Anu61 A New Ulster

ISSN 2053-6119 (Print) ISSN 2053-6127 (Online)

Featuring the works of Aurora Copolla, Jac Shortland, Marc Carver, John Walsh, Alisa Velaj, Peter Adair, Martin Kelleher, Antoinette Rock, Claire Storr, Liam O'Neill, Patricia Walsh, John Doyle, Gary Beck, Hard copies can be

purchased from our website.

Issue 61 October 2017

A New Ulster Prose On the Wall Website

Editor: Amos Greig Editor: E V Greig Editor: Arizahn Editor: Adam Rudden Contents

Editorial Aurora Copolla;

1. The Huntsman 2. The Courtship Jac Shortland; 1. Dear Jane Marc Carver; 1. Waiting Time 2. Randy John Walsh; 1. Southern Words Alisa Velaj; 1. Stump of an almond tree 2. Chemistry 3. Prone to panic Peter Adair; 1. Van Morrison Patted My Dog 2. Harrison Adair 3. Orange Breakdown 4. Roselawn 5. Empire Martin Kelleher; 1. For one moment they were birds Antoinette Rock; 1. St. Dympana’s Claire Storr; 1. Michael 2. On Life 3. Reflex 4. Symmetrical

Liam O’Neill; 1. Brothers From Numerous Mothers Patricia Walsh; 1. Ordinary Death 2. Medication 3. Minding Business 4. Protected Scripture John Doyle; 1.

Sligo Landscape, January 2.

It’s Van Morrison O’Clock 3.

Nacimiento Del Rio Cabra, Asturias 4.

Sean Og O Ceallachain Gary Beck; 1.

Temporal Dream 2.

The Lost 3.

Affair of State 4.

Repeated Warnings 5.

Appetite 6.

Viewing Pleasure On The Wall Message from the Alleycats Round the Back

Poetry, prose, art work and letters to be sent to: Submissions Editor A New Ulster 23 High Street, Ballyhalbert BT22 1BL Alternatively e-mail: g.greig3@gmail.com See page 50 for further details and guidelines regarding submissions. Hard copy distribution is available c/o Lapwing Publications, 1 Ballysillan Drive, Belfast BT14 8HQ Or via PEECHO Digital distribution is via links on our website: https://anuanewulster.wixsite.com/anewulster Published in Baskerville Oldface & Times New Roman Produced in Belfast & Ballyhalbert, Northern Ireland.

All rights reserved The artists have reserved their right under Section 77 Of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 To be identified as the authors of their work.

ISSN 2053-6119 (Print) ISSN 2053-6127 (Online) Cover Image “Flotsam� by Amos Greig

“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light. ” Aristotle Onassis.

Editorial Five years ago, I started this journey at that time there weren’t a lot of magazines that were available for people to submit work towards. Since then there are many new outlets for people to have their work read in. I still consider A New Ulster a useful resource for established and new writers. Of course we aren’t just about poetry we also publish artwork, prose and more.

For some reason in all of that time writing the editorial for each issue still remains the hardest part for myself. I’m not sure if it’s because I worry about taking away from the rest of the content, may come across political or just the difficulty of putting thoughts down coherently. The latter is a recent concern I’ve started a new medication and one of the side effects is memory problems, confusion and increased anxiety. Still apart from that it does help with my health issues.

A New Ulster has become something of a global magazine we’ve readers and writer’s from around the world including, Palestine, Iraq, Israel, America and more. The continued interest in the magazine shows that there is still a ‘market’ for literary magazines I dislike the term market as art is in essence an ephemeral commodity how do you put an intrinsic value on something that a person has poured their heart and soul into?

I still hope that this magazine and those like it continue to reach a larger audience not just those who move within the venn diagram of artists and art enthusiasts but everyone no matter their experience with art and literature. We hope you enjoy reading this anniversary issue and here’s hoping to many more issues to come.

Amos Greig Editor.

Biographical Note: Aurora Coppola

Aurora is a poet/writer from Dublin but is originally from Italy. Aurora has published a couple of books so far, one is a collection of poems and the last one is a novel, both of them are in Italian.

City lights (Aurora Coppola)

Who knows what’s behind city lights Maybe a man waiting for his bus home Going to cry his life away on his own Sitting on his chair, no dinner, no company, he’s a sinner Until he lights up a cigarette and tears off his arm that patch of Nicorette.

Who knows what’s behind city lights When a hobo has that guy in his mind Wishing he had a roof on his head But no place to find And lights up a cigarette instead To have a sparkle of hope in his eye.

Who knows what’s behind city lights When a girl is too shy To swing a bag down the Canal Waiting for her next customer to pass by Her name is Amal She’s far away from home She’s hiding under a bulb on a pole Singing a sad song she wrote once as a poem.

Temple Bar Nights (Aurora Coppola)

It was the same old story Have a dance in a club The two of them meet in the lavatory But they don’t end up in a pub Instead, they have a walk in Grafton Street Suddenly they are in the mood for something sweet Where they get the smell of waffles and whipped cream Now they're sitting around a table for two and it’s just like a dream Desire is dipped in hot chocolate and in porcelain laid “Goodbye stranger” she said And that’s what’s left of a love affair Two cups, one marshmallow and a vanilla in the air.

Red mist (Aurora Coppola)

The capacity of senses To trace romances When you least expect them to hit So come on now give us a fit Fling your dart to my board And it will spring into roses Get my hopes all aboard On a ship with no captain and no Moses Silver lighting in the dark Moon shining in the mosses Chilled in pink frost I left you my last post But you didn't even bother reading it I am best of forgetting it Stupid Cupid leave us alone now at least You and me cannot exist until our hearts are together in this red mist.

Maybe it's just me, I would never split One of this days I'll quit I will never be seen And then you will know what a fool you have been.

Biographical Note: Jac Shortland Jac Shortland is a Cork woman. Her work has been published in a diversity of journals and anthologies and she has, this year been shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize. Her poems reflect the mind of a woman, who hasn't made her mind up about any of life`s mysteries and most likely never will.

Aspirations You were a big part of my life and I keep on lighting the candles, even if I don't believe.

In stress, I bless myself.

In distress, I say one Our Father, three Hail Marys and a Glory Be, even if I`m not convinced.

If I`m struck down by a lorry, or a stroke, and some good soul thinks to minister First Aid, with whispered aspirations in my ear, I know I`ll be glad of it, even if they`re only winging it.

And if I`m conscious it`s the end, the devotions of a seven year old will most likely issue out of me, in synch with my dying breaths....

"Jesus, Jesus....You have come.

Jesus, I am now your home....." even if you don't exist.

Jac Shortland

My Blessed Lamb The Devil was a snake.

You were supposed to be afraid of snakes.

He was Lucifer, who was sent to hell, but you shouldn't feel sorry for him.

God was in heaven.

He was like a tame lion.

Benevolent meant He could be kind to you, but you shouldn't torment Him.

The Holy Ghost wasn't a ghost.

He was a dove.

He came down when you were baptised, but you would never be able to remember.

Holy Mary was the Lady in the grotto.

Immaculate meant she was like a swan.

She could appear to you, but you had to be special to be chosen.

Jesus was the Lamb on the altar cloth.

You had to say 'Agnus Dei' when the bell rang.

The Eucharist was put on your tongue

and the Lamb came into your soul.

That part was real for me, god knows why?

Jac Shortland

Awe is Torc Waterfall after rain, the urge to jump under it, the eyes-closed stampede, the symphonies, the echoing palpitations, the love-lore lost in it, the fairy fear of hearing your own name called from it, the spray and the thirst, the insurmountable salmon leap of it all, the gasp of it.

Jac Shortland

Dance moves Dance Fingers can`t not twitch. Palms sense the percussion. Feet feel toes wriggle. And soles and calves and thighs soak up the vibration, from the soul of it.

Knees take off. Elbows mock them. Shoulders pick it up and go mad, rolling, rolling ... Ah yes, we know this. The breath joins in. This is easy!

Hips counter the shoulders. And do their shimmy. 'Hip bone connected to the thigh bone - dem bones - dem bones -' brain remembers. What does the music want?

Eyes soft, chance a look. What are the others doing? That`s a good one. Face dares to share. Throat has a deep urge to shout out. This is the best thing ever!

Here's the head. Don't let it spoil it. Back of the neck, shake it, shake it hair. Feel the rattle bones and roll.

Womb resounds with the drums, resonates with breasts content to wobble. And balls, too, if you had them. Don`t stop us now.

Heart thinks it`s the beat. Tongue panting happily, needs restraining. Backbone pleasures itself. Sweat is salty and sweet enough.

The body knows the tune.

Jac Shortland

Biographical Note: Marc Carver Marc Carver has had ten collections of poetry published and over two thousand poems published on the net but all that really matters to him is that people send emails telling Mark they enjoy his work.

WAITING TIME I wait then wait some more sometimes it is hard to wait.

You have to stop yourself, take a deep breath know that it is not quite the right time.

You have to look at it from the other side You can look into the window and you see something totally different from when you look out but still it is the same window.

So still I am here and the wait goes on as it may forever.

He never finished anything, they may say about me he said it was never the right time but they don't understand the waiting is the most important part.

Marc Carver

RANDY I have little to say now as the day darkens my words are slowing even less, an audience do I care to find time counts double.

There do you see it, the big black door with the handle the size of a giant's hand.

The sea turned black impossible to escape from.

The ground that pulls me to the earth or I could fly away What a bird I would be in and out through the clouds, making the towns small and the fields change colour as I get higher. but no, here I stay.

The flightless bird looking for my wings and hoping one day I will fly away.

Marc Carver

Biographical Note: John Walsh John Walsh is a member of Bayside Writers’ Group in Dublin. He was a public servant for thirty five years and now lives in Spain.

Southern Words

It is all very well for Northern folk To call a shovel a spade, To sink the phrase to the hilt And blind us with the Word Between the eyes.

It is all very different down South.

Here we play with words.

We press them and test them And let them be.

We know that clarity Is not as clear as it might seem.

It is a stone under water Shining a refracted beauty, But take it out and it is Not perfect anymore.

Down South our language is a veil.

We do not know the answer.

Solutions lie elsewhere.

Language to us is not a wedge To split the true from false.

We use it to bandage feelings And conceal the pain.

Yet if we are ever to change And learn to speak to one another; We’ll need another tongue Perhaps?

ŠJohn Walsh

Biographical Note: Alisa Velaj

Alisa Velaj was born in the southern port town of Vlora, Albania in 1982. She has been shortlisted for the annual international Erbacce-Press Poetry Award in UK in June 2014. Her works have appeared in more than seventy print and online international magazines, including: FourW twentyfive Anthology (Australia), The Journal (UK), The Dallas Review (USA), The Linnet's Wings (UK) The Seventh Quarry (UK), Envoi Magazine (UK) etc etc. Her poems are also translated in Hebrew, Swedish, Romanian, French and Portuguese.

Velaj’s poetry book "With No Sweat At All" (trans by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj) will be published by Cervena Barva Press in 2019. Velaj's digital chapbook "The Wind Foundation" is availuable through Zany Zygote Review. https://zanyzygotereview.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/the-windfoundations.pdf

STUMP OF AN ALMOND TREE I'm going to sing tonight this song of the boy bound alone inside a man's body-frame; of the man forsaken inside a boyhood echo.

I'm going to sing it until I totally shake the traveler's shadow off the sorrow's trunk.

Faded boyhood hurts as bad as the taste of almonds never crunched in time.

The white flowers are far, past two seasons and a dusk...

Ah, the sad sob, Peter Pan's sigh in the bosom of the night, which grew up into a woman!

Alisa Velaj

CHEMISTRY "A tree growing roots deep inside me" Arianit Roshi If I were absent in you, this tree of brilliance, growing roots deep inside me, would seek some other land for its leaves to migrate to...

If you were absent in me, that tree of impatience, spreading its roots through your every bone, wouldn't shoot out branches towards my eager flesh...

A dusky eagerness, thirsty like rainstorms, while blueness happens to be my bed and yours...

PRONE TO PANIC This morning shadow scared, like an alarmed hare.

Translated by Arben P. Latifi

Alisa Velaj

Biographical Note: Peter Adair

Peter Adair won the 2015 Translink Poetry Competition and the 2016 Funeral Services Northern Ireland Poetry Competition. His poems have appeared in The Honest Ulsterman, The Galway Review, Four X Four, CAP (Community Arts Partnership) Anthology 2017, Lagan Online’s Inking the Unthinkable echapbook and other journals. He is a 12NOW (New Original Writer) with Lagan Online, where his poems have also featured in Poetry Originals. He lives in Bangor, Co Down.

Van Morrison Patted My Dog

Beside the beach at Helen’s Bay I was walking with my friend who was walking her old white Labrador.

The sun was dancing in his gold lamé suit, the waves were singing, the trees a chorus, the day a vintage record spinning for eternity.

We might have sailed into the mystic across the bay to Tir-Na-Nog, not forgetting the dog.

Then we beheld an apparition falling from the sky, not an angel but a black-caped man in a black hat.

‘My God!’ my friend whispered, ‘that’s Van Morrison.’

‘No, it isn’t’ I said.

‘Yes it is,’ she said.’

How do you act when you pass Van Morrison?

Pretend not to know him?

Pretend he’s invisible?

And how does Van Morrison act when he passes people?

Does he glower at the ground and stump along?

Does he smash cameras concealed in trees?

Or worse, he’s convinced you’re a hack on his trail chasing the headline : VAN MORRISON WALKS ON BEACH!

Well, none of these. No rant. No scowl. No punch.

Van Morrison smiled, bent down and stroked the dog’s old white fur.

‘Lovely dog,’ he cooed.

I hoped he might sing to the dog, that lovely dog as sweet as Tupelo honey.

But I didn’t ask or say a word and Van Morrison walked on.

The dog didn’t bristle, growl or bark.

Van Morrison, like us, must have smelt just right.

‘Wasn’t he sweet,’ my friend said, disappointed Van Morrison didn’t run amok.

I thought of Wild Van, circa 1973, ageless on You Tube like an angel of the first degree.

I thought of a young man getting stoned to Astral Weeks.

I thought of Fitzroy Avenue, a party, ghosts dancing to an LP, a friend who died last year.

Then my friend tugged my arm and we stopped for that lovely dog to wee on the grass.

‘Van Morrison smiled,’ she said.

‘Van Morrison smiled and patted my dog.

Yes, Van Morrison patted my dog.’

Peter Adair

Harrison Adair (1887-1960)

He never spoke of dead friends, entrails gouged out on barbed wire, or the ear-shattering blast of guns, or his fear – no, just the mud, the mud, the bloody mud.

Peter Adair

Orange Breakdown

He ripped off his sash and flung it back in Martin Luther’s chattering teeth.

He tootled a tune on his ol’ da’s flute, tore off his Sunday suit, his red, white and blue unthertrews, and shouting a word or two at the big bad daddy in the sky stamped out a heathen dance, started to cry, while the crowd threw bibles at thon eedyit who ran, naked, jabbering in tongues, to pin prophecies on the Orange Hall door, then streaked away to cool his fever in Moloch’s dark idolatrous river.

Peter Adair

Roselawn

Coming in from the cold to a colder place we slump in the foyer among numbed wreaths, till, shooed along the unending conveyor belt of death, we pass ‘clients’ sleepwalking past us.

Behind, they’re queuing for miles, for the schedule’s tight.

And while the priest mumbles uncomforting words, our hands freezing as we murmur amen, I could wish we made an offering, a sacrifice: a sunny glade with flowers, birdsong, scented air. We would throw roses on your corpse, pour out our libation, set light to the oil-soaked sticks of your pyre and dream your soul claps hands and rises to that never-never land where all tears are dried, as if this parting were not final, as if we never died.

Peter Adair

Empire Hard not to admire their conquest of earth, the yellow outposts that colonise the rocks on Ballywalter beach.

Like the Romans and British they’ve built an empire to last. But when we’ve fled to some distant planet, and laid down sewage pipes and poisoned the rivers, a few dogs might miss us but not the imperious lichen.

Peter Adair

Biographical Note: Martin Kelleher

Martin Kelleher is from Cork City and has been publishing his short stories since 1986.

He has twice received nominations for the Hennessy Short Story Awards. He is author of two books, "Small City Blues" (2000) and the novel, "Taudrey" (2013)

For One Moment They Were Birds Martin Kelleher

Sometimes I make lives for them.

Like unhappy ghosts they visit at intervals, on their own terms, eternally disembodied from their consciousnesses as they cling to the mystified living. Often, I see them, their hands uncoupling as they flail into mother gravity, for one moment both believing in flight, hoping that the last thing that crosses their minds is the other, eyes closed to receive the communion of God's everlasting mercy, and not the cold surface of the highway running beneath the railway viaduct as it spirals upwards to take them to nothing.

Traffic swerves. From overhead the God of love observes the scene of sacrifice through the autumnal dusk, the occupants of half a dozen cars, in the character of their laughably human hesitancy, break from their doors, throwing their hands to the tops of their skulls, some blessing themselves, some vomiting into the roadside flora, their half digested evening meals profanely lathering the brambles. From now on it is all misconception, the vulgarity of recrimination. For the witness, in that same laughable human darkness, sees not the shed pupa from which beauty and faith became born, but an ugly, disheveled pulp.

In not one of these lives which I make for them are they together. In that other world, the world which I imagine, their parents plan had worked: Sylvia would have started third year in that early September of 1978 in County Meath, where her eldest sister would include the lovelorn teenager in her young family. There she would help

around the house, babysit and count, like DantĂŠs, the days, which, to her, would pass like years. Communication, for Mikey, would have been impossible. In this necessary torture he would be cast out from all knowledge of his beloved. The road from Cork City to the rural wilds of Meath would be dark and wintry and beyond his limited imagination and childish attempts at traversal. While surely they plotted some route in those last desperate few days they both knew in the wisest and most ancient part of their hearts the agony of separation could not be borne. From the one hundred foot drop of the mighty viaduct bridge they committed to their determination that it would not be, should not be, endured.

Mikey stumbled through the rest of school, probably played a little senior football in the Munster leagues, had a job somewhere in middle management, modest enough that he would have had an affordable life with the woman he met at a weekend away with the lads in Lahinch or Westport. They would be married in their late 20s and at some point he might have divulged the story of his first love, his first kiss, how silly he was back then, but only a kid after all, and her name was Sylvia. And to the question was she pretty he would have politely answered not as pretty as you.

They hung behind us when we walked out the Waterfall Road on those summer afternoons. We wondered, even complained, about why they even bothered to come along. They didn't hold hands. It didn't seem enough. They clung so close to each other they could only limp along the country road as one tragically deformed being.

Outside O'Neill's shop, on the wooden trestle tables, they sat away from us, speaking sotto voce and touching one another's hands and faces. Love, or whatever this sickness was, had invaded them with the same seemingly deadly caprice as cancer through

innocent cells. But soon we would come to accept it, taking it as a condition of the world. But, as children, we did not fear its madness.

Sylvia did exceptionally well in college, became driven in her career, then had a child in her early thirties, raised it herself. Given the passage of time she was a grandmother now. Only after a little too much wine does she reminisce, and not with a great deal of romantic regret, because she is a pragmatic sort. And all the touching they had ever done had only skirted the borders of indecency. Three weeks in her sister's place in Meath and she had started smiling at a local boy who worked in the racehorse stables she passed on her way from school. Mikey was two hundred miles away and there was nothing she could do. He seldom wrote anyway.

But it is not the truth. Truth. Or maybe it should be called The Great Impression. What does a fourteen year old feel but the zero point energy keeping all matter together. No tomorrow. No pain. Us here. Nothing else. There is nothing. Just you. Time without you is waste. Time not spent touching your skin is worthless. Time with you is timeless.

So, we had gathered, the Cronins were beside themselves. They feared that the next step would be their daughter's pregnancy. Ha, a month later they would realise there were worse things. Adults: they were even more ignorant of The Great Impression than their enthralled child. Her clothes, warm enough to guard against the growing cold of late summer as she willingly edged towards death, were the only things holding her little body together on the wide Bandon Road. The medical examiners had tried and failed to reconstruct her face for the formal identification.

I saw them sit around the table in the Horgan's kitchen. As much as the Horgans were somebodys they were no match for Liz Cronin. Yet it didn't matter.

They weren't poets. Poets knew about the secret gases, the momentary nature of flight, but also the atomic bomb of the little heart when it was temporarily drunk, the dangers of waking the dancing dreamers from their nursery rhyme. I imagine that Mikey's mum and dad, confidently well off and far too busy with their chain of petrol stations, probably said 'yes, whatever you think is best'.

For one moment, in a sense, they were birds. And perhaps they lived as full and meaningful a life as many, many others as they went into space and gathered heartbreaking speed. And as for their God of love, it is easier to not believe in Him than to know his vile, impassive Self.

"Down through time," said the priest at Sylvia's Mass, "we praised God for everything. Now we blame him for everything."

With each family blaming the other there were separate funerals. At both we watched from the back of the church the fools in this world above ground grieving, and realised, perhaps, how less and less we would know as we grew older.

Biographical Note: Antoinette Rock

Antoinette Rock lives in Cavan she was born in Belfast. From an early age she has always enjoyed words and reading. Everyday things inspire her poetry.

St. Dympana's Cool turquoise wall.

Protection.

Perpetual spooling images that repeat and repeat and repeat.

Fixated on the same street.

Hope, a blue healing threaded through light, ribbon days.

Antoinette Rock

Biographical Note: Claire Storr

Claire Delores Storr is a 33 year old writer from Cumbria. After completing a MA in Critical Theory in Photography in 2008, she worked as a commercial and editorial photographer with most of the large publishing houses such as Faber and Faber and Penguin, alongside writing poetry and prose in her spare time. Since then, she has progressed into writing full time and has been published in various anthologies, magazines and newspapers. In 2017, she began working on a collection of short stories based in Ireland called Tides. She lives with her husband and daughter in Carlisle.

Michael Claire Delores Storr

I knew Michael from when I was about four. I say knew and not met, because I don’t remember him in person, just a mirage like you would get in a dream, hazy and always with the same clothes and expressions. Mam always said he was such a bonny lad, graceful in stance with shaggy fair hair parted in the middle and a stonewashed denim jacket covered with badly embroidered band patches on the sleeves. She said when my brother Luke had friends round, I would bang on his door with my tiny balled-up fists, shouting “let me innnn!!” and Michael would always let me come in and see what they were all doing, pausing the video nasties they were watching and airing out the room of their weed smoke that curled the edges of Luke’s posters and gave them all red rimmed eyes like they’d been crying.

He would go off with my brother on adventures in his Toyota Carolla. It was his father’s car that he gave to Michael for his 18th birthday, and how grand they looked in it. Grand, if somewhat off kilter with their long rocker hair and frayed Nirvana tshirts and ripped jeans, sat in a metallic baby blue saloon. Mam said they once took me out with them without her permission. I don’t remember anything aside driving fast through the O’Devaney Gardens council estate with sun blurring bright through the windows and pounding rock music so loud we couldn’t talk over it, just laugh like characters in a silent movie. If I think hard enough, I can see Michael in the driver’s seat, looking back at me with Swedish blonde hair flopping over one eye and laughing, or smiling at least, though I can’t remember what his eyes look like, or the shape of his face. Mam was furious when we got in, her and Luke had a blazing argument as I sat on the pouffe in the living room, hoping that I could still go out with them. But of course, I couldn’t, and I stormed around the house with a glass of full fat milk and poured it all over the bed sheets and splashed it on the curtains in upward waves of cream white, a rebellion I would later regret when my bedroom smelled like off cheddar and Luke laughed at me calling me cheesy Louisey. Dad was no better, I

wasn’t allowed to go into his room anymore as he knew they were smoking wacky baccy in there, though he allowed it and told mam it was better they did it in the house rather than on the streets. The landing would smell of burnt paper and hippy scent, with constant laughing coming from his room as I sat cross legged in mine looking at his door.

It wasn’t long after Luke got his first tattoo, a black and orange panther curling around his bicep, that that he moved out and into a flat with Michael. Mam and Dad didn’t see him for a couple of weeks, with Mam walking around the house sniffing and wiping her eyes throughout the day and Dad closing off his bedroom like it was a tomb in the middle of the house. Eventually they went to see them both; they were living in a bedsit above a chemist, an old damp smelling Victorian flat with bay windows and sofas in each of their rooms, which I always thought was really cool but Mam and Dad not so much. I know now they wanted the best for him, not to be 19 and living in a bedsit on the dole. But, at the time I think I felt resentful of the way they looked down on them, I thought their life was great and they were so adult to have a flat together and live like men. They always had Metallica blaring and cans of beer stacked in the windows blocking all the light, and Mam would almost run to the door and drag me through as fast as possible because she didn’t want their neighbours to see us and maybe recognise her. The stair carpet was worn through to the underlay and the wallpaper had a feint smell of old woman, like the clothes smell in vintage shops. When I was older I went into retro markets but my friend Bethany put me off because she said you could never wash out the smell of dead nana. It made sense that an older person had lived there as there was a Stannah Stair lift that slid down the lower staircase on a broken motor. When the doorbell went they’d sit on the top and whizz down to the bottom step in a curl, then push it back to the top. I always wanted one but mam said to hush it, it’s for frail old people and they shouldn’t be so disrespectful, eejits the pair of them.

They lived together like that for a couple of months, and then Michael got his first girlfriend, Annabelle. I’m not sure why, but I remember her more than him. Mam reckons it was because I was jealous, but I don’t think I felt like that when I knew

him. To want to kiss him or cuddle him, or feeling the twitch down below like I did when I was 14 and Joseph Flaherty kissed me in Balkers Park, with his full lips and dilated dark green eyes. I think I remember her because I wanted to be her, even at six years old, I could see that if you were pretty and funny, life would be easier than if not. Anna had permed blonde and brown hair and always wore black high waisted jeans with burgundy Dr Martens. Before we had Sky TV, she would tape me The Simpsons and I’d watch it on a Sunday night after my bath, sat in my pink and purple spotted nightie in the living room and eating chocolate digestives that I’d melt on the electric fire. She never forgot, even when she went to an open day at London Met, she had her dad tape it and she dropped it off for me when she got back, all full of excitement at the campus and the fine arts course she wanted to study. Michael was to go with her, and at the time I didn’t really think of the bigger picture, just that I wouldn’t have The Simpsons to watch on a Sunday night anymore.

It was Halloween night when the bad thing happened. We were all at home, me asleep in my moon and stars printed covers, and my parents watching Taggart downstairs.

All day I had spent carving pumpkins with Mam, her arms scraping deep inside a cavern of soupy smelling mulch and pips. It had lightly rained all throughout the day, that weird smelling acid rain that my dad had told me was something to do with the water on the soil, and I chucked a paddy because I wasn’t allowed out trick or treating because Mam would get wet walking around with me. So, I sat in a huff until dad went to the video shop and rented me Hocus Pocus and got me a massive bag of chocolate éclairs. In bed afterwards, I heard the banging on the door, and my heartbeat instantly elevated; it’s like mam said, any visitor after 10pm doesn’t bring good news.

I tried to listen as best as I could, but the TV mashed in with the raised voices, then I just heard a unisex wail and I didn’t know who it had come from, or why. This was the beginning of the bad thing that would go on for months in our house, pale faces, and dinners eaten in silence. I slid out of bed, shivering at what the bad thing might be, and I could hear downstairs my mam shouting, over and over again “oh son!, oh son!” and Luke cried in thin high pitched howls, it sounded like one continuous noise with no breath in between. When I crept downstairs with tiny feet on padded carpet, I could see she had her arms around him and was rocking him side to side on the edge

of the sofa as my dad silently looked out of the window onto the dark of the night with his hands deep in his pockets and my pumpkin glowing orange on the window ledge.

No one saw me, and I watched though the crack in the door hinge until my legs were sore from standing awkwardly with one foot on each stair, then I slid back to bed and lay there until I woke in the morning. I don’t remember much after that, I got up for school as normal, and Luke was asleep on the sofa so I got changed in front of the oven for the warmth as mam and dad moved noiselessly around each other, mute while scrambling eggs and sipping hot coffee.

It took days for them to tell me, with me trying to subtly broach the conversation as best as a seven year old can, asking why Luke was back, why was he crying.

Eventually I found out that the bad thing was that Michael had had an accident in his car, and he wouldn’t be coming home.

Suddenly he wasn’t normal Michael anymore, he was Michael that was dead, Michael that had died in his Toyota Carolla that he loved so much. I could see on Luke’s face that he didn’t see him like that anymore either, it was impossible to think of him any other way now because he would be that Michael forever. He wouldn’t grow up, leave the flat, leave Anna, find another girlfriend, get a job, lose a job, go to uni, work as an apprentice, go out drinking every Friday, find a wife, get a proper job, have two children, move to Coventry, buy a house that needed more work than expected, lose his parents, pay off his mortgage, holiday in Southern France, put on two stone, stand with his grandsons in his conservatory, laughing and bending down on old legs to give an ant a single grain of sugar as his wife calls for them to all come in for scones with jam, made from the plump, pillar-box red strawberries he had grown in his garden.

He was buried on Bonfire night, and after the funeral Luke, dad and I watched the town fireworks in silence from the top of North Bank shore. For a while I had nightmares where Michael was trapped in hot metal, and the metallic blue was closing in on him slowly. He was too afraid to scream so he sat breathing burning shallow breaths and let it shroud around him like a blanket. I didn’t tell anyone because there was too much crying in the house already, but I told a friend at school and she called me a weirdo so I didn’t mention it at all after that. In time I stopped thinking about

him, and death. I didn’t quietly panic every time my dad went to work in his car. Or stop my mam doing the weekly shop by burying her shoes in the garden and blaming it on the dog. Eventually, you forget. The house went back to normal as best as it could, Luke left that same summer and went to university to study art and design, ultimately dropping out and working in a shoe shop for a year until mam and dad gave him money to go back and study again, this time Architecture, and he graduated with honours in 1996. I do remember of the ceremony, that he looked so old and mature with his cropped hair and thin-as-a-pin girlfriend that dad said was a snotty git, with her airs and graces and posh London accent. And what got me the most was that he never spoke to me again like he used to, abrupt and sometimes with a bored malice, calling me arseface or shitbag. Telling me that a ghost lived under my bed when I was scared after accidentally watching a bit of Poltergeist on telly, taking my Sega off me to win Dr Robotnik on Sonic 2 before I could, running about and laughing and kicking one of mam’s failed rock cakes around the kitchen where she feigned scorn but hid a smile underneath. I saw him as he would now forever be, with his rolled up certificate and mortarboard and smile on demand grin, poised for every angle of every photograph and hand tightly shaking that of his peers. The man that Michael would never be.

It’s strange because it’s something we didn’t really talk about as a family until I left school, as if I wouldn’t remember the grief and horror and atmosphere of the house for months and months. That every year after we weren’t allowed to celebrate Halloween, and I’d have to sit by the window resentfully watching the kids go by in their costumes, witches, werewolves, miniature Dracula’s with waxy white make up and glow in the dark teeth too big for their mouths. And when years later, Michaels dad died of a heart attack Mam sobbed saying he’d died from a broken heart, and Dad had told her not to say such stupid things and she cried even more. And on my summer break from Uni, as I sit with my mam at the same weathered breakfast table, in the same wallpapered room, in the same house and listen to her speak, I try to retrieve the memories of Michael that just don’t exist. And although I don’t remember Michael in full as others do, a shy and loving and happy teenager with eons of life ahead, as I’m

looking at mam’s face when she speaks of him I’ve a feeling that my distant and puzzle-piece thoughts of him are better as they are.

On life Claire Delores Storr

You board a plane and meet your tiny, fragile sister at the other side. Jittery and nervous, she hops from one foot to the other as you walk over to her. Belfast International Airport, sterile, bleach white and not seen by you for almost 12 years.

Her cafe business has collapsed, haemorrhaging money in paper fountains, and the building has been repossessed. The mortgage on the house is vast and unending, debts accrue like leaves falling from a dead tree, redder with each letter that lands. Aiden left her, with his strained jaw sinew-tight, he was unable to cope with her. He has aged 10 years in 2, both of them barely 35 yet seeming so close to the edge of life. You are staying here with her, and when you see him in the hallway, door quietly unlocked and picking up mail, he only just seems in this world, spaced and smiling a vacant smile. “Howre’ya Charlotte?”, his thick Dublin accent is sweet and so familiar in essence, it’s like you never left. He still has that smile, gracious, even in defeat. There was a point where you were jealous of Aoife, this house, her business, Aiden. Him honey coated with joy on their wedding day, small featured and sunny, flirtatious as a scamp. “I’m great!” You’re not sure why you’re so exaggeratedly cheerful, but your face is still shining and upward to him, grinning with a light freckles of sweat on your brow. He smiles knowingly and nods, heads for the door, no goodbye. “Did he call?!”

Aoife jumps down each stair, missing the last one and skidding in bare socks. “No, you say, it was the postman.”

Most of the day after she wakes, she paces, finding fault in plug sockets, chipped wallpaper, dado rails that are slightly out of joint. “Well that’ll reduce his share of the house” she says, rippling with anxiety and sweating grief. Mourn, I say, grieve, for your lost life, husband, house, business, let yourself submerge in the misery. “Really I have no option but to carry on as normal” she says, scratching at carpet and twisting tight new door handles up and down, up and down.

It is a lovely building, and frothing with modernist furniture, thin modern white MDF everywhere and as plain as yoghurt. Books bought as ornaments, lined purposefully in odd stripes of colour and differing sizes. Beech floors, stripped and with bare knots of wood you feel underfoot. Contemporary upright radiators that emit only tiny sheaths of heat, but scald to the touch. This is a house that personifies the recession, you think, stroking the suede effect rainbow striped sofa, the plumped scatter cushions that poke goose feathers. She knows this, and she is ashamed. But the clots of anxiety grow thicker every day, rivers of stress pulse through her, lining every stretched, thinning limb and strands of hair drift in small clouds around the house.

She is beginning to fade, cells die every day but new ones do not form. She insists on caking foundation and powder onto her skin, lines run thick in the cracks of her face, around her lips, her eyes. Under pencilled eyebrows, her eyes are rheumy blue, milky marbles twitching under sporadic eyelashes. Her hair has fallen out in clumps through stress, anxiety related alopecia. But, we do not mention it, in any form. She takes her pills (blue, pink, bone white, hexagonal and powdery, dense with sedative) and washes them down with tepid water, leaving smudges of bitty pink lipstick at the rim.

For the first few days, we meander round the house like strangers to each other, oddly polite and aware. Then, the shell soon breaks and we are sisters again. I am suddenly 12 to her 16, watching her leave to go out with her first boyfriend in his car, crouching underneath the windowsill net curtain with poking nosy eyes like little lumps of azure, sparkling in jealousy. Her wardrobe of knee torn jeans, glitter scrunchies and hyper colour t-shirts that changed shade with the heat of your body, sunset orange to apricot cream. The smell of her bedroom with brown waves of patchouli incense that mam called hippy scent. And the way we left each other, a rushed goodbye from her as I waited for dad to take me to the airport for Oxford. I waited for her, tight hand gripped on my suitcase, expecting her key in the door, listening for a metal scrape and the sharp notes of her voice. She arrived after an hour, breezing through looking for her car keys, and past the living room, doubling back. “Oh, you waited!?” A question, left hanging as I stood inert and without words. She gave a confused glance at mam, who looked embarrassed and angry with pulsing flared nostrils. “Why shouldn’t she wait

for you Aoife?! She is your sister! She’s moving hundreds of miles away!” And quickly, I felt young, and stupid, and unwanted. Cheeks flushed, I blustered and said that I had to wait for another flight, it wouldn’t land at Heathrow, there would be changes, I wanted a direct flight. All stuttered as I could feel the sympathy radiating from my mother as she silently listened to my lie. Aoife smiled without moving and said “Oh, right! I see!” She did see, she knew there was no hold up and simply left me with fluid welled eyes, crying not at my departure but at my selfish, thoughtless sister.

Tense white knuckles around my suitcase handle, I let her look at me. Me as an adult, leaving for university and living on my own in a dormitory of mixed sexes, driving a car around narrow aged streets, melting into the skin of men I may share my bed with.

She breathed in sharply, straightening her posture as she inhaled and said “Well, good luck!” Mam snorted and walked into the vestibule, opening the door for her as she left. I stood at the door, singed and hurt, and as I watched her bustling with chatter as she walked hand in hand up the street with Aiden, she didn’t look back.

In the living room, we lie on faux leather reclining chairs. A furling and unfurling motion of her finger beckons her to me; slowly and with effort, she asks for her cigarettes. When I shake one out for her and throw it across the room at her, she blows me a sweet snap of a kiss, eyes slanted and deep with medication. Pretend to catch it and put it in your top pocket. I look at her and I can feel myself depleting with age. At 30, I no longer feel young. My skin sheds a thin confetti of eczema dead cells from around my extremities, I have little puddles of jowls at the sides of my jaw line that quiver with movement. Studying old photographs of myself as a teenager makes me curls the edges of my skirt unconsciously. Underneath my eyes lay tiny maps of heritage. Sometimes I pretend to smile in the mirror, going from a brash grin to blank, thoughtless and plain expressions. When I look at her, it’s like looking at myself age 40, a vicious reflection and one I do not want to see.

Aoife sits with a whisky sour, after three pints of Guinness she is animated and sentimental. Gesticulating towards the door, she says “Go up the shops, Charlotte, I need another four pack.” Get up and go, buy an eight pack and two bottles of thin watery red wine. Both of you spend the next day critically hung over and restless.

Uncomfortable around each other and dawdling around the house, both picking things up and putting them down, trying to nap but staring at the ceiling, lying straight in this visitors bed, in this unfamiliar house, a blank faced tourist back in your homeland.

There are no real feelings to these streets, and it rains, near constantly. Your friend Carly came to visit you in October, two weeks after you arrived. The rain water of yet another shower drenched through her trainers and into her sock, chafing the skin away from her feet in red welts. We laughed and called it her Dublin Toe, forever scarred by the fluid of the Irish sky. She abandoned her socks on your radiator after she left for home, crusted with brown blood at the edges. You felt a cold creep when you thought of the material rubbing the layers of skin away, into her shoes, and you threw the sock out of your bedroom window into the street below where it lay soaking in a gutter for weeks.

Aoife pranced to the hallway when Carly arrived, rushing open the thick wooden door and presenting herself like a debutante at a ball. “We tried very hard to work around the period features of the house, the cornices and the light mounts had to stay of course! Although we also felt we had to be true to contemporary times too, we are living in our own futures!” She said, overly jolly with an enforced wide grin and gabbling, she looked like a lunatic. Carly knew what had happened, though a sense of discomfort at this display of false wealth was not apparent in her; she smiled genuinely and engaged the necessary oohs and ahhs, as if credulous to the situation. I couldn’t wait to leave, I rushed Carly out of the door before she’d even reached the yard. “I need to pick up your prescription, Aoife. Chemist shuts at 2pm.” I saw her as I left , smaller and smaller and shifting from foot to foot to see me move down the hallway in strides, hurt expression, as I ambled for the door. There is only so much I can give to her. The house was filled with a noxious, anxious gas, seeping and permeating through my lungs with every short breath. I was inhaling lumps of her slow death.

She doesn’t rise from her bed until late afternoon, and with scalp dampened hair and ochre bagged eyes she tells me of night sweats of fret and loneliness. “Aiden was in my dream, he strangled me in the yard, I could feel the gravel underneath me, gritting

my skin. Who would want me now.” Uhumm, I say, through closed lips; I do not engage this type of wounded self pity. She has had enough compassion, sympathy poured out of urns, with walls made of tenderness and empathy. Enveloping, wrapping, gentle and kind. She taps the table nervously, looking at me while a turn the page of my book, a thin scratch of paper almost noiseless under my fingers.

She has no money. No income, no help from Aiden. There are rows of expensive silk scarves in her bedroom draped across mahogany rails like dying plants, in emerald green, artery red, and patterned with warm brown paisley designs of curling vines.

You tell her she should sell them online, an offer which is met with disgust. You take one, slid from the rails silently in her room, whipped through the door and taken into the bathroom to try on. You thought your eyes bulged with the crime, lips too fat, skin too ashen. After all this time, you are still her little sister, stealing clothes from her wardrobe and terrified at her reaction.

You remember a time when you were both eight and twelve, and you were playing rounder’s with other kids from the estate. One of the older brothers of the girls, rough and already spotted with acne, came and stole the bat straight out of Aoife’s hands, pulled with force and laughing. Afterwards, you both sat on a kerb outside near the house, and she fussed and reared, screaming at the injustice, the lack of control.

“Nothing is really ours, is it Charlotte?” she asked, looking down with rage eyes and filled with incredulity. “It’s only a cheap bat, Eef...” my furtive reply, scuffing my foot on the floor. “IT’S THE PRINCIPLE!” she cried, with fat child tears. I had never seen her this upset, and I could feel even then, sat in the sun of a thick hot summer, that she was different.

Later that night when we slept, she crawled over the landing into my room, and told me about her Polly Pocket box. “The one that got nicked at my birthday party?” I groaned with crackle sleep voice. “It didn’t get thieved”, she was whispering to me, crouched by the side of the bed on the flat of her feet. She tells me the story. It was one with a Prince and Princess in a fold out box complete with plastic pink castle and horse drawn carriage. She loved it, but there was a problem; the prince stood just to the left of the princess and didn’t quite face her eye to eye. It bothered her so much,

she thought about it at school, when we were away at the seaside, when she was reading at night in bed. It was so troubling, she eventually burnt the mould for his feet with a lighter, but the melted gap was too large and he couldn’t even stand up anymore. She tried her best to ignore it, she really did, and she knew it had cost a lot of money that our parents could ill afford. She wanted it so desperately that she circled it in the Argos catalogue with a thick red marker so many times it soaked through to the pages behind. But, it had to go. It would sit at night on her drawing table, the pink plastic gemstone winking at her through the night. Even when she put it under the bed it stared up at her all night, burning through the mattress. She threw it out under a pile of newspapers the next day, and at my birthday party weeks later, told our parents that one of my friends had stolen it. When she is telling this story, her eyes dart from side to side, and I felt this sensation, like when you’ve eaten too many ten pence mixes of sherbet saucers and pink shrimps. Like you want to throw up, but there is no gagging, just the need to expunge something, a heavy sludge in your stomach. When I said it was the saddest thing I’d ever heard, she looked at the window and said; no, it’s just reality is all.

Aoife asks you to take letters to Aiden, bills and credit card statements in his name.

He has moved across the river, less affluent and more populous with students. He’s living in an apartment block, one that used to be a large, Victorian terrace, but now renovated with the character stripped and raw, each flat identical throughout the building. The rooms are sparse in design. Everything inside is furnished by the landlord, and has no patterns or colours, just greys and whites mixed in a square pot of a room. A kitchen/living room, 2 small rectangle bedrooms with minute windows and an acetone bright bathroom.

He lets you in; he looks better. Plumper around the face, he no longer looks as gaunt and haunted as he did. His blonde hair is swept, long and across his head, eyes pale and lips slightly apart. Stubbled, and sturdy in gait, fixed in slim grey jeans and Converse sneakers. He looks younger than he did a few weeks ago. “Charlotte! I was just thinking about ya. Come in” with a wide swift pass of his hands into the living room. There are no trinkets like the house he shared with Aoife, just objects of

purpose and practicality. He stands behind you, closing the door softly and smiling, and odd smile, unchanging and staring at you. After a thick and heavy silence, he says “Jesus, I remember you when you were leaving for university, what were ya, 19?” Not a question, as I begin to answer, he talks over me. “Christ yeah, you were young. And always thinking, weren’t you Charlotte? A real thinker.” He’s still staring, that odd wide smile and eyes catatonic and unblinking. Then, he stops abruptly, clapping his hands in front of him. “What’ll you have to drink? Tea, coffee? Pint?” Smiling again, motionless. You fidget on the couch, pulling your paisley print skirt down, lifting slightly and smoothing the rear underneath you. With a dry throat you say - no drink thanks, I’m just dropping these off. Looking downward at the thin stack of letters in your hand, you realise how tightly you are gripping them and loosen your fingers, white at the knuckle. He moves out of his rigid stance and walks towards you, sitting to your right. He licks his lips, and blinking slowly he moves towards you, too close and says “Can I tempt you?” Your face is tight and oily with sweat, it’s too warm in here with radiators on full blast even though it’s May. In your silence, he motions downwards towards his crotch. He’s holding a box, stainless steel with a Christmas motif, and filled with shortbread. You’re face bears evident embarrassment, and he says “You always were the one with the heart, weren’t you Char? Aoife doesn’t practice empathy. I remember ya at the wedding, in that dress, laced at the back?

Gorgeous you were, so young then. And sometimes, just sometimes, I’m sure you looked at me in a certain way. I’m just being daft though, eh?” He no longer is smiling, his warm hand is touching yours and his face is red and searing with intent.

Drop the letters on the table and head for the door with wobbling feet. Pass a mirror and look away quickly, back in his direction and he is looking at you, smiling with his static, broad beam. “Bye, Charlotte” you hear faintly on the way down the subtly padded staircase, and you notice you’ve sweated through your ivory silk shirt through the armpits in soaking patches of phlegm yellow. Embroidered edged, you thought it looked vintage. Now it feels old fashioned and ages you. Pad down the stairs, into the light and walk to the house, vibrating and twitching in your skin. In the bathroom when you get back, you can’t undo the buttons at the wrist so you cut off the blouse with scissors and flush it down the toilet in sequential clumps of shivering wet fabric

as Aoife loiters on the landing, hopping from one foot to another, asking what he was like, was he happy? Did he look sad? Did he ask about me? Charlotte?

When things were well for Aoife, everything else was forgotten. People were ok, but generally unnecessary. Thoughts empty and happy, no saddle of wicked notions from this busy little brain, unkind and watchful. But nervous tension, common stress that happens in life, things shifted. You can’t run away from it, she says, it follows you everywhere, watching and clinging to you and filling you with dirty, crossed messages. There is no antidote to this mass of electricity filled membranes that float in your skull and weep tiny wires of hate into your body. When you are sane you are thoughtless, it is a simple life. When you are not, you are static with fire and worry, you no longer care about hiding, you talk unconsciously of counting breaths and how often you are blinking, making us all feel awkward that we don’t understand. The internet says it is sensorimotor OCD, being unable to be autonomous anymore, constantly aware of your body and its functions. Every breath is deep and makes you tremble with excess oxygen intake, blinks are heavy and forced. We are all at the dinner table as a family. You prod mashed potato with the end of a fork, your other hand squashes in beneath your thighs like a child would sit. I can see from the edges it is white with pressure. Talking until your voice is grated you tell us of these thoughts, and that you think you might never be the same. This depression fills you, it now is you. And we are all silent, hunger abated, and mam’s eyes fill with tears as she leaves the table. You notice but say nothing. And the worst thing is you say, looking upwards and with one raised eyebrow and a faint smile, once you’ve noticed, it never goes away.

The weeks pass, your flat in Oxford cries for your return. This place is absolutely misery. You feel old and ugly and hateful, her madness is seeping into you. Friends send letters - a new cafe has opened in the city – it sells pot brownies on the side, Char! It’s a really cool place, you have to come home and try some. Home.

Knock, heavy and forthright on the door to his building. A dishevelled, young faced tenant opens the door and lets you into the foyer. Shout “Aiden!” echoing up to his flat door and tell him to come to the front door downstairs, you’re not going upstairs.

When he answers, he has a bowl of thick red soup in his hand rested aloft his palm.

“You’re to come and sort things out about the house, Aiden. You have responsibilities the same as her, in terms of bills and upkeep.” He grimaces and lowers one side of his head and tuts; “Oh, fuck off Charlotte” he says, “this has absolutely nothing to do with you, you’ve not even been around for 10 years.” Feel a ball of hard sickness, think of running up and knocking the soup off his hand in a swift flip. Redden him the same colour as his face. Instead : “What’s your favourite colour?” you ask. He looks vivid with anger, an under brow ice pick eye straight into your pupil , spiteful. Supercilious.

“Char, it really doesn’t matter what you...”. Cut him off; “what’s your favourite colour, Aiden?” he sighs, then begins to speak. Cut him off again, talk over him, his lips contorting. “Mine’s purple, like a deep purple, Indigo. Aoife’s is a colour she made up when we were kids. It’s called Ortuche. She described it as the colour of a bruise, yellow and orange in the middle, and fading to purple at the edges. She said a bruise had no colour, but it needs a description, a visualization. She said if, no actually when, she had a little girl she was going to call her Ortuche. Isn’t that strange, that that is my first go-to thought of Aoife? Nothing, aside a made up colour for something that doesn’t exist unless you’re hurt. Doesn’t that say a lot, Aiden?”. Turn around immediately and walk down the stairs as he stands in the doorway, blank. “I’m going home, Aiden. She’s your wife, and your responsibility. Give her the money for the house, or sell it, I don’t care. Just go home you fucking coward.” The light of the day is so intense and blue when you exit the building and see Aoife outside, that your vision briefly shines with iridescence, a pearl without a shell.

The path outside the flat is longer than expected, wider at the sides, girthed with sun soaked pools of summer rain, acid in the air. I look back, Aiden is still in the door with his soup in his hand, centred and flanked by Georgian columns wreathed in decorative ivy. He watches you walk, silent and expressionless, he nods, once. I nod, and continue. She is beside me, looking back incessantly at the house, at Aiden, waving at intermissions with thin twig arms without flesh. Her pace is disjointed with her tendons tight and out of synch, but she will continue to walk, always, with one foot more ahead than the other.

Reflex Claire Delores Storr

Although now it feels like it was an inevitability, you just don’t think that things like this happen. A hushed conversation murmurs through the parlour of repose and for once, I have absolutely nothing to say. Paddy walks around, thanking everyone and shaking hands. Karl and I sit, fidgeting and waiting for an appropriate moment to leave, and Karl keeps saying “Lynda, when we next see the door open, we’ll say were going for a smoke and then not come back. Do you think Pad will care?” ‘Yes, I hiss, he’s our best mate of course he will you fucking idiot.’ Grief manifests in many forms, for Pad it is a stoic poise, he never looks encumbered. For Karl, it was talking too much. For me, the burden of memory.

Paddy’s little sister Catriona was always in the living room when we arrived. She’d hear the door lock click and she’d rush down the stairs, past Paddy’s mam sat in the kitchen, to the front room as if she’d been there all along. Every time she would see that I had driven, she’d try and get the keys from me to pretend to drive, though we all knew that there would be no pretending. I’d have to heave back my hand, her little sharp nails would dig into my cuticles and she’d eventually have to give up, falling to the floor belly first and writhe serpentine with a permanent fizzy cola can still in hand.

“GIVE ME THE KEYS, LYNDA!” she’d scream, venomous and lips edged with spittle. The TV and radio in the kitchen would fight for first place, the house would be hectic with noise, mess, food, and Catriona, always prepped and ready for something, anything.

Catriona was 9, and had something that wasn’t right in her. In the future, ADHD becomes a word everyone knows, but then it’s wasn’t something that was known about. It’s difficult to think that she’d be in seniors in 2 years, rubbing shoulders with 16 year olds and having to do proper homework. She got homework but she never did it, Paddy would do it for her, writing with his left hand so it looked more genuine.

Catriona ruled the house with every inch of her tiny body and mind. There was

random screeching and yelling, she’d burst into song while kicking apples dropped from her hand above and aimed at the window, scribble on the walls with anything she can find, chew the ends of the kitchen cupboards. She once filled a glass mason jar full of spiders and twigs and burst into Paddys’ room, throwing it upwards covering his ex-girlfriend with them. Paddy said Catriona laughed hysterically as his ex screamed and cried, frantically pulling off her jumper with different shapes and sizes of spiders tangling in her hair. There would be mothers at the door with twitchy nervous kids covered in bruises or with red crescent bite marks around their arm, “what are you going to do about her?! She’s a bloody animal!” That one got her a 2 week suspension as the mother was on the PTA board. Paddy has a way of soothing the mothers, with his deep and smooth voice, his bulky frame rested on the door and a cool-as-the-breeze attitude. He never gets ruffled by anything, relaxed as if he’s on some lovely, peaceful tranquilisers. If only he understood how manic she was, or at least acknowledged it. You never know what she’d do next. And she had an unnerving way of looking you straight in the eye for longer than necessary, her eyes vacant but with a twitch of a smile on her lips, watching and evaluating, seeing how you might react to a hug, a kiss or a bite. She was a miniature tyrant and it was utterly exhausting. She’ll do that to you, 20 minutes with her and you were completely knackered with a tension headache. She’d wore a nappy until she was 6 because she simply couldn’t be bothered going to the toilet, and she’d come into the room with a broad inert grin and you knew she’d be pissing or shitting, looking you right in the face and doing it.

Pad and his Ma did their best to ignore her ‘moments of madness’. His Ma buzzed with stress, drying her hands on a tea towel over and over, her face wrinkled far past her 39 years. But to me there were never any moments of sanity with Catriona. His mother eventually turned to drink. It was Catriona that drove her to it, that and Pad’s Da dying. She sat most days in The Lion or The Apple Tree, cheeks sweat-wet and red veined, drinking away her husband’s life insurance. She’d have periods of sober lucidity where she’d stay in the house for a few weeks, cleaning and cooking, and Paddy’s feet always seemed to be a little lighter when she was there. She’d cook shepherd’s pie from scratch with local meats and vegetables, thick brown mince and

gravy, salted with the fat drained from the mince and soft baby carrots nesting in the mashed potato. Paddy said she used to love cooking when he was a kid, there was always some kind of food smell in the house, sweet cake dough or meaty stews. And in the photographs on the wall leading up the stairs, she was young and pretty and smiling. There was one where she’s on a beach where she’s with Paddy’s Da before getting married. She’s got her eyes closed and her mouth open in a happy shriek, with Paddy’s Da tickling her waist behind her, and a sweep of her long umber hair flowed over her face and whipped into his. It got knocked off the wall a few years back when Catriona tried cart wheeling down the stairs and broke her ankle. In the bedlam of getting her to the hospital, it was put somewhere and never made it back onto the wall.

The comforting presence of his Ma never lasted though, she’d start getting frustrated with Catriona again and the arguments would begin, “Catriona get off the counter tops in your shoes!” “Catriona put down the fishbowl!” “No, don’t take out the fish!”

“Catriona STOP!” Pad’s Da died about 5 years ago now, and he didn’t see what Catriona was like, he only saw her for an hour or so after work when she was sweet as caramel. Showing him crayon pictures she’d drawn, they’d hug together on the recliner while she’d be looking back at Margaret, smiling maliciously. I never knew it was possible for a 3 year old do be spiteful, but Catriona could do it. “Where’s my Kitty Cat?!” he’d say, coming in. “Kitty Cat! Meow for me Kitty Cat!” and Catriona would hold up her hands in front of her like little paws, and lick the back of them smoothing them over her hair and eyebrows like a cat grooming itself. When his Da died, so quickly ravaged by cancer he turned to bone in a couple of weeks, Pad took over entirely.

Even at 15 he was a man, he was just the type that was born with a steady head and broad shoulders that held everyone else’s weight. Margaret would sob openly at the kitchen table as Catriona would shout and yell and punch and slap with such tenacity that the air around her would be palpable with her mother’s hatred. “Catriona, please, for the love of GOD go to bed!!” you’d hear screamed through the house while Catriona laughed and shrieked, ripping off clothes and pulling down curtains to use as a cape. None of the other kids would play with her obviously, she was vicious and didn’t fare well at playing nicely. She’d also have to win every game or a tantrum

would begin with cries of “CHEAT!!” or frustrated table flipping. Then there would be some form of damage, smashed glasses or food purposefully eaten to be spat out in faces, mixes of cake and pies and fizzy lemonade all chewed to mulch and sprayed in shocked faces. I’m not surprised Margaret turned to drink, I would’ve too.

She’d repeat quotes from a film over and over again, you wouldn’t even know what film it’s from. Then it’d be a pure barrage of animated quotes, with her acting both parts of a scene and exaggerating each part with voices and characters. You have to clap after each bit otherwise she’d jump on you, winding you or shouting in your face.

I once brought her a video of Who Framed Roger Rabbit so Pad, Karl and I could have a couple of hours peace. She stopped instantly as she saw it and I passed it down to her as she ran over, shoving it into the video player. In Paddy’s bedroom, we heard the video going, then stopping and silence. Silence was never good in the house if Catriona was around. When we went into the living room, she’d smashed up the video tape and pulled out the spools inside, wrapping the brown plastic innards round the sofa so tightly Paddy had to cut them off. “Did you not like it?” I said annoyed. “Yeah it was great!” she replied, looking past me and spinning a Wedgewood ashtray in the air.

When their mam would go out, often for days at a time, Pad would stay at home with Catriona, missing school as she would rarely go to hers. I don’t know how he did it, but he could put up with her without getting frustrated. He’d been 9 when she’d been born so growing up with it, he never knew just how different she was. Or maybe he did and said nothing. Sometimes she’d really go for it, scream-singing and turning on the radio full blast, climbing into the fridge and squishing pins in the butter, smearing the coals from the fire on the bedcovers, and Pad would have to lock her in her room.

She had no toys of course, they were all smashed or broken, and there was no pens as she’d just draw on the walls or colour in the downstairs TV with permanent markers.

So she’d hurt herself with anything she could. Bruising her arms by running at the door knobs of the wardrobe or head butting the wall in a slow, heavy rhythm. When Pad would open the door, sometimes she’d make a break for the door to get past him, or more often than not she’d be dazed, quietly rubbing her head with the back of her

hand with bleary eyes and scrunched up eyebrows, saying “Paddy? I hurt my head on the wall” and Pad would pick her up and carry her downstairs where she’d be still and calm in front of the TV while they both sat in silence.

Although it was predictable, it doesn’t stop it being a blow. At first Pad took it well, then it slid through him, a grease of depression that took the light out of him. It was game all the kids were playing, they’d all done it or heard of it but no one wanted to talk about it after in case they got in trouble. It was a game where they’d hang themselves off the coat pegs by their ties or their collars. They got a rush or something like that, seeing how long they could do it without fainting, timing each other and going as far as they could without passing out. Anything for a hit of something. She’d hung there for hours before anyone noticed, they thought she’d just ran out of class, she’d done it before. When a teacher had finally walked past the coatroom and saw her, for reasons I don’t understand, they evacuated the school and all the kids where stood outside with crying, fraught teachers with not a fucking clue what was happening. “Why, what would you have done?” asked Karl, and I didn’t really know.

Just that that seemed the wrong way. Pad had punched the headmaster when he’d said it could be a small mercy from God, she’d never have functioned as an adult. Some people have no idea what they’re saying , but I could see where he was coming from.

And then I couldn’t stop myself imagining her as an adult, throwing a tantrum in a cafe if they don’t have her favourite cake or fly kicking a stranger in the street for talking too loudly on a phone. And aside it all I find an odd laugh escapes me.

It’s late when we get to Karl’s house, the sky is black after an orange autumn day. We left Pad turning a cracked crystal tumbler of whisky around the kitchen table while he sorted out the costs of the funeral and how to pay for it all, his mother ashen and blank faced throughout. Karl has taken it all remarkably well, he’s less soulful then any of us, and I say that in the nicest way I could. He says things like “at least she’s at peace now” or “Pad can finally live a life, and Catriona would have wanted that” not knowing how crass he sounds. While he spouts clichés, I remember a Christmas Pad told me about when Catriona was about 5. She opened all her presents downstairs while everyone was in bed on Christmas Eve and she had nothing for Christmas Day. Margaret put them on

top of the wardrobe as a punishment and Catriona screamed so much the neighbours came round and, exasperated, told Margaret they couldn’t take any more of it. She’d had to pull them all back down from the wardrobe while Catriona waited eagerly at her feet, and for the first time Pad said, she played with her dollies and made a tea party for them and played quietly. I asked why, and Pad smiled and said “deep down, she’s just a little girl, Lynda. I think folk forget that”.

I have a firework surge of frustration as Karl talks about something I’m not listening to.

He goes on, a superfluous buzz of a voice in a small room and I want to yell at him but I can’t really enunciate my thoughts properly and I feel like I could hug or kiss or bite.

Instead, I turn up the TV as Karl looks at me across from his armchair, confused and with an incomprehensive stare. Flicking without aim, to my left there is a slice of blue sky beginning to show through a gap in the curtains, seamlessly the next day has begun and the amber of the sunlight will soon be visible.

Symmetrical Towers Claire Delores Storr

You’re holding your fifth glass of watery red wine at the charity function, fingertips gripped white at the rim. The breath in your mouth is hot and sour edged, you can see the polite grimace of those who you speak to. You lean against the conversation of others, hearing junk chatter. Miss a chance to speak and slope, sneakily, to the bar.

It is 1996. You are the fuse of the boom, the explosion of new economy in Belfast.

Gone were the images of desolate fields and grey lines of limp jobless men. For you, the Celtic Tiger roars. Your transition from London was seamless and without trouble.

They needed a transfer of a solicitor in Belfast, you had no ties to the metropolis, your mother and father were dead, no siblings. You have learnt early on, and this is a message you would mantra to yourself several times over the years, that you can only ever rely on yourself. Two months after the move, and living in a small but serviceable flat in Malone, you meet Jonathon through colleagues. He is a gleaming pillar of success, a barrister feared throughout the courts, flashing bone white teeth that balance somewhere between a snarl and a smile. He likes you. And for the first time in a relationship, you like you.

“Jonathon and I” was simply a part of your repertoire like “oh, the pleasures all mine!” or “now let’s get to the nitty gritty”. You say, “Jonathon and I went skiing over the weekend. You know, if you don’t get out and do these things you’ll just end up in front of the TV!”, knowing fine well that’s exactly what your colleague did, as she as she has a small inward laugh and looks down at her feet. You were the power couple.

He would ask every morning what the rota for the day was, “planning is key Audrey!

God what would you do without me.” Two people, rulers in this time and place in a world embraced as an impenetrable duo.

Holiday’s arose at the simplest nudge. A cruise, in two’s. Aloft the decking of the huge white mass floating in the Pacific sea you have a smug satisfaction of the man’s

body reclining next to you with a feverish smile, tennis pumped legs broad at the calves and tanned ripe in the sun. Cherries and sweet cakes tinted with cinnamon are lavished in platters, your taut fingers are selective of the tastes and his eyes watch under iridescent mirrored sunglasses as you pass the cakes and go for the fruit. Pop in a cherry; give him a merry smile as you think of the next multi coloured cocktail you will drink.

He would work until late in the night and you would match him, keeping up with the work rhythm and riding this terminal wave of wealth. And of course, there were mid afternoon meetings where dark red bottles of wine were shared with prospective clients, the light patter of accents moulding into done deals. You both drank together, every night. Dinners of delicately trimmed pork lions and steamed vegetables with a crisp prosecco. Aperitifs of sherry and peach brandy before tender shrimp broiled in butter with veal. Raspberry and vanilla parfit with a wisp of spun sugar and a warm baileys. You once called a meal he had prepared “a rainbow in my mouth!” and you never forgot how he looked at you when you said it, such a genuine reaction where he needed not to laugh out loud or say how wonderful he thought you were, just top up your glass as you smiled at each other across the table.

The flat was purchased together in 1996. New businesses welcomed the wealth with artisan cafe’s and boujoursie delicatessens sprouting everywhere, rich with stiff red chorizo and pomegranate condiments, art for your cupboards. Flats begun to rise from the soil, yours is a feat of engineering with solid pine kitchen units and glass shining like burning mirrors. A stout pot of money bought the flat, pooled together in funds from the both of you. “An investment, Audrey. For our future together!”. Give a bashful smile at the prospect of this life that you’re already living, the move from London already worth it after only 14 months. This life, this wonderful life. Standing arm in arm, you both survey your landscape. The flat was fitted with the newest of everything. There was the olive green breakfast bar in the kitchen, fitted into the units and decorated with trailing green vine embellishments around the covings. Matching denim suede ottomans with blue piped lace edging, chequered lime and pastel pink cushions. You would enter wide with the breadth of your arms spread across the walls

as you walked into the hallway, twitching in success atop of the nameless streets beneath you.

Sometimes the open windows brought the smell of fires and mortar and pounding guttural screams. The nationalist and unionists lashed the ground with gunfire, cars alight in the roads with teenagers beside, watching and mechanically tapping their trainers on broken curbs. Your windows have new double glazed glass, the Grecian architrave surrounding it was specifically designed by an architect for this building, and how wonderful it is. Below, the shattered yells puncture the air for most of the night, the thickness of the Belfast accent rumbles through the night. A swift drag of air pulled the Laura Ashley ivory voile in a clean sweep through the window and rested supernaturally on the breeze. Tomorrow you will buy the new wicker rimmed coffee table from Habitat. It will match the kitchen perfectly.

Jonathon would come back later and later after work to find you a bottle deep into a thick Temperanillo with another bottle prepped at the glass dining room table. You would hide your slurs and ask him questions about his day, careful not to talk about yourself too much and aware to hold his gaze. You were still a doting partner, even if your eyes sometimes focused and unfocused as he spoke, holding onto the edge of the Italian granite kitchen counter for balance. Bottles were hidden in next doors recycling bins, cigarettes smoked outside and hands washed to conceal the ash smell on your fingers. His gaze at you somehow became both cloudy and bright. There was no more talk of stars shining in your dreams. No more love in the bed you shared. There were now silent drives in the car to the seaside for weekends away, creaking in seats and hair savaged by the breeze from the open roof. Walking with mismatched steps to the promenade and watching the families with bare legged children, so tiny in form with wet hair and sun bright laughter. And feeling so out of place, so aware of your physicality and the growing mountain between you where you tried so hard to think of anything to say. This mid 30s couple without children, dressed in ÂŁ200 jumpers with velveteen linings and designer slacks with canvas tipped maritime shoes, both standing silently watching yellow sands and the happy faces surrounding it. Unsure but tempted, you could imagine the soft squidge of a small, fatty shape pressed from

your stomach in waves of agony and joy, but, as he told you, you both simply wouldn’t have the time for such a commitment.

In the same month, the lower half of your apartment containing the private car park is fire bombed with the neighbours cars inside, torched and melting in ash black clouds.

No one phones the Garda, the fire is lathered by the last residents of the building with creamy foam extinguishers. There is the techno beat of a radio echoing like sonar from a dirty white van parked across the road, with men looking at you and your dressing robed neighbours, all of you chilled in the midnight wind and eyes slitted from the ash. The beat continues from the van with sharp synthetic instruments, and the men are waving, but the balaclavas stop you from seeing if they are smiling.

The spilt was so lax and silent that it almost felt like him just popping to the shops.

You didn’t know what to do or say aside silently watch him pack and ask if you could keep the bed. “Of course” he said. “it’s too old for me to take anyway, I’ll get a new one.” You had no doubt that he would.

The flat concave of your stomach is done no harm by your vomiting each morning, it keeps your figure neat so it’s worth it, though your teeth are thin and the enamel feels sensitive with tentative licks. But, it passes. Every day, week, month, it passes.

Morning fuzz makes you sleepy in meetings, but the glow of a lunchtime drink keeps you afloat. A feel good salad; leafy greens, goji berries, pomegranate, lemon cous cous and 3 large Rioja’s to their one gin and tonic. 350 calories in the salad, 750 calories in the wine. There will be no room for a supper if you have the bottle of prosecco when you get in. It’s ok, you can have a bowl of dark malty bran, 140 calories, then 800 for the bottle. You will throw up hot, bitter strings in the morning, but it’s ok, it passes.

Sometimes the frequency of the day is too bright and loud. Your desk at work is so clean and highly polished that the glare is like high pitched ice burning into your retina in a pine scented laser. The bulbs that light the office are incandescent and white as snow, the hot coffee brought to you by your secretary is hot and fizzes on

your empty stomach. She brings you a stack of papers, each with a dotted line to sign, you don’t read them and ink the necessary blanks.

The woman approaches you with a foreign, confident step and closes the gap between you and her in balanced measures, she will tint your evening with a feeling you can’t describe, a knotty movement in your stomach. You are here as an advocate of the bank’s chosen charities, and this gala sponsored by them is in aid of children whose parents have died in the conflict. She is in an old fashioned fitted bright blue suit, embellished with thick wooden buttons and nipped at the waist with a crocodile print patent leather belt. She is petite with masses of curled black hair to her shoulder blades, complexion white and with a thin, lightly boned face. Laughing and serious in equal measure, she evaluates the scene with lowered eyes and thick black mascara.

When she speaks to you about the work that her charity does, you can see she has very light aqua eyes with one tiny hetrochromia slice of green in her left iris. You stumble over your words and feel reduced and awkward as she leans into you to whisper into your ear; “these are all a bunch of phonies, eh? are you?” Her name is Orla. Later that night, you dream of her leaving your office block and looking up at your office window as you look down at her, blonde hair lulling in stripes at your sides. You shout something indecipherable; a warning? Wake in a stupor. Reach for the remains of last night’s wine in the glass next to your bed and drink it in one gulp.

Weekends rise and fall like sunrise and sunset. Mostly you don’t leave the apartment anymore. Lie in your bed flat as paper on a desk, like the desks you had at school with the small hole for an inkwell and stiff, painted lids you could open upward that were filled with graffiti and boy-inked pictures of breasts and “W” shapes with tufts of hair.

There was never the chance to excel past your limitations. When you were studying at university, 6 members of your course dropped out, leaving 3 remaining, all men, with smarmy smiles and brittle, licked lips. They asked you questions about your lovers, looked down your top and pinched your sides when you moved past them. The lecturer laughed, they laughed, you laughed, a stupid girl in a rigid suit with stockings so tight that you had to lie on the bed to pull them up. Time seems irrelevant, your past seems irrelevant. Do you feel moulded by you, you before you? Her and me, she

and you. You felt like you could be anything when you were a child, but now, and with all the means to do it, you’re unsure if you can.

Mooch around the apartment, picking things up and putting them back down. Stand at your window and look out across the ivory white sky with your hands on your hips.

Feel lonely and drink 2 bottles of wine, one a bubbly prosecco rose and the other a Temperanillo, while listening to The Manic Street Preacher’s new album over and over again. In the midst of the second bottle, ring Jonathon to come to the apartment and discuss the sale of the flat. You have savings and can buy him out. A girl answers, you can tell she’s youthful by the cheerful “Hi?!” “Who are you?” you ask, confrontational. “Sorry? Who’s this?” she replies, questioning, but still polite. Put down the phone gently into its receiver, staring at the silver plastic handset, then smash up the glass topped wrought iron trestle table you bought together in Vienna using a bronze sculpture. The delivery costs for the table were extortionate, but you were so tired from all the sightseeing and al a carte meals you’d had that day that you just agreed and signed the required forms.

On her street, you see Orla’s house has an orange, white and green flag that dances in the wind outside, held crookedly by a cracked wooden windowpane. She is 31, the same age as you and born in the same month, the same month that had a heat wave in London that was so intense your mum told you there was a hosepipe ban and the tarmac was melting on the streets. One of Orla’s brothers has killed a man outside of his house in County Antrim. This man was a bold and open faced supporter of the opposition, a catholic with a heart that beats for another land, but it was in self defence she says. You twiddle the springy rubber cord of the phone as you offer to review the case when she calls you direct. When you arrive at her house, her ma dithers at the table, serving tea from a cracked porcelain teapot covered in pink rose petals. The tea is so hot you can barely bring it to your lips, but everyone else has drank the first quarter of it, dark brown with too little milk. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, and her sister, engulfed in velvet black hair, hunches up her leg on the seat and picks at the toe of her tights while holding a roll up cigarette and glancing at you in discomfort.

The minced beef and carrot hotpot in the oven is brought to the table, while everyone

is smoking and drinking their fire tea. Decades old grey doily’s lay under brown tinged Pyrex, with her mother up and down from the table bringing knives, spoons, bowls and wringing her hands in a knot of tight skin chapped from washing decades of dishes in boiling soapy water. Orla looks at you across the table, contemplating the picture. Of you, in a now ridiculous feeling green fitted suit with wing tipped collar, tight in posture at this elbow worn table of comfort while her bewildered family members look at you as if you were an alien.

After tea she lines up a sweet sherry for you in a small delicate flute, which you decline and she pours anyway. She smokes thin roll ups, one after the other, just looking at you as you speak, assessing. Feel the colour rush up your neck as you look at her tiny ribcage, you feel tall and fat next to her; you have never felt this way before. She has an iridescent helium balloon dancing softly behind her head, with “Happy 10th Birthday” written on it in holographic blue foil. “His birthday, you know”, she begins, “was supposed to be in the house but none of his friends would come here. Like we’ve got the plague. Paint a red cross on the door, it’ll be easier for all of us.” Her son, never any mention of father. Nod, half awkwardly, half understanding. She mutters something softly under hear breath, you don’t catch it fully but it sounds something like ‘if I wanted to, I could.’ You don’t want to drink the sherry, it is decades old and without any remaining flavour, but you grimace and suck it back through your lips and curled tongue, trying to avoid it touching your teeth. As she talks, you melt into the couch, softened by years of sitting, each seat bucketed with hessian lines beginning to show in the material. It fits perfectly, and for a second you realise you wouldn’t ever be able to buy something like this new in a shop.

Mention it to her, as you speak you think it may have come across patronisingly and try to correct yourself, but she’s already begun to speak, flicking dead ash into a blue ashtray decorated with tiny purple birds, “aye, it’s pre-arsed for your comfort.”

After the meal, she takes you back to your flat over the fields and through the terraces in Shankhill. She warns you to take off your jacket, you look too different and people may be interested in a way that doesn’t sound friendly. She looks at you and smiles, “that thing is daft anyway! Why does it have such sharp lapels?” she says, tugging at

the ends as if dressing a child for school. You walk, limp gaited beside her, this tiny tower of poise and confidence, 5”4 to your 5”8, yet so much bigger than you. She turns, dead eye gaze, and asks why you live this life if you don’t like it? There is literally no answer to this question, and it is one you’ve never even considered.

Ervin Mitchell has sent a large bouquet of flowers to your office for “executing both good will and common sense” at the gala. They are in full flourish with a mix of white and pink orchids, moonflowers and thin shooting vines of fern and blades of grass, bursting through the top like little green fireworks. The smell is overwhelming, and you put them in your secretaries office, much to her joy and later in the day she takes them home to her 2 up 2 down in Balmoral, filling the front window of the tiny mid terrace. The next day after she has taken the flowers and told you how nice they looked in her house, she asks you, politely but nosily, does Jonathon still buy you flowers? What type does he buy you, the girls below in admin were asking? as she looks up with a small smirk. Walk away without speaking and organise a formal disciplinary for her with you, your boss and the senior secretary, in which the details of formal and personal interaction with executive members of staff are sanctioned and clarified, as her eyes water the whole way through, panicked and darting from you, to boss, and back to you. That night you buy a 1992 bottle of Chateau Duhart Milon Rothschild, a classic Lafite perfume of graphite interwoven with blackcurrants, smoke, and tobacco leaf. Put it on the glass table and look at it all night. Power and burden, you feel. And how equally measured it is.

The wicker table you buy doesn’t fit somehow and looks out of place. Take it apart with a screwdriver, then bash it with a hammer to loosen the legs, hitting yourself on the kneecap and bringing a bruise the colour of an apricot. It’s too big to take back so drag it downstairs and leave it next to the communal Biffa bins where the next day it has already been taken, dragged through the liquid waste of the bin and leaving a thin shiny snail trail up the street.

Exactly 2 years from now, a car bomb filled with 225kg of fertilizer based explosives detonates in Omagh and kills 29 people, seriously wounding 220 others. No one will ever be prosecuted.

“So how do you afford this type of flat? It wasn’t even here 2 years ago. How much do you earn?” She quizzes without discomfort, with a genuineness that allows you to answer without feeling as if you have to explain your success. She has come to your flat to discuss the ongoing case with her brother; he has now been arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm and it is becoming likely he will be imprisoned. “I bought it with my ex. It was £80,000, I paid my half in full with my savings. I earn £38,000, but I don’t really like my job. So I drink. At nights. Sometimes in the day now.” Stroke a small piece of wallpaper subconsciously . “My dad was a drinker” she says to no one, looking at a gloomy Cindy Sherman print on the wall. You realise just at that moment, you hate that print. She continues, “He was shot, you know. Right through the heart. Still took 5 minutes to die though, and I swear the blood was dark blue. Christ, how much were these blinds?”

When the man came to measure the window frame to install the venetian blinds, you asked him if he wanted a cup of tea, and he turned, coarse and deep lines developed in the creases in his skin as he smiled, and said “not from you, you British bitch.” You were so shocked, you stood mouth agape as he whistled and unfurled his tape measure, ignoring your presence. Hiding in the bedroom, pacing and sweating, you heard the door slam shut and you peeped your head out of the room, a doorframe guillotine. You’d had the occasional remarks in supermarkets, bars. But the hostility was as vivid as a lit match in this man, the common person of unified thought. Your card was marked; people knew you were different, not one of them. You were part of the conflict and a defiant face amongst the war, stripping the culture and its identity.

Floating as an immigrant, your roots were no more than a tiny shrub in this tower.

Stay at the top, you’re not wanted down below.

As soon as she leaves, take down the Cindy Sherman print and feel pleased at your decisiveness. Go further and take a knife to it, shredding in from the top to the bottom with a bread knife, then stabbing it with such ferocity that you go through the thick card at the rear of the frame and bend the blade on the stone floor beneath it.

Darragh has been released, under observation. You feel smug and needed as the family invite you to the house to join a party they are having for him, Orla gives you a

small half pint glass of stout and you get a kiss on the cheek from her mother. When the party is shifted to the local pub, you stay behind and your hand is shook like a man’s would be. Orla and her brothers are left with you as her mother washes plates and cups and cutlery, tinkling china under running water, little feet scuffing worn lino as she gives everything its place. Darragh is the first to address you with a warm hand on your left thigh; “You know what we fight for don’t you Audrey?” Nod. Yes, you do. “And you know we don’t think that way about you though, don’t you?” Yes, you know. You will work this case for free, and fund it yourself. This is what it is like to be a part of something, and believe.

As the wind blew, the car she was a passenger in sloped around the corner of the residential avenue, a snake under sand. The slow motion knitted face mask adopted to her skin was pulled down tight, pale white eyelids in flaky black mascara dart from side to side. A child, a bike of thin metal underneath him and legs pumping on the pedals passes a group of floating faces at a bus stop. Fiat Punto, dark green, no licence plate, slows and stops. She runs, small gun in her hand fires and enters a window pane, pop, pop, pop, running, shouting, pop, pop, pop. The man lies with a bullet wound in his hand as he shielded himself, and exited through his cheeks. Run, run Orla, through a piss reeking alley and past a man stood silently, head down. Throw your black woollen face into a brown tinged hedgerow and run, walk, pace to your ma’s where she will burn your dress in the back field and make you a strong tea in a mug with a chip. Flick your tongue across the little missing ledge of ceramic and blow gently, sip.

A few things happened the next month. You bake a cake for the first time in your life, chocolate and orange with tiny strips of Clementine skin resting on the icing.

A man is knifed in the leg outside your local post office, he lay for 40 minutes, crying and screaming into the silence before someone phoned for an ambulance.

On a rainy weekday when stars pierced the sky like pin pricks in dark denim, Darragh sleeps in your bed, talking afterwards in a light whisper about how soft the cotton sheets are.

A man paints a colourful mural of a local hero on side back of an end terrace, there is a woman who stays there day and night with a tuneful cry that rides on the quiet of the clean summer breeze.

There is just no way you can work on this case, Eoin has spoken to the partners, there will be no representation of any party, Unionists or Nationalists. He stands, hands on hips, and tells you you’re lucky he hasn’t taken this further; “It just isn’t safe, it’s not just you it’s everyone in the building you have to think about, I don’t care how involved you are with the family. You are to cease all professional communication with the McKinlay’s, with immediate effect, and you will be watched, Audrey. This is a very serious matter, and outside your remit as a solicitor. If you do, you will be dismissed, and good luck finding another job with any other firm.” Your secretary springs into your involuntary focus. He strides away without letting you speak, watch him leave until he walks the entire corridor and into the lift, looking down and reading from a stack of papers you never even noticed he was holding.

It was so quick and without mercy or warning . There were no tears or tantrums when you told Orla over the phone, bracing yourself with half a bottle of wine before you called. You were more emotional than her; she simply said she understood and hung up the phone. You cried and cried and cried afterwards, sat crossed legged like a tired child and let the tears and mucus drain into your lap.

Look around you; you have everything you need and nothing you want.

“So how as the week off?” asks your boss, Stephen. Lie, and say “Oh it was great!”

Panic and make up a story about a relative visiting you from London. In reality, you visited Orla on a whim, under the guise of talking further about the upcoming case that’s been taken up by another firm. You can help even if you’re not representing them. Darragh and Orla smile at each other and shake their heads. In the silence, put down your tea and leave without looking at them. Thank her mother and tell her if she ever needed the services of Brooks and Everard, to call you direct. “Oh, just fuck off, slag” says Darragh sat at the edge of the sofa. He is so young and beautiful, the whole family is, and even now you would leap into his arms if he offered them.

“Is there any other time off you’d like to take?” Stephen asks. “Just you’ve got three more weeks of statutory and only ten more weeks of the year left. You were the opposite last year with how many holidays you had!” Mumble yes, you will decide on a holiday abroad soon. You deserve it.

You never see them again after that, and her ma always says she’s out when you ring, eventually telling you, in a whisper spat with malice, to stop calling the house or there’d be real trouble coming your way.

11 months later, almost to the day of the gala, your secretary, now wary and simpering, brings you the daily paper. Open it, and a wash of blood fills your face in the acid bright fluoresce of the office. Your window is too square, papers too stacked, hands too tight around the paper in your hand. A piercing palpitation overwhelms as you mindlessly rub your fingers tips over your ridged nails and pick at the dried prickly skin around them. Orla has a black and white squared dotted face in the newspaper photograph, ‘Woman killed in failed terror plot.’ Premature detonation of a bomb; there will be no open casket. Did she have time to know; to have an eye flash recognition just before it discharged a mix of fire and metal , to know she was going to die? You will not attend the funeral or the wake. You later hear that the Garda blocked one end of the street to prevent rioting, and as the men ahead raged together with fists thrust like tiny pillars of valiant flesh into the sky, her coffin, with closed lid and draped with an Irish flag, lay mounted and alone in the centre of the street with every front door closed around it.

Biographical Note: Liam O’Neill

Liam O'Neill a Galway based writer-poet who has been published in a number poetry broadsheets and chapbooks. He was recently asked to read his work at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2017. Liam has also published a non-fiction ebook on Amazon called 'All the Days of Winter'.

For a day job he works in social care with people with intellectual disabilities. With a surname of 'O'Neill', Liam believes that his ancestors must have had some connections with the North.

Brothers From Numerous

Mothers

We met each week for Saturday football league.

Some forgot their boots, others socks and shorts, and the last guy to arrive was unkindly punished with the goalkeepers jersey.

Each year we fielded a team of working class boys, bad at mathematics and chemistry, and generally, struggling at school.

Each year we fielded a team of slow, un-athletic kids and each year we ended up, propping up, the table from below.

My father came to watch us once and never came back, I guess he had better things to do than watch his genetic inheritance suffer such tremendous loss.

Then came the crucial game; our team versus the top of the league.

At half time we were 7 goals down when Rob called us to a huddle.

He told us of his scheme for the final whistle, and asked if we were all on board with the spirit of his plan.

13 goals to nil; the referee played no injury time.

I guess there was no real threat of us ever getting a goal – so the Ref just blew it up.

At the shrill of the whistle, Rob screamed and punched the air and the rest of us followed suit; doing laps of the pitch as group and waving our hands outstretched to invisible fans.

The faces on the opposition players was priceless – as me and my brothers from numerous mothers behaved like we'd just won the World Cup.

As I said earlier, each year we fielded a team of working class boys bad at mathematics and chemistry, and generally, struggling at school.

Sometimes, if you want to feel it hard enough, you can just close your eyes and pretend, that you have won the world.

Liam O’Neill

Biographical Note: Patricia Walsh Patricia Walsh was born and raised in the parish of Mourneabbey, Co Cork, Ireland, and was educated in University College Cork, being shortlisted for inclusion for publication in the 2017 edition of the The Quarryman. Previously she has published one collection of poetry, titled Continuity Errors, with Lapwing Publications in 2010, and has since been published in a variety of print and online journals. These include: The Fractured Nuance; Revival Magazine; Ink Sweat and Tears; Drunk Monkeys; Hesterglock Press; Linnet's Wing, Narrator International, The Galway Review; Poethead and The Evening Echo, a local Cork newspaper with a wide circulation In addition, she has also published a novel, titled The Quest for Lost Eire, in 2014, and performed in the ‘closed mic’ section of the Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer Festival in 2016.

Ordinary Death A trickle of brilliance permeates your existence Post-partum excellence a whitening hear Only to the selected few, lining of existence Writing on borrowed time earns payback.

Renegade years spoof the performance Freedom at cost price a fearful proposition Walking streets at night, not a single bother The bell-strikes at a small hour, scattering jewels Are we really that different, after all? Let me think Dizziness experienced in crossing the street Reforming mutual habits too hard for future plans A too-local camera caught on the recorder.

Dissenting into boredom, being a typical institution Solitary embankment a just course of disaster Cheering for God, and all His revolutions Not seeing them all first had, victory at a remove.

All in the blood. Mixed and agglutinated Mutual heritage a trump card to always enjoy Behind the velvet curtain sneaks a war cry Sinking lover into like terror, a sham marriage Reform at the last minute, sweeping for heaven Measured speeches under breath a ghastly turn Quoting from a history booming after all A village to raise offspring, a conscientious plot.

Patricia Walsh

Medication The advertisements swing for their supper Threaten with ignorance is bypassed Bleeding with need, a cause obviated Quality purpose a nice overture.

Reluctantly leaving an excellent situation High-fiving from the gutter and the stars Petty technicalities mar the obvious Removing literature from a righteous spot.

Once we were deserving hallows, assets fleeting muster Reddened from mortification, brightly found Animated local history at a glance Minding business a sage occupation The current situation is a joke. Man the barricades Persuading betters to stretch their placement Muddle over insurance, always a bitch Now shuddering the righteous indolence.

Searing with numbers, aptitude still hovering Over a satisfied customer, crushed to her bone Not accessible enough to swear by credence Sprouting wings and fly, a repetitive necessity.

Slovenly enough to win the prize, manoeuvred Working on time, still a disposable worker Wanting on both sides, a crafty individual No longer functional, but a civilised exit.

Patricia Walsh

Minding Business Sleeping, in chagrin of the local cafÊ Humour trickling down at a stone’s pace The worse weather, the better, allowing transport To pass by the necessary functions apart Planning slight trips on the back of the dole.

The violent wind rustles up some drying Clothes on the line a fearsome trip Cutting across homefulness never abating Last ditch fears never far from home Social sanctity home, begging for more.

On the lookout for thieves, costly as they are Corralled in the bedroom to keep producing Groomed to partake the wary amongst us Animated efforts never stop evolving Falling between knees a happier time.

Amplifying past the solo, I kid you not.

Closer to godliness a quid pro quo.

Being close to technology to solve our ills No declaration of need, just one more confession Remedying depressions shock as it happens.

Hopping off walls, in touch with the village Caffeine outbursts jolt the seething lifeline Cigarettes aside, to warn us of dangers Going too far for this, on happier times Imposing on borrowed causes a treat.

Patricia Walsh

Protected Scripture Tired, whenever the occasion demands Round whip-up tours to see what’s fashionable Weekly literature clogs the Stygian banks Computerized gossip a stay for the glossy.

Diving into hell, to retrieve what matters.

Wasting infinite time on what can’t come back High moral ground a slippery entity, Taking credit where intended, a wishful type.

Paying attention for once, for sore eyes.

Cold spoons a remedy for the last holiday Someone to get attached to, good, or otherwise Creaming off grief another story to tell.

Irregular sculptures fire the brain Suspending disbelief for expense’s journey Studying for lost time, a secondary massacre Apologizing through the house of happy indenture.

Freely received, freely given. Jolted copybooks Describes the worst scenario, bleeding forever Knowing every move made, not fulfilling purpose Every given name is a holy damnation.

Reading through keepsakes, never the wiser Imagined misdemeanors enough to hang dry.

Automated responses chiming punctually, Spatial pictures punished for sensibility.

Patricia Walsh

Biographical Note: John Doyle

John Doyle, 39, from County Kildare has recently returned to writing poetry after a considerable absence. He was educated at N.U.I. Maynooth, and is influenced by a diverse range of writers, many of whom do not adhere to canonical peccadilloes.

Sligo Landscape, January

By glut of bulbous stone sunk in haggard land,

by ceaseless fist in stiffened militia wall -

these stoic regiments mark where time and rank begins;

Their discs are blistered on clockwork disc, backbone entwined in flesh, their hands tense as corpse in icy-soil,

and the daring conclaves of thistle are drizzle-pierced mast hoarding virgin’s stone.

A caustic cut of sea washes remnants, kernels, on Ben Bulben's

withered shaft there is a living-spirit within,

a sandwort-healed aeon raised-up for bidding;

up from the thaws of moistened soil, fingertips untangled,

handprint framing mordant sea, the arriving folds of crystal-white beach

John Doyle

It's Van Morrison O'Clock

From jazz-breathing Volkswagen vans I see police inspectors dance with their well-educated daughters, Tupelo Honey tinting glens-misted scotch, a few cows chewing through tufts of June’s chilled and tempted navel.

These statues come to life in hieroglyphs of spatial change like a brambling abject to winter's slips of stone.

I could carve their figures in voracious ore, in sentries who gaze on French chateaus, icy, blue, like the sudden dim of day as father, and daughter, sip their drizzled dram and a dance re-awakens; I cross and bless my key with baptised ignition there is wheat that sings the songs of harvest, corn whispering to be cut, I'll keep these migrations scored in psalm, bramblings and strangers cool as Armagh hands who push in motion, the blue patchworked sky the light-kissed train-tracks crooning Hewitt’s transcending tones

John Doyle

Nacimiento Del Rio Cabra, Asturias

A cottage soaks Llanes in its devoted Latin stone, a dawn looms in communions of light, through a glanced yawning sun; we host daybreak’s tender rites, as one - as the same;

And the realness of trees from which hidden waters appear

make real too this gravid arch, this sudden dreggy ruffle -

on water sifting muck, on faces virile

from the green blackened shadow of drooping leaf, of parceled foot; The realness

in Sunday quotes Exodus where water shows its fears for the first - and the only time -

its mother and father a pair of chattering shadows whispered on frosted Latin stone.

La Borbolla will tear daybreak from its moorings the skipper's telescope gurgling lens on passing hooves in splattered mud,

the blueness of Atlantic almost endless, the gelding’s chassis surging from sea

John Doyle

Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin

To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things John Haines

(1) Lixnaw, Clogherinkoe, Eastern Harps -

a shake of muck-caked boot silhouettes fluorescent glare; antlers brushing themselves clean of battle, sharp-suits ironed for long-wave’s evening call.

(2) Man-O-War, Shelmaliers, Ramor United -

winds pulsate in Sunday tenor tones, mud-squish field, scything westerly rain,

and boys harnessed on Atlas' shoulder - their faces willingly marooned on squelching turf.

(3) Brick Rangers, Mount Sion, Postal Celtic -

a final whistle's silver bullet punctures callous throbbing cold, the metaphysical seer chips names on Sunday-glinted stone, a typewriter’s font set in Ogham

John Doyle

Biographical Note: Gary Beck Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director, and as an art dealer when he couldn’t make a living in theater. He has 11 published chapbooks and 2 more accepted for publication. His poetry collections include: Days of Destruction(Skive Press), Expectations (Rogue Scholars Press). Dawn in Cities, Assault on Nature, Songs of a Clerk, Civilized Ways, Displays, Perceptions, Fault Lines & Tremors (Winter Goose Publishing). Perturbations, Rude Awakenings and The Remission of Order will be published

by Winter Goose Publishing. Conditioned Response (Nazar Look). Resonance(Dreaming Big Publications). Virtual Living (Thurston Howl Publications). Blossoms of Decay, Blunt Force and Expectationswill be published by Wordcatcher Publishing. His novels include: Extreme Change (Cogwheel Press), Flawed Connections(Black Rose Writing), Call to Valor (Gnome on Pigs Productions) and Sudden Conflicts (Lillicat Publishers). State of Ragewill be published by Rainy Day Reads Publishing , Crumbling Ramparts by Gnome on Pigs Productions and Flare Up by Michael Terrence Publishing (MTP. His short story collection, A Glimpse of Youth (Sweatshoppe Publications) and. Now I Accuse and other stories will be published by Winter Goose Publishing. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. He currently lives in New York City.

The Lost (Gary Beck)

Winter comes closer.

The homeless shuffle faster on unkind streets, some still sane struggling to survive in a harsh land.

Others mumble to themselves, twitchy, staring sightlessly at distant demons brought closer by lack of medication.

The ravaged specters pass unnoticed, unless eruption inflicts them on passersby, desperation mounting as it gets colder.

Affair of State (Gary Beck)

Heads of state gather for civilized discussions of barbaric crimes that ravage the world.

Then they return home, nothing resolved, as the glib media builds the delusion of hope, while unbenevolent rulers torment their people.

Repeated Warnings (Gary Beck)

I wish to sing a song of awakening to our somnolent people lulled by our leaders into negligence of preparations for survival.

The volcano of our nation already erupting, spewing lava of destruction devastating the land, citizens no longer resilient, crumbling under the threats of constant terror, dissolving from disasters, unendurable demands leaving us helpless as we approach finality.

Appetite (Gary Beck)

Power and wealth have always been the guiding forces deciding the future, with or without consent of the people, ambition triumphing over decency, the fate of a nation, as the people suffer, the few revel.

Viewing Pleasure (Gary Beck) I watched a late night movie on my big screen tv with commercial breaks offering Iphones, Ipads, Ipods, just about affordable on my clerk's salary.

Then they showed a slick car ad, a sleek German convertible, a powerful machine so far beyond my income I could only fantasize racing along an open highway, top down, wind blowing, a beautiful blonde next to me thrilled by the ride, occasional looks promising delight when we arrive at a posh resort, but I came back to reality, bitterly accepting I'd never have the money to purchase such delight and could only imagine what I was missing.

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September 2017’s MESSAGE FROM THE ALLEYCATS:

October is here and the hot weather has vanished. I’m afraid there has been some delays due to Amos’ asthma the doctor has had to change his medication. Where does the time fly? It seems like it was only last week when we were busy making the January issue meow!!.

Well, that’s just about it from us for this edition everyone.

Thanks again to all of the artists who submitted their work to be presented “On the Wall”. As ever, if you didn’t make it into this edition, don’t despair! Chances are that your submission arrived just too late to be included this time. Check out future editions of “A New Ulster” to see your work showcased “On the Wall”.

We continue to provide a platform for poets and artists around the world we want to offer our thanks to the following for their financial support Richard Halperin, John Grady, P.W. Bridgman, Bridie Breen, John Byrne, Arthur Broomfield, Silva Merjanin, Orla McAlinden, Michael Whelan, Sharon Donnell, Damien Smyth, Arthur Harrier, Maire Morrissey Cummins, Alistair Graham, Strider Marcus Jones Our anthologies https://issuu.com/amosgreig/docs/anu_present_voices_for_peace https://issuu.com/amosgreig/docs/anu_poetry_anthology_-april