The young lounge the hours on the benches of the dead: their carefully careless hair skew-wiffs caps. Scratched and battered skateboards slung at their outstretched sneakers. Energy drinks clutched in one hand, handset in the other. Sickly, sticky-blue smiles on insect faces. You rarely see anyone riding a board these days. The older guys, sure. … Continue reading The Ancient Skate Punk.
They sat on the doorstep at the back of the flats. They came every evening, as summer elapsed, to smoke and trade hushed nothings and somethings and to wait for the pipistrelle bat. They sat with their knees drawn and sometimes she stretched and he admired her legs and he rolled tobacco, licking the … Continue reading Vespers.
It was chalked on the bog wall and spread quickly round school - a whisper to a chant in the playground. “Pippin’s mum’s only got one tit!” Odd. • We’d played darts at Pippin’s last summer. The house on the corner, halfway up Steep Street. I kept score. We smoked his mum’s cigarettes, drank his … Continue reading Withered Apples.
Martin Kettle, once of Stoneyclough (the pronunciation, if I remember correctly, being ‘-cluff’ rather than ‘-clow’), a town a long way north of here, but now resident of Penn Beacon, was stood on a table in the Eight Kings. He was busy sellotaping the corner of a large poster of Bob Dylan high up onto … Continue reading The Bristol Arm.
