Prose

He calls me Sally and I’ve never bothered to correct him. No point. My real name has nine notes in it and he wouldn’t even get past the second. I just took a chip clean off his fork and laid the morning wide open with my best laugh, the one that carries right along the promenade and scares the toddlers. Forty-seven years and the man still sits with his back to the sky. The sheer nerve of him. Some enemies you keep alive out of respect. It started with a chimney. Spring of ‘79. He came up the ladder with a bucket and a grin and tipped my nest into it like it was just gutter muck. I’ve built an entire life on that grin. Birds talk about letting go but letting go is for gulls who die at thirty. I wasn’t going to die at thirty. The books say forty-nine’s the record, some ringed nobody in a Welsh archive, I expect, whereas I consider forty-nine to be nowt but warming up. I’ve been thorough, mind. The ice cream at South Shields, 1986. The toupee incident of 2008, which I don’t need to detail, he remembers. Oh aye, he remembers. His daughter's wedding, where I conducted myself with absolute restraint and only took his buttonhole. The christenings, the school fêtes, the walks to work, the lot. Riding the thermals while he went fat and grey and slow and wonderful to hunt.

I'm the best at fencing in the North East. That's not bragging either, it's just pointedly true. County level, easy. England, if I could be bothered with the travel. People don't understand the skill involved. They see the final outcome and think anyone could do it. They couldn't. A lad from Durham thought he could foil me once. He didn’t. It's all in the line, see. Get that wrong and you’re done for, and everyone sees it. You can't hide a bad line in this game. I might take up driving next. Three doors down could do with theirs repaving.

Three months. Maybe four. You stop counting the days, after a while. Her pillowcase still smells of her. I haven't washed it. That isn't strange. People keep things. But is there a rule? A decent interval before a man's allowed. Before it stops being a betrayal and starts being living. I keep waiting for someone to tell me the number. She'd laugh at me. Agonising up here in the dark. She always said I overthought the simple stuff.

They always pick the good ones for the end. Whichever was their favourite. You can tell they were loved, the way they're wrapped. Tucked in, like they're sleeping. Most folk don't want them back after. Can't bear the smell of him gone, I suppose. So I take them home. Wash them. Dry them warm. They’re the softest things I own. You sink right down into them. Pull them close. I've got a stack now. Every one a different goodbye and good boy. All that love all ready to wrap around me.

When he woke up this morning, all his thoughts were French. Not about France. Actually French. So what does he think about that? Is he OK with it, or freaking the fuck out? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t speak French. He tries to read the room. Looks at the… what? Is that a bird, or a book, or a baguette? No. Not a baguette. He tries speaking. But saying what?

One dog, two chairs, a washing line, establishing the facts. We pass, exchange our little nods I call the friendship tax. Then reinstate the distance to a comfortable between. The ripples settle. Nothing's moved. Were we ever seen?

I counted the flowers on Mrs Farrell's curtains instead of learning where middle C was. Thirty-seven roses. I counted them every Tuesday for two years. The boy had no ear, no interest and no intention of developing either. Lovely hands. Wasted on him entirely but his mother paid on time. I sat outside in the car because Mrs Farrell said I made him nervous. I could hear scales through the open window. They sounded beautiful. The old piano’s against the wall. I lifted the lid for the first time in years. Middle C is still where it was. Mum isn't.

A Tragedie of Digital Disruption, in One Acte THERE WERE THREE of them, as there have always been three, and they met on a Thursday in a rented office above a Pret A Manger near Kings Cross. The baristas downstairs would later say that the coffee machine had behaved strangely that morning, producing three black coffees, without instruction, before anyone had arrived. They would say, too, that of the three women who came to collect them, only two cast shadows. But baristas say a lot of things, and none of them write any of it down. The three were named Denise, Morag, and Constance, and they were builders, for that is the word the industry uses, and they used it too, and we shall let it stand. Though what they built was not a bridge nor a building nor, indeed, anything that existed in the physical realm. They built platforms. Between them they had built AlgoRecruit™ that rejected a human rights lawyer for "insufficient moral signalling," The Happiness Index™ that secretly reported employees' private Slack messages to HR in a weekly dashboard, and FocusForge® that disabled your emails for three hours every morning whether you wanted it to or not. All three of their ventures had been seed funded. All three had been successful.  All three had been acquired. And all three had made the lives of ordinary professionals immeasurably worse. They fully intended their next idea to be the most wicked yet.