it on to the site in the end, but I'm still pretty proud of it.

The attendants at the metro station are confused. Why would I want to know how to get to Varna Street? It’s a six lane highway with an industrial complex on either side. Nobody lives there, nobody to give a plate of cookies to, a plate of cookies like the one I’m carrying. The only stores are

behemoths filled with auto-parts,

bulk-buy grocery stores / for families with four-by fours,

factory second camping supplies.

There’s nothing there for a single girl on foot. But I press them for directions and they point me in the direction of the line that I had to ride til the end before walking for half and hour.

The day is a hot one. On the walk to the station I felt my sandals resist my steps because the melting pavement clung to them. The train is hotter still, cloying, but almost empty and still emptying. There’s no sound except the screeching of the rails. I look straight ahead at the window on the opposite side because there is no-one there but my own distorted reflection. I move my head from side to side, sit up, slide down, playing with my cheap fun-house mirror. Then I sit back and think about why I am taking this journey.

I couldn’t pass up the offer of a free wish. The hokey last sentence aside, it seemed pretty real; simple and sincere. But after the surprise and excitement had melted away, I had a bad taste in my mouth, because I had nothing to wish for. I was tempted to wish for never having seen it, then I could be drinking cold beer in the park with my friends on Friday evening instead, but that would be a waste of a wish and thinking about the outcome gave me a headache. It was night and rainy when I saw the listing. I looked out of my window on to the slick street below. On the other side of the road, outside the café, was

an enormous car,

heavy and black,

the size of my flat,

more expensive.

In the back of the car was a woman, about 30 years old, with expensively tousled blonde hair. She was of average size, but the car made her look as small as a doll, protected from the rain and the rest of the world. She held a baby. It was sleeping soundly and wrapped in a yellow blanket. His tiny lips were puckered in a wet little pout and his whole body rose and fell with his breaths. She rocked it quickly, stiffly, back and forth. Her brow was furrowed and her mouth was open as if she was about to speak but couldn't remember the words. The baby went on sleeping.

I decided then what my wish was going to be. I phoned around and found a new home for my cat. I gave my house plants, my pots and pans, my paintings to my neighbours and left the rest in the street to be picked up by students. When I woke on Friday, I put my clothes in a bag for the charity people to collect and started to bake the cookies. The ad said the wish was free, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to get mystical forces on your side. Everyone likes cookies.

Now I’m walking along Varna at seven pm. The trucks rush by and my feet will be covered with grime. If I took my sandals off, I would see the stripes of raw white flesh where it missed. But the highway provides me with a broad horizon so I can watch the sunset. I missed the real light show, but now the sky is a fine, pale lavender with feathers of cherub-pink cloud. It feels like the end of something, sweet and sad.

I arrive at a short wide building. It is plain and purposeless, full of rooms to be rented by people with their own reasons. 234B is at the end of a winding corridor with ceiling tiles that match the carpet tiles. Home printed signs pinned to the plasterboard walls point me to the end, a big empty room with a stack of plastic chairs against the far wall and two in the middle, facing each-other. I give the old lady in the chair opposite me the plate of cookies, which she receives with a smile. I pull the notepaper out of my pocket and I make my wish.

I wake up warm, wrapped in a soft blanket. I am being held close, surrounded, but I feel happy. I feel small. I feel safe. But then I forget what “safe” means. Then I forget.

Five Slides

2009-05-07T17:29:00.004+01:00

I sometimes get to write short pieces for Quirky Nomads, according to specs sent to me by Editrix-In-Chief, Sage Tyrtle, who is always finding interesting stuff for her minions to write stories about. This project was based on five slides sent to different writers in turn to string in to a story. The first four parts were recorded years ago, and she gave me the honour of wrapping up the project with this picture here. I think it makes sense without hearing the first four parts, but more sense with them. Besides, they are well worth listening to, so go have a look around the website.

Five Slides- part 5

The fields were even colder than they had looked from the train. Eunice’s breath crystallized in her scarf. The cold made her eyes water and the tears froze on her cheeks. Her thick clothes prevented the cold from biting in to her skin but the longer she stayed out in it, the longer it made her bones ache. Her jaw hurt from all the clenching and she sometimes caught herself grinding her teeth. But she would stay out for a while longer, she decided. The silence and the stillness of the early evening kept her there, feeling the wideness of the world.

Ronny Jay would have supper prepared in his little cabin. It might even be good. He had warned her when she proposed her visit that he did not have much time to spare for her. The laboratory kept him pretty busy, running about with a wrench mending all the bits and bobs that the high-minded science types couldn’t do for themselves. It didn’t look like much of a laboratory, more like a school-house, covered everywhere with chunks of log. These were what they were researching. When Ronny-Jay took her visit the place, he had explained that it was something to do with conservation, what these lonely men were doing, all the way up in Alaska. Eunice chuckled to herself that cutting down trees was a funny way of conserving them, but she knew very well that you sometimes had to make sacrifices for the good of the thing.

It made Eunice sad that Ronny Jay had become one of these lonely men. While it seemed to give him some solace, being so far from sunny Missouri and its people and its lakes, it broke her heart that these had become things that he had wanted to run away from. He had gone to Stephen and Tracie’s wedding. He had even helped them paint the store when they took it over from Mrs. Hanrahan. He knew that Tracie was a first crush, a flailing shot at an idea of love, but something changed inside him when she took up with his brother. His world had become too small and the faces old, ugly and sickeningly familiar. He didn’t understand how people worked and, by now, nobody was going to grant him allowances for that. Nobody was going to help him out anymore.

Eunice imagined him now, shuffling around in the background of the wedding photos in his nylon suit. Very stylish, cut in the modern fashion and worn with a blue frilled shirt. He looked like a sad clown. There he was, smiling weakly as his laughing brother and uncle threw their arms across his shoulders, drinks in their hands. Sitting at a paper-covered table, watching the dancing. Crestfallen and still smiling beside Tracie, who wore her boyish grin, but was now in a long white dress that didn’t quite hide her bare feet. Her head was crowned with a daisy chain that her niece had made. When she laughed, she looked like Janis Joplin. The memory was still so crisp that Eunice felt that she could walk right back into it if she turned in just the right way.

Eunice checked her watch and saw that it had been four hours since she had last laid eyes on another human being. How often does that happen? Aside from sleeping, how long had she gone for without hearing another human voice? How long without talking to someone? How long without seeing a person just walk right by her window? Eunice felt that she should count herself lucky. She knew of many old ladies who met sad ends that way. But in spite of the company, or perhaps rather the presence of other humans, she could not escape the lack. Out here, it became a crystal thing, this lack. It was solid, it had shape. She could point at it and name it and she could ignore it. And ignoring it had become very simple because, for a short while, she ceased to be.

She hadn’t seen her own shadow or heard or own voice for hours. She hadn’t seen anyone else to remind her what her own shape looked like. The cold made her mind clear and sharp and she felt like she was simply drifting on the wind, nothing but a formless cluster of thoughts. It couldn’t go on forever, but she decided to enjoy it while it lasted. She stopped walking and looked around. She was in the bottom of a broad valley. The mountains she had walked down from shielded the project from the worst weather, but kept them isolated. She could see why Ronny Jay would like it so much. As she took the trail down, she felt cocooned by the rocks and the trees. It was a cold, hard embrace, but it was still an embrace; it kept the monsters out.

Out in the valley, you were free, but you were exposed. The broad river was low and frozen. The winds blew right across the open expanses and battered the thin bunches of trees which clung to the banks. Nothing could survive here. And yet, here she was, wrapped in fur and feathers, still clinging to life and the old Canon camera that had been left to her, just six months ago. Just an hour ago, the sky had been stunningly blue. The light on the snow made her eyes hurt, but it picked out the dead trees in gold and embroidered them on the landscape. She had even seen birds in ones and twos, breaking up the sky like punctuation, their smallness showing it to be as broad and deep as heaven. But as she watched it turned pale pastels and the horizon was almost white. The snow turned lavender and then a chilling blue. Through the trees the dying sun glowed like the tip of a cigar, casting an orange halo and a line of dusty pink that settled over the mountains. It was pretty, but Eunice had seen many sunsets and knew that it was just going to come round the other side again. She couldn’t shake that knowledge. “Inevitable” was not just a ten-dollar word anymore.

The marriage took place with very little fuss. Leave that sort of thing to the young people. Her old friends, Janet and Bob, were there to act as witnesses but apart from them, there was just an officer of the law, herself, and Carl Porter. His suit looked like it hadn’t been worn in years and had been in his wardrobe for many years longer, but he sure looked good in it. Both being retired, a weekend by the lake was all the honeymoon they needed. After that, life felt like nothing but a vacation. It was all so easy. Not a word was said when Eunice quietly moved across the street. A nice young family moved right in and Eunice even looked after the children sometimes.

Theirs was a good life. Together they tended the garden, completed puzzles and did “old person stuff” as Carl joked. They went to the drive-in to make out, every Thursday. He said it was just like being 16 without having to worry about curfews or being at school the next day. They holidayed in the sun. They didn't see many people and when they did, they saw them seperately. Their marriage was between them, after all. What did anyone need to know?

Eunice carried on cleaning for people and Carl never had to ask why. For a while, at first, he still handed her envelopes with a bill or two in with a smile and a raise of the eyebrows, like a dog bringing back a bone over and over and expecting the same reaction he got the first time. He stopped, but Eunice still had the sense that he was awkward somehow. It was as if he couldn't get over the sense that he had married the maid, always looking over his shoulder and waiting for the disappointed sigh. Eunice just had to give him time.

They were grocery shopping when Carl fainted, his lungs filling with fluid. Within the day he had been diagnosed with cancer and three months later he was dead. It was just that simple. He was out of his mind with fear, pain and morphine in the last days. Eunice had been surprised how easy it had been to forget those days but now, a widow twice over, little effected her anymore. She had had Carl buried in his wedding suit and along with the make-up they had put on him, they had made him look like a clown. She had had to swallow her giggles at the graveside. Everyone had assumed she was sobbing. She was just glad to have felt anything at all. As his box was lowered, it felt as though everything they'd had was gone. When Eunice saw her friends afterwards, she didn't really mention Carl too much. She hardly seemed sad at all. People started to think that maybe there's was not a great love after all but she said nothing to change their minds. It was, and had never really been, any of anyone else's business. Looking back on their times together was just like looking at pictures in a book, images on the TV set. It wasn't real and if it was, it had happened to somebody else, somebody very lucky.

Eunice realised that she hadn't moved for a couple of minutes when the cold started the feel painful again. The night was falling and she would have to head back soon before Ronny-Jay panicked and sent out a search party. She wanted to enjoy the scene a moment longer before seeing people again. Something stirred a few metres away. Eunice watched it for a moment before she raised her camera and hit the shutter. It heard her and ran away.

After the photographs were printed, Ronny-Jay assured her that she hadn't seen the fox. They never came so close to the settlement, let alone old ladies tramping about the place in spiked walking boots. The "tail" of the white mass amongst the white masses had a dark tip to it and an arctic fox's tail wouldn't still be dark. But Eunice had seen that thing living where she had thought nothing could, surviving on what it could find and keeping going. Eunice was experienced, after all, and Eunice knew that, just because you couldn't see something at first glance, it didn't mean it wasn't there.

Five by Five

2009-05-07T17:11:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure why Route 57 put this for non-fiction, or why I did, since I think it's experimental. Anyway, I wrote it for the lent writing thing I did, because my mates were doing it and I was impressionable. The editors were the ones who had me change it to second person, but I rather like it. It would be silly if I did it all the time, but just this once it was fun to look at my experiences (or rather my sense memories, deeper than experiences) from an outsider perspective. I think it's something I need to do more with writing, find that distance.

Five Sounds

You keep the radio on if you're staying up all night working or something. You like to have another human voice in the room with you, which you cannot get from CDs. The radio keeps you company with whispered inanities until the sun rises and the work is done. The music gets stranger and stranger until it drifts back into normality again and you can be shocked at news items and hum to the songs as you slowly turn down the sound over the hours so as not to disturb the neighbours.

The rustle of covers and half moan or sigh as the person sleeping beside you rolls over in bed. You cannot sleep. Perhaps their elbow knocks the wall. The murmur or moan and you listen to half sounds until you drift off.

It seems that you can never escape the humming of electricity. When you were younger you used to sneak out of your house at night, walk through the dead streets of your town and you would notice the low buzz of the generators when all was silent. Even now when you turn the plug off at the wall you can still hear the hum. You wonder if you would still hear it even if it stopped. It was quieter in the graveyard. You went there to do a rubbing of a stone in purple crayon then the clock boomed midnight and you ran away.

Your mother worked out pretty early on in life that you could recognise the sound of her keys. The jangle they made on their heart-shaped fob always alerted your sister and you to the fact that she was coming to pick you up from a friend's house, or about to walk out the door. She could get a Pavlovian response from you, say, if we were out of sight. She could just shake them and the two of you would find her. Still works even now.

Waves on a beach can sound very different depending on whether the beach is sand or pebble (whispering or clattering) whether the sky is clear or overcast (the rain makes it echo) or whether you are happy or sad (childhood holidays or alone). You were sat on Brighton beach with your weekend bag on your shoulders, waiting for the rain and listening to the waves washing in and out and feeling very small indeed. Like sitting by the river, waiting for the bottle to pass by with a lucky in hand, feeling perfectly calm and once in a while noticing the sound of the water below. You perhaps thought to yourself how nice it would be to just slide into it and down, wrap it around me until you fell asleep, how pleasant it would feel.

Five touches

Skin. You pick at yours. You chew at the sides of your fingers until they are rough and bloody. You fuss at your back and scalp. You like the feeling of your face, freshly washed and powdered. You think you like hers better. Downy soft, but smoother, but warmer, but more human. You can feel her beneath it. You like the bit on her neck that makes her shiver. You don't tell her where it tickles. She must find out for herself. Now cool in the sunlight, now warm and shining beside you. But smooth though. Very smooth.

The cemetery stones get warm in the dappling light that makes it through the trees. You feel very comforted by it, a glow that travels up your arm and gives you an Easter feeling. The cats like it too.

You like to run your hands over things when you're walking. Railing and walls mostly. You get into trouble for touching up the sculptures in galleries. Once you brushed your hand along a box hedge and felt the prickles and scratches and tingles wake up your nerves. Felt how you'd expect it to. You brought your hand back covered in blood. You had only scratched it lightly but the movement spread the blood out. It stung terribly when you washed it though.

An egg is a very beautiful thing. Smooth and cool and symmetrical. It settles beautifully in your hand and the weight feels pleasant. It's nice to contemplate for a moment that this thing was born, not sculpted, before you smash it against the rim of the bowl.

It was hot and at this point you didn't have a single pair of shoes that didn't make your feet bleed. The cheap sandals you had bought had broken and you were keeping to the shade because you couldn't afford sunscreen. You were red and sore and peeling on your chest and nose and shoulders. At a certain point you just stuffed the shoes into your bag and felt the surfaces on your soles. There are many different sorts. Road tarmac is painfully rough. The bumps for the blind at crossing can hurt if you aren't aware of them. The pavement is often scored which makes it cushiony. You don't see much of a view on account of looking out for spit and cigarettes and chewing gum. Still, it's a freeing feeling. A light and pleasant one.

Five Smells

The girl sitting next to you in the theatre today was sucking on a strawberry lollypop. It smelt like you imagine all candy does. Nothing at all like strawberries. Thing was, it made you feel like a kid again. You wanted to lean over and kiss her, in the middle of the theatre, in the middle of the play. Feel her sticky strawberry lips on yours.

Things don't just smell damp after rain. Rain has its own scent and you can smell it coming before it starts. It smells a little like the taste of blood in your mouth from a split lip or torn gum. A rust scent, but sort of fresher, cleaner, or pregnant with cleanliness. The knowledge that that layer of grime is shortly to be cleansed from the sky and brought down on your own head. It does make you wonder if the rain always smelt the same. Why should water in the sky have any scent at all?

You would often come home from school, or stagger bleary-eyed from your bedroom in the morning to the scent of something cooking on the stove. Often it was a comforting warm smell of, most likely, stock, which smelt like it should be dinner. Rich and complex with bay and carrot slices and onion, it didn't bear any resemblance to the grey and greasy bone-filled liquid when you raised the lid on the pan. You remember the smell of pears pickling. You knew before you ever saw them that they were purple in the pan. Must have been the red wine spreading its sleepy mist across your brain. Exotic spice and warm cinnamon masking the sweetness. Drunk on the odour.

People. People smell of their shampoo, conditioner, washing powder, sprayed fragrance, their sweat, house, whatever they are thinking, what they've been cooking, what they have eaten, the person they have been holding for what seemed like all day, the warmth of bodies and the sun outside glows brighter in the summer. You love how people smell.

The smell of burnt clutch is to you possibly the most repulsive one in the whole world. You're not sure if it's because of pubescent years being dragged out to race meetings of classic cars (it always either poured with rain or burning sunshine) and catch that perverted bonfire toffee odour that caught blackly in the nostrils and would not give up its hold for ages, in spite of you sticking your nose in the coleslaw or tupperware of home-baked brownies. Burnt clutch makes you imagine a haze of mauve smoke even where the car no longer is, even if you never saw it. It doesn't matter what car it was, because that scent forms a pattern in your mind of a clapped out plum coloured Ginetta, desperate not to come last this time. It puts you in mind of sunburn, shirtless old men smeared with oil being passed flasks by supportive wives and fibreglass shards under the skin.

Five Tastes

Cigarettes. Tobacco smells sweet before it's lit, and you get some of that as it wisps momentarily across your tongue on route to push its toxins through your fragile little lungs. A very different one from the sour taste you catch in the moment before the next drag. It's a stale, dead taste, the one that follows you after you have stubbed the damn thing out with your heel, a bitter tang that makes you crave for a lump of chewing gum. The grey taste of burnt cells.

Chocolate. Sweet and spicy and full and melting. Everywhere and always.

Decent roast chicken, something that isn't some poor beakless bastard creature born and raised in a shoebox-sized cage, really does seem to melt on your tongue. The flavours seep in like caramel as it starts to soften and seep. Maybe there is a garlic richness or lemon tang, depending on how bothered you or your mother could be with pasty unwieldy thing. The skin is the nicest part. A moment on the lips...

50p lemon ice lollies that make toxic-looking yellow goop down your 7-year-old face on a summer day out at one stately home or another. Tastes of summer. Turning the stick to catch the shards threatening to hit the gravel. Swallowing the fizzy zest-flavoured water and reading the joke on the stick.

Gin cut 1 part to 2 with orangina and drank out of both bottles on heaving, living streets where music is pouring from every bar and church and corner. Doesn't quite knock off the dust that catches in your throat and leaves some kind of negative flavour, but the bubbles do enough to compensate with a glorious artificial clean. By now you are drunk enough to take off those bloody painful shoes that are making you cry and smash bottles in the square.

Five Sights

Coming home with a bag of market goods, you found that the apartment wasn't empty for once. The TV had been removed from the wardrobe and placed on the burnt blue lino next to the lump stone wall by the window and set up to view what was this year being called the Tour de Lance. Over the bare plastic curtain poles two wet bed sheets, one pale green, one yellow, softly mediated the beaming august light. In this glow an eighteen-year-old Scottish girl, not yet in control of her coltish limbs, stood by the bathroom sink in bra and skirt and attempted to make her hair the blonde she wanted it to be. Apparently oblivious to her was the homeless English boy with drunkenly cut blonde hair and the clothes of the last month sitting on the L-shaped blue sofa cushion on the floor and watching primary coloured figures flash by the screen again and again.

Figs in a bowl. The richest shades of green and purple and tiny specks of gold on their bell-shaped bodies. Some of them have been ripped in half to reveal clusters of sticky pink-red innards surrounded by a white pulp.

You seem to see an awful lot of dead birds lying around. Mostly pigeons squished and bloody in the middle of roads. Looking down from a church in Venice, the tops of some ancient pillars were scattered with the corpses of birds, eyes rolled back blankly, in various stages of decomposition. Some were no more than bones. You saw tiny scattered bodies around in the fields and woods by your house since you was a child. Poisoned fox cubs, puff-eyed rabbits, yet another stupid bloody pheasant, mice, voles. The stink is awful. You don't mind so much when they are nothing but bones. These things are beautiful, sculptural and impossible to connect to the living creatures they once were.

The boy you see on the bus is possibly the most beautiful creature you have ever seen. Amazing brown eyes. He carries a skateboard under one arm. You feel disgusted at yourself for appraising the looks of a child of no more than fifteen when the Mexican girl turns to you and says, "Isn't he the prettiest thing you ever saw? I can't take my eyes off him."

Your face is sort of heart shaped, quite round but with a small chin. Your nose is small and nicely rounded, but is slightly turned up. You have a mole above your lip on your left hand side. Your mouth is small and your lips are slightly pouted, but not noticeably. The lower one is darker, which may have something to do with it. You had a lot of dental work, but you still have prominent front teeth, which chip easily. You currently have the remains of the spot on your chin, which you just kept fussing over. Your eyes are almond shaped and quite large. They have dark circles underneath which you dislike intensely. The irises are a colour which some people say is blue, some green, you settle on grey. They have a dark blue ring around the outer edge and a dirty orange burst around the pupil. Your eyelashes are long and you like them a lot. Your eyebrows are fair and undefined, frequently messy. Your forehead is perhaps slightly large and if you pull back my hair you can see the widow's peak you inherited from your father. Your earlobes are joined to your head and are pierced twice. Your skin looks rather red and blotchy today, suggesting you've reacted to something and you always have blocked pores, but some days you can't see them so much.

My Grandparents, Possibly

2009-05-07T17:08:00.000+01:00

I wrote this over and over between starting it for my writing group in Paris in 2005 and submitting it in late 2006. It's a stream-of-consciouness from the woman who might as well have been my grandmother on my father's side.-

Golly but that fellow has white teeth. He must get through the old arm-and-hammer and no mistaking. Lovely uniform those boys wear, those sharp edges in that thingummy colour. Not olive. Oh fiddle. It'll come to me.

Anyway, so there he is, with his white teeth, and surely more of them than a normal person has any right to and his khaki, that's it, khaki, and he looked just like that movie chappy. Oh not again. Corn field, dimple, girl's name. Marion or some such. Grant chap, that's him. That's who he looked like. And the air was full of shouts and colours and freedom and white cliffs and that was all I could see; khaki creases and straight white teeth.

I was wearing a friend's shoes. Whatshername's. Kitty's. Stupid Shiny red things that made my poor old feet bleed to look at them. To think of them even. So I wasn't much in the mood for dancing, white cliffs or otherwise. And the others looked so pretty, all rouged and hair-sprayed and nothing at all to suggest that they were straight from the department store or the telephone exchange or what have you. But I was certain that the scent of a thousand Clerkenwell district books would mark me out, clinging to my hair, the cracks in my hands.

I could see him because I wouldn't take off my glasses. "But Edie, men don't..."
Marilyn Monroe could suck eggs. I won't walk into a table for any man. Shan't go blind. Why should I, mother? And what business is it of yours anyway? Can't you see I'm reading, mother, can't you?

And weren't his eyes so very blue? The jazz too loud and the people so very happy. Oh I wish you could have been there. In a way you were my dearest, the dust of you in the smoke of the black market cigarettes that curled under low-lights over gin-breathed bodies. You were there. He said his name was Hank or some such, and you were there.

Hank or some such rock-like name that held a gun and drank beer out of cans, I'll wager. But what charm! What a gentleman, and he asked me for a dance and the air turned red and the girls behind him smiling, turning circles with their own rock-named khaki boys. He said it "Haink" like "paint". Not "Hank" like plank. Yank. Thank. Wham, bam, oh dear me no!

And I don't really know when my feet stopped hurting, or even if they did. I wasn't walking on air or any other such Cole Porter nonsense. It was a background feeling, traffic in the street. I don't even remember his words, only the soft lull of his voice. Twang they call it, don't they? A Southern twang, a lilt. So whadya say? Odessa. Oh-DESS-uhh. You give me the vapours.

Gin doesn't taste so very dusty ginny with a dash of Indian tonic and a slice of lemon in now does it? Isn't it funny how you can swallow five of those without really noticing. Don't you just walk so much taller with a crisp-khakied soldier-boy on your arm. Suddenly, you are no longer the library girl from Clerkenwell, or Edith, Mary's daughter, or ask the nice lady in the glasses. Look over your shoulder just so and be Betty Grable while the band gets fainter and the air cooler, bluer and you can't feel your feet anymore.

And I got a good look at the stars that night, I can tell you. I don't think I've ever smiled so much in all my life. Stung like the blazes and his skin like velvet over iron and I just couldn't stop laughing. "This is life," I thought. And it was life beginning. You were there. On the wet grass behind the rhododendrons with their shocking pink flowers, you were there.

And then he was gone, my blue-eyed, white-teethed, crisp-khakied boy. Don't know where. Don't know when. Some sunny day. So then it was me on a train to an aunt in Scotland. She must have been created for that purpose. What else are aunts in Scotland good for. No more cocooning smog, just mile upon mile of heather, the aunt's porridge. "Pass the cornflakes, Edie."

Everyday you grew and I never felt ashamed. No, damn it, I loved that man and I loved you too. I wanted to yell it to the hills, to the blasted, bloody heather, fit to beat the band and make the mountains crack and damn them all! I loved him and he loved me. I saw those letters and I know it was true. Reams of love, paper bound and charred unrequited. He never knew. They wouldn't let me tell him. "Who will want you now?" They said. "Ruined" Oh stop it mother, please. Just stop.

I don't remember clearly the day you were torn from me. Sixteen hours they told me. Two working days. Eight trips to the pictures. All I can recall is your cry. You announced your presence to the world in the first breath and told it that you were here now whether it wanted you or not. I could have killed for you then. I felt like a bear or some other wild mother-beast and if anybody had touched a hair on your dark little head, I would have killed them. I would have ripped them to shreds with my bare hands like paper dolls, tired and torn as I was. It knocks you over, a feeling like that.

For three days, seven hours and thirty-two minutes in April, I was your mother. There was sun and new flowers and the doctors say it isn't possible but I'm sure I saw you smile. Then off you went to some home full of other women's cast-offs and mistakes and I never saw you again. Nothing left but a talcum powdered new skin smell and one already browning photograph and your cry in my ears like a telephone in the house next door. That was all. A black sucking place opened up somewhere below my ribs that could never be filled because you weren't there anymore.

You went away and I am sure that eventually some nice stupid people came along and gave you a dull name and called you theirs. What I named you doesn't matter now. That is my secret and it stays in my head and yours, my little gypsy child. I don't even call it in my sleep. But I always dreamt of you. Did I cry? I suppose I must have done.

I went back to the library and worked and ate and slept and cried (I suppose) and eventually I met him. What was his name? It doesn't matter, he's dead now. Well, he married me anyway. We moved to Norwich and never knew each other, spending thirty-two years in crossword-puzzled Sunday breakfast oblivion. He was a large, sandy-haired fellow. He had a fondness for soccer and Morecambe and Wise and now I think about it his name was Dennis. It was a stroke that finished him off. Rather a shame, I thought. He was very kind to me.

I had two children after you, and gosh but if they didn't turn out very nicely indeed. Stephan and Angela. Dennis and Edith and Stephan and Angela. All bound together with a name and a house with a white front door in a street in Norwich. My happy sandy-haired family. I still see the children, or rather, they see me. Angela works for the council and has a husband in a bank and a girl called Charlotte who is fourteen. Stephan is the eldest and he does something to do with trains. It's rather funny. He was a thingy, a punk, when he was young, with the blue hair and the safety pins and it was all terribly funny.

They none of them ever knew about you. The subject never arose, although I don't suppose it would, so that is a rather poor defence. I just wanted to keep you all to myself. That dark-haired, blue-eyed baby screaming his existence to all and sundry would only ever be mine really. My baby, not somebody else's stepson or half-brother or whathaveyou. Silly, isn't it, the way people think? Must be why there are so very many books around on the subject these days. But they never knew, and still don't know and I doubt they ever will know.

He had a family too. Hank, this is. In those sad monologues he told me that he had met and married and pro-created and all the rest. I had no tears left by then. There is no word I can find, not even a sound, that I could use to tell you the agony those letters caused me. For five years he kept on writing, my broken-hearted soldier boy and I read every letter until the words became less than symbols, mere ink-shapes on paper so they couldn't hurt me anymore. Of course it didn't really work, but it was a little something. Something that made me not want to push my hands into that sick-aching place beneath my ribs and rip my body wide open to let out the howl. He never told me her name, but I imagined that she was called Blanche and had big hair and made the best darn lemonade on the block. He had children too. I don't know, let's say Billy, Bobby and Betty and why not.

I'm still certain he loved you. How can you love someone you don't even know existed? True, but how can you not somehow be aware of a powerful little shard of yourself, the life you made, somewhere in your soul? Insofar as you can love someone you never met, he loved you. What did you do in the war, Daddy? Khaki, blue and white. My heart belongs to...

I suppose there isn't much else to say. All I do these days is sit and stare in a room full of sitting, staring men and women with the odour of death about us. I cannot speak well or hold a pen to write. They look into my eyes and think that I can barely recall my own name. But I recall yours. Whatever became of you, my little love? If there is any good left in the world, you will never be anything but happy. Where are we now? Will you please tell me when it's time to go?

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

2009-05-07T17:04:00.000+01:00

I wrote this almost on a dare from a friend. I'd become a little fascinated with my name and was interested in re-imagining the Devil. This also came about through an awakening interest in SF and fantasy due to the crowd I'd taken to hanging with back then. This was before I'd read Mike Carey's "Lucifer" series, which has just now wrapped up. Still, this takes a slightly different tack and a smaller focus.-

Who brings the dawn now, do you reckon?

Now I'm here, sat on this mountain watching the sky fade in, I see the star that draws it from the ground. It pulls the sun up by the roots of its hair and puts it to work. Everyone and everything getting along, doing the job for which they were created. I don't think I'm so different. The pale sparrows-egg turquoise is a nice touch I think. Who would have thought it would set off the dusty pink so prettily. That's some nice work there, isn't it? I did it better, but still, nice work all the same.

Yes, of course I know that that is Venus. Yes, it sure as h..l doesn't pull up the sun. The sun will do what it d..n well pleases and the earth will dance to its tune. I don't think that that is any less magic to be honest. I don't know why people think that it should be. Don't you think that it is incredible that everyday rain and sunlight can conspire to create something as stunning as a rainbow? Isn't it great that moulds can cure diseases? How brilliant is it that some spiders developed the ability to look like flowers? or that some fish grew lights on their heads? or that millions of years ago human beings were apes?

Sorry. Was that wrong of me?

No, fuck it. This is not wrong. Just because things can be explained by science or even by sheer coincidence does not make them somehow sullied. Chance leads you to the point where you can explain nearly everything and create almost anything else. I mean, you made me. You made H.m. That's a h..l of an achievement. Well done you. I for one am very grateful.

Yes, it is a beautiful place up there. I really think you'd like it. Yeah, yeah, really good times. I could tell you stories! The new place? Wouldn't call it nice, per se, but no-one's in it for forever. Best keep that one under your hat. Hey, it's not a pleasant stay, you know? You're there for a reason, keep that in mind. It's for your own good, is my opinion. That's why I stick with it, I guess. Grown rather fond of you lot. Bird song comes along now. It's changed, you know. More blackbirds than there used to be. Fewer nightingales. Alters the pitch. Still pretty though, isn't it. I'd call that a miracle.

How did I end up down here? I walked didn't I? Oh right, the big question. Sorry, it's been a long night. Well, like I say, I like you fellows. Problem is, I liked H.m more. Nothing personal like, but you made us all that way. And therein lies the problem. I watched you. For years and years I watched you and felt something mean and strong and powerful, but I couldn't tell why. Then one day, I realised that you lucky bastards got to choose. Not like us. It was part of the job-description, but you could do it right. You must have felt this. When you choose to love someone, that's what true love is, and it's terrifying and joyful and ugly and beautiful and you're not sure for a bit and then you are and it's the best feeling in the world.

I wanted that too. To love H.m like you can love H.m. So I left.

Yeah, they weren't kind. They say some pretty cruel things. Oh of course there's evil. Don't be an idiot. Light and shade, man, light and shade. But it was all your idea. Shakes up that chicken and egg thing, doesn't it? I'm not a good guy. Getting your souls clean and shiny so you can have a taste of the kind of bliss I once thought I knew will certainly earn me some brownie points, but I won't say that I don't enjoy doing it. L..d no! It's a great laugh. And I walk around here and I see the fucking rotten shit you lot do to each other and yes, it makes me smile. Envy's a biggy, you know. But I didn't put that in your brains. Don't ever think it's me leading you anywhere. You did that.

I like what you've come up with for me, by the way. This is a nice suit. I mean, I get put in suits a lot these days, but this is a good one. Versace? Oh don't worry about the beard, I'm used to it. At least you didn't make me look Arabic, that's one of my peeves about you fellows. Just can't get along.

Well, the star's faded now. That was a nice little show, but I should really be off. Oh I can't tell you that, don't be silly! You'll find out eventually. Cigarette? Suit yourself. All the more for me.

Loneliness...loneliness I understand. But I suppose I'm rather glad I do. If you'll excuse me now, I must be getting on. It's Sunday.

Dining Out for Down-And-Outs

2009-05-07T17:00:00.000+01:00

In a sad bid to have a piece of writing submitted to every section of Route 57 that semester, I threw together this uppity bit of prose based on my time in Paris. I worry that my non-fiction writing, like my personal blogging, ends up sounding frantic and immature, but maybe I just read it quickly.-

Almost every wet-eyed Beat generation wannabe who ends up in Paris reads Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. It is not a nice book. It details unflinchingly with the pitfalls of poverty, from filthy working conditions and filthier living conditions to the light-headedness of not eating for three days. And for all that, it still seems kind of cool to do that thing. It's pretty romantic on some level and gives you something to talk about with Julian and Simone over a joint and a tin of beans when you get back to the University of Whatevershire in the autumn.

Fair enough, but at the time, things are never so shiny. When your money runs out, it does provide a little of the freedom that Orwell described, but it doesn't provide you with a full feeling in your belly or the energy to keep walking in shoes that are making your feet bleed because you can't risk getting fined on the metro, not again. The terrace cafes just make it worse. Walking past heaping plates of expensive food, the tang of garlic and fresh meat and cheese catching on your tongue. Paris smells beautiful in the heat sometimes, like the scent of the fruit as you walk past a market stall. It lingers.

I have been there, done that, and my t-shirt got holes in it and smelt like feet. So here is my advice to you if you ever get the itch to sample the life of the artistic vagrant for yourself.

You need food, and so to our first port of call - the market. Actually, before that, a word of advice: Always have at least one garment that makes you not look poor. I had a red trench coat that I always kept clean no matter what because to get by, you have to fake like you're rich. At markets, they give away samples; fruit, cheese, salami, cake. Good stuff. Enough of those little mouthfuls can fill you up for the day no trouble, but the store holders have to believe that you might actually buy stuff. Smile, flirt, nibble, nod, move on. A similar principle applies to the food halls of the big department stores around Hausmann, but it had better be a damn nice coat. Pretty hit-and-miss.

Famously now, there is the dumpster dive. I only did this one place, but I knew people who were dab hands at finding stuff anywhere, though I questioned its suitability for human consumption. This was also never a dead cert (very irritating on occasion), but the Starbucks near the Pompidou gallery would sometimes put the leftover food into a bag and leave it on top of the other rubbish for us. They'll turn a blind eye to the hungry kids raiding the bins, but don’t even think about it until they’ve left at the end of the day. Half eleven at night is the best time to go. Do not rummage through bags. Poke them. If you feel drink containers or other rubbishy items, leave well alone. Look for paper bags. Those are all good. Pick up the bag and saunter away. If all goes well, you will be in muffin and sandwich heaven. If not, you may still have muffins and sandwiches, but these shall taste of orange peels and stale coffee grounds. At best.

The kindness of strangers. Know when to question it, and when not to. If you are in a hostel, and there is a shelf of food that says, "help yourself", help yourself. It will all be pasta. Getting people to get you stuff is something you will grow a talent for. Learning not to feel too shitty about it may take a little longer, but it's that or not eating.

If you manage to get a little money together, good for you! Now you can move onto the finer things in life. The two-euro-fifty sandwich and drink on Rue St Jacques. The four-euro falafel from Maoz on Rue de la Huchette if you want to blow the day's budget. The Saturday beer-and-cous-cous-and-stew for two euros deal at La Cordonnerie on the corner of St Denis and Grenata (highly recommended).

Do not be fooled by the name of the supermarket “Monoprix”. Sounds cheap ‘n’ cheerful, but it’s actually the French equivalent of Marks and Spencer; too expensive for the daily shop. You only really go there for your bits. Stick with Franprix and Ed. A lunch of baguette (never more than a euro by law), generic camembert and hazelnut spread and a ninety cent wine (I recommend the La Mancha) shared with other down and outs and devoured in the park is a pleasure that everyone should know. Also of note are the packets of ice creams from Franprix at one-euro-seventy for eight. You need to keep your sugar levels up after all.

On the subject, if you are there in the summer it is invaluable to have a bottle of water on the go at all times. Buy one, then fill it up from the public fountains as you go. Food is not much good when you’ve passed out from dehydration. And also, wear sunscreen...

If you are really lucky, you might end up with a job such as au-pairing. Perhaps luck is the wrong word when you find yourself on the wrong end of a spoilt four year old and his demanding mother, but revenge is pretty sweet when you are gorging yourself on chocolate pilfered from the house where you have been condemned to baby-sit. Sure enough, all that excess blubber that you’ve shed came back and bit you in the arse. And then some.

My friends were pretty happy about my newfound health. I thought the visible ribs were a good look, personally. Poverty beats Atkins any day; you lose weight, you smell bad and it’s all you can ever talk about, but the difference is that the book at the end of it all might be interesting.

Villanelle

2009-05-07T16:56:00.000+01:00

This is a poem I wrote for the same issue of Route 57 in 2006. I was messing about with poetry forms and wanted to see if I could turn my hand to a few of the more obscure ones and use a rigid for as a framework for expression. I wrote this shortly after I was hospitalised with an infection of my small bowel. I wanted to take my own voice away from the writing and look at my body as the doctors did- as a sick object that needed to be fixed.

Miss Munks, we need to do another test.
This is not what it first appeared to be.
I think that you should try to get some rest.

I’ll look away so you can get undressed.
Hold still so I can put in your IV.
Miss Munks, we need to do another test.

You can be given nothing to ingest.
Tomorrow you might have a cup of tea.
I think that you should try to get some rest.

Please pull up your gown to just below your breasts.
Is there something you’re not telling me?
Miss Munks, we need to do another test.

I know it hurts, but this is for the best
This screaming isn’t helping, don’t you see?
I think that you should try to get some rest.

You need to say goodbye now to your guests.
I’m sure it won’t be long until you’re free.
Miss Munks, we need to do another test.
I think that you should try to get some rest.

The Secret Lives of the Spammers

2009-05-07T16:40:00.000+01:00

‘The Secret Lives of the Spammers’ is ‘a patchwork story based on the names that turn up in my spam folder’. First published at http://www.route57.group.shef.ac.uk in 2006. I was rather proud to get (brief) props for this here, since this is one of the very few things that comes up when you google my name.

Phemie Lamont looked out of the window of her fifth floor apartment as she fed her white cat.
Raul Gonzales saw her out of the corner of his eye as he rushed to a meeting in the office on the other side of the street.
Lynette Forck, his boss, smiled and tapped her watch face as he ran into the room two minutes later.
Chloris Pitman wrote her aunt Lynette a postcard from the bunk of her hostel in Barcelona.
Iona McKenna lay awake and wished the girl in the bunk above would turn the light out.
Ber Demarco thought about the girl with the freckles and the strange accent who had smiled at him when she asked directions earlier that day.
Vasquez Burns cooked dinner for his flatmate and himself while the other man stared smiling into his water glass.
Marvin Moses walked out of the glass factory and opened his umbrella. He thought about rubber boots.
Evdokia Halliday pushed her wet yellow boots under the chair on which she had folded her clothes.
Dr Byron B. Lamont tried to reassure her with a calm, even tone that there was probably nothing seriously wrong.
Rosalinda Cummins greeted her weeping family at the reception of the funeral home a few months later.
Marfa Sanner assembled the small, tight arrangements of carnations and lilies that she recommended for the grave.
Petros Barahona took the flowers round to her studio and a big white van.
Riley Day dragged his grimy finger across the grimy van to make suggestions about Petros’ wife.
Mary Miner shook her head at this event and returned to filling out her tax return.
Lorene Bellamy closed her window at the counter as soon as the time ran out to return the forms.
Leos Vuong broke into her car on a whim on his way home from school and drove it to the river where he sat and stared.
Meghan Lincoln tried to work out with their names and numbers what percentage they loved each other.
Benson Bunt gave her a caramel on their way out of chemistry where they watched magnesium ignite in water.
Lennart Radovich emptied the water tank, replaced the materials in the cupboard and walked to the wall by the staff room for a cigarette.
Mohinder Yun, substitute teacher pretending knowledge of religious studies, asked him for a light.
Baker Balderas helped him to the hospital when he collapsed in the street from an asthma attack.
Mariabella Alger had her faith in humanity temporarily restored in witnessing this.
Elisavet Coale removed it again when she removed the notes from the other woman’s lost wallet before handing it to the police.
Horus Marquart filled in the forms for its receipt.
Margo Garrett held the bus for him when she saw him run for it at the end of the day.
Mabel Shearer was Margo’s cousin who had just won an award for her fifth popular novel, even though she knew it wasn’t really any good.
Cibra Groce was the hero of that story, a disenfranchised youth journeying alone through Asia, having many adventures with drugs, but could not kill his loneliness.
Tonya McCabe totally identified with the character and told herself that she would keep her stupid summer job until she had enough money to do the same thing.
Inanna Carrasquillo worked the same tree-planting job and felt really happy to be outdoors all day, listening to the birds while she worked. She looked up and saw a blue jay.
Marla Phillips saw the same bird while eating in the park on her lunch break and smoking the cigarette she promised her husband she would not smoke.
Nataly Morozova picked up the butt and the end of the day and ripped it open, along with fifteen others she found, to scrape enough tobacco together for a rollie.
Ericka Christiansen was the girlfriend she shared it with. They could never go home, but they were in love, so what did it matter?
Troy Clemons watched them kiss in the streetlight from the warmth of his car.
Jerold Ramsey wrinkled his nose when he valetted the interior the next day and thought about how strange people are.
Alex Raines was the next person he thought of. He had the largest collection of Coca Cola memorabilia in the whole entire world.
Mandy Villanueva met him at the Guinness party. She held the record for the largest number of clothes pegs attached to her face.
Nelda Unsworth was the journalist who reported on their wedding for a tabloid newspaper.
Summer Hoppes read the paper in the bathroom, waiting and trying not to panic.
Patrick Elias was the name she gave the baby.
Vasya Howerton cooed over the infant when she saw him out in his pram and thought about when her own children were young.
Jaynie Defelice nearly walked into the vacant-looking woman in the baking aisle of the supermarket.
Lukacz Cluck was annoyed by the woman’s brusque manner, but refused to let it spoil his day.
Jaana Olivarez joined him on the sofa to watch the entire Star Wars DVD collection and get high till 4am.
Oni Eisenhart smiled at the scent wafting in from the apartment next door and remembered what it was like to be young.
Dax Mansfield asked him to keep his mind on the damn chess game.
Candice Rosenberger picked him up at the apartment in a shiny red convertible when it got too late for him to be up. While she drove, he told her stories about his life.
Lakeisha Gallup bugged her about why she hung out with that weird old guy all the time.
Buddy McCarthy was chastised for picking a costume as boring as James Dean for the party when she had made the effort and turned herself into a Disney princess for the occasion.
Steen Clarkson was dissuaded by him from the Karl Marx costume because no-one would get it.
Alf Soles nodded acknowledgement to the portrait of the serious man with the beard before putting on his hat and riding his bike to the factory, fifty years before.
Helen Rivers winked and flashed the top of her stocking at him and laughed with her friends at his sour face.
Sylvana Shine was the name she used when she had her picture taken for the magazines. She gave her profession as “artist’s model”.
Chrissie Cade thumbed through page after page of these photos for a book she was writing about pornography and feminism. The made her feel strange in a way she couldn’t explain.
Zena Cobbins was drawn to the book’s excitingly coloured jacket, but put it down and bought a novel instead because she was going on holiday.
Sheryl Sprague excitedly greeted her at the airport and held up a digital camera to capture both their faces.
Jozo Lane, an overweight Jack Russell terrier, was perplexed and annoyed to find himself in boarding kennels for two weeks. He promised himself that he would shit on the rag rug when he got home.
Alexis Burke was charged with cleaning the offending article.
Georg Dave decided that today was the day he would ask the laundry girl out for a beer. Instead he simply left three shirts and, blushing, left.
Terrance Perkins had put his name on those shirts, even though he hadn’t designed them. A shirt’s a shirt.
Maria O. was a young woman from Russia who was interested in marrying him, if the email was to be believed.