I am unaware I drink absinthe and drinking absinthe am unaware. Suzanne has asked me what I am about, why I prefer furniture to music and ham to any furniture. My mother shook me awake every morning. So Suzanne, I say it is the kind of love that is rhythmic, tender, surprising and hurtful. ‘Suzanne […]

For fun, the dolphins raced the prow, flipping their white bellies over for the crowd, some of whom ran from one side to the other. Even his wife smiled, gripping the rail. After, she drove them up the coast into a sea fret. Their flat’s balcony seemed suspended. She went for a rest. On the […]

A field snapped with frost and stitched with brittle docks, a metal gate where I hung, still, like the horses there – the grey standing gentle over the bay mare, held inside their listening; wick-wick of a pigeon, the chat of a jackdaw flock. Each second was a frozen bead, but lovely to the touch. […]

They were maybe on their last legs even when Manchester first stuck its fingers into the wound and began pulling out peasants. Poor old monsters, who had clung to their hosts’ dark places! What a wrench to see those hungry farmers ride away! No wonder a few of them smuggled aboard the carts – rode […]

He were forever glancing behind; I’d see him under streetlamps as he waited for the clouds to catch up. When they did from his pocket tin he’d bring out the mother-dough, feverish with spoor-droppings, cuckoo spit, cobweb clots. In those days he’d bet an owl from her feathers, a bride from her ring, on a […]

When I think of my father in the furnace – the gas jets aimed at his chest, fire-wings budding from his shoulders and his mouth opening with its lit interior, his tongue delicate as an icicle – I want to be a harpy eagle mother, feed dainties into his beak, its red gape wide open […]

You will change into ‘trashers’, canvas shoes, when you lock yourself in at eight. Collecting your strongbox from the safe it will be weighed. It will be weighed again when you clock off at six. You will sit at a vice with apron attached to funnel the filed off dust. You will blow your nose […]

Most of the time I saw Granddad indoors, first in his dark room with blue gas mantles and a kitchen range and one tall window in Poplar, then in the overheated lounge of Aunt Nell and Uncle George’s new flat in Morden when he was in his nineties. But he came to stay in our […]

It’s dark in here and forest green: Britannica, sixteen oak trees in a London living room, the little girl my mother in the bookcase glass. Italy, Ithaca, Izmail, Japan, each page a mainsail turning, HMS Discovery, none of the rivers of southern Italy is of any great importance. Like birds on long-haul flight, let not […]