Lenny is a movie fan who wants to be a private eye. He’s unsure how he’s going to make the transition from part-time mortuary attendant to the status of his hero Philip Marlowe. Anything is possible in the US of A, he thinks.
On the evening of March 26th 1959 a cadaver under a white sheet on a gurney is wheeled into the San Diego mortuary.
Continue readingBrother Giovanni is a Franciscan and lives in the Convento San Francesco in San Miniato Alto in Tuscany. He is short, tubby, bald and wears a plain brown robe tied with a white cincture; he has sandals on his bare feet. At the age of sixty-nine he is excused work outside the Convento in the lower Arno valley. He now welcomes Via Francigena pellegrini who are walking to Rome. This, he struggles to enjoy.
Continue readingHis mother’s end of terrace house is silent, even tranquil, filled with summer sunlight, but for him the clamour of memory is deafening. Standing in the dining room, overlooking the neat back garden, he draws his finger across the table and the backs of the chairs and smiles; it is as if her life-long enemy, dust, has realised that their battle is, at last, over. He sits at the table and looks at his feet resting on the salmon pink carpet and wonders, as always, why she chose such an impractical colour; it was uncharacteristic.
Continue readingIt is October 1951. Pip, aged five, is with his mother, Gwen, and his father, Arthur, in the New Theatre at a charity variety show. They are sitting in the front stalls next to the aisle. His parents are smartly dressed and Pip, in short trousers, blue shirt and short sleeved jumper, sits on his mother’s folded up overcoat so that he can see the stage where an aged male comedian is in the middle of his act.
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Phil Cosker 