I stare down at the young man who stands below me ankle-deep in the mud of the banks of the Thames.
Yia-Yia knew many stories of gods and heroes, giants and nymphs, and the Three Fates who spun and measured and cut the thread of life.
We’d been driving for about seven thousand years. Or at least that’s how it felt.
Charlotte could listen no more in silence. For several minutes now a young man at the teahouse counter had been abusing a waiter with language that pierced her soul.
There was no possibility of walking to the library that day. Morning rain had blanched the air, and Miss Darlington feared that if Cecilia ventured out she would develop a cough and be dead within the week.
Jen is glad of the clocks going back tonight. A gained hour, extra time, to be spent pretending she isn’t waiting up for her son.
I’ve got six minutes to walk to the train station, plenty of time if I wear my flat boots.
My fifteenth birthday is stinging with a blistering heatwave. Balloons and streamers are dangling off the clothesline, motionless.
One morning in March 2014, I woke up and wondered just how the hell I’d got here. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a one-room sleep-out at a community home in South Auckland, with rapists and drug addicts as my neighbours.
‘Jason Mott?’ ‘Yes. Here. That’s me.’ I stare down at the young man who stands below me ankle deep in the mud of the banks of the Thames.
For some, the sound that defined their adolescence was the joyful shrieks of their siblings playing in the garden.
I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.
Charlie’s ugly Crocs stuck to the mats on the floor behind the bar, making a sticky, squelching sound.
Jun Chu stood on the deck of a three-masted junk given the auspicious name Silken Dragon.
Cristabel picks up the stick. It fits well in her hand. She is in the garden, waiting with the rest of the household for her father to return with her new mother.
