Out in 2020
The Trio
Toothpickers - beware!
'I watched them openly now from the cash register, because they were too absorbed at this stage of their meal to be aware of anything else. Dad’s and Nino’s faces filled the hatch, Dad’s lips slightly wet, Nino maintaining the even line of the grim Soviet smile that hid her metal false teeth.'
Can we all agree that it's very bad form to go to a diner, even if it fancies itself as a restaurant, and pick your teeth at the table? Three men get a terrifying lesson in manners in my story The Trio, out now in The Fictional Café.
Eaters of offal, toothpicks, two sets of identical twins - and more toothpicks, all in The Trio, which can be read in its terrible entirety right here.
Can we all agree that it's very bad form to go to a diner, even if it fancies itself as a restaurant, and pick your teeth at the table? Three men get a terrifying lesson in manners in my story The Trio, out now in The Fictional Café.
Eaters of offal, toothpicks, two sets of identical twins - and more toothpicks, all in The Trio, which can be read in its terrible entirety right here.
Istanbul Song
A bit of Turkish-style Art Deco on Istiklal Caddesi, the main drag through the old 'European Quarter' of Istanbul.
One: The Blind Beggar’s Daughter
I knew the rain would never stop, that second winter in İstanbul, knew I’d be stuck in it till the summer, when I could bake myself dry in the sun. By then, all the colour would be washed out of me, and perhaps that’s the lot of the Englishman abroad, to lose himself bit-by-bit to the elements. I love that city of polyglots and performers here in my head, but hated it that first week of November as I claimed a doorway on İstiklal, that is, Independence Avenue, and stood there giving it five minutes more.
Standing in that doorway, doing nothing except keep out of the rain, I realised that, as long as I stayed there, my life could seem less complicated. All my conflicts and problems were out there, under sheets of water, and they couldn’t reach me.
The blind man who begged outside the shops with his daughter wasn’t there, and I missed him, didn’t know why, wondered how he’d ever make a penny in all that foul weather. The daughter caught my eye once, and I tried to make out it wasn’t touching me, this moment of scrutiny. I had a dream about her soon after, and in it she’d come out of the rain and said it didn’t matter that she’d seen the face I’d put on, that not many people were cut out for deception. I turned my face up into the water falling down into my dream, and she called after me, “Wash your sins, not only your face.” Everything is blurred in the rain, and deception is easy, though the blind man’s daughter would tell me the weather makes no difference, that all acts like that are played out in the head.
This is the introduction to my 'long lost' novel set in Istanbul, where I lived from 1990-1992, and in Eastern Turkey. It's a perhaps familiar story of 'the Englishman abroad trying to make sense of everything.' In real life, I stopped trying to do that not too long after landing in Istanbul, a city I love and miss to this day.
Maybe it deserves to be long lost - it's certainly long enough to have got more or less instant rejections all its life. All the same, chapters 1 and 2 have been published in the appropriately-named Rejected Manuscripts magazine. You can read them here.
I knew the rain would never stop, that second winter in İstanbul, knew I’d be stuck in it till the summer, when I could bake myself dry in the sun. By then, all the colour would be washed out of me, and perhaps that’s the lot of the Englishman abroad, to lose himself bit-by-bit to the elements. I love that city of polyglots and performers here in my head, but hated it that first week of November as I claimed a doorway on İstiklal, that is, Independence Avenue, and stood there giving it five minutes more.
Standing in that doorway, doing nothing except keep out of the rain, I realised that, as long as I stayed there, my life could seem less complicated. All my conflicts and problems were out there, under sheets of water, and they couldn’t reach me.
The blind man who begged outside the shops with his daughter wasn’t there, and I missed him, didn’t know why, wondered how he’d ever make a penny in all that foul weather. The daughter caught my eye once, and I tried to make out it wasn’t touching me, this moment of scrutiny. I had a dream about her soon after, and in it she’d come out of the rain and said it didn’t matter that she’d seen the face I’d put on, that not many people were cut out for deception. I turned my face up into the water falling down into my dream, and she called after me, “Wash your sins, not only your face.” Everything is blurred in the rain, and deception is easy, though the blind man’s daughter would tell me the weather makes no difference, that all acts like that are played out in the head.
This is the introduction to my 'long lost' novel set in Istanbul, where I lived from 1990-1992, and in Eastern Turkey. It's a perhaps familiar story of 'the Englishman abroad trying to make sense of everything.' In real life, I stopped trying to do that not too long after landing in Istanbul, a city I love and miss to this day.
Maybe it deserves to be long lost - it's certainly long enough to have got more or less instant rejections all its life. All the same, chapters 1 and 2 have been published in the appropriately-named Rejected Manuscripts magazine. You can read them here.
I Think of Ariadne when I Eat Hummus
'I think of Ariadne when I eat hummus, and specifically the time I made it and she tasted it and said You forgot the garlic. I’d made it for what passed for a party in Lefkimmi among a certain type of person – her friends, of course, people like us, I guess, into gentle snacking and not big blow-outs. Some of them had already arrived, and had one ear on the conversation and the other on the sound of food being brought out.'
Lefkimmi is not a particularly good-looking or remarkable town, though it's Corfu's second city. I only spent an afternoon there (our trusty car did NOT break down), and that was in 2003, but it left enough of an impression on me to want to set this very short story there.
It's out now in the Who Are We? anthology, which looks at race, place and nationality, alongside other winners of Willowdown Books' Cunningham Prize. Available for £11.99 from Amazon UK and Amazon USA for $14.99.
The House of the Siren
My flash tale The House of the Siren, will be reprinted and reissued later this year, all 250 careful words of it... so I won't give any of them away here, for now.
