Major Lazer aka Diplo and Switch

Just before I was going to do a shameless plug for my gritty short story night at Red Roaster (which is on tonight!), it did occur to me that I happened to pick a pretty spectacular night for my event.

Not only were there two other literary events happening (Space, Hammer & Tongue), but more importantly, Goldie, Major Lazer Soundsystem and Herbaliser were all in Brighton TONIGHT.

Plus there’s a new techno/psy-trance night called Sicknote down at the Volks, which I was planning to make my final destination after getting drunk at St James.

Being a fair person, I decided to feature all of them, instead of my own night. I’ll let you make up your own mind regarding music tastes, but whatever you do, don’t stay in.

If you were a kid in the ’80s or a true short story lover, come down to Kemptown’s Red Roaster for Grit Lit, featuring Isabel Ashdown, Jake Kennedy, Emma Gray, Tim Lay, Chris Callard, Ed Siegle, and me.

We’ve got gangsters, black artists, Brazillian favelas, drugs, raves, alcoholic mums, pretty much the whole gritty deck. It’s a fiver to get in, licensed bar, nice people and we kick out at 10pm (doors 7.45pm). Facebook holds all the answers.

Music fiends

• Major Lazer Soundsystem, Mumdance, Blah Blah Blah DJs – Digital
• Sicknote: D.A.V.E. the Drummer, Julian Liberator, Antispin, 11pm £5/4 – Volks
• Herbaliser, Tinroots, 7.30pm – Concorde 2

Culture vultures

• Studio Hammer & Tongue 2009 Grand Slam Final Performance poetry, 7.30pm £5 – Komedia
• The Space: Goldie, Ian Rankin, 8pm, £6/4 – Latest Music Bar
• Wayne McGregor/Random Dance: Entity Dance and multimedia performance with a soundtrack from Jon Hopkins and Joby Talbot, 8pm £17.50/15/10 – Corn Exchange

Tim Lay reading at Grit Lit

At recent Brighton Festival fringe literary event Grit Lit, Tim Lay read an extract from his second novel Rats with Wings, which tells the tale of a London copper – Lewis – who is dragged down to Brighton by her sinister patrol partner Letch for an unknown and dodgy pretext.

They’ve just left a swingers’ party outside of Brighton and return to find an outdoor rave on the seafront and are about to take some drugs.

‘You doing one?’ he asked. She stuck her tongue out so he could see the yellow tablet sitting on it.
‘In for a penny in for a pound,’ he said with a nervous smile and popped his.

The rave was easy enough to find. They’d cut down to the beach and driven up and down the seafront until the crowds and the sound of music had led them to it. Rob breathed a sigh of relief as Letch parked up the car. He’d survived the journey, hair-raised but unscathed, and was thankful that home was only a walk away from here. His new acquaintances didn’t seem to be in any rush to leave the car – the interior light was on and new lines were being carved – but Rob needed some fresh air. He got out of the car and walked his way up to the rave.

A couple of hundred people were spilling out of a concrete recess, cut into the side of the hill, an alcove that must have dated back to the Victorian times. Colonnade pillars and high ceilings gave it an air of majesty, despite its popularity as a shooting gallery. The speakers were set into a smaller alcove at one end. It was a small system but came out swinging, the punchy bass boomeranging around the alcove and spinning its way outside.

A single strobe threw shadows from the tightly packed dance floor on to the white ceiling above. People spilled out of the alcove and crowded the area outside, talking, drinking, smoking, laughing and dancing. Some sat, or lay on the steep grass bank.

Rob stood for a while, hands in pockets, bobbing his head, self consciously, his eyes on a girl wearing a silver bikini top and fairy wings, a glow stick in each hand. He felt a bit disjointed, like everyone else was in on something that he wasn’t. He couldn’t feel anything from the pill Lewis had given him, but he wondered if he was just too drunk to notice its effects.

In the car, the drugs were kicking in and Letch’s body had begun to hum, a little like a plane warming on the runway. He felt good. Alert but relaxed, and satisfied too – just the way one is when they’ve done a good job. And the swingers’ party had been just that.

‘So what’s the score then?’ he asked, watching Lewis chop. He took a quick glance out of the window to make sure that Rob wasn’t near the car.

‘Four, two,’ said Lewis.

‘Sarcastic bitch,’ he said, flicking the top of her shoulder.

‘What fucking score?’ said Lewis. She leant forward, taking the whole line up one nostril because the other one had become too blocked.

‘What’s his name.’

‘Rob?’ Lewis shrugged and handed him the note. ‘Nothing.’ She sniffed. ‘He just seemed like a laugh.’

‘Some laugh,’ Letch muttered. ‘Any of that vodka left?’

‘No. Got this though.’ She pulled a bottle of Jack from under her chair. ‘Swingers’ compliments,’ she grinned.

‘Ooh. You’re a sly one!’ Letch broke the seal and drank heavily before wedging the bottle in the pocket of his door. Stooping low he snorted both of the remaining lines. He pinched his nose and rode out the sting that was so far up his nostril his eye hurt.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘That one’s for him.’

‘I need it more than he does,’ grunted Letch. Through watery eyes he saw the expression on her face. ‘Fuck sake. Make him another. There’s enough of it. Do the same again for me while you’re at it.’

‘It’s not a race,’ she tutted, reaching for the bag.

‘So did you fuck him?’ Letch asked, liking the way the word sounded to him. Very definitive, he thought. Starts soft and ends hard. F-U-C-K.

‘Not my type. We were having a laugh.’

‘Shall we ditch him and go somewhere else?’ asked Letch, stroking the steering wheel.

‘Like where?’

‘I’m sure there’s some little drinking den that’s open all hours,’ he purred. He was massaging the back of his neck, massaging away the stress of the day. He moved his head rhythmically from side to side, and the more he did it the more he found himself wanting to do it.

‘It’s not fucking Hackney,’ shot Lewis.

He didn’t reply. Just carried on moving his head from side to side, letting his fingers probe the muscles of the lower neck, feeling the skin ripple beneath his touch…

‘Why, who did you fuck?’ she asked, looking over. Letch was slouched in his seat, head lolling against the window, a knee crooked and resting on the upholstery. He had his eyes closed and she knew he was fucked because, unusually for Letch, he was smiling.

‘No one special,’ he replied.

‘I wasn’t impressed with that Letch,’ she said, her tone more serious. ‘That was out of order not telling me what sort of place that was.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Letch. He opened his eyes, had the words in his mouth that he wanted to say, but his vision was flickering and the words were suddenly lost as the humming inside his body began to intensify.

‘I know,’ was all he could manage. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes again, unable to carry on talking, trying to hold back the sweats.

‘Oh well,’ said Lewis, gazing out of the window. ‘I suppose it’s another tick in a box. Fucking swingers’ party,’ she laughed softly.

‘Got to get out,’ said Letch urgently, groping for the door handle.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Out,’ he hissed, and literally tumbled out of his door.

He shouldn’t have double dropped those pills, she thought. Could’ve been anything in them. Served him right really. She didn’t even know if he’d done an E before. Letch was more booze and charlie. She thought about going outside and seeing if he was ok, but Letch wasn’t the really sort of person you did that with.

She was glad she’d slowed down when she’d got to the swingers’ party. She felt all right now, could go on through the night. No worries. She leant over and pulled the driver’s door closed, then snorted one of the new sets of lines. There was a knock on the window and the back door opened.

‘Thought Letch had scared you off,’ she laughed.

‘Nah,’ said Rob, although his smile was just a little too thin.

Letch was flying now, but shit had it been a rough take off…

One minute, he’d been fine, sitting in the car, snorting coke and shooting the breeze with Lewis and the next he’d been clawing to hold it together as that hum in his head had just got louder and louder until he’d thought he was about to do a Leah Betts.

He’d thrown up and sat on a kerb for a good long while, head in hands, until the hum had gone quiet. Only when he’d been absolutely sure his head wasn’t going to cave in, had he started walking. He hadn’t a clue where he was heading, just put his head down and walked until the feeling wasn’t so bad anymore, and his jaw had stopped grinding like an industrial compressor.

He’d stopped by the pier, smoked a cigarette, done a self-assessment and passed himself fit, then turned around and walked back the way he’d come feeling like Forest fucking Gump.

He was aware that the world around him seemed different now, as if the edges had been sanded down and softened. He felt different too. Half an hour ago he’d been praying to a God he didn’t believe in, pleading to him to make it to the other side, but now he felt fantastic, like a superhero incarnate, ready for anything. His mind was clear and alert and his body felt fully charged. His stride was purposeful and he had the sudden notion that walking had never seemed so enjoyable before.

The sea front road was lively considering the hour, people walking this way and that along the seafront path, gangs of boy racers huddled around car boots stuffed with stereo speakers, and the occasional roar of engines as souped up saloon cars raced off down the long straight road. Letch reached a shuttered café beside a deserted playground. A solitary figure sat on one of the wooden tables, his white puffer jacket shining him up like a beacon in the darkness. He had some cans on the table beside him.

‘Hey mate, you don’t want to sell me one of those do you?’ Letch called over.
The figure didn’t reply straight away. He looked at the can in his hand and to the cans beside him.

‘Yeah all right,’ he said. ‘Cost you five.’

‘Five quid for a can?’ Letch laughed contemptuously.

‘It’s the only bar round here geez. Take it or leave it.’

‘I’d better take it then son,’ said Letch. ‘You got change for a twenty?’

‘I’ve got change.’

Letch veritably skipped over to where the cockney was sitting.

‘Let’s see your money first.’

Letch smiled. ‘Here, ‘he said, pulling out the bundle of notes he’d taken from Swinger’s party.’ ‘Satisfied now?’

The cockney nodded and gave the can over. ‘You like acid mate? Got some Superman blotters if you fancy.’

‘Superman eh?’ asked Letch, doing a little jig on the spot. It was too good to be true. ‘Why the fuck not! The night’s still young wouldn’t you say?’

‘I suppose so,’ the other shrugged, unimpressed with Letch’s enthusiasm. ‘How many?’

‘How many you got?’

‘Ten.’

‘I’ll take the ten then please my good man.’ Letch quipped. He cracked the can open while the cockney removed his shoe. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said without looking up. ‘They’re wrapped in cling film.’

‘Good. I’d hate to get Athlete’s mouth.’ Letch began to laugh at his joke.

The cockney didn’t laugh. He held the plastic wrap out to him. ‘Go on then mate,’ he said. ‘Thirty quid and five for the beer.’

Letch pulled his wallet out. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I take those ten, this can, and another for luck…’ He nodded to the lagers on the table. ‘… And we’ll call it quits shall we?’

The cockney cracked a smile. It was part bemusement but part something more sinister. ‘You’re having a fucking laugh pal.’ His hand dropped down and behind, reaching for something in his waistband.

‘You’re right,’ said Letch. ‘I’m having a real fucking laugh.’ He snapped his wallet open and flashed his Met ID. ‘Now give me another can and fuck off.’

Letch could see the white of the puffer jacket bobbing away in the dark of the distance as he tore the plastic wrapping away and ripped off a cardboard square. ‘OK superman,’ he said out loud. ‘Let’s see if we can make this party fly shall we?…

The tab stung his tongue and he drained half the can to drown the battery taste away.

Tim’s first novel, The Sewerside Chronicles,was the winner of the 2007 Undiscovered Authors prize. His short stories appear in QueenSpark’s Alt Future and the upcoming ‘Urban’ anthology published by Phoenix Press

Here is Tara Gould’s short story “Little Birds”, which is the story of Grace, a woman who’s alcoholic father has just died and she must return home to comfort her mother.

The story explores Grace’s conflicting feelings for the man she despised, yet mourns and sketches out the tragic life he led. Ultimately Grace must confront herself in the face of losing a person who is irevocably flesh and blood – her father.

Little Birds, by Tara Gould

At Euston bodies fell from the crowded tube train like lumpy food from a can. Grace navigated the sweaty tunnels like a fox, sticking to the walls.

The escalator carried her up to the bright, open relief of the huge railway station where she took the 10.33 to Leighton Buzzard, and sat by the window in an empty carriage travelling backwards. She looked out at the diagonal winter rain which solidified the spaces between buildings and thought of her step-dad, who had died two days before. He had fallen down the stairs.

It seemed bizarre to Grace that this large, robust man should be killed by such a minor and ordinary domestic accident. Fergus was a rough, baggy man whose rusty face and broad palms were leathered from years of working outside, as a digger driver in the local sand quarry. His alcoholism and the daily maintenance of his habit had yet to diminish more than a small percentage of his liver. He was lucky – that had been the doctor’s opinion – the booze wouldn’t kill him yet. But surely it had done – indirectly and lucky was never a word that Grace would have used to describe a man whose life had been a progression of misfortunes all leading to this final, fatal calamity.

As the train left London she attached the facts of this life to the passing buildings, in the same way she would peg up historical events on a string stretched across her classroom for the children she taught. Her mother had often spoken of him in this distanced way, even when he was alive, as if he were some museum exhibit. So Grace had inherited much of his story second hand. Now that he was dead it was easy and satisfying to reduce him to a potted biography like this, an interesting character profile.

Fergus Wick: born an only child in a 1930’s council house in a village called Heath and Reach. His father was absent at war, his mother was phobic, domineering and over-protective. She wouldn’t let him play with other children, she bathed with him nightly in water and olive oil to sooth the childhood eczema which plagued his limbs. Grace wondered whether his fixation with shiny women body builders in later years was informed by this early experience, while other men in happy marriages in the 1980’s kept piles of porn magazines under the bed, Fergus kept a stash of well thumbed ‘Iron Ladies’.

At fifteen he joined his father down the quarry. He was clumsy and self conscious, always spilling drinks, breaking things, he got on people’s nerves. At 19 he finally passed his driving test, after 5 attempts, on his third he knocked the grocer’s delivery man from his bike, he was taken to hospital with a broken collar bone. Fergus had once said to Grace what he remembered most was watching all the oranges from the basket rolling down hill like little planets, it was the only detail from his past that she had been given as a primary source.

Then, at 26, he killed a man. Alan Saunders was only 19 years old. It was his third day at the quarry and Fergus was meant to be training him. They had got on well. They had been having a laugh, mucking about in the digger, then Alan fell and Fergus couldn’t take the machine out of reverse in time. Alan died in Fergus’s arms, apparently.

Then when Fergus was acquitted of manslaughter, the shrieking Saunders family were on his back as he left Luton Crown Court, head hanging low, feeling despicable and bare, “Murderer!” they screamed.

By 36, he was still living at home, still grieving Alan’s death at his hands.

His social life consisted of 8 solitary pints, in the Axe and Compass, every night, and there, at 37, he met Grace’s mother. Marion was a civil service accountant in the throws of post-divorce promiscuity. She was hawk like, a fierce 45 year old Yorkshire woman with three angry teenage kids. He lost his virginity, told her he loved her more than life itself and started calling her Pixie, she said he looked like Richard Briars, but not as clever.

Grace had frequently wished the drinking would kill him. It was her fear that he would outlive her mother, re-mortgage their undervalued town house out of existence and, using grief as an excuse, in a tenacious onslaught drink what remained of any inheritance. Marion had given him a house, two cars, thrice yearly holidays, and a constant supply of booze, much of which came involuntarily, from her credit card which he’d steal from her purse – racking up monthly bills of hundreds of pounds. Without my mum he would have had nothing, Grace had told her boyfriend after hearing about Fergus’s death. Sam had criticized Grace’s severity, her lack of grief or compassion.

“He accidentally killed a man. How would you ever get over that? No wonder he turned to drink” Sam said, he was convincing but unoriginal. Did he think this thought hadn’t occurred to her after twenty years of knowing the man.

“If it hadn’t been that he would have found something else to destroy himself with. Some people are just like that. He has been a parasite” Grace argued “financially and emotionally, if he had never met my mum, he would still be living in a council house with his simple headed father”

“Maybe he would have been happier?” Sam had said, irritatingly insightful as ever, and Grace knew what he meant. Her mother was possibly not the best match for a man like Fergus.

But she had shrugged at Sam, because now it didn’t matter, because now at last he was gone, wiped out by a prodigious fall down a flight of stairs and Grace was glad. It had come about ten years earlier than she had expected. Yes, she was grateful and glad. It was a clean word, glad, so neat and straight forward and it felt fine in the mouth and in the head. It was uncompromising, especially in the face of something as murky and ambivalent as death.

But there it was, quietly repeating inside her, like a word doing cartwheels. It made her feel good that word. It was authoritative, contentious and surprisingly guilt free. It was gladness dizzy with self possession and potential, and it made her feel so alive.

Now there would be a clear channel to her mother. She had felt exiled from her mother’s house for nearly 20 years. Now she could visit unhindered, now she could build the relationship with her that she’d always craved. Without Fergus around her mother would be different. Surely it was his presence that had made Marion so unmaternal.

“Do you know he once dragged me from the sofa by my hair because I wouldn’t wash up! Sometimes he drank so much he smelled of pickled onions. He was disgusting. How can my mother have put up with that! No, good fucking riddance to him the old piss head” she had said as she scrubbed the dried, burnt lasagna cheese from the side of the casserole dish. Sam didn’t reply, he wiped the plates slowly, carefully, his silent judgment only fueled her vitriol.

But today the vitriol had passed and as the train continued its monotonous three four rhythm she looked out to the open landscape. It had stopped raining, and her gratitude for the recent change in circumstances spread over the wide, thick fields of Buckinghamshire. A rusty canal went by, a rusty bike frame by a hedge, a stone bridge, a walker with a black dog, a magpie flew from a tree, another dropped into a meadow – not close enough to make a pair, but almost.

The train bounced gently to a halt at Leighton Buzzard. She hurried through the familiar station. Outside the December air was chilling, the sky was thin, pebble grey. Marion pulled up in her Maroon Nissan, forcing the puddle next to the pavement out in a perfect arc and wetting the tips of Grace’s shiny black shoes.

They embraced, quick and dry.

“I’m so sorry Mum” Grace said trying to sound convincing and Marion nodded shakily.

Grace suppressed her shock at her mother’s appearance, she had lost at least a stone in weight, and was now so thin there was a wide space between her thighs which were bound in strange tight purple jeans, her hair had gone almost completely white, and her face was all sucked in on itself, there was drudgery in the folds of flesh. But contrary to her lifeless face her body was full of vitality, the compressed, anxious vitality of a tiny bird, but less wholesome, like a jerky, clock work bird with sand stuck in its machinery.

In the car she rubbed her mother’s shoulder, there was no flesh on it. Marion was not an easy person to touch. She did not yield. It was hard to tell whether she liked it or not. Grace removed her hand and prepared for the effort of speech.

“How are you? ….Shit…. probably?”

“Yes, shit.” Marion said contorting her features into a clown like frown. Grace still struggled with her mother’s total lack of physical dignity.

“It hasn’t really sunk in yet, it doesn’t feel real.” Marion said “ I keep having to tell myself he’s dead and it feels just….really weird for a second, and then it goes unreal again…. You can’t…grasp it …it’s…” She stopped mid-flow and manoeuvred the little car around the roundabout and into the small market town.

“It’s shock. You’ll be in shock. It’s so recent, ” Grace said watching her mother’s confused expression. The tiny silver eyes darted about, a thousand feelings seemed to pass over it like clouds or ripples, she seemed to be preparing to speak, she licked her lips and looked at Grace and then away.

“In a way…” Marion said finally “and I couldn’t say this to Andrew or Francis….but actually, in a way it’s a relief. I feel terribly guilty for that. ”

“Don’t feel guilty…” Grace jumped in, a bit too quickly and proceeded with caution in case some unconstrained malevolence came out “he didn’t…you weren’t…it’s not as if..”

“Am I a terrible person?”

“No!”

“In the end, all he ever did was sit in that chair in his bedroom looking at the birds in the garden,” Marion said “We had breakfast and tea together. He watched Dad’s army sometimes. He’d spent months you know, drinking, and watching the birds out the window…it’s funny cos he were always terrified I’d go before him.”

Grace remembered visiting Marion in hospital the year before. She had suffered a minor heart attack. For weeks afterwards Fergus had complained of pains down his arm and in his chest, no one had believed him, he was being shamelessly self-centred.

“He made my life fucking hell!” Marion suddenly said like she was arguing with someone.
They arrived at the Cul-du sac of three storey town houses and Marion parked the car in front of the yellow garage.

Marion opened the door to the hall where there was a chair and a piano. It was the same as it had been eight years ago when Grace had last visited, except for empty space at the bottom of the stairs, which was now occupied by the knowledge of a death.

“This is where I found him” Marion pointed to where Grace’s gaze was already fixed, “his head was up against the skirting board here. You see, I’m not sure it was the fall that did it at all” she said and started to check the stairs and the skirting board that ran alongside them, “I haven’t been able to find any blood or dents or anything and he was a big man”

Grace watched Marion searching for clues, she was animated and mundane. There was a sense of macabre delight in all this. Did Marion feel it? Or was it just Grace? She found herself sitting on the second step, morbidly compelled to be close to the place of death.

She imagined the large body turning heavily and landing with a slump at the bottom, the head at an awkward angle up against the wall, a tortured look on the ruddy face, the bloodshot, terrified eyes wide open.

“They said he’d probably been dead for an hour when I found him, maybe more. He looked peaceful.” Marion said and sat on the stairs next to her daughter.

She became wistful, “I haven’t seen his face looking like that for twenty odd years, not since our honeymoon, completely relaxed he seemed, he was smiling, “ she looked at Grace “Ask Andrew, he saw him, he said it too, he was really smiling….Oh look! ” she picked up a circular plastic thing the size of a nipple from the floor next to the piano leg, “I keep finding these, they must have tried to get him going again.” She put the disc in her pocket and pointed to a pale stain on the carpet, “this is the stuff that came out of his mouth, I’m not washing that off, I think I’ll leave that there”.

Marion sat down again next to Grace and they both looked into the place where the man had died, and the silence of the unfamiliar settled on them.

“I gave him a kiss to say goodbye. I did love him.” Marion said finally and her eyes trickled up and down the keys on the piano, then she began to sob. Grace thought it was a mild, unconvincing sob, like an actor in a soap opera. Had she got it wrong all those times before? When she had had no sympathy, when she had criticized her of falseness? This was the same cry. She put her arm firmly around her and for a moment Marion received it. She leant on her daughter’s shoulder and cried, like a bad actor.

The crying stopped as quickly as it started and Marion said, “I was a bitch to him….And now he’s gone” she waved her arms angrily, bizarrely in the air and looked at the ceiling,

“ Completely bloody gone! He’s just not here at all – not in this world.” Her arms dropped down to her sides and she looked at Grace and said “Isn’t that a funny thing?”
Grace stood up suddenly, she had an urge to walk out of the door and go back home.

“Let’s go upstairs and have a cup of tea” she said against all compulsion.

After a light meal, Marion went to have a nap. Grace was hot and nauseous. She went to the bathroom to wash her face in cold water. She looked in the mirror. Her cheeks were red and blotchy.

She looked in the wicker bin and found four empty cans of Tenants Super. She picked them out, and ran downstairs and she threw them away in a black bin liner in the kitchen, then she returned to the bathroom and she scrubbed away the shit she sensed was Fergus’s from the side of the toilet with the bog brush. She squirted it with bleach and flushed hard.

She went into Fergus’s bedroom. Marion and Fergus had slept in separate beds for years, and Marion had made up the bed in Fergus’s room for Grace to sleep in. There was a single bedroom next door, but Marion had said she thought Grace might like the double bed. Grace could see that Marion wanted her to sleep in there for some reason, but was surprised that she had not been more direct.

What person would volunteer to sleep in a dead man’s bed? An alcoholic dead man’s bed come to that. She wanted to ask if the mattress was clean, she wanted to check the room for odours and she knew that if she had asked for the single room Marion would not have refused her, but she found that she didn’t ask. She found herself accepting the room she was being given.

The Ercol dining chair he had sat in for hours each day, month after month was by the window, facing outwards diagonally, and there was a square cushion in a William Morris style fabric, its corner was pressed over the side of the wooden seat and it was flattened into the shape of his backside.

For a moment Grace saw him clearly, as if he was made of glass, sitting there, those hopeless, bloodshot, worried eyes, watching the little garden birds hopping from branch to branch. She closed the curtains, moved the chair to another corner, and removed the cushion which she threw across the room.

Then she stood at the end of his bed for five minutes with one hand on her hip and one hand over her mouth, and she thought to herself “Am I ruthless? Am I hard? When did that happen?” and the phone started ringing from another room somewhere.

She ran down the stairs to the kitchen and retrieved the empty cans from the black bin liner, the ringing had stopped and she could hear her mother talking to someone, she ran upstairs and put the cans back into the wicker bin in the bathroom. She looked into the toilet hopelessly but the shit was gone forever.

She returned to Fergus’s bedroom and opened the curtains, then dragged the chair back to its original spot by the window. She replaced the cushion, but it wasn’t right, it was puffed-up, so she sat on it.

Then she stopped and looked out at the tops of the shrubs and trees in the small garden, they were waving gently. The drizzle had started up again. A robin perched on the bird feeder, bright orange in the grey, two blue tits chirped and hopped about within the small branches of a large bush, a thrush appeared on the lawn and pulled a worm from the wet grass.

She looked around the bedroom, at Fergus’s collection of die cast, scaled down replicas of cars and vans from the 1930’s and ’40’s. They covered an entire wall from floor to ceiling. They queued neatly, patiently on slim balsa wood shelves. Right in the middle was a vehicle that didn’t quite fit, a bright yellow Sitemaster Excavator, a copy of the digger that Fergus drove for years in the quarry. Grace was taken back to a time before, when she was a teenager still living at home, and she had watched him through the crack in his bedroom door. He was lying on the bed, pushing the tiny toy digger backwards and forwards in a valley between peaks in the duvet.

Grace had not had time to move before Marion came running up the stairs and pushed open the door to the room, she faltered when she saw Grace in Fergus’s chair,

“Well they just phoned and told me the results of the post- mortem, it were heart failure….I thought it was…” Grace nodded “Poor Fergus” she said and found that this time she meant it.

“You know you were always his favourite” Marion said. Grace feigned a smile, but felt her face contort in the same way her mother’s had earlier in the car. She experienced a strange hollowness, a sense of disappointed, it was an intensification of the feeling she got when she threw a ball of screwed up paper at the waste bin, expecting it to go in, and it missed.

She watched her tiny, round shouldered mother go into the bathroom, pull up her dress and sit on the loo and pee heavily, she didn’t even bother to shut the door, it was a habit that Grace had always hated, and watched her wipe herself and stand and linger over the empty cans in the bin. Finally she picked them out and took them downstairs.

The funeral was a week later. Grace had gone home in between and spent very little time thinking about her step-father’s death, it had been a busy week at work, life had gone back to normal. Given the opportunity, she found she was reluctant to go and spend anymore time with her mother than was absolutely necessary.

Grace’s brother Andrew made a speech. He spoke about how much Fergus had loved their mother, how he been a good man, a good step father. Yeah right…and what about the rest? Grace thought. But it wasn’t so much the false presentation of his role as a husband or parent that bothered her, it was deceit in the face of death, it was so ultimately cynical.

So, while her brother delivered his well meaning words, she tried hard to salvage something. She gave her attention to the ambiguity and irresolution of his life, she thought of the terrors he fought against, of the boy he killed, the boy who died in his arms, the addiction, the inability to ever enjoy – and all of those unsolved problems, blunt, cruel, dumb, and forever unsettled.

She remembered the birds on the tree in the garden, going about their business with such clear, simple purpose, and discovered there for a moment the relief of transparency, but it was private, idealistic.
Then she saw her own life, like the tree cut right through its middle, and on the inside it too was dense, complicated and ugly, and that clear, tidy feeling of gladness was overwhelmed, and so remote that she could no longer even grasp what it had been, or what had been the point of it.

During the requisite dirge, ‘ Abide with Me’ her weeping began and intensified, by the final verse she was paroxysmal. She was so ashamed, but she could not stop.

Tara Gould is the founder of Brighton’s seminal short fiction night, “Short Fuse” at Komedia. Currently working on her first novel, she is the winner of two short story awards and has had plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Photo by Eliot Gill

If you fancy a night of stories of that will make Hunter S possibly turn in his cannon-singed grave, come along next Thursday (7th May) to this evening Amythefilmmaker (Amy Riley) is organising and reading at called Grit Lit.

The event features eight writers, all with Brighton connections, who will be reading rough, tough (and easily digestible) tales from the South coast’s social and cultural fringe:

Tim Lay [The Sewerside Chronicles]
Amy Riley[Trash Menagerie/Brighton Fusion]
Tony Diamond[Pebble on the Beach/Queenspark]
Tara Gould[Short Fuse]
Chris Ellis, Tom Jayston, Martin Curtis and B [The Big Issue/Amazement/Creative Future]
Dave Swann[The Last Days of Johnny North/Tongues and Strings]

£2.50 won’t break the bank and you might even have fun at this literary night, cafe style, along the dirty but beloved street of St James in Kemptown. It’s 70 capacity at RR so be sure to get down for 7.45pm to guarantee your spot down the front.

The night is being put in conjunction with Queenspark Books and our very own, Brighton Fusion.

See you there & happy festivalling !