Phyllida Shrimpton

ide because the thought of having to dig them out made him feel almost as if he’d

inside because the thought of having to dig them out made him feel almost as if he’d become an intruder in his own home.
In the end, the ready meals were already cooling on the plates

Algernon’s feet, constricted by brand-new leather shoes, dangled a good two inches above a bare wooden floor where he sat. The narrow bed, metal-framed and identical in every way to all the others in the dormitory, sagged wearily beneath him, and a coarse woollen over-blanket made the back of his legs itch. A single pillow, where he was to lay his head that night, whispered to him of other schoolboys’ nightmares still caught inside its cotton slip.
Algernon’s bony knees, poking out from black flannel shorts, sported ruddy brown grazes which peppered their way over the bulge of his kneecaps before disappearing into the carefully folded cuffs of his new grey socks. Dragging a nail along the skin of his right leg he gathered a line of pinprick scabby crusts, which, when bringing his finger up close to his face, he was able to examine closely. Each one, he thought, was a beautiful relic of the life he’d left behind. He flicked the debris from his nail onto the floor and watched how a single tear of blood trickled down his shin before rather satisfyingly staining the cuff of his new grey socks. His knees told of a very recent and daringly triumphant act of bravery and for a brief, liberatin

‘Stop being so nice when I want to hate you!’ she’d said, her words gurgling through the tears in her throat. He was not her father, he was just her mother’s ex-boyfriend but she’d known, in that moment, she had loved him all the same.

How can you be who you are when you don’t even know where you’re going?

Algernon stayed mute, astonished by his own stupidity. Once again, the right words had come out of his mouth yet the meaning of them had glitched somewhere on the path between his brain and his vocal cords.

Algernon glanced at his carriage clock. The steady tick of its mechanism nudged its delicate gold hands to 5.28pm, telling him that it was nearly time for his ready meal and another cup of tea, virtually the highlight of his whole day.

day Algernon walked to the shop for his newspaper, listened to the news on the radio, then made a valiant attempt at completing The Times crossword which, to his intense but private shame, he managed less often these days. He would always have an afternoon nap and later, after a supper prepared at exactly 5.30pm, he would watch the news probably followed by a detective series on television. Each activity was marked or perhaps dictated by the carriage clock on his mantelpiece and that was just the way it was. If he were to hold a conversation with himself, Algernon might admit to having been more than skilled in the art of creating tidy boxes in which to place the various stages of his life. He was unlikely, however, to hold a conversation with himself. He was unlikely to hold a conversation with anyone, being a man of so few words as he was.

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