Beech Wood Embers

  After the peaches and cream had been gobbled, the clank of cutlery started. Dinner was over. I left the table. I took my bowl to the kitchen while my Grandma started clearing the mess. My granddad got up without carrying his bowl to the kitchen and snuck off to watch the news. Outside the clouds had left the sky. A hot breeze rattled the sun-baked leaves. My father decided to take a walk down the hill to the fields. I went with him. The cloudless sky made me anxious. With no clouds to reassure me it felt as if we were isolated on a tiny piece of the world cut off from everyone else. We walked down the hill past all the other bungalows. We peered at their front gardens, judging them with scores out-of-ten. At the bottom we turned onto the farm track. Two strips of pebbled concrete ran into the shadow tunnel of trees. The track had been there for decades. The farmers and their sons and wives and daughters had driven cattle along that same half-mile stretch for centuries. I didn’t...

  My Grandparents avoided popular culture like it was a poison that could infect their little slice of 1950s England. Everything was much simpler in the 1950s. Men and women had defined roles they knew where to be at all times. The 1960s were frightening. They were still scared of it years after it had ended. They were devout Christians of the United Reform Church. The Beatles, and everything that came after the Beatles, was ignored. They didn’t want a ticket to ride the Magical Mystery Tour. They didn’t listen to blues, jazz, rock or any of its filthy incarnations. They were ballroom and classical or silence. They understood the rhythm of the Tango’s, waltzes and fox-trots. The purpose of ballroom music was to dance in step and time. Ordered and measured expression.   Acid was for batteries, trips were down to the sea-front for tea and cake, space was where god lived, and women did the cooking and cleaning until they dropped dead. They kept their beliefs from the 1950s an...

  After my parents split I used to visit my Dad thrice a year during summer, Christmas, and Easter. He lived the frugal life of a Yorkshire artist forced to live in Essex. His house smelt funny. He used a certain spice in his cooking that got into the walls of the kitchen. He used cheap bicarbonate toothpaste that tasted weird. He wasn’t a messy person but his art studio was the little bit of paint-dripped chaos he refused to tame. There were piles of old tapes with strange music that nobody listened to except artists. Like obscure blues from the twenties and thirties, all types of jazz, classical, fairground organ instrumentals, and Fats Waller. He painted pictures that not even he understood. They weren’t very saleable. I remember a giant canvas he painted in 1996 with loads of naked men from different angles. The naked figures had an uncanny resemblance to his best friend. He had some success early on in his career. He got commissioned to paint murals that have either been paint...

  On the platform severed from main line there was bench left peeling in the sun. There sat the old guitar man, with his bundle of bedding, and his worn string-less guitar. He had sat there for as long as I can remember. When I was young he used to play for money. He played sharp furious blues. He used to draw small crowds during the carnival week. I heard him play and wondered why a man with such talent wasn’t in a band. I was in my teens the day he lost his first string. The story went round the town fast, as nothing much happened after they cut us off from the mainline. The loss of the string didn’t affect his music. He recalibrated and began a different style of playing, which drew a new crowd of people.             One by one, the other strings broke. Each time he adjusted and evolved into a different groove. I can still remember when he only had one string left. One string was all he needed. He made use of every note, pau...

  ONE Professor Ortner went from pressing his palms into his eyes, to staring out his office window. The sea was calm, lead coloured with patches turquoise. It was gently lapping against the cliffs below. His office was a mess of coffee stained papers and empty beer bottles. The Brain Ortner had spent his career enhancing, had got up and walked away. The host, code named Whitethorn, had escaped, and the news had reached high command. The brain was irreplaceable. The combined intellects of thirty eight professors had been implanted inside Whitethorn’s Skull. Trillions of dollars worth of cerebral enhancement had escaped. A bloated bulk of ginger masculinity burst into Ortner’s office. The Major and his leather clad adjutants didn’t waste time on polite formalities.  ‘What the fuck happened?’ said the major, without breathing, ‘Where is Whitethorn?’ Ortner grit his teeth. ‘If I knew, you wouldn’t be here.’  ‘You address me as major. We're not sipping coffee in the facul...