SOMAThey spent the next few hours at separate ends of the aircraft. Aidan would not leave, despite Jane's pleas. It was getting dark. Figures were moving around the edges of the airstrip, stopping, and turning their way. Even if they could not see Jane and Aidan maybe they were nonetheless baffle...
Riven. Unstable. Spastic flashes of electric light shivered and skidded across the walls of my room. I lay there, coming out of sleep, my fingers idling in the dried juices of lovemaking on my belly and pubes, trying to remember if it really happened, despite this physical evidence. It was unbear...
She wished him luck and begged him always to relax the upper body and foot arches, so that energy could ‘come through to all of us’. He received flowers from the John Sampson Agency with a note from Ursula, voicemails from Laurent Mattier Brzeska of the London Piano Competition, and from Olivier ...
Mist layered the fields surrounding the shattered motorway, thickening by the minute. For miles, the ribbon of road sported knots of destruction where bombs had detonated. Carrying Elisabeth had protected him against the cold, but now he saw how Sadie was walking with her arms crossed, her jaw se...
Another of Phythian’s so-called haunts was in N19, a good old-fashioned public house where you drank till you made yourself ill. None of that fannying around that was going on at Stodge. I imagined the most fannying that went on at the Lion was up against the wall outside, at chucking-out time. T...
SAFE HARBOUR At lunch time, Ray would leave her in charge of things and have a pint of Broadside and something to eat at the Lord Nelson. Although she had warmed to him quickly, Sarah was glad to have these few hours to herself. Claire seemed happy to sit in the deep leather armchair in the offic...
Standing room only. All attention on me at the front of the room. A light blazed in my face alongside the unblinking shark’s eye of the TV camera. Nerves rioting in my gut like a nest of snakes sprayed with petrol. Pencils poised. I speak and I can’t hear the words. They fold and jumble in my hea...
Over five hundred miles of shelves, running from floor to ceiling. Red-draped yorks; plastic crates; sorting tables and boxes and bins all filled with weird ephemera. This is the National Returns Centre for the UK – in other words, the dead letter office. This is where Her Majesty washes her hand...