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  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked, trying to snatch it back, only for her to reply, “Give that here!” with no shame whatsoever.

  The next thing I knew, I was struggling for my own wallet in someone else’s house. It was like being in a nightmare. We fell against the sofa wrestling for the wallet, knocking some of my stuff over in the process with the man in the painting still fingering his walrus moustache, his expression that of a bemused observer. She started screaming that I’d kicked her in the stomach. I had to call Jaruk over. She claimed I’d stolen twenty quid from her mantelpiece, my own twenty pounds! She was like a professional actress in front of Jaruk. She stood trembling and tearful with just the right amount of panicked distress on display, heightened by the fact that she was pregnant. I had to call on my better angels to restrain myself. As Jaruk dragged me out of there, I told her I hoped her child had webbed feet.

  The charity fired me. They said I had to “re-evaluate” my attitude to charitable work. But I didn’t do anything wrong! What kind of world do we live in where someone attempts to rob a charity fundraiser? I despaired at the darkness around me.

  I went back to the drawing board. I have a degree in Communications, which is about the most useless degree you could have. In fact, the paper it’s printed on is probably worth more. At least with an English degree you can always teach; an admirable profession in my eyes. Teachers should be given way more credit, good teachers change lives.

  I signed on for a bit but the system is designed to make you feel like something stuck in the sink plughole at every stage of the process. And the money wasn’t enough for a church mouse to live on. I tried applying for a local council job in my borough but failed the maths test. I was depressed for a while; I struggled to get out of bed some days. When I did, I’d sit by the living room window smoking cigarettes and listening to old blues records, By Golly Wow circling my chair, licking my left hand consolingly.

  I worked as a waitress at a greasy spoon café for two months. I actually liked the customers well enough, particularly some of the builders who loved to banter, wearing unfailingly bright yellow jackets, boots covered in cement, hard hats tucked under their arms or on the tables besides steaming cups of tea. They would often tease and compliment me. I couldn’t help being interested in their stories. What some considered an underwhelming job seemed magical to me; the ability to create something from the ground up, something that didn’t exist before, which would breathe, live and buzz with human activity. They were building a new spa roughly five minutes away from the café. Sometimes, when I got some spare time, I’d imagine myself in the windows of that building, picking up instruments I could use to carve a path in my own life until I found the right one.

  The fact that there was only one waitress per shift meant that it became really stressful when the café was busy. Hal, the manager, started trying to touch me up, which was awkward to say the least. In the end, he told me he had to let me go due to “unforeseen financial circumstances.” He decided to keep the other waitress, Moira, because she’d been there longer. I was less angry about losing that job, maybe because I felt I’d gotten something from it. The customers liked me, people weren’t mean to me the way they were during my fundraising days.

  I signed on again to buy myself some time. That lasted about a month, since I kept missing appointments. I considered doing voice work since I did a great Frank Spencer impression, a good Cilla Black and an excellent Moira Stewart. I left messages for companies that never called me back.

  Then I started working for a sales company selling perfumes on the streets, commission only. I mostly took the job because I needed one. I was sure that had I walked into that interview a blind, one-legged, black dwarf they’d have given me the job anyway. I did that for a bit until one day the company folded, every trace of them gone. I was stuck with a box of cheap-smelling perfume I wouldn’t have been able to get rid of at a bazaar.

  Once again, I had no money and possibly a terrible run of bad luck. The day I found out about the company, I dragged that heavy box of perfume home. I called my sister Vivian crying. I fell into a hole, I couldn’t recognise myself there.

  It’s hard being a young person these days. There’s so much expectation to do the right thing. What happens when you keep trying to do the right thing and it keeps backfiring? What happens when you feel invisible and lost, that nobody cares? You apply for jobs on the lower rungs of the ladder since everywhere you look people are silently showing you that dark girls like you won’t be allowed a seat at the table. I drifted in and out of jobs because I never discovered what I was good at, because nobody ever helped me find out as a kid. And Viv did the best she could after our mother went back to St Lucia when I was nineteen.

  Dear all, really I wanted to say that I joined the army. I know, it surprised me too. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea but it seemed like it at the time. I needed structure in my life. I was tired of drifting from one thing to another. I miss Viv, her bawdy laugh, the flowers she always tucked in her hair. I miss By Golly Wow. I miss the musty smell of him and the way he’s always excited to see me in the morning.

  I’ve seen some crazy things since joining the army. Just two weeks ago, there was a bombing in Basra and one of my fellow officers, Louise, got killed. I saw the lower half of her body blown right off. Witnessing people die this way impacts you. I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop feeling that heat, the splinters in my eye, the smoke all around, the sudden weight of my uniform, the deafening screaming, the desert threatening to swallow me. I can’t stop feeling the panic in my chest and seeing a grenade exploding from Louise’s stomach in my nightmares. I still remember the picture she showed me of her son playing football with the watermark on it. And I cry when I think about it. I cry when I think about her.

  I miss London. I miss home. Being out here puts everything into perspective. That’s what I wanted to say. Everything seems small and a world away. It’s like my vision is bloodshot now and I can’t get rid of the blood no matter what I do. I can’t stop thinking about my endings, all the ones I can remember, whether or not I had much of a choice in most of them and if that makes me feel any better.

  What I really wanted to say is: find what you like so you don’t get the wrong ending. I don’t know how to tell my mother that I left one war to join another in Iraq. I’m scared every day. British troops here are under constant attack, they’re bombing us on the roads, firing rockets at our base. I’m going back out there tomorrow. And I guess I’m writing this letter in case I don’t come back, in case I never get to write another one again.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Anonymous Jones.

  The Thumbnail Interruptions

  “I kissed a mouse once,” Jonno said.

  They were lying in the park, their backs on the grass looking up at the sky.

  Birdie saw a road in the sky where God was distributing throbbing headaches to dysfunctional dreams, but she didn’t mention this. Instead, she retorted, “How do mice kiss? With or without tongue?”

  “Very funny. I was fourteen. We put paper traps around the house. You know? The ones you stick glue on, because suddenly they were everywhere, eating holes in our underwear, gnawing through cereal boxes, scratching relentlessly in the attic. Even daring to come out and watch TV with us!”

  Birdy laughed. “So what? You formed an attachment to this particular mouse?”

  “No, it was weird because for weeks the traps weren’t working. They caught other things: my old prefect badge, dad’s tie, mum’s glasses, a used condom everybody denied owning. One night I couldn’t sleep, I went downstairs to get a drink and from the hallway I could hear this horrific squeaking.”

  “And…?”

  “It was like a sound you’d hear in a nightmare coming from the kitchen. I went in to find a mouse had been caught, bleeding from the neck down in an attempt to wrench free. There were spots of blood on the trap. It was such a tiny thing, I felt sorry for it then.”

>   “You wanted it that way though.”

  “Strange, I know. I’d set that particular trap, made it look like a small mouse bed. I hunkered down, picked it up while it yelped wildly.”

  “What did the kiss taste of?” Birdy asked.

  “Despair and blood.”

  “Why did you kiss it?”

  Jonno said, “How would you feel if you woke up to find you were dying painfully?”

  From anyone else this confession would have appeared odd, but it was Jonno after all. In the distance, Jonno’s mouse and the sperm from the condom that night fornicated to bear creatures resistant to traps and the mutant limbs of being caught off-guard.

  Birdy used Photoshop to create a thumbnail image of herself. She liked this particular picture; she was wearing her mother’s face and her grandmother’s too. They’d sat on her skin like a moving canvass to dimple with white hot breaths from beyond. She had on her blue vest with the skull design. Her braided hair fell to her shoulders and you could make out the tattoo of a bracelet with a lizard’s eye on her wrist. In the photo, her braids obscured part of her face. There were liquorice coloured buttons in clusters on her top, each button a full stop from a different conversation held in the day. Jonno had taken the picture. She wondered if through the lens, he saw not her but a projection of what he wanted her to be, only to print it and discover he was stuck with the version he had.

  Birdy squinted at the image, trying to recall what she’d talked about that day and with whom but her memory had been scooped out of her pumpkin head. She could only remember a vague sense of vulnerability that had different coats in the seasons, her voice clinging to the flimsy threads of fragile things.

  At first the thumbnail image invaded her life in harmless but intrusive ways. Bobbing across her orange laptop screen background in short sprints from one end to another, jammed in the CD slot, buried in her grey bucket of rice as though caught in an avalanche. She discovered it stuck on her kitchen notice board among the Jimmy Hendrix shark, the sloth private investigator and the baby weight lifter. Birdy couldn’t recall placing any of them there. Why would she? It was weird; she didn’t consider herself narcissistic enough to need the validation of seeing her image reflected in everything around her. What was next? The photo in her sandwiches? Swallowing them with a singular determination?

  She and Jonno indulged in smoking some pretty strong skunk every so often and she always felt high and malleable afterwards. Her memory was lousy now. She’d told Jonno so the other day; her memory felt like eels slipping through her fingers.

  Birdy worked for an arts organisation in Lewisham. The company programmed everything from theatre, to comedy, to spoken word and secret cinema screenings. They had a big, open loft office with wooden beams and windows in the ceiling that allowed wailing flashes of light to seep through. There was a storeroom cupboard at the back with old computers, flyers, branded items, CDs and anything you could label miscellaneous. Birdy was a National Coordinator, she met with artists and oversaw the running of the programme.

  She deeply resented working in an open plan environment. There was no privacy. People saw your successes but they watched for your weaknesses too. Their eyes were pockets collecting every flaw. The director Martin was usually dressed in his favourite attire of jeans and T-shirts except when he had important meetings with potential partners. That was the arts; people went for that carefully conceived casual nonchalance with their appearance. If they wanted to crank it up a notch, they’d be quirkily casually dressed. Never flashy, which would be cheap. More often than not, arts practitioners were white middle-class. Birdy thought she could identify them in a crowd thanks to the privilege they wore almost indifferently and an understated cool. They were birds with purple breasts.

  By twelve o’ clock that afternoon Birdy was bored of wading through emails from artists enquiring about opportunities and a report she was only half-heartedly writing. She took a break by rifling through the store cupboard on the hunt for an old flyer. The store room had a red door; this always amused Birdy, as though it led to another dimension. It was full of boxes and files and needed a good clear out. Sometimes, you could hear the conversations of the staff from the women’s shelter that floated just beyond their reach and a horizon covered in bruises. She heard the door shut quietly and turned to see Martin behind her.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Surreptitious.” Birdy dropped the box of flyers she’d been holding, the patient paper cuts sighed disappointedly.

  “What?”

  “Surreptitious, word of the day.”

  “Oh! Your word of the day thing, not sure what it means. Listen, this is awkward, so I’m going to jump right in.” He leaned back against the wooden shelf. “You’re a very attractive young woman, even more so since you’ve grown in confidence these last few years and I’m flattered, I really am, but you should stop.”

  Birdy looked at him confusingly, her expression wrinkled.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Stop sending pictures of yourself to my home. Karen found them and she’s very upset. She thinks I’m having an affair with you, it’s causing me a lot of stress at home right now.”

  Birdy’s face flushed, her armpits tingled with sweat.

  “Martin, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t send any pictures.” Although she said this with conviction, a nagging doubt buried itself in her chest. Had she sent pictures and forgotten? Surely she’d remember doing something so stupid? She’d never felt any form of attraction to Martin, only gratitude. He’d been a mentor to her. A lump formed in her throat, a prism with a miniature version of her trapped inside trying to smash through.

  “What sort of pictures?” she asked. “Show me.”

  “Well, it’s the same one, only different sizes. Hold on.” He stuck his hand into his back pocket, pulled it out and dropped it in her palm. It was a strip of passport sized images, the same one she’d been spotting in incongruous places around her flat. It felt hot on her palm, a paper runway. She saw the remnants of her career in LEGO sized cases, lugging themselves up that runway with no flight at the end to catch.

  “I recognise the picture, but I didn’t send it. I’m sorry for any trouble this has caused; please tell your wife that.”

  Martin rubbed his face. “Okay, I’m confused. You’ve been acting a little strange lately, distracted and agitated. If something’s going on, you can come to me.”

  “Thanks,” she weakly said.

  Martin walked out, leaving the door slightly ajar. Birdy’s skin mottled with embarrassment. She couldn’t trust herself anymore. What she did and didn’t do, what she saw and didn’t see. It had all become one blurry gulf she was feeling her way around. She wondered if other members of staff knew. She opened the door a little wider and several people were staring at their screens with a little too much intent. She glanced at the window in the ceiling and tongues were wagging against the glass, or maybe it was rain. The other workers were becoming animals at her expense, laughing at her. Dinosaur jaws sprang from their backs, hyena heads jutted from their stomachs. Their hands became horse hooves pointing. Birdy shrank back, but before she knew it she was on the ceiling, hanging from her paranoia as though it was a rope and she a circus act.

  Jonno was a thief. He stole the gleam from people’s eyes and used them as half-stars on his tongue, a starry pink entity that required damaged light. It flicked over her hard nipples and concave chest, it traced the outlines of new lies that sprang out of her skin like small, wet cellophane bags.

  Jonno had been adopted. It accounted for his sense of displacement. His parents told him during a furious row about money. It made sense at the time; there had always been a niggling doubt. The ghost showed its head, its blotchy skin. It wriggled between them and used its mouth to pick up the rest of its body parts. Jonno had been pleased to find out. He said that his house was so miserable, even the furniture didn’t look happy to be there.

  They
met at a Roots Manuva gig. Jonno was impressed by the way she pretended to be a member of the press who’d had her ID stolen. She conned her way backstage, reminding him of a frenetic drum beat that gathered speed and rhythm. The beat lodged in his throat until he couldn’t swallow anymore.

  Jonno looked like Lenny Kravitz, something he got fed up of being told. He had that one slack, smaller eye that seemed to be elsewhere while simultaneously having a conversation with you. It was a black marble crawling under your skin, floating in someone’s glass of Guinness blinking away the creamy foam or stuck to a shiny copper two pence piece in your wallet, like a tiny fallen planet. He spoke in a calm, measured way. Birdy had been intrigued by the things left unsaid.

  They fed on a diet of kaleidoscopes those first few months. They rocked each other in tight embraces at smoky, intimate music gigs, watched obscure films in kitsch, independent cinemas, had sex in the dressing room of a Sense charity shop between items of clothing, partied at the temporary homes of squatters who didn’t have last names and smoked everything but their nomadic sensibilities. They streaked through Victoria Park at night with nothing but the winter chill turning their limbs into the body parts of store dummies. One dead arm, one dead leg, kisses at body temperature. When they went night swimming, the pale moonlight was anaemic. They watched it swallow headlights from the cars on the motorway in the distance. Jonno looked like a beautiful, black shark in the water, a fin in his back, leaning to the right like a silvery right angle triangle. He came up for air and the water rushed off his skin, flashed his sharp, white teeth. He held her, handed her the shark smile as she wore his fin. Afterwards, he told her there was a beauty in destruction.