New Voices Rise Vol.III

Vol. III

From the Silence of the Stacks,

New Voices Rise

An anthology of writing by The London Library Emerging Writers Programme 2021–22 cohort * Edited by Claire Berliner

Published 2022 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 2022 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) 978-0-9553277-5-9 ISBN (ebook) 978-0-9553277-6-6 Typeset by Will Dady, 2022 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

Contents

About The London Library Introduction

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Fiction Beth Alliband Leonie Annor-Owiredu Phoebe Yemi Ara Isabella Rose Bengoechea Katie Buckley Tilda Coleman Tom Conaghan Viktoria Dahill Edward Fortes Gilli Fryzer Stewart Gott Niamh Hunt Vanessa Phan Harriet Rix Liz Tresidder David Willey

Cashmere 13 The Visit 17 Extract from a fantasy novel 21 Extract from Rusalka 25 Extract from The Truck Driver 29 Extract from Sea Bruise 33 Extract from Father Nicolas 37 Extract from Compassion Fatigue 41 Extract from Soirée 45 Extract from Resurrection 49 Extract from Hammerhead 54 Extract from English Rose 59 Beneath the Stairwell 64 Citadel 69 Extract from Greetings from Cooke, Montana 73 Dream / Time 77

Graphic Novel Ella Baron Dominique Heyse-Moore

Character Designs for INTERFACE 83 Prologue from a family memoir 88

Non-f iction Paul Atherton Hana Fazal Eleanor Franzén Kate Holderness Alexis Keir

Britain Isn’t Great 93 Extract from All the way down 98 Gamble/Forebear 103 Happier Than Ever 107 Extract from Treehouses You Can Build by Yourself! 111 5

Grace Quantock Jessie Thompson Kathleen Walker-Meikle

Extract from Madwomen Are My Ancestors 115 The Peanut-Crunching Crowd 120 Dead Parrot Society 124

Poetry Courtney Conrad

Oakley Flanagan S Kim Daisy Syme-Taylor

Anastasia Taylor-Lind

Community Breeds Miracle 131 Holey Ground 132 Hope Road 134 Yardie’s First Day 135 Apparently Personal 136 Perennial 139 Asylum 141 ash & elm 146 tissue paper 147 ellipse 148 Rewind 150 Shooting 152 Welcome to Donetsk 154

Stage & Screen stage

Simon Jaggers Will Lord Charles Edward Pipe

Esohe Uwadiae screen

Paolo Chianta Ella Godfrey Gerline Ndombasi Sid Sagar

Gun to Your Head 157 The Voice Inside Your Head 163 Extract from The Ill-Fated 1875 Cattle Drive from the Able Ranch in Texas to One of the Railheads in Kansas 168 When Among Friends 173

Ideas for a Film Set in The London Library 177 Extract from Please Excuse Me 182 Extract from Don’t Forget Me 185 Extract from Baked Beans 190 Author biographies Acknowledgements

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196 201

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 seventeen 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

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Introduction

The desire to know more, the desire to feel more, and, accompanying these but not strangling them, the desire to help others: here, briefly, is the human aim, and the Library exists to further it. –

S

o said former London Library member EM Forster and no quote better embodies both the Library’s values and those underpinning our Emerging Writers Programme. The Library was founded to be a place where knowledge and creativity could be shared, cultivated and sanctified. And not just for their own sake, but for the sake of humanity itself. It is just as important now that there should be a space where literature, freedom of expression and a multiplicity of voices can be celebrated, explored and nurtured. And it is essential that this space be as open and accessible as possible. This is why the Emerging Writers Programme was conceived and why it is such an important part of what the Library has to offer.

The London Library Emerging Writers Programme has been running each year, since 2019. It is 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; and 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.

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introduction

In the first year, we received over 600 applications to the Programme; in the second year, just over 800; and, in the third year, almost 1000 people applied, from which forty writers were offered a place. They became the 2021/22 cohort, whose work is collected in this anthology. The group hail from across the UK but, as their work in this collection reveals, are international in outlook, background or because of the work they do – whether that be photographing the war in Ukraine, clearing mines on the Turkish-Syrian border, translating French and Italian literature, investigating their own Caribbean, Asian and/or African heritage, or imagining their characters into Parisian banlieues or small-town America. The group work across a range of genres including poetry, novels, short stories, memoir, history, children’s and young adult writing, screenwriting, playwriting and, for the first time on the Programme, graphic novel.

Their projects explore a huge range of topics, such as migration and identity, climate change and war, parenthood and childhood, grief and joy, illness, homelessness, inequality, disability, sexuality, myth and religion. They feature pets, vets, Norse chieftains, mermaids, ghosts, dreamers, schemers, writers, fighters, players and plenty more besides.

The application deadline for this Programme fell in the midst of a COVID lockdown, the judges’ meeting took place online and we had no idea whether the Programme would eventually take place in person, but it did… and then it didn’t… and then it did again. It was a strange year of hybrid meetings and never knowing who would be able to turn up. And a disproportionate number of the cohort experienced huge life events – for better or worse – in the course of their year. Yet, the group came together with commitment, inclusivity and drive. They formed supportive communities within their peer groups, forged friendships, shared ideas, work and opportunities. A number of them found agents and publishers, or had work commissioned or produced. There was also, I’m delighted to report, a dedicated post-event pub-going contingent. introduction

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The work the cohort have produced, as you’ll see, is diverse, compelling, beautiful, wise, provocative, generous, moving and, some of it, laugh-out-loud funny. It has been a joy to collect it into this volume, just as it has been a joy – and so much fun – to work with this incredibly talented bunch of writers. I look forward to coming across their books on the shelves of the Library in the not-too-distant future and to spying them wandering the stacks, as they continue to explore, to learn and to create, in the spirit of their Library-haunting forebears and for the sake of furthering the ‘human aim’.

Claire Berliner

Head of Programmes, The London Library August 2022

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Fiction

Beth Alliband Cashmere

T

he Aga was bought before the kitchen was built. The kitchen was designed before the house had even been bought. Magnus, Mags for short, had thought it needless. He prefers the new high-tech contraptions. The sort that clean themselves and beep when they’re heated to the perfect temperature. He made a good case too for getting one of those. What was the point in renovating an entire house into an ode to modernity if you were just going to stick an ‘old oven’ into it at the end? But he relented. He always does.

I turn the temperature up on the dial, ready to begin making dinner for the kids, then go to the corner cupboard and pull out my favourite mug. It was an old Christmas gift from a work party. It is not seasonally decorated, but rather one of those with an initial painted on in florals, as if we are all so narcissistic that even our coffee cups should somehow speak our names. J is for JANICE. T is for TIFFANY. C is for CHRISTINE and this mug is MINE. I don’t like the mug because of the decoration – it’s not even my letter – but I like the way it sits in my hand. And, so it is, that every afternoon, as I begin the routine of making dinner for two children who change their minds daily about what they do or do not like to eat, I pick this mug that settles comfortably into the palm of my hand and make a coffee with whatever new Nespresso pods have been delivered.

The younger child, the girl, who is exactly like her father in temperament, comes running into the kitchen to hug my legs and tell me she loves me, as if it has only just occurred to her. It’s as if she gets hit by waves of affection in the middle of her game-playing and she simply must express them. I think she hugs my legs because it reminds her of when she was still just a toddler and that move automatically resulted in her being hoisted onto my hip. But she’s five now. Long since passed those days. beth alliband

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She is still holding my legs when Magnus walks in and she runs to his legs instead. He scoops her up and they share their affections with each other, both warm and open and unafraid of what they feel. I am much more guarded.

“Do you know…” he begins. But I know what he needs and so run out into the hallway to the cupboard and pull out the dry-cleaning I picked up earlier. I hand him a blue shirt.

“I picked everything up this afternoon. I know you’ve got an important dinner.”

“You’re amazing. What would we do without you?” he says, looking to the girl conspiratorially.

Magnus is good when it comes to acknowledging the small things. I think that matters more to me than the big. Feeding the kids, keeping the house clean, keeping on top of all the important dates; he says thank you for all of those, but what am I going to do? Forget to make dinner? Leave the children at school and go shopping? But the little things – like when I pick-up important dry cleaning or go to the store that’s further away to get the local honey for his hay fever – those thank yous mean a lot. It means that what I do matters. So often, it feels like it doesn’t.

While Magnus sits with the kids, I go to take the rest of the dry-cleaning upstairs. There’s not much. A couple of cashmere sweaters, a tiny woollen skirt, the rest of Magnus’s shirts. When I open the cupboard, I first put the children’s shoes in, knocking the pair of tatty Converse off the rack and placing a pair of patent Mary Janes in their place.

Upstairs I hang the shirts next to the dress that I got dry-cleaned last week. It was worn at a wedding and had champagne spilt down it more than once. I think I hate it. When I first saw it, I loved it, had been wooed by the softness of the material and the reassurance of a lavish price tag. It’s the sort of material that tells me how much I should love it. That, despite its boring print, it is expensive and therefore should be coveted. Its very presence has an authority here that I do not. It’s as if it sneers at me, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’

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or rather, ‘Don’t you know where I was bought? How much I cost?

Who designed me?’ The answer to all these questions is that I do and I don’t care. But, still, I find myself gently cradling it as I walk to the dry-cleaners, offering up the champagne-soaked bodice like it’s a gunshot wound to the chest.

Dinner is cajoling a single spoon of peas into their respective mouths. Half a spoon then. A single pea. When did they stop liking peas? Thankfully they still like mash potato, and so I dollop another mountainous gloop onto their plates. Carbs on carbs with a side of ketchup it is.

They get their twenty minutes of TV whilst I am cleaning up.

Oh yes, this is a TV sanctioned household. With barely enough minutes’ allowance that the pressure of selecting a show with enough time left to actually watch it in its fullness has, on more than one occasion, resulted in tears… But, to be fair to me, that had been a very stressful day.

There’s the usual fuss when the TV goes mute and what feels like a rehearsed resistance to bath-time.

“I don’t care if I stink,” the boy will say.

“I do,” I reply.

“No soap though.”

“You have to have soap.”

“A ten second bath then.”

“If you can clean your entire body in ten seconds, then you can have a ten second bath.”

Inevitably, he doesn’t want to get out for twenty minutes.

Magnus comes in when they are in their pyjamas, hair combed, teeth brushed, snuggled up together reading a book. I escape downstairs before this tableau of domestic bliss is disrupted by one of them hitting the other.

I am on the stairs when the doorbell rings. I open it and Claire, the mother, is standing there.

“Sorry. Forgot my key. All OK?” beth alliband

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“All is good.”

“Brilliant. I’m glad I caught you actually. Someone gave me this as a belated birthday gift and I actually already have it. There’s no gift receipt, so I thought you might like it.”

She hands me a bundle of tissue paper, a cashmere cardigan like one I hung up earlier is nestled inside.

“Oh, thank you.”

She dashes upstairs calling out to her beloved little ones, whose feet I can hear landing on the floor to run to her. I put on my battered Converse and, grabbing my bag, stuff the cardigan inside next to a well-thumbed book and lunch’s dirty Tupperware. I leave to go home.

Outside it is colder than I anticipated and halfway down the road I decide I cannot bear to keep my arms bare.

I put the cardigan on. It doesn’t quite fit.

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fiction

Leonie Annor-Owiredu The Visit

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t was a clap that woke James up that morning. Not that it differed from any other morning, but it still shocked him. When the dry and dusty winds blew over from the Sahara, they brought guests with them into their bedroom. These guests were somewhat obsessed with his wife Maia. They’d whisper sweet nothings in her ears and leave love bites that were sure to show up the following day.

He let out a yawn, stretching his hand to pat down the left side of his bed, knowing that Maia wouldn’t be there. He shook his head as he slumped his body forward.

There she was, tip-toeing around the room, tracing after a mosquito. It was like a kind of waltz, if he looked at her after he had rubbed his eyes. Maia’s claps mimicked an off-beat Caucasian trying their best to move their hands in time to prove they were down with the culture, as they sang along to Kendrick Lamar’s latest, careful to miss out the n-word, of course.

“You’ve got it all wrong.” James tutted and stepped down from bed. His hands framed hers and slowly drew them together and then apart again, bringing her hands back into rhythm for clapping back at mosquitoes. She chuckled as she twirled around to face him. She fidgeted with the sleeves of his robe.

“Do you think our house is easy to find?” Maia stilled as she spoke.

“Hey,” he said. “It’ll be OK, I’m sure they will find us.”

“We should never have moved. These mosquitoes are trying to kill me. And don’t you dare say anything about my ‘sweet blood’,” Maia said.

James took a deep breath and thought about the place they had left behind. It had been his idea to move. He’d had to crouch to get through doors and avoid hitting light bulbs. Cooking caused the ceiling to sweat. The air-conditioning unit would blow leonie annor-owiredu

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hotter air than that which they were trying to cool. And the hallway had been filled with portraits, floor to ceiling, of his ancestors and while their eyes followed whoever walked near them, Maia didn’t mind. She’d often stop and stare back at them, until one day they spoke to her and they hadn’t stopped since. Despite leaving the portraits behind, the voices had found their way to Maia in their new home.

She looked towards their balcony. They had lined it with plants; each was dripping with tepid water droplets from the diffuser left nearby. When she stepped out, she saw a car pulling up to the house.

She turned to James, bouncing with joy.

“They’re here.” Maia proclaimed and the house-help eavesdroppers scattered like ants as she rushed back into the bedroom, grabbed something from her jewellery box and ran downstairs to open the door. James followed her but could see no one on the threshold. He saw no one follow Maia into the garden or sit down on the chair she was beckoning them into. He watched the house-help pour two cups of hibiscus tea for Maia and her visitor but he could only see Maia sip at it.

“Hi.” “Hi,” it replied.

They sat on wicker bistro chairs under the canopy.

“You look different. Well. I mean you look well. I wasn’t sure that you would find us, we– we moved.” How do you compliment a spirit?

What’s the right amount of small talk? Maia thought as she stumbled over her words.

“I’m here. How has it been?” it said. It had grown shorter and was a less alarming colour than when they’d first met. Its overall demeanour was calmer.

“I’ve got something to show you.” Maia awaited her guest’s reaction as she held out the ball she’d grabbed from her jewellery box, a ball that she’d found outside of their previous home the morning of the spirit’s first visit. It was smaller than she remembered, she almost didn’t recognise it. “I kept it, but…”

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The spirit simply laughed and took a gulp of the tea, which seeped out of the holes in its ethereal body. When these spirits would visit at first, their presence was overbearing and now she struggled to remember what she had once looked forward to. She knew James didn’t understand any of it, though he wanted to.

“What do you see?” he’d sometimes ask. “How do you know they’re there?”

“These things have a way of making themselves known,” she’d explain. “They’ve been roaming around earth since before time was a reference point.” But she knew he struggled to believe her.

She tried to stay present. She pressed down on the edges of her seat.

“You tried to hold on to the child?” the spirit asked.

The pang of guilt growled in her stomach. It couldn’t be drowned away with tea.

Clouds grew closer together and the Fan-Ice merchants beeped their horns for the last call of the day. The sun was retiring for the evening, as the hour of parting arrived. The spirit stood up.

“You’re leaving?” Maia asked, as the spirit embraced her.

“There are days, necessary days, when things... change. But in our culture, death isn’t the end, you know that.”

At the old house, when Maia’s ‘visitors’ came over, James would go into the family room and rearrange books, dust glasses and, every so often, peek out into the garden to check on his wife. He never thought he’d have to do the same in the new house, but here he was. He saw Maia hug nobody and then walk sheepishly into the house. When she entered the room and saw him, she held out her hand and led him to their kitchen. She pulled out a stool from under the table to stand and reach the cabinets above. She took out flour, sugar and a deep frying-pan. James took eggs and butter from the fridge and when he closed it, he heard his name and turned to Maia.

“Yes, babe?” leonie annor-owiredu

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She was sifting through the flour. “Huh?” “Didn’t you just call me?”

She shook her head.

He looked beyond her and there in the doorway, he recognised the vague shape of a small child. He pressed his eyelids tight, as if that could stop the fact that he could now see.

Weeks passed since that day in the kitchen, when it had become true for him too. When the rain fell on their roof, he’d lay there next to Maia, knowing more and less about himself than before. He was unsure when the next visit would be, but he knew that he would be ready.

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fiction

Phoebe Yemi Ara Extract from a fantasy novel

S

The Third Dawn

he made her third attempt when the moon was at its highest.

This time she wouldn’t be caught.

The girl prowled in the shadows of the hall, watching as a pool of light spilled over the kitchen threshold. A woman appeared beneath the arched entry, lantern swaying in her fist. Like the rest of the foreigners, the woman was pale – her skin the same shade of cream as the inside of a rambutan and dusted with brown dots – and a braid of flaxen hair fell down her back. The woman’s frame was swallowed by the same bedlam of frills and fabric that the girl had identified as servant-wear.

The woman paused, and the girl’s grip tightened on her knife. The grooves of the hilt dug into her palm. The woman glanced back into the kitchen, then started down the corridor. The girl didn’t breathe until the lantern light vanished.

She crept into the kitchen. The kitchens in the palace-city were open circular rooms with coloured-glass ceilings and blood-stone walls. The foreigners’ kitchens were mazes of twisted arches and shadowed alcoves. Metal-vined windows spilled moonlight onto the tiles.

She could feel the pulse of her heartbeat reverberating in her skull as she clambered onto the countertop beneath the largest window, her bare feet sliding against the marble. She crouched in front of the glass.

Connecting the frame to the sill was an ornate dial. She pushed her fingers into the slots, as she’d seen the servants and the tutors do when they brought meals to her chambers. Clockwise, then a click.

The dial didn’t move.

She dropped the knife, gripping the dial with both hands, and pushed. phoebe yemi ara

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Mother, please– “They lock the windows at night.”

She whipped back.

Standing beneath the arch was a shadow. The breath vanished from her lungs. And then the shadow shifted and a shard of moonlight slanted over his features.

Not a shadow. A boy. He was slender, wisplike, with amber eyes large as dead suns. And his skin – it was bronze. That was what startled her the most. Not like hers, but dark nevertheless and unlike the foreigners she’d seen so far. For a moment, she wondered if the Traitor had stolen him too. And that thought snapped her back to herself.

The shadow-boy stared at her, unblinking.

Terror pooled in her chest. All he had to do was shout and every lantern would be lit, and they would drag her back – not again. She would not suffer failure again.

Her gaze flitted to the knife. A throw aimed at the skull from this distance – he would die before he could even scream. They wouldn’t find his corpse till the morning. Her palms became slick. Kill him.

She was warrior-born, trained in weaponry since before she could walk. It would be easy.

The boy was walking towards her.

Mother would do it; Mother would do whatever was needed to return to her kin. She reached for the knife just as he pulled himself onto the countertop.

He didn’t look at her; instead, he pulled a set of keys from his pockets. She stared as he unlocked the window. He pushed the glass with a force that shook his frail limbs and the window squealed open.

An icy wind gusted into the room, swaying the dark strands of his hair.

He stared at her with an eerie solemnity. “Do you know where to go?”

She blinked, then stared. “Yes,” she finally bit out. Then she kept staring.

Perhaps he is a wisp. The thought sent a chill through her bones.

Her cousins had told her stories of the envoys that ancestors sent 22

fiction

when you were in dire need. Servants caught between this world and the next, brought forth as portents and guides.

And then she noticed the locket around his throat. The gold was chiselled with the Traitor’s crest – a rose and a sparrow. She felt hatred rise beneath her skin.

He might not look like the foreigners, but he dressed like them.

And if he was a servant of her ancestors, he would look like her, wouldn’t he? The shape of his features was unfamiliar and his bronze skin was wan – as if he hadn’t seen the sun in an eternity. And not just that, but he had the grief-sickness; she could see it in the sunken lines of his face, the glaze of his eyes. She could not imagine what barbarism passed here to let a grief-sick child wander alone at night.

If Mother sent a portent, it would not be this sickly shadow-creature.

She hesitated anyway. “Your name,” she demanded.

He blinked. Then, “Dante.” He held out his hand.

She didn’t take it. “This debt will be paid.”

The boy faltered – then smiled.

The expression startled her enough that she froze. She gripped the knife and focused on the world outside. A sprawling garden stretched beyond the window, the rest of the Traitor’s grounds obscured by hedged borders. Hectares of land stood between her and the riverbank. She could reach it in minutes – she was the fastest runner in her training cohort; faster than her instructor even. When she’d aced the examinations last cycle, Mother had started calling her cheetah; it was the first time Mother had smiled at her. Since then, the girl had woken up at dawn and practised sprints every day.

The boy watched her. She had the faintest sense that he wanted to come with her. As if he were waiting for an invitation. But he was not her kin – she held no responsibility to him.

Besides, he would slow her down.

The girl slipped out of the window, crushing the flowerbeds beneath. She felt the shadow-boy’s stare on her as she sprinted across the garden. She didn’t look back. phoebe yemi ara

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* She made it as far as the port. And, just as dawn light stained the sky, she was caught.

The first time they caught her, they started locking the doors. The Traitor had cried and she’d imagined ripping his eyes from his skull.

The second time, they’d taken to injecting her with chloral, a cloudy drug that deadened her till daylight.

This time, they broke her legs.

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Isabella Rose Bengoechea Extract from Rusalka

S

he waits for him in hotels.

Always his choice of course. He chooses the grand old ones with plush lounges and private dining rooms, where staff in tailed black jackets speak in whispers, and gold-rimmed porcelain gleams in glass cabinets. The hotels whose names cast a spell in whichever city of the world they are repeated. Names she heard long before she set foot in their marble foyers.

She stretches out on the enormous bed and inhales the potent scent of the flowers spilling from a vase. This suite is the finest they have. But she is used to rooms such as this, with their antique tables bulging in carved fruit and balconies that overlook the parks and fine streets of the city. She must have waited in a thousand rooms just like this. Dug her toes into a thousand rugs. Must have lain in a thousand beds.

A cloud streaks the setting sun. The summer heat has been beating down onto the terrace all afternoon where a table set for two is untouched. Tiny cakes are arranged on a tiered stand and a bottle of champagne reclines in a bucket, a pool of tepid water rising around it.

She glances at the blank face of her phone. No message or missed call. A breeze, perhaps from the cooling day, causes a shiver to pass through the flowers.

The traffic of the city rumbles far below.

The woman lifts herself up from the bed. She pads to the bathroom, and stands before the mirror. With the balletic near-caress of a longhoned art, she peels the nightdress from her shoulders until she stands unclothed. Her appearance is arresting. Skin so pale it is almost luminescent, strange hair, a young doll face.

She is yet to meet a man displeased by what he sees. And she has known and forgotten thousands in her time. Over many years she has watched their movements and talk and learnt to please, to satisfy. Artist isabella rose bengoechea

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and canvas in one, both Pygmalion and Galatea, moulding herself to each man she reels into her way. She can smell their curiosity, the wants buried in them, the stink of their desire. In the flushes creeping up their necks, the throw of their shoulders, the clench of their hands on her body. They want to breathe her in, that salty tang of the exotic damp on her skin. And she hooks them on her, a spear through their guts.

Of course, great art is born through struggle, mistakes and pain.

There were times it did not come so easily to her. Even now, after so long, she recalls flashes: the too-firm pressure of a hand on the small of her back; slurred words thrust into her ear on stinking breath; salty drops slipping down a shiny nose into the corner of her mouth.

* Her head cocks to one side, listening to something far away, like an animal sensing movement in the distance. Something only she can hear.

Not long now, she hopes.

She turns on the taps in the bath and looks around the room. Beside the sink is a miscellany of half-empty tubes and opened bottles choked with the congealed remnants of moisturisers and serums. Even when he does not come, it is necessary to prepare. This is what he expects. Proper effort. Most afternoons she shaves and plucks her body hair the way he likes, until she’s as slippery as an eel. She rubs colourful dollops of lotion into her skin that make her smell like bergamot and rose and wealth.

She dusts the suggestion of blushes onto her cheeks and paints magenta outlines up over her Cupid’s bow.

She cocks her head to one side to examine in the mirror a thin, faded scar on one side of her neck. Then she tilts it the other way. On the opposite side is another, identical, slightly raised and vivid under the bathroom light. Her fingers trace them, two tight mouths curved slightly down, as though they were displeased with the things they had seen.

In the bedroom, a clock on the mantelpiece tolls the hour.

Today he’ll come. He has to.

He’ll stride into the suite, have her shake out her hair so it streams and ripples over the bed like waterweeds. He will touch her neck, 26

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caressing her scars, and in the tangled sheets, he’ll gaze into her eyes and tell her he could drown in them.

In the mirror, she runs her fingers through her long green hair.

* The sun slips down behind the horizon. In the distance a cluster of towers pierces a bank of clouds that are starting to roll her way. In the darkening suite, shadows slide over paintings lining the wall, mythological scenes of girls and gods and ghastly transformations. On the terrace the tea tray tips into darkness.

Waiting doesn’t bother her. She knows how to wait. It is what she has always done. For hours, days. She can wait for decades if she must.

Besides, nowadays, the wait is often pleasant. In this world, in these buildings of dazzling wealth that drips from every corner. The restaurants, the quiet bars and private clubs where her every wish is pre-empted. Hidden away in quiet rooms behind white stucco facades, swirling tumblers of golden-brown liquid that gleams like honey behind cut glass.

But sometimes, the hours tick by, and he still doesn’t come. And she loses track of the days or weeks and the air in the suite feels thin and brittle as though it could crack. And when she looks around, the flowers in their vase have rotted, and the bedsheets are threadbare and scrape her skin. And from elsewhere, she hears everything. The screech of deliveries in the bowels of the hotel, the chef swearing and hurling cutlery in the kitchen. A trolley loaded with oysters and champagne rattling along the third-floor corridor to a dead-eyed woman who flicks unseeing through television channels. The grunts of the aged executive skewering a woman his daughter’s age on the floor below. The nameless, creeping things in the walls.

* In the nights, he takes her to clubs full of models and footballers, where money flows like water. Places to be seen and flaunted, where young women in skin-tight leather bring icy bottles without him having to ask. isabella rose bengoechea

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Places where men loiter and prowl the dancefloor for female flesh. They are young and old and sag under the weight of watches and cufflinks, even medallions that nest in the curled hair on their chests.

If they approach him, he asks her to move closer, and she pushes her body against his and curls her fingers around his belt buckle the way he likes.

“How did you reel that one in? Upgrade on the old model, no?” they ask through vodka-thickened tongues and she watches the crowd and pretends she cannot hear them.

These types are everywhere. The dancefloor roils with them like freshly netted fish on a trawler. At the bar, they pass over gold cards for magnums of champagne stuffed with sparklers. In booths, they clutch at young women who have learnt not to grimace at the touch of mottled hands. Types who glance down as their phones vibrate to see a call from home, only to slip it back into a pocket. They join the girls in toasts and breathe air that tastes like fireworks and sweat and triumph.

* In the suite bathroom, she sits in the bath, eyes shut. The taps continue to run, and water pours over the rim. She sinks beneath the surface and lies on the bottom. Slowly, she reaches for her neck, where the two slits have opened. The skin moves softly as though waving to her. Tentatively, she edges a finger into one, feeling a wall of springy threads like a comb or violin.

She does not know how long she is down there. But when she surfaces, the skin on her hands is shrivelled and pearly webs hang between her fingers. The gashes on her neck gasp wide like mouths.

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Katie Buckley Extract from The Truck Driver

T

he truck is so large that it does not fit into the normal-sized parking space outside the normal-sized grocery store. One of its front wheels has actually mounted the curb and is prodding the sandswept boardwalk of this open-plan mall. It is July. The boardwalk runs, river-like, around a collection of shops that suggest a drunken blend of change and permanence. The grocery store. An art gallery that only sells sea-glass, reworked into unusual objects, including, this season, a life-sized mermaid. The library, where the truck driver’s mother used to work. It has posters in the window advertising the summer reading competition. The truck driver’s sister brought it up the last time they spoke. How Mom had always made them do it and how the truck driver had read the most books of anyone on the island that one summer when Dad was sick. A hardware store. LENNY’S: SCREWING SINCE 1983. The pharmacy. The liquor store. And a real estate agent. ESCAPE CITY LIFE. SECOND HOME POTENTIAL. Land is for sale, reams of it, rolling on down to the laughing belly of the Pacific.

Down the road from the mall there is a house. You go past the beaches, past the soccer fields, yellow and scratchy on the small knees that thud into it, and up the hill. Hang right, into cool puddles of shade thrown by arbutus trees. At the end of this road, where the pavement peters out into gravel, the small house sits. Pine needles in the gutter. A screen door. A black swimsuit hangs and sways from a low-hanging branch.

Inside the small house, the phone is ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing.

The bell above the grocery store door chirps. A woman walks out and heads straight for the truck. She is wearing denim cut-offs with a cropped Canucks t-shirt and her hair is held up by a pen, twisted katie buckley

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through the stack of gold on top of her head. She hauls the crate of beer she is carrying into the bed of the truck, opens the passenger seat door and places the paper bag of groceries in the well of the seat.

As she walks round the hood, she taps it with her nails, also red.

Sea air roars into the truck. A few strands of blonde hair roar out, ripped away by the wind. Some will end up woven into a blue jay’s nest.

The truck driver’s aunt owns the house. She lives in another, on the same plot of land, divided by a row of surprisingly even pines. The truck driver wakes often at night. She sees a solitary light in the top window of her aunt’s house and falls back to sleep quickly.

The highest concentration of cougars in the world is on an island a crow’s flight from this one. Cougars kill you by tearing your stomach open with their back claws. They disembowel you. It is, naturally, impossible to run away from a big cat when your insides are at your feet in the dirt.

If you ever see a cougar, her father had said, back when she was so small that his sweaters reached her toes, it has already been following you for hours. It has been watching you from the woods.

If you ever see a cougar, it’s over.

Cougars are the same cat as panthers, she had explained to her husband years before, lying in bed, listening to his heart purr.

I don’t believe you, he said.

That, she thinks, looking out at the pines, was when their troubles started.

No one is sure if there are cougars here, on this smaller, wilder island, in comparable density. The island is so small that it seems impossible that anyone, living or dead, would’ve missed them.

Sometimes, the truck driver walks all the way around the island. She has cut her hands before, scrambling up rocks bedecked in barnacles.

But it is something to do. And she has layers of scars on her hands from other things. One is from a pizza oven, her first job, fifteen years ago. Another from cutting melon recklessly, distracted by her husband. Laughing at something she can’t remember anymore.

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There are cougars here. Tracks, outside the cabin door. Yowling, disquieting in its similarity to a housecat in heat. A lazy trick. It makes the hair on her neck stand up. Not the sound. The impulse to check if the cat is OK. The way she almost falls for it, every time.

She cannot bear to sleep with the windows open. She thinks she hears the clack of claws on the thin screen. The screen is there to prevent mosquitos. She imagines it crumpling like cellophane at the first curious paw.

The phone rings in the night. She thinks about unplugging it. She asks her aunt one day, in the garden, if she can.

Disconnect the phone? the aunt asks. Ice hurls itself from one side of the highball glass to the other. The surface of the ice tea has a film on it, like an oil slick.

Yes, the truck driver says. She uses her finger to stir her glass of ice tea. The slick becomes a whirlpool. The second she stops stirring it, it goes back to disaster. As if she’d never tried to fix it at all.

Why? the aunt asks. She wears all white. There is a tiny grass stain on each knee. A keen gardener, like the truck driver’s mother.

The truck driver doesn’t say anything. In the driveway, behind them and through the old driftwood fence, a cougar hops into the bed of the truck. She settles. Sighs, as if she misses someone. Licks a monstrous paw.

He will still try to call, you know, the aunt says, shifting in her chair.

The truck driver nods. She knows. She has been told. Look how the waves can’t help coming back.

He misses you, the aunt says.

And I him, the truck driver thinks. She says, I’ll get us more tea.

In the kitchen, her mother and father stare down at her from the fridge.

Sitting on the hood of the truck. Her mother is mid-sentence. Her father, mid-laugh and there is no rust anywhere. She used to fall asleep in the truck, sandwiched between her family. Her head on her father’s lap. Her feet on her mother’s. Drifting off listening to everyone singing along to Jerry Lee Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire. The feeling of knowing you would all make it home. katie buckley

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They wouldn’t like it, her aunt says, when she brings back the ice tea. All this misery-making.

The truck driver used to seek out danger. She walked by herself in the woods for hours. She went home with strange, wide-mouthed men. Once, she danced on the lonely edge of a pier. Balancing on the splintered wood. Slivers biting into the soft skin of her instep. The water was shallow around the base of the pier and there were rocks, sneering up at her and impossible to miss. The ocean so wet and wanting her so badly and her almost losing her footing over and over again.

Why did you do it? her husband asked her. They had just met and she was lying between his legs, her face pressed into the bready, domestic smell of his cock. She laughed. When she tilted her face up to look at him, he didn’t smile. He wiped her hair off her sticky face and tucked it behind her ear.

The next time the phone rings she is sitting right next to it. It is 4am. The sun is stretching her tired limbs over the horizon. The truck driver has not slept. She heard crunching. When the yowling starts, she is almost relieved that she was right to be scared, right to keep the windows closed. She answers the phone before she remembers not to.

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Tilda Coleman Extract from Sea Bruise

T

he twins walked home fast, navigating rocky patches of the terrain with ease. After the day’s rain, the sky was clear. A fat moon illuminated the sodden grass and strips of rock seemed to flow into each other, so the ground looked more liquid than solid.

What was left of winter lasted for three months at most on the island. All the trees kept their leaves and the temperature never dropped below 12°C. Purple splatters of bell heather bloomed across the island year-round and already, in the last week of January, Talia had noticed dark yellow monkey flowers on the path down to White Cove. But that evening, the half-darkness painted all plant-life a uniform shade of very dark blue and Talia imagined it was the kind of winter her dads had told her about, when cold made the grass crunchy, and your own breath showed as white puffs on the air. She narrowed her eyes and imagined that the ground ahead was a frozen lake. Her steps became more cautious and she held her arms out, pretending to balance herself.

“We still haven’t made a plan,” Harlow said, interrupting Talia’s daydream as they stepped through the gate at the bottom of their garden and onto the path that led directly to the back door. All the lights were out, except one in the kitchen. Their dads would be in there now, waiting. The singular lit window glowed, an orange beacon against the dark bulk of the house.

“We need four or five hours,” Talia replied, thoughtfully. Two days before, they had stolen a significant quantity of drugs from their dads and were plotting when to take them. It was Harlow’s idea. Aged twelve, she was always trying to relieve a deep boredom she couldn’t articulate.

“Tomorrow then. After lessons,” Harlow said.

“Is that enough time?” tilda coleman

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“If we get rid of the boys.”

“Why don’t we just tell them? And share?”

“No. They are too young. Think about the spine-tingling hotness and everything blasting apart.”

Sometimes in their tech lessons, the children’s restricted access to the internet was relaxed so they could practise independent research.

During one of these ten-minute slots, Harlow searched and read about the effects of the drugs, noting one user’s experience of ‘spine tingling hotness’ and ‘everything blasting apart’, then wiping this from her history. Their tech teacher was supposed to monitor the children’s browsing at all times, but he was lazy. Most State Package teachers were. They earnt very little and taught online classes of up to two hundred students. All the good teachers went Premium.

“We can tell them we want to do extra work for Lara,” Harlow said.

Lara was their biology teacher. She was Premium and all the children adored her. She had long, curly red hair and a thick Scottish accent. Lately, they had been learning about puberty and Talia loved the way Lara’s voice curled around the word: ‘pew-bur-tea’.

“Like what?”

“More observing nature.”

“We’ve done loads of that.”

“We can say we want to do more. The boys are so bored of nature, they won’t want to join us.”

“They will suspect.”

“No. I am an expert liar.”

This was true, and silenced Talia, who stood still, feeling their conversation was unfinished, but unable to name her concerns. The girls were now outside their back door. Harlow grabbed her sister’s hand and pulled her inside the kitchen. She was an unusually strong child.

Their dad, Conrad, was sat at the driftwood table with his back to the door, scrolling on his tablet. As soon as the girls entered, he rose, beaming.

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“Daddy!” Harlow screeched, and flung herself into his open arms.

Slotting his massive hands under her armpits, he hoisted her into the air and kissed her noisily on both cheeks. Harlow was tall for her age, but she inherited her height and athleticism from Conrad, who lifted her with ease. He was wearing his favourite outfit, a navy silk dressing gown pattered with white orchids.

Their other dad, Waldon, was in the middle of putting the delivery away. He put the two lemons he was holding in the fridge, then gave Talia a quick hug. Without being asked, she started helping him unpack the three large, red plastic crates filled with food that were piled on top of each other next to the door.

“Tell us about your day,” Conrad instructed, sitting down at the head of the table with Harlow on his lap. She started chattering away, describing the drawing they did when it started raining outside and the dead rabbit Talia found rotting under a bush on the way down to White Cove. As she spoke, Conrad jiggled his knee up and down rhythmically.

Talia chimed in every now and then to add information or query and description and Waldon asked careful questions. As they listened, they worked efficiently. Talia took responsibility for the stuff that belonged in the fridge, making sure to place each item on the correct shelf and organising as she went. Waldon ferried the dried goods from the boxes to the larder in the hallway opposite the kitchen.

“It sounds like you’ve been very busy,” Waldon said to Harlow once the last pack of oatcakes had been neatly deposited on their shelf.

“Yes. We did do a lot.”

“Dad and I also had long days,” Waldon continued, looking at Conrad, who gave a barely perceptible nod.

“Indeed. I think we could all use an early night,” Conrad said.

Harlow sat bolt upright and narrowed her eyes.

“I’m not tired.”

“I am,” Conrad said, stretching his arms behind his head and yawning theatrically. “So tired, in fact, that I would appreciate an easy, quiet bedtime tonight.” tilda coleman

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There was just a touch of menace in his tone.

“Poor Dada.”

Using her index fingers, Harlow gently traced the soft area underneath Conrad’s eyes. Talia looked at the floor.

“Now, Harlow,” said Conrad quietly. For a moment, they all waited to see whether she would explode.

“OK,” she finally said and Talia let out her breath.

“Good girl,” Conrad said approvingly.

“But can we try and sleep down here first?”

“Of course. Well done for asking.”

Conrad stood, took Harlow’s hand and led her to the sitting room, where he would read to her until she became drowsy and hopefully fell asleep.

Talia and Waldon made their way upstairs, to the girls’ bedroom. Talia knew the drill. She would brush her teeth and put on her pyjamas quickly, without complaint. Waldon would read her a story, just one, and then it would be lights out, so he could go and help Conrad. And all the time Talia was being read to, she and Waldon would both be tensed for an interruption, ready to stop talking and turn the lights out immediately if they heard a sleeping Harlow being carried up the stairs.

As she slipped under her duvet, a small part of Talia hoped Harlow would fake sleep and that Conrad would bring her to bed awake. Then they could whisper together in the dark. But a better part of her hoped that sleep would come easily to her sister and that it wasn’t one of those nights when Harlow would try and keep talking long after Talia’s eyelids started to droop, when Talia shook with laughter at Harlow’s silliness, knowing deep down she was only being funny to keep Talia awake, so that she didn’t have to face the agony of trying to sleep, so that she didn’t have to strain alone to leave the waking world.

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Tom Conaghan Extract from Father Nicolas

T

he morning before the funeral, a passing hay wagon went over Paulie Bryant’s foot on the Nailsworth road by Devil’s Elbow.

When Paulie protested, a great hollering came from the wagon and down jumped a lad of Paulie’s age, white-haired down to his eyelashes.

They barneyed and cursed at each other and, in their hotness, agreed to have it out. Paulie stripped his shirt over his head and raised his guard but only to find the other holding out something to him.

Paulie were uneasy for it to come to weapons but the pale lad said it weren’t that and showed him a small bell on a strip of leather. He told Paulie his sight weren’t any good and if Paulie wanted the satisfaction, he would have to strap the bell to his head for their rumble.

Paulie reckoned he were too far stepped in the business to get out now and no doubt that this’d be easy pickings for him, so he tied it on. He wiggled his head and laughed at the nice noise round the fields.

Come here, boy, the lad said and set at Paulie then, his swinging so strong, Paulie could feel the air off it. Paulie advanced slow and – meeting such a fusillade – retired quick, tinkling out a rhythm so like a May Day carol he’d sung as a nipper, a rhyme from it recurred, consoling, in him.

I have brought you a branch of May, Come here, boy, said the lad, approaching suddenly– A branch of May, my dear, I say.

It were in such a reverie that the white lad landed a crashing punch to Paulie’s cheekbone, ringing his bell so long and loud that Paulie saw stars and wondered if it were the fair setting up in the village. He scampered back, bewildered: I have brought you a branch of May, with all the time the white-haired lad calling out, Come here, boy! tom conaghan

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With the lad’s unnatural incessance and the strange holiday air of it, Paulie came desperate afraid he were fighting the Devil himself and so were not far from weeping.

He greatly rued his haste then and, thinking better of it, slung off his bell and lugged it at the lad, though it dinged only on a wayside stone. With his doings mercifully quietened, Paulie straightaway run off down the road, going a way before he felt safe to holler back at him.

The white lad roared back awfully, calling over for him to come here, which Paulie gave the lie to and ran home instead.

The funeral were set for the evening – summer deaths in the parish needing greater haste. Everyone was standing out The Swan in the last of the day’s sun, enjoying the story of Paulie and the blind lad, when the church bell chimed.

Paulie! called many at its pealing.

Round two! said others.

They finished their drinks and slowly walked round and up the steps to the church – the whole parish it looked, to see their procession out of the warm and noise, folding their selves smaller as they come in and sit at their customed pews, a strange and sudden dwindling to come straight from the pub and silent into mass, for any who spoke in church the old rector would denounce with great fire in front of God and his Angels and all the Parishioners.

Underneath the pulpit, dappled under the stained glass like it were midst a river, were Kate’s coffin. The raven shape of the old rector moved behind her, which shrivelled everyone’s hearts to see him, though knowing their dislike were the same in everyone round him.

They quietened as he come out from the dark and approach them.

Up the steps to the pulpit he goes, between the two brass candlesticks there, and as they raise their eyes to see him, they find he’s not the rector at all. Instead, stood over them much taller than the rector ever, were young Nicky. He were so broad for the old cassock, it were like he were tied in it. As a dream is so usual in its strangeness, it were 38

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queer and natural how even in priest’s clothes Nicky couldn’t seem a priest. From on high now come that simple smile of his, like one half of his face had told the other a joke unknownst to him.

The church were filled with quiet of a whole parish craning their necks. The old rector weren’t sat in the choir, weren’t in the front pews or behind them or anywhere else they could see… plain wasn’t in the church at all… They looked at each other then and with the fleet sense of something slipping loose, came in their silence to look back to Nick.

The lowering sun were like a bright lake on the floor in front of him, lighting up the brass candlesticks and him between, the grand beauty and terror of it all in the line of his mouth, so that all of them – that moment, each a child – were full of such grand wishfulness in him it took the five years of his reign for the whole of it to come out.

He swayed from left to right and then leaned forward, veering over us like a bird in a wind.

Dear everyone, he said at last, after the old rector’s screeching, his voice a whisper round us all.

Thank you for all coming here, together here, he said, his words breathless and infrequent like he’d run a mile. The church’s summoning you here were louder than I’d expected. We hope we conjure God here the same – and poor Kate here to heaven.

They felt the first gleaming of a lightness then, an unkeptness, and many of their eyes followed his, rising up from their watching him to move among the stone angels and sprites above them.

As he whispered, he gave wide gestures – one time a hand glancing one candlestick over and near off the side – like the arms in his cassock were those of a much bolder man. We looked at the candlestick wobbling and slow righting itself, shocking how all these years it’d never been made safe but had stood there loose and unmoored like that.

Nicolas was nodding. The bearing, he said, of one to their graves, needs right casting of words and the one feeling among many.

His arm were waving again and, who knows, if he hadn’t done what he did next, maybe we’d have learned to love him. But instead, tom conaghan

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at that moment, he biffed the same candlestick right off the edge, the brass moving through the evening light and down, to crash echoing around, too heavy to break, bouncing and rolling terribly along the floor.

Folk cowered where they sat, so quiet still that the one voice that spoke from the back could be heard at once by everyone.

Come here, boy, it said. And like a sudden homecoming, or a baby knowing its ma, a vast trembling delight filled them up, and they were overtook by a great laughter – pinned by it, it felt – and sweeping across the expanse of them, all laughing more and more and louder and louder in the safety of everyone else.

Paulie! cried a voice or two.

Round three! hollered others.

Nicky looked out over them all with his estranged smile and then, like a cow in a pen, unwedged his self from the halflit pulpit and turned and went down, their noise ringing on and on round the darkening spaces.

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Viktoria Dahill Extract from Compassion Fatigue

A

Chapter 1

“

re we really going to do it?” Cassie asked into the burdening silence of another slow, costly Friday.

“She paid for it,” Jen replied, her emotion lost in monotone as she entered the client’s information into the computer.

The sterile buzz of the waiting room and reception area made Cassie feel like a monster wrapped in a veterinarian’s coat. If only she could be as detached as the seasoned professionals on clinical podcasts.

They murmured dry, throaty statements like, “at least we’re not human doctors.”

“But we don’t have to,” Cassie persisted, looking straight ahead.

Meeting Jen’s eyes might set her off and Cassie was too bewildered for another of their arguments. After the last one, Cassie had nearly moved out of their shared apartment and taken a job somewhere else. The restless anxiety and rage spurred her wakefulness into the wee hours of the morning.

“But.” Jen waited. For what Cassie didn’t know, but her tone was patronising. “The client paid us to do this. Otherwise, she would have taken them to a shelter. Or,” she paused again for effect and Cassie hated it, “she would have asked us to take them.”

“To save them,” Cassie corrected. “We can still save them. They aren’t dead yet.”

“Don’t,” Jen replied, a note of warning in her voice.

It could be forgiven that Jen listened to country music and said opportunity a lot, that her daddy loved her and she was ambitious; all qualities that drew Cassie to Jen when they first met in college. But Jen never hesitated to remind Cassie that she was the one with the MBA and lecture her about debt, like just how much they would be in if their veterinary clinic sank. viktoria dahill

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To think, hours earlier, Cassie had come out of a successful surgery, handing a client the sparkly G-string she’d found lodged in his Labrador’s stomach. That dopamine hit was nowhere to be found now.

“I…” Cassie began, but didn’t finish.

Peter came through from the breakroom, easing into his sickly blue scrubs. “Cat?” he asked, eyeing the green carrier.

“No.” Cassie sighed and pinched her nose between her fingers to make sure she was breathing and wouldn’t faint. “Euthanasia. They’re puppies. I haven’t had a look yet, but I’m guessing either newborn or a few days old.”

“Oh.” Experience was evident in his tinged tone. Perhaps the numbness was something Cassie would look forward to when she was broken in.

“I can,” he began simply, looking her over with concern. “If you want to sit this one out.” He reached for the carrier.

“That won’t help me.” She tensed, and brought the carrier against her chest, cradling it with both arms. “I need to just do it.” She swallowed. It wasn’t a slick reflex as usual, but rather a challenged exercise that coated her throat with adrenaline.

“You’ll be fine,” Jen said.

Cassie shook her head and pushed the doors open. She walked down the bleak, white hallway and into the euthanasia suite that was big enough to fit a grieving family, herself or Peter, a nurse and the equipment needed to ensure each pet had a comfortable departure.

The room was too big for one person, leaving Cassie with a pervading, dangerous emptiness that she feared would swallow her. She stood in it alone for a few minutes holding the carrier over her heart. Was it possible to burn out this early in her career? She opened the carrier on the exam table and reached in, removing the creatures one at a time and lining them up on the table top.

The puppies had round seal heads. Their ears were small and pressed against their skulls. Some of them were the same colour as their mother, a mottled black and white cow spot. They grunted like little pigs. The grunting moved their whole bodies.

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“You’re hungry,” Cassie whispered.

She was able to rub their bellies with only her index finger. A tan male puppy sucked on her thumb while she opened a drawer for syringes with the other hand. It would only be too late once the needles were unwrapped. She could still save them.

When was she going to turn off I’m going to save them and accept that she had to kill them?

She counted the victims of circumstance. There were eight, as the lady had said. It came in handy that she was truthful, because Jen hadn’t bothered to check. Then again, if there had been more than eight, Cassie could have saved the extras.

But she wanted to save them all.

She was setting the needles into the syringes and drawing liquid out of the pentobarbital vial when her phone vibrated in her pocket. She read the text to prolong eight lives.

It was Austin. Somehow, he always knew when she was vulnerable to him.

She slid the phone back into her pocket, and took a deep breath as if she were attempting a winter ocean dive. She felt naked, exposed.

Every hurt paled in comparison. She was giving up what she loved and just making money.

Now she would kill them softly. She closed her eyes. In vet school she had learned to understand death and help others understand it too.

Coping with it was different.

“Ouch,” she spoke for the puppies, and her chest pinched as she watched the intracardiac needles stop their hearts.

The puppies sighed in pain, their heads drooping one at a time as she stuck them and pushed the plunger.

Cassie imagined their journey through the clouds. If the rainbow bridge and pet heaven were real, would they forgive her? Or was it all a hoax, as she now suspected? If it was, they would not continue and this was really the end. She felt like they deserved names before they left, as if it would somehow solidify their existence. Farm animals weren’t named because it was important not to get attached and Cassie refused to see viktoria dahill

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the puppies as a commodity. She named them, the words dropping from her mouth like wishes. Her mother had given her a book of baby names once upon a time, but Cassie would never use it.

Their tight little bodies went slack in her fist, and there was a sudden give to their lifeless flesh. Cassie loosened her grip shakily. She didn’t want to crush them, even if they were dead.

The bodies went into a clear bag used for IV fluid. Unlike the others, the last puppy was missing pigment in his nose, leaving it an irritated pink. Cassie settled them into the bag and lifted. The biohazardous waste collectors only came twice a week, so they would sit in a freezer for three days.

Cassie played with her stethoscope as she flew down the long, narrow hallway. The stark whiteness of it seemed to go on forever.

The double doors swished back, dulling the squeaks and barks of the overnight room as they closed. Reception was quiet except for Jen and her country radio, the banjos chafing Cassie’s already irritated skin.

Her fingers were cold, and annoyance rose in her chest once more, except this time it was debilitating.

“I can’t believe you,” Cassie said. She’d meant for it to be strong, but it was quiet and broken.

“What?” Jen looked up from the computer. “You want to get paid this month, right?”

In Cassie’s silence, Jen added, “Sleep on it is all I’m saying. This stuff is only traumatic until you get used to it.”

“Oh, get your head out of your ass.” Anger helped mask all the sadness that she’d held on to until it soaked through her clothes and pulsed outwards like a slashed artery. Soon her skin would be dripping, weeping with the pressure of the water behind the dam. It was unprofessional to cry, she told herself. Very unprofessional to cry on the job.

Jen swivelled in her chair. “It’s not like I could do it. That pentobarb stuff is a controlled substance. Peter offered, but no. You had to be that type-A vet student.”

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Edward Fortes Extract from Soirée

T

he final thing was a foyer, or anteroom, in which one could comfortably stand to welcome guests or bid them farewell, as the Swedish couple had done relatively late that evening. They’d said goodbye to her and the American singer and their two Swedish friends – also a couple – and the French performance artists she’d sat next to and the Irish art critic she hadn’t been able to talk to – all with great warmth and genuine affection. And so, much as she wanted to begrudge the Swedish couple their wealth and hospitality, she couldn’t, on reflection. She couldn’t fathom it either, as she walked back to the Panthéon after the little soirée. For that is what it was, a soirée – and she couldn’t fathom that either, even though it was a word she loved and had heard many times; a word she was attracted to, like a deep blue anchor.

And as she’d walked back to the Panthéon she’d thought about how she would roll herself a little cigarette when she got there, a little ‘rollie’, and smoke it out the window in the little kitchenette, which was really just a corner of the room – a ‘kitchen corner’, as the young woman from the residency programme, who’d shown her the flat, had called it. A kitchen cor nur, she’d said, overemphasising the ‘r’s in the way the French did. This young woman was definitely very French, she’d thought: from the olive skin to the striped, long-sleeved t-shirt to her scooter helmet, to the way her black jeans fitted so neatly, so smartly. Did she feel French? Perhaps she did.

So, she had made her way slowly back to where she was staying in that unfamiliar part of Paris to smoke that little rollie in the kitchen corner, and stare at the top of the Panthéon from over the Rue Descartes. She always anglicised the word ‘Pantheon’ every time she said it, even in her head, wilfully overlooking the hard ‘th’ and the accent in the way that she knew Gran would have done. Because it edward fortes

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was absurd that she was staying there, that’s all she could think as she approached it, somewhere even more lavish than the easy, relaxed wealth of the Marais – a wealth that was always wanting to make itself look easy, décontracté. The kind of ‘have a patisserie and get a €600 coat next door’ sort of wealth, even though, she noticed, people mostly wore jeans and trainers. She was more likely to spend her €600 stipend in the patisserie, on eclairs, not next door. She reflected that, for a very long time, the only eclairs she’d known about were the Cadbury’s kind and how it may, in fact, have been those chocolates or sweets, however you’d class them – they were individually wrapped after all, purply midnight blue with a dash of yellow – that had first imbued the word ‘éclair’ with such glamour, such exclusivity, not an unknown patisserie in Paris’s third arrondissement. Gran liked to have them for special occasions and Christmas, in particular, and, as a child, she’d had no more idea of Paris than Gran herself, who’d never left England and never would leave England as long as she lived. And she’d lived until not long ago at all, she remembered as she climbed the stairs to the seventh floor at midnight in the fifth having been at her soirée in the third – Paris was a lot about numbers, wasn’t it? And in fact if you put those numbers together – seven, five and three – you could reconstruct the age Gran was this year, the year she’d died – it was two weeks ago, in fact, when they’d still thought she’d come through. But no, two was not a number to be added now, although she had decided she was going to have two rollies, not just one.

The top of the Panthéon was still visible from the kitchen corner window. And she didn’t have to lean out far to see the narrow stream of Rue Descartes, its little pebbles of dropped amber glowing up from the streetlights beneath and a strong spring breeze closing a day that had been hot, all told, the last day of the residency and the day after her reading at the bookshop, when she’d thought she would read something interesting, but which had quickly transpired to not be interesting at all – in fact it was crap. And as she’d read, she’d become conscious of how much she was trying to underline the traits and background and experience that she wanted them, the earnest, polished 46

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faces watching her in the bookshop, to know and hear. It was crap that came from somewhere, somewhere Gran knew and they weren’t familiar with, because there are people who get asked to do readings in bookshops in Paris and people who don’t; in other words, there are people who grow up in the sound knowledge that they will, one day, most likely be asked to read something in a Paris bookshop and she was not one of those people.

In the twenty-fours that followed, she’d had to admit that what she’d written was not worth the stipend they’d given her to spend on coats or patisseries, not in a million years. And she knew that while reading she’d fallen back on a kind of fragility, a performed weakness she sometimes resorted to in places like that, when she wanted to be both in and outside of her background, in and outside of herself. She wanted to be able to draw on it and also put it away in a drawer, like the one in which she’d put those terrible pages she’d written in Paris.

And then having to face the easy, earnest questions afterwards, the owner smiling encouragingly at the back, no doubt revelling in the vibrancy of these events, the avant-garde writeresse sitting in the small chair with literature fans all crowded round, pressing at the bookshelves. This was what the shop was for, the owner had thought, why her father had set it up in the first place and why expanding the business was so necessary, so clear, because Paris could still be a haven for writers – and this was what the owner had mentioned to her, after she’d read, when she was standing on the pavement outside with a cigarette in hand, which she really just wanted to enjoy on her own, along with the view out towards Notre-Dame and the Île de la Cité in that very pink, rosy-orange explosion of colour behind the spires, suffusing the clouds. Suffusing the clouds: there was something she could keep, maybe, but then here was the owner asking her for a rollie she didn’t want to give but would have to and asking her how had it gone, how had Paris been, and do you have a lighter?

The night after her reading, after dinner at the Swedish couple’s, she’d finished her second rollie and naughtily flicked the end down towards to the Rue Descartes. Naughty, that little brown snowflake edward fortes

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that had drifted down, perhaps falling unexpectedly on some passer-by’s head. Naughty in the way that Gran had always used the word – “bit naughty that, I believe” – comma, I believe – with that little smile she remembered again now, back in Ireland, a week after she’d been in Paris and one breathless tear coming through while she waited to rent out the other room.

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Gilli Fryzer Extract from Resurrection A thousand leagues from home I lye When the cat returns so then shall I

S

Prologue

ecrets, unearthed by time. A needle sharpened by betrayal; a malediction worked by tallow light.

Driving on the left is harder than expected; the hired car swerves past brackish dykes, jolts awkwardly down narrow marsh roads. Slow-cropping sheep startle at her approach. She grips the wheel with both hands, focuses on the congealing dusk. Beside her the satnav arrow glows a brighter green, traverses an opalescent landscape.

Nothing here stays buried forever.

Chapter One My account begins, as all devilment must, with a woman.

Rye, in the year of our Lord 1633. You must know that this was a most quarrelsome time. Even this plain town was not free from the whiff of incense and some that protested the Protestant faith saw nothing but sin and venality in many of our aldermen. A town of differences, between those who argued that the Lord Himself had silted up this ungodly harbour and those of us who looked to commerce, London and royal patronage for our salvation. We were not a welcoming place for Papists, to be true; yet neither did we welcome those who unsettled the general peace, as that troublesome girl had begun to do even before she pushed open my door.

“Good evening to you, Master Jenks.” gilli fryzer

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Stupidly, I had not barred the shutters, the hour being one when none but the sick or their messengers would disturb my studies. Mistress Johnes was comelier than most who seek pastes or draughts, and I was uneasy at her presence. It would do me no good to be caught with her so late if only half the town’s talk were true, and it seemed the girl carried no message, nor did she notice my lack of invitation to be seated. She dropped her basket on the floor and tipped her chin. An impudent stare in one so young.

“How may I help you, Mistress?”

I did not credit the accounts of curses and ill-dealing, but it behoved me to proceed carefully.

“I come on a matter of business, Master Jenks.”

The maid stood firm in the centre of my little shop for all the world as if she, not I, were its master. Her kerchief was sober enough for one so recently bereaved, yet a single unruly lock had escaped from its confines.

“How so?”

“Bread does not yet buy itself, nor fish.” It was as if I had been caught with an oath, not sugar, on my tongue. “Those who seek me out have little enough with which to reward my skill; the rest take nothing from my hand for fear – not even my mother’s most trusted receipts.”

“For fear?”

“Of bewitchment.” She spat the word towards the un-swept boards. “I hear talk that I am too forward in my ways, that ’tis not meet to hold myself out as I do. I am already slandered in some quarters.”

“Not so, child. It disturbs the town is all, that one so young should set herself up so independent.”

That chin rose again.

“So it transpires: I am chastised for having learnt too much at my mother’s knee. I know who and what lies behind such speech.

My aunt and uncle would rob me if they could, but the house is mine. I dwell alone now and I would keep it so.”

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She indicated the covered basket at her feet.

“These will work as well from your hands as from mine, I warrant. I seek less for each physic from you than this good town will pay one who has the Grocers’ badge above his door.”

I smoothed the leaves of my almanac and closed the covers. I was possessive of my small library and proud that none might consult my books but me.

“Let me understand you. You are not offering me herbs, but your finished remedies. You wish me to sell your work as though my own?”

Ambition, not shame, tinged her cheek.

“Master Cotton has the grey of dropsy about him. I have brought you tincture of fairy glove I have prepared myself, a faithful receipt. That sharp-tongued wife of his will send in the morning for you, not I. She hath stated plain that she will let no unmarried wench into the clerk’s chamber, no matter the cost. Restrict his ale and give him this. With God’s will, he may have more time to arrange his affairs, even if ‘tis like to be to her advantage.”

It would do me no good to be hasty in my dismissal. Goody Johnes had been a cunning-woman of skill. Yet her daughter’s copper hair marked her out amongst the dark Sussex folk, as did her ready tongue. Without her mother’s teachings Hannah Johnes would earn no place but the pillory in this plain-dealing town of fishermen and timber merchants.

“What makes you so sure of the clerk, girl?”

“Examine him all you will, sir; nothing in your books will serve him better.” She had a haughty enough manner for one without family to speak for her. “Do you doubt my understanding? Name your malady, Master Jenks. I could provide for each one a cure.”

I brushed aside the boast, of course. I tell you I was a poor fool back then.

“If I consent to sell your wares – what then?”

“You will have more time in which to continue your distillations and your alchemicals.” She nodded toward the alembic in front of the fire. “And I will have ready money of my own.” gilli fryzer

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“It is agreed, then. But this bargain must not be known abroad. Wayside herbs and petty simples have their place, but my learning gives me the skill. If I consent to sell your remedies to any it must be as ordered by me and none other.”

“So be it. Look you to your business and I to mine. Mistress Jennings is like to be brought to bed of twins before the dawn.

I am called on to assist her women, maiden or no.” She bobbed a faint curtsey as she lifted that basket of hers. “You will allow that there are certain places in which my understanding surpasses yours, even so, Master Apothecary.”

* She was easy to follow once I had put my mind to it. In the market with her simples in a basket, or at church with her eyes open when she thought herself least observed. There was little that was godly about Hannah Johnes, yet she took her place on Sundays and holy days peaceably enough.

I watched her most from a nook above the Landgate. From here I spied her returning from the dwellings down by the ford; one day dressing Goody Turner’s rotting foot; another, called to set the fore-bone on a child, or bind woodcutter Clary’s nearsevered hand. The pigeons grew so tame that there were times I throttled the fattest for the pot while I waited. More than once I saw the goatish gatekeeper content his own lechery with a kick to the backside of that ill-favoured cat of hers. Word was, the wench had dragged that kitten from the bucket by its broken tail and blown her own life down its throat, so faithful was it to heel.

For all my misgivings we began to do good business, Hannah Johnes and I. She brought me salves and tinctures, centaury for wounds, mugwort for the bloody flux or worms. My own distilling was naturally of finer stuff, hartshorn, and mercury: such matters being known by skilled apprenticeship it would have been wrong of me to share their secrets with her, yet I took freely of her compounds and syrups. And – I am not ashamed of 52

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this – sell her physic I did, whenever her remedy was like to work as well as one of mine, for it saved me labour and meant I could spend more time on study and therefore my own betterment.

Yet, observing the girl did not loosen her enchantment over me.

gilli fryzer

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Stewart Gott Extract from Hammerhead

T

Norse Kingdom of Hordaland, AD 774

he next day, the snow stopped. A feeble sun pushed briefly through the clouds, then slunk back behind them again. Jarl Hrothgar the Ring-Giver and three of his Wolfcoats trudged their way up the hill behind the fortress.

When they got to the top they stood looking back down at the warmth and safety they had left behind them, far below. Smoke drifted from the chimneys and people scurried about their business, wrapped tight against the cold.

Hrothgar turned to the warriors by his side.

“When Olaf brought me the news yesterday, I could scarcely believe it. A farm burned, the farmer killed and his horses stolen. I will not tolerate it. In these lands I am the Jarl, I am the chieftain who men answer to. The thieves responsible will die slowly. I will make a rope out of their guts to hang them with.”

There was an icy wind blowing. It had taken two hours to climb the hill, and it would take many more to track the thieves to their den.

Olaf Olafsson stepped forward. He was a senior man, one of Hrothgar’s most trusted war captains.

“The serf I talked to told me that there were twenty of these robbers, maybe more. Four of us will be plenty though. We are Wolfcoats. It is more than just the furs we wear. In battle we become wolves, teeth and claws. Four Wolfcoats could take down a hundred ordinary men.”

A woman in a black gown was lurking in the garden at the back of the fortress. From their vantage point they could all see her.

Svipdag Hothead, who was a Christian, crossed himself.

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“That filthy witch again. You should have done more than carve her head in two, Jarl Hrothgar.”

Rannveig Split-Skull spoke spells and threw curses. She had red hair, green eyes and a deep scar that ran from her forehead down her nose and onto her chin. She had been married to Hrothgar’s eldest son, but the boy had died in battle.

Hrothgar towered over the other men, rough-bearded, stoopshouldered, as brawny and belligerent as a great grey bear.

“When my son died, I spoiled Rannveig’s face so that no-one else would want her. Five handmaidens were put into Ketil’s grave, still alive but with their wrists and ankles broken. His ponies and his hunting dogs too, their throats cut. I let Rannveig live, because she might still be useful to me.”

Towards the top of the next hill the men crouched by the side of the path, regaining their breath after the steep climb. The fortress was now hidden from sight.

Hrothgar beckoned Svipdag to him. Svipdag Hothead was reckless and quick tempered, but he was a convivial, popular man and a fearless fighter. His arms gleamed with the rings Hrothgar had given to him for his prowess in battle.

Wherever Svipdag went his blood brother Vitserk the Fierce followed. He stood behind Svipdag now. Vitserk was a raw-boned, sharp-faced, bitter snarl of a man, a warrior through and through, as dark as Svipdag was fair. Vitserk seethed with fury. He seldom spoke. He never laughed.

Svipdag squatted on his haunches and the muscles bulged in his legs and his arms. His long, yellow hair was tied up in a topknot, his eyes sparkled and his teeth gleamed when he smiled. He didn’t seem concerned that Hrothgar had called him over.

“I only have one son left to me,” said Hrothgar. “Gunnar is still a boy. Olaf tells me you’ve been showing Gunnar how to use a spear. Is that so?”

Svipdag shrugged. “He doesn’t hold it properly.” He imitated Gunnar’s fighting action, exaggerating its clumsiness. stewart gott

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“Olaf said you threw your spear at Gunnar.” Hrothgar smiled, but there was menace in his voice. If Svipdag heard it then he ignored it. He glanced over at Olaf Olafsson, a sneer on his face.

“Olaf is growing old. His eyesight is getting dim. I threw my spear at the target Gunnar was standing beside and hit that, not him.”

Hrothgar nodded. “The young men admire you, Svipdag Hothead. They are impatient. They say I am too old to raid now and it would be best if I let you lead the way instead. You would have the support of your friend here, who stands staring at me and saying nothing. Vitserk is as lethal as a snake, a hard fighting man, as cold-blooded a killer as I’ve ever seen on the battlefield. He would do anything to protect you, wouldn’t he?”

“We are great friends,” said Svipdag. “More than that. We have sworn an oath to be brothers.”

Vitserk bared his teeth. He had sharpened them to points.

Hrothgar’s voice still carried menace. “Is it true, Svipdag, that you tripped Gunnar so he fell into a horse trough, then knocked him down when he tried to get back out of it?”

“Gunnar has great potential,” said Svipdag. “I can help him reach it.”

“By blacking his eye and sending him flying into a bucket of water?”

Svipdag offered another expressive shrug. “Gunnar learns from every fall he takes. That is all.”

“Well, Svipdag, I’m glad we had this conversation. You have made yourself clear,” said Hrothgar.

The four of them moved on, strung out now as they had reached the hilltop and the path had widened out. Bare trees stood out against the leaden sky, from which faint wisps of snow were beginning to fall again. A gaggle of crows bickered at them from the branches.

A few days beforehand Svipdag had taunted the witch, Rannveig Split-Skull. He had told her she should be stood in the fields so that her ruined face could scare the birds from the crops.

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That night Rannveig had stood over Svipdag as he slept, her green eyes glittering as she weaved her curse.

“The crows will come for you, Svipdag. Your mouth will be full of water. The wolves will feast on your flesh.”

Olaf Olafsson had been in Hrothgar’s company a long time.

His beard had turned grey, but he was still immensely strong. He had been walking a few steps behind the other three men, carrying his great double-headed axe.

Now he hefted the axe, ran forward and chopped it down hard across Vitserk the Fierce’s back.

Vitserk fell to his knees. Olaf, now standing behind him, swung the axe downwards and split Vitserk’s skull open. Vitserk’s brains sprayed out onto the snowy path.

The crows lurking in the trees took off with a tremendous cawing.

Hrothgar had Svipdag in a wrestler’s grip. Svipdag had drawn his sword but Hrothgar had his arms pinned and now he punched Svipdag in the face and broke his nose.

Svipdag’s sword fell from his hand. He began screaming.

Hrothgar tugged him over to a frozen puddle by the side of the path, forced him onto his knees, then rammed his head down.

The frost on the puddle broke and Svipdag was drowned in the icy water. Hrothgar’s huge hands gripped him round his neck, keeping him under.

When Hrothgar stood up Olaf Olafsson kicked Svipdag’s dead body onto its back, then he spat in Svipdag’s face.

“Growing old, am I? Well, that’s more than you’ll ever know, Hothead.”

He began to strip the rings from Svipdag’s arms.

“What became of these two fine warriors?” asked Hrothgar.

“The robbers killed them,” said Olaf.

“How did they die?”

“Bravely,” said Olaf. “With their swords in their hands.”

“What happened to the robbers?” stewart gott

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Olaf laughed. “They are all dead too. No doubt they were as I described them to everyone, desperate men who deserved their fate.”

“Yes,” agreed Hrothgar and let out a satisfied sigh. “Olaf, old friend, our work is done. We can go home now. Everyone will mourn Svipdag, especially the young men who thought him strong enough to take my place. They were wrong. It will be my son Gunnar who will be Jarl after I die. Svipdag and his fierce friend Vitserk, we will leave them here for the wolves.”

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Niamh Hunt Extract from English Rose

I

Chapter One: Hard Man Fe Dead

f you happened to walk past 77 Cobourg Road on any given day between 1978 and 1981, it would not be uncommon to see a young girl and a youngish boy bickering over excessive use of the telephone or whose-turn-it-was-to-replace-the-milk-beforemum-realised-it-was-gone. The two siblings provided many a curtain-twitching neighbour with free entertainment. Mrs Heath, from number 74, had been known to abandon Corrie to watch CeCe and Desmond Campbell battle it out, as though they were two towering intellectuals, rather than unemployed teenagers with far too much time on their hands.

On this particular Saturday in 1981, it could be said that they actually had good reason to argue, that grief is a confusing emotion. You see, the siblings had received a call two days prior from their father’s wife informing them that he had proverbially kicked the bucket. CeCe and Desmond had not even been aware that he was ill. That’s not to say it came as a total shock – you don’t smoke forty a day from the age of ten to the age of fifty without doing some damage. Still, he was a man who had always seemed to land on his feet.

On one of the rare evenings they had spent together, he had told them (over a bottle of Wray and Nephew for him; two mugs of shandy for them) about a time, back in Barbados, when he had been walking home from the local dancehall after a few too many. He had taken a shortcut through the cemetery and fallen into an open grave. After spending the night there, he awoke with a pounding headache, to a man poking him with a shovel, who observed “him look pretty alive for a duppy.” niamh hunt

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When they excitedly repeated the story to their mother, Rhoda, all she had to say was, “him shoulda stayed in there.” Rhoda could say something like this with such venom because her former gentleman caller appeared to be immortal. Even now, when he was lying in state somewhere in Coventry, she still felt that he might slither back to the house to break her heart again. She needed more than nine days to pass before she would believe that his soul had truly commenced its journey below.

The supposed invincibility of their father was an attitude CeCe and Desmond had adopted as fact, delaying any attempt to form a relationship with him because they assumed he would outlive them all. Neither sibling was aware that they both had an identical fantasy of eventually sitting with their father, upgraded from shandy to rum, listening to him tell tall tales of life before he migrated to this “col’ miserable country”. Perhaps, then, CeCe and Desmond could be forgiven for the undeniably undignified argument that took place on their doorstep that day.

“I want the Prince Buster records.”

“No chance in hell. You only like him because of me.” Desmond flicked cigarette ash to the ground with the bravado of a mafia boss.

“That’s so not true. The only reason you even know about his stuff is ’cause of The Specials. You’re such a poser.”

“Well, you only like him ’cause of Madness.”

“OK, since you’re the expert, name one of his B-sides then. Go on. I’ve got time,” CeCe glanced at a non-existent watch on her wrist.

Desmond did, in fact, only know Prince Buster through the proxy of The Specials or as background music played by his distinctly unhip mother. His sister’s interrogation left him as flummoxed as he had felt during most of his O-Level exams. Deploying the same trusty tactic he had used on nosy extended family members who quizzed him about his results, he opted for indignance and said, “I don’t need to prove anything to you.”

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In the five stages of grief, CeCe and Desmond had jumped straight to bargaining. Although they struggled to recall their father’s middle name, they were acutely aware of the extensive vinyl collection he had relied on to soundtrack their evenings together. Both desperately clinging to a small fraternal fragment, they continued to bicker, their vocal registers reaching heights choir boys would have envied. All the while, Mrs Heath slurped her lukewarm cup of tea and ignored her husband’s passive-aggressive murmuring about how empty his belly was after a long day at work.

The decision to conduct their clashes al fresco was a pragmatic one: it allowed the siblings to argue without directly disturbing their mother’s much-deserved afternoon nap after a long shift at the hospital. The strategy had evidently failed that day.

Rhoda emerged in her dressing gown, clutching a cup of tea and looking at them with raised eyebrows which had clearly been sketched on mere moments before. She pushed the door back and motioned inwards. Desmond stubbed out the cigarette that had mostly been dangling in his hand, depositing ash onto the pavement throughout the altercation. CeCe involuntarily thought about the number of times her father must have performed the exact same gesture.

The three settled into the living room, CeCe and Desmond slouching at opposite ends of the sofa, Rhoda sinking into the armchair in the corner which knowingly moulded to her figure. She took a sip from her favourite Silver Jubilee mug, gifted to CeCe at school four years before (Desmond had misplaced his own by lunchtime). Queen Elizabeth II grinned out at the two siblings mockingly, as Rhoda began to reprimand them.

“Dat man not even col’ yet and y’already fighting over him tings.”

CeCe felt the surge of shame that her mother’s comment was intended to elicit. Desmond was naturally defensive.

“Well, you called dad a bumbaclart just last week so...” niamh hunt

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“Desmond, if me ever hear ya use dat word again!” Rhoda shouted.

“Bumbaclart?”

“D-A-D,” Rhoda enunciated, dramatically adjusting the spectacles dominating the upper half of her face, “dat man was no ‘dad’ to you pickney.”

CeCe had a theory that her mother secretly had 20/20 vision, but used her glasses primarily as a prop, each change in position choreographed to match her mood. If Rhoda’s glasses were on top of her head, then it was probably a sensible time to inform her that you had accidentally broken her favourite ceramic fish, while dancing along too exuberantly to Top of the Pops. If Rhoda’s glasses were perched on the end of her nose, then you should probably consider the possibility of going into witness protection.

Right now, her glasses looked dangerously close to sliding off.

Unfortunately, Desmond failed to read his mother’s stage-managed cues as well as his younger sister.

“I thought you’d be over the moon that we’re not being too sentimental about the bloke.”

“Me didn’t raise ya to be getting on like that over a couple of poxy records.”

“They’re not just any re–” “We’re sorry, Mum,” CeCe interjected before her brother could dig a verbal grave deeper than the one their father had fallen into, “Des, it’s fine. You can have your pick of the records. It’s not worth stressing over.”

This was a classic CeCe move: she could argue with Desmond until the cows came home when there wasn’t an audience (Mrs Heath et al didn’t count), but her mother’s presence was strangely sobering. It raised the stakes far too high.

Especially when she remembered the moment, two days ago, when the phone ominously summoned the family from their dinner. Teeth were kissed as Rhoda questioned who on earth would dare call at this particular time, on a weeknight, when they would 62

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obviously be settling down for their evening meal. Desmond had been the one to push his chair back and lumber over to the phone, cussing under his breath as he went. There was no possible indication from Desmond’s emotionless grunts or vague replies as to either the identity of the caller or the topic of conversation. CeCe continued to eat, too focused on her mum’s curry goat to engage with the impenetrable phone conversation occurring across the room.

After a couple of minutes, she was distracted by Desmond’s hand struggling to replace the receiver.

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Vanessa Phan Beneath the Stairwell

“

C

rap.”

A series of sharp clatters followed by footsteps thudding overhead reverberates in the stairwell. Lia Choi jolts. It’s the last Friday of October, the single day of the school week where she has back-to-back free periods all afternoon. She cocks her head to one side and holds her breath as a vape falls into view. It strikes the ground with a high-pitched clink next to where she sits, hidden away in a nook under the stairs. She had meant to get to study hall an hour ago. Her thumb hovers over her phone, paused in the action of scrolling, as a pair of scuffed shoes and mismatched socks come into view. The edge of one shoe collides with the vape, sending it spiralling sideways across the linoleum floor until it lands next to Lia. “For God’s sake.”

Lia’s stomach drops. The voice is familiar. An exasperated sigh punctuates the silence. Blood pounds and a low roaring fills her ears as Charlie squats down and turns to face her.

“Choi?” His eyes widen at the sight of her, curled up under the stairwell. “What are you doing here?”

He spots his vape, bright red against the floor and reaches for it.

His fingers can’t quite grasp the slim device. A small grunt escapes him as he hunkers low. Lia shifts onto her right butt cheek, numb from sitting on the hard flooring. She nudges it towards him with one index finger.

“Here you go,” she says. She gnaws her fingers, pulling off bits of skin, then stops when she remembers how Mamee told her it was a bad habit. Instead, she bites the inside of her cheek. Charlie smiles at her hesitantly.

“Thanks.”

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He straightens and takes a step away. Then another. Two steps more in total before he stops. He backtracks and squats down.

Squints at her uncertainly, looking around at the cramped space she has contorted her body into.

“What are you doing here?” he repeats.

Lia fidgets and tugs the end of her skirt over her knees, which are pulled close to her chest. Crawling into the hidey hole under the second-floor stairwell in the Humanities block hadn’t been planned, but ever since her meeting with Mr Miller earlier, she felt frantic.

His sweat patches were the first clue that something was wrong.

Her permission slip for the overnight debate trip, slightly crumpled and worn around the edges, was laid flat on his desk. I’m afraid that we need to discuss your eligibility for the debate team.

She was an intelligent girl, he’d said with little preamble, but her grades simply weren’t good enough. She needed to channel her energy into doing better before he could even think about letting her represent the school. He had trouble meeting her eyes, or maybe Lia had trouble meeting his. Embarrassingly, every time she blinked, tears spilled down her face. They sat across from each other, a box of tissues and folders stacked between them, until the bell rang, signalling the end of fourth period. He held the door for her on the way out.

“People watching?” Lia offers.

Charlie looks at her, unconvinced. She gestures towards the triangular slice of glass next to her. One side of the stairwell offers a perfect view of the student parking lot, where grey concrete is flecked with vestiges of autumn. With each gust of wind, burnished leaves fall from spindly maple trees lining the walkways.

“I gotta say, Choi, you pick the weirdest places to hang out.” He takes a slow drag on the vape, releases a breath and sighs. She looks at him in alarm as he gets onto his hands and knees, crawling into the small space to settle beside her.

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“Move up, I can’t fit in.”

He scoots in to sit beside her, jostling for space, until, finally, his back rests against the wall and both legs are hidden under the stairwell.

“So, this is nice,” he observes, loosening his tie. He takes another puff and the smell of strawberries fills the air. His discomfort coupled with the sight of his long legs doubled up to fit the tight space is comical. Lia suppresses a smile. Sudden pleasure blooms inside her.

“Very homey.”

“Thanks, I tried.”

“Smells like eggs and could be bigger, but at least you’ve got a view.”

He nods out the window, where rain mists finely.

“I was going for minimalist chic when I designed this space,” she says. “Micro-apartments are all the rage now. Because of inflation.

And the rising cost of living.”

“We’ve got a lot to look forward to when we leave school.”

“Mm.” “It’s not very clean,” he adds. She follows his gaze past their feet, all the way to the far end where the stairwell tapers to meet the ground. Thick cobwebs fill the void.

“You came on a bad day.”

“There are good days?”

“If you don’t like it, you can always leave.”

“Nah, I love a good bit of people watching.”

Lia snorts.

“Yeah, alright then,” she says. “How come you’re not in class?” She plucks the vape from his hands and holds it to her lips. He nods in silent acquiescence.

“I had to talk to the headteacher about Parent’s Evening.” He rolls his eyes, smile fading. “I have to give this speech to the parents about how great the school is, but she didn’t think it was good enough.”

“Sounds tough.”

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“It’s not that bad,” he says. “I have to jump through a few hoops, that’s just the way it is.” He rolls his shoulder absentmindedly, cracks his neck in a way that makes Lia cringe.

“Is your shoulder still bothering you?”

“My shoulder?”

“Christina told me you injured your rotator cuff at the start of the year,” Lia says. “That you couldn’t play rugby anymore.”

You told me, she thinks, but she doesn’t want to come across weird for bringing up things about him from text conversations that he doesn’t even remember anymore.

“Oh, that.” He laughs self-deprecatingly, rubbing his hands against his trousers. “I must really have been whining if Chris said something to you. A bit of physio and rest was all I needed. There was a moment when I thought Coach would bench me, though.”

“That doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“I’m not really into organised sports,” she says.

“I’ve noticed.”

“What do you mean?” Lia is uncertain about whether she should be offended.

“I just mean that you’re always at the back when we have to run laps in PE.” “Yeah, OK, you got me there,” she says. “I can barely run two hundred metres, let alone a lap around the field.”

“Hey, you’re the brains and I’m the brawn, right?”

“Right.”

He opens his mouth to say something, then snaps it closed as above them, the creak of a door opening and voices chattering echoes loudly. Footsteps patter down the stairs in quick succession.

“Think it’s home time,” he says, once silence descends again. He crawls out of the enclosure, reaching out a hand to help Lia up. Her legs tingle with disuse. The bell rings deafeningly overhead.

“I’m a big fan of the practice rooms, by the way.”

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“In the music block,” he clarifies. “You don’t have to actually play an instrument to use them, but it’s easy to book a room and just hang out.”

Lia knows all about the practice rooms. Back before Christina and Charlie started properly dating, they would hang out there after school. We don’t do anything there, Christina said once. Like, how gross would that be? But it’s a good place to hang, you know? ’Cause if I brought Charlie home, I swear, my brothers would take the mick out of me.

“Not that this isn’t nice and all, but if you’re ever looking for more space, I mean.”

“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind,” Lia replies. She slides his vape into her pocket as they leave.

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Harriet Rix Citadel

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he citadel was complete and yet it suffered. From the sky it was an unlidded eye stranded forty kilometres north of the Syrian border; a sharp-edged blue iris ringed with graphite and a golden pupil staring straight at the sun.

A grey paved road encircled the mound. Inside it, blue plastic sheeting ran up the slope to the bottom of a wall. The wall was made of honey-coloured blocks of stone, square-cut and close-fitting. A rampart up one side of the mound ended in an arch and a door, otherwise it was an unbroken circle of havara limestone, rising into a blue sky.

A smaller eye nestled under the wall. Notching a peristem out of the circular path round the citadel was the dome of a hammam, and under the dome, naked and still as a sacrificial victim on the hot marble slab, lay Dr Assa’ad Al-Halabi, thinking about his first wife.

He had seen her that morning in UN Meeting Room Three.

A prickling consciousness had made him look up and she had looked at him; she was older and thinner and more beautiful and he felt a warmth and then a muffled rage which choked him with the realisation that he could never come to terms with the world he lived in because too many of the patterns he had known had been destroyed and the all-important reasons for their divorce had become, in the last six years, completely irrelevant.

When they had divorced he could still walk around the streets of Aleppo and he operated on the flesh of living people and he had fierce political beliefs and when he wrote something it related to actual events and when he celebrated Eid it was a true tradition and when he told his mother he loved her, it expressed something as rooted and tangible as an oak tree and when he longed for children he longed for them with a certainty that it was right to create something that experienced the real world that he knew. None of this was reality now. harriet rix

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It was too wet in the bath to cry, but he was full of self-pity and rage and wanted to. Not because he was hurt, but because he was impervious now, and nothing could make him care. There had been rage in her eyes too that morning; rage which had still been there as they chatted in a desultory fashion after the meeting. But he sensed that for her, life was still as real as it had been six years ago and that she still felt the hurt of being divorced. Divorced for working too much and not having children and growing old. Divorced, in short, for all the reasons that men divorce their beautiful, intelligent first wives and marry younger, less charismatic second wives. Why was it that she could hang onto the past and he had lost it?

The revolution, of course, he thought, his guilt; he had lost a dimension and become the shadow on a screen in a karakoz show. But no, the puppet shows too had disappeared since the revolution and now only existed in a UNESCO wet dream. He was more adaptable than that. A shadow on a computer screen, he thought wryly, a projection in the international metaverse. He had come out of that crowded, darkened room, with the strong directional light shining, into a room with no walls and diffuse light and no shadows, where he could choose any direction and all meant nothing. He looked up at the beams of light coming down through the steam from the octagon skylights of the little dome, and to distract himself from his impotence, he tried to think about the citadel, the mamluk emblems carved into the wall, surely identical to the ones in Aleppo?

It didn’t work. Finally, he stretched out one toe and, half twisting his head, saw Bajram sidling in through the door. Bajram looked surprised and made a half-wave and frowned at him once with veiled eyes and looked at the floor. Then, concentrating on his feet, he paddled duck-like around the circumference of the light from the glass in the dome, his blue plastic slippers gripping the wet marble floor. Dr Assa’ad, rage subsiding, smiled back up at the ceiling. How characteristic of Bajram, who he saw every week at this time, to look surprised, to make no effort to smile, to armour himself in an awkward reserve even when he was wearing nothing. Later he would thaw, 70

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no doubt, as he had done last week and start to tell stories of life in Pristina, life before the war. But he always started with a carapace that had to be prised off.

Dr Assa’ad, relaxed again, was wondering why steam lost so much of its form when it was trapped in a confined space. Steam, he thought, looked nothing, really, like clouds. I shall never get used to it, he had thought earlier that week, as he flew to Istanbul in the evening.

Never get used to the splendour of earth and the splendour of flying, never get used to the chasms that appear in the clouds, the whitecapped mountains sending computer-generated fingers out below the layers of cloud. The clouds themselves, classifiable, in Arabic, in English, by their enchanting names. Never get used to coming up through the cloud after a bumpy take-off, and finding the sun setting over the horizon, lighting up the tops of the clouds and sometimes gilding them, sometimes making them gently pink, so that you are in the light and the rest of the world clouded and in shadow.

The funny Englishman who had been handing out the cash this time at Istanbul airport had made a joke of it. “Clouds of dollars,” he had said, “helping us soar above the storm clouds” he had added. The Englishman had, thought Dr Assa’ad, spoken good Arabic. A slight Egyptian accent, but he had known what he was doing. Perhaps this was a sign that they had decided at last.

He was vaguely aware of Bajram in the marble niche in the wall, sluicing layers and layers of water over himself, methodically, carefully, concentrating absolutely on the next step. A strange thing, how hard it was to find forward motivation. Surely not compatible with the human condition where you must escape, live, travel and quest, always looking for the next thing physically or mentally and then absorb the effort required to move, the psychological drag of moving on and on. They were mostly poor, the great travellers. Evvliyya Celebi, for whom the word great couldn’t be less appropriate, the jester sitting so lightly on the earth and travelling over and over it, mixing in the eddies of a great mass of people and laughing with them. harriet rix

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That story of the hamsi, for example, he wasn’t laughing at the man, he was speculating as to whether he himself, in the middle of having sex (with his wife, a detail which seemed to reinforce the importance of his decision) would stop and race down to the quay for anchovies. Dr Assa’ad pondered the lusts and logistics involved and decided that he would certainly not have rushed away from his wife for a fish. Not for either wife.

But then he giggled to himself and remembered a time when he had done exactly that; a bright afternoon in May when the protests were starting and when the shouts in the street were so infectious that he had broken out of his focus and listened, and then his movements had become automatic while his mind repeated idiotically, it’s started, it’s started, over and over again, and then his wife, removing his hand from her left breast, had said, “it’s no good, I can’t concentrate. Go and see what’s happening!”

She looked cross, and he realised that she was probably able to concentrate, but he was soft. He had put on his trousers and rushed out onto the street with some other people in his building. That was when the snipers started. So, in a sense, he chose fish.

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Liz Tresidder Extract from Greetings from Cooke, Montana

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y parents die when I’m sixteen years old. They meet, twenty years earlier, at the math department at Ohio State. Mom studies pure math but my dad is a statistics professor. He spends ten hours a day in his office coming up with absurd predictive equations. What is the likelihood of the earth getting hit by an asteroid in the next ten years? What is the likelihood of a pile-up occurring on the I-71? On the I-80? On the Golden Gate Bridge?

When I am ten years old, I am afraid of failing my history test.

Dad comes up with a formula. You’ve studied for a total of eighteen hours and you know seventy percent of the material. Your likelihood of failure is seventeen percent. I pass the test with a B plus. I learn that my dad can predict the future.

When I am fifteen years old, Mom and Dad buy a new car. Dad worries about it. We’re point-zero nine percent more likely to die in this car than the model before it. Something to do with the airbags. Dad brings it up every single time we get in the car. It drives Mom crazy.

But Dad is right. We get in a crash. Mom and Dad die. I wake up in the hospital with a five-inch-long incision in my chest where part of the windscreen had cut through my sternum. My grandpop is sat in a stiff-backed chair pulled up to the left-hand side of the bed. He tells me that there has been an accident. A freak accident.

I can only think of the point-zero-nine percent chance that this was always going to happen.

I leave Ohio and move to Cooke, to live with my grandparents.

I practice my dad’s ability to predict the future. I study the sows on the farm. I listen to everything my grandpop tells me about them.

I look up the long-range weather forecast for the winter. I figure out that three percent of the litter will die this year. And I am right.

Three percent do die, give or take a few. liz tresidder

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The next summer, four percent of piglets die. I don’t get attached to any of them. I do the same math, but this time for my grandparents. I take their ages, their doctor’s reports, their cholesterol levels and blood tests. I find out whether the winter will be particularly bitter this year, whether the flu variant will be worse than usual. I find that they have a point-four percent chance of dying in the next five years. Goes up to two percent in the next ten. But they’re pretty young, pretty healthy. I don’t worry about it.

My first day at Cooke High, I try to work out whether I will make any friends. There are sixty-three kids in our year. I think I have a good chance. But I fail to take into consideration all the variables; how the kids already have their own friendship groups, how I joined halfway through the year, how everyone at Cooke High has known each other since they were little.

Before he died, Dad taught me about mitigation. When you don’t know the likely outcome of an event, you manipulate all the potential variables to work out in your favour. So, I try that. I make sure I have the right clothes, the right rucksack, even the right pencil case. I take the bus to school so no one sees my grandpop dropping me off in his ancient truck. When a girl in my lit class asks me why I moved halfway through the school year, I tell her my dad got offered a job in Parsons and we had to move. I am careful not to stand out. Before I came to Cooke, I could do a lot of things. I could backflip into a swimming pool or tumble along the strip of grass behind the science block. I always landed on my feet. I could play the clarinet and I was captain of the sophomore debate team. I was second in my class.

I make sure all of that melts away in Cooke. My old school in Columbus had over two thousand students. Cooke High has four hundred. The classes are tiny, but noisy. The lunch hall piles in most of the students all at once. I can never find an empty table.

There is no debate team. There is no gymnastics team. There’s a cheer team but when I practice one of the chants at home in front of the mirror – Cooke High Pride, we’re steppin’ up, so step aside!

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– the words fall to the ground, dead on arrival. There’s an orchestra, but in my second week a senior tries to flush a freshman’s flute down the toilet. It is safer to retreat. I don’t raise my hand in class. I bring a book to the lunch hall and keep my head down in the corridor.

It works. All the kids who were curious about the new girl learn that there is nothing interesting to be found. I make friends with my chemistry lab partner. Lyn. A nice girl with shiny black hair and very straight teeth. She tells me about how she wore retainers all through seventh and eighth grade and boys didn’t think she was pretty until she took them off. Then she flashes her perfect smile at me.

I get a good few months before it all goes wrong. The last gym session before the summer break. Our coach takes us to the pool down the road from school. After the holidays the pool will close for the fall and we’ll be back in gym, doing burpees and running laps. For today, the sun is bright and the water is cold and sharp. The teachers let us do what we like. The boys mess about with pool floats or dunk the smaller kids. I tread water close by to Lyn and her friends, watching the way the sun turns Lyn’s hair golden-black. Every now and then the girls laugh about something and I inch closer. Eventually, I am in their circle. My skin starts to tingle on the bridge of my nose and the tops of my shoulders. I will be burnt, later. For now, I tilt my head back and let my hair get wet.

A boy, drifting past on a pool float, stops nearby. He has long bangs that are stuck close to his forehead and big, heavy eyebrows that droop down around his eyes. He has a patchy tan, brown in random spots. His knees are still white under the water. He bobs up and down for a moment, then asks: “What happened to you?”

He gestures to his own chest as he says it. I have no idea what he’s talking about. The day is so beautiful, the sun is so bright, Lyn is smiling so prettily. I have forgotten who I am. Where I came from. liz tresidder

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Then I look down, to my own chest. My bathing suit – baby blue, bought new for the summer, too small now, digging into my shoulders – has slipped. Just enough to reveal the scar on my chest. About as long as the span of your hands. Thick like rope. Lyn notices too. And now the whole group is staring at me, reaching out towards me. Like they’re going to pull at my bathing suit until they can see the whole long scar.

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David Willey Dream / Time

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n the beginning there was nothing. Then one of us – impossible to say who – began to dream. Also unknown is the nature of that first dream, but we suspect it was of a particle, too small to be then named, but essential to everything that followed. Then another of us, inspired by the first, dreamed of a complementary particle, or perhaps its opposite. The trend caught on and soon enough we had dreamed of enough material to create the world, although we did not dream the genescent spark (it is suspected one of the children mischieved a collision). That we were creating the world was not something we understood back then. Dreaming, in those earliest of days, was not even instinct, but a natural thing. Beyond our manipulations and which, in fact, manipulated us. It was our air, is how you might understand it: always present, often unacknowledged. Or perhaps you would not understand it that way, not anymore, because these days you are more aware of the air than ever.

But that was how it was. The mechanics of it all were of no interest to us, and anyway, there seemed to be no discernible pattern to who dreamed what: one dreamer had no obvious connection to their predecessor. Nor did we worry about things like if the dreams were allocated. Much like your investigations into what you know as evolution, that which was necessary, found a way. One of us dreamed of a burning revolving mass, another dreamed that it cooled and slowed down; one of us dreamed of those forms you know as mountains, another dreamed that something you later called rain fell. Soon enough we had dreamed of land, trees and forests; of oceans, trenches and reefs.

Someone (perhaps the children again) dreamed of fish, lizards and birds; of mammoths, primates and humans. Recall these were not words we knew: language was not required by us then, nor is it necessary now, only we had to find something to do after we stopped dreaming. david willey

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Note that our listing of dreams is not exhaustive. To enumerate everything of which we dreamed would take as long as it took to dream it all in the first place. (For more information we refer you to our pending comments on time.) But our dreams were not as you might think: lengthy and fracturous; inscrutable and enigmatic. They were instantaneous, efficient. And there was no need for us to talk about them, the way you might the next morning, because the evidence was there for us to see: the oceans, as we’d dreamed them; the forests, exactly the same. And while there were some similarities from one dream to another (a pebble, smooth and ovalous; another pebble, the same but with an orange squiggle) each one was distinct, unique.

Were we happy? An interesting question to which we do not know the answer. We can say we were not unhappy. It has been said, by you, that we did not enquire enough, ignored the matter of ‘why’.

But that is your way: there is, in you, an innation to acquire knowledge.

It is admirable, but not something we have ever sought. That will be hard for you to understand, we know. We have heard of your saying, ignorance is bliss, but it was not ignorance in which we lived, it was simply our state. Can you understand that? Perhaps not. It has long been our contention that there are some things which cannot be translated, and so perhaps there will always be a barrier between us, one which prevents us from truly seeing and knowing one another.

But the dreams. They carried on for a long time. Although again, that word – ‘time’ – meant nothing to us. It still doesn’t, but we use it here because we know it means something to you. That there was once a time when we hadn’t dreamed, or that there was a time when we dreamed only of particles and that such times are distinct from when we dreamed of you and when we stopped dreaming at all, is a thing we cannot understand. It is impossible for us to say one thing happened before the other, or that other things occurred concurrently.

Time, like air is for you, is simply around us, so much so, we truly have no name for it. We cannot account for what it might be, although many of us are amused by your adherence to it, whereas others admire your organisation.

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Because we are fond of you, who we once dreamed of and so breathed into life. (Not the other way around. It is not life which is inside you, but you who are contained by life.) Fond still, even after what took place, the time – that word again. What can it mean? – but the time after which we no longer dreamed. When we made the decision to stop dreaming, the only decision we have ever made, one which you might understand in the context of your words ‘unthinkable’, ‘treason’, or ‘blasphemy’.

We have always had bad dreams (it was you who called them nightmares) because that is in the nature of things. Only the good dreams far outweighed the bad. Even then, they came only sporadically: a forest fire, an earthquake, an asteroid. But over time (ah! We say it only to help you see, but how we might see it, we don’t know), the bad dreams came with a greater frequency. Some of us thought there were connections between the two forms. Someone had a good dream that we could control fire; someone else had a bad dream that the fire controlled us. One of us had a good dream of oxygen; another had a bad dream that we could not breathe. These are deliberately reductive examples, but another one, not uncontroversial around these parts, is the good dream when we dreamed of you and the bad dream when…

Well, you begin to see.

And so, we stopped dreaming. The decision was a collective one, because we have what we believe you call a hive mind. Our reasoning being that if we stopped dreaming, then all things – good and bad – would stop. Not entirely, which was not what we sought, but pause; cease only to progress, a word we know you think is good. But things did not stop, because our dreams no longer had any effect on the world and, perhaps, they never did. We miss them, of course – the same way you would miss air – but are wary of starting again. We fear that the bad dreams will take control, that they might outnumber the good, that this was how it was always going to be (we recall the time one of us dreamed of a pendulum) that good dreams are not inherently good, nor bad dreams inherently bad, only each are different, and difference alone bearing no moral quality, but simply being something which is. david willey

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In order to no longer dream, we choose to no longer sleep, which is easier for us than it is for you. Although we miss it, in sleep, in dreams.

Occasionally, one of us will nod off and it is required that another of us prods the about-to-be-sleeping one awake. It is not something we enjoy but we thank each other anyway. To stay alert, we march on the spot, splash our faces with water, sing hearty songs and argue over who first dreamed of marching, of water, of singing. There is much of which we are proud – the dream of bees and of honey, for example – and on the whole we think we might be more happy than sad. But we do miss it, miss it we do and hope that one day the dreams – the good dreams – can come back.

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Graphic Novel

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INTERFACE will be published by Virago in 2025.

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Non-fiction

Paul Atherton Britain isn’t Great

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ritain, as an idea, isn’t Great anymore.

It used to be.

It used to be phenomenal.

We used to be the world’s great thinkers, inventors, society-builders and rule-breakers. You only have to look at our history to understand that.

Take the Monarchy; a more than 1000-year-old institution. We fell out of love with the concept for a while, so cut the King’s head off; tried running things ourselves by putting Oliver Cromwell in charge. Then, after a few years of wearing sackcloth, went, “Hell no!

Seriously, bad idea,” chopped his head off and reinstated decades of partying under King Charles II, although this time, the public and the royals had a contract.

The deal, sealed some years later, meant the royals could continue as monarchs in return for giving the government all their rental revenues from their lands, which turned out to be most of the British Isles. Genius! As long as we don’t execute them anymore, we keep their money and simply returned them a stipend to sustain their buildings and admin.

That’s how Britain learnt things. Had an idea, trialled it, then only took the bits that worked into the future.

Put that focus onto the love of my life, the nation’s capital city, London, and you enter a whole new stratosphere of brilliance.

Here we invented television, radio, telecommunications, the computer, software, electricity generation, gas power, underground travel, the airport, air traffic control, passports, maps (even though Britain was ridiculously oversized on them for centuries – to reflect our greatness, of course); not to mention the scientific breakthroughs of the theories of gravity and evolution, paul atherton

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the medical innovations of vaccines, antiseptics, antibiotics, medicinal tablets and the discovery of the building blocks of life itself, DNA; and modern theatre and the very notion of the English language. The list is endless. Indeed, so influential were we, that the world still sets their clocks to our time; when that ball drops in Greenwich, the globe aligns with us.

I mean, just one Londoner, Sir Henry Cole, invented the area of South Kensington, the world’s first Museum Cafe, the pre-paid postal system and the Christmas card. He also came up with the notion of crowdfunding to create the Great Exhibition and Crystal Palace, still the largest freestanding building in the world today, which charged admission in order to raise funds to build the free-to-the-public museums of the V&A, Natural History Museum, Science Museum and the almost pay-what-you-can ticketed Royal Albert Hall.

In Britain, in general, and London, in particular, we aspired to brilliance, praised knowledge above all else and made education our most valued currency. Scientists at the Royal Institution were our Love Island stars in the 1890s. People queued around the block to see them perform experiments there. Where we found social problems, we sought to fix them; think Barnardo’s and the children’s home, Peabody and social housing, Beveridge and the welfare state.

But things are not what they used to be.

It’s August 2022 and things are really bleak. Boris Johnson is Prime Minister, we’re on the brink of the worst cost of living crisis ever recorded and societal cohesion is in complete breakdown and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Our nation and my city have become shadows of their former selves. How did they bow so low from their past, become so insignificant, so pointless, so cheap today?

Well, that has an easy answer… Money!

When money is the only driver, then money is the only outcome.

Creativity is crushed, progress reversed and social problems are no longer addressed. And I know this, because it is that drive for money that has created my plight.

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I have been homeless for thirteen years. My last home on the Southbank, a two-bed apartment with views over St. Paul’s Cathedral and a terrace overlooking the London Eye, went from costing me and my flatmate £800 per month each in 2009, to costing the eye-watering £76,000 per year in rent it does today, almost four time as much. That this has been allowed to happen and that the infrastructure of our social system is such a mess, is why Heathrow Terminal 5 is now my bedroom.

Prices go up and everything else goes down. Today London is a stack of lackless, designed buildings and homogenised shops; a profit-making creative wasteland. Cockney film star, Bob Hoskins, warned us about this in 1982 (in a BBC Omnibus programme)… we didn’t listen.

Because when money is all, nobody cares about the destruction of history, architecture, place, society, community, humans. Nope, when money comes into play, it’s just money we care about.

Our government is closing universities which fail to produce money-making graduates. Going are the drama schools, the history and English courses, philosophy, music and art. The institutions that were revered the world over are now nothing more than spawning grounds for drone workers. A student’s contribution is now their profit to the credit and loan companies, not their intellect and ingenuity to innovation, industry and society as a whole.

Why? Because we made our universities into businesses.

Why? Perhaps because if you educate people, they learn and do annoying things like challenge power, figure out the lies of politicians – when you understand economics, no one can bamboozle you with economics – and even check behind the headlines of a biased media.

In university you used to learn how to deconstruct ideas that have no validity and put forward arguments with sound reasoning.

But, as Billie Piper’s character in the National Theatre’s play, Great Britain, inherently understood, in the twenty-first century, where industries like social media are the monster profit machines paul atherton

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and run on the fuel of uninformed public opinion, barely a soul wants reasoned debate.

It’s ironic, because another London invention was the general interest magazine, an idea that came about because people were standing on street corners in the eighteenth century spouting their opinions and handing out their printed polemic to anyone that passed. This was deemed not a great idea and so compiling opinions through an editor and only picking those substantiated and supported became a much better way to present them to the public. Smart, eh? But we’ve come full circle and gone back to shouting unsubstantiated opinions to anyone who’ll listen.

And because of this commercialisation of everything and stifling of thinking, every single day, news like this breaks my soul a little more: the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the one that made Big Ben and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the one that’s made and maintained bells on the same spot for seven centuries, is being turned into a bell-themed boutique hotel. I wish I was exaggerating to make a point, but I’m not. That’s really what they’re doing! The longest trading retail store in Britain, the Chandler, Arthur Beale, was forced to leave Covent Garden during COVID after 550 years, though trading under different names, all because of the landlord’s greed.

The irony is, I’m homeless, partly because I want to stay in the city that still has the vestiges of and potential for ingenuity, charity and philanthropy. I’m creative, cultural, inquisitive, intelligent, Welsh, Black, Disabled, passionate and love history, so of course I call this place home. Nowhere else in the world do you have so many free museums, free theatre, free art, so that even though penniless, I can still live here like a king. Try doing that in Ystrad Mynach, where I originated. I aspire to be a Sir Henry Cole and, like him, I am now a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, realising an ambition I have held since I was ten years old, to be surrounded by intelligence and in a position to make genuine and long-lasting social change.

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And it’s the possibility of change that gives me hope. Because London is a place of constant change, constant movement, with every new generation bringing new values, new ideas, breaking a few more rules.

I think Gen Z will give Britain its prefix back and, under Charles III, we’ll all be partying again.

I hope I’m around to see it, as it really will be great!

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Hana Fazal Extract from All the way down Noon, Wednesday June 5, 2019

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he photo on the mantel in a Brighton apartment is of a man in his late forties. A smile zings in his face. He’s in shorts and tee shirt. Tanned arms folded, legs askance; relaxed in the shade outside. A naked, flip-flopped toe is touching-distance from the paw of a ginger and white cat. Behind him, the upward slant of a limestone house made of outsize blocks, whited out by the flat, expansive light. Tell-tale signs of the Mediterranean island of Gozo. On the back of the photo, in a tiny – almost illegible – hand, are the words: ‘This is how I want to be remembered’. Next to it, on the otherwise bare shelf, is a scrap of paper with a wild scrawl of writing. ‘I’m sorry,’ it says.

Gozo is the second largest island of the Maltese archipelago. It’s twenty-six square miles of lunar-landscape, which, seen from the plane descending into Malta, vaguely resembles a scaly fat fish.

It’s edged by lava-faced cliffs, rocky coastline and the vast topaz of the Mediterranean. It’s just south of Sicily and north of Malta, on the same latitude as its neighbours: Tunisia (to the west) and the southernmost tip of Greece (due east). But it’s far from a paradise island. It’s more a run-down, craggy rock. It’s seemingly inhabited by only the very old and the very young. Those in between have either emigrated or are out working the overlong days that commuting via ferry to Malta entails. There’s a surface sheen to the place. Its arterial roads, for example, are sleek and well-maintained with EU money, but Gozitans drive like they’re in a slalom race and – as with health and safety practices in general – they have a cavalier attitude to the highway code. Northwest African winds, cool in the summer, are wild and ferocious at all other times. Kindly local women feeding a 98

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stray cat their leftover fishbones are insensible to the exploding feral population – so big, it threatens to outnumber the humans. And, in the intense heat of July and August, the slightest precipitation brings forth a plague of rain beetles descending from the sky, making it appear as if the ground underfoot is moving.

But this is where he was at his happiest.

Chapter One

Noon, Wednesday September 4, 2019 I grip the armrests of the aeroplane seat so tight I can feel the blood draining from my fingers. I am alone, returning to Gozo, where he – M – and I lived for nearly two years from 2012 to 2014, inadvertently finding ourselves looking after a colony of feral cats. I have no idea how I have made it onto the flight. I have been in a mental fug, with no sense of day or night, since the thing happened. And yet, I feel the stroke of noon on a Wednesday like a slug to the head from behind.

I am transported to that moment three months ago as if I was right there. I feel what M felt. The engulfing panic of being dragged under. The seduction of relief, no matter the cost. I have imbibed his pain, and it’s wide and deep and it goes all the way down.

But I am a fraud. I wasn’t there. I had abandoned him.

I am clinging to that photo of M. Literally. I’ve had a pocket-sized copy made for my purse and have been pawing it the entire journey. I also had it blown up and four duplicates made, which I had framed in a rose-gold surround. I gave one to each of his family members: his mum, his step-mum and his sister. The fourth, I kept for myself.

I don’t even remember that day: the one in the picture.

I’m guessing it was taken towards the end of our time living on the island judging by the size of Pixi, his favourite of the feral cats we looked after. He was right though. In almost ten years of our relationship, it was the happiest I’d ever known him. That smile. It must have been me behind the camera. hana fazal

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But I don’t recall taking the picture.

The plane lurches into its descent. A wave of grief sluices through me. It’s too soon to return, but I need relief from the pain.

I need to come to this place.

I hear Fabio before I see him in arrivals. He’s Rita and her husband Salvu’s adopted little boy. They were our next-door neighbours when we lived on the island. He’s screeching my name – loud, demanding and spoiled. I am pulling my wheelie suitcase, sweat trails are prickling my neck and the bright overhead strip-lights of the compact airport dizzy me. I can feel the blood beating around my head. What was I thinking? I have spent the twelve weeks since the event in bed, awake at night and in a fitful sleep during the day. I have cried convulsively the entire time. I have been terrified by the rattle of my heart against my ribcage, the dry-mouthed breathlessness and the surging waves of grief. I only have to get through this moment.

I move a foot, then the other.

Internally, every atom fights it, but my face constructs a smile. I have spotted them in the crowd. Rita’s leaning over the barrier with a plumper, much-grown, almost-seven-year-old Fabio perched on her hip.

Irritation begins to pucker in my belly. Rita and Salvu have insisted on picking me up at the airport. But I want to be alone. I want to recreate the journeys he and I made crossing Malta to get to the ferry port in the north. I want to feel that same thrill we felt together as we got closer to seeing our fur babies. I want to catch the bus. He loved to feel like a local.

Salvu’s chamois leather face looks more worn, his eyes more rheumy, his gait more awkward. Rita is all soft curves, warmth and ready – as always – to break into laughter. My shoulders drop an inch. She will take care of me.

As I approach them, Fabio has leapt over the metal bar and thrown himself at me. I have no choice but to catch him. He has 100

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his arms and legs wrapped around me and is kissing my face and telling me he loves me. Rita’s already laughing. I stop to set him down. She hugs me. Her hold is bosom-deep.

“Journey was ok?” Rita says in that familiar intonation of Gozitan Malti with a sharp rise at the end of the sentence. Soothing.

I nod, unable to speak.

Salvu and I hug. I see the distinct glassiness of tears in his eyes as we break apart. I don’t know if they are for M. Salvu is very sentimental and cries easily. It could just be that he’s genuinely happy to see me again.

“Are you well, Salvu?”

“Yes, yes. You are well?”

“Yes,” I lie.

And with that, we have exhausted the extent of his English.

We’re driving through Malta and I am mimicking a functioning, normal person. I swap pleasantries with Rita, asking about the health of her siblings, her aunt and her aging father.

“How are the babies?”

“Good, good,” she says. “Mela, all three are good. They are eating good. Looking forward to their Mummy. I told them when they come for the breakfast in the morning their Mummy is coming today.” She glances over her shoulder at me and squeezes a smile from her eyes.

The ‘breakfast’ reminds me of how M used to call the island ‘The Gozo’ in an affectionate nod to the Gozitan habit of misusing the definite article in English, their second language. I look away, afraid of the tears backing up. Out the window, the familiar low skyline: a treeless confusion of neo-classical shopfronts sandwiched between the glass and plastic of contemporary, commercial premises. I have no interest in Malta.

Rita thinks I have come all this way just for the cats. After we left, we returned twice a year – much to the amusement of the locals – to check on the remaining colony and to give Rita the money to hana fazal

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continue to feed them. There are only three left. Still, I’ll need to pick up the tab on my own from now on.

They’re talking in Malti, while Salvu navigates the Maltese roads that to them are terrifyingly busy. I slump into my seat. They have not mentioned M. It aggrieves and relieves me in equal measure. His absence is the ghost that sits between us.

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Eleanor Franzén Gamble/Forebear

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iagnosis, if it was a trauma, is one I don’t remember. The paediatrician was a family friend and lived in our neighbourhood.

I knew him as Dr Ford, but to my parents he was Ray. Sometimes I build the memory in my head: the painted animals that adorned each clinic room door, me on the scratchy paper cover of the examining table, anxious and thirsty. My mother explaining my symptoms and odd behaviour. The blood-test. I can’t believe I don’t remember this, since every blood test taken afterwards is seared into my brain with a visceral sense of terror and helplessness. Did they take it from my arm, did they prick my finger? I have no idea. When I think of what happened next – Ray returning to the exam room, grey-faced, with the test results; my mother already dimly aware that his next sentence was going to change her life – it’s like directing a music video in my head.

All made up.

This is what happened, according to my mother: there was a blood test, and a prolonged period of time during which Ray left the room. He was making a phone call to the paediatric endocrinology department at the University of Virginia hospital. I’m lucky that he thought to call them; the other hospital in town, Martha Jefferson, was closer, but didn’t have the same reputation or the well-funded research. When he came back, he handed my mother a paper with an appointment time. She looked at him and said, “I can’t do this.” She was defending her doctoral dissertation in a week. She had meetings with advisors, class sections to teach and a precisely calibrated schedule of childcare. Perhaps at this point Ray took off his glasses. He said, “I’m not asking you. I’ve given you twenty-four hours to organise your life for this. You need to bring David, and you need to be there.” eleanor franzén

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My godmother, Beryl – I always called her Aunt B – was an alto in the Methodist choir, and a nurse; my mother must have phoned her not long after we got home. By the end of Monday, every choir lady knew that the little Franzén girl was sick. They cried and prayed.

I was surrounded by a cloud of their prayers and when we arrived at the hospital on Tuesday night, the Methodist pastor was there too, though neither of my parents had asked him.

It is extraordinary to consider the risk that Ray took by prolonging my admission to hospital. He suspected I had developed type I diabetes, but he was a family doctor, not a specialist; he still did not know what was wrong with me. Either way, my blood sugar was so high that I could have slipped into a coma at any moment. That day of grace, even now, strikes me as deeply kind and deeply dangerous.

So often our bodies are asked to hold on just a little longer – a minute, a day, a week – while we scramble to organise our minds. More often than not, we are asked to hold on when we’re near death. My paternal grandparents died within twenty-four hours of each other, and my grandfather spent most of his last day asking if he could go now. He stopped fighting when he was told that my grandmother was already gone. I wasn’t asked, as a three-year-old, and I did not make a choice to keep living; I just kept living, for a little while longer, blissfully ignorant, in an untreated, malfunctioning body and a gamble was made and everyone got lucky.

Forebear In August 2021, in a small village in Devon on the edge of Dartmoor, I am on holiday and standing in the graveyard of the parish church.

The evening light makes the sky hard and brilliant, like a polished stone. There is not a hint of cloud. In the west, on the far side of the churchyard, the horizon is cooling to pearl. Swifts flit between tower and tree, tree and chimney. The grass is long but not unkempt, giving the place a gracefully unbuttoned look. It is a comforting place to be and, I imagine, a comfortable place to lie.

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Charles Tozer, before whose tomb I am standing, died at the age of twenty-nine – my age – in 1813, as did two of his children. He had some kind of long illness, according to the verse on his tomb. Learning to read slant, between the lines, is an ongoing project for the diabetic or disabled person looking for her people in the evidence of history.

He likely contracted tuberculosis – that would certainly explain the “pining sickness” mentioned in his elegy – but there is something about the phrasing that makes me think, hope, it was something else. Maybe he was born with it. It could have been cystic fibrosis or haemophilia, or, or, or... Maybe Charles Tozer was a diabetic who fell in love, married, had children, despite knowing that his presence could not be relied upon to bring them to adulthood.

SACRED to the MEMORY of CHARLES TOZER, late of Howton in this Parish, who Died the 24th of February 1813 in the 29th Year of his Age. Also of two of his Children.

A pining Sickness gave the fatal blow, The stroke was Certain but th’effect was slow, With wasting pain Death found me sore oppress’d, Pitied my sighs, and kindly gave me rest.

A pining sickness. A wasting pain. Hyperglycaemia doesn’t hurt, but hunger does and constant hunger would have been the only way to control a person’s blood sugar in an era before insulin. Anyway, not all pain is acute, or even physical. Diabetes is genetically transmitted. It often skips generations, but it also often manifests in childhood, after an illness. (Why are his children memorialised with him?) There is no way of knowing. All that Tozer’s grave tells us is that he was chronically ill. But that is a very great deal of knowledge, in its own way.

It is a beautiful tomb, one of those tall square things, like hackedoff altars, that proliferate in Anglican churchyards all over England.

Most of them are old and lichenous. It’s rare for one to have anything carved on it, let alone something legible. The painstaking record of name, village, date of death, age at death, status as father, and poetic eleanor franzén

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couplets took time and money to create, and it has taken attention to maintain. The tomb is perfectly clear. He has been dead for over two hundred years.

Someone loved him. He must have had a wife. She is mentioned nowhere, but someone had those babies. Where is she? Was she angry he died so soon? Did she ever recover? Did she remarry, and does she now lie in earth next to her other husband?

Lower down, at the bottom of the stone slab, there is a second inscription. Charles Tozer had another son, William, who died at the ripe old age of eighty-four, and is memorialised – perhaps buried – in that ground. William would have been five when his father and two of his siblings died. I wonder if he remembered any of them. I wonder if his father ever picked him up and spun him around, or if he was always too unwell.

I find it easier to imagine and empathise with the lives of historical people than I do with present-day ones. I can control them and I can’t control the living, who are logically incoherent in the way that all living people are. There is an element of this instinct towards control that troubles me. I cannot get Charles Tozer out of my head. He haunts me all the way back to London, where for weeks I do periodic battle with feelings of pity and excited recognition.

Is that unfair? Am I fooling myself with this niggling hope that maybe the unspoken of Charles Tozer’s life is somehow on my side?

Do I have any right to the story of his life?

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Kate Holderness Happier Than Ever

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Author’s Note

hen I applied to the wonderful London Library Emerging Writers Programme, I was working on my children’s adventure novel The Full Moon Society. This was the book I intended to take through the twelve-month programme and emerge (rather presumptuously) triumphantly on the other side – a children’s author – with a full manuscript under one arm and the plot outline for book two under the other. Then life happened. Or, perhaps, the enemy of life. Cancer.

My partner of eighteen years, Adele, was diagnosed with bowel cancer in October 2021 and our lives turned upside down. Whilst I did try to continue working on my novel, it became harder and harder for my imagination to get into middle grade fiction mode as I helped Adele to navigate her own hero’s journey in our – suddenly very real!

– real life.

Since the Emerging Writers Programme began, Adele has been diagnosed with cancer, had surgery to remove a tumour, gained an ileostomy (a section of small intestine which now lives on the outside of her body and allows her to go to the toilet in a pouch, rather than the old-fashioned way), had gruelling chemotherapy treatment and eventually, I’m overjoyed to say, has been declared free of cancer. Let’s just say… it’s been a year!

We’ve been documenting everything and are beginning to put it all together into a book of our own, in the hope that it can help anyone finding themselves in the position we did just a few short months ago.

We want to write the book that we were looking for last October… and perhaps the book we didn’t know we were looking for too. Whilst it was very easy, at the start of this journey, to imagine the heartache, worry and sadness that was ahead, we were completely unprepared kate holderness

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for the positives. We have laughed every day. We’ve found strength we didn’t know we had and we’ve been inspired by the most incredible people we’ve met along the way. We hope our book can provide comfort and hope to anyone going through something similar, or supporting a loved one who is.

I’ve had the deadline to submit my excerpt to this anthology in my diary since the very first day of the programme. I always imagined it would be the first chapter of my children’s book; full of magic, courage and adventure. And yes, I could probably have polished up that chapter, but it wouldn’t really be the story I’ve been writing over these last twelve months. So, PLOT TWIST! Here is the introduction (or my part of it) to a very real adventure story… still filled with magic, courage and adventure!

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Introduction I think a lot of us have imagined how we might feel if we’re ever told we have cancer. I tend to follow an if I ignore it, it doesn’t exist policy for most of life’s inconveniences (bills, the dust behind our TV, death, etc.), but with one in two people likely to develop cancer at some stage, well, it’s kind of impossible not to worry about it once in a while, isn’t it?

As an occasionally (ok, mostly) out of work actor, I’ve watched a lot of daytime TV and soaps in my time and cancer storylines are rife, so I thought I had a pretty good idea of how the narrative of the diagnosis goes down: 1. You find a lump. Perhaps in a boob.

2. You don’t tell any of your friends or family, but you somehow magically get an appointment with the doctor the next morning.

3. They confirm the bad news.

4. You cry.

5. The end.

Simple.

But it wasn’t until I was sitting in a tiny hospital room, holding my girlfriend Adele’s hand as she was being told that she had stage two bowel cancer, that it hit me – whilst I’d imagined myself getting cancer, I’d never imagined it happening to somebody I loved.

Depending on how you look at it, this was either very self-centred of me – why was I hogging all the imaginary cancer? – or it was the opposite. Either way, it was like getting the worst possible news, twice. It wasn’t just, ‘Here, have a dose of cancer,’ it was being served up with an ‘Oh, and by the way, it’s happening to the person you love most in the world’ chaser. What was I supposed to do with that?

No, literally, what could I DO? In that room, at that exact moment, I felt like I’d been split in two. I wanted to cry – because, cancer! – but I also wanted kate holderness

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to be strong and reassuring for Adele. If I cried, would she think I thought she wouldn’t beat it? But then, if I didn’t cry, would she think I didn’t care? Was I even allowed to cry when it wasn’t technically my news? It felt selfish, somehow. Like it wasn’t my place to be getting emotional. Adele wasn’t crying, so who was I to let myself go?

Over the last few months, I’ve heard many people say that cancer is as hard on loved ones as it is for the patient. Adele says it to me a lot, too. Whilst I definitely don’t believe it to be true (watching Adele go through the surgery, chemotherapy and a world of anguish, has left me in no doubt about that), I think what people are getting at when they say it, is the overwhelming feeling of helplessness that loved ones have. There is literally, it seems, nothing you can do.

All you want to do is take the pain away from the person you care about, to share it somehow. But you can’t ‘do’ cancer for somebody else, however much you may wish you could. You’re so close to this person, you care about them so deeply and your lives are so entwined, that it sometimes feels like you both have it, but only one of you can really go through it. You’re determined to beat it, to do everything you can, but you can’t be the one to physically ‘fight’ it (whatever that means). It’s a weird one.

The good news is that although the feeling of helplessness has never fully gone away, I have found ways of being helpful. Right at the start of all of this, a good friend of ours said to me that getting through cancer is a team effort. That has become my mantra. Our mantra. I hope this book can be part of your team, too. A helping hand, or at least a hand on your shoulder to reassure you that you’re not alone and that you are far from helpless. If you’re in the ‘friend zone’ of cancer, cheering on from the sidelines, while someone you love is out there, taking on its numerous hurdles and challenges, I hope we can offer some ideas to help you get out on that track, running right alongside them.

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Alexis Keir Extract from Treehouses You Can Build by Yourself !

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ext to him on the chestnut sofa, a book was splayed facedown, its pages punctuated with post-it notes poking out like fat jaundiced fingers. The cover photograph was of a forest wonderland, a beaming and perfectly framed white family peering up at the wooden fort their son was defending in the low branches of what was surely a giant redwood. The themes were clear: happiness and contentment transmitted across the decades. A reaction rose within him, a tide of bad memories receding as if to leave the carcass of a good father uncovered and half-visible. The surviving ribs and sinews, all the things he had done with his own children, the things he fixed, the closeness they had. Reflections on the things he did right poking upwards out of the sands of guilt for those he had got wrong. But those achievements lacked a sharpness. Where images should be clear, instead there were dapples of green and sunlight filtered through the haze of a Lambeth school holiday. A summer so hot that escaping bedrooms seemed a necessity, but because other plans restricted the opportunity to escape to the countryside, his family erected their tent in the garden instead.

The boys played merrily in it in the daytime. Luke the oldest, excited and scared by the idea of leaving the familiarity of primary school and the friends he had known since nursery, retreated into the tangerine interior with books and a drink, the mesh zipped up to give him privacy and a hidden world. Rob, his younger brother, having only just started at primary school himself, would gather his games and puzzles to play with and happily line them up in the covered tent entrance that was open to the world. The boys could spend hours like this alone and quiet in the garden, except for the squeaks of outrage from Rob when Luke, emerging for the toilet, strode through the carefully created tableaux of soft toy animals and Marvel figures Rob alexis keir

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had brought down from his bedroom to engage in a rescue or battle.

When dusk brought a little cool to the humidity of those summer days, the father squeezed in too with his sons either side lost in the billowing sleeping bags which were too big for their still small child bodies.

They snuggled together and listened to the whisper of the pine tree and smaller elders that shielded the garden, guardian trees that folklore said would ward off evil spirits and protect against the devil.

The father told or read the boys stories under the light of the small red camping lantern from Argos which they had tied to the apex of the sanctuary they had made for themselves. Many different tales but he always came back to the character they had invented together. Bedspread. A little boy who had come to life on previous indoor nights as, unable to sleep, the boys rolled in the vast valleys and mountains of the duvet on Mummy and Daddy’s bed. Bedspread had the magical power of being able to shrink to a minuscule size and would come to the aid of any soul or creature who was in trouble or distress. First of all, he would hear something, or just feel it… And then, if someone were perhaps nearby and close enough to notice, they would see Bedspread’s silhouette shimmer… And then watch the outline shrink and fade like someone walking away into the sunset… Smaller… And smaller… And then… Gone!

One night after Bedspread, helped by his friends, the ants, had had another marvellous adventure and his younger brother Rob had slipped off to sleep, Luke the eldest whispered to his father, “Daddy can you build me a treehouse?”

The man did not have the faintest clue how to build a treehouse but he hesitated not even one second in his reply.

“Yes darling. Anything for you.”

He wanted to bind his love for his son in a structure that was pure and free of the cracks and ungluing that he himself had had to experience. Maybe it was because he could not provide a puppy or flashy new car. Maybe because he was so irritable at times or stayed too late in the office. But he knew his eldest son loved the trees and being high up in the pine especially, where he could survey the suburban 112

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vista of gardens, roofs and loft extensions. The boy would climb the bare lower trunk and disappear into the bottom folds of the pyramid of needles, staying invisible for the longest time before appearing triumphantly at the top to fix in place a pennant tribute adorned with a hand-drawn picture of his favourite budgie.

Men, without the passage of pregnancy or scars and memories of the pain of childbirth to plant milestones in their lives may latch onto other signs and signifiers of parenthood. The clamp of a partner’s hand as the contractions of labour begin. The squeeze of legs around the neck and the weight across shoulders as little fingers used adult ears to steer the right direction. That weight and pressure still seemed to live in the man’s spine forever. And the memories stayed with him of the accessories, decorations and fixtures, carers and parents add to the spaces they occupy and of how he had been swept up by that instinct too. ‘Nesting’ they call it as if mothers and fathers accumulate and weave together materials gathered in flights around their neighbourhood. But it is more a carving out, shaping the space we are in to make it ready for inhabitants with different tastes and needs, smaller, more insistent people. So, we fix, we paint, we install and get ready. The wallpaper border for a child’s bedroom, teddy bears dancing through flowers just below the ceiling. The trampoline whose cords were pulled taut by a grim determination to conquer their tension and which now could never be got rid of despite the seasons when it lay unused through rain, hail and snow.

To build a treehouse, he first bought a book: the one which now lay on the sofa next to him, miraculously unstained by dirt or wood preservative. He had surprised himself by getting it. He normally half-read or ignored maps and instructions for flatpack furniture.

But for his son he wanted his work to be perfect and he gave himself those warm months and hours of reading to get his project right. The book’s pages, post-its and the faint pencil scrawls in the margins, told him what he must have done. It had been his bible, full of gnomic instructions which he tried to observe religiously. alexis keir

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He acquired a huge waspish Stanley toolbox, filled with all sorts of nails and screws, some implausibly long for any kind of ordinary domestic use. He thought that the viciously sharp five-inch screws were like golden assassins which could have no conceivable purpose except to be buried deep in arboreal flesh. These were screws for the outdoors only, elongated, heavy and with capabilities way past those of their poor cousins, the two-inch black worker screws. All nestled in the toolbox along with spirit levels and hammers, Allen keys, Stanley knife blades, cable ties, broken rulers and pencils. Fifteen years after the last nail for the treehouse had been hammered in, the father found a soft Nerfgun pellet buried in the detritus of sawdust and small fixings at the bottom, a spongy bullet from the past. The sight of it hit him straight between the eyes and children’s gleeful screams and the splash of water ricocheted around his memory, the sounds which had punctuated the spaces of those long days of freedom from school and work. As well as the squashed and faded Nerfgun pellet, he discovered a pebble-sized child’s marble, circuitry still faintly visible within its translucent blue plastic. After all these years when he dropped it on a hard surface, flickers of red light still danced around inside. Signs of magic surviving, which he thought that Bedspread would very much have admired.

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Grace Quantock Extract from Madwomen Are My Ancestors

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What’s Left in My Body

’m wobbling back and forth, my wheelchair precariously balanced on a sloping pavement with no traction to move forwards. It’s a dreadful corner, just before Chepstow Town Gate, an imposing castellated eighteenth-century archway where the pavement inexplicably drops to road level. The steep camber risks me sliding into the road every time I pass through the arch on my way from the bus station to work at the Chepstow Child and Family Therapy Clinic. I specialise in working with clients with complex trauma and multiple marginalised identities – clients like me.

“Do you want a hand?” I hear the voice from my left.

“No. Yes. No.” I pause. “Don’t touch me, please.”

The woman offering help is tall, with brunette bobbed hair and a sensible navy anorak, her voice sounds English. She looks to be about ten years older than me and like a person who has children and organises them with ease. I can see bemusement on her face.

“Do you need help? I can help you.”

“No, no. Yes, I do, but no. Please don’t, thank you. I’m fine, thank you.”

I’m talking to her from a tunnel inside myself, where a thousand interactions are coalescing into this moment, the kaleidoscope fragments of touch and pain subsuming me. My would-be rescuer takes a step back and I feel my chest expand into the space that opens. I feel unbearably grateful to her. But for what? For not attacking or ridiculing me? I’m furious, because I shouldn’t need to be grateful. I try to regulate my breathing; I can hear my exhales loud in that quiet stillness a town centre has before commerce grace quantock

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comes to life. I hold my own shaking hands and try to come into the present moment: February, Chepstow. My plan: vegan coconut hot chocolate at Coffee #1 before the clinic opens, client sessions, then later my own therapy. I’m still stuck on this corner. But at least I am here, in the now, not in a flashback, not lost somewhere inside the pain that still lives in me.

“OK. Yes, please. If you could just help push me onto the flat pavement, that’s great, thanks.” She steps forward and moves me onto the level pavement, nearer the archway. I don’t mean to say more, but it all suddenly comes out in a rush.

“Thank you, for not hurting me. For not grabbing me. It happens all the time. I’m sorry, I’m so… you know…”

I can just comprehend how mad I must sound to the woman.

But in the moment that is barely perceptible to me, layered as I am with strata upon strata of suppressed sediment left by every encounter that begins with an offer of ‘help’ but is underpinned with assertions of ownership over my body. This is the objectification that’s shaped me for years. My response at the archway may seem disproportionate to the situation but it’s absolutely proportionate, given my history. I’m not just reacting to this moment; I’m shaking from the lash of a chain of similar encounters which stretches into my past. It tightens grotesque coils around me when I try to navigate conversations shaped like the ones that have hurt me so many times. Conversations that ended in my suffering. It’s not just the person in front of me, but every person who began with a smile and ended with my humiliation and pain. The hardest part is how powerless I am. I can’t stop it happening, not the hurt, nor my reaction to the potential of it.

Last week, on my way to the Chepstow clinic, a man grabbed the handles of my wheelchair and started striding off, dragging me in the wrong direction.

“Excuse me? Sir? No, thank you. This is the wrong way. I don’t need help.”

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“I’m happy to, my love. I saw you and I thought, ‘Albert, you go and help that poor girl. Be a good Samaritan’. Now, don’t worry sweetheart, I’m here.”

“Albert, please let me go.” I can hear him laughing behind me, big chuckles like I’m joking.

“Stop, Albert. Sir, stop.”

He’s dragging me towards the high curb at the edge of the bus station, it’s too steep, I’m going to fall. I grab my wheels and hold on. He looks jovial and well-turned out in his tweed coat. He’s only helping me, after all. Or at least, I’m sure he thinks of it like that.

But he’s about to hurt me and I can’t stop him.

I can’t remember the last time someone helped me without micro-aggressions, or more.

Later that day, I talk to my therapist about Albert. We’re sitting in her therapy room, through the window, I can see the sun setting over the valley. Our conversation has been laced with bird song, but as the day turns to dusk, hawks cease their high calls. They retreat from hovering in wide blue skies over the fields. Now I hear hoots of owls and occasional squawks from pheasants. They’re settling in to roost in the upper branches of the trees surrounding the farm, safe from foxes for another night.

“But what could I have done differently with Albert?” I ask.

“Why do you think you’ve done anything wrong?” my therapist replies.

“This can’t keep happening. There has to be a better way to handle it. I don’t have time to be dragged around by strangers.”

“It’s almost like people can’t hear you say ‘no’ in your wheelchair.”

“I don’t know what to do. I’ve worked with you on my boundaries, on making my voice strong and commanding. I’m in self-defence classes. But I can’t just put people in a wrist lock when they think they’re helping me. There has to be a way. Other therapists don’t arrive to work shaking and mussed up from being manhandled.”

“But the therapists you work with aren’t disabled. They aren’t exposed to all that you are.” grace quantock

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I understand this, but I’m still frustrated.

“It can’t just be me.”

That night, I’m writing in my journal in bed, but I can’t let go of this question; why does this always happen to me? I pull myself up and head back to my studio, open my laptop and start searching. I start with Google Scholar, there are papers on street harassment of women, but nothing specific to disabled people. If no one is doing the analysis, I need to find the data. I navigate to the website of the Office of National Statistics and delve into their data, scribbling notes in my journal next to me. My partner pads into the room, looking for me. I glance at the clock, it’s later than I thought.

“Are you ok?”

“I don’t know. I have a lot of numbers. It can’t just be me. But I would also rather it just be me.”

He bends down and touches his lips to my hair and then quietly leaves. I turn back to the numbers, trying to make sense of my hours of reading. When Linus returns, he brings me a mug of rooibos tea. I’m agitated.

“Listen, did you know disability hate crime is increasing? Over 9,250 disability hate crimes were reported to police across England and Wales last year. Half were classed as violent – which means they included assault or weapons.” I look up from my notes.

“Where are you finding all this?”

“It’s data from Freedom of Information Requests from the thirty nine police forces across England and Wales. I found an advocacy group researching it.”

Linus shakes his head. I’m just shaking. I go on.

“Violence against disabled women specifically, has increased by a third since 2014. A third. And disabled women are twice as likely to be assaulted or raped as non-disabled women – it can be a stranger or, more likely their family, a partner or a carer. It’s not just me, it’s all of us.”

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“I don’t know what to say.”

He hands me the tea, the mug has watercolour leaves painted on it, the hand-lettering wrapping around the centre says, Write through the story.

And, that is what I do.

grace quantock

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Jessie Thompson The Peanut-Crunching Crowd

The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot – The big strip tease.

— Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’ (1960)

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n my early twenties, I saw one of my idols in concert. Naturally, I bought a t-shirt with his face on to mark the occasion. He had been the indie god of my teen years; I’d written his lyrics on my school books in gel pen, played his songs at the half-term house parties where I’d learned to smoke. I can’t tell you who he is because he has now been cancelled and I have a reputation to maintain. But on that day, I handed over a twenty pound note, asked the man on the merch stand to cut off the sleeves, and went to a portaloo to put it on. It didn’t really matter if the singer didn’t play many of the old ones, because I was wearing his face. I felt like I was one step further on the road to showing the world who I was.

A few months later, I was at a hipster music festival, waiting to watch a singer I’d never heard of. At the time, that seemed to me the cool sort of thing to do. What also seemed cool to me: my t-shirt. I wore it proudly. But when I sat down, something felt wrong. I had a sense that everyone was whispering about me; an awkward feeling that I’d somehow marked myself out as a person who is not quite correct. The man sitting in front turned around, looked at me for a bit too long, and turned back. Then he muttered something to the woman sitting next to him.

“There’s a girl behind us wearing a [REDACTED] t-shirt.”

Blood rushed to my cheeks. I bristled. But it was abundantly clear: I was tacky.

Shortly after, I put the t-shirt in the bin.

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* A decade later, and I have an inexplicable need to wear a t-shirt with Princess Diana’s face on.

Every so often I go on Etsy and type in ‘Sylvia Plath’. I browse arty prints that put her words into bad fonts. I picture putting them above my desk.

I think about wearing Frida Kahlo’s face on a necklace.

Why? Because now I want to wear my allegiances across my chest.

I want to carry them with me at all times. And I refuse to feel shame!

Am I tacky? I don’t care. These women are my talismans. My rock stars.

They are what I want to listen to on repeat.

In 1976, Joan Didion wrote an essay about Georgia O’Keeffe. She describes what happened when she took her then seven-year-old daughter to see one of the artist’s shows.

One of the vast O’Keeffe Sky Above Clouds canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. “Who drew it?” she whispered after a while. I told her. “I need to talk to her,” she said, finally.

I know exactly how she felt.

* I try not to buy things, but I am a repeat consumer of these women’s stories. I race through biographies, trawl YouTube, hunt down podcasts with tinny sound quality and even go on pilgrimages to blue-plaqued houses. They don’t have to be artists or writers. It can be any woman who tore a psychic wound through what the world expected of her. By now, the details of their lives are so imprinted on my mind that they’re like background music. I can run my fingers along their overfamiliar grooves. I know that Tracey Emin thought her life started at art college in Maidstone, for example. That Sylvia Plath asked her neighbour for stamps before she died. That Sarah Kane directed Michael Shannon in a fringe production of Woyzeck. And that Princess Diana’s favourite books were by Barbara Cartland. But still, tell me! Tell me again. jessie thompson

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I want to get beyond the limit of what I can know, to find a story I’ve not heard before. Sometimes, I just want to fill my head with them. But – I can’t ignore it – there is shame in my hunger. A looming fear of becoming something I don’t want to be; something they’d hate. Someone who is a ghoul. Who gorges on their pain. Am I ‘the peanut-crunching crowd’? I don’t want to be. I just want to know all about them. I don’t want them to be perfect either – I want them to be human. I positively don’t want to see their complicated lives squashed down into symbolism. My mind is on the hunt for kindred spirits: recruits for my fantasy dinner party, new members to my non-optimising, non-networking club for broken hearted girls labouring under late capitalism.

But, as Patricia Lockwood writes, ‘Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money’. The protagonist in her novel No One Is Talking About This finds herself wryly ‘moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores’. I too am consumed by these metaphysical gymnastics. I let my eyes linger over the tote bags and notecards and I hate how monetizable my devotion is. Should Jane Austen be on this pair of socks? Did fourth wave feminism die when someone made a pink notebook emblazoned with the words ‘Well-behaved women don’t make history’? What idea, exactly, are we selling when we make women into neat, mass-produced corporate products? Not included in the marketing: her scrunched up, shitty first drafts, the bad paintings, the times she was a bit crap to her mates, or when she was too tired to leave the house. No space for the fight, the struggle, the unpalatable everyday battles. Is an afterlife as an industrial complex now just an inevitable fact for any interesting woman?

Maybe it doesn’t really matter. What doesn’t capitalism eat, anyway? But these women have made the world seem bigger to me, made countless things seem possible. I don’t want capitalism to eat them and I don’t want to become its agent either. But I’m trying to 122

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make my tastes visible to understand who I am, and show that to the world. I don’t want my obsessions to be private; I want to perform them over and over, to fill my life with colour and complexity and bravery and boldness. I’m backed into a corner.

* Recently I had a conversation with a writer. She’d written a book about her life – nothing hugely dramatic, but full of the hard-won wisdom that makes a person. I quoted bits, told her that I related.

Quoted, related. Quoted, related.

Towards the end, I quoted myself: “Why do I keep telling you I relate to you? Why do all the books by women have to be relatable?”

She thought about it. And then she suggested that maybe we’re just all trying to find ways to make ourselves legible. If you’re someone the world hasn’t made a habit of understanding, you have to communicate who you are repeatedly. You have to keep using that muscle. Essentially: you have to wear the t-shirts.

So, I picture myself walking outside, wearing the women I love like a patchwork quilt. Virginia Woolf’s words tattooed on my face.

A mug with Nancy Mitford’s name on it. A Zadie Smith pin badge, a Jenny Holzer patch and Dorothea Tanning’s self-portrait on my tights. A rucksack full of the plays of Caryl Churchill. Daring someone to turn around and mutter “there’s a girl behind us wearing a Sylvia Plath t-shirt”. Sticking my flagpole in the ground, adding to cart, buying a print with a quote: ‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.’

Or maybe just: ‘Who drew it. I need to talk to her.’

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Kathleen Walker-Meikle Dead Parrot Society

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argaret of Austria had a dead parrot on her hands. 1505 was not looking like her year. Her beloved husband Philibert had died the year before and now a cherished parrot had shuffled off his mortal coil. Margaret had taken the death of her husband hard.

Even getting a husband had been a trial, a rather remarkable situation for the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and Mary, Duchess of Burgundy. She had been sent as a toddler to France and it was planned she would marry the future Charles VIII, had he not had the bad taste to repudiate the marriage contract and wed Anne of Brittany instead. Margaret was then sent off to Spain to marry the royal heir Juan, Prince of Asturias. But Margaret was left a widow when Juan died of a fever barely six months later, her loss quickly compounded when she bore their stillborn daughter. With handsome and hunting-mad Philibert, Duke of Savoy, this hugely intelligent and capable woman finally thought she had found a keeper. Alas, it was not to be. A widow for the second time, at the age of twenty-four, enmeshed in politics and power moves, decisions on everything from her dowry, property and potential future suitors were up in the air, even while Margaret was still grieving for her husband.

Then, on top of everything her parrot was eaten by a dog. It was her favourite parrot, which she had brought from Spain after the death of the Prince of Asturias: a bright green bird, either a rose-necked Indian parakeet (of the sort that now throng London’s parks) or a very novel New World bird, perhaps a green Caribbean Amazon parrot, which were soon to be all the rage and testimony to Spain’s imperial possessions in the Americas. Margaret had a fondness for all things involving parrots. Her favourite game was the wildly popular le jeu de Papegay (the game of the parrot), in which contestants aimed to shoot a painted, pole-mounted wooden parrot with a crossbow. You could 124

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shoot at wooden parrots without hurting beloved live specimens! She wasn’t the only parrot lover. Parrots were hugely popular pets among aristocratic and urban elites at the time. Bird-sellers in towns sold them in cages. Parrot paraphernalia was available, from ornamented cages to brocade cage covers and accessories from little mirrors to ringing bells in cages. Birdseed could be purchased at your local apothecary and if you were feeling extravagant you could always throw in an expensive imported nutmeg or almond for your pampered bird.

But now Margaret was parrot-less.

Fortunately, help was on hand. Court poet and professional hanger-on Jean Lemaire de Belges made the canny career move of deciding that what she needed to assuage her grief was parrot poetry.

Lots of it. Perhaps he was worried that commissions would dry up or that he would not be needed at her court – and bills had to be paid. His first effort was ‘The Epistle of the Green Lover’. In true Renaissance style, Lemaire turned to the classics and drew on the Roman poets Ovid and Statius, who had thoughtfully written on girlfriends’ and friends’ dead parrots.

In Lemaire’s poem, Margaret’s parrot (named Green Lover, Amant vert) is left all alone in the château of Pont d’Ain. His mistress is visiting her father in Strasbourg and has forgotten to take her parrot, who is overcome with despair at being abandoned and cannot live in such a melancholic state without his beloved owner. The entire poem is a long suicide note, narrated in the first person – the parrot’s last will and testament. Green Lover resolves to end his misery and dive into a dog’s jaws. A helpful and peckish mastiff kindly waits nearby until the bird finishes his poetic declamation before administering the coup de grâce. If Margaret does not want his company, then he may as well provide a decent lunch for one of her dogs. Margaret was delighted by this appeal to eternal devotion and encouraged Lemaire to keep writing, because surely once you are on a parrot-reading binge, it is hard to stop.

‘The Epistle of the Green Lover, Part II’, now takes a rather unusual angle. First, our dead bird must get into the underworld. kathleen walker-meikle

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The god Mercury, with his winged sandals is a fitting companion and together they fly through the entrance, avoiding the snapping jaws of Cerberus, the three-headed canine guardian, as presumably Green Lover had had his fill of dogs by now. The parrot starts his tour with a visit to the infernal realms, meeting assorted wicked animals from Greek mythology to the Bible. There’s the multi-headed hydra that Hercules slew, the serpent that bit Eurydice, Acteon’s hounds that ripped him to shreds when the goddess Diana transformed him into a stag, along with the youth-eating Minotaur Theseus managed to kill. If you ever wondered what happened to St George’s dragon, rest assured that it ends up in animal hell, along with the raven released

by Noah who could not be bothered to return to the ark. There are even historical evil beasts, such as the black pig that stumbled into the path of the horse carrying King Louis VI’s heir and even the mule who had the unfortunate fame of having his hoof used as a container for poison that was given to Alexander the Great. And perhaps rather poetic justice, among all the wicked beasts, the mastiff that killed Green Lover is condemned to roam the infernal realms. Parrot and Mercury fly from the infernal realms across a frozen realm, full of beasts, from apes to werewolves. Minos, one of the judges of the dead, ascertains the bird’s deeds and judges him worthy of ascending to the Elysian fields.

After many adventures, our avian traveller arrives at the Elysian Fields, and to what can only be described as Pet Paradise. His companion here is a lady parrot, Esprit Vermeil (Red Parrot) who by happy coincidence was the parrot of Margaret’s mother, Mary of Burgundy. In this version of the Elysian Fields, all the famous ‘good’ animals of myth, legend, and history, live in contentment. The beasts from the ancient world include Lesbia’s sparrow (the mistress of the Roman poet Catullus), the geese of Juno that honked and warned the Romans of an imminent Gaulish attack and the maternal she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. From the gospels and saints’ lives there is the cockerel that crowed three times when St Peter denied Jesus, the pig companion of St Anthony, the dog that fed plague-afflicted St 126

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Roch when everyone else had abandoned him and St Jerome’s lion, who had stayed at the saint’s side after he kindly removed a painful thorn in a paw. They’re all there, it’s replete with virtuous beasts.

Suicidal parrot Green Lover’s fate and supernatural journey was not conceived as comic melodrama but a thoughtful reflection on grief, loss and life after death, presented in a light-hearted manner.

Margaret is assured that her parrot, like all departed, is happy in heaven. The parrot poems (combined as Les Épîtres de l’Amant vert) did not only enchant Margaret of Austria. Anne of Brittany, Queen of France and ruling Duchess of Brittany loved them and even made the effort to memorise them. When Lemaire decided to leave Margaret’s service, a parrot’s death wish became a career boost as Anne of Brittany was more than keen to employ him. The poems started a trend, with other parrot lyrics appearing, from Englishman John Skelton’s Speke Parrot (a satire on Cardinal Wolsey, presumed owner of said parrot) to Scot Sir David Lindsay’s The Testament and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo (in which James V’s parrot takes the Scottish court to task). But in the packed field of early sixteenth-century parrot poetry, Lemaire’s work stands out, taking readers on the emotional rollercoaster of a parrot’s journey from a mastiff’s stomach to Pet Paradise. Margaret’s parrot lives forever!

kathleen walker-meikle

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Courtney Conrad Community Breeds Miracle CCTV catches a 9-year-old girl walking hand in hand with a 32-year-old man clenching a knife. Courtyard roosters send for five hundred mesh marinas, jeans shorts and flip flops.

They comb through bushes with cutlasses, funeral parlour a wait fi yuh bwoy. Prayerful women circle her mother like helicopters. Her mother’s face stiffens as regret injects it, a wah di fada God, mi jus run guh a shop fi buy likkle flour and corned beef. Her father’s eyes are red. His mouth wide and ear-splitting, if yuh even rape her, send her home still. The 9year-old’s belly hushes field crickets while she feeds mosquitoes for three nights. She shivers. Leaves rustle, and she thinks of her granny’s sweetie wrappers. Tiny footprints lead to tarpaulin hut. Any longer it would’ve been her unmarked grave. She emerges a muddy dolly. Reunion hugs stifle her traumatised squeal, don’t kill him. 32-year-old man tingles at the tender touch of low hanging leaves while he’s on the run. Fire swallows his home. His girlfriend flees without panties and documents. Luck scratches palms. The community marches to the nearest shop for Cash Pot tickets. Mi a buy 3 (dead), 16 (young girl) and 27 (big fire). The 32-year-old man’s urges interrupt clinking Red Stripe bottles. He snatches a 13-year-old-girl feeding her father’s pigs. He drags her into a vegetated area and bashes her head with a stone as if opening a coconut. Weary feet and hoarse voices hunt again.

The 13-year-old girl waits for rescue and winces as shrubs pinch her hair like her mother’s braiding technique. Her uncle finds her in a pit and carries her like a bare laundry basket.

Her fingers hold a white sheet around her. The 32-year-old man escapes into nearby bushes. Community says, wi glad wi get di girls dem, but him wi di want.

Shortlisted in The Manchester Writing Competition 2021 Manchester Poetry Prize.

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Holey Ground Sundays were spent crowded around like crows over ground holes.

Mothers draped up Pastors for Lazarus miracles, the life in their eyes buried as they whispered, mi will send gunman fi yuh.

Relatives bawled. Heaved. Passed out.

Some friends leaned into coffins to kiss stiff foreheads; while others reached in to tief di likkle jewellery fi di money owed.

Meanwhile, baby madas, bastard pickney dem and girlfriends became acquainted for the first time – brawls left hands holding each other’s hair like seaweed; mouths bawled out, gweh from yasso, a mi dem di love more.

When shoes sunk into the grass, our dead tried to take us.

Sometimes, we left extra roses on tombstones for street yutes who lingered and became florists under traffic lights for a warm meal.

Other times, retaliation gunshots rang out like percussions.

We abandoned our dead, scampering towards nearby bushes.

At our dead’s childhood home, in the street, we stacked boom boxes like Legos, gospel cued in between Disney and gun tunes.

Testimonials paired with Celine Dion soundtracks.

Confusion flavoured mannish water. Curry goat stained unforgiveness. Regret chased rum shots.

Relatives darted around scouring the house – their car boots swallowed the dead’s TVs, stereos and kitchen appliances. Safes broken into and wills torn.

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We all returned to our homes with graveyard dirt in the groves of rings and shoes, placed them in plastic bags to remember our dead.

Shortlisted in The Manchester Writing Competition 2021 Manchester Poetry Prize.

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Hope Road Classmates pile into taxis. Conductors bawl out onemore-onemore, everybody can hold, unnu lap up man. I doodle on the school gate till Mommy cruises through with a smouldering patty on the front seat. I fling myself in the car with my white uniform soiled from playground shenanigans. Beef pouring over the brown paper bag, my tongue rests on my finger like a cool pack. Mommy and I wait for tyres to roll half an inch. Shirtless cocoa-head yutes with tarmac soles, pop-lock under traffic lights. In their hands, a bottle of soap water and a windscreen squeegee.

Their mother perches on a white bucket, breastfeeding on the sidewalk singing where cometh my help. Father pushes a coconut handcart along the white line, wielding his cutlass and sugar bag. His daughter trails behind with peppered shrimps dangling from a wire hanger. Mommy’s handbag shakes for my cupped hand. Two shallow beeps summon the bag juice, peanut, and Gleaner man. The winner sticks his head through my window, relaxes in front of the A/C. His eyes closed, handkerchief patting down his face and the nape of his neck. After funnelling peanuts down my throat, I hurdle over to the back seat, windows clipping towel into a fitting-room curtain. I dive into my swimsuit, surf shorts and t-shirt, Mi a guh jump out here suh and run di rest of di way, —lata Mommy.

Previously published in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal.

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Yardie’s First Day Mama seh, yuh betta wrap up and nuh ketch pneumonia my classmate says I look like the Michelin Man. My teacher asks me to repeat four, five, six times, says, if you remain silent I will have to put you in isolation.

My old teachers used to be tempted to cut my tongue out encouraged mother to use the belt buckle to reassure my silence.

My classmate flings our PE teacher’s car key in the bushes like a girl’s body, only a few help to look. No bamboo stick licks palms.

I tell the lunch lady, “no cucumba, please”, she says, you mean cucumber. the scent of curry goat and oxtail does not engulf the cafeteria.

After school, when the year group forms a circle around me, I wait for belts to wrap fists. I spin scanning for the first whip.

Instead, they ask me to perform and my gun fingers sing, “a weh yuh get dat new Clarks deh, Addi?”, the crowd goes apeshit.

A double-decker collects me. Outside my window, the forest is moving to swallow the sun.

I say, “please go around again, I missed my letterbox” and the bus driver says, get off the route ends here.

Thankful grin trembles while holding back mumbling complaints.

Previously published by Stand Magazine.

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Oakley Flanagan Apparently Personal my mother doesn’t like the apparently personal atmosphere of dentist clinics when they are anything but personal her tooth is rotting her scepticism is at least wellfounded it was a dentist who invented the electric chair apparently he witnessed a drunk man die after touching a live generator realising electricity could better suit the then current cultural hegemony of punishment I receive an offer from a professional paying for an Uber to his high-rise apartment boasting superior views of the city if I was less concerned with the teeth I might have written how below everyone looked small and insignificant in comparison but then the laying on of hands some remedial touching on the sofa after which I followed a placated baby through a door leading to another me to a room empty other than a leather chair modified for the purpose he asked I sit while he stood I supposed it went with the territory I sat he stood there was a bit of chafing it was hot the leather smelt like a dead cow he asked I clamp his nipples until he cried out saying he loved me most when I did this for him as if I did this sort of thing on a regular basis it was not what I expected from prior experience I imagined he might have said open wide ask to see my teeth and I bend over o I have a horror of oral exposure o my canaries his pearly y-fronts reiterate the facts fortunately he kissed me unfortunately his lips like an eraser I wondered if I let it go on longer whether I’d grow faceless he upset cited a boyfriend heartbreak ordering another man from another app to take me home paying with his company account I could have cried this generosity of his the driver dropping me a mile and a half from my rented refused to go any further past the bolted station 136

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it was raining my phone was dead I was very angry but very alive the next morning I to a flatmate said I’d be going as a demon dentist for Halloween the CEO of the sex app gave an interview going on record to clarify the name originated from a coffee grinder he was at pains to stress how the app brought people together a bit of a social stew he said like the coffee grinder the app is representative of community like the coffee house in Friends which acts as one imagined space for the group to be seen outside in public daylit enjoying coffee and trust funds and trusting nothing truly awful ever happens to one another on account of their shared humanity stressed from the outset the love they share for one another the kind that makes them fundamentally good and wholly relatable to television viewers who just were the demographic the producers were reaching for when they originally pitched the show as Friends Like Us because who can argue with a title like that? in the year leading up to the dentist I kept seeing the face of a man at theatres at bus stops walking home accompanied by a chattering set of teeth which made me near frantic when they began a random grinding motion I focus my attention on the play about a bad man with good friends the friends are trying to keep a lid on the social media fall-out We Had No Idea their general line of defence We’re Just As Surprised As You I am an audience member of my life at the fright night a costumed woman recognises me through my outfit fighting her way past a sea of bloody girls in uniforms to get close to me the dark lady says the ultimate male fantasy is the dead wife returning to avenge in a lecture room the costumed woman crosses the dancefloor interrupting the teeth she asks how I have been I ask if she wants the story or the truth the truth obviously the schoolgirls are survivors on the dancefloor the song testament the man behind me blameless I can’t name him so quote the dark lady quoting the feminist critic to the costumed woman unable to remember the woman’s name in question who first articulated the point circling twice over WHO? WHO? earlier that night I watched my girls getting ready oakley flanagan

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frightening I said how little effort to suddenly become victims but I have never felt comfortable wearing dresses I sat on a rickety wooden structure as another stood above me dyeing my beard a temporary blue I was assured would come out and say it Previously published in bath magg.

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Perennial I once thought we’d fought to become entitled to love & divorce; leave the parade, go home mindless. I was near senseless, forgetting what we’d really inherited. Lonely as a young one, desperate for men who wouldn’t give me a second glance. That wasn’t grief.

Lonely when I first, in the night, half-asleep with blitheness. I was unafraid, too young to be a flower blooming to spite a scythe: I survived.

One morning I found rosemary growing where it oughtn’t (cut down as weed). I began finding broken eggshells in the recycling. Slimy chicks.

A plague of locusts dogged my bathroom, the kitchen sink filled with blood.

I lost my fingerprints.

Quitting to return with answers, I visited an occult store.

The palmist could tell me nothing.

She asked I leave, something unpleasant about me. Rotten fruit cast out by grocer boys into unlit alleyways as I returned home, oakley flanagan

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greeted by my queer house’s heady stink.

The postman stopped delivering letters, people had stopped writing them. The dog messed the floor gave out a yelp as if struck.

Rosemary sprouted about the windows, reclaiming my house in an act of remembering.

A photo frame I covered over with black lace, black lace observed day as rosemary shrouded (perhaps it was night) holing me in darkness to impress the weight of my body, afforded life choosing my Previously published in Poetry London, with thanks to Martha Sprackland.

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S Kim Asylum

In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. …

I miss you more than I remember you.

— Ocean Vuong

1 So this is the Promised Land/ Britannia What luck/ Who wouldn’t want/ a better life digging dirt on a marijuana farm/ or laying bricks/ cutting hair or painting nails in Birmingham breathing fumes of acetone/ isopropyl acetate/ ethyl acetate/ chloride/ sodium lauryl sulphate Quan Âm/ Goddess of Compassion/ when you were human/ what did you wish what did you dream/ when you were alive?

I dreamed/ of helping my family/ pay off the local loan-sharks/ so they wouldn’t kill us so I left Ha Tinh/ to work/ We all worked washing dishes in Bulgaria/ or chopping chicken wings in Romania/ picking plums in Hungary sleeping in orchards/ fast-food factories/“Chinois” restaurants/to save money/to send home before getting arrested/ trapped in a migrant camp in Eisenhüttenstadt/ on the German-Polish border escaping/ hiding in the forest/ drinking water from a bog until my parents could sell their ox/ their farmland/ to pay for passage/ They wept begged me to return/ “soft slavery”/ they called it/ but how soft How hard/ could it be/ to pay off their debts/ Who wouldn’t want a better life/ Who wouldn’t/ want more?

Soon, soon, hissed the fields of rapeweed/ in Bierne where we waited to board the white lorry/ like animals sailing on the ark/ crammed front to back driving past Dunkirk/ Ostend/ Bruges/ Zeebrugge/ ferrying across/ the North Sea on a ship called Clementine/ O my darling/ to Tilbury Port in Purfleet-on-Thames Dear Empire/ Dear Home Office/ even locked in a lorry/ my soul/ linh hồn/ dreamed My soul could see/ the City/ brokers trading in futures/ and bonds/ as we dreamed s kim

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locked in the refrigeration unit/ heated by our bodies/ 20/ 30/ 40 degrees/ rising rising the driver watching a wee bit of Netflix/ as we beat the walls/ and screamed Open breaking a metal pole/ trying to punch through the roof scraping our nails/ on the steel doors/ locking us in/ the oxygen vanishing stewing in our sweat/ stripping down/ mouths frothing/ as if the lorry were on fire It’s Tuan/ I’m sorry/ I’m dying/ I cannot take care of you Mum It’s all my fault/ I have to go now/ I can’t breathe Hoping they’d unlock the doors if only we would keep quiet, and wait.

Lungs burning/ bodies gasping/ spirits thirsting / We drink the air/ the hours/ like water We drink and drink/ and cannot drink enough Give them air quickly don’t let them out Steam hissing from our flesh/ when the doors finally opened Snake-slough/ between the self left behind /and the self moving on Like a flayed man shivering, holding his bloody skin in his hands, grasping a self only when it’s passed – oh my god you fucking fuck Heads bowed/ on both sides of the road/ as the ambulances pass/ sirens wailing from which you prefer to avert your gaze – Visa: from the past participle of videre/ to see Or not to see/ inside the container/ lies another container and inside that container lies what cannot be contained

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2 I talk to him in one tongue/ he answers from the morgue — Diana Khoi Nguyen

They tracked the traffickers to Basildon, Birmingham, Tottenham, County Down, County Monaghan, County Armagh.

Sentenced at the Old Bailey for 39 counts of manslaughter.

The head-honchos in Paris, Frankfurt, Budapest, Bucharest know: It’s dirty work, keeping your hands clean.

Business. It’s only business.

We still owe them money for murdering our son.

3 [ => Voice call unanswered]

s kim

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4 At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?

And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?

— Ilya Kaminsky

I can’t erase his voice. My son’s face inside the little black machine. His eyes his words his breath still alive inside. I can’t bear to listen but I can’t bear to delete them because part of me would die too.

Mum, why don’t you answer?

I’ve been dead all night.

His words: shrapnel in the mind.

Part of me is already dead, his voice like a voice-over, waves of data, pixels of last breath crossing the continent until his body can be returned to us in a box – HUMAN REMAINS: HANDLE WITH CARE. And what did they give him?

A bucket in the corner for piss and shit.

And what did I give him?

Only silence.

And now?

Only the great silence, bearer of many names including God.

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5 While she prays and implores…

The icon listens, solemn and sad, knowing well That the son she expects will no longer return.

— CP Cavafy

A child shouldn’t have to save his mother from loan-sharks.

Forgive me, faith, for not feeling you: I cannot not see my son’s closing eyes, so I don’t believe in belief, I believe in this dirt floor, these cinder-block walls, the steel brace soldering spine to skull, I believe in every pock and crook of his bones, every clotted hair on his blue-black scalp, every lash, every nail, every pore, every breath – Our Lady of Acetone, Our Lady of Sodium Lauryl Sulphate, Our Lady of Chloride and Ethyl Acetate, see him, spare him, son I cannot save.

6 [ => Voice call unanswered] [ => Voice call unanswered] [ => Voice call unanswered] s kim

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Daisy Syme-Taylor ash & elm Should I write of brittle grief when thinking of a severed tree? I plot a line against it, an inroad into unresponsive stillness, collapsed inwards and shrinking simplified and doubled-over and nodding delirious. I hold its wreathed head and gentle in two palms, comb whitened hair.

And so I take care, the utmost care.

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tissue paper I am persuaded that your vanishing is, in fact, a truth, a dark line on thick white paper. I hear my mother opening and closing drawers. I refold each shirt and wrap them in tissue paper, as if wrapping a child’s birthday presents.

While translucent sheets floated over cheekbone, I touched a hand and was afraid it would crumple or crease out of shape under the weight of my thumb and he was, she said, like a god lying in a tomb. I thought of linen shrouds, neither folded or unfolded, but stretched and wrinkling. White paper opens over white skin – unopened or unwritten diaries, letters.

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ellipse I think of him, in the absence of all of you, and I think of him in his felt hat, in the picture taken when roads knotted him into the country, won with promises of bee-hives, water-butts, and fishing-ponds, to be a son-of-the-earth and to do-something-with-his-own-hands – imagining the wood-stack and the iron fence painted blue, a pony and trap, and fathers waiting patient in the hall, made of lace and overcoat and composed of well-turned phrases. Nothing is mistaken for anything.

A gathered compromise of sons and fathers, fathers and sons, someone who will school you in fishing. Here is a slight of tongue tripping over the stairs in an ill-fitting dress, and baby hairs pulled loose around the ears. A green hymnal is the work of god, him who makes magnificent all green things, neatness of metrical staves against a side-stepping dance like a sweeping parabola. A line of fathers stands all along the staircase, with their hands on shoulders, and in the other a trowel, or a spade, or a pen, or an axe. Closely-knit as a trellis trim with sweet-peas, and their wives with neat-pressed hands and fingertips curt against smiling lips. Below, vines of children, small as they are silent, eyes fixed on receding points behind eyes. The stems are stitched red, white garment of reclose (here innocence, my sister dear), an importance of the proper clothes. In this year there is no forgiveness of hair cut close below the ears, the thoughtless way of standing or walking beside another as a softly bursting planet, a line 148

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dropped down to the centre, a plummet still in turning water. I think of you fiercely living, and of me fiercely being born. I want to confess but there’s no way of confessing. I should have said something as strong as the lines cornered at my right eye. Now, it is important to go to parties. To make of life a drink, or something beautiful someone said, or Pleiades rearranging over a stranger’s bedroom window. To swim in open water. To work out the margins. To say something open-ended and walk home. But I think always of Sunday mornings, the hymn-singing, the wooden box-pews. The leaves like eyes, looking in through the stainless lead grid, and the hills beyond, and the singing. Lead falls away. Overcoats rip as if caught on fishing hooks. Each father releases a hand from a shoulder, lace trimmings undone, buttons falling to the floor, and each one folds into nothing. The wife parts her hands, they are covered with soil – Soil, too, under fingernails – Swift, up in in the rafters, wing raised as a latch

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Anastasia Taylor-Lind Rewind It’s 9/11 the first time you stay.

In the morning you bring Taliban poems back to bed.

I drink cardamom coffee and you read their tender lines ‘May you not be hungry in the desert, my dear’.

Their loving as ordinary as mine.

I see wilding men shouldering RPGs by the swimming pool of a warlord’s compound and think they’re beautiful, watch a dentist fall to Earth from an aeroplane rising over Kabul.

Human payload slipping from the undercarriage, falling through swipes, scrolls and clicks.

Rewind the tapes, see the little man flying upwards, returning to his life, rewind the tapes.

Like Bruegel’s Icarus, he touches down with a splash in a rooftop water tank 4km away, his suffering unnoticed except for a casual cell phone recording. Twenty years ago, the twin towers man fell too, twisting and turning, tie fluttering, past flames and smoke, for a moment head first over Manhattan. Rewind the tapes, see the little men flying upwards, returning to their lives, rewind the tapes.

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We lie under a marigold embroidered bedspread bought in Afghanistan.

My old friend Tom took me on that shopping trip in an armoured vehicle with his bodyguard and I remembered the summer before the end of uni, how he and I sat up late, drinking Jameson, listening to Johnny Cash and imagining our own deaths, together, somewhere in a dusty alley, all golden light, slow motion and elevated camera angles.

We took it in turns who was doing the dying and who was doing the cradling.

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Shooting

What have you been shooting? an editor asks one afternoon in the South of France – table service, Aperol spritz, sunglasses and sunshine.

We say we shoot people, fire shutters, take pictures, capture subjects with cameras and expose them onto film.

Warfare’s words ingrained in our lexicon.

*

The Comanche married guns and horses on the great planes – combining speed and fire power changed the battlefield forever.

Cameras, again.

I wonder what shutter-speed Capa shot the falling soldier with – perhaps a 125th of a second.

Fast enough to capture the moment of death for the first time.

*

One afternoon another year, under a sunless grey sky Berehynia looks out from her pedestal on the Black Square. Men stretcher the wounded down a hill leaving a trail of bright red arterial blood across the cobblestones, fresh and thick.

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I follow, picking my way through smouldering debris and broken glass, my face covered with soot from burning tyres; a Maidan-tan.

Corpses lie under a barricade, each tucked in with a blanket.

Grey and waxy faces, blue lips, each with a single bullet hole to the forehead, or chest.

Each ready for his close up; I shoot them like everybody else.

Under a hot shower at night the water runs black over my feet.

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Welcome to Donetsk You teach me this wartime trick – to look for living pot plants in the windows on Kievska Avenue.

Most are crisped and brown.

But one green geranium and a succulent spider plant offer proof of life for the person who waters them.

Whole apartment blocks are abandoned.

Collapsed telephone lines, blown-up branches litter the road.

No voices, no tinkering metalwork in the distance, no buses, no playing children.

Leaves rustle white noise.

You say It’s like Sunday, every day.

Stray dogs and swallows, and the soft thud of shelling.

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Stage & Screen

Simon Jaggers Gun to Your Head

Summer in the wildest England. This WHOLE room/theatre is your stage. The fourth wall and wings are the actual walls in this room.

Two teenagers burst in.

DAKOTA – a fifteen-year-old girl. Big hoodie on. Hiding something in her hoodie.

BEDE – a fifteen-year-old boy.

Chasing each other. Like a game of tag.

They’re probably ducking behind stuff and hiding, etc. The gun is always a finger gun – it’s imagination, it’s theatre!

Bede: Give it back!

Dakota:

I found it.

Bede:

You said, I could hold it!

Dakota:

(Finger gun to his head.) Gun to your head: Nirvana or Biggie?

Bede:

Nirvana!

Dakota:

Gun to your head: never hear music again or never read again?

Bede:

You promised!!

Dakota:

Gun to your head, Bede!

Bede:

Never read again.

Dakota:

Congratulations, you survive.

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Bede:

Can I see her?

Dakota:

She’s sleeping in here. (Lets him look in her hoodie pocket.)

Bede:

What shall we call her?

Dakota:

Mouse.

Bede:

Can I hold her cos I’m bored???

Dakota:

Only boring people get bored, Bede.

Bede:

Gun to your head: richest person in the world or the smartest person in the world?

Dakota:

If you were the smartest person in the world, you’d be able to make yourself the richest.

Bede:

Gun to your head: ten ice cream flavours.

Dakota:

Chocolate, banana, strawberry, fudge, lemon sherbet, cookies ’n cream, salted caramel, cherry macaroon, peppermint swirl, peanut butter.

Bede:

Wow.

Dakota:

I didn’t even use vanilla– Gun to your head: what is the greatest toy in the world?

Bede:

The greatest toy?

Dakota:

Three, two, one.

Bede:

Snow.

DAKOTA is silently amazed by this.

Gun to your head: what sequel was better than the original?

Beat.

Dakota:

World War Two. Better plot and a clear antagonist.

Bede:

Give me the mouse!

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Dakota:

Gun to your head: pestle and mortar – which one is the mortar?

Bede:

Erm.

Dakota:

Gun to your head, Bede: choose.

Bede:

Mortar is the… (closes his eyes) bowl.

Dakota:

Click, click.

Bede:

(Opens eyes.) Really?

Dakota:

Correcto-mondo! Gun to your head: you get one song choice. Recite it perfectly. Mess up and blam!

Bede:

Word for word??

Dakota:

Mess up and blam.

Bede:

(Singing Nirvana’s ‘Lithium’.) I’m so happy cos today I found my friends, they’re in my / head–

Dakota:

Boring! Gun to your head: fuck your mum or kill your dad?

Bede:

What-the-FUCK!

Dakota:

Gun to your head.

Bede:

Pull the fuckin’ trigger mate!!!

Dakota:

Gun to little Mouse’s head. (Aims finger gun in her hoodie pocket.)

Bede:

No.

Dakota:

Three, two, one.

Bede:

Err… like I guess… fuck my mum.

Dakota:

OH-MY-FUCKING-GOD!

Bede:

Yeh, but they’d both be alive.

Dakota:

You’d fuck your mum for a mouse, you freakazoid!

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Bede:

No, I wouldn’t.

Dakota:

Bede-ipus!

Bede:

Fuck you!

Dakota:

(Sarky.) Sorry, but, like, I’m not your mum.

Bede:

Can I just hold the mouse now please?

Dakota:

Gun to your head: last three words of your life.

Short pause.

Bede:

Dream… More… Light.

Dakota:

Sounds like a Coldplay song.

Bede:

I don’t want to play anymore.

Dakota:

Gun to your head: recite a scene from a movie word for word.

Bede:

Fuck this, I don’t want to play anymore.

Dakota:

Gun to your head Motherfucker!

Bede:

Fuck off, Dakota!

Dakota:

Recite a movie scene. Three… two… one.

Bede:

(As Lennie from Of Mice and Men.) George…

George, where are we gonna go now?

A moment.

Dakota: I don’t know.

Bede/Lennie: I… I like it here. George, tell, tell me like you done before. About them other guys and about us.

George, tell it like you done before.

Dakota:

OK. OK. You look over there. OK, I’ll tell ya. So you can almost see it. OK?

Bede/Lennie: Where?

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Dakota:

Over there. OK? Over there.

Bede/Lennie: OK.

Bede as Lennie looks out front and Dakota kneels behind him.

Dakota:

Guys like us, they got no family. They ain’t got nobody in the world who gives a hoot in hell about ’em.

Bede/Lennie: But, but not us, George. That’s it, George. But not, not us. Tell about us now.

Dakota:

Not us.

Bede/Lennie: Because…

Dakota:

Cos I got you.

Bede/Lennie: And I got you, George. That’s what, that, gives a hoot in hell about us. George, but tell, tell, now how it’s gonna be.

Dakota:

We’re gonna get a little place.

Bede/Lennie: Good.

Dakota:

Kay.

Bede/Lennie: Yeah. We’re gonna get a little place and we’re gonna…

Dakota:

We’re gonna…

Bede/Lennie: Have…

Dakota:

We’re gonna have a cow, and some pigs, and we’re gonna have maybe, maybe a chicken. Down in the flat, we’ll have a little field / of al–

Bede/Lennie: Field of alfalfa for the rabbits.

Dakota:

For the rabbits.

Bede/Lennie: And I get to tend the rabbits.

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Dakota pulls the finger pistol and we hear a huge GUNSHOT! This should make the audience jump.

Bede falls down dead.

A moment. This isn’t supposed to happen. We were just pretending. We were only playing.

Dakota:

Bede? Bede? Bede get up? Get up??? What the fuck, Bede get up?

A moment.

Bede? Please? Bede, please get up?

Dakota is totally about to break down.

Bede:

(From the floor.) Can I hold the mouse now?

Dakota:

Bede man, what the fuck?!!!

Bede:

Can I?

Dakota:

Never do that again.

Bede:

That was some trippy shit, right.

Dakota:

Do you know how much I fucking love you?

A moment.

BEDE smiles.

Bede:

So, can I?

She gently hands him the mouse from her hoodie.

Black out.

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Will Lord The Voice Inside Your Head Hey! Hey there. It’s me. Down here. The little bit of text you’re reading.

How are you?

Good.

I mean I don’t imagine you actually replied – would’ve looked a bit crazy. But I bet you thought a response.

And I heard it. I am inside your head, after all.

I think that’s useful, to try to imagine me as a voice inside your head. That’s how he imagines me anyway, the person who wrote this. Dashed off in some feverish attempt to meet an approaching deadline, probably.

As voices go, I’m a friendly voice, right? Amiable.

Bouncy, too! With the energy of an eighties Zumba teacher. And possibly the accompanying cocaine addiction. I’m that friend who yells “SO WHAT’S THE NEXT MOVE?” at 5am, when all you can think of is the sweet release of sleep.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m contagious. Viral. If I could slip through the touch of a hand. Or the words on a page. But I’m probably just glued to this paper.

Screaming inside the shape of the ink.

So where are you reading me? Can I ask that? Is it somewhere nice? I hope it’s nice. Aesthetic. Perhaps a library.

Are there other people around? Anyone at all?

Because I’d like to play a little game, if that’s OK. Would you like a game? He does. Or at least, I think will lord

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he does. I’m never sure but I play lots of games with him, and he keeps playing.

OK. Let’s play. Look away from me – don’t worry, I’ll still be here – and find someone. Anyone. Preferably someone you don’t know, but we’ll make do. Find them and look at them. Have you had a look?

Good, now. Answer nice and quick and out loud, loud enough so they can hear.

Would you fuck them?

Oh, don’t be childish about it, come on. Would you fuck them? It’s a simple yes/no question.

I don’t mean right now – if you are in a library the staff might have an issue with that – but more hypothetically. At any point in your life, if the circumstances were to align, and it’s on the table.

Maybe on an actual table.

Would you fuck them?

I can sense some resistance to answering this question. But I’ve given you long enough to stare at them by now, haven’t I? You’ve had a good look.

Haven’t you made up your mind?

See, now you’ve got to say it out loud. You’re all fucking shy but don’t pretend you weren’t thinking about it before I even asked. Staring at a stranger... little bit of you going “Nice”. Or perhaps “Ugh”. So why is it so hard to tell them?

Let’s try it a different way. Look at your person.

Look at them. Now imagine. It’s five years in the future. If you’re with someone now, sorry, they’re dead. Or they left you for your brother. Or they starting having twice weekly ‘yoga’ sessions with Enrique 164

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and stopped coming home. I don’t care. They’re gone. You... are available.

You’re in a bar. Or a library. Or leafleting. However people meet these days. Anyway. This person in front of you walks up and introduces themselves.

They’ve been looking at you, you see. From across the bar, nursing their gin & tonic. Or their copy of War and Peace. Or the incredibly depressing ‘Liberal Democrats Winning Here!’ leaflet you’ve just forced them to look at before binning.

And they wanted to say hi.

Now before you know it, you’ve been chatting for hours. You have so much in common. Or maybe you don’t – maybe that excites you. But the bar’s closing.

The librarian is giving you a disapproving glare. The Lib Dems have already lost. Again.

This person – the one you’re supposed to be looking at – gives you a little touch on your arm. Maybe you’ve been out of the game for a while, but you know what that means.

So here we are. You’ve connected, you’ve found each other, as two lost souls in the terrifying storm of life, blah blah blah whatever. But, at the end of the day, you are fucking primates looking to continue your gene pools and you need to be physically attracted to someone. So, look at the curves of their face. The curves of the rest of them. The clothes they’re wearing. The kind of person you’ve assumed they are.

Look at them and tell them. Tell me. Out loud.

Now. Would you fuck them? Tell them. Yes or no.

Three, two, one. will lord

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If you are so afraid to tell them what you want, what’s the point in wanting it?

You can’t even look into their eyes, can you? The burning shame is eating you up, even though you haven’t found the slightest bit of courage since you started reading me. Because if you meet their gaze and if the light’s right, you might catch a glimpse of your own guilty, broken reflection.

And then you’d see all the shit I’m trying to get you to say out loud! To just acknowledge!

Cos it’s all inside your head, this. Burning, folding, spinning. Would I fuck her, would I kill him, should I tell them I don’t love them anymore? Will I ever find anyone or will I be alone forever? Will I ever be happy with myself? Am I destined for greatness or am I going to die alone in a ditch with nobody but hungry foxes to remember the taste of me?

It’s all inside your head. And you’ve got to let me help you get it out. Because if you don’t get it out, I can promise you won’t leave any mark on this world but vapid, empty breath.

So, for once in your life, pay attention. When you lock eyes with someone – walking down the street, sitting in a restaurant, dancing in a club – and I ask you if you’d fuck them... give me an answer.

Now, I know some would feel ‘a bit awkward’. “Oh no I feel like I’m judging this person that I’ve never met unfairly, it’s rude to objectify people, isn’t this harassment?” Blah blah blah.

“What if I don’t want to say?”

What if you don’t want to say?

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Well, maybe I’ll make you have sex with them.

Maybe you’ll have to. Maybe you’ll find yourself under them, disgusted, knowing that all you had to do to avoid this was to have some fucking respect for yourself. And for me.

Or maybe... maybe I’ll make them your soulmate.

Your one true love. God, it’s magical, isn’t it? They’re everything you ever dreamed of. You’re so deliriously happy – they’ve given your life meaning again. You won’t die alone. You’re not a pointless, fleeting speck of dust. You’re in looooooove.

But when you lie them down on your bed and you lean in for that perfect kiss on those perfect lips, thinking of everything you could do to each other... you stop. They’re confused – “is everything alright honey?” But you don’t move. And you don’t say anything. Because you know, deep down. You remember this moment and you know.

That I won’t ever let you fuck them. Ever.

How’s that sound?

Now don’t panic. Don’t get all in a twist.

Remember, you’re just reading me. I’m just some silly little words. A silly little voice, he calls me. As he scribbles this down. A silly little voice inside his head.

Except, for the last few minutes, I’ve been inside yours. And I must say – it’s not half bad here.

So maybe I’ll stick around a while.

Teach you how to play.

will lord

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Charles Edward Pipe Extract from The Ill-Fated 1875 Cattle Drive from the Able Ranch in Texas to One of the Railheads in Kansas

The chuckwagon is on the move. REUBEN FORRESTER is sitting on the driver’s seat, holding the reins.

FRANKLIN GOODMAN, less than a third of Forrester’s age, walks alongside, gathering firewood and placing it in the ‘possum belly’ beneath the chuckwagon.

Forrester:

Get that piece there. And that. Soon you will learn what to look for. And keep an eye on those horses.

Watch out for snakes. Always good to have some fresh meat.

Goodman:

How long have you been doing this?

Forrester:

I have been a cook for six years and a cowhand for near enough my entire life prior to that. Of course, the industry was very different before the war. Heck, everything was different before the war.

Goodman:

Did you fight?

Forrester:

I did.

Goodman:

My father did also.

Forrester:

Oh really?

Goodman:

Yeah.

Forrester:

You must have been… what? Just a new-born baby at the outset? It is a terrible thing, the way war separates people. Your pa should have been there with you in those early years.

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Goodman:

Yeah, and the later ones too.

Forrester:

Oh, I am sorry. I did not realise he did not return.

Goodman:

Oh, he did return. Very briefly.

Forrester:

I see. Well, I am sorry for that too.

Goodman:

Do you have children?

Forrester:

I sure hope not.

Goodman:

Never thought of settling down?

Forrester:

I have thought about it. I might someday.

Goodman:

Well, you better be quick about it.

Forrester:

Excuse me?

Goodman:

You are old.

Forrester:

Focus on your work! You have walked right past at least four good pieces of firewood.

Goodman:

Yes sir…

Forrester:

And keep an eye on those horses. At this pace, the others are likely to need to swap mounts at least twice today.

Goodman:

So, when one of them needs to swap their mount, I just ride out and catch the horse they want?

Forrester:

You make it sound easy. Talk to Elijah about it when you get the chance. He is one of the best wranglers I have ever worked with.

Goodman:

If he is such a great wrangler, why am I doing this and not he? He is learning a new job. I am learning a new job. Why not just have me learn that one and him stay here doing this?

Forrester:

I have thought about this often. The fact is – for better or worse – there is a hierarchy. A progression.

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To have you, young and green as you are, advance ahead of him would be… well, not right.

Goodman:

That is stupid.

Forrester:

You might be correct. But hey, be grateful. Your job is not easy but… you see all the dust the herd is kicking up there? Elijah is right in the middle of that.

Forrester squints at something.

Hey look, what is that in that tree there?

Goodman:

That one?

Forrester:

(Pretending his eyesight is worse than it is) Yes, I thought I saw something but it is difficult to tell, what with my old eyes.

Goodman:

Do you mean the bird nest?

Forrester:

Is that what that is?

Goodman:

Yeah.

Forrester:

Shame. I was hoping it might be a squirrel or such.

Goodman:

I bet there is eggs in there.

Forrester:

Eggs? You are right! That is smart thinking! Say, could you climb that tree and have a look? I would do it, but I fear I am too old.

Goodman:

Sure.

Forrester:

Make sure to leave one or two in there.

Goodman exits, to climb the tree.

You are doing great! Almost there! Are there eggs in there? Ooh wee! The others will be pleased. Careful now! Don’t you fall and break those eggs! Caref– I said don’t fall! Anything broken? Your bones I mean!

Good! Well, don’t just lie there!

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Goodman enters, looking slightly more dishevelled than before.

Good job, boy. And smart thinking, looking for eggs.

Come on up here and let me take a look at them.

Goodman climbs up and takes a seat next to Forrester.

These are crow eggs. Mamma and papa crow should be around somewhere, and some older siblings I reckon. You left a couple of eggs behind?

Goodman:

I did.

Forrester:

Good. That should soften the blow a little, for the parents.

Goodman:

How do you know that these are crow eggs?

Forrester:

You see they are a little bit green in colour, with lots of brown speckles? Lots of dense, small speckles.

Crow eggs. These should be very good to eat.

Goodman:

Alright, well, I shall keep an eye out for more nests.

Forrester:

Crow nests are easy to spot. Now, if you are particularly observant, you will see signs of all sorts of birds.

Quail and woodpeckers and tiny burrowing owls.

Funny little creatures. But first and foremost, you should be looking out for firewood, and keeping an eye on those horses.

Goodman descends from the wagon and continues collecting wood.

Goodman:

Why do you know so much about birds?

Forrester:

A convergence between necessity and curiosity.

Goodman:

Huh?

Forrester:

I both like birds and like to eat.

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Goodman:

I see.

Forrester:

Keep an eye out, boy. A rider has separated from the herd and is making their way here.

Goodman:

Oh, yeah, I see them. Looks like… Mister Quincey.

What do you reckon he wants?

Forrester:

A fresh horse would be my guess.

Goodman:

Already?

Forrester:

Go and meet him and find out. Quickly now.

Goodman exits.

Forrester rides the wagon onwards for a few moments, then halts the wagon, realising he still has the eggs in his lap.

He descends from his seat to stow the crow eggs away safely in one of the many compartments on the wagon, tenderly wrapping them in a rag first.

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Esohe Uwadiae W hen Among Friends I’m not... stable.

Well.

Not really. But I guess neither are any of you or this group wouldn’t exist.

I was on meetup.com looking for a new way to, you know, meet people and there you were. I thought it was a joke at first – because why would we need support, we aren’t good people, clearly. And then I wondered if it was more social than that – like a place to share tips, advice, maybe even...

And, I hate to say it, but that is what made me click.

You know, a bit like I am scum so at least let me be scum with others. Like when you’ve nearly finished a whole pack of digestives and because you already feel terrible, you keep going, keep eating, keep shovelling down the thing you know will make you hate yourself more.

I wanted you to help me hate myself more.

Pause.

Kinda can’t believe I said that, but also who better to say it to than all of you, my fellow…

Beat.

I’m not sure what the preferred terminology is.

I don’t know why I’m unfaithful. I don’t even think I’m addicted to sex. Like it’s fine. Nice. Kind of like a massage of sorts. But not really worth the guilt and shame. esohe uwadiae

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So, I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s the taboo of it. I mean I used to really like having sex in public or anywhere that I shouldn’t and with people that I shouldn’t, like married guys or my teachers at school, pastors even. Like the thrill was in the wrongness and not the act. Does that make sense?

And so maybe this is just an evolution of that. The next stage of my brain trying to... I don’t know.

Because now, I don’t even have to have sex, it just needs to be something physical with someone who isn’t the person I’m married to. Like a compulsion. Like my brain might explode out my nose if I don’t.

Beat.

I thought marriage would solve everything, curb me. And it did, briefly. I’d cheated pretty much our whole relationship but marriage was sacred.

Marriage would be my, our, fresh start. I would be good. I wanted to be good.

And I was. Everything was.

For a time.

For a very short time.

I think about pretences a lot, all the ways I lie to myself and others. Even right now, my husband thinks I’m at M&S getting my bra size checked.

I’ve used that excuse three times this year and it’s not even my dumbest one. Once I was late to his family’s dinner – train delays. And instead of what really happened, I told them a fox tried to attack me.

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It’s like I’m allergic to the truth. Except it’s exciting too, you know, literally distorting reality, reshaping it to suit me. Seeing if anyone notices. Seeing just how much I can get away with.

Or maybe I married an idiot.

Maybe he doesn’t notice because he cares so little.

Beat.

I’ve basically always been like this, so I guess points for consistency? Like when I was a kid and would meet people, I’d do this thing where I’d work really hard to be their friend, their best friend, while withholding all my big secrets.

And then I’d trot them out, one by one, become a hero in their eyes, someone so strong and brave and...

And then whatever I wanted to happen would happen.

Beat.

I’m sorry for saying you aren’t good people. That was wrong of me. And for saying you aren’t stable. To be honest, how could I possibly know? I don’t know you. You could be very stable. In other ways. The ways that count.

And I’m certainly not one to judge because even outside of this, I’m a depressed, anxious mess of a human. I burn through jobs like cigarettes.

I should probably go to therapy or something.

If you can believe it, this is actually the least of my issues. I haven’t even mentioned my collection of dead starfish. esohe uwadiae

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Beat.

That was a joke by the way.

Pause.

But there is something inside that wants to destroy me.

On some level, I hope one day it does.

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Paolo Chianta Ideas for a Film Set in The London Librar y • A comedy about tourists who want to visit the Library and don’t realise that it’s membership only. I don’t know how you’d set it in the Library if they can’t actually get in, maybe it’s that they try various tactics to get inside in a screwball sort of way and the Library staff have to foil them. You know, seeing through their ‘famous author’ disguises, shoving off their ladders from third-floor windows and watching them fall backwards bug-eyed, that sort of thing.

• A romantic comedy about two Library members who don’t recognise each other because of their masks, I mean they don’t realise they actually know and hate each other outside the Library, whereas wearing masks in the Library they fall in love.

Then later, when they remove their masks, they realise they already know and fully hate each other and it’s bad for a while, then it’s fine.

• A horror film where the Library is alive somehow, not in a Shining way but actually alive and talking (don’t give the Library a scary voice).

• An anthology film with different stories set in the Library and famous actors in a few of them – we’ll get the famous actors because they’ll be willing to spend only minimal time shooting their individual segments. The strongest segments should be positioned first and last and the worst ones somewhere in the middle (try not to make them bad though). The worst segments will feature the most famous actors for some reason, making the audience wonder why the most famous actors agreed to be in the worst segments or why the famousness of paolo chianta

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the actors failed to elevate the material. It should be unclear whether the famous actors read the entire script and actively decided to act in the weakest segments or whether they were only offered the scripts of the weaker segments and were led to believe that the other segments were of similar quality.

• A film about a librarian who goes through a reverse Big and becomes a child again and then has to keep trying to work in the Library but the whole thing is incredibly stressful for all concerned (explore the very real and deeply unfunny impracticalities of a child having to work in a library).

• An animated kids’ film about books in the Library that come to life. The main books are voiced by Ricky Gervais and Chris Martin and it all looks a bit 2010 but there’s one famous American actor doing one of the voices, possibly Nicole Kidman, and there will be one sequel to this and one spin-off.

• An anthology film about a writer struggling to write a book at the Library and each of the short stories we see is a different genre piece that he’s trying to write and the actor playing the writer also appears as the fictional protagonist in each section, now a bumbling explorer, now a plucky periodontist. The stories should also echo his real comings and goings around the Library, for instance, maybe there’s another writer at the Library who’s mean to him and then the actor playing the mean writer appears in the various stories in different ‘mean’ guises until the two eventually fall in love and Eddie Redmayne should probably play the not-mean writer.

• A film about a mouse who lives in the Library, but it isn’t a kids’ film, it’s a serious adult film. I don’t know how you’d work this exactly but it’s a serious adult film about this mouse and he has serious, relatable problems. Not 178

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in a Ratatouille way, the mouse isn’t doing wacky things, what I’m saying is that a child watching the film would be fully unable to relate to the mouse’s problems and that the mouse’s problems are unique to adult life. Basically, what I’m saying is that you would have to have reached a certain point in life and have gone through a certain amount of toils to be able to even vaguely appreciate what this poor mouse is going through. It shouldn’t be so adult that a child isn’t allowed to watch it though, in theory a child could watch the film and be unable to relate to the mouse’s problems but then grow up and become an adult themselves and go through problems similar to those of the mouse that would eventually bring them to rewatch the film as an adult and be able to relate. This way you guarantee two watches from a single person, in which case it could potentially be marketed as a family film to trick kids into watching it when, in fact, this film about a mouse and his relatable adult problems is not even remotely for them. The film shouldn’t be that enjoyable either, it should be a hard watch, ideally critics should describe it as ‘a hard watch’.

• A vehicle for Rowan Atkinson, not exactly Mr Bean Goes to the Library or Man Versus Library but something with him running around doing something at the Library that causes full mayhem, maybe not full mayhem, consider just partial mayhem.

• A horror film set in the Library back stacks, there’s something on the loose but nobody’s sure what. I don’t know how people wouldn’t notice the thing that’s on the loose in between the killings, you’d have to find a way for it to hide somewhere, maybe it keeps hiding in between the bookshelves and switching places whenever someone comes round to that particular bookshelf. There should be a scene paolo chianta

179

where someone removes a book from a shelf and there’s a giant eye behind it, then after the person jumps and looks again, the eye is gone. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember if this is how the shelves work in the Library but if it isn’t, the production design team could just design a new type of shelf for that scene, a special shelf with a gap in the middle. It should turn out that whatever is on the loose there and killing people is actually extremely lonely and misunderstood and Eddie Redmayne should play the protagonist who eventually befriends the poor monster.

• A film about a massive robot who solves a crime – the crime should be a human crime but the robot confounds expectations and solves it all the same. This is nothing to do with the Library but consider it anyway (the robot doesn’t have to be massive).

• Just thinking re: the horror film with the thing on the loose idea, perhaps a good way to hide it in between the killings is to give it suction pads all over its body so it fastens itself to the ceiling and there could be a scene with sinister music where Eddie Redmayne notices all these suction-type marks on the ceiling and a maintenance guy says ah, that’s just a bad paint job and this same ignorant guy is very soon after gruesomely killed.

• An indie film about someone who does something at the Library that isn’t exactly relatable, not at first, but eventually it becomes relatable, and then finally it is deliberately shockingly unrelatable.

• A musical set in the Library, but nobody can sing at full volume because it’s a library, so everyone sings really quietly, so quietly that you can’t make out the lyrics and as a consequence 180

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the plot and character development are largely unintelligible.

A few famous singers are in it as well as a few actors who can’t sing but are famous enough to be in it and try their best to sing and there will be one non-singer actor who surprises everyone by singing amazingly well, maybe even better than the real singers and the real singers are intensely jealous and refer to the non-singing actor in interviews as “an excellent amateur voice”.

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Ella Godfrey Extract from Please Excuse Me EXT. THE CARRINGTON ESTATE – NIGHT

A grand manor house rests in shadow. It looks picturesque.

Tranquil. Innocent.

We slowly glide closer.

CAPTION: July 1812.

Shadows flit past the windows. Delicate string music drifts through the air, faint at first.

As we float across the driveway, the shapes become dancing couples.

Beneath the music we hear the buzz of laughter.

We approach the open front door, accessorised by two FOOTMEN. They stare unblinkingly into the darkness.

We drift past them and enter – INT. ENTRANCE HALL – NIGHT, CONTINUOUS

Marble columns gleam in the candlelight.

We approach an ornate set of double doors. We wait...

Before they SWING open to reveal – INT. GRAND BALLROOM – NIGHT, CONTINUOUS

Now this is a Regency party.

A sea of beautiful people wear beautiful things and behave beautifully. We weave through the revellers.

Past BEJEWELLED DANDIES toasting crystal champagne flutes.

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Past RESPLENDENT LADIES giggling behind embroidered fans.

Past DANCING COUPLES, each on the brink of a proposal.

We push through the crowd until we find a plainer figure. Like us, she does not belong here.

MERCY (18), is new to the household and brimming with naïve excitement. She wears a servant’s dress and holds a silver tray of glasses.

Mercy gawps at the enchanting elegance around her. She admires the décor, then the dancers, before her eyes fix on a man. He is definitely too handsome.

Mercy watches the master of the house, LORD JAMES CARRINGTON, (29), as he makes energised conversation with a cluster of gentlemen. He cracks a joke and the whole group laughs.

Carrington sips from his glass. Then he glances over.

Mercy’s breath catches. She looks down. Blushes. Steels herself. She risks a second glance – And Carrington is looking right back at her.

There’s a moment as they hold each other’s gaze.

The corner of his mouth curls into an irresistible smirk.

Just before – CRAAASSSHHH. The silver tray tips out of Mercy’s hand. Glass and champagne smashes across the floor.

A sudden silence.

In eerie unison, the guests swivel their heads to stare at the servant.

They scowl, sneer, snarl. For a moment, Mercy is paralysed by shame. She searches, desperately, for a friendly face, but she can’t see Carrington anymore. ella godfrey

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In panic, Mercy drops to her knees. Frantically, she tries to scoop up broken glass with the tray. It doesn’t work.

Disapproving mutters. Shaking heads. They are still watching.

Mercy fights tears. Abandoning safety, she grabs fistfuls of glass and hurls them onto the tray. Shards lodge deep in her hand. She doesn’t stop. Blood smears the silver.

Mercy stands. Her whole body shakes. She carries the tray of glass to a hidden door at the far end of the ballroom.

The crowd watches. No one helps her.

INT. SERVANTS’ STAIRCASE – NIGHT

Grey, no decoration.

We hear the RATTLE of glass against silver as Mercy descends the stairs into darkness.

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Gerline Ndombasi Extract from Don’t Forget Me

[Note: All dialogue in these brackets are in French and subtitled.]

OVER BLACK

We hear the radiant laughter of two YOUNG GIRLS. GIRL 1 (VO) [Seven. Six. Five. Two–] GIRL 2 (VO) [Wait, no. You can’t do that–] GIRL 1 (VO) [One...]

EXT. PARK – DAY

In the middle of a lush park stands a little girl (3, colourful hair bobbles wrapped around her pigtails) with her hands firmly covering her eyes.

She peaks through one hand, catching a glimpse of blue fabric moving behind a bush, followed by a light snicker. She quickly snaps her hand shut. A devilish smirk grows across her face.

This is ORA. YOUNG ORA [Zero!]

Her arms burst free and she races towards the bushes.

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185

YOUNG ORA (CONT’D) [Found yo–]

Nothing.

Ora turns back, her eyes scanning across the park, searching for just a trace of her cousin’s presence.

YOUNG ORA (CONT’D) Kasai.

Beat.

Ora marches forth, her attention swaying from the cries of the crickets nestled below to the rustling of the squirrels in the trees up high.

YOUNG ORA (CONT’D) [Kasai. Where are you?]

She trudges through the overgrown weeds, breaking into the view of a boarded-up, forgotten château, encircled by forget-me-not flowers.

She nears it with hesitancy but eases as soon as she makes contact, caressing the building as if it were alive.

Several beats pass as Ora gets lost in the presence of the château, tracing the veins of the ivy that has bored into the brickwork, working her way to the château’s front door.

Deep breath.

GIRL 2 (OS) Boo.

Ora spins round to face the source of the voice, belonging to KASAI (11), and trips on her own foot.

Kasai towers over Ora, bellowing with laughter. The blue beads in her hair dance around, forming a gentle chime.

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KASAI [You didn’t say ‘ready or not, here I come’. Next time you have to say it or I won’t come out.]

Ora cradles herself on the floor, dusting the dirt off her body. She examines her knee – blood trickles down her leg.

A woman’s voice cuts through the park.

VOICE (OS) Ora! KASAI [Come on. Let’s go.]

Ora remains fascinated by the stream of red.

KASAI (CONT’D) [Ora, we have to go.]

ORA [No, my leg.]

Kasai crouches down, brushes away the blood on Ora’s knee and plants a soft kiss on her wound.

KASAI [Ready?] >JUMP CUT TO: INT. COACH – DAWN

Ora, now 16, with a braided bob, traces over her scar.

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SUPER: THIRTEEN YEARS LATER

The sudden movement from a passenger resting across the aisle from Ora, covered by their jacket, jolts Ora’s concentration.

Ora pulls back her curtain and looks out into the motorway and the fields beyond.

A sign marked ‘PARIS’ flashes past the window.

ORA (to resting passenger) Mama.

Silence.

Ora digs into her backpack to find some rolled up tissue and launches it directly at the head of the sleeping passenger.

ORA (CONT’D) Mama, we’re here.

A grumbling RENEE (48, with a youthful glow and short dreadlocks) peaks her head out from her jacket.

RENEE Liar.

ORA I promise.

Renee fully rises from her slumber and peers out the window but quickly turns back and kisses her teeth, which Ora laughs off.

RENEE Ugh, give me ten more minutes.

Renee lies back down.

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ORA Can I have my ball back?

RENEE No.

Beat. Still laid down, Renee hurls the ball of tissue back, hitting Ora in the head. Ora catches the ball before it falls.

ORA Ouch.

RENEE (OS) Crybaby.

Ora smirks to herself and gazes back out the window.

Alongside Ora, we watch the pastoral landscape blur into a green streak and finally give way to the steely structures of Paris.

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Sid Sagar Extract from Baked Beans FADE IN: INT. STUDIO – DAY

NIK, an actor (British Asian, 20s), speaks directly to camera. It’s an intense, emotive speech, and should seem entirely genuine.

NIK I was pathetic, tonight in the pub with the lads. We were sat drinking, telling jokes, playing music, telling more jokes. Jokes about sex, thick Irish men, wog jokes, chink jokes, Paki jokes. And the biggest joke was me, ’cause I was laughing the hardest. And they laughed at me because I was laughing. It seemed as if the whole pub was laughing at me, one giant grinning mouth. I just sat there and watched them, and I didn’t belong, I was crying, crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath, so I ran and kept on running. When I got home, me dad was here praying, and it was right, to be here, to be a part of this place, to belong to something. It’s what I want. I know– SUZY (OC) Can I stop you there?

Reveal: SUZY, an enthusiastic, friendly Casting Director (30s), on the other side of the camera.

SUZY (CONT’D) Nothing was wrong, don’t worry!

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NIK OK. SUZY It’s just a note from the director, basically? He’s sort of keen, basically, to find something raw. To tap into something a bit frenzied, y’know? Does that make sense?

NIK I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

SUZY OK. Great.

Beat.

NIK Should I go again?

SUZY Yes please!

She fiddles with the camera.

NIK (Re: the camera) Is it...?

SUZY (Struggling with camera) Yeah. Fine. Just... fuck’s sake. Sorry.

NIK Don’t worry. They’re a pain. sid sagar

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SUZY God they are, aren’t they?

NIK Yeah. Honestly. The amount of times I’ve had to do a self-tape, and my mate comes around, andSUZY Right. OK. NIK So raw, right? Frenzied.

SUZY Yeah. It’s, y’know, East is East, but not up North in a grey town somewhere off the M1. This is real, y’know?

Today. It’s all those themes, but today. The mixed marriage. The anger. The abuse. Like, a mate of mine, she’s black, or well, mixed, but that doesn’t matter, I suppose, but she just split up with this guy and... well, it was his religion, really. And his family. His religion and his family and it was an awful, horrid, really awful relationship.

Because of how toxic that stuff makes it.

Beat, presses record When you’re ready.

INT. ALEX & KATIE’S DINING ROOM – NIGHT

The end of a dinner party in a pleasantly furnished dining room: nice art, hanging plants, floating shelves, etc.

We find NIK at a dining table, next to his girlfriend FLO (20s).

Opposite them are KATIE (20s) and ALEX (20s).

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ALEX So, yeah, we might have to venture north of the river!

KATIE We’re thinking Walthamstow.

FLO Lovely!

KATIE It’s quite bouji now? Which I know isn’t a good thing...

ALEX Definitely a good thing.

FLO Everything in moderation, perhaps?

Nik smiles.

ALEX I dunno, Flo. I’d rather pay more for a flat white than keep things affordable and crime-ridden.

FLO Bit of an oversimplification.

ALEX You’ve clearly never been to Tottenham.

KATIE Alex. Stop being a snob.

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ALEX It’s the truth! No offence, Nik. NIK Oh. I’m not from Tottenham.

KATIE Really?

FLO He’s from Hemel Hempstead.

NIK But I am offended.

The joke doesn’t land. Alex and Katie are confused. Flo tries not to laugh. She squeezes Nik’s hand and stands.

FLO Where’s the loo again?

Katie gets up. Flo follows her out the room.

KATIE Upstairs. I’ll show you. Too many bloody doors in this place. It’s like a shit Downton Abbey...

Their laughter fades away, leaving Nik and Alex in an uncomfortable silence.

Alex drains his beer and stands.

ALEX You want another one?

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NIK Yeah. Thanks. Mate.

Nik grimaces. Alex heads towards the kitchen.

The action continues over Nik’s asides.

NIK (CONT’D) (aside) Sometimes I know I should be somewhere else, doing something else, somehow. But I’m here for Flo. It’s nearly been a year. And she’s here for Katie. Who she’s known since school. And Katie’s here, well, because she lives here. With–

Alex returns, sitting down with a grunt. Places two bottles of beer on the table.

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Author Biographies

Beth Alliband is a writer living in East London. She has a First-Class degree in Comparative Literature and is currently working on her first novel.

Leonie Annor-Owiredu is a writer, UX researcher and cultural strategist based in London. She writes fiction and has essays featured in Harper’s Bazaar, Empire and other publications.

Phoebe Yemi Ara writes fantasy, science-fiction and romance novels, targeted at the Adult and YA market. When she’s not doing that, she’s writing screenplays that (rather often) star murderous women.

Paul Atherton (FRSA) is a social campaigning film-maker, playwright, author, artist. Through thirteen years of ongoing homelessness, his work has been seen at Odeon Leicester Square, Camden People’s Theatre, Gallery@OXO, Museum of London and the BFI. Ella Baron is a graphic novelist. Her topical cartoons/comics have been published by The Sunday Times, TLS, Guardian, BBC, Harper Collins and MSF, amongst others. Her debut graphic novel INTERFACE is forthcoming with Virago (2025).

Isabella Rose Bengoechea is a journalist and writer, formerly of The Times and now at the i newspaper. A published short story author, her fiction often explores fairytale, feminism and the fantastic.

Katie Buckley graduated from the Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway, where she held a Principal’s Masters Scholarship, in 2021. Her writing, which has been published in Litro and Horizon magazines, amongst others, explores female subjectivity and myth.

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author biographies

Paolo Chianta was selected for the BBC Writersroom and his play Brighter Later aired on Radio 3. He is currently developing a sitcom, a feature and a drama for Radio 4.

Tilda Coleman is an English teacher living in London. She is working on her first novel.

Tom Conaghan’s fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Shirley Jackson Award 2021. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Observer, TLS, Irish Times and 3am Magazine, amongst others.

Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet. Courtney has been a winner of the Eric Gregory Award and Bridport Prize Young Writers Award; shortlistee of The White Review Poet’s Prize, Manchester Poetry Prize and Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition.

Viktoria Dahill has been shortlisted for the Grindstone Novel Prize, RWA Stiletto Award, Creative Future Writers Award 2022, the Novel Studio Scholarship and won the 2022 Hachette UK/Byte the Book scholarship for Unpublished Writers.

Hana Fazal works as a copywriter and is a former national newspaper and magazine journalist. She writes general commercial fiction about people who are trapped by family, culture and bad ideas.

Oakley Flanagan is a writer and poet. Their poetry appears in bath magg, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The North, Under the Radar and Wasafiri. Their pamphlet is forthcoming with Out-Spoken Press.

Edward Fortes was born in London. Aside from writing, he works as a translator from French and Italian. After living in Rome for seven years, he is now based in Bristol.

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197

Eleanor Franzén is a writer, a part-time PhD student at Birkbeck College, and a type I diabetic. She lives in Bromley with her partner and a glut of books.

Gilli Fryzer was the winner of the Mslexia Short Story Prize 2020.

Her stories have been published in anthologies, journals, online, in translation and recently in the Bath Short Story Anthology, 2022.

Ella Godfrey is a playwright, screenwriter, and ex-shopping centre elf originally from the West Midlands, now living in London. She often asks herself, what if Bridgerton had more cannibals in it?

Stewart Gott writes historical fiction (and other stuff). He still can’t believe he won a place on the Emerging Writers Programme, but he’s learned a lot from the experience!

Dominique Heyse-Moore is Senior Curator of British Contemporary Art at Tate Britain. She is working on a graphic memoir about the ramifications of the manifold global movements of her family.

Kate Holderness is an actress and now calls herself a writer too! A proud member of the LGBTQ+ community and passionate about bowel cancer awareness and stoma visibility.

Niamh Hunt is a Bristolian writer. She studied English Literature at Cambridge. In 2021, she participated in the inaugural HarperCollins Author Academy. She is currently working on her debut novel.

Simon Jaggers is a playwright from London. His plays have been performed at Theatre503, Soho Theatre, The Bunker and Southwark Playhouse. He is also a songwriter/performer and spent his youth playing in punk bands and deejaying hip hop.

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author biographies

Alexis Keir grew up in Luton and spent part of his childhood living in Saint Vincent. Alexis’s first book Windward Family will be published by Thread Books in February 2023.

S Kim divides her time between Little P’yongyang, New Malden, Surrey UK and Little Seoul, Bergen County, NJ US. Will Lord is a writer and script editor, contributing to shows for BBC One/HBO Max and Paramount+. His work has been longlisted by the Royal Court, Soho and Space theatres.

Gerline Ndombasi is a writer from South London whose work primarily explores Black womanhood and girlhood within liminal and intimate spaces (but truthfully, whatever story takes her fancy).

Vanessa Phan is a British-Chinese writer living in London. She is a graduate of Princeton University and participated in the inaugural HarperCollins Author Academy in 2021.

Charles Edward Pipe is a playwright and director based in London. He creates work ranging from wry tragicomedies to outright goofy spoofs, usually rooted in history or genre (especially Westerns).

Grace Quantock is a writer and therapist, published in The Guardian, The New Statesman and An Open Door (Parthian, 2022). Shortlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize, she won a Curtis Brown Breakthrough award for her memoir, Madwomen Are My Ancestors.

Harriet Rix studied biochemistry and the history of science before working in landmine clearance in the Middle East. She writes about trees, ecological history and cosmopolitanism. author biographies

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Sid Sagar is a British Indian actor, playwright and screenwriter. He is writing plays for Almeida and Hampstead Theatres and developing TV projects for Slam Films, Sky and Channel 4.

Daisy Syme-Taylor is a writer and poet, based in London. She is a bookseller, musician, and a postgraduate student at UCL, where she researches sound, science and environment in early modern and twentieth century poetry.

Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a National Geographic photojournalist, a TED fellow and a 2016 Harvard Nieman fellow. Her first poetry collection One Language was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022.

Jessie Thompson joined The Independent as Arts Editor earlier this year. She is writing essays on culture and feminism; her epic novel has not yet moved house from her head.

Liz Tresidder is a London-based writer working on her first novel.

She was shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2019 and is represented by Euan Thorneycroft at AM Heath.

Esohe Uwadiae’s play She Is a Place Called Home ran at VAULT Festival and was longlisted for the Alfred Fagon Award. She has participated in programmes with the Royal Court and Almeida.

Kathleen Walker-Meikle is a keen writer of historical non-fiction.

She’s a trained historian in animal studies and medical history. Born and raised in Chile, Kathleen lives in London with her partner and their puritanical cat.

David Willey writes under the name JL Bogenschneider. He has had work published in a number of journals and magazines, including The Stinging Fly, PANK and Ambit.

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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: AM Heath Literary Agency, Philip Broadley, Mark and Rosemary Carawan, The John S Cohen Foundation, John Colenutt, Isabelle Dupuy, Sir Max Hastings, The Hon PN Gibson’s Charity Trust, The International Friends of The London Library, David Ireland, Stephen Lambert & Jenni Russell, David Lubin, The Julio and Maria Marta Núñez Memorial Fund, OJ Colman Charitable Trust, PF Charitable Trust, David Reade, Victor Sebestyen, Virago Books and a number of donors who wish to remain anonymous.

A huge thank you to the judges, who deliberated with great care, deep consideration and a spirit of openness and curiosity to pick out the gems amongst a record number of applications: Sareeta Domingo, Karim Flint, Will Harris, Tim Lott, Sarah Savitt and her colleagues at Virago, Euan Thorneycroft and his colleagues at AM Heath, Sara Wheeler (Chair) and Alexis Zegerman.

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: Lianne Dillsworth, Edward Docx, Travis Elborough, Eleanor Greene, Jane Feaver, Will Harris, Anna Kelly, Sara Langham, Nell Leyshon, John O’Farrell, Scott Pack, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Gemma Seltzer, Nicola Solomon and the team at the Society of Authors, 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 acknowledgements

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strength; the Member Services Team, who made the cohort feel 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; Programme Assistant Annie Werner for all her help getting both the Programme events and the anthology together; and Director of The London Library, Philip Marshall.

Thank you to the team at Scratch Books for doing all the magical, clever things that need to be done to turn an enormous Word document into a book.

And, finally, thank you to the forty wonderful writers who made the third year of the programme an absolute joy, the 2021/2022 London Library Emerging Writers cohort: Beth Alliband, Leonie Annor-Owiredu, Phoebe Yemi Ara, Paul Atherton, Ella Baron, Isabella Rose Bengoechea, Katie Buckley, Paolo Chianta, Tilda Coleman, Tom Conaghan, Courtney Conrad, Viktoria Dahill, Annie Fan, Hana Fazal, Oakley Flanagan, Edward Fortes, Eleanor Franzén, Gilli Fryzer, Ella Godfrey, Stewart Gott, Dominique Heyse-Moore, Kate Holderness, Niamh Hunt, Simon Jaggers, Alexis Keir, S Kim, Will Lord, Gerline Ndombasi, Vanessa Phan, Charles Edward Pipe, Grace Quantock, Harriet Rix, Sid Sagar, Daisy Syme-Taylor, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Jessie Thompson, Liz Tresidder, Esohe Uwadiae, Kathleen Walker-Meikle and David Willey.

Claire Berliner is Head of Programmes at The London Library and oversees the Emerging Writers Programme. She previously worked for Arvon, the national creative writing charity, as Centre Director of Totleigh Barton, where she worked with thousands of established and emerging writers over many years. She has worked as a literature programmer in various organisations and as a freelance writer and editor.

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acknowledgements