But this site? Wow. That’s all I find myself capable of saying. And I’m someone who’s trying to make a living out of saying things in interesting, fancy ways. So when I say ‘wow’, you know it’s something to be wowed by.

Most of the spam this site gets is fairly dull, generally following the lines of ‘An interesting an informative post, see [insert site being promoted here] if this interests you too’. But some of them… oh, boy. Some of them don’t just take the biscuit; they take the entire cookie jar.

But why, I thought today, should I be the only one to have a laugh at these bizarre, often nigh-incomprehensible automated replies. So, I reckoned that I’d put together… (pause for trumpets)… a top five Spam-of-the-Week. Let’s get on with the first week.

Number Five

Our first spam post was in response to ‘The Waiting Room’. I found it pleasantly ironic, given that the story is about the Grim Reaper performing his duties in the waiting room of a hospital.

I think so too I think maybe they just see the pelope who were sent to hospital, and forget all the pelope who were diverted (out of sight, out of mind ).

Number Four

This one made the list purely because I’ve never seen spam mangle the word ‘people’ quite so horrifically.

Posted on Do you ppolee have a facebook fan page? I looked for one on twitter but could not discover one, I would really like to become a fan!

Number Three

I had to do a double take on this one just to confirm it actually was in French. Translations would be most welcome!

KitchAnne dit :Ce sont des hemoms celibataires ces designers ? Quand ils imaginent un frigo il est toujours a moitie vide.

Number Two

Whoever comes up with the best definition of what ‘rtonamic’ means gets themselves a free commissioned story. I’m honestly stumped…

I think being rtonamic can be as easy as just showing that you put a little thought into something. Anything that you do that shows that you were paying attention and listening and then acting on that, can be rtonamic

Number One

This week’s winner was a guarantee from the moment I saw it.

One of the tghnis that I most cherish is bedtime reading with my daughters. My oldest is 11, so I spend most bedtimes reading with my youngest daughter now, but it pains me to let go of that tradition completely. So, sometimes I sneak in and we read a few paragraphs together or discuss our latest favs. I’m SO thankful that my daughters are readers. We have shared so much together through books and it has also led to many discussions on faith, love, friendship, life, family and more. I hope you get to share this with your Atticus as well!

This is the number one spam of the week because, firstly, it’s actually quite a well written spam post and, secondly, because Atticus is probably something I’d name my child. Because I’m cruel like that.

See you ppolee next week!

Here’s the dirty little secret though: rules are meant to be broken. Or at least bent.

Let’s take setting an example. Setting can be a huge limitation on what resources you have to work with. The traditional fantasy setting is what you might call, in the vein of A Clockwork Orange, ‘medieval plus’. That is to say, the general historical setting of the medieval period (knights, royalty, poor bodily hygiene) plus a fantastical element (magic, bizarre critters, capricious gods and the like).

Consider a generic ‘medieval plus’ setting. It’s a Europe-sized world with, say, four kingdoms that exist in a constant state of mistrust, political manoeuvring and backstabbing. Wild, savage orcs roam the hinterlands around these kingdoms, elves sit in their forests singing and generally being ineffectually introspective, dwarves drink and mine beneath the mountains. Maybe, if you want to get really exotic, there’s a dragon or two.

Now, I’m not saying that you can’t write an interesting story set in this world interesting. You can, and more power to you if you do. But you’ll never be able to escape the fact that your setting has limited your available resources. You won’t be able to have, for example, a chrome plated death-cyborg rampaging around the marketplace of a sleepy little hamlet. At least, not without your readership coming back to you and asking what the hell you’re playing at. The fact that you’ve included something from an entirely different setting stands out like… well, like a chrome plated death-cyborg in a sleepy hamlet marketplace. By choosing the generic ‘medieval plus’ fantasy setting, you’ve limited the resources you can acceptably use in your story.

This has never sat well with me. I’m a man who likes having his options open. Not just because it means I can throw new and strange ideas into my stories with gleeful abandon, but because I believe it makes a story more interesting. The less resources you have available, the more predictable your story becomes. I’d put good money on most anyone being able to guess how a plot set in the world described above will play out. Why? Because we’re used to the resources available in such settings and that means that stories in those settings risk becoming predictable. No matter how much effort a writer spends developing a unique history to that world, he’ll be hamstringed (hamstrung?) by the fact that his history is composed of building-blocks that we’re used to. The problem is felt with particular keenness among fantasy writers because we’ve been choosing settings that give us the same basic resources that have been used since Tolkien and earlier.

How do we get around this? Well, we have two choices. The first is to choose settings that give us resources that readers are altogether less used to. I’m of the ever-growing opinion that this is behind the (relatively) recent rise of interest in the Steampunk sub-genre. In Steampunk the resources available are still comparatively new and unexplored, which means that writers have a greater chance of penning stories that capture and hold the reader’s attention because, simply put, it’s all still new.

You might see where this choice is going. Simply choosing a new setting may give you new and interesting resources to work with, but it: a) still limits your resources, and b) won’t stay new and interesting forever.

Thus we come to the second option. It’s simple and obvious on paper, and a complete pain in the ass to realise in practice. Create your own damn setting. Don’t find a setting that’s still new and interesting. Make a setting that’s new and interesting.

I think I need to clarify this point. I’m not saying build an entirely new setting from the ground up; you’re welcome to try, but it seems (to me at least) to be an inescapable fact that every setting will, to one extent or another, draw inspiration (and thus resources) from pre-existing settings. No, the real trick is finding a way to tweak a setting so that you can introduce new and unexpected resources.

Let me give a few examples. In gaming circles, Skyrim has been creating a massive hubbub recently for being an excellently put-together gaming experience. I spent most of Christmas playing it and massively enjoyed it. But a part of me was stepping back and examining it in terms of story-telling. And, for the most part, it conformed to the ‘medieval plus’ setting: a few factions eyeing each other up suspiciously, elves being insufferable, orcs gnashing their teeth at the borders of civilisation. There were even a few dragons (well, technically wyverns, but I was almost beaten around the head for belabouring that point…).

But here’s where they changed things up, where they built a new setting that allowed new resources to surprise me as an experiencer of their story. In Skyrim’s setting, there are no dwarves. At least, not any more. Some mysterious calamity befell them at some point in the distant past, removing the entire race but not, and here’s the crucial part, the remains of their hyper-advanced empire. So, when I was exploring one of their ruined cities for the first time, and I came across what was effectively a chrome plated death-cyborgs left over from the dwarves’ techno-kingdom. I barely had time to say ‘oh, that’s a surprise’ before it boiled me in my armour with a blast of super-heated steam.

Or look at Harry Potter. At its heart it’s similar to many other fantasy stories (lots of magic, fair few monsters) but Rowling modified the setting in two important ways. Firstly, she placed the setting parallel to the modern real world, allowing for an interesting interplay here and there between the ‘wizarding world’ and the ‘Muggle world’ (Platform Nine and Three-Quarters and the Prime Minister’s briefing at the beginning of Book Five spring to mind). Secondly, she placed the setting’s focus inside a school, introducing the new resources of classes, teachers, house-rivalries and, perhaps most lastingly of all, schoolyard sports.

A third example might be Twilight, where Stephenie Meyer took a standard vampiric setting and introduced new resources by making the central characters nothing like vampires at all…

Okay, that was an easy jab, but the point remains. By combining settings in a sort of world-building alchemy, you can produce an entirely new setting with resources from its constituent parts. And while individually the reader might be familiar with those resources, when brought together the new interactions offered make things new and difficult to anticipate.

That, at least, is what I’ve been trying to do with Crescent Knife. I’ve always enjoyed the ‘fallen empire’ setting in works like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Warhammer’s 40,000 setting and, to a slightly lesser extent, Frank Herbert’s Dune. There’s something massively attractive about a world that has passed its peak and, while retaining many wonders, has forgotten where they come from or how they truly work.

Crescent Knife is set in the slowly decaying city of Ivarda. Thanks to its miles-high walls, it is the only city to have survived the coming of ‘the Mist’, a strange phenomenon that has scoured the rest of the world of life. Before the Mist came, Ivarda and its empire was a place of enlightenment, possessing mastery of technology and magic, but after millennia besieged behind their walls this enlightenment has dimmed to a faint ember. Relics of their advanced technology remain, but there are either poorly understood or completely misunderstood.

So far, so generic. So I decided to throw some of the standard fantasy setting resources into this mix and see what came out. Magic and an accepted theology are often key staples of fantasy settings: mages are experts in magic and the gods actively manoeuvre mortals in elaborate plans spanning centuries. What happens when you mix that with a fallen empire setting? Well, in Crescent Knife, the mages are a desperate order of covetous scholars, using their magic to hoard knowledge in a desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of history. But with each passing generation the knowledge fades, more magic is forgotten and the task becomes simultaneously harder and more futile. The gods, meanwhile, have experienced a similar fall: dependant upon the worship of a people now far more concerned with day-to-day survival, they have grown frail and starved, weak shells of their former glories attended too by only a few, desperate souls in otherwise abandoned churches. In their absence, born from the primordial fears and sufferings of the population, a new race of gods has replaced them. Afraid they will end up like their predecessors, these capricious entities seek, like the citizens of Ivarda, to secure their daily survival, which they do so by ensuring that the atmosphere of dread and drudgery that birthed them is sustained.

I’d like to think that this sort of setting will keep readers on their toes. Far from being the usual masters of the fantasy setting, the mages and gods are just as desperate, if not more so, than the common population, and that makes them altogether more dangerous, unpredictable forces in the setting. They also allow for different lenses through which to see the desperate battle for survival in this slowly-disintegrating world. All-in-all, I reckon, some useful new resources to play around with.

Priests call it the Fallen Sky.

Common men call it the Mist.

All agree, however, on one thing…

Truly, it is Death.

Besieged by an enemy that cannot be understood or stopped, Ivarda has slowly decayed behind its high walls. Its refugee citizens struggle to see another sunrise in the choked Low Quarter. Abased beasts skulk through the Innard City. Once-mighty Wizards huddle in their towers, desperately grasping for secrets lost over the millennia. Even the Gods that once blessed the land now lie, forgotten and withered, in the hollow edifices of once-gold temples.

And above it all, looking down from their estates of sand and dust, the Nobles scheme and vie for more illusionary power. Amongst their ancient arsenal of forgotten secrets and impossible devices are the Crescent Knives: slave-assassins bound to a Noble household, sworn to persecute their vile and petty agendas until liberation or death.

Memphield is Crescent Knife to the Elcyst Dynast, and his mistress’ last hope to see her family’s fortunes restored. But even as he spins his own web of treachery and deception, Memphield finds himself uncovering a greater, and altogether more dangerous plot. A plan that threatens to change Ivarda forever. A plot that extends from the Nobles’ Tower all the way out…

… Into the Mist.

To the patrons, it was just a sword. A slab of dark metal that hung above the hearth, its nicks and grooves illuminated from beneath by the ochre flame that blossomed amidst the lumps of coal every evening, when the townsfolk slumped in from the fields and mercenaries paused their quests in search of food and board. On occasion one of the mercenaries might comment on the archaic design, but only as a passing curiosity, in much the same way they might remark about an odd-shaped cloud that resembled a war-pachyderm, or a collection of rocks stacked in what once might have been some ancient cairn.

To Ruther, the sword was indeed a cairn: a relic from glories past, denoting the great landmarks of his life’s geography. The soaring peaks of his victories over the Partridge Lord and the Cauling Wilds, the low gully of his incarceration in Blackmarsh, the jagged plains of his long years as a sell-sword. But as time had passed, those landmarks had faded, until they were little more than odd-shaped clouds themselves. And there was only Ruther to remark upon them. Old, haggard Ruther, as faded as his victories, if not yet quite as forgotten.

It did not trouble him most nights. He contented himself behind the bar, polishing the steins so that they, at least, remained clear and dragging another barrel from the cellar when thirsty patrons drained the pervious one. But like his arthritis when he polished the steins, or his alchemically-wrought pseudo-spine when he dragged barrels up, there were the occasional flashes. His joints would sear, his back would twitch involuntarily. And the prowess he had once possessed would leave his hands trembling for the weight of his sword and his ears ringing with the distant sounds of battle.

In the early days of his retirement, Ruther had shuffled over to the hearth whenever those pangs overtook so that he might take his blade in hand once more. Just to let the grip rest in his palm and hear the edge swim through the air. For a few years he had managed to stagger around the hall of his tavern, swinging clumsy, overbearing strokes and tripping over his worn sandals. Slowly his strength had seeped even further from him, leaving his form as frail and drained as a rotten wooden bucket. Then came the day when his palms looked more gnarled and leathery than the grip of his blade. The two had never touched since.

Like his glories, time had slowly faded the ache in his chest too.

The evening had started out as all the rest that month. Sun set and the lone men, having little elsewhere to go, found themselves seats near the bar and bought themselves frothed pints of cider made from the apples they had probably helped pick that harvest. It was enough to keep the tavern’s costs managed, but Ruther would have admitted to feeling a breath of relief slip from his tired lungs as the rune carved across the front door chimed and four armoured men sauntered in. Mercenaries were liberal with their drinking, and that meant they were liberal with their coin.

Ruther was slowly working out the sums in his head for the profit he might make off the mercenaries for drink and lodging when it caught his eye. A blush. Searing red across three of their cheeks that seemed to glow with its own furious glare when their faces were turned from the hearth. It was a summer’s eve beyond the thick stone walls of the tavern, the muggy, close, moist-ridden air slowly cooling beneath the moon’s icy watch.

He knew what it was. Gut instinct. The one thing that had never faded. He could have identified what breed of dragon made that kreening siren blare fifty years ago, and he could tell what narcotic was blistering its way through those mercenaries’ veins now. He didn’t need to be sitting with his regulars as the sell-swords loomed over them with mocking tones and menacing looks to smell the cinnamon stench on their breath, or see the twisting ropes of blood in their eyes. He just knew.

Fire-moss.

‘If’n you boys ent round here to cool yer embers, I’ll be askin’ for youse to leave.’ Even through cracked, yellowed and missing teeth, there was still steel in Ruther’s voice. The fact that his fingers were brushing the trigger of the crossbow he kept beneath the counter probably leant some strength to his words.

One mercenary, tall and wiry with a rapier dangling from his lip, looked up an over at him. ‘Quiet, sandstone. We’re looking for some actual sport.’ He gave a grating chuckle, like a jagged shard of glass scouring over bone, and patted one of the regular’s shoulders. ‘Strapping farming stock, you know?’

‘I ent lettin’ youse go burnin’ up in my tavern.’

The rapier-man didn’t even look up this time. ‘I said quiet, old man. You’re not worth the effort of fighting.’

Ruther didn’t need to be fast. He just needed to be accurate. Or damn lucky. He wasn’t sure which resulted in the crossbow bolt finding itself jammed into the rapier-man’s leg, but he didn’t question or complain. He just reloaded and trained it between the man’s eyes.

‘You’ll be forgivin’ me if I ent extendin’ the same courtesy.’

The situation lurched. One of the rapier-man’s comrades, a large brute with fists the size of mallets, and a mallet the size of a small sheep, lunged towards the bar. He was a boulder: large and unwieldy, but full of a terrifying momentum that crushed down upon Ruther. And, also like a boulder, he was entirely unfazed by the bolt Ruther unloaded into his shoulder.

The situation lurched again, Ruther’s sense of time and everything else blurring as he was hauled over the bar and launched onto the table. Still reeling from the fastest he’d been made to move in years, Ruther could do nothing as the brute pinned him to the table, and a gore-drenched arrowhead was brandished inches from his face.

‘Okay, now you’re going to make good sport,’ the rapier-man snarled, pupils dilated so wide with rage and fire-moss that between his eyelids there was only black, white and increasing amounts of red. He opened his mouth, presumably to threaten Ruther some more, but with a heavy crack there grew a halo of splinters and wooden fragments around his head. He slumped to the side, staggering into the path of the brute and revealing one of Ruther’s regulars standing behind with the remnants of the upper half of a chair clutched in shaking hands.

Filled with desperate strength, and aided by the brute’s distraction, Ruther managed to scrabble off the table but found himself tripping and slipping over the detritus of the chair beneath his feet. Knees and palms jarred against the cold flagstones of the hearth and a blunt ache of impact rippled along his lips, but as Ruther struggled to stand everything stopped. The tavern fell silent, the mercenaries fell still. The pain, the ache, the tiredness, the age… They all evaporated. For a brief, beautiful moment all the long, worn years of retirement were cast into an oubliette and left to languish.

There, hanging above the hearth, its nicks and grooves illuminated from beneath by the ochre flame, was his sword. He couldn’t see the wrinkles when his hand closed around the grip, and although the weapon dragged his arm down with its weight, it didn’t matter. Yes, it was heavy, but it was strong too, and still sharp.

Ruther’s tired lungs managed to force out a grunt of exertion as he raised his sword. To either side stood his regulars and across from him snarled the mercenaries, the fire-moss searing every last nerve in their bodies with bloodlust. And it didn’t matter that they were hopelessly outclassed either. Because even if this was his last fight, Ruther was happy. The sword had been his cairn, marking every high and low on the long trail of his life. Having it mark the end… Yes, he was happy with that.

Because maybe, just maybe, when they cleared away the broken bodies and smashed tables, they’d find his sword and realise that it was more than just an old blade. That it had always been much, much more.

So, that’s my submission to Napier winging its digital way through the cyber warrens of the e-mail nexus and all hands can step down from battle-stations. How hands are capable of stepping, I’m not entirely sure, but that might be because my brain has burned out a few of its motors working on this brief and I’m four days into the mother of all caffeine withdraws. Damn you Coca Cola, my dark and effervescent mistress!

I’m going to keep this short and sweet, because this site really isn’t supposed to be about the random minutia updates of my rain-soaked, suddenly-caffeine-free life, and I really don’t like how my blog posts are threatening to outnumber my short stories. Dammit, Griff, it used to be about the words. Anyway…

Here’s how this week is going to go as I make up for lost time and actually get my ass into gear for attracting views. This weekend is going to be a double-bill with a new short story and a teaser for Crescent Knife (that book-shaped thing that I’ll be harping on about very soon). I’ll also be tinkering around with Amazon to get my portfolio up on their Kindle site so that folks can download them for free. And if I can’t get people interested by handing out free stuff, I’m in serious sodding trouble.

Next week will finally be a return to our scheduled programming, with the long-awaited (by me, at least) start to my ‘Realities of Fantasy’ series. So be sure to come back on Tuesday at least when I start getting my hands dirty with how to tackle swords and sorcery, myths and magic, Dungeons and… wait, I’ve already put one product placement into this post. Better not push my luck with the lawyers.

Be seein’ you.

To explain myself: I’m applying for a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Napier University (take a gander). It’s a course with an utterly excellent reputation for producing publishable writers, and I know it’d give my work the kick it needs to make it onto bookstore shelves. Here’s the catch: their application process is rigorous. I’ve already managed to get my foot in the door by passing the first stage, but now I’ve got two weeks to write a short story based on a brief I’m being given tomorrow. And then, various pantheons of gods willing, a final interview.

I need to do well at this. Napier’s Masters the biggest opportunity I’ve ever had to make a name for myself, so if there was ever a story I needed to be utterly stellar, it’s this one. So I’m putting a pause on my other short story work and my ‘Realities of Fantasy’ series (although, since it hasn’t properly started, I guess that’s more of a delay than a pause). I hope those of you out there already reading this, what few of you there are, bear with me on this.

See you guys next time. It’ll be worth the wait, I promise!

I walked in to find him sat on the foot of my bed. He looked up, our gazes met, and I could see in his eyes the long years he’d spent as a half-remembered dream in the back of my head. My prodigal son had returned.

‘Long time, no see,’ Duke murmured, voice hovering awkwardly between nostalgic friend and victim of an old, but still red raw, betrayal. His appearance hadn’t changed from the last time I’d seen him: the same tall, perhaps to the point of gangly, dark and handsome man I’d loved. ‘How you been keeping?’

I didn’t say anything. It had been a long day, full of drab textbooks and fluorescent lighting. I’d popped two painkillers a few hours ago and my brain was still feeling wrapped in needle-laced wool. This was the last thing I needed. I prayed it wasn’t real. My shoulders slouched, relieving themselves both of the workload I had slogged through and the straps of my backpack, the old and tattering thing clattering with the sound of laptops and books really too valuable to be allowed to clatter as it hit the floor. I crossed the room in a few shuffled steps, dropped myself into my desk-chair and let it carry me on its groaning wheels a few inches further.

When my eyes slid halfway open once more, Duke was still there. I told him so.

‘Making up for lost appearances,’ he replied, digging into his coat pocket and producing a bruised, crumpled packet of cigarettes. Well, packet of cigarette really, since as he pulled one out with his teeth he crumpled the paper carton into a ball and stuffed it back into his pocket without a second thought. In no hurry, he drew out a Zippo and, after a few tries, managed to light up. I couldn’t help but notice, through the cheap green plastic, that there were only a few droplets of fuel left. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that to be bitter.’ He’d taken too long for the apology to even come across as remotely sincere. That brought a tired, low smirk to one side of his face. ‘Can you blame me? It’s been three years since you last wrote me. Pushing six since we spent any proper time together.’ He rose to his feet and tried to start pacing, but the room was too small to let him really get more than two or three strides. So instead he rounded on me and tore the cigarette from the side of his mouth. Those long years in his eyes had deepened, darkened, and were slowly spilling over and running down his cheeks. ‘You know what? I am bitter. Why the fuck shouldn’t I be? After all the changes I made for you, everything I risked, the life I gave up because you wanted me to. And for what? So you could run off with someone smarter, or someone more attractive? Without even a goddamn word of goodbye?’

He was panting, softly, but I could hear the catch in his voice. That little strangled choke of a sob suppressed. I commented on his smoking habit, and his swearing. When I knew him he hadn’t done either. It wasn’t an attempt to derail him. I was morbidly curious.

‘Yeah, well, you didn’t expect me to just stay still, did you?’ Actually, I did. I thought that was how the relationship worked. Duke snorted at that. ‘Hate to break it to you, but after you left I kinda fell apart. Just ask Izzy, he’s well on his way now that you’ve moved on to Mr. Tall, Green and Handsome.’

I sighed and pressed down on my temples. The headache was returning. I told him that it wasn’t personal, that it was the way things happened, that… It was complicated. I thought we had agreed, at the beginning, that it was never going to last: I would stay with him until things began to sour and stagnate, then I’d move on to the next relationship. Duke slumped back down onto the bed and ran a hand through his hair. I knew he did that whenever he was subtly trying to dry his eyes; I’d made him pull that trick more times than I was comfortable with.

‘But you never said goodbye.’

I got up and moved over to the bed, wrapping an arm around his shoulder and resting my forehead against his. It had been so long, I’d forgotten the feel of wind-battered skin and wildly curling hair. He felt alive. He felt real.

My voice was little more than an errant breath. I had become that shy, awkward boy again, starting a relationship with no idea where it would go or what to expect along the way. And I was sorry. It wouldn’t make things better, or wash away the years Duke had spent as a dim and distant memory buried beneath his successors and fantasised what-ifs. But it was all I could really offer him: a full stop to a story that had gone on too long.

Duke took me by my free hand, brought me back up onto my feet and guided me into my desk-chair. He knelt, produced my laptop from my bag and set it open before me. His hands moved to my shoulders, gripped them with a gentle firmness and slowly began to massage the day’s stress from them. I let out a sigh and permitted the warm glow of relaxation to spread down my spine. My fingers moved over the keyboard, dancing with a carefree grace they had forgotten amidst the e-mails and essays. No dull plod from one letter to another, no vitriolic red lines beneath misspelt words as my absent mind failed to process some jargon. It came as naturally as water flowing down a leaf, sliding effortlessly around obstacles to find the best route to the end. And when my words reached the tip of the leaf, they hung there, a crystal mirror in which I saw myself and Duke suspended for a moment.

I saved the story and with a click of the mouse closed the file. My droplet fell from its leaf and disappeared into the growing lake below. I looked up from my chair. Duke smiled down at me, and then he was gone.

‘Goodbye.’

Duke got his goodbye from me. He got one last story.

As the thug’s cold, steel fist slams into my jaw and sends me spiralling to the ground in a dribble of blood and teeth, I wonder where it all went wrong. The bastard has another three friends with him, all with that hungry look every soon-to-be-murderer gets, so I don’t exactly have time for the whole life-flashing-before-my-eyes shtick. Just the crib notes, please… I’ve got an appointment to get the shit kicked out of me.

It started like all tragedies: with a dame. One of those real stunners, like that Fay Wray that had been getting all the blokes flocking to the hollie-theatres. You know the sort: hair down to her shoulders, legs up to her ears. A come hither look that smouldered like a crashed zeppelin. The sort of dame men would die to be with. Maybe not the best turn of phrase, given the situation…

She was dressed up in an emerald cocktail dress. Told me she’d seen my office on the way to a shindig, liked the look of it – discreet, she seemed to think. I didn’t know if I liked being called discreet. Rent boys were discreet, backstreet surgi-tecs were discreet. Private eyes? Well, I guess maybe my pride just wanted to hear something more along the lines of ‘talented’… Hell, even ‘competent’. I bristled, and asked her what self-respecting gent holds a shindig in Dagenham. She told me she was on her way to the Ford aeroworks, friend of the wife of the manager’s son or some such thing. Said the company needed someone discreet for a little look-see at the competition. I took my time to light up before telling her to sling it; private eyes deal with unfaithful husbands, not corporate espionage.

She flashed me the puppy-dog eyes, and then a cheque with a whole bunch of zeroes on it. I asked when she wanted me to start. Don’t go judging me… Professional integrity, what little there is in private dickery, had never put food on the table before.

She told me the job. Funny goings-on at the areoworks, parts missing, machines fried and whatnot. In a word: sabotage. The manager seemed to have gotten the idea into his head that Briggs Motor Bodies were still raw at Ford for muscling in on their turf (not to mention setting up the largest aeroworks in Europa right under their noses). I filled in the rest of the job for myself: hit the pubs, ask around and drop a few not-so-subtle, not-so-empty threats here and there until I got myself a name. As she left, she nodded at the cheque I’d stuffed in my breast pocket and told me there was another one of those waiting if I got the right man. I’d grabbed my coat and hat and was hot-footing it to the nearest pub before you could say ‘corporate whore’.

The place wasn’t much to look at. Literally. The bombed-out remains of an old tenement building patched up with corrugated iron and bric-a-brac from the nearby junkyard, the oily glimmer of kerosene lanterns flickering through the dirt-caked, crack-webbed windows. Five years since the Great War and they still hadn’t got around to fixing the electricity around here? Sometimes I wondered why the rest of the world looked to London as the capital of capitals…

Inside it wasn’t much better: a haphazard collection of workers just finished their factory shifts cluttered around a haphazard collection of broken tables pilfered from the neighbouring, less fortunate, tenements. In the corner, a rusty old ‘Bard clunked and whirred as his thick metal digits crashed down on a bruised piano, completely drowning out the music. Thank God for small mercies. A thick, stinking blanket of smoke hung from the roof, trying its best to hide the reek of alcohol that smelt more like motor spirit dregs and the whiff of the unwashed masses. It was a foulness you never got used to: I’d spent years putting up with the same reek in a ditch somewhere in the arse-end of France, and it still burnt my nostrils as I crossed over to the bar.

I recognised a few of the blokes through the cigarette miasma and soon after my second pint homed in on reliable old Donny. A few years back I’d tracked down a surgi-tec who’d given him a dodgy prosthetic and put the shyster in need of a few fake limbs himself. Donny had told me he could never repay me, and I’d been holding him to that ever since.

Turns out Donny had a friend who’s brother’s father-in-law worked at the Ford plant and might know something about the spanner-in-the-works. I got an address off the poor half-man and headed up to the next floor to check if there was anyone else I could squeeze gossip and half-heard rumours out of.

It was well past midnight when I finally slipped from the pub and started back for the office. It was too late to bother getting the Mono back to Covent Garden; my desk chair was more than sufficient.

As I passed by a wall covered in posters of Marshall Kitchener pointing accusingly at me and demanding I enlist, the uncomfortable sound of a second set of footsteps echoed through the alley. I barely had the time to tell myself it was just another Joe on his way back home when another set of heels clicked against the cobblestones. Not the moth-eaten, dog-eared loafers of local workmen, no…These shoes sounded well-heeled. Corporate shoes.

‘The bosses don’t appreciate dicks sticking their noses where it don’t belong.’

I groaned. My trademark unsubtlety was fine for runaway husbands, but it looked like the corporations were a lot more on-the-ball. Proved the dame right, though…

There were four of them in the mouth of the alleyway, two abreast. The speaker was a short bastard – looked broader than he was tall. Beneath his coat I could hear the steady whirring of a prosthetic. Not the clumsy clunking of Donny’s; this was the proper deal. Military-grade.

Well fuck…

I look up from the dirt and blood and find myself staring down the infinite blackness of a gun barrel. The alleyway echoes as he thumbs back the hammer. I close my eyes as a shot rings out across the city. Never could say no to a pretty dress, or a hefty paycheque.

Goddamn dame…

I hadn’t hit anyone since primary school. Tommy Sheldon had been picking on me for weeks: teasing, insulting, pushing, the whole nine yards. It had been a slow, gradual build-up of anger and then a sudden lurch into violence, like bad weather gathering overhead before the heavens open in an instant. He had cut in ahead of me in the lunch queue and was rehashing the usual jibes of ‘fatty’, ‘lardy’ and ‘piggy-pig-pig’ when I dropped the tray I was holding and landed a solid blow to his jaw, sending him clattering to the ground hard. My brain hadn’t had any input: my body knew what it was doing and was sick of my better judgment holding it back.

Twenty years later, I hit someone again. This time I thought about it. She was old, which translated into two things in my mind. Firstly, I could take her. Secondly, she’d already lived a full life: she didn’t deserve the twenty-pack of bottled water we were arguing over. It wasn’t that I’d pondered long and hard, in fact the thoughts came and went unsettlingly quickly, but this time I knew what I was doing. My brain was definitely in control, and my better half was already slipping.

I dropped the bottles of water into the trolley and no one around us thought to question me. I wasn’t a tough man, I didn’t have practice in the don’t-mess-with-me stare, but they knew just as well as I did that none of that mattered. My eyes were hard, shoulders tense and back ramrod-straight as I pushed my way through the crowd tearing tins and cartons from the shelves.

I was going to survive this, even if it meant someone else didn’t.

David held me tight when I finally returned home, and I permitted myself a few moments of intimacy before telling him to go unpack the shopping while I boarded up the windows. He swallowed, took a breath and then nodded. I was halfway through nailing the final board over the living room window when he came in holding a pack of kitchen knives, asking me why I’d bought them when everything else was tinned or bottled. He didn’t like the answer I gave him.

That night we sat on the sofa and watched the news reports come in. Confirmation in five new cities and twenty-seven more deaths. David’s arms closed tight around my shoulders. Over the pleas of the presenter to remain calm and his repetitions of the government’s emergency procedures, I could hear his breathing: shallow, erratic, desperately trying to stifle sobs. I placed one hand between his shoulders, rubbing up and down his spine in time with my own, regular breaths. The fingertips of my other hand brushed against the handle of the largest of the knives I’d bought. I let out a sigh that very slowly transformed into a yawn. When I slept, I barely even felt the knife beneath my pillow.

Three days later, the television refused to work. I checked the stereo and then all the lamps. No power. The utilities had failed quicker that the newspapers, and I, had expected. We ate what remained of our untinned food in the dark of the kitchen that night, silent as the first helicopters beat their propellers overhead.

After that time became something of an irrelevance, measured only in baked bean tins and bottles of water per day. David didn’t think I noticed he was piling more onto my plate than his, but I’d always manage to get him to look away for long enough to switch them around. The office job had left me doughy around the edges, so I could afford to eat a little less. I almost tried to smile at the prospect of using all this mess as a slim-down programme.

We were down to our last five tins when the first person pounded on our door. David had been squinting through the darkness at a book, face pressed almost flush to the page, while I’d been recounting the bottles of water. Three rapid taps, a pause, another three faster, another pause, then a constant beating at the doorframe. I could hear the muffled voice of Mrs. Jones coming from behind the plywood and, approaching step-by-step, managed to make out a few choice words. ‘Help’ was among them. I explained to her, voice raised to penetrate the barricade, that we didn’t have enough food to keep ourselves going much longer, let along her family. Her voice was just as loud as mine, but my tone had been flat, steady, uncompromising; hers rose and felt like the tides, at one moment a manic dash of desperate, hopeful entreaties, the next a near-wailing jumble of pleads. She was halfway through explaining that it was only her and Danielle, her youngest, now that-

From behind the door came a sneeze. The sort of high-pitched sneeze than not too long ago might have brought a light smile to my face and prompted me to share a look with the parent, in an ‘isn’t that adorable’ sort of way. Now I just turned away from the door and returned to counting bottles, telling David to ignore the racket. For five hours, all we heard was the rapping on our door, punctuated by the occasional sob and increasingly frequent sneezes.

Time didn’t pass, but the supplies did. We scraped the insides of the tins for a rogue bean, or carrot, or sliver of pasta and that managed to keep us going for what felt like a few more days. But before long a new sort of emptiness settled over me, and from the silence David had fallen into I guessed he wasn’t far behind.

So I decided I had to go scavenging. David protested, at first against the whole idea, then against the fact that I should do it. Too risky, he said. The military, looters, exposure. I placed a hand on his cheek and one side of my lip twitched as I felt the thick pelt that was developing. That must have been driving him mad. I told him that I didn’t want him risking himself, but I think he understood one of the meanings behind my placation. He didn’t have what it took. I wasn’t sure if he got my second implication.

I didn’t want him to have what it took.

There are two kinds of people in the waiting room, and it barely takes a passing glance to tell them apart. The first kind sit back, legs crossed, fingers drumming on that smoothly lacquered not-wood that can only be bought at Ikea. They read the out-of-date magazines, listen to music, send a text message. They have the gall to roll their eyes at the wait, expressions full of an apathetic indignation that the doctor should dare to cut such a swathe of time from their important days.

And then there’s the second kind. The frightened kind. They lean forwards in their chairs, hands clasped in their laps like small children in prayer, eyes downcast to gaze blindly at the anaesthetised blue linoleum floor. They don’t rock, or shake, or seem to move at all. A half dozen Pompeian statues frozen in an agonised tableau of doomed uncertainty: still, expressionless, unflinching as the nurse calls their name. They rise as if through water, their movements slow and somehow exaggeratedly understated. They don’t return the stares of the other kind: they’re not here at the request of a partner or out of some hypochondriacal sense of just-in-case, better-to-be-sure. They’re here because in the back of their heads echoes the steady tick tick ticking of a clock counting its way down to their date with the biological gallows. They don’t want to hear their sentence, but they no longer have a choice in the matter.

I watch as one walks past me. He’s uncomfortable in his own skin, a sort of writhing in his movements as if he’s trying to wriggle himself free from his body. Because it’s not his body, not any more. There’s a tenant in there now, a fetid squatter who isn’t going to leave until he’s trashed up the place. The man knows this, knows he’s inadvertently made the worst kind of deal by letting that little demon in. But the nurse greets him with an antiseptic smile that barely reaches her cheeks, let alone her eyes, and moves a hand up to his shoulder as she turns to guide him down the corridor. Her hand barely, just barely, makes contact. Silly little girl… don’t you know how cooties are caught?

I readjust myself in the chair, check my watch and sigh. The movements register in the peripheral of another a few seats down from me and she looks at me, mouth opening to say ‘yeah, tell me about it’ in the hopes that we might be self-righteous together. But I’m forgotten about before the words even form on her lips. I’m not offended; on the contrary, I prefer my privacy. She’s one of the first kind, and barely a minute after eye-contact she’s set down her newspaper with a huff and begun drumming out a beat on the armrest. She doesn’t look up a second time as I take the paper and leaf through. Honour killings here, gangland shoots there, fabric of society breaking down everywhere. Busy, busy, busy.

A shock of red hair bobs over the rim of the broadsheet. It’s him, and he’s late. I fold the paper closed and watch as he walks across the waiting room to the reception desk, planting his hands on the rim and leaning down to murmur that he has an appointment. The nurse’s reply masks my approach, feet making nary a sound on the cool plastic, clothes not daring to rustle under the motion. Only when I’m within a good two paces of the man do I let my presence be felt: a squeak on the linoleum floor, a faint cough. Just enough to draw his attention, to make him twist around and let me slip my hand into his. I squeeze. His hand is cold, but then again it’s winter and I’ve never exactly been the warmest person either. His eyebrows meet as he regards me with confusion. Have we met? Does he know me?

I shake my head. My face is set into that second kind of person: resigned, doomed to follow the motions, go through the procedure full well knowing how it will turn out. I meet his gaze as my free hand rises to clap him on the shoulder. None of this barely-touching the nurse pulled. I grip his shoulder good and hard; it’s the least I owe the guy. I half pull him close, half lean inwards. My lips brush against his ear, and my breath is a biting December breeze. I whisper three little words in his ear. The nurse looks up, confused at this sudden, awkward embrace, but the words aren’t meant for her. I squeeze his hand tighter.

He tries to pull himself from my grip, and I let him. With a half-step back, he looks at me, no more confusion left in eyes. For a moment, I see myself reflected in those two little panes of human glass: the damnation, the fatality, of prescience. And then it’s gone, pupils dilating as the fear takes over, the mind shuts itself off from raw, untainted fact. The human mind isn’t built to cope with a divine truth, but there you have it. Them’s the breaks.

I turn and leave. No other gaze follows me but the red haired man’s. No one else cares; I’m not their problem. Only he understands that, actually, I am. I’m everyone’s problem, sooner or later. Although it always seems to be sooner.

I keep my hands in my pockets as I step out of the hospital and onto the rain-cut street. The wet cobblestones are just what my skin asked for: the sensations are little sunburst in my nerve endings reminding me that, for everything else in the world, I’m still here. Alive? Well, that would be an ecumenical matter. But definitely still here.

As I cross the road, I turn and look back up at the hospital. I’m almost sure I can see a red flash of hair in one of the upper windows. Perhaps it’s one of my infrequent moments of whimsy, or that Serendipity that’s always following me around, little tease that she is. I shrug to myself. Either way, there’s nothing to be done about it. I’ve said my piece.

I put my back to the hospital and it’s doomed occupants and head down the street. For what it’s worth, I really was sorry.