Category: Creative Writing

By Rory McAlpine

It consumes you, a dinner party such as this. You become no longer a person but an omnipresent host. You are the hands serving canopies and topping up delicate champagne flutes. You are the decorator and the entertainment; the gentle smiles and the “lovely to see you again” and “how is the family” and “how was the summer, it was France wasn’t it, where you went?” And the laughter, the flirting with the men – but tasteful – because you have a husband, and the smiling. You are even the weather. I have learned that the only way to ensure others’ happiness at these events, it seems, is one’s own deep unhappiness. But only if that unhappiness is hidden from sight. 

Henry and I had hired staff for the event, naturally. But the bodies do not matter. Still, I feel the responsibility, still the weight of everything all at once grinding me to the earth. Atlas should pity me. What is the weight of the world when I must shoulder this dreadful dinner party? 

The candles are being toyed with by the warm evening breeze, and every one that flickers I feel a flicker in my breast. They must remain lit. It would be on me if one was to extinguish. Henry had insisted on a garden party. And a lovely garden we have, gently sloping down from the house to level out towards the cliff. It is full of flower beds and old bowed trees, statues and benches and an herb garden. There are olive trees and oleander, pomegranate, and paper flowers. The colours are best at this time of year, vibrant and fully realised. Then once you reach the edge of the garden out over the cliff, is the sea. 

People are jealous because of it. They would never breathe a word of it. Yet when they come round and step out of our French windows and see the view, even if they have seen it a thousand times, I see that flash of jealousy in their eyes. It feels unfair to them that someone could possess such a view. Money cannot buy it; I imagine that is part of the problem. It is the one thing that our guests, women and the men alike (friends I suppose I should call them) are unable to have. Sure, they have beautiful views from their own homes, but it is like placing a Picasso beside the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Both are beauty incarnate, but one is mortal, and one belongs to the realms of heaven. 

“How is Reuben?” Daphne brightens as I ask, her hands are moving like spiders across her high neck dressed in the lavender shawl and bulbous pearls that she has a habit of fiddling with. I would slap her hands away, but now that wouldn’t be proper, would it. “Oh Reuben, yes he is back for his second term at college at present. He is studying in Britain; I think I may have mentioned it; he reads Arabic. I look at the symbols and despair but my boy he just gets it. Really it is a wonderous thing to witness”. I nod my head; my neck is stiff and sore already. I sip the white wine, it is French. It sharpens me, the crisp alcohol. “Children, they do amaze us”. 

I pass our pond; it is freshly stocked with fish for the occasion. Their golden scales dart below the lily pads and lotuses, like glimmers of sunlight that have been left behind. The sky is fast darkening. Sparks leap into the air as some of the servants shovel more coal onto the large fire pits that are placed around the garden. Coal does not smoke like wood, and the pits were raised so any smoke will waft high above the guests. It would be unimaginable for smoke to mingle with the mix of perfumes, scented candles, colognes, and flowers that are being rolled together in the sea air. 

I watch my husband at the far end of the garden, over the pinkish oregano flowers beside the olive and lemon trees that we had planted only last year. They were so slender, those olive trees, they would so easily snap. Given time they would grow strong. Or alternatively; break. He is talking to someone. I cannot see her face but the short cut blonde hair and green flowing dress tight in all the right places is enough for me to know. My husband takes her hand to help her up the steps to the garden’s upper tiers. I feel my hand squeeze the glass stem and breathe deeply.
In and out. In.
It was weighing heavier now. This whole evening. The throb in my temple was worse. I answered it with another delicate sip from my delicate glass.
And out
I want sea air. I walk down through the tiers of the garden. Nodding politely, smiling. “Lovely evening, isn’t it?” I am like water, slipping unimpeded across and around stones. The stones; my guests. I reach the edge of the garden and sit on the simple wooden bench I had placed here so long ago now. I can hear the waves crashing below. In the same way rocking a baby soothes it, the sea was my mother calming me in her swell and tide.
In and out. 

The background behind me: beautiful people, beautifully dressed, in my beautiful garden. The band has begun to play, and their gentle strumming and opening notes waft down to my ears. The dying daylight casts everything in a rich honey hue. This was my beautiful life: the sophisticated parties full of lawyers and bankers and government ministers. The holidays, just a few weeks ago I had returned from St Tropez. I sat on the boards of foundations and charities; my photo appeared in the press catching me at just the right angle. I had raised three children who were polite and excelling in their respective fields. Then I had my husband, the man who held the art world in his hand, a God that could mould critics and public opinion to his will. His art hangs in galleries across Europe and the US. Reviews of his recent exhibitions never failed to allude to not only his work but his handsome face and charm. The man himself was admired in journals almost as much as his paintings. He had the world enthralled, adoration and jealousy of his life and success, culminating to create a fervent worshipping. And I had that sea view. The entire world in front of me, the sea a gateway to countries afar. What an ironic view to have from a cage. A gilded cage, with glass bars. But nonetheless, a cage. 

I didn’t know what love was when I met Henry. I thought I loved him. He was older, successful, good looking and interested in me. But it wasn’t love, I was dazzled by him, just like the rest of the world. Once we married that bright light quickly faded, and the ugly darkness was left to seep back in. There was the Henry everyone saw, the artist with the house and the powerful friends and the idyllic life. But that was just a façade. A façade I was to play my own part in. On his arms at the galas and balls I was just like his Italian suits or Swiss watches, the right accessory to make the right picture. A doting, pretty wife to hang off his arm. Henry was a celebrated artist, but his greatest painting was his own life. He had planned the composition, the shading, the elements so they looked beautiful. Makeup to mask the ugly truth. 

There were the affairs, the harem of young women that would wander half naked through my living room while I ate breakfast. In the beginning, occasionally he would welcome me back to his bed when it suited him, I would hope each time he was returning to me, but it was never for long. Then there was the drinking, he was a mean and scornful man made worse by alcohol. I was left to do everything, at his beck and call night and day, more servant than wife. He would at one point insult me, at another profess his love for me. I would often open the door to a different Henry then the one I had left. 

When we first met, I had told him I wanted to be a writer. He had encouraged me then, and read my stories. He said he knew friends in publishing, people who could help me. But our marriage changed that. He became dismissive of my work, he discouraged me from it. “Why spend your time with silly words,” he said. He had a place for me at one of his friends’ charities, somewhere I could make a real change. So, I joined these boards, but soon learned I was to be a pretty face for the press photos and nothing more, do not speak dear just smile. So, the truth of my beautiful life was that it was hollow, there was no substance to it. You wonder why I stay. Why does any prisoner stay in a locked cell? I had married a God in the eyes of the world, I had everything a woman could want, and the ancient Greeks will tell you what happens when you make an enemy of a spiteful God. They destroy you. 

I don’t know when people began to leave our party. I think some came over to thank me. I am sure all of them thanked my husband. Henry who did little more than turn up, showered with praise for months of work by his wife. I think I missed the point where I became an extension of him. I lean against the railing, it was designed by a sculptor friend, large looping curves of iron that form the wings and bodies of birds in different stages of flight. The final laughter of the guests departs the house, the fires dim and for the first time I feel the chill of the night begin to set in. 

A hand wraps around my waist.
I breath: in and out.
I can smell the alcohol on his breath, the perfume of the pretty woman in the tight dress on his jacket.
In.
Like Jekyll and Hyde, Henry is a collection of identities. An actor playing every part in the
play.
The kiss on my cheek
Out.
My husband.
In.
“Come to bed.” the words are slightly slurred.
He wanted everything. He could have everything. I was always his wife, but he could pick and choose when he deigned to act like a husband.
In and out, in, out, in.
I tear myself away. My headache echoes the thundering of my heart. I throw the delicate wine glass from my hand and watch Henry twist out the way as it shatters. “I can’t do this,” the words rip at my vocal cords, my anger is a physical thing clawing its way up my throat. “I won’t.”  

Before he can react, I continue. The floodgates are open. Maybe it’s the wine, maybe the stress. I have opened, no, smashed, Pandora’s Box.
“God, Henry, can you not see we live in an illusion?”
We stare at each other. The thread holding everything together is unwinding itself before our eyes. I see the anger cloud his eyes, but I am too riled to understand the warning signs. This night has broken me. I have been holding the pieces of me together for so long.
“And you know the problem with illusions Henry – they aren’t real.”

Henry moves across the grass; his movement is so quick my anger dissolves to fear. He is inches from me. His cigar smoke, a hand that slides over my mouth. My voice is choked. “Illusions are only false when you stop believing in them.” Henry says, his voice is quiet. The tip of his cigar flares red. “If you believe in the illusion, if you live in it. What does truth matter, it is irrelevant. The illusion becomes what is real.” 

I stare at him. He is so calm. No, not calm, dead. Dead behind the eyes. He has no emotion towards me. It would be better if he screamed, if he called me every name under the sun, rather than this. “Just think if someone owns a golden statue. That everyone treats as gold, admires as gold, buys as if gold. Well then, if the truth is that the statue is tin painted yellow. Does it really make any difference?” He tosses the stump of his cigar over the railings and the glowing spark is engulfed by the dark waters below. “No, it doesn’t. Because regardless of what the statue is made of; it is gold my dear”. 

Trust an artist to love appearances. 

His eyes are inches from mine. If this was a love story we would be poised to kiss. To the servants from the house, it most likely looked like that. But this was not a love story. 

“One doesn’t leave a man like me,” Henry says, his voice isn’t threatening, but the words are sharp as knives. “Why give up all this? Because if you leave me, make no doubt I will ruin you. The stories I will tell, the people I will talk to, the favours I will pull.” Henry takes my hand. The wedding band he still wears is icy against my skin.
“Live in the illusion darling. It really is such a beautiful one. You have the house and the children, the fancy events, the money, me as a husband. If you let it be real, then does the truth really matter?” 

My necklace. It is so heavy. The emerald that hangs from it, a dropped anchor. I cannot move, I cannot leave. I dissolve into his arms. 

By Matthew Dodd.

In a deckchair under the late afternoon sun, he sat lazily writing in a worn leather pocketbook. A pale blue linen shirt fit loosely over his torso, setting off the darker blue of his linen trousers. His deckchair stood a little off-centre on the balcony of La Porte Ouverte, one of the finer hotels that overlooked the River Loire before its destruction by a German bomber, which was to prematurely eject its load en-route to Tours at the onset of the war. This would not happen for half a decade yet; he had no notion of staying that long.

In the pocketbook he was, with a fervent energy, composing passionate declarations of love to women he’d never met nor had any intention of meeting again. By this point in the afternoon (a large antique clock over the balcony entrance informed him, and twelve other patrons, that it was twenty-six minutes past four) he had completed one hundred and twenty-five such declarations in pieces that ranged from single sentences to polemics spanning a dozen pages. The object of this practice was unclear, but it evidently engaged the man deeply: his attention had hardly left the pocketbook since lunch, save short trips to the bar to order gin rickeys. By the bank of the river, a small child reached her hand out to feed a heron which had landed a metre or so into the water, only to tumble unceremoniously into the mud before her. Nearby, her parents did not seem to notice. They were, at that moment, preoccupied with the task of cutting a few slices of brie. 

The balustrades that enclosed the balcony were ornate with various vaguely Grecian images – an all but unrecognisable figure of Perseus that was recovered from La Porte’s wreck now takes pride-of-place in a local museum – and were spaced evenly as to allow guests an ample view of the river below. A single hollow chime announced the arrival of the half hour. At this, he set the pocketbook down on the table by his deckchair and got up, setting off once more on his familiar pilgrimage to the bar. The book, whose once black covers had grown brown by continued exposure to sunlight, displayed two open pages of an impassioned message to one Miss Delilah June. It was not one of the stronger pieces in the book but nevertheless exhibited the finely tempered prose on which he prided himself. At the end of the address he had written in a delicate hand: ‘With my love, which clings to you like climbing hydrangea, Frankie Oregon.’ 

Oregon wasn’t really his name. It was only the first name that his grandfather’s father had seen when he poked his head out from the boat on which he had stolen a trip out of Manila. And so it became his name. When it came time for him to pass his name on to a son – who would in turn pass it onto another son, who would then pass it onto Frankie – the suggestion of a family name preceding Oregon had evaporated. That life in Manila, and whatever name it was attached to, had been lost. Great-Grandfather Oregon was a man of few words and had never felt his own history to be worth wasting them on, so the memory of his life had died with him. By the time that Frankie Oregon was sat on the balcony of La Porte Ouverte, working on his second gin rickey, he had no family in either Manila or Oregon as far as he knew. The few relatives that he was aware of were scattered randomly about the world, on ranches or living in sensible two-bedroomed apartments. The River Oregon had no clear mouth and Frankie hardly cared to seek one out. As far as he was concerned, all that he owed to his ancestors was the odd flower on a gravestone, if he should happen to pass it by. Beyond that, he was content to be a singular, floating person. He had drifted all over the world in this way. Europe, Africa, Asia – oceans to oceans and coasts to coasts. He had briefly stopped in both Manila and Oregon but had felt very little in either. Indeed, very few places elicited a response from him merely by the fact of his being in them. Of course, he remembered the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal and, of course, he could itemise and expound their many intricacies and resonances – he had taken courses in both history and architecture – but, excluding those, the places meant practically nothing to him. For him, there was nothing in between the lines.

While Frankie was sitting on the balcony, head poised immovably above the pocketbook, a telegram arrived at the hotel’s front desk addressed to him. It was an invitation to the wedding of his sister, Evelyn, in Syracuse. Frankie would not read this message and the paper on which it was printed would one day join the unrecognisably charred rubble that had once been this fine hotel. The concierge who was on duty at the time of the  arrival of this telegram had, most peculiarly, just received one himself. In it, he learnt that his uncle had passed away from pneumonia at his home in Nantes just last weekend. As such, the concierge, whose name was Antoine (although everyone called him Tony), abandoned his post for the first time in his decade at La Porte Ouverte and ran off in the direction of a nearby bus station.

Outside, Frankie was nearly finished with his gin rickey. The next morning, he would check out of La Porte Ouverte and take a car to Orleans where he would likely find yet another hotel, or perhaps a café, and another deckchair to sit in. For now, though, he persisted in his scribblings. Behind him, in the hotel’s quite extravagant dining hall, tonight’s dinner service was being prepared. A bearded and bespectacled old man in a gravy-stained apron was yelling directions at a fleet of young chefs who, as a rule, wore far tidier uniforms than their superior. This evening, they would be serving a Chicken Fricassee, a dish La Porte’s kitchen was renowned for, with a crab bisque for its starter. In a few hours, Frankie Oregon would take the staff up on both these dishes, as well as a Crème Brulée which he would take once more on the balcony. By all accounts, he would enjoy them. After dinner he would drink a glass of neat scotch in his room and be in bed by eleven; he might even dream. 

As the clock’s larger hand moved towards the Roman numeral V, Frankie noticed something. His pocketbook was full. By a stroke of sheer coincidence, Frankie found that upon completing a plea of gentle longing to an unattached book clerk in Somerset, he had reached the book’s exact end. There were now precisely one hundred and thirty-two full messages in the book. Without exception, they were signed by the author, although the specific nature of his closing remarks differed throughout. The final words of his last message, and by extension the whole book, were uncomplicated: ‘with love, Frankie’. If he’d known these were to be his final words, perhaps he would’ve thought of something more exciting, but he hadn’t, so he didn’t. 

Upon finishing, he closed the book and placed it in his left trouser pocket. From his right, he produced a silver cigarette case out of which he drew one white cigarette. He raised it to his lips and, with a gold lighter he’d picked up somewhere in Warsaw, lit it. After taking two drags he began to walk towards the edge of the balcony. A gentle wind blew through a poplar tree across the river. Frankie gripped the banister with one hand and gazed down at the Loire as it passed below him. With the other he took the cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it off of the balcony, aiming vaguely for a small outcrop of thrushes on the riverbank. After a few moments he reached into his left pocket and took out the pocketbook. For a matter of seconds he observed the book, turning it over once, then twice, in his hands before casting it deliberately over the banister. It spun wildly in an arc through the air, its covers splayed to give the impression of a bird fruitlessly attempting to take flight. After a journey of some seconds it landed noiselessly in the river and was borne immediately by the current downstream, where it soon passed a small girl feeding some cheese to a heron, before disappearing ultimately and irretrievably into the dark recesses of the water.

By Tom Edgar

Gertrude: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.

Hamlet: Mother, you have my father much offended.

He stands on the Thames foreshore, down beneath the Tate Modern, looking out across the river blankly. He wears a black overcoat, cut rigidly around his shoulders, and the coattails flutter up in the wind, the black satin capturing the light, alchemising his back into a temporary silver. Slowly, he bends over, scanning the beach floor, furrowing between the dusted jade of beer bottles and river-stained needles, until he finally picks up a stone. He holds it in his right hand, moving his thumb along its edge, studying it like a blind man’s vocabulary. It is soft; he is losing himself on this shore. In the stone’s cold press, some more complete past flows into his empty present. He leans, awkwardly, as if about to squat: his overcoat stretches tight against his shoulders. He draws his right arm back, the gesture pregnant with defeatism. He is going to skim a stone on the Thames. He pauses and looks out across the river — the brown swell, unmoved and unlit by a grey sky — before making a sudden jolt. He releases his arm, making the gesture of skimming, but he does not let go of the stone. Instead, he keeps it clenched in his hand, so that by the time he has followed through, it is not dashing across towards the North Bank, but is pressed up against his chest. He steps back and drops the stone. He turns to see if anyone has been watching him, before scuttling off, the briskness of his walk straightening his legs. 

It was an early afternoon in mid-August and the sky was acid-washed with an unrefined brightness that wavered between blue and grey. Today, for Adam, it looked blue — an impossible, wonderful blue. He was eight years-old and he was in his favourite place in the world: the beach, a five minute walk along the sandy footpath from Sea Cottage, where he had stayed every Summer since time immemorial. And at breakfast that morning, Toby had promised to show him how to skim a stone. 

It was a small, pebbled beach: a cove nestled between two craggy headlands. Looking out, there was a pale view of Scotland — its sullen verdure assuming an airy lightness across the thin strait of Atlantic water, its deep blue wind-tossed with the white, spitting arabesques of the waves. Looking out, Adam could see the hourly steamer headed, face-on, towards the island: a bizarre, upturned triangle, ever-expanding, with people leaning on the guard-rails and watching the island expand before them just as it had done the day before. He had stood by the rails on his tiptoes, watching the island dilate, pointing his finger and squinting his eyes, saying “Look, Mum, there’s the house,” or else, “The Beach! It’s the Beach.” It didn’t matter that his estimations were incorrect — that the pointed-to house was the wrong shape or the wrong colour, or that the indicated beach was of the whitest sand — because to Adam, Sea Cottage and the Beach were the whole island, and so, in his heart, he was right. 

A small campfire had been set up where the beach ended and met the wild grass. It was surrounded by camp chairs. Mackerel cooked on the fire in silver parcels of foil, its edges folding upwards in the heat, while fresh-picked mussels bubbled away in white wine and garlic. The adults were mostly sitting around the fire: the Bateses, the Sutherlands, and Adam’s parents, the Cromptons. Only Toby Symes was absent, despite being the nominal chef. 

David Crompton was, by now, half-asleep, a metal cup of white wine rested supine against his chest, whilst a facedown paperback straddled his thigh. His wife, Christie, was sitting next to him. Through dark sunglasses, she looked out towards the sea and Scotland, down the barrel of her aquiline nose, until she spotted her son, Adam, with Toby. They were standing by the water’s edge. Toby was leaning over, skimming a stone. She sipped on her beaker of wine, holding the rim against her face to hide a smile. She stood up and walked over to the pink, quilted beach-bag, from which she extracted a packet of cigarettes. She returned to her seat, lit a cigarette, and continued watching. 

“Bend over,” Toby said, instructing Adam. “Find the smoothest pebble you can possibly find. It must be perfect, like this.” Having chosen one, Toby exhibited it in Adam’s eye-line, holding it between thumb and middle-finger. “Not too big, you see. Otherwise it’ll go plop and sink right down to where the fishes swim and the crabs scuttle and the dainty oysters recline with their innards of pearl. And then,” he leaned over to his right, planting his left foot forwards, and drew back the pebble-bearing arm, “you throw it like this. Watch.” The stone dashed loose of Toby’s grip and skated across the sea, all the way, Adam thought, to the mainland. “Now, Adam, you try.”

Adam smiled. Easy, he thought. He looked down at the beach: half-scanning for a stone, half-imagining that same stone hurtling over the waves, all the way to Scotland and beyond. Dreaming, he became that stone, kissing the water’s surface with all his body, flying safely over the deep, the cold salt wind turning his face numb and red and warm. He crouched, allowing his brittle white hands to brush over the pebbles. He found one. It was smooth and dark grey with white and amber rings. He stroked it, imagining its soft and weightless flight. Adam’s father had only ever shown him dead rocks — fossils, the embalmed mummies of unknowable prehistory — but here, now, were the living rocks, which soar weightlessly at the imperative of a human hand. “Now, remember,” Toby said. “Left foot forwards, lean to your right. And then, let it fly away.”

“Yes,” Adam replied. “I will, I will.” But his excitement muddled his concentration, and as he leaned into his position and began to throw, he wobbled, his foot faltering forwards, and he overthrew it. It was as if the pebble was so dear to him that his hand had refused to release it. It careered off to the left and, at first contact with the cruel and dark sea, it sank — down, down, to where the fishes swim and … The Mainland seemed so far away, an evasive, unreachable world. 

“Don’t worry, Adam.” Toby placed his large, veiny hand on Adam’s back. It felt warm. “You know, I couldn’t do it until I was about thirteen.”

Adam laughed. “Huh! Really? That’s so funny.” 

“Yes. Well, keep trying. It’ll work eventually.” Toby turned to look at the campfire. “Right, I best be off. Your father’s fallen asleep on duty.” He walked a few strides before breaking into an easy jog: a sudden gust of wind blew and changed the direction of the campfire smoke, enveloping Toby for a moment. Adam was smiling: the sort of smile which knows the world is simple and that there is nothing more to it than whether or not a stone sinks or swims, or whether you sit on your mother’s left or right knee. And although his stone had sunk, Toby’s had sunk once too, so it was really only a matter of time. He saw his mother looking over towards him and smiled even more. But as she lifted her sunglasses, resting them on her hairline, Adam noticed Toby, now halfway across the beach, moving with slow, athletic grace, his bare torso warmed by the sun. 

Adam turned back to the sea. He picked up another pebble, Toby’s earlier words echoing in his head, and he tried to throw it. Again, it careered off to the left and sank on its first contact with the sea. The other children, nine of them altogether, had been playing aimlessly about the beach and, seeing Adam’s latest failure, began to laugh. “Look at Adam! It’s not that hard.” But Adam was smiling, that big and certain smile, because Toby had said he’d be able to do it eventually and Toby knew so much more than all the children. 

Mussels gaped in the pot. The air was drunk from the hot wine simmering. Toby rattled the large pot a few times before removing it from the fire, placing it on a small trestle table, next to the mackerel on its foil platter, the edges of which lifted at the wind’s slightest intimations. They had caught the fish that morning. There hadn’t been space for Adam, the youngest of all the children, to go fishing. Instead, he had been assigned the task of harvesting mussels, severing them from their bed of rock and rubbing away the moss and grit and hair with his fingernails and tepid water. But it had been lovely, since he had been with his mother. Hector, the Sutherlands’ youngest, had joined them. He was one year older than Adam and he was cruel — the crude relish on his face as he tore mussel from rock, the way his tongue pressed his upper lip when he smiled. But Adam had his mother, and that was enough. He would skip and sprint about, an inefficient harvester, before circling back to his mother to hold her hand. “Mummy, Mummy — you have to see this. There’s a crab.” To each of his enthusiastic discoveries, she responded with a stiff, aristocratic smile, the knowing parsedness of which suggested a quiet condescension. “Oh, how wonderful,” she would say, with a detached but loving irony, before giving him a gentle pat on the back. “You are clever, Adam. Go on. Let’s see.” Then she would draw a cigarette from her pocket and follow him, smoking, with one hand in her coat pocket.

“Are you all ready for some food?” Toby announced, in part to the adults, but with the gentle inflection of his tone directed towards the adoring troop of children. 

“Yes.”

“I’m starving.”

“Mmm. Smells so good.”

David awoke to the gleeful chorus. Startled into life, his sudden jolt unsettled the beaker of wine which had been resting on his tummy, and the liquid splashed onto his blue linen shirt. “Bugger,” he said, before fumbling into a stentorian laugh. He peeled the paperback off his lap, turned the corner of the page, and stood up. Christie looked at him, half in disgust, and rolled her eyes. She stood up and moved towards the spread of food. “Toby, it looks wonderful. You do spoil us. Thank you.” 

Behind the beach, there was a patch of shorter grass on which the children had set up a cricket pitch. The two oldest children — Adam’s brothers, Henry and John — were, respectively, batsman and bowler. Everyone else hung about the makeshift wicket like satellites, doting on the every move of the older two, eager to impress them whilst masking their frustration at their own lack of inclusion. John would bowl, not very effectively, and Henry would hit the ball down to the beach, and then the fielder closest would bruise their bare feet by running over the pebbles and the dry, tumorous kelp, whose bubbles snapped on their feet. Or else, if the ball was hit in the other direction, into the bracken, they would get on their knees and crawl through the damp, tick-laden crop in vain pursuit of a surely lost wind ball. All the while, Henry and John screamed: “Hurry up.”

Adam had been placed at Fine Leg. He was the youngest, and so, inevitably, had the least right to be included in the match. Rarely would a ball be hit towards him. But he was happy with this — dawdling away, his eyes wandered about as his mind flew off about the landscape, up the heather-blushed slopes and the wind-curled sea. Even still, he could only think of one thing: skimming stones. He was sure he’d be able to do it now, if only he could practise. But he couldn’t: on a group holiday, he must play with the group, even if the group didn’t much care about playing with him. He felt like an outsider here. His brothers, so kind and considerate at home, adopted a cruel, teasing attitude towards him in front of their extrafamilial disciples. And so all the other children behaved like that to him. Especially Hector — Hector, who just last summer, had been his best friend. 

He looked towards the beach. Toby and his mother were standing near the water’s edge, close together. They were talking, her face turned up towards his greater height. The tide was coming in quickly. If only he could be over there, with Toby and with his mother, skimming stones, and they’d both be so proud of him. But he was standing here, the short wild grass itching his feet, awaiting the ball which would never come, only so that he could fumble it and misthrow it and get shouted at by his brothers. His mother was smoking: wisps of cigarette smoke, blue against the sea and view of Scotland. She tossed it to the floor and then they both started to walk back. 

“ADAM!” Shouts. He paused, confused. What? He thought. He looked about, briefly, puzzled, until he saw a dot of orange expanding faster and faster and coming straight towards him. He couldn’t quite register what was happening. By the time he was raising his hands to his face, it was too late. The ball hit his nose; its worn-out seam imprinting itself on his skin and he fell to the floor. 

“Adam,” John shouted, irritated at the dropped catch. “You spaz”. He could hear Hector and a few others laughing. 

He stood up and limply threw the ball towards the wicket-keeper. It bounced a few times, landing a few metres wide of its destination. His nose felt even more painful when he thought about his brothers’ mistreatment of him. He ran off. 

“Mummy, mummy.” He shouted as he ran towards her. 

“Oh, Adam. What is it?” Her and Toby had almost returned to the campfire.

“My face. Henry hit it.”

“Henry hit you?”

“Yes. He hit me with a cricket ball.” 

“Oh darling. That must be so painful. Come here.” She pulled him tightly against her, tucking his head into her arms. But the sympathy increased his pain and so he cried more. 

“Now, let me look at your face.” Adam turned his face upwards so that she could see it. Placing her hands on his small face, with her thumbs she wiped away each tear as it sprouted. “Well, I think we should take you back up to the cottage.”

“Okay Mummy, okay.” 

After she had pressed an ice-pack to his face and nourished him with Hot Chocolate, Adam had moved through to the TV room, where eventually he was joined by the other children. John and Henry decided to put on an episode of South Park, with the volume turned down so the adults wouldn’t hear. Adam kept looking out the window towards the sea: a sort of liquid silver, now, in the cloud-broken light, its faint, metallic ripples calling him down. He thought about tomorrow: that was when he’d finally do it. But why couldn’t he do it now? He could slip away, unnoticed, and practice. The adults were resting, and the children were watching TV. He could say he’d been reading in some quiet, undisturbed corner of the house. His mother, perhaps, would come looking for him. If she discovered he’d gone to the beach on his own, she’d be furious. But she’d come around: besides, what was her anger compared to the proud exhilaration of a skimming stone? He would go to the beach. 

It was quiet down there, other than the rumble of the wind buffeting against the headland, and the waves lapping: small, sympathetic ones, noisy only due to the impatient speed with which the sea dispatched them. Since most of the beach was visible from Sea Cottage, he walked to the far end where he’d be invisible. He had an hour, he reckoned, until supper. 

He turned over Toby’s words. The smoothest pebble; Perfect, like this; You throw it like this! He shut his eyes, remembering Toby’s graceful movements: the subtle rightwards lean, the left foot striding forwards, the arm stretched backwards, pregnant with energy. Eyes closed, he mimicked these actions, over-and-over, without holding or throwing one. He opened his eyes and picked up a stone. He threw it, and did so again-and-again, for about twenty minutes or so until the smooth mosaic of the beach conjured a smooth, lopsided, if ovular pebble: a concrete grey, with one vague amber ring and two white spots on the upside of its thinner end. It felt strange in his hand, inosculating with his palm: like two continents pieced together after millennia of drift, two lovers whose curves and inclines met each other’s with a casted precision. He leaned into the throw, releasing it, and then, it skimmed. The pebble leaped up in a spray of white, then curved to the left and bounced a few more times before plunging into the sea on its fourth bounce. He had done it. How was he going to not tell anyone about it? He’d have to wait until tomorrow and then he could show them all. He tried once again for good measure: again, it skimmed. 

He set off back to the house along the path. He imagined the pebble now: yes, it hadn’t quite gone all the way to the mainland, but had gone quite far. Five bounces: and where would it be now? Fish gliding over it, enthroned amongst the scallops and the oysters: a diamond encrusted on the ocean floor. 

He heard a twig snap. Quick breaths; low murmurs. It grew louder, now, as he acclimatised to reality. His heartbeat dropped a little. It was coming from about ten metres away, just off the path. He followed it, creeping slowly through a small pathway of trampled bracken, almost ferric and rusted on its ends, feeling wet and itchy on his uncovered calves. There was a clearing. He looked up at the tree: its late August canopy of etiolating leaves jostled in the wind. There was a stream next to it; the stream moaned and murmured as it rushed quickly over the rocks in white bursts. It grew louder. There were two figures, trembling on the floor, flickering in the dusk: one white and the other darker. Adam’s mother tilted her head to her side, noticing him, and raised one finger to her lips to quieten him. Toby, eyes closed, maintained his course, skating away across the high seas to Scotland. 

The next day Adam went to the beach, but his throw was limp, and the stone sunk, and the other children laughed at him. 

By Tom Edgar

There is a restaurant in Montmartre, a few hundred metres away from the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, down a backstreet where the narrow concrete road is flanked by two raised pavements, and the low shopfronts open to the Parisian sky. The restaurant is a weathered crimson, with intermittent patches of flaked and ochreous wood — and, above the fusty windows, in a gilded, antique font: MAISON PIERRE. 

Every year, in the first week of August, when the city is hot and the bin-bags fester on the street corners, and the tourists swarm the haunts where Hemingway drank and Camus questioned suicide, Pierre, the Maitre d’, leaves the now unfamiliar city and travels to his farm in Burgundy where he harvests blackcurrants. 

It is always the same. He arrives at the farm, nestled in a shallow vale between two low hills, and sees the overworked sun spreading its tired white fingers over the clusters of deep purple blackcurrants, hanging on the etiolated bushes. He sets about his task; the rusted blades of his scissors osculate on each strig of currants, which Pierre tosses into the old feed buckets, where a few docile bugs attempt one last, decadent feast. Once clean, the currants are crushed: their bruised skin torn, the brutalised flesh falls into his ensanguined hands. He soaks the flesh in Eau de Vie, the water of life, whereby it delicately resurrects into Creme de Cassis, a sweet, heady liquor, which is mixed with chilled white Burgundy. It is for this, the Kir, that Maison Pierre is loved by its patrons. 

In the early nineties, John’s parents happened upon the restaurant as they hiked through a quiescent, autumnal Paris, on their way to Sacré-Coeur. Tired, they paused in a backstreet, next to an old-fashioned brasserie, with red-and-cream woven chairs and heavy white table cloths, the romantic kind John’s dad so detested. He interrogated the menu, like a priest confronting an heretical mass, doggedly questioning whether or not it was done ‘properly’ here. Deciding it wasn’t, he turned away, started walking off, when his wife grabbed his shoulder. “Darling,” she said, with unprecedented authority, “we’re eating here.” They did. They drank sweet, heady Kirs, and ate foie gras and bavette steaks. 

They were happy, briefly. They never returned. 

* * * * * * * * * * * *

“Dad,” John spoke, drawing out the monotone syllable in expression of his otherwise latent tiredness. “How much further is it?”

They had walked for two hours, now, through the mid-August’s disquiet heat. Most of the restaurants which they had passed were closing for the afternoon. The blackboards, with their lists of chalk-scribbled specials (Escargots x 12 –  €18 Steak Frites – €25), were being hurried inside, tucked under the arms of waiters who had rolled up their sweat-heavy sleeves.

John’s top was damp and it stuck to his chest. It was blue-and-white and stripy. He had always wanted a top like it. At least, always since they had arrived in Paris, earlier that week. The day before, when his father had bought it for him, he had put it on immediately, tearing off the one he was wearing with such alacrity that the shop-assistant rolled her eyes. That it was Dad who had got it for him made it that much more special. Dad, who he so rarely saw, who could be so reserved and so cutting in his misbegotten efforts at fatherly love. But now the t-shirt was sodden and by tomorrow it would smell. He wouldn’t be able to wear it again all week. He tried to contain his frustration but it made his head sore. 

“John, will you shut up? It’s around here,” he paused. “Somewhere.” Even if John’s father’s words expressed doubt, the tone was always certain. It was as if he had a subjective concept, or rather contempt, for natural law. What he said would come to pass. And, if it didn’t, then Nature was to blame for not allowing herself to be beaten into the requisite shape. His lips were parsed tightly. Pensiveness, frustration, anger, or absence? John could never decide. To him, his father’s face was an illegible scroll, its features an unremitting cuneiform. There was a drop of sweat on his untrimmed beard. He beat it away with one swift brush of the back of his hand. 

“What you mean is, you don’t know where it is. That’s it, isn’t it Dad?” Alfie, John’s older brother, retorted, his eyes alight with the prospect of battle. 

“If you’re that hungry, Alfie, we’ll eat here.” He pointed towards a Tourist menu with an inflated photograph of a grey steak and soggy fries. “Perfectly good, don’t you think?” Alfie didn’t reply. He looked down at the floor, sheepishly, content with the reaction, but now wary of provoking anything more extreme. 

“No, Dad. Don’t worry. We’ll find it soon.” John smiled timidly, with the eyes of a told-off Spaniel: a sense of hurt and sadness glinting beneath the still dependent gaze. “I’ll help. Pass your phone and I’ll see if I can find it.” 

“Thanks, John. At least one of you is helpful,” he said, passing his unlocked phone to John. 

Looking up, John asked, “What’s it called?”

“How the fuck am I supposed to know?”

John pursed his lips, unwilling to say anything, but unsure how he could help any further without that crucial information. 

“Well, Dad,” Alfie said. “It’s your restaurant, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Alfie. Fuck off.” He turned away. “Useless prick, you —” he paused. A tour group was walking past, a militia of cargo shorts and baseball caps, chattering away happily and unaware, clearly, of the consternation they had caused as John’s father was made to back into the wall to let them past. He glared at them, sternly. “Bloody…” He sighed. “Well, the restaurant. Yes. It’s Paul’s? No. No. It can’t be.” It was a moment of unusual interest to the children — a brief exhibition of their father’s internal monologue. “It’s um. P – something. P. It’s Pierre’s. That’s it. Pierre’s. Maison Pierre.” He raised his hand, limply, to gesture to John to get on with it. 

John tapped away at the screen with his small fingers, so pared and bitten that their tips were like cratered moons. He pressed on the search bar and started to key in the word. The screen was so damp from his clammy hands that the keyboard wouldn’t respond. He rubbed the phone and his hands against his shorts to dry them. He started again. P. The first letter. He paused. A list of suggestions appeared. 

Pornhub

Private Escorts, Hungary — visit Budapest in Style, V.I.P.

Peace — Find Help Now, near you

The phone shook in John’s hands. He was sinking, sinking, inhumed by the weight of a thousand fallen stars. He trembled. And Dad …. And Dad … And Dad. Lurid images flashed before his mind. He was sinking, back into the long, dark, high-ceilinged corridor at home — so little, and so unsure of the voices, the loud voices, which scratched at his eardrums and wet his eyes. And then. It faded — to a blankness, a blur; and weight, the weight of it all. Absently, palely, he stared at the pavement, his heart and breath and all his innards wobbling and shaking and uncertain. 

He looked towards Alfie. On his t-shirt, there was a woman posing for some 1950s edition of Vogue. The woman. Not that woman. She would be Hungarian and pale, a prostitute, much paler than the woman in the black-and-white photograph, pale and wearing deep, black eyeshadow, which was maybe just her tiredness and sadness and not eyeshadow at all. John couldn’t speak. His eyes failed. Trembling, the phone fell out of his hand and it hit the floor. “Sorry,” he stuttered. “Dad.” 

John’s father leant down to pick the phone off the floor, passing John’s line of vision as he did so. There was a crack in the top right of the screen, a snowflake on a pond at night. He sighed, spoke quietly: “You fucking moron.” He paused, looking at John, and then waved his hand in John’s direction as if to bat away an impertinent fly. 

He continued the internet search which John had started; either he didn’t notice, or was simply unaffected, by what John had seen. “Oh well. It looks like the restaurant’s closed. Sorry. Let’s eat here instead.” He gestured to the Tourist menu from earlier. “They can’t fuck up a steak haché, can they?”

“No, Dad.” John stammered.

“God, what’s got into you?” He paused to think. “You probably haven’t drunk enough water. I told you this would happen. Some food should sort you out.”

He signalled the waiter. “Une table pour a tres.”

“Ouais.” The waiter pointed them towards a table. Alfie was about to sit down, but their father shook his head, and said, “I’ll sit there.” 

The waiter returned with three menus. But there was no need to look since John’s father had already decided. “Tres kir, pour entre; tres steak ash, oon carafe de vin roug avec duh there.” The waiter was confused and asked John’s father to repeat the order, which he did; only this time he said it much quicker. The waiter, it seemed, partially understood and hurried back to the kitchen. 

“He must be from the South. They don’t speak French down there, you know?”

Alfie lit a cigarette. “Oh please. Don’t get smoke in my eyes.”

The kirs came. They were sickening, saccharine. John’s father smiled, his yellowing teeth bared fully. “Typically French. Poor Cassis, the wrong wine. I told you it’d be awful.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

John and Alfie were standing in front of the Basilica de Sacré-Coeur. Their father was ‘doing business’ on a shaded park bench, interrupting the flirtations of the German couple with whom he shared it. He was speaking to a colleague on his phone’s loudspeaker. The Germans looked at one another, not with love, but with a newfound awkwardness and silence.

“What’s up, John? You were quiet all of lunch,” Alfie asked. 

“Nothing. It’s really nothing.” He spoke quietly. “Just dehydrated — like Dad said.”

“Really? I don’t believe that.” Alfie lit a cigarette and passed it over to John for a puff. He coughed. He was fourteen. John moved his eyes to look at the view. Paris stretched into the horizon. There was too much of it, simply too much of it for him to make sense of. He saw but he could not feel. He turned back towards Alfie. 

Their father looked over, saw the cigarette in John’s hand, and didn’t seem too concerned. Then he waved to them and shouted, “Go inside. I’ll catch up with you. I’ve seen it plenty of times before … Sorry about that, yes — the kids. You know how they are … Yes, 14 and 16 … Not the best age.”

John and Alfie walked into the church. “Alfie, I’ll talk to you later. I just don’t feel like it now. That’s all. Please can you leave it.” The church was not so busy as the crowds out front had led them to expect. There were a few tourists, unaware that you should look away from Sacre-Coeur rather than at it, who were now struggling to determine why the place was so esteemed by their guidebooks. An American family, pondering the same question, decided it was big. “Hey, look kids,” their father spoke adoringly. “This is ancient. It’s from way back in the Renaissance. Would you believe it? Heck, that was like five hundred years ago. And there’s Jesus, too — watching over all of us.” He said, pointing above the Choir, where a vulpine Christ scowled down at them gallically. 

“Hey, John. Listen to these yanks. So cringe.” Alfie said. 

John wasn’t listening, and if he was, he was listening not with his brother’s scorn, but with a kind of envy of the loving simplicity of those transpontine innocents. 

“John. Listen to them. So irritating, I mean really.”

“Yeah,” John replied blankly. He could only really think about his father. He felt so terrible and alone and isolated in his knowledge. That Dad fucks prostitutes — poor, mistreated Hungarian ones; that he wanks and watches porn; and that he’s unhappy too. And could he really say these things? Could he tell anyone? Wouldn’t that be unfair? To tell people things which would make them think differently about his father. It is a lie to say that knowledge is freedom. Knowledge is a burden, one which can rarely be offloaded without consequence. He could tell his mother, but then she’d just hate his father more. 

He was sitting in one of the front pews, looking up at the mosaics. He felt so alone that, impulsively, he kneeled down to pray. It had been so long since he’d done this. He leaned forwards, his knees pressed reassuringly against the kneeler, and felt a big whoosh of relief. It’s alright, he thought. It will be alright. It is fine. God is with me, and God will help me, even if Dad won’t. John had been drowning and, he thought, God had fished him out of a cold and Arctic deep. 

* * * * * * * * * * * *

John was standing in the gift-shop queue. There was a thick black-string necklace with a cross on it in his hand. He wanted to buy it. He felt good, now — close to God and reassured. It will be alright, his thoughts incanted, it will be alright. His father had given him ten euros earlier that day and he was going to spend it on the necklace. The cross was metallic and it felt smooth in his hands. He wanted it more than anything he had ever wanted. More, even, than the t-shirt; it was like a hug from his mother, or the corridor light which would glow through his slightly-opened bedroom door on cold Winter nights. It made him feel safe. As he neared the front of the queue, both Alfie and his father joined him.

“There you are,” his father said. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you. What are you buying?”

John didn’t speak. He showed his father the necklace. 

“Well, get on with it then.”

The woman at the counter scanned the necklace. John handed her his ten euro note.

“Mais non. C’est quinze euros.”

John hesitated and then turned to his father. “Dad, please could I have five more euros for this?”

“Really, John? You spend so much money.”

John turned to the woman at the counter and said, in a hushed voice, “Sorry.” She snatched it back, putting it under the counter. He looked down at the floor, briefly, and noted how the cheap white lights reflected on the fake marble floor. 

“Come on, then. You didn’t need it, anyway.”

“Yes Dad.”

“Besides, it’s not like you believe in any of that crap.”