Close

Tags: Time

I arrive just after 6pm, wheeling my suitcase up the long gravel drive from where the taxi dropped me off. The drive curves, so the house only comes into view gradually – a Georgian mansion with tall, many-paned windows and squat chimneys. Steps lead up to a portico with Doric columns that looks l

I look up at the clock on the wall. A quarter to nine. I wait for Miss Flood’s light knock on my door. I listen but hear nothing. I continue to wait. The world beyond my office is a muffled, soft-carpeted silence. My eyes have settled on the photograph of my mother and father. It stands by itself

‘I can’t believe you kept it.’ It’s an ugly thing – a Year 8 woodwork project. Unevenly circular, almost egg-shaped where I over-planed to make tiny unnecessary adjustments, erroneous hour-increment markings where my chisel deviated around the grain. For some reason I painted a black ca

Each morning one of the staff wheeled Mr Aiken from the room where he slept, along the corridor and into the big lounge with all the chairs. Today it was a young man. Mr Aiken did not know him. They did not talk. Usually he was parked against the wall, facing towards the television. Some days he

I’ve avoided this for a long time because, let’s be honest, I’ve done you no favours. I am not what you intended, you dreamed of something different. Perhaps that’s why I struggle to remember you completely: we could be expected to be like one another, but we are not. For years you sang to t

The Hour My job is simple. I have to embroider the flag. Every day I come here from the village to earn our ethnic improvement grant. I sit here in the dust and sew the tiny threads which will make up, one day, the glory of the new flag. Paco, my husband, says it is like laying hairs over the