Contents:

Not Unusual

Halogen

The Three Brothers

Old English Riddles

Take Me Home

Henry V’s Advice on Vomiting

Where’s William Now?

Interview with Ruth Padel

Disappointed

Journey of a Cycle-Free Woman

Duck in a Forest Ritual

The 17:17 Service to Graveshead

The woman standing at the window has started to grow grey. You can clearly see it. It may also be because she has black hair. Being black haired means that it shows immediately.

She looks at some children who are passing, walking in twos. She turns around to the others in the room and says: ”I love it when they walk in twos, it’s so adorable.”

After a while, she says: “I wish I had a child. I could watch it on the playground.”She passes her hand through her black/grey hair, and the sun is reflected on her wedding ring.

by Carla Scholderer

Not Unusual

He sat slumped in the man-made glow of the halogen God that had become his only comfort. The porcelain cooled an aching head, words swam uncomfortably across his consciousness.

He could feel the coarse thread of a towel under his knees. Everything was bad. Apart from the light; at least that deity stayed with him when the rest had gone home laughing at the jovial way he’d danced and sung, merrily sipping red and drowning white. His insides most definitely wanted out.

He wretched.

An outpouring of material soul, his whole life experiences of the last few hours summed up in the contents of his gut. Acid rain fell from his mouth onto a quiet lake steeped by elegant white mountains (almost blinding under the light of his God) from which the occasional rainfall caused cascades of water to envelop and sweep away all that rested below, rushing down into the pitch black caverns.

Just as in those infernal tunnels, his sight darkened and he slept. Dreams of streets in cities, flags hanging from the sky, cars going backwards, the drumming, endless drumming. And the girl, leading him by the hand, stopping every few me-ters to take disposable images that would never see the light of day. Her scarf swept through her blonde hair as gusts be-gan to chase the couple. She turned and smiled at him, plac-ing her arms around his waist, her hands tracing the base of his spine. The drumming increased. He leant down to kiss her, their lips brushed and she was blown away, steam in the breeze spreading, spreading.

Halogen

He awoke. Light swam around him. The whole room shook with stampede like irregularity, a thudding coming from no-where but within. He propped himself up on the porcelain and looked down into the fateful pool of what was once goodness. But he could see no goodness now.

He was fixated.

The more he looked, the more wrong he seemed. The colours swam into bodies, into continents and oceans, islands and seas. Mountains stood next to valleys. Forests and plains met like old friends in conflict, close but distinct.

He looked closer.

A teeming city sat below him, he could see roads, buildings, cars and people, all autonomous and all ignorant of their cre-ator gazing down upon them beneath his own halogen God. A man stood on a corner with a tattered umbrella looking like a well-loved book with a broken spine, which has sat on a desk too long and no longer shuts properly, and opens even worse. He had sad eyes, like he’d seen many things in the minutes he had existed: abominations of humanity. People walked past his worn suit without a glimpse, the knees worn through, two planets breaking free from the cloth, black space surround-ing them. Umbrella-man had obviously been left out in the rain.

He shifted his view under his God.

A plain spread for miles and miles, seemingly endless and empty apart from a lone tree upon which sat a squirrel, apple green eyes surrounded by blood red fur, studying the grass-land around it. A breeze swept through its evergreen home. A shiver. It clawed its way down the trunk and sat at the base, in the shorter glass, unaware of the two pairs of eyes upon it.

A fox-cat leapt from the grass.

He returned to his view of the city.

A street, flags hanging from the sky, cars going backwards. A boy and girl strolling. They go to kiss.

He shuts his eyes, not wanting to see the outcome of his dream torture. Squinting so as not to look down, he reached to summon the cascade of water to destroy his world, filled with a torment for him that he could not bear.

As he rose, the carpet slipped from under him, propelling him forward, his halogen God mocking him with its persistent overseeing; laughing but not helping, as his head cracked against the shining white mountains. He plummeted down into his creation. Darkness enveloped his mind. His world filled his lungs.

by Matt Winkless

“There were three boys, you said?” the nurse asked in the tone of voice used by people who spend too much time around other people and would rather be on their lunch breaks. She lifted the bedpans gently and handed them to another nurse, who was waiting on the other side of a standard issue, un-bearably tropical-printed curtain.

“Yes, three of them,” responded a graying woman. “Three – my boys. The blonde… what was his name?” She appeared frustrated with her inability to recall the fact. Her face didn’t seem to move in any visible way, but something about it be-gan to look taut and sallow. Her eyes, burning and unfocused, shifted to the second nurse, whose form was just visible from behind the curtain.

“Who’re you? Are you some kind of pervert?” she mumbled, her features as tough as gristle.

Embarrassed, the second nurse ducked back behind the curtain, taking the bedpans with her. The first one, whose nametag read ‘Megan’, made a disapproving noise whilst she readjusted the sheets on the older woman’s bed.

“What were your boys like, Ms. Lancaster?” she asked as she arranged the other’s pillows.

Marie shifted forward, attempting to shrug off her disinter-ested and unfocused expression. “They were… alright,” she said.

*

The Three Brothers

The oldest of the three is Henry, or maybe it’s Andrew who’s the oldest. Either way, one of them’s blonde. They’re good men. Henry played for the local football club, although he was never much good at it. He had the legs for it; he started run-ning before he could walk, but could never handle the com-mitment.

I tried to set him right, but it never took hold. That’s the curse of children – you have them thinking they’ll respect you, the way you respected your parents, only to watch them ignore your advice more and more until they don’t hear a damn word you say. Everyone thinks they know better than every-one else, but I don’t. If I know any better, it’s because I think things through. It’s harder to find a person who takes the time to think about things anymore. That’s the reason why print journalism is in a decline.

But I like Andrew well enough. He’s a good son – always came by to chop wood for me in the winter, every two weeks, just like clockwork. He’s maddeningly dependable, which is a trait that should be admired in people. If you don’t place value on valuable traits, people will stop having them, and then you’ll end up a seventy five year old woman freezing to death in her house, like that story in the paper the other day. If you didn’t read it, you ought to. It might open your eyes a bit to just how terrible things have got in the world. Henry, though, is a banker. Useless, especially when he gave all of his damn money away to that French girl. Lea, he said her name was. I don’t understand why the French have to mess around with everything. In the Bible it’s Leah, not Lea.

Yeah, well, I don’t give a damn about the French – it’s sac-rilege. God said Leah, not Lea, and that’s the way it should be done. Now, you’re interrupting me and I’m about to go all fuzzy.

He has a good heart, like a woman. The kind of person who would devote his life to cleaning up another person’s bed-pans. He could’ve done so much more. You know, I used to knit him sweaters. Sent them to his apartment. I never saw him wear one, but I did see one on a homeless man on the way home from the supermarket one night. Damn him. I didn’t speak to him for three years after that. But it wasn’t a bad thing to do, you know, if the man needed it. I never told him that. Would’ve made him even softer, probably.

Anyway, the third one was the most decent one of the lot. That was Paul. He was a good boy, always stayed in with me on Tuesdays when Charlie worked late. That was before the heart attack, mind you. We would stay in the sitting room, me with my knitting and him with some new book. He thought his old woman didn’t know a thing – when he’d leave the books for next week, I’d read them sometimes. One was about a woman who adopted a little girl. Don’t know why anyone would put themselves through the trouble – of adopting, and it being a little girl. Good way to break your own heart, I said. Charlie never wanted them, anyways, so it was all fine.

Anyways, I’m glad we never did. We got good ones, you know. Not easy to find them, these days.

*

“The woman in room 203 passed last night. Hate to say it, but the ICU’s been overcrowded for weeks, and she was here for so long, it’s almost like they had nowhere else to put her,” said a young nurse with drooping eyelids, as she poured cream into her coffee. “Can you hand me a sugar, Roy?”

“Yeah, here you go. God, I feel bad for Meg – dealing with the old woman for the last two weeks. She was a character, man,” responded a middle-aged man in tan scrubs with a thousand

tiny cowboys printed on them, lassoing a thousand tiny bulls.

A haggard woman slumped onto the doorframe, waving a meek hello to the other two. “How have you lot been?” she asked, filling up her coffee mug.

“Us? What about you? Happy to have old Lancaster off your hands?” Roy asked, as he handed her the sugar sachets.

Meg exhaled. “A bit, yeah. It was sad though – she went with-out any of her children showing up. Two weeks here, and not one of the three could come down. They were all she talked about, too.” She finished stirring her coffee, and tossing the two of them a tired nod, made her exit.

“That’s interesting,” Roy mused as he picked up his mug to go. “I looked up her records the other day to look for allergies to meds, and all it mentioned under next of kin was a hus-band, who died a few years back.”

“They could’ve been emancipated. Wouldn’t really surprise me… she didn’t seem much like the motherly type,” the oth-er nurse replied, sitting down with a crunch onto the plastic hospital lounge sofa.

“I don’t know. I looked down the page and I thought it said that she was infertile. Salpingitis – unknown cause. It might’ve been someone else, though.”

“How strange.”

“Tell me about it,” he replied.

by Taylor Held

Quiet’s my quilt when I tread the Earth,Or inhabit my habitat; afflict,Bring ripples forth in cloaking-sea’s wide berth. At times my armour-trappings, and this mistOf lofty heights and deepest pride exaltAnd lifts me up, past dwellings unadornedOf those heroic men who’ve battle-fought.In firm, unshaking might of clouds I’m bornAfield so far from tribes of army-men.My ornaments and trappings sound aloudAnd make a swansong melody, and thenRecite, sing splendid; chant and cry to crowdWhen I avoid the sea that floods the coastAnd earthen soil, a departing ghost.

by Jonathan Andrews

Swan Riddle

Riddles Translated From Old English

Hrægl min swigað þōn ic hrusan tredeoþþe þa wic buge oþþe wado drefe

hwilum mec ahebbað ofer hæleþa byhthyrste mine 7þeos hea lyft

7 mec þōn wide wolcna strenguofer folc byreð frætwe mine

swogað hlude 7swinsiaðtorhte singað þōn ic getenge ne beom ·

flode 7 foldan ferende gæst · :7

The moth devoured words. A curious fate,I thought, when I heard of that wondrous thing;Such a strange providence that such a snakeCould swallow such a song; force self to singA certain man, a Prince’s, turn-of-phrase;A thief among the dark; majestic words,A resolute foundation for his praise.That Stealing-guest was never, afterwards,In any way imbued with clarityThough swelled by verbs he took in orally.

by Jonathan Andrews

Bookworm Riddle

Moððe word fræt— me þæt þuhtewraetlicu wyrd þa ic þaet wundor gefraegn,

þaet se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes, þeof in þystro, þrymfaestne cwide

and þæs strangan stapol. Stælgiest ne wæs wihte þy gleawra þe he þam wordum swealg.

The river is a leaking tapan emptying beer cana puddle of piss.I went down last night to capture an audience.The Blackfriars barmaids listen better than the bankersI have a lot to say when I am paid by the metre.

I couldn’t get out of my head this girlshe came to me dressed up to the nineswith a face like she had been drowned.

She reminded me of my sisterwhen I was young and visited herin that bare, fluorescent flat off the Old Kent Road.I couldn’t hit back herbad boyfriend.She cried more than her baby.

The river is a blob of black from a girl’s eyelashit rains on my windows and I can’t wipe it away,I always take it home.

by Imogen Free

Take Me Home

Once more into the sink, dear friends, once more;Or coat the wall green with our English puke.By day there’s nothing so becomes a manAs toilet manners and sobriety;But when we’ve one too many vodka shotsWe’ll imitate the action of a chunder;Coax out the vomit, summon up the bile,Relieve discomfort with a sickly spurt.

Relax your sinews, shimmy to the floor,Collapse beside the firmly-bolted doorAnticipating the next upwards rushSo that you can lunge forward to the bog,O’erhang your head in that shit-swallowing mawAnd deposit your milky-yellow swirl.

Now heave the teeth apart, shut firm the eyes,Hold hard your head and wretch up every spiritYou’ve downed tonight. On, on, you noblest pissheadWhose blood is mingled with the cheapest booze;Sambuca, and so many G&Ts…And now, the final flood. The game’s afoot.Vomit your spirits; and upon this chargeCry “Bleugh! Agahhhbluggg! Gahflww…spugh!”

by Jonathan Andrews

Henry V’s Advice on Vomiting

Ruth Padel is an award-win-ning poet, novelist, and liter-ary critic. She recently joined King’s College London as a teaching fellow of Poetry.

Interviewer: Joshua Stupple

You have been a published poet for some time now, but it was only a few years ago that your first novel was re-leased. How does your pro-cess for writing prose differ from how you write your poetry?

My first novel only came out in 2010 but I’ve written non-fic-tion for a long time, and that was much easier. I found it much easier to write non-fiction whilst writing poetry at the same time. But I can’t write novels at the same time as poetry. When I write a poem I have to drop other things, you have to follow the poem up when it appears. The novels need so much more sustaining; you have to live with them for such a long time. Novels are so much about people, and you have to consider them first, their voices and their characters and their relationships. Whereas with a poem, you are concerned very much with the language. Of course you are concerned with the language in a novel too, but in poetry the language is prime.

Your work is always accompanied by fierce respect and ad-oration of wildlife. I was wondering what role you believe literature, specifically poetry, can play in green move-ments and conservation programmes?

Well, it’s very important for poetry to regard itself as poet-ry first. Seamus Heaney was very clear that respect for the poem as art has got to come first. If you have a poem with a message and you only think of the message, you are letting the message and poetry down.

Your writing also seems to be very occupied with travel and unique locations. Are there places that you have a par-ticular artistic affinity with?

I don’t think I would separate an artistic affinity from any other affinity. But I live a lot in Greece and have written a lot in Crete. My next novel is going to be set in the Second World War in Crete. But my first novel was very much about India and mainly because of the wildlife. I have a particular fasci-nation with the Jungle and the rural areas rather than the cities. So India and Greece are two places I care about a lot. But then Burma, I’ve taught poetry there and I loved Burma.

You have recently joined King’s College London as a teach-ing fellow. What do you think can be gained from learning to write poetry and fiction in an academic setting?

Attention to language and the discipline of using your im-agination, using language very precisely. When I wrote Fif-ty-two Ways of Looking at a Poem I explained that, unlike America, in Britain and Ireland poets had nothing to do with universities, because that’s what it was like in 2002, when I wrote that book. In 2006, I released The Poem and the Jour-ney, and in all the biographies of the poets I used, all I had to say was where they were teaching creative writing. So it happened in four years; that’s extraordinary how the univer-sities changed. And mostly they were nested alongside Eng-lish departments, and that is a natural relationship. English departments are trying to get students to see how fiction is made and what has bearing upon the writers as they create.

So I think that a creative writing department and an English department have a lot to give each other and each other’s stu-dents.

What can you tell us about your forthcoming poetry collec-tion, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth?

It’s taken me about twelve years to write this book because it started with poems I wrote in 2002. But then I got torpedoed by my book, Darwin - A Life in Poems. Charles Darwin was my great, great grandfather. And suddenly people, a few years before his centenary year, began to ask me to write poems about him, so I did. So this completely scuppered all my other poetry writing. Then I was also writing another book called The Mara Crossing, which I had a grant to do from the Arts Council, so I had to finish that. As it transpired there ended up being five books between beginning the poems of this col-lection and their release. But it meant these were poems that I really had to write. The poems are about the Middle East, which seems to me to be at the heart of so much of what’s been happening in the last twenty years. I’ve been in Israel and have done reading tours in Palestine. I felt very much at home in the Palestini-an parts. So the poems themselves are about making things, making the Oud, making music, somebody making a chain out of a broom handle in a Nazi camp. This is based on something that happened. This man used a penknife and carved out of this handle a linked chain, with pictures on the links showing what the camp was like. And that’s what I want to talk about, people’s intrinsic need to make things even in extremity.

So to counter the idea that art is somehow frivolous, to show that it is something innate?

Art is desperately important, yes. One of the last lines in the poem is ‘making is our defence against the dark.’

With Vic going as suddenly as he did we were doing things together right up to the end. Creeping infirmity never had the chance to limit our leisure. Our social life was not curtailed as our faculties diminished. Wonky knees and worn out hips didn’t constrain us to the garden centre and bladder weak-ness didn’t confine us to activities that were within a safe dis-tance of a change of underwear. Failing eyesight didn’t stop Vic driving although that would perhaps have been a blessing, even in his prime he was never more than competent behind the wheel and by the end he was little better than dangerous.

The final trip we took together was to the Shakespeare Festi-val held at Ludlow Castle - a performance of ‘As You Like It’ and then dinner at The Feathers.Vic wasn’t the greatest fan of the Bard but was content to snooze the afternoon away in the sun. Happy if I was happy and happier still at the prospect of rounding off the evening with something more to his taste.The hearty fire, free flowing booze and healthy banter of The Feathers’ smoke room was more Vic’s milieu. His rosy cheeks and yellow dickie bow slotted seamlessly into such a scene. He was bundling me away from the action al-most before the end of the first curtain call, eager to take his place with a scotch in hand. We clapped as we walked to the car.

In the smoke room Vic was soon holding court, calling the barman by name, running up a tab.Here we go.Scotch for him, a single malt.A small port and lemon for me. Vic always attracted an entourage: they talked, Vic talked

Disappointed

the most. Vic waved his empty glass suggestively.‘Time for another?’ Deliberately ambiguous‘No let me’‘If you insist’Vic put his wallet away, his empty wallet.With resigned reluctance Vic’s new best friend pays the bar-man.The new best friend scowls but can’t back down. He frowns at the pitiful coins returned by the barman. A sucker caught with a sucker punch. He’s not the first and won’t be the last, Vic already has the next victim in his sights.He’s very good at this, an adept beer burglar. He will give the impression of doing the lion’s share of the buying, of being the soul of bibulous largesse when in fact he will duck and dodge, connive and twist and get everyone else to do the spending.

I sink into the well-worn chair, resisting the urge to kick off my shoes. Vic sighs contentedly and winks at me.Now comes the tricky bit.The pocket patting riff.No chequebook! What are we going to do?An arrangement with manager, my son will send a cheque, quicker that way, no need to wait for my new book to arrive. A cheque really will be in the post nest day, Vic will make sure that The Feathers gets paid, after all we want to eat there next time after Richard III. Vic just makes sure that he doesn’t do the paying.

Next year my daughter took me. Our youngest, Vic’s favour-ite. He always introduced her in the same way: This is my youngest, Aisling. He would begin.‘She’s had a bit of trouble’. Pause. The pause went on and on, he could really milk it.Before, crash, bang:‘She married a bastard!’

I was thinking about Vic as we drove to Ludlow and couldn’t help shedding a tear. As we took our seat I was cheered by the thought that Vic would be with us in spirit later at The Feathers.Contented with thoughts of dinner, I settled back to enjoy Richard III.‘Now is the winter of our discontent’.I said in unison with the lead, a little too loudly, a few of peo-ple sitting close by noticed, they turned to look at me; mad old bag in a straw hat, they were thinking so I couldn’t help myself.Louder than the lead:‘Made glorious summer by this son of York’.The scowlers nearby shifted grumpily.My daughter hissed.I kept quiet from then on.

Interval.I’m handed a soggy tinned salmon sandwich and lukewarm tea.I handed them back.‘Don’t want to spoil my appetite for later’.‘Later?’‘The Feathers?’ I asked.‘We always had a meal there, your dad and I’.‘Not made of money’.‘A light snack al fresco will be nicer’.Nicer for whom?

That’s disappointment.

by Ian Cassidy

Thingy Something. The sun rose again as I woke up. The dark-living didn’t last long, I don’t think. I couldn’t really tell because I was eye-shut-visioning but then I can’t have been out too big-length or I’d be dead: hunted, poached and stuffed. I should really sun-live now.

Thingy Something, but I’ve existed a bit more. I wish there was a word for it; existencer? No, that sounds ridiculous, like a ray gun from a children’s cartoon only it creates things not kills. Whatever a child is… is it a thing-not-much-existencer? I think it might be. I’ve done more sun-living. Hunted. Eaten. Drunk. Surprisingly like the last sun-living. Or was it sun-liv-ings? They blur. Perhaps I should order them all into one big sun-living? But then you’d have constant interruption from the dark-living. Or dark livings. This is tough.

Thingy New-Something. Dark-living came back and went. In-cidentally, I’ve thought of a word for the existing-living. It’s ‘time’. You get more time as you existence-live more. The not-much-existence-living you did in the done-things time is the past. That’s time that’s gone. And the existence-living you’ll do in the not-done time is the future. That makes this all a bit easier, I think. So I’m having… I mean, I have… hunted. Eaten. Drunk. Danced around a bit. Bludgeoned a few skulls in. Now I’m sitting by a rock awaiting dark-livings. I miss them, strangely. I don’t know what happens in them and I want to. I want to thought-make to them. Like with time.

Thingy New-New-Something. Night? Is that dark-living? Seems a good enough word as any. So… not-night is sun-times? Yes. Not-night is good. But night-not-eye-shut-vision-ing is awful. No energy-fullness. Drank. Tried to hunt. Found

Journey of a Cycle-Free Woman

no prey. Ate green-shoot instead; the all-leg-leg-leg-leg-udder-man seemed to get energy-fullness from it. Time passed same amount from this night-end to the next night-end. Plip-plip-plip-plip. A plip is a time measurement I’ve devised, you see. It’s roughly equal to one half-plip and another half-plip.

Not-night New-New-New Something. Last night only lasted plip-plip-plip. Odd. We must be moving into sun-not-nights. Every not-night is sunny though. So that name is awful. Sun-long-not-nights? Clunky. But it’ll have to do. Now, I’ve had the radical idea to split a plip into a half-plip. Hunted. Ate. Drank.

Not-Night New-New-New-New Something. Half-plips are far too large to keep track of, so I’ve devised a new measurement: half-half-plips! Sixteen of them in a night-end. And actually, they’re a bit big too, I’ll have to work of a newer, smaller meas-urement there. Oh, and I’ve had a thought for a thing-list. Thing will be one, Thing-thing will be two. Thing-thing three. On and on it’ll go. Makes counting easier. So this not-night… what thing will it be? We’ll have to start fresh with one, I sup-pose. Can’t tally an abyss of infinity. Ooh. That was almost profound. Profound… I wonder what that word means? Hunt-ed. Ate. Drank. Slept.Not-Night Two. I’m starting to think after three it should cy-cle back to one. So we’ll have a one again? A two-one. These things… they’re different, though. The numbers are the same, but one two is bigger, it lasts three one-two-threes. So they must be different things. Need names. Well one’s a not-night. The other… months? That’ll do. Hunted. Ate. Drank. The nights are definitely getting shorter. Sun-long-not-nights are getting longer too. I seem to recall this happening before…

Not-Night Three, Month One. The lengths of the not-nights are very odd. Like a boomerang, whatever that is. They just sort of… stretch, contract, stretch, conract, continuously. It’s obviously a big battle. A war in heaven or something. But just

when night-god or not-night-devil are going to win, they lose. Nature-enforced equality. Very odd. Someone should group the days and months together into bigger things. Can’t be arsed myself, though. Oh, and perhaps a celebration to keep our spirits up when the nights reach their pinnacle and the not-heat stretches far and wide. Something like… Christmas? That’s a good name.

by Jonathan Andrews

A duck, symbol of nothing entersthe drizzling leaves, the murk; blackand soggy dipping its feet.

Its eye doesn’t even blinkwhen the drops come falling on the beak;round and mellow knocks.

The proud chest, perfect in balance.Feathers not fluttering on a sandpaper branch,and the late sun beams

through the leaves and strike upa fluid tone: and duck follows,its breathing soundless.

There is not a swan waiting outsidethis forest. With Feathers in a floatof expectancy, white and distant.

For the duck lets out a quack.

And its out of the woods on agile wings.

All the forest’s timein the unblinking eyes.

by Charles He

Duck in a Forest Ritual

“It is like this in death’s other KingdomWaking alone

At the hour when we areTrembling with tenderness

Lips that would KissForm prayers to a broken stone”

– T.S. Eliot

PrologueLittle do we realize that in every commute, in our daily travel in an out of somewhere or another, that we – in a way – prove Zeno right. We never quite reach our destination, not because our destination is unreachable but, because in every journey we fade away a little more; half, by half, by half, until we are left with a shadow, an image, a mirage of our true selves. Like uranium we are left without our former vigour, our former strength.Our former power is lost to the time we have left, but we refuse to let ourselves notice and so we travel on, and on and on.

The Old SectionThe train plummeted through the darkness. Though, it wasn’t real darkness. It certainly wasn’t the type of darkness that you imagine lurks in the deepest cave or on the other side of the moon. It was the drab dullness that exists in London - that which is extenuated by time of day – around ten past five. It is as if the clocks, after a long day of whirring around in a clockwise motion, became tired and demanded a rest; so they slow down. All we can do is wait until they have decided that they are rested and return to work.

The revolutions of the world, contained behind the glass front

The 17:17 Service to Graveshead

of a pocket watch- sitting in a businessman’s waistcoat pock-et will slow and pull people from their sightseeing tour buses, desks, school books, and matinees with that mutually unspo-ken promise of home.As if the crowds have taken on the spirit of the exodus who, after forty years of briskly ambling through the desert start to slow and tire; the fatigue making the crowds flow towards the bus stations, taxi ranks and train stations, in the same way that a river doesn’t flow upstream.I don’t suppose we can say the train was plummeting either. Certainly, the trains on the posters, that decorated the shab-by platforms, plummeted. They plummeted through their watercolour background, alongside a statement saying that the locomotive company could get a passenger to Brighton in less than fifty minutes. These trains plummeted alongside the taxpayer’s investment in the project. This train howev-er, could at best be described as moving. It simply moved, it moved no faster than it ever had or with more vigour - it just moved. It is likely to move again tomorrow and the next day, and the next, living behind all civilisation and remaining eternally the same.

...to be continued

by Jon Brown

Read the next section online at

kclcabbages.wordpress.com

and other fantastic writing from KCL students

Editorial Team:

Aja GarrodSerena GrassoNessa KhurramJosh StuppleAnouk Van RossumMichael CourtAndrew MarksKatrina GeorgiadesJake CarrCaro Boro

Cover design by Lucy Ambler

With thanks to the KCL English Literary Society,King’s English Department, KWT Printing, Ruth Padel