“morally excellent
pure: in a state of sexual virginity”

There shines a certain virtuous sheen on the skins of those Catholic School girls behind the blue wrought iron gates. Mine disappeared as swiftly as the carpet burns on my lower back appeared. I am not virtuous in any form of the word, not in the word ‘celibate’, [...]

(She squeezed the two little chequered hearts together with gusto, cream and maple syrup and strawberries oozing from the centre and falling solidly back onto the plate. I had an urge to scoop the mess back up with an index finger. A heart sandwich, she said with great emphasis, her eyebrows raised, looking pointedly at [...]

I am grabbing on tight to the rungs of a ladder. Every morning a little man wearing a fedora hat (not jauntily, but somewhat sardonically, ironically, with a touch of evil) and steel-capped leather boots squeezes my breakable ankles in his two hairy fists, two meaty paws, and pulls down hard. This is a white-knuckle [...]

Nothing makes me happier than a new pen. Biros I can start nothing with. They leave me frustrated. It’s the plastic caps, chewed something unrecognisable, the dents on the reverse side of the paper -secret mirror writing gone wrong- the way the ink seems reluctant to leave the cheap plastic tube. Like sweets too small [...]

It seems I’m spending most of my life on trains. I’ve been itching to get away, literally, every part of me, arms and eyes, back of the knees, chin. Even my cuticles itch. Little things are driving me slowly crazy, here.
The calls from sellers, for example. They call at nine pm with rude disregard for [...]

It gets dark here at 6.15 PM now. Today it rained so heavily and with such persistence that even the bravest, most addicted of smokers preferred to sit through three or four one-and-half hour lectures shuffling with agitation and nicotine deprivation than to smoke under the dripping oak tree by the road. It always [...]

The pitter-patter of stiletto-heeled Offsted feet-to-come echo along the yellow corridors of both college campuses. The tutors are all so busy writing lecture plans and schemes of work that they no longer have time to teach us. The janitor has been instructed to stop karate-chopping students without their student ID cards (to prove they belong, [...]

I’d been there for a good half an hour, wrapped up in a striped blue fleece, hands molded around a steaming mug of dubious berry infusion tea, before the glaring white bathroom light of the adjacent house flickered on once, twice. I was sitting, abject and dejected, under the slant of the roof, deep into [...]

It makes me sick, he shouts, smashes something with more force than is necessary into the overflowing sink. She sits there, an ocean of calm, clicking needles.
Perhaps you need help, she suggests in a voice which leaves me cold, a dribble of cheap ice-cream onto hot, sandy toes. Click clack click. Even the budgie feels [...]

I tell my mother I will be living with Judith for a week or so. She looks up at me with pitiful large eyes, and stops mid-knit (the scarf I asked her to help me start, the scarf she is sabotaging).
You’re not at home for that much longer, you know! she says reproachfully. A week…! [...]