Company

I am in a white tee shirt and a lady in an old cardigan calls me and she has something behind her eyes that I cannot read, that I waste too much time trying to memorise, and she says that she needs me and it's all that I hear at first, and then the sound of her pencil scratching something shorthand onto the paper she has fastened to a clip board in her palm. As we walk down the aisle, her hand now on my elbow, the line of people on the stage seems to part like biblical sea, making space for me to stand, to join, a wave against the shore.
Lapping again. Lapping again. 
And she is busy making introductions as we walk up the stairs to where the people are and they salute and wave half hearted waves and some say their names and others say "Nice to meet you" and "I'm glad you're here" and it seems sort of sincere and one girl with a blonde ponytail and a pink sweater looks at me into my face and she smiles with her mouth closed and I'm transported somewhere and its just the two of us and we've shared something that binds us, ties us in knots, two sides of the same coin; and then I am back and her smile is still there and I am in the middle of the line, in its belly, and the introductions have all been eaten. Leftover morsels floating up and up and up. The lady in the old cardigan is some way through a list of instructions that I haven't heard and she is waiting for a response so I nod and she carries on.
I am in over my head.
It is the beginning and it is the end.
Somebody elses life that I have climbed inside, their skin a coat over my skin.
I step forward, unsteady on my feet as if it all, every bit of this, is new.
I take another step, the emergency exit light above the emergency exit now a glowing green beacon.
"Go" it says, "Pick up and go."

A crying girl and an old, beaten leather bag

I was outside the train station when she cried. This girl, twenty maybe, carrying an old, beaten leather bag over her shoulder, so big it made her seem so small; you know how sometimes a girl can look like a bird? All legs and eyes and features. She was crying down her phone like nobody had any fucking idea about any of it and she marched and paced and the tears seemed to fall in direct correlation to how fast her feet moved, slowing as she turned to walk the other way, stopping completely when she stood still, her hand on her hip as if to say "this whole thing is fucking useless."
And then she balanced the phone between her cheek and her shoulder and she dropped the old, beaten leather bag onto the ground and undid the zip and took out a pair of red shoes and placed them side by side next to the old, beaten leather bag and took off the shoes she had on and put them into the old, beaten leather bag and did the zip back up and then took the red shoes, one by one, and put them onto her now bare feet and then stood up and wiped her face with the back of her right hand and ran her wet fingers through her hair and tucked it behind her right ear and then fussed with her dress and tugged at the sides until the hem puckered and rippled, the whole time shouting and hollering and sniffing.
Now I had a book in my hand as I stood waiting outside the train station, an old book folded at the spine, opened to the same page I had been on when I first was waiting outside the train station for the bus to take me home, and every now and then I would look up from the book at the girl, each time her face marked more with the path of her tears and I really did think that I should perhaps go over to her to try and see if there was anything I could do, but all of a sudden and in spite of myself I felt very British, reserved I suppose, and it seemed improper and gauche and so I watched out of the tops of my eyes, the same paragraph dancing over and over on the page in the old book I had in my hand, folded at the spine.
The girl was off the phone then. The phone in her pocket. That conversation hanging around her like city smog. Both of her hands at her sides. Stood straight up and down. The old, beaten leather bag by her feet. Her feet inside the red shoes. The both of us outside the train station. Together but not together.
I looked up from my book one last time, to try and catch her eye I guess, and saw the red shoes again, two rubies amidst the early evening commuters.
Maybe if she tapped her heels together three times she'd get to go home, I thought and then immediately hated myself for thinking it.

First, illustrated

Margaret, illustrated

T.K

I am in a coffee shop.

It is a coffee shop that plays the news on one of those twenty four hour news channels. I don’t like that very much, feels like the world is trying to get in my way when I all I want is to get away from it. I walked here this morning from my house, headphones plugged in playing music loud into my ears so I couldn’t hear the traffic. I didn’t always look when I crossed the roads down towards the sea either. I don’t know why. I was feeling sort of lucky I guess.

I order eggs, over easy, and a pot of peppermint tea which both come pretty quickly. I am the only one here save for the coffee barista and a guy in a beige t-shirt who I take to be the chef. They’re talking about hog roasts and the tenderest meat on the hog. They say it’s the cheek. It is 8.45am and it seems a little early for all of that. I find myself wondering about the tongue. Is that even a meat? I take a small book from my bag, one about a love that spans a lifetime and a continent, and stir the tea.

An hour passes.

A boy walks in. Twenty seven maybe. He has on a rucksack and a denim shirt that looks bleached by the sun but was probably bought that way, his hair swept backwards by the wind outside. It is cold and I think to myself that he should have worn a coat, a vestige leftover from my childhood being told the same thing once, twice, a thousand times.

I watch as he sits at the table just inside the window and beneath his denim shirt, rolled up to his elbow, I see two letters, etched onto his skin, black, architectural in their accuracy.

“T.K”

I take a sip of the second pot of peppermint tea I have ordered, concerned as I was that the barista would ask me to leave. The café has started to fill up with families, children in hats that cover their ears and the tops of their eyes.

The boy notices my gaze at his arm and, with what I suppose is at least a little self consciousness, strokes it with his left hand.

I put my cup of peppermint tea back on the table, wipe my mouth with the tips of my fingers, cough a cough I don’t really need to cough and look out of the window beyond his face to the young family outside. He in a coat that reminds me of my father, she saying something to the young girl, the young girl dressed in a Princess dress, all purple sequins and glitter; she is laughing back, pink hearts painted at the corners of her eyes. For a second I swear I hear it through the door but the barista starts grinding coffee beans behind me, the sound chasing away her laugh like birds.

I remember the boy now, eyes deep inside a book whose title I can’t read, and I think again of those initials on his arm and just for a minute allow myself to believe it’s a sign of something; because those initials are my initials. The ones drawn on the outside of his bicep belong to me.  Me, a man now, carving out a somewhere to be, gathering sticks, making a nest, and those initials are at my beginning. They are the start of all that has come since. They are mine.

 And then, with a confidence that surprises me, I lean forward in my chair towards his and I say

“Excuse me,” my voice like a stranger.

He looks up from his book.

“Your arm.” I say, “The tattoo on your arm.”

I point to the tattoo on his arm.

My name.

The beginning.  

He hardly reacts, turning slightly in my direction.

And as clear as I know I shouldn’t ask what I am about to ask I know too that I must, the question already bubbling up inside of me, a volcano no longer dormant. Waiting.

“Why do you have it?” I say.

He looks at his arm again and then at me, the black letters are whispering my name. The barista grinds more coffee beans and the whisper is silenced.

The boy puts his book down cover side up onto the table. The guy I took to be the chef comes over and puts a tall cup of coffee on the boys table next to his book. The boy smiles a thank you. The chef smiles back.

“They use it in copywriting.” he says in an easy sort of way that implies we’ve grown up together, that we’ve shared some sort of history. I even question the possibility of it for a second but am sure I would remember something like that.

“It is for when there’s more to come” he continues.

“It means that there are words yet to be written.”

And then “I’m a writer. It seemed to make sense.”

I say “I thought there would be a story behind it” and then I thank him and say I hope he enjoys his coffee. I don’t say anything else and he picks up his book and starts reading again.

Then I remember something I said once to my friend Marissa.

“I’ve always been tied to something, Marissa.” I said and she laughed and then I listed them until her laughter stopped. I didn’t need to think, I had carried them all like rocks in my pockets since I could walk, each getting heavier as the years added up. Dense as asteroids by the time adult life started happening around me to the kids I was a kid with too.

“I’m too frightened to run.” I said.

Marissa looked at me with eyes that said she understood. She took my face in her hands.

“There will always be something,” she said.

She smoothed my beard and smiled.

“And then there will be something worth running to. You just don’t know it yet.”  

The Electric Palace Film Quiz

A friend and I run a film quiz at the Electric Palace Cinema in Hastings. Here is the poster I designed for the upcoming Film Adaptations Quiz in May. Book your tickets here NOW. The website also has some taster clips from our previous quizzes-guess the film we're re-enacting and I'll give you a big fat pound.

I don't mean to brag, but it sells out pretty quickly; it's that good.

Margaret

Margaret Thatcher died when you were sleeping.
Thats what the note said; the one scrawled on the back of a brown envelope and propped up against the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen counter. Lois picked the envelope up, held it close to her face and read the words again, slower this time and out loud. The dog twisted in her basket, smacked her lips with her tongue and sighed. Lois took the envelope, opened the knife and fork draw and slid it into one of the recesses made for the knife edges to sit inside. She ran her fingers through her tangled hair but otherwise stood still, her pink house coat tied loosely around her waist.
She remembered then, a time long ago, her mum and her dad, her, small in her pyjamas, sitting around a television as the country buckled under its own weight outside. She remembered the look on her mothers face, the quiet concern behind her eyes, hands filled with knitting and yarn. She remembered her father yelling campaign slogans at images of angry and outspoken workers fighting for rights she didn't fully understand on the TV set, the wind howling through winter-empty streets.
And then she thought of Margaret, swollen with age, her skin draping heavy like curtains over her shoulders.
The world kept turning.
It somehow grew bigger in the shadow.
Lois took a carton of fruit juice from the fridge, walked back upstairs and sat on the edge of her bed; her feet cold from walking barefoot on the kitchen tiles. She took a pair of striped socks from the chest of drawers underneath the window and put them on.
Later, Lois fell back into sleep again until the sun, a teardrop in the sky, was replaced by night time.

Margot and her hat, illustrated

Gym

I caught myself in the middle of a lie yesterday as I stretched at the gym, a top knot on my head tied in a heap with strands of my own unwashed hair. The clarity with which I saw myself was so startling, and a wave of realisation washed over me so quickly that I stood there still, feeling foolish. A nakedness I had forgotten I had felt before.
I realised all of a sudden that I was trying to convince the girl by my side of something. The girl paying no attention to me, who hadn't noticed I was even there, mid work out and sweaty, headphones blasting music I couldn't hear. In that moment, as the sun had begun to disappear into the sea outside, more than anything else, I wanted her to believe I was a ballet dancer.
I was stretching stretches from a life long ago when I was a tiny somebody else trying to be somebody bigger than I was, pointing my toes and arching my back, small arabesques, fifth position.
How desperate I was for her to imagine me on the stage, dancing Romeo and Juliet; masculine and soft, a Rudolf Nureyev type with arms that women felt safe in; arms that could lift them up towards heaven, arms that said I was guiding us to a magnificence so shiny and astounding in its newness.
I wanted her to think I was somebody else and let myself get lost in the identity I had created, her still none the wiser; everybody has to be somewhere. And so I continued until the lie grew so whole, so complete I barely recognised myself inside of it.
And then, with an urgency that scared me, I wanted to run to her and put my hands on her shoulders and make it clear, make it crystal clear, that I probably wouldn't always be lost. That I wouldn't spend forever sifting through the leftovers of lives that never were, that I wouldn't live inside the dreams that hadn't been weaved into the reality of my actual life, that it wouldn't always be an endless list of tasks that I'm better than or worse than or so deep in the middle of that I forget that I am still able to take my days in my hands and mould them into something else.
That I wouldn't always be that guy at the gym, imagining himself somewhere other than there.
That I would one day be enough.

Ethel, Bobby, Jackie and Jack-illustrated