Daily stories

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.

There wasn't much left at the yard sale by the time I arrived. A kid's bike helmet. A dog bowl. I bought the single walkie-talkie, price one pound. Somehow its being completely useless didn't make that feel any less of a bargain. At home I changed the batteries and saw the light come on, and that was that, I supposed. But almost straight away it crackled into life with a message I couldn't make out. "Receiving," I replied, "Please identify. Over." It was worth a pound to talk that way. A moment later the voice was back: "I just got this walkie talkie from some kid for 50p." I threw mine at the wall, and the fresh batteries rolled away. He didn't even say "Over."

I never slept more than an hour at a time. Every sound was a burglar. Every silence was someone hiding in the dark. My hair was greying. My hands were swollen. One morning Jackie knocked on my door carrying a cardboard box with holes punched in it. Inside was a cat who looked almost as rough as I did. Jackie went back to her car for food and bowls and a handwritten sheet of instructions, and then she left. That night, I didn't sleep thirty minutes at a time. Every silence was the cat, frightened, hiding, not eating. But now, every noise is just little Fernando, and I sleep right through. And the burglars didn't take anything that mattered.

Nobody was looking at the crack. A few hadn't noticed, but most had chosen to look away. Of those, some were afraid they would see it get bigger and some were afraid it would become theirs to attend to. I had been of all three types in my time. They all had me smooth on the surface and cracked somewhere beneath. So now I look, ready for painful truth, ready to bear responsibility. Or so I thought. Tell me – being the only one brave enough to look - shouldn't that be enough?

When I was a fly I was often waved away from picnics and al-fresco tables, from all the places where the good food was. Now I am a man it is much the same, though once in a while I am invited to sit and have my glass filled. And sometimes, too, there is still that kind of generosity I feared before: the kind that drowns you in syrup and wine.

Outside, people were hurrying along beneath newspapers. This confused Graham, since few people take a newspaper these days, and since it wasn't raining. He waited impatiently for the lift to arrive, and to carry him down, and to open its doors on the ground floor. Then he stepped outside. There was neither rain nor beating sun, and as Graham walked he tried to catch someone's eye, but with their hurry and the newspaper drooping over their faces it was difficult. After a minute or so, he began to feel a prickling, first at the back of his neck, then his shoulders, then his scalp. He rushed for the bin, for the locked door of the newsagents, for any sort of cover he could find, but there was nothing left.

Everyone is jealous of my little teal Mini. I see it when I'm driving, when I'm parking up, when I'm out washing it. One day someone's going to put a key down that beautiful paintwork. One day someone in the oncoming lane is going to pull across and smash into me, just so I can't have it anymore. I hope they do it soon. I hate that colour.

They left the hotel with a little stack of leaflets. The UK's funnest day out. The World-Famous Old Boot Inn. Kit wanted to go to all of them. He was already plotting a route. But Alex was pulling scraps off the corners, tearing them into smaller and smaller pieces. The map didn't match the roads. The opening dates didn't match the calendar. And who in the world had heard of the Old Boot Inn?

Down on the beach a boy in green swimmers was building a sundial. He had stuck a long driftwood branch into the wet sand and set seashells round it as the shadow moved, a different one each hour. As he pushed a crab claw into place I asked him, "How do you know what number each shell is?" He shrugged. "Doesn't matter," he said. "They'll all wash away before the sun comes back round."