New Voices Rise Vol. IV

Vol. IV

From the Silence of the Stacks,

New Voices Rise

An anthology of writing by The London Library Emerging Writers Programme 2022–23 cohort * Edited by Claire Berliner

Published 2023 by The London Library The London Library 14 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LG londonlibrary.co.uk Charity No. 312175 Collection and introductions © The London Library 2023 Copyright of the individual works remains with the respective authors.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN (print) 978-0-9553277-7-3 ISBN (ebook) 978-0-9553277-8-0 Typeset by Will Dady, 2023 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

Contents

About The London Library 9 The London Library Emerging Writers Programme 10 Introduction 11

Fiction Hala A Jasmin Allenspach Ettie Bailey-King Anna Jane Carling Melanie Carvalho Patrick Cash Jess Edwards Inigo Laguda Thomas Peermohamed Lambert Harriet Matthews Sharanya Murali Leeor Ohayon JP Pangilinan O’Brien Melissa Richards BR Rose Grahame Williams

Extract from Aziza Extract from The Sky Too Wide Fever Extract from In the Name of the Daughter Extract from Xim Extract from Flamboyant Extract from Sharp Teeth Extract from Dodgems Extract from an untitled novel Extract from In the Shadow of the Flame Extract from Encore Extract from One Last Time Extract from Midnight Mass Extract from Azultierra Extract from Black Castrato, Woman Undone blame the tools

15 20 24 28 33 37 41 45 47 52 56 60 64 68 72 76

Writing for Children and Young Adults Fatima Cham Gayathiri Kamalakanthan Gita Ralleigh Kimberley Sheehan Sarah Stribley

Extract from It Was an Accident Extract from WORD-BENDERS Extract from The Destiny of Minou Moonshine Extract from Say You’ll Be There Extract from Operation Platypus

5

83 87 91 95 99

Non-f iction Pacifica Goddard Miriam Gold Carla Montemayor Michael Pourfar Electra Rhodes Yvonne Singh

Phantom Line 105 Extract from graphic memoir Water Music: A Swimming Playlist 109 Extract from The Island of Forgotten Daughters: A Family Memoir from the Philippines 113 Extract from A Neurologist in the Landscape 116 Extract from The Stone Harvester 120 Extract from INK! A story of protest, pride and finding a voice – the epic struggle for a black and minority press in the UK 124

Poetry Melanie Banim

Trespasses Knocking Shop In an experiment with rabbits buried at 35cm depth

131 133 135

Katie Byford

bed 10, ve day 75 hibernaculum virile parchment

137 138 139 140

Eve Ellis

All My Dead Relatives Are Picnicking on the Banks of the Tennessee The Trauma Haint Genealogy

142 143 144 145

Nicole Lee

21 Stanzas for Her Nephew on His Birthday What Everyone Should Know about the Workshops and Stores of the Ministry of Public Works

146

Extract from garage girls Point and Shoot Extract from brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Extract from Long Distance: A Cyber-Dialectic of Falling In and Out

155 160 165

149

Stage & Screen stage

Yasmine Dankwah Soria Hamidi Jack Stanley Eli Zuzovsky 6

172

screen

Annie Hodson Zia Holloway

Inigo Laguda Temi Majekodunmi Megan Smith

Extract from An Cladach Eile Extract from Become Life

178 183

Extract from I Don’t Need Help, Thanks Extract from Bros Extract from Be a Darling

188 192 197

Author biographies 202 Acknowledgements 207

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About The London Library

F

ounded in 1841, The London Library is one of the world’s great lending libraries. A unique literary oasis in the heart of London, it houses an extraordinary collection of around one million books and periodicals dating from 1700 to the present day, nearly all of which can be borrowed.

Members can browse 17 miles of atmospheric bookstacks, read and write in hidden corners or in beautiful reading rooms, attend our vibrant events programme or work remotely using the extensive online resources.

From the outset, the Library has been a place of inspiration and support to writers, readers and thinkers of all kinds. From Charles Dickens to Sarah Waters, TS Eliot to Raymond Antrobus, Virginia Woolf to Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter to Jessie Burton and to successive cohorts participating in our thriving Emerging Writers Programme, our building in St James’s Square has provided a home and a creative community for anyone who loves the written word.

about the london library

9

The London Library Emerging Writers Programme

T

he London Library Emerging Writers Programme has been running since 2019 for up to 40 participants each year. It is a year-long programme designed to provide early-career writers with the support, resources and community that they need to establish themselves and hone their craft.

The Programme includes: a year’s free membership of the Library, with full access to all its resources; a structured programme of masterclasses with established writers and industry professionals; peer support meetings and a writing network; as well as support from the Library’s expert staff. Writers of any genre, age, level of writing experience and from anywhere in the country, are welcome to apply – for free – for a place on the Programme. The only criteria are that applicants have to have a project in mind to work on throughout the year, they have to commit to using the space and collection of the Library and they must not have previously had a full work published or produced. Applications are judged anonymously by a panel of judges drawn from across the literary world.

Previous participants on the Programme have gone on to find agents, publishers and multiple platforms for their work. Some have enjoyed international success and critical acclaim. A number of the communities and networks created on the programme have been sustained long after the year’s end and participants have gone on to contribute to future iterations of the Programme.

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the london library emerging writers programme

Introduction

T

he London Library was established in 1841 by a group of friends, a community of writers who sought a place where they could come together to learn, write, share ideas and gather knowledge. They wanted to get lost in the stacks, pluck books from the shelves, allow their minds and imaginations to wander and make surprising new discoveries. From the beginning, the Library has welcomed readers, writers, thinkers and dreamers from across society, gender and discipline, from any economic, national or cultural background, and from every ideological, political and theological standpoint. Friendships have been forged, love affairs conducted, collaborations begun. Artistic groups have gathered, ideologues have debated and suffragettes have rallied. Iconic fictional characters, world-changing theories and plenty of literary careers have been born here and taken flight.

The Emerging Writers Programme exists for all the reasons the Library exists – community, conversation, curiosity and creative space. Since it began in 2019, the community of writers who have been through the Programme has grown and grown. Like their Library member predecessors, they have come together to learn, explore and exchange ideas. They have built networks, supported each other and raised toasts at each other’s book launches. Their output and contributions have enriched the literary landscape.

The 2022/23 cohort, whose work is collected in this anthology, were selected from nearly 1000 applicants to the Programme and their talent shone from the very beginning. They brought with them energy, humour, dynamism, kindness and an array of exciting and diverse project ideas. The group work across a range of genres including poetry, novels, short stories, memoir, graphic biography, history, art writing, children’s and young adult writing, screenwriting and playwriting. Their projects take us across time and all over the world: from Montana to Goa to rural Australia; 12th century York introduction

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to 18th century Italy to Troubles-era Belfast; imagined worlds, the ancient past and dystopian futures. They have drawn on, amongst others, Afghani, Arabic, Caribbean, Chinese, Filipino, Ghanaian, Irish, Jewish, Nigerian, Tamil and Zanzibari heritages and explore storytelling and protest, neurology and cryogenics, mythological beasts and anthropomorphised ones, motherhood, childhood and adolescence, music and art, sexuality and gender, immigration, representation and identity.

The group spent their year honing and shaping these projects and this anthology offers a little taste of each one. As you’ll see, the work is clever, funny, thoughtful, moving, experimental, beautiful and, surely, a peek into the literary future. A number of these writers already have publishing deals and work slated for production and I look forward to plucking their books from London Library shelves for years to come.

It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with such a warm and wonderful group of writers over the last year, to gather their work into this anthology and put it out into the world. I cannot wait to see what they all do next.

Claire Berliner Head of Programmes, The London Library September 2023

Fiction

Hala A Extract from Aziza

A

ziza hated coming to London in the summer but her husband insisted on running away from the unforgiving Gulf sun.

“Habibti,” Rashid would joke. “What will you do in the Khaleej when all your friends are in Harrods?”

They had visited most years since her son was born and there had been some good times, especially when Jamal was still a boy.

Nothing excited him more than riding pedal boats on the Serpentine among the ducks and swans. Rashid would watch them, waving nonstop from the edge of the lake, and then magically appear with three 99 Flakes in hand as they disembarked. After every ride Jamal would plead, “Mama, Baba, can we come back tomorrow?”

As her son transitioned into adulthood, he treated her in a way she’d always feared: sweet but distant. He spent most of his days with his friends and would be out of Brunswick Gardens by noon. Rashid would wait for the Asr afternoon prayers before leaving, hardly ever returning until after Aziza went to bed in her own room.

Her only true companion was Evelyn, but, on Sundays, she gave her the afternoon off to go to church. She would never dream of joining her, or be seen there with her, but took comfort in her devotion to her faith. “I’ll pray for you, Ma’am,” she promised every time. “You and Sir Rashid and Jamal.”

Aziza had always felt isolated in the forced companionship of those Harrods women. They weren’t her friends but they were the ones who taught her to want Balenciaga and Furla before she knew how. Where she grew up, there was no higher aspiration than American imports of Guess and Gap. Now, she wrapped herself up in European splendour and was equipped to slip into their world with ease. She was always invited to afternoon tea at The Wolseley hala a

15

and sushi nights at Harvey Nichols. But if she paid careful attention, she could spot their noses turn up a little and hear their whispers of contempt.

One of them, Iman, invited her to brunch. With Evelyn away for the day, Aziza’s afternoon felt particularly empty and she found herself having eggs royale in a Covent Garden brasserie.

“Isn’t it so nice to get out of Knightsbridge?” Iman beams.

“I bump into more Khaleejis there than I do in the Khaleej itself!”

Aziza smiles.

“Actually,” Iman says. “I have something to confess.”

“What is it?” Aziza asks absentmindedly. She remembers that a nearby bakery makes Jamal’s favourite pistachio cake. It will be his 22nd birthday tomorrow and they will have cake at midnight.

“I brought you here for a reason,” Iman continues.

“What do you mean?” Aziza asks.

“Well... it doesn’t actually concern me.”

“Please just tell me, Iman. I have to pick up Jamal’s birthday cake soon.”

“Okay, well you know my good friend Sarah, the Saudia?”

“Vaguely, yes. Rashid knows her husband.”

“Well, she was at a wedding in Khobar and met an older lady who asked about her family and where she was from. You know, the usual questions.”

Aziza feels the room come to a standstill with the mention of ‘Khobar’. She has never been there because Rashid has always told her she won’t like it. But Khobar is his hometown, the place where he grew up. His reluctance to share such a crucial part of himself has always made her feel like she didn’t truly know him.

“So, this lady was quite old, very conservative. Didn’t even remove her niqab in the ladies’ section. Anyway, when Sarah said she lived in Hawally, the old lady said: ‘Oh, my husband also lives in Hawally, his name is Rashid Al Dosari.’”

Aziza watches a boy on the next table stuff a fistful of chips into his mouth. She doesn’t want to look at Iman’s face.

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hala a

“Then the old lady asked her: ‘Do you know him?’ And Sarah said: ‘My husband has a friend called Rashid Al Dosari but there must be another one because he’s married.’ But then the lady said: ‘Yes, my husband took another wife, a Filipiniya, they live in Kuwait.’”

Aziza yields to Iman’s gaze and senses a thirst in her eyes, desperate for a cue to divulge more of her findings. Her body stiffens as a quiet panic slices into her.

“I’m so sorry, habibti, but I just couldn’t keep this from you.”

Aziza notes how deliberate her expression is and wonders whether she really is sorry.

“But habibti, don’t worry, Rashid is a good man. I asked around.

For you, of course. I wanted you to know the facts. This woman, his first wife, is from the Hawajer tribe. So how could he divorce her without ruining her reputation? He’s a good man, he showed her kindness. He didn’t want people to talk about her. But this doesn’t change anything for you. I’m sure he is still committed to you, and to Jamal.”

Aziza manages to squeeze out an ‘okay’. She doesn’t tell Iman that she can hardly breathe, that she wishes she hadn’t told her.

Despite not knowing details, Aziza has no doubt that what she heard is true. What a fool she was to believe she was an exception to the social hierarchy. People would constantly ask her if she was Rashid’s second wife and if he was also married to a Khaleeji.

Implicit in their curiosity was a blatant reminder of the natural order of things. Gulf Arabs were first wives but Filipinos, Palestinians, Moroccans – the Help, the Levantines and the North Africans – were typically second wives. How could she so naively pride herself on being the first wife of a man like Rashid Al Dosari?

Aziza wasn’t her name when she first met Rashid in Manila. 1987 was a year in which Analyn’s life seemed to take preordained momentum.

Her mother had always said that the Lord blessed them with Analyn’s fair skin and a nose so narrow and ever so slightly aquiline that she could be mistaken for a mestiza. She and her mother were not in hala a

17

the slums or the streets, but they still struggled. They lived with her uncle, his wife and kids in the living room of their one-bedroom flat.

Feeling both the pressure of fate and the hopeful expectations of her mother, Analyn religiously washed her face with brightening papaya soap and never stepped outside without an umbrella to shield her skin from the tropical sun. She waited to be discovered, hoping to become a model, or an actress, or even a multi-pronged artista like the mestizas on the nation’s beloved teleseryes.

But as fate would have it, her uncle came home one day with a friend who worked for the newly established Khaleeji Air. They were headquartered in the Middle East but were recruiting for local air hostesses in Manila. At first sight of Analyn, he noted that with her milky skin and pleasingly proportioned figure, she would be perfect for the inaugural flight.

She took weeks of intensive English classes to prepare herself for her first official route: the 9:55 overnight flight from Manila to Kuwait City. It was her first time on a plane and her first journey westward.

She felt so glamorous in her burgundy skirt suit, which came complete with an oversized ivory bow tie and thick shoulder pads.

She was so ready for new beginnings that it felt only natural to say yes when Rashid, a business class passenger with an audacious laugh and eyes that smiled, asked if he could take her out to dinner.

She was used to men taking an interest in her but unlike the eligible bachelors of Makati, Rashid showed her off unashamedly. He introduced her to all his friends and business partners, and would say, “this is the woman I’m going to marry,” to any waitress, doorman or taxi driver who would listen.

After just three months of flights from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf, Rashid proposed to Aziza and her brief career came to a sudden halt. He had a knack for telling her what she did and didn’t want and with each declaration, her life took a profound turn. He said, “You’re too beautiful to work,” and she swiftly handed in her notice; “You’re too precious for the pollution and chaos of Manila,” and she immediately packed all her belongings to leave with him.

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hala a

In her final act as Analyn, she moved her mother into a luxurious Malate flat that Rashid gifted her, fought back tears and hopped on a plane with him to Kuwait. When they got there, Rashid said, “Habibti, you don’t want our children to have a different religion from you.” And with no need for convincing, she took the Shahada, bearing witness that there was no God but Allah, and Rashid said, “Yal gumar, now you are my Aziza.”

hala a

19

Jasmin Allenspach Extract from The Sky Too Wide

A

fter, the first thing Sean said was, “So you like to read.”

They were lying on a greying mattress atop some pallets in the store’s cramped backroom, wedged between empty carton boxes and crates of Coors. After the warmth of their skin, the cold came like a bereavement. It always found a way of claiming you back, as relentless as the steady drip of the big rigs along the arteries of the nation’s highways, clotting at these truck stops for the truckers to fuel up, to spend the night, to rid their bodies of the emptiness of the road.

The sex had been different and Hal didn’t know what to make of it.

He attributed it to Sean’s age. He was used to being fucked by truckers two, three times older than him; it was neater, the hierarchies clear. This was harder to keep straight. There had been moments when, fleetingly, it had felt like an extension of their conversation, like stepping out on thin ice, waiting for the crack that would reveal the depths below. He’d held Sean’s cock in his mouth and thought, I could hurt this man.

“I used to,” he said, watching Sean light a cigarette.

“Why not anymore?”

Sean had a strange way of smoking, the way he cupped his Pall Mall with pinched fingers, burning tip hovering at his palm. It reminded him of his grandma plucking cherry pits from her mouth.

He looked away.

“Didn’t pack any books when I ran away from home.”

He regretted it as soon as he’d said it. Here, again, was the truth and he’d let it into the open, where another could grab it with greedy hands and turn it on him like a knife. It startled him. The currency of his encounters with the truckers had never been words; their interactions were conducted with a taciturn efficiency. Yet here he was, and something had shifted, the terms of this particular transaction rearranged ever so slightly.

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jasmin allenspach

The dangerous thing about telling the truth was that truth begot more truth and so he braced himself for the question he knew would come after the silence. When it did, Sean’s voice had taken on an edge of hesitation, as if he too could now feel the thinness of the ice under their feet.

“Why did you run away?”

His grandma came back to him in stillness, in portraits frozen in time but shimmering with warmth. He’d see her sitting at the cracked-open kitchen window in summertime, plucking a cherry pit from her mouth, wrinkles crinkling the edges of her eyes. He’d see her settled in the armchair once winter fell, watching the yarn being swallowed by her fingers, until the ground thawed and the snow turned to slush again. He would always see her sitting somewhere in the house.

Back home, every day was for farm work, no exceptions, but Sundays were special.

He would sit impatiently beside his grandma through the morning sermon in town, his fidgeting occasionally retributed with his father’s sharp elbow, and through lunch back home, the four of them gathered around the table in their Sunday best. He would push the food around his plate, awaiting the moment when his grandfather would, without a word, stamp off to the bedroom only to return stripped of his Sunday pageantry, back in his well-worn work clothes, coat in hand. He would rumble past them, all still seated.

Then, at the door, Grampa would turn as if remembering something and grumble, “No one good enough to help a man?”, which was permission for him to finally spring to his feet and run to him squeaking, “Me!” Grampa would squint at him as if not quite certain he was up to the job. He would hold his breath and then, at Grampa’s nod, he would follow out the door hot on his heels, beaming.

Together, they would drive the pickup down to the chicken foot beyond the house, where the road forked off in three directions, following one of them all the way down to the crick that ran along the jasmin allenspach

21

border of their spread. Grampa drove with one hand on the wheel, the other propped on the headrest where he sat riding shotgun. In front of them, the wheat fields stretched out until they were swallowed up by the sky.

Their spread lay in Gopher Crotch, Montana, or so Grampa used to say. He didn’t use to say much, except on Sundays at the crick.

There, it was just the two of them, and Grampa liked it that way; his affection could be sized by the number of words he spoke. Hal liked it too, liked knowing those words were bestowed upon him alone.

The crick was their secret spot and instead of following its stream, repairing fences and checking irrigation ditches, Grampa parked the pickup on its bank and dug in his coat for the book.

This was their secret: Grampa would bring a book for him and they would sit together and take turns reading. In summertime, they would settle on the grassy bank and let the sun hit their bare arms and turn the pages a blinding white. In deep winter, they would spread a woollen blanket over their seats and watch the pickup’s windows fog up until they could no longer see the fields beyond the milky mist.

They would sit for hours, letting the words on the pages fill the air between them, richer than oxygen, as thick as glue.

Every day was for farm work, but Sundays were special, because he was Grampa’s only exception.

“He liked Vonnegut,” Hal added and finally glanced over at Sean.

“Once, there was a blizzard that destroyed a fucking quarter of our crop. My grandfather looked at the flattened stalks and his only words were, ‘So it goes.’”

The day after that storm, the snow had lain thick on the barren fields beyond the crick. The heavy snowfall and ground blizzards had finally calmed and he was glad of it, for it meant they could drive out there. They even had the perfect excuse.

“Goin’ out to check the fences for storm damage,” Grampa had grumbled rising from the table, more than he normally spoke. And so they had set out past the chicken foot to their spot.

22

jasmin allenspach

The crick lay enshrouded in white. Grampa kept the motor running to warm up the pickup, windows rapidly fogging up and they huddled together under the blanket and read. They’d started on Vonnegut. A special treat, Grampa had said. Hand propped on his headrest, Grampa’s other hand moved beneath the blanket.

“Gammy leg,” he explained, “needs rubbing in the cold.”

“Does it hurt a lot?”

“Yup,” Grampa said. “But it hurts a little less when I’m with you.”

Under the blanket, the hand kept rubbing.

All around them, the windows were covered in milky fog and outside, the sky was too wide.

The Sunday after, they continued with the Vonnegut and then again the Sunday after that. Hal began to linger after Sunday Mass. His father remarked on his newfound interest in religion. “We’re farmers.

Pastures, not pastors.” He didn’t know how to say that he didn’t want to be a pastor, but he didn’t want to be a farmer anymore either.

Winter turned into spring, then summer and his hope – that what had started with the cold, would end with it too – was crushed. They no longer sat on the crick’s bank, but stayed in the pickup. Outside, the wheat fields stretched on, stalks ripe with blind eyes turned up to the sky. He helped his father and grandfather harvest the wheat, grain elevators towering in the distance like lost churches, and then autumn turned into winter again, and he understood it would never end, and neither would the cold.

The house became his refuge from the vastness outside, and the house was his grandma.

He had always been fond of her but over the course of that year, he realised how irreplaceable she was to him. He grew to understand that the people one loved most were places: she was in the house and the house was in her, and leaving one meant leaving the other.

jasmin allenspach

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Ettie Bailey-King Fever

I

had to get out the house, so I went to buy flowers.

As I waited in line for the girl to wrap my peonies, my eyes stopped on two women.

Milk-white teeth and tans like toasted sourdough. Cream leggings, taupe cashmere, hair the colour of oats. Taut foreheads.

Tighter smiles.

Familiar. I couldn’t be sure if I knew them from Baby Bump Bikram or Body by Bella, but I knew them.

Women like that are always so loud. Their lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear them.

So I moved closer, pretending to smell a rose.

“And that’s why you never see her around. She got into The Class.”

“Wait, that’s real? I thought it was a myth.”

“I thought so too. But it’s totally real, I think. Anyway, she says it’s totally life-changing.”

“I bet. And it’s, like, viciously expensive?”

“No doubt.”

They both nodded their approval.

“So how did she get on the list?”

“That’s just it” – she paused – “you don’t get on the list. They find you.”

The other woman’s eyes widened.

“You have to impress them.”

A murmur passed between them. Then my arms were full of peonies. Then the women were gone.

I go to classes with a new intensity.

7am, No Pain No Gain with Ashley.

“That’s it girls! Lean into it. Find that edge.”

10am, Body Blitz with Brenna.

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ettie bailey-king

“I wanna see that sweat, ladies.”

3pm, Raising the Barre with Kellie.

“And breathe! Breathe! Breathe! I said: breathe!”

10pm, Namaste Ninja with Chloe.

“This isn’t easy! You didn’t come here for easy! You! Came!

Here! To! Be! Someone!”

We sweat together in the darkness. The hum of synchronised pushing, panting and pedalling reminds me of something I read once. It said the world’s spiritual traditions involve breathing in a pattern. Whether it’s the rosary, or sutras, or Vedas or whatever, reading scripture makes you breathe according to a pattern.

I wonder how they discovered that. How many lapsed Catholic grad students in Ann Arbor had to be hooked up to how many machines to count how many breaths and how many heartbeats?

So this is devotion, I think.

Head bowed. Thighs scream. Arms prickle.

I could find a church, or do Kabbalah, I think, but what would that do for my ass?

I pedal harder and harder.

“I didn’t choose you!” yells Sarah.

Lungs scorched. Thighs burn. Mind white.

“You chose me!”

And there’s my name, top of the leaderboard.

There’s clapping and laughing and hands on my wet back and neck. Kellie presses her hard collarbones against mine. A hug.

My phone rings.

It’s Lucia, about the house. Of course, the house. I nearly forgot.

They’re ready for us, so I drive down to Southampton with the boys.

Steven comes later.

They have the same fitness studios out here, the same classes.

This instructor’s a Shellie or an Ellie or maybe a Kellie. I’d call her a tier three, at best. She’s not even on the Instagram, I checked. ettie bailey-king

25

She doesn’t get flown out to Hawaii or the Virgin Islands for their best customers.

She hardly even curates the class. Anyone can sit on the front row.

If anyone can sit there, I don’t want to.

But she is getting us breathing together, sweating together. She’s okay, a sort of junior priestess.

So I plug away in the darkness of this inferior spin studio, with its never-ending flow of Kellies and Katies and Kendras.

And I picture how the other women will react when they hear the news.

They’ll stop in the farmers’ market and talk to each other over their microgreens and almond milk iced lattes.

“Did you hear? It’s true. She’s in. Yeah, to the invite-only class.

I know, I know. I thought it was a myth too but she’s really in.”

Summer passes in a few blinks.

Hot yoga and jet-skiing and rosé on the terrace and Pilates and just-divorced Jessica comes over with her hairless boyfriend and there’s barbecued salmon and vegan slaw and Steven comes down on the weekends and falls asleep in the sun and there’s a white, white crease in the back of his red, red neck.

And now it’s the last day.

Is that a dry leaf or a wasp? A wasp. So frail. It kicks and buzzes on the windowsill.

Someone’s iPad is out of charge. Someone’s lost their racquet.

The setting sun winks at us, calling us back to the city.

Blink once and I’m home. Blink again, I’m in bed.

And now it’s September.

The only month in which this absurd city is liveable. I think of all my summers before air conditioning. My winters before I had a driver.

New York isn’t a city, she’s a monster.

I climbed inside her mouth and I survived.

I dragged myself out of it. Out of the A train as it cooks on a July night. Out of the inevitability of roaches. Out of laundry on the 26

ettie bailey-king

fire escape. Out of apartment blocks where I got mugged in my own hallway. Out of the furnace, into that temperature-controlled inner sanctum, where the raging heat and cold can’t reach.

On the 32nd floor, the city can’t touch me. No crash of bins, no crack of gunshots, no women wailing.

Sometimes I forget if I’m driving or being driven. I snap awake, forehead mating with the window, and realise I’m in the backseat.

The backseat of cars has been the making of me. And the men who drove them. I hardly remember the first one’s name. (It was Emilio).

The air conditioning is on blast and I feel hot, so hot. I ask Maria to open the windows but we both know they don’t open.

I fall asleep between Portuguese linen sheets and then I’m in Spanish Harlem. Dreaming of coal dark spinning studios, a neon leaderboard, icons old and new. Ashley Kellie Amy lit up red, blue and white. Up and up and up. I’m being called somewhere, by someone.

Louder, louder. Called up into a white-hot blaze punching through the darkness.

I snap awake to the buzz of my phone, bright light shining in the dark.

ettie bailey-king

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Anna Jane Carling Extract from In the Name of the Daughter Caitlin, 2014

T

here was something nauseating about the first line of my book. I don’t know whether my mind was incapable of taking it in because of the fact my bare arse – why hadn’t I worn tights? Sure, I knew it’d be freezing in Belfast and what odds if there was a hole in the lower shin – was stuck to the plastic of the seat. The tiny movement I kept making to unpeel myself was distracting me from the line, ‘my father died when I was five years old’.

I’d read this line five or more times and it was gradually making me feel sicker and sicker. Probably because my own father was drowning from inside his own body a mere matter of metres away. It’d been years since I was five though. Still, I don’t think I was weathering the situation better now than I would have 20 odd years ago.

I tried twisting from the hips without moving upwards.

Impossible. It doesn’t matter how cold it is, my skin always seems to stick itself to furniture in a way that makes me look like a complete idiot when my face inevitably contorts upon getting up. Oh well, no one knew me here. Plus, wearing a pair of tights with a hole in them was the last thing I needed. I felt like I was barely holding myself together as it was. Like something had literally cracked inside me and I was constantly trying to compress myself together, willing it so that I didn’t break open then hit the ground and shatter. It was a bit like when I dreamt about losing teeth. I’d be willing some extraneous force from within my gums to hold them in their sockets, like a desperate glue, but I knew their departure from my mouth was imminent. Like when I had a minor chip in the gel polish of a nail, how that tiny, nothing crack was a harbinger for a bleeding finger a day or so later, as I followed 28

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the crack into a rip and then into a gnaw wound… just like your woman from The Yellow Wallpaper.

I gave up the ghost, swapping my freshly cracked book spine for a spider’s web of an iPhone screen. No fucking wonder I was in pieces, I couldn’t manoeuvre my finger over my screen without tiny flecks of glass coming off in my hand. The screen lit up. Nothing.

Then I opened my iMessages and sure enough, he’d been in touch.

I’d muted notifications from him but still found myself checking my inbox hourly and immediately responding to whatever nonsense he’d just sent.

Thinkin of U xx Eurgh, he even texts in old-man-trying-to-seem-young language.

I wish I’d never told him I was coming to see my dad. Or that my dad was dying. That gave him another void to try and fill.

A woman shouted, “Caitlin?” The word assaulted me. How this woman, small, middle-aged and deeply wrinkled with Coronation Street glasses, knew that the name Caitlin was pronounced Cashleen and not Kate-Lynn frightened me.

“Caitlin?”

She repeated it and I recoiled as I felt years peel off me. It was freeing and terrifying…

Caitlin, 1993 “Caitlin! Come on now.”

Granny had me by the underarm which I hated ‘cus she always had a hold of me too rough! And it hurted me. She didn’t mean to like, an’ I did know that an’ all, but I gave out to her just the same.

“Granny…”

“Weesht now Caitlin. We’re goin’ into this wee house here but we’re not stopping, we’re going through the back then we’re going to go into the entry then we’ll be through another wee house. Is that okay wee love?”

“Aye Granny, sure you told me this already!” anna jane carling

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Granny was always tellin’ me things over an’ over again an’ my mummy says that’s because she’s old an’ dotin’ – which means she can’t remember things as well as she could when she was young.

Not young like me but young like my mummy, but I said probably not like me either ‘cus I minded things better than Mummy but Mummy pretended she did. Like the time Mummy was liftin’ my holy communion money outta my piggy jar with a pencil and I seen her doin’ it an’ she said she needed it to buy gas. But then a week later I said to Mummy about it in front of my granny an’ Mummy said that didn’t happen but I know it happened. She’d just forgotten. When we left Granny’s that day, Mummy hit me a slap on my leg – which didn’t actually hurt that much but I started cryin’ a wee bit after cus Mummy said to me in a wild harsh way I was to stop tellin’ lies but I knew I hadn’t been lyin’! She stopped us where we were walkin’ down the street, just at the top beside the pictures of the hungry strikers (which I think is something to do with football and when you don’t eat for a whole day to raise money for Trocaire to give to the wee black babies in Africa but no-one will talk to me about it and I get in trouble if I ask too many times the same questions) and crouched down in front of me so her eyes could look at the whites of mine. When she did this, I knew I was in trouble. Then Mummy said this thing I don’t really understand and neither does Sinead, my best school friend or Breaigh, my best street friend.

“Caitlin, if we’re in front of people and I say something’s black, it’s fuckin’ black. It may be fucking green but if I say it’s black it’s fucking black.”

None of us can work this out and we did colours back in nursery school! She musta just been confused we reckon.

“Mon now wee love.”

Granny was still pulling at me but it wasn’t as hard as she’d been at me before. We’d crossed the entry without me dawdlin’ and were now headin’ through a big brown door into someone’s backyard. The toilet in that backyard was wild smelly! No one was 30

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supposed to use them toilets anymore but someone musta been because it was stinkin’.

“Yuck!”

“Ssshshshh” There was an old bath that was full of stinkin’ slimy green water in there too – these people must have been using the backyard as a bathroom, the stinky pups! I hope my daddy wasn’t doin’ that cus he always gave me big hugs an’ kisses an’ I didn’t want him doin’ that if he’d been washin’ himself in that stinkin’ green bathtub! Granny had my armpit again.

“Mon don’t be dawdlin’.”

“Owww.”

“Sssh.”

Granny was cross. Her face swooped in and her hand covered my mouth, liftin’ me up the step into the house – even though she’s not supposed to be liftin’ me with her bad back!

“Granny nooo!”

I was about to start givin’ out again ‘cus when she lifted me, I’d scraped myself on the door comin’ in. But then I saw Daddy in the corner of the room.

“Daddy!”

I ran over to him and went to jump on his knee.

“Wee button.”

He was smilin’ his best Daddy smile. He’d quickly put out his cigarette – one time I’d seen him he’d accidentally burnt my arm when I was hugging at him too quickly so now he always puts out his cigarettes before he gave me cuddles. I didn’t like Daddy smokin’ but I didn’t give out to him because when I’d told Mummy off after we’d learned in school that they could give you cancer and make you die, she got wild annoyed at me and I didn’t want Daddy getting wild annoyed at me. Daddy never gave out to me but. Plus, he put them out before I got on his knee now anyway. And the burn wasn’t even that bad and I think I’d only been cryin’ so much when it happened because of the shock, not because it was actually sore anna jane carling

31

– that’s what Granny said anyway. But I wish I hadn’t said anything to Mummy because then Mummy went buck mad and wouldn’t let me see Daddy for weeks and weeks and weeks even though I told her it was an accident! I was always gettin’ punished for accidents which wasn’t my fault just ‘cus I was wee and wee ones always get the blame.

“How’s my wee button doin?”

“I’m not a button, Daddy!”

I knew he knew I wasn’t a button but. He just called me his wee button cus’ I’m wild cute.

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Melanie Carvalho Extract from Xim

T

oday, she didn’t turn away. Today, when she reached the crossroads, she turned left, then cut diagonally across the grove that had belonged to her grandparents. It now belonged to their children, Savio, Ida and Valerio, and, she supposed, in some small way, to her. Coconuts were heaped on matting, ready to be counted. Her grandfather would stand there with a small red Silvine notebook and a pencil and take notes. He kept careful records of every tree, every coconut, within each square yard. Marisa remembered her father’s story, of when her parents first went to the cinema in England and on screen the inside fruit of the coconut with its furry husk fell directly from the tree and landed on somebody’s head. Everyone was laughing because the nut had hit the character’s head but her parents laughed because how could a fruit fall with its shell already taken off? A toddy tapper was at the top of one tree, a curved machete tucked into his ragged kashti, swaying in the breeze.

Her grandfather would order the tapper to slice the top off a nut and give it to her to drink the water; she could taste the sweet sherbet fizzing on her tongue.

The Pink House was paler than before, like candyfloss. Faded away completely in parts, with patches of greying whitewash and, beyond that, hand-cut brick, huge and uneven. There was a motorbike outside, vintage, like something out of a 50s movie, the rusty shell of a VW Beetle, raised on bricks and signs of small fires, faded firecracker papers sprinkled among the vegetation. Savio was right. It was not the house she remembered. It hurt to breathe when she thought of the years that had passed. Her grandparents gone, her aunt and uncle also, and her only having spent those two weeks with them, 20 years ago. Why had she not come before? Why had she not even thought about coming before? Why had she not really thought about it until melanie carvalho

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this moment, right now, when it was too late? But Baby was still here.

Baby was here right now, sitting on the balcao.

Baby was oblivious, immersed in whatever she was doing, buried by carrier bags full of organza and bundles of wire. A small white Pomeranian dog lay at her feet. Marisa climbed the steps slowly.

“Hello.”

Baby continued working, her small hands deftly twisting wire and fabric, but the dog jumped up and made short, high-pitched barks at Marisa. She stopped short. The dog’s hackles rose, it bared its teeth and the bark turned to a low growl.

“Shhh, Riri,” Baby hissed. The dog spun and yapped a few more times, then sat down on her mistress’s feet and leaned against her legs, quivering. Marisa pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and repeated her greeting.

“Hi. It’s me, Marisa.”

“I know. Hello. Sit.” Marisa sat down on a green plastic chair, one of several standing around. Pieces of old furniture lay in states of abandonment on the balcao, along with broken pots and pieces of china, some of which were filled with leftover rice, for the dog she presumed. Baby remained focused on her work, wrapping wire and pulling the petals out just so. She was tiny, too small to be married, it seemed, with thin arms and legs like sticks but a round rice belly that pushed against her housedress in the wrong places. Aunty Rosaria’s dress. It came to Marisa then, the smell of frying onions and ground spices mingled with patchouli and jasmine and sweat. Her aunty hugging her tightly, her forehead pressed against the belt buckle, the prickle of polyester against her skin. The memory made her head swim.

“How was your journey?” Baby’s tone was flat. She bent and delved into the bags around her, chose a peach scrap of netting and began to cut it into arc-shaped pieces.

“Fine, thanks. A bit tiring.”

Baby didn’t respond. She took a piece of wire and snipped it into short lengths, threaded it through the fabric, twisted it, and tied the 34

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ends together with cotton. As she did so, she clicked her tongue at Riri, whose coiled-up tail beat the floor in response. Marisa wished she could join in and the three of them converse with clicks and beats. At this thought, she let out a giggle. Baby’s forehead furrowed but then she smiled too and her face was transformed. Marisa remembered that now. How rewarding it was when Baby did respond. Like when she opened the present Marisa’s family had brought with them that Christmas. The perfect blonde doll in the pink box, her cupid’s bow lips pressing again the plastic, her hands curved in front of her tulle skirt like a ballerina. Baby’s face had lit up but she was not allowed to open the box. Rosaria snatched it up and locked it fast in a glass cabinet, where it stayed. It’s Baby’s present, Marisa had cried. Let her open it. Her indignation was also, privately, for herself, as she had longed to play with the doll. She had brought her Sindy, and they were to be best friends. She and Baby were to play with them together and now the grownups had ruined it. But Marisa was shushed and led away, and her cousin returned to playing with her kitten and a piece of string, watched over by the doll in the cabinet.

Baby held the finished peach flower up to the sunlight between finger and thumb, squinting as the light refracted through the manmade blooms.

“Are they for your wedding?”

“Yes.” Baby picked up the wire and organza and began threading again. “I have so many to make.”

“I can help if you like.”

A pink butterfly danced across them until Riri jumped at it and it fluttered off. Marisa tried again. “How is your uncle, Melvyn?”

Baby waggled her head. “He is inside only.’”

“He’s here?” Marisa looked back at the dark doorway.

“Eh! Uncle!” Baby shouted, so loudly that Marisa jumped.

“Come! My cousin is here!”

A few minutes passed before a balding, pot-bellied man shuffled to the doorway in a vest and shorts. He scratched his head and stared at Marisa in confusion. melanie carvalho

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“Uncle, this is my cousin from England. Ti’ Valerio’s daughter.

She has come for the wedding.”

Melvyn stepped forward and extended an uncertain hand. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled strongly of cashew and alcohol.

“Welcome. You are staying here with us? That is good.”

His hand was limp and clammy, she dropped it quickly. “No, I’m with Ti’ Ida in the village. We thought it would be easier for you all if I stayed there. Baby’s got enough on her plate.”

“Good, good. Well, I am sleeping now, I had a late shift at the hotel you know, but come back later. Baby will make chapatis.” He nodded his head towards her. “Very good. Just like her mother used to make.” He crossed himself. “We’ll talk then.”

Marisa looked up at the house and his departing back. She took in the hibiscus and jasmine that grew wildly off the broken roof, which had been battered by the fallen branches of a large, gnarled mango tree. The pungent fragrance reached down to them, as did the constant hum of insects attracted by it. She could almost smell the fresh chapatis toasting on the coconut husk fire. Her aunty would make them in the morning for her to spread butter and guava jam on.

She would roll them up and close her eyes as she bit into the still warm ends, melted butter and sticky jam oozing out on to her fingers.

“I’m sorry about your mother, Baby.”

Baby shook her head. “That was a long time ago.” She rummaged in her bag for fresh netting and wire.

It was a long time ago, but Marisa could still taste it. She looked around herself, taking in the unswept floor, and realised one of the broken pieces of furniture, leaning now on three legs and with a torn wicker seat, was her grandfather’s old planter’s chair, in which he would sit with his bald legs up on the extended arms, reading his Navhind Times. She pushed the lump back down her throat.

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melanie carvalho

Patrick Cash Extract from Flamboyant

M

ikey stood outside Halfway to Heaven, smoking a menthol vape, watching the disappointed England fans trudge towards Charing Cross. A giant screen had been erected in Trafalgar Square to show the game. Drunken Sweet Carolines still rose into the July evening. He was careful not to make eye contact. Straight – or at least straight-acting – men had always been able to read him. Long before he’d worked out his own desires, the boys at school had clocked him as different.

Anointed young by camp, Mikey had donned the crown into adulthood. He’d chosen Mikey Fantastique as his nom de plume, he wore his black hair shoulder-length, accentuated dark eyes with a touch of blue eyeshadow and applied a geranium lip gloss (Mikey’s lips were undoubtedly his best feature, drag queens from Hounslow to Hackney envied him that pout). That night his nails were varnished indigo and he’d opted for a royal blue suit, topped with his signature white scarf.

Steven emerged from the bar, holding two glasses of juice.

“Cranberry for the birthday boy. Cure the cystitis.”

“I should be so lucky.” Mikey swigged the juice and spat out lime pith. “You know, darling, I once went for a pint in Soho on the Friday and woke up on the Sunday on the floor of a brothel in Amsterdam.

That was when I lived.”

“Yes, well, I prefer knowing you’re getting home okay.”

Steven’s blue eyes were earnest beneath a strawberry blonde fringe, clean-shaven face still boyish. They’d met as students at a LGBTQ night, Mikey had been studying Drama with a soupçon of French (when he peeled himself away from an afterparty to attend a lecture), whereas Steven had diligently won himself an economics degree and now worked in ‘the city’. He consequently bore the workplace imprint: patrick cash

37

navy trousers clinging to pearish hips and white shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow.

“You’re the only friend I have left,” said Mikey.

“That’s not true.”

Mikey began flouncing his scarf, the street his theatre. The football fans were temporarily forgotten.

“It is! There I am, an award-nominated editor and half the table doesn’t turn up! It’s because they’re all drunks and drug addicts.”

“Let’s not get too pious.”

“I’ll get as pious as I want, darling, I’m in NA, I’ve got to make the most of it. Turn sober on the gay scene, watch your friends fall away like flies. ‘Sorry, I had a family emergency.’ Family emergency, mon cul, he’s snorting cocaine off a rent boy’s testicles in a back-alley hotel room.”

“Do you want to go in for a dance?”

When still a young man, Mikey had been made aware that he held limited sexual worth on the gay scene. If the muscle queens were strong greenbacks, and lithe twinks eternal sterling, then Mikey was more a Belarusian kopeck in the scene’s great exchange mechanism.

At 35, he concluded his value had fallen even lower, probably around a dodgy Bitcoin scam. He offered Steven a dejected smile.

“I think I’ll call it a night, darling.”

“Oh, don’t get down.”

Mikey placed a hand on Steven’s shoulder.

“Thank you for a lovely evening.”

He embraced Steven warmly and bid him adieu. He yanked a pair of tangled earphones from his pocket, then hummed along to the Brindisi from La Traviata as he strode across Trafalgar Square.

His thoughts transferred, as they usually did when he was alone, to his book. Mikey always had his book. His outrageous memoirs would prove he was a serious writer, not just some third-rate fag rag editor.

He was walking in the shadow behind the giant screen when he felt a sharp pain. He staggered two steps forward as a heavy object hit 38

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the back of his head. Liquid drenched his scarf. He was overwhelmed by the stench of lager and saw a can of Fosters fall to the paving.

Removing his earphones, he heard drunken sniggers. A trio of young men watched him from beneath Nelson’s first black lion.

“Sorry, mate! I was aiming for the bin.”

The guy’s two friends exploded into renewed laughter, a particular laughter that Mikey knew well. In that laugh, he was spat upon in the locker room, he was taunted for his walk, the way in which he held a pen, his assumed sexual role, he was baptised with a new name – Michael Farrer bastardised so easily to ‘Mike Faggot’ – he was made to understand gay itself as a synonym for wrong.

“Oh fuck off, you cunt!”

The laughter stopped.

“What did you call me?”

Mikey didn’t wait. He’d provided the excuse for further violence.

Nothing was so dangerous as injured pride. He walked rapidly, footsteps to the pace of his heartbeat, trying to assess where the CCTV cameras were, potential escape routes, he needed to get to the bus stop, yes, the bus stop, yes, other people. That fucking screen.

No one could see him here, any crime could be done. His mind was fantastically alert to the lights and traffic, straining to hear the sound of footsteps behind – “Hey!” Mikey quickened his pace further, a run. People were at the zebra crossing, if he could reach people, he’d find protection.

A strong blow to the top of his spine, just below the neck, floored him. It was more pointed than a fist, presumably the man had used his elbow. Mikey would be informed later that one should never fall to the ground, that this should be the last resort in a street fight. He curled up like a larva, noticed odd details like the dirty chewing gum flattened on the tarmac, the grit that itched his cheek, the dull, unpolished leather of the man’s boots as they kicked. He screwed his eyes closed and hoped that he would live.

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He was assigned an LGBT liaison officer by the Met. She had a Welsh accent and visited Mikey’s flat with a male colleague. Did the attacker have any distinguishing tattoos or piercings? Did his friends call him by a name? Did he get into a vehicle? The ‘no’s’ that Mikey offered made him feel he was failing an exam. As she left, she advised Mikey not to use his headphones in places with bad lighting.

“I shouldn’t listen to my music?”

“If somebody’s coming, you want to be able to hear them.”

Mikey looked at her kind face.

“What kind of places?”

“Just anywhere you feel unsafe.”

He had an impulse to reply that that was any street in the whole of the city, any place outside of his flat, and inside his flat too, for recently he wasn’t often safe with himself. In fact, the last place he’d felt safe was a club night named Salvation where he’d taken so much pink crystal MDMA he briefly transcended his own consciousness. Therein lay the trap. He thanked her and shook her hand.

A week later, he received an email from the Community Safety Unit. I have made enquiries with CCTV operators in the local area but it has not been possible to identify any suspects. The crime is recorded and remains on the system. It can be re-opened should any more information come to light.

Mikey watched the red sky darken across London. He felt incomparably powerless.

He wondered if it became, at some point in a misspent life, too late to reclaim who you want to be. Maybe some people are just Frankenstein’s personalities, their views stitched together through the limbs of borrowed character traits. On his computer he took his scandalous memoir, full of his hilarious confessions about all the terrible things he’d done and moved it to the trash. He opened a new blank page.

Love, he wrote, is a fucking dare in this society.

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Jess Edwards Extract from Sharp Teeth

A

nd deep inside her, she felt terrible, terrible pain. And she knew if she succumbed to the pain then all would be lost. And it was difficult to say how she knew this, but she seemed to know it with a certainty that was BONE DEEP. And she tried to concentrate on what she was doing, she tried as hard as she could. And she felt like the pain would engulf her if she didn’t do SOMETHING. And so she took her right hand, flexed at the wrist. And she opened and closed the palm a few times. And she felt strong enough. And she reached back and began to push her hand into her abdomen on the right side. And the texture of the abdomen felt soft but solid and sort of stretchy? Like rubber, like chewing gum.

And her hand pierced the chewing gum rubber surface of her abdomen, and she grabbed the ball of pain and pulled it out, extracted it. And it was covered in stuff, in gunk and bile and blood and bits.

And she slowly opened her hand.

And the ball fell open.

And it was full of teeth.

Jamie caught sight of someone across the packed dance floor, standing alone at the edge. A girl. Her hair was very long and very straight and very dark, split down the centre with the ruled line of her parting.

Ankle length blue fur coat. She looked incredible. And she was staring straight at Jamie.

She picked her way through the mass of bodies, came and stood next to the girl. Jamie’s edges felt blunted and smoothed, her self-consciousness less raw. She could start this. But before she did— “What were you thinking about?”

Jamie blinked at her.

“When you were dancing. What were you thinking about? You looked so – abundantly joyful? That’s why I was watching you.” jess edwards

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Jamie licked her lips, cigarette-dry, and took a breath.

“Nothing. I wasn’t thinking. About anything. Which is rare for me. That’s why I looked that way, I suppose.”

The girl threw back her head and laughed. It was a laugh made of exploding champagne corks and loose dives into clean blue oceans and stomach-dropping freewheeling down a hill.

“I know exactly what you mean.”

For a moment, the two of them were held in suspended animation.

The pulse of the dance floor became slow and dilated and the rush in Jamie’s bloodstream seemed to move with it. Beat by beat. And she stood. And looked. At this girl.

“I’m Liv, by the way.”

She stuck out her hand, incongruously, for a shake.

And that was the moment when everything changed.

The two of them talked and talked and talked, first at the edge of the dance floor, then moving into a creased leather armchair, large enough to take them both. They were obsessed with each other.

They imbibed, inhaled, drank each other in. Afterwards, Jamie would wonder if it was the MD, but in the moment, then and there in that grimy kitchen, it felt like pure electric connection.

After some time had passed – maybe 20 minutes, maybe four hours, but the summer night sky was still etched with stars, still felt far from the disappointment of dawn – Liv slipped out of the armchair.

“I’m just going for a wee. Back in a sec.”

Jamie felt strange to suddenly be alone.

After what felt like far too long – even with the length of the queue for the single bathroom – Jamie wove her way through the unravelling party to look for Liv. She started to feel like she might have imagined this girl. She was nowhere to be seen. Jamie snuck through the remains of the crowd on the dance floor, up a set of stairs, into a bedroom. It was empty. But there was an open skylight exhaling hot air into the still-dark night. Jamie felt her burning cheeks. She wanted nothing more than to be outside. The skylight just opened enough. The roof was cool and smooth like the surface of another planet.

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“Can I tempt you back inside by any chance?”

Jamie jumped out of her skin. She looked between her legs to see Liv, grinning, in the room beneath her.

As Jamie’s feet hit the scuffed floor, their lips met. It felt like all the electricity that had built up, that connection forged as Liv watched Jamie on the dance floor, was immediately released in a delicious surge of sparks. It was kamikaze kissing. End of the world kissing.

They fumbled to peel off each other’s clothes and in the awkwardness of overalls, knee-high boots, taut leggings and socks they finally ended up nearly naked, on a stranger’s bed. A futon, low to the ground, inches away from the MDF floor. Jamie wriggled out of her pants so quickly that they pinged off, elastic tripped, into a corner.

Their sex felt blurry and powerful. The pure, visceral joy of exploring a stranger’s body for the first time. There was no door on the room they were in and Jamie had a tiny place in her brain always attuned to their being disturbed, never quite able to switch off this out-of-body instinct that sometimes dogged her during sex.

Like the conversation, it felt like it both lasted for an eternity and was over before it had even begun. Jamie watched Liv pulling on her boots, shirt and fur coat, envious of her slightness, her bra-less freedom.

Liv said lightly, “I’ve never done that before.”

Jamie blinked at her. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve never slept with a woman before.”

A pause while Jamie took this in.

“Is that OK?” Jamie swallowed. “Oh, yeah, of course. I’m just surprised. I mean...”

She hesitated, unwilling to say it out loud. ‘You started it’ felt childish and, Jamie realised, untrue.

Liv laughed again, a smaller sibling to the wild laugh of their first conversation. She fixed her with that laser gaze, seeming to pierce Jamie, see right inside her, to read her thoughts. “Well,” said Liv, “I am nothing if not game.” jess edwards

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She stood up, shaking herself in her blue fur coat like a dog expunging water.

“I have to go. Give me your phone.”

She tapped her number in with the practised ease of those who are used to being called back, happy to cede the power of the first move, safe in the knowledge it will be reciprocated.

“Let’s hang out again. You’re interesting.”

Liv drew her fur coat around her and headed for the stairs. Jamie was still lying on the bed. In the presence of Liv clothed, she felt very naked.

As she left, Liv looked straight at Jamie again with that penetrating gaze. Radiating confidence.

“I can’t bear people who make the world feel small. I need people who turn the world into somewhere vast and exciting and full of possibility.”

Jamie thought for a second of the couple on the trapeze, drinking out of the crystal tumblers above the party.

“Which one am I?” Liv smiled, almost to herself, and started down the stairs.

Over her shoulder: “Too early to tell. But I’ve high hopes for you.”

Jamie tried to think of something else to say but found she couldn’t.

“What’s your name by the way?”

“Jamie.”

“Right. Jamie.”

She blew her a kiss and vanished.

Jamie gathered her overalls and left the party.

It was only later, as Jamie was cycling home, that she realised her pants were still somewhere in a corner of that unknown person’s room.

She smiled to herself at the memory. Thought for a moment about all the scattered pieces of herself across London. The pants, the ends of rollups, the blood and skin and bundles of cells. The traces left behind.

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Inigo Laguda Extract from Dodgems

“Krisis wants to swing you” and I quake at the mouth of The Fair. A gong or a toll.

My sigh flumes down the high street. Pinballing off the crowd until it hits the chipping paint of the Ferris wheel at the end of the lane, peeling it back.

The Fair lands on Old Town every year. It drops on the weekend between the last sneeze of spring and the first socklessness of summer. Friday is always ours. Mandem flood the road, doused in Paco Rabanne 1 Million.

Adorned in Evisu jeans. Reigning.

Old Town high street wheezes, frosted in time. The Ladbrokes sign – vivid red decaying into coral. Maharajahs’ dingy insides – infested with too many horseflies for the high FSA rating galleried on the back wall to be taken seriously. Best korma for miles though. Darkwood pubs and surgically lit newsagents. Elizabethan buildings poking out from cobbled walkways, leaning into one another like janky teeth. The road is a yawn, closed for cars. The paths. Car park. Maybe I should text Chantelle.

Myths about The Fair jenga on top of each other.

Heard last year that Creepz shanked somebody.

Heard Remi lost her V in the Waltzer.

Heard Creepz shanked Remi’s V in the Waltzer.

Dante continues: “You good, fam?”

As he always asks after he’s ladled out shit, cooked to perfection and ready to stir. inigo laguda

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As if I’m not a hostage to ‘good-night-out etiquette’ – forced to keep the mad moths in my belly from flapping to my throat, lest I murder the vibe.

As if I can do anything now but appear cheap and cheerful in the wake of man two years my senior, hungry to weigh me in.

Of course, bruv I wrench the two-litre cylinder of Coca Cola he’s been hogging since Bermuda Way shops and convene with the Jack Daniels hiding within. The carnival shrieks of excitement drop a semitone.

Man can’t take me for a playground ride My words flume down the Old Town road with oodles of hubris. My balled fist quivers.

I was thinking about busting jeans today but I’m glad I rocked a trackie. It won’t hurt to be aerodynamic in case I gotta rush. Or get rushed.

There’s a chill tonight.

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inigo laguda

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert Extract from an untitled novel

A

ngelica had invited herself to dinner on the way back from the workshop. At her behest, Edward had recited a slew of made-up East African proverbs of the ‘give a man a fish’ variety, improvised the liturgies of several Islamic religious festivals and concocted several extremely contentious opinions on African politics on which he hoped Angelica wouldn’t press him. On this last point, she seemed especially enthusiastic. Her latest project, it transpired, involved lobbying to remove the statue of some monocled old colonialist on the college parapet.

“I can’t imagine how upsetting it must be for you,” she’d said, foot tapping excitedly on the pavement as Edward tried to work out whether it was safe to cross the road. “Samuel Codringham, Edward. I mean he owned plantations in Kenya – it’s practically the same thing…”

When he opened his mouth to protest, she stilled him with a touch on the forearm, which she somehow managed to charge with such depth, such suggestion, that for several seconds, neither of them said a word. Then she caught herself, she grew brisk, and flashed him a smile that looked almost sheepish.

“I know, I know. But we’ve tried everything already, I’m afraid.

Eggs, rotten fruit. We even drenched the thing with red paint the other day.”

She went quiet suddenly, staring off into the roadway at the stream of traffic. Edward wondered what she was thinking. Part of him hoped it didn’t involve him, part of him hoped it definitely did.

Then she gathered herself, blinking her way back to consciousness through her wide, combed lashes.

“Now, this evening, Edward. I don’t care if Conrad will be there.

I’m more interested in getting to know you.”

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So, it was the four of them: Edward, Angelica, Conrad, Youssef, in the oak-panelled great hall, tended to by a flock of waiters groomed to upward mobility from the council estate at the back end of college.

Angelica had spent the last twenty minutes retracing the itinerary of her Latin American gap year: the three months building a mudbrick school for Bolivian children; the three weeks teaching in it; the six months at an Animal Rescue Centre in Cuzco, massaging sun-cream into the wattles of ozone-starved condors. That time she had been propositioned for marriage by an Araucanian chief and he was so charming and so polite, (though not, of course, in some stuffy bourgeois way) that she felt almost too guilty to refuse… Then it was on to her arresting spiritual insights: time is an illusion, existence is a spiral, all religions are really one religion, striving to make itself understood.

For Conrad and Youssef, he sensed, the food couldn’t have come soon enough. It didn’t matter. For Edward, there was still something captivating about her, even at her most ludicrous: the way she laughed authoritatively, flung her hair about her as she spoke. It sounded, quite simply, like the kind of thing you ought to listen to.

The starter was some kind of broth, surrounded by little mangroves of feathered green. It smelled faintly iodinated. Angelica batted it away without a word to the waiter, then leaned across the table towards Edward, eyes starry before the candles, every so often raising her pale arm and running a finger back and forth over the lip of her glass. That, of course, was the other unusual thing about this evening. All the posturing: the tossed hair, the whinnying laughs.

It wasn’t for the benefit of Conrad or Youssef or even the general, centreless scrutiny by which girls of Angelica’s class and upbringing always felt themselves silently appraised. It was for him.

“I mean, I understand the appeal of doing a gap year and everything, Ange. But choosing your whole degree based on a few doe-eyed Peruvians? Really?” Conrad, in his customary way, was doing his best to hijack the conversation. He’d recovered from the workshop and was now busy chipping away at Angelica’s Spanish degree: “It’s just all the same, Ange – she-wolves with ambrosial breast-milk, five 48

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generations of shoemakers called Aurelio, some squat little Tiresias from a Buenos Aires slum…”

Edward felt almost sorry for her. Conrad had this way of implying that he knew everything already – that he’d read everything she had, everything any of them could ever hope to read, back in the mists of his infancy. Every time she looked about to collect herself, he would lace his fingers above his head in a self-satisfied stretch and, enjoying how the frustration settled over her brow, make a grand new pronouncement that drove a stake through the heart of some cherished piece of culture.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Angie dear – Latin America is such a cliché these days. Magical realism is the lowest form of wit.”

Angelica took a ragged sip of water. In her indignation she had shrugged off the graffitied jacket to reveal a new top, a dark, hoopnecked thing that showed off the little constellations of moles round her clavicles and seemed very different from the kind of thing she usually wore. For a brief, vertiginous moment, Edward wondered if she had chosen it with him in mind. It really did seem possible – Angelica struck him as the kind of person who had spent a lot of time in front of mirrors, holding clothes up against her slim body as if trying to work out whether they deserved her.

“Your problem, Conrad, is that you’re obsessed with things being canonical. There are plenty of writers from, I don’t know…” she smiled at Edward, amiably, but in a way that also seemed to demand him to sit up straighter, “East Africa, for example – which is an area I’m increasingly interested in, by the way – who make your classics look…”

“Name one,” said Conrad.

“That’s not the p…”

“Name one, Angie. Go on. Give me the Somali Shakespeare. The Hutu Homer.”

Angelica laid her knife and fork to rest. “I’m not getting drawn into this, Conrad,” she said. “Edward understands what I mean.”

Edward stared across the tealights at Angelica. He wasn’t sure he did understand. Angelica was just like Conrad, in her way. She thomas peermohamed lambert

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had the same unnerving habit, a way of presenting little fragments of knowledge, little pearls of history or literature that she had gathered over the course of her gap year, as pieces of profound, occult wisdom that he really ought to know too. A Hundred Years of Solitude. The Mexican muralists. The Malê Revolt. The shooting of Oscar Romero (“It means rosemary, you know,” she informed him solemnly, brushing her fingers over the back of his hand). And yet even as Edward became aware of the technique, he was impressed by it, by this fund of reference hidden from view.

“The thing is, Angelica,” he said, “I’m not sure I do. Understand, that is. Like I said before, I’m hardly even…”

“You see?” Conrad slammed a triumphant palm on the table, hard enough to make the cutlery jump. “He’s being polite, Ange. Truth is, he’s fed up. Aren’t you, Edward?”

Edward glanced over at Angelica. Her brow was steepled and she had begun to wring her crimson-nailed hands.

“I wouldn’t say I was fed up,” he explained. “Just that my relationship with all this is far more complicated…”

“Course he is,” Conrad continued. “He’s his own man.”

Youssef rose in his seat, smiling sweetly: “If he’s his own man, Conrad, then he doesn’t need you to speak for him.”

“Quite right, Youssef,” said Angelica, nodding vigorously, then training her sympathy on Edward once more. “Let’s let Edward speak for once.”

“Well, Edward?” said Youssef. They were all staring at him now, Conrad and Youssef leaning back in their chairs, Angelica craning forward, chin propped expectantly on her fists.

“I guess…” Edward cleared his throat. “I guess, all I’d really say is that I don’t need to have an opinion about everything. Sometimes it feels like that’s all that’s required of me. As if…” He stared down at his uneaten broth, hoping Angelica wouldn’t assume he was addressing her and her alone.

“As if what?” said Angelica.

“Honestly, we can drop it.”

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“No no. I have to hear it, Edward.” She nodded to herself stoically.

“It’s important that I understand my own blind spots, too. That’s the hardest thing, after all, isn’t it? Self-examination.”

“I just…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t want to be someone people wheel out to prove a point.”

Angelica let out a little whimper of compassion. “Oh Edward, I…” She stopped short, and pulled her hands into her lap as though worried what more damage she might do. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean – I didn’t think.”

Conrad was grinning now, mopping away the last of his broth with a hunk of chalk-white bread. “Dear me, Ange. Looks like you’ll have to put yourself on the list.”

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Harriet Matthews Extract from In the Shadow of the Flame

“

D

on’t you know that old woman’s a witch?” Dinah practically spits at me.

This is the first I’ve heard of it. Dinah is the much younger cousin of one of my patients, an old man named Isaiah with ulcers on his legs. She puts her screwed-up face close to mine, her breath hot and stinking. The word ‘witch’ is like a whip cracking.

I tell her it isn’t true. She tells me Miriam can take on the shape of a dog. That she catches animals and drinks their blood or uses it in spells. That she curses people. That she kills people.

“Where did you hear it?” I ask, and then, “Where did you hear it?” when all she does is stare defiantly.

“Everywhere.”

I tell Dinah to shut her mouth.

A few days later, after synagogue, I catch her gossiping again.

I slap her, hard, the first time I have ever slapped anyone. It leaves a yellow green bruise on her cheek, and my fingers red and stinging, as if from frozen water.

I’m running towards the castle, alongside the river. I dare not go through the streets in case someone recognises me; my absence must have been noted by now, and soon my father, and probably Asher too, will be out looking. It’s early in the morning, and the day is still cold.

The sky is high and grey and flat, but everywhere there is the scent and feeling of spring, of things waiting to grow, to burst open. Pigeons are startled as I pass. The only sounds I can hear are my feet hitting the earth and the urgent whistling of their wings. The edges of my lungs are starting to burn.

I know what I’m doing is foolish. No-one can stop what’s coming, least of all me. I’m putting myself, my family, all of us, in danger. And 52

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for what? To bear witness. That’s all. Shemira, of sorts. My last gift, the only thing I can give to her, in the best way I know how to give it. Someone has to be there.

“Do you know what they’re saying about you?” I greet Miriam, striding into her workshop without knocking. She lives and works near Walmgate, south of the River Foss.

She doesn’t look up at me, nor even stop what she’s doing. The knife she’s using to chop rosemary pauses for just a moment, before once again rhythmically slicing the dark green leaves against the bare wooden tabletop.

“I’d imagine it’s the same thing they said about me last time,” she sniffs, pushing a strand of grey straw-like hair away from her eyes.

“And the time before. And the time before that.”

“How can you be so calm about it?”

“It’ll come to nothing is how. It always does.”

But this is England, I want to say. This is England; they seem to hate us more here than anywhere else. They hate us so much now you can taste it on the air.

I do not say it. I slump into a chair, unladylike: elbows on table, head in hands, fingertips buried in hair.

I think of Dinah and her face slides into my mind, her hateful mouth forming those terrible lies. How could a Jew think of spreading those rumours, even one as young and stupid as her?

Hasn’t she been told? Haven’t her parents explained? My righthand curls into a fist, and then reflexively flattens, as if preparing to slap her again.

Miriam stops chopping. Her feet scrape on the flagstones, and she’s standing next to me, taking hold of my face with her cold rosemary-scented fingers, making me look at her.

“There’s no unsaying what’s been said, Rebekah. Nothing you or I can do about it now.”

“So that’s what you’re going to do? Nothing?”

Even as I’m saying it, I realise that nothing is the only thing she can do. If she publicly denies the rumours, it will only be seen as an harriet matthews

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opportunity for an official accusation to be made. If she leaves York, people will more than likely take it as an admission of guilt, and wherever she goes she’ll be shunned and hunted in turn. Famous throughout the land, even: Miriam, the Jewish Witch of York who drinks blood and curses men.

“Couldn’t you get out of the country somehow?”

“And go where?”

I think wildly to myself. Slanted sunlight on warm stone walls, a snatch of music on the air, a bird swooping past, a flash of colour. Is it my memory, or another’s? But it’s impossible, foolish even. She’s too old to travel and if the journey didn’t kill her then the endless wars would.

“Anywhere but here,” I say, finally.

Lavender scampers in; she must have slipped through the gate somehow and chased me all the way from Coney Street. She licks the salt from my dangling fingers until I pick her up, trying to settle her in my lap. I bend my head, let her lick my face. I realise I’ve come out without a veil.

“No gloves either,” Miriam grunts. “And those are house shoes, not walking shoes. What are you about, working yourself into a state over this?”

I scratch Lavender’s head while she blinks her big amber eyes at Miriam, nostrils flaring at the chopped rosemary. I take deep steadying breaths. I decide to let Miriam, and Lavender, comfort me. I make the choice, yet again, to ignore. To disregard. To rise above, I tell myself.

It’s only words.

I run past the synagogue, cutting around the back. I have to slow down as I sneak between the trees clinging to the riverbank. It’s been raining a little in the night, my boots sink into the earth, and clouds of tiny flies rise from every branch I brush against. A bramble scratches me, droplets of bright blood on my fingers. I put my hand to my mouth and lick them away. Taste of metal. I hold my hood close around my face and pull my feet from the mud. I keep going.

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I keep waking. I keep waking from dreams. Broken, half-remembered images. Faintly echoing voices. I dream of Jerusalem, of a song being sung there. In the dream I know the words, when I wake, they slip away. I dream of Spain, of Granada. Of the taste of figs, of a brother buried there, of his coffin in my father’s arms.

I dream of an army. Crusaders. Swords drawn; a shining silver forest. Their voices are like the wind. The candles at the synagogue flicker and gutter. A man is praying, chanting, long and low. I can’t make out the words, and yet I know what he’s saying: Yitgaddal veyitqaddash shmeh rabba, Be’alma di vra khir’uteh, Veyamlikh malkhuteh…

I dream of fire. Hair curling, houses collapsing, stone crumbling, wood cracking like bones. I dream of strangers, with their faces shrouded in darkness. My memory of them is gone completely soon after waking. Am I dreaming of the past, or the future? I try to pray, but I can’t find the words.

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Sharanya Murali Extract from Encore

F

or the first time in 25 years, when John Fernandes awoke on a bright Tuesday morning and, with his eyes still closed, put his hand under his bed, he could not feel the cold curve of metal that had dictated his adult life in this city. The shock of empty space around his hand. His eyes unstuck. He thrust his other hand under the bed, shaking, like a piano player in the middle of a nightmare. As the noises outside his grilled window grew louder – Bandra traffic, the call of the nariyal walla, Mrs Matthews’ chickens next door – John Fernandes did too. In a minute, Mrs Matthews would yell from across the compound wall, – Johnny, no swearing – and John Fernandes would tell her that his trumpet was missing. Gone, gone only, he would shout.

The Bombay neighbourhood blurred faster than usual that morning: Catholic women in their fading nighties were in and out of each other’s houses, milk burnt through more than one saucepan, and motorbikes took over the pavements for the day as those who had once been tutored in music by John Fernandes as children returned early from work to hunt for the trumpet. Chickens were no longer in coops by sunset, one found its way to the doily on the top of the television set in John Fernandes’s ground floor flat, and he was so grateful for the tiny mute life that he didn’t inform Mrs Colaco about her missing bird. By evening, with the trumpet still missing, worries about Johnny did not dissipate. But the neighbourhood, which had resembled a Mario Miranda sketch through the day, began to arch back into two-dimensional repose. It was the close of March. Summer had arrived early in Bombay. Pink trumpet trees lined the pavements, carpeting them in rose and rust. Household tempers ran higher than midday temperatures.

Do you think someone from the Sena took it? Mrs Colaco whispered to her son in the kitchen. He sat on the chair where she did all her paperback reading while dishes screamed on the gas hob.

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Why are you whispering, ma?

Because I don’t want the Sena people to hear us.

You’re mad.

They took Johnny’s trumpet, no?

Her son scraped the chair back into the hall in response. Oho so they did take it. It must be, Mrs Colaco thought, because of that protest at Bandstand. Johnny is always playing outside church. Before turning off the light, she said the Lord’s Prayer and added two extra prayers in addition to her usual ones, one of which was about returning Johnny’s trumpet to him for an extra donation at St Andrew’s Church this Sunday thank you Lord.

There were many enviable qualities to John Fernandes, Bombay’s most reliable trumpet player, but amongst them was the external, accidental resemblance of his life to that of a musical legend. Any of them. This was not an ambition of his. He simply lived his hours, falling in and out of scenes as though they were trials for the role of a famous musician or actor. Even the ordinary details of his life enhanced this persona. John Fernandes wore the same maroon checked shirt every day – of which he had two, both bought from Hill Road – except on weekends when he wore a faded vest. He did not oil his salt-andpepper hair, which had changed overnight when he was 20. His beard was shaved every fifth Sunday by the barber De Silva, who gave him, and only him, a discount. When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he did was blow his nose and then his trumpet, after which he lit up two Marlboro reds. John Fernandes liked mutton curry and white rice, of which his domestic worker Sapna always made a large steel vatful, and of which he ate very little, but friends and strangers ate throughout the day in his kitchen. It was difficult to predict where John Fernandes would play in the evenings. He liked to play for the neighbourhood children, but he needed to play wherever he would be paid cash in hand. So, at midday, when the trains were not as crowded and everything out of shadow burned, John Fernandes walked to Bandra station and took a train somewhere. He did not go to church on Sundays and was the only person in the neighbourhood not to be sharanya murali

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chastised by Father Antony for it because John Fernandes had played ‘Annie’s Song’ at his 50th birthday for no payment. If he had gone to the Bandstand protest, it was almost definitely to play ‘Hum Honge Kamiyab’ on his trumpet and pose unsmilingly for photographs with the newest generation of college students, some of whom had almost certainly made a pilgrimage to the Bandra protest all the way from their suburbs across the creek. Everyone was protesting the Sena’s move to change the city’s name, but everyone also wanted to see John Fernandes play.

It was rumoured that he had once had a girlfriend 30 years ago in Saligao, Goa, but she did not want to marry him. This was never verifiable, like most details about his past life. But, since it was the sort of detail you would want to associate with a legend, this is what newspaper profiles of John Fernandes periodically reported. John Fernandes did not read these profiles. He only read the obituaries and marriage listings. He cried at holy communions, protests and weddings, and also at funerals, even when he did not know the deceased. Loss is loss, he said, or maybe he never did say it but this is how most press profiles of John Fernandes ended. Nobody could resist a life lived so brazenly like a cliché and so nobody appeared to care if any of it was true.

John Fernandes lived in his own insulated enclave of solitude, ten minutes and a world away from skyscrapers owned by American presidents and fascist Hindu real-estate tycoons. Too much only this traffic is, he would complain to his teal walls every evening, and no, this city and its most recent iterations did not deserve his guileless, thrilling commitment to life, but he had long ceased to be capable of sleep in any other nightscape. The last time he had left the city, six years ago, he had taken his trumpet with him. Lying on a beach in South Goa, not being able to face his parents and sister who had reheated the pork vindaloo five times that night while waiting for him, he opened his trumpet case and brought his lips to the cold brass.

Played some Chic Chocolate, low, wide-eyed. The dark around him was unwavering, the moon weak and new and he played with his eyes 58

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closed. The next morning, he took the first bus back from Panjim bus depot. The vindaloo was placed before the Fernandes’s dog Lucky, who smelt the grief in the cold meat and refused it.

That Tuesday evening, long after mint-coloured rosaries had been returned to their rightful owners, John Fernandes paced around his living room, expecting the trumpet to simply appear. The flat was still.

He sat down cross-legged on the dull, dal-flecked tiles of his kitchen floor and waited for his heart to stop beating, as it should, of course, after such a loss. But it did not.

John Fernandes was not a man of willpower, following the minutes of the day had led him to live as he had. But he felt, for the first time in his life, a hefty, crimson rod of determination ram through his gut and tilt his chin up. He would find his trumpet, saala. It had come to him, with sudden, hurtful clarity, the person who would know where it was. A person he had not spoken to in 25 years.

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Leeor Ohayon Extract from One Last Time

W

e grew up in the same place at the same time. Our mums were pregnant together. Scheduled to give birth at the same hospital on the same date: Homerton, June 21st. But I came out on the ninth, David on the twelfth. Our brit-milahs a few days apart. The leftover food from mine went into foil containers for his.

We lived around the corner from each other, where Stamford Hill met South Tottenham. Me on the Hackney part, Pleasant View Road. David on the Haringey side, Carnation Terrace. You could see the start of his house from our living room window.

A slither of drainpipe, the edge of the door frame. An orange-brick terrace painted lavender purple.

Don’t know how they live in a purple house, Mum used to say, gazing out through the blinds.

David’s mum used to say that it was like turquoise, protected against jealousy and the evil eye.

Shabbat afternoon would come around and we’d stroll by David’s after we’d eaten the gahnun in our Shabbat best. Buttoned shirts, winklepicker shoes. Mum with her hair blow-dried straight. If it was warm, we’d be out in the garden. The adults sat on white plastic chairs on the pink and yellow patio squares.

Sliced chocolate cake on the table. Habhab or honeydew melon, depending on season. Litre bottles of Mirinda and Coke. Amnon and Dad talking in snatches of conversation, cracking sunflower seeds. Hulls piling up in a bowl. A’liza and Mum with Shani and Tali on their laps. David’s savta sitting in the corner in silence.

Fake Gucci headscarf on.

They’d sit there on their white plastic thrones until evening.

The men gone to pray, our mums waiting to count three stars in 60

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the sky, ready to light their first cigarette after Shabbat. Silhouettes against a navy sky. Loud whispers, cackling laughs. The clicking sound of a lighter.

David and I would play. Toy cars, Action Men. Sometimes we used our imagination. We dreamt up a bank, named it Sony after the letters on the television set. Took the money out of the Monopoly box, stacked it up in piles. David was always the clerk, he’d fetch his dad’s synagogue tie slumped over the chair, swing it around his neck like a scarf, put on a professional voice. I was always the customer in need of a loan. Sometimes he’d have me beg for the money.

Other times, it was doctors and patients or builders refurbing the home. And sometimes we’d spend hours packing a suitcase for Israel. We’d take it in turns being the dad who got to shout the orders for what to pack, the other had to be the mum grabbing things from the rooms. It was a shot of adrenaline, running around, the pretend promise of a plane in the sky. A4 passports made of paper and crayons. David would shout, I need shampoo, and I’d have to rummage through the bathroom looking for it.

One time David set the task: to pack presents for his aunt Rivkah and cousins in Bat Yam. He left me to interpret a suitable gift, stood there over the case by the bed, rejecting the items as he saw fit. Made a big mess. Left a trail of discarded gifts from living room to bedroom. I gave David my paisley dot tie, my kippah with the Nike tick to clip on his head. So, he could get into character.

Amnon came in, saw me playing the mum – A’liza. Her handbag dangling off my shoulder.

He grabbed it, asked, why are you playing with this? Are you a girl? Ah? What would your parents say?

I lowered my gaze.

My eyes fixed on his synagogue shoes.

He flung the bag onto the bed, then placed his hands on our backs, directed us out of the room, sighing as he locked up. leeor ohayon

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In his room, David carried on like nothing had happened. Picking things up, putting things down. I sat down on the end of his bed. A ghostly burn on my shoulder where his mum’s handbag had been. David left the room, went into the next, came back in holding a box. He pushed down the flaps, opened the bottom, poked his small head through.

Look it’s a TV, he said, face crowned in cardboard.

He grabbed my hand and tapped it on the side of the box. Press on the side, like this.

Then he let out a Meep Meep, glanced at me to see my reaction.

Meep! Meep!

I shrugged.

Roadrunner? he said. Here, hold the box.

I held it up in the air.

Change the channel, he said. Tap it.

David picked up a t-shirt, slung it on his left shoulder – a pretend tea towel. Put a hand on his hip: Hyeeee, Amnon, I’m warning you.

Kul hara.

My face creased into a smile, then a giggle. It’s your mum!

Hand off his hip, he threw off the tea-shirt, sat down on the floor, arms behind head. Come, I give you one pound for massage.

He went from mimicking his mum and her Adeni expressions to a voice low and gruff. He played with the syntax, put it in Hebrew.

Did my dad and his soft Moroccan accent. Punctuated with tuts, hand gestures. He was good at that. Putting on voices.

We doubled over with laughter. The cardboard box in his hand.

I said, our parents aren’t a TV programme.

He straightened his back, said, yeah, doesn’t have to be. You tell the story.

So, it’s a book?

He paused. No, it’s like a storytelling machine, he said, eyes wide open.

David raised the box up to his face, there were once two boys named…named… Natan and Aharon. Natan who lived on Carnation Terrace and Aharon lived on Pleasant View Road.

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I giggled. Why am I the old man?

He’s not an old man.

Aharon is an old man’s name.

David handed me the box. Here, you tell the story.

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JP Pangilinan O’Brien Extract from Midnight Mass

J

immy trailed behind Mrs Chaudhry as she marched around the flat.

That motor, she said, lifting a finger towards a switch on the bathroom wall, is only to be used temporarily. You must turn it off when you are finished washing.

Yes, Mrs Chaudhry, Jimmy said. We know.

There is a timer there for your convenience. No one should take longer than three minutes. It is perfectly possible to be done in two, but I understand some of you may not be as efficient.

Yes, Mrs Chaudhry.

Jimmy followed her into the kitchen. As they walked, Mrs Chaudhry made small, concise notes on her checklist. Her pencil was sharp. It made a swooping noise against the paper, like cloth being cut.

I take it you have the rent ready, James?

Yes, Mrs Chaudhry. Of course.

Have you been drying clothes with the windows shut? I can see some mould in the corner over there.

No, Mrs Chaudhry. We use the dryer at the laundrette.

Mrs Chaudhry pulled out a chair from under the kitchen table.

She stumbled slightly as she climbed on top, but still did not take up Jimmy’s offer of a hand. Mrs Chaudhry was a small, compact woman.

She had not made her empire from accepting hands.

Well?

Sorry, Mrs Chaudhry?

I expect an explanation, she said, jabbing her nose at the blackened patch of wall in the corner of the room. If you are using the dryer, I see no reason why this should be here.

I think it’s because of the evaporation.

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Sorry?

Jimmy pointed at the windows. They were wet, striped with steam.

The condensation, you mean?

I think so, Mrs Chaudhry, yes.

She stared at him for a second, then nodded primly and got down from her chair. She was darker than any of them in the flat, a fact they never failed to mention after her departure, but she spoke English impeccably, like the newscasters on TV. Though they would never admit it, this was a source of great trepidation to the boys.

Whenever Mrs Chaudhry visited, they scurried away to their rooms, leaving Jimmy to deal with her as though he were her eldest and most favoured son.

Very well. I will take the rent now then, if you please.

Jimmy nodded and reached into his back pocket. While she counted the cash, Mrs Chaudhry peered over the perimeter of her glasses. It was not an especially flattering angle, both her chin and neck seemed welded into a single piece.

I’m afraid you are short, James.

No, Mrs Chaudhry, that cannot be. Please, count again.

Jimmy hollered up the hall. He noticed Mrs Chaudhry wincing slightly at the sound. She was not used to him in Tagalog. All the Ps and Ts, the glottal stops.

Please, Mrs Chaudhry, he said, switching back. One second.

Apart from Jimmy, there were three others: Jacinto and his younger brother Daniel, and Arnel, the eldest in the flat. Daniel was deaf. He’d lost his hearing as a child in an accident involving a pencil and the kid next door. He could lip read in Tagalog, Cebuano and even a little Bisaya, but when it came to English, he still had to stare intently at the person’s mouth. When Jacinto realised this was what he was doing now with Mrs Chaudhry, he reached over and twisted the nub of flesh hanging over his brother’s belt.

I assume someone has made a mistake, Mrs Chaudhry announced, her chin in the air. You see, I am ten pounds short. jp pangilinan o’brien

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What, Arnel said. What does she want?

You heard her. Someone didn’t put in their full share.

So what? Nothing works in this place. Tell her to fix the shower then she can have her ten pounds.

It seemed Mrs Chaudhry had not realised Daniel was deaf, for she was looking over at Jacinto’s hands with her mouth slightly ajar.

Ask her if she does discount, Arnel said. Incapacity benefit.

I don’t think she knows about your condition, kuya, Jacinto whispered. Did you tell her about your condition?

Sige na, Jimmy said. Before she gets mad. Who was it?

At the sound of Mrs Chaudhry clearing her throat, all four of the boys stopped bickering and turned to look. Mrs Chaudhry had moved to the kitchen counter, where the rent lay in a neat pile behind her. Jimmy, who, until then, had suspected Arnel as the guilty one amongst them, looked over at the cash and asked if everything was okay. Mrs Chaudhry let out a small laugh and stared down at her feet.

Well, she said. I’d prefer if you took the notes out from the bank next time. They’re fresher, and, er, easier to count.

Wait, Jacinto said. What’s she saying? Is it all there?

Mrs Chaudhry, who had kept her eyes on Jimmy the whole time, nodded and turned to gather up the cash. Windows open please, she said, heading for the door. Keep an eye on that mould.

Standing at the living room window, the boys shook their heads at the departing silhouette of their landlady. It was December.

Christmas Eve. Outside, the streets were quiet, the seasonal hush had finally taken hold. For the last two weeks, men in trucks had driven up and down the Bath Road, gritting the lanes. But this snow the weather-folk had promised had still not arrived. Instead, a thin layer of frost coated the borough every morning, stalling the planes from Heathrow, keeping all but the most venturesome inside.

Unbelievable, Jacinto said. The day before Christmas. She couldn’t wait two days?

What do you expect, said Jimmy. She’s not Christian. It’s just a day like any other to her.

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Arnel took out a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose. He did not pass the carton around. Money is the only God in this country, he said, tiredly. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Muslim or a Jew. Daniel signed something quickly in his brother’s direction. Jacinto grinned at his feet.

Hey, said Arnel. Tell your brother not to do that shit around me.

He should have some respect.

Daniel looked from Arnel to Jacinto, then back again. He made a slow, ceremonial bow. It was only after Arnel left and the boys stopped laughing that Jimmy could ask Daniel what he’d said.

That he hopes Arnel isn’t right, Jacinto translated. If he is, he’ll be the only one of us who can afford to go to heaven.

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Melissa Richards Extract from Azultierra

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ore villagers materialised. Like the seine which they used to pull the fish up from the sea, some invisible net pulled them down towards the beach. Their actions were unhurried. One man walked down to the shore and stood for a while beside the line of men who held the rope taut. Shirtless, his large barrel of a stomach had the tightness of pregnancy. He stood, looking out to sea, perhaps judging the best time to add his labour. Then revealing no effort, he slipped himself into the formation, only leaning back on the rope so that his weight was added to the endeavour.

Other men moved backwards up the beach bringing the rope with them, like they were walking that way anyway and the rope was just something they happened to carry. Only a few pulled hand-over-hand, the net falling in puddles at their feet, black and delicate like stockings.

“Ay, ay, ay,” a man at the waterline called, and the sound travelled up the beach.

It was taken up with varying degrees of urgency, as if this single sound was all that was needed to direct the labour. Bobby admired the casualness of it, the cigarettes dangling from lips. Pulling the seine seemed something for which the men had temporarily abandoned a morning of leisure, something that might be put down as easily as it had been taken up.

The net formed a basin at the shoreline and advanced up the beach and she watched the desperate flapping of the trapped fish.

Pulled tightly together they became a slick of silver and black in the agitated water. Gulls flocked above them, performing a similar trick.

Looking up, Bobby saw only a pattern in the sky, a black and white kaleidoscope in which shape tumbled after shape. Only at the top of the scrum would a bird, ejected or ascending to regroup, regain its birdness.

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“They t’iefing the fish,” a young boy called, and ran headlong into the melee, waving his arms at the circling gulls. The throbbing mass ascended and broke apart, became for a moment a flock of individual birds, before again contracting and descending.

Before Bobby could stop her, Lily ran towards the boy.

“Lily!” she called hopelessly and watched her go.

The urgent beating of the dying fish made a sound like rain.

It was added to the sound of the screeching gulls, and the chorus of men calling “ay… ay… ay.” The net was opened, the bodies of the fish splashing water and kicking up sand and the men moved about grabbing the largest, thrusting hands into gills to stop their flailing and throwing them clear, into mounds, which glowed in the early morning sunlight.

Tiny fish littered the beach like coins fallen from a purse. Lily and her new friend followed the pothounds sniffing about. The children collected the finger-sized fish, holding them clustered, showing their palms to each other, comparing their booty.

Out at sea, the flat line of the horizon was now a dark blue, the water beyond the shoreline still, like glass. A pirogue sat anchored at the point where the nets had started out. God is love, it said on its hull.

“Miss, what you want? It have small one, big one… everyt’ing. You see how it fresh.”

Bobby turned towards the man.

“No, I’m good. Thanks,” she said.

“Alright Mammy,” he said, his eyes travelling down her body, his voice breathy and close.

She took a step backwards, drew breath to speak, but he had turned away and was shouting towards the centre of the open net.

“Watch nuh, watch nuh,” he called and she looked to a spot picked clean of large fish but still littered with sprat, where dogs and children, including Lily, roamed.

“Watch the stingray,” he shouted.

And simultaneously, Bobby could see the massive, fleshy disk laid out on the sand, its tail whipping gently and Lily skipping backwards melissa richards

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and forwards in a playful dance as she avoided the small fish that floated in the ankle-deep water. The waves created a pattern of lacelike foam around the creature which sat too far up from the shoreline to gain traction and escape. Instead, the edges of its body fluttered, as if blown by the breeze, and its tail traced a hopeless arc. Even as she ran, calling out, Bobby watched Lily’s two-step take her backwards towards the flicking tail.

Then a woman standing nearby grabbed Lily by the arm and manhandled her out of the path of danger.

“Watch you’self, child,” she said.

“Thank you,” Bobby called as she made it to Lily.

“If she step on the tail it go sting she,” the woman said coolly.

“Yes,” Bobby said. She flushed. She was unsure what level of danger had been avoided but Lily burst into tears. “She just didn’t want you to step on the stingray,” Bobby said consolingly.

The woman looked briefly skyward, bewildered that a child stupid enough to almost get herself stung should be consoled.

“I think she just feels a little embarrassed,” Bobby whispered, as she allowed Lily to climb up into her arms, and hide her face in her neck.

“Okay darlin’,” the woman said. “You mind you’self.” She seemed about to go but stopped as the fisherman approached.

“She hurt she self?” he asked as he walked past them to the duncoloured creature which still lay on the sand. He stuck his forefinger and thumb into the ray’s gills, raising it off the ground and half carrying, half dragging it down towards the sea. His arm tensed under the weight and the edges of the stingray curled gently, revealing its vulnerable white underside.

The children cleared a path and exclaimed with pleasure as it passed, its strong tail gently hitting the ground. Even Lily raised her head and watched as, with a final flourish, he attempted to throw the creature clear of the breaking waves. Raised off the ground, its tail in motion, the stingray became a fleshy kite which fell awkwardly on the breakers. But it landed on its stomach and was carried in briefly before 70

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flapping powerfully and disappearing out to sea. The children cheered and slapped each other’s backs, describing what they had seen as if they hadn’t all witnessed it themselves.

“Waay! You see the size of that stingray, boy!”

“Hear nuh, it have a man up by me, he step on one and he foot swell up big, big.”

“Man, is chop they does chop off you’ foot if you get sting.”

“Nah, nah, nah. You go dead. Fuh true, fuh true. My father friend dead from stingray.”

Their tales became increasingly far-fetched, along with their reports of the size of the creature. Lily watched them with interest from her position on her mother’s hip. Her arms were draped around Bobby’s neck and she shifted her weight to make herself more comfortable, as if her mother’s body were a piece of furniture, something which existed only for her convenience.

“The ray doesn’t want to hurt nobody, you hear. He only protec’in’ heself,” said the fisherman, coming back up the beach.

“She’s okay. Thank you,” Bobby said. She noticed that he stood well back from her now.

“Allyou must watch out for them rays. Look how much chi’ren it have running round the beach. And you does go t’rough and pick out all the big fish to sell. Allyou can’ just t’row back the rays one time?” the woman said to him.

“Oh gawd, take it easy nuh Joyce. You ent see I just t’row it back.”

“After the child almost get sting.”

The argument was loud and good-natured. The performance seemed to be its appeal, rather than any desire to pursue a real grievance. Other voices chimed in, fishermen and other villagers.

Bobby and Lily stood at its centre. She put the child down.

“You’re too heavy,” she said quietly. And with Lily on the ground she saw the child’s hands still full of fish and became aware of the smell on the child and on her own body and in her hair, and the music from the rum shop and the ole talk going back and forth were all too loud and she suddenly needed, quite desperately, to be back at the house. melissa richards

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BR Rose Extract from Black Castrato, Woman Undone

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here’s no story in my natural birth, so I won’t begin with it. I can’t yet speak of a rebirth either, for a castrato is not born, but made.

Just as vampires and werewolves must have their flesh punctured deep by a pair of fangs to become what they become. It takes a wicked act of violence on hapless prey, plucked fresh from what is too often called mankind.

I write these words from inside the chaste walls of my hotel room, as the sun disappears below the horizon. My metronome penetrates the silence with its clicks, while the desk lamp’s light gleams on my reflection in the TV screen. Glancing at the shadowy silhouette of my over-long arms and barely-there breasts in the dark glass, I feel the familiar chill of discontent creep up my spine like the fumbling fingers of an unwanted touch. My preferable black face and box braids are harder to make out, so with a modest solemnity I return my mascaraed brown eyes to this page completely. The cigarette between my lips burns, and the sweet bitterness of its smoke arouses lush memories of centuries past. I’m reminded that my erect ambition to explain what’s occurred is nothing more than an attempt to prevent another black life erased. But in the time when my tale begins, the very idea of such a life was as much myth as it was mystery, even to me.

The year was 1710 and I was just a nine-year-old boy. I was living in an orphanage then. Nestled among the gnarled trees and high stone walls of the southern Italian town of Gravina, it was the only home I’d ever known. It was run by the Sisters, who were as indistinguishable in their draped sable sacks as they were in cruelty. The cross end of the rosaries that hung down from their waists like dead-limbed pendulums swinging to the rhythm of their steps lingers most in my memory and 72

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how following them with my eyes seemed to hypnotise me. They were determined in their habits to bend any of our crookedness straight, if we dared to have any. This was most recognised at mealtimes in our obligatory silence, as the Sisters read scripture aloud, touching their untouched tongues to the backs of their teeth with each syllable in a fervour that crescendo-ed at the full stops.

Such was my life.

That is, until one morning Mass that spring, when the chill of winter still nibbled at the morning, and we choir boys stood shoulder to shoulder in the high balcony near the church ceiling, openmouthed, shaping the sound of our prepubescent voices into holy melodies. Missa Assumpta est Maria filled the church walls like air to lungs, expanding at the high notes and receding at the lows with the purest of sounds. I had already sung the leading passages to Credo and Christie without a single omission, and all the while my eyes remained fixed on the crucifix before me. Slumped head, eyes shut, anguished expression, flesh nailed through. For all his suffering, I couldn’t help but be consumed with my own.

Why had he done it? Why had God made me this way?

These questions whirled through my mind like a twister’s ruthless winds unearthing my feral indignation for this body I’d been born into. My detest for it was concentrated at those parts down below my groin, where stuck between my thighs was a hanging sex so misaligned, it felt as if it’d been pasted to me by some purblind artisan out for revenge.

I had to have been a mistake.

Tears trickled down my cheeks into my open singing mouth as my gaze moved from the crucifix to the congregation below. In the sea of front-facing bodies, a single man stood askew in my direction.

He had a receding widow’s peak and grey-tinged brown hair that fell to his shoulders, framing his hollow cheeks.

His dark eyes were all over me.

My own eyes darted from him to the crucifix and back again, as the melodies of Agnus Dei swelled and recoiled a final time with br rose

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an ethereal beauty that I so longed for but would never possess.

I wiped my tears away with my arm, certain they were to blame for the man’s relentless stare, but his frosty gaze remained fixed on me.

Mass ended and I descended the stairs from the balcony with the other boys in a single file line as we always did and were required to do. However, this time, my feet had barely hit the final stair when I felt a hand grip me like captured prey in a predator’s sharp claws.

“You stay here,” Father Rossi said, digging his fingers into my forearm.

The other boys looked on, slowing as they filed past. One managed to stick his tongue out in my direction.

“On you go,” Father ordered.

His voice was as commanding as his black robes and, as the other boys hurried along, I stood paralysed in his grasp. Father had never spoken to me directly outside of confession. His words were mainly reserved for the disobedient and I searched my mind for the nature of my offence as we waited for the church to empty, which it soon did, apart from one sole male body in the front pew.

Father led me down the aisle towards the man, whose back was to us, with a cautious urgency I couldn’t understand. When we reached the front pew, Father stopped and the man faced us. Father remained standing close behind me as his hands clenched my shoulders near the base of my neck. I immediately recognised the man to be the same leering one from Mass. Close up, his sharp features seemed even more ominous as he cast his hunter-green eyes down on me.

“I can’t say how delighted I am that you joined us for Mass today, Maestro,” Father said. “I do hope the music was to your liking.”

“Some, yes,” the man replied, studying me. “Some, no.”

“Well, I—” Father began.

“Michele?”

“Yes, that’s it,” Father replied. “You remember from my letter.”

“I remember from the voice.”

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“Didn’t I tell you, Signor Maestro?” Father Rossi replied, his voice excited. “Not a note out of place.”

My attention had been drawn to a spider on the floor since the two began to speak. It was crawling in the direction of a wide crack, when it paused just near the opening. It was black and small like me.

I quietly rooted for it.

“What of the boy’s family?” the man asked.

“Nothing is known,” replied Father. “He was left here before he could even speak.”

The man was silent, and I could still feel his stare fixed on me without even having looked up.

“As you can see, he is not well-born,” Father continued. “But, I assure you, he’s extremely clever, well-behaved and, most of all, my dear Maestro, he can sing!”

The spider had begun to turn away from the opening and crawl back towards me, when the man Father called Maestro raised his boot and stomped down on the creature with a healthy twist, crunching it flat into lifelessness.

“His voice does show promise,” the man said, grabbing his hat off the bench. Father cleared us from his path and started to leave, but soon stopped and turned to us again.

“So strange the boy possesses the voice of an angel,” he said, “but the skin of the devil.”

Placing the hat on his head, he secured it with a wriggling of his veiny hand.

“I’ll write,” he said and strode down the aisle and out of the church.

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Grahame Williams blame the tools

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tart this way: I am McCandless. I am after seeing this: two kids in the oak by the trailer that marks the beginning of my land. hgv trailer red with a crow inside a circle, says swift on the side but I tell you it is a crow. oak on the farm side of the gate meaning the kids were no doubt on my land. had no doubt clambered the fence. boy and a girl. saw their beams at the top of the hill up by geddis. I mean the geddis garbage garage petrol station. open 24 hours. torches in their hands and the moonlight. torches searching up in the trees. torches off. torches on as they slid down the hill to me. torches off. clouds went over the moon and the sky went greenblack with here it comes. still with me? grand! keep up! this is the jim jam jamboree time of year that ever has me on edge. the scuts scouts coming from all over. yes, let’s call them scuts. you see I cut letters from some worlds, add them to others and make out I mean to do it! scuts coming by the farm for a nose. scuts pressing faces against my fences, rolling up in their ulcer buzzes. ulster buses. this however the first-time kids come over. geddis my sworn enemy and, as I tell it, one of the kids will turn out to be geddis daughter. geddis always trying to put a stop to me. geddis daughter always trying to save me. that’s not even the half of it.

Deal with the bloody kids then, if the son of mine dares call himself McCandless.

Go on quick, before they scuttle the whole operation. scuttle! ha! there’s the other half. daddy cutting through me already. can’t keep his mouth shut. drives me buck daft he calls me boy. 27 and it is my land now. I am the kin kind king of all this valley. let me show how I ship-shaped it: 76

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up in the bedroom put my ear to the hole in the window. in the deep dark put it to the hole that helps me hear better any scuttlers. such as these kids. such as the boy squeaking a cork from a bottle. cork came free and he says, show me the fancy caravan. this is far enough, she says. no way somebody lives in this junkyard, he says. near had my head off laughing at that! as you can see: yes way! i’ve seen people climbing from the back of trailers, she says. the dreamers she meant. but this is not possible. not since before daddy’s last day has anyone been offloaded on the farm. I am not stupid. not since daddy’s lorry ended up in the dish ditch with a whole load of poor dreamers in the back. nineteen dreamers to be exact. because daddy always liked his prim prime numbers. you’re shivering, he says. i’m not scared, she says. you’re cold, he says. put my eye to the hole but the kids were now part blocked by the crow trailer. could see only legs. mistake of positioning on my part. they call him the ballycrawburn cancer, she says. i’ll cancer you, he says and she was laughing. that was when I had it clear she was geddis daughter. the geddis laugh. geddis laugh from the geddis summer. huge laugh. laugh I heard when geddis gave me this hell hole in the head. geddis who Here we go, Geddis again and again and again. Geddis who does you no good. Get rid of the kids and leave Geddis be. yes, let me say more about geddis. geddis you need to know to understand the turn I am telling you about. geddis who sat behind me in computer science. geddis who was pure spide. geddis who left skill skull school to run a car dealership. geddis who while I was steady studying got a girl pregnant. geddis my age and has a daughter. grahame williams

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now geddis is respectable. geddis is upstanding. geddis is friends with the americans. americans with their money. americans with their money eyes all over on my land. how did that happen to him and look see what happened to me. the geddis garbage garage petrol station the only place I can go to get my messages. I tell you it is true. too far for me to asda tesco marks and sparks. my diet coke my crisps my frankfurters. can’t help myself reading notices on his community board: tippers not welcome, countryside spoilers get out, eyesore, eyesore, call this number to complain. disgrace with a country park nearby. disgrace with scut headquarters nearby. no place for such a hell hole. he doesn’t dare say that to the boys with jesus saves painted in giant worlds on their barns the other side of the village. these days it is McCandless, I who saves. what else would you call what I do with the dreamers? believe you me? yes! up there at the garbage garage only geddis daughter will serve me. bless her. time my visits as best I can. if geddis comes out I put the messages back on his shelves. guess he sees me on the sea see cctv. stars stares until I leave. whispers eyesore after me. can feel him watch me walk back down the hill and he looks and no doubt surveys my land. my rolling green feels fields where he thinks should be cows and sheep and houses for chickens there are there are what? what do you want? whatever takes your fancy: cars in streams, taxicabs in ditches, knackered tractors by the tens, tipper trucks, car doors hung off trees, springs of burned-out mattresses, a smashed up 4X4 I disposed of for the bad lads, the red hand lads, leave you with a sports bag full of money lads, bring the dreamers over here for a better life lads. all that once littered glittered: john deere. jcb. subaru. daddy’s scania. McCandless & Son Salvage. McCandless & Son Sea Salvage. geddis looks down and sees my name all over the old lorries. my home the hell hole in the middle of all the machines. and the hell hole in my head where the dream gets in!

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That’s it, get to our dream and get clear of Geddis. yes. pull the old dream around me like a warm sack: one hundred and sixteen u-boats lifted from the bottom of the irish sea and brought here to ballycrawburn. lined for salvage amongst my rolling green fields. pure clean metal pulled up from under the sea. pre-atomic steel. not ruined like all else in creation. and I will dismantle the submarines one by one. a salvage nobody else would dare dream of. the dream that will get me free of the red hand lads. dream daddy shared with me back before everything I could have been was took away by geddis. there! dream right first time! world for world!

Calm yourself, son. Take a breath.

That’s it, breathe. back to the kids: changed rooms. as I said, couldn’t see them well enough from my own. cut through to daddy’s. closer to the gate. from here you can hear even more and see even better the whole heaven above you. windows all gone. roof almost all gone. this is backwoods cooking, the boy says. this is fire safety. this is animal carer. you can touch them if you like. out again came the moon and showed me geddis daughter. running her hand over his harm arm. yes, he was indeed one of the scuts from over the way. proud as a punch of his badges. what’s this one? she says. explorer, he says and she laughed again the geddis laugh and in the light of that summer laugh I could see him clear. scarf on. arms all badged. now his arms all over geddis daughter in my oak. so let’s explore this magical caravan, he says. it’s too dangerous, she says and she was right.

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Writing for Children and Young Adults

Fatima Cham Extract from It Was an Accident

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his is unsettling. The possibility of him ending our relationship just before the most defining year of my life… I should have been a better girlfriend this summer. I should have made more effort to see him.

Though if I hadn’t done this internship, how would I have set myself up as a serious candidate against private school kids with a gazillion extracurriculars, the bank of mummy and daddy and the helping hand of nepotism? To be somebody away from the dismal everyday of Chalener Fields. To do something that will grant my parents a badge of honour. If I’d thought it might cost me my relationship, I would have been better. I should have been better. Juggled them both.

Though what if this isn’t about me? Perhaps it’s another explosive conflict with his dad or he’s worried about school or something. Nothing to do with me, I repeat in my head, crossing my fingers and concealing them as I walk.

He rises from the swing as I walk up to him. He towers over me, a tall boy with an even taller personality, yet something about him seems small today. We embrace, briefly, but he clings onto me so tightly, his large chest crushing my smaller frame. It feels like the hug of a person who will never touch me again. Intentionally ephemeral. The imaginary moths ambush my insides.

I sit beside him on the empty swing. We’re silent, listening to the chains creak as we move back and forth. Children are playing in the playground. Nature sways to the music of the soft summer breeze.

“So…” I begin, breaking the ice. “How have you been? I’ve missed you.”

“I missed you too,” he says quietly, looking down at the grass beneath us.

“I’m sorry I didn’t see you more this summer. I needed to do this internship, but I’m here now,” I insist, making a case for myself. He simply shrugs and a lump forms in my throat. fatima cham

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“Are you ready to go back to school? I can’t believe it’s our last year.” I try to keep some conversation going.

“Our last year,” he echoes sadly.

This is bizarre. Marcus always speaks. It often irritates me how much he rambles but, since he’s uncomfortable with silence, I’ve become accustomed to him talking about anything and everything that pops up in his brain, from football to his outrageous conspiracy theories, like the one about his local chicken shop using pigeon meat. It tastes nice anyway, he’d always conclude. I think this is the longest we’ve ever gone without him nattering on. I shift in my seat to face him properly.

“Marcus. What’s going on? Is it your dad?” He remains mute.

“Please talk to me so I can help.”

Choked-up tears break his silence. I’ve never seen him cry before and I’m a little uncomfortable. I don’t really cry either. Tears aren’t a Beatrice thing. I’m a five-foot-five bank of wisdom, not a tissue dispensary. You come to me if you want life-saving advice, not a shoulder to cry on. My mother instilled in us that crying was for spoiled children. Whenever my older sister and I cried, she’d yell that there was nothing to be upset about, making us sob even harder. We eventually learnt to stop.

I know I must reach out and tell him everything is going to be okay, but I can’t. Especially when I don’t know what’s going on. I’m afraid. I often forget that under this macho exterior is a boy carrying the entire world on his back rather than having it at his feet. His body starts to shake violently as though the weather has suddenly plummeted. In between breaths, he apologises again and again, almost in a chant.

“Why are you sorry?” I ask, my voice soft but firm.

He looks up into my eyes for the first time since my arrival. Behind his golden honey eyes, blurred by the floods of tears, is a terrified child.

I quickly scan his face to see if his father left any marks or bruises but, even tear-stained, his face is perfect, just like it always is. His hands are trembling, so I grab one to hold. He knows I hate all forms of 84

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PDA, even handholding in public feels a bit excessive, but I must get over myself and show him I’m there for him. It doesn’t work though, as his entire body tenses at my touch. He looks away from me again, back down at the grass like he’s counting the blades individually. He breathes deeply before opening his mouth to confess.

I wish I hadn’t pressured him into talking.

I wish that I’d just stayed at my desk.

I wish I didn’t have this incessant I can fix everything attitude.

His words are scalpels in an open-heart surgery. An incision to my chest, cracking me open.

Stab. Stab. Stab.

He speaks quietly, lacking the usual bass he has in his voice and apologises at the end of every sentence. His words knock me down further and further, each sentence a blow to the throat, chest and stomach. Why is he even apologising? You apologise when you accidentally bump into someone walking down a crowded pavement or after accidentally breaking a plate. I think when you’re in the process of slitting and slashing the fabric of someone’s life, they deserve a little more.

My organs feel like they’re melding together. My chest tightens with every breath and my own heartbeat is starting to drown out his voice. I’m not going to cry but a wave of nausea hits me. My brain splits into two. I’m reliving the night Marielle left home while simultaneously experiencing this situation here at the park. That was a night I never wanted to remember and yet, here I am, enduring it all over again. The playground spins as the trees and kids dance around my head. I shut my eyes and clench the chains of the swing to regain some control over my body and thoughts, but it’s futile as Marcus shakily whispers, “she’s pregnant.”

With my eyes still shut, a small and uneasy laugh escapes me.

This is a joke. Marcus is pranking me for blanking him the entire summer. He’s teaching me a lesson. Albeit a scary one. If I open my eyes, somebody will jump out with a camera. I bet his boys are hiding behind some bushes or something. Marcus will shout “kidding!” and this ordeal will be over. fatima cham

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Three… Two… One… My eyes slowly open. Not a camera in sight. But it does feel like someone’s shoved greyscale contact lenses into my eyes. The park has lost its colour. Marcus is still looking at the ground in shame. He too has lost all his vibrancy. His light brown skin is now a dull beige.

Through all this, I forget that our hands are still intertwined. I pull away aggressively. Disgust pulsates through me. I can’t sit here any longer. I stand up, without a word, and bolt. Without even thinking about how crazy things look, I speed away from him towards the park’s exit.

“Beatrice!” I hear him shout behind me, but I don’t stop running and I don’t think he’s chasing after me.

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Gayathiri Kamalakanthan Extract from WORD -BENDERS Ice Cream Mike chats away with customers as he spoons soft scoop into giant cups and cones.

When we’re close enough for him to see us, he says, “Alright girlies, lovely weather.”

Mike is warm and friendly, just like his dad who makes their ice-cream from scratch.

I don’t correct Mike when he calls us ‘girls’.

When it comes to saying my pronouns out loud my voice turns to ice – my shame frozen in time.

Why can’t I just say it?

Maha steps up.

She smiles and says, “Hiya Sam, I’ll have vanilla and they’ll have chocolate please.”

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Sam doesn’t notice the word my best friend uses but Maha knows what she’s said.

And she knows that to me, it means everything.

People see me as a girl and I understand why.

We live in a world of binaries which means a system involving two opposite elements. Like: Girl Boy Home Away Hope Fear But is that really how people work?

Since I can remember, Mum and Amma have given me the freedom to choose what I wear, how I play, who my friends are and what I say.

I know I’m not a girl or a boy.

Actually, the idea of gender doesn’t feel right for me at all.

I’m not like Amma, who feels connected to their masculinity and femininity differently on different days.

They say, “For me, it’s fluid.

A wave of knowing.

It shapes my vibe, self-expression, and body language too.”

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Those words, masculine and feminine are sometimes entangled and sometimes separate, but always meaningful for Amma.

But for me, they feel empty.

Sort of meaningless.

Using the labels of girl and boy don’t add to my understanding of who I am. For me, that makes sense.

My nail varnish, my leg hair, shorts and bowl-cut are things I wear that don’t wear me.

They’re unconnected to gender.

They don’t tell people how I’d talk, or what I’d say, or how I’d feel.

Only I can do that.

Finding the words for who I am with my family is one thing –

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but the thought of explaining myself to the rest of the world, unpicking my queerness for people who don’t want to understand it brews a storm of anxiety deep in my body.

It picks up momentum, swells through my chest, fills up my throat till I feel like I’m going to choke.

So instead of replying, instead of correcting, instead of voicing who I am, I say nothing.

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Gita Ralleigh Extract from The Destiny of Minou Moonshine

T

he gunshot’s crack and boom woke Minou with a start. She blinked in the darkness, thinking at first she’d been dreaming.

But the air was hazy with smoke and she could smell the acrid burn of gunpowder. Outside, wildfowl on the river squawked and beat their wings in alarm and a troop of monkeys shrieked noisily from the treetops. Minou yawned, pulling herself up out of her hammock and calling to her grandmother, a dark outline at the entrance to their houseboat.

“Dima? What was that noise?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep, child.”

Minou collapsed back into her hammock. Dima had most likely scared off a crocodile again she decided, her eyes growing heavy with the sway and dip of the water. If only she’d been awake, for it was a rare thing to see the great muggers in the city. She remembered the last time one of the armoured beasts had ventured this far, though she’d been tiny. She’d stood on deck, clinging to her grandmother’s legs and watched its wide snout drift through black water, like a monster from an old tale. Dima had told her to cover her ears and then fired her old pistol in the air to scare it off.

Dima was Minou’s adopted grandmother. She had been a foundling, discovered after the great storm thirteen years ago by Father Jacob, the Whitetown priest. A rowboat had washed up on the muddy bank with Minou, a helpless baby bawling inside. Thinking her parents surely drowned, he’d taken her to Dima’s floating shack which, though battered, had survived. The two of them had lived on the Lally River ever since.

Next morning, Minou stirred in the stifling heat. She’d overslept.

Both she and Dima usually woke at dawn when the air was cool, disturbed by noisy parakeets stealing guavas from the trees. She gita ralleigh

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peeled herself out of her hammock and swung down, crouching over the copper bowl of water to splash sweat from her face. Today was Sunday and there was no school. She didn’t want to waste a single moment of freedom.

Minou and Dima’s home, lodged like flotsam at the riverbend, was not strictly a boat or a house and houseboat was much too grand a word for it. Dima had built it herself. The base was wooden planks, nailed and tarred to make a deck, the roof an upturned boat, with canvas tacked over it. The wooden walls were patched with packing cases, gaps sealed with mud, baked hard by the scorching sun. A rusted metal pipe was their chimney and six car tyres roped to the deck kept it afloat. The shack was firmly anchored and chained to the trees so it wouldn’t be swept away by the current. On the cases, a faded image of a baby with shiny black curls advertised: MIGNON EVAPORATED MILK. Mignon was the name Dima had given her and one she did not like. She preferred Minou, which she’d called herself as a baby.

Minou pulled the hessian curtain aside and stepped on to the freshly scrubbed deck. Dima was sitting cross-legged, gazing peacefully over the green water and puffing at her pipe. A wreath of smoke hovered in the air. For a moment, Minou wondered if she’d dreamed the gunshot. Then she saw Dima had taken apart her ancient Hungama 19 flintlock pistol to clean it, the parts neatly arranged on a cloth before her.

“What happened last night, Dima? Did you scare off a crocodile – was it a big one?”

Her grandmother shrugged. This might have meant yes or no or simply don’t ask so many questions.

“How come you have that old pistol, anyway?” Minou asked.

Dima sniffed. “Tigers.”

“From when you were a postie in Rangila district?”

Dima had once been postmistress of an area of scattered villages in deepest jungle. Armed with her antique pistol and a boneshaker bicycle, she hadn’t let wild dogs, snakes or the odd tiger hold up the 92

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mail once in forty years. Her grandmother nodded curtly and took the pipe from her mouth. “Go and eat breakfast,” she ordered. “It’s late.”

Minou sighed. She wouldn’t get another word out of Dima, not until her grandmother was good and ready. And she was famished.

Her stomach yowled like a stray cat. She swallowed the rice porridge that Dima had left on the iron stove and rinsed her battered metal bowl in the river, leaving it in the sun to dry.

The morning sunshine was thick and golden as melted sugar.

Bright red dragonflies flitted over the deck and frogs croaked from the tall grass. Minou wiped her hands on her tunic and slipped on her sandals. The rice porridge had taken the edge off her hunger, but today was Sunday – which meant the churches of Moonlally served food after morning prayers. Dima cooked good, simple meals, but there was never quite enough for a growing girl like Minou.

“I’m off, Dima!” she called. The rusted chains that tethered their houseboat clanked and rasped as she stepped across. Dima turned her head.

“Where are you going?” she called sharply.

It was so unlike Dima to ask this, that Minou teetered and almost slipped off. Righting herself, she swivelled round on one foot.

“Church, Dima – it’s Sunday. If I don’t go now, I’ll miss the food.

Shall I bring some back for you?” Dima rarely attended church, preferring to pray at her own small altar, although she’d taken Minou when she was younger.

“Come here!”

Minou heel-toed back along the chain and sprang on to the deck. Dima’s old brown face was creased with worry, like a crumpled paper bag. Minou ran to sit beside her. “What is it, Dima? What’s wrong?”

Her grandmother reached up to pull off the tin elephant she kept strung on a bootlace around her neck. She pressed it firmly into Minou’s palm with her rough, gnarled fingers. “You were too small to look after this when you came to me. Almost thirteen years ago! But you’re old enough now. Keep it safe. It’s all you have of your mother. If gita ralleigh

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anything happens...” Dima took a long draw on her pipe, as if talking had exhausted her.

Minou examined the tin elephant, small as a baby’s fist but surprisingly heavy. Dima had not let her wear it before. The amulet was black with age and the red glass beads that once studded it had fallen out. It had been tucked in her swaddling shawl when she was found – placed there by her mother.

She looked at Dima. In the silence, crickets chirred and a hoopoe made its whooping call. Her grandmother’s eyes were watchful, her gaze on the huge, rusted gates that barred the way to the General’s palace.

“If anything happens... like what, Dima?” she asked, scratching a mosquito bite on her neck. She looped the bootlace over her head, tucking the tin elephant safely beneath her tunic. “What’s going to happen?”

Her grandmother shook her head. “Thirteen years since the last floods. The Dark Lady grows restless. This monsoon will be powerful, after so many dry years. Remember, she watches over you, child. Ever since the night you were found!”

The Dark Lady was an old goddess of Moonlally, whom Dima prayed to every morning. Most Blacktowners kept a small icon of her hidden in their homes – she protected their city. Dima claimed to see the Lady when she smoked her pipe on deck at night – a dark shape between flashes of lightning, eyes glowing like coals – but she’d never appeared to Minou.

Minou’s stomach gave a pained growl. “Can I go now, Dima?”

Her grandmother nodded. “Go to Whitetown Cathedral today.

Father Jacob is a good man. You can trust him if you ever need help.”

“I will, Dima. See you later!”

Without another thought to the night’s events, Minou hopped along the chains and on to the bank. She turned to wave, but Dima’s attention was elsewhere. Minou followed her gaze to the vast purple balloon hovering above, its engines rumbling like thunder.

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Kimberley Sheehan Extract from Say You’ll Be There Jade 19 February 1996

S

lapping my ringing alarm clock on the floor, I snuggle deeper into my warm duvet bubble. Then a high-pitched squeal ends my extra-minutes-in-bed joy.

I lie still.

If I don’t move, they won’t hear me. I’m pretty sure that’s how they escaped the snarling T-Rex in ‘Jurassic Park’. The noise my brother is making could easily be confused with a prehistoric beast. ‘‘Rubes, I need a poo!’’

I try to telepathically tell my sister to pause her very important morning beauty routine and just let him in. I just want five more minutes with the comfy love of my life.

All goes silent. Maybe I untapped some hidden talent?

“Uh-oh.”

I throw my glorious duvet off, yank open the door and step straight onto a piece of LEGO. I breathe out for ten seconds, to: 1. wait for the pain to pass, 2. stop me from losing my shit, 3. not swear as Frankie has already gotten into trouble for telling someone to ‘piss off’ when they asked him to share a tricycle at nursery.

When I open my eyes the tearful, occasionally swearing four-yearold is holding the back of his faded Ninja Turtles pyjama bottoms.

Frankie sees me and cries. The disgusting sort of snot-runningdown-your-face cry. I try not to gag and move closer to the snotfest as I’m obviously being punished for mistakes in a past life. He’s nearly hyperventilating but I don’t know what to do as we don’t have any of kimberley sheehan

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those brown paper bags they always use when someone is struggling to breathe in American TV shows. So, I do the only thing I can think of and brush my fingers through his hair saying “There, there.” I’m hoping it comes across as soothing rather than frantic.

I’m never having kids.

When I bend down to his level, Frankie asks, “Am I going to die, Jade?’’

I get a familiar kick to the heart. ‘‘No buddy, you’re not going to die. Ruby’s life expectancy however is rapidly decreasing.’’

“No!” he wails. He’s not yet developed the sense of sarcasm needed for our family.

I begin battering the bathroom door with my foot to speed her up.

No response.

I bang harder. Many times. I wait for Mum to come and yell at us, but her door remains still. When my foot starts throbbing, I give up and put my ear to the door. The shower is running but it sounds like non-stop rain, so I know she is not in it. I learnt that from ‘Diagnosis Murder’.

Seriously, the genius detectives on TV have prepared me for life.

“Ruby, I mean it. If you don’t open the door, I am going to rub Frankie’s shi- poo-trousers all over your posters!”

The door opens, the shower still running and steaming up the background. She just glides past like an Essex Cindy Crawford. I should have threatened her beloved Take That posters earlier. Robbie left the band last year and she’s still not over the heartbreak. She keeps the posters up as a shrine. I swear she cares more about those pieces of shiny paper than us. She’d probably trade us all in for Robbie to come back. She wants him back for good.

“You don’t have to be so dramatic, you know,” she says.

Her voice sets my body temperature to extreme. The bitch!

Every time I think there might be a nice human being underneath all of her Charlie body spray, she does something like this. No apology.

No soul. The cute girl who used to film dance routines with me on the video recorder is long gone. Maybe, I’ll hide her make-up bag as 96

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punishment – a fate without heavily lined eyes is worse than death.

I’d be interested to see what her face looks like without all the orange.

A disgusting smell, like three-day-old bin juice hits my nose so I nudge Frankie into the bathroom. The water’s warm enough. It’ll be freezing by the time it is my turn, if I even get one. If Mondays after a half term weren’t already the most depressing day of the week, the suck-level on this one is rapidly breaking known historical records.

“Come on mister, let’s get you ready.”

Taking a deep breath before I begin to pull down his trousers, I notice that his chin is beginning to wobble again. “What’s the matter, little dude?”

“What if… I slip and then I will die! The water will come up and I… will… die!”

I take a deep breath to keep the kick-in-the-heart pain and irritation from my face. This kid asks if he’s going to die about a hundred times a day. I’m not exaggerating either. He had a nightmare and wet the bed last week just because Ted, our other brother, told him that penguins used to be more than five-feet-tall a gazillion years ago.

Lots of soap and three more attempts at convincing him he won’t die later, Frankie is dressed in another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle outfit. Not because he has any idea who they are but because Ted used to be obsessed with them and Frankie’s still in the hand-me-down phase of his clothing lifecycle.

Hearing the ending music of ‘The Racoons’ blaring from downstairs, I know we have exactly half an hour to make sure everyone is out of the house, otherwise the schools will be on us again. As the oldest, it’s all up to me. I scoop him up and run us down the obstacle course of our staircase. He giggles, thinking we’re playing.

Ignoring the crisp packets and Kwenchy Cup plastic containers that litter the sofa, I throw him down on it. Luckily, he still sees the funny side and not a possible demise via sofa cushion. Ruby is in the kitchen eating cereal whilst humming away to that shitting song by Bjork about it being ‘oh so quiet’ and I can only wish for that right now. kimberley sheehan

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Ted is attempting to put on his school jumper, knocking his glasses all around his face in an amazing feat against gravity. Saph, our other sister, is on the floor watching telly and thankfully dressed.

She tells me that Ted did her hair.

Ted is eight going on 58 and is by far the most helpful of my siblings. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean he’s generally that successful in his efforts. As proven by the fact he has put his jumper on back to front again and Saph’s hair looks like she’s been pulled through a hedge backwards. Ted signs that he is hungry.

“Ruby, can you make the kids some breakfast?” I yell whilst searching for near-enough matching socks for Frankie in the pile of ironing that lives in a basket on a chair by the telly.

“What would you like me to use? We have nothing left,” she replies in the monotone, bored voice she’s recently perfected.

“Well, what are you eating?”

She slowly and loudly slurps the last drop of milk from her bowl.

Eyes boring into mine as she does it. “The last half of a Weetabix. They were stale.”

“What about the bread in the freezer?”

“We have no bread.”

She throws the bowl in the sink, clattering the plates and mugs already in it.

I chuck the clothes I’m strangling on the floor to stop me from throwing them at her face. None of the kids’ eyes stray from the Smurfs, who are going on yet another bloody journey. If Mum was down here, she’d turn it off and tell them she can see their pupils turning into rectangles.

Ruby then leaves without looking back. She’ll get the chance to walk with her friends to school, probably bitching about me so it’ll be off her chest by the time she arrives. She’ll get to class on time. Maybe catch up on homework she’s missed. The teachers won’t give her any stick. She won’t worry about smelling like her brother’s crap all day.

I wish I had that luxury.

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Sarah Stribley Extract from Operation Platypus

1 April 1943, Australia

T

he letter came on the 12th day.

Splash had almost given up hope of a reply, but all the same, her heart beat a little faster as she hurried to meet the morning post. The air hung heavy with the heat of the day and the parched earth coughed up clouds of dust under her scurrying webbed feet. She had made the journey eleven times before and knew every step of the way; each snaking root, each blackened red gum tree, each dried-up stream.

It was hard to remember that, only a month ago, this spot had been crowded with leafy eucalyptus and she had somersaulted in the clear waters of the creek while her mother watched from the shaded shore.

Now, as Splash slipped down the bank, she passed only the skeletal ghosts of the eucalyptus and the stream she paddled through was choked with ash and debris from the fire. But the Creek was Splash’s home and she loved it, however much it had changed.

Splash pulled herself out and sped on, not stopping to shake the water from her bill. Her fur had dried slick as velvet before she rounded the bend.

Two water rats stood waiting on the threadbare grass of the clearing ahead. She skidded to a stop beside them. “Has the post bird been yet?”

“Not yet,” said the largest, his skeleton visible through his patchy fur.

“Good, I was afraid I’d missed him,” Splash panted.

“You should know his schedule by now. Been first in line every morning, haven’t you?” The water rat grinned nastily, showing his needle-sharp teeth. “What’s this letter you’re waiting for?”

“Nothing important,” Splash tried to ignore the tremor in her voice.

She had always been a terrible liar. As soon as the post bird could get sarah stribley

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through to the Creek again, she’d written to Uncle Bill to tell him what had happened. He was all the family Splash had left now that her mother was gone and, though they’d never met, she felt sure he would help.

“Looks like your pen pal has forgotten your address,” the rat said slyly.

Splash ignored him. Her tail drummed the ground, its restless rhythm filling the silence. She looked around for the source of the noise and hastily stilled it.

The rat fixed his beady eyes on her. “You know, your burrow is the biggest one left after the fire. It must be far too big for a young platypus like you.”

The rat winked at his friend, who snickered.

Before Splash could answer, her bill gave a tell-tale quiver as the air hummed with the flutter of wings. She swung round and spotted the approaching post bird, silhouetted against the cloudless sky. He announced his arrival with an ear-splitting screech and the kookaburras in the nearby tree erupted in noisy indignation.

A cluster of other animals scurried into the clearing as the post bird came in to land, brushing the ground with his scarlet tail feathers.

Splash rushed over to him. “Have you got anything for me Banksii?”

“It’s nice to see you too, Splash,” the cockatoo said. “Let me just catch my breath.”

“Hey, we were here first.” The water rat barged through the knot of waiting animals and elbowed Splash in the ribs. “Out of the way duckbill.”

“Don’t call her that,” Banksii said, puffing up his glossy black crest.

“It’s alright.” Splash got up and rummaged in her fur. “I just thought you might be hungry, so I brought you something.”

“You did?” Banksii brightened. “Thanks, I haven’t eaten since Melbourne.”

The rat’s thin face contorted. “How come you have enough food to spare for your feathered friend here? The rest of us are starving.”

“It’s not like that…” Splash spluttered. “It’s just a couple of things I saved from my dinner yesterday.”

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His friend seized the reed basket strapped to Banskii’s foot and rifled through it. “There’s nothing here for her. As usual.”

“We know you’ve written to that uncle of yours,” the rat hissed.

“Just remember, it’s every animal for themselves since the fire, and we’re not going to put up with another greedy hodgepodge platypus like you.”

Banksii opened his beak to protest, but the other residents of the Creek had crowded round him, eager for news. “You alright?” he called.

Splash bit her bill and gave the tiniest of nods. The rat rejoined his friend and she retreated to the edge of the clearing to watch the queue of animals and birds collect their post. There were no other platypuses amongst them.

This never seemed to bother Splash’s mother, but it bothered her.

Once, when she was a small platypup, she had been playing with some neighbours, running races, jumping in the pool, and she was having fun, until someone suggested they divide into two teams – animals and birds.

Splash joined the animals, but a possum pointed out that she had a bill, which meant she was a bird.

So, Splash moved to the birds’ team.

Then a group of kookaburras said she couldn’t be one of them as she didn’t have wings. “She’s not really anything,” one twittered. “She’s a hodgepodge.”

Splash went back and forth, both teams refusing to have her, until she finally gave up and went home.

When she told her mother, she smiled sadly and said, “Platypuses aren’t like anyone else, Splash. We don’t fit in.”

“But I want to fit in,” Splash sobbed. “I hate being different. I hate being a platypus.”

“You can’t change who you are,” Shy sighed. “Maybe someday you will understand that your differences are what make you special.”

Splash was nearly full-grown now, but she still had her thick platypup coat, and she still tripped over her flippers and chewed her sarah stribley

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bill, and being called a hodgepodge still made her feel as different as it had that day.

She couldn’t see how being a platypus made her special. Clearly the rats didn’t think so and if they had set their sights on her burrow, she couldn’t do much to stop them. After all, she wasn’t strong, and she couldn’t bite or fly or do anything clever. If only Uncle Bill would help. Maybe he’ll write back tomorrow, she told herself, holding on to that glimmer of hope.

Banksii passed a letter to a limping bandicoot and closed his empty basket as Splash came over. “What a morning. I had to dodge two planes on my way here. The skies have been full of them since the humans started that war of theirs. Did you say something about food?”

Splash pulled out a squashed package of leaves and peeled away the wrappings. “They’re fresh. I collected them this morning.”

A few juicy worms wriggled in her outstretched flipper.

“Thanks.” Banksii seized one and slurped. “I hope you saved some for yourself. It can’t be easy here since you lost your mother.”

Splash fiddled with the empty wrapping, the leaves crumbling in her grasp. “There’s no one else like me here now she’s gone.”

“Nothing wrong with being a bit different.” The cockatoo gulped down the last worm and preened his feathers.

“I don’t think it’s doing me much good. I better be getting back Banksii.” She turned to go. “Thanks anyway.”

“Don’t you want your letter?” Banksii called.

Splash whipped round. “My letter? But I thought…”

“I know I have it somewhere.” Splash tried to keep still as Banksii searched under his wings. “Yes, here it is,” he said finally, pulling out a folded strip of bark. “Put it away for safekeeping.”

Splash took it from him, her stomach flip-flopping. Her name was scratched on the outside. “It’s really here?”

Banksii chuckled. “Seems so. Well, are you going to read it?”

Her heart in her mouth, Splash prised off the tree sap seal and opened the letter.

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Non-fiction

Pacifica Goddard Phantom Line

A

t three weeks of age, my son Zephyr became transparent. He was put under anaesthesia and an ophthalmologist peered inside his eyes and found a six-millimetre tumour.

At four weeks of age, Zephyr was turned inside-out. In order to receive chemotherapy and give regular blood samples, he was fitted with a central line – a catheter that extended to his heart via a large vein for long-term access.

That strange extra appendage was a constant visible reminder of his condition. Part of him was always covered in plastic, sealed off from everything including my own touch. And beneath that was an undefended pathway into his body that was never allowed to close, a wound that was never allowed to heal.

When Zephyr had his third and final central line removed at seven months of age, it had come to seem like an inherent part of him.

Once it was gone, I was haunted by the feeling that he was still open, vulnerable to the world, strung through by a ghost line that I could not remove.

Zephyr’s life before the line was a blur. He was born and shortly thereafter diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a rare children’s eye cancer. I had a mere handful of days to get my mind around the diagnosis before we found ourselves in Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, signing consent forms for the surgical insertion of his Hickman Line.

In the days before the operation, I was desperate for clocks to stop, for the world to cease spinning, so I could squeeze out a little more time with my baby just as he was – so perfect and new – before he was changed.

It all felt so wrong; we would be taking this creature who just a few weeks earlier had been nestled inside me, peaceful, undisturbed, pacifica goddard

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never having experienced air or light, a creature to whom the world was so new, fuzzy, bright and loud – and handing him over to doctors who would slow his body and brain to near stillness and do violence to that body. It felt like a desecration.

He would no longer be solely what I forged inside my own body.

He would be part-foreign material. Part-someone else’s construction.

That morning, I held him while the mask was placed over his face and he struggled against the static-filled darkness pulling him under. As soon as he went limp, we had to leave him with strangers.

Hours passed and he was returned to us transformed.

I expected something clean and precise, sterile like a hospital room – but when they brought him back, naked, clumsily swaddled in hospital blankets, awake but not really there, he was still caked with blood and the dressing covering the line entry site was peeling at the edges. There was a gash in his neck, stitched and angry, that no one had prepared us for and no one explained. And I knew then that the scars would form, and he would never be the same. Nor would I. I felt the intense vulnerability of his little body, so freshly emerged.

They had taken what was closed and cut it open, taken what was connected and ripped it apart, taken what flowed and put something in its path.

In the piercing of his body and the insertion of this line, I began to see through him.

You are pregnant with a child, and your body is their home, their life support, their nourishment. Your blood is theirs. Your food, theirs.

Your antibodies, theirs. You share everything.

And then they emerge, the umbilical cord is cut and the child begins to be shaped by the world beyond your body – their lungs, skin and senses bringing the outside in. But if you are breastfeeding, much of what goes into your child in their first half-year of life is produced by your own body, an extension of the umbilical relationship.

That changed for us with the line. Part of the grief I felt was in having to accept that other people would be putting so much into him 106

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– chemotherapy, antibiotics, and medication. Later, he even had several blood transfusions – a stranger’s body becoming part of his own.

A child is born of you. You fill them up with good things – good milk, good nutrition, good touch, good ideas, good feelings. And then day by day they grow more and more of the world and less and less of you, as it should be.

But this was so sudden.

My newborn was no longer just of me. His veins flowed with someone else’s blood. He was part plastic. Part chemical. Part lab creation.

When I held him, I could feel the line dangling there between us.

I learned to see the beauty in how blood was pulled from him so effortlessly, no piercing or pain required and how medicine could be pumped directly into his bloodstream where it would take immediate effect.

But this ease came with vulnerability and risk. They had placed in him the perfect plastic pathway for bacteria to make their way straight to his bloodstream, potentially even to his heart. He got a staph aureus line infection resulting in sepsis not once but twice, requiring long hospital stays, lots of antibiotics, and the surgical insertion of two new central lines.

From four weeks until seven months of age, Zephyr was inside-out. Via ultrasound, I peered into each of his organs. I watched the palpitations of his heart as specialists scoured it for bacterial vegetation. I repeatedly saw his blood pulled through tubes, sucked into syringes and dripped into tiny containers to be sent to labs for analysis. I followed his pulse rate and oxygen saturation on a flashing screen through many long nights, the motion and flow of his body taken from him and turned like magic into numbers.

I never saw my first son Rio this way. Rio seemed watertight, a body to himself. I never questioned his solidity. I never worried about his porousness. pacifica goddard

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But I have had to see the inside of my second child’s body and think about its functionality constantly. Zephyr has been punctured with so many lines, cannulas and catheters, filled with so many holes, that when he had his first real bath at seven months, I imagined the water moving into his body as though he were a sponge. When he drank water, I imagined him leaking like a sieve.

Zephyr’s growing autonomy is the one thing that helps change this perspective. The more I see him taking charge of his own body, step by toddling step, the less vulnerable he seems.

But also less a part of me. Which is hard in a different way.

Although the line is long gone, the ghostly feeling of it remains.

When other people look at Zephyr they see a sturdy, robust little boy, but I see my child in layers. When I look at him, I don’t just see his eyes but I see into them, all the way to the retinas. When I look at his torso, I see a map of channels in and out of his heart, waterways that can be travelled. I see the mechanics of him. I see a phantom line leading straight inside him, a pathway that never closes, a wound that never heals. And I don’t know how to un-see it.

The truth is that the solidity I wish I could see in Zephyr is an illusion anyway, and the permeability I wish to forget is closer to reality.

We are all permeable. We are all big nets, loosely strung together for a little lifetime, changing as things around us filter in and out.

I think perhaps it is tempting to see the ones we love as sound and enduring. But the truth is we are wildly fragile, temporal and ever-changing. We are never exclusively ourselves; we become a little of everything that surrounds us, transformed constantly by osmosis and diffusion.

I see this more clearly with Zephyr than anyone else. Perhaps instead of trying to un-see it, I can use this X-ray vision to see the human condition more clearly. Perhaps I can become more cognisant of our temporality, of the beautiful fragility of these human bodies and hearts that can appear so solid and individual, but are really just so many molecules dancing together for the length of a song.

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Miriam Gold Extract from graphic memoir Water Music: A Swimming Playlist

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Carla Montemayor Extract from The Island of Forgotten Daughters: A Family Memoir From the Philippines

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n the beginning was an accusation.

Huyang, the weaver, who spent her days hunched over a loom, was not the kindly, helpful woman she appeared to be. There was malice in her magic, they said; it could heal or harm.

She would turn up at the doorsteps of the ill and the dying, listen patiently to their litany of suffering and return with a poultice or some infusion to rub on their limbs. Most of the time her remedies worked. Tang Indoy had terrible night tremors and didn’t Huyang give him a jar of cloudy broth to drink at night that made him sleep soundly afterwards? And for Teresing, whose monthly flows didn’t arrive until she was 20, Huyang massaged her belly with an oil she had prayed over and, if we are to believe Teresing’s husband’s boasting, taught her certain positions in bed to use for a successful conception. They had three children in as many years after Huyang’s interventions.

Everyone trusted her until those children died, seven of them from a village near the port. One of the mothers, Azon, had summoned Huyang first. Her twins had been vomiting for days, she said. They must have been poisoned. Give them one of your potions, she pleaded with Huyang, punish the one who has done this to them!

Huyang was silent. She had heard about the illness sweeping the capital. Cholera, it was called. It was not something she had been taught to cure. Her mother-in-law, a healer herself, had seen it before, when two revolutions burned into each other and dead bodies overflowed from battle trenches. When the American teacher in Kalibo told Huyang that it had something to do with infected water from the wells, she made her own children drink coconut carla montemayor

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water, despite their complaints. The liquid was sealed inside the shell, she reasoned, no poison could possibly contaminate it. She had four young ones herself and she was determined to keep them alive with whatever power she possessed.

It was too late for the twins. Huyang boiled some guava leaves in water and made them take a few sips. The rest of the liquid she used to wipe them down to prepare them for death. She chanted her prayers to Kaptan to receive the innocents into Madya-as, to the Mother Maria, who would intercede with Jesus and The Father to welcome these young souls into Heaven. Huyang believed in the mercy of all gods.

In the nights that followed, the sea breeze carried the groans of the children and kept the town awake. Someone was to blame for this tragedy. It wasn’t God, according to the priest who presided over the funerals. God did not wish suffering on His people, he said, although all of them had listened to his long sermons about plagues inflicted on heathens. If not God, then who?

The quiet woman, who sat at her loom all day, whose children thrived while theirs perished, whose magic was impotent if not evil, who uttered prayers to deities they had forgotten. She was to blame.

Nothing was the same for Huyang and her family after this.

Neighbours refused to sit next to her in church. Someone informed the priest that she kept the old beliefs alive and had not truly embraced the Church, so he devised homilies designed to shame unbelievers who harboured the Devil in their hearts. Huyang stopped going to Sunday mass.

The next to be shunned were her textiles, woven from pineapple leaf fibre and ornately embroidered. All her work was tainted, said her former patrons, best avoid anything she has made with the cursed hands that had once massaged their sprained muscles and oiled their limbs. Don’t accept food or drink from her, she has cast spells on them to make you bend to her will.

The most damning allegation came from Lucio, whom she had spurned when they were young, as everyone remembered. Hadn’t 114

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he come across her by the edge of the mangroves one evening as he made his way home from a fiesta? It’s true he had consumed a lot of tuba and was perhaps tipsy, but he knows what he saw. She, Huyang, was standing in the dark, arms and face to the moon, muttering something he couldn’t understand. He called out to her but she had disappeared. Instead, a giant bat flew directly at him, the swoosh of its wings putting out the flame of his torch.

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Michael Pourfar Extract from A Neurologist in the Landscape Of Marginal Interest Study the science of art. Study the art of science… especially learn how to see.

— Leonardo da Vinci

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he first time we met, he was holding a brain and smiling broadly. He was beaming with the excitement of a boy who had just discovered a fossil in a rock, turning it over in his hands with delight. “Look!” he exclaimed, pointing out an undulation on the convoluted surface that resembled a small ‘W’ drawn in bubble letters. “A double hook of the motor strip! Perhaps he was a piano player.” He went on to explain how, on rare occasion, he observed in highly dexterous people who had acquired their skills at a young age – like musicians – a kind of bonus bump on the part of the brain that controlled fine motor function of the hand. It was as if that part of the brain had been given a workout and had a little extra muscle to show for it. I found myself captivated by this dynamo who seemed to hold the keys to locks I didn’t know existed.

Dr Thomas Naidich was slight with a bald, outsized head that stood upon his tiny frame rather precariously. His wide eyes, magnified through thick lenses, could neither conceal nor contain his intelligence.

In his spare time, he could be found in the cadaver lab burrowing in the folds of a brain for obscure neuroanatomical landmarks. That was where, in the early days of my neurology residency, I first encountered him with his double-hooked discovery.1 We would come to spend many hours together in the neuro­ radiology reading room, where his job was not merely to look but to observe. He would quietly scan in the dark for something that might catch his attention. As bleary-eyed residents, we would arrive early every morning to review the prior day’s CT and MRI scans of the 116

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patients in the ward and find ourselves regular prey for his pedagogic talons. He would call each of us forward to present a case and, fatigued and faltering, we endeavoured to describe the images with a coherence that seldom matched our confidence.

Once I had thought myself lucky for getting a seemingly easy question. Up went the scan.

“What do you see?”

Clear as day I saw the starburst streaks of white radiating out from the brainstem, the tell-tale sign of a subarachnoid haemorrhage, blood in the brain, often spouting from a burst aneurysm. It is the type of neurological emergency that one must not miss.

“It’s a subarachnoid haemorrhage!” I declared.

The long silence that followed indicated this was perhaps not the softball I had reckoned it to be.

“What do you see?” came the question again.

I looked closer. Surely that’s a subarachnoid haemorrhage.

Was I missing the aneurysm that was the potential cause of the bleed? Try as I might, I could not find any source of the bleeding.

I perceived Dr Naidich’s smile illuminated in the backlight of the projector screen.

“You have fallen for the common trap of only seeing what is in front of your eyes.”

The subarachnoid haemorrhage, which I had correctly identified, had blinded me like a bright flash to any further observations.

“Forget the haemorrhage for a moment or you will overlook things hidden in plain sight. Important things sometimes happen in the margins.”

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obvious: first inspecting the skull, checking for fractures or evidence of prior surgical intervention, next moving inward and concentrating on the underlying dura that encases the brain, looking for bleeding that might track along its edges. After this, we concentrated on the flow of the cerebral spinal fluid through its labyrinth of interior tunnels for signs of blood or blockage. We then turned our attention to the trails of the vasculature as the various arteries wended their way upward, checking for asymmetries and anomalies, for absences of flow that could indicate a stroke. Then and only then would we allow ourselves the prize of taking in the brain, which I had over-eagerly jumped to like a child opening a present before reading the card. This time, we would unwrap it methodically, from the brainstem and cerebellum at the bottom, up through the cerebrum, looking first at shades discriminating surface-grey from underlying white matter. Then, we’d go back to the bottom again and rise upwards slowly like a diver, looking for evidence of old or new lesions, strokes, tumours, bleeding. Lastly, we took in the entirety with one final panoramic overview, putting the disparate elements together into a totality. In so doing, he was able to point out all that I had missed: the small skull fracture with the thin crescent of subdural blood just below it and the evidence of a prior surgery to remove the pituitary gland. In my rush to judgement, I had missed not only what was there and ought not to have been but, also, what was not there that should have been.

Dr Naidich understood more consciously than most the difference between seeing and observing. Seeing calls into action a battalion of cranial nerves relaying signals back to our brains where our cortex distinguishes zigs from zags, blacks from whites. Observing, on the other hand, is not so easily reduced to a visual pathway, a zig or a zag.

The learning eye requires the involvement of the whole brain with its manifold connections and recollections. Observation, I would come to understand, was a rigorous process, an active noticing.

Jean Martin Charcot, often regarded as the father of modern neurology, counselled his trainees to be ever noticing, ever re-examining: 118

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“Look. Look again. Keep on looking. This is how we come to see.”

I would come to appreciate this imperative more and more as I progressed in my neurological career. It was not a question merely of looking systematically but of collecting and collating the clues along the way. It is a marvel how distal findings connect to proximal causes, how something in the periphery holds the key to something far afield.

A gentle stroke of the underside of the foot elicits a reflexive movement of the big toe up or down. An upward inclination – the Babinski sign – points to a pathological process in the faraway climes of the central nervous system, an infarction or a tumour way up north in the brain, hidden communiques presenting in distant ports of call. Like hunter-gatherers, we learn to assemble what we can, where we can and put it all together with parsimonious efficiency: left up-going toe + droop of the left corner of the mouth = right cerebral lesion. Slowly you come to piece together the hidden connections and cross the threshold from seeing to observing, from observing to understanding. Once you have learned to look for the hidden trails you come to possess an intimacy with the landscape that others have walked clumsily through.

Reflecting on this, I came to contemplate all the terrains I had bumbled through: as a boy watching a game, entranced only by the player with the ball; as an enthusiast at the museum, sufficiently content recognizing a painting as being by a particular artist. The consoling aspect of missing so much is that – unlike the time-sensitive imperative of spotting a subarachnoid haemorrhage – one often has a lifetime to revisit things taken in only glancingly.

1. Dr. Naidich was unable to prove the hypothesis of the ‘double hook’ but subsequent neuroscience has corroborated the general principle that structural changes do occur in the brains of highly dexterous individuals. Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that finger representation in the brain is significantly larger in professional musicians who learned to play string instruments at a young age (cf. Elbert et al, Science 1995)

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Electra Rhodes Extract from The Stone Harvester Consumerism in the Neolithic

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hat if consumerism, and the conflict it engenders, is a way to understand the transition between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages? To help us get our heads round this, rather than focusing on the collective, let’s consider the life of a single man.

He could have come from Brittany, or Orkney or anywhere across half of Europe. But, this man has walked all the way from Cornwall and, like the ‘hill’ he stands in front of, built over 120 years, he is right on the cusp of when the Neolithic meets the Bronze Age in Britain.

He’s seen twenty summers. His mother’s kin are farmers, but his father’s kin pull something even better from the earth – they harvest stone. He too has the feel for it – his father joking proudly that he can spot a good flint half a field away. And like his father and grandfather, he can whisper the secrets of any rock he handles, by touch alone. It’s a good campfire trick, tradeable for hospitality from any settlement he passes through.

He carries two polished jadeite axes, proud of his skills. But, in the depths of his bag, he also carries the future – a thin blade made of beaten copper. And though he respects his family’s past, though he has a deep respect for stone, he knows what can be harvested from within the stone and he has an appetite for the new.

He remembers his father’s face when he saw the blade and tries to focus on the hill.

It rained in the night and the base of the ramp is a slippery mess, chalk and earth stamped into a hard pack by countless skin-shoed feet. He is carrying a deerskin pouch at his waist and he checks it again. There are more people here than he expected, all of them jostling, waiting, 120

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good humoured, mostly, but impatient to get on now that a slanting drizzle has begun again.

A short way ahead, a group hunker around a pile of crushed chalk.

They scoop it, by hand, into small baskets woven from reeds. As the queue snakes past the men, each family pauses to make an offering and, in turn, collects a filled basket. As he watches, a child trots up to the man in charge of the scoopers, a tottering stack of empty baskets in his arms.

He looks up at the unfinished hill. Out of sight, on the other side of the mound, there must be a way down. He nods, appreciating the efficiency and steps forward another few paces. He has good pieces of knapped flint ready. The man in charge admires the work and, in return, he is given a basket half-filled with the soft crumble of the local chalk.

While he waits to get onto the ramp itself, someone up ahead taking their time over the slippery path, he puts the basket down by his feet, steadying it between his ankles. He empties out his deerskin pouch into the basket and mixes the granite-grained soil of home into the chalk.

As he hoists the basket again the contents still shine, white and bright.

At the top of the ramp, he passes the basket to an older man, grizzled and yawning, shivering in the sodden cold. This man, in turn, passes the basket up a chain of men, each of them perched on shallow steps that are grooved into the side of the flat-topped mound.

The empty deerskin pouch flapping against his legs, he watches the back breaking work – bending knees, reaching, stretching upwards or downwards for the next basket-bound offering – until the people behind urge him forwards and he is forced to go on.

It means he doesn’t witness his own basket of chalk being added to the mound but, as he circuits the hill and finds the steep ramp down, he tells himself it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he came. What matters is that this hill is here at all, and that he has been a part of it, as his father was, and his grandfather before, and that he has fulfilled promises made to both of them.

When he reaches the bottom of the short ramp, the sun has passed the midpoint of the midwinter sky. As he walks away from the hill, he electra rhodes

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adjusts his backpack more comfortably. The pack hardly deserves the name, just a sheepskin round a rolled-up deerskin cloak – a make-shift bedroll, that he sleeps on or under or both. Inside the bedroll, there’s a deerskin bag and this contains some dried meat wrapped in yet another skin, a stoppered water gourd, his still essential stone-working tools, his axe heads, his trade objects and the future.

That evening he joins in the celebrations taking place near the Stones and watches as a great stave is erected at the entrance to the earthworks that surround the circle. An oak, stripped of its branches.

Some kind of marker, he supposes. Wood for the living. Stone for the dead. It was his grandfather’s favourite aphorism, a reminder of what mattered in the moment and what would last beyond them all.

There have been other stones on his journey, detouring sometimes for many days to see them; tombs, barrows, avenues, single sentinels or small groups, landscapes littered with stones as though the hills or valleys had grown teeth. All the monumental sites, still regularly in use – but not as busy as he’d expected. His elder-kin were full of stories, all epic celebrations and the frenzied crush of hordes hoping to witness the magnificent turn of the Sun or the Moon or the Stars. Tonight’s festival to see in the mid-winter dawn leaves him as flat as his emptied-out deerskin pouch of hearth-earth; the people are spread out and subdued, and though there are trumpets and the drums are incessant, and though countless torches flare, it is not the spectacle he’d anticipated or hoped for.

As he skirts a group round a fire, he wonders, briefly, why fewer people come to the major festivals. He may even sense that this hill will be the last of the great monuments built in the ritual landscape that is Avebury. Even as he thinks it, he shakes off the vestiges of his disappointment. He came prepared to make the most of this trip and, his filial promises fulfilled, he has another promise in mind.

He’s looking for someone he met on the journey. She’s here, somewhere. He’s uncertain of her family’s welcome, but, if he can demonstrate he’s a good prospect, well, it might work out. Then, he has to decide whether to trust her flashing smile and whether she is 122

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worth both the polished jadeite axes. He has to hope her family sees him, with all his skills, as an opportunity rather than a threat. Most of all he has to find a way to discover whether she will awaken to the possibilities shining in his copper blade or whether she too, like his own kin, is beholden to stone.

He wants to tell her, what he senses deep down in his belly, that the rising copper-red sun at this particular winter-turn is a warning as well as a promise. That despite what her family believes, despite what his kin has written into their bones, despite the tombs and monuments that will be erected for another few hundred years, despite everything they all think they know about the past, the present, and the future, they should make ready for the coming wave of change that will sweep everything away. He has already seen it, in the depths of a smelting fire as the copper flowed and in the gleaming eyes of the traveller from over the sea, who wanted him and taught him the secrets of the forge in exchange.

The age of metal is coming.

Stone? He thinks, as he looks for a girl who might be his. Stone is already dead.

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Yvonne Singh Extract from INK! A story of protest, pride and f inding a voice – the epic struggle for a black and minority press in the UK The Forgotten Angel of History

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n unseasonably warm Sunday in May had brought crowds in their hundreds to ‘People’s Park’ in Hackney. That day, May 26 1889, heralded the first of the park’s free open-air lectures at the Forum, situated in the shadow of the ornate, gothic Burdett-Coutts Fountain.

The popular lecturer who was first to take the lectern that Sunday afternoon was to be presented with a new podium, a great honour,1 and the bright young things of London’s East End were out Samuel Jules Celestine Edwards, Fraternity October 1894, in force. Working men were

by William Harry Horlington in their Sunday best, shirts starched, derby hats proudly perched and watch chains winking in the spring sunlight. They mingled with young women in silk bustle gowns of mazarine, lilac-grey and buttercup yellow. This was a place to see and be seen. In the park’s heyday, speakers at the Forum read like a roll call of early socialist agitators: George Bernard Shaw, William Morris, Annie Besant and Ben Tillett, as well as speakers from the Social Democratic Foundation and the Independent Labour Party.

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The turn of the century had witnessed a growing industrial consciousness, known as New Unionism, among the working classes. The previous year had seen the successful Match Girls’ Strike at the Bryant & May factory in nearby Bow, while the London Dock Strike in August 1889 would result again in victory for the workers.

The British Empire was at the zenith of its powers in the late 1880s and 90s, but those that worked in its engine rooms were beginning to recognise that it had unjust and rotten working practices at its core. Victoria Park, which opened in 1843, had been partially built over Bonner’s Fields, a meeting place for the Chartist movement earlier that century.

Radicalism was in its soil.

According to historian Charles Poulsen, the golden age of the Forum was between 1890 and 1914 – for this was ‘the school in which the intelligent young men and women of the East End learnt about the society they lived in, their place in it and how it could be changed for the better.’ Forum lectures were the entertainment of the day, featuring news, history, politics, theatre and comedy. Enthralled audiences would debate a speaker for weeks afterwards, revelling in the intellectual arguments they had witnessed.2 The winter of 1888-89 had been harsh and long and the crowd assembled that May Day was keen for entertainment, but as they craned their necks to get a glimpse of the celebrity speaker, an interloper with no interest in the proceedings threaded his way through the human tangle. Joseph Wailey, in his shabby frock coat and tilted cap, was not interested in speeches from the great and the good. He was a man who inhabited the shadows, interested in what he could cull from this sea of pockets, not from what he could learn. This human magpie saw in this avid crowd the rich pickings of leather wallets, silk handkerchiefs, moleskin purses and pocket watches. This was a man who, before he hit puberty ‘could have given a few hints to Fagin’.3 At nearly 80, Wailey boasted a lengthy criminal CV of unusual talents. His early years pickpocketing had led to smuggling and yvonne singh

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gangs and he had been a member of the notorious London night robbers The Thorns. Later, he had turned to forgery and blackmail and spent his best years as a horse thief in the US. Old age had brought him back to a familiar stomping ground, a place where he could make, in his own words, thousands of pounds.

As Wailey’s nimble fingers reached for a loose watch chain, the lecturer began to speak, on ‘reason and godliness’, the subject of that Sunday’s lecture and an ecclesiastical hush descended over the crowd. Wailey, his curiosity piqued as to who could demand such rapture, looked up to see a tall, elegant black man in a top hat, frock coat and tails speaking on the open-air platform, framed by a cherry blossom tree.4 Captivated by this extraordinary figure, who he later found out was Samuel Jules Celestine Edwards from the Christian Evidence Society, Wailey renounced his lifetime of crime there and then and, up until his dying day, would tell anyone who cared to listen that it was Edwards and his lecture that had set him on the straight and narrow path.

As Edwards ended his speech and made a special appeal for funds to provide breakfasts for the poor children of the district, Wailey found himself reaching for any loose change in his pocket as the collection tin was passed around.5 Edwards’ mesmeric qualities were well documented. ‘His was truly a most marvellous personality,’ wrote RV Allen, a friend and colleague. ‘The bright and merry twinkling of his piercing eye, the motion of his head and limbs, the erectness of stature, every one of them silently t[old] volumes and len[t] to his words an irresistible charm.’ His ability to ‘take up the threads of an opponent’s argument, and unravel, disentangle and expose them,’ recorded another admirer, ‘caused him often to be greeted with a wild and frantic cheer of triumph and delight.’6 Handsome, always smartly dressed in a top hat and frock coat (once the famed coat and hat had been stolen at a talk in Sunderland, arousing such anger in Edwards that he threatened to ‘knock 126

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the dust’ out of ‘the prig’), the newspapers of the day were extravagant in their praise of Edwards’ rhetorical alchemy, with the words ‘eloquent’, ‘assured’ and ‘witty’ peppering reviews.7 On one occasion, Edwards’ magnetism led to a crush in Landport, Portsmouth, with the floor giving way, and about fifty people falling seven feet into the cellar below. The local paper reported: ‘So closely had the people been standing together that they fell in one block and filled the cellar so completely that there was no room even to fall down.’8 At the point of the 1893 Portsmouth crush, Edwards was 35 and at the height of his fame. He was a lecturer of huge renown; the editor of two journals, Lux, the Christian Evidence Society newspaper and Fraternity, which espoused his anti-imperialist and proto-Pan African views; and he was also about to embark on what was to be a successful nationwide UK tour with the American journalist Ida B Wells to raise awareness of the horrific practice of lynching in the southern United States. The charismatic young editor had found himself at the helm of a progressive, trans-Atlantic movement, which sought to challenge racial injustice, wherever it existed. It embodied a momentum, a sheer force, that had not been seen since the days of abolition.

The stars, though, have been known to etch the cruellest of fates for those that shine the brightest.

In the winter of 1894, Edwards was infected with a nasty bout of influenza that inflamed his right lung, forcing him to be confined to bed. He tried to tour with Wells a second time, but those that heard him speak were alarmed by his frail appearance and a cough that wracked his whole body. He was sent back to his family in the Caribbean to recover, but he never did. He died on 25 July 1894 in his brother Albert’s house in Portsmouth, Dominica.

In his absence, passion, jealousy and a bitter rivalry would corrode the movement he had taken years to build, ensuring, in part, that the story of a courageous black editor who had tackled imperialism at its height would be all but erased from the history books. yvonne singh

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1 Eastern Argus and Borough of Hackney Times, 25 May 1889 2 Charles Poulsen, Victoria Park: A Study in the History of East London (P Journeyman, 1976) p99 3 ‘An extraordinary career ended’, Shields Daily Gazette, 25 September 1895, p3 4 Edwards was 5ft 10inches. The average height for an 1870s male was 5ft 6. He was said to be such a magnificent public speaker that it elevated his physical presence.

5 ‘An extraordinary career ended’, Shields Daily Gazette, 25 September 1895, p3; ‘Feeding the Children’, Justice, 1 February 1890, p3 – this is a composite of Joseph Wailey’s obituary, published in several newspapers, and an article about one of the regular collections Edwards would make in Victoria Park 6 Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (Yale University Press, 1999) p207 7 ‘Who stole the coat?’, Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, 23 September 1890, p3 8 ‘Remarkable Accident at Landport’, The Hampshire Telegraph, 18 February 1893, p7 128

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Poetry

Melanie Banim Trespasses Before you allow yourself a look, the crack of the midwife’s palm initiates her into the room. Her bottom is pink as pig skin, her legs puffed up like buttered pastry. You watch her grasp at air with one sea-anemone hand. Your friend Marie, when she first hears, foists a rolled-up Jackie into your hands at break. Cross-legged behind St Bridget’s, she helps ink your sin: Dear Cathy and Claire. From her house (plush coats hung beside their crosses) she smuggles money for your stamp. Each Sunday, your Mammy threatens spit or the slipper to the ones who forget to slick their hair.

At mass, she is flanked by her starched shirts and frocks. She has delivered to the Father sixteen eyelids lowered in guilt. Your turn.

In this bleach-blank room, you watch the midwife origami linen from under your legs, expose a flash of stop-sign red, crate her like fruit into a cot beside your bed. The baby’s sheet is Sunday-best white, tucked in so tightly she rolls like a tugboat.

A stamp stretches the length of her: Hospital use only.

A warning. There are visitors. Four men murmuring at your feet, like neighbours at a wake; steel wishbones slung around their necks, they volley questions. Sister Colleen huddles like a penguin in a storm at your bedside, forces into your hand a page the colour of the clotted cream on the cakes that appear from behind Daddy’s back on pay day, begins: Our father,

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the rest in Gaeilge: Agus maith duinn ar bhfiacha. You try to still your juddering lips: Repeat after me: Forgive us our trespasses, steady your hand to test the ache between your thighs for an end to all the blood. With one finger, follow the line.

Father’s occupation? Lower. Reason? The child is illegitimate. The mother unable to care for it. Their words sway like seaweed around your fish-mouth. You hear the baby near your breast, short breaths steepening to a squeal, feel Sister’s lips so close she wets the vellus of your ear: Liú ar fhásach. You need forty more days, child, to be worthy of His love. Signed: (Nothing but a cross).

Date: Twelfth of the ninth, nineteen seventy two. Alone, later, in the muted light of dawn, you recite those numbers like a prayer.

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Knocking Shop The first time I hear knocking shop, there is a wall between us. My body bends origami-tight in the space under the stairs. It is Friday, reserved for his visits and fish; the skirting, the lino, the window ledges blanch with Mum’s bleach. I finger a days-old biscuit in my blazer pocket.

Oh, for Chrissakes, Dave. A cymbal strike, the rings of her left hand on the worktop. Tell me they weren’t underage. I think, Knock: how my sister and I were taught to ask for the paper: if the man isn’t there, tap twice on the glass counter, smile without teeth, take the right change; the Headmaster’s sign, knock to enter; Mum’s quick knuckles at the doctor’s office.

I survive the stillness of Sundays in late August, ride in shorts, one foot a rudder, on the trolley through aisles at B & Q: Help me choose, love: brass for the front door?

Our street was still seven days more before he came; I crane against the window in the box room, to see the mongrel from two doors down, stretched in protest from Mrs Var’s hand. It hunts at a trot, grumbles into the hollow of a packet of crisps. Next door’s baby crows until it is fed. That’s why you didn’t turn up for weeks?

I hear it first; his rumble comes in throttled waves. I press my nose into his leather jacket, slung across the stairs, bat-wing black. She scrapes her acrylic nails in the steel basin,

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collects bacon rind, slivers of onion, her other hand fills the kettle.

I don’t know what you expect me to tell the girls. I unfurl, from under-stairs, cakey heat between the rolls under my shirt, rehearse a term in one breath’s worth. Start with the As. I’ve been chosen to play one of three witches, loads of lines. He snorts a laugh, charms two grey snakes from his nose: You’ll pick that up easy– his eyes on her hand, suspended halfway; he has to stand to reach the cup –from your Mother.

How are your others? she asks. His eldest, we’ve heard, is freshly-slit from nine pounds seven ounces of her own. He laughs, You know I never liked kids. Lights off, later, my sister meets me on the tiles, two prawns in white nighties, slick with sweat.

Mum is there at once to hold back our long, black hair.

With ragged breath, we kneel at the bowl and curse his name.

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In an experiment with rabbits buried at 35cm depth The soil is the colour of just-poured chocolate where she is shovelled out. I smell chicken congealed in the back of the fridge or her wound last year, fat with infection. I’m a clumsy fool, love, that’s all. I see her one porcelain calf before they secure the sheet. She texts her excuses, for weeks: My old stomach. I knock until she tugs his door open, her dressing gown over a freshly-bandaged knee. Them stairs are lethal.

In tomorrow’s paper, I will read the hole he dug was too shallow; they found books beside his bed on the perfect conditions for compost.

In her wake, through second-hand shops in St Helens, past pubs showing rugby to men stilled for three decades by the closing of the pits, I shuffled until we found those bedside cabinets.

Sutton Manor Colliery is boarded up in 1991 and, over tea on our knees, Dad reads from his newspaper we are unintended consequences of deindustrialisation in the North.

Walking to school Will Dad be sat home for long? She folds my hand into hers. Twenty thousand working men sink into pints of Mild, the dole.

I read that next door liked him; he introduced blowflies before he settled her in. Thick with wine, I google it. Forensics International, vol V: In an experiment with rabbits buried at 35cm depth, those exposed to insects before burial melanie banim

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decomposed 30% more quickly than those not. There was hot weather he couldn’t predict in April. Unearthing sun-loungers from their sheds, neighbours began to complain to the council about the smell.

He was unlucky.

The headline: The husband’s fatal mistake. I think of teachers with red pen, famous fouls too close to the goal, that friend groping into my knickers when I couldn’t stand. (It is Mum I call, the morning after.) I read she was sixty-five, widowed, one daughter, said Yes just weeks after they met.

In the only photograph she sends We wanted it quiet, love. He’s right, I’m too old for a fuss, the same sunburst grin as at her wedding to Dad, head tipped back, a cat licked by heat, an exhibition of teeth. I don’t sleep. Red (wine?)

Pollocks my sheets. I read The eighteenth letter of the Ogham alphabet was Úr: one of only twenty to exist. I read Plant growth is suppressed for one year after a carcass is placed in soil. The ground has held her, stopped seed-burst. Quiet protest.

The last time I see her, I take the long route, turn up late. She smiles into her glass at each of his jokes at her expense. In the hallway, begs me to stay the night. Tight-lipped, I laugh, don’t look up Getting lonely in your old age, Mum? I worry at my coat buttons, my fingernails, his lock.

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Katie Byford bed 10, ve day 75 needs to find a way in to the gentleman’s forearm tracks the vein to the crease and pins it

exhales, opens his fist an incubus tuning him static

wants to leave. doctors say he is reaching his threshold makes sure to shave his chin and upper lip before the change over over it a wide eye, endless width would like not to die but it happens walks home past bunting and trampled sponge cake We’ll Meet Again buzzes through a phonograph trumpet The Last Post played backwards through wet lashes the morning has slipped into rainbows, colours fall he melts catches him in his own hands

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hibernaculum an encampment for winter; a refuge velvet heads, spelunctial, knotted like a tapestry’s back share shallow breath in calcite clades, sleep. the warming air gets an ear first, a twitch, a lick. eyes ripen and pry open. molecule by molecule they shiver into consciousness, exchange relief, delight, drip like icicles from the vast vault. deep below, dark guano: phosphates, saltpetre, undigested beetle wings glitter in the tiny rub of light that dissolves the limestone in one thin seam. from above voices, their creatures, twist and rumble like gods, but what are footprints to wingbeats, what is fire to flight? in spring hope bleaches hard things and bats eat mosquitoes.

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virile the sharpest teeth in the kingdom / she* drinks his blood for thirty minutes without alerting the bull to her* presence / hairy-legged she* may have begun to develop a taste for human blood / once she* has taken her* first bloody meal she* infects her* next victim / to survive and reproduce he* must penetrate a living cell and assume command / he* is not a passenger multiplies in her* saliva / once inside he* ravages and in return gives nothing / the single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is a vir—

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parchment What Bird alone bringeth forth aliving creature º produceth milk for laruæ º ignoble; Uermin : or like uermin º grovveth from the tree as frutt : for when one doth droppe the reſt follovv º middle-beaſte cunning : unſound of spirit

cf. Æsop : crauen º fauovrs darke obſerue the vvings hath talons º draconis (m) serpēns (f) º ſhe doth take greateſt delight to feed vpon the pregnant moon or in the gloaming to hunt night moths and butterflies; of which they are most fond. º it is a ſoueraign counter charme againſt all ſocerie if a man naile her head dovvnvvard vpon his vvindovv.

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Here upon this leaf find the Battes spine pinned so as to justly demonstrate the head hath not feathers but haires : and the wings are thin skins or pannicles not unlike parchment: and that the wings have digits unnaturally long yet not unlike a human hand.

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Eve Ellis All My Dead Relatives Are Picnicking on the Banks of the Tennessee And it’s a fine day for it: checkered blankets spread under willow trees, children muddying their pinafores, plenty of hayseed for everyone’s teeth.

In their mutton-sleeved, sweat-yellowed dresses, the women dish out dessert – burntsugar, creamy – and the river washes over a build-up of sticks.

A number of the company are getting sloshed.

A girl laughs high and zithery. The menfolk lean back in the grass, considering her stockings.

Granny eyes the men over her specs; two uncles play catch with her knitting. A cake knife goes missing. The cousins get bored, play catch with the crockery, hurl saucers like discuses at the willow trees. China dust rains into the baby’s pram, Granny shoos the cousins, the women jiggle the baby and shush. Let’s play hide and seek, a small boy suggests, but there’s already rustling in the bushes, a zithershriek, crying.

No one’s seen the girl in awhile. And then the men sidle back out again. There’s a pause but this is Eternity, there’s plenty of time, everyone looking at each other like portraits in a very long hallway where nothing can be changed or undone, so the women get busy with the packing, the men tie it all down to the horsecart, the cake knife turns up, and at dusk the girl’s found.

She’s at the river, kneeling in the shallows, looking for the place where her mouth used to be.

Shortlisted for the Nine Arches Primers Scheme 2019.

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The Trauma Some nights, home by myself, I stream The Trauma on TV. I don’t even watch it, really, just leave it on in the background as I put away dishes, spray the countertop, wipe down the edges of things. At the end of each evening, I tell myself, it’s not a good series. The sloppy jump cuts, the repeated scenes, the soundtrack of car doors and tent flaps!

The girl too young to be thirteen. I could do a PhD on the director’s influences: Hammer horror, Full Metal Jacket, the rape films of the 70s.

Perhaps my research would discover why everyone’s hair looks like that. Imagine the viva: me in a cheap suit, my sweaty palms pressed to the podium, audience of dour professors in front of me. As evidence of my deep knowledge of the field, I play a long take reflected off the whites of my eyes, while my mother watches from the gallery, beaming and weeping, her lips moving with mine.

Previously published by And Other Poems.

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Haint Last night I heard the dogs again, this side of the crick. This morning another window’s smudged and her bitty footprint’s in the skift.

Ma wipes her eyes and the glass, takes the broom out to snow-sweep.

Pa’s painting the fence blue like a river she can’t cross. Tonight he’ll throw salt on the coals.

They’ll tuck me in while the sun’s stumbling down through the hollers, tripping on all those new stones.

But I’ve been up early, when it’s airish, with no light yet over the balds, and crept into the front room and seen her playing by the stove, her mite fingers dandling the red embers. I know she sees me with her black eyes and her brickle hair and her gap mouth and her pocky skin.

I say, baby sis, jasper-girl, where have you been?

Appalachian/ Standard haint/ ghost bald/ treeless mountaintop crick/ creek, stream mite/ small skift/ thin layer of snow brickle/ brittle holler/ a hollow, valley jasper/ stranger, outsider airish/ chilly

Winner of the Winchester Poetry Prize 2016.

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Genealogy after Mary Ruefle I was born, like a grub, under a sassafras leaf. Nourished by its juices, I grew thick forearms. These came in handy for my job in the curing barn. The farmer kept me on even when I lost two fingers to the steamer. Contraption was a word we girls understood as we slumped in the wavering heat, eating peaches for lunch. When Allie walked off the line one day I followed, ditching my apron in a red clay puddle. We camped under moss-bearded trees and grew to enjoy the chiggers who sucked our blood.

A moat of summer rain grew around us; I would have stayed, washing my clothes in the downpours, kindling fires with stray bolts of lightning—but I woke in my own apartment, a century on, with a word on my lips: Pa! My forgotten father. I stumbled to the moonlit stairwell, believing I might find him and be returned to myself, released from history, but in the streets below, the car roofs shone like beetle-backs and the asphalt ran like mercury.

Clutching the banister, I watched the hallway window as my backlit reflection blurred into an antique photo: his hand on my head as a child, both of us stern in our muslin, waiting for the camera’s pinprick, the light that goes boom.

Previously published in Propel.

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Nicole Lee 21 Stanzas for Her Nephew on His Birthday I have nothing but the air that I eat I give it to you I have nothing but the canker that rivets and shivers my nerves to stop-motion flights of time I give you my time When I could work I paid taxes & now I can’t work those taxes are paid back to me in cold round coin counted out by mercenaries into my shrinking palm one then one and only one How dare I need How dare I want How dare I still be living I give you my needing my wanting my still living

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I have thirty years on you but no words of wisdom other than these Don’t be poor Blessed are the poor in spirit I give you my poorness of spirit I have no thing to give you I have only the few things that still are free that require no cold round coin Here is a picture of sunlight pouring through a hole in the millstone cloud like water through a sluice that I saw over the common today I give it to you Here is the scent as we passed the industrial estate Goat curry you said and saliva pricked in our mouths and we both smiled Eating together That is an absolute good I give it to you That rushing sound high in the stratosphere once that sounded like God was finally arriving nicole lee

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I give it to you And this warm square of sun like a sticking plaster on my forearm as I write I give these to you

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What Everyone Should Know about the Workshops and Stores of the Ministry of Public Works That therein are employed 124,173 persons precisely and one of them is my cousin Xiangfei The Worthless When he got the job his mother my mother’s No 2 Sister cried And that a year later he still has the job and goes into the warehouse every day in his blue government uniform Is the occasion for much scarcely concealed incredulity among his relatives Second Aunt goes to the temple every day to pray and to give thanks for this gift of the ineffable gods She brings chicken steeped in rice wine steamed lotus leaf dumplings oranges Item: the original sketches of Engineer Qiao for his pound lock mechanism raising the elevation of the Grand Canal to carry it over the Eastern Mountains on its 4000 li journey from the Northern Capital to Hangzhou That there are fifteen levels in the hierarchy of the workshops and stores of the Ministry of Public Works and three branches: Army, Engineers, Highly-Skilled Craftsmen The youngest at level fifteen are the messenger boys

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They run through the streets of Kaifeng Open City in their red caps with their leather satchels They bear the silken knot of the emperor They cry that the camel train has come from Dun Huang Beacon City bearing amber blown glass and red coral from Isfahan and Tabriz And also my friend Ibn Malek who is a carpet merchant like his father and grandfather before him but likes to bring me tales also of his stern and lonely desert god Item: a 1000:1 model of the Dazzling Brightness Palace in Chang’an City of Everlasting Peace plaster and sandalwood painted in slate grey white and red, set on a revolving plinth. Overhead is suspended a golden phoenix enamelled with eyes of onyx. If you peer in through the open double doors of the Hall of Munificence you can see the Emperor inspecting a model of the palace in which you can see the Emperor inspecting a model of the palace in which you can &c The beacons are lit on the Taklamakan wall and drums resound through the city The barbarians have returned on their blood-sweating horses they fly over the trembling grass their eyes glow like braziers Armies are marching north the ground shakes the sky murmurs In the temples they pray for the Emperor: May he retain the Mandate of Heaven!

Item: a jade figurine of Kuan Yin the goddess of mercy emerging from swirling clouds workshop of Master Cho. One of a pair. The other is missing.

We have a booth by the shores of Dragon Pavilion Lake and they bring us hotpot from the famous Szechuan eating-shop in Little Sweetwater 150

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Alley. Ibn Malek tells me of the great astronomer Al-Khazin and his measurements of the obliquity of the ecliptic for the Vizier of Ray, using his chopsticks to illustrate. Three moves to checkmate. The steam rises from our cups of wine making us giddy. Music echoes from across the lake. The moon is rising.

Item: an annotated map of the Middle Kingdom. On the edges of the world we see Nippon Aleppo Lake Balkash. Beyond that the rushing sound of endless crystal waters that sluice off the tail of the Universal Dragon as he shifts in his sleep and the steam hisses from his nostrils descending as rain.

Previously published in Harana

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Stage & Screen

Yasmine Dankwah Extract from garage girls track 4: fa wokoma mame by ck mann spotlight on evelyn holding a letter. opens it. looks like she’s about to crumble under the weight of what she’s read. breathes. evelyn: it’s the fourth letter from the council in the space a two weeks. can’t keep doing this. i wanna tell someone. maybe mumsy? but she don’t want nothin to do with mensah’s … and my sisters... well, they’re only kids, whaddo they know ‘bout runnin a business and tryna keep it? just wanna hand over the weight and cost of this coupla benz’s letter and forget about it. just live my life but then i see you. nana. my grandmother, who didn’t wanna be called that. face too wrinkle-free too palmers-cocoa-butter smooth for that but then I find you and the irony, the irony of you, the irony of you sitting in a room in an old people’s home with that old people’s smell actin’ all old yasmine dankwah

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being all… old. and there you are. in that same old rocking chair [as] though you ain’t moved from the last time I was here just dizzee sittin’ there, starin’ into thin air but then you see me both eyebrows we rock-raised and i’m boiler suited and steel-toe booted up then you say it what you middle name christened me. [you] thought it were a blessing cos I was born on a monday same day, same name as your sister adowa so when you say it “adowa” call me “adowa” with a smile, there’s a… there’s this… this… gmt+1 early sunrise pride in your eyes beat. a pride that weren’t meant for me “adowa” born on the same day, same name as ya sister the one who run the garage with ya “adowa, εte sεn?”

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“nana, bɔkɔɔ, na wo nsoε?” i reply pretending to be her pretending to be her so that you could… see me? see that i miss you and your ability to remember me… evelyn. “adowa. the garage?”

Nana – ey3 ok. i say it every single visit. it will be ok. i will sort summit out. i will, nana. evelyn takes the letter and hides it in her draw. dusts herself off and exits. track 5: original nuttah by shy fx and uk apache louisa enters the garage looking like chili from tlc, wearing oversized silk grey pjs. a freshly pressed pair in red is hanging on one of the key hooks. double takes. she lays a framed image of her grandma face flat. coast is clear. earphones in, louisa feels the rhythm and proper gets into it. she starts t-t-to… sing (?) original nuttah. louisa: nah-nee-nee-woh-oh, zig-ee-nah-nah-no-no-no! nah-nee-nee-woh-oh, zig-ee-nah-nah-no-no-no! abigail: /what the? abigail, locked in the clamped car, sits up in the backseat. yasmine dankwah

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louisa: /nah-nee-nee-woh-oh, zig-ee-nah-nah-no-no-no abigail: lou!? is that you? lou! lou! louisa: ooh-yeah-eh, ooh-yeah-eh, ooh-noo-no-no-no-no. abigail bangs on the car window. louisa still “singing” is rummaging through the garage cupboards. louisa: abigaiiiiiiiil-ahhhhabigail: yeah yeah! louisa:

teefin’ my shit yet again searched high and low for my face kit only to find it in your crusty draw.

abigail: huh? louisa: … nah. nah are you actually mad? is this how much cream you left me? abigail:

whaaaat? you clearly don’t know me if you think i, big-girl-me would let a fellow human, my family member even suffer the treachery that is dry skin. fuck… louisa! louisaaaaa! louisa pissed, bad-bassline-bounces towards the car. humming, with what’s left of her face kit in hand. she kneels face level with the side window. adjusts

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it. lipstick at the ready. abigail climbs to the front seat – she’s gonna bang the window – clang! louisa double takes. a toolbox has fallen. she debates whether she should pick up the mess. sighs. gets up and then dances over to do so. abigail:

n-n-n-n-n-n-no-no-no louisa: come back! come back!

original madamadamadamadamada madamadamadah nutttah

garage girls was funded by the Boundless Accelerator Bursary and supported by Boundless Theatre.

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Soria Hamidi Point and Shoot A person appears in a blue burqa and looks around.

Woman:

Savages ignorant, animals – a person runs through the ages, a person yet to be surfaced, Polished, scrubbed clean, so a light hits the dark room Touches the film, develops the photo in the image of those with Enlightened sight for the person’s sake, for those with Unclear minds I smell the words, hear the sounds, Breathe, until I feel a heavy gaze burn my skin, rip my clothes, force their Single-minded attention on the body through the body – Flickering eyes grip the body in a violent stare until She stares back I like my outfit, it’s comfortable, breathable, Nice and easy My Mother gave me it when I was nine A tough woman, a soft woman, an Afghan woman I never understood her life Don’t think she ever had an orgasm A bit uptight, a bit wound up, a bit serious,

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Locked her feelings and threw away the keys, Found herself among the crumbling sorrows Of hollow Earth Maybe she wanted to protect me From the world or warn me About the future or save me from Life’s thick blade, Covering my body so I can see others while they can’t see me But at least she cared Yes, I’m naked under this What’s the need?

It’s summer The wind touches my skin I feel alive, alert, awake, What’s not to love?

She pulls up her burqa. We see a nude leg.

Really, sometimes It’s quite fun She drops the burqa.

You’re waiting You want to know You’re fidgeting You’re confused Until I put you at ease Then it appears The invitation you need To join and discover something New Otherworldly soria hamidi

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The PHOTOGRAPHER appears.

Photographer: Good, but maybe don’t tease Woman:

It’s what they want

Photographer: You’ll bait the audience Woman:

Did it work on you?

Photographer: Can I? The Woman nods. The Photographer prepares his camera.

Photographer: My project is about showing people from other countries And you’re Something new, Something else, Something fresh Someone who needs to be seen – and you have something to say The camera flashes.

The Woman starts to feel uncomfortable: turns her back, puts up her hands, crouches and withdraws.

The flashes continue.

The Woman takes off her burqa We meet an ordinary brown woman.

The Photographer is uninterested.

The Woman approaches the Photographer.

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Woman:

Did I get the job?

The Photographer seems unsure and shrugs.

Photographer: What’s your background?

Woman:

(looks behind her) White

Photographer: As you know, this is for an assistant role What do you want?

Woman:

Well, I’ve applied and you’re one Of the best photographers in the world In the country, of course, I want to learn But the story isn’t true I need your help Before, before it happens again, before she’s buried in the rubble

Photographer: What do you— Woman:

She stayed and she shouldn’t have and then Sadness swallowed her in an Ocean full of memories Back to Kabul, back home I couldn’t help her, couldn’t save her And I left her there, all alone, To return to my world of soft light sounds – do you hear it?

The Woman looks at the Photographer The Woman approaches the Photographer watching her.

The Woman pulls out a gun.

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The Woman aims it at the Photographer.

Blackout.

A shot is fired.

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Jack Stanley Extract from brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr And we begin. THE PATIENT is on stage. Entirely still. A cryogenic pod behind. She’s also holding a packaged frozen lasagne for some reason.

The Patient: Might not seem like it okay when you umm when you first hear this but I think the most profound thing you can do in your life is keep a Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference four layer rich ragu lasagne in your freezer I know I KNOW you’re thinking what is this been here five seconds she’s talking bollocks already but no seriously go with me on it okay throughout history humans have always been desperate to pause the inevitable onslaught of time and for centuries we couldn’t we were like yeah fuck it you win nature guess I will die now as a shell of my former self hope you’re happy but then eventually we found ways to fight back like for example errrrrr Industrial Revolution

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yeah I know I get it like the way I can just chuck out historical references like it’s no big deal well there’s plenty more where that came from and that’s Google now with the Industrial Revolution the machines and mechanics and technical shit took over so we had twenty more years tacked on the end of our lives to watch repeats of Tipping Point and then there were other things we did like pretending to buy time pausing us in time we invented cameras so people in centuries to come can look back through historical archives of selfies and think how fit you looked at your 30th but then the final way the best way was when we actually literally learnt to properly stop time people say the most important thing ever invented was the internet but nooooo they could not be more wrong it was the freezer cause the freezer in showing how time and decay and decomposition could be stopped that gave us hope and how did we first use this inspiring ability to change the course of nature as we know it that’s right frozen ready meals That’s what I just love about humans there’s nothing we won’t make mundane so that’s why when I walked over to the freezer that day and took out the lasagne that’s why it felt so poignant because like everytime we put food in a freezer we are saying and you still need to be on board here okay you said you’d be on board

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we know more than nature now we can stop time you having a Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference four layer rich ragu lasagne in the freezer is fundamentally a personal admission of your fear of death and desperate desire to put it off … wow that’s so profound I hear you scream please share more wisdom and you know I contemplated its symbolic importance in that moment while I stared at all those layers of processed meat and misery and mortality thinking how long have I just been sat slumped against the fridge alone turning the packet over and over in my hands feeling it defrost running with water while wondering what’s the point in anything trying to stop myself from reaching into the cutlery drawer that’s there literally there within arm’s reach and drawing out you know well that but I didn’t okay and that’s yeah err the most important thing isn’t it and umm when I finally got along to see my therapist Kate Come in come in no no no you know I love it when you drop by for an unannounced appointment I told her exactly what had happened now Kate

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Kate would buy fresh tagliatelle wouldn’t buy a reduced frozen macaroni bake cause she’s scared she’d be judged by the other people in the self-checkout area cause it’s very open plan and yes I will be defining everyone’s personalities in this story by whether or not they’d buy processed pasta I finish telling her what happened all of it about the episode I’d had how it was much longer and scarier and way nearer to the edge than the others because if anyone should know this stuff how low I felt about myself it’s her right and she sort of seems to be listening and going mmmmm which everyone knows is a sound only therapists can make like a bat sending out sonar as a way of saying ‘I totally understand’ she’s doing all the right things and then I get to the end and she just goes 164 Sorry?

164 I shake my head Patients referred to me in the last year oh some days I’m like aaaah why is it so hard to be me why do I have to be so good at therapy I continue to stare at her 168

stage

but it does make me think we are living through a mental health epidemic and other people need my help while with you sometimes I just think I haven’t helped you I’ve just made you worse course I hope that’s not the case she laughs maniacally in my face and I smile politely just as I had done for the previous five years I’d been here where yes as she said exactly right she hadn’t helped me at all The thing is in my professionally accredited opinion I don’t think therapy’s for you but there might be another way she starts typing something on her tablet pausing every few clicks to look at me and grin in a way that either says I’ve found the answer to this nightmare life you’re living or you’ve been on a fixed rate for five years I’m charging the next person in your slot double she finally reveals the screen the words FROZEN FUTURES displayed across it in sharp ice blue font if you can’t find an answer in the world today and you probably won’t from me why not freeze yourself into a future where you can find it there

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you’d be surprised how mainstream cryogenic treatment has got now it’s very affordable She leans towards me in the chair just like she did in that first session where she said she wouldn’t give up on me until I had this all under control this right here is the best chain of cryogenic centres this side of the north circular comfortable pods self storage for up to 10 years free coffee while you’re defrosting plus if you quote my name you get 20% off and I get a referral fee so who isn’t a winner I asked at this point in a way that didn’t feel unreasonable am I not just putting off my mental health problems by freezing myself for however long it might take for medical research to advance to where I need it to be and she said mmmmmmmmmmmmmm Sending out more echolocation than ever just have a look for yourself see what you think and I’m not saying it didn’t do wonders for my self esteem to realise that the only way I might be able to cure my depression is putting myself in what looked from the webpage like a unit from the middle aisle of Aldi but it probably didn’t help 170

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and yet still here I was scrolling through booking a slot ended up paying for premium so I could get a pillow and not wake up in 2033 with a dodgy neck (priorities) that’s when I realised and no I don’t think this is sad to say this actually that the thing that probably understood me most in the world in that moment was the frozen lasagne sure it was unwanted forgotten had anything of nutritional value squeezed out long ago but err crucially when you realise it’s there at the back of a freezer empty but for that and the five frozen peas you knew you should’ve just cooked with the others the relief and joy that there’s something there when you could’ve sworn there was nothing that’s yeah there was something in that I really really had to hold on to that

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Eli Zuzovsky Extract from Long Distance: A Cyber-Dialectic of Falling In and Out The dialogue consists of text messages between A (23) and Z (19), both college students.

Italicized text indicates the use of an emoji.

Z:

honey i think i’ve just met my future husband so you might as well start working on your speech

A:

oh. really where?

Pause.

Z:

oops. sorry. not for you my bad cat with tears of joy lol

A:

all good

Z:

sorry!

A:

by the way you left so fast that i forgot to say thanks for the library sesh grinning cat with smiling eyes

Z:

my plej

A:

plej??

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Z:

ha ha plej like pleasure. you know like, you said sesh

A:

ha ha yes.

Z:

not the biggest fan of irony, i gather

A:

no i do like irony but sometimes it flies over my head i think i might be a bit too literal

Z:

you didn’t strike me as particularly literal

A:

well you don’t know me Beat. sorry you can’t hear my tone i didn’t mean this in a snarky way

Z:

well i don’t know you yet…..

Beat. you there?

A:

sorry someone called Beat. ugh they called again (they being my mum)

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Z:

she ok?

A:

yeah that’s just what she’s like incessant.

Z:

that sounds more manageable than my mum to be honest

A:

what’s your mum like?

Z:

my mother is the kindest, warmest, best-intentioned person but

A:

oh here comes the but

Z:

it always does the butt Beat. sorry that was cataclysmic

A:

no worries just a low-hanging fruit, that’s all they say that every now and then it’s good for you high in fibre Beat. my bad (just trying to reciprocate unfunniness)

Z:

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ha ha, sure thanks

stage

A:

so you were just about to shit talk your mother before you were rudely interrupted Pause.

Z:

i don’t really feel like talking about her

A:

fair Beat. so tell me more about him

Z:

who?

A:

that future husband

Z:

they say he’s very literal

A:

a huge red flag

Z:

i know

A:

no really listen those are the most dangerous ones, i hear apparently hitler was extremely literal

Z:

wait so you’re telling me that when he called for the annihilation of the jewish race he actually meant it???

A:

face screaming in fear

Z:

exploding head

A:

crying cat

Z:

he does look like trouble

A:

hitler?

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Z:

well also but that dear old future husband

A:

and why would you want to marry trouble? i mean unless it’s in disguise or if he’s super hot

Z:

that’s a question for future-me beats present-me, really present-me only falls for well behaved, emotionally stable individuals past-me used to have a thing for sad bass players with facial hair but he got over it

A:

oh did he Beat. how did he get over it? (asking for a friend)

Z:

well you know experience is the teacher of all things and all that jazz

A:

i see

Z:

i fucking hate experience

A:

what have you got against experience?

Z:

are you kidding it’s the mother of all evils

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pain, shame, trauma where do you think they all come from? our consciousness?

A:

well what’s the alternative i guess

Z:

you ask a lot of questions

A:

how else will i learn?

Z:

and here’s another one

A:

nah, that one was rhetorical those don’t count ready for another q?

Z:

only if it’s shockingly intrusive and amazingly improper

A:

who were you trying to text about your future husband?

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Annie Hodson Extract from An Cladach Eile [NOTE: All dialogue in square brackets is in English, all other dialogue is in Irish] EXT. ROSSNOWLAGH BEACH – MORNING A vast and empty beach in the south of Donegal, northwest Ireland. Very early morning. Light just filtering into the sky.

A RUNNER disturbs the peace. She is fast and focused, breathing hard. The beach is a long dark stretch ahead of her. She runs and runs and– Slows down.

There’s a shape on the sand. Large and grey.

She jogs forward tentatively to see— A seal. Its head has been removed.

The runner stares down at it.

She looks around but the beach is empty.

Looks down at the seal again.

Then out to the sea, as though the answer might be there.

INT. LONDON. A SMALL BEDROOM – MORNING ÓRLAITH (32, half-black Ghanaian, half-white Irish) sits on the bed, a suitcase beside her.

She’s usually self-contained but witty, with a rich internal life. Right now, she is a woman retreated in on herself.

LUKE stands above her, face unseen. Cut-glass English accent.

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LUKE [This is it, then?] Órlaith is silent LUKE [Do you even understand what you’re doing to me? You heartless bitch.] Órlaith stares straight ahead.

LUKE [You wouldn’t care, would you? If I killed myself, you wouldn’t give a— Look at me. LOOK AT ME.] Órlaith raises her eyes, very slowly.

EXT. IRELAND WEST AIRPORT CARPARK – DAY OISÍN (29, half-black Ghanaian, half-white Irish, affable) sits on the bonnet of his car. Órlaith appears, suitcase in hand.

Oisín jumps up and waves to her. ÓRLAITH [Alright?]

OISÍN [Eyy!] He lifts her in a hug, spinning her round. ÓRLAITH (laughing) [Get off.] annie hodson

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He puts her down and they hug a little longer.

INT. OISÍN’S CAR – DAY Oisín drives through the countryside, Órlaith in the passenger seat.

She stares out of the window as the sea comes into view.

EXT. FINTRA BEACH – DAY Órlaith walks to where the seal was. There’s nothing there.

She looks around, kicks up some sand.

A shadow falls in front of her. ÉANNA Are you looking for the seal? Órlaith turns to see a dark haired man. This is ÉANNA, intense but wry, with a sense of something strange about him. ÉANNA [I said—] ÓRLAITH I know what you said. Where is it? ÉANNA I buried it. ÓRLAITH Why? ÉANNA It was dead. Dead things should be buried.

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ÓRLAITH It looked like a human killed it. How can anyone investigate if you’ve buried it? ÉANNA No one was going to investigate. ÓRLAITH Who are you, the dead seal whisperer? How would you know? Éanna’s lips twitch. ÉANNA Éanna. ÓRLAITH What? ÉANNA Éanna. That’s who I am.

She regards him a moment. ÓRLAITH You’re not from Killybegs. ÉANNA No. ÓRLAITH Where are you from? ÉANNA All over. Aren’t you going to tell me your name? annie hodson

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ÓRLAITH You shouldn’t have buried it. I was trying to find out what happened to it. ÉANNA Why? ÓRLAITH Because someone hurt it for no reason. ÉANNA Maybe they had a reason. ÓRLAITH Are you serious? ÉANNA No, I don’t mean that I agree. I mean that there’s always a reason.

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Zia Holloway Extract from Become Life INT. CONSERVATORY, OBSERVATION ROOM – DAY AMARIS (16, Caribbean), strong beyond her years, and LAZ (23), an uncertain man who always feels out of place, both wearing black, and both silent in grief, stand by an observation window.

LAZ We don’t have to see this part. It’s not too late to tell them you’ve changed your mind.

Amaris refuses to look away from the window. She shakes her head grimly.

INT. CONSERVATORY, ANNIHILATION ROOM – CONTINUOUS The observation room overlooks a small, tiled, low-lit room. The floor is made up of a pool of still, faintly luminous water, the size of a large bathtub. Its light glistens off the tiles around it. Shifting. Organic. This is the ANNIHILATION CHAMBER. A door opens behind the pool. Two attendants, in hazmat gear, enter, carrying a plastic stretcher on which lays SAMARA (23, Caribbean). In the low light, she looks like she’s sleeping. Only her stillness tells of her death.

INT. OBSERVATION ROOM Laz glances at Amaris, to check how she’s doing. she’s tormented – this can’t be happening but she cannot look away. The attendants place the stretcher with Samara’s body over the pool, just above the water. They exit the room.

AMARIS I don’t know if I should pray. zia holloway

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INT. ANNIHILATION ROOM The stretcher begins to lower into the pool. Samara’s getting closer to the surface of the water. We see her in all her living detail, braided hair, piercings in both ears, smile lines, a woman who expressed things without filter, who coveted little eccentricities. Doesn’t matter now, she’s dead— Samara’s body touches the water. When the liquid contacts her flesh, the effect is instantaneous. The water’s luminescence amplifies, becoming different colours, and froths. As Samara becomes completely submerged in the water, she looks almost alive as her arms spread out, and her hair wisps out around her from the movements of the water. Ripples of colour spread as unknowable chemical reactions spark between flesh and liquid to create an incredible sight— Her fingers are dissolving.

As are her limbs. And her skin. And her hair.

But the horror of her annihilation is hidden by the dazzling colours of the liquid as her body disintegrates in front of our very eyes.

Amaris cannot tear her gaze away. It’s beautiful. And terrible. But mostly beautiful.

INT. CONSERVATORY, QUIET ROOM – DAY A window looks into a vast enclosed tropical botanical garden. Light cascades from the glass dome roof. The room is starkly simple in comparison, only a table and a sofa, on which Amaris sits, trying and failing to process her enormous grief.

There’s a pamphlet in front of her. ‘LOSING LOVED ONES: FINDING PURPOSE BEYOND THE END.’ The door opens and FINCH (30s), an androgynous professor with a clinically polished aloofness enters. She wears a mask of sympathy.

FINCH How are we?

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Amaris carefully draws in her emotions. She doesn’t like people to see her like this.

AMARIS What happened to her?

FINCH She’s going through a process called simulated annihilation.

It sounds far worse than it actually is.

AMARIS You put her in acid, right?

FINCH Not acid. Alkaline, but even that grossly simplifies what it is. The solution is something many generations of scientists have worked on, which is the basis for dismantling matter so that it can be reassembled again into something new and organic.

AMARIS You’re recycling the dead?

FINCH Resurrecting. Listen, your sister will be part of a new scheme we’re conducting. One that uses the deceased to help bring back extinct life. Tigers. Bears. Elephants. We can rewild what we’ve lost through human-beings finally giving back.

AMARIS I don’t get it.

FINCH We’ll go through a very intensive process where we use the components of your sister’s life to facilitate the creation of an animal. All zia holloway

185

those flowers and trees out there, that entire park, did not exist five years ago. It was only through people donating their remains, giving us the ingredients to recreate organic material, that we brought back all the plant-life you see out there. It’s not exactly a 100% genetic match to what we’ve lost, but nothing ever is in science— AMARIS We’re Catholic. She should be buried by the church, like our parents.

FINCH I’m spiritual too. Religion and science doesn’t have to be in conflict.

Your sister has done an extraordinary thing. She’s helping create a miracle and hopefully, should this be a success, an animal that has been extinct for decades can walk the earth again.

Take comfort from that.

Amaris takes no comfort. She stands up and approaches the window to look out over the trees made of the dead.

EXT. CONSERVATORY – LATER The conservatory. A blisteringly white hall, like the modern version of the Parthenon, on burnt yellow park grounds in London. It is lit up by the last dying rays of the sun. The domed glass ceiling of the botanic garden reflects the setting sun like a beetle’s wing.

Amaris exits and sits down on the steps outside. Over the trees of the park, are the towers, high rises, constructions, and cranes of a changing London. Laz approaches. Sits beside her. A long beat. Their emotions weigh heavy on them both.

AMARIS Aren’t you supposed to say something?

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LAZ What do you want me to say?

They continue to be silent.

AMARIS That was my sister.

zia holloway

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Inigo Laguda Extract from I Don’t Need Help, Thanks EXT. SUPERMARKET – 21:50 ZEB (27) swans up to the supermarket entrance. LEMN (28) is perched in an enclave, smoking.

LEMN Well, well, well. We got bumbaclart Basquiat back in the building!

ZEB What’s going on, Lemony?

LEMN What’s going on with you? Where the hell you been?

Zeb pats himself searchingly.

ZEB You got a cigarette?

Lemn kisses her teeth and throws one to him. He sparks up.

ZEB But I don’t know, fam.

INTERCUT – MAIA FLASH The eyes of Maia bathed in red light.

ZEB I’ve been feeling a bit mad. I think all that stuff with—

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LEMN --Lemme stop you there. I hear you. And I respect the depth of your experience.

But give me one second.

Lemn lowers her cigarette hand as SAVANNAH (27) approaches.

LEMN (To Savannah) Wow! Babe, how are you looking so amazing for a bloody night shift?

If eyes are a window to the soul then, Savannah...

I wanna be your peeping tom.

ZEB Jesus Horatio Christ.

SAVANNAH You’re so silly, Lemn! See you inside?

LEMN Of course, darling.

Savannah heads inside, blushing. Lemn licks her lips until Savannah is out of earshot.

LEMN (Leaning into Zeb) Zebediah. I am going to (beep) the living (beep) out of that (beep) or my name isn’t Lemn Cleverly.

A beat.

ZEB What kind of supreme sorcerer fuckboy were you reincarnated from, fam? inigo laguda

189

LEMN Speaking of fuckboys: I see the vroom patrol is at it again.

LEMN gestures to the congregation of modded cars at the back of the supermarket car park.

LEMN What are they doing over there?

A car engine revs to subtitles that read: Serenading everyone in a quarter-mile radius with the splutters of my sweet muffler, wbu?

Zeb and Lemn take a drag in unison.

ZEB My boy from school put purple neons under his Renault Clio.

There was bare man like them in my hometown.

We linger on Zeb’s face as a car revs off screen. The subtitles read: Somebody, please be impressed by my sexy, engine noises.

ZEB They’re generally pretty harmless.

LEMN I keep forgetting that you grew up in the bloody shire of Narnia.

BRIONNE (54) exits the supermarket and makes a beeline towards them.

BRIONNE Lemn, your pick-pack rate has been exceptional lately. Keep it up!

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LEMN Aw, shucks! Thanks, Bree.

BRIONNE Zebediah. I’m glad you’re here.

We need to have a chat at some point regarding your unauthorised absences.

ZEB Should we do it now?

Brionne checks her watch. Lemn and Zeb flick their cigarettes away in opposite directions. Brionne looks back up.

BRIONNE Good idea. I have a little time. Please, after you.

We pan around to follow Brionne and Zeb head towards the automatic doors of the supermarket but stop at the cluster of cars.

Car 1 revs and the subtitles appear: Look at my sick new spoiler! Wow! Car 2 revs and the subtitles appear: Who needs a supercar when my 1-litre has an exhaust this loud?

Car 3 – the loudest – revs and the subtitles appear: THIS IS THE CARBURETING SYMPHONY OF A TOTALLY HEALTHY MASCULINITY. WITNESS MY ROARING ORCHESTRA.

inigo laguda

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Temi Majekodunmi Extract from Bros INT. ENISH NIGERIAN RESTAURANT – EVENING TOSIN (mid 20s, Black, dresses like he lives in Urban Outfitters), ASHLEY (mid 20s, Mixed- race, always has a fresh trim) and DAMI (mid 20s, Black, in an old River Island Rihanna T- shirt) are all finishing their meals. Dami scrapes his plate for the last few grains of rice, enjoying his meal. Tosin and Ashley look disgusted.

ASHLEY How did you finish all of that? Aunty overdid it with the scotch bonnets in that jollof rice. I’m sweating.

DAMI (Mouth full) It’s cuz you’re only half Nigerian. Your mum’s shepherd’s bush pie ain’t got nothing on this.

Ashley throws a used tissue at Dami.

TOSIN You’re deffo gonna have the runs.

Dami washes his hands in a bowl of water. Tosin smiles mischievously.

TOSIN How’s your roommate Dami?

DAMI He’s still got a girlfriend.

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TOSIN But does he have a boyfriend though?

Ashley clicks his fingers in Tosin’s face and Tosin swats his hands away.

ASHLEY Can we focus on the task at hand? So, this guy ghosted you, and now you want what?

DAMI You can’t be talking about going on a second date and then vanish.

ASHLEY How long have you been talking for?

DAMI Like a month.

ASHLEY A month? So, we’re just gonna turn up to this man’s gaff unannounced like the feds?

DAMI I thought you were down for the cause?

ASHLEY I am.

TOSIN Act first, questions later.

They do a three-way spud.

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193

ASHLEY What happened to the other guy you were chatting to?

DAMI Which one?

ASHLEY The airy-fairy one.

DAMI He said that I liked him too much which didn’t leave him space to be human or something.

Tosin tilts his head to the side confused and unamused like he does usually.

DAMI Exactly. Fake deep men are so annoying, I moved on.

A waiter drops the bill on the table. Dami looks at it and exhales loudly.

DAMI We splitting it?

Tosin looks at the bill and Dami burps.

TOSIN £200 for rice and stew? I’m not splitting it; you had like four meat pies and assorted meat.

DAMI You know I’m broke till pay-day.

They all stare at each other. Ashley sighs and taps his card, paying the whole bill.

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TOSIN Thanks daddy.

ASHLEY Shut up.

TOSIN A hetro paying for our homo’s meal, just the way I like to end my evening.

ASHLEY Don’t say hetro, its heterophobic bro.

INT. UNDERGROUND TRAIN BARRIERS – EVENING They approach the barriers and Ashley taps his card calmly. Tosin smirks and effortlessly jumps over the barriers without paying.

TOSIN Keep up.

Dami looks around anxiously, his stomach rumbles.

DAMI Wait! I’m not a hood rat like you.

Ashley and Tosin laugh leaving Dami. Dami ends up awkwardly crawling underneath the barriers. A woman stands over Dami and taps her card, the barriers hit Dami’s head.

EXT. A HOUSE – NIGHT Tosin and Ashley walk in front and Dami follows behind sheepishly, his stomach rumbles. temi majekodunmi

195

DAMI I think it’s this green one.

ASHLEY You think? I thought you’ve been here before?

DAMI Yeah... after a night at Heaven. I wasn’t paying attention to what his front door looked like.

They all stare at each other. Tosin abruptly walks to the door and presses the bell for Dami.

DAMI Wait is this number 16B or 116B? TOSIN Act first, questions later!

A spotlight flashes on as the front door swings open. Tosin and Ashley immediately duck down behind bins. Dami farts loudly and, instead of gas releasing, a small amount of watery poo trickles down his leg and then onto the ground.

Dami freezes. A man steps out.

MAN Dami? What are you doing!?

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Megan Smith Extract from Be a Darling EXT. BAMBURGH – DAY GRACE and THOMASIN walk through Bamburgh towards North Sunderland. Her face is everywhere, the ‘pretty’ version and the real version.

A constant stream of people approach them to say hello. She smiles politely but does not hear them.

A woman hands her a newspaper to sign. She signs it.

Another woman gives her a book – ‘GRACE DARLING AND THE WRECK’. A wildly beautiful woman adorns the cover. Grace signs her.

Another hands her a set of mittens. Grace’s breath quickens. She blinks and they are gone.

She looks at a shop window and sees Grace Darling smiling back at her, just for a second. She zones out to a daze.

INT. LONGSTONE LIGHTHOUSE – DAY Grace is still in a daze as she peels potatoes.

Through the haze, WILLIAM and Thomasin discuss their day.

THOMASIN You should have seen them, love. All over her. Madness.

I said, haway now, she’s not a toy.

WILLIAM Aye, just being nice I’m sure.

THOMASIN At least you’ve got here, love. Maybe leave all that a while.

Have you heard from the museum? megan smith

197

GRACE No. They might not like… no, I haven’t.

THOMASIN They might like it even more now.

GRACE I think I do good work for them. I’m not sure if they will be fond of all of ‘this’.

WILLIAM All this is them on the Main being grateful, just remember that, aye.

GRACE I’m grateful we made it back. I thank God for that.

A lot I’m not grateful for.

A lot I question him about.

WILLIAM I need some air.

He exits.

INT. PUB SOMEWHERE IN THE UK – NIGHT A pub full of men. Cheering and drunk.

A POET with a guitar stands on a stool by the bar. He clears his throat and as he begins. The men cheer – a favourite. A man dressed as a maid rushes into the middle of the pub, jumps onto a stool and pretends to row, to much amusement.

POET Frail was the bark, and fragile was the form, borne on the bosom of the bustling storm!

Illustrious maid! – O for a deathless strain to make thy name as boundless as the main!

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Bless’d were thine efforts destined thus to save the wretched from the terrors of the wave.

Let pyramids be placed high over the flood.

Where thy light foot, like faith, undaunted stood.

When Record shall to various renowns, assign bright honours and immortal crowns.

Lord she will sing, and lengthened she will say, how many mighties of the earth bore sway – but when she speaks of the perils of the sea, this shall be told – enough – to tell of thee.

The poem underscores the next scenes. The scenes and poetry combined have a sense of dread, as though there’s a monster approaching, just out of sight.

EXT. NEWCASTLE QUAYSIDE – DAY A large sign by a large boat in the busy quayside.

‘THE GRACE DARLING EXPERIENCE – FIVE SHILLINGS’ Passengers line up alongside the boat with tickets in hand, eager and expectant.

Geordie voices ring through the air, jumbles of words and sing song banter.

EXT. BROWNSMAN ISLAND – LATER Grace is in the walled vegetable garden. She digs deep and pulls from the earth.

Her arms covered in mud. Her dress much the same, without vanity.

EXT. NORTH SEA – LATER The boat from Newcastle steams through the sea up the Northern coastline.

EXT. LONGSTONE ISLAND – LATER Grace pulls into Sunderland Hole in her rowboat. She pulls the basket of vegetables to her hip and walks towards the Lighthouse. megan smith

199

A noise makes her turn – a steam ship sailing close to the island.

INT. LONGSTONE LIGHTHOUSE – LATER Grace is unloading her basket with the help of Thomasin.

William updates his log book.

A knock at the door.

Thomasin walks to open the door. Outside, the BOAT GUIDE from the tour stands, smiling.

BOAT GUIDE (performative) We are here to visit the home of the heroine Grace Horsley Darling.

THOMASIN Right.

BOAT GUIDE (quietly) Aye, well, if she just bobs her head out, I’ll have a happy boss and happy patrons.

Do us a favour.

She shuts the door and turns to look at William.

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Author Biographies

Hala A is a fiction writer. She is working on her first novel.

Jasmin Allenspach is a Swiss writer, award-winning physicist and ballet dancer living in London. In a no-man’s-land between languages, her literary fiction explores loss of identity, multilinguality, queerness and grandmothers.

Ettie Bailey-King writes macabre fiction about influencer culture, desire and jealousy online. She’s also working on a non-fiction book about inclusive language, based on her work as an inclusive communication consultant.

Melanie Banim’s writing explores how families do and undo harm.

Melanie has recently been shortlisted for Bridport and Northern Writers’ Debut Poet prizes and writes between Liverpool, London and Dublin on a programme with The Stinging Fly. Katie Byford is an alum of the Barbican Young Poets and a Britten Pears Young Artist 23-24. Her pamphlet He Said I Was a Peach was published in 2021.

Anna Jane Carling is a London based writer who is currently completing her first novel. Her writing is strongly influenced by the Irish diaspora and a sense of belonging.

Melanie Carvalho is an artist, writer and obituaries editor. Her first novel, Xim, was long-listed for the Cheshire novel prize. A short story, ‘Gybe’, will be published in the Brick Lane short story prize anthology 2023.

Patrick Cash holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Oxford and has been published in Dazed, Vice and The London Magazine. He’s currently working on Nightlife, a short story collection.

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author biographies

Fatima Cham is a recently graduated historian who, away from her endeavours to uplift the histories of society’s most marginalised, writes YA fiction that also centres around the side-lined.

Yasmine Dankwah is a British Ghanaian neurodivergent spoken word poet who writes plays. She is a Roundhouse Poetry Slam Finalist and an Accelerator Artist at Boundless Theatre (2022-3).

Jess Edwards is an award-winning writer/director of theatre and TV, directing professionally for the last decade. She is a Queer artist with a varied slate in development. Sharp Teeth is her first novel.

Eve Ellis won the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2016 and was long-listed for the National Poetry Competition in 2017 and 2022. Her poems have appeared in Magma, And Other Poems and Propel.

Pacifica Goddard is currently writing a collection of essays about parenting a child through non-terminal cancer. These moving inquiries push beyond stereotypical assumptions about the disease in an unconventional exploration of the mundane to the metaphysical.

Miriam Gold writes and illustrates from her home in London. Her first book, a graphic memoir of her grandmother’s extraordinary life, is being published next year by Jonathan Cape. She’s working on more graphic non-fiction about music, teaching and swimming.

Soria Hamidi is a writer. She doesn’t know how to feel about the ‘Afghan Girl’ photo taken by Steve McCurry, so she wrote a play.

Next up: more plays.

Annie Hodson is a scriptwriter and playwright from York, now based in London. She has been shortlisted for Channel4 Screenwriting, BBC Writersroom, the Sir Peter Ustinov Award and the Funny Women Writing Award. author biographies

203

Zia Holloway is a prolific film and television screenwriter based in Wales, with multiple original series in development with the UK’s most exciting production companies. She is known for characterful writing and rich worlds.

Gayathiri Kamalakanthan is a Tamil poet and facilitator. They won the Faber & Andlyn Publisher’s Prize and the Primadonna Prize. They run the poetry workshop WORD-BENDERS at The Common Press, East London.

Inigo Laguda is a Yoruba-British writer and musician from Hertfordshire. He is working on his debut short story collection.

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a writer based in Oxford and London. His chosen extract is taken from his first novel, as yet untitled, to be published by Europa Editions in Spring 2025.

Nicole Lee was educated at Malvern and Oxford. She works at an environmental charity and divides her time between London and Kuala Lumpur. Her poems have been published in numerous magazines.

Temi Majekodunmi’s debut play The Life of Olu ran at Soho Theatre.

His second Thicker Than Water was long-listed for the Alfred Fagon: Mustapha Matura Award. Writing groups include Soho, Royal Court and Bush Theatre.

Harriet Matthews is writing her first novel, a retelling of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe focusing on medieval Anglo-Jewry. She was longlisted for the Exeter Novel Prize and selected for the Jewish Book Week Emerging Writers Programme 23-24.

Carla Montemayor is originally from the Philippines and writes creative non-fiction. She won a London Writers Award for narrative non-fiction in 2021. She is represented by Lisette Verhagen of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop Literary Agents.

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author biographies

Sharanya Murali is a lecturer and writer in London. She is a graduate of the Tin House Workshop (2022) and a recipient of the London Writers Award for fiction (2021).

Leeor Ohayon is a writer from London, based in Norwich, where he is pursuing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. His work has featured in the White Review, Prospect Magazine, RSL Review and Paper Brigade.

JP Pangilinan O’Brien is a teacher and writer from West London. He is currently working on a connected collection of short fiction which deals with issues of diaspora, belonging and identity.

Michael Pourfar studied art history and interned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before becoming a neurologist. His EWP work-inprogress is an exploration of the intersections between art history and neurology told through the works of Rembrandt.

Gita Ralleigh grew up reading fantasy adventures set in faraway lands.

After having two children, she decided to write her own, The Destiny of Minou Moonshine, out now from Zephyr/Bloomsbury.

Electra Rhodes is an archaeologist whose prose has been widely published, broadcast, and recognised in a range of awards and competitions. She’s represented by Ariella Feiner at United Agents.

Melissa Richards is a Trinidadian writer and editor based in London.

She has an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths University, where she was shortlisted for the Pat Kavanagh Prize.

BR Rose is originally from Goldsboro, North Carolina and lives in London. She has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Kingston University, as well as a BA in History from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. author biographies

205

Kimberley Sheehan is based in Essex and this is her first novel. She works for national reading charity, The Reading Agency, running campaigns with publishers, libraries and schools.

Yvonne Singh is a journalist, editor and writer. Her work has been published in the Guardian, White Review, BBC History and Evening Standard, amongst others. She lectures in narrative non-fiction, fiction and journalism at London’s City Lit. Megan Smith is a writer from rural Northumberland specialising in screen and stage. Her work focuses on putting complex and occasionally morally dubious female characters centre stage.

Jack Stanley is a writer from South London whose stories explore the moments where personal and planet-sized crises meet. He’s had work performed at Southwark Playhouse, HighTide Festival and Latitude and was chosen for the Royal Court Writers’ Group.

Sarah Stribley is a theatre producer and writes middle-grade fiction.

She has a degree in English Literature from the University of Sussex and is working on her first novel, inspired by a true story involving a platypus and a WW2 spy mystery.

Grahame Williams is a fiction writer from Bangor, Northern Ireland, and his work has appeared in the Stinging Fly, the Winter Papers and been broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Eli Zuzovsky is an Israeli-Italian writer and director working across film, TV, literature and theatre. He holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford, where he studies as a Rhodes Scholar.

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author biographies

Acknowledgements

T

he London Library Emerging Writers Programme would not have been possible without a huge amount of support.

We would like to thank all the individuals and organisations who granted us the funds to carry out this Programme: Bloomsbury Publishing, Philip Broadley, The John S Cohen Foundation, Paul Dettman, The Garrick Charitable Trust, John and Kiendl Gordon, Sir Max Hastings, Drue Heinz Trust, The International Friends of The London Library, Gretchen and James Johnson, Simon Lorne, Robert Macleod, The Julio and Maria Marta Núñez Memorial Fund, OJ Colman Charitable Trust, Peter Stormonth Darling Charitable Trust, PF Charitable Trust, Deborah Goodrich Royce, Sarah and Hank Slack, Virago Books and a number of donors who wish to remain anonymous.

A huge thank you to the judges – Yassmin Abdel-Magied (chair), Simon Garfield, Eli Keren, Nell Leyshon, Rachel Long and John McNally – who read many many applications with openness, careful attention, generosity, empathy and, when it came to the judges meeting, a great sense of fun and collaborative endeavour. Thank you also to all the brilliant readers who helped us through an epic application process.

Thank you to everybody who generously shared their expertise with the cohort during the writing development masterclasses and workshops, which took place over the course of the year: Kwame Alexander, Rishi Dastidar, Edward Docx, Travis Elborough, Eleanor Greene, Jane Feaver, Carole Hailey, Sara Langham, Nell Leyshon, Karen McCarthy Woolf, John O’Farrell, Scott Pack, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Sarah Savitt, Gemma Seltzer, Alexis Zegerman and, from The London Library, Matthew Brooke and Amanda Stebbings.

Thank you to all the staff of The London Library, who worked so hard to make this Programme a success, in particular: the Fundraising Team, who first developed the idea and have worked tirelessly to raise the money to keep it going from strength to strength; acknowledgements

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the Member Services Team, who make everyone feel so at home in the Library; the Membership Team, for endless admin and logistics; the Communications Team who helped spread the word far and wide; the Building and Facilities Management Team who enabled the cohort to come together in the Library; Annie Werner for all the work throughout the applications and judging process, administration of the Programme and help running Programme events; Emily Harris for yet more help with administration and Programme events and for all the collating, formatting and comma wielding on this anthology; and Agnes Gill for all the chasing and cross-checking and general calm vibes. And thank you to the Director of The London Library, Philip Marshall, and Membership Director, Felicity Nelson, for all their support.

Thank you to Tom Conaghan and the team at Scratch Books for doing all the clever work which makes a book a book and to Matt Bourne at Level for the design.

And, finally, thank you to the forty fabulous writers, an A to Z of true talent, who made the fourth year of the Programme such a joy and a pleasure, the 2022/2023 London Library Emerging Writers cohort: Hala A, Jasmin Allenspach, Ettie Bailey-King, Melanie Banim, Katie Byford, Anna Jane Carling, Melanie Carvalho, Patrick Cash, Fatima Cham, Yasmine Dankwah, Bryn Davies, Jess Edwards, Eve Ellis, Pacifica Goddard, Miriam Gold, Soria Hamidi, Annie Hodson, Zia Holloway, Gayathiri Kamalakanthan, Inigo Laguda, Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, Nicole Lee, Temi Majekodunmi, Harriet Matthews, Carla Montemayor, Sharanya Murali, Leeor Ohayon, JP Pangilinan O’Brien, Michael Pourfar, Gita Ralleigh, Electra Rhodes, Melissa Richards, BR Rose, Kimberley Sheehan, Yvonne Singh, Megan Smith, Jack Stanley, Sarah Stribley, Grahame Williams and Eli Zuzovsky.

Claire Berliner is Head of Programmes at The London Library and oversees the Emerging Writers Programme. She is also a writer and editor.

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acknowledgements