God, he says, the shadow of his fist obscuring my notes, I’m bored.
He sits down before he asks if I want company. He is doing everything backwards. Even in today’s sun he’s wearing his shin-length leather coat. When he takes it off I see he’s shrouded in black.
He tells me how great A Clockwork [...]

Wishing yourself flattened between the pages of a glossy magazine never works. Nothing is ever so shiny, nor do any more than 2% of the population possess legs quite so long. Wishing yourself in small bold letters with your words italicised and everything describable and unknottable also never works. Because.
The Girl With The Priestly Admirer [...]

I am sitting there inhaling the musty trapped sun in your room and trying really really hard to stop laughing at something. I’ve forgotten why I originally started, which makes me laugh harder, and I hide my grinning mouth behind a hand. It seeps out from beneath my fingers. Two hands, the fingers pinching the [...]

You’re looking well, he says, looking me up and down.
Looking well, what does this mean? I decide this statement of his is loaded, long before he repeats himself once, twice. A sideways look of appraisal.
I tell him I slept four hours. When I woke, damp T-shirt and the hazy remainder of a dream ebbing and [...]

Last day in Dublin. Today I feel like the walking dead even after coffee in Bewley’s, where the Boomtown Rats met regularly, according to the glinting mosaic plaque above the door. I am very conscious of having my feet walk where James Joyces’ and Oscar Wilde’s once did.
Evensong at St. Patrick’s - I am mesmerised [...]

We create an open-air anthropomorphic drama, where we direct and interpret and say this way that way and play audience all at once, where our causal agents walk bow-legged with six spread toes, frequently defying gravity with a sound that drops the centre of my stomach somewhere half-way between my disobedient knees and purple painted [...]

Part of Virginia Woolf fluttered into my luke-warm bath water. She is lying on my carpet looking wrinkly and disgruntled.
Hearing your tired pizza voice is becoming increasingly difficult. Three insurmountable hash keys, two indefatigable stars and a whole bunch of scribbly numbers.
Charlotte Gainsbourg has amazing everything.
Shhh.

Gerry sits at his desk with a homemade brownie sitting neatly before him. He has lined it up so that the longest edge is parallel with the end of the desk, and every stray crumb he lifts with a licked finger to his mouth. I know his game. He is making a brownie island. The [...]

Bye bye, prospect of Edinburgh Uni. Hello Cambridge or a big blank nothing, and garish yellow exam timetable pinned to the wall.

England shakes at half past midnight, and I forget to breathe with my head under the duvet scared shitless, jello legs and a slammed door somewhere in the house.
By three pm I realise that this morning’s blue-skied potential will amount to nothing more than drinking from the cold carton of milk in the fridge.