Friday, 30 September 2011
Saturday, 24 September 2011
The Garden
On the other side was a man’s house. He was very interesting as he had an enormous television and loads of musical equipment, like radios and speakers and plastic eggs that recorded sound. He had no sofas or carpets and only one tea cup and his house smelt heavy like a sickly kind of smoke, but he let the children climb over the wall and come inside when it was raining in their garden. Sometimes the students who lived at the top of the huge wall at the back of the garden leaned over and said, "Hi!" They dropped gummy fried eggs into the garden and Christopher ran round and round in circles with his hands out.
Sylvia climbed onto the wall, which was a little taller than she was and jumped, with her limbs flailing in a way that she thought might cause her to break her leg or die when she hit the hard ground. She lay on the floor for several minutes, then put on her boots and looked at the cat who yawned again and half closed his eyes, his black lips curling up at the sides like part of a smile. She imagined the cat with another family on the next street along. They fed him salmon in a little silver dish. A bead of sweat broke free of her hairline. She kicked the cat in the softness of his stomach three times and when Christopher cried she kicked him too so that he screamed and swore. She tore at her dress and threw a rusting bicycle at the heavy door. The woman from next door squawked “Shut up you brats!” and the man from the other side looked worried from behind the smoke in his upstairs window. Three students heard Christopher screaming and popped their heads over the wall in unison and said, “Hey! Leave that cat alone!” But still their mother did not come out of her bedroom.
Sylvia looked at Christopher who was lying on top of the obese cat and realised that she would probably never be a little girl ever again.
Friday, 23 September 2011
Sunday, 18 September 2011
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Bath Time
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Tuesday, 30 August 2011
She’d grind her teeth and they’d say, ‘Are you working on the Sullivan project Soph? Jeez we’ve got to be up early haven’t we?’
A few years after Sophie has stopped bleaching her hair and using mascara she realised that during conversation she could watch pupils ticking back and forth like the hands of a clock. Men and women glanced behind her and counted the seconds they had to spend talking.
Sunday, 28 August 2011
He hit me (and it felt like a kiss)
Sunday, 14 August 2011
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
Monday, 4 July 2011
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Monday, 27 June 2011
Flies
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Saturday, 25 June 2011
Thursday, 23 June 2011
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Francis smiled.
She put her hands in the pockets of her fleece and felt the ten 'lucky seven' cards she had bought the week before. They were scratched smooth, curling like grey slugs.
It had been raining when she sat on the vast flight of steps outside the market scratching them. She laid them out in front of her sensible shoes and blinked at them in disbelief.
She had not won a pound.
She reached the counter and shouted through the glass, “you got a bin back there love?”
The girl scowled as she peeled the tickets off the counter, “you’re not very lucky are you?” She had short blonde hair, which was dark at the roots and a nose piercing.
The line of customers reached to the back of the home-ware aisle and a woman in a museli patterned dress was crunching her trolly wheels.
She tried to pat one of the girls long fingers, but the blue plastic separated them.
The girl was bathed aquamarine light.
“You’re going to be famous soon.”
She opened up her wallet and held up card to the glass so that the cashier could see. She pointed to her photograph and to where it said, ‘Psychic Network’ and wiggled her eyebrows emphatically. “You’re gonna be famous Hunny."
Francis cupped her left breast and said, "I can feel it.”
She left the supermarket feeling better that she had in years.
Monday, 13 June 2011
Peter laughed.
Sunday, 12 June 2011
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
Saturday, 28 May 2011
Friday, 27 May 2011
Thursday, 26 May 2011
Wednesday, 25 May 2011
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Thursday, 19 May 2011
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
On Bohemia
“You have always been a medium sized man.”
“Well no, not before we met.”
“I bet that before we met, you were a medium sized child.”
“At some points in school I was actually tall for my age.”
“Don’t say that or I will ring your mother and ask and then I will hand the phone to you and you will be stuck in the hallway for forty-five minutes. Then you will be depressed again.”
“What is so bad about being medium sized anyway?”
“It is just quite boring” she paused “you can’t help it though. Being medium.”
****
It was more or less thirty years before my parents got divorced. He, Adrian Harvey was a bruised car salesman with a loyalty to a tie covered in sunflowers that nobody, even my mother, could understand - she, Virginia Harvey, an ethereal shoe shop manager who had felt huge grief with every promotion and proved it with tattoos that showed up on her aging skin like a cow brand. Right up until the end they sat with their fingers locked in painful jubilation, him drinking too much, and my mother not drinking enough.
After the break-up it was no stranger than before, they instantly seemed to spring apart in their differences as though they were two people that could have never even inhabited the same room, let alone the same bed. I mainly saw my father at night. He always had trouble sleeping so we would go to the late night cinema showings and drive around, up onto The Downs to watch the sunrise. One time we stumbled into the most rundown cinema in the City and found ourselves, father and daughter, confronted with huge orange breasts so close to the camera that their brown aureoles blurred. We sat through the whole film, both of us wearing our office uniforms, even though we could almost feel the heat coming off each other’s faces. When the lights came up we sat until the cinema emptied,
We made the same mistake a couple of times, once with a boyfriend of mine Karl Grating, who sat in horror as the fleshy credits rolled up, while my father and I glowed next to each other in pleasurable bohemian tolerance, chewing on a bag of foam bananas as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Sometimes we talked about the subtext to the rough sex or the tone of the plot, whether we found it progressive or not. We found special ways to share in our own pretensions, and would often discuss colour schemes and design faults in crisp packets and burger wrappers. At home we were drowned by my mother's stories of Keith Moon, acid trips and body prints. Enough times for me to remember, which must have been considerable as I would only have been six or seven years old, my father pulled the living room curtains closed and switched off the lights to project films on the wall above the mantelpiece. He invited neighbours over to show my friends and I, thrust into adaptations of Pinter plays, draped in robes and symbolic colours.
My father had several affairs, all of them wretched and most of them lasting for less than two weeks. The most significant of his women was Edna, a talented musician who played the clarinet in a Church in
The morning after my father left the sky was like a peach. I drove out to the small town house my parents had lived in, located to the side of a square of art galleries and fish and chip shops. While I walked through the house collecting up the rubbish she sat in a grey dressing gown in her small, fruitless kitchen. I noticed that pieces of the house were missing, the good arm chairs and the eight steel bottomed saucepans. Without them, the house looked like a toy box, filled with worthless crap.
I put her to bed that evening, her head small in the enormous bed of cushions and Indian blankets. My father’s spare set of pyjamas trailed on the floor as I sloped over to his side of the bed. A stack of self- help books covered in cigarette ash and orange peel stood in a precarious tower by his bedside cabinet. I wondered if my father had read them while my mother slept, oblivious to his feverish page turning. The sheets were softer than I had imagined but the bells that were sown into the faces of elephants jangled all night long and I didn’t get much sleep. My mother had given in to the large brandy which I knew would put her to sleep but before I turned out the light she slurred into my ear, with hot breath, “He just couldn’t offer me the stability I needed honey…” She stretched her arm around me and shivered lightly, “…he was just too... too...” she sighed “…too bohemian, or something.”
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Thursday, 12 May 2011
Saturday, 7 May 2011
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Friday, 29 April 2011
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Monday, 25 April 2011
Sunday, 24 April 2011
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
Thursday, 7 April 2011
SURFING UNICORNS
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
Sunday, 3 April 2011
Saturday, 26 March 2011
Friday, 25 March 2011
Thursday, 24 March 2011
The Library
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Toff Rents Out Front Step To Hobo
So I thought I should do something about it, considering I was feeling so sorry and all, but I wasn't sure if the guy was asleep or drunk or what so I figured I'd have to shout because I didn't want to get close to the fellow in case he was drunk and aggressive and most probably even mad. So I shouted "Hello fellow, what're you doing down there?" and after a few seconds he answered me and he didn't look aggressive or mad and I asked him if it didn't annoy him what with people treading over him all day and night. After a while I stopped trying to understand what he was saying and an amazing idea came to me. The guy was showing me a trick that the little dog could do and I had to interrupt him and the whole time I told him the idea I had this really warm and happy feeling because I was thinking about my porch and how much wider and more sheltered and private this fellow would find it. So I told him my address and he looked embarrassed I think, what with someone being so kind and everything. I wasn't sure whether he would come and sleep on my porch that night or not but the next morning, when I went out to get the paper and my bread and milk, I was careful to step over him and his little dog without waking them.