All articles by this author
Lightning bolt. Heart on fire. Sailboat. Statue of Liberty.
Just once in her life she shot a gun, when she was in the Venture Scouts, aged 16. It was at the Thiepval Barracks a few months before she took her GCSEs. The army must have been trying to recruit them or something. As if. The army guy, who’d shown her how to shoot the gun, looked like Travis Bickle prior to the mohawk. She’d fancied him slightly. They didn’t converse.
What he’d like is to not be a burden
The worst thing about being alone is that you have to talk to strangers, and that’s awkward. He was bullied as a boy for saying funny things at the wrong time. Even his sisters used to say he had an odd manner of speaking, but there’s nothing he can do about that. What’s he supposed to do, not speak?
Something wants out
He eats, cuts more. A thick coin of marbled purple slithers across the counter and over the lip to the floor. He scoops it up, gobbles. Five-second rule, he says. She stares at the tiles that haven’t been mopped since they moved in: Are you looking for food poisoning? Don’t believe in it, he replies, setting his bottle back on the squid stain. I don’t endorse your obsessive fixations, he says, turning back to his spitting pan, tossing in a ring and tentacle to test the oil’s heat. Charlotte arrives at last, via Uber, straight off the flight, fashionable, strangely neat, with a hard little mouth.
June 9, 2017
Truth is you were ransacked and you will never cease to know that.
You drift gingerly out of the clinic. The air flaps and you quiver. You linger a minute at the squat wall between the carpark and the pavement—over there is the old St. Columba’s graveyard, where you always meant to go. This town was a “thin place” that pilgrims came to, in the belief that here the margin is finest between heaven and earth. You can’t fathom that. Heaven’s only a sweet con to mollify and defer you, an excuse for why some days here get so painful. No reason, no good reason. Would it be better or worse if you had reason to feel this joyless? Nothing matters and you’re meant to keep on going on.
