Fiction

You stand transfixed, hugging the cork bark of the Baobab tree as warm liquid drips down your legs, staining your white socks yellow. You want to bend down and scratch because it’s itchy, but you are frozen to the playground. You watch them form a circle around you. The revulsion in their frowns and screwed…

The first time the man arrives at the ballet studio, the girls ignore him. An embarrassing father come to watch a class, probably, or a friend of Miss Maisie. In the cramped corridor of a changing room, the girls are more interested in staying warm, twisting their hair into tight knots at the base of…

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…

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…

‘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…

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…

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.

If someone broke into your house now, how would you get out? Ever since I was a child I have always planned my escape route.  It started as a game; a question posed to myself. Then I would spend a delicious few minutes plotting my escape. It was a child’s flight of fancy of course,…

Whoever named this town Prosper had a sense of humour, and no one was laughing anymore. Prosper was dusty and dry, the kind of sleepy place that looks good in an old black and white film, but not so good in technicolour. Once there was a mill, and fields which could be worked. Then the…

His mother had been a fan of the Ford Cortina. Like her son, she had admired the shape, their finesse. Finesse. Through him, she had acquired an interest in cars; we’re just two car freaks spotting on Holloway Road, they used to sing to the tune of Wish You Were Here. But this February morning, almost a year…