His hair, growing out of a short cut, was beginning to curl. He had the beginnings of a beard. He was one of many in jeans, dark T-shirt, and a green parka never removed however warm the room. But the way he carried himself was distinctive. She thought he might have trained as a dancer, or served...
Liz sat, cross-legged, with the light on and the gas fire blazing. Her Indian-print skirt was stretched tight across her knees, the excess tucked beneath her, forming a taut surface to serve as a table from which to eat her paper of chips. She sat with her back to where the television set would h...
September 2nd 1979, Amanda and I ate in a fancy Chinese restaurant Amanda had heard about from a friend. We had won ton soup, crispy seaweed, then pork in black bean sauce with spring onions and ginger: peculiar, salty-sweet, slightly sticky things. Egg rice. Straw mushroo...
I lie in the darkness for quite a while before realising that it isn’t darkness at all. Light is pushing bravely through the four sets of plaid curtains, those to my left – which I think is south – in particular. Outside it will be bluish and cold, but the curtain fabric warms it up, and I’d be q...
Its staggered shape and ochre walls deliberately echoed the landforms surrounding it, but, as Mama had once pointed out, you could also think of it as a ship voyaging on the vanished Cretaceous seas, a kind of modern-day ark, huge and well-equipped, its storerooms filled with plaster-wrapped life...