She is Lillia, addicted to ice, hungry for its tip-tap-toe coldness, stuffing ice-cubes in her mouth, getting high from their ice-cold sweetness. It is summer, when the rank heat of the sun pushes down on the earth that so it must gasp for breath. Closing the curtains Lillia speaks on the phone to a man whose hearty tones are too warm. Afterwards, she runs herself an ice bath.
Once upon a time, in a far-away desert kingdom, there lived a prince, the darling of his people: strong and tall, with skin golden as the shifting sands, and eyes black as the desert night. On his twenty-first birthday a magnificent feast was arranged, and chieftains and merchants and artists came many miles to honour their young lord.
The occasion was magnificent and the guests giddy with wonders, but as the prince entered the dining hall he gasped again. A beautiful woman stood before him, quite naked, quite still. She was the loveliest thing he had ever seen, and the strangest; for her smooth, slender body was glistening and transparent, as though made of the clearest glass.
Mum loved Andrew Lloyd-Webber. To me, that was always disappointing. But then, Mum read The Daily Mail, so it wasn’t really a surprise.
‘You watch X-Factor,’ she’d said.
‘Completely different - that’s ironic.’
‘Everything is,’ she said. ‘With you.’
I think of Mum a lot here. When they play Puccini on the radio, O Mio Bambino Caro (Mum only knew it as a song from a film) I listen on the plastic headsets they give out on the ward. I try not to think about hospital-acquired infections.
She feels no communion with stoves or fireplaces; the fires there are tame things, anaemic and bland. It's not the patterns in the flames that draw her, though they twine into answered prayers and dreams as she watches. It's not even the way fire destroys, although there is a part of her that finds some satisfaction in that. For Phoebe, the thrill and the rapture come from freeing the beast. Its hunger is fed by her own, its wildness is joined by hers and she feels part of something ancient and primal as she wields its power. And, it consumes. At first, it consumed small things: the contents of bins, small patches of scrub, a sack of clothes left out back of the thrift store. In time, these weren't enough. It wanted more, she wanted more. A barge, half-sunk and abandoned in the shallows of the river. A pile of tires out the back of old man Tooley's scrapyard. Watching as the smoke rises in a dark column from a field of barley, she basks in the glow and the heat.
Ol’ Jethro, he’s tall as a grizzly and twice as ornery. Like to died the first time he walked in my door, stooping so low his nose scuffed the floor, beard like a broom sweeping it clean, just so’s his head wouldn’t bang against the top of the door frame. Would’ve pulled the whole house down if he did that. He’d come in, all scrunched up like, stuffing himself into my ol’ comfy easy chair like it’s a toy one – you know, like in little Addie’s doll house, the one her daddy Joe made her when she turned six. Just before Joe died, that was. Anyway, that’s what he looked like, Jethro, when he’d come to visit – a giant in a doll house. Had the bellow of a lion been done wrong – least got his tail stepped on. Yep, tall as a grizzly and roar like a lion, that man.
Longtime contributors Niall Boyce, Jonathan Pinnock & Richard Smyth all have books out which you'd be well advised to buy, then read, then buy for others. All genres are catered for, from novels (Niall's Veronica Britton) and short stories (Jonathan's Dot Dash) to nonfiction (Richard's Bumfodder)
KATY LIAR'S DEBUT NOVEL
Liar Katy Darby's debut novel, a Victorian drama called The Unpierced Heart (previously titled The Whores' Asylum) is now out in Penguin paperback. It's had nice reviews in The Independent on Sunday, Sunday Times & Metro (4*).
OUR INTERVIEW WITH ANNEXE MAG!
They came, they saw, they asked us a bunch of interesting questions. Interview by Nick of Annexe Magazine with Katy of LL: here
