Daily stories

They spent the lesson looking up rude words in the dictionary. But something was wrong. A small agricultural holding. The part of the leg that extends from the knee to the ankle. Sticky or claggy dirt. Not one of them was rude at all. They had been tricked. They would go home and demand their parents teach them better, but they hadn't the words to show how angry they were.

I was still wearing the daisy chain, and somehow I knew that when it broke I would too. But days in the sun had dried the stems until they were stiff and brittle. We did not have long left. Unless I lay down in the mud to be preserved, we would be separated soon – and the mud had dried too. As we picked our way along the crag I felt my foot twist and my body lurch. No sooner did I know I was falling than I felt myself caught: the daisy chain stretched between a jut of rock and my burned neck, seeming to grow stronger by its straining.

The playground is the best place to go. You sit on a swing and look at the empty climbing frame and you can't forget the way things are. In the cafés and the streets it is not so strange that you don't see children. We made them that way on purpose for a long time. So there, you just feel the quiet, and the ending of things, without really knowing it. In the playground, you can watch the slide turn to rust, and have something to grieve.

A year after it happened, I saw they had put bollards in where the car hit him. I stopped to give them a shove, a shake, a kick. I wanted them to break loose. I wanted them to crumble into powder. If they stayed standing under my bloody knuckles it meant they worked. It meant they would have stopped it, if they had been there twelve months earlier.

We spray-painted empty ice cream black and strapped them partway up lamp posts. That is, Tom painted them and Lou shimmied up the streetlights. It was my job to start the rumours, but I never had to. By the end of the week I'd heard they were scanners to check you weren't rat running and pest control for plague-carrying Chinese bats. We thought one would get smashed down, they'd see it was empty but for a smear of Neapolitan, and that would be that. But the fire didn't leave much evidence. And when I said it had gone too far, Tom shrugged and said: "Maybe they've got a point."

We were almost done with the morning shift when the kids from the school trip arrived. They lined up along the wall and numbered off, well practiced but distracted. We kept turning the cranks. The teacher explained that they were in the main cranking room, and said a few words about how important the work was. We kept turning the cranks. It was nice to feel that we mattered, although the teacher said no more about what the cranks do than the boss tells us. We kept turning them anyway. One of the kids asked if they could have a go, and the teacher looked round at us, and Si waved him over. The rest of us kept turning the cranks. I don't know why they bring the school trips in. They'll all be turning the cranks here soon enough.

Halfway to the exit, a man she half-recognised put a hand up to stop her. "Hilary, perfect," he said. "Do you think you can help me with something?" While the answer was still softening in her mouth, he led her into a meeting room, the blinds down, the lights low. She imagined a bag slipped over her head. Laid out on the table was a wooden boy, all in pieces, his eyes flicking this way and that. "I can't work it out," the man said, pulling anxiously at his lanyard. "I can't get him back together."

Once the tube was down his throat, Frank tried not to look at the screen. He knew it would make him faint or retch or both. But curiosity overcame him: how many chances do you get to see inside yourself? He tilted his eyes down until the picture came into view. But the light on the endoscope must have failed: he saw nothing but darkness. So why were they still going? Then there was a light: a star – no, a galaxy. As the tube pushed further he saw more, great spirals and distant fires, uncountable worlds, a universe within. A voice said we're taking it out now, well done, and Frank wanted to clamp his teeth down so he could keep watching.

I'll leave a key under the mat for you, and one with the neighbours. I'll send you one in the post. I'll wait in, if I can, and if I can't I'll put a note on the door saying just where I'll be so you can find me. I'll leave a vase of sunflowers in the window so you know which house is mine, and a trail of petals all the way to your door. I'll leave a key in the lock for you. I'll take the door off its hinges. Please come. I can't live locked up here any longer.

Kev got the fruit machine at auction, with fourteen pounds still in the cash drawer, which made for a nice little discount. When he had fixed it up and changed the lock he persuaded Maeve to have it in the corner of the lounge bar, with a fifty-fifty split on the takings, since it would be drinking her customers' beer money. It made a tidy profit, and sometimes Kev sat in the opposite corner and watched. He liked to see it earning for him while he had a quiet drink. He even liked to see it pay out: the cheers, the celebratory rounds. But there was that one older fella, who came in Friday lunchtimes and posted up until the bell rang or his money ran out. Kev didn't like to watch that, or to empty the cash drawer afterwards. He started paying Maeve's lad to do it. He started drinking over the road instead.