Everyone went out.
My father donned a navy suit and licked what is left of his hair over his forehead. He leaves the house with one eye partly obscured. And a bow-tie. He went out wearing a bow-tie. A spotted blue bow-tie. The parental unit has a busier social life than I do at the moment. [...]

Naively, I am really hoping she will know. It has been bugging me for a while, a year or so.
I ask Mami what the ex does with everything he knows about me now that he no longer needs it.
He Knows a lot, I tell her darkly. She looks taken aback.
What does he know? Her hands [...]

Len has a friend stay over. They shut themselves into his room and drink large glass bottles of lambrini obtained illegally from the guy at the market. At two am Len stumbles into me muttering unintelligibly. His friend hangs miserably over the sink.
Consumed not by guilt but swallowed almost whole, this morning, by his first [...]

Today was the first day of real spring weather.
Chrisie and I sat on our sun-warmed doorstep and talked about her boyfriend. He interjects crikey into every other sentence. He also says happy days a lot, wistfully, as if he were on death’s doorstep with a head full of nostalgia. Whenever he says this, I suppress [...]

My father is discovering his tribal roots. He has been sent a letter from Germany by his ancestors. He says this as if they wrote from beyond the grave, as if this is a spiritual calling.
My tribe, he tells us in the car, have invited me to a large gathering of relatives. The vast number [...]

I am asleep, secretly harbouring left-over hurt, when Chrisie falls into the sink.
Over the salt stone candle, she picks out the rice from her risotto, I pick the peas. Hers pushed to one side, sticky parmesan-coated. I like how they were frozen not long before balancing so deceptively garden-fresh on my fork. Just when I’m [...]

My hair smells of smoke and jelly bean sweets. Today’s wind blows hair into mouths, black wheelie bins into roads, fusty pms cobwebs into trees. I get into the car next to my mother, and hold my breath so she won’t guess. She looks at me anyway. Under the flash of streetlights she is the [...]

At half past eleven, jarring a tableaux of uncommonly peaceful people placed close, food-and-wine malleable around a table dripping with one large wax white candle, comes a knock on the door.
It is The Ghost of bloody Christmas Past.
Remnants of himself smeared over Chrisie’s wall in blood red paint. The anti-christ and his balls.
(BRITAIN’S
BURNING
DIAL
999)
The violent slash [...]

You look suspicious, different tonight, the way you stumble into the room and its cooking smells. The way you twist your mouth at the corner, subconsciously and one hundred percent unaware of how you look, drives me crazy. Also, you look a little grey right now. That thing you do with your eyes - stare [...]

Len’s relationships are mapped out to a tee on the crisp, white phone bill.
Here is where Nicki starts… he points at a mobile phone number, a constant for half a side in tiny black print.
And this is where she ends. Finger hovering over a break in the numbers, pointing out an extra 9 and a [...]