i think i mentioned it before but my bike got stolen – well they caught the guy who stole it – wouldnt you just know it – he was a chav – yeah – they showed me a picture of him – baseball cap and everything – it was this pixellated CCTV still – from like a cash converters or somewhere – cos the police had sent out the description of my bike to all the second-hand shops – silly bastard – he might have known the police would do that – so when they caught him they came round my house – to take a statement (more…)

It’s a boring Sunday. Rain beats against my windscreen, my bonnet, my roof, like a thousand fingers drumming a monotonous, impatient rhythm against the glass and the metal. The clouds it falls from have cast a twilight over the whole day, but I think now it finally must be dusk, because the streetlights have switched themselves on and are casting an orange glaze over the dark blue tarmac, under the dark blue sky.

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“I think maybe we should take a break, from each other, just for a while,” he said, “then maybe things’ll go back to how they were before.” But they could never go back. Not once he said that, not once that one small seed of doubt was planted. Because even if we did get back together afterwards, after our break, it wouldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t ever be the same, because he had had doubts once, and he might well have them again, always afterwards I would live in fear of that, of the doubts he may have. And we would never be comfortable again, there would always be that tension. Long gone were the days of expectation, of sweet denial and hope that one day we would be properly together after those spring nights of dreaming about each other.

And so I walked away.

Lightly rain fell, collecting in droplets on the leaves, blurring the eyes of men walking their dogs, of women jogging across concrete. Josh watched, stared unfocused, contemplated considered, and felt the rain slowly soak into his hair. It hadn’t been raining long. It hadn’t been long since Arietta had sat and stood and hugged him and left. She’d left and he was still sat there. She’d left this time, but he had left her, and he was leaving again.

“Can we meet this week?”

“I’m busy, why?”

“I’m going away. It’ll be a long time until I see you again.”

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Read part (i)

She was painting a picture of him, she had told him earlier across a table. Art feeding art. Life feeding art, criss-crossing across the way. Her breath had been warm, beer-tainted, warm. Two mornings later he changed the sheets on his bed, an hour after rising. They were still warm. Would he have been able to tell the difference between the warmth of two bodies having slept in that bed and just one? In a way, in mind only, there had been another person in that bed, a phantom of imagination. The bed was warm when he woke; comfortable; phallus erectus. He had not arisen immediately, but there had been no sleight of hand and no spring of warm, wet, pleasure-sensation, just a dull longing.

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He felt it roll over him in a wave; the realisation that a story was coming. It was like standing on a beach, staring at a huge, overbearing tidal wave as it builds up higher and higher in slow motion, white horses straining against blue reigns at its crest. He had had dreams like that as a child. He had feared then that the wave would sweep everything away, or sweep him away, and drown him or leave him alone. Now he welcomed the wave, the metaphor, the coming story.

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Outside, the sun beats down, warming and illuminating everything. Probably. It might be raining now for all you know. If not, then children will be out in the streets by this time, cycling, or playing football, or walking, or even just sitting around, talking about nothing. Even if it is raining, they’ll be inside, together, talking and laughing and playing videogames and complaining they’re bored. Perhaps you miss those uncomplicated days, before you had your own computer and the internet. When you were still at school, and not university. Before you had all the time in the world to kill and everyone else had jobs. You open up the internet browser and click through the familiar pages. It’s the summer holiday.

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Throughout life there are days that don’t really mean anything, interchangeable days where you change nothing, do nothing; days that don’t serve any real purpose beyond getting you to the next one and adding just that tiniest shred to your total experience. There are days too, even if you don’t realise it at the time, when a single action, a misplaced word, sends ripples out across your life, irreversibly altering your future. The fifth of June 2008 was one of these days. (more…)

My aim with this site is to create the kind of blog that I, as an aspiring writer, would want to read, as well as to improve my own writing. (more…)