Lawe sits in the doorway of an empty shop on Salter Gate. Heavy rain falls; orange light from a street lamp illuminates each drop before it splashes onto the pavement. He stares at the rain thinking, It don’t look like rain, more like the bleeding sea falling. I never learnt to swim; if it was the sea I could dive in and that would be that. Nar, not for us. He makes a pair of fists and does a quick left-right-left punch into the splashing rain. He remembers how it began. He takes a good swig from a can of Carlsberg Special and shivers.
Continue readingMonthly Archives: August 2021
A Change of Climate
It’s early morning in La Jolla, Southern California. A large shingled single storey house stands amid sub tropical plants. Clouds of spray from spurting sprinklers make rainbows in the sun while in the background there’s the perpetual whoosh of the Pacific Ocean. The front door opens. Mike yawns and walks, dodging the spray, across the wet grass to the mailbox. There’s a single letter, with the franked postmark: Hull – Great Britain. Postage Paid.
Continue readingThe Men in Blue Serge Suits
It’s 1969 and, while in America Sarah has secured a new job in Cardiff, finally allowing her to be near her father, Selwyn.
Continue readingThe Odeon
It’s a Saturday afternoon in 1960 and the Odeon cinema is screening Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘Spartacus’ with Kirk Douglas as the eponymous slave. Oliver, fourteen, and his first girlfriend, Roxanne, aka Roxy, sit next to each other holding hands in the middle of the stalls. They have a great view; the two rows in front of them are empty. Oliver lacks the confidence to put his right arm around Roxy’s shoulders. He wonders if that’s allowed on a first date. Oliver whispers to Roxy, It’s a great film. She nods, lost in the excitement of the battle between the slave army lead by Spartacus and the Roman forces led by Crassus (Laurence Olivier). The camera pans across the many dead bodies of men, women and children. Roxy wipes tears from her eyes.
Continue readingThe Ossuary
Nick discovers the word ossuary when he’s fourteen in 1960 and delights in its euphony. Discovering its meaning, he finds it perfectly describes Candleton Boys’ Grammar School in which he’s imprisoned; what better description could there be for the old white male bones of the staff? Leo, a fellow classmate, and the only Jewish boy in the class, is less concerned with the sound of words than the ugly meaning of the whispering anti-Semitic innuendoes he endures.
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