No Dancing Allowed

Last night I did a new etching. I’d been sitting at my kitchen table leafing through a book of Edward Hopper paintings, my fingers through the handle of a coffee mug, the remnants of the paper spread out around me. The light faded and I plugged in a lamp, opened my sketchbook to a new page and drew the pub at the end of my street. The green one. With the mosaic tiled floor and unmatched tables and chairs. The smooth dark wood and tea light candles on the tables. You must remember it. It’s still the same, well no, it’s less busy. A new one has opened up across the road.

The Saturday Man

The kitchen door slams closed behind her and Amanda leans heavily against the white washed brick of the courtyard wall. It’s already gone ten o’clock but the concrete is still damp with dew. The café is full of the breakfast bunch: today mostly broad-shouldered railway workers in their luminous orange trousers and muddy black boots. They trail dirt across the linoleum tiles and sling their thick arms over the backs of the chairs, fingers poised to brush against her thigh. There is a smear of egg on the back of her hand and so she wipes it across her apron before reaching into her pocket for a cigarette. The craving for nicotine doesn’t usually come this early in the morning. She strikes a match and inhales deeply, thinking again of the man at the window table, who looks so like her father. His silk grey hair, the long thin, washed-white fingers of a pathologist.

Michael’s Hand

We are talking about the night that Michael set his hand on fire when he comes over to say “Hello”. We are even sitting at our old-favourite table in the very far corner of the bar against the windows. Jenna has the view out across the room, Emmie is on the edge to let her smoke drift out and me, I’m facing them. Three girls at a square table, a bottle of red wine in the middle.

Enough

Catherine in her flat house shoes, watch swinging at her wrist, hair in a bun tighter than knitting climbs the stairs again, feet heavy with reluctance, fingers gripping the polished handrail, potato-mud beneath her nails, pill of anger on her tongue. Her tea sits cooling on the kitchen counter.

Her father waits white as the sheets, one thin claw above the covers, gummy eyed, smells of old breath and empty cupboards, coughs stains onto the sheets.

My Inadequate Hair

“If only,” he said, “you had curly hair.” We were lying on a blanket in the sun, in the park. The newspapers were heaped at our feet. I had my head in his lap and he was pressing his fingers into my scalp, rubbing in small tight circles. “Oh well,” I thought. It had been fun.

Going up to get down

Jack is on his way back to his desk to, as they’ve put it, “have a think about it” and the foyer of the 6th floor is unusually crowded; only one of the lifts is working. On the far wall soldiers firing from behind a blockade, loom from a huge black and white print. Beneath it some journalists are clutched over a folio of photographs, paging, pointing. Jack stands off to one side, staring out of the window across the rooftops of the neighbouring buildings. The faint outline of his face hovers ghostlike over the skyline. He presses down a stray tuft of hair that has sprung up on his crown.

A Short Story In Which She Finds Her Feet

They are in a shoebox wrapped individually, in tissue paper, packed toe to ankle. The box is under her bed, right back against the wall, behind a tennis racket and a suitcase of old books. She has forgotten where she put them and almost, that she had them at all. She unfolds them one at a time; runs a critical finger over the scuffed heels and slightly bent toes, rubs the smooth strong arches with the palm of her hand; picks at the painted nails.
She tries them on.
They fit just fine.

Shelly Finds a Film

On the way home, Shelly found a film. A yellow cased, Kodak, Elite Chrome 36 exposure, colour slide film. It was just sitting there on the pavement. She’d got off the 19 bus from town and was waiting to cross the road, when she glanced down at her shoes, and noticed it. She considered for a moment and then bent down and picked it up. There was slight dent in the casing and some scuff marks where the black paint had come off to reveal the silver tin beneath. She shook it gently and although there was no sound, the weight of it suggested that the film was still inside. She put it in her coat pocket.

The Bell Tolls

“I don’t like to be late,” said Catherine Lang as the door was opened for her at 6:50pm. Kate had said 7pm and not to bring anything. Her friends called her Clang. Not unkindly of course but because of her initials C. Lang. And also, a little bit she suspected, for the way that sentences swung with the weight of her confidence, out of her mouth and struck against the conversation. Sure she was opinionated, but so were all the women in her family. Her grandmother: a local MP for many years, had campaigned vigorously around maternity issues, and her ideas shaped not one, not two, but three major legislative amendments in the course of her career. And her mother: former head of the Council of Higher Education and now steering the Education Action Group in their reformation of inner city schools.