Geoffrey is proud of the home he and his late wife, Isabella, created, for themselves and their daughter, Anita. In the ten months since Isabella’s death he’s kept the three promises he made her: he’s kept a close eye on Anita, eaten three meals a day and kept himself ‘respectable’.
Continue readingHeavy rain sweeps over the overgrown back garden. Margaret, or Peg, as her husband Oliver calls her, is staring out of the kitchen window of the rambling Victorian house that has been the Cromwell family home for nearly fifty years. Gusting wind bends the silver birch and the black barked laurel hedge shudders in the growing storm. It’s not rain, Peg thinks, it’s the ocean, the cold Atlantic, as squalls of rain, thick as waves, pound the window panes. She imagines white horses breaking on the lawn. The once herbaceous borders, now populated by weeds, drown under the weight of rainwater. The leafless branches of trees wave frantically as if they are the masts of long lost galleons. Are there pirates to be saved, Peg wonders? I’m all at sea, she thinks, lost in memories of her daughter, Ellie.
Continue readingThe reverend Ellis Evans, the parish priest of St Gwynno’s church in the village of Ynysybwl, South Wales, is a long way from home and still somewhat bemused by his new role as the ‘Visiting Shepherd’ at The Church of the Lost Sheep in San Diego, California. Learning that the church is the home of an evangelical TV station, Ellis begins to doubt the ‘special job’ the Archbishop found for him.
Continue readingAdam has late diagnosed metastatic prostate cancer. On being told he has, at the most, sixty months to live (years are not used in calculating life expectancy when dealing with cancer – a year is too long a metric), he says, Sod that.
Continue readingAngelo, a widower, has lived in the apartment block for nearly ten years; it’s a friendly place and he prides himself on knowing all his neighbours. On the eve of May Day, he’s in the local supermarket in the queue at the till behind a stranger carrying a small child. As the man picks up his shopping, a plastic bag of onions splits and onions bounce off the conveyor belt and all over the floor. The child wails.
Continue readingThey have no telephone at home nor callbox nearby, so Abraham is on an errand for his mother to see how his uncle Fred is doing in Cardiff Royal Infirmary after a heart attack. It’s the school holidays and Abraham’s been as bored as only a thirteen year-old can be. Not now. He’s sitting on the number 6 trolleybus whistling Buddy Holly’s hit, ‘It doesn’t matter any more’.
Continue readingIt is the evening of June 7th 1983. Archie and his wife, Rosy, are watching a Conservative Party Election Broadcast on their twenty-two inch PYE television in the front room of their council house on Orchard Park Estate in Hull.
Continue readingAs I approach my sixtieth birthday it’s time to commit to paper the extraordinary events I experienced in 1960 when I was ten. I find it hard not to think it was all make-believe; even my own wife and grown-up children think it was a coping mechanism in the face of trauma.
Continue readingSteph is visiting her partner, Adam, who’s in an induced coma in an Intensive Treatment Unit. She stands at the foot of Adam’s bed, staring at the array of apparatus that’s keeping him alive. She had expected silence but the room is filled with the incessant bleeping of the many life-support machines and monitors surrounding the beds.
Continue readingTwo brothers in their seventies, Vinnie and Oz, share a ‘squeeze’, Vanessa, on holiday in Oludeniz. It’s late morning and they’re in the ‘Lions of St George’ bar where there’s ale on tap and English St George flags hang flaccid amidst cigarette smoke.
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Phil Cosker 