Ignite Books: David Hadley

Ignite Books: David Hadley: This is the first longer work I've read from David Hadley and it gave me a lot of chuckles! Juggling Balls Amazon .com  Juggling ...

Ignite Books: David Hadley

Ignite Books: David Hadley: This is the first longer work I've read from David Hadley and it gave me a lot of chuckles! Juggling Balls Amazon .com  Juggling ...

New Kindle Novel Out Now: Juggling Balls

Juggling Balls available here(UK) or here(US)

Special Low Launch Price: £0.77/$0.99

Martin Laws hates mysteries. 

So why has someone sent him a bag of juggling balls? 

Why has he no memory of buying a new computer?

Why has that new computer decided Martin needs to go shopping?

Why does a hairstylist he's never met before keep saluting him?

Most of all, why are so many Elvis impersonators trying to kill him?

Juggling Balls - a science fiction comedy featuring time travel, mind control implants and a future religion that claims an Elvis Presley clone as its saviour. 

Oh, and an interplanetary terraced house.

Juggling Balls available here(UK) or here(US)

Special Low Launch Price: £0.77/$0.99

[Other Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

Writer's Block

I turned.

Then I wished I hadn't.

There was a man, standing there in the doorway behind me. He had a gun in his hand.

I raised my hands.

'What are you doing?' he said.

'You've got a gun.'

'And?' He looked down at the pistol in his hand. It was a big one. The sort that Clint Eastwood would point at a street punk.

'And you are pointing it at me.'

'Oh, sorry.' He lowered the gun, but remained standing in the doorway.

'But... well, what's going on?'

'You... you're writing that story.' He nodded towards the computer on the desk.

'Well... yes. But what's that got to do with you?' I remembered about the gun. 'If you don't mind me asking?'

'It's that Raymond Chandler thing.'

'What Raymond Chandler thing?'

'Don't you know?'

I shook my head.

'But you are the writer?' He spoke as though it was something every writer should know. But, if he was so bloody smart then he'd know that writers don't know much at all, about anything. That's why there is Google.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, that story....' He pointed with the gun towards the computer. 'You are having trouble with it, aren't you?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Well, Raymond Chandler said once: When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.' He shrugged. 'So here I am.'

'Ah, right.'

'What?'

'I'm not entirely sure that is what he meant.'

'Oh.' The man slumped. 'Should I go then?'

'Yes. I think that would probably be for the best.'

'Oh, right.' He turned. 'Bye.'

'Bye.' I said. 'Oh... one thing...?'

He turned back eagerly. 'Yes?'

'How did you know I was having problems?'

'Oh, your muse told me.' He trudged off down the hallway. 'Bye, again.'

'Bye,' I called, but he'd already gone.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

Something for the Weekend: Free Kindle Novel – Hanging Around Until

Hanging Around Until

'Education is hanging around until you've caught on' - Robert Frost.

Set during the mid-1980s, Hanging Around Until is the story of Paul Carr, who, at the age of 28, decides to become a mature student at a North-Eastern university in the hope that an education will help give a direction to his life. On arriving at the university Paul discovers he is to share a house with five other students. Two of those housemates – Alison and Julia, each in their own way – turn Paul’s simple quest for an education into a tangle of confusion and uncertainty amid the turmoil of university life during the height of anti-Thatcherite campus activism and the birth of the new Left.

Available here (UK) or here (US)

[Extract]

[….]

‘I frightened myself yesterday,’ she said. ‘I was shaking so much I couldn't get dressed. I was expecting you to come back to my room, hoping you would but scared in case you did. I've been sitting up there for over an hour tonight trying to make sense of it all.’

I sat up and turned towards her. As we kissed, my hand moved up to her breast under the T-shirt. She broke off the kiss and looked down at the place where my hand disappeared under her clothes. I started to move my hand away. She took my other hand in hers as I let it drop. She stood up, still holding my left hand and led me from the room.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs while Alison was three steps above me, still holding my hand. I took a step forward, then another, and then we walked up the stairs together, hand in hand.

Alison moved over to her bed, still holding my hand. We sat down side by side. I kissed her lightly on the lips, lifting the jumper and T-shirt together. She lifted her arms to help me. I dropped the bundled clothes on the floor and she glanced down at them for a second. We kissed again as I reached out to touch a breast with each hand.

‘You are gentle,’ Alison said softly as she began to unbutton my shirt.

‘No, not really. I'm clumsy most of the time.’

‘One of the first things I noticed, and liked, about you was the way you rolled your cigarettes, so graceful, delicate. I could feel those fingers touching me.’

‘These fingers?’ I held up my hand. The fingers looked too thin, too long and too hesitant to be of any real use.

Alison helped me pull off my shirt and then pushed me back onto the bed. She undid and pulled down my trousers. She let her jeans, and then her pale green knickers fall to the floor. She sat down on my thighs, looking into my face as her hand held me. She lowered her face towards me. I felt the tips of her nipples brush my chest and the tickle of her hair. Alison kissed me on the lips; the chin, neck and chest, moving lower until her lips met her hand.

A few moments later, I whispered: ‘Come here. No, all the way up here.’ She crouched as I kissed her deeply. She stroked my hair and smiled down at me as I looked into her eyes from between her thighs.

Alison rose slowly, unwillingly, but in some other, greater, need and moved backwards, lowering herself again. She moved languidly, as slow as a lazy summer afternoon.

A few minutes later she began to speed up, then her back arched, stiffened. She sighed deeply and fell onto my chest. I rolled us onto our sides. Alison opened her eyes and looked at me as I resumed the slow rhythm.

‘Do you like it slow as well?’ she whispered.

‘I prefer to play the slow Blues rather than a twelve-bar boogie.’ I demonstrated both rhythms.

Alison laughed deeply in her throat and hugged me close, ‘I want adagio rather than allegro,’ she said before nibbling at my nose.

‘Yes,’ I whispered as I began to kiss my way slowly down her body, pausing at each breast in turn before moving lower. My tongue entered her navel and trailed lower. I could taste echoes of myself as my tongue moved deeply before returning to trace and caress along the mystery of folds and creases.

My tongue moved deeper again. Alison stiffened and relaxed as it eased her open and crept inside. As my tongue curled and turned and my lips kissed, my fingers traced the journey where my tongue had travelled moments before. Alison moved with the rhythm of my fingers and tongue. Her rhythm changed and mine changed to match hers. My fingers and mouth changed places and the rhythm continued, grew and changed.

As her body relaxed from the sudden stiffness again, I retraced my kisses back up her body and ended with two kisses, one on each closed eyelid. I eased back inside her and felt the warmth enclose me. The slow, gentle rhythm began again.

We lay on our sides facing each other. Alison lay with her head resting on my arm and my body between her thighs. She reached up to stroke my face. I kissed her fingertips and sucked them into my mouth. She held me tightly with her legs breathing hard against my ear. Moments later, I stiffened and then finally relaxed.

Alison trailed her fingers down my sweat-damp chest and rolled onto her back. I lay for a moment between her spread thighs, tracing around a nipple with my finger then I too rolled and lay on my back.

Alison turned and laid her head on my chest, wrapping her legs around me. I could feel a warm dampness on my thigh where she held herself against me. She sighed softly and rolled onto her back.

She looked across the pillow at me. ‘I've been thinking about that since the moment I first saw you.’ She reached out to touch my cheek. ‘For a time I was hoping you'd turn out to be a bastard, but you're not. The more I got to know you the more I wanted you. But that's the problem.’

‘What do you mean?’

She sighed. ‘I just wanted to get through this year and get out of here. I didn't want to get involved with anything… or anyone.’ She lay on her back with her hand over her face.

I reached out a hand towards her, but I couldn't seem to make it touch her. My hand fell back uselessly. ‘I'm sorry. But I wasn't expecting anything like this to happen either.’

‘Pathetique is about right.’ Alison turned to face me. ‘You looked so pathetic lying on your bed earlier. If I'd had any sense, I would have walked away. Would we be here like this if I'd waited for you to make a move?’ She stared across the pillow at me, ignoring the single tear that ran slowly down her cheek, daring me to contradict her. ‘Well?’

‘I never feel really sure,’ I said, hesitating. ‘I'm always afraid to act in case I'm wrong.’

Alison sat up slightly, leaning her head on her hand. The sheet slipped down over her breasts. The small pale nipples stared back at me. I wanted to take one into my mouth and be held. ‘Well, you'll just have to learn how to take a chance, won't you?’ She smiled. ‘Do you know how long it took for me to arrange my dressing gown yesterday morning, so it fell open like that?’

Disorientated by Alison's sudden change of mood, it took me a few seconds to realise what she had said. ‘Did you really arrange it?’

Alison laughed, but did not answer. She smiled at me for a moment and then kissed me on the lips. ‘Why can't I stay angry with you?’ she murmured, more to herself than to me. ‘I suppose you ought to go now, before the others come back.’

‘No, I want to stay.’

‘That's nice to hear,’ she said. ‘Even though I'm not sure I want you to stay.’ She took my hand in hers and turned it over, tracing the lines on my palm. She turned it back over and touched the small scar - diamond-shaped, pale and almost white - in the centre of the back of my hand. ‘After all, I know almost nothing about you, and you don't know much about me.’

‘Does any of that matter?’

She shook her head. ‘Maybe... maybe not.... I don't know.’ She lay back, staring at the ceiling.

[….]

Available here (UK) or here (US)

Something for the Weekend: Free Kindle Novel – Dance on Fire

Free for the next five days:

Dance on Fire

What do you do when sex and drugs and rock and roll are no longer enough? At one time, Transmission were probably the most famous rock band on the planet. Now, even as they approach their twenty-fifth anniversary they are still up there, one of the top ten bands of all time. However, each of the surviving members of the band feels something, somewhere, has gone wrong, and the rock and roll dream they used to believe in so much has become an empty and hollow routine. Dance On Fire is an exploration of the relationships between the remaining original members of Transmission, and their manager, as the band enters their 25th year together. The novel charts their growing realisation that rock music no longer has any meaning for them, and they are - at best - still going through force of habit - 'We've become our own tribute band.' Dance On Fire is a novel about the shallowness of everlasting adolescence and the vacuity at the heart of the rock and roll mythology.

Extract:

The throbbing beating brain-numbing noise was almost solid enough to touch. The noise used as music in clubs like this was too loud to be music, too primal to be music, too crude to be music; a noise stripped of almost all its possibilities of becoming music. It was music beaten up, raped, buggered, pissed on and left for dead with its lifeblood oozing out of it and running down the drain with each pulsebeat.

Pete loved it now.

He was dancing, with a half-full bottle of Champagne in each hand. Dancing – or so he thought – like a shaman, like a witch doctor. He was the mystical priest of the beat. He was primal too. He was savage. He was base. He was Dionysus.

The lights throbbed and pulsed showing then concealing the smiling, laughing, grinning coterie he - or rather, his recently discovered valid credit card – had gathered. He had disciples. He was the pied piper, the pied pissed-up prankster that would lead his gang of grinning cavorting lovelies to a new, higher paradise.

‘Wsdsd…FGGFvmm…? HGTffvbb!’

‘What?’ Pete jammed his ear up against the mouth of… whatever her name was.

‘XXXXZXzzzzzz! Quuallll! Tits?’

In the briefest of silences in the noise, Pete was sure that he had heard the word ‘tits’. He nodded his head enthusiastically. ‘Tits, yes!’ he yelled grinning down at the items in question. He was almost sure she had only the normal complement, but there seemed to be far more than just two in there. However, she proved his notion of the conventional correct when she whipped her top off and shook both of them in Pete’s face.

‘Yum! Yum!’ Pete shouted, watching mesmerised, as they performed a slow-motion gravity-defining dance all of their own.

The rest of his entourage had now noticed that one of their number had managed to monopolise the attention of their platinum-credit-card wielding sugar daddy. So, in the spirit of good old free enterprise they too decided that a revealing of their own not-inconsiderable assets would be a way of restoring some balance to the proceedings.

By this time, Pete was already seeing double – if not triple – the sudden avalanche of naked mammaries bouncing and undulating for his delectation was almost too much for him to cope with. He stopped his cavorting and took a step back.

Unfortunately, his backwards motion brought him into contact with the almost full pint held by one of a group of young men. The men were already feeling more than a touch aggrieved that this bloke – at least old enough to be their father – was monopolising so much female attention seemingly through the mere fact of being significantly wealthier than all of them put together.

‘Oi! Cunt. Watch it.’

Pete heard and turned. He grinned. ‘Sorry, mate. It’s getting a bit crowded in here isn’t it?’ He gestured behind him towards the undulating mammorial tide that was threatening to engulf them all.

‘Are you taking the piss?’

‘What? No.’

‘Hey Jimmy, this old cunt is taking the piss, as well as all the birds.’

Jimmy and the rest of the gang began to circle around Pete. Even in his befuddled state, Pete could recognise that things were beginning to get ugly. As the circle closed around him, he could see the girls edged out one by one. But still the first punch to the side of his head took him by surprise.

Pete staggered back into the men who had moved around behind him. They pushed him forward once more. It was over twenty years since Pete and Johnny had to fight their way out of an Austin bar. Since then Pete had not had to raise a fist in anger. Despite this, he knew he was easily able to handle half a dozen or so blokes who were probably over twenty years his junior. He raised his fists, noticing that he still held the two – now empty – champagne bottles.

‘Hmm… useful,’ Pete Muttered. He could feel that his mouth was already starting to swell up. He raised the bottles and took up a martial arts pose.

There was a whirling blur and the man directly in front of Pete collapsed. One of the topless girls took his place. The way she was swinging her lethal looking handbag around her head caused all the young men to turn in her direction. They gazed, mesmerised by her breasts and the slow, almost, leisurely way they developed independent orbits around her upper body.

Two more of the men fell, handbagged from behind be Pete’s tribe of vengeful amazons. Pete lowered his bottles and just stared as the gang fell one by one. Out of the corner of his eye, Pete just noticed the handbag bouncing off the shaven head of one of his attackers and heading towards him.

‘Wat…!’

There was pain. He fell. It went dark.

*

Available here: UK or here: US

Tired of Being Alone

[….]

I recognised the sound: I Fought the Law by The Clash. I had been a teenager when punk hit the music scene like a fist in the face, and I was still there to see how quickly it became an empty parody of itself just over a year later. Now it had become nothing more than golden oldies, just another hairstyle in the ever-lengthening history of Rock 'n' Roll. It seemed as though the outrageous had become commonplace, mundane with outrage itself out of date and worn out. No-one had the energy to be outraged any more, hardly meriting a paragraph unless it was a slow news day.

Guy marched up to where I sat and bowed formally. I stood up and Guy took me into his arms. We waltzed sedately around the half-empty dance floor completely out of step with the frantic beat of the anonymous disco tune the DJ played. As people turned to stare, I noticed Julia and Anne sitting side by side, as we twirled around the dance-floor, laughing as they watched us.

Guy tried to tango. I could not hold him as he bent backwards in my arms. We fell to the floor. I stood and held out my hand to Guy. He pulled me back down onto the floor. Then he rolled and stood up, tottering backwards into a pair of serious dancers. They glared and moved away. I sat cross-legged in the middle of the dance-floor trying to make a roll-up as the strobe light flickered.

‘Al Green: Tired of Being Alone,’ I muttered to myself and looked up as Julia held out her hand and pulled me to my feet. We danced slowly, seriously, close together. I let my cigarette go out as Julia rested her head on my shoulder. Slowly I danced us towards the doorway.

‘I need a drink,’ I said as we danced out into the corridor.

‘Okay.’ Julia let me go. ‘Are you glad you came now?’

‘Yes. I'd forgotten how good a night out could be.’ I frowned as I saw Robert engaged in yet another serious discussion at a table near the door. I turned away towards the bar, hoping he would not notice us.

Robert waved at Julia, gesturing for her to come over to his table. She waved and shook her head. Robert shrugged and resumed his conversation with his union cronies. Someone else I didn't recognise waved at Julia; she waved back once more.

I fought my way to the bar and brought back two pints. Julia was in conversation with someone else I vaguely recognised. Eventually, I remembered her name was Jennifer and I’d seen her at the house a couple of times with Julia. I presumed she was studying Politics too.

I handed a pint to Julia and lit the remains of my roll-up. Julia put her glass down on a nearby table and pulled my tin from my pocket. The two girls chatted together as I leant back against the wall and looked around.

The differences between the first year students and the others were not so obvious any more. The nervous awkwardness was almost gone. Only a few stood, or sat, stiffly on the periphery with nervous hands, seeking sanctuary from others' eyes.

The lights flashed twice and Julia turned to me, raising her eyebrows; I nodded and gave her my empty glass. She and Jennifer headed off to the bar together, chatting all the way.

‘Have you done the essay?’

I turned. Steve, a classmate from my tutorial group, looked up at me blinking nervously behind the thick lenses of his black-framed glasses.

‘More or less, just writing it out neatly. I'll have it done tomorrow sometime,’ I said. ‘Is yours finished?’

Steve nodded and looked around. ‘I don't see you in here very often. You're usually with some girl. The one that meets you sometimes, after the tutorials.’

‘Yes, Alison. She's gone home for the weekend,’ I said.

Julia returned and handed me another pint. Steve blinked across at Julia. I could see beads of sweat on his top lip. He muttered something, gestured vaguely and wandered off.

‘Who's that?’ Julia said, leaning closer to me as she watched him walk away.

‘That's Steve. He's a bit on the nervous side. He sits in the corner in tutorials and never says a word, always terrified of being asked a question.’ I watched him disappear into the crowd at the doorway. ‘The sad thing, though, is that he is the smartest one in our group. We could do with his help sometimes. It took three weeks for him to build up the nerve to say hello to me…. So, by the summer he may even speak in the tutorials.’

‘That's a shame,’ Julia said. ‘I wonder what made him like that?’

‘Being one out of only three in his school to take A levels,’ I said. ‘In some places a little bit of knowledge can be very dangerous. I went to a school similar to Steve's. I've seen what can happen to kids at those places.’

‘What sort of things?’

I pulled the sleeve of my shirt up and showed her the scar: long and jagged, from just below the shoulder to an inch above the elbow, twisting from the outside of my arm at the top to just above the crease of flesh on the inside of my elbow.

‘That was for wanting to keep my Geography homework to myself.’ I pulled down the sleeve.

Julia stared at my sleeve as though the scar was still visible through the material of my shirt. Over the other side of the room, I could see people being herded out by the bar staff.

‘Come on, drink up. I think it's time to go,’ I said.

‘Was your school really like that?’ Julia said, still looking at my arm as she drank.

‘Yes,’ I said. From the age of eleven, I had been interred in a school notorious throughout the local education authority. It was infamous even for the viciousness of the girls' netball team. I remembered once meeting a girl at a party who had played netball against my old school. Much later that night she showed me the scar that ran for six inches up the inside of her thigh. The scar had the shape of an arrow pointing to the place where I was keen to go, nevertheless, I paused to kiss along it in a kind of awe.

The girls at my school had been the granddaughters of the small, pale, hard-faced and broad-backed retired miners who now raced pigeons and grew vegetables on their allotments. Allotments that were already subsiding into the underground tunnels they had dug many years before. Their granddaughters had inherited the small stature and hard faces of the miners, while developing large aggressive breasts that were more terrifying than erotic. Before I moved away, I occasionally saw some of those girls I had lain awake at night trying not to stain the sheets over during my early teenage years. They seemed to be suddenly decades older with sagging faces and breasts, each one with several wild children of her own.

I had escaped Empire Street School with only one small scar on my chin as well as the long one on my arm, and two CSEs: Geography and Mathematics, which suggested only a career in cartography. Instead, I spent a year at the local Technical College, amongst welders and car mechanics, and came out with four O levels. ‘It was nasty, it was violent and I got out as soon as I could.’

Julia looked at me closely and then nodded. She finished her drink, and put the glass down on a table as we walked out of the bar.

I sat on the cloakroom bench, rolling a cigarette, as Julia fished her own coat out from under a deep pile of coats that had been hanging up when we first arrived. Julia put her coat on and I handed the cigarette to her. I began to roll another. I put the cigarette into my mouth and shut the tin.

There was a dull thud and a curse from further up the cloakroom. I opened my tin and began to roll yet another cigarette. I finished rolling it just as Guy came over, rubbing his head. I held out the cigarette to him as he sat down next to me.

‘So how many times is it that you've forgotten about the low doorway?’

‘Seven, no six,’ Guy said and rubbed his head again. ‘Can you hang on a minute? Anne's gone to the toilet. Oh, and we have a couple of bottles of wine back at the house. Interested?’

[….]

[Extract from: Hanging Around Until: A novel]

High-rise

[….]

After the rehearsal, they adjourned to The Pit. Stan went off with Cathy and did whatever it was he did when he was running the place.

Matt seemed quiet and thoughtful, again.

‘What's the matter?’ Spike asked him.

‘I'm just wondering what my parents will say when I tell them what I'm going to do.’

‘They can't stop you though, can they?’ Jenny said. ‘We are all over eighteen, our own bosses.’

‘It's not that simple though,’ Matt said. ‘It was bad enough when I said I didn't want to go to university.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Spike said earnestly as she reached for Jenny's hand. ‘There seems to be this plan, this blueprint: school, university, good job, mortgage, wife, kids, retirement, grandchildren… death. Step out of that and… well, they just don't understand why I… why anyone, would want to. Any deviation from the accepted plan and it all spells disaster. The end of the world as they know it.’

‘I can understand it, though,’ Johnny said. Everyone turned to look at him. ‘When you think of all the stuff our parents and their parents and so on, had to go through: wars, depressions, unemployment, no NHS and all that… I suppose a stable – even boring - life seemed like perfection to them.’ Johnny shrugged and hid his face behind his glass, taking a long drink.

Everyone was silent again for a while. Jenny was the first to speak. ‘So, do you agree with Matt's parents then, Johnny?’

‘No.’ Johnny said. ‘I think that you ought to grab at - with both hands - any chance that comes your way. I'd rather regret doing something; take the risk of seeing it all go tits up, than to regret not doing something because I let the chance slip by me. But I can understand their cautious attitude, in a way - that's all. But, it's a middle-class way of looking at things, and I'm working-class. The working-class way is to grab it now, with both hands, before they notice and take it away.’

By the time The Pit closed, they were all pretty-well pissed. They staggered out into the dark night, heading for home. Pete, Matt and Johnny saw Jenny and Spike to their door, offered several helpful suggestions as to how the girls should spend the rest of the night, and then headed on up the road.

At the top of the hill were three blocks of flats, standing together like some giant's henge on the brow of the hill.

‘Hang on,’ Johnny said. ‘We - my family - used to live in the middle one. Come on, I want to show you something.’

Matt and Pete were cautious, knowing they were out of place. But Johnny strolled in as if he owned the whole block. The lift to the top floor was slow and rickety.

Pete was more than relieved when the lift finally got up there and shuddered to a halt. He had regular nightmares about lifts that failed and trapped him.

Johnny led the others around the corner and up a small flight of steps to a locked door. Pete felt a shiver of relief run through him as he turned to go, but Johnny grinned and held up a key.

The wind was cold and strong. All Pete could see were stars and the low darker shadow of a high wall. He felt relieved to see the wall; his knees were already a bit shaky from the realisation that they were nineteen stories from the cold hard ground. Pete had always been terrified of heights. His reticence about leaving safety of the doorway meant the others were across the other side of the roof by the time he had gathered the courage to follow them.

‘Oh shit! Shit! Shit!’ Pete could not take another step. There was a sort of window in the wall. It was a long narrow strip of toughened glass, as tall as the five-and-a-half foot high wall. He could see the bright lights of the town far below distorted through the pebbled glass. He froze, unable to take another step closer to that window. He looked around. ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fucking Fuck!’

Johnny was kneeling on top of the wall, pulling Matt up beside him. Matt scrambled up the wall and they stood together side by side on top of the wall, looking down. A moment later, they were both pissing over the edge.

Pete stepped back into the doorway and lit a cigarette, expecting - at any moment - to hear the screams as Matt and Johnny fell to their deaths. A short while later they were back inside, laughing and joking together.

Johnny looked into Pete's eyes. ‘You should have come with us. There is nothing like the feeling that you are pissing on the entire fuckin' world.’

Pete shrugged, trying to appear casual. ‘I didn't need one. Maybe next time,’ he said and headed off towards the lifts.

‘No, this way,’ Johnny said. ‘It’s party time!’

‘Wha…?’ Pete shrugged, stubbed out the cigarette on the concrete floor, then followed Johnny and Matt.

For some reason he didn't quite understand, Pete didn't find the stairs as terrifying as the roof, or as scary as the lift. Despite the possibility of being able to look down and see the banisters curling down and down and down - like some graphic representation of vertigo - on one side, he felt no real fear. On the other side - the wall side - there were a couple of small windows on each landing, but Pete found he could get past these without feeling a need to glance out and terrify himself.

Johnny was pausing at each landing and opening the stair door, listening intently. They had to go down about half a dozen or so floors before Johnny found what he wanted. Even Pete could feel the throbbing music, from a flight of stairs above, when Johnny opened the door to that floor.

‘Party time! Come on.’ Johnny led the other two down the corridor towards the party. He stepped over an unconscious form slumped in the hallway, picked up the empty sherry bottle next to it, and banged on the door.

As the door opened, Johnny quickly herded Matt and Pete in, waving the sherry bottle in his other hand. ‘Jim invited us,’ he said to the bloke who was holding the door open. The bloke nodded vaguely as the three disappeared into the crowd.

‘But it’s bloody packed in there,’ Pete said uncertainly. The other two ignored him and pushed their way in. Pete sighed and followed them.

They had to weave their way slowly - and delicately - through the crowd. Pete was not that keen on parties at the best of times, but this was rapidly approaching the party of his nightmares. After glancing away, at a semi-naked woman dancing on a table, he lost sight of Matt and Johnny in the crowd.

‘Shit!’ He turned and headed back towards the door.

There was a sudden unintelligible shout and the sound of breaking glass. The crowd between the door and Pete surged backwards, thrusting him through a door into a darkened room. He could hear the shouts of ‘Fight!’ over the music outside the room, then a couple of women screaming.

He stepped back further into the darkened room. He heard sounds behind him. Pete turned and saw several moving shapes silhouetted in the darkness. Despite his relative inexperience, he could still recognise the sounds of people fucking. But whether it was an orgy or a gang-bang, Pete couldn't tell in the darkness. He eased himself out of the room as slowly and as quietly as he could.

There was a smear of blood up the wall by the door. Next to it, a sobbing woman knelt on the floor trying to wipe blood off her hands with a blood-sodden handkerchief. Another drunken woman, who had not yet realised that her cigarette was slowly burning a hole in the shoulder of the distressed woman's dress, knelt next to her muttering slurred platitudes into her ear. For a moment, Pete almost stopped to tell them about the slowly rising smoke. But, after another glance at the blood-smeared wall, he changed his mind.

By the door into the main party room, some malodorous bloke with long hair and a shaggy unkempt beard tried to tell Pete something, grabbing his shoulder and rambling incoherently into his ear. Pete could feel the heat of sour breath on the side of his head as he nodded profoundly, clapped the man on the back, and then headed for the door.

Out in the corridor Pete thought about the stairs, but decided the lift might be - marginally - faster. He pressed the button and stood with his head pressed against the cool metal of the lift doors. Several minutes later, he heard a slow groaning rattle and through the tiny window, he could just make out the dark shadow of the lift's arrival.

The doors creaked open slowly. The snogging couple inside the lift disentangled themselves from each other before readjusting their clothing and stepping out of the lift. Pete squeezed past them and managed to thump the button that kept the wheezing doors open long enough for him to get into the lift.

‘Er… excuse me?’ Pete smiled nervously as the teenage boy and girl both stared at him.

‘What?’ The boy's hands were already curling into fists.

Pete ignored him and faced the girl. ‘Are those yours?’ He pointed to the discarded knickers on the floor of the lift.

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said without looking at him. She snatched them from the floor and shoved them into her pocket. ‘Ta.’

‘No problem.’ Pete beamed at the boy and girl as the doors began to close.

‘Pete! Hang on! For fuck's sake - hold the lift!’ Johnny and Matt were racing down the narrow corridor. A bottle exploded against the wall above them, showering them both with glass. Out of the corner of his eye, Pete saw the teenage couple quickly disappearing around the opposite corner of the corridor.

‘Press the fuckin' button - quick!’ Johnny said, falling through the door and pulling Matt in with him.

Pete jabbed frantically at the button. He could see a gang of men heading down the corridor, some carrying broken bottles, others with an ominous flash of metal in their hands.

The arthritically slow doors shuddered to a close seconds before the mob got to the lift. It shuddered again and slowly began to descend. Pete could hear the thumping as the gang took out their frustrations on the outside lift doors. The sound faded away as the lift descended and - presumably - the gang gave up and wandered back to the party.

Matt and Johnny sat on the floor of the lift, trying to get their breath back. They looked up at each other and laughed.

‘Stupid cunt,’ Johnny said to Matt.

‘What happened?’ Pete said, already half suspecting the answer.

‘A girl,’ Matt said. ‘I was just talking to her, and this… this… fucking lunatic… just….’

‘I saw it coming,’ Johnny said. ‘I just managed to grab him in time. Luckily, you still had the lift there. I wouldn't have fancied legging it down all them stairs with that mob after us.’

‘It's just bloody ridiculous,’ Matt said. ‘We were only talking, about Woolworth's as it happened. That girl works there, and my sister had a Saturday job there for a while. It was just one of those coincidences that come up at parties. I couldn't believe that man - the way he reacted! All the time we were running down that corridor - it seemed bloody endless, like in a nightmare - I kept saying to myself: This can't be happening! This can't be happening!’

The lift stopped and they cautiously stepped out into the ground floor. Johnny checked around, but there was no sign of anyone from the party.

‘I think it would be a good idea to call it a night,’ Matt said. ‘I suddenly sobered up back up there, and now all I want to do is go home.’

The other two sombrely nodded their agreement. There was a moment of awkward silence before they split up to go their separate ways.

The next day Matt left the band.

[….]

[Extract from Dance on Fire]

Envy

[….]

‘Are you going to tell me?’ Julia said as the song ended.

‘Tell you what?’

‘Why you aren't going to the lectures? Why you act so pissed off all the time? Why you don't make me laugh like you used to?’ She knelt up on the bed, looking at me. The light of the desk lamp behind her made her blonde hair a pale halo around her head, her face in deep shadow.

I sighed and sat up slightly. ‘All right...’ I paused for a moment of thought. ‘It is the contrast, the difference, the gap. In my tutorial group, we all sit in this small room around a table talking quietly about rages, angers, passion, despair, love and confusion. Then after an hour of this we pick up our books, put away our pens and walk away for a cup of coffee....’ I paused again and took a long drink of my wine, holding my hand up as Julia opened her mouth to speak.

‘Then, I come back here to Alison. I think about food, whether or not I need a shower and if we have enough dirty washing to go to the launderette. Now, I find myself thinking of The Wasteland as I watch the tumble-dryer, and thinking of sweat-stained shirts in the tutorials. But neither of them seems to be of any help, of any use. I can connect nothing with nothing. The shirts will only get dirty again, and what real use is the other stuff?’ I took the cigarette from between Julia's fingers. She sat with her head down, deep in thought. I laughed as I lit the cigarette. She looked up at me, slightly puzzled.

‘It's a silly thing, I know. I thought I was too old for any of this teenage-angst stuff, walking through the rain in a too-long second-hand overcoat, raging at the cold indifferent moon and moaning in existential despair.’

Julia shifted slightly and I could see her eyes as she looked at me. ‘It doesn't sound silly to me,’ she said. ‘I get upset by things like social injustice, inequality, the Tories winning the election again, university underfunding and the poverty of students, and things like sexism and racism, but I've never felt so... so lost as that.’

I reached out and took her hand in mine. I shook my head slowly. ‘It's not that bad, honestly. It just gets like that sometimes.’ I smiled, squeezing Julia's fingers. ‘Anyway, it will soon be Christmas; perhaps I just need a holiday.’

Julia turned, and moved back to sit beside me. I let go of her hand, but she picked my hand up and held it in both of hers, resting in her lap. ‘You will come back though, won't you, after Christmas?’ Julia looked down at my hand and stroked her thumb across the back of it.

‘Of course,’ I said. I still felt, despite everything, that this was my last chance. My last chance to find some sort of life for myself, some sort of meaning, nothing else had worked for me. Nowhere felt like home any longer. If I gave up, I would have to go back to my parents' house. I would have to face my sister's confirming sneer, my mother's reproach, but most of all I would have to stand face to face with my father.

‘Good luck, son,’ he had said with a shy, almost proud, smile. ‘I wish I could've had a chance like this. There's always been so much I wanted to know, to learn, I envy you.’ I felt the rough skin of my father's hand as he held mine, tight, for a moment. He winked and then smiled at me. The sound of my sister's car horn jerked me into movement and I let go of his hand. As we drove away, I looked back to see them both, my mother and father with their arms around each other, waving.

Until that point, I had never felt my father needed to know anything. He was a man who could fix anything with a short, sharp intake of breath, a shake of the head and a screwdriver. He had a screwdriver with a shining shaft and a worn, sweat-stained wooden handle, far older than me, and probably of far more use.

I had no use for those screwdrivers, but I felt I could use some of my father's envy. The envy that had so surprised me. I could envy Julia and her belief in the rightness of her socialism and feminism. I could envy Guy's desire for the music, noise and crowds of a good party. I could envy Ron's desire for a good degree to get him a good job, and his easy social manner. I could envy Margot's arrogant disregard of those around her. I could envy my sister's tabloid certainties, her desire for the money, expensive clothes and jewellery that spelled success for her. I could even envy Alison's ironic distancing of herself, turning away from the university life she no longer felt she needed. There was also my parents' stable, happy contentment with each other, which I could envy too.

I could use some envy, but only if I could feel it like the solid, purposeful weight of that screwdriver. But, I had no strength for envy. Strong emotion feels out of place with me, fraudulent in some way; I am not built for such things. At that moment, I couldn't even feel the true weight of my own doubts about the value of what I was doing at the university. They seemed airy, light and insubstantial. As I had said to Julia when I tried to put them into words, they seemed silly, adolescent even. I was getting very tired of words.

‘Do I dare eat a peach?’ I said.

‘What?’ Julia said sleepily, letting go of my hand to stroke her hair back from her eyes.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘Do you want a cigarette?’

[….]

[Extract from Hanging Around Until]

Fire Hose

[….]

‘Aaarrgh! Jesus, fuck!’ Pete leapt out of bed, suddenly soaking wet and cold. Johnny was standing on the bottom of Pete's bed, stark naked except for a bright red bra fastened over his head like a Spitfire pilot's leather helmet. He was aiming a still-dripping fire hose at Pete.

‘Oh, hello Helena,’ Johnny said cordially.

‘Bastard!’ Helena said as she tried to extricate herself from the sodden sheets.

Johnny whipped the sheets away from her. ‘Nice tits,’ he said. He dropped the fire hose and sat on the bed, taking one of Helena's cigarettes from the bedside table and lighting it. ‘Y'know, I wish I'd seen you pair shagging on that table. Not old hairy arse here, of course. But you.’ He leered at Helena. ‘I suppose a quick one, now, is out of the question?’

‘Would 'fuck off' and 'over my dead body' be too ambiguous for you?’

‘Ambi-what? Don't forget dear heart, I'm just a working-class thicko. I don't understand your posh words.’ Johnny stood up and waved his cock at Helena. ‘Anyway, fancy a bit of rough then?’

‘Piss off.’

Pete leapt across the bed. ‘No, don….’ He made a grab for Helena just as Johnny did as she'd asked, all over the bed where she had been sitting. Pete took Helena by the hand and ran for the door as Johnny re-aimed his own personal fire hose.

‘Johnny's coming to get you!’ Johnny cried, leaping over the bed. ‘Come back, Helena. It's only a bit of social justice. I only want to do to you what you upper-class folk have been doing to us workers for centuries.’

Pete grabbed the door and flung it open, dragging Helena out into the hotel corridor with him.

‘Good evening, sir.’ The police sergeant said. ‘We have had reports from the hotel manager here, of a disturbance.’

Pete and Helena were trapped. They stood, naked, in front of the open hotel room door, confronted by the police sergeant, a constable, a WPC and the hotel manager. The two policemen smiled humourlessly at the nude couple as the WPC turned away towards the room just as Johnny pissed through the open doorway.

‘Oh… shit,’ she cried, jumping back out of the doorway and gingerly trying to keep her sodden uniform blouse away from her skin, holding it between the tips of her fingers.

‘Er no… WPC Rogers,’ the sergeant said, trying not to laugh. ‘A misinterpretation of the evidence I would say.’ He looked around the door into the hotel room. ‘Oh, hello Johnny, I thought it would be you,’ he said with a sigh. ‘You know the form. Hold your hands out for the cuffs, and keep that thing pointed away from me.’ He turned to Pete and Helena. ‘I suggest you get dressed, sir, miss… before….’

There were several flashes in rapid succession. Pete turned to see a photographer and reporter at the other end of the corridor.

‘Hey!’ The constable shouted. But the photographer and reporter had already disappeared through the fire exit.

The sergeant herded the entire group back into Pete's room. Helena began to pick her clothes up from the floor as the WPC disappeared into the bathroom, still trying to stop her sodden blouse from touching her skin.

‘I was going to say: 'before the press boys get here',’ the sergeant said. ‘But it's too late now.’ He turned to Johnny. ‘Have you got any idea where your clothes are this time?’

Johnny shook his head. The sergeant turned to the hotel manager and asked to borrow a blanket.

The manager nodded. ‘I'll add it to the bill.’

‘We are going to have to charge you this time, Johnny,’ the constable said. ‘Someone had parked their car underneath where you let that telly fall out of the window. He is not a happy man at all. It was a brand-new Mercedes.’

The WPC came back from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, and dropped her blouse and personal radio on the bed. ‘There's also damage to police property,’ she said. ‘He pissed all over my radio, it's completely fucked.’ She turned to Johnny.

Johnny smiled at her. ‘Any chance of a shag? I like a woman in uniform.’

The WPC smiled, and then brought her knee up quickly. Johnny groaned as he collapsed. He squirmed on the floor, gasping for breath and clutching his genitals.

The three police officers stood watching impassively for the several minutes it took before Johnny could speak again.

‘My, my. What happened to you then?’ the sergeant asked Johnny.

‘I… I….’ Johnny looked up at each of the officers in turn. ‘I seem to have foolishly bumped into some furniture while I was too drunk to realise what I was doing.’

‘Yes, my thoughts exactly,’ the sergeant agreed.

‘How much this time?’

Everyone turned at the sound of Stan's voice.

‘It's gone beyond that, I'm afraid… sir,’ the hotel manager said.

Stan glanced at the manager, then ignored him. He walked over to the sergeant. The sergeant was standing in the middle of the soaking wet hotel room, next to where Johnny lay on the floor. The PC and the WPC stood behind them. The WPC was now wearing a Transmission tour t-shirt Pete had given her.

‘Is that true?’ Stan said to the sergeant. The sergeant nodded.

‘In that case,’ Stan said. ‘How much would I have to pay you to drop him out of the window?’

‘I'd do that for nothing,’ the WPC said.

‘I’m in love!’ Johnny said, reaching up to kiss the policewoman's hand. He groaned and then curled up into a ball on the soaking wet carpet. A moment later, he was snoring soundly.

[….]

[An extract from Dance on Fire]

Chick Lit Sales Slump

Despite the apparent recent slump in the sales of chic-lit novels, Sherrytrifle Avoirdupois’ new novel Go On Shag me, I’m A Really Fit Bird, Honest goes on sale today. In this, her 23^rd novel, Avoirdupois again explores her familiar Chick Lit theme of slightly chubby girls trying to get a decent bloke to hang around for more than a one-night stand. For those of you needing to know, the embarrassing episode concerning the unsuitable knickers and the immanent shag conflict is on page 134, a staggering 22 pages later than the similar episode in her last novel: OOOoooh Chocolate! and 56 pages later than the original scene in her first novel I Need A Fit Bloke To Give Me A Damn Good Seeing To.

Critics have now claimed that the whole Chick Lit genre has long since been mined to exhaustion. After all, they reason, there can’t be all that many young(ish) urban single women out there completely wasting their lives away on too much alcohol, too much chocolate and a vague undefined longing.

Maybe, as one cynical reviewer suggested, the readers of these books never go beyond a vague feeling that there must be more to life than wine, handbags, shoes and a seemingly endless line of brief unsatisfactory superficial relationships with a long line of men who never really seem to know how to grow up, or even realise that they should.

The Mystical Priest of the Beat

 

The throbbing beating brain-numbing noise was almost solid enough to touch. The noise used as music in clubs like this was too loud to be music, too primal to be music, too crude to be music; a noise stripped of almost all its possibilities of becoming music. It was music beaten up, raped, buggered, pissed on and left for dead with its lifeblood oozing out of it and running down the drain with each pulsebeat.

Pete loved it now.

He was dancing, with a half-full bottle of Champagne in each hand. Dancing – or so he thought – like a shaman, like a witch doctor. He was the mystical priest of the beat. He was primal too. He was savage. He was base. He was Dionysus.

The lights throbbed and pulsed showing then concealing the smiling, laughing, grinning coterie he - or rather, his recently discovered valid credit card – had gathered. He had disciples. He was the pied piper, the pied pissed-up prankster that would lead his gang of grinning cavorting lovelies to a new, higher paradise.

‘Wsdsd…FGGFvmm…? HGTffvbb!’

‘What?’ Pete jammed his ear up against the mouth of… whatever her name was.

‘XXXXZXzzzzzz! Quuallll! Tits?’

In the briefest of silences in the noise, Pete was sure that he had heard the word ‘tits’. He nodded his head enthusiastically. ‘Tits, yes!’ he yelled grinning down at the items in question. He was almost sure she had only the normal complement, but there seemed to be far more than just two in there. However, she proved his notion of the conventional correct when she whipped her top off and shook both of them in Pete’s face.

‘Yum! Yum!’ Pete shouted, watching mesmerised, as they performed a slow-motion gravity-defining dance all of their own.

The rest of his entourage had now noticed that one of their number had managed to monopolise the attention of their platinum-credit-card wielding sugar daddy. So, in the spirit of good old free enterprise they too decided that a revealing of their own not-inconsiderable assets would be a way of restoring some balance to the proceedings.

By this time, Pete was already seeing double – if not triple – the sudden avalanche of naked mammaries bouncing and undulating for his delectation was almost too much for him to cope with. He stopped his cavorting and took a step back.

Unfortunately, his backwards motion brought him into contact with the almost full pint held by one of a group of young men. The men were already feeling more than a touch aggrieved that this bloke – at least old enough to be their father – was monopolising so much female attention seemingly through the mere fact of being significantly wealthier than all of them put together.

‘Oi! Cunt. Watch it.’

Pete heard and turned. He grinned. ‘Sorry, mate. It’s getting a bit crowded in here isn’t it?’ He gestured behind him towards the undulating mammorial tide that was threatening to engulf them all.

‘Are you taking the piss?’

‘What? No.’

‘Hey Jimmy, this old cunt is taking the piss, as well as all the birds.’

Jimmy and the rest of the gang began to circle around Pete. Even in his befuddled state, Pete could recognise that things were beginning to get ugly. As the circle closed around him, he could see the girls edged out one by one. But still the first punch to the side of his head took him by surprise.

Pete staggered back into the men who had moved around behind him. They pushed him forward once more. It was over twenty years since Pete and Johnny had to fight their way out of an Austin bar. Since then Pete had not had to raise a fist in anger. Despite this, he knew he was easily able to handle half a dozen or so blokes who were probably over twenty years his junior. He raised his fists, noticing that he still held the two – now empty – champagne bottles.

‘Hmm… useful,’ Pete Muttered. He could feel that his mouth was already starting to swell up. He raised the bottles and took up a martial arts pose.

There was a whirling blur and the man directly in front of Pete collapsed. One of the topless girls took his place. The way she was swinging her lethal looking handbag around her head caused all the young men to turn in her direction. They gazed, mesmerised by her breasts and the slow, almost, leisurely way they developed independent orbits around her upper body.

Two more of the men fell, handbagged from behind be Pete’s tribe of vengeful amazons. Pete lowered his bottles and just stared as the gang fell one by one. Out of the corner of his eye, Pete just noticed the handbag bouncing off the shaven head of one of his attackers and heading towards him.

‘Wat…!’

There was pain. He fell. It went dark.

[….]

[An extract from Dance on Fire: a novel]

Furry Pink Slippers

‘Good Morning, fellow student!’ Ron cried as I walked into the kitchen the following morning.

‘Hello, how long have you been up?’ As I filled the kettle, I risked a glance inside it. Was that stuff moving? It was certainly growing. I shuddered and turned the kettle on.

‘Not long, but long enough to meet Margot. She's gone out to run a marathon, or practice to run a marathon, or to be run over by a marathon… something involving a marathon, anyway. She was talking for ages; she just goes on and on. You stop listening after a while and you drift off. When you come back she's still going.’

‘So, I see you have a lot in common then?’

‘Bollocks!’

‘You both have bollocks? Well, that's something else you have in common then.’ I gave Ron a mug of coffee and sat down with my own. I rolled a cigarette. Ron picked up my tin, glancing up at me. I nodded and Ron rolled himself a cigarette and lit it.

‘I'm going to buy a paper,’ Ron said a few minutes later as he finished his coffee.

I put my empty cup down next to his. ‘I'll come for a walk with you. I'll get myself a paper as well.’

*

Ron bought milk and sugar from the shop along with his paper. Back at the house again, we sat each side of the kitchen table and sorted out the readable sections of our newspapers. When we had done this, the discarded pile was higher than the piles in front of each of us. For a while, we read, drank coffee and smoked in near silence. The only sound was turning pages and the sigh of relief at the end of each section.

I could feel the traditional Sunday torpor creeping over me. I leaned back against the wall and lit a cigarette. Ron was reading the Business section. I thought about commenting on it. How anyone could find anything of interest in that section amazed me. But Ron was studying Economics, maybe that explained it. Dismal reading for dismal scientists.

Alison came in, her hair wet from the shower. She was wearing an old white dressing gown and bright pink fluffy slippers. Ron looked up from his paper and noticed the slippers. He opened his mouth to speak. She wagged her finger at him and he closed his mouth.

Alison turned on the kettle and sat down next to me. ‘Oh, there's a pub up the road a bit that does Sunday lunches. It's very good and very cheap. Do you two want to go?’

‘Cheap?’ Ron said. ‘My favourite word. Yes, I'll go.’

‘Yes, okay,’ I said. ‘I don't fancy cooking anything, anyway.’

Ron closed his paper and stood up. ‘I suppose the bathroom is free now?’ He said to Alison. She nodded as Ron walked around the table to take a closer look at her furry pink slippers.

‘Ron,’ she warned.

‘Not a word. Not a word,’ Ron said as he walked to the door. At the door, he turned and pointed. Covering his face with his hand, he bent double and shook as if in laughter. He glanced up and saw Alison searching for something to throw. He ran and the door slammed behind him.

[Extract from Hanging Around Until]

 

Teach Me Not to Care

‘You bastard!’

It isn't easy to look up in terrified guilty shock while a naked woman is sitting on your face, but Pete tried it. His physical reaction to the sound of Helena's voice threw the woman off him. She landed in an untidy heap on the far side of the bed - luckily for her the far side, away from Helena.

Pete had discovered by then that Helena had a habit of throwing things. She was usually and dangerously accurate too.

‘I… I… I….’ Pete instinctively shielded his genitals with his hands and crossed his thighs.

‘Who the fuck is the little tart?’ Helena yelled. ‘She looks like that bitch who did the make-up for the album cover!’

The woman down by the bed peeped over the side, like a nervous sentry in a trench.

‘Sharon? No, it isn't her. This is Cindy, her sister.’ Pete didn't know why he said it, but the pedantry felt like a small victory. He pulled back the sheets from the bottom of the bed, revealing another woman curled up in as tight a ball as she could manage. ‘This is Sharon. And she is not a tart.’ Pete almost gave in to the urge to stand up and gather the sisters to his side like some Victorian gentleman protecting the virtue of his daughters. He could feel a self-justificatory anger growing inside him at the way Helena had destroyed their innocent afternoon idyll. ‘Or a bitch.’

Helena stood there, her mouth opening and closing slowly, but making no sound. Not attempting to throw anything, or shout or scream, just seemingly stunned, shell-shocked and defeated, she turned and strode out of the bedroom.

A moment later, the front door slammed. The sisters began to gather their clothes, avoiding eye contact with Pete. He lit a cigarette.

‘You don't have to go.’ It was a half-hearted gesture.

‘I think we do,’ Sharon said. ‘Things like this don't work when they get too real.’

Pete sat, watching the sisters dressing. It was suddenly as impersonal as a changing room. He felt ridiculous, sitting there - still with half a hard-on - while the sisters brushed their hair and straightened sleeves and hems.

They were ready to go finally. They looked at each other, then at Pete.

‘Well,’ Cindy said.

‘I'm… we…. ‘ Sharon glanced at Cindy before turning back to Pete. ‘We… we're… sorry. We only meant to have a bit of fun - that's all.’ She shrugged helplessly. Sharon took a step towards him, paused, and then changed her mind. She turned and left the room.

Pete looked up at Cindy. She smiled and shrugged. ‘I….’ Then she turned and left.

Pete must have sat there for a while. It was dark when he finally came back from wherever his mind had wandered. He could see her silhouette in the doorway. He didn't know how long she had been standing there.

‘You are a bastard.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I ought to walk out. Fuck off. Leave you and never come back.’ She walked towards him. ‘I'm going to regret doing this. Not now, later.’ She walked right up to Pete, bent down and kissed him, deeply.

She pushed Pete back onto the bed. Her clothes felt rough on his naked skin.

‘I'm sor….’

‘Don't try to apologise,’ she said. ‘We both know you don't mean it.’

‘But I do love you.’

Her sigh seemed loud in the darkness. ‘You really believe that, don't you?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘No, you don't love me. You don't love anyone or anything. That is half, more than half, the attraction.’

‘What is?’

Helena was silent for a moment or two as she slipped her clothes off. ‘You don't let anything get close, do you? Even now, at a time like this, I get the feeling that you are not here on this bed with me. I see you over there, in the corner watching. This is probably going to be another one of your bloody songs.’

‘But… so why did you come back then?’

‘I don't know. Maybe part of it is seeing if I can break through to that place where you live.’ She sat up. ‘Maybe it is envy. Maybe I want to see the world as you do. Maybe that is why I chose the camera. It puts distance between me and the world - separates me from it. When I look at things through the viewfinder, they are not so close. I can't touch them, they can't touch, get at me. I feel safe. Maybe I want you to teach me how not to care.’

[An extract from Dance on Fire by David Hadley]

Lion Tamer

After a couple of hours of sweating, they had cleared enough space to get the gear set up and working. Matt spent a good ten minutes with Johnny, admiring and discussing Johnny's new drum kit. While they waited for them, Pete chatted with Jenny and Spike.

‘So, what do you think of him then?’ Pete inclined his head towards Johnny and Matt, who seemed to be talking about cymbals.

‘I like him,’ Jenny said. ‘He makes me laugh.’

‘Yes,’ Spike said. ‘I just hope he can play.’

‘I don't fancy telling him, if he can't though,’ Pete said.

‘Why not?’ Spike seemed genuinely puzzled.

‘He scares me.’

‘Really?’ Jenny laughed. ‘But he's only a tiny little thing.’

‘I dunno.’ Pete shrugged. ‘You just get this feeling with some blokes. I dunno… perhaps it is a male thing.’

Spike and Jenny nodded, almost in unison.

‘Besides that, he has been in the army. He probably knows loads of ways of killing with his bare hands and all that.’

‘But he wasn't in the bloody SAS or anything. He was only a musician, a drummer,’ Spike said.

‘Perhaps he knows of a hundred ways to kill someone with just a drumstick then,’ Pete said. ‘Anyway, he still scares me.’

‘But you work with him,’ Jenny said.

‘Only in the way a lion tamer works with lions,’ Pete replied.

[Taken from Dance on Fire – A Novel by David Hadley – available here]

Dancing

Guy approached dancing in a manner all of his own. Ignoring the rhythm of the music and other irrelevancies, he threw out his arms and legs at seemingly random intervals. He followed this with a rapid jog on the spot, possibly in the attempt to catch up with the music. Then there was the almost graceful pirouette, followed by the slightly less graceful stumble over empty bags and boxes.

I, who only ever resorted to dancing under threat of extreme violence and if the bar was closed, could only sit and admire such ineptitude, Guy must have practised tirelessly to be so impervious to rhythm.

Taken from: Hanging Around Until - a novel by David Hadley

Hanging Around Until - A novel

Set during the mid-1980s, Hanging Around Until is the story of Paul Carr, who, at the age of 28, decides to become a mature student at a North-Eastern university in the hope that an education will help give a direction to his life.

On arriving at the university Paul discovers he is to share a house with five other students. Two of those housemates – Alison and Julia, each in their own way – turn Paul’s simple quest for an education into a tangle of confusion and uncertainty amid the turmoil of university life during the height of anti-Thatcherite campus activism and the birth of the new Left.

Review: House of Meetings – Martin Amis

[Fiction 2006]

Money by Marin Amis was one of the best books of the 1980s, an almost perfect satire of that awful decade. It is therefore almost inevitable that any novel Amis writes will be compared to that tour-de-force, and often unfavourably. House of Meetings, unfortunately does not stand up well in comparison to Money at all. In fact, there were times when reading this when I almost checked the name on the cover was actually Martin Amis, and not some pale impostor. This book seems to lack almost all of those authorial traits, touches, call them what you will, that enables one to feel an authorial presence, lack Amis himself. There are only a few – far too few – examples of his – almost trademark – linguistic dexterity and flights of fluency. Also, probably, for the first time ever with a Martin Amis book, I cannot remember laughing at all, not even smiling, as I read this. In fact, I had no sense of engagement with it at all, and felt very little authorial engagement with it either. In the end, it became a chore just to finish the book.

The novel is the story of a love triangle between the narrator, and his brother Lev and the woman they both love Zoya set in 20^th Century Russia. The central point around which the novel revolves is ‘The House of Meetings’ a place set aside for conjugal visits in the Russian slave camp where both brothers at incarcerated, and where Lev and his then wife Zoya meet for such a visit.

Of course, the tragic events of communist Russia, and post-communist Russia, are played out around this story of these three characters. Unfortunately neither the love-triangle story, nor the greater tragedy of Russia itself seems to engage the reader to any great extent, everything seems distant, almost an exercise, as if all the tragedies, crimes, mistakes and so forth of a triangular relationship, and of the history of 20^th century Russia are being ticked off on a list by the author.

It is a shame really. The world could do with yet another great Martin Amis novel, but this one isn’t it.

Review: The People’s Act Of Love by James Meek

[Fiction - 2005]

The Siberian wastes of Russia where this novel is set are cold, bleak wastelands where people freeze to death all the time. That is just how this novel left me… freezing cold.

A few pages in and I was wondering why anyone should feel the need to rewrite Doctor Zhivago.

At times it feels like someone took all the Russian greats of the novel: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak, etc whizzed them up in a blender and poured away the best parts, then watered what remained down to leave this rather thin bland insipid juice.

The vast long stretches of prose like Samarin’s tale of his escape from the prison, and the story of the Czech soldiers’ war are as bleak and featureless as the Siberian wastes. Oh, it looks pretty enough, but once you are out trudging wearily through these wastelands of backstory, death, at least of the characters, does come as a blessed relief. Someone seems to freeze to death every few pages. It is often hard to know, or care, who it is. The number of people freezing to death seems to reach absurd proportions in the Czech soldiers’ tale, by the way, with someone icing up seemingly every other paragraph.

There is interwoven with all this snow a tale of a bizarre religious sect who – for deluded reasons of their own – castrate themselves in order to get closer to god. This could have been interesting as these self-castrated religious folk demonstrate the essential insanity of religion, the religious denial of the connection between the human and the rest of nature, and that religion destroys some essential human part of us.

The main aspect of the novel, indeed ‘The People’s Act of Love’ is a debate between and through some of the characters about whether cannibalism out ion the frozen wastelands is ever justifiable. It is no doubt some overly wrought metaphor for the revolution – i.e. is it ever right to kill and eat another human being to survive, is it right for people to die to help bring about the people’s paradise on Earth? But all of this is lost in the blizzard of tedium.

The characters themselves seem frozen to the page, refusing to come alive. It is one of those novels where, when a character reappears in the narrative, you have trouble remembering who it is and whether they are old or new characters.

If you want to see the novelist as playing some deep game of chess against the fates with his characters as the chess pieces, then this novel reads like someone aimless doodling about with a set of chess pieces on some long slow Sunday afternoon while waiting for something to happen.

If it wasn’t for the sake of this review I would have given up on it and left the book unfinished – something rare for me. I don’t like to give bad reviews, knowing how hard writing a book can be, but I do genuinely struggle to find anything good to say about this book at all, and am genuinely mystified as to why it seems to have had generally favourable reviews elsewhere.

Review: First Lady – Michael Dobbs

[Fiction - 2006]

The brooding shadow of that magnificently Machiavellian creation Francis Urquhart seems to hang over all of Michael Dobbs subsequent fiction, with nothing he has written since the House of Cards trilogy coming close to matching it. Despite that, this novel is still a great page-turning read.

With Ginny Edge, the central character of First Lady Dobbs returns to those corridors of power within Westminster once more. This time though we see it all through the wife of an MP, rather than the MP himself. This allows Dobbs a slight distancing from the machinations of the politicians themselves.

Dobbs never bothers that much with ideology, political theories, philosophy, or any of the dubious reasons politicians usually give in interviews for why they are doing what they do. For Dobbs, as we always suspected, for the politicians it is all about, power, ambition, corruption, backstabbing and political manoeuvring between so-called colleagues for momentary advantage rather than the great seep of historical events.

To Dobbs it seems that not only, as the old adage has it, does power corrupt, power also - in David Brin’s famous quote – ‘attracts the corruptible.’ Furthermore, the innocent are never entirely safe from this corruptibility. Ginny, a more or less innocent at the start of the novel is altered the closer she gets to power, as is her husband to a lesser degree. Even the novel’s only real innocent, the Somali refugee, Ajok – in what at first appears a sort of tacked–on social conscience sub-plot – is used quite blatantly by others to further their own particular purposes, often at her expense.

It is interesting that Dobbs doesn’t – as far as I can recall – ever mention which party is which, Edge is in the opposition party, probably the Conservatives, and the government party is – we assume – the Labour party because of its involvement in the Iraq war, but this is never made explicit. It is as though Dobbs - like the rest of us – now sees the parties as more or less interchangeable, without any great ideological divide between them, unlike back in the heyday of Urquhart. These days too, we don’t seem to get the great characters in politics, that Urquhart was meant to represent, now that the party machines work so hard to eradicate anything human from the personality-free androids and clones they put up as candidates.

It is a relief in these times when so many readers apparently want characters they ‘can identify with’ and other such puerile imbecilities, to have Dobbs’s nasty people running amok in the corridors of power like this, and to even get away with it to a greater or lesser extent on occasions. The only disconcerting note about this great read is that one cannot escape the feeling that deep down we do really know that this is no fiction. That we know the people who would wish to rule our lives are really – at least - this nasty, self-serving, egotistical, power-mad, venial and corrupt, but we still allow them to get away with it all, whilst claiming they are the servants of the people. But, as the history of every revolution has shown, any attempt to replace it with something better will only make it a great deal worse. So, all we can really do is keep an eye on those in power and expose them when they get up to no good, which is why it is not only good, but perhaps essential, that there are people like Dobbs around to open it all up for us.