Extract from Seagulls in the Gutters, A Novel

There were only a few footsteps in the snow. Decklan started to walk, trying, at first, to match them, but soon giving up.

                The air was cold in his lungs, stinging his nose as it entered. He could already feel his ears reddening. He put his hands in his pockets and walked up the hill towards the new playground. Christmas lights flashed in the windows of the houses lining the street. Christmas trees stood proudly in the bay windows. Looking through each window, he could see colour. And it wasn’t white or grey. Decorations were hanging, and they were orange and yellow and red and green and blue. There were kids wearing Christmas cracker crowns of purple and pink, playing with their new toys. Adults were sitting on sofas, drinking beer and other liquors, but they looked happy, and Decklan suspected it wasn’t just an illusion. Music could even be faintly heard through the double glazed windows of some houses. And they weren’t theme tunes to popular shows and films. Some people weren’t even watching television. Music was a background to their conversation.

                Decklan entered the playground and sat down on a swing. Was all this surface happiness too? Would it be gone after the twelve drummers had drummed? Would the snow, melted and evaporated, uncover their real feelings again, or did they not need snow on Christmas day to feel cheerful?

                He bundled a snowball in his gloved palm and threw it at the slide. He looked around him. If he didn’t know he was in Far Forest, with trees and fields the other side of the houses, he could be mistaken for thinking he was on an estate in the middle of town. He used to play golf with Graham right here. Now he would hit a window with a golf ball. Or worse, a kid. Actually, maybe not worse. He smiled. Then it disappeared as he remembered the other reason why he wished he hadn’t come back.

                He’d seen Kelly in town two days ago. He went to Kidderminster train station to catch a train to Worcester to do some shopping, but the lines were down and he had to turn around and go back to the bus station, from where he'd just come. He decided, on the way back, to stop in the newsagents and buy a drink. This small act meant he missed the next bus to Worcester. The next one was in thirty minutes. So he sat there, disgruntled and shivering, when she appeared from the Tesco car park with her mother. The last time he’d seen her had been a glimpse between a pub doorway. She’d been behind the bar, pouring drinks. Earning money to fund University. And the last time he spoke to her? He couldn’t remember. Probably an ill-advised, ill-judged text message before he deleted her number from his phone memory. Try deleting it from your own memory, he thought. Luckily, she changed it, the cause of much midnight heartache.

                He’d thought about her quite a bit while at University. Less in the last year or so. But always at night when trying to sleep, making up self-success stories in his head, deleting the yearning feeling from his heart at the thought of never, ever, seeing her again. What if she never returns home? What if she stays in Cambridge? It’s not that he wanted to see her again, but having the option removed completely? It made his throat want to swallow, but his chest was too tight.

                And then, completely randomly, not even in the town she lived in, she was there.

                First a set of circumstances; the leaves on the rail, the distance of his parents, his thirst; then to find him waiting for a bus he’d never caught before. Here, after the separation of High School had made all unrecognisable, those eyes and lips and curves that had been imprinted by regret. Second, his reaction; the clenching of his jaw, the tunnel-view of her, his rising lungs and heart where breath was suddenly a useless tool for life. And all too quickly gone as she passed on by. Unremembered or unnoticed? Had time changed his face that much? The answer was no, where truth lay hard, still heaving, upon that bus-station seat.

                The parting of High School had made all, once friends, strangers in the street. But worse then that was this: her ignorance and his still caring. 'Kelly, I can’t believe you blanked me.' In truth, he found it hard to believe he could have pushed someone far enough to hate him. Perhaps it wasn’t hate she felt. Or hopefully not. But whatever it was, it was certainly negative. Guess time can't atone for my childhood and the mistakes I’ve made, he thinks. The thing all dumpees need to remember so they don’t make fools of themselves, is you can never get them back – no amount of pleading, changing or threatening will undo their decision. You only cause personal embarrassment. You just have to file it under the growing list of regrets and hope you’ve forgotten it when it comes to die, or if not, that you die too quick to feel that particular emotional pain.

                Decklan realised he didn’t want to see Kelly again in order to be more than friends. Too much had happened and too much time had passed, however he knew what he did want. Just to show that he had changed. Had grown up. He didn’t make the kind of silly mistakes he had made as an inexperienced, desperately in love, kid. Desperation had driven him to the edge of stupidity, he knew this, he knew it then. She knew it then too, probably, and still does, thus rendering his need to show her he’s changed redundant. But he needs to nonetheless. In some way. Not for her, though he would like to say sorry. But for him, so he, what? He can die happy? Happier?

                The sun burst through the cloud coverage sending down a ray that landed somewhere in the distant trees. He couldn’t see where exactly, rooftops were in the way.

Extract from The Frontier

There was no moon in the sky when Kacey woke, no sun either, and the air was too thick with ice to see through, though she could touch it; feel it drain her heat. Beneath her two blankets, in her nightshirt and socks, it had been cold anyway. And she was awake now so she rose in the darkness, hearing where her step-father and mother slept twelve feet away; their low snoring a mysterious sediment that ingrained the soundless air. Her siblings were invisible to her left and right, and she couldn’t hear a sound from them.

She stood up, lifting her blankets with her and walked towards the door – or where she thought it was. She reached out and found the handle immediately, intuitively, and pulled the door inwards. Fresh air hurried in and replaced the stale smell of mixed sweat. Her boots waited for her outside.

She shut the door behind her, hearing the latch click into place, and sat on the edge of the porch where she pulled her boots on. Her eyes were adjusting now, or maybe the stars were bright enough to see her breath issuing from her mouth. It was as cold as Montana could get, but it was a refreshing temperature; one that made Kacey want to breathe it in and hold it, to nourish her lungs. She imagined the ends of her hair crystallising as it hung across her face.

Once her boots were on she stood up and wrapped the blankets around her, wondered what to do. But she knew what she was going to do all along, ever since her eyes opened.

Above her, the hill rose, and in turn that hill rose to meet another. A path led up to the top, a ten minute walk tops. And from there, on the first day, they had seen for miles down the Boulder valley that looked as though it had been perfectly cut away by the swing of a pendulum. And the only colour to be seen was green, grasslands of unending green. Green, green, green; from dark to light; unmarred by any other colour except maybe that of a transparent rainbow looking like the bow of that pendulum.

She wanted to see it again.

She was drawn by my will, I led her. I protected her from the carnivorous mammals. She felt safe, though she didn’t know why. And eventually she was there, sitting on an outcrop and staring down at a dark valley, her arms around her legs, hands tucked under the hem of the blanket that wrapped her. She shivered, but only half from the cold: the other half was from expectation. Her affinity for nature had grown, as it had for the others. Now she was sitting in anticipation of the moment of sunrise, as if nothing else at all existed in the whole of the world. Just her on that outcrop.

On that first day there had been only green, but now she saw every colour imaginable as the top of the sun filtered over the summit of the mountain and filled the valley with warmth, spreading rays of gold and silver, of bronze and copper and tainted zinc; the spectacle reminding her of a science lesson; of magnesium burning and I could see the distinction she made – in her mind, the sparks casting colours that exploded out 360 degrees, for an instant lighting the room and the heads of all present, before vanishing to a dull opaqueness. It was as if she hadn’t seen colour before that moment, and upon seeing it now it would never be the same again. That feeling held onto only momentarily and then lost again in a surge of happiness to sadness, enlightenment to dumbness.

The shadows in the valley gradually receded, revealing elk and deer like dots whose heads could be seen rising from the nutritious grass as warmth found their backs. Here is the new day, they thought, before returning to graze. But they saw it everyday, Kacey didn’t. The cold still lent out to touch her, and her spine shivered and shuddered her crouching body. She was crying. The cold poked its fingers into her eyes and if not for the blinking, would maybe have crystallised her tears before they had even left their source. As it was, they streamed over her cheeks and dribbled off her chin, but she didn’t wipe them away. She wasn’t self-conscious enough to even realise she was crying. Or if she was, she figured it was because of the sudden blinding of the sun.

Down the valley, groups of honeylocusts were rooted to the spot by the spectacle; they drank the sunlight like the specks of two brown bears were lapping from a mountain-side stream. Further down the valley, though unknown to Kacey, was the Crow reservation, the only place now for a Crow Indian to live if he wanted to remain true to his roots. Not many mule deer around there, most been hunted down for food, as they were allowed to be. That’s all this view needs, she thought, a group of Indians with actual real tepees with smoke coming out the top, camped down there in a circle. I wanted to tell her that wasn’t possible, that her government had starved them all out from hunting legislations, over a hundred years ago. But I couldn’t. Her mind soon wondered away from that thought anyway, and onto the cliff faces marked with deep black caves where anything, for all she knew, could be sleeping away in there.

A bald eagle set flight from a family of scotch pines, emerging into the new day and rising, spreading its wings and soaring, floating on the air’s currents around and around in circles, flying as high as Kacey was sitting, and sometimes as close as a muskrat dared to near a weasel. She watched it, with a perpetual smile, for ten minutes, before it disappeared over into the next valley.

By the time she left, she had no idea how long she had been there, and her limbs had stiffened and her skin nearly frozen. But it had been worth it. Once in a lifetime, she thought. She didn’t want to spoil it and wake up to that every day and dispel the magic. No, she would see it once more, and once more only. Just she wouldn’t be alone next time.