First published in UK 2019 by Arachne Press Limited
100 Grierson Road, London SE23 1NX
www.arachnepress.com
©Arachne Press Limited
ISBNs:
print: 978-1-909208-78-0
ePub: 978-1-909208-79-7
mobi/kindle: 978-1-909208-80-3
The moral rights of the authors and designer 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.
Thanks to Muireann Grealy for her proofing.
Printed on wood-free paper in the UK by
TJ International, Padstow.
INDIVIDUAL COPYRIGHT
A Quarter Glass of Wine © Jayne Buxton 2019
Alleys and Dumpsters, In Between, Sunny Day © Patty Tomsky 2019
At the Crossroads © Matthew Pountney 2019
Backwater © David Mathews 2019
Between Skyscrapers © Wes Lee 2019
Careful Where You Tread, Eavesdropping, The Right Place, and Today’s Arrivals and Departures © Rosamund Davies 2019
Chance Meetings and Happy New Year © Maja Bodenstein 2019
City Tour and Coffee Meeting © Stuart Larner 2019
Coffee © Shamini Sriskandarajah 2019
Dance Where No One Watches © Cath Holland 2019
Dawn of the City © Nicholas McGaughey 2019
Feet in a Yard © Sarah-Clare Conlon 2019
Flotsam and Jetsam and Sic Transit Gloria Mundi © Cathy Lennon 2019
Foundation Myth © Cherry Potts 2019
Go Directly to Go © Rob Walton 2019
Hole in the Wall © Ash Lim 2019
How to Go with the Flow: a Survival Guide © Arna Radovich 2019
Humans Of © Belinda Huang 2019
I Left the City that Night © Pedro Basso Neves 2019
In the Park, Man with the Guitar and Switching On © Kam Rehal 2019
Lifted and On Whose Bench Are You Sitting? © Jane Roberts 2019
Lost and Found © Catherine Jones 2019
Not Every Train © Jasmin Kirkbride 2019
Other Signals © Annabel Banks 2019
Passage © Jess Kilby 2019
School Bus © Evleen Towey 2019
Seeing in the Dark © Roland Denning 2019
Slim Odds © Laura Besley 2019
Spider Goes to the Park © Melaina Barnes 2019
Starlight © C.A. Limina 2019
Survivor © Rachael McGill 2019
Tech Down © Nic Vine 2019
The Alleyway i and The Alleyway ii © Miriam Sorrentino 2019
The Call of the Sea © Aisling Keogh 2019
The City’s Heartbeat © Emma Lee 2019
The Promise © Reshma Ruia 2019
The Second Car from the Front © Alexandra Penland 2019
Truing the Square © Dave Murray 2019
Two Till Four © Liam Hogan 2019
Walking Back to the Future © Máire Malone 2019
You Stand in the Secret Place © Steven Wingate 2019
Your Brand of Smokes © Jesse Sensibar 2019
CONTENTS
TERMINI
Today’s Arrivals and Departures
Feet in a Yard
City Tour
The Call of the Sea
HOTELS
The Right Place
Lifted
Your Brand of Smokes
Two Till Four
Starlight
TRANSPORT
Coffee
Not Every Train
The Second Car from the Front
Slim Odds
Other Signals
School Bus
CAFÉS
Coffee Meeting
Eavesdropping
A Quarter Glass of Wine
The Promise
MAIN STREETS
Switching On
Walking Back to the Future
Flotsam and Jetsam
You Stand in the Secret Place
How to Go with the Flow: A Survival Guide
Between Skyscrapers
Dawn of the City
Seeing in the Dark
I Left the City that Night
MARKET
The City’s Heartbeat
CROSSROADS
Foundation Myth
Go Directly to Go
At the Crossroads
Chance Meetings
SIDE STREETS
The Alleyway i
The Alleyway ii
Backwater
Alleys and Dumpsters, In Between, Sunny Day
Lost and Found
Dance Where No One Watches
Careful Where You Tread
Hole in the Wall
Passage
Tech Down
SQUARES AND PARKS
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
Truing the Square
Spider Goes to the Park
Survivor
In the Park, Man with the Guitar
On Whose Bench Are You Sitting?
Happy New Year
Humans Of
INTRODUCTION
Which city are you in? How have you come to be here? What are the characters, voices, stories that you have come across in your city? Your experiences – the people and places you encounter, the things you hear and see, the thoughts and sensations you feel – are at once individual and also connected to countless others in cities everywhere. Your city is also the city.
These were the thoughts that inspired us to put together this collection. Through the voices and perspectives of many different writers, it offers readers a book that they can take with them into the city to experience it through stories.
You will not find in its pages any cities, landmarks, or even characters that are identified by name. These are stories about any city, every city in which you might find yourself. The story of the woman sitting in front of you on the bus, the waiter in your café, or even the spider on the pavement.
As you read them, maybe you will also start to see – in the streets and alleyways and cafés and hotels of this city, the one you are standing in now – the lines and traces of other cities: familiar cities, past cities, cities of the future, cities of the imagination.
We would like to invite you to share your experience of the city through your own photos. You can email them to us at StoryCities@gre.ac.uk, telling us if /it relates to a particular story in the book. Or share them via instagram: story_cities_book, twitter: @storycities #storycities or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StoryCities/
Rosamund Davies & Kam Rehal
TERMINI
TODAY’S ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
Rosamund Davies
Those who have just arrived
Those who are going home
Those who have left home
Those who are on leave
Those who have left it all behind
Those who are on holiday
Those who are here on business
Those who work here
Those who need work
Those who need money
Those who are here for the season
Those who are lost
Those who have something to lose
Those who
are fleeing a war
Those who are carrying a passport
Those who have a ticket
Those who have something to sell
Those who have something to give
Those who are homeless
Those who are travelling light
Those who packed the night before
Those who are thirsty
Those who are hungry
Those who have missed their train
Those who will not be missed
Those who are waiting for someone
Those who are waiting for a connection
Those who do not mind waiting
Those who check their watch repeatedly
Those who are in a hurry
Those who look straight ahead
Those who look around
Those who look down
Those whose feet hurt
Those who are looking for somewhere to sit
Those who are looking for somewhere to sleep
Those who have just woken up
Those who remember what it used to be like
Those who want to make a new start
Those who are returning
Those who are going to war
Those who come and go
Those who will never leave
Those who are leaving for good
FEET IN A YARD
Sarah-Clare Conlon
Each time I see her, she is wearing a different pair of shoes. Tonight, they are shiny. Patent leather. I’m jealous of her shoes. I’ve watched her every day for three days out of a week for four months. She’s stood in the same place each time and traced a half moon on the station platform with the toe of a flat shoe until the train arrives. She glides up the steps into the carriage – even when the train comes in slightly before or slightly behind what I assume is its designated stopping point. Yet despite me watching her feet, I never see any significant movement either to her left or to her right.
I gradually move closer to her. For two weeks, I’ve loitered nearby, ready to climb on board alongside her. I have marked the spot like a dog. There’s the crumpled flagstone at the edge where the warning line has worn out and the rut collects water. When it’s raining hard, I hold back because a puddle will have formed. But I know when to surge forward, split seconds ahead of them calling the arrival, and I always find a seat. Even so, I never see her once I’ve pulled myself up with the handrail and look around. I never see her, until the same time, the next whenever day it is, because it’s not always tomorrow. I wonder what shoes she wears on the other days. I wonder if she takes the same size as me.
CITY TOUR
Stuart Larner
The river slinks through the city, oozing in afternoon heat, feeding monuments with its blood, carrying secrets so old and deep only it has seen. Only it could know.
I take another sip at my riverside table.
A pleasure boat hums into view, large-windowed, labelled ‘See the City!’ People sit in rows, staring out, as still as flowers in their floating greenhouse where commentary bathes them like the sun.
Smooth white boatskin cleaves the surface, churning the cream of history’s milk.
The engine sloshes as they pass. At the stern, a single flag salutes each monument ticked off their list. Memories will lap like lullabies.
The boat turns behind a building.
At its stern some strangers wave to me.
I raise my glass.
They raise an iphone, just as the boat disappears.
I pose long after they have gone, wondering if the picture was taken.
THE CALL OF THE SEA
Aisling Keogh
The city welcomed me in as though I were a long-lost cousin, come in search of his roots.
Street artists played tunes that raised me up to the sun, and the bodhran’s beat drummed its music into my bones, while I drank pints of porter and watched hen parties wobble on cobblestone streets.
And then watched, as night fell, a dozen or so men, big and burly, in orange high visibility jackets – padded, waterproof – like vigilantes patrolling I didn’t know what. With their benign smiles and idle talk, their presence didn’t signal a threat the same way the police force did at home.
‘That’s because they’re not the police,’ my dreadlocked drinking companion told me.
‘Then what are they?’ I asked.
‘Water patrol,’ he said, matter-of-factly.
‘I’m sorry?’
At first, I didn’t understand. When you grow up in a country that’s landlocked, you can comprehend the call of the mountains, but not the call of the sea.
‘There’s a couple of bridges this end of town,’ he said, as he stood to move towards the bar, again. ‘They patrol them.’
I nodded as though I knew what he meant, but really I was thinking back to heated discussions around my grandparents’ kitchen table. Frayed tempers and cross words about rod licences and salmon fishing, back when I was young enough to wear cord trousers of my mother’s choosing.
After swallowing the dregs from that last one he bought, we stopped into a takeaway and ate vinegar-soaked chips, like the ones Mum used to make, as we strolled to a taxi rank, and I counted them along the way.
Counted four posters, of four young men, all smiling for the camera, now ‘missing’ since April 4th, May 15th, July 19th, October 27th.
No more than arctic dwellers have hundreds of words for snow, this city has many words to describe rain. It’s a soft day when the rain-mist blows horizontal in off the sea, instead of falling in globulous drops from the sky. Damp-chilled to the bone, still clinging to the protective warmth of a tray of deep-fried potato, I shuddered as a coolness spread from my neck to behind my ears, and it shook me awake.
Those men in orange jackets were not there to stymie poachers, they were there to fight the tide. To stop it bringing another young man home.
My urge was to run, anywhere but here, at a taxi stand, with rain blowing the hard truth. I could run to a bridge, climb its railings. Test the city’s force of orange peacekeepers. But I hadn’t air enough in my lungs to act, so I stood. Frozen. Remotely viewing the crowds as they walked on past those posters, as if it was normal. Inevitable. And on the short taxi ride home, I couldn’t help but wonder – am I safe?
HOTELS
THE RIGHT PLACE
Rosamund Davies
When we return to the hotel, it is no longer here.
The taxi dropped us off here that morning, we think… we’re pretty sure, we hope… and there is a hotel here and it looks like our hotel, but it does not have the name of our hotel.
So we look at the dot on our phone and we find that we are almost in the right place, but not quite. We need to move up the street a bit.
So we move up the street until we reach the dot. But the dot is not in the right place. It marks an empty shop that we do not recognise at all.
So we ask a passerby, who tells us that the place we are looking for is not in this street at all.
So we turn right and right again and find another street with another hotel that has the right name.
But this hotel does not look like our hotel. Has our hotel got bored in our absence and swapped names with the hotel in the next street? Has it reproduced or split into two? How can we get our hotel back into the right place? And what tricks will it play on us tomorrow?
LIFTED
Jane Roberts
As you lie in bed in the executive hotel room that was an upgrade because you complained about your original room not overlooking the garden, you are kept awake by the rumblings of the lift – straps and cogs and hydraulics throbbing and graunching. It occurs to you that the hotel must be an exceptionally busy hotel, and, therefore, you have picked a good hotel. The thought is almost enough to send you into a contented sleep. Almost. It does not occur to you that the hotel reception staff are pressing the lift buttons on the ground floor all night long.
YOUR BRAND OF SMOKES
Jess
e Sensibar
I’m leaned up against the old cigarette machine that hulks in the shadows to the right of the main door to the bar of the lounge, almost underground in the bottom of the old hotel. I’m up against the big machine because it’s about the only place left to stand in the crowded, smoky bar.
The machine and me are the only two things not moving in the place. The music is hard and fast and the crowd moves pogo-style with it.
I’ve got a lot of love for this cigarette machine. My grandfather was one of the first Marlboro Men.
It’s so old it is mechanical instead of being electronic. It jams every once and a while but it mostly works pretty flawlessly. You pick your brand of smoke from the pictures on the face of the machine and put your coins in the slot. Below each picture is a small round chrome knob decorated and edged with tiny scallops. You grab the knob and pull, the knob comes out towards you a full ten or twelve inches on a steel slide with a sound like working a long action on a 12 gauge pump shotgun. It makes the same resounding chunk, when your pack of cigarettes falls out of the machine and into the tray below, as a shotgun does when it chambers another shell.
TWO TILL FOUR
Liam Hogan
She stretched out on the rumpled linen, listening to the shower from the hotel en suite. There was something indolent about sex in the afternoon. The knowledge that everyone else was at their desks, staring at spreadsheets or unravelling corporate memos, minds dulled by a snatched lunch.
She’d be one of them if she hadn’t, some four months earlier, invented a weekly therapy session. She’d never specified what the therapy was and her boss had been too nervous to pry. Presumably he thought she was seeing a shrink.
He can’t have been disappointed with the results. On Tuesdays, both after and before her appointment, she was relaxed and simultaneously more focused. Whether it was the sex or simply the midday timeout, she often returned with the solution to a tricky problem, or a new direction for her team to take.
Her lover didn’t have any difficulty getting away either. One of the perks of being freelance. Or self-unemployed, as he joked when things weren’t going so well. She didn’t mind paying for the room; a block booking made it indecently affordable.