The room was a small box full of colour. As they entered, Mohamed was standing behind the counter cutting cloth. Lalani liked the way he cut without cutting, holding the scissor, and running the cloth against it, so that the pieces of silk fell smoothly to either side. ‘Sari jacket?’ La
Read MoreThe soil crunches against Nell’s teeth as she grinds them together. Clumps of earth and small shards of stone cake her gums. Her tongue feels around for pebbles too big to ingest and brings them out from the very back of her mouth. They have no place here. Once identified, she spits them back onto
Read MoreSeen from a boat, approaching the island through cold, choppy, white-flecked seas, the island of Staffa looks like a dense grey forest of rock off the western coast of Scotland. Columns of basalt push up and then flower out into a puffy, cloud-like summit on top of which the plantlife of the island
Read MoreKicking the thin sward, he brings up chalk in the roots of knapweed and bladder campion. Eyebright, rockrose, sainfoin. In the morning light, Bee Orchids dance dark and purple against the pale green of marjoram. Sun up. Showtime. Julian is eight and every Saturday his father marches him out of th
Read MoreWhen Jill arrived, the paddling pool was already inflated and filled, laid out on the lawn like a huge yellow pet feeding-bowl – if your pet was a diplodocus. She’d always thought there was something prehistoric about her mum’s garden. The trees from the edge of the cemetery craned over the ol
Read MoreYou were there long before I took the form of a {man}. Before I began to steal shapes out of my pregnant {mother}, and before adolescence stole back shapes out of me. You, my grandfather, have always been a man. Stoic and sinewy, you emerged from the delivery room five feet and eleven inches tall a
Read MoreIn rain, sunshine, mist and high winds we tottered through the fields as fast as Elspeth’s little legs and my dodgy knees allowed. Both of us breathless, we rushed up the hill – more of a hillock really – that Elspeth had named The Big Mountain. The vista from the top encompassed the sweep of
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