I’d hauled myself skywards on steep metal rungs. You were safe below, hurling taunts like stones. We’re two brothers, poles apart, but I’d climbed the ladder. I’d had to. You’d dared me to rodeo the Donkey.
We’re staring down a tin of Quality Street at the centre of our circle of seats when the church door bangs open. It’s a new bloke, crucifix dripping from his neck like a lanyard.
It’ll burn on your skin. The problem is that you won’t put a whisper of sun cream on underneath; you’ll just slap the hard stick of face paint on under your eyes, faintly sweet like crayons, one long stripe, and you’ll think of the school fair, six years old at your favourite stand, begging to be made a tiger.
Once, Alex ate the same cereal for nine months because each carton earned a square inch of Alaska. “Eighteen, all told. You earned them,” his mother said when Alex was thirty-one, handing him the deeds the summer before she died.
Tell your mother the truth, complicated boy. Illuminate your cramping collegiate mind-spills, logarithms, fruit flies, Shakespeare, splattered on plush beige carpet, unreachable from your bedridden grasps.
The pond cradles them in its mouth like teeth. The statues. Cracked and shattered. They’re reskinned and restitched with moss and algae.
and in those days I played chicken with life and roulette with oblivion. I ducked under the lowered crossing signals to race the oncoming train across the tracks, and when I reached the other side, I turned and saw a girl I knew from school jumping after me.
When the alien lands in the layby [PLACE TO STOP TEMPORARILY AND DRINK AMBER LIQUID FROM THERMOS FLASK] on the A303 at Barton Stacey near the Travelodge, it climbs down the steps from its spaceship into gloomy light.
The rumours arrive on the dawn wind and by mid-afternoon the village ladies have landed in Leonora’s kitchen to disembowel the news.
From the time she was seven, Ketra could smell lies. Some reeked of burnt hair. Some of overripe plums. A half-truth had the scent of chewed mint, stale and thin.
When Jill’s eyes adjust to the light, she comes face-to-face with a life-sized painting of a naked, spread-eagled woman. It takes her a full minute to recognise herself.