Sticky Rice

tonight, just me and my daughter tucked into a dim booth at a chop suey joint on Wardour Street. the air is thick with the hot steam of sticky rice, the green tea sharp enough to cut through the haze and remind you that you’re still alive. sweet-and-sour sauce pools on the plate, glossy and

The Planets

the schoolyard’s a cheap bar at closing time, and he’s the last burning match in the ashtray, like the sun with a five o’clock shadow, standing there in scuffed boots and yesterday’s shirt, smoking those little rollups. the planets roll in — tired eyes, soft hips — pushing prams with snot-nosed little moons strapped inside,

Lorenzo’s Girl

Doctor Smirnov

there I was, sprawled in the dim light of my room, bottle half-empty on the floor, the drink going hot through me. I thought of Doctor Smirnov in the East End, his little practice with the cracked linoleum and the waiting room that smelled of old magazines and fear. I saw those posters on his

The Reunion

forty years on, and still I have my small spoon and small chipped cup from Trinity College, Cambridge — sacred little relics, warm in my hands like talismans from another life. last night the reunion surged through me: red wine dark and heavy, escargots glistening in garlic butter, and a rich bloody fillet of lamb.

Swallows

in the café on Rue Lepic, I sit with a little green fairy in front of me, the absinthe gone louche and cloudy now, a slow swirling storm in the glass that brings its own dull and necessary release from the absolute. the flavours move through the mouth in their old way — fennel, star

The Orchid

Sunday, early evening sliding down over the rooftops, and there I was in my garden, listening to them, that couple going at each other. screams with no floor to them, rage climbing and splitting, no pause, no breath between, the same thing they have been saying to each other since August, just the red of

The Jockey

the horn blows wild. tidal wave, six to one, 3:35 sharp, the bell clanging, and there she goes, the grey ghost streaking over Sandown’s green lung. punters lean into the dream, eyes wild, hearts pounding against the rail, while Mary — sweet Mary of the quick laugh — slides the coldest pint across the oak,

Little Cathedrals

The Fence

it was a big bastard of a project, the first time I saw the house, the kind of dumb hope you buy when you still believe in forever. the front fence, cast iron, 1940s, rising off its brick columns, proud and solid, untouched by the rot that had taken everything else. I made the rust

Inducing a Migraine

there she is behind the marked oak bar, that Irish angel with the black hair falling like midnight rain, serving up the warmest smile you ever saw, pulling a perfect pint, slow and creamy, her eyes shining like Dionysus himself in drag, pouring out the madness. red wine flowing free now, warm in the throat,

Sitting with Diego

the morning’s got its claws in, a hangover sitting heavy on the brain. there’s still a little whiskey left in the blood, sloshing around in the empty tank, burning sweet. we talk the usual shit, love, life, the happiness that fucked off years ago and never sent a postcard. he’s a gentle Spaniard out of

The Girl and the Great Dane

across the road and onto the pavement, feet hitting wet concrete in that old, flat wanderer rhythm. and then I see her, walking dead ahead, just out of reach, a stranger I’ve already named Kate in the silent room of my mind. beside her strides a Great Dane, a massive, ridiculous beast I’ve christened Claude

The Steaming Beast

spring, new blossoms forcing their way open across the garden after the dead winter. the air has the first thin smell of lilacs and the promise of tomatoes. across the patch of turned earth, the beast is cooking — steam rising thick and sour from the middle of it, a slow furnace of rot where

University Braille

here I am, sitting in the heat of the subway train, watching this blind girl across the aisle, her fingers crawling over some textbook like it’s a lover’s back. those pages are slick, white, gleaming under the dizzy fluorescent lights, little bumps raised up just enough for her to feel the secrets — technical diagrams,

Lucky Luke

I dragged myself along the canal path through snow that rose to the ankles, pure and untouched, no one across it yet. the cold cut at my face with a slow, steady insistence, the way old debts come back in the dark. ahead, one yellow smear of light leaked from a porthole, warm-looking, false-looking, the

The Dead Letter

that summer morning arrived hot and sticky, the air thick and close, bright sun blasting through the kitchen window while the girls tore around the place scribbling homework frantic, yanking plimsolls from under beds, hunting lunch boxes, stuffing in raisins and cucumber slices and little yoghurt tubs – all that packed-lunch madness before the school

Cold Soup

I’m up on the top deck of this double-decker, stopped at a light, staring down through the piss-streaked window into a restaurant with red tablecloths and napkins folded like origami sculptures. waiters running plates, patrons shaking off the rain like wet dogs, umbrellas dumped in the corner dripping into one big grey puddle. and my

St Augustine’s

marked cards and letters filled the top drawer of the old writing desk — two long years of them, correspondence and poems and notes of love and want, all folded away in the quiet dark. he remembered the gate to her front door, the narrow path through the garden where lavender and rosemary and basil

The Copper Grill

Credit Crunch. Banks Collapse. In a grubby newspaper spread out across a sticky table, the headline bleeds out, the ink fused with smears of butter from oily ketchup fingers. coffee stains and dog-eared corners. whole chunks are ripped from the classifieds on page 33—the desperate poetry of a dying town: used cars and escort services.

Broken Homes

Is it a shadow, or just some curled-up leaf. It’s tough trying to miss them on the black path before dawn, stumbling half-drunk on sleep with your eyes still glued shut from last night’s whiskey. you try. God, you try, squinting into the nothing, but it always ends the same: a wet pop under the

Table for Two

the talk drags on all night, two old bastards mumbling into the black hours about pensions and politicians and how the world’s circling the drain. they never once touch the real rot — the wars that chewed up their youth, the women who walked out and never looked back. it’s a Christmas lunch, some half-arsed

The List

I picked up the scrap of shopping-list paper from the kitchen counter, the one with the faded blue lines, and there it was — her handwriting, still the same after twenty wild years, looping and sure as the first time she wrote “I love you” on a napkin in that Mexican restaurant in Smith Street

The Bicycle

those were the days when nothing hurt yet, pedalling like a dumb kid through the maize fields of Southern Africa, dust choking the air, wire fences ripping at your legs if you got too close, the sun baking everything into one long stupid dream. then bam, over the handlebars, eating dirt, picking bloody gravel out

The High-Hat Solo

blow by blow, the drummer’s foot stomps that pedal like she’s kicking the world in the ribs, cymbals crashing silver in the dim, hi-hat, chick-chick-chick in a wild solo to nowhere and everywhere. there she plays under the hot spotlight, the girl with the brushes and the furious heart, beating it out while the room

Mice

I need something else, something other than the low-down hum of silence blowing through my wide-awake bedroom like the ghost of all the roads I never took, the heater dead, the night frozen stiff at six below. I’m lying here in this fever-cabin with the taste of my favourite Mexican place, Las Iguanas, still rolling

Che Guevara

the humidity comes down heavy over the whole sweating city, and we’re all gasping on the eastbound underground, choking on air thick as soup, the train rattling through the black tunnels like some endless iron beast hungry for more souls. toddlers wail and groan in their sticky seats while their mothers bend low, murmuring soft

The Landlord

I let myself in on Monday evening with the spare key on its green plastic tag. Three months of unpaid rent had passed, and the smell in the hall already carried what waited on the other side of the door. and there you were, in the centre of the room, suspended from the rafters, toes

The Night Watchman

the joint was cold, but it pulled you in anyway, like a half-frozen bottle of muscatel somebody forgot on the windowsill in December – cheap, sticky, promising nothing but a headache and a warm gut for ten minutes. she lay there beside me, panting like a dying dog during the worst heatwave, that wet rattle

Platform 2

stiletto snaps sharp on concrete, ankle caves in with a wet twist of pain. platform 2, breathless and running late for the six forty-five to London, the dawn cold slicing through bones. her lips crack audibly in the frost, Marlboro smoke curling warm and bitter around a flushed face shadowed by a sheepskin hat, arms

The Evening Dress

untouched, a beautiful size 12 gleaming in the lamplight, pressed up hard against the cold steel teeth of a vice that grips her like some old jazzman’s fist around a bottle at midnight, unyielding, eternal. naked in her isolation she waits, this slender shank of possibility, for the first tender strand of cotton to come

Waiting for Mary

truck stop glowing under fluorescence, bloodshot eyes everywhere. long-haul drivers slumped in the corners. builders with cement dust still in their hair and travelling salesmen chasing the next few quid. cheap knives scraping grease off the plates. old coffee stains dried deep into the formica. above the jukebox, a chalkboard menu with blue and white

The Welsh Dragon

the winter sun blasts through tinted Welsh windows, and my skin feels it all at once, sudden and warm after the cold grey miles. through the glass, the valleys roll on soft and endless, the long grass bending and lifting in the winter wind like it’s breathing slow and easy with the land. I drift

Neptune’s Crown

my daughter pointed at it through the green murk and said, “Look, Daddy, Neptune’s crown.” it was just a goddamn hubcap off a Ford Mondeo, once chrome-bright and spinning proud on some salesman’s ride, half-shiny even when the rest of the car was coughing rust. one day the clips gave up — like everything else

Shunting Trains

I stand here pissing in this narrow shithole of a toilet, staring up through the little slit of a window at a sky the colour of a dead man’s face. little worms of light wriggle across my vision, the cheap vodka still working its way through me. the place smells like something that crawled in

The Salty Dog

crank the burner till the flame goes that sick blue. throw in those greasy capers, let them jump around like drunk bastards in the oil—anchovies too, those little salty pricks dissolving into the grease until they own the pot. slice the onions thin. Garlic filling the room. and those dirty green chillies flown in from

Little Bird

I sat on the broken porch steps with a warm beer going flat between my knees, watching that mangy cat take the sparrow right out of the air. The bird hit the gravel, still flapping, one wing bent completely backwards and blood bubbling at its beak. the cat pinned it down with a heavy paw,

The Seafood Special

Saturday night in the pub, and the old man sat hunched over his plate like the weight of every wasted year had finally pinned him there. he sneezed into the crook of his elbow, the same childhood tic that eighty-odd years couldn’t burn out of him. a long, glistening strand of snot stretched from his

The Hosepipe

I needed petrol – 5 litres to get me there and the rest for the process. A small price to pay, running on empty, the urine already cold on my winter jeans, stinking on my frozen legs, a dreadful trembling fear. the hard stench of black tobacco fills my nostrils, my last few cigarettes, another

Your Last Orbit

did you just die? I can’t hear those wings anymore, that frantic beating gone silent. you were drunk on panic, bashing your skull against the cheap IKEA lamp I got last week, that blinding circle of light pulling you into the tin shade, hot electric death. I sat here at the typewriter, half-sick with the

Fava Beans

the soup again tonight, using up the stale crust of bread from Saturday, only tonight I bought a tin of fava beans from the corner shop, breaking a thirty-year silence I hadn’t meant to break. I’d gone down there for the paper, and just as I passed under the flats, old Mrs Rodriguez tipped her

Uncle Patrick

the bar hasn’t changed, and neon still bleeds a sickly red down the walls. and the smoke hangs in the air like it’s got nowhere better to be. I’m on the stool next to the empty one, the corner spot where Uncle Patrick used to sit with a Campari and Soda glowing in his fist

The Priesthood

the room, this dormitory cist, one bed like a slab they forgot to bury me in, two chairs that nobody sits on, and a corner window that stares out at nothing. solitude, the old whore, she climbs in bed with you every night, whispers the same tired shit in your ear until you almost believe

The Drought

the barns bulge with a perverse rot, heaps of fruit gone black and swollen, produce twisted in mildew and blight under the long dead eye of the sun. and out on the land the cattle fall, one by one, legs buckling into the dust like broken prayers nobody’s listening to anymore. frustration sworn into every

Poor Hygiene

it could have been the fridge handle, or the front door. maybe the button on the stereo. it didn’t matter which, the dirt had found its way in, and now the body was paying for it in the oldest, most ridiculous way. the eggs were already there, smaller than anything you could see, waiting in

Rachel Kadinsky

red lips parted just enough to promise trouble, and me with my battered brass Zippo from ’86, hinge still catching like it remembered every heartbreak, grinding the wheel slow till the sooty flame whooshed up wild, orange-blue dancing the old cliche dance, kerosene stinging sweet right in the veins. she sucked hard on the New

The Pear Tree

there you were in that ragged denim jacket, frayed at the cuffs, and your jeans hung loose on your bony hips in the hot wind. I stood at the kitchen window, watching you reach up into my husband’s pear tree, plucking those fat golden pears one by one. slow. deliberate. you turned and caught me

The Corpse Flower

she told me this years later, near the end, in the small warm room where she kept her pressed flowers under glass. a botanist all her life, fluent in the Latin of things that bloom and things that poison. her hands were still precise, even then. she’d loved, and travelled, and lived a good deal

Jacobs Ladder

those gleaming silver travellers of the tar, holy rollers deserting me like faithless friends hitching rides to wilder horizons. they vanish into the night, or the blistering noon, tumbling free while I loop the same grimy industrial estate, the same sharp corners, round and round. it’s their one breakout, and I almost envy it. I

Train to Newport

I sit here half-dead on this rattling train to Wales, and my mind starts cranking out its cheap carnival movie, clear as the sour smell drifting from the toilet in the empty carriage ahead. there I was. cotton candy in the air, popcorn grease, the merry-go-round wheezing like an old whore on her last trick.

Photo Albums

the pictures went in like a splinter you can’t dig out. one was a Jewish boy, maybe ten, lost inside a heap of striped rags, the yellow star sewn onto the chest like a shipping label on a crate. then page after page of bones twisted wrong, and black smoke rolling out of brick chimneys

Shirley

the heat was already a bastard at 6:15am, thick and merciless, pressing down on the city like some drunk god’s hangover that wouldn’t lift. everything felt wrong before I knew why, that dead quiet, broken by a wet, ugly confusion, the kind of sound that crawls into your gut and tells you death is close,

Ladybird Long Stay Hotel

late in the season again — the way I’m late for everything that matters — and there they hang, those dead hydrangea heads, brown and crisp as paper lanterns left out in the rain, still clinging to stems that don’t give a damn, pushing out new blossoms anyway, pink and smug, like the world saying

The Bank Loan

this fucking heat won’t quit, sweat pooling in every crease of this rotten carcass, another nightmare, third one this week, crawling out of the sheets like a rat with its throat cut. I can’t even remember what the dream was, just that high-pitched whine in my skull when I snapped awake, nothing else breaking the

The Night Veld

outside, on a spread of lawn behind the fishpond, the thick heat of the day finally lifting. tender pepper chicken, a splash of water, the old man talking in his low, gravelly drone. the same stories I’ve heard all my life, looping in the quiet air. dinner with grandfather. pockets of cropped moonlight break along

The Honey Jar

The Reflection

Hyde Park

Hyde Park on a Sunday, the sun pressing down like a hot boot on the back of the neck. kids on plastic scooters scraping the hot concrete like they’re trying to file the day down to nothing. bicycles with training wheels squeaking through the legs of mums and dads who just want a bench before

The Mirror

she starts the day with a big pot of turmeric and aniseed tea, some half-arsed apology to the liver after the whiskey kicked the shit out of it all night. it steams up the cracked window while the rain does its usual madness outside. another grey Sunday at home. at her table, she thinks about

The Yellow Digger

the railway tracks hum all night like a drunk’s heartbeat, and come seven in the morning, the yellow bastard starts gnawing the street — teeth filthy, breath of diesel and broken stone — ripping up clean concrete that never hurt nobody, hunting for pipes for a wage so that some engineer can feed his kids,

The Talk Show Host

they wait in the fluorescent hum of the evening. Motorised chairs whining low, plastic seats creaking under the weight of old bones. some have steel poles rising above balding heads and thin hair, clear bags of saline dripping slow, intravenous lines taped to blue-veined arms. they sit in rows, three deep, five across, care-home attendants

The Fairy

she blew in after the lunch bells had faded. Sunday, round two in the afternoon. Beautiful in a pale whirl, dancing and floating between aisles in the vortex air of the slow train rumbling toward London. suspended there, afloat in the rattle and sway of the rails. she drifted into the baggage jungle, over the

Lemon and Poppyseed

the tube’s jammed tighter than a whorehouse on payday, bodies mashed up like sardines in a tin that’s been kicked down the stairs one too many times. they say lambs to the slaughter get more room to wiggle before the knife, and right now I believe it. I’ve got some poor bastard’s armpit parked under

Charlotte

there I was, rattling along through the grey English drizzle, the underground train clicking under my feet, when I spotted her across the aisle — dark hair falling wild, eyes like midnight streets — and I leaned over, heart going that crazy beat, and asked if I could take her photo, just a quick one

Christmas Day

his nine-year-old loved her nursery, and she loved climbing trees, and reading her books about history, flowers, and trains. and she loved her father, and he thought of her as he buffed his black Oxford brogues from Loakes in London. and he thought of her again when he ironed his shirt — how she smiled

Easter Lilies

I drop a sugar cube into the glass, watching it fizz up through the cheap vodka and warm champagne. You give me that crooked grin, arguing over some half-read paperback while the room fills with the smell of garlic and damp masonry. the sauce is bubbling on the stove, a thick, heavy muck that spits

The Storm

the sky over Jesus Green is one big hangover—black, bloated, hanging there like a miserable drunk who won’t leave the bar, just holding it all back before the rush. then it starts. I look up at the shitty streetlight with a sign dangling off the iron: Faulty, please report. like anyone gives enough of a

The Funeral

forty-five years on, and the memory blows back through my skull like smoke from a tailpipe. that hazy day rushing in, a cool breeze pushing cherry blossoms around the churchyard like cheap confetti after a parade. petals swirl down on the stone, soft, useless, already gone. the Catholic incense finds my nostrils, and a thin

Harvey

In the pub, at my little table. Yesterday’s paper, Blair’s secret note to Bush — I will be with you, whatever. Tony, I’ll hold your coat while you blow up the world. beside it, a warm gin and tonic going flat, and a tin of cashews gone soft on the sticky wood. the country pretends

Columbus

the body, broken like a sack of bones and meat, floats quietly on the flat endless sea beneath a low grey sky; no ripple, no hurry, just the slow swell lifting and lowering him, gentle as a sigh. no fight left, no scream, no prayer. he drifted like a cork, arms out, face half to

Frank’s on Milton Road

I shove the door open at this café on Milton Road, the handle all chewed up with rust bites and pits. the place reeks of burnt bacon and old grease, and it hits you in the gut, hard. “Coffee, black, eight sugars please.” I stare out the smeared window. across the street there’s a hardware

Cambridge Old Boys

rugby season in Cambridge, last night’s training brutal, a muddy grind under the floodlights, oranges sliced and quartered for halftime, the sharp acid juice stinging like fire on cracked lips. one last scrum under the dark sky, shoulders slamming into ribs, the smell of wet jersey and hot breath, stubble scraping against raw cheekbones until

The Trader’s Bell

Maharaj and Co, General Suppliers, Established 1888. stand still a second in here, and the place shows you its ghosts. the floor, beat-to-shit planks of Canadian pine, scarred and grey as a coin worn smooth by too many hands, have been there since the clippers came in heavy with tea from the east. sailors with

The Mainstay

I’m sunk deep in this old armchair, the one with the springs poking through like bad memories, and the room’s half-lit, half-dead, snow still spitting at the window. the clock’s oak pendulum swings back and forth, steady as a slow heartbeat, counting me out. I’m just letting go, sliding down easy into the booze and

Jupiter Outside my Window

two forty-five in the goddamn morning. I’m sitting with an empty mug; the crumbs of a biscuit packet scattered like dead soldiers across Shayne and Martin’s kitchen table. three of the bastards, maybe four—I lost count somewhere between the second refill and the third. now my mouth tastes like the bottom of a hamster hutch,

The Paisley Dress

he stands there in a brown three-piece suit that costs more than my wage, shiny chin pointed like a dagger, teeth a brilliant white. he has a comb in his pocket, his hair slicked sideways because who gives a fuck. the cold sores are blooming—three little bastards that decided to grow overnight, red, wet, impossible

Private Screening

it was a private screening, no appointment, just the final masterpiece there on the wall. and him — part of it now, framed complete. like an artist’s work, it was modern, strokes of gaudy colour with thick applications of material, no planning, no design. on a large canvas of magnolia it lay, a perfect wash

The Clocks

under the white fluorescence of the beer garden, the oak tables gleamed against the pine, their surfaces marked with faint rings where ashtrays once stood. the coasters still carried their faded pictures of maidens; the empty glasses held thin circles of dry froth along their rims. I had a pint in front of me, my

The Tiger

the train stops—some mechanical fault. through the glass of the passenger car, I see her, heavy muscle shifting under orange and black, thick paws dragging through the grass; a tiger moving slow beyond the window. and I close my eyes. It could have been the swelter of a harsh Indian summer, Calcutta due north on

First Frost

there were these two kids on a winter bench. one soft as fresh bread. a pale English rose with braces glinting in the light. he was reading Brontë, his face still damp from a summer that wouldn’t quit. next to him, the other one. a briar-rose, thorns already showing. cheeks whipped red by the cold,