Accidental Flowers E-Book

Lily Peters

• Herausgeber: Arachne Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 294

Beschreibung

Set mostly in the north of the UK, in a near future. Women march together in protest at a government reneging on climate promises. Two glorified paper pushers in Spain help British ex-pats escape a heatwave that will soon lay waste to most of southern Europe. A twitter storm erupts in the panic of a real tempest. In the northeast, a beloved allotment sinks below the waterline. Sea levels rise, toxic rain falls and the earth poisons the food that grows in it. The elite, and winners of the life lottery, are evacuated to giant towers. As a notional government tries to keep control at ground level, eco warriors, protestors and radical 'allotmenteers' proliferate. In the towers, new blueprints for the regime of the future are drawn up. For many, a decision has to be made between living safe or living free.

Leseprobe

First published in UK 2021 by Arachne Press Limited

100 Grierson Road, London SE23 1NX

www.arachnepress.com

© Lily Peters 2021

ISBNs

Print 978-1-913665-33-3

ePub 978-1-913665-34-0

Mobi/kindle 978-1-913665-35-7

Audio 978-1-913665-22-7

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Except for short passages for review purposes no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of Arachne Press Limited.

Thanks to Muireann Grealy for her proofing.

Thanks to Kevin Threlfall for his cover design.

The publication of this book is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of Up On the Roof was published in Noon, Stories and Poems from Sosltice Shorts Festival 2018, Arachne Press, 2019

An earlier version of The Greenhouse was published in The Newcastle University Anthology for Creative Writing Students, 2019

Accidental Flowers

Contents

Beginning

Bliss

All Bosom and Pride

El Gordo

A Good War?

Extraordinary General Meeting

Bad Timing

Sailing to Crouch End

Middle

Up on the Roof (at Noon)

The Greenhouse

Accidental Flowers

To Whom It May Concern

Juliet’s Fate

Ending

Renaissance

Our Land, Our Rules

Happy Anniversary

Benthesikyme Styx

After

Generation B

Message Deleted

A Valid Endeavour

Dear Architects

Beginning

2030

Bliss

Everyone says that they love spring because of the longer days and the green leaves, but I think the real reason that people love spring is because of cow parsley. Would that I could sell the bliss that cow parsley brings. Anthriscus sylvestris – a silvery cloudy line that links cities to the countryside, seaside towns to landlocked hamlets. Heaven in a plant.

It’s May and muggy with it. I have made it through the traffic in the city, a slow process, accompanied by the sound of too-loud talk radio, and rumbling from other road users. I’m now heading out into the country. My SatNav tells me I have twenty or so glorious minutes of winding sixty mph roads, bordered by happy banks of – yes, you guessed it – cow parsley.

Freedom.

If I were to marry, I’d do it in May. I can see it all: jugs of cow parsley spilling onto tables, cow parsley buttonholes, cow parsley accessories for my hair, letting all the indigent creatures crawl from the stems and build a home on my scalp.

*

Bliss and I met in May. A long time ago, at a party. We were both fifteen and it was one of those house parties that started off with bowls of Doritos and ended with local boys coming around to smash televisions and pull chests of drawers apart. Their arrival signalled that it was time to leave (if you hadn’t already left with your latest crush, of course).

We were standing in the narrow, noisy kitchen. Some of the skinny girls, the ones from our year or the year below, the ones who still looked like infants, were sat cross-legged on counter-tops.

I’d offered Bliss a drink from my can of cider. She’d declined. She didn’t drink, not then.

‘It messes with my artistic nature,’ she informed me, her eyes lost beneath a thick layer of shimmering blue makeup. I fell in love.

*

Apart from the occasional surprising Land Rover, the roads are quiet. Cows stand pressed against the hedge, their big black snouts poking through the hedgerows. I want to put my hand out of the window and boop their noses, but I’m going too fast. And cows have always scared me. It is the city girl in me perhaps, I’m wary of their sheer size. The SatNav beeps a speed warning. I take my foot from the pedal as the road hairpins. Something I’ve not secured well enough hits the side of the truck with a metallic ping. Possibly the watering can? Possibly the handle of a now ruined tool?

It always surprises me how well gardening businesses do in May. I mean, the best time to plan a summer garden is actually in October, but it’s the cow parsley thing again. People live on scrubland all year around and then they take one May walk through the park and there grows inside them this aching desire for a perfect, bee-humming, paradise-possessing back yard. Before last year, I was always so busy in April and May. So busy, that when I shut my eyes, all I saw were the fine veins on the surface of a leaf, or the curl of an unfurling bulb. So busy, especially if it was warm.

And when isn’t it warm now?

*

Our friendship was never equal. Our loyalty to each other was fierce, but, at any one time, one of us always loved the other more. Her addiction to the melodramatic gave me a stomach ache and she thought I liked boys too much, that I spent too much time pining. Her eyes would roll when I said I was in love with a boy, but when she fell for ‘the one’, it was the end of the world if (when) he didn’t call her back. My school was ‘too posh’ for her, and I hated the way she would act as if her school was situated in a war zone, and that going to it was equal to risking her life.

I grew up on the sort of road where everyone’s hedge was big enough and wide enough to hide their goings-on. She and her mum shared a garden with their upstairs neighbours. A garden with an apricot tree and courgettes, with their pretty yellow flowers that Bliss’s mum would batter for us if we asked enough times.

If Bliss’s clothes were loose on me, she would throw a tantrum. If her feet were slight enough to wear a pair of ridiculous heels I couldn’t get past my little toes, I refused to talk to her for a week.

But really, for two wistful teenage girls, we were equally vital to the other. We grew up and, unaware, we became tangled, like two French dwarf bean seedlings, left to their own devices on a sunny windowsill.

*

There are hearty helpings of apple blossom here and there en route – ornamental orchards, there for show rather than produce. My mental boundaries blur and although I am currently on a winding country road and in complete control of the van, in my mind I’m elsewhere – on her hospital ward, by her bedside. Her cheeks are as pink as apple blossom, the rest of her skin the pale brown of new bark. Her lips still tinged green, the colour of new leaves.

I can remember how helpless she looked. I can still see the police on their way down the corridor. Even on this beautiful spring day, the birds competing with the engine, I am still shaken to the core.

*

We grew apart, letting our shoots aim towards different patches of sunlight. It was such a slow process that there was no dawning realisation, no sudden devastation. Just a sporadic pang of loss, occasionally brought on by a change in the weather, like the sudden drip of a pipe reminding you that you meant to fix it last autumn, before the rain.

By the time we reconnected, Bliss had made a lot more of herself than I had. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my job. Running my own small garden design business allowed me to pass my weeks in the quiet friendship of plants and fertiliser, spades and seedlings. I was paid to spend other people’s money on wrought iron furniture and decorative pebbles. It was a gift, to be rewarded for merely observing and occasionally facilitating, green, earthy life. I became fit and slight and quick-fingered.

But Bliss, Bliss had actually become famous. She was a celebrity. She had rendered into reality the dreams we used to discuss over a box of chips, the night bus home taking its sweet, slow time.

When I first saw her face on the advertisement on the side of a bus, I was on a date, sitting in a pub garden. Lime fizzed in my tonic, bubbles popped on their pint. Bliss had done it! She had a leading role! As the vehicle sped past us and on up the high street, I had lifted my drink in stone-cold admiration for my old friend, and said ‘to Bliss’. Upon reflection, I think I may have instilled some false hope in the acquaintance opposite me, who, incidentally, I didn’t meet up with again.

*

By taking in gulps of the sweet smelling, almost alcoholic air hammering through the window, I manage to bring myself back to the present. I am speeding again. My shoulders have levered themselves up to my ears and my back aches as I force them back down. I slow as I come to a crossroads. The SatNav tells me straight on, but the signs say differently.

To the future, says the one to the left. I’m not ready, am I?

To regret, says the one on the right. Not again.

I put my foot down and screech across, following the sign that says head down, but chin up.

*

Dear Ms Forrest,

– went the emailed request –

You may not remember me, but I remember you. We grew up together, shared mutual friends. Your mum told mine that you had started a garden business and that your work was, as your mum put it, ‘exquisite’.

– Sounds like mum, always in my corner. Or on my side of the courtroom.

I’ve just moved out of the city and finally have a yard,

– interesting choice of word for what turned out to be a huge oasis of horticultural potential.

and we haven’t a clue what to do with it. Would we be able to book you in for as long as it takes to fix it?

– it took a lot longer to fix than either of us expected, didn’t it Bliss?

*

Before the court case, when I was driving to visit a new client, I would try to imagine what they looked like, how they behaved. My ruminations were always biased. Even now, my first impressions of people are fully formed before I even meet them. It is all down to how they contact me. If they email, then I respect their professional nature, their desire to keep everything above board – to have a ‘paper’ trail. If they text me, I know that they’re either single parents with very little time or looking at their patches of land like it is a second thought. So, it was lovely, driving out to Bliss’s new ‘yard’, the anticipation of our reunion bubbling in my stomach like water moving through dried-out soil. For the business, this deal was huge. I had never considered that kind of money or the demand of creativity. It was a job that should have set me up for life, but the legal fees devoured most of it like a snail on a marigold.

For me, the deal was about far more than money.

And her face, when I saw it, was just as lovely as portrayed on the many screens on which I’d watched her. A few more marks of life, but as delicate and supple as it always had been.

She had opened the door with a gin and tonic in a coupe. A few peels of grapefruit sailed across the top, a tonic-induced tang jumping to my top lip when she went in for the hug I had hoped for. It was just after lunch, but she was hazy with day-drinking. A floral silk shirt hung about her brown body. She was a magnolia incarnate.

I fell in love all over again.

*

That day, as the size of the project became clearer, we talked business. We knew there would be time enough for the rest, time for the roots of our friendship to begin to show again, shivering and tender, peeking above a decade of soil. She kept trying to press a cocktail on me, I kept nodding back to my van, Forrest Horticulture emblazoned across the back doors in teal lettering. Keeping my business close, as an excuse.

She was wonderfully haughty, like she had always wanted to be. She spoke over me constantly, as she always had. She wanted a vegetable patch, a pond, two separate seating areas, bamboo and flowering shrubs, ornamental trees and fruiting shrubs, grasses and variegated shrubs and...

‘Everything.’ She drained her glass, looking at me from above her over-large sunglasses. ‘Can you give me everything?’

*

I have to pull over. I am finding it hard to breathe. All my fault. I plead guilty – guilty for taking the road down memory lane. A journey bordered by edible flowers in a golden batter and the bunches of cow parsley and earth-dribbling daisy chains strung in my hair by Bliss’s teenage fingers while we dozed in the sun of my back garden. I have let the doubts move about, and now I must wait for them to settle, to drop, to decompose.

*

It took me a year, along with my team, to complete it all. We were so wrapped up in it that we had to work through the torrential summer rain, to work hard to stop the bulbs coming up too early in the unusual December warmth of that year. Bliss was around occasionally, but nowhere near as much as I would have liked. Whoever hired her would pay to fly her out to thrillingly exotic locations, where plants grew of such size and beauty that I could only dream. Even when flying became more difficult, what with the bans on certain countries within the EU, and the stricter rules on carbon emissions; somehow, she still managed to travel.

When she did return from filming, or tours, she would make me walk around the plot and tell her everything that I had done, show her every single thing I had planted, and explain it all. Her need for knowledge was almost as voracious as her thirst for the white wine she cupped in one slender hand. I didn’t care. I was so proud of the borders and the colours and the way everything, once settled, looked like an image from the sorts of gardening magazines my parents used to read on the toilet. I was proud of my entrepreneurial research, of the different seeds I had ordered from the other side of the world (it was easier then to buy produce from Australia than it was Spain), so chuffed to be able to tell her that her vegetable patch was as original as she was.

Like I said at the trial: my desire for her affections almost killed her.

She always made me stay for dinner and, if she managed to get me drunk enough, for the night. We would lie in her huge bed in her huge room and giggle through memories that had been made between then and now. We would fall asleep against the stacked pillows, our heads bobbing in our snores like fuchsias on the wind.

*

This is the first business request we’ve had since my name was cleared. The first person who has looked below the tabloid line and seen the potential that their back/front/side garden has to offer. It must be the warmer weather, the ever-tightening environmental restrictions on flying – people want more from their outside spaces, or maybe this person just doesn’t know who I am yet. Maybe they’ll see my face and I’ll look familiar and they’ll Google me and that will be that.

The SatNav says two minutes to go. I’m on my way now, aren’t I?

*

When they took her into the hospital, no one knew what was wrong. There are still quite a lot of unknowns surrounding her illness, especially as she was the first one in the UK (that we know of) to have been affected. According to the trial, they pumped her stomach at the scene – but only because the shattered glass around her prone body made them think she had drunk too much. It was a blessing that they did. Emptied her out, right there and then, on her almost-new morning patio.

It was then that they brought up the slimy, black, half-digested aubergine from her stomach. It was then that they dug through her records, through her potting shed (also painted teal, to remind her of me), through the tins and boxes I had organised in neat, alphabetically-labelled fashion.

It was then that they found a selection of the seed packets I had ordered from abroad. The ones that would be used as evidence in the trial of R v Forrest.

It was then that I got the phone call.

*

I start the engine, pull back onto the road. No one has passed me, but I look around me anyway. It is clouding over, as it always does at this time of day. With the gulf stream breaking down, the erratic behaviour of the weather is becoming increasingly predictable. I hope that the customer will offer me a cup of tea, because I need the sugar. I am a bee, losing its buzz.

My hands stick to the steering wheel.

*

According to Doctor Williams, the scientist who supported me in the trial, it wasn’t just the seeds. She was so young, but she knew so much. She hated the limelight, but loved the research part. She told me – and the jury – that the seeds wouldn’t have turned to poison if the soil hadn’t been infected. After the trial, she told me – and my mum – that what had happened was a good thing in the long run. That it will teach us all something about our world. She asked if I would be a case study for part of her research that she was conducting for the Committee for Climate Change, all about the impending crisis.

According to Doctor Williams, Bliss will not be the only one to suffer such a fate.

*

I pull into the driveway of a wisteria-lined cottage. It has begun to rain, but one of the sash windows is still wide open – the heat hasn’t dissipated. I park and unstick myself from the seat. The plant arching across the wall is an old-timer. There is comfort in that: the soil is still giving it what it needs, and vice versa.

*

Bliss will come out of hospital, eventually. Her mum updates my mum, which is kind. Bliss never really thought I’d tried to poison her, but her people took hold of the wrong end of the stick and that was that.

Technically, I am culpable.

When she does emerge, blinking in the bright, constant light, she’ll see they’ve overturned her vegetable patch, cordoned it off. She’ll read about all the new laws and regulations that have been put in place because of my bad luck. She’ll see how those days of eating apricots straight from the tree are gone.

It is all different now.

*

Or is it? I turn away from the cottage and look back the way I drove in. The hedges are fluttered with cow parsley, holding petals to the rain in gleeful acceptance. They don’t bend, or break. They don’t give in. They bed down, shoot up.

See? You can’t help but smile.

All Bosom and Pride

Joanna could see the face of the young woman beside her in the reflection of her phone. It looked unwieldy and not ideal for a day of rebellion. The reflection was somewhat disgruntled. Joanna always thought that a furrowed brow on a young face made it seem even younger. When Martha’s frons knitted together, it took Joanna right back to bath-time, to car journeys in the baby seat, to rushed and squashed picnics in the park. She must check her own phone soon, Martha had promised to text her the test results.

Joanna’s breast swelled as she bellowed out her favourite of today’s sayings: ‘THERE IS NO PLANET B!’, shocking the young woman in front of her into parcelling away her mobile and shaking her placard (how many hands did she have?). They looked sideways, flashed each other a grin.

‘I’m Joanna.’

‘Megan.’

They nodded in recognition of the companionship surrounding them, the hope that was at once fleeting and as sticky as the glue some of their comrades would later use to adhere themselves to an important pavement.

The crowd pushed slowly forward, a sea of sustainable raincoats ranging from sun yellow to hot pink, which clashed terribly with the burning rainforests and the cruel beige droughts decorating the placards of their owners.

Megan could feel her phone buzzing away in her pocket, but tried to ignore it. Her mum would not have been impressed.

‘Taking selfies? On an important day like this?’ Gathering one of her patterned shawls around her, all bosom and pride. ‘Keep your chin up, Meg!’ One smooth, clever hand raising her daughter’s chin. ‘This is a key moment in our history as humans!’

Ben nudged her, and with his voice full of the cold, sunny day and the excitement of people around him, shouted, ‘Your mum would have loved this!’

Megan shrugged. Her mum would not have loved the news coming from Greenland, about the shattering ice caps, nor the government’s reneging on the Paris Agreement. No net-zero by 2050, like they had promised.

For a split second, she imagined the woman beside her was her mum. Ben, seeing her eyebrows crinkle, shouted into the crowd on a stream of steam:

‘ITS GETTING HOT IN HERE, SO TAKE OFF ALL YOUR COALS.’

It had the desired effect. Megan’s face melted into a smile.

‘Very clever,’ nodded Joanna.

‘Excuse me,’ somebody (somebodies?) shunted into the back of Joanna. ‘We need to get through.’

*

The old woman was moving so slowly, that it was beginning to annoy Nesta, whose sticky-handed children were making progress difficult. The sandwich board around her neck continually banged her knees, but she refused to let this impede her pursuit of justice.

‘Come on you two! Remember what I told you – NOT OUR FUTURE, NOT OUR FUTURE!’

Their thin, six- and eight-year-old voices rang in unison. Nesta continued to charge forward, her Solidarity With Our Planet sign whacking into others as well as herself.

Typical, Joanna thought, bending and unbending her offended elbow. ‘Me first, me first’. Having marched for decades (she, her husband and their friends had won the cold war, after all) Joanna knew how to keep her place in a throng. She made herself as wide as possible. She linked an arm into Megan’s, who squeezed it against her, looking at Joanna with a wink. Joanna admired the wool of Megan’s coat. Very soft, a beautiful colour. There were some fashions Joanna wished she could still wear. She had been the sort of young woman who was brave enough to wear teal. Martha should wear brighter colours, do away with those stylish yet boring business suits. Joanna had once questioned Martha’s taste and had almost lost her head (and heart) in the fierce, and yet rather sad, chomp of her retort: ‘Mum! Stop! We can’t all be ageing hippies!’

Joanna wondered if Megan, this daughter-aged woman beside her, was part of a career path that demanded she hide her roots? As a little one, Martha used to roll around with bare limbs all summer long, throwing pudgy arms around tree trunks and tumbling down hillsides. Now, she worked for the petrol giants, her sharp heels splicing themselves into the Earth’s core and slurping.

What had Joanna been marching for, these past thirty years?

Nesta’s sigh was audible above the cheers, the whistles, the chants. She so desperately wanted to break through, to be at the front, to shake off the clammy clutches of her hard-won children. She wondered if Laura was here, like she’d promised. Now that was a soft, wedding-band-free hand she would happily clutch.

‘I’m sorry,’ she tried again, appealing to the younger woman. ‘I’m trying to find someone at the front of the march.’

‘But that’s at least a mile ahead,’ the older woman dismissed, her short silver hair bobbing with self-importance, or very expensive conditioner.

The young girl looked at her, a sympathetic twist on her brow. ‘If you need company, you can march with us.’ She glanced down at Nesta’s youngest, Elizabeth (Bert, for short) and gave her a wink. Bert grinned shyly back, wanting desperately for the nice lady to wink at her again.

With Mitchell a dead-weight pulling on Nesta’s arm, staring up at the buildings towering above them, his nose running freely into his scarf, she was glad to relinquish a thrilled Bert to Megan, who put a bright-gloved arm on her shoulder and explained to her the latest chant: THE SEAS ARE RISING AND SO ARE WE!

Joanna glanced at the little boy, his cheeks pink with an incoming tantrum. He saw her looking and wiped his nose with his sleeve.

‘Do you come on a lot of marches?’ Joanna asked, tightening her scarf around her neck as they started to cross the river. The boy nodded and then shrugged.

‘Use your words, Mitchell.’ His mother squeezed his gloveless hand to comfort him. Her daughter chatted away with Megan, who had now moved slightly ahead. Joanna felt a strange pang of rejection, and tried not to think of Martha’s smooth grey jackets, free of grass stains. Nor did she dare check her phone.

Mitchell cleared his throat, as if about to make a great speech.

‘Yes. Mum always takes us. Normally, we march with one of her friends, but we got here late today.’

‘Yeah, mum,’ Bert chirped up, whipping around to look at her mum. ‘Where’s Laura?’

Nesta’s face flushed. She wrapped her scarf tighter to her chin. ‘At the front. With the others.’ Nesta wished she was marching among them, holding the banner and proving to anyone who cared to watch, just how far she’d come on what her mum would have branded her ‘silly journey of self-discovery’, but the LNER services have a knack of ruining your dreams, and so she was marching with the sort of women she had always felt rejected by.

‘I’m sorry you missed your group,’ the young woman in the blue coat smiled kindly, her nose bright red in the cold, her frown one of concern. ‘I hate marching alone, there isn’t anyone to talk to. Ben comes with me,’ she patted the shoulder of the man beside her, who was waving his sign with gusto.

‘Thing is,’ Ben said, ‘Megan ends up talking to everyone! I don’t think you can say you’re alone on a march like this.’

‘Hear, hear,’ Joanna chimed in. ‘A best friend can be made on a march and yet never seen again.’

Nesta thought this was all well and good, and refrained from mentioning an SWP march in Salford where she had been almost trampled underfoot by enthusiasts, when a rumour went up that a sympathetic celebrity was cycling alongside them. But then, that was the day Laura had knelt down and become part of Nesta’s life, as quickly, simply and trustingly as her little Bert had taken to the furrowed-browed, blue-coated woman in front.

‘I’m Megan,’ the blue-coat held out a hand and Nesta, sandwich board against elbow, grasped it.

‘Nesta.’

‘I’m Bert, and this is Mitchell,’ the little girl piped up.

‘And this is Ben and Joanna,’ Megan introduced her rally family to the upturned chin beside her.

Megan felt a little choked up. She missed her mum. Ben’s warmth beside her was a comfort, but Joanna’s melancholy presence offered a solace she didn’t think she’d feel today, marching as they all were towards the edge of the abyss. And the new woman, Nesta, she seemed sad too, downcast, downtrodden... knackered. Megan’s arm already hurt from Bert’s attention, and they hadn’t even crossed the bridge yet.

All around her, Megan’s home town sprawled. A city with a routine that ran on plastic and petrol that could be smelt all around the world. Even with the bridge closed, the sun glinting off cars and trains hurt her eyes, the roar of the planes constantly overhead hummed in her ears.

Standing there over the Thames, Megan felt a wave of inadequacy wash over her. Bert tugged her hand, excitedly pointing at the London Eye.

Joanna shrugged, told Bert to look the other way: ‘At the beauty that is St Paul’s Cathedral. Not for any religious reason. Just for sheer grandeur.’

Nesta glanced at the quiet, elegant building. Mitchell shrugged. ‘I like the Shard.’

‘A phallic symbol, if ever I saw one,’ Joanna admonished. Megan raised her eyebrows at Mitchell’s confusion.

‘But it is really shiny,’ Bert added, much to Nesta’s relief. She laughed quietly into her scarf and raised her chin slightly, weirdly proud of her infants’ perceived lack of taste and her son’s happy admiration for such a priapic skyline. As she looked back down from the shining spear, her eyes caught sight of a rainbow coloured banner, lower at one corner than the other.

Nesta’s heart beat hard beneath her sandwich board. Laura.

‘Laura!’ Nesta shouted above the chanting, cheering, laughing crowd, looking for the flash of red of Laura’s dyed ponytail.

‘Laura!’ Bert squeaked, jumping to try to see through the crowd.

‘Lauraaaaaa!’ Mitchell whined, his nose still dripping profusely.

‘Laura!’ Joanna barked, hoping this would cheer up the dopey Nesta.

‘Laura!’ Ben bellowed, enjoying himself without really being able to explain why.

‘Laura!’ Megan croaked out, struggling to shout a name so familiar to her. A name she adored and yet rarely used. A name synonymous with ‘mum’. ‘Laura!’ she continued, strengthened by Ben’s hand on hers. ‘LAURA!’ she cried.

Joanna jumped at the force of Megan’s shout. Her Ben seemed unperturbed, but had his arm wrapped around her shoulders. The rest of the group fell silent as she shouted the name again, and again. It was as if she were deflating. She hollered repeatedly, until there was a crack in her voice, and then at a pitch just short of tears.

Ben supported her as she screamed.

Nesta watched, aghast.

Bert let go of Megan and returned to the relative safety of her mother’s sandwich board.

‘Laura!’ Megan croaked, the volume rapidly decreasing. ‘Laura?’ It was almost a question. Ben, unable to answer it, hugged her close to him as she finally gave up and fell quiet.

Nesta looked at Joanna, whose mouth twisted in discomfort at the awkward silence that had fallen. The march jostled and moved around their uncomfortable bubble.

The group started to move again.

After a moment or too, Mitchell burst the atmosphere with an elongated:

‘Muuuuum?’

‘Not now, Mitchell,’ Nesta sighed, still looking towards the colourful banner that was moving further away.

‘But…’ Mitchell paused. ‘But m–’

‘Nesta?’ A vibrantly red head of hair forced its way back towards Nesta and her children. She kissed Nesta fiercely on the mouth and Joanna, finally seeing a smile on Nesta’s face, sighed.

‘Laura,’ Nesta gasped in air. ‘This is Megan,’ – a tearful nod – ‘and Ben,’ – a friendly smile – ‘and Joanna.’

‘Lovely day for it, isn’t it?’ Laura grinned, hoisting Bert onto her hip and ruffling Mitchell’s hair. Mitchell was transfixed, however, with a sign behind them.

‘Mu-um,’ he whined, glancing at Nesta. ‘Muuuum!’ Mitchell was growing impatient now, fed up with being ignored: ‘MUUUUM!’

‘What is it, Mitchell?’ Nesta asked, still gazing at Laura, ‘You’re screaming like it is the end of the world or something!’

Megan started to laugh. Joanna’s mouth twitched up. Bert snuggled into Laura’s scarf.

The sun shone over London. Joanna thought of Martha, Nesta and Laura hugged. Bert hit Mitchell, who pinched back. Ben worried about Megan. Megan thought about her mum, and raised her placard high.

El Gordo

(There is safety on our island)

Jane jumped as the air conditioning hummed into action. Sitting in front of the machine, she let the air dry the sweat sticking her shirt to her body. Pelayo, her co-worker, grinned at her. His cigarette, stuck to his bottom lip, dripped ash onto his desk.

‘Joder!’ He swore, rubbing the ash from the page. She wheeled herself back to her desk, afraid to stand in case she had sweat patches anywhere else. She raised an eyebrow at her colleague.

‘The application form for daughter of the alcalde,’ he waved the ash-stained document at her. ‘I have made a mess of it. He won’t be very happy.’

She grinned.

‘Do not laugh at me!’ he warned, his head tilted. ‘What is funny, la rubia?’

She thrilled to the nickname, in the same way that she thrilled to all the comfortable, happy signs of belonging in this place. She frowned.

‘That word – alcalde,’ Jane laughed. ‘In Spanish lessons at school, we used to use it to say what we would do if we were mayor. To talk about hypothetical situations.’

Pelayo sat back, hands behind his head, two sweat-stained armpits on show. He frowned at her to continue. Jane knew he liked the stories about how she came to speak Spanish.

‘For example, si fuera alcaldesa, if I were mayor, I would apply to escape to Great Britain even though I have no repatriation rights…’

Pelayo sat forward, a ready grin on his face. ‘I would get a non-smoker to complete my immigration forms.’

Jane laughed. ‘I wouldn’t put my life in the hands of two bored post-graduates.’

‘I never graduated,’ Pelayo leaned across the desk. ‘They hired me due to my charm and wit.’

The air conditioning’s hum abruptly stopped.

‘Joder!’ Pelayo stood up, marched towards the machine, removed a flip-flop and began to beat the vented box with all the frustration of the day.

Jane put her hands to her ears and stared at her inbox. Today, her job, funded by the English and supported by the Spanish, had consisted of deleting over twenty emails from desperate ex-pats, begging for passage back to England. Ex-pats who were finding the sun that they had sought just a little too hot and their new home just a little too dangerous. Ex-pats who now looked for solace in the lies fed to them by British politicians.

There is safety in our island nation.

Or isolanation, as Jane liked to think of it.