This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.”

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.”

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• The Colony by Audrey Magee. I love how Magee's narration flows freely between points of view, building her characters through its shifting style, which is inventive but not showy. I enjoyed this book a lot.
• Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. This short novel opens with a prologue depicting a human sacrifice in ancient Britain, before jumping to the story of Silvie, a teenage girl dragged along on an experiential archaeology trip by her abusive father. For the first half or so I thought the prologue was heavy-handed and wished it hadn't been there, but the work it does is much more subtle than I had realised. It's a foil that lets the facets of Silvie's understated, traumatised narration show.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

The Audit

It started with a letter, which I tucked away in the post rack in case I needed to refer to it later. The letter was the first thing they took when the day came. They took the rest of the post rack's contents along with it, all the old bank statements and takeaway menus and money-off vouchers and flyers and receipts and invitations I had stuffed in there. It all went in a big box file with colour-coded tabs, and into the back of a seafoam-green van. For half a minute they considered the rack itself, then replaced it on the table by the front door.

It had been worth keeping the letter, even though I had put the date on my calendar, because it said what I should do to prepare. Which was, chiefly, nothing at all: only to phone if the appointed time was not possible. Any items I held on behalf of others, or that were awaiting disposal, could be tagged with the enclosed sheet of stickers, but this was not mandatory. I placed a sticker on the broken lamp, and another on my brother's pressure washer, then slid the rest in behind the letter, in case I thought of anything else.

They worked methodically, in a way that made me think of a dissection. They walked once through the house, looking. Then a second time, opening doors and drawers and boxes. Only then did they reach in and take. There were two of them, a man and a woman, and for the most part he worked downstairs and she upstairs. When they were together they talked principally about Formula One.

I had expected they would sit me down at the kitchen table and talk it all through, perhaps presenting me with something to sign so that I might feel involved. I had feared that they would barge in like the police, shouldering past me in the doorway. Instead they were friendly but terse, in a manner that made me want to stay out of their way, for fear of disappointing them. It was fair enough, since all had been explained in the letter.

The two F1 fans who had taken temporary ownership of my little semi-detached were completing a survey and reallocation of items held just in case. Once they had completed their walk-throughs and emptied the letter rack, they quickly collected a quantity of one-day-to-be-useful screws, cables, plastic bags and instruction manuals that even I could not quite believe. From the kitchen, they took spices I didn't know how to use and spirits I didn't like to drink. Into another crate went the waffle iron and the utensil for slicing cheese, along with several other implements whose purpose I was no longer sure of.

I am perhaps a little discombobulated this week, as a result of returning from Eigg to my office job, and the discovery that our adopted cat was once named Biggie Smalls. I don't think this has unduly affected the daily stories, but I will let you be the judge.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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?

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.”

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• The Crofter and the Laird by John McPhee, which has been on my shelf for a while but leapt off it following my trip to Eigg.
• I was similarly moved to leaf through O Choille gu Bearradh/From Wood to Ridge, which collects Sorley MacLean's Gaelic poetry with his own English translations. This seems to be out of print now; the currently available collected poems seems to be Caoir Gheal Leumraich/White Leaping Flame.
• Having got over my Scottish island kick, I started on The Colony by Audrey Magee, which I had out from the library but remembered nothing about. It turns out to be about an artist visiting a small island. But this one's Irish!
• Away from islands, I also read (Don't) Call Mum by Matt Wesolowski, part of Wild Hunt Books' Northern Weird Project. It's a fun book, perhaps more as straightforwardly scary story than a weird one. I think it's most effective in how it captures the in-betweenness of early adulthood.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

Karaoke Night at the Vindication

There was a note that Zoë couldn’t hit. Not in the shower and not in the car and not with the hoover on. But she could hit it at the Vindication. With Silver Jim’s scuffed-up mic in her hand and a display board of Scampi Fries to sing to, she didn’t see it coming until she was already past it. She sailed up and over and back down into the last chorus, and it felt like the hills had when she hired that ebike.

Afterwards, Silver Jim said to her “We should stop letting you come in. You’re showing the rest of them up,” and Zoë blushed, even though she had heard him say it to four other women. But they had all been young and pretty, and Jim might not have been thinking of their voices. She smiled and rolled her eyes as she handed back the microphone, and he went on with introducing the next performers, Kim and Johnny singing “A Little Respect”.

Zoë went to the bar and ordered a diet Coke. Eight months ago, when she first started coming to the Vindication, it would have had a double rum in it. For her nerves, and because she thought it looked strange to come out and not drink. But the nerves had never really been there, only her expectation of them. As for the look of it, well, she had learned as a teenager that nobody could see the difference between plain Coke and rum & Coke. Besides, on her first sober night, she had discovered she if these people thought she was strange, and for their part, none of them did. And it was all easier, with a clear head. Easier to hit the notes. Easier to say what she meant. Easier to remember that her name was Zoë.

🎤

The first time she took the train to Barcombe, she wasn’t Zoë yet. The train had been almost empty, just a few commuters who worked late or had stopped for a swift half after work. Anyone dressed up like her was going the other way, heading to the city she was leaving, where the nightlife was. But her date assumed she would come to him, and she, keen to please, had proved him right. She arrived in that strange town and made her way to the strange bar they had agreed on, where that strange man stood her up.

If she had turned around then, she could have got home just as soon as if she never left the station. She couldn't face it, shoving onto the train with all those pre-drunk out-of-towners. She felt stupid coming out here just to go straight home.

She left the bar, and turned quickly onto a side street. It was winter, treacle-dark already. Not-Zoë liked dark streets, despite a lifetime of warnings. She liked to wrap herself in a long coat and a long night and walk about with nobody seeing her. But that night, it didn't feel right. She had readied herself to be seen, for the gamble of it. And perhaps she had been seen, through the window or across the room, and the gamble had failed. But she had a terrible itch to chase her losses. She wanted to throw off her coat and show herself to this whole town. And why not? Nobody here knew her. Anyone she saw tonight she would in most likely never see again. She could walk naked back to the station if she wanted to. Maybe she did want to.

It was as she thought that thought, and her hand toyed idly with the button of her coat, that she passed the door of the Vindication, and heard the sound of ABBA filtering through it. And she thought for a second time a thought that had become something a stranger to her: "Why not?"

That, she sometimes told herself after, was the best night of her life. She knew it wasn't true: she had sat quietly in a corner for most of it, and only sang once, writing the name she always wished she had on Silver Jim’s little slip. She didn't even get the last train home. If it had been the best night of her life, then she wouldn't have gone back. She would have put it in a little box and taken it out to look at when she couldn't sleep. You shouldn't try to have the best night of your life again, Zoë thought. The best day of your life is meant to be your wedding day, isn't it? And if you have another one of those then it means the first one didn't work out, one way or another.

🎤

Zoë didn't go to the Vindication karaoke night every week. She had a life back home, after all, as much as she might try to forget it. But she went most weeks. She had never been a regular at anything without some manner of rot setting in, resentment or obligation or just plain boredom. But the Vindication excited her every time. The pub wasn't her kind of pub and the people weren't her kind of people and what surprised her the most was that it didn't matter. She could be the kind of person who doesn't care only for her kind of person in her kind of place. She could wash up with a bunch of strangers and come to love them just because. At her kind of pub, her kind of people had insulted her and patronised her and threatened her and belittled her, and done it all in that quiet way that meant they could blame her, too, if she made a fuss. The men at her kind of pub would have called Silver Jim a creep as a way to get your guard down. She was sick of her kind of people. She wanted to spit them out onto the train tracks for the city to keep.

So she had. She had given her notice on the flat and at work, although like most of the rest of Barcombe she could have commuted. She packed up all her things and discovered that there weren't very many of them, after all. That was a relief. She wanted everything new. She moved into a furnished flat with a rucksack and a suitcase, not far from where she had been stood up. For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder where that man was. If she had passed him in the street, or at the station. If he had seen her singing at the Vindication and recognised her, and kicked himself for missing his chance. If she had seen him singing there, and not known it, and if he had been any good.

On the first morning, she woke up scared to go out. She had never been on these streets in the early light. She had never seen them quiet and empty, or industrious, full of people working and shopping and sober. It felt a little like waking up next to someone you had only seen in the half-light: the fear of finding out who you had gone to bed with, and what it meant about you.

But the town was cute enough. At the bottom of the stairs that led up to her flat there was a handsome old bike and a folded pushchair. On the street outside there were sensible cars bought second hand for cash, kept clean but not too shiny. As she walked down to the high street she saw a single pint glass, a cider logo printed on the side, liberated from some pub or other and left carefully on a garden wall. She slipped it into her shopping bag. She had nothing in the flat to drink from except her stupid oversized water bottle.

She bought one of everything from the charity shops: one plate, one bowl, one mug, one knife, one fork. One day, she would need more. She would have friends round to eat, Sally who only sang Sinatra in a winking baritone you wouldn't think fit inside her, or Imran who never put his name down but spent all night singing along and never missed a word. One morning she would need a second plate for someone else's breakfast. But for now, simple felt good.

As the sun set over the railway line, she cooked supermarket tortellini in tomato sauce and ate it from the pan like she had as a student. She changed, not into her best clothes, but into fun ones: a top with a bit of sparkle, a skirt that whirled out when she turned. She put on the lipstick her mum said men wouldn't like and Silver Jim said made her look like the rockstar she was, and went out.

She didn't recognise the feeling at first: the shimmer at her breastbone, the shivers in her vision. She thought the pasta must not have been enough. It was a feeling she knew well, but not here: like running into a colleague in the swimming baths and not recognising them. She had never been nervous on her way to the Vindication. For half a breath, she could feel the top note lifting away from her, just out of reach. But that was change, and you had to change sometimes.

With her head so fuzzy, she didn't notice the quiet. She just felt something wrong, unplaceable. As she drew closer and heard the rustle of wind in a tree, she understood, and she thought: of course, without the office and the train I'm early. She thought about Silver Jim setting up, pulling boxes and cables from his big hard cases, his pint of stout placed carefully two tables away where nothing would catch it. She thought about taking the first song, and announcing to them all on the mike that she was here to stay, and what she would sing. But she knew she wasn't early. Those nerves, that tooth-tightening uncertainty that was not Zoë, had made her late. And Silver Jim's lights were not shining through the windows of the Vindication, because the windows were covered with big plywood boards, roughly whitewashed. On the locked door was a laminated notice that she couldn't seem to read. She thought of Sally belting out "My Way" with tears in her eyes, and how it had felt like a sign, like something that was about her life. She thought of all her friends, knowing and thinking that she knew, and not wanting to talk about it. She thought about her one fork, drying on the draining board. She sat on the cold front step of the Vindication, and sang to herself, just quietly. Her voice was close to breaking. But she hit all the notes.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

Doreen printed an A4 sign for the cigarette bin: “Do not use, Birds Nesting”. It was kind, and it was an excuse to use the laminator. Next year they were back again. Doreen thought she recognised one of last year’s chicks, now laying. She persuaded management to install a second cigarette bin. The year after, both were occupied, and she suggested they buy nest boxes instead. Everyone had quit by then, anyway. They spent their breaks watching the birds.

Tuesday

I emerged from the hollow of the tree into a land I had long imagined. I saw at once it was all wrong: the mile-high cliffs, the million golden birds. I had known nothing of the scale of the world while I was in it. This place I had dreamed up could not keep itself together and still hold people like me. Yet there was the ground beneath my feet, firm and true, and blanketed with singing flowers.

Wednesday

It was all mist and drizzle on the day I learned how much of the Earth is covered by sea. I sat by the cold shore I had been dragged away to two cold summers ago, and thought how much sense it made, that almost all the world was grey and empty like that. But the next morning’s sun burned sky and sea blue, and I saw silver clouds in the water, and horizons where there had been fog, and the promise of islands.

Thursday

We believed her, at first: that dolphins were witches’ creatures, unlucky to see; that to watch a sunset meant death by morning. We accepted that the beauty of a flower was in proportion to its toxicity, and that the same was true of the laughter of friends. But she pushed beyond her strength. She said that wholesome food and dreams should both be bitter, and brewed tea that fulfilled both oughts. We could not swallow it. We opened.

Friday

The tide forgot to come in. I waved the tide tables at it, pointed to my watch and the sands and the mud. I looked up at the moon, pale and whole in the blue sky, still pulling at us. I can wait, I shouted at the sea. I’ve got all day. I was outwaited. The next day it came back, not crawling but crashing. I spat in a wave, but I didn’t mean it. The tide took me in its arms and told me all about the pretty mermaid that had kept it out so long.

Saturday

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."

Sunday

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?

I have been reading...

In an attempt to travel light, I have been reading on my ereader this week. But I am increasingly grumpy about the whole idea of DRM-encumbered ebooks, so I have been limited to what I could read DRM-free – which was a fine selection:

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, in the linked edition by Standard Ebooks. Standard Ebooks take texts in the public domain and make them into polished ebook editions. I'm grateful to them for this one, which draws me close to having read as many Brontë novels as I have made visits to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
• The Off Season by Jodie Robins, part of the Northern Weird Project from Wild Hunt Books. I've had the novellas in this series sitting waiting to be read for ages but haven't got round to them. The Off Season blends the charming and the bleak much like the wintry seaside it depicts. I hope to get to the others in the series with less delay.
• The tenth and final issue of Inner Worlds, which ended earlier this year. I particularly enjoyed "The Listening Room" by Carol Mbugua. All ten issues of Inner Worlds are available to read for free online.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

Chemical Treatment

Suddenly it all stopped, and Sam found herself wondering who had brought the padlock. It didn't matter just then, with the stink of chemical-bathed sewage in her nose and eyes and the nausea rising in her stomach, but it was all she could think of. For most of them it was a bit of spontaneous fun: lock her in and shake her up and hear the way her screaming echoed. She was saving her screams for when she got out, but for all her anger, part of her knew she would have joined in if she as on the outside. But one of them had thought about it, found a lock, maybe even bought one. Made sure it was in their pocket when they came out. Maybe led them here. Sam wouldn't have done that.

Of course, nobody had really led them here. That wasn't how their little gang went about. Everyone followed everyone, so they never went, they just ended up. This evening they had ended up in the big car park, where the portaloos waited for the Sunday market, and Sam had been the unlucky one with the quickest bladder. It had been half a plan at most, but that was enough.

Next week, I will be on a Hebridean island. I will still be writing daily stories, but they may not reach you until I return to these shores. I don't know exactly what will reach you when, but I will make you whole before too long.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

It looked like rain, so we walked up to the train station. There you can stand on the ridge, under the big canopy that covers the platforms, and watch the rain fall all around without getting wet yourself. But it's no good if you get rained on walking up there. You have to go before the rain comes, or step off a train. After an hour's joy there the rain showed no sign of relenting. It would be a wet walk home. So we caught the next train, without checking its destination.

Tuesday

When the birds spoke we learned they had names for us too. Not as many as we might have liked: not as many as we had for them, or for each other. A little brown one, a sparrow or a wren, I thought, alighted on my shoulder. I asked her what they called me. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “I’m terrible at names. But I love the way you sing.”

Wednesday

Dr Popovik turned a little dial on the lectern, and slowly the clock wound back. It was a cruel trick, she knew, and self-defeating. She had her bit of fun, and the students got grumpier and harder to teach, and she reached for the dial again to keep herself going. She couldn’t give it up. The looks on their faces, baffled, aghast, were just too much. And on the second row there was this girl, who saw ten more minutes left than she expected, and smiled.

Thursday

There were new flags flying, slow-stitched and unique. You couldn’t rally under them on a battlefield or dress in their colours – they were all the colours, made to clothe all who were in rags. On the third night, a boy with blood on his boots climbed the city gate and tied the old flag there with his bootlaces. But that flag was everyone’s, too, and it soon grew flowers and feathers and threads in every shade.

Friday

We drifted between McDonald's and the university library. We were not hungry for fries or learning but they were the only places open 24 hours. At McDonald's the crew and the security guy started greeting us by name. They dropped in an extra nugget, another half-scoop of chips. At the library, there was nobody, and the lights went off everywhere we weren't, and our fingers were to greasy to handle all the books we didn't want to read.

Saturday

Something rattled in the vase when I picked it up, but the light wasn't good enough to see it down the neck. I had to buy it. Seven pounds! The man on the stall – the boy – was twitching at the cheeks trying not to laugh. When the deal was done I turned the vase over and shook it, right there over his trestle table, but nothing came. I laid it in the bottom of my shopping bag and swung it against the wall of the church, and then I went home. It's in the hallway now, waiting for me to look through the shards, to slice my thumb open searching, and decide whether what I find was worth the breaking.

Sunday

As good as their word, the new council ripped out the bike lane, leaving a yawning crevasse down each side of the road, a wound in the skin of the world that none could see the bottom of. A child or two fell in; they should not have been playing near the road in any case. The voters were delighted. But, they asked after a week or two, where were they to park?

I have been reading...

• Vaim by Jon Fosse (translated by Damian Searls), a short novel in three parts, each of which is one rambling sentence looping through the thoughts of one of its male characters. Eline, the almost supernaturally forceful woman who drives the story, remains a mystery the narrators can't begin to comprehend.
• Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo, a remarkable collection which, among much else, captures they way a tragedy can haunt the mind. I suspect this book may haunt in a similar way.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

The Cat Flap

When Mr Greystones adopted cat number four, his neighbours began to worry. Mr Greystones adopted cats a little at a time, but the street first noticed the new one (who was ginger and friendly and stupid) on the same day he was seen cutting a hole in his front door for a cat flap. The cat flap was, on the whole, a sensible addition: before it, cats one to three had their comings and goings through the permanently-open kitchen window, a temptation to burglars and winter winds alike. But the simultaneous arrival of the fourth cat, who was not only ginger and friendly and stupid but also slow and a poor jumper, gave the business an air of madcap destruction. A rumour quickly started that Mr Greystones had made several ill-considered alterations to the inside of his home for the cats' sake. And, well, they whispered, wasn't that more the sort of thing you expected of a spinster, more than a widower?

And yet there was an unthinking male confidence to the installation of the cat flap that reassured them. He had set aside the included screws in favour of his own hardware, and thrown away the paper template in favour of his measuring tape and spirit level, and these acts suggested a solidity of thought and purpose that set the minds of Mr Greystones neighbours at ease.

Saturday's daily story refers to the simple way of sharing a cake fairly between two people, in which one cuts and the other chooses. If you would like to go down a cake-cutting rabbithole, please enjoy the Wikipedia article on fair cake-cutting. Here you may learn about "the Stromquist moving-knives procedure", and discover that you are only two clicks away from the article on unsolved problems in computer science. In such a world we can never run out of things to write about.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

It's a good life, being the King's poisoner. Well paid, with room and board on top, and the freedom to pursue my research, my healing. Very rarely am I called upon to poison anyone. We have other ways of handling such things these days. When I am needed, of course I serve. If I did not, another poisoner would, and who would make my medicines?

Tuesday

Not much changed after the accident, except that clouds only looked like clouds. There were no faces in the wallpaper or songs in the wind. At times I would lie my healed skull on the heather and look up at the shapeless clouds, and breathe in the moor, and the smell would remind me of nothing at all.

Wednesday

We all lined up for a turn touching the electric fence. The lining up was part of the bravado: pushing to go first, or laughing to show you weren’t scared while the boys in front of you shrieked. When it was my go, I laid my hand on good and firm, thinking it wouldn’t hurt any more, but I’d impress the others. I felt nothing. The fence was dead. But I yelped and snatched my hand back all the same.

Thursday

I was over the river with the chicken when the strangest thing happened. The fox took the sack of grain between its teeth and dragged it away. By the time I got the boat back over they were far enough gone that I couldn’t follow the trail. I crossed once more, and picked up a feather from where my chicken used to be. I had thought I had it all worked out.

Friday

He looked all through the button drawer, but while it seemed that every shape and size and colour and finish could be found there, none of them were close to matching. He brushed a finger over the torn threads that tendriled from his coat. Then he heard that tobacco-torn voice at his shoulder, as her hand reached in and took out something bright and pearlescent: “You’ll never match the old, you daft thing. And why bother if you could? Look for something new and beautiful.”

Saturday

I slice the cake and you choose and that is fair. You slice the cake and I choose and that is fair. I slice the cake while you watch me and set the angle of my cut by the angle of your eyebrows. You slice the cake and keep hold of the knife while I choose, turning it this way and that. You wipe the blade with a napkin and I eat my little portion and agree, yes, this is fair.

Sunday

I took a walk in the moonlight to drop the things that shamed me into the hole. It was a good hole, deep and dark with a steep, sharp edge. We all used it, and all let each other pretend we didn't. As I walked home the moon went in and a steady rain fell, and things began to float past me in the gutter: a letter, a bottle, a photograph. We would clean it up in the morning without exchanging even a glance. We never needed the hole at all.

I have been reading...

• If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi, translated by William Weaver. I'm struck by how uninterested this novel is in incident. When its characters fight or die or kill, it is utterly matter-of-fact: there is no suspense in even its most dangerous moments. All of the energy is reserved for when its characters reflect or grieve or talk, in a novel that insists, more than anything, on unconditional humanity.
• Bondo by Menna Elfyn, translated by Elin ap Hywel, Gillian Clarke, Damion Walford Davies and Robert Minhinnick. I enjoyed these poems a great deal, and although I know no Welsh I appreciated this being a facing translation. The translations have some obvious differences: a question becoming a statement, an epigraph that is not in the original, a sestina where lines no longer repeat exactly. Walford Davies describes the translations as "not compromise, the latest victory for global English, but something more complex – a two-way transaction in which two utterances, two languages, hail and contend with each other." Even for a parochial English monoglot like me, it's rewarding to see that transaction happen.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

The Time You Brought a Goat Home

You led the goat down the street by a rope fixed around its neck. You did not trust that rope. You thought a goat could probably chew through it. But this was how the goat had been presented to you, by someone you had reason to believe knew more about goats than you did. So you pulled gently on the rope, and the two of you went step by step along the road.

That "gently" may have been an error too. You imagined the girl who handed you the rope leading the animal confidently behind her, knowing that it could drag her along to her death if it sprang off, and knowing that it wouldn't if she showed that she was to be respected. But you were fearful of getting it wrong, and to put a more positive spin on it, you are patient. Besides, aren't goats changeable, unpredictable? “Capricious”, isn't that a goat word, like “Capricorn”? (But then, you thought, surely capri pants are not goatish. And is Capricorn the goat, or is that Aries?)

By now, as you and the goat make your unsteady way home, your patience may be fraying like a rope under a goat's teeth. Of course I know that Capricorn is the goat, you may be thinking. Or, I would not be so timid with the animal. Or perhaps, I know a great deal about goats, thank you very much. It is a trying thing, to be misrepresented in this way. I can only beg your forgiveness. This is a story about the time you brought a goat home.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

We had a wonderful day at the old zoo, seeing all the different habitats. We felt the heat of the reptile house and bathed our feet where the penguins once swam. It’s astonishing to think that so many different creatures lived so close to us. We ate the last of our honey on dense, dry bread, and looked at the photographs, faded but beautiful.

Tuesday

The band played on as the bandstand sank into the lake. One last show, by the light of headtorches and battery-powered lanterns: the warden, as angry as anyone, would have let them play regardless, but there was a general will to spare him the trouble. When their boots were full of water and mud and unfunded splinters, they waded out, instruments held over their heads like rifles. There was one final round of applause, barely heard over the cracking of timber.

Wednesday

Ben and Emily loitered on the pier, mugging people of their doughnuts. Just one from each bag, mind, and if you said no they let you be. But very few said no. Most admired the cheek of it, and besides, a bag of five was too many. After another success they licked the sugar from their lips and their fingers, ready for the next. They were starting to feel queasy, but neither wanted to be the one to call a stop.

Thursday

I lived on the new moon and he lived on the old. I had only footprints and broken things to tell me what he had learned. What are we to do, so far from home but always tied to it? What are we to do with just thirty days in the sun? It is dark for him now, and I never met him. A small mercy.

Friday

We were caught twice over: once by the shrinking, and again by the web. Fear not, I said. A barrier has fallen. We can reason with the spider now. We can show it all that we understand of the world. But of the world we were caught in, we understood nothing.

Saturday

The next morning I didn’t remember, but I could feel it, the way you feel the grit in your eye long after it washes away, the way you taste the dirt in your mouth after you spit it out. I had a long, hot bath, a walk in the park, a cinema trip, another drink. But there’s no more forgetting what’s forgotten. When the teeth of my fear closed on me, there was nothing left but to remember.

Sunday

When breakfast was ready Jamie was still snoring away in his five-quid tent. Even from outside you could see the droplets where his breath had condensed on the plastic sheet. We grabbed a corner each and shook to make it rain, but on he snored. The zip wouldn't pull so we ripped the seam open. Inside was a snoring speaker, and a tunnel leading far and away.

I have been reading...

• Not very much, apparently! I am a little way into If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi, which follows Jewish resistance fighters stranded in Nazi-occupied territory. The clear, plain way Levi depicts their hardships is striking.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

Medium Wave

If the radio plays when it isn't plugged in then chances are it has batteries. If there is music between the stations then in all likelihood there is interference, or a pirate broadcast, or you simply have a musical imagination.

If it is in pieces on your bench, the speaker wires desoldered and the voltage regulator burnt out, and you still hear a choir, then of course it is only natural that you should begin to think of ghosts.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

The sweetshops had grown more competitive all through summer, carrying on long after the children calmed. The sourest sweets in the village, the country, the country, the world. The proprietors were seen on social media with tears in their eyes and smiling, bleeding mouths. A boy went in for jelly babies and they added a scoop of citric acid to the bag. By the end of the holidays, both were closed: one owner bankrupt, one laid out with chronic indigestion.

Tuesday

I wished to live in grids from the first time my birthday was marked on a calendar, from noughts and crosses to chess to go. In school I loved when they brought out graph paper in maths, or even for handwriting practice: fitting all those curls and scratches into perfect squares. I hated when they brought it with the scrap paper for a wet playtime, and it got drawn on howsoever. I dream of enclosed fields, of a square apartment on an American city block, a pixel-perfect image of the world. Or failing that, I might make do with prison.

Wednesday

In my eighth year under the sea I began to dream about leaks. I knew that I was dreaming because I saw the water coming in, heard the trickle, felt the wetness in my socks. If there was truly a leak it would be over faster than waking, my little world smeared flat by the weight of the ocean. I worried that a slow leak in my dreams meant death slowly growing in my body. I did not want to die sealed up tight. Give me the catastrophe, that I might feed the deep like a whale fall.

Thursday

We spent a happy afternoon arguing about the helicopter, he that it was a model close by, I that it was real but distant. We talked about flight time and engine noise and rotor speed and all sorts of other things we knew nothing about, and the wronger we felt the harder we argued, until the sun began to set and we compromised. It was a half-scale helicopter, monkey-piloted, a middling way away.

Friday

When Sadie was bad they sat her in front of the mirror. To stare into the mirror at any other time would have been dreadful vanity, but to do it in shame was quite different. It fascinated her to see her iris move, her nostrils twitch with breath, her skin curve and fold: so much complexity, and not a wisp of badness in it.

Saturday

For my birthday she gave me a book about secret languages. What it means to wear a certain flower or colour or perfume. How the way a letter is folded might show love, respect, contempt, forgiveness. I turned the pages and looked at the reused silver gift wrap it came in, and I wondered: what does this mean?

Sunday

For just one week I lived my nightmares. Went to work in my pants and let deadlines breeze past my bare skin. Sent the wrong words to the wrong people. When they asked me to leave, I drove home from the back seat. When such absurd fears become real, they lose their hold over you. I sleep dreamlessly now, but I hope to wake up soon.

I have been reading...

• Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan, which tells the stories of the residents of an Edinburgh tenement across 90 years. It's an odd novel, full of destabilising shifts in tone and genre, and little anachronisms that give it a strange sense of unreality. The supernatural parts end up feeling more real than the rest – but I think that suits it.
• The current issue of Forgotten Ground Regained, a journal of alliterative poetry. I was introduced to the journal because my friend Lindy Newns has a poem in this issue that I like very much (two, in fact), but the whole journal is a delight, a clear labour of love. A real gem (or a pearl, if you prefer).

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

Separate Containers

Around two o'clock one of the guys from the tip comes over to my open window. "Excuse me, sir," he says, "are you all right? You've been here a long time."

"Oh, yes, thank you, no, all fine," I say, with a demonstrative glance over my shoulder to the rubble sacks and disassembled bed in the back, the things that prove I belong here. "Just taking a moment. I've this bad shoulder, you see. It needs resting now and then."

He looks at his watch, fast, like he doesn't want me to see. "Do you need any help, sir? I can help you with your waste if the shoulder is hurting."

"Oh, no, thank you. There's no need." I smile, and give him a reassuring roll, trying to remember which shoulder it is that hurts me. "We're nearly there."

"Okay, well, if you do need any help, anyone in the orange jacket will be able to help you." He looks at his watch again, for longer this time. I have the impression that his first glance was too quick to read it. "If it gets busy, we will have to move you along," he says, "but while it is quiet, there is no problem." As he walks away, I hear him speak gently into his radio, and I take it that he is reporting me as a suspicious presence.

It is quiet, like he said. Not quiet: there are engines running, and crunches of metal and glass. But there are only a few of us here, no queue of cars like you get at the end of a bank holiday weekend. I could have accepted his help and not felt bad about it, things being this quiet. They are always so helpful at the tip. They will look in your bags and tell you where your unnwanted things are wanted. They will help you to carry what is too heavy or just too awkward. They will sweep up behind you and never make you feel bad for the mess you make.

After he lifts his hand from his radio, the man in the orange jacket takes up one of the large brooms and clears away the leaves and branches from beside the garden waste receptacle. A small, thin old woman who I think could lift eighty times her body weight, like an ant, has been emptying the trimmings from her boot. I would have liked to help her. I might have done, if it weren't for my shoulder. Instead, we exchange little smiles as she gets into her car and I get out of mine, and that is enough. We are both here for the same reason, comrades for a day.

I take the bed out first, piece by piece, over to where the wood goes. Step aside for a man heaving paving slabs. Hear the pleasing clatter of my contribution landing on everyone else's. I like the wood best, I think. It makes me think of bonfire night when I was a kid, when everyone piled what they had to get rid of around the back of the scout hut, and you felt your eyes would melt if you didn't step back. I think it would be nice to give out toffee apples at the tip, though I know it wouldn't be allowed. They could have a sort of street party, just once a year, where we all get together properly. There is always furniture at hand, and the cleanup would be easy.

Next, I upend the rubble sacks over the edge, one at a time, shaking out the scraps and the dust from the bottom. I try not to look down. It is dizzying, that edge: it feels higher than it truly is, perhaps because it is built for things to fall from. And at the bottom there are all sorts of things that are in the wrong place, and those make me a little sad. They make me think of hedgehogs under the bonfire. They make me think of how long it has been since my shoulder hurt.

When I turn the last sack over, a lump of brick catches in a fold and drags it through my hands. The plastic drops like the stone it isn't, and sits on the pile below, edges fluttering. It was so fast, you'd never know I didn't mean it.

I look around me to see who has seen, to work out where the cameras point. When I look back, I can't say which was the sack I dropped. Mine is not the only transgression. I reach an arm down, as if the drop wasn't there at all, and feel my feet lift from the floor, just for a moment.

I get into my car, and gave my shoulder a rub. Buckle up. Check all my blind spots. I see the little dot-matrix sign flash up my number plate, tallying another visit. As I pull past the exit barrier, the man in the orange jacket gives me a smile and a wave. I pretend not to notice him. I am so ashamed, I feel I can never come back here. But already I am wondering what other things I have to throw away.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

While the machine warmed up, we watched increasingly complicated time-travel movies and challenged each other to explain them. We thought we were preparing our minds. But we were wrong to believe a journey in the machine would be explicable. Now our worlds all have different histories, and my mother was a pine tree, and my heart is younger than my head when it had always been the other way around.

Tuesday

I learned to paint one colour at a time, squeezing the last of the blue from the tube as I saved up for orange. At first it annoyed me to see the red of my tomatoes and have only the green of the vine to paint with. In time I found there was a little of each hue in everything. At last I sold a painting, and with the little money I made I bought five pretty little tubes. I squeezed a little blob from each, and watched them on the palette, daring me to mix them.

Wednesday

On my birthday I took a pass-the-parcel to work. We spend the team meeting passing unwanted crap around the table anyway: we might as well get a Chewit when the music stops. It was a wonderful birthday, an unexpected afternoon in the sun. And if management or the bomb squad ask any difficult questions, I will say: I am older now, and wiser.

Thursday

I put the key into its hole and turn until the spring tightens. Straight away an unseen mechanism takes up the tension, easing it away little by little. The next day, I put the key into its hole and turn until the spring tightens. The mechanism clicks, and somewhere I will never go, something happens. If, one day, I do not turn the key, the spring will slacken and the mechanism will slow and stop. I would never do it. But I might, any day now, put the key into its hole and turn and turn and turn until something snaps.

Friday

After the demolition there was so much sky in the sky that the dust didn’t seem to matter. We sat in evening sun where once we were in shadow. We had learned how these things that seem part of the shape of the world can vanish like an ebb tide. Nobody had lived there anywhere, we thought.

Saturday

There was no big crash when it shattered, only a sound like hailstones pattering across the lobby, and the hum of the outside pouring in. Everything was much brighter, suddenly. I hadn’t realised how dirty the skylights were. It made you want to look up, straight up, with wide open eyes to watch the falling glass.

Sunday

Laundry day, all heat and steam and detergent, cracking hands so they threaten bloodstains on shirts. Everything cleaner than when it was new, and a slick film on the fingers that makes you shudder at your own touch. Soap in the air, mouth, eyes, like we are being cleaned from the world. But fresh sheets tonight, and sharp collars on Sunday, to calm our red skin.

I have been reading...

• The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud (translated by John Cullen), a novel narrated by the brother of the man murdered in Albert Camus's L'Étranger. Leila Aboulela did something similar in her play The Insider, which appears in the anthology The Things I Would Tell You. Daoud's novel adds some extra wrinkles: L'Étranger exists within it, but written by Meursault, and there is a degree of ambiguity to the narrator's claimed identity.
• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, my book club's Beltane pick.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Limited Visibility

I had stopped midway over the bridge to admire the effect of the fog. It came down suddenly, as thick as I had ever seen it, and you couldn't see the ends of the bridge, or the town at either side. Couldn't see the water below, and even the sound of it was dulled by all the white it was wrapped in. There was only the steel walkway under my feet and the steel rail under my hands and the chipped green paint with red showing beneath to make it all seem real.

By the dial of my watch I knew I ought to go on, but I had so turned myself around trying to see the view in all its aspects that I couldn't say which way was onwards. There were no lights through the fog to guide me, no pattern to track in the worn paint. I thought of Robert Frost, and of the footprints I had made by my arrival, and how nobody walked half the bridge. But the day had been dry until the fog came, and now the walkway was evenly patterned with little dewdrops, except in the circles I had made by my turning. There was no track to see but that.

It would have taken a few minutes to resolve my uncertainty. Choose a direction and walk, and see what emerged, if anything still could. But the choosing was impossible, the ways both being blank. And if I had chosen, I did not believe then – do not believe now – that I could have walked straight, even suspended on that line in the empty sky.

You can hear more about my daily stories on this month's episode of The Joy Ethic Show. Jolene's show is always warm, connecting, and thoughtful, and will make your day better. I was really pleased to have the chance to talk to her about Scattering, and to share the space with two lovely features on art and on visibility and vulnerability

This week’s daily stories

Monday

Dad said you must always give the seagulls one chip, as an offering. Mum said you mustn’t encourage them. So chips at the seaside meant a choice about who to betray. There was no third option: to throw half a chip, or one soaked to inedibility in vinegar, would betray them both. It was only going back home, fully grown and accustomed to making my own choices, that I noticed: she always threw them a chip, and he never did.

Tuesday

A person can drown in as little as an inch of cherry blossom. Nose and throat plugged, and you imagine that if you can cough it up it will make a fluttering pink cloud, but all it makes is a thick wet splat. All the beauty was gone when you tried to breathe it, and you only tried to breathe it because there was nothing else left. You have spoiled the spring insisting on air, but air is better than beauty, and it will be summer soon.

Wednesday

We were blowing dandelion clocks all afternoon, the seeds streaming from the stems and never running out. There would be weeds all over our mother’s perfect lawn, making it more beautiful. But they didn’t grow, for we blew and blew and never found the time.

Thursday

The mosquitoes were biting, but they weren’t biting me. Was it something in my blood, or the scent of my skin? Was there some poison in my veins that they could taste even before landing? I slapped where they should have been, and scratched until I made the welts I was missing. I scratched until the blood came, and I saw what was wrong with it.

Friday

All week we gambled on ladybird spots, betting chocolate bars and pints and twenty pound notes. On the last night we found a wildlife book in Gary’s room, in among his winnings, with the page on ladybirds turned down at the corner. 7-spot, 2-spot, 4-spot. I’d always thought it was random. Serves us right, I suppose, for not being curious.

Saturday

Through slatted blinds I read the landscape plotted out on graph paper: the treetops rising steadily on the horizon; the sky squeezed out by rising land; and at the end of the x axis, one big square column, a mode far from the median. I understood, until he pulled the cord and the blinds rattled up, and I could no longer see the shape of things.

Sunday

There was a shudder in the walls every morning in the old house. "Don't worry," my uncle said, "it's just the pipes, where the Creature lives." He was always like that. He didn't know how much kids can believe. He didn't know I'd crawl out of bed before dawn and sit by the radiator, looking for something to talk to.

I have been reading...

• Winter's Tales by Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen. These stories have an element of fairytale uncanniness to them, which I've found hard to get to grips with but compelling.
• "Hold Me Looser, Tiny Dancer" by Maria Kuznetsova, from One Story, which has a similar sort of oddness to it.
• I've dipped into the first two issues of The Aftershock Review, which hold some very fine and varied poems. Issue 3 is out soon.

This week’s story: Ossified

For Hallowe'en it was fancy dress in the student bar. It had been fancy dress the year before, too, when they were all still new and keen to impress. Lots of scanty costumes and daring jokes. Jane and her new best friend had gone elaborate, a two-part pantomime demon-horse that dripped paper entrails when they separated. The friend had dropped out at Christmas, and they had both sincerely meant to keep in touch. This year, Jane couldn't be bothered. She went along for the company, and hoped she might be scary enough on her own. When asked, she said: "I'm a skeleton. But it's almost November, so I've got my big coat on."

This week’s daily stories

Monday

Danielle set off at eleven o’ clock on the bank holiday, hoping to catch the traffic. With luck she would get five hours, sat on her own, phone in the glovebox, while the queues raged around her. She would put the traffic report on the radio and enjoy being part of the problem. But something terrible must have happened, and she made it there in two hours flat.

Tuesday

Breakfast was stars in milk, the two galaxies swimming together. The brilliance of the stars showed the true yellow in the milk, just as the dark left where we filled our bowl showed how blue the night had been. There were stars left up there still. The sky still lived. But we were hungry, and one bowl could not fill us.

Wednesday

In a little note on his phone, Kev wrote down all the words he found redolent but didn’t quite know the meaning of. Mangrove. Bucolic. Redolent. One day things would get desperate, and he would start looking them up. Behind one of them would be an escape. Now, while there was hope, he read it and was grateful that there were things in the world deserving of such names.

Thursday

We knew that Auntie Lisa must be rich because there was a huge bowl of pine cones in her hallway, and pine cones were rare and precious to us. Dad said that she picked them all up herself, one for each walk she went on, but nobody could have walked that far or that often. Not with a bad leg and a stick. We cleared her house one warm October. For all her riches, that bowl was the one thing we fought over.

Friday

“What’s in the sandwiches?” she asked, and he said “Paste”, and after a minute or so of waiting for him to elaborate she said “What kind? Wallpaper?” Chewingly he answered with a question: “What do you know about wallpaper paste? We’ve never redecorated since you were born.” And that was true, the house was faded almost to grey. She peeled up one damp slice that left a layer of itself clinging to the paste like a half-stripped wall. Sniffed. “I think it’s fish.” He shrugged. It was the jar they had left at the back of the fridge, label soaked off. He hoped it was fish, if that’s what it smelled of.

Saturday

The stump I like to sit on was once her favourite tree. I sat on it and thought of time worked backwards. How angry I would be to see them come and put that trunk over my seat. How I would resent her for playing in the branches and getting younger by it. How the rest of us would come undone, too.

Sunday

When they met up on a Saturday they only played the games she couldn't win, and then they made fun of her for caring. She practised until she could beat them, and they made fun of her for that, too. She brought new games, ones where you worked together to solve problems or make something beautiful. She knew what would happen. But she was storing up all the awful things about them, ready for the lonely Saturdays to come.

I have been reading...

• Schooling by Heather McGowan, which appears to be out of print in the UK but is well worth picking up if you spot a second-hand copy. Its stream-of-consciousness style reads like a memory, in which feeling and character are vivid but never certain.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Only As Prescribed

On the morning of the funeral, halfway through shaving, with the foam still covering the left of his face, John stole one of his wife's beta blockers. Snipped a tidy square out of the sheet with nail scissors and tucked it his phone case. With razor clutched awkwardly between ring finger and pinky he opened out the map-creased leaflet and read about not taking unless prescribed, looking for the side effects to make sure he was safe really. Silly to print side-effects on pills for anxiety, he thought, but there are rules about these things. Shaving the left side he thought to himself in the mirror that the cut away corner would tell on him. An empty cell would be just another pill that Heather had taken before she got better. Besides, she hadn't counted even before they were retired to the back of the cabinet, she was always running out and then going into an unmedicated panic about it. A neat, square cut spoke plainly of her husband, who feared more precisely, who lined up the point of his scissors so as not to leave an unsightly nick in the packet, while the razor swung loose from his hand.

When he had rinsed with too-warm water from the cold tap, all his pores half-closed, he went back to the cabinet and turned the sheet over so that a glance would only show the intact corners. He had forgotten that Heather always ended up opening medicine packets from both ends, so that the pills slid out and you could only find the empty box.

⁂

This week I had the pleasure of reading a few of my daily stories at Speak Easy, a really lovely spoken word open mic night here in Manchester. If you're in the area I highly recommend it: it's joyful and eclectic and welcoming and warm.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

I dreamed I was a clownfish, tucked up safe in my anemone. I woke tasting brine, the night sweats running over my lips, but I was safe. I wondered what unfelt poison was protecting me.

Tuesday

Behind my eye the migraine sits, angry that it cannot push the ball out if its socket and escape to purer air. It has such colour and such shape to it, it seems a pity it should be locked up inside my drab old skull. I put a hand to my face to comfort it, and whisper to it in the dark, knowing it will not outlive the day. Darling migraine, you will miss all the beauty of this world except your own: jagged, iridescent, painful.

Wednesday

We lived in sliding frames, like kept bees. When they needed something from us they pulled us out and scraped us open. The little that was left they gave back for us to rebuild. A bee in smoke is too busy escaping the fire to use her stinger. The arrangement is for the good of everyone, the keeper says from behind his mask.

Thursday

Caring for the frogs in the garden kept me afloat, for a while. I sloped the edge of the pond for them, dropped logs in the water as resting places, and felt I was building up somewhere I could breathe. When they moved into the house it got harder: puddles on the carpet, tadpoles in the bath. I didn’t want pondweed in my bed and those strange eyes watching me. I didn’t want to wake choking on frogspawn. I didn’t know what I was choosing.

Friday

Danny wouldn’t let us paint or put up wallpaper. “It makes the room smaller,” he said. “We’ve little enough room as it is.” He took the walls back to brick and ripped up the carpets and stood there in all his space. But he left those heavy curtains that blocked off the whole bay window, and the bracken growing over the front door.

Saturday

The fairies sealed her son inside an acorn, and so she sat and watched all through the autumn, trying to see which one was him. She gathered them in sacks, and threw sharp stones at squirrels. Her palms itched through the winter as the acorns cooled under the soil. In twenty years there will be a forest where there had been nothing, and she will sit under the branches and remember him.

Sunday

I got a little dab of ink on my finger, which spread to my page and my sleeve and my face. I got mustard on my shirt and ketchup at the corner of my mouth. I slipped walking through the park, grass on one knee, mud on the other. I was a disaster, more colourful than I have ever been.

I have been reading...

• Bee by Claire Preston. I developed a long fascination with bees while at university, where I was taught by Claire Preston. Shortly after the bee-fever took me I found myself wandering downstairs in a local bookshop, to a section I rarely visited, where the first thing I saw was this book. Of course I bought it immediately, but for some reason I never got around to reading it until now. It's a delightful tour of the many places bees nest in our culture.
• 'The Crossing' by David Frankel, the latest Little Uncertainty from Uncertain Stories. These stories are available free in bookshops across the UK, or as a bonus when you buy an anthology. 'The Crossing' is a taut little story which uses a hint of horror to show the inhumanity of borders.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Dad Dancing

The dancing began at seven pm with a reticent first shuffle, before the beckoning bride, a steady set of floor-fillers, and the arrival of pre-drunk evening-only guests set the party mood simmering. Ecstatic uni friends and indifferent cousins jostled for space with ballroom enthusiasts trying a little too hard. And dotted here and there, loosening their ties and keeping close to their pints, there were dads, each dancing his own dad dance for his own dad reasons.

🕺

Martin never saw the point of dancing. He loved music, and prided himself on listening widely and without snobbery. He felt a good beat in his bones, but never the urge to shake them. He might tap a foot, or a finger; he might, now and then, in a moment of wild abandon, air-drum. But to dance was a distraction. Dancing wasn’t listening, and listening was the point.

When Kitty started dancing, two months after walking, Martin was thrilled. Not about the dancing, sweet as it was, but because it was the first flicker of interest she had shown in any music not directly produced by her mum. She had chewed on crayons to Charles Mingus, rolled a Duplo car back and forth to the Stones, and turned her back on CBeebies when the presenters started singing. The nearest she came to an emotional response was filling her nappy. But when ‘Blame It on the Boogie’ came on, it was like it had come with a software update. She stood completely still for a minute or so, then exploded into a cacophony of limbs and didn’t stop for half an hour except to shout ‘Again!’. Whether it was the song, the stage her ever-growing brain had reached, or the weird orange powder on her melty straws, something had changed her.

After that, Kitty could pick out the rhythm of a car radio carried on the wind from a mile away. She danced to ice-cream van chimes and the ten-second loop of her toy mobile phone and the rain on the roof of the conservatory. She sought out music like a bee seeks a flower. She rarely had far to search: from that first frenzy of movement, Martin had saturated her in it, playing all the grooves he wanted to cut into her brain, trying to cram in all he could before she decided she preferred jumping or climbing or hiding handfuls of dirt between the sofa cushions.

Before long, she wasn’t content to dance alone: daddy had to dance too. And Martin wasn’t going to risk her losing interest, so he complied, dancing as best he could. His mind was never on dancing: it was on Kitty, and the joy of all that music pouring into her. Until he realised that the joy and the music and the love were pouring back out again with every movement. There was no Jackson 5 moment when lightning struck him and innervated his hips. But there was a moment when he noticed the change: noticed he was enjoying himself, noticed himself dancing when Kitty wasn’t there. He waved his hands like he was swatting flies, grinned his biggest, stupidest grin, and queued up The Contours’ ‘Do You Love Me’.

A few weeks later, Kitty discovered how much fun it was to bash her toy pans together when there was a cymbal crash, or tinkle her tuneless glockenspiel along with a piano part, or shake her tambourine to literally anything. Martin never had the patience to learn an instrument, but for her, he had perhaps too much. When Kitty gave insisted on performing for visitors, Martin insisted on dancing; when she climbed out of bed at three in the morning to play her recorder, Martin climbed out of bed and danced; when she played her first proper gig at the pub on the corner, Martin was there dancing while everyone who knew him pretended that they didn’t. Everyone but Kitty.

Martin still couldn’t dance (though Kitty loved him anyway). Whether he mashed potato or did the twist, his head was still nodding quietly between the earcups of his good headphones. He danced like a man at a silent disco tuned to a different channel. But there at the reception, as Kitty’s band filled the air with love, it didn’t matter. Nobody could quite see what Martin was trying to do with his flapping arms and stiff legs, but they could see it was joyful, and generous, and true.

🕺

Jan is dancing to the rhythm of his internal monologue. If it bears any resemblance to the music being played, it is a second-order effect as he worries along to the beat. But dancing is celebration without words, without thought, without justification or explanation. Dancing is celebration without question or doubt or an unguarded word; an unmediated expression of the joy that is supposed to be in your heart. So Jan dances.

Milena is with her grandparents for the night, the first time since she was born. That means wine and dancing and stopping out, rest and calm and early nights. It means not attending to her every need, and thinking of her every moment. It means uninterrupted adult conversations, and having nothing to talk about but the baby. It means quality time together (outside, in a private corner, while Emily cries guilty tears into Jan’s jacket). It means a strange alienation from a life Jan thought he desperately missed, which he must either acknowledge or ignore. So Jan dances.

Jan realises that he is still dancing to the last song, or possibly the song before that. He hasn’t been listening. A few feet away, Emily is dancing too, much more capably than him. Emily has always been an effortless, elegant dancer. It is as though the music moves and she just relaxes into the currents of it. You have to look into her eyes to see she knows what she is doing, for she dances there, too. But there is no dancing in her eyes tonight. When her eyes are like this, Jan knows he would have to call her name three or four times before she heard him, even without the music. And Jan knows he isn’t going to do it. So Jan dances.

It’s dance or talk.

Yes, she’s a treasure.

Ha, I remember sleep, I used to get that sometimes!

Such a beautiful wedding.

Yes, she’s OK, it’s hard but she’s tough.

I’m always saying going to work feels like a day off now! But I’d rather be at home with them.

I’d better not, got to be sensible these days.

You’ve got three, why didn’t you tell me how hard it is?!

Dance or talk, and the talking is all the same. So Jan dances.

🕺

Amol was always too self-conscious to dance in public. Not that he cared if people thought he was a bad dancer, or even if they made fun of him. The standard of his dancing was of no importance to him, and he knew that even the worst dancer looks less strange on the dance floor than being the only one still sat down. But he couldn’t shake his awareness of eyes on him: other people’s attention, layered between him and the world like patterned glass. When he danced in the shower, the music went straight from his ears to his feet, but on a dance floor every move went through his mind first, adding a fraction of a second’s delay like he was on the end of a video call, throwing him off the beat. He didn’t mind that it made him dance badly. He danced badly anyway. But dancing out of time just wasn’t fun. It felt like his attempts at learning to juggle, with the added frustration that he knew how it felt to do it properly.

‘Wild horses couldn’t drag me up there,’ he would say, and he meant it. He had no interest in doing something he didn’t enjoy just because it was supposed to be fun. But wild horses were nothing compared to Ajay, grabbing a handful of jacket in his tiny fist and pulling Amol insistently towards the dance floor. Ajay could drag him anywhere, and though he hadn’t yet learned to say ‘dance’ and struggled even with ‘baba’, it couldn’t have been clearer what he wanted.

So Amol danced, like the two of them did at home, but still aware of the other guests watching (‘So cute!’), still thinking about every step and clap, still always a little behind the beat. And Ajay danced, barely even knowing that other people could watch, but not yet in full control of his little body, still feeling it out, the music still cutting channels from ears to feet, leaving him, too, just a fraction late. And as the lights pulsed and the bass thumped, the two of them danced together, out of time with the whole room, and perfectly in sync with each other.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

I learned to cook sitting in my bedroom, guessing what was cooking by the smells drifting up the stairs. Later, when the house was quiet, I would slip down to the kitchen in bare feet and hold the spice jars to my nose, and learn which aroma was cumin and which was ginger and which was garlic. For years I cooked without salt or sugar, without any of the things I couldn’t smell and didn’t see. I had to learn all over again, but that doesn’t mean forgetting.

Tuesday

He took a book down from the shelf, saying as he did so, “A mind, like a gun, must be kept well oiled.” He had never held a gun; was not quite sure where the oil went, or what might happen if it was neglected. He had looked at pictures, and imagined what gun oil might smell like. He realised one Christmas that he was imagining the smell of his auntie’s sewing machine oil, and had to change it to something more like diesel. None of that mattered, since he wouldn’t read the book either.

Wednesday

The mug was filled with chocolates and said “BEST TEACHER EVER”. Ted wasn’t sure about it. The mug made him think of Miss Smithson and her wide, safe smile. It made him think of Mr King, who he had been scared of, but who had helped when he broke his arm in the playground. It made him think about cards that said “To a special son” and “To my wonderful wife”, and about how it only seemed to be wrong to lie sometimes. He ate a piece of the chocolate, and that made him feel better.

Thursday

There was a fox on the bus, and nobody else noticed because he had somehow got hold of a broadsheet newspaper and was reading it quietly on the back seat. I could see his little amber paws holding the pages. He seemed out-of-place, to me: the back seats are for smoking and snogging and dead arms. But I suppose that is only school buses, and I have grown up now. Outside the Crown Court he folded the paper, put it on the seat beside him, and disembarked. The rest of us were appalled. He didn’t even thank the driver.

Friday

Between her driving licence and her Tesco Clubcard she kept a razor blade. She imagined a thief sliced to the bone, his blood staining the cash like a bank vault’s dye packs. She began leaving her handbag open in bars and walking home alone. She left her wallet on the wall outside the supermarket. It came back to her in the post three days later, with a rust-brown circle on the leather.

Saturday

Brian came back into the kitchen, and through glances and smothered smiles we all agreed not to mention the pancake stuck to the ceiling. He took up his place by the cooker, and we waited for it to come down on him. It stayed up there for forty days. By the time it fell, Brian was gone, and I was going, and it landed, mid-viewing, on the landlord’s bald head.

Sunday

Scratched in charcoal on the gate were the words “THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE WOODS”. Reading them made me feel better about things. I tried to imagine the woods without anything in them, and it felt like a hole right through me. I thought they couldn't even be woods. I climbed the gate, and hopped over, and went on my way.

I have been reading...

• A Life of Adventure and Delight by Akhil Sharma. These are very fine, tightly observed stories. I'm not sure they are well served by the cover quote that claims they "transform the very nature of reading", although I suppose that may be true of everything we read.
• Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, which I found so propulsive I read it too fast, and now I feel I need to return to it more thoughtfully. I think that way of reading suits it.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: The Tour Guide

On Tuesdays Arthur gave tours of the gallery. They were not a formal part of his job, which was primarily a matter of pest control, but he was treated with charmed indulgence, and Arthur felt that everybody in a gallery ought to have a stake in the artwork. For his part, Arthur had a stake in everything, particularly the cafe and the garden and the spot in the main atrium where the sun shone down through the skylights.

Arthur generally picked up his tour groups by the front entrance, and this Tuesday was no different. His tours, being unofficial, were not scheduled or advertised: he simply found a lost-looking group and introduced himself. This was the great privilege of working at the gallery: not merely to share the exhibitions with visitors who might feel uncertain or out-of-place or even fearful, but to make them feel at ease. Or more than at ease: at home. Arthur fancied that he was especially well suited to that. Perhaps he didn't have the knowledge of the other tour guides, either the old hands who knew every piece in the collection or the art students eager as kittens, but the visitors never looked at him with glazed eyes, or nodded along so he wouldn't think they were stupid. This was art, to Arthur: an intimacy like the artist's heart beating against yours. He liked to think that, though not an artist himself, he embodied that spirit. He liked to think that's why they called him Arthur, Artie, Art.