Nightbirds, again.

Later that night, after the tears and spilt wine and stilted apologies, I buried myself between the coats in my wardrobe and placed a hushed call to Caroline. The line was terrible; I was on the verge of emerging from the soft folds of 2009 Topshop and second-hand Whistles until I discerned some tinkly words on the other end. They sounded rather like ‘Highlands’ and ‘in touch’.

About a week later, Bron shuffled through to my room in her slippers.

‘Mum phoned. She said do we want to go up North to her new cottage. She said she’s got a surprise for me. I said no.’

‘Bron, I think we should go.’

‘She’s only doing this because she’s seen a baby in her Boden catalogue or something—’

‘I think we should go.’

It must have been something about my tone, or perhaps she was just noticing the hollowness in my cheeks for the first time in the cold afternoon light, because she shifted on her feet for a moment before nodding almost deferentially. 

‘It’s a boy, by the way,' she said after a pause. 'I know it. And he’s going to be virile and kind, not like his father. I’m going to call him Marius.’

‘Marius is wet. Valjean is more alpha.’

‘I can’t call my son Valjean, Cathy. Anyway, Hugo’s original Marius wasn’t wet. Everyone just thinks he’s wet because of Michael Ball.’

‘I really like Michael Ball,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you call him Michael Ball? Both names, like the Tiger in Life of Pi.'

Briar twisted her mouth about for a while, trying not to smile. I did the same.

'Nightbirds' excerpt

Bron looks tired and very pale. There’s a slightly mad look in her eye – the same one she used to get at the Woodlands Road flat if she’d been cooped up too long. I can’t remember the last time she changed out of her red dressing gown, and I don’t think she’s had a bath for two weeks. The overall effect is a bit like if Kate Bush in the Wuthering Heights video had been paused mid-pivot, dropped like a spider into a jam jar and told she wasn’t allowed to dance anymore.  

Bron has always reminded me of Kate Bush, minus the dreamy, slightly wandered eyes. Bron could remained ruffled and unwashed for the rest of her life and her eyes would still be sharp and quick.

If a bit wild.   

'Humanities' - as published in Gutter Magazine Issue 19

Issue 19: now available at www.guttermag.co.uk 

The Tinder app chirrups gaily in my pocket like a little digital blackbird. I have matched with Seb, 27. Seb is a PhD student at Durham University, visiting Glasgow for reasons unspecified. He is handsome, but in one of his pictures he is wearing one of those T-Shirts that lists famously associated names in hip vertical text (John & Paul & George & Ringo, etc), except his says

Derrida &

Baudrillard &

Foucault &

Žižek.

This immediately bursts the delicate bubble of denial I prefer to keep suspended for as long as possible when it comes to the fit ones: he is clearly, on some level - on every level, perhaps - a cock. Dithering, I zoom in on a couple of the other photos. He has jagged, daintily fragile white teeth and a chiselled jawline – chiselled enough that I could probably forget the dire implications of the T-Shirt if a coital scenario were to present itself.

Reluctant to participate in the inevitable and vastly unsexy fellow-students-of-literature-circle-jerk opening dance, my fingers work deftly to take my degree details off my profile. Too late. Another chirrup, slightly different in tonal quality this time - a chaffinch, perhaps - heralds a message:

Cathy! I would have guessed you were a fellow lit student. Us humanities folk can sniff one another out like wolves.

In my mind I circle the words I take exception to (‘lit,’ ‘humanities,’ ‘folk,') in some sort of Star-Trekky digital red pen, and send the message back to him. I consider and reject a string of hollow, enabling replies, some if not all incorporating Wuthering-Heights references I have used several times in the past, when I’ve found myself complicit in other such dismal exchanges.

Eventually, I go back into profile settings and delete my main display photo (me in a slightly insipid double-skirted floral dress, long red hair falling in waves to my waist), and replace it with a more recent image. In it my lips are drenched in gloss and parted in an overt display of sex-doll sexuality, and I’m wearing a top I ordered on ASOS that is really, technically, underwear. I put my phone back in my pocket and make myself a hot chocolate. Ostentatious peacocking is a good acid test, I find. It separates the talkers from the ones with hard-ons they actually want to do something about. After about ten minutes my phone pings again.

Blimey.

☾⋆

We meet at The Old Hairdressers – his suggestion – there’s something on later that he wants to see. I decide not to Google the event in case the prospect of whatever it is depresses me too much to turn up. My agenda – the vampiric consumption of his jawline - must remain clear and unsullied.

Seb greets me charmingly outside and puts a light hand on my shoulder as we go up to the bar, where he pays for two beers. He seems nice, actually. Bit earnest, but nice. He asks me about myself, and is attractively vague and modest about his own circumstances. It’s still not entirely clear why he is visiting Glasgow, but he seems happy to be here. He likes the people, he says. They are less ‘repressed.’

The bar staff are lively, messing around with a playlist of watered-down indie disco music from our teenage years – The Kooks, Razorlight, The Wombats (!). I start to feel pleasantly drunk and nostalgic. I wait for him to slag off the music, to make it very clear that he Never Liked The Kooks, Remember Luke Pritchard, What a Cunt, It Was So Good When Simon Amstell Slagged Him Off On Popworld, but he doesn’t go there, and I like that he doesn’t. I imagine him when he was fourteen, in a sunny English suburban bedroom, putting on ‘She Moves In Her Own Way’ for a pretty blonde girl with a snub-nose and rosebud lips. I giggle to myself: it’s nice. I don’t resent him. I like that he came from a different world, a world I’ve seen on Channel 4 teen shows and Gurinder Chadha films, but never inhabited myself. I chide myself for my earlier cynicism, my intolerance, and as the beers go down, I am really looking forward to sleeping with him.

At 10pm, the bar area starts to clear a bit – people our age and a bit younger are heading up the fairy-lit staircase to the ‘mezzanine’.

‘Do you want to go through?’ asks Seb, eyes shining.

‘Yes! If you like. What’s on?’

‘It’s a spoken word event – some incredible voices – I’ve seen quite a bit of their stuff online. There’s one girl who’s just… absolutely brilliant.’

I look back at the crowd flowing up the stairs. Bringing up the rear is Rose Keller, an obnoxious and unfriendly girl I remember from my university tutorials. She is speaking loudly to a wan-looking friend in brothel creepers and black lipstick. The word ‘gender’ drifts down to me several times as ‘Golden Touch’ fades out over the bar speakers. I take a deep breath.

Spoken fucking word.

☾⋆

When we enter the room there are lots of people sitting cross-legged on bedraggled, grubby cushions on the floor. The first thing I notice is that none of them have bought any booze. I gulp nervously at my beer, wishing I’d bought another two as back-up. There aren’t many cushions left for Seb and I. Instinctively, I know I’d feel safer standing in the doorway, but he has other plans.

‘Do you want to go in the middle there,’ he says, ‘and I’ll, sort of, hover near the front?’

I notice that Rose Keller is also, sort of, hovering near the front.

Seb doesn’t wait for a response, so I wind my way awkwardly through the mass of angular limbs and politically correct tote bags, eventually finding a spot between two middle-aged women, one of whom I recognise. Joanna Silversmith. She was one of my tutors at Glasgow. My heart gives a little leap of relief – a familiar face! O joy! Here I am, my budding mind once honed by her and others of her kind. I tap her shoulder and smile.

‘Hello. Do you mind if I squeeze in?’

She looks me up and down nastily.

‘ Squeeze? You’re a rake darling, sure, but morbidly obese I ain’t.’

Her companion, a blue-haired, slack-mouthed creature, lets out a Hallowe’en cackle. I sink onto my cushion, feeling the heat radiating from my cheeks. Two tiny pin-pricks tickle my eyes - the threat of tears - but there is a flurry of activity from the front of the room, and they don’t come.

Rose Keller sways up to the microphone, her salmon-pink dress floating around her as though her bottom half has been submerged in a tank of crystalline water. I glance over at Seb, who is staring at her with the glaikit expression of one recently fellated by Christina Hendricks; a Christina Hendricks who’d just read a Cosmo article about the importance of perineum work.

‘Hi, everyone,’ says Rose too loudly, in her best ‘take-my-picture-by-the-pool-cos-I’m-the-next-big-thing’ voice.

‘So, uh, yeah! When I first came to Glasgow I thought – fuck – sure, it’ll be an experience, but in terms of the poetry scene, I’m a Bristol girl, so, you know…’

She trails off coquettishly. A ripple of knowing, indulgent laughter spreads across the room.

‘So, uh, yeah! I just thought, let’s bring a voice to this city! We have some fantastic artists here tonight - so, without further…whatever (we all hate a cliché in here!), let me introduce the gorgeous Guy Banks.’

Guy Banks is from Reading. He has things to say about the gentrification of Finnieston, where he moved two months ago. He stands too close to the microphone, so I can hear the spit clicking about in his mouth as he speaks.

Being not a poet myself, I'm conscious that I am somewhat ill-equipped to criticise Guy-Banks-from-Reading. Instinctively, though, I feel that poetry should flow - it should have a natural pace that compliments its meaning, so that it permeates the listener, seeps in, nourishes, lingers. But Guy has adopted that unfortunate trend of delivering his lines with a monotonous, contrived rhythm that does nothing for me whatsoever – the hairs on the back of my neck remain unruffled, my heart still, my soul unmoved. It's a trend growing more popular by the second – there are teens with posters of Kate Tempest on their ceilings, Nationwide are using spoken-word performers to narrate their cutting-edge ad campaigns about the grafters toiling to keep our economy afloat(!). On paper, of course, it’s all ‘good’. Liberal messages communicated in new, imaginative ways. I’m down for that, in theory. In practice, though, usually I find it irritating, insincere and downright boring.

I look around me, at Guy’s wide-eyed audience, and wonder whether what he’s saying actually means something to them – whether I’m the one in the minority here, I’m the robot - or whether they know that to be part of this… ‘scene,’ motion, whatever the fuck it is, they have simply had to learn to look as though it resonates.

Next, Yvonne Harper from Leeds shouts very loudly for twenty minutes about tampons.

It’s over for my beer. The happy, warm nostalgia I felt down at the bar has long since drained from my bones, and I feel scared. I’m scared that when I finally get home, the thought of these people will make me sharpen my kitchen knife and plunge it into the soft part of my cuticles until the blood seeps over my hands and up my arms.

Rose Keller is last to read. She swooshes up to the stage, fully aware that she is commanding a room full of people to whom she is the ultimate prize. This time, when she speaks, it’s in a softer, ethereal, barely-there voice. She knows know what she’s doing. I find myself glancing around at the mens’ crotches for signs of movement.

Rose’s poem is an aggrieved account of being cat-called in the street (why the fuck do men think they have the right to indulge in such behaviour, it’s 2018, we are not sirloins, etc, etc). Again, in principle, of course I agree. But I cannot help but suspect that Rose has fabricated this incident in her mind, not as a way of positively countering the lascivious and intimidating behaviour of men, but in fact, as a way of telling her audience one thing, and one thing alone: ‘I’m a beautiful young woman and men want me.’

Rose knows she can’t just say that outright, so instead, she has created a story vilifying a fictitious man and dressed it up as being an ethical and socially cleansing piece of work. This girl is clearly a straight-up narcissist, and she’s turned a roomful of her generation into an Oxytocin factory.

She finishes. There is a short silence followed by rapturous applause and stricken, ‘I’m-so-sorry-that-happened-to-you’ expressions.

Breathless and flushed, Rose speaks once more.

‘We have five more minutes, so let’s open up the floor.’

Thing is, If I were to go up there, get up to that microphone and say what I believe to be the crux of Rose’s agenda, I would be shot down in flames. I know that the majority of people who have come here wouldn’t understand what I was getting at – they would have me down as anti-feminist, on the wrong side, ‘part of the problem.’ But… isn’t that a bit, well, fucking thick of them? Yes, I am appalled by any man who takes advantage of his physical or social superiority over any woman. Yes, it should be fought against. And yet, I have also noticed a burgeoning trend of women themselves taking advantage of their own perceived inferiority, and using it against men in a multitude of manipulative and extremely dangerous ways. I think that’s exactly what Rose just did. That’s what’s inspired the creative petites morts in so many of Glasgow’s bright young things. And it scares the shit out of me.

Joanna Silversmith practically volts over the huddled cushion-dwellers so she can bellow on about Virginia Woolf’s vagina until the venue owners come in and, effectively, tell everyone to get the fuck out. I smile at them gratefully.

Seb finds me in the throng as we’re leaving.

‘Fantastic, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, yes. Lovely,’ I murmur, fishing about in my pocket for my cigarettes.

We push outside, where everyone is lighting up and wanking each other off, figuratively and literally, probably. I offer him a cigarette and he takes one absent-mindedly, his eyes darting and bright. A flash of hatred seizes me. The strength of it takes me by surprise.

‘Why did you move here? To Glasgow I mean,’ I ask him.

His eyes meet mine, but he’s stopped seeing me.

‘My parents are a bit Tory. I thought it would piss them off.’

I dig my nails into my palms. I look up and down the cobbled alley outside the pub – this dark place in the city I love. Someone has overheard Seb’s last comment and guffaws towards us.

‘Me too, mate. And I did Lit, to top it off. They’re like, Humanities degree? Sort of, what are you going to do with that? Teach?’

Seb laughs. ‘I know. But, I mean, after seeing something like that, you just think, like, God, us Humanities folk have such a lot of heart.’

I could lose it, really go for it; 'WHY THE FUCK DO YOU HAVE TO SAY 'HUMANITIES'? WHY CAN'T YOU JUST SAY YOU STUDIED FUCKING ENGLISH, OR FUCKING SOCIOLOGY, OR WHATEVER THE FUCK? DON’T YOU REALISE HOW MUCH OF A COMPLETE KNOB YOU ARE? DON’T YOU REALISE HOW ALIENATING AND MEANINGLESS THAT SOUNDS? OR – OR – ARE YOU PUTTING US ALL IN THE SAME BRACKET DELIBERATELY, BECAUSE YOU HAVE A MASSIVE CHIP ON YOUR SHOULDER? BECAUSE YOU KNOW OUR CHANCES OF MAKING ANY FUCKING MONEY WHATSOEVER ARE CONSIDERABLY SLIMMER THAN THEY ARE FOR PEOPLE WHO CHOSE, SAY, ACCOUNTANCY OR... I DON'T KNOW, FUCKING... FUCKING... ORTHODONTICS? IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT TO FEEL? OH YES, US 'HUMANITIES FOLK' ARE ALL IN IT TOGETHER. MAYBE WE WON'T GET A JOB OUT OF IT, BUT WE'RE STILL MORE ENLIGHTENED THAN EVERYONE ELSE, AND MORE UNIQUE IN EVERY WAY. REBELLING FROM OUR ‘A BIT TORY’ PARENTS. YEAH, WELL. APPLES. TREES. DON’T FALL FAR FROM. I HATE TO TELL YOU, MATE, BUT THAT SHIT IS IN YOUR BLOOD WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. AND THERE-IN-LIES-THE-RUB.’

Needless to say, I don't go there. I see him clock Rose in her swishing gown, take my cue, and slip off into the night.

When I get home, instead of slitting my wrists (it’s a close call), I put on ‘Local Hero.’ I didn’t know this, but Mark Knopfler did the soundtrack. There’s one called ‘The Ceilidh and the Northern Lights,’ which is played over a montage of a ceilidh… and the Northern Lights. A young Denis Lawson swings his wife around a windswept Aberdeenshire hall. People drink whisky, sing into microphones, snog. Laugh. Outside the village hall, apart from the churning sea, there is peace. I fall asleep trying my best to think about that beach, that sublime Northern sky. I fall asleep trying not to lose hope.

The Truth About (Some) Writers... #sorrynotsorry

 The bar staff were lively, messing around with a playlist of watered-down indie disco music from our teenage years – The Kooks, Razorlight, The Wombats. I started to feel pleasantly drunk and nostalgic. I imagined him when he was fourteen, in a sunny bedroom in the London suburbs, putting on ‘She Moves In Her Own Way’ for a pretty blonde girl with a snub-nose and rosebud lips. I giggled to myself: it was nice. I didn’t resent him. I liked that he came from a different world, a world I’d seen on E4 and Gurinder Chadha films but had never inhabited myself. I chided myself for my earlier cynicism, and as the beers went down I was really looking forward to sleeping with him.

Eventually, inevitably, we got to talking about our experiences as undergraduates.

‘Yeah, I mean, I was part of a couple of creative writing societies in my, sort of, second year and, you know, it was fine, but I just don’t find that environment particularly sort of, didactic in a helpful way?’ said Seb.

I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he seemed to be taking a pop out of Durham’s ‘LitSoc’, which was fine by me. I was nicely drunk by now: the happy, trusting kind of drunk that makes you feel like everything you have to say will resonate with the other person so completely they’ll think you’re reading their mind.

 ‘Oh fuck, god, creative writing classes,’ I agreed. ‘Here’s something I noticed when I was doing creative writing classes at uni, right: there are certain phrases that, when people use them in their prose, their readers automatically think it’s fucking great. So, not-very-good writers have stock ‘this-is-really-good-writing’ phrases that allow them to hoodwink the undiscerning masses into thinking they have talent. Oh, let me think of one, right… Right, so if they’re writing a sex scene, and it’s a blowjob, rather than write, ‘I sucked him off for a bit,’ they’ll write, ‘I trailed my tongue down the length of him,’ or, you know, ‘he pushed inside me’ becomes ‘he moved until his full length was inside me.’ People read this and think, holy shit that’s fucking brilliant. Or, rather than ‘she had her hair up in ponytail,’ they’ll write, ‘her hair was piled high on top of her head.’ God, I mean, I love writing, I want it to be part of my life, but don’t you think so many people who do it are such knobs.

I knew people at uni who were into writing, and that whole ‘arts-admin’ kind of scene – not very nice people, a lot of them… some of them got stuff published, some are about to, some never will, but they’re all bloody ‘friends’ with each other, Tweeting each other in support of each other’s fucking massive manuscripts that they claim to have read, supportively, in a day!? And I’m seeing this, thinking, am I missing something here? You’re writing your own novel - how the fucking fuck do you have time to read all your ‘friends’’ unpublished manuscripts? It screams of paranoia to me, it just seems really transparent: I read it just to check it wasn’t better than mine, and it wasn’t, so now I’m safe to do a patronising Tweet about it because it’ll never get published, unlike my novel, which is excellent.

Or, you know, like, writers who arrange erotic literature nights when it’s totally obvious that they’re completely fucking repressed, and you’re going, am I the only one who can see that this person is TOTALLY FUCKING REPRESSED?! Or when people say to you, you have to write out all the crap first before you get somewhere, let it all spew out of you, and only one tiny part of that spew will be any good, so you have to start again with just that bit. Edit, edit, edit. A lot of it will have to go, they say. Okay, but what if everything I write and want to keep is what everyone else would call the warm-up, and get rid of?

 And bios! My friend got some of her writing published in an anthology and they asked her to write a bio and she wrote, you know, went to uni at bla-bla and then did bla-bla and lives in bla-bla. So when the anthology came out we looked at the bio pages and they all had stuff like, ‘after surviving two years of Tindering in Newcastle, Jerome felt it was only right (and in the interests of public welfare, ho ho!) for him to share his experiences,’ and we’re like, fuck’s sake Jerome! You wrote that about yourself! You total prick! It’s this weird suspension of disbelief thing - are we all supposed to pretend that someone has written that about Jerome, like, has he got some sort of superfan who writes his bios for him at this very very fucking fledgling stage of his career—’

Seb, I realised, was staring at me blankly.

Figs and George Michael

The light in the hall was harsh. It showed up the blue veins in my hands, which unsettled me, so I switched it off and clip-clopped through to the gentle glow of my bedroom. I’d made my bed that morning with snowy white sheets. Virginal – too virginal, I’d felt – so I’d unravelled my pink chiffon shawl speckled with embroidered figs and thrown it over the bottom half of the duvet.

            ‘Oh yeah, the fig thing. Nice. See, the thing about D.H. Lawrence—’ I’d imagined Seb saying, before I silenced him. Or – maybe – if he’d been nice, if he’d been actually quite funny, if he’d been the one, he’d have held the scarf up to the light mid-snog and said in his best Alan Partridge,

            ‘Figs. Is that a… uhh… euphemism?’

I’d left all the lights off except the pebble lamp I kept on my nightstand, which omitted a soft rosy luminescence. Everything else – laptop cables, stray knickers, magazines, had been shoved under the bed; so certain had I been that I would be sharing my room that night, so keen was I to turn it into one giant, pulsating female appendage. (Yes, Alan. It was a euphemism. Yes.)

I caught a glimpse of myself in my mirror. There was a feral, banshee look about me; my eyes were dark, a livid red blossom was climbing from my cleavage up my neck. I walked closer to my reflection, put my hands on my breasts, held them tight. With my long pinkie nail I drew a dark red line across my throat, dragging harder at the last moment so that tiny beads of blood came to the surface of my skin. I slapped my throat once, twice, and looked down at the fine trail of blood on my palm. Not enough. It’s never enough.

I snaked my hand down under the fine material of my skirt, formed a fist with my fingers and pressed it hard against my clitoris. I could tell immediately from its bad-tempered response that I would not be blessed with an orgasm tonight. The novel mystery of someone else’s touch, perhaps, could have coaxed one out. But not my own. Not now. I clenched my teeth and let out a low, animal growl.

‘There are two of her,’ I remember my mum saying to a nurse. There was a frightened look in her eye. ‘She’s… she changes.’

If I really was a banshee, I remember thinking, I’d transform myself into a bat-girl and smash out of my bedroom window, shrouded in a cloud of undulating black smoke. Up, up I’d fly, over the Sainsbury’s Local and through the city night, leaving a trail of shadowy sexual mischief in my wake. George Michael would wake from his slumber and provide a luxuriously forbidding, glittering version of ‘Fastlove’ just for me: my personal soundtrack. He’d know that my bat-self would perceive in full the profound loneliness of that song – not the upbeat disco number others took it for, but dark, so very dark.

In the absence of security, I made my way into the night.

(‘How could you be lonely if you were George Michael?’ one of his fans had asked in a documentary. ‘You’d be with George Michael all the time.’)

Eventually the haze of smoke around me would clear. My wings would carry me back through my bedroom window and I would curl up in my virginal white sheets, spent and peaceful – human again, and as whole as I could possibly be.

I was just sane enough in that moment to accept that supernatural banshee antics were not a workable Plan A. My most desired activities thus eliminated, I knew I had to find a way back to functional, sensible me that did not involve two bottles of red wine and nicking an artery. 

Playing with dialogue for novel

‘How was Jo or whatever his name is.’

Bronwen draws on her cigarette and exhales slowly, eyes dark. When she speaks it’s in the resigned, dull monotone that spells imminent booze and recklessness.  

‘He was boring. Very, very fucking boring. He knew he was boring, so in the middle of the night he pretended to sleep-talk. So that he would seem less boring. This is a thing people do now – I’ve seen them doing it on Big Brother.’

She draws again on her cig, eyes foggy.

‘Only fairly recent Big Brothers, though. See, even in 2010, when people were cunts, they weren’t such cunts as they are now. Have you noticed that?’

I’m about to ask her how she knows when it’s fake, but I know exactly. You just do. Well, people like Bron and me do. This is our magic. It is also the thing that will probably kill us.  

Without taking her eyes off the telly, Bron slithers her hand out from beneath her nest of blankets and grapples about on the sideboard for her bottle of wine.

‘Was he nice, though?’

‘No.’

‘Oh. What are you watching?’ I try to keep my voice light and cheery in the hope that hers will miraculously follow suit.

‘Celebs Go Dating.’

‘Doesn’t that have sleep-talking cunts on it?’

‘No, s’good. Can you get me a thing of seafood from the fridge?’

‘What do you mean seafood?’

‘It's in the fridge.’

Uneasy, I shuffle in my slippers to the fridge. In it there are ten packets of Waitrose seafood antipasti, neatly piled on top of one another. There is also a carton of Alvalle Gazpacho and three bottles of James White organic carrot juice. And nothing else. 

‘Where’s the Waitrose?’

‘Dornoch.’

‘How did you get to Dornoch?’

‘I got the bus. That was my activity for today. Anyway, no he wasn’t nice. He kept trying to fuck me when he’d already come, and he also didn’t put his boxers back on between sessions, which I hate. So he was lounging about in my bed, flopping about like a cherub in one of those paintings, with his small, out-of-proportion arse. Then he tried to fuck me again with his flaccid Botticelli cock and I got fed up and asked him if he understood basic anatomy and he went all quiet and then he thought about it a bit more and was downright fucking raging and said to me, what the fuck were you thinking calling your son Marius—'

Marius comes thudding down the stairs, and for a second it’s as if the whole thing is a sitcom, except it isn’t, it’s our lives.

‘Mummy, were you talking about activities? Because our activity today was potato painting and Jeremy said—’

‘Which teacher did potato painting with you and called it potato painting’ says Browen, seething.

‘Miss Hynes.’

‘Is Miss Hynes the one who gave you the idea to call your grandpa Pap-Pap?’

‘Bron, don’t.’

Maris’s little tummy inflates and deflates as he breathes quickly, keeping up with the change of tack.

‘Yes, Miss Hynes said grandpa was Pap-Pap because it’s a song: WHEN YOU BOYS AND GIRLIES PLAY SNAP-SNAP, REMEMBER TO ASK YOUR OLD PAP-PAP. FOR OLD PAP-PAP WON’T BE HERE LONG, SO LET HIM PLAY AND SING ALONG.’

Bron stares at me, enraged.

‘What’s snap-snap?’

‘Bronwen, don’t.’

‘I told mum, the last thing I TOLD HER BEFORE SHE DIED… is that he’s not going to a primary school with five other ffffff-ing children in it—’

‘WHEN YOU BOYS AND GIRLIES PLAY RAM-BAM, REMEMBER TO ASK YOUR OLD GRAM-GRAM. FOR OLD GRAM-GRAM LIKES… ehhh… LIKES PLAYING TOO, AND SOON SHE WON’T BE HERE FOR YOU.’

Bron sinks back into her armchair and pulls the blankets tightly around her as Marius pulls his t-shirt up, swells his tummy out as far as it will go, and beams at me.

‘And guess what?’

I kneel, twisting my arms around his sticky neck.

'Miss Hynes made those songs up herself!'

Smörgåsbord

Ralph gazes at the vast array of food laid out on the kitchen table.

‘Hey, wow, it’s quite the… smörgåsbord!’

Stellan glances up at us, licking meatball sauce from his thumb.  

‘Hi. Yes. Yeah, it is.’

He’s stooping slightly, too tall for my kitchen. He’s wearing the navy linen shirt his mother sent him for his birthday.

‘So this is… from your country?’ offers Ralph. He hasn’t quite caught up with his breathing after the stairs.

‘We eat this kind of thing a lot in Sweden, yes. But it’s just, y’know, fish and meat. British fish and meat, in this case.’

When Stellan first opened that shirt it was practically rigid with starch. We laughed about it. He said this was typical of his mother; she had probably washed and treated it herself after buying it. I can see that it is soft now. It ripples slightly over his naval as he bends to roll a herring fillet.

‘So what do you guys call this… you know… type of… thing?’ asks Ralph, touching the tablecloth lightly. 

‘A smörgåsbord,’ says Stellan mildly, skewering the herring into position with a cocktail stick.

Juliet snorts unhelpfully from the couch.