They sat around in the low light and the blue smoke of the room and after a while he picked up a guitar and started to strum some rudimentary chords, plucking triads and tripping harmonics and, believing he was, of a sudden, some rough blues man, he began to throw in some hems, some hums, … Continue reading Some hems, some hums, some uh-huhs.
Medication teeth, rotund in dungarees, grey dreads adorned with beads (and other Keith Richard knickknacks), Jessica shows a greeting hand. Bangles singing. In and out of the lobster and bronze crowd to The Standard. Dialects bubbling, a foam of voice. The gulls loom and retreat and shadow the pale sand, the bodies. Beyond this, the … Continue reading The Colour of The Crabmeat.
Crazy Jeannie and Pleasant Terry finally got married again. Fair play to them. But, somewhere, somehow, along the way, in exchanging names twice, they confused each other’s nicknames, so that he, at last, found her, pleasant, and she, him, eventually, crazy. The actual details of how, or why, this confusion occurred are obscure. That’s … Continue reading Unexpected Butterfly.
It started to rain, so I dripped into The Eight Kings. The usual liquid-lunchers, afternoon boozers, the work-shy, the free. The knock-off merchants, too, and the old. The two-for-one crowd with the pushy pushchair. I could hear Snoyle laughing it up with the bookie boys behind me. They were playing a game of cards. Far too … Continue reading The Definitive Slide.
He waited a while longer, but he saw no return. He got out from under and he went upstairs. He laid in the bath and rolled another cigarette from an ashtray collection. The mirror steamed and rain drummed the thin glass in the skylight. When the water lost its heat, he climbed out, dried himself and … Continue reading The Table.
It is a gorse-yellow and golden dawn over Penn Beacon. Fresh rush and suck of the shingle beneath the shallow lap waves as they reach, keel and recoil. We roll the boat from the low trailer into the sea. Ffooks and Farrow, his cousin, on one side, Sean and I on the other. When we … Continue reading Five in the lapstrake.
