Pulp Idol - Firsts 2017

Pulp Idol - Firsts

Writing on the Wall Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre 4 Princes Road Liverpool L8 1TH Published by Writing on the Wall 2016 Š Remains with authors Design and layout by Rosa Murdoch ISBN: 978-1-910580-14-1 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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

0151 703 0020 info@writingonthewall.org.uk www.writingonthewall.org.uk

Contents Foreword

i

Introductions

ii

Helen Dring - Whatever Happened to Sophie McClure?

1

CJ Harter - Fitful Head

13

Matthew Cook - Life on Other Planets

19

John Crawley - A Perfect Sunset

27

Caroline England - Time is of the Essence

33

Tiger Lee - In Memory of Kianis

47

Francesca McFarlane - A Brick for a Pillow

53

Alex McHugh - St Crispin's

65

Rashi Rohatgi - Wednesday

75

Mandy Redvers-Rowe - Half a Cold Take-away Later

85

Andy Smith - Breaking The Lore

93

Helen Walsh - Z'Kani

105

Foreword We can thank the writer Kevin Sampson (Awaydays, Powder, Stars Are Stars) for coming up with the title Pulp Idol. I’d been batting around an idea for a competition under the moniker of ‘Book Idol’, which as you can see doesn’t have quite the ring to it as Kevin’s idea.

Writing a novel is a lonely, often arduous process. Our aim was, and still is, to help writers bring their work out into the light and offer them something to aim for; a staging post along the way where they could test their voice in front of a live audience and take on feedback from professional writers.

We also wanted to build a bridge between the predominantly southern based publishing industry and the immense talent we know exists in the Liverpool and Merseyside area.

Ten years on and this unique novel-writing competition has become an annual fixture of the Writing on the Wall Festival. It has also gained a certain cache among agents and publishers, who have responded to the competition many times over, taking part as judges, reading the entries, and publishing many of the winners and finalists.

Since 2006 we have had over five hundred entrants, and since we began ‘Pulp Idol – Firsts’ in 2010, have published the first chapters of approx. seventy finalists, some of whom, like James Rice, John Donoghue, Clare Coombes and Deborah Morgan, have been picked up by mainstream publishers, and even had their work published in over five languages.

Our success is down to the hard work and commitment of many people over the years. Our thanks go out to all of them, including our current editors Clare Coombes, Penny Feeny and Jenny Newman, our numerous heat judges, and our final judges, Laura Williams of PFD Literary Agents, Nathan i

Connolly of Dead Ink Publishers, and novelist Anthony Schumacher, The Darkest Hour (William Morrow, 2014) The British Lion (2015).

I'd also like to thank our sponsor this year, PH Holt, for their invaluable support.

Our success lies also in the talent of our winners and finalists, as represented again during our 2016 finals and produced here in Firsts – 2017.

‘One has to be a little crazy to write a novel’, said the novelist and creative writing teacher John Gardner in ‘On Becoming a Novelist’ (Harper Collins, 1983). True, but crazy is good.

However, if there is one thing that separates out the ‘crazies’ who have found success through Pulp idol, is that their craziness and talent is matched equally by their commitment to driving on from their first chapters to the completion of their novel.

John Gardner also said ‘Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown…it is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.’

The quality of the writing in Firsts – 2017 is as good as any year before, and having met the writers, I am certain that their commitment to completing their novels is as great as the writers who have already achieved success through Pulp idol. It is this commitment that I am sure will bring them the success they deserve, and keep us organising this competition for many years to come.

Mike Morris, Editor and Co-Director of Writing on the Wall

Introductions By adapting the techniques of a tense psychological thriller, winner Helen Dring’s Whatever Happened to Sophie McClure? grips the reader from its opening line. Lucy, the fragile schoolgirlnarrator, has learnt to depend on the confident, knowledgeable Sophie for protection from bullies and help with the process of growing up. Then, to Lucy’s surprise, Sophie disappears and Lucy, now at the centre of a police investigation, is left baffled about herself, the world and the girl whom she’d thought had been her closest friend.

Fitful Head by runner-up CJ Harter, intrigues and tantalises from the start as the horror of family disintegration is hinted at and a sense of menace is beautifully conveyed in crisp and lucid prose.

Narrated by seventeen-year-old Benjamin Carter, runner-up Matthew Cook’s Life on Other Planets opens with the death, in Eastbourne, of Ben’s eccentric Great Aunt Edith. In this highly original, multi-dimensional take on the family saga, the rest of his relatives soon arrive to squabble about the inheritance. Trapped with them in his great aunt’s spooky, ramshackle home, Ben finds himself drawn into a collective nervous breakdown, to be transformed by what he learns about his family and himself.

A Perfect Sunset by John Crawley stuns with its vivid imagery from the start. What has taken burnt-out photo-journalist turned Private Detective Pete McKinnon into this violent world and what has caused the anger feeding him? The intrigue from this opening chapter will certainly keep the reader hooked.

Caroline England introduces us to Natalie Bach, whose polished lawyerly mask hides a broken heart. In Time is of the Essence she returns to her old life only to encounter new issues from the start. This chapter gives us a flavour for the intriguing characters and the setting, both skilfully set up by the author, that will force Natalie into uncovering disturbing secrets.

Tiger Lee’s poignant In Remembrance of Kianis is narrated by Tutu, a boy whose story begins eight months after the earthquake which buried his village, when he has moved to Nairobi to live with his aunt. The novel explores his grief, trauma, and anger at injustice as it follows his struggle, that of his aunt and of a human rights activist to oblige the government to take the surviving villagers from a camp and resettle them on new land.

In A Brick for A Pillow, Francesca McFarlane offers the reader an assured and pitch-perfect child’s eye view through the captivating voice of Augustus, the young narrator, as he struggles to make sense of a mysterious and challenging world.

Alex McHugh’s first person narrator in St Crispin’s sets up a quirky, flamboyant introduction where it is likely that nothing is what it seems, and leads us into an encounter which is deliciously surreal and comic by turns.

The chief protagonist in Wednesday, Rashi Rohatgi’s American campus novel, is torn between starting afresh and her desire to reconnect with her alienated family in a story that combines vivid and atmospheric detail with conflict of identity.

Half A Cold Take-Away Later, from Mandy Redvers-Rowe, is a fantastic and unique concept, the idea of finding what home, and therefore, what life means to an individual. In this chapter we are introduced to ‘Churchyard Man’, his character adeptly drawn through observations, colour, music and his immediate surroundings.

Hard-drinking, famously rational Inspector Paris is summoned to investigate the death of a crucified fairy: so opens Andy Smith’s witty, fantastical novel, the punningly entitled Breaking the Lore. That evening, as the puzzled inspector unwinds over a whisky bottle, who should fly

into his living room but a laconic talking crow? While smoking a cadged cigarette throughout the course of a brilliant duologue, the bird suggests a line of research that calls all Paris’s know-how into doubt and drolly subverts the standard police procedural.

Helen Walsh’s sci-fi/fantasy novel Z’kani, takes the reader to a hospital where a young girl is seeing angels, or at least that’s what she thinks they are. The reader is given a series of clues when the ‘something at the window’ gets in as we are gripped by the sense of tension and suspense. A clever opening that makes you want to read on.

Editors: Clare Coombes, Penny Feeny & Jenny Newman

Helen Dring

h.dring@outlook.com Helen Dring teaches Creative Writing and works as a SEN Coordinator in a Liverpool school. She has been published in a range of anthologies and is currently writing a Young Adult novel. She enjoys tales of mermaids, lost (and found) things and happy(ish) endings.

Whatever Happened to Sophie McClure Lucy Harris knows the world best through her best friend, Sophie. Until Sophie disappears, and Lucy learns that she doesn’t know the world – or Sophie – at all.

i

Whatever Happened to Sophie McClure?

My dad’s mouth moves and one-two-nineteen-thirty-eight words come out. My dad says thirty-eight words and inside my veins turn to small, squirly worms that twist and tighten until I can’t move my arms any more. I look down at my wrists and wonder how exactly a wrist manages to continue being a wrist when there are tiny worms inside it. Can I still pick things up?

Dad puts his cup down on the counter and I watch his fingers stretch and I wonder what creatures are swimming around inside his blood today. Maybe we all have a jungle of creatures inside us but we never know. Except me. I know.

‘Lucy?’ My dad’s mouth moves again but this time there’s more sound. ‘Did you hear me?’

I nod slowly and I do not think about the creatures living in my neck.

‘Lucy,’ the dadvoice again. ‘Tell me what I said.’

‘Sophie’s missing.’

He nods. You can stay home today, if you want to.’

The twisty worms in my neck and wrists wriggle back to their houses and the sound of a thousand howler monkeys creeps in to my head. I look at the whiteness of our walls, like snow, and I think about crawling in to a snow bunker for the rest of my life.

And then I think about what will be waiting for me and how lions get hungrier the longer it is since they last ate.

‘I’ll go.’

Dad drives me to school even though I could walk in half an hour. He says it’s because he misses school since he stopped working there but really it’s because of what happened last year.

‘Sophie’s mum will ring when she knows more,’ he tells 2

me as we pull up at the gates. ‘I’ll text you.’

‘I can’t have my phone in class.’ Ex-principals should know this.

‘Check it at break time, Lucy.’ He smiles and messes up my hair the way he used to when I was little. ‘Take it easy today.’

The car speeds away and the noise around me turns from normal day to ear-piercing. Teenagers must break the sound barrier hourly.

Usually, I would breathe, look around, and walk to Sophie.

Today, there is no Sophie and the lack of Sophie is probably why the noise is so loud anyway. I look down at my phone.

Nothing.

She left without telling me.

Tiny spiders crawl across my neck and I hit them away with the back of my hand. I thought she would have always told me things, even if she didn’t think I’d understand.

Maybe she wasn’t the friend I thought she was.

A big third year is pushed by his friends and spins across the path, crashing in to me. I fall down like a skittle, like I always do.

‘Sorry,’ the boy mutters with a mixture of gruff and squeak that makes me think he probably avoids speaking out loud these days.

His friends scuttle away, laughing. I pick myself up and dust the mud off my skirt.

Without Sophie, this is how it starts.

With Sophie, it’s like having a volume dial. I listen to Sophie and the rest of them don’t sound so loud. She steers me through crowds and not as many third and fourth years seem to crash in to me when I’m walking with her.

But that’s not happening. Not today, at least.

The last time I walked somewhere without Sophie I ended up at Cambuskenneth after dark. I’ve always liked the way 3

Cambuskenneth sounds when you say it and it was a straight line away from my school. I remember how the walk took forever and each step closer seemed to take away more light from the sky. The girl with blonde hair kept walking behind me and telling me that we were nearly there, and every so often she got her phone out to text her mum because her mum worried where she was and she had to text her all the time.

I thought about texting my mum, but I hate texting when I’m out because it always seems to take me ages to find the letters and I can’t walk and do it at the same time, so I left my phone in my bag and made my feet keep walking all the way towards the old abbey.

Behind the abbey is a kind of field. It must be a garden, really, but it doesn’t look tidy enough. I stepped in to it and my feet sank in to the ground. The blonde girl walked closer to me, and she put her arm in my arm like Sophie sometimes did, so I kept walking with her.

Everyone says I knew what I was doing. They said that Clare Lewis had seen me staring at her in French and that she wanted it out with me, and that the blonde girl (who was called Amber, even though she should have been called straw or sand) had asked me in Maths if I’d have her out so here we were.

The air around me was dark and sweet smelling, like there were flowers in the grass just dying from summer but fresh enough to still smell nice.

She hit me like she meant it. I’ve never hit anyone so I don’t know how it feels to them if you don’t mean it, but the space in front of me was black and red and purple, and when I came to my mum was leaning over me and my dad was calling the police. Someone had called them to tell them where I was, so I try to think that no one meant any harm.

4

But they did.

For three weeks my dad interrogated First Year. He listened to every detail and noted them down in files. He listened in the corridors. He sent the police to question Clare Lewis and Amber. I told him who did it. It didn’t seem like there was any point in protecting them. I’d only manage to get myself in to trouble again. By the end of the month, both of them went to a new school and my dad decided it was about time he retired. I went back to school with faded bruises and a promise that I wouldn’t leave Sophie’s side.

We never talked about what I should do if she left mine.

I am pushed along the people river in to the hall and end up sat between a blonde and a ginger piranha. They are both in my form, but I stopped caring about their names even before What Happened Last Year. I separate people by their lowest common denominator. What do they have least in common with someone else? It’s usually hair colour or height, because I’m not interested enough to look at small details like their eyes. Last week I tried to explain to Sophie which boy in Maths I meant by telling her he was ‘the one with the big nose’ and she told me it was rude to call people by their flaws. But if their flaws are so big they take over their whole faces, I don’t see what’s wrong with it.

I remember teacher faces. My form teacher is Mrs Little, which is funny because she really is. She’s the youngest teacher in the school and she started here at the same time I did, which always made me feel better. My dad told me all this. I know lots of things about the teachers here which is Strictly Confidential, Lucy. I’ve never told anyone, except Sophie, and she won’t say anything.

Mrs Little looks over at me and mouths ‘are you okay?’

She knows I’ll get nervous if she comes over to speak to me 5

because then everyone will look at me, but it’s nice to know she’s there. I nod. I don’t really know if it’s true, but it’s a good enough answer for now.

We have a little stage door in our hall that gets used for plays and sometimes, if he’s running late for assemblies, Principal Connors comes through that because his office backs on to the corridor leading on to it. Plus, he can make a grander entrance that way.

Today, his hand turns that door handle and everyone goes silent.

He comes through the door quietly. Behind him are two police officers, a man and a woman. They’re both trying to look friendly but neither of them is smiling.

Principal Connors coughs. He’s smaller, thinner, younger than my dad and this is the first time he’s been Principal. He knows that not everyone in the school trusts him yet. A lot of the older kids here liked my dad, although not enough to help me which would have been the one thing that would have made him stay. Usually, he uses a microphone for assemblies but it isn’t here today. He coughs again.

‘Morning, everyone,’ he begins. ‘Can you all hear me?’

The teachers sat at the back with their forms nod when none of the students do.

He nods. ‘Great. This isn’t the kind of assembly I want to be doing with you this morning. Some of you will know already, but Sophie McClure, one of our second years, went missing yesterday.’

There’s a tiny silence before a whisper wave erupts across the hall, followed by a barrage of ‘shushes’.

‘She was last seen walking home from school, so some of you may have been the last ones to see her.’ He looks to his side. ‘This is Detective Clemence and Detective Inspector Munro. They’ll be in today to ask some of you some 6

questions. I don’t want any of you to worry, but it’s important we find out any information we need to as soon as we can.’

I look around and down the line of kids in my form. Some of them are fidgeting, tapping their feet on the floor. Some of the girls have teary eyes and the boys are playing nervously with their hands because they don’t know what the right way to react is. One of the girls, another blonde, looks down the line and catches my eye. She smiles. I turn my head back to face the front.

‘I know,’ Principal Connors carries on, ‘that this will be a shock to all of you. I want things to be as normal as possible for you all today so please do still try your best in lessons. If anyone needs to, Mrs Parrish will be available in her office for the whole day today.’

Mrs Parrish is our school counsellor who doubles up as a cover teacher sometimes. I know they’ll dump me in to her office at some point today because I might ‘need to talk’.

‘The one thing we do really well at Marsh Academy is support one another,’ Principal Connors says.

I manage not to laugh.

‘So, please, continue to do that today. Second Year, if you could remain in the hall when the others leave, please.’

The rest of the school shuffles past us, catching sly glances at us as they do. It feels strange to be gawped at as part of a group, as if just having to sit in the same line as everyone else makes me suddenly a little less strange.

‘The police would like to speak to you all first,’ Mr Connors says. ‘I know this will be the hardest for your year group, so I’d like to keep you all in here for the first lesson so we can talk about any worries you might have. The police will talk to you individually.

Lucy Harris, could we start with you?’

Detective Inspector Munro and Detective Clemence take 7

me in to Principal Connors’ office, which used to be my dad’s office, and sit down opposite me. They both take out notepads. I sit with my hands under my thighs and the pressure of my body on my fingers makes my breath slow down.

‘It’s alright, Lucy,’ Detective Inspector Munro says, ‘nothing to worry about. Just tell us when you last saw Sophie.’

‘The last time? I think about all of the times I’ve seen Sophie and how when you say the last time it is such an everyday thing because you know that in the future you’ll see them again. The last time I brushed my teeth was probably this morning but I can’t remember, because in ten hours I’ll brush my teeth again so it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember the last time. I don’t mean to think of Sophie in the same way as brushing my teeth, but it’s similar.’

Detective Clemence looks at me open-mouthed as all of this spills out of my mouth. I look down at the desk, which is my dad’s old desk, and I try to put my thoughts in order. After what happened, Mrs Parrish tried to help me organise thoughts in my head before I said them by thinking about what the two words I most wanted to say were.

‘Don’t know.’

And I don’t. In my head, I flip pictures over and over in my mind. Sophie in the canteen. Sophie in Maths. Sophie smiling as she waved goodbye to me. But they’re all just pictures.

And they don’t come with a time stamp like on my phone for me to remember when they’re from. They’re just Sophie, Sophie the way she always is.

‘Perhaps,’ Detective Inspector Munro says, leaning forwards, ‘it might help to talk about when you usually see Sophie in your day. You spend your whole days together in school, don’t you?’

8

I nod. ‘Except for History and Geography, because Sophie does Spanish and French instead.’

‘Okay,’ she nods at me and smiles, and I know I’m starting to say the right things.

‘I meet Sophie outside in the mornings. She walks in with me in the morning.’

‘Did she do that yesterday?’ Detective Clemence asks.

‘Uh huh. Then she walked with me to History before she went to French. Then we had lessons together for the rest of the day.’

‘Do you walk home together?’ Detective Inspector Munro asks.

‘No. Dad picks me up after…’

Detective Clemence whispers to Detective Inspector Munro and she nods, but softly. ‘After the incident last Autumn, you mean?’

I nod. ‘So she never walks home with me, but she walks with me out to the car park and then she waves and walks back down the opposite way.’

‘Does she live nearby?’ Detective Clemence asks, ‘does she walk all the way home?’

‘She lives in Dunblane, she gets the bus with some other people from school.’

Detective Inspector Munro’s genuinely prick up. ‘Who are they?’

‘I’m not very good with names,’ I say. ‘But I think the boys she gets the bus with, or the ones that live near her, are called Alex and Neil.’

Both of them smile.

‘Are they in the same year as you?’ Detective Inspector Munro asks.

‘I think so. I’m not sure.’

‘So,’ Detective Inspector Munro looks over the small page 9

of notes she’s taken during our conversation, ‘you last saw Sophie yesterday, when you left school?’

‘Yes.’ ‘She didn’t text you after she left?’

I try to remember, but the same problem comes in to my mind and I can see every text Sophie’s ever sent me but not when they were from. ‘Can I look at my phone and see?’

Detective Inspector Munro nods.

I pull my phone out of my pocket. No text from Dad, which means no news about Sophie. I open my messages and look at the list of conversations I have: Dad, Mum, Sophie. Sophie is at the top, so she must have sent me something recently.

I click on her conversation. The last time she texted me was four, after school finished, when she sent me a pink heart emoticon. Now I look at it, I wonder why I didn’t remember it. She doesn’t send me emoticons very often.

I show the phone to Detective Inspector Munro who looks over it.

‘This heart is the last thing she sent you?’

‘Yes.’ ‘Do you often send each other things like that?’

I shrug. ‘Sometimes. Sophie usually sends them to me. I don’t really send anything back very often. She sends them to me when she thinks I’ve had a bad day or when she knows I’m upset.’

‘Why does she do that?’ Detective Inspector Munro asks.

‘I don’t like to talk much,’ I tell her. ‘I find it really difficult to say what I really want to say sometimes, so she sends me things like that to show that we’re still friends and that she knows I’m upset even though I can’t tell her.’

Detective Inspector Munro nods. ‘And was this what happened yesterday? You were upset in school?’

I think back to yesterday. I hate every day in school but I 10

don’t remember yesterday being worse than normal. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘So do you think Sophie might have meant something else by that heart?’

My voice comes out in a whisper. ‘She was saying that she loves me.

11

12

CJ Harter

cjjharter@gmail.com CJ Harter’s dissected human bodies in Sheffield, organised Salford bed-baths, shushed Wigan library-users, and shared poetry in Liverpool. Now she lives to write, and hopes to write to live. With a degree in Literature and Philosophy, she’s mother to two adults, wife to one and slave to two tiny dogs.

Fitful Head When you lose your mind, what takes its place? Is grieving Isobel haunted? When a voiceless patient speaks from neardeath, strange events spark. Past and present interweave to ensnare her. Why does that doctor knock and she never hears? What’s crawling in her attic? And who’s playing that damn music?

13

Fitful Head They’re eating breakfast, Richard with the children and Isobel, her bodied self. She’s watching them. Can smell the toast, the coffee, see the light bouncing off the jug of juice, the crumbs around Ben’s plate, hear background radio from the kitchen, Terry Wogan. What she can’t do is touch. She hasn’t tried but knows this absolutely. There are rules.

The children’s ages flow, it seems. Ben, at once, all his years. His bright new teeth: seven. Excited and loud: ten.

Embarrassed high-deep voice: twelve. He’s all there.

Melissa’s toddler-chubby face on her etiolated nine-yearold body. Her teenage hair uncurled, radiant.

Richard, in her favourite blue-green shirt he never wears, leans across and pinches a sugar puff from Melissa’s bowl.

“Oi!” She smacks the back of his hand with her spoon.

They laugh.

All of them.

She, Isobel, laughs with them, only she’s unheard. She aches for them. Sun streams through the window. This isn’t home: their dining room’s never sunny. The light flares Richard’s hair. He looks up at her. At her. That smile: beautiful, healthy, sane.

A white halo.

The last supper.

She pulls back, like a cameraman seeking the wide view, or a woman desperate to obliterate it. She’s drawn out to the pink-slashed dawn. Her children are never up at this hour.

Now she’s outside the cottage, she recognises it. Their holidays at Sumburgh.

Light, friends, music. Cliff walks, boat trips, puffins, whales… they float before her. Or she floats by them?

14

She’s walking on the cliff. Steep grassy climbs, slippy with dew. A Shetland sea fret fogs out sheer drops. Chill, soundblotting. Except for the ripping cries of fulmars soaring, the guttural thrum of razorbills huddled on the rocks far below.

Eerie, otherworldly.

Fitful Head.

Crack-crack! Beyond the smothering gauze, she can’t see.

Spins around, aware of the cliff-close drop. A firework?

Richard leans across and pinches a rice crispy from Melissa’s bowl. He snatches: snap. They laugh: crackle. She smacks: pop. Run. Run! She knows this. She’s on her belly. Presses her face into the scratching grass. Draws her arms up to protect her head. Please don’t kill me. The children! Where are they?

They were here just a moment ago. Weren’t they? Why can’t she remember?

Lie still.

But the children!

Play dead.

Crack! Stuttering, unbodied, dragging death closer, closer.

Richard! Don’t go, don’t leave me. He saunters across the sun-blind road, smiling at her over his shoulder. Bleaching away. Silly Bel, I have to go. She scrambles to her feet, starts to run.

It grabs from behind, it always does. Sly. The blue-black arm clamps her shoulders, crushes her chest. The ground falls away.

Her eyes shoot open.

The cuckoo clock sang out with that irritating woodland echo.

Isobel Hickey had survived another night. Her relief felt almost like happiness. Until she remembered. Her border terrier sighed and snuggled closer into her warmth. She took her phone from the stack of books that served as her bedside 15

table and peered at it: 07:00. A civilised time to rise, for a change. She felt giddy and… something else. She struggled to identify the sensation. Was it hope?

She sat up and swung her legs to the floor, feeling creakier than she should at forty-two. She put her hands to her lower back and stretched. Brodie copied her, stretched front legs first, then the back. She tickled his ear. He yawned, emitting a tiny yowl that sounded more cat than dog. She ran a hand through her unmanageable hair. It needed a damn good cut.

She wound some of it around her finger, shocked yet again to see the bands of grey threading through her chestnut. You should do something about that, Ursula kept telling her. She reached for the ratty dressing gown the dog had been sleeping on at the bottom of the bed and shrugged it on. It was too big, an old one of Richard’s.

The bubble of hope burst with a cold splat. She held the sleeve to her nose and breathed in. It smelled of dog.

Nothing else. The temptation to curl up and drag the duvet over her head again almost swallowed her, but she pulled on the two pairs of woollen walking socks she’d left on the floor the night before and headed downstairs for coffee.

The kids would be stirring soon. She had the quiet to herself for half an hour, tops. She stepped into the wellies by the back door and took her coffee outside. The garden was tiny, no more than a yard, but it wasn’t overlooked like The Elms. She surveyed the fields and small wood beyond the new low fence, glad she’d done away with the six-foot monstrosity that had been here when they moved in. Why would you want to block a view like that? It was the only good thing about this house.

A sudden outpouring of birdsong thrilled her: the thrush on the tree by the back gate. He’d been there every day this week, singing even before dawn. She listened to the silences 16

between his liquid calls. Soon she’d hear neighbours clattering pans and crockery as they made breakfast. It reminded her of camping. It felt temporary, everything felt temporary; the tiny house, the view, as if she was on holiday or dreaming. But she was comforted by the proximity of people. She didn’t have to like them. She just needed them near. Like a buffalo standing back to back with its herd.

Against danger.

“Mum, what are you doing out there? It’s freezing. Come inside.” Melissa stood at the back door, tousled and beautiful.

She smiled. Wasn’t that her line?

17

18

Matthew Cook

hellomattcook@gmail.com Matthew Cook is a freelance writer based in South Liverpool. His short stories and flash fiction have appeared in The Pygmy Giant, The Stockholm Review, Oblong Magazine, Number Eleven, Spelk, Small Doggies, Imbroglio and the Cooldog short story prize.

Life on Other Planets When 15 year old Benjamin Carter’s Great Aunt Edith dies, his eccentric family descend on Eastbourne to do battle over the inheritance. Trapped with them in her ramshackle house, Ben is gradually drawn into their collective meltdown, and transformed by what he learns about his family and himself.

19

Life on Other Planets 'And lo, that celestial crucible which bore us all to Earth doth embrace thy spirit once again' Book of Jupiter, Chapter 6, Verse 3 When I was 15 my family had a nervous breakdown. It was August 1997, the summer my Great Aunt Edith died. The same summer that all the spiders in East Sussex chose to leave their homes and run amok for reasons no scientist on the planet could explain. Were these two things connected? I like to think so.

I have a lot to thank Edith for, especially my name Benjamin Convalescence Wade Carter. I was a difficult birth.

My father, Victor, says it never stopped, that I’m now a difficult person, but he’s a pessimist and a godless scientist so what does he know? Anyway, things were going badly for Mother and me but thanks to the midwives at St Francis Maternity Hospital & Convalescence Gardens in Ipswich, we’re both here to laugh about it. Or we might if anyone knew where Mother was. It wasn’t Edith’s idea to call me Convalescence, by the way. She just convinced my mother not to call me Francis.

That particular summer my life was going pretty much down the toilet. For a start, my teachers wanted me gone, expelled, evicted, probably worse, assassinated, on account of my academic suicide, which no one else in my family was yet aware of. So, there was that. Additionally, I was in disgrace. I had fallen prey to a slick magazine advert that promised to turn my flab into giant muscles via a miraculous new protein powder. Except that all I got was a rash from the 20

muscle potions and a tubload of grief when Victor opened his credit card bill and nearly passed out. Fact: Victor is a mycologist, which means he knows mushrooms inside and out. That is his thing, to start sentences with the word ‘Fact’, like a grand opening. For instance: Fact: this room smells absolutely terrible. What on earth have you been doing in here?

Fact: this car is making some very peculiar noises that it was absolutely not making when we set off.

Fact: fungi absorb nutrients from plant or animal matter around them, which may be living or dead.

Fungi are my father’s passion. He is a quiet academic with an unfashionable moustache, who believes in the slow life and wishes we could all just be more content and love the ground we are on. He even has his own special gesture: rubbing the tips of his thumb and index finger together gently, as if crushing a fragrant herb or rolling a bogie. Its secret meaning is ‘savour this moment’. Back then I’d sometimes see him doing it alone, and it looked like he was crying, until I remembered that he never cried in front of me, only ever in locked rooms or the car when he thought I was out.

But let us return to The Breakdown. It is generally taken by those prepared to discuss it - to have been a random thing that materialised out of nowhere. That God took his eye off the ball momentarily. But I know He was watching closely because I was watching too. What happened had been set in motion years before. Pale monsters had been lying in wait for decades, and I probably should have felt their presence, a rumbling you can smell and feel in the roots of your hair. But I 21

had my problems, and Victor, well, he was just one giant mushroom of a problem. It didn’t help that Mum was now officially AWOL, or that Uncle Patrick had accidentally impregnated his new girlfriend and everyone’s coping strategies were beginning to wear thin. And then Edith had a stroke and none of it was her problem anymore.

Eastbourne, if you don’t know, is way, way down, on the very edge of our great country. Once, on a Flying Visitation there when I was little, Mum told me, ‘If we all pray really hard, maybe it will drop off’. To me Eastbourne was always a mysterious place, somewhere dinosaurs lived and where truths forced themselves out of your mouth before you knew what was happening. My Great Aunts Edith and Gloria had lived there all alone since well before I was born. A trip to Eastbourne was an excuse to go crazy for all concerned.

Shrieking at the sky was entirely permissible. Stealing things.

Heavy drinking. Believing. Disbelieving. Everything was allowed in Eastbourne. It was always hot there, not from the sun which actually seemed to bleach everything cold, but from ancient lavas which coursed shallow beneath the earth’s surface, which was what we all knew even if we never talked about it. Sounds were clearer. People in themselves were so much more so. That’s how I remember it, anyway.

Fact: some fungi drop spores gently, which are blown away by the wind. Others shoot them out in an explosive burst.

Supposedly the Breakdown began on August 16th, the day that Edith died. It was a day that had been endlessly anticipated and dissected throughout the Carter clan for years. What will happen, we wondered aloud to each other, when the Lord finally relents and whisks her up to be reunited with Gloria on Pluto or wherever? Even so it 22

managed to creep up on us, just like everything else. Without warning Edith’s soul was released and fired into space at a 1000mph and the Earth-Membrane was left momentarily ruptured, leaving the rest of us to deal with the monsters, who were keen to get to know us, yes indeed, and they started, I can tell you, with me. * Imagine for a moment that you are rushing through space at a million miles an hour. That stars whip by you like streetlights on the motorway. So dense they appear to you like a gas, unconstrained and beautiful beyond all words.

Imagine that the dots blur, an adjustment is made, and all of a sudden they really are streetlamps, it really is a motorway. Your brain is idling but you know certain things to be so. There is a car. It is a Saturday. It is late. A boy is halfasleep, sliding in and out of dreams. His father is awake and driving, steering carefully, apprehensively. They have been folded up inside it for hours, four at least. They are freezing and hungry. The conversation dried up and crusted over miles back. A sign flashes E’bourne 3m. The car slows, eases through ever smaller and darker roads before finally pulling up outside an old house. Legs creaking, the man and the boy unfold themselves like insects and shuffle towards the front door. Imagine that there they stand, each waiting for the other to reach out. There are no lights on. Nobody is home.

Imagine that the moment lasts for a long while and that this wait disturbs something inside the boy, trips a wire, brings every sense imploding in upon some central point, rushing, binding into consciousness, awake at last. And now imagine that this consciousness is not somebody else but you, you are the boy and the dream is over and you are cold and you are 23

here at a dead woman’s house, your skin prickling and dancing with something like a life of its own. You turn to your father.

‘Well? Open it,’ you say, feeling hardly any guilt for behaving like such a brat. Your bones feel frail. It is freezing.

The man who is your father, but who in this light could be anybody, nods and reaches into his pocket for the key, pushes at the door. It sticks. Something is massed behind it, heavy and crunchy like snow. You squeeze your fingers through the gap. They are letters. Hundreds of envelopes of all shapes and sizes, strange, ornate markings just visible. You kick at them until the door begins to move.

In you go. The house is dark. You grope for the hockey stick you hope is still there, in the umbrella stand. Is it? Yes it is. You lift it up.

‘There’s nothing here, Ben,’ says your father. ‘Settle down.’

You realise in the darkness that this old face staring back at you is very possibly what you will look like 30 years from now.

You realise also that this is the kind of house you might live in. You shudder.

You follow your father inside, knowing he is enjoying the experience even less than you, and that all his bravery, including the shapeless tune he is humming, is for show. He feels like you, that he is tiptoeing along a brink. The moonlight shows you where things are in the corridor, the simple silly belongings of a recluse. What you can just about see appears heaped up. As your nose warms up, odours compete; old booze, corroding metal and mouldy fabrics.

Soap. Plastics. You adjust your grip on the hockey stick, a twist and a heft. Just like you always used to.

The man who is your father is wrong. There is definitely something here. It may not be alive or necessarily visible, but 24

you can feel it absorbing, hear it adjusting itself behind the unseeable curtain. It has been raining and somewhere there is a drip.

A cupboard door hangs open. You peer in. It is a cupboard of jams. At least, you hope they are jams. Spiders retreat from you, pretending not to be there, or perhaps they simply aren’t. Your eyes are definitely not behaving normally. One is fluttering uncontrollably. The smell of old flowers now intrudes. Mice. A rottenness in the air.

‘There’s a rottenness in the air,’ you say loudly to the man who you hope is your father but who is far away inside the kitchen, and whose reply is too faint to make out. You see something in her handwriting on the side, on one of the heaps. God, this place is rank. Key to small red door. The key is sellotaped to some newspaper. There is no such door in this house, none that you have seen and you know it well enough. Your footsteps are making a nauseating wet crinkling noise and you cannot quite tell whether it’s the carpet or your shoes or a combination of the two. You take a few steps and can see the wall of pictures now. This place is horrifying, truly terrifying. How did anyone live here?

It is now that the hairy face comes at you from the darkness, white whiskers splayed, teeth bared, and you scream but wow, here comes the hockey stick. It lands well several times before you see that it is just the stuffed badger, Marco, now eyeless and jawless, a window of clean white bone apparent underneath, a light dusting of Marco all over your shoes.

Father is holding your arm. This is ridiculous, you both agree, though what exactly, which aspect, is hard to say. This is not a house, it is a dead person’s fever dream brought to life then allowed to go cold. You press the heel of your hand 25

into your temple and hold it there. Something is throbbing inside you. Your eyes are still not to be trusted.

Someone turns on the light.

26

John Crawley

johncrawley@icloud.com Inspired by Lehane, Pelecanos, Connolly and Harvey I’ve come to writing late but I aim to make up for lost time! I’m a member of the Lantern Theatre Writers group; I’ve had two pieces put on at scratch nights. I work in Liverpool in the housing field.

A Perfect Sunset What starts out as a routine missing person’s case takes Kinnon, a burnt-out photojournalist turned Private Detective, back to the war zone of Syria and a cover up which threatens his life. With a love of nature and his hawk Strella, Kinnon is a private eye with a difference.

27

A Perfect Sunset The early evening light pushed through the treetops and flickered across the bullet holes in my leg and arm. Blood trickled down my pants and soaked into the grass, turning it copper brown. I pulled the belt tighter, trying to stop the blood loss with a make-shift tourniquet. My eyes watered. I took a couple of long slow breaths, the air was autumn crisp but the smell of cordite hung there like morning mist on a lake.

I rolled my head to the left, resting my face on the damp grass. A patch of blood snaked its way towards me, a question mark in the brown dirt. I traced its path and came to Anna, her body turned towards me, red hair splayed to the side like a half-opened fan. Her turquoise eyes were still open, still the kind that you lost yourself in. The rest of Anna’s face was torn up, her flesh deeply gouged, strips of it hanging down the cheekbone. Except for the scorched grey mark on her blouse to the left of her breastbone, the front of her body was undamaged. A single bullet must have stopped her heart and gravity had done the rest, her life oozing out of the exit wound in her back. A direct hit to the heart. Unfortunately, it was from a 9mm bullet and not cupid’s arrow. Did MI6 keep tabs on their ex-spooks, would a case officer come looking for Anna, come looking for me? Maybe, maybe not, but there was no denying it, this was a total fuck up.

I turned my head away from Anna and small drops of water slid down my face, the worst part; they were from the moist grass. Above me was a giant oak tree, was Strella perched there? My eyes felt heavy but I forced my eyelids open, pressing them up into my forehead. A single leaf fell 28

towards me and I followed its slow spiraling descent, the field silent around me. I was, after all this time, finally in the moment; all it had taken was an interrogation by gunpoint, a couple of bullet wounds and the fear of imminent death. As a meditation technique, I wouldn’t recommend it.

I couldn’t feel the small stone that had been digging into the small of my back. The ground was no longer so cold, so hard; it whispered to me to let go, to ease into its soft embrace. I pressed my back down into the stone. My camper van was parked twenty feet to the right; the gap stretched before me like a large chasm, daring me to cross it. In the distance, behind the van, the muddy grey waters of the River Mersey flowed by.

A deep chill reached into my limbs as if an anaesthetist was inducing a coma. The trees went hazy. I shut my eyes for a second then re-focused.

Richard was standing in front of the van, ‘Move Kinnon’.

His right hand urged me towards him.

‘I need help.’

‘Remember what happened the last time I did that?’

Richard said.

I dug my fingers into the dirt and rolled onto my side.

‘Well, it’s a start. Not much of one, but they say God loves a trier.’

I glanced up at his skinny pale figure, ‘you’re the colour of boiled shite and your face looks like a burst balloon.'

‘Ah there’s some life yet in the old Scouse git.’

‘Flattery will . . .’ I took a big gulp of air ‘get you nowhere.’

‘Still a smart arse, even when you’re dying. It’s impressive.

But now you have to get off your arse and start fighting.’

‘I need help.’

‘Christ, you’re like a broken record. I can’t help you Kinnon, remember?’

29

For fuck’s sake. ‘Why not, you ungrateful bastard?’

‘I warned you didn’t I Kinnon? I told you to drop it, but you wouldn’t let it go, would you?’

‘I couldn’t, you know that.’

‘Yeah you couldn’t, and look what happened.’

He pulled up his shirt. His sickly white skin was full of bullet holes, dozens of them. Seconds later blood began to trickle down his stomach, and then it streamed out. His jeans turned black as the blood soaked into the stonewashed denim on its journey into the past.

‘Unless you want to join me I suggest you crawl over to the van. Now.’ I pushed myself onto my knees, balanced on all fours and took a deep breath.

‘Please try to make it before you bleed out Kinnon.’

I placed my left arm forward and put weight onto it. A hot stabbing pain rose up the arm and into my side. Richard started to fade away. I bit down hard on my bottom lip. I didn’t want to lose him again. I crawled forward.

‘That’s it Kinnon, keep moving.’

I dragged myself forward.

‘Call that fast Kinnon. C’mon put some effort into it, you lazy bastard.’

I couldn’t hold my head up any longer, it felt like a bowling ball and the weight of it forced my face into the dirt. I laid there panting like an exhausted dog on a hot summer’s day.

‘Shut . . . the . . . fuck . . .’ but I was spent, what little energy I had drained out of me.

I thought back to what had started all of this; the photograph I had taken of the dead children in their parent’s arms. A low growl came from deep inside my chest; the anger fed me. I dug my elbows into the ground and then brought my knees up one after the other. I crept forward. The blood 30

from my left arm dripped into the ground, its trail stretching behind me.

There was no sign of Richard but the van door was less than a foot away. Somehow the bastard had got me here but now he was gone and I was left with a hollow ache inside. I pushed it away. My fingers reached up and found the cold metal of the van’s door handle. The door creaked open, slowly, then gained speed. I tried to lift my hand to stop it but my limbs were too heavy to move. The door hit my shoulder. I screamed but nothing came out of my mouth but a dry retch.

Somehow I managed to stay on all fours.

I took a moment, and then stretched my hand forward onto the front seat. Nothing. I slid my hand to the side and my fingertips felt the edge of the mobile phone. I inched my fingers forward over the surface of the phone, pulling it towards me. It fell out of the van, bounced against the metal door and landed on the ground to the side of me. I rested my hand onto the side of the van for balance. I took a couple of shallow breaths and then bent my other arm down to the phone. I picked it up and looked down at the screen. No service. Fuck.

31

32

Caroline England

carolineenglandauthor@gmail.com Born a Yorkshire lass, Caroline studied Law in Manchester and stayed over the border. She instigated her jottings when she deserted the law to raise her three lovely daughters. In addition to her short story collection, Watching Horsepats Feed the Roses, Caroline has had short stories and poems published in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies.

Time Is of the Essence After a five-year absence and a broken heart, Natalie Bach returns to Manchester to work for her old law firm. With the help of fellow solicitor Gavin Savage, she investigates allegations of attempted murder, unravelling the trail of half-truths and deceptions back to the door of her firm.

33

Time Is of the Essence First Day Nerves Staring at her reflection, Natalie Bach took a deep breath.

The woman in the mirror looked surprised. Perhaps it was the arch of her dark eyebrows or maybe it was the foundation and blusher which, replicating her tanned skin underneath, wasn’t really necessary. But that’s what one did when starting a new job, what she had done, at least. That polished lawyerly mask which had hidden the real her, the human inside who hadn't approved of what she did half the time.

Still she was older now, if not wiser. Ten weeks off her fortieth birthday, Miss Bach was back in Manchester, living with her mother and starting a new job. Perhaps this time she’d be a Ms. The sound of flushing made her start. A woman waddled from the cubicle. She’d been a girl with swinging hair the last time Nat saw her.

‘Hiya, Natalie.’

Nat smiled in reply. The nasal Salford accent she remembered, but couldn’t summon a name. As though she knew, the woman gazed for a moment with judgmental lips.

‘It’s Wendy, Natalie. Wendy Manning-Dawn now. Good job I’m here, Natalie, else you wouldn’t have got into the building.’ She dangled a set of keys. ‘Office manager. I open up eight-thirty sharp every morning. Happens I was early today.’ She rubbed her huge bump. ‘I keep telling Wesley and Catherine they’ll be lost without me.’

She followed Wendy out of the toilets and watched her punch numbers into a key pad at the glassed office door.

Wendy looked back and chuckled, a little too pleased with 34

herself. Nat knew what was coming before she spoke. ‘Come on then, new girl, I’ll show you ‘round.’

Nat smiled stiffly; she’d just have to get used to it.

She followed Wendy in, the smell of coffee and polish both familiar and disturbing, then gazed through the window at the high street below, chock-a-block with morning traffic. It was like a television on mute, a film she’d seen before. The sewing shop had closed and the large cafe opposite had a new name, but the florist was there and presumably the brothel above was still going strong. Some things, surely, didn’t change.

She turned back to the first-floor office, aware that she should be listening to Wendy’s dreary tones but struggling to do so. This floor had been refurbished, mainly to open plan, and her old corner office was now a cubicle of glass. Wesley Hughes’s office, she assumed, Catherine having had the floor above for her team. Perhaps that was glass too; perhaps she’d be invited for a chat later. Her sudden return hadn’t included any discussion with Catherine. She might’ve been the managing partner of Goldman Law, but she didn’t have the final say, she never had.

‘So your typing will go into the pool with the other assistants, paralegals and trainees,’ Wendy was saying, drawling her words. ‘I don’t know if you've heard of desk sharing, but that’s what you've got. Each fee earner has a drawer over there, but everything at this bench is shared, computer, stapler, post-it notes, chair. So, no personal effects on the desk and if you have a drink, you clear away the cup before you leave.’

Nat looked at the seats; there were six. She’d counted seven non-partner fee earners on the website last night. She glanced at the empty glass office and took a breath to ask what happened if everyone was in at the same time, but 35

pursed lips got there first.

‘Property’s at a premium in Didsbury, Natalie. We have to make do. It’ll pay to get in early now you've added to the… maths.’ She handed Nat a grey ring-binder. ‘Office manual for you to read while you wait.’ She wobbled away before turning back. ‘I’ll sort you a swipe card. We do check on attendance times. Hope you remembered to bring a mug.’

Nat sat at the bench and opened the folder, wondering who had decided on open plan, swipe cards and the need for a flipping office manual. Jack hadn’t mentioned the refurbishment during their occasional chats since she’d left, but then, why would he? These days he was a partner in name only, the name of the legal firm he’d set up thirty or so years previously, Goldman Law. The newly qualified Miss Bach had been thrilled to get the well-paid job, but it had taken a few months to realise the firm was entirely dedicated to Jack’s multifarious business interests and wasn't the niche corporate and commercial practice she’d thought was employing her.

She glanced at the glass cubicle and nodded to herself.

The blinds were open, revealing some bright modern art rubbish taking up most of the far wall. Flash, of course. Jack had asked her to stay an extra week before she left for her ‘new life’ to show her replacement the ropes, but Wesley Hughes hadn’t bothered to hide his desire to be rid of her, so she’d left after just one fraught day.

‘I tried to help Wesley, but he’s so bloody arrogant,’ she’d complained to Jack at the time. ‘He isn’t interested in listening; wants to do everything his own way.’

Jack had laughed. ‘Sounds promising. Like someone I know.’

Of course he’d meant her. She’d wondered whether it was arrogant or wanting her own way. The latter she’d supposed.

36

There had been a few silent tussles with Catherine over the years, until Catherine played her surprise trump card. Not even Nat had known she was Jack’s mistress, and her elevation to wife was seamless, becoming the new Mrs Goldman almost the moment the ink was dried on his decree absolute.

‘Natalie!’ A familiar voice brought Nat back from her thoughts. ‘I wasn’t prepared to believe it until I saw it.’

Looking exactly as Nat remembered, down to the dent at the rear of her back-combed bleached hair, Sandra held out her arms. ‘I never thought I’d see you back here. I heard about your mum. How’s she doing?’

‘Amazing, actually…’ Nat replied, not wanting to talk about it, but realising all the same it was true. Six weeks ago her mother was in hospital and couldn’t speak. Save for a droop on one side of her face, no-one would now know she’d been ill.

The bench filled up with bodies as Sandra talked and Nat listened, then noticing she was on the sixth seat, she stood and inched away, making sure to take the office manual with her. She’d forgotten how Sandra liked to talk. She was her secretary once, Wesley Hughes’s undoubtedly now. Though Sandra was hard working and kind, she was horrendously indiscreet; Nat had learned the hard way not to tell her anything she didn’t want the rest of the office to know. Still, it was useful today. Five years of gossip within fifteen minutes or so: Jack had survived an investigation by the Law Society after a malicious complaint; Catherine had had some surgery on her eyes; Wesley’s twin boys were just starting at uni.

Nat sensed a movement behind her and turned as Sandra took breath. Sure enough the sixth seat had been filled by a young man who looked no older than thirteen. It was a relief that she’d stood; she didn’t fancy a fist fight on the day of her 37

return. She didn’t fancy doing work either; never mind open plan and swipe cards, God knows what had changed in the law. It was tempting, in fact, just to leave, to go home to her mum and say, ‘Tell you what, Mum, working in Tesco is just fine. We’ll manage somehow.’

She turned back to Sandra who was still talking. ‘The defendant was ill so Wesley’s still in London on the trial.’ She put her hand in the small of Nat’s back, gently guiding her into the glass cube. ‘So I’m sure he won’t mind. I’ll get you a drink. Still milky coffee, no sugar? Then I’d better get on.’

Nat stood in Wesley’s office, hovering. The empty desk policy clearly stretched to him as well, though he did have a photograph of his twins as babies, chubby, dark-skinned and beautiful. She looked through the glass towards the fee earners’ bench, the six of them looking comfortable, companionable and at least a decade younger than her. She wondered what had become of the seventh.

‘Sod it,’ she said, sitting down in the client chair. She felt less guilty sitting there as she swung gently from side to side, wondering if anyone was going to give her work at some point. She put her handbag on the floor, resisting the urge to glance at her mobile. The garish painting felt warm on her back. The artist was probably famous. She could picture smart-suited Wesley Hughes in an art gallery, his finger on his lips, studying it thoughtfully, then looking at his simpering blonde wife. ‘What do you think, Andrea? Don’t look at the price. Should we splash out?’

She opened the office manual and flicked through the tabs: Health and safety, data protection, appraisals, time recording, corporate responsibility. Of course, all the large firms had rules and regulations in flipping office manuals years back, but Goldman Law hadn’t been that type of practice. She lifted another tab - internal complaints 38

procedure. That was a laugh; in the old days a complaint by an employee would result in a swift kick out of the door.

The peal of the telephone brought her back from her thoughts and she stared for a moment, wondering whether to answer. ‘It’s Jack,’ Sandra said at the door, her candy-floss hair appearing before she did. ‘For you.’

As though she’d never left, Jack dived in immediately with his baritone voice. ‘Ask that dreadful woman for the key to my filing cabinet, bottom drawer, red file. Especially for you —’ Nat couldn’t help but smile at his description of Wendy.

‘For me. Which means?’ she asked.

‘For your eyes only.’

‘Let me guess. Julien?’

‘You’re a cynic, Natalie, you know that, don’t you?’

She could feel her heart sinking. Julien Goldman, Jack’s flaky son. ‘What’s he done this time?’

‘Read the file, Nat. Get some lunch and call me. Don’t let —’ ‘Catherine know?’

‘See why I’ve missed you.’

She headed towards Wendy sitting at her own little pod, glad to have a purpose even if it was Julien. ‘Jack has asked—’ she started to say, but Wendy was pointing to her head and holding out her arm. It took seconds to realise that Wendy had a hands-free device attached to her ear and was holding out a key. Who the hell would've thought? The dim office junior in her own ‘office’ with a cactus and a wireless headphone. She wondered if the bluetooth technology extended to listening into her private chat with Jack, but the desire to chuckle and share was followed swiftly by a wave of sadness. When last she worked here she had mates in this office, people with common gripes and common humour, but 39

they’d all dispersed after her, leaving just Wendy and Sandra and a shared desk full of teenagers.

She opened the red file in Wesley’s office, wondering what to do if Catherine suddenly appeared. Unlikely but not impossible. In years gone by this office had walls and a creaking door; she could quietly go about Jack’s files ‘for her eyes only’ without looking furtive. She never understood why Jack kept those files from Catherine. They were his kids, not hers.

A sound made her start. ‘I see you've made yourself comfortable, Natalie.’ The voice wasn’t expected, but its tone didn’t surprise her.

Wesley Hughes stood at the open door, frowning. Perhaps his dark hair was closer cropped, but he looked much the same as he did the last time she saw him, well-cut suit, expensive tie, straight back, folded arms, bad attitude.

She automatically closed the red folder. ‘Sorry, I was just —’ ‘So I see. Something for Jack, presumably.’

‘Yes, he…’ she started. She didn’t really know what to say.

Wesley Hughes was a partner, as much her employer as Catherine and Jack these days. Though the thought was galling, she couldn’t afford to offend him.

He shrugged. ‘Whatever, it’s fine. I really don’t want to know.’ He stared for a moment, his chiselled jaw tight. ‘Jack wanted you back, so we’ll all have to live with it.’

Nat stood, collecting the red file, the resolution to be amiable short-lived. ‘I assume one is allowed a lunch break?’

She nodded at the office manual on his desk. ‘I was so riveted by the eighty-three pages of the firm’s policies, plans and procedures, I didn’t get as far as the Working Time Regulations.’

The slightest of smiles cracked Wesley’s obvious irritation.

40

‘It’ll be interesting to discover what you remember about the law, Nat, but I see your sarcasm’s intact. Yes, an hour for lunch.’ He nodded to the fee-earners’ bench, his smile stretching to show his white even teeth. ‘Good luck with finding a seat when you're back.’

Standing on the corner pavement for a few moments, Nat was glad of the breeze to cool her hot cheeks. She was still getting used to the English weather again, but after a rainy August, September was better, balmy and dry, even if it did have that back-to-school feeling. She turned one way and turned again, surprised to see a homeless man and his dog hunched beneath the Co-op window. Too much choice; the smart suburban village seemed to have become one line of eateries, most of them new. At breakfast her mum had offered to rustle up a sandwich. ‘Or maybe not on your first day, eh, Skarbie?’ she’d added, using Nat’s childhood pet name.

‘We’re not that bloody poor!’ Nat had wanted to say, but she knew her mum meant well and it wasn’t just their precarious finances. Like her, she needed a sense of purpose, even if it was looking after her adult daughter in some small way. She’d asked her mum to surprise her with something tasty for dinner, she hoped that would do it for today. And if she was honest it was nice to be fussed over a little. For now, anyway.

After emptying the coins from her purse into the homeless dog’s bowl, Nat opted for the cafe with sofas beneath the office building. It had a large front window, easy to spot any of the staff coming in. She took some time to order, gazing at the tapas menu and working out the likely profit before remembering to stop herself, which made her think of her mobile, the mobile she’d managed not to look at all morning.

41

She ordered a panini and sat on a leather sofa, warm from the sun shining in through the window, then she opened the file.

There was only a handful of documents; letters, it appeared, written to Jack. It took several moments to work out what was going on. They were from his son Julien, vitriolic missives written on behalf of his mother. Apart from frequent complaints of his father never having been there for the family, the gist was the inadequate divorce settlement and his mother’s need for more cash.

Nat closed the file as her lunch was placed on the low table. She wondered where this information was going. Over the years she’d been nominated several times to get Julien ‘out of a fix’, mostly when he was in his teens - suspension from his private school, refusal to take a breathalyser test, minor criminal damage, alleged plagiarism at uni - but he was now in his mid-twenties and the letters were quite eloquent.

She read through to the last, his bile expanding to Catherine ‘the slag you were shagging when I was still wearing pyjamas’.

He said his father had been generous until she came along; he could only assume the spite came from her.

Nat shook her head, now understanding why Jack had suggested she read the file privately having lunch, but completely perplexed as to how she could help. The letters were over a year old. She dug the mobile out of her bag, taking a small breath before checking for messages. There wasn’t one; no message, no bloody message. She composed herself for a moment, then rang Jack.

‘So?’ she began. ‘I’ve read the file.’

‘How’s the office?’ Jack replied.

‘Cramped. If I ever manage to rest half a buttock I’ll be lucky. So, these letters from Julien…’

‘Just to show you the state of play.’

42

‘Oh?’ ‘We don't talk; we haven’t for some time. His mother’s a drunk. She got more than her fair share. You of all people know that. Those letters hurt but…’

She waited for Jack to speak, wondering how a man could swing from being so straight to so cryptic, but knowing not to rush him. ‘… but he’s still my son.’ She could hear his deep sigh, pictured him taking off his glasses and rubbing those striking blue eyes. ‘I’ve been tipped off by a police pal at Wilmslow station. There’s been an assault. A complaint of an assault.’

He paused for a beat. ‘By Julien’s girlfriend, his partner, whatever the phrase is these days.’

Nat waited for more, but Jack remained silent. ‘Okay,’ she said slowly. ‘But you’re estranged, Jack. Why would Julien want anything to do with me?’

‘He refused legal representation at the station. Then he reluctantly agreed to speak to the duty solicitor. I need to know what’s going on. Talk to him, Nat. You’ll find a way.’

Nat had determined to walk the two miles home each working day, not to lose weight, those extra Mallorcan pounds had fallen off without trying, but to keep fit. Bus to Didsbury in the morning, don the trainers after work and trot home. That was the theory, but she hadn’t anticipated being so bloody tired both mentally and physically. Of course that was a good thing, she spent too many wakeful hours examining the past, but by the time she reached her neat terraced house in Cheadle village, her blouse was dripping with sweat and her feet were blistered. New trainers hadn’t been a good idea, like being caught in Wesley Hughes’s office, she should've broken them in first.

Bacon, potato and cabbage casserole was for dinner, just 43

the way that she liked it, plenty of potato and just a smattering of bacon.

‘So, how was your day?’ her mum asked.

She pulled a wry face. ‘There must be easier ways to make money.’

Her mum studied her for a moment. ‘You enjoyed yourself, though, I can tell. Your eyes are bright. Better keeping busy than dwelling…’

Nat scooped up her last cube of potato. ‘Yeah, I know, Mum.’ Her mum was itching to say more, she knew, but she was sick of talking about it. The thinking was constantly there, at least she could do something about not saying it out loud.

Her mobile rang then, it was Jack, as though telepathic.

As usual he launched in without a greeting. ‘What happened with the Spaniard?’

‘He isn’t Spanish, Jack, and nothing happened. My mum…’ she glanced up at her mother, who’d discreetly moved to the sink. ‘Anna was ill and needed me and now I’m back. That’s all there is to know, so—’ ‘The girlfriend. Tomorrow, start with her.’

It took a moment for Nat to shift focus. She was thinking that perhaps Jose was a Spaniard. Born and brought up in Liverpool but with a Mallorcan grandma. Did that make him Spanish?

‘On the assumption he’s still living there,’ Jack continued.

‘Julien will be at work. You could have a chat with the girl.

Persuade her to see sense—’ Wesley Hughes’s face flashed into her mind, that look of irritation and disapproval when Jack’s name had been mentioned. She could see where it came from; Jack could be impossible at times, his demands often on the brink of unlawful, one had to stand firm.

44

‘I’m not going to strong-arm a bloody witness, Jack. I’m here to earn a salary, not to be locked up for perverting the course of justice. Have we got that clear? If you're in any doubt then you can stick your bloody—’ ‘But you will have a word?’

Nat sighed; she’d never denied Jack anything, there was no point starting now. ‘I will have a word, Jack, but I’ll do it my own way.’

45

46

Tiger Lee

mmozrui@gmail.com Tiger Lee, pseudonym, has lived in Liverpool for the last seven years. During this period, she has been learning to write creatively. This is the first novel she has managed to finish, and although the story is fictional, earthquakes are not unusual in East Africa.

In Memory of Kianis This is a story of a boy named Tutu who, after his village, Kiani, is buried in a landslide following an earthquake, moves in with his Aunt. The surviving Kiani victims are taken to a camp where they wait for the government to resettle them.

When the government fails to resettle them, Tutu and his Aunt enlist the help of a human rights activist, Mrs. Bee. But will the Government ever concede?

47

In Memory of Kianis A lot had happened before that hot, April Sunday afternoon when I openly wailed in the city youth club’s field. Many times after that day I lay awake at night silently weeping for what once was. It had taken me a while to get to that point.

That Sunday afternoon, I must have shocked many as I sat at a distance howling and pounding the ground.

I had not been following the football game. A small butterfly landing on the grass had taken me back to the times when huge colourful butterflies would ride in from the south.

During the spring they would cross our farm in all their splendour, swarm after swarm, day after day.

Their beauty was so arresting that we would stand in awe, happy to witness their migration. This was unlike the moths when they came fluttering out of ant-holes during heavy rain storms. My sister and I would eagerly chase those around to see who could capture the most. Once my sister slipped in the rain and I yelled at her for being clumsy while she lay there crying in agony, with a twisted ankle. I cringed as I remembered this, wishing I had been gentle with her like a brother should. But I could never go back. Nor could I ever look into my mum’s eyes again: eyes that I would later realise had been full of sadness. Nor could I hear my father’s tone getting snappier every time the annual coffee dividends were released. My guilts are many.

Aching for my family, my home, my people and my land, I started to mumble to myself. Just why the earth chose to quake right on the spot where my village had been located had never made sense to me. But I was tired of trying to make sense of things. I wanted someone to tell me why. My aunt had claimed that such catastrophes are due to forces 48

beyond our control.

What forces? I asked myself. I wanted revenge over whatever forces had been responsible. I wanted to hurt them back so badly I could feel my forehead tighten. I took an aim and punched the air. I felt my heart race. I punched more and then thumped the ground with my fist.

It was hard dealing with the fact that my family was gone.

Gone, and never to come back. Making peace with it all was unimaginable. To make peace would be to accept defeat. Part of me was desperate for some closure but another part of me could not resolve what had happened. Too much had been taken away without any reason. I was not ready to let go.

No way. I punched the ground again, standing true to my word. Who was going to pay for all the unwarranted, undeserved pain? Imagining the fear my little sister must have felt and the horror her tiny form must have met, I intuitively squeezed my eyes shut to black it all out. I imagined my mum’s shrieks of terror and my dad, long legged as he had been, silenced before he could reach her. I imagined my grandmother and grandfather violently crushed without a fight.

I flinched. My eyes were blurry and the tightness in my forehead starting to take effect. Sometimes in my dreams my family is still alive. Sometimes I watch them being engulfed in fire. Sometimes it’s hailstones that descend on us. I never knew what to make of my dreams. I wanted so badly to believe the shock of rubble falling in on them might have killed them instantly. That they didn’t suffer too long. But death was death regardless.

If only it was possible to have gone back in time. There were many things I would have liked to have taken back. Like the way I used to wish we were living in the city like my aunt and cousin Ali. Or the way I used to groan loudly on being 49

woken up by my mother at six o’clock to milk the cows. And that was the most bitter of all. That I could never right the wrong I had done.

It’s not fair. The feelings of vengefulness intensified.

You are a cruel, cruel, and mean God. I spat out what I had harboured for the last eight months.

How I had wasted time believing in him. My grandparents had strictly followed his teachings. My grandfather had even devoted himself to getting me to know the teachings. The whole village had allowed themselves to believe in him. And he had shown no mercy to them. What kind of God would make people suffer like that other than a horrible, horrible one?

Why us, why them, why me? I could sense myself losing control now. I thumped the ground harder, this time repeatedly.

Why God, why, you God, why...?

I hate you like the hell that you are.

Finally, I broke down and cried. * The next thing I heard were feet bounding up the steps.

‘What happened? Are you okay?’ they chorused, swarming around me. It took a moment for me to remember where I was.

My throat hurt from the rage I had just released. My chest heaved and my temples throbbed like they used to on finishing an 800m race on my old school track field. Sniffling, I fumbled for a handkerchief.

‘Hush now, everybody,’ the coach said as he motioned them aside.

Bending over, he leveled his face with mine and took a 50

long straight look at me.

In a softer tone than was usual, he asked, ‘Son, what's wrong?’

‘My family, they all died, in the landslide,’ I stammered.

He stared at me, perturbed.

‘What landslide?’

‘Ali says a huge earthquake sucked in the whole of his village,’ someone replied.

‘There has been an earthquake?’ the coach looked at me with disbelief.

‘Ali! Don't you care? He’s your cousin,’ another yelled.

Everyone turned to the pitch and I could just make out Ali in the middle.

You see it is not that Ali was cold-hearted. When I first moved in with his family he was very patient with me. We rode the bus to school together. My aunt had enrolled me in school soon after I arrived. But new school in the city for a village kid was too much for me. I had not found it easy to fit in. So, I hung around Ali most of the time. But recently he had become distanced. I think to him I was too much of a burden.

The only reason he ever took me with him to the youth club was because my aunt insisted.

‘Let's go into the office,’ coach said, his hand on my back, gently prodding.

We went down the steps, the team following. Every stretch of my legs was like a punishment to the rest of my body and to the very sense of my whole being. I looked up at Ali as we approached but he turned his face away. Just then, the coach turned to dismiss the team, waving them off.

51

52

Francesca McFarlane

francesca.mcfarlane@gmail.com Originally from Suffolk, Francesca is an English Literature graduate who now works for Liverpool John Moores University as a writer. Francesa won the Miriam Allott Prize for Poetry and produces a weekly radio show.

A Brick for a Pillow Augustus Fry, a cross between Paddy Clarke and Oskar Schell, is a charming, sensitive boy who is being evicted from his London home. Through the upheaval of leaving his family home, Augustus also comes to terms with the death of his mother. The story explores first-hand what it is like to live through today’s housing crisis.

53

A Brick for a Pillow A letter hit our mat. Thwack. And then everything changed. It was me who picked the letter up. And it was me who gave the letter to Oma. When she read it, Oma went a funny colour. A bit like a boiled egg. The kind of egg you get with bready eggy soldiers.

Me: ‘Oma?’ Oma wasn't listening. She was reading.

Oma: ‘God.’ Me: ‘Oma? Is the letter from God? Did he write to us?’

Oma wasn't listening.

Me: ‘Oma? Is it a flood? Is a flood coming? Oma? Should I pack our things? Oma?’ Oma wasn’t listening.

You have to twist the knobs on the binoculars gently gently until the world isn’t blurry. Once the world has become clear again that's when you can do the spotting of the birds.

Blackbird. Robin. Blue tit. TIT! It's not a bad word. Not a mortal-gosh-it’s-hot-holy-sin word. Not a banished-to-hellforever word. Tit is a bird word.

I do my bird watching on our balcony. Oma used to lift me up so I could see over the top of the balcony wall, but I’m not a baby anymore. If she tries to pick me up now I make her back all achey breaky and her face goes pinch. I have a stool instead. When I stand on it I can see everything in the world. I can see the criss-cross roads and all of the cars moving left and right and backwards and forwards. I can see everyone’s house and the shiny towers where people wear suits. I can see trains shooting through the houses and the swings and the people in wellies who stand about scratching their heads or kneeling in the dirt, massaging the ground, trying to make vegetables and fruit and flowers come out of the mud. I’m 54

the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal.

Me: ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands, he’s got the whole world in his hands, He’s got the litty bitty baby in his hands, He’s got the whole world in his hands.’

That’s how I feel when I’m on the balcony. Like I’ve got the whole world in my hands. Not that I’m God. I’m not allowed to say I’m God anymore. Or even that I’m like God. Oma said it was a bad thing to do. A definite mortal-you’re-going-tohell sin.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling 100 shades of blue, I take a handful of glitter from my craft box. And I throw it up above my head. I like watching all of the pieces flitter down, flitter round, flitter down. When I do the throwing of the glitter it’s like the whole world has been torn into thousands of bits and everything is crashing and circling and fluttering. You try to watch it all, but you can’t. No matter how fast you spin round and round and round. Even if you never ever do a blink you still can’t see it all. And then, when the last piece has fallen, everything is still and quiet.

And that’s kind of how I feel when I’m looking out at the world on my balcony – like everything is crashing and circling and fluttering and, no matter how hard I try, I can’t watch everything. It makes me feel kind of happy and kind of sad at the same time. If I think about it too much it makes my head hurt.

Everyone is being nice to me and I don’t know why.

Oma: ‘Would you like a lemonade, Augustus?’

Albus: ‘Should we do your sticker book, Augustus?’

Oma: ‘Want another nugget, Augustus?’

Socks off. That’s the rule. No shoes. No socks. Nude little piggies, wiggling on the mat. Deep breath in. Stretch your 55

hands to the sky. Don’t wave at the plane. Deep breath out.

Lean forwards, straight legs, down to the ground. Deep breath in. Hands on the floor. Step back one foot. Step back two feet. Deep breath out. Down. Bend your chest into a C. Cobra. Stop hissing. Bad Augustus. Deep breath in.

Doing the yoga is good for your mind and your body and your soul. That’s what Albus says. Albus isn’t really Albus’ name. His real name is Albert. But he wears round glasses and he has a long, grey beard and long, grey hair and he wears a purple kufi hat. And all of those things make him look like Albus Dumbledore. The only thing missing is Albus’ cloak.

My Albus doesn’t wear a cloak. He wears an orange puffer jacket instead. I checked to see if my Albus had any cloaks in his wardrobe. He doesn’t. And he doesn’t live at Hogwarts either. He lives two floors below me and Oma. Me: ‘Albus?’

Albus: ‘Yes.’ Me: ‘What did God say?’

Albus: ‘What do you mean?’

Me: ‘In the letter?’

Albus: ‘Not again, Augustus.’

Deep breath in. Deep breath out. It’s okay. No one is telling me what God said in the letter, but I know where the letter is. It’s in Oma’s secret place. It’s where she keeps all her important, top secret things. I haven’t been able to get to the secret place yet, but I have a plan.

It’s hot hot hot so we’ve done our asanas on the roof.

Asanas is the word for the shapes you put your body into when you’re doing the yoga. I’ve been a mountain, a dog, a tree and a cobra. I like tree best. Look at my leaves shimmy shimmy.

There was someone under my bed last night. If I got out, he 56

would have grabbed my ankle. If I shouted for Oma, he would have pushed his knife up through my mattress and into my stomach. I had to stay very, very still.

We watched them from the wall. The Protesters.

Oma: ‘You’ll get piles sitting on that.’ I took off my jumper and sat on it. Sitting on jumpers stops piles growing on your bum.

There were lots of them. Ten or maybe a hundred. Some had tea in flasks. One woman had an orange scarf and orange hair and blue tights. I liked her best. The people who weren’t drinking tea had signs or cameras. Snap, snap, flash. Snap, snap, flash. Others walked round and round the garden, like a teddy bear, one step, two step, tickle you under there. Except they weren’t tickling. They were shouting. And they weren’t walking round a garden. They were just walking around outside Block Four. Oma kept giving them tea. And cakes. I had a butterfly bun AND a flapjack.

Me and Hatty copied the words from their signs into Hatty’s book. Hatty has to carry a notebook AT All TIMES. Not because she’s sick and she’ll die if she doesn’t. It’s not like Jin Wong’s epi pen. Hatty has to carry a notebook because when she grows up she’s going to be a world-famous detective. Like Sherlock Holmes, but better. And to become a world-famous detective you always have to have a notebook. It’s the rules.

That way, you never forget any of the clues and you can always catch the baddies. Take that, Baddie One. Ka Pow, Baddie Two. See you in hell, sucker.

Hatty can’t write that well. Even though she’s three months five days older than me. I do it for her. This is what I wrote: 60% of Housing Benefit Goes To People In Work Barnet Council Have Built 3 Council Houses in 23 Years 57

Hi Ho Hi Ho, Off To The Workhouse We Go Me: ‘Tell me about when I was a baby.’

Oma: ‘What do you want to know?’

Me: ‘Tell me about when you were tired and I wouldn’t stop crying?’

Oma: ‘I’d put you in your pram.’

Me: ‘And then what?’

Oma: And then I’d leave you.

Me: ‘Where?’

Oma: ‘Under a tree.’

Oma didn’t leave me under a tree because she was mad or bad or sad. She did it because I liked the trees. I liked them best when they waved their little leaves at me and said ssshhhh ssshhhh ssshhhh, Baby Augustus. Ssshhhh ssshhhh ssshhhh.

Oma has been crying again. She likes to cry at night when she thinks I’m asleep. Sometimes she likes to cry in the quiet and sometimes she likes to do her crying with music. Sometimes it’s Nina Simone. Sometimes it’s Van Morrison. I think she thinks I can’t hear her when she cries and puts the music on.

But I can.

One of The Protesters was in my kitchen today. It was the woman with the orange scarf and orange hair and blue tights.

Albus hugged her when he saw her. When he left, Oma said I should go and watch Doctor Who in my room.

A man called Robert Blackwell gave a talk in assembly today.

Robert Blackwell: ‘Getting an education is like filling your head with fine furniture.’

At first, everyone thought Robert Blackwell was cuckoo.

58

But then I started to understand. So, when I read Young’s First Science Encyclopaedia, I gave my head an oak cabinet, full of fish and chemicals and circuit boards. And when I read the Bible, I gave my head a lovely rug. The type of rug that looks like it might purr if you stroked it.

What will happen when I’m older? I know lots now. And I haven’t even been to high school yet. There won’t be room for everything when I’m a grown up. My brain will be jam packed. What if I get on a bus to go to work, in my smart businessman suit, and we go over a BUMP and just like that, out tumbles Tutankhamen? And what about sneezing? I’d have to put a cork up my nose to stop myself from achooing out octaves.

Here’s a list of all the things that make Oma cry: 1. When you talk about your mum 2. When letters that little boys aren’t allowed to read come through the door 3. When Albus shouts 4. When you ask too many questions 5. When Albus smokes his fruity cigarettes 6. When she drops the milk on the kitchen floor and it makes a mess 7. When you talk about your dad 8. When the news is on On the underground I shut my eyes. Tight Tight No Light. If I don’t, my heart gets angry. It sounds like it’s bashing up my insides. Take that, liver. Take that, ribs. Smash bonk pow, pancreas. Shutting my eyes Tight Tight No Light makes my heart happier though. Happier and less bashy. As long as I don’t think about the bombers or the baddies. Or the floods.

59

The kind that come tidal waving down the tunnel and carry you miles and miles under water until your lungs go N-O spells no, but the water leaks inside of you anyway and you stop breathing and your heart goes ka-dunk ka-dunk kadead.

Before I knew about the shutting of the eyes I’d make my head hurt by trying to work out if there was a bomber or a baddie on the train. I’d have to do lots of tests. Like, I’d stand up very quickly. If someone jumped or flinched it meant they were very nervous and that meant they were probably a baddie or a bomber.

Oma: Sit down, Augustus. Stop messing about.

But I wasn’t messing about. I was pulling her up because I was rescuing her. But Oma wouldn’t budge. So I pulled harder. And she got angry and a man shouted at me that I was hurting my poor nana and then I cried and ran off the tube without Oma and then the doors shut. Thump. Hiss. Bye bye, Oma. That’s when Oma took me to The Doctor. Not THE Doctor.

Not The Doctor who gets to whoosh through time. Oma took me to see the boring Doctor. The one I had to speak to about the tubes and the trains and the tunnels. The Doctor sat in a funny smelling room and nodded whenever you said anything.

Me: Hello.

The Doctor: Nod. I’m going on a bear hunt. I’m going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day! I’m not scared. I might have been a little bit scared. Just a teensy teeny weeny bit. Especially when I heard the footsteps. I had to hold my willy so the wee wouldn’t come out.

Oma was asleep again. She didn’t used to sleep. Not ever.

60

But now she’s always nodding off. That’s what she calls it.

Oma: ‘Sorry. Did I nod off again?’

When she does that I have to tell her all about what she’s missed. About how the family of blood have been trying to get the Doctor’s body again. And that the vortex manipulator made their spaceship invisible. And about how the Doctor saved the day. The End. But Oma didn’t wake up this time. Not even when I picked up her arm. Her breath kept going in and out, in and out. I moved her arm back. In and out, in and out. I slid my butt forward across the cushion. It started to fall so I stopped and put my legs out like a crab. In and out, in and out. And then I was on the floor, doing my army man crawl. In and out, in and out. And then I was outside Oma’s room. The door squeals if you push it too hard and it squeals if you push it too slow. But I pushed it just right.

Oma’s secret place is in her wardrobe. She thinks I don’t know where it is, but I do. She thinks because it’s high I can’t get up there. But I can. I just get the chair and then use Oma’s pillows to make a pillow tower. The flowery pillows with the pink swirls. It’s a bit wibbly wobbly, but I’m a good balancer.

Inside the wardrobe there’s a shelf. At first, all you can see is the Christmas tree and the spare towels and our holiday suitcase. It smells inside the wardrobe. Not bad. Not like when the man with no home wet himself. The wardrobe smells warm. A bit like Oma’s bubble bath.

You have to look inside the old sewing machine box to find the secret place. There isn’t a sewing machine inside the box.

There’s lots of secret things. Like letters and cigarettes and photos of men I don’t know.

I pulled the box out. I didn’t do it quite right. Some of the handbags fell to the floor. I stopped and listened. Nothing.

She must have still been doing her ins and her outs. The box 61

is heavy. To get it out you have to push it against the wardrobe door and slide it down. BUMP. It landed on the carpet. I opened the lid. The cardboard is thin and it makes my fingers feel dirty even though I can’t see the dirt. There was something new in the box this time. A white envelope.

The letter from God. I pulled it out and looked inside. No letter. Just photos. I tipped the envelope upside down and let the photos fall. No letter. Nothing. I emptied the box.

Nothing. My eyes wanted to cry but I kept telling them no and then my throat felt hot and burny. I opened up the books and looked inside the pages. No letter.

I put my head into the carpet. Sometimes it’s nice to feel something still and big like the floor next to your head. I did some ins and outs too, like what the doctor said. That’s when I saw it. The photo. Of Oma in the hospital. She was different.

Her face had less lines and her hair was black and she was smiling big. She had a baby on her. It wasn’t me. It was a teeny tiny baby wearing pink. I looked at the other photo. It was of a bigger baby. With a white dress on and white hair and the baby was holding Oma’s hand because she wasn’t good at walking and in her other hand was a rag doll with red hair and a blue dress. In another photo there was a woman with black long boots on and Oma was trying to hug her but the woman wasn’t hugging Oma back because she had her hand up to the camera as though she wanted to hit the camera away. In another photo there was a girl on a bike who had her tongue out. In another there was the woman with the black boots again, but older. And she was in hospital and in her arms there was a baby. He had on a blue hat so he must have been a baby boy. And the woman was smiling. Big. I picked that one up and looked close. A little duck was on the bed. And there were flowers and some cards and the woman had on a little white plastic bracelet. I turned it over.

62

Someone had written on it with a blue pen: Ceri and Augustus 2005.

Augustus is my name. And Ceri is yours.

That’s when I heard the footsteps. I looked at the door.

She was coming. I pushed some of the photos back into the box, but she was coming closer.

Oma: ‘Augustus? Where are you?’

There wasn’t time. I pulled myself across the floor towards the bed. My jeans rubbed against the carpet and my knees went hot. I pushed myself under the bed. She opened the door. And that’s when the screaming started.

63

64

Alex McHugh

alexmchugh1@hotmail.co.uk I’ve been writing stories, poems, raps, and fictitious football biographies since childhood (Alex McHugh, Liverpool FC. Apps: 289 Goals:196). St. Crispin’s is my first novel. I live in Liverpool and work for the family packaging business. I’ve been a waiter, English teacher, nursery nurse and ice-cream salesman, amongst other things.

St Crispin’s Cecil takes a creative role at his local shopping centre, unaware that the manager, the secretary, and not least the sinister property developers, are taking a disturbing interest in his progress. And now what’s this strange feeling in his belly? The unfurling of genius? Trapped wind? Or something altogether more sinister?

65

ST CRISPIN’S We'll start with me shakily entering a cheap shopping centre and heading for the escalators. Needs must. Get yourself here for nine, they said, and come up ... up into our blare of trapped day-time noises, higher into our headache of reflective surfaces. At angles of thirty-degrees, they said, come up smoothly through criss-crossing plastic and bisecting handrails, on steps with teeth and floors that shriek. And look! from behind the artificial foliage, here's appearing now an ear, an eye, the nose, on a window at the perfume place, it's the fat and flattened face of Michael Bublé, blown-up to fifteen-feet, smouldering, trying hard to sell you something.

It's not him though, bad as he is, that's giving me the shakes. And it's not the other bad things either. I'm nervous.

Been nervous all morning. Enough nerves in me, Mr Bublé, to lift the hairs and charge the phones of everybody on the bus I took to reach you. Though for the journey I'd sat quite still.

Just a bit of lip chewing. Biting things over. The full-body shakes only came on once I stepped off and, on the approach to St. Crispin's, crossed paths with the amateur poets who had it in for me. Suddenly there they were, the big one and the small one, just across the forecourt; as surprised as I was at the swiftness of this reunion, then quickly closing in with clenched fists and creased foreheads. What followed? The flap of rising pigeons, the growing of an audience, the shocked nearby child dropping a full can of fizz. That's what.

Oh aye, and the rest. The physical stuff. The Whoosh - Crack Burst - Boom! This I take on the chin, and other places, until, twisting free, I dash through the foaming puddle, into the crowd, then into the shopping centre, entering shakily and heading for the escalators.

Come on up, they said.

66

My first coherent thought is how I was lucky to come out of it with just a bloodied-up nose - though patting pockets on the third escalator, or maybe the fourth, I realise the bastards had in fact robbed me of my phone and my wallet. True, they had every right to be angry. But daylight robbery is a little out of proportion, wouldn't you say?

I reach the top, the fifth level, or the sixth. Hard to say.

Either way it's the top because here bleary cloud presses down on a murky glass ceiling and there are no more escalators, only screaming buggies colliding head-on and shoppers slumped on flimsy walls or barking into the mismatching pop music pumping out of the shop-fronts. Nerves strung out now and jangling for all.

Come up to the highest aisle, they said, and take the first right after the money lenders. Find the corner with the out of service lift, they said, and pass through the adjacent swinging doors. Climb echoey steps to a narrow corridor and stop, they said, at the first door on the right, the one with the shiny plaque at eye level reading - Mr Carmichael, Manager. Two quick taps then I drop my head, roll back on my heels and take the first in a series of unsuccessful calming breaths.

Ah, yes: the shoes. Jesus fuck. Hastily borrowed and laughably too long. Clown shoes, that's what they are; one now sticky-on-the-floor with dashed-through sugar-juice. And the suit! A suit for a maniac. In Help The Aged they'd said it looked good, wonderful in fact, you'll soon be courting in a suit like that, the turkey-necked till woman had felt moved to speculate. To be fair to them its condition was, on the whole, not too shabby - minimal fraying, no discernible odour.

There's even an expensive looking handkerchief in the breast pocket. It's the volume of wrist and ankle on show that I'm not so taken with. Must be an aggregate of some seven

67

inches. Problem enough; now I have a bent collar and blood running down the left lapel.

I suppose I should be thankful. For the shoes. And the suit was a gift. And there is, after all, an almost imperceptible comfort to be had in the thought that even if it had all been plain and appropriately-dressed sailing up to now, I'd still be no less a wreck of nerves here, in front of this plaque, in this narrow corridor. Interviews make me nervous. Make everyone nervous, sure, but especially me and especially now with me very much out of my depth, in over my head, floundering, having tried to pull the wool over my potential employer’s eyes before I've even had the chance to look into them. And now the real source of my hot anxiety: I've lied on my application, quite spectacularly and about almost everything.

The door swings open. Not the door here with the plaque, but one way off down the corridor. There's a girl down there, or half a one, come out for a good stare with one hand on the door handle, one high-heeled leg out in the corridor.

'Cecil, is it?'

'That's right.'

'Ok.' There is a pause for further staring. 'Right,' she says.

'We're in here now.'

The green knitted pull-over and rich blonde bun stand out clearest. Then the richly featured face comes into focus. The hand moves to rest on the rolled-out hip and the perfume comes a ticklin'. By the time I'm stood before her, it's thrust itself well up my nose and to the back of my throat. The girl pouts, gives me a censorious going over, then breaks into a disingenuous smile which is not un-pretty. Very white teeth.

'Well, hello there. Come on in and take a seat for yourself.'

68

Ignoring my half-held out hand she saunters back into the room, spinning to face me again as she reaches a cluttered desk. I follow and close the door behind me.

'There's a chair just there against the wall. That's it.

Shouldn't be too long, he's just with someone at the minute.

Everything's a bit all over the place right now so you'll have to . . . oh look, you've got blood on you. Just there.' She points to her nostril. The finger lingers there for a moment, red nail varnish resting on smiling pouting lips.

'That's it, you've got it. Weird. Maybe it's the altitude, hey? I mean, we are quite high up here. They do that, don't they? Get nosebleeds when they climb mountains and things? Is that a thing?'

I can do a noncommittal laugh and slight nod of the head, but that's about it. I'm having a hard enough time just trying to get this bloodied hankie back in the pocket. A buxom blonde with thrusting perfume and a runaway tongue, this is almost more than I can cope with. I take the seat, sniff up blood, and hoping to portray a sophisticated quiescence which I don’t have right now, and may never again, I cross one long leg over the other in what you might call the feminine way. Familiar dull-ache in the calf and yards of shin on show. The girl, meanwhile, has propped herself against the desk, hands leisurely planted either side of her, chest pushed out beneath the tight green pull-over. She smiles at me with all her rich features. This is a bit too much so I look instead to the threadbare carpet, letting my fingers fiddle wildly with the buttons on the jacket.

'Hey, that's a lovely suit, Cecil. Not everyone looks good in a suit, I don't think. You do though. Very dashing. Mr Carmichael did tell me to expect someone a bit special. Looks like he was right.'

69

Here comes the blood to lash itself against the cheeks.

And no doubt the pupils have dilated enormously. Thankfully my head has lowered enough for such desperate changes in appearance to go unnoticed. But is she being genuine?

Chancing she is, without being able to see why she wouldn't be, I let the wave pass then look up to offer her a gracious smile, the kind I imagine she thinks the type of person she believes me to be would give to a person like her. A moment of blank staring then she responds with a quick smile of her own before she jumps up, swishes herself behind the desk, takes her seat with a girlish sigh and begins to move some papers around.

I couldn't just walk out now, could I? Yes, I could. The door is not locked. The handle's within reach. No. No walking out.

Not on this one. This one's to be endured. By pushing my leg hard to the floor, I can stop all this crazy twitching. That's good. More pain to the calf though.

'You don't get many Cecils these days,' she says after some minutes and without taking her eyes from the screen of her computer.

'No, I suppose you don't,' I say, or rather, I hear; the voice seeming to come not from me but from somewhere else, somewhere behind me and far away. 'My mum told me it had sounded like a good idea at the time,' the voice says, 'but now I think she rather regrets the whole thing.' After this there is some idiotic chuckling. She smiles and goes on typing.

'Well, I like it, Cecil. It's ... sophisticated. And those old names are all coming back now, aren't they? I've got a little niece called Bertha, if you can believe it. And two called Ethel. Ethel Ariana and Ethel Rhiana. I know, who'd call a baby Bertha though? Fuck me. Help yourself to water.'

70

She nods to the water cooler squatting beneath the window. A drink of water would be nice. But the walk over there, the fiddling about with nozzles and cup dispensers, not to mention the walk back - no, I'd have to be out of my fucking mind. I resolve instead to stay put and swallow some saliva. Unable to produce any, I settle on dryly looking up at the window, dry lips pressed together, dry narrowed eyes taking in the strips of cloud stuck between the slats. Dirty white cloud. Dirty window. Venetian blinds gilded with dust.

No wonder my mouth's so dry. Horizontal is Venetian, is it?

Or vertical? Either way, the grey furred edges get me brooding on dead skin cells and dead insects, crumbs and hairs, dandruff and all the silent dirt trapped here in the stink of the perfume. But dexterous minds make better connections, so soon it's culture that I'm thinking of, and canals, gondolas, obviously, and flags and nice old fashioned architecture before the inevitable drive to more familiar cities further up the coast; telephone wires and clear blue skies, around steep corners, rolling out to the red-hot quayside off Via Arsenale, and the Cafe Uno bar, and tiny cups of coffee and bone-dry cigarettes, an exhaust starting up, smoke rising above the cup, and real black shadows out on the street, and the man-waiter in the long white apron, coming over with the bill, and the sun glaring off the steel tray to which he's clipped it. And the sun.

I'd messaged everyone saying I'd be back off to the Continent soon enough. Everyone who? No idea. Off to Europe, I'd said, shan't be long, got the wanderlust, I'll write you - or something pompous like that. Yet, as it happened, I was here, in this dust-layered waiting room, wrangling sweating fingers into buttonholes, anticipating the impending trauma of an interview with one Ronald J Carmichael - a man who, presumably due to some drastic run of events in his 71

own life, had also failed to make it to the continent, or wherever it was he actually wanted to be, and instead wound up here, in a position which is the life long ambition of nobody whatsoever - that being head honcho at a down at heel shopping centre in a down at heel town approximately one thousand one hundred and eighty-eight miles from hot cities on the Adriatic (this was incidentally and just for fun the very last question I had consulted my phone over prior to the pilfering. How far am I from the sun? I'd asked it. How far am I from love?).

'Mr Carmichael says you reported on the world handball championships in, where was it, China? That's so amazing.'

Oh, the lies.

'Oh yes. All a bit of a blur now, if I'm honest. It's a very fast sport, really, and quite complicated. Difficult to get it across to a ... Have you ever played yourself?'

She full-snorts then stops typing to prop chin onto folded fingers. 'Now, Cecil,' she says, amateur-dramatically 'Do I look like the kind of girl that knows the first thing about handball?'

She pauses with one eyebrow arched and the plump wet lips twisted off to the side.

What is it then that she knows the first thing about?

'I did play goal-attack for the school netball team, mind.

But that only lasted up until Gary Lynch asked me out and, well, let's just say which ever girl Gary Lynch was seeing to had precious little time for netball. God, Gary bloody Lynch.

Maybe that's where it all started to go wrong - ha! He was a beautiful man though; you have to give him that if nothing else.'

She sends me over a slow wink. It sets the tingle in my cheeks, which I offset by altering the crossing of my legs - not to the masculine way, I'll stick with the feminine, just with the

72

legs swapped over - giving one calf a rest, starting up the pain in the other.

'Who won then?'

'I'm sorry?'

'The world handball championships, Cecil. Who won it?'

'Oh. That's ... Russia.'

Now we're lying on the fly. Free form lying. It's so audacious it relaxes me. Of course, I've no evidence to suggest Russian didn't win it. Then again, I've as equally little evidence suggesting that such a thing as the world handball championships even exists at all. Did the Russians play it?

Would the Chinese host it? What had she meant exactly by winking at me like that? Questions questions.

'Russia!' she cries. 'Oh, of course they did. I can imagine, with those big Russian hands. I should've guessed!' She snorts again and shakes her head, happily filled now, one could guess, with thoughts of big Russian hands. Her head bows slightly and the beginnings of a smile form discreetly in one corner of her mouth. She lifts a mint from the glass bowl beside the mouse mat and pushes it through her lips, and then swallows her lips into her mouth.

Yes, times moved on a great deal, that's for sure. Have I made the most of it? Have I used it to cultivate an arresting personality? Have I been enough there and done enough that? More pertinently, could I plant my feet solid on the ground and leaning back with hands on hips honestly boast to a man in a pub that, yes, oh aye, I've been around the block a few times when it comes to the ladies? No. I could perhaps say I've been well up past the first corner once or twice. Would that be accurate? Well, I've lost myself, let's say, in some of the initial alleyways and cul-de-sacs of the block.

That'd be about right. Oh, I've been to the block, yes, I'm sure of that, but I can by no means call myself a seasoned lapper.

73

That's not to say I haven't gleaned one or two worthwhile pieces of information out of life. For example, I know how things go between people like myself and women like this one here, displaying these kinds of levels of wanton vivacity, to guess with a fair amount of certitude that the attributes she'd found so attractive in Gary Lynch, she would almost definitely find lacking in me. Not that that's ever been anything to fret over. I have my intellect, after all, and that brooding air about me. Still, despite our profound differences, I feel now something human and significant pass between us, here in the stillness of the room. Maybe she is taken by the suit. Perhaps my pose excites her. For a wellbuilt girl delicate hands she has, typing typing, and that lock of hair there fallen behind the ear. Creaseless golden neck she has sliding out of the green pull-over. Attractive. And there's genuine charm too in how she talks like that with the mint in her mouth.

'Do you know what, Cecil?' she says, pushing it into her cheek. 'Until Mr Carmichael showed me your application, I never even knew there was a world handball championships.

You know, sometimes you forget there's a whole world out there, filled with people playing handball and people like you going off to report on it. A whole world, Cecil, and then there's me, here, stuck behind this desk with only that old thing for company.'

Here she thumbs to the drooping plant pot over in the corner, its depressed leaves resting limply on the watercooler. I make a vague noise of agreement then return my attention to the slices of cloud. She goes back on with her typing and we pass the next few moments in warm stilted silence, until the water cooler bubbles, the leaves of the plant quiver and the door to my right bursts open on squeaking hinges and I meet for the first time - Mr Ronald J Carmichael.

74

75

Rashi Rohatgi

rashenka@gmail.com Rashi Rohatgi is Assistant Professor of English and World Literature at Kutztown University and Fiction Editor at Boston Accent Lit, where she convenes the Accent Prize for emerging WOC writers.

Her writing can be found at www.rashenka.com Wednesday Wednesday is a campus romance with a Quit Lit twist, exploring the precarious bond between two young academics of colour on a campus that doesn’t love them back.

76

Wednesday Kettering was a university town, like the East Coast American town I’d grown up in before jetting off for the London life. Its natural barriers were better, though: instead of the hardscrabble mountains on every side, the dorms and lightbrick boxes of classrooms looked out over a beach – not entirely sandy, and covered in young people in shorts, but with fine pale green California water.

I didn’t have an office or a classroom of my own, and my boyfriend Philip’s department was in the building across the jarringly right-angled quad. I wished we’d been able to arrive before the students had spread their cream cheese limbs across it, but I’d gotten a teaching assignment for the summer session that lasted until the last day of our lease, and we hadn’t been keen to leave. Our flat was basically on campus, though, tucked down behind the dorms, flanked by the highway. We had a treacherous-looking slatted balcony overlooking a bedraggled communal yard. The grass there was the normal color. The other balconies had plastic chairs on them, and ashtrays, and I’d considered, last night, taking up smoking. I’d watched one of our new neighbors through our kitchen blinds, her face further obscured by strings of yellow-blonde hair, her figure obscured by a Navajopatterned blanket. She leaned on that balcony like a Dorothea Lange photo; I wondered what her research subject was.

The Writing Center had double doors, the kind that were only locked by night watchmen, with silver door-handles shiny but not inviting. I opened them anyways. There was a four-foot square area that had retained the math-classroom linoleum flooring, but beyond that there was brown 77

carpeting and the ¾ walls of various ‘pods.’ The light was good: it was a big room, with lots of windows. I didn’t push the service bell on the reception counter because I could see a towheaded young man sorting mail in the back room.

When he glanced towards the clock that must have been above the mailroom door, he saw my face and mouthed a greeting.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, coming out with a bunch of intercampus mail envelopes still in his left hand. “Did you sign in?” He had bad skin, but it looked like he’d had a haircut before coming back to campus.

“I’m Celine Debrett, one of the new adjuncts,” I explained.

As if a new tenure-track professor would have been left to their own devices this late into the summer: when we’d gotten into to town yesterday night, we’d found a bottle of single malt in front of our door with a welcome card from Philip’s department chair. Still, Philip had practically been born in an oak-walled office with a bottle of single malt on the desk; I’d spent my childhood wanting the ivy-laced campus walls to pull me in, and however you parsed it, here I was. Just with slightly less ivy.

“Sign in,” he repeated, “and then you’re… let’s see. Not scheduled in today, it seems. Do you want me to print off your schedule?”

“I just wanted to get a sense of the space before starting work tomorrow. Are there workstations? Will I be in the same pod every time? Is there a coffee machine? That kind of thing.”

He held my gaze with a bit more implied assessment.

“There are computers against the back wall, and the copierprinter is there, too. Try to keep it double-sided, okay?”

He actually waited until I nodded, then nodded back, and turned back to the mail. I stepped onto the carpet, my new 78

sandals sinking in a little. Alongside a wall of three computers, there was a bookcase turned into pigeonholes.

Mine was, alphabetically, towards the top, where I couldn’t see if there was anything in it. I poked my hand in and pulled out a flyer inviting its reader to an a capella festival. I crumpled it in my fist and turned to look for the recycling bin.

“Way harsh, Tai.” A mass of curly black hair with a person underneath was holding about 50 sheets of the same fluorescent orange paper I’d just crumpled in my fist. “You don’t like a capella?”

“I’m not a student here,” I said hastily, wondering if I could lob the paper ball in my hand into the recycling bin he was standing in front of. I looked down at my cream georgette palazzo pants and polka dot blouse, and then to his faded red Om t-shirt. Of course – I’d been drawn to the other desi on campus like a magnet, and he was advertising his otherness like it was just another preference, like a favorite sports team.

My face felt as red as his shirt, while his was, well, kind of perfect. Unlike his shirt.

“Paras.” He stuck his hand out: long, graceful fingers that made me try to hide my own amongst the fluorescent folds.

Philip has wonderful fingers, too, I reminded myself, though of course I wasn’t comparing them. I was just storing details for later, like any good English professor. While I was at it, I catalogued the lushness of his lips and the fact that underneath some truly tragic cargo khaki shorts, his legs were wiry and lean, making him seem even more leonine. “I teach composition, and, when they fuck up my enrollment numbers, evidently also writing. I’m the faculty sponsor for the Keynotes.”

I shook his hand, catching myself before I leaned in for the double cheek-kiss. It wasn’t totally obligatory to give your 79

name out to everyone you met, right? The sad thing was that I actually really did like a capella. You couldn’t grow up on the fringes of a college campus and not be inured to its more ridiculous aspects.

I lobbed the flyer over his shoulder: score! “Nice to meet you,” I said, walking away.

It wasn’t that I loathed friendly overtures: indeed, the opposite. I’d been hoping to meet a copacetic boss or a friendly fellow adjunct and strike up a best friendship that would end with both of us, widowed and wrinkled, remembering all the times we’d shown up at each other’s houses unannounced with bottles of vodka – well, at least someone I could talk to for a year. But he’d been too much, that musician – too bright, too comfortable in his own skin… great skin though it was. Was it just California? If so, why didn’t everyone else’s enviable ringlets distract me in the same way?

There are always spaces on a campus if you know what you’re looking for: and I was looking for a faculty kitchen and a discrete window with a view. The campus wasn’t new, but its proximity to the sea salt air and its insistence on a faded pastel palette meant there were fewer crannies than I was expecting. Kettering yielded its own delights, though. At the end of a hallway of closed doors I found a child-sized room with an adult-sized label: The Stamford Whelan Special Collections Library for the Sciences. It didn’t have a bay window, but instead its dusty panes of glass were cordoned off from the small room by a dove grey curtain. If I stood between the curtain and the window, I could see a bursting parking lot, but behind that, the sea. The walls were all shelves of books I’d never read – Squint, 2nd edition – and I could almost jump with excitement, although I doubted 80

anyone else would. There wasn’t even a chair, so who else would linger?

“We went on vacation once, your mother and I, alone, in India – after we’d moved to this country, but before either of you were born.” On a college campus, I supposed I’d been expecting it: my father’s voice. These were words he’d spoken to me the night I’d gotten my acceptance letter for a college out of state, one I’d known I’d never be able to afford, but wanted legitimation from, anyways. He was the only one in my family who knew I’d applied. He’d been the only one in my family who knew so many things about me.

“We’d been married six months. She was pregnant with you, and after the holiday she was going to stay behind in India and visit her parents. I hardly knew her – I think I wasn’t sure she’d really come back to the States, to us. I was afraid she’d stay, but part of me also dreamt of it. Until we arrived for the vacation in Kovalam. It was so beautiful, Sarita, I can’t describe it. You will describe it, one day, in your books. It was the opposite of everything I’d ever known, even after having traversed half the world. The sea was blue and rugged, and I thought of Satyayani, drowning all her babies at the opening of the Mahabharata.” Most days, my father and I talked about practical things: when he’d be home, what I’d documented in science lab. He wasn’t talkative, which made our talks more precious than ever.

“And then I realized: I was ready for this marriage I’d been thrown into, this partnered life I’d already been living, but with a sense of underlying panic. Finally, that sense of panic was gone. I could love your mother, because you weren’t even here yet, and I realized I already loved you more than anything else in the world. And I turned to her, and I kissed her, and I told her to come back to Gnedel’s Valley as soon as she could. We never needed another vacation alone after 81

that. For what?”

My breath caught in my throat. We hadn’t spoken for years, and when I thought back to the day he died, there had been no flashes of intuition. Almost a year ago: that week that London claims for its summer, the entire populace humid but enthralled. Even Philip had agreed that we needed to spend the weekend at a festival, and broken out his one pair of shorts, and laughed when I’d modeled a fluorescent romper for him at Primark. We’d eaten huge, silly bowls of mac and cheese with wooden spoons, sitting on the grass, listening to the strum of guitars and ignoring the girls with bindis. (At least I had. I didn’t think bindis were his thing; at least, I never wore them.) Mac and cheese, stars and stripes: I’d thought of Amma, imagined her whipping up a bowl for Aaliyah and Anissa, then adding heaps of chili powder to her own bowl. But she must not have been in the kitchen at all.

She must have been calling the crematorium, the Social Security office, her sister-in-law in Jhansi. I couldn’t picture her face: would she have been shocked? Would sadness have cloaked her more immediate worries?

The next week it had started raining again, and I’d started tweaking my lesson plans for the fall semester, when my ex, Alex, texted me to let me know he had gotten some mail for me he really thought I should read.

I was so removed from my family, I couldn’t picture what they were thinking, how they were feeling. And perhaps what I felt then had been just a cover-up for being bereft. But I didn’t call either of them that day. I didn’t try my mother’s phone, and then Shanti’s, until a week later. Until I’d convinced Philip that a job in the U.S.A. would be a gateway to new academic pastures. I hadn’t said to him, “I feel far away,” but that’s what it was like. And here I was, my eyes trained on the Pacific Ocean that stretched, if you were a 82

little hazy about the details, to the town in which my father had first felt like my father. Where he’d seen the most beautiful sight he knew he’d ever see – the unending, undemanding, unrelenting sea – and still wanted to go home.

I closed the door and leaned against it. Finally, peacefully on my own, I could breathe. I took my shiny new cell phone into my hands and dialed the East Coast. Gnedel’s Valley. Where all the living members of my family still lived. When the ringer cut off, I didn’t wait to hear her voice. If my mother was going to hang up on me again, I didn’t need to hear it.

“Amma?”

Five seconds of silence. Five, before the click.

I took five more seconds and then dialed my sister’s home number. “Khan residence,” said a distorted version of her voice.

I looked at the dove grey curtain, and at the dust on the spines of the library bindings. “Is your mother there?”

“Just a sec.” If I’d been around, maybe I would have taught Aaliyah or Anissa – I couldn’t tell which one had just left me hanging – some phone manners. “Who is it?” I heard my sister ask, but not into the phone. There was silence, so I imagined a little mini-me shrugging at her.

“Khan residence,” she said, and I could hear the impatience in her voice. Since the twins, she’d worked from home, and I was keeping her from something more important.

“Shanti?”

“Sarita! Where are you calling from? Hold on a second –” then, muffled, “give Mama a second, sweetheart. Go watch Dora.” There were footsteps. Shanti had moved from my parents’ house to the house she shared with Yusuf: no 83

pokey flats, always space for twelve, fourteen, footsteps.

“Hey,” she said, finally.

My sister had always been a good listener. Younger than me by two years, she’d had her ear open to every fight I’d had with my parents, almost every rejection I’d gotten from friends or boys or colleges or magazines. For the past five years, though, I’d listened to her. Sort of. The updates she posted on her blog about interfaith mothering were always mindful of the fact that these sorts of things are less private than one expects. I wanted to speak and never stop speaking.

“I’ve missed you,” I told her.

“You’re back in the US.” “I’m back,” I confirmed. “But it’s nowhere familiar.”

“I google-d Philip while I was walking up the stairs,” she admitted. “Kettering College. What does that mean, though, Associate Professor? Is he a subcontractor?”

“No, no, it’s a good thing. Things are good. I’m far away for now, but next June… it’s still okay?”

“It’s still okay,” she reassured me, and then things really were good. Next year, this dull facsimile of a campus would recede into history – all of the last ten years would be gone, superseded. “The room will be ready for you, and Yusuf’s got a friend who says the English teacher at GV Academy looks pregnant. He could try and get an interview for you.”

My life back… and though there were some relationships I’d never be able to repair, there were other new ones. “Can I say hello to the girls? Just as some anonymous auntie?”

“They’re not old enough yet, Sarita,” she whispered. “Even just now, I’m going to have watch Aaliyah the next few times we’re at Amma’s this week, give her some more obvious things to want to talk about.”

She knows I’ve called, I wanted to tell her – but their relationship wasn’t mine to meddle in. Not yet. “Is there 84

anything I can bring for them? Books, clothes... I know you must have spent a lot of money on the funeral.”

“We could afford the funeral,” she said quickly, and I put my hand to my forehead. She wasn’t about to change her number, but I wasn’t home yet. What if she just hung up and thought that maybe the memory of what we’d shared wasn’t worth it after all?

“Of course you could. Actually it’s me who’s poor. I don’t even have a shared office at this job,” I confessed. “I’m going to have to carry around a supersized thermos to stay caffeinated.” And eventually, class by class, I’d have enough money in my bank account to show up at my sister’s with my chin up – or, at the very least, to show up at my sister’s. The silence on the other end of the phone line when I’d tried to negotiate my contract had clarified just how hard-won each dollar was going to be.

“Yusuf’s gotten really into coffee,” she said gracefully. “He uses those capsules. It’s actually a blessing in disguise, because now that I’m not breast-feeding anymore I’ve been able to spike my chai…”

“Spike your chai?” I waited until I wasn’t actually speaking to add, “Is that really advisable?”

“One of the mum’s at their school told me about it. She’s Latvian. They do it all winter.”

I laughed, for lack of a better response, because she wanted me to. It did make me feel better. “Maybe I’ll try it this afternoon.”

“See that you do!” We shared a giggle, but she curtailed hers quickly, and I followed suit. “Look, I’ve got your new number now. I should go, but we could talk more?”

“I’m looking forward to it,” I said, more fervently than I’d let myself feel in a long time. I listened to the silence of the cut line for a moment, then slipped the phone back in my 85

purse and gave my hair a pat down, though it was fine. The weather here felt so unobtrusive, it made me uneasy. But I had Shanti back, if not yet completely, then at least in phone calls. I looked at the grey curtains, the old books. A boyfriend, a house, a job: from the outside, I seemed anchored here.

But if I didn’t mess it all up, ‘here’ would never become ‘home.’

86

Mandy Redvers-Rowe

a.redvers_rowe@btinternet.com Mandy lost her sight as a teenager, went to blind school, then university. She graduated with a drama degree and a passion for acting, but found very few parts she could play. So began writing to address the balance. Initially sketches for Disability Cabaret, transferring to radio and television. This is her first novel.

Half A Cold Take-Away Later Churchyard Man has his perfect home – until it’s vandalised.

Sam, a Disabled Veteran, has lost his –although he has somewhere to live. They meet in a duck pond when one saves the other from drowning...symbiosis! Sam gains the courage to talk to the girl he’s admired from afar, whilst Churchyard Man begins to save for a new tent!

87

Half A Cold Take-Away Later Churchyard Man is lying, snug and dry, inside his blue and purple sleeping bag, which has itself been wrapped inside several black bin bags. He’s wearing a tracksuit, coat, hat, scarf and gloves…he’d be sweating if it wasn’t January, but it is, so he isn’t.

He can’t move, though it’s nothing to do with the quantity of clothes he’s wearing, but because he doesn’t want to touch the sides of his tent. It’s actually quite small, officially two person, but as he’s tall, any movement would result in him making unwanted contact with the canvas. Then the wet would come in and he’d have to get up, and at the moment that’s the last thing he wants to do. In here he’s warm and dry, but out there…well out there it’s raining hard. So hard that last night he’d found it difficult to sleep. He’d finally nodded off listening to the hollow sound the rain had made as it landed again and again on his material roof. Blop blop blop. Blop Blop. Blop. Blop blop. And even once asleep the rhythmic sound had persisted, accompanying his dreams, inhabiting his sub-conscious, somehow comforting, reassuring. But in the last few minutes it must have gotten harder, or louder, because it has just woken him up. As he listens he understands why. The sound of the rain has tipped over, turned from benign to aggressive. It means that he can’t afford to go back to sleep. No not now. He’ll need to be on his guard, ready to stem leaks, firm up the frame, whatever might be required.

It’s still dark, very early, nowhere would be open. So he lies still, hopes that the rain will ease off and watches the thin morning light as it slowly edges into the orange of his tent.

He absently listens to the traffic which grows from a single 88

rain soaked note made by one car, to a gentle continuous hum of engine followed by engine, to a roaring fuel-spitting, rush-hour crescendo. He considers how homes will light up, process their inhabitants, through a wash, a dress and a feed to then spew them out to work or school. He imagines the lives that other people are living until a drip starts to drop, from the cross bar above, onto his right foot. Again, and again. Drip. Drip. Drip.

He yawns, stretches and sits up. One of the many good things about living in a tent, is that one is never allowed a long lie-in. For by about eight o’clock, it’s always too hot, or too cold, too light, too noisy, or too wet to stay in bed. He loves his tent. Wouldn’t swap it for a tin box-container, or a caravan, or a wooden hut, or some sort of shack in the forest, or anything else. Tents have all sorts of advantages, they’re portable, easy to put up, and come in a range of colours and sizes.

He is still reflecting on tents in general, about thirty minutes later, as he crouches under the little extended porch, which he’s made by lifting the door flaps up and wedging a stick of wood under each corner. He’s already washed, using a foldaway plastic bowl which was filled with a kettle of partly boiled water. Now dressed, he’s boiling his second kettle of water on his single Calor gas ring, this time to make his morning cup of tea. As the kettle heats, he cups his large pale hands around the blue flame to try to warm himself up. He’ll feel better once he’s had his morning brew and something to eat.

Yes, that’s what he needs. He already has his breakfast next to him in a plastic bag; it’s the remains of a small loaf he’d bought two days ago. He considers how best to prepare the bread. He could have it cold with butter and jam…or he could toast it. That would be a real treat, but it would also 89

give him an excuse to keep the ring going a bit longer. He begins to look around for a fork. When the kettle has boiled, he’ll make his tea and then stab each slice of bread and hold it out over the heat, being careful not to let it burn. He’ll first do one side, then turn it over and do the other. In a few minutes, just a few, he’ll be able to take a sip of that hot, sweet, life-affirming liquid and bite into a warm hot piece of toasted bread. Hot tea and toast! That will brighten his spirits on this cold dark day. He finds a fork and places it next to the plastic bag containing the bread then returns his hands to cupping the flame and looks about him.

Last night he’d pitched here in the dark, on the grass directly in front of the church. It’s a church he knows quite well, he’s stayed here a few times before. It’s Victorian, very grand, and is named in remembrance of St. Alban. Although not a gardener himself, he knows that normally at this time of year most gardens are rather untidy, scattered with wet leaves and other plant debris. However, here all the mess has been safely tidied away, banished, placed out of sight. So that the garden seems unnaturally bare, still, silent, sad. He reflects that in the past nature would have had its way.

Would have rampantly disregarded all fine lines and edges.

Would have plunged roots down deep, spread tendrils out wide and roamed freely, riotously across the wide open spaces. Scanning the area again, he imagines what it must have looked like, felt like, to have been surrounded by all that growth. Foliage. Wildness.

Nothing is permanent though, he knows this. Change will come. One way or another. Bringing with it some kind of action. He hopes that the change when it arrives, will be for the better and that colour and life will return in abundance.

Although, he can’t help suspecting that when life does return to this Churchyard, the gardener responsible will no 90

doubt ensure that it’s carefully restricted. Flowers will be nurtured and weeded and pruned, trees will be trimmed and plucked and kept looking their best, and the lawn will be mown, be rolled, be edged, so beautifully that children will not be encouraged to play on it. When spring does return here, it will be carefully managed and controlled. The warmer weather will arrive to re-kindle life, but the messiness that sometimes accompanies it will most definitely not be tolerated.

Never mind. He looks out beyond the garden, through the wrought iron railings and directly on to the High Street. Either side of the Church frontage are a number of small shops and although he can’t see them all from where he’s seated he knows that to the right is a greengrocer’s, a minisupermarket, a butcher’s and a hair salon. To the left there’s an estate agent’s, a bank, a solicitor’s, a chip shop and a pub.

Opposite are some flats, some more shops, including a betting shop, and a hotel called The Lion Inn. As he looks, he sees a girl in a raincoat rush past. Sees her small figure reach the first shop on the left, the estate agent’s, and watches her as she disappears inside. So semipermanent. Fragile. She had been there one minute and gone the next. Like a newly formed melody, that had tripped fleetingly through the air, she had lived, clearly resonated, but now out of his sight, she no longer existed. Was silent. A mere musical memory.

His kettle screams. Good, the water is finally ready. He lifts it off the heat, carefully pours the boiling water into his tin mug which contains an already used tea bag and stirs it around with a teaspoon. But just as he’s about to stab his bread in preparation for toasting, he sees the vicar coming around the side of the church wrestling with a large black umbrella. He knows the vicar, of course, from his last visit, 91

and the visit before that. He knows him and knows, from the expression on his face, that he isn’t happy. He abandons the bread and returns to the tea, expertly fishing the hot tea bag out of the cup with his teaspoon and finger before spreading it out on the corner of the plastic bag to dry. He adds a splash of milk and three spoons of sugar, sighs and hopes, uncharitably, that the vicar is going to be too busy to visit, that he’s going to have more important things to do, and go straight past. But he’s out of luck, for the vicar gazes directly at him, sort of smiles and turns off the path to cross the grass towards him. Reluctantly he turns off the ring. Then, firmly taking hold of his cup in both hands, he takes a slurp of tea and smiles as he addresses his visitor: ‘Morning brother.’

The vicar jumps, but gathers himself quickly: ‘Morning…um…Mr… you know, I don’t think you’ve ever actually told me your name. Or perhaps you have and I’ve forgotten. Oh dear. Um… please, forgive me’ ‘There’s nothing to forgive. Would you like a cup of tea brother?’

‘Umm… no… it’s okay. I’m afraid I can’t really stop. I have a coffee morning to arrange, organise, you see. It’s 10am if…. If you’d like to join us. I’m sure you’d be very welcome.’

‘Thank you, I appreciate the offer.’

‘So … so you’ll come?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, then, perhaps… perhaps a quick word now then. If that’s... okay?’

Churchyard man takes another sip of his wonderful, wonderful hot tea. He looks up and sees that his visitor is shivering.

‘Would you like to come into the tent? It’s quite dry inside.’

92

‘Ah, no, no… actually, actually it’s … it’s glorious out here.

Don’t you think? The rain, you know, very good for you, very underrated. And the cold. All God-given. All… splendid.

Absolutely… splendid.’ Having apparently run out of adjectives to describe the storm, the vicar pauses, puts on a serious face and continues. ‘Am… the thing is … Have you … I mean ... any idea, how long you might be … might be actually … with us?’

‘No, I’m as much in the dark about that one as you brother. But I do know that when The Lord is ready to take me, he will call me, and I will come.’ ‘umm… yes… yes… amen. Me too. Surely. And I pray that his call is not… not imminent. No…I actually meant to say…. I mean …How long might you be here, in this particular spot, in this particular churchyard. On this particular... you know... patch of... of grass.’

‘Ah yes. Well, I have something I must do here, I don’t know how long it will take. And until my work is done, I cannot move on.’

‘Oh… I see… that’s… that’s what I thought but you see…’

He looks at the man of cloth closely. The vicar is talking, incessantly, desperately filling all the silent spaces with sound, as though too embarrassed to stay still, to listen, and to hear. And as he watches him squirming painfully in front of him, he feels an enormous surge of pity for the man.

‘Of course it’s not a problem ... to me … but there are those, the gardener for example, who needs to know, and then there are the ladies, you know, the ones that do things... in the church... they also need to know...’

‘Well, perhaps we could pray about it together.’

‘Pray? Oh yes, pray. Oh that would be…but, another time perhaps because, because I really must dash now. The coffee morning. The ladies.’

93

He waves, sips his tea silently and watches as the vicar retreats backwards towards the church. Battling with his over-large umbrella, which sways now backwards, now forwards, like an undecided dark cloud. When the vicar finally reaches the path Churchyard Man shouts after him: ‘God bless you. May he love and protect you. Keep you safe.’ And, as a gust of wind spatters more rain against his flimsy roof, he thinks he hears the vicar say ‘you too’, but he can’t be sure.

94

Andy Smith

andrew.c.smith@hotmail.co.uk Originally from Liverpool, I now live in Manchester. The people there are great, but we don’t talk about football. I work as a project manager in a software company, so my writing is what keeps me sane. Relatively! This is my first novel.

Breaking The Lore A crucified fairy is discovered. This is a problem for Inspector Paris, since he doesn’t believe in magic. Other mystical creatures soon arrive to help with his investigation – or sometimes hinder it. Paris realises there’s more to this case than meets the eye; something much bigger than one tiny body.

95

Breaking The Lore Discovering fairies at the bottom of the garden is supposed to be good luck. Except when the fairy’s been crucified. Two pieces of wood shoved into the ground; one tiny form fastened on to them. Sometimes, thought Inspector Paris, being a cop could be the worst job in the world. And sometimes it was bloody amazing.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What do you reckon?’

Williams, the pathologist, lay on the grass examining the scene. He shuffled round and peered up at the detective.

‘I’m not sure what to make of it,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’

‘You think I have?’

‘Maybe, Boss,’ said a voice over Paris’ shoulder. ‘We do get to see some mighty weird stuff. Remember I told you about those talking fish?’

‘Bonetti,’ said Paris. ‘That was “Finding Nemo”.’

For the umpteenth time, Paris cursed the process of allocating Sergeants, and how the hell he’d been assigned this one. Life could be a right pain. Still, considering the grisly sight in front of him, it had to be better than the alternative.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘we’re not in Hollywood. This is Manchester, for God’s sake! The leafy suburbs granted, but your archetypal northern industrial city. Things like this just don’t happen here. Mind you, things like this probably don’t happen anywhere. Help me out, Jack. Is it even real?’

Williams pushed his glasses back on his nose, then pointed at the grass.

‘We’ve got what appears to be blood,’ he said. ‘There’s also bruising around the wounds. Hence the answer is: yes and no.’

96

He clambered up to his feet, brushing the soil from his trousers. ‘“Real” – yes. “It” – no. Most definitely a “she”.’

Paris crouched down to survey the scene once more. The two sticks were in the ground in an X shape, with one wrist and the opposite ankle attached to each. The petite head drooped forward, golden hair obscuring the face. Over the shoulders rose silver wings, glistening in the early morning sun. Below the head he could see a body covered by a pale blue dress. A body that was clearly female, with a sensational, albeit minute, figure.

‘Can’t argue with you,’ he said. ‘Living doll. Well, a dead one. But she can’t be a fairy, because they don’t exist. So what are we dealing with? Freak of nature? Genetic mutation?’

‘Maybe,’ said Bonetti, ‘she really is a fairy. Or a woman who got stuck in a washing machine.’

Paris looked up into his assistant’s permanently vacant face, sitting on top of the solid, rugby player’s torso. He had to admit, a good person to have around if they ever got into a fight. Plus a reasonable enough chauffeur. Apart from that though, about as much use as the Gobi Desert white water rafting team.

‘A washing machine?’

‘Happened to me, Boss. One of my shirts shrunk when we put it in extra hot.’

‘I see,’ said Paris, as patiently as he could manage. ‘And did it grow wings at the same time?’

‘No Boss. Our machine’s too old for any of them fancy settings.’

Paris contemplated life with Bonetti as his Sergeant. The alternative didn’t seem so bad after all.

‘Right,’ he said, turning back towards Williams. ‘Any 97

suggestions which actually come from Planet Earth? Or anything else you want to tell me?’

‘I can’t give you a definitive cause of death until we get back to the lab,’ replied the pathologist. ‘I can tell you I don’t appreciate working in a circus.’

Paris raised his head. Shouting voices rumbled down from the house, hidden from view by a thick privet hedge.

‘There you go,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wondered why these people with great big gardens split them into different sections. Now I know. It’s to stop the media from seeing the bodies.’

He looked back at Williams, who frowned at him.

‘Bound to happen,’ said Paris. ‘You know how fast the papers pick up on the slightest hint of a story. Then someone reports finding a murdered fairy? Just be glad my guys are holding them back. Besides, we’ve kept it down to three camera crews and half a dozen reporters; I think we’ve done pretty well.’

Williams tutted.

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ he asked.

‘I never enjoy finding the victims. Even when they’re fifteen centimetres tall. But I do like interesting cases.’

‘Indeed. You’ve certainly got one here.’

‘Boss,’ said Bonetti. ‘Do we tell the press anything?’

‘Do we hell!’ replied Paris. ‘Say it’s a hoax. I’m sure Jack can whip up whatever you need.’

‘Of course,’ said Williams. ‘Give you time to whip up the killer, I suppose.’

‘Yeah. Only that won’t even be the hard part. That’ll be dealing with the lawyers.’

‘What do you mean?’

Paris stared up at him.

‘How do you kill someone who doesn’t exist?’

98

* Paris plonked his empty glass on the coffee table as he let out a long, slow sigh.

‘Needed that,’ he said.

His living room’s only reply was the ticking of the clock.

Quarter past eight, fourteen hours since he’d been called out this morning. Doesn’t time fly, he thought. And it hasn’t even got wings.

He poured himself a refill and contemplated it for a moment. A cop on his own with a bottle of whisky was hardly an unusual occurrence. Some of them drank due to stress, or depression, or failed marriages. Paris drank because he got paid to. Years ago he’d hit upon a novel way of cracking cases.

He would go home, gather his thoughts, study the evidence, analyse the problem – then lubricate his renowned logical brain to work it all out. This method had helped him to solve a number of complicated investigations successfully. So successfully, in fact, that these days his superiors not only knew what he did; they also supplied the alcohol. Of course, the more confusing the assignment, the more thinking it required. Paris considered the current case. He reflected on the peculiar crime scene, the astonishing corpse. He sighed again.

‘Looks like I’m going to need another bottle.’

The current one stood on the coffee table in front of him, half empty from previous nights. It occupied pride of place between the ashtray and the screwed up takeaway wrappings. When she came to clean tomorrow, Mrs Doherty would be telling him off. Again.

He plucked his cigarette from the edge of the ashtray. One deep inhale, one slow breath out, then sit back on the sofa.

All day long, through mountains of paperwork plus 99

interminable meetings, the mystery had gnawed away at him like a hyperactive beaver. Now, finally, some quiet time. Time to think.

A tapping sound interrupted the tranquillity. Paris turned his head towards the French windows. Long evening shadows of trees spilled in from the garden, with no sign of a person.

The Inspector got up, and walked to the back of the room. He leant against the window to examine the gathering darkness.

Nothing.

The tapping came again, down by his feet. Paris peered at the ground outside. He could just about make out something moving in the gloom. Crouching down, he pressed his face against the glass.

Two black eyes squinted back at him.

‘What the hell?’ said Paris. ‘A bloody crow?’

He banged on the window.

‘Shoo! Clear off!’

The crow remained in exactly the same place, indifferent to the protests. Paris stood up to unlock the door. He opened it and waved his foot at the feathered nuisance.

‘Get out of it!’

The bird glared up at him.

‘That’s not very friendly, is it?’

Paris lowered his leg and stared at the creature. Had it really talked to him? In a broad Cockney accent?

‘Did – did you just speak?’ ‘’Course I spoke,’ replied the crow. ‘Do I look like a ventriloquist?’

It tilted its head to one side, peeking round him.

‘You letting me in then?’

Paris moved out of the way, holding onto the window handle to stop himself from falling over. The crow hopped past him, then jumped up and flew onto the coffee table. It 100

appraised the lounge from its new position.

‘Not bad,’ it said, as it strutted around. ‘Even if it does stink of curry. Bit boring though. Bit functional. No cushions or photos or stuff. Never settled down, eh? Too busy with your career, I suppose. Know the feeling.’

It circled to face him, nodding its head towards his left hand.

‘Gizza fag.’

‘What?’

‘One of them you’re holding. Fag. Tab. Stick of death. Go on. Pretty please.’

Paris let go of the handle and stepped very slowly across the room. He fumbled in his shirt pocket for another cigarette. Lighting it with his own one, he bent down, extending his arm so the bird could reach. It closed its beak over the filter tip and began to smoke.

It winked at him.

‘Cheers.’

Paris moved round the table to his seat. He lowered himself into it carefully, not taking his gaze off the strange thing in front of him. It appeared the same as every crow he’d ever seen; maybe half a metre long, with glossy black plumage and intense beady eyes. It smelt the way he imagined they would too; of grass and trees and eating from bins. But it sounded like an East End gangster.

At least it had stopped talking, presumably while it concentrated on getting the cigarette going. Whatever the reason, Paris wasn’t about to complain.

They studied each other warily for a few moments, neither of them speaking. Eventually the visitor broke the silence.

‘You seem kinda shocked.’

Paris blinked and shook his head.

101

‘Really?’ he said. ‘I’m talking to a crow who’s smoking a fag. So yeah; I’m a little surprised. This isn’t a conversation I ever planned on having.’

‘Me neither. But you know how it is. Times change.

Someone gets killed. You’re Inspector Nick Paris, right?’

‘Think so. Unless I’ve become Dr. Dolittle.’

‘Nah,’ replied the bird. ‘You’re still you. I’m Malbus. Saw you this morning, from up in the trees. Heard one of the others talking. Said you were the detective in charge. Took a while to find you afterwards. Had to do a bit of detective work myself.’

It puffed away, blowing out smoke rings. Paris shook his head again, trying to take everything in. Gradually his policeman’s logic overcame his confusion.

‘Someone gets killed,’ he repeated. ‘You said “someone”.’

‘I’m using your language. What do you want me to call her? Anyhow, what do you reckon she is?’

‘We’re still investigating.’

The crow leant towards him.

‘Yeah, yeah. What do you think? You personally.’

Paris evaluated the question. He knew how he was supposed to answer, even if he couldn’t accept it himself. In the current circumstances, however, it didn’t sound quite so mad.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘it’s a fairy.’

Malbus stood up straight again.

‘You’d be right. Well done. Her name’s Daffodil.’

‘You knew her?’

The bird ruffled its feathers in what looked like an approximation of a shrug.

‘Friend of a friend.’

Paris frowned.

‘I see. You acquainted with many fairies?’

102

‘A few. They keep themselves to themselves. Now me; I’ll talk to anyone. Only not normally humans.’

‘So why are you talking to one now?’

The crow hopped closer to him.

‘Because you need my help,’ said Malbus. ‘And we need yours.’

‘We?’ ‘Yup. See, young Daffodil being put there on them two chunks of wood: it’s a warning.’

‘A warning?’ said Paris. ‘You mean like a reprisal for being an informant?’

‘Not exactly. If they wanted her for talking, they would’ve stuck her head on a pole. This is much worse. It’s sending a message.’

‘A message to the fairies?’ asked Paris, still struggling to believe this discussion was happening.

‘Not only them. To the goblins, the trolls - to all magic creatures.’

‘How do you know this?’

Malbus looked at him.

‘I’m a talking crow,’ it said. ‘How magical do you want?’

Paris didn’t reply. The bird moved the cigarette round in its beak.

‘Your scientist bloke did brilliant this morning,’ it said.

‘Swiping a doll from the next garden, sticking some tissue paper on the back. Weird enough to make it worth calling you in; rubbish enough to be clearly bogus. Very clever way of keeping things under wraps. ‘Course, me and you understand it ain’t no fake. So who do you think killed her?’

Paris considered for a moment. Discussing an active case was absolutely not part of normal procedure. This, however, was not a normal case.

‘I told you,’ he said, ‘we’re investigating. I presume we’re 103

after one of those perverts who torture small animals.’

The crow nodded its head. Flakes of ash dropped onto the table.

‘Knew you would. This is why I’m here. You can stop hunting for anybody like that. Matter of fact, you can stop looking for anyone. Well, anyone human.’

Paris almost felt his eyes growing wider.

‘Not human?’

‘This is what the message means. They’re called The Vanethria. And they’ve come to get us.’

Malbus paused. Whether for dramatic effect or simply to have another suck on the stick of death, Paris had no idea.

Then again, he had no idea about a lot of things right now.

His famously rational mind battled to cope with the current irrational situation. Questions flashed around his head, fighting to come out.

‘Y’see,’ said Malbus, before Paris managed to ask any of them, ‘we’ve been hearing rumours for a couple of weeks now. Things going on which got us a bit concerned, but you lot wouldn’t ever notice. ‘Course, we wanted to check ‘em out before we said anything. We were trying to keep things under wraps too. It’s all out in the open now though, innit?

So this is where you come in.’

‘Me?’ asked Paris. ‘What do you mean?’

The crow said nothing, and seemed to be distracted. It swivelled its head towards the French windows. Paris followed its gaze, peering out into the garden. He could see nothing except darkness.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Heard something,’ replied Malbus, without moving.

Paris faced the bird again.

‘Never mind hearing things. You’re supposed to be telling me what’s going on.’

104

The crow turned back toward him. It took a long, deep drag on its cigarette. Then it exhaled slowly, as if savouring the taste. ‘’Fraid not,’ it said. ‘Didn’t have as long as I thought.

Bugger.’

It leant forward, dropping the fag into the ashtray.

‘You better do some more detective work,’ Malbus said quietly. ‘Get on your interweb thingy. Find out about magical creatures. Everything you can.’

‘That’s it? That’s all you’re telling me?’

‘Yeah. I’ve got to go out there.’

It glanced through the open doorway into the garden.

‘Right,’ said Paris, not fully comprehending what he was agreeing to. ‘Are you okay flying in the dark?’

Malbus cawed.

‘I’m magic, remember? Night time’s the least of my problems.’

It jumped off the table and flew out the way it had entered. Paris tried to watch it go, but the crow vanished into the blackness as soon as it left the room.

Paris walked over and closed the door. He shook his head once more.

‘I am definitely going to need another bottle.’

105

106

Helen Walsh

gratiniayangra@hotmail.co.uk Helen has been telling stories since before she could spell, initially by making her parents transcribe for her. She has studied English and Creative Writing at every opportunity, graduating with a BA (Joint Hons.) from Liverpool John Moores University. She currently studies at LJMU as a Writing Masters student.

Z’kani When Lucy Mase nearly died in a hit-and-run when she was seven, events were set in motion that would change humanity forever. When an undercover agent from another dimension, Z’kani, integrated herself into a human family for five years, she never realised how quickly her life would crumble around her.

107

Z’kani The something at the window scratched again.

She fought her eyelids until they were half-way open. Nothing but the lamplight shining in the dark glass and, if she squinted, the tops of the trees, black against the greying night sky.

Still the scratching.

Soft voices drifted in from the corridor outside, from the nurses’ station. Quieter tonight; no new patients, no emergencies.

She tried to call out. Only a rasping wail passed the tube that shook against the inside of her throat.

The heart monitor next to her burst into life and she groaned, the alarm jerking her away from sleep again. It always went off when her heart went too slow, right as she was about to fall asleep. Now she was awake, heart pounding, it fell silent.

Footsteps near the bed.

The nurse with the dark hair, stooping to hold her hand.

‘What’s the matter, sweetheart? You need anything?’

She managed to squeeze the nurse’s hand, then waved at the window. Her fingers wouldn’t curl up so she could point.

‘What’s wrong with the window sweetie? You have another bad dream?’

The scratching at the window wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t.

She tried to shake her head, but rocking it pressed it against the pillows and she whimpered at the odd softness on the right side of her skull. The nurse repositioned her head so she was staring at the ceiling again.

‘Let’s see if we can give you more pain killers, okay?’

Painkillers kept her away from everything, too sleepy to 108

focus. In her few lucid moments, she wondered if that thin, fragile connection between her mind and body would snap, casting her adrift. She wanted to be awake.

She gripped the nurse’s hand tighter as the woman went to pull away, trying to keep her from the machine. The nurse just patted her hand and vanished towards the end of the bed. She came back into view holding the clipboard before doing something to the bags on the stand, then said goodnight and walked away.

The odd, cool tingling spread along the inside of her elbow. The softness in her skull faded along with the tiny, fluttering feeling behind her breastbone and the phantom thickness in her throat when she thought of the window.

The lock grated softly. The window opened.

A light, cold breeze drifted across her face, leaving warmer voids on her skin where the tubes covered her, threading through the fabric of the bandages to brush her scalp, relieving some of the itchy heat.

A whispering, a dragging – higher up from the top of the window. Then two short thumps on the floor and a squeak like when Daddy wore his new shoes.

Then footsteps, closer.

The metallic ring and papery swish of the curtain pushed back a few inches. More soft footsteps, the curtain whispered back into place again, then quiet.

Two indistinct shapes stood at the foot of her bed.

‘Burglars?’ she wondered hazily. ‘Spiderman and Batman?’

They weren’t superheroes, though they both had cloaks...

Cloaks?

Not cloaks.

Wings.

Angels.

109

She tried to announce this discovery. The air sighed wordlessly through the tube.

The angels came closer. One knocked Flopsy Bunny off the cabinet with its wing and stooped to rescue her, whispering a soft ‘sorry!’

They looked so funny for angels, their feathers were black, and they were wearing dark trousers - not smart ones like Daddy wears, casual ones with lots of pockets - and sleeveless tops instead of white dresses. Short, dark hair and no halos either, but their skin did look gold-ish. Maybe that counted? The shorter one with the spikier hair smiled, showing its teeth.

She squinted.

The angel’s teeth were sharp, the canines clearly extending past the line of the rest of her teeth.

She blinked. Gold skin, normal clothes and pointy teeth.

She flexed her hands. Unlike her voice, they obeyed her, and she mimed writing something.

The first angel, the taller one, straightened up and nodded. Holding Flopsy to its chest it searched the drawers for a pen, careful it didn’t hit anything again. Its wing rustled against the edge of the bed, and she stared. It had feathers at the top, but the bottoms were weird. Looked more like a bat’s than an angel’s.

The tall angel passed her one of the get well soon cards and a pen, then looked down at Flopsy like it had forgotten it was holding her and put her back on the cabinet. The angel with the spiky hair sniggered.

She coerced her fingers into working, gripping the pen and digging black lines of ink into the laminated paper. The letters not as neat, had large spaces between them or squished close together, but legible.

She turned the card round for them to see written in 110

large, spidery capital letters, ANGELS? They looked at each other, eyebrows lifting, revealing their pointy teeth as they smiled.

Their eyes flickered, the bigger angel’s lightening to a soft green, the shorter one’s shifting to yellow.

She scowled. Her heart quivered as she flipped the card around and scribbled again. Why would angels laugh at being called angels?

Unless they weren’t…

When she showed them the card, she had scored five deep lines of ink underneath ‘ANGELS’.

Her heart felt funny now, quick, fluttery beats bouncing off her ribs. The feeling would go soon, it always did.

They both paused, glancing up at each other for a moment. The spiky haired one lifted its shoulder slightly, then turned back at her and smiled, sinking down into one of the chairs and taking her hand, squeezing it lightly. Its other hand, so warm, brushed her hair back, not scared of the bandages and tubes like Mummy was. The chilled, burning knot lodged behind her sternum unwound and she relaxed.

She was right. They were angels. So there was nothing to be scared of anymore.

The card slid from her hand and towards the edge of the bed. The funny feeling had gone, her heart slowing again, steadily dipping past its usual beat.

She felt so sleepy.

She thought she heard the alarms wailing again, but they were so far away. She hoped whoever they were for would be okay. She heard voices, but they were nothing but a comforting murmur to drift away to.

111

i

Writing on the Wall Writing on the Wall is a dynamic, Liverpool-based community organisation that celebrates writing in all its forms. We hold an annual festival and a series of year-round projects. We work with a broad and inclusive definition of writing that embraces literature, creative writing, journalism and non-fiction, poetry, song-writing, and storytelling. We work with local, national and international writers whose work provokes controversy and debate, and with all of Liverpool’s communities to promote and celebrate individual and collective creativity. WoW creative writing projects support health, well-being and personal development.

If you have a story to tell, or would like to take part in, or work with WoW to develop a writing project, please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.

Writing on the Wall info@writingonthewall.org.uk www.writingonthewall.org.uk 0151 703 0020

i

2