Read by Ben Crystal
May 29th '85
The phone is ringing. Footsteps on the stairs. Mum whispering. Silence. Footsteps on the stairs. My bedroom door opening and Mum’s on top of me, tears on her face and in her curls and on me. Holding me too tight.
When I catch my breath, I ask “What was the score?” She pulls back, looks at me, looks at Kenny Dalglish above my bed, the scarves and the rosettes, all red.
“Dad’s safe. The rest doesn’t matter.”
Continue reading "Red by Peter Lachaise" »
Read by Paul Clarke
First off, I have to make one thing clear: I’m not a chef. I’d like to be, of course; who wouldn’t these days? The industry’s come a long way since the years of Fanny Craddock and the Muppet Show’s Swede, to the point where now, the kind of guy who might once have been accused of being tied to his mother’s apron-strings can reasonably look forward to his own TV series by the time he’s thirty, to say nothing of the book deals, the rave reviews and the international jet-set lifestyle. Look at Jamie Oliver, for example. Well, you look at him; I can’t, really, without imagining a pig shitting on his head. A pig in a clown costume. Which is laughing while it’s doing it.
Continue reading "Tries to Cook and Eat Gordon Ramsay by Francois Castile" »
Read by Camila Fiori
I was born in a storm, somewhere several miles above the Atlantic Ocean. This was unexpected, to say the least, as my mother was only six months pregnant at the time, but so it was. She went into short, sharp labour in the aeroplane toilet during the in-flight movie (Heaven’s Gate – she didn’t miss much) and by the time the nuts and Bloody Marys were being handed around, I was squealing and squalling tinily in the washbasin.
Continue reading "Touchdown by Sam Carter" »
Now that she is straight again, she would not even come to my play. If I were the vengeful type, I could easily just call her church and out her. She is a piece of clay, firmly in the grip of her born-again husband. The one that won’t look me in the eye.
Continue reading "The Summer My Mother Made Me Pretend I Was a Lesbian by Hedy Zimra" »
Read by Martin Lamb
Richard Meinhertzhagen, the famous soldier naturalist, said that if men do not hunt and kill animals frequently, a rage will build up inside them that will lead, inevitably, to the desire to hunt and kill other men.
Continue reading "The Rage by Brindley Hallam Dennis" »
Read by Marc Forde
London, 1963
I’m playing knockout with my younger brother James. It involves one of us
kicking the plastic football at a goal on the school wall and the other, with
his first touch, knocking the ball back on target – a sort of football squash. The
rules are enforced as much by what we hear as what we see. The goal is an
oblong of biscuit-like rendering. Hitting its crumbling surface is the sound of
a ‘goal’; striking both rendering and
glazed brick, is ‘post’, and if you hear the metallic ping of ball on brick
only, you’ve missed. Today, we’re not trying to win but to keep the game going
in regular, satisfying thuds that bring Mrs Johnson, who lives opposite, to the
front door of her prefab.
Continue reading "The Cowboy Hat by Barry Walsh" »