MIR Editor

This year, 2020, everything has paused. May Day itself is interrupted. In the midst of the Covid-19 lockdown the usual rituals and festivals and rites and wakes and processions that mark this day have all been called off.

The colonoscopy had been booked a month before the wedding, to ensure matters of the body were taken care of before matters of the heart. But it didn’t matter in the end, both had to be cancelled.

It’s spring, and the sunshine has arrived. I put on a black cotton dress I haven’t worn since last summer. It pulls tight as I button it up at the front. My breasts have swelled; they are at least a cup size bigger. I’ll need to buy bigger bras soon.

She is gripping Eddie’s wrist tight, an affectionate Chinese Burn to remind him how loved he is. ‘Work okay?’ she asks. ‘Treating you kindly?’             Not wanting to disappoint his mother, Eddie resorts to fabricating elongated stories about his Cancer Research colleagues, about how kind and unassuming they all are.

God it feels good, Baxter! To be back out here with you, galloping across the Dairy Acres stubble! A venerable Wycherly stamping ground. Hounds speaking low and strong, streaking across the fields! The finest view in Europe!

There were more cars than usual parked in the drive. Sat in his van, the gardener flicked off the radio and surveyed the area. It was a sprawling Georgian farmhouse practically in the middle of nowhere, enclosed within a fortress of holly. Houses like this once seemed remarkable, but in his line of work they…

‘It’s not an orgy without five people, minimum. Everyone knows that.’ Livia watched Roland crushing the cube of brown sugar into his espresso with the back of a teaspoon. Every time she visited his basement flat, there seemed to be another horse painting. The bachelor uncle who had left this place to him had been…

There are fireworks in the air today, tiny invisible fireworks sparking off me and Tom. Bangers, rockets, Catherine wheels. A spark from me ignites him. A spark from him ignites me. I want to run outside and walk on and on to nowhere.

31 January I’m in a harbourside café in Wellington, stealing a summer from the south. Catapulted into the light, guilty about flying this far but wanting to visit my brother, I arrive with pale peaky skin, eyes squinting at the brightness, legs shaved for the first time in months.

The dump was a big, steep-sided crater in an old slagheap next to Miley’s scrap yard. From the top, fourteen-year-old Habib lobbed a stone at a fridge poking out of brambles that crept up the slopes. It missed.