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My father left Damascus like a lover creeping from his mistress’ bed in the dark of night. He didn’t even look back towards her as she slept unawares. He left her, but she had her revenge, as she would haunt him throughout the years.

“I arrived in London amidst the smog of the 60s,” he would say.

“In the beginning, I found it very difficult that there was one day I remember just sitting on a curb in Bermondsey and crying.”

He was 18 years old.

“Why did you leave Baba?”

“The ambition of youth, plus your grandmother having died, there was nothing keeping me there. My waters had dried up as the Syrian saying goes.”

Baba watered my childhood with his reminisces that eventually flowered through the yearly vacations and trips to Syria. I gradually learnt to understand his love for Damascus. He would often tell me that once you drink from the springs of Barada, you are overcome by an eternal love for the place.

“Baba I’ve heard people say that about the Thames!”

“Rubbish…there is no water like that of Barada!”

***

“Ladies and gentlemen this is your pilot speaking. We have just been cleared to land at Beirut International Airport. We will be landing at 0030 hrs local time; the temperature is 10 degrees and the skies are clear—”

I look out of the window at the boisterous lights of Beirut breaking the boundaries of the Mediterranean Sea, trying not to spill over. The plane tilting sideways to give me a panoramic view of the Levant’s approaching majesty. 2017, and it has been 6 years since my last visit to Syria. No longer able to fly direct, you have to take a detour via Lebanon. I look at the empty adjacent seat that reminded me that I had gone against everyone in my determination to make this trip. My companion backing out last minute. My life also on detour, to where I don’t quite know.

At passport control, I fumble around for my documents, handing over my Syrian ID card.

“Do you have a visa to stay in Lebanon?”

I’m still rummaging.

“If not, you will need to be across the border within 24 hours or risk deportation.”

“Sorry, here it is.” I hand over my British passport.

His face contorts into a plastic smile.

“Welcome to Lebanon,” he says.

“Don’t worry I have a taxi waiting for me, I will be in Damascus in less than three hours.”

Asshole… under my breath.

Thud, stamp, passport.

I exit the airport into the thick of night and the gnawing January air. Solitary in my apprehension and wondering where my taxi driver is and all but eager to reach Syria safely. A car approaches and he rolls down the window.

“Bayan?”

“Yes, are you Abu Ahmad?”

“Yes!” He jumps out to help me with my luggage.

Grateful to get into the gaudy taxi, I look over at him, barely able to move his limbs from being so over-dressed.

“Are you cold, akhti?”

“No, no, I’m fine thank you.” I stifle a smirk. I can’t help but smile, remembering how averse Syrians are to the cold. The engine starts and I feel apprehension crushing my chest as we begin to snake our way towards the mountain ranges, through Zahle and eventually the border. I watch Lebanon disappear behind us and the cedar tree flag gradually flutter out of view as we drive along a no man’s land.

“Can you see? Not a light in sight! The war has drained the coffers,” he says.

He hasn’t drawn breath from the moment we left the airport. It’s been one monotonous small- talk-heavy exchange. I am trying to be polite, but all I can concentrate on is the desolation. I am watching the car curve along into a new unknown. The headlights seem useless barely making a dent upon the night. I strain my eyes in an attempt to see the terrain that I remember, to see the country that I love, to recognise some semblance of the past. Impenetrable.

This is not the Beirut-Damascus exchange…normally bustling with commuters. Cedars in the rear, jasmine on the approach. The closer we seem the heavier my heart begins to feel. My only fear on having made my way to Heathrow a few hours earlier, was that I want to remember Syria as it was. I don’t want my memories stolen along with the souls that I have lost. I want to retrace some footsteps as if walking backwards in the snow, savour them one last time I suppose. I don’t know, it all sounds like a bad idea now.

The taxi, a migraine in itself, the chandelier is jingling and really jarring on me. The worry beads swaying above the mirror at every bend in the road, not to mention the incessant intrusive questions. He means well, but I’m just tired.

“What brings you back?”

“How much do you earn?”

“How old are you?”

“Are you married?”

God! Will he not stop? I think. Next, he will want to know what contraception I’m on!

Ya Allah, please make him stop! Maybe if I tilt my head against the window and pretend to sleep, maybe then he will allow me a moment with my thoughts. He taps me on the shoulder. Lord!

We roll into the first checkpoint.

“Don’t say anything, let me do the talking, don’t say you have any foreign currency, just don’t say anything at all!”

“Ahlan Abu Ahmad!”

Huge soldier slaps him on the back.

“Look at you, looking well, this taxi driving must be a prosperous number for you?”

“Allah wakeel Abu Tarek, I barely make enough to feed my four children. This is my second job as you know.”

I watch him hand over packs of cigarettes and rolls of cash to the hyenas sitting around on cheap plastic chairs. I can see their AK47’s propped up and ready. One of them is tending to a coffee pot on a gas canister as he looks up and stares at me. I hold his gaze as I wonder how much money he has made from the desperation of people crossing this very border.  How many free cigarettes has he lined his tarred lungs with? How many people has he detained and stopped metres short from freedom? Blood money.

Abu Ahmad breaks my thoughts.

 Yala akhti, come out we need to go into customs.”

Empty. Gone is the chaos of people trying to obtain their stamps. There are two men sat at the desk beneath the mandatory portrait of Bashar and his beady blue eyes that seem to follow me around. I hand over my passport and ID card. He looks up at me with contempt at having seen the foreign passport, stamping it and all but throwing it back. One violent entry stamp and I am given the permission to continue down towards the Damascus basin. We speed off.

The view as we reach the monument of the Unknown Soldier, the lights…a raven mane studded with diamonds.

 “At least this is the same,” I say.

Tears begin to pool in the corners of my eyes.

 “You are lucky the electricity is back on, they cut it every three hours. Where are you staying?”

“Muhajarrin, district 10.”

 “That’s very high up, akhti! Only thing being is that to get into Muhajarrin, checkpoints, and more checkpoints. You are literally perched right up Bashar’s arse, so they will check every in and out!”

“Funny how he chose to remain in a house amidst the civilian population!” I retort.

Electricity suddenly cuts. Black. A veil envelopes Damascus obscuring her gemmed hair.

Checkpoint.

We stop and I am blinded by the torchlight that is being thrust in my face.

“Where are you going?”

“Muhajarrin, district 10, I am visiting my cousins, my name is Bayan Al Turki, this is my ID.”

…and all I want to do is get to my cousins shitty flat.

“What happened to our country?” I whisper to Abu Ahmad.

The soldier takes out what looks like an improvised bomb detector and shoves it under the car while the other illuminates his view. Cursively they shine the light throughout the back of the taxi, glaring at us before beckoning us through.

“Stop the car please I need to vomit!”

I heave my nerves out onto the sidewalk. He passes me a bottle of water, and I try to wash the fear from my face. Nothing could have prepared me for this.

“Use the water sparingly,” he says.

I’m not quite sure why he is saying this.

The streets are quiet, empty, bar the filthy street cat that looks up at me, as I drink out of the Bukein water bottle. I pour some out as it dashes towards me and starts lapping it up.

“Even the cats are thirsty,” he says.

Still, I don’t understand.

The taxi struggles up the mountainside, screeches to a halt and I am jostling to grab my belongings as there is a soldier telling us to move on. I am barely on the pavement and I watch the car disappear like water down a plug hole. I fill my lungs with relief, I am here in one piece at least. My cousins – abandoned by time – in a decaying flat they inherited from a dilapidated great aunt. It clings to Mount Qasyun like a baby to its mother’s breast. I haul my suitcase up the staircase and knock on the door and I’m almost immediately engulfed by hungry limbs. Oh god, the familiarity of their smell, the incense and jasmine that transports me to the stalls outside the Umayyad mosque. It smells like childhood memories. Layers of moth-eaten cardigans, scarves and shawls, and Hana’s thick-rimmed glasses, she is kissing me and pulling at my luggage entreating me to sit, while offering me a blanket. The only source of heat coming from an old diesel stove in the back room. I’m sure to die of carbon monoxide poisoning before any bullet can get at me. She insists on swaddling me. I examine their faces through the dim candlelight, they have aged, seem shorter and somewhat concave. Their complexions sallow as they examine me intently, hurling questions right and left. Their faces…war-beaten.

“How is khalo and mart khalo?” They ask in unison like Siamese twins.

“How are your children? Mashallah, we see their pictures on your mother’s Facebook! So beautiful!”

I look around, taking in the old family photos. The sofa that my aunt would always occupy all the way up until death claimed her in her sleep. I imagine her having dissolved into the cushions. They are rushing around to make me some tea, yet I am numb from my journey, everything seems familiar but unfamiliar. I am trying to process. It’s clear that they are in full blown ‘war mode’, yet are treating my impromptu visit no different than any other. Suddenly the electricity switches back on, they dash over to make sure the phones are in the chargers, and to recharge the battery-powered lamp. The lights, without mercy, reveal the decay of the flat and its inhabitants. I always knew deep down the journey back was going to be hard, but the more I see, the more I wish that the lights would stay out, that the sun not rise.

 

By morning I have succumbed to the several layers to keep out the cold. Lama is snoring gently as I wake to the call to prayer. I tiptoe past to get to the bathroom. Twisting the tap, the pipes groan in agony from behind the tiles giving forth little more than a spurt. I twist again, both ways, nothing but the remnants of a rusty tanker. Hana pops her head round the corner.

“Habibti we should have warned you…there is no water, the rebels cut off the supply from Ain al-Fija. What you used last night was our last of the tanker.”

“So, what do you do?”

She hands me a massive Jerry can.

“Get dressed,” she says.

With two Jerry cans in tow, I come out into the piercing blue momentary bliss. The view, there it is, the birds compassing above and beneath the morning canopy. Then I see the people coming from all avenues, with their buckets, containers, wheelbarrows and buggies. The old, the young, all heading in one direction. I join the pilgrimage as I look around me at the stories etched on their faces.

I ask a woman next to me.

“Where are we going exactly?”

“Just to the next street, there are three taps, we will have to queue for a while.”

A camera crew appears from nowhere.

“Why are they filming?” I ask her.

It’s the Syrian National TV.

“Yes, but what are they doing?”

I spoke too soon as they stick the camera in my face.

“Tell us miss, what do you think of the water facilities here that thanks to our benevolent president, has been opened up to counteract the rebel’s act of aggression in cutting off water supplies to the city?”

My Camden girl element heats up…

“Are you being serious? Is that…is that a serious question? Can you not see for yourselves? I’ll tell you what I think of the fucking taps!”

Camera cuts and they hurry off.

“You should be careful miss, you can’t speak like that. They are all Mukhabarat. Get your water and go home, I can see that you have come from outside, please be careful.” Fear in her eyes.

Eventually, I hurl the Jerry cans back up, as I watch a small child not much taller than her can drag hers. Damascus has been somewhat spared the worst of the conflict, but seeing this is just too much to take in.

In the bathroom I crouch my nakedness over a bucket, my body angry with cold. Jealously safeguarding every drop, making sure that they fall meticulously back in so that I can use them over and over and over, as Lama brings me in a boiled saucepan full and pours it in to warm me up. Today I cherish every atom of H2O. I wash my face, my body, my hair, brush my teeth, and finally flush the toilet with my one bucket of well-used water.

 

I needed to get home, or rather I wanted to go home. Before setting off from London I had asked my parents for the keys to our flat. Two days later I got a call telling me they had been misplaced.

“What do you mean misplaced, Mum?”

“It’s been six years. We haven’t been back in six years. You will have to take a locksmith up,” she said.

“He will think I’m a squatter trying to illegally occupy!”

“Don’t be dramatic, the caretaker will be there to confirm your identity.”

 

A bucket full cleaner, I set off down the mountainside to the street they call the Line.  I always thought that it was called this in reference to the old tram lines that used to run through Muhajirin. Today there is a line, a line of humanity queuing as far down the road as I can see. Queuing behind two enormous Red Crescent water tankers. The air smells thick of acquiescent defeat; the people are tired. Tired of a government that is willing to kill every last one of us in order to cling to power. Oh god, why did I come? What was I running from or to? What questions did I need answering? I need a locksmith to open the door so that I may rummage through my memories for answers.

I peer through his frontage into a quagmire of bolts, locks and keys piled in organised chaos.

“Marahaba akh.”

He looks up at me from his newspaper.

“How can I help you, akhti?”

“I lost my keys, I need you to open my front door. It’s been six years.”

“Hmm this is not a simple request, the police could get involved, and do you have any relevant documents?”

“Well, only my ID, plus the caretaker will be able to vouch for me.”

He hesitates but only momentarily, and then starts looking through his locks. He places a selection before me.

“Which one would you like?”

“I’d not thought that far ahead! The most secure, I suppose.”

“This one is made in China, the cheapest. This one is German, but the best are the Yales…hard to come by now, they are smuggled in, and that’s why they are the dearest. But the German locks are still reasonably priced and a sturdy choice.”

“Ok, well I will take the German one.”

He grabs his toolbox and locks the store up.

“Where is your car?” he asks.

“Sorry, but I don’t have one.”

Squeezed into a microbus tight with far too many commuters, we wind our way up and over towards my front door that I had locked years ago, under entirely different circumstances. There are stickers on the window, prohibiting the use of mobiles at the checkpoints: I take a picture of it. In the daylight, it is clearer as to how many there are. My thoughts are often disturbed by the echo of gunfire when suddenly I hear the thud of a mortar hitting the ground in the not so far distance. I spin around nervously for eye contact, for assurance, but everyone is oblivious. I look out at the green spaces that are no longer green, but rather parched nakedness. Damascus is dishevelled, ravaged like a woman brought to her knees. I can hear her weeping upon the breeze. People would say they didn’t want to go back and see her, they wanted to remember her in her glory. I understand now.

There it is, my front door, as he takes out a drill and begins disfiguring the lock. I push open on the vault to my past. Six years of dust particles prancing upon the beams of light streaming through into the tomb.

I collapse into a chair surrendering to the tears that have been slowly welling up from the moment I embarked at Heathrow.

The locksmith, his face, he also understands.

“Akti, have faith in God, place your blessings upon the prophet. Stop crying.”

“I’m sorry.”

He stands there out of some sort of brotherly duty. He doesn’t have to, his job is done, but he stands there in silence like a sentry to my mourning. I stop. He places the new set of keys in my hand. Non-descript German set of keys, keys to an empty carcass of a flat. Keys to a graveyard of memories. The life I had known was lost to the past, lost to the war, along with the keys. He leaves.

I close the door and open the balcony shutters to let in a bit of light.

 

That’s the balcony where that summer, my sister got me wasted on cokes and vodka.

“Bayan look what I have!” she said, with a mischievous glint in her eye.

That night on the balcony amidst the stars and the August heat, along with all the neighbours on their balconies. Those who were smoking their hubble bubbles, the animated backgammon player that kept swearing at his khara luck and the lovers exchanging clandestine glances. Sit there long enough and you had a Rear Window into their lives. You would hear the conversations, arguments, jokes…even lovemaking, a curtain twitchers heaven. I remembered my mother telling me to grow up that night.

“Come inside before the neighbours see you, Bayan!”

As I rugby tackled my sister to the floor.

“The scandal! You girls are out of control…you’re a mother, Bayan you should have more sense, you will wake the baby up!”

Fits of giggles, Mum gives up.

“I seek forgiveness from Allah, I wash my hands of you both!” As her hand went to her mouth to hide the smile invading her face.

 

Every corner of this flat retells a story, every piece of furniture a witness to my life as it was. Pulling back the dust sheet from on the side cabinet, I open its door, and there it is, the vodka bottle still in the place that we had hidden it. Waiting for someone to pick up from where we had left off and be merry all over again. Most of the balcony shutters are closed now.

I need to pee, thankfully the cistern has the contents of its last refill. I open the tap…not so lucky. I look at myself in the mottled mirror, at the tear-stained countenance staring back at me. All I want to do is wash my face. I rub furiously at the sadness streaking my cheeks. Maybe I should wash it with the vodka.

 

I was drunk that night, bent over a bucket for an entirely different reason, as I pleaded with the elephants to refrain from jumping on my head. My sister laughing uncontrollably as she held my hair up, while I filled it.

“All I gave you was two glasses you’re such a lightweight!”

It was all so vivid, yet so distant as well. My baby girl waking up for her feed the next morning.

“Your mummy has had a night off and has been super bad.” As I guiltily fed her a substitute bottle of formula.

That mottled mirror witnessed me cupping my breast and gently squeezing on the nipple in a downward motion to encourage the flow of milk. Milk washing away with the water pouring from the tap unrationed. My sister walking in conveniently at that very moment.

“What are you doing?!”

“I’m trying to get the vodka laced milk out of my tits you idiot!”

“I should get social services onto you when we get home!” As she ran out laughing.

 

The reflection I see now is so far removed from that hung over carefree summer morning. I wish I can express the melancholy out of my body. I wish there were a contraption to expel the empty misery that has replaced the abundant milk. I can’t stand being in here much longer, there are too many ghosts tugging at my sleeves asking me where I have been. I close the shutters, slam the door and with that awful bunch of keys, I lock the memories back into their tomb.  I step out onto the street. Thirsty. The flat has dehydrated my senses and spat me out without a trickle of water, nor a single answer.

A bygone traveller to the city once wrote, ‘begirt with gardens and orchards and watered in and out by waters, rivers, brooks and fountains cunningly arranged to minister to men’s luxury.’

“Can I have a bottle of water please?” As I enter the local grocery store.

I catch the microbus back to Muhajirin. I greet my cousins and with no time to lose, I make ready the jerricans to go and fetch our evening’s supply of H2O.

 

 

Farrah Akbik is a British-Syrian based writer that writes to raise awareness of the hardships of Syria and Syrian refugees, particularly women. Born to a Syrian father and Moroccan mother, she resided in Syria over two periods during her childhood and later as a young adult, where she studied English Literature and Language at Damascus University. She is currently doing her Masters in Creative Writing in London.

Johnny Pulp sees his name tattooed all over the Lower East Side. On doors and walls and up the sides of fire escapes, there he is.

He’s still somebody else the first few times he sees it. Still carrying the name he picked up in some other living city. He knows that if Johnny Pulp is tagged up from Chinatown to the East Village, then someone must already be Johnny Pulp. But he doesn’t mind. He is made of multitudes. Climbing into bed that night, he dreams a placard of the revolution lettered; WE ARE JOHNNY PULP. 

When he wakes up in the morning, that’s his name. 

Johnny Pulp used to be a girl. It’s not his favourite thing about himself, but that’s the deal. Four years ago he started strapping down his peach-pit tits with surgical tape, and he’s been shedding names ever since. 

(Sometimes, in the choking summer of the hot cities, he peels off the tape and lies on his back so his chest pools outwards, almost flat. The internet hive mind has always told him you’re not supposed to strap ‘em, but surgery costs money and Johnny Pulp has places to be. He’s never quite got the hang of the other boys’ writhe, the way they flip inside-out binders up over their hips like selkies wrestling back into their own wet skin.)

In Liverpool, Johnny Pulp fell in love with a man and so he’d had to leave. What was he going to do, tell him? Asleep, he’d ground himself down into the mattress and dreamt of things fizzing inside of him. Woke gasping and grasping at the fitted sheet. But Johnny Pulp doesn’t take his clothes off for anybody. 

In the other places he’d been, there were people who wanted answers. There were questions, like have you had the, will you have the and what if you change your mind? He is nothing if not a constantly changing mind. He has never understood why it would matter.

Just like the t-shirts, Johnny Pulp loves New York. He’d maybe like to stay. When he sees the word flicker and disappear down the side of a subway train, stay clacking away down the tracks, his heart itches. He knows this feeling. His best and oldest friend. It means it’s time for him to start folding up his clothes again. 

He is a quick getaway. A subway, and then a plane, and then he is gone. When he lands in the next place, Johnny Pulp writes his name on a toilet door and leaves it, ready to be chosen by somebody else.

 

Liam Konemann is a queer Australian writer based in London. In 2019, he was a participant in Spread the Word’s London Writers Awards scheme, and in 2020 his short story ‘There Is No Zodiac Year of the Absent Father’ placed second in the Streetcake Magazine Experimental Writing Prize. He writes music journalism, fiction and poetry, and is studying for an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford.

‘This morning I imagined breaking up with Alice. We’re standing under a plane tree in Ruskin Park and it’s raining hard and she’s staring at the black edge of a storm front coming in–’

‘That all seems very specific.’ I tried to keep my face neutral.

Connie frowned before she remembered to look lost in her revelation. ‘I look down at raindrops kicking up the dust and that’s when I say it.’

I shot a pointed glance at the sparkling waves, the tan and black-striped cliffs as the boat hugged the coast of Lanzarote. ‘Doesn’t seem like today’s the day then.’

Connie scowled at me. 

For the fourteen months they’d been going out I’d told Connie to break up with Alice roughly once every three days. It was usually in the wake of an incident like the one last night. Alice had spent much of the evening perched on a barstool in whispered conversation with the moustachioed restaurant owner as he plied her with drinks. When we’d tried to take her home she’d screamed at us to let her go then lain face down on the smooth black tarmac of the road by the harbour.

 ‘Just let me finish, Jem. I’ve come to realise over the last few days, you know, getting some headspace out here, that it’s something I need to do. But this tree in the storm is not actually how it’s going to happen, is it?’

‘Right.’ 

‘So I’m going to break up with her tonight.’

Nausea surged through me. Had she found out? I wanted to hang my head over the edge of the boat and spill the contents of my stomach into the glassy blue water but instead I gave Connie a long, slow look from behind my sunglasses. Often when she talked about Alice she’d stare down at her feet but now she sat, chin at a noble angle, her black hair pinned up in elaborate loops, staring out as if in the glint of the sun on waves she saw a challenging but ultimately worthwhile future, free of Alice. No, she clearly hadn’t found out. Breaking up was her own inspiration.

The sea wind slapped me in the face as we rounded a headland to catch a glimpse of the rocky coast of La Graciosa. Guilt spread inside me like octopus ink when I thought about what Alice and I had done yesterday evening while Connie was out buying more beers. 

‘Are you sure, Con? You have been together a fair while now.’

‘Are you fucking kidding me? I thought you’d be delighted. You hate Alice. You’ve been nagging me to break up with her for months.’

‘But how’s she even going to survive on her own? You told me she couldn’t sleep alone without the lights on.’

Connie’s face hardened. ‘She’ll have to learn. I’m going to tell her tonight.’

‘That’s going to make for a super fun last day of the holiday.’

‘I’ll do it after we go out for dinner, stupid.’

 

As our boat ploughed on through the choppy water towards the tiny port of Caleta de Sebo, I decided I would have to tell Connie. Once she split up with Alice there would be nothing to stop Alice telling her the truth about what had happened yesterday. The very thought of what this would do to our friendship made me feel sick all over again.

I imagined Alice now on the narrow terrace of the apartment, sunbathing on a plastic lounger in that stupid yellow bikini. She had long, colourless hair which hung down her back and always looked artfully salt-tangled, like she might just have stepped off a beach. She was tall and slender with a cat’s narrow face. If she wore make-up I couldn’t really tell. I wasn’t sure why I’d let Alice bumping into me last night – her coming out with another beer, me coming in for a shower, us awkwardly too close in the doorway – become arms locking, skin scraping, fingers digging in, biting at each other’s mouths. Her breath had tasted of whiskey overlain with mint chewing gum. It wasn’t clear until we lurched backwards together onto the sofa inside that this was fucking rather than fighting. 

When Connie and I disembarked on the tiny island nothing stirred in the streets of low, white buildings. We spotted a bakery, a couple of restaurants and a scatter of private houses before this gave way to a sandy, unpaved road. There were some attempts at marking out rocky fields but quickly agriculture and the flapping plastic-sheeted remains of polytunnels petered out into uneven, scrubby heath.

I should tell her now, I thought, every time we stopped or Connie turned to me to speak, but I didn’t. When we reached the beach on the opposite side of the island we scuffed around disconsolately. I felt like I should be enjoying myself more. Blazing sunshine alternated with the deathly shadows of huge clouds. Other couples spaced themselves out along the vast sands. No one looked like they were thinking of swimming. Two smug women had taken shelter from the nagging wind in the dunes and were picnicking.

I nodded in their direction. ‘Aren’t those the posh women who were on our boat?’

‘Oh, yeah.’

‘Were you eavesdropping on what they were saying?’

Connie gave me a steady, green-eyed look. ‘Of course.’

‘What did you think?’

‘Of what bit? It was pretty endless.’

‘When she said that her therapist said that no matter what you consciously think you want, you usually want the opposite?’

Connie shrugged. ‘Makes a kind of sense.’

‘Really? So whatever we think we want, we actually want the opposite? So you’re going to break up with Alice because actually you want to stay together with her forever?’

Connie bent to pick up a whorled shell but dropped it again when she saw the spiral point was chipped off. ‘Yeah, probably.’

‘That’s bullshit.’

‘How are you so certain?’

‘Because I know what I want.’

‘Lucky you.’ Connie swooped on another shell. This time, it was a perfect ivory ice-cream cone.

 

There were restaurants on the island, not many but enough. We spent a frustrating fifteen minutes trying to get money out of the single ATM, using different cards and wearily selecting ENG as the language each time, before Connie’s battered credit card finally worked.

I had decided I would definitely tell her over lunch but every moment of Connie hoovering up the red and green sauces with half a loaf of bread and licking her fingers while she skimmed through the flimsy pamphlet, La Graciosa: The short but difficult history of an isolated island, now seemed painfully precious. She was someone I was going to lose. Someone who soon wouldn’t speak to me. Who would hate me.

As Connie kept reading from the guidebook I was flooded by the most intense sadness I’d ever felt. 

‘Jem, hello, do you want that last bit of roll?’

‘Connie, I–’ I meant to confess but the words just weren’t there. Who would go for Tuesday night nachos with me? Who would I phone when I broke up with yet another girlfriend? Who would lie on towels with me in Burgess Park when south London got too hot in the summer?

She was waiting, head tilted, dark eyes like an inquisitive blackbird. 

I nodded at the roll. ‘Go ahead. You have it.’

 

The waves had been flattened by a day of sun and the little boat rocked us gently back to Orzola. Connie was outlining how impossible it was to be in a relationship with Alice. She usually restrained from criticising Alice at all but now it was like she couldn’t hold back anymore. ‘And she’s selfish, she’s so fucking selfish. And I know this is an awful thing to say about your partner but sometimes I look at her Instagram, like that one today, and it just makes me… I can’t even.’ 

I’d already seen the post she meant. If a privileged white girl, tearful at the injustice she sees in the world, can add her voice to this cause, then I’d like to do that, Alice had written about a Black Lives Matter protest on Instagram. ‘She’s completely awful,’ I said, ‘Such an attention-seeker.’ But the memory of how strands of her hair had lodged in my mouth as we fucked came to me. 

‘Why are you so fucking obsessed with Alice?’ my ex-girlfriend, Tam, used to say. I guess she thought I just liked complaining as it was obvious that Connie and Alice would never break up. 

‘Come on, though, there must be some things you like about her?’

Connie tilted her head to the side. ‘When we first started going out I used to wake up in the night because she was clinging to me so tightly. She’d hold me in this special way with her arm tucked right around me and it totally used to melt my heart–’

‘Right, there you go–’

‘Yeah, but one night I got back late when her friend, Max, was staying over and they were curled up on the couch together asleep and she was holding him like that and I realised that this wasn’t our special thing at all, that I could have been anyone.’ Connie opened the Styrofoam shell we’d got from the bakery and took a bite out of one of the doughnuts.  ‘Anyway, that’s enough about that. Don’t you want some airtime?’

I shrugged and helped myself to a doughnut. ‘What for?’

Connie left what was clearly meant to be a meaningful silence. 

‘Did you want half of this or not?’

Connie took it off me and munched through to the cream filling, interspersing her bites with heavy, raised-eyebrow looks. ‘You don’t want to say anything about how you’re doing after breaking up with Tam?’

‘Damn, those cream ones were good.’

‘Jem, really?’

‘We should have got a couple more.’

I rushed into Alice’s room, so pleased to have got to her first that she must have thought it was good news. ‘Look, last night, I don’t think we should do this anymore.’

She paused with one magazine page held in the air. ‘Do what?’

‘Yeah, absolutely, I mean it’s never really been a thing even, has it, I mean? Not worth mentioning.’

The more flustered other people got the cooler Alice became. She let the glossy page fall flat. ‘Jem, do you agree with Vogue that socks and sandal pairings are the ultimate for city-dwellers with wanderlust?’

I left, closing the door softly behind me, but I was halfway down the corridor before it occurred to me that I hadn’t got what I thought I wanted out of Alice at all. Out of the window I could see another white-washed apartment with green railings buried in early evening shadow. It was beyond me, if I stopped to break it down, why I’d had sex with her. I didn’t actually fancy Alice, although I could see that many people found her beautiful. I wanted to pretend to be ill in order to miss tonight’s dinner but this would only draw more attention to me.

 

We had to haggle with the waiter for a table as most of the restaurants in Orzola seemed desperate to close before 8pm. He seated us reluctantly under an awning with wrap-around plastic windows, like we were in a caravan extension. It should have been a sea view, but the blackness outside only exposed the licks of salt left by the jumping spray. One German couple sat at a table at the back. His tucked-in shirt overhung his belly, she stayed resolutely silent. There was no eavesdropping to be done there.

As the sea crashed on the concrete wall across the road, it was easy to look at Alice, huddled in a jumper in the ugly light of the restaurant, as if she were still just my best friend’s girlfriend, no one I’d ever be interested in. I’d hated her for so long. But even as I looked, I remembered the way we’d grabbed and pinched and pulled at each other as we fucked, that I’d been wetter than I’d been in a long time.

We ordered apathetically. Alice perked up when a carafe of local wine arrived and poured for everyone. It was bound to be shocking. I took a mouthful. It was. Tension crawled up my spine when I looked around the table and even Alice seemed jittery. ‘I think we should all go water-skiing tomorrow. There’s a place that does it in Arrieta.’

‘Alice, no one wants to go water-skiing.’

‘But that’s the thing about water-skiing, you never think you’re going to like it before you actually go. The first time I ever went water-skiing on the American River–’

‘The American River’s not a thing. What’s that? A river that runs through the whole of America?’

‘Shut up, Connie,’ I interrupted. ‘It’s a river in California.’

Connie looked surprised but Alice didn’t even bother to give me a grateful grin.

‘My friend, Max, had a motorboat so most weekends he’d just throw a bunch of water-skis in the car–’

Alice made Connie self-important. That had been my earliest and most bitter objection to her. Connie started talking about staying in Alice’s father’s empty flat in the Barbican when they went out in Shoreditch one weekend and the next thing I knew they were going skiing in Klosters. It was the ‘no big deal’ tone in Connie’s voice, her shining eyes as she dropped these names that made me want to shake her and tell her that anyone who genuinely took it in their stride wouldn’t sound like that. But now it seemed to me that going out with Alice had lit Connie up and I felt another wave of sadness.

Alice was still talking. ‘And then all the guys were like, “Genuinely was that your first ever time water-skiing?” and I was like, “Duh, um, yeah–”’

I could see Connie getting more and more annoyed as she snapped the heads from her prawns and piled them up on the side of her plate.

‘I think because I’d been so adamant I was going to hate it and that I didn’t even want a go but when I actually got up there–’

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ Connie’s tone, as she got to her feet, was too loud like a theatre director calling a halt to an appalling rehearsal. 

Alice’s grey eyes widened. I shot Connie a look that said what the fuck?

‘Sorry, sorry but I really can’t do this any more.’

‘The water-skiing?’

Connie swivelled towards Alice, one hand on her hip. ‘No, Alice, not the water-skiing. Everything.’ Her face looked suddenly gaunt in the harsh light of the restaurant. ‘I don’t think this is working between us. We’re just really different people. I need to break up with you. Sorry to do it in such a public way but there we are.’ Connie pulled her cardigan off the back of her chair. ‘Right, I needed to say that and now I need to leave.’ 

I became very still in my chair, convinced that if I didn’t move I would be forgotten. Alice stared across the table at Connie, her face blank. I reckoned she’d already had three glasses of wine on an empty stomach. This was close to when the demonic, screaming version of Alice usually kicked in.

‘Fuck, where are the apartment keys?’ Connie patted her pocket, her expression stranded between defiant and sheepish.

Alice did look upset but unexpectedly she nodded. ‘I think that’s a good idea,’ she said calmly to Connie. ‘We really haven’t been getting on well recently, have we?’

Connie and I could only stare. Alice had clung to Connie, begged her forgiveness again and again after her drunken outbursts. To see her taking this so calmly was frightening. What was she building up to?

Connie stood there. I could see from her frown that she felt she should say something more but didn’t know what.

Alice gave me a cool smile. When I swallowed and tried to grimace back it hurt. Was she about to tell Connie about yesterday evening? I pressed the edge of the rivet on my denim shorts so hard a line of blood appeared on my thumb. 

Alice took a calm sip of wine. ‘If you need to go, Connie, then just go.’

‘Right.’

I handed my set of keys to Connie and she left the restaurant, shoulders bunched, her walk stiff and artificial under our watching eyes. ‘Thanks,’ I said, once the dim blur that was Connie had disappeared past the plastic awning. Relief thrummed through me. ‘For, you know, not mentioning.’ 

‘Thanks for what?’

I pushed the scales of my cooling fish with my fork but the idea of eating now seemed ludicrous. ‘Well, anyway. Right.’ I got slowly to my feet. ‘I’m not super hungry. I should probably go and see how she is.’

Alice beckoned for me to lean across the table towards her. Reluctantly I did. ‘I haven’t forgotten what happened between us yesterday.’

Where I thought I’d see her expectant gaze on me, her narrow cat’s face waiting to pounce triumphantly on whatever reaction I showed, a sad appeal shone from her grey eyes.

‘I know you think you hate me, Jem,’ Alice whispered, her breath heavy with wine, ‘but you don’t.’

And in that moment my head emptied of everything except that perfect ivory shell Connie had found on the beach.

 

 

Lucy Yates is a thirty-nine year old queer woman who is from Manchester but now lives in London. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and has had work published in a variety magazines and journals since then, including ‘How to Shoot down President Trump’s helicopter with a surface to air missile’ in Litro and ‘Cheating is Sexier’ in Clav Mag.

 

Near Brownsville, where the Rio Grande zigzags from border to border, a man and his twenty-three-month old daughter float face down in the murky river. Beneath his sodden t-shirt, she’s clinging to her father in one final, primal embrace.

*

“Alaska, that’s where it starts.” 

Kingi’s smoke ring floats for a moment, then dissolves into thin air. “Godwits travel twelve-K to get a good feed in New Zealand. Longest known non-stop flight of any bird. 

Not like the others – godwits they don’t even stop for kai.” 

He studies the glowing embers at the end of his smoke. “Maori call them kuaka. 

We reckoned the godwits accompanied the spirits of the dead. We all have our secrets, see godwits breed in the northern hemisphere, up in the tundra, so we thought they were very mysterious because we could never find their nests.” He cracks a ragged grin. “Still used to eat them though.”

He smears butter on a tan arrowroot biscuit, oval as a rugby ball. “Tiny birds – 

only weigh about as much as a block of butter, eh.” He pops the biscuit in his mouth in one go. “Make that long journey every spring. Takes them about nine days. Driven by nature to survive. Pretty scraggy and hungry by the time they get here. All that way…” He sweeps the white-cloud sky with his battered hand. “Helluva migration when you think about it.”

*

In Clifton, your taxi – booked by the nice Spanish man at reception – arrives outside your hotel right on time. It’s a black Mercedes; gleaming outside, plush and clean inside. 

You smile, sink into the leather and enjoy the cool contrast to the strange heat-wave that’s scorching Bristol. 

As you wend the snaking streets of the old port city, the driver hears your accent and asks where you’re from. 

He grins. Long way from home. New Zealand nice place, he says firmly, and he tells you that he knows people who moved to live down there. 

He’s Kurdish, from Afghanistan. Back home, it’s bad, he says. The exchange rate. Bad. 

People here think the trouble is over. He shakes his head. The war. The bombs. He woke in the night and he and his family and friends all had to go to a bomb shelter. In the morning, 

he woke with blood streaming from his hand. Shrapnel from the bomb…He bites his lip.

Over three thousand miles from home. A fifty-two-hour drive, non-stop. He’s a chemical engineer, moving people around the West Country in a taxi.

*

Near Bodrum, three-year-old Alan Kurdi sprawls on the golden Mediterranean sand. Flotsam.

*

When he saw the famous photo of the boy on the shores of Bodrum, he says it made him cry. Mothers, they drug their babies to stop them from crying, he explains. 

Tears. The taxi-driver looks at you in the rear-vision mirror, eyes pleading, searching for some shared humanity. You know?

Yes, you say. But there’s knowing and knowing. In a truck, you repeat. 

He nods. Between the wheels, there’s a space and the metal is turning and your arms holding…holding and the road is wet and dirty and you are holding…and the metal is turning…

The axles, you say.

Yes. Axles. Moving all the time. Not in. He hums like a CD player searching for a track. Under, he says, trying to show you without taking his hands off the steering wheel.

He travelled under an articulated truck, wedged between the axles, using his leather belt as a makeshift harness. He rubs his forearms…axles moving…moving and my arms…. 

And you can’t imagine. Yet anyone who survives that endurance test deserves a place.

The boy, he wants to talk about the little boy on the beach. 

I see that picture and I want to cry. He moves his head from side to side, but the trauma doesn’t shift. I saw them, the mothers and they give the little babies the tablets so they don’t cry and get found out…and sometimes…he shakes his head…too much you know…they don’t wake up.

He drives you past the lush Downs where the kids are playing cricket and punctuates your conversation with World Cup Cricket news. And you understand his need for normal. 

After witnessing all he has, he would want to smack something very hard, to drive it far, 

far away. And you realise the word, that poetic word, sorrow…that’s what you are seeing, that’s what he’s living, his nightmare is stuck, replaying. You can’t tape over PTSD.

He’s not sure who will win the match later today, but he’s backing England…although the 

Black Caps are strong, he acknowledges graciously. 

*

In Istanbul, when you are a refugee trying to swim to Europe and you fail and you drown, your destination is not a continent. It’s a grave without a name. All you are fit for is a number.

*

“Round the Waitemata estuaries, the pollies are letting developers build and build – even though they all know full well that the run-off water and soil erosion from their construction leaves heaps of sediment – and that smothers the food that the godwits rely on.” 

Kingi raises his wiry eyebrows. “We better put up a fight. For a country so keen 

on sending its kids north, you’d have to be a mug to let developers bugger up the  godwit migration.” He plucks a thread of tobacco from his bottom lip and mutters. It sounds like fuckwits. “Happy to plaster the cute little birds on stamps and fancy wine labels though.”

He grinds out his tab end. “That’s marketing and the media for you, eh?”

*

From Ireland in the 1840’s, Canada is a better destination than New York as far as the suits in the mass transportation business are concerned; the fewer regulations the better. Stack ‘em high below decks, huddled cheek-by-jowl and sell ‘em cheap. 

Coffin ship crossings are for the brave or the desperate. Made broke by the fare, they are crammed in. Crossing the Atlantic in six weeks, already weakened passengers taking flight from the Great Hunger, are provided with as little food and water as is legal – if the suits obey the law at all. In steerage, you might see the light of day for an hour each day. At most.

Luck? There aren’t enough shamrocks. Up to one in five migrants, or even more, die on the voyage. Some say it’s more like fifty per cent.

So many bodies are thrown overboard that sharks learn to follow the ships. They too are looking for an easy feed.

*

In Alnwick, five generations ago, Earl Grey – of scented tea fame – turns his mind to a deadweight in the overflowing workhouses; the problem of surplus girls.

In the new southern colony, nearly eleven thousand miles away, there are eight men for every woman. In Sydney, wives and domestic servants of good character are needed.

Two birds, one scheme. Across the thirty-two counties of Ireland, the Earl has orphans of the Great Hunger vetted, for the Three R’s, and screened to check they are free from disease, industrious and of good character. 

The girls, some of them your relatives, make a teen gamble, choosing a beautiful tropical adventure over the frightful conditions of home and the legacy of serial famines. Most have already lost one parent. They take the horse and cart to the port, to a buckshee voyage on the bride ship. It’s a no-brainer. Far away fields are always green.

Four thousand girls, transported to the bottom of the world to become little mothers, drudges for convicts with notions. Where would a girl straight off a remote subsistence farm have learned the proper way to polish silver? The best laid plans…

Soon the girls are labelled as bog-trotting pig chasers who can barely tell the inside of 

a potato from the outside. Alternative facts about the girls’ incapacity, insolence and immorality flourish and spread across the new colony. Tales of the girls’ neglect and cruel treatment; those stories sink.  Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Or a bad one. 

*

In the plush, comfortable Mercedes, the driver ferries people around the city all day, every day. Passengers bitching about the traffic and the swing bridge and getting stuck again and the price of the fare. People who think it’s all over, over there.  No, he says.  Not over at all.  Maybe it is just beginning.  Life for them is very bad.

He strokes his long, silky, black beard.  Sorry about New Zealand, he says and you know he means March 15th.  The Christchurch Massacre.  He hands you his business card, a receipt on the back and says, that lady prime minister, she’s very good.  Real leader.

You ask his name.

Irfan, he says, and he wishes you well.

You thank him and leave the cool interior of the Mercedes and face the searing heat. 

When you get back to the hotel that night, you look up his name. In Arabic, Irfan means knowledge, awareness and learning.

*

In Aotearoa New Zealand, doused in myths, you think: we understand migration. We know about othering. The chiefs, Paoa and Tupaia and the seven canoes – maybe more waka – and then centuries later, Pakeha follow the man-god Cook’s wake. Displacement is in our air, in our bones.

Empire, OE. Every woman, man and their dog travels to those cloud-smudged islands that are drenched by sun and rain. They land chasing something…whales, kauri gum, gold. 

Those are their public stories and then there’s their private business. Running after relatives. Running from the law. Running from disease. Running from the end of the world to the end of the world. There’s always another side of the story. 

Around the world, you stumble over history, you witness journeys, knowing that the others are always out there, the others you never see, the ones you never hear. Alaska, Afghanistan, America, Calais…all the others, the ones in transit.

Kingi says a godwit is nature’s jet-fighter, sleek and efficient, using her energy to fly, to survive. He rolls himself another racehorse and reckons that people are like godwits, it’s in our nature to fight to survive, to take flight to get by, eh?

Alex Reece Abbott is an emerging-UK-based New Zealand-Irish writer working across genres and forms, her stories are widely published and anthologised, including in Bonsai: Best Small Stories from Aotearoa New Zealand; The Broken Spiral (UNESCO Dublin City of Literature Read); The Real Jazz Baby (Best Anthology, 2020 Saboteur Awards) and Heron (Katherine Mansfield Society). She’s a graduate of Curtis Brown’s Creative programme and a Penguin Random House WriteNow finalist.

 

Whenever there’s a crisis, the women in my family cook. A health crisis in the family, that is. I’m not talking about the tsunami in Florida or the genocide in Scotland or the famine on the Isle of Wight. Just common or garden family matters of birth, illness and death. Thus, we had appendicitis flapjack (my cousin Mary), banana bread broken leg (me), lung cancer linguine (Aunty Joan), heart attack hummus (Grandma Phyllis), miscarriage pine nut and pistachio salad (Mum), haemorrhoid hash browns (also Mum). And so on. When I’d learnt to read and write, I made my mum a handwritten recipe book with all the best recipes in it: eczema eggy bread (me), tiramisu earache (my sister), cheesy chip hip replacement (Grandma Phyllis), rheumatism rum baba and cream (Aunty Joan).

 

So it wasn’t surprising when, in 2031, I tried, by cooking, to make things better. I was only eleven. We’d had three winters of terrible flooding; crops were ruined; whole villages in Wales were starving; a new strain of the virus was wiping out Bristol, even though the city had been in lockdown for the last eight months; we Londoners were relying on food-drops by drone from the Taoiseach. And Mum had a lump in her right breast the size of a marble, plus another, in her armpit, bigger than a golf ball and making it impossible for her to lift and use her arm. The lumps were inoperable, Mum told us.

“What does inoperable mean?” I asked my sister, who was three years older than me and had burst into tears when Mum said that word.

“It means she’ll die,” said my sister. “She’s got metastasis.”

“Metastasis?”

“Spreading.”

I knew about spreading. I was a Covid kid. That’s what they called everyone conceived, born, or just very young when the first wave of Covid hit. We were used to death, and I’d probably half-guessed what the word ‘inoperable’ meant. But I didn’t want my mum to die. This was a crisis. I decided to cook.

 

*

 

Men shrank.

No one knew why. It began the year I was born. Not overnight. But by Christmas 2020, at the Downing Street press conferences, apparently, Matt Hancock was standing on a wooden block in order to reach the microphone. And by the following summer, when Boris Johnson addressed the nation, announcing the failure of the Oxford vaccine, he needed two blocks and, even then, had to stand on tiptoes.

 

Johnson was assassinated in April 2022 and his coffin, Mum told me, was the size of a baby’s crib. Scientists were baffled. They assumed the shrinking was due to the virus, which continued to rage in waves and spikes all over the world, killing thousands, maiming millions. Covid simply spread, with no cure, no vaccine, no understanding. There was worldwide political turmoil, civil disobedience, rioting, looting, chaos. Volunteers for one of the UK’s early attempts at a vaccine died like rabid dogs, howling and drooling.

 

In 2023, Labour seized power. The following year, Keir Starmer was lynched. One of my earliest memories is of his televised state funeral, the shoe-box sized coffin being placed in the ground by his wife. When Starmer’s wife stood up, she towered above the little, roly-poly, male grave diggers and funeral directors, but she wasn’t as tall as the really, truly, startlingly tall, almost-ugly, actually beautiful, red-haired woman next to her.

Angela Raynor took over the leadership of the country, and we females immediately felt safer, happier, stronger, more hopeful, but mostly just relieved. Gradually, Angie and her team of tall women got things onto more of an even keel. Except for men, who continued to shrink. Moreover, and what’s important to understand for this story, is, they didn’t shrink proportionally. They shrank into sausage shapes. Penises, to be precise. Men became walking, talking penises. Nowadays we’re used to it, but at first, my sister told me, it was a matter of newsworthy astonishment: how men’s balls shrivelled and transformed into inch-long, spindly legs; how the tip of their penis – the hole, which used to be the urethra – became eye and mouth in one; how the loose foreskin around the glans turned into their only real means of self-expression – tightening, contracting, slackening, scowling, smiling, relaxing. Circumcised penises are the equivalent of bald men bc (before Covid), and these penises open and close their eye/mouths a lot, making all sorts of different shapes with their little old hole of a urethra, because they don’t have the option of expressing their thoughts, feelings or personality via a foreskin.

 

None of the penises have arms and, although scans show small brains behind the eye/mouths, they don’t seem to have much intelligence. They drink milk, from saucers, bending in the middle to suck; and that appears to suffice to keep them alive. They huddle quietly together, in groups on the street, in parks and gardens, or watch sport on television. We use them as toys. My sister said that grown-up women use them as sex toys, but she wouldn’t explain what that meant.

“For making babies?” I asked her once, having read something about this in a bc biology text-book.

“No. You know we don’t need them for making babies.”

Yes. I knew we didn’t need them for making babies and I wondered why we needed them at all. They weren’t even frightening any more. Before all the men shrank to the size and shape of their penis, Angela Raynor organized sperm banks and created a fair and efficient system for impregnating women who wanted to be impregnated. She announced at a Downing Street conference in May, 2029, that there was enough sperm stored in sperm banks to repopulate the world a zillion times over. 

“A zillion’s not a number,” I said.

“She just means we’ve more than enough.” My sister squeezed the two penises she was playing with, so their eye/mouths went tight and thin and long. “So we don’t need you, do we, except for fun?” She gave the penises a friendly shake and knocked them against each other. They wobbled and flopped until my sister rubbed them enough to make them stay straightish again.

 

These two penises were our brothers. Boy babies continued to be born, but they shrank within days of birth, now, to the size of a man’s penis. No one gave them names.

“We live in a true matriarchy now,” said my sister. This was Easter 2031 and we were watching Angela Raynor open a new rehabilitation centre for Covid sufferers. The doctors and nurses, patients, dignitaries and journalists were dressed alike in full PPE, and you could tell they were all women, not because of their tits, hips and calm melodic voices, but simply because of their height.

“Is that good?” I asked.

“It’s too soon to say,” said my sister.

 

*

 

Less than a month after this, Mum went to bed and stayed in bed. She said she was too tired to look after my sister and me and we’d have to fend for ourselves. That’s when I decided to cook something special, if not to make her better, at least to take my mind off how much worse she was getting. There was butter in the fridge; eggs, flour and sugar in the larder. I could make a cake. But I wanted whatever I cooked to be truly memorable, and we’d already had varicose vein Victoria sponge (Grandma Phyllis) and chocolate brownie migraine (my sister); we’d even had coronavirus cupcakes (fat Mrs Harris, next door, who went to hospital and was in a coma for months, but then came home and wasn’t fat any more). Perhaps a soup would be a better idea. There were a few onions and some manky old carrots in the vegetable rack. I’d call it lumpy soup. No. Not ambitious enough. Breast cancer consommé? Too cordon bleu.

 

I looked through our stained and greasy Joy of Cooking recipe book Mum had been given as a wedding present. Boeuf bourgignon. Coq au vin. Lamb with rosemary and mint. The pictures made the food look mouth-watering, but the lists of ingredients were dizzyingly long and the instructions complicated. I flicked to the everyday-family-meals section: macaroni cheese; spaghetti bolognese; toad-in-the-hole – I already knew how to make that, and I knew it was a favourite of Mum’s. Yes. Hurrah. I’d call it metastasis pork pancake. We had everything needed for the batter, but no sausages, so I used penises instead.

 

I was only eleven. We ate insects, chucking them live into a sizzling hot pan for a noodle stir-fry. We ate fish, caught from the river, alive in their bucket, sloshed into pans of boiling water. Birds shot and roasted before the natural warmth of their bodies had waned. So it didn’t cross my mind that there was anything odd about using penises to cook with. 

 

I made the batter and left it to cool in the fridge. Then I took a rucksack and went to the park. There were always plenty of penises hanging out near the old football stands. I collected a dozen of them, all roughly the same, medium size. I could feel them squirming in my rucksack as I walked home, and some of them were making strange squeaky noises; but I ignored them, in the same way I’d seen my sister ignore the sounds the chickens made before she twisted their necks until they died.

 

While the batter began to cook in the oven, I grilled the penises gently until they were cooked through. Then I tipped them into the semi-cooked batter and turned up the oven as high it would go. The batter rose, the penises crisped and browned, their little legs and their eye/mouths disappearing completely. My metastasis pork pancake was a triumph.

I made the tea-tray pretty for Mum. I grated some carrot and arranged it around the rim of the plate. I added a flowery napkin and put a straw in the glass of water. My sister carried the tray upstairs. Mum ate a few mouthfuls of my offering. She smiled and said it was delicious, she just wasn’t very hungry. My sister saw my disappointment. She finished Mum’s plate and said she’d like seconds. So my sister and I went downstairs and polished off the rest of the dish. It was indeed delicious.

Afterwards, I told my sister about using penises instead of sausages. She said it was a good idea, and I should write to Angela Raynor about it.

 

Mum died a few days later, but my sister helped me write the letter anyway.

 

*

 

That happened ten years ago. The virus hasn’t gone away and there continue to be catastrophes in the world, like tsunamis and floods and droughts and famines, and zillions of people dying from those as well as from the virus and from all the other bc illnesses. My sister and I still cook, whenever there’s a crisis in the family. But there are fewer crises and the family’s smaller. I’m rich and quite famous. Angela Raynor saw the economic and health benefits of my penis-based toad-in-the hole. With their ready availability and ease of production, penises were the simplest of solutions to food-shortages and distribution. Penises, it turned out, were chock full of vitamins, protein and all manner of essential nutrients. No longer redundant and just the playthings of children and idle frustrated women, penises were given a new lease of life as the mainstay of the matriarchal diet. Recipes for them proliferated. At Christmas nowadays, turkey, goose and ham are frequently accompanied by delicious variations of my penis-based toad-in-the-hole. I wrote a cookbook, patenting and trade-marking the original recipe as metastasis pork pancake. But over the years, the dish has become known as cock au covid, and men nothing more than a distant, sometimes nostalgic memory. We watch them on screen in old movies, TV shows and documentaries and –  safely, joyfully – we laugh.

Emma Henderson is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Keele University. She has worked as a blurbs’ writer for Penguin Books, as an English teacher and as the manager of a B&B in the French Alps. In 2006 she gained a distinction in the MA in creative writing at Birkbeck. Her first novel, Grace Williams Says It Loud, published in 2010, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction; her second, The Valentine House, published in 2017, was shortlisted for the Historical Writers Association Gold Crown Award; she is currently working on her third novel, Two Good Men.