lying in my throat

She doesn't live here anymore

She doesn't live here any more, but you can still feel her, the combination of inertia with a vague nervousness. After her husband died she kept the house by the sea for the sake of her children; she wanted to provide them with its stability as they had none in their lives. Besides, with the vision of retirement in the city gone, she found herself adrift in choices as wide and empty as the views she spent her days staring at. Soon after her husband, her mother died, and, unable to make the necessary decisions, she moved much of the furniture from that house north to her ex-husband's house. Her children were no help; they had lives of their own. And so, although big the house by the sea, became crowded with heavy furniture which was not at all to her taste and the very weight of which overwhelmed and defeated her.  

A friend recently remarked that I must love that house by the sea. "It must be full of memories," she had said.

£1.55

£1.55? To cross town? An unjustifiable amount for a small town. For a pound you got access to all that lay in zones one and two of London. One euro made all Paris intra-muros available.  But £1.55 for a journey that would take him half an hour to walk was ridiculous. With the driver change it would take just as long on the bus. And it wasn't coming for another twenty minutes. Fifty minutes and £1.55 to cross a crappy town in the north of England. The only thing he would avoid was the rain.

This is not a public transit system, he thought, but a network of mobile shelters that might take you somewhere slightly more interesting than the place from which you started.

And of this, at least, he was assured; a chat and a coffee waited at the other end. Paris and London could not offer him that. The price of the coffee? £1.55.

A million dollars

It's been an age since I posted anything, at least six months. Reasons will be forthcoming, but one resolution has been to include a 10 minute writing exercise into my day. The (quickly) edited results shall be posted here with the tag 10 Minutes of Writing. Here's the first.

“I had been feeling like a million dollars,” he said.

At the age of thirty-four, James Reader had found himself in a hotel room in the west end of Glasgow, alone and unemployed. At noon, check-out had long past and yet he still clutched to the bedclothes and the trapped warmth of his body. Inadequacy and loathing were his fastest qualities, there from waking and not leaving until the opening of a second bottle of wine, and so he clung to the trapped warmth. In the inert silence of the hotel room, it was all he could expect from himself.   

“Definitely,” he insisted, “a million dollars.”