Fiction

I arrived in Quito in October 1968. Rolling Stone sent me to write an article on a growing counterculture of freaks and hippies travelling to South America to experience ayahuasca.

“Genghis Khan? Never heard of her.” – Diana Ross I When Genghis Khan died, they buried him in lowland shrub beside a river and then re-directed the river over his remains as per his wishes, so that he may lay undisturbed in the afterlife, if there was an afterlife; which he didn’t think there was.

Church is, I’m sorry to say, a mixed blessing.  I wish I could testify that it’s been all fellowship and edification, but in truth God’s people come with a steady stream of frustrated tears and angry words as well. 

Lauren thinks about this picture a lot. It’s hard not to; she sees it almost every Sunday. It’s framed on the wall in the Queens Head where her mum tends the bar, above a long-since-faded police appeal for information.

Your voice carries through walls, travels along pipes, pierces wallpaper, drips from taps. Your smell is a film that rubs off every surface I touch, no matter how much I scrub and clean.

It’s Sunday morning. The days are longer now and today there is the first real heat of summer in the air. I’m shopping in a market in the suburbs of London. I’m in the market shopping and I’m standing in front of oranges

She wasn’t taking the escaped crocodile seriously, no one was. In the news reports, it was just one more mythical beast, not a razor-crunching reality.

“The swans on the river where we used to live have laid some eggs on a nest they made at the weir,” said Olive, who was waiting at the nursery door to collect her children, Nia and Mikey. The other mothers turned to look at Olive, but not in a good way.

f you ever come looking for me, you’ll find me sitting in my car at the Kisementi car park, listening to Radio One.  Kisementi is a shopping centre on Number 12 Bukoto Street, in Kololo, a suburb of Kampala.

Liz wipes a tankard dry, humming along with the fiddler and the singer in the corner. The tavern is only half full tonight, a crowd of beardless students daring each other to one more ale, and a few older men scattered about the place.