All stories

It was warm. Too warm. Susan lay in the hammock squinting at the murky sun, slowly descending across the hazy orange sky. It would set soon, not that it would cool off much. She knew she'd have to move soon, or the mosquitoes would set in and she would pay for that for days. Heaving herself out, she made her way into her shack, pulling the door closed in her wake. Shuffling over to the window, she pulled the shutters closed too, briefly pausing, hands pressed against the window frame, head dropping forward in the oppressive, steamy darkness, before lighting the gas lamp to allow her to prepare her paltry dinner.

Early to bed, what else was there to do. She slept fitfully. Was there any other way in those conditions? Waking at dawn, more tired than when she'd lay down, Susan contemplated the peeling paint above her hard bed. She didn't want to get up, but this was the only time of the day it was tolerable to move around.

Walking outside, she slid her feet into her flip flops, and made her way down the overgrown path to the beach. Along the surf she was greeted, as she was every morning, by the squatting silhouettes of the the local fishermen, voiding their bowels in the wash before venturing out for the day. It always struck her as both grotesque and beautiful, the relationship these people had to their bodily functions. Sitting against a steep sand dune, she leaned back and closed her eyes. The air wasn't exactly fresh, or cool for that matter, but it was the closest it would get today.

She jolted awake a little while later to the sounding of yelping and barking. Pulling her cracked sunglasses over her eyes to lessen the glare of the low but already blinding sun, she looked around. Running along the beach towards her was a hideous looking hound, drool flying from its maw and eyes rolling rabidly in its mangy looking sockets. Shit.

Leaping to her feet, Susan ran for it. Her left flip flop snapped as her hut came into view, so she shook it free and dived through her doorway. Slamming it shut, not a second too soon, the dog crashed into the door, growling, snarling, scrabbling. Susan sank down the other side of the door, sobbing, panting, drenched in sweat. Leaning forward, overwhelmed by fear and adrenaline, she vomited into her lap.

When she regained her ability to stand, Susan made her way into her grim little bathroom, and turned on the tap into the oversized bucket which served as a bathtub. Stripping off her vomit and sweat drenched tunic she saw it, from the corner of her eye; a young macaque perched precariously on the top of the door, hissing, drooling, red eyed. It leapt, jaws wide and perfectly aimed, and Susan dropped to the floor, the blood from her ruptured jugular mixing with the water pooling around the outside of her overflowing bathtub.

Welsh rabid

It was a hero came out of that cell, a man with red welts on both wrists from the chains, and with eyes almost too swollen to open. He swaggered in front of the copper out from the holding cells and into processing where precisely no one waited to laud him.

He took his sweet time to cross to the sergeant’s desk, then struck his best pose of disdainful nonchalance.

Without looking up, the sergeant said, ‘Name?’

In a booming voice, the hero said, ‘Dafydd ap Rees ap Ifor!’

The sergeant sighed. He tapped the nib of his pen a few times on his pad, then in a voice heavy with the weight of a long night, said, ‘Your real name.

‘Dafydd…ap Rees…ap-‘

‘You want to get out of here, or not?’

Dafydd checked the room was empty, then whispered his terrible anglicised name - David Smith.

‘Thank you,’ the sergeant said. He tapped at the computer, scrolled with the mouse, and then looked up. He said, ‘You can go, mate.’

Dafydd deflated from the pose of righteous anger he’d readied.

‘But…I was in the cell! We were chained up to the railings protesting the council’s Welsh language policy.’

He bent down to bring his face close to the sergeant’s.

‘And what about these eyes? Police brutality, this is. Saes mafia, you lot.’ He stood back from the desk to point at the sergeant and the constable that brought him in. ‘There’s gonna be a reckoning.’ Dafydd stood up proudly, and with hand over his heart he bellowed it – ‘Cymru am byth!’

The sergeant stood. He plucked a folded newspaper from his desk, laid it on top of the counter then flipped through to page number seven. It was dominated by a full colour photo and for a moment Dafydd could only see the vision in the centre, Gwenllian of the blue eyes and hair like the sun, small frame at odds with the hugeness of her fervour. It took him a moment to work out the rest of the photo; a pair of figures squaring up to each other, one with fisted arm stretched long, the other caught mid-twist, face puckered into fish lips.

David Smith looked up at the sergeant grinning back at him.

‘Here’s your gear. ‘Phone, wallet, keys. And maybe these still work.’ He grinned harder as he pushed a pair of cracked and bent sunglasses across the desk.

David Smith trudged home behind broken sunglasses and a face that was throbbing. He went round the back of the house, Dad’s hammock sitting inviting on the back lawn. That’s what he was going to do, beers and the hammock and nothing else.

The kitchen laminate was strangely bouncy underfoot, and in places there were swollen lumps. Mum and Dad were sat next door with tea at the dining table. Neither of them rushed to greet him at the sight of his black eyes.

He cleared his throat, he pointed at his battle scars.

‘Anyone?’

Mum said, ‘I hope they bloody hurt.’

Dad said, ‘Before you went off on your protest, were you running a bath?’

Fuck. The plastic gave underneath my foot, a Harry Potter scar trickled down the left lens and that was the end of my Ray Bans. I’d have to go down and get a knock off pair from Roy Bunn Ravi, who also sold elephant bags, pashminas and bags of greying curry powder.

I pushed open the door into the hotel garden and the heat hit me in a blast as if I’d opened an oven door followed by the usual wave of noise. The beeping, the shouting, the screech and clatter of roller shutters, the roar of engines, the call to prayer brought the street to life around me. Clive dangled in a hammock, reading Cujo, stoned already. He raised a dozy hand to me as I stomped off bad temperedly into the midday sun.

The sun was blisteringly hot. Dazzling. The road was lined with watchful, filthy dogs sprawling underneath rusting rabies vans with pictures of happy pets painted on the side. We eyed each other warily as I picked my way along a path brimming with tuk tuks, garlands of brilliant orange flowers, cows, people and streams of open sewers that threaded their way along the gutters, sometimes breaching them, like an overflowing bath of crap. The air smelled of incense and spices, of smoke and excrement and jasmine and petrol.

I batted away offers of chai, cheap scarves, strings of colourful elephant beads and tuk tuk rides as I entered the bazaar. They fell upon me immediately - ‘come and look at my shop,’ ‘nice pashminas, good price’, ‘looking is free!’ and I navigated my way past them all until I found Ravi’s stand. He was there, as always, drinking his tiny paper cup of coffee.

“Hi Ravi”

“Good morning!” A brilliant grin “what do you need? Some toothpaste? Maybe chocolate?” He brandished a soggy bar of Cadbury’s at least a year out of date. If you needed something here, Ravi was the man who could get it for you. It might be broken, or fake, or melted, or rotten, but he was a man of his word and he would, given time, produce almost exactly what you had asked for.

“I need some sunglasses - what have you got?”

We got the obligatory business of haggling out of the way and when I left I could hide comfortably behind the fake designer shades Ravi had dug out for me.

Perhaps it was because I wasn’t used to the darkness of the fake shades, or perhaps it was because I felt protected behind them that I didn’t notice quite how close the dog was. And so I fell over it. I landed on my hands in the dust and was so concerned about not cutting myself there in the street filth that it wasn’t until I felt its teeth sink into the flesh of my leg that I realised I had made a terrible mistake. Fuck.