1. Lucien Wolfson’s Story Salon… {Stories and Links}

2. You Too Will Have Experiences… {Pocket Lint}

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Lucien Wolfson’s Story Salon

☙❦❧

Dear ,

At this week’s salon, we discussed William Trevor’s “The Dressmaker’s Child” (, $)1. I love Trevor, but didn’t know the story, and when I read it last night I found it a little hard-going at first. I began to wonder, was there even a story there? But then the story turned, and turned so hard it would be cruel to spoil it. From then on I was gripped. Not “gripped by the throat” but instead gripped in some deep unconscious place we only experience in our most terrifying dreams. As if, on some thrashing night of guilt and persecution and suspended disaster, Trevor was riding alongside me, taking notes.

Another story that came out of the salon was Andrea Lee’s “Brothers and Sisters Around the World” (also The New Yorker, $). It’s a firecracker, about a woman and her French husband on holiday in Madagascar. The husband becomes the complicit object of fixation for a pair of young women, really girls, and the girls make the wife the object of their contempt.

One thing I loved was the way the story shows a mind chewing on a problem, circling it, spiralling into action. The structure, braided paragraphs that build the narrator’s obsessional fury, is worth studying. This braiding pattern reminded me of an experience I had, the first time a story really worked for me. The first time I didn’t feel “I” was writing it. I found myself in an alternating current of two different voices in the same head, one internal and one external. The story, which I typed into a typewriter, just seemed to come out of me – to come alive.

That was the first story I published, in the Fish Anthology 2019. The title was “In Memoriam” (it was published under my “other” name, Joshua Davis). On the page I used marks to separate the paragraphs, trying to preserve that division between the two voices. But the editors of the anthology, not knowing what to do with these strange marks, tried to delete them. At the launch, when I read the piece aloud, I alternated between two different voices. In place of the marks, I clicked my fingers. Afterwards, people came up to me. “I loved the clicks,” they said.2

But I want to know about you: what did you read this week? What stories gripped you and which ones didn’t? What stories brought back memories you didn’t expect?

Some of you have been emailing, or telling me on Substack, and it’s been brilliant to receive so many recommendations. I don’t trust reviews, because I don’t think our reactions to art take place on an intellectual level, and too many reviews attempt to intellectualise an instinctive response. But when two people tell me about the same author, or book, or story, I pay attention.

You’d be very welcome to come and tell me what you’re reading, face to face on Zoom, at my Story Salon, Mondays 6-7pm UK time.

For the link to join the salon on Monday, 2nd November 2026, subscribe here:

Subscribe now

You can join the Discord community, where we share and discuss the stories we’re reading, here.

Wishing you safe travels, and happy reading,

LW

☙❦❧

You Too Will Have Experiences

                                                           Pocket Lint
                                                                   ▾

At dinner with S and the kids, I had the sensation I was inhaling a strand of spaghetti. The strand lay against the inside of my throat, like a piece of string, and I could neither move it up nor down. Only, when I coughed, small morsels broke away and rose back up into my mouth. I felt them, soft and slick on my tongue. Coughing didn’t shift the pasta, but it did make it wriggle, giving me brief moments of relief. I pictured the strand as a worm, angrily rearranging itself in the hole where it slept.

Across the table, the kids were asking what Scotland was famous for, and S was listing haggis, the Knights Templar, the invention of the telephone. Once, when S still lived in Scotland, she visited a Scottish friend who was travelling in Italy. The friend, craving home comforts, asked S to carry a haggis with her on the plane.

“It was in my suitcase,” S told the kids. “It never went near a fridge. I can’t believe we ate it.”

The boy wanted to know: did the Knights Templar fight dragons. Between coughs, I told him there were no dragons in Scotland, but S said there were. We turned to Google. There were indeed dragons in Scotland, said Google. It gave a list of the three most famous Scottish dragons, but two of the three were actually famous Scottish worms.

The restaurant was part of a hotel, which was full of families like ours, travelling for half term. The only table we’d been able to book was late at night. The kids menu included a dessert, which turned out to be enormous ice cream sundaes. Before they’d dug halfway through the bowls, the kids stopped eating. Their faces looked grey.

“They’re tired,” S said, with a hint of reproach. I’d just stopped the waiter and ordered a mint tea. “I’ll take them up.”

While I waited for the tea, I couldn’t help eavesdropping on the table beside me. A group of adults were explaining rugby to a cluster of children. One of the older children, the oldest, had just started at a school that played rugby, and the men were telling tales from their own schooldays. The men pointed to various scars, visible and invisible. They reminded me of characters in tales, old members of a warrior brotherhood gathered around a fire. Telling of raids on foreign lands, promising the listening children: You too will have experiences. The oldest boy encouraged the stories, asking questions, hungry to know more.

“I didn’t know how badly I’d done it,” one of the men said, pointing to the scar on his nose. “The guy who tackled me was too busy screaming about his knee.”

I was trying to catch the waiter’s eye, but he kept walking past me, attending to other tables. In irritation, I stroked my moustache. There was still a small indent, just above my lip on the left hand side. We had left from London that morning by train. Shaving in a hurry, while continuing an argument in my head about whether S had time to stop at a bookshop on the way to the station, I became distracted. I kept rehearsing my objections as I ran the clippers over my beard, as I removed the comb, as I pressed the cold metal teeth against the skin of my upper cheeks and lower neck. My moustache looked a little on the thick side, and I brought the clippers up to trim it. The teeth met my skin. I had forgotten to replace the comb, and a pale hairless scar appeared in the middle of my moustache. Carefully, I trimmed around the scar, willing it into a neat line. I stepped back and tried to persuade myself that my face looked intentional, as if it were my intention to walk around with only half a moustache. I thought I could get away with it, and also that this was an act of self-deception, and so I attached the shortest comb and trimmed the whole beard almost to nothing. It’ll grow back, I told myself, and sitting in the restaurant, catching my thumb on the edge of stubble, I reflected that my family hadn’t commented on my mistake, and the most likely reason was that they hadn’t even noticed.

Finally my tea arrived, and I signalled for the bill. I started drinking it at once, burning my tongue and throat. A shriek behind me made me think my family had come back, but it was only another diner, pulling out their chair. On the train we had sat separately, facing backwards, with three seats in one row, and one seat in the row in front. There was no point asking the kids which parent they preferred to sit with. I’d made a mistake when I booked, I explained, when the inspector checked our tickets. I hadn’t realised we could choose our seats. “My wife hates travelling backwards on trains,” I told the ticket inspector, “but actually I prefer it. I like seeing where I’ve been and not where I’m going, the way the Greeks saw the future and the past.” The inspector nodded, in a way that suggested she knew all about the Greeks. She glanced over her shoulder, as if suddenly afraid something was coming at her from behind.

“There’s a table over there,” the inspector said. “If nobody comes on at the next stop, you can have it.”

I thanked her. I wanted to continue our conversation about the Greeks. But the inspector was moving on down the carriage, past S and the kids. She stopped beside a man in a pilot’s uniform. The pilot was racing from one city to another, but his plane had been delayed landing, and he’d missed his train. The inspector didn’t punish the pilot for not having a valid ticket. She had another pilot in another carriage who was travelling on the wrong ticket, the inspector said. The other pilot flew for G— Airlines, which was a bit of luck. The inspector was flying to Miami in December, and the G— Airlines pilot was helping her with a discount. The pilot in the row behind my family flew for a different airline, D— Air. Our pilot’s airline didn’t fly to Miami, but if it did, the pilot would have been more than happy to lend a hand. In fact, the inspector said, she was trying to travel around Asia in February, but the internal flights were a nightmare. The pilot said he could certainly help the inspector out, seeing as she’d been so forgiving about his ticket.

“I’ll give you my personal email,” the pilot told the inspector. “I won’t give you the corporate one. They wouldn’t want to know.”

In the hotel restaurant, the waiter approached my table with the bill. But before he could place it in front of me, the former rugby players summoned him. The men were complaining because their own bill included something they didn’t want to pay for, or perhaps something they’d ordered hadn’t arrived. The men were speaking in tones of quiet fury, making their words hard to make out. There was an air of menace, the way the former rugby players knitted together in the candlelight, an air I associated with lawyers and gossips, while the children mooned close to the candle, watching to see what the waiter would do. The waiter, making small bows as he retreated to the till, apologised again and again, refusing to meet my eye.

On the table, the naked flame of the candle flickered. I scratched at a smear of chocolate which had stained the tablecloth. At any moment, I would have to go upstairs, where the children would no doubt be screaming, wild with tiredness and ice cream and with that special fury that possesses them, a kind of sibling bloodlust, when they compete for S’s love. For now I was trapped at the table, waiting for the waiter to remember me. And I thought that it would be pleasant to sit here, in this brief interlude of candlelit calm, with no demands placed on me, if it weren’t for the fact that my nose was blocked, and that the worm still writhed in my throat.

                                                                 ☙❦❧

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive. Feel free to provide feedback through my Complaints Form, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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I was also pointed there by ’s selection for ’s - which features many names I know and love, and many stories I’m looking forward to checking out.

William Trevor has an incredible interview, The Art of Fiction No. 108 ($), in which he said this about the short story:

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.

For more on William Trevor, ’s essay on his stories is brilliant:

First Lines

First Lines #4: William Trevor

William Trevor is well-known here in his native Ireland, so it’s somewhat surprising that he first crossed my radar thanks to the words of incredible international authors on The New Yorker Fiction po…

Read more

a year ago · 8 likes · 6 comments · Amy

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Dear ,

At last week’s Story Salon, we discussed pattern stories – stories in which a shape or pattern creates the narrative structure. Jhumpa Lahiri has written two of my favourite pattern stories: “A Temporary Matter” (New Yorker, $), in which five nights of power outages lead to a nightly game of truth-telling between a couple (a pattern built upon a pattern); and “P’s Parties” (New Yorker, $), in which the pattern of an annual party becomes the landscape for a writer’s fantasy relationship with a stranger. But as always when we go looking for patterns, we find them everywhere. Now I can’t read a story without wondering: is this too a pattern story?

One form of pattern is the family cycle. I’ve been reading Alice Munro’s The View From Castle Rock (Bookshop.org), in which she imagines herself into the lives of her Scottish and Canadian ancestors on their dangerous journeys towards the present. Genetic inheritance is one of the oldest narrative patterns we have, and it comes through here in crossgenerational recognition (the man who sees in his nephew the outlines of the nephew’s father, the man’s brother) and echoing (the repeating stories of disappearing infants). Another pattern is coincidence: I picked up the book on a whim, with no notion the stories would fit my week so well, both through my travels and through the other book I was reading, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (Project Gutenberg, Free), so that I could compare the techniques of Munro’s ancestors to Thoreau when it came to building houses in their respective wildernesses.

Some of the favourite stories we discussed last week were:

• Gunnhild Øyehaug’s “Apples” ( , $)

• Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” (Library of Short Stories, Free)

• Mariana Enriquez’s “My Sad Dead” (New Yorker, $).

This afternoon, in preparation, I’ll be reading (and rereading):

• ’s “The Shared Patio”1 (Guardian, Free)

and three stories by Kevin Barry:

• “Fjord of Killary”

• “The Coast of Leitrim”

• “The Pub With No Beer” (all New Yorker, $2).

But what have you been reading, enjoying, wondering about? I’d be delighted if you’d come and tell me at this evening’s Fourth Story Salon, between the hours of 6pm and 7pm UK time3.

You can join via this Zoom link, and sign up for the salon Discord community to share stories here.

Wishing you a wonderful day and happy reading,

LW

☙❦❧

A SAFE SPACE FOR STORY LOVERS!

Lucien Wolfson would be delighted if you’d join his Story Salon, Mondays 6-7pm UK time on Zoom.

We’ll be discussing our favourite stories, our current reads, and the ways stories touch our lives. Come for recommendations, friendly disagreements, and surprising synchronicities. Bring a problem for Story Homeopathy and leave with “like cures like” reading suggestions.

One More Draft subscribers will receive the link on the day.

Join the conversation early and see what we’ve been reading on Discord.

Our Favourite Story.

                                                           Pocket Lint
                                                                   ▾

The Doll Goes Shopping.

When the girl goes to school, the girl’s doll goes to nursery. All day long the girl is at school, and the doll is at nursery, and when the girl has half term, the doll has half term.

This half term, the girl is taking the doll shopping. The doll has no accessories, which makes her sad, and so to cheer the doll up the girl has promised to buy her one accessory. At the shop, the doll will look at the accessories, and whichever accessory the doll likes most, the girl will buy her. The girl will pay because the girl is the doll’s mama, and a mum always pays for her baby.

(In fact, the girl whispers to the doll, the girl’s mum will pay for the accessories, since the girl has no money.)

At the shop there are many accessories. The shop sells accessories for bedtime, for the kitchen, for nursery, for sport, for the swimming pool. There are so many, it is impossible for the doll to pick. The girl knows this is a delicate situation. It’s easy for a doll to become overwhelmed. Then the girl will be stuck, unable to leave the shop, comforting the inconsolable doll.

Gently, the girl guides the doll to discard one accessory, then another. One by one, the girl brings the unwanted accessories to the shop owner. These ones are not quite right for my little girl, the girl says.

Don’t worry, the girl whispers to the accessories before leaving them on the counter. It’s not your fault. Maybe tomorrow the doll will pick you, the girl says.

If it was up to me, the girl whispers, I’d buy you all.

                                                                   ▾

Your Own Don’t Smell.

For a long time, when the bin lorry went by, S would turn away and cover her nose, wearing a look of disgust. When we walked together, she would tug my elbow to pull me away from a bin lorry stopped in the street. Later, we had the pram, and I would suddenly find myself walking alone. S and the pram had slipped away across the street.

What are you doing over there, I called.

Lately, the smell of bins has disturbed me. When I walk home from the school run, I catch an odour and know: there’s a bin lorry ahead. What am I breathing in, I wonder. The smell is a noxious cloud. The smell means danger.

On bin day, the smell of rubbish forces me off my usual route. Every familiar street has its own stinking barrier, pushing me down side street after side street, my legs growing weary, carrying me further and further from home. Finally, as I drag myself along a clean stretch of pavement beside a park, I discover a familiar corner. I’ve made it, I think. But as I approach the corner of the clean and pleasant street, I meet the same rich stench I have been avoiding all morning: sour milk, leaking nappies, decaying vegetable peelings, decomposing rubber, the sulphur of eggs. There’s no other way: with my eyes closed, humming to block my sinuses, I step into the cloud.

Today, turning into our street after lunch, S and I met a bin lorry. Its insect face smiled at us, while the pincers in the rear went up and down, crashing trash into the compactor. Two refuse collectors looked up from our neighbour’s bin, which the men were picking through, hiding small items in their coveralls. The men waved. We waved back. S’s arm tightened around my elbow.

                                                                   ▾

Our Favourite Story.

Our favourite story goes: a bad thing happens to a good person, then a good thing happens which undoes the bad thing. A dragon threatens the kingdom, then a brave warrior murders the dragon. Now the kingdom is safe! A terrible headache threatens the big presentation, then a white pill slays the headache. Now a telegenic woman’s future employment is secured!

Sadly, the world rarely backs up our favourite story. Now and again a terrible monster threatens to destroy the hard work of a community. Occasionally in the past an alliance of worthy heroes encircled the monster and forced its destruction. Ever after we remember the dark shadow that was once dispelled from the world.

Mostly, we endure the shadow. We struggle in the monster’s claws. From the stinking heat of its hairy palms, we retreat into our favourite story. Our inner nature, our story reminds us, is essentially good. Haven’t we demonstrated such astonishing goodness in the past?

Meanwhile, the monster tightens its grip. Meanwhile, cruel diseases creep into our organs. Meanwhile, the world devours us silently, from inside and out. Meanwhile, we open our fist and find a small weeping creature whispering to itself. Surprise! We are the monster after all!

This revelation, which horrifies us, also oddly soothes us. After all the monster, we now know, will never be vanquished. Therefore, we will never be vanquished. We will never have to suffer the sudden agony that pierces our guts, our chests, our temples, that announces: we aren’t exempt! Death, the final ending, will never come for us.

                                                                   ▾

Let the Old Couple Speak.

There was a man and a woman. The man said: In narratives, death can happen at any moment. The man died, the man said, and then the woman died. Now they’re both dead.

Life isn’t like that, the woman said. In life, death can happen at any moment. But death can’t come from nowhere. Your narrative of the man and woman’s death is meaningless. There’s no causality, no consequence. If a man and a woman died in quick succession, we would attempt to establish how it happened, why it happened. We would see what could be done to prevent recurrence. We would comfort the grievers. For this reason, in life there is no truly meaningless death.

The doctor listened to the discussion, still holding the sheet of printer paper. The paper was in the doctor’s right hand, and the telephone, which was flashing, was on the right-hand side of her slim desk. Soon the doctor would have to put down the paper and answer the phone. The nurse would be calling to tell the doctor another patient was waiting. Sooner rather than later, the doctor would have to bring an end to the debate. But for now, for compassion’s sake, the doctor let the old couple speak.

                                                                   ▾

Manipulation.

When a pair of hands types on a keyboard, nine digits (eight fingers and one of the thumbs) must coordinate. The hands work like a slow machine, clumsily tripping over each other. The movements must be accurate in time as well as space, since the right key typed at the wrong time is as wrong as the wrong key typed at the right time.

The action of writing with pen and paper must also be learnt. But unlike with their competing trajectories on a keyboard, the fingers combine around the pen in a loose fist. All of the fingers of one hand work in unison, together with the wrist, the arm. Neatly, all of this is controlled from a single hemisphere of the brain. Half of the person engages in the act of making letters. Meanwhile the other half relaxes. It lets itself dream.

                                                                   ▾

Jealousy.

After the talk, an audience member brought up a famous author’s diaries. The diaries were published when the author was still alive. Neither of the men on stage had read the diaries, but one of the men, a journalist-turned-thriller-writer, said it was gauche for a living person to publish her diary.

The thriller writer didn’t publish a novel until he was sixty. When the diarist was sixty, she had kept a diary for twenty years, while publishing several novels. The thriller writer didn’t originally plan to write thrillers. He’d tried to write literary stories, but he couldn’t make them interesting. The thriller writer didn’t particularly believe in plots, but for a reader’s sake, he felt a novel had to have a plot.

Maybe I’m just not a good enough writer, the thriller writer said. The audience laughed. He had said it as a joke and was rewarded for his joke, and for this reason the thriller writer smiled. He smiled with an edge that suggested he had only been speaking his mind.

                                                                   ▾

The Value of Literary Festivals.

At the literary festival, I bought several books. I’ll read these when I get home, I thought. What about those books I was already reading? I’ll read those too.

I felt energised by the festival. All the authors had talked about the importance of reading, the value of books, the significance of gatherings like this literary festival. Reading is a valiant act, one of the authors said, and I remembered this on the drive home. Reading is a valiant act, I thought. When I read, it is important and valuable and significant.

Later, I sat in bed, surrounded by books. Around me were the books I had bought at the festival and the books I had been reading before the festival. I thought how important it was that I was about to start reading. But there was nobody there to witness the importance of my valiant act. I wrote a note about my valiance. Then I rewrote the note. I couldn’t figure out how to finish it. I’ll start reading as soon as I figure this out, I wrote.

                                                                   ▾

A Magic Trick.

The woman’s face (her hair and makeup, the suggestion of plastic surgery) makes her resemble a character from a manga. It’s as if she has stepped off a page, perhaps from one of those books that are sold in the Japanese supermarket. She walks with an expression of furious determination, half-hidden inside the curtains of her hair.

Only the street lets down the illusion. The human ugliness of the faded chain stores. The man waiting, grumpily texting, his striving face pitted with past worries. Passing the man, the manga woman looks otherworldly, more artificial than the primary colour smoothies on the sign.

Perhaps the woman is going to a conference. Perhaps she will step out of the station at the foot of an exhibition centre in some suburban redevelopment, joining a tide of faces like hers. Like a card in a magic trick, she tucks herself inside the pack and disappears.

                                                                   ▾

The Angel, Islington

At lunch in Angel, I recommend a couple of stories to my waiter: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes and Tolstoy’s “Master and Man”. The waiter recommends Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

I’ve noticed something about the stories you read, my waiter says as I’m paying the bill. In your stories, the characters are always lost, stumbling around the forest, wandering in snow.

I start to defend myself, but realise he’s right.

Aren’t we all lost? I say. And I mean it. Most of the time, I do feel like I’m wandering in a dense fog, waiting for the next surprise to hit me between the eyes.

The waiter tilts his head. He is wearing a pained smile. His smile says: oh, baby.

He walks away, and I have a sudden compulsion to know his name. It’s there at the top of the bill on the tablecloth, and at first I think I’ve made a mistake. I read the name again.

Before I leave the restaurant, I snap a photograph. I need evidence. I need proof the waiter’s name isn’t just another story.

                                                                   ☙❦❧

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive. Feel free to provide feedback through my Complaints Form, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

Bonus Lint

Streets.

The man stands on a street corner, awaiting a woman. The woman told him to wait for her, she sent him a pin. Now the man stands in the dark…

                                                                   ☙❦❧

☙❦❧

Dear ,

Lucien Wolfson will be at Home today, Monday 19th October 2026, between the Hours of 6pm and 7pm UK time.1

He would be delighted if you would join his third Story Salon, to discuss your favourite stories, the stories you’re reading, and the ways stories have touched your lives.

You’d be most welcome to participate in Story Homeopathy, and receive “like cures like” reading suggestions to heal your woes2.

If you’d prefer, you can Podcast In, with no pressure to join the discussion, but with opportunities to add your voice if you choose to.

You can join at the Zoom link here, and sign up for the community noticeboard to share stories here.

Wishing you a wonderful day and happy reading,

LW

☙❦❧

A SAFE SPACE FOR STORY LOVERS!

Lucien Wolfson would be delighted if you’d join his Story Salon, Mondays 6-7pm UK time on Zoom.

We’ll be discussing our favourite stories, our current reads, and the ways stories touch our lives. Come for recommendations. Stay for conversation and surprising synchronicities. Bring a problem for Story Homeopathy and leave with “like cures like” reading suggestions.

One More Draft subscribers will receive the link on the day.

Join the conversation early and see what we’ve been reading on Discord

Why Not Kill the Actor

                                                           Pocket Lint
                                                                   ▾

Zeros.

The device is an oval of pearlescent glass. At its centre, a dark plastic ball shines a brilliant light that reflects into my eyes, dazzling me. I find an unconscious echo in the cluster of dead flies that have tumbled into a loose dark circle in the middle of the fluorescent oblong on the ceiling. No sooner does it come to me that I’m looking at a pair of zeros than I notice the radio is playing. The word repeats: zero, zero, zero.

                                                                   ▾

Notifications.

An empty feeling. You have been scrolling. For what? Your stomach is tight, as if you’ve swallowed a pair of magnets that pinch your guts together, as if they’re ripping at the walls. You stare at the corner of the screen, willing the cheerful circle to appear.

                                                                   ▾

Human is a Problematic Word.

A spy chief is arrested for spying. A naval officer is charged with conspiracy. Authorities investigate an outbreak of plague. A chart breaks down the functions that will be threatened when we run out of oil. The poet on the radio says: Human is a problematic word.

The newspaper reports a public execution, viewable on livestream. I register sick excitement. The spectacle of violence. I close the newspaper. I am crestfallen, nauseated.

                                                                   ▾

Catholics.

The men break in with a crowbar, wearing black masks, black hoodies. They spray ammonia on their footprints. A mother, feeding three children, screams at the men. The mother’s rage terrifies the men, even though the men are carrying weapons. The men flee and burgle other houses.

The police report that the men are highly organised, clever, close to untraceable. They do not burgle on Sundays. For this reason, the men are deemed to be Catholics.

                                                                   ▾

Pedestrians.

The contorted faces people make, walking alone and feeling unobserved. The strangeness disturbs me. Their expressions are never still.

                                                                   ▾

The Author’s Ego.

The rejection takes the form of a generous, praise-filled appreciation of the submission. The suggestion is that the story has been read carefully, enjoyed, argued for. There’s regret that space won’t allow this particular story’s inclusion, but the author’s writing is always welcome. The rejection mentions a discount code on the journal’s current issue, an upcoming competition that costs $25 to enter.

A website that aggregates rejection styles has an entry for the journal. The journal responds to every rejection the same way. Every story was read carefully, enjoyed, argued for. Space did not allow any story’s inclusion, and every author’s writing is always welcome.

                                                                   ▾

A literary influencer says.

The word count didn’t grow, in fact it shrank. But the draft improves.

The author knows the opposite is true. Often he makes changes, telling himself he’s improving his work. Only later does he learn he was cheerfully, methodically ripping out the heart.

                                                                   ▾

Autofiction.

The author complains that her story was read too literally. She wrote about a woman like herself, breastfeeding as she was, who made a trip the author herself made. But the story was invented. Nothing in it happened the way she described. Her neighbour asked her: doesn’t your husband mind you slept with a woman?

The man notes down what the author says. Later, he describes the author’s words to his wife. He, too, has written a story about a character who shares certain details of his autobiography. Forgetting Proust’s rule1, the man also used the word I to describe his character. His wife hates the story. She believes herself misrepresented. The wife does not believe that the wife in the story bears no relation to her.

About the author, the wife says: If you use your life in a story, you want people to believe it’s you.

The man says that the author said almost exactly the opposite: You use I in a story to lure the reader in. The more the reader believes the character is You, the more inclined they are to read. Readers want to know the secrets that authors keep for themselves.

                                                                   ▾

A Generous Reading.

The play ends with a car crash, the death of a major character, string music reminiscent of Le Mèpris.

Le Mèpris, in fact, ends the same way, with a car crash, the death of a major character, and string music. But Le Mèpris is a masterwork. The car crash is the final result of a final decision. Whether or not the character died or lived, she made her choice.

In the play, the character has made a decision, but the car crash undoes the decision. The most generous reading is that the character, having thrown away artistic talent in pursuit of capitalist brutality, commits deliberate suicide as an act of penance. The woman he kills, compromised but good, is the cost of his selfishness. The play is an opportunity to reflect on wasted life.

                                                                   ▾

A Thing Can Be Known.

The historian cares about realism. She is highly visual, distressingly so. She takes comfort from knowing the facts in her stories can be supported by evidence. She can take any spoon or candlestick and point to its source.

The historian believes in facts, that a thing can be known. She relies on research and on her excellent memory. She trusts in the reality of her experience.

                                                                   ▾

Citadels.

When universities were citadels, the lecturer says, the thoughts of each academic community had their own identity. The internet has erased those boundaries. The closer we are to academia, the more alike we sound, the more alike we think.

Whether or not this is true, the poet says, and I’m inclined to think it isn’t, it’s necessary to have ways of speaking outside the intellectual bubble. We must not speak only to good thought.

                                                                   ▾

Why Not Kill the Actor.

The child is relieved. When the lion fell, she saw the wires. She knew the lion didn’t really die. It was pretend. She liked that the lion died, and that the actor who played the lion was still alive.

The man says: If the actor is alive, how did you know the character died?

The man says: Why not kill the actor?

                                                                  ☙❦❧

Thank you for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive. Feel free to provide feedback through my Complaints Form, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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This post has bonus content for paid subscribers. Upgrade to get full access.

Bonus Lint

                                                                   ▾

The Author’s Materials.

The author carries an old suitcase made of cheap leather…

                                                                  ☙❦❧

☙❦❧

Dear ,

Lucien Wolfson will be at Home today, Monday 12th October 2026, between the Hours of 6pm and 7pm UK time.1

He would be delighted if you would join his second Story Salon, to discuss your favourite stories, the stories you’re reading, and the ways stories have touched your lives.

You’d be most welcome to participate in Story Homeopathy, and receive “like cures like” reading suggestions to heal your woes2.

You can join at the Zoom link here, and sign up for the community noticeboard to share stories here.

Wishing you a wonderful day and happy reading,

LW

☙❦❧

CALLING SHORT STORY LOVERS!

Lucien Wolfson invites you to his Story Salon, Mondays 6-7pm UK time on Zoom.

We’ll be talking favourite stories, new stories, the ways stories touch our lives. Come for recommendations. Bring a problem for Story Homeopathy and leave with “like cures like” reading suggestions.

Get the link and join the salon on Discord here: https://discord.gg/Dt2uCERB

Or feel free to DM me.

My Teeth Are Fuzzy

                                                           Pocket Lint
                                                                   ▾

A sudden thunk. Moving off at a green light, a woman has driven her BMW into the side of a white van. She gestures, annoyed. The van was pulling into the other lane, but stopped. The van driver throws up his hands, exasperated. What now?

They both get out and walk around their vehicles, inspecting the damage. Cars honk behind, impatient to get through the intersection. The lights change, and change again. The cars begin to work their way around the obstruction.

                                                                   ▾

I don’t know how I feel about my story, Velcro. What is this, I ask my writing group. I don’t even think it’s a story. But R says, of all the works of mine she’s read, this is her favourite.

                                                                   ▾

I wrote a vomit draft about a shadow artist, who punishes artists for her own repressed artistic instincts. I hate it. There’s no story, and my reaction is to imagine a different, better story. Maybe that’s the real story. Maybe I have to write the better story before I can rewrite this one.

There’s always a period when it’s unclear. Will a story come off, or won’t it? The vomit draft seems like it’s not worth the effort. But adding together the evidence of the day I can say: you are coming down with something, you cannot rely on your judgement.

                                                                  ▾

Sorry, says an advert on the station concourse. Now you’re on this platform craving crunchy tacos.

I’m not on a platform, I think.

Underground, a woman waits beside the glass barrier. Her T-shirt reads: 2024 Catwalk Model. She is wheeling her case to the airport, standing a head taller than anyone else on the platform, the men as well as the woman.

She shakes out her long hair, combing it with her fingers. Her nails sparkle. More T-shirt reveals itself. Fashion México.

Something - an Autumn leaf, a crisp packet - crunches. My tongue is dry. I want tacos.

                                                                  ▾

If taste is an attempt to be like, taste is also an attempt to be unlike. There’s fashion, and there’s anti-fashion. At the frontier, anti-fashion is fashionable. Those who wish to be unlike the fashionable become trendsetters.

If they wear it, we must also wear it.

At the core, those who follow the fashionable destroy the trend.

If they wear it, we won’t.

                                                                  ▾

The man says he has shut down the memory on his AI chatbot. He tried to make Claude his assistant, his therapist, and his coach. But now he’s fed up.

AI can’t tell you anything about yourself you haven’t already told it, he says. It has no opinion of its own.

Now he has the zealotry of a convert. The time has come to pick a side, he says. You have to hate AI, that plagiarist, that lickspittle, that criminal. He waves his hand, encouraging me to supply more terms.

You have to side with humanity, he says. What other side do we have?

I tell him about the poet on the podcast, who called Human a problematic term.

The fact is, he says, while his phone plays a Ride of the Valkyries ringtone, nothing digital is safe.

                                                                  ▾

When we’re hungry and rushing to meet someone, we spy ten restaurants we’d like to try. But when we need to eat, and have time, and all the options a city can provide, there are no suitable restaurants, no snack bars, no food shacks. Nothing satisfies our desire. Or: the choice overwhelms us.

                                                                  ▾

The moody light inside a supermarket van at night: Lynchian, Crewdsonesque. A handwritten sign, leaning against a man sleeping on cardboard beneath an awning: Please Help Me. The intriguing patch of gleaming, webbed skin at the base of a passing stranger’s neck.

Heinrich Jöst’s photographs of the Warsaw ghetto1. The begging, barefoot children, the disease. They die in the street with faces like mine. Their corpses are emaciated, lying on cobbles, piled in carts, dumped in mass graves.

                                                                  ▾

In a city, we cannot help each other. There are too many, the need is too great. The individual is reduced to a series of functions. If we cannot bear what we see, we make it our function to care for those in need. But only within limits. Outside of our caring functions, very few of us can care without limit.

                                                                  ▾

An experimental play, my companion called it. In fact, it comes from a long-established tradition: Brechtian, epic theatre. Between the acts, the actors wiped chalk from their faces while stagehands mopped up blood. Then, the actors did their own makeup. Before the play began, the famous actress and the less-well-known actress came out at the front of the stage, leading a spotlight. They both wore all black. They gave a coin to an audience member and asked him to toss it. But the man failed to follow their instructions.

This is the last audience participation of the evening, the famous actress said.

The man’s incompetence made the actresses laugh, followed by the audience. After such a delay, the famous actress couldn’t remember: did she call heads or tails? Heads, the audience told her. Heads, the other actress confirmed. Everyone was laughing, the famous actress had won.

Fuck it, she said. I’ll play the lead.

                                                                  ▾

Afterwards, we said that wasn’t for the best. In the second half, twice the length of the first, or so it felt, the famous actress stayed silent. She held an infrared camera in front of her, projecting onto an enormous screen. In black and white, we saw every pore and wrinkle in her famous face.2

                                                                  ▾

A man Googles his friend and finds a news article: a decade-old cold case. A baby that shares the friend’s name disappeared and was never found. The family were in the house, the parents, the grandparents, a family friend. The baby followed the family friend outside into the snow. The friend brought the baby back inside, then went home. Later, when the police showed up to interview the family friend, an attorney answered the door.

The police suspect the family. They say there was an interval of time between the baby’s disappearance and the police call. They say the family were cleaning up drugs. The family say the police blame them to excuse the police’s own incompetence. They ask: how can a person just disappear?

                                                                  ▾

There are spheres of instinct and spheres of intellect.

The family in the home is a landscape of pure instinct. There’s little the intellect can do but watch, complain, scream from the sidelines. In pauses, the intellect picks up the pieces. It asks: what do I do with these pieces?

The public realm is full of intellect, especially sales, commerce, performance. Instincts are crushed as soon as they emerge. Like whack-a-mole. Still, they burrow up and leave their scars, like real moles.

In between are those negotiated spaces: teams, classrooms, communities, collectives, extended families. There, each person divines how much of her true self she can allow, how much the intellect must be trusted to rein in instinct.

In many instances, an attempt is made to impose order on the family. The family home becomes a negotiated space. This is how artists are born. More commonly, this is how shadow artists are born.

                                                                  ▾

The strange pause when the eye lands on a process of change. The movement of the second hand on a watch. For an instant, the hand freezes. Time stands still. The watch is broken.

But then the mind catches up, the hand moves on, everything runs as it should.

                                                                  ▾

In America, a woman says, a million eyedrops have been recalled.

Her husband says: Is that a million bottles? Or a million drops?

She scowls.

My teeth are fuzzy, he says.

                                                                  ✢

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive. Feel free to provide feedback through my Complaints Form, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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Footnotes, story recommendations, and additional lint below the paywall.

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Rejection always hurts, and I say that as someone who has experienced a lot of rejection. These days, I receive literary rejections (or, just as often, don’t receive them). Sometimes they remind me of my friend Danny, who I used to envy a little in the days when I knew him, before I met my wife.

Back then, Danny was a bit of a player, and he always seemed to be rejecting people, men as well as women. Danny once broke up with a woman outside Tottenham Court Road station. They’d been to dinner and a movie, and then had a long conversation at the top of the escalator, where she begged him to reconsider. It was getting on for midnight when Danny made it onto the tube, but the woman, instead of going in the opposite direction, followed him to Hampstead. She called him from the station just as Danny was arriving at his parents’ house. The woman wanted Danny to come back to the tube with some personal lubricant she’d left in his bedroom. She wanted to sever every last connection to Danny, so much so that she risked missing the last tube, just to get a 5ml sleeve of silicone gel that was mostly used.

At the time I knew Danny, we were both interning, getting paid minimum wage. That was pretty lucky. A lot of internships only covered – or didn’t even cover – travel and lunch.

I was interning at a film company, where I read a lot of script submissions and sometimes wrote the rejection emails for my bosses to send. Once, I wrote a rejection email for my boss, and instead of copying the text into a new email, my boss forwarded my email directly to the agent. Attached to my email was my reader’s report. The report was largely fair, not like some of the other reports I’d written, trying to be funny, or in a rush to finish. Still, the situation kept me up at night, thinking about the different ways such a scenario could have gone.

When I told Danny this story, he told me about the submissions process at the literary agency where he worked. Danny’s agency had a reader, Cliff. The agents and their assistants had no choice but to read anything that came with a bit of buzz, or a strong personal connection. But anything else, even manuscripts sent by friends, went to Cliff. Of course, unsolicited submissions went to Cliff. Nobody at the agency wanted to touch the slush pile.

Cliff was a writer himself, with a healthy loathing of other writers. Whether he excluded himself from this loathing, Danny couldn’t say, but Cliff’s reports always delivered exactly the same verdict. In the months Danny worked at the agency, answering calls and making tea and taking meeting notes, Danny never once saw Cliff recommend a manuscript. Cliff’s reports always implied that he could do a better job, though the agency didn’t represent Cliff. Sometimes Cliff could be amusingly scathing. At other times, he was simply weary.

Once Cliff’s reports arrived, it was the assistants’ job to send out rejections. The assistants in Danny’s agency were all young women in their twenties, while the agents were nearly all male, in their forties or fifties, and married to women who weren’t their assistants. None of the agents was sleeping with his own assistant, as you might expect. But several of the assistants were sleeping with agents they didn’t work for. Only one of the assistants was trying to sleep with the intern, and so that assistant didn’t, as the others did, delegate her rejections to him – that is, to Danny.

Danny’s job was to read Cliff’s report, then adapt a form response. Danny was told to create just enough of an impression that the manuscript had been read, without giving so much detail as to suggest anyone enjoyed it. Danny was supposed to send these emails from the assistants’ computers when they went to meetings, but he often missed his chance. When Danny fell behind, he sent the rejections from his own computer, from his intern email account. If Danny was feeling lazy, he copy-pasted the same response to multiple messages. What difference could it make? The answer was always the same.

Danny didn’t feel bad about sending these rejections. But he did wonder how the people on the other end would feel, receiving a copy-pasted email from the intern, explaining that the manuscript was not wanted.

“Are you sure you don’t enjoy it a little bit?” I asked him. These were the days when we would sit in his parents’ basement on Sundays, smoking joints and watching movies in between games of FIFA, which Danny always won. I’d written, to date, precisely one short story, which I’d sent to Granta. A few months after I sent the story, Granta responded with a one-line rejection, and I decided I might not be a writer after all. I suspected the nervous energy I felt when I wrote my reports, which mostly recommended that my company turn down whatever screenplay I’d read, might be schadenfreude. But Danny didn’t feel much of anything about the rejections. He rejected the implication that he was doing anything wrong.

“Forget it, Jake,” Danny said, flicking the Mini Guide through the movie channels. “It’s Chinatown.”

After a few weeks, one of the writers Danny rejected responded to Danny’s email. The writer didn’t reply directly, but forwarded the email to the agent he’d originally submitted to, cc’ing the agent’s assistant.

“Intern,” the assistant said, summoning Danny to her desk. He stood over her shoulder while she scrolled through the forwarded rejection email. It was a copy-paste job. There was almost nothing to identify the manuscript. She scrolled to the top and read the writer’s name, but Danny didn’t recognise it.

“I’ve come too far in my career,” the assistant read, moving her mouse across the words on the screen (or so I imagined, from the way Danny acted it, his eyes following the spliff he was tracing through the air). “I don’t deserve a form response from the intern. Surely I’m worth more than that, by this stage.”

The assistant sounded pretty angry, Danny thought. Probably, the assistant’s agent would fire him, and if that agent didn’t, then the assistant would tell the other agent she was sleeping with, and the other agent would poison the agency against Danny. Danny still hoped that at the end of his internship the agency might give him a job. Maybe one of the assistants would make her relationship with one of the agents official and be forced to leave, or maybe she’d marry him, or become his co-agent. We were still figuring out how these agencies worked, but Danny thought sooner or later there’d be space for a new hire.

“Surely I’m worth more than that,” the assistant read again. Danny looked at me over the spliff. Then he mimed tapping two keys. “I guess he wasn’t,” Danny said, in the assistant’s voice, curt and high. The assistant had closed the window and was already moving on to another email. Danny went back to his desk.

Though we’ve lost touch, I often think of Danny at his agency. Those last few months after the writer’s email, he told me, Danny was meticulous. His rejections always contained at least one detail about the manuscript. He only got in trouble once, near the end, when an assistant got mad about the tone of one of his emails. But that was more about her personal issues with Danny than about the email itself. One of the agents, the assistant’s boss, told Danny not to worry about it. The agent had noticed his assistant coming onto Danny, and praised Danny for resisting her advances. It got messy when you slept with people you worked with, the agent said. “And he should know,” Danny said, telling me the story.

Nobody ever mentioned the writer who complained about Danny again. Really, it was no different to the producers at my film company. Unless it was somebody important, nobody much minded who sent the rejection emails, or what they said, or if they were sent at all. Even back then, when people still read novels and watched movies and went to the theatre, nobody cared. It was only the slush pile, after all.

Danny finished his internship and left the agency. Eventually he got a job at a publisher, working in marketing. After a few years, he found out he could make more money marketing makeup. It was the same work, with better hours, and he could afford to buy a flat. I visited when he first moved, but the flat was south of the river, and I only went the once. Back when I was thinking of sending out my novel, my wife suggested showing Danny a draft. The email must have arrived out of the blue, and Danny didn’t like the book, or maybe he deleted the file without opening it. Maybe he deleted all my emails, I’m not sure. I got the message in the end.

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious fictional serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive. Feel free to provide feedback through my Complaints Form, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next time, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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1. Lint

2. Reading

3. Death Drives

Lint

I’ve tried a lot of things on Substack, but I’ve never tried writing a real newsletter.

I was reading Drew Gummerson’s diary. I enjoy Drew’s stories, and Saltburn is a very entertaining collection, and I like his newsletters just as much. The strange thrill of reading about the stories he’s writing, and then reading the stories.

Why don’t I do that, I thought. Since I’m not doing anything else.

One of the stories I’m working on is for Lint. The story was called “Death Readings”, but it seemed like a mistake to have death in the title. Now it’s called “The Immortals”. It’s about books, the power of words, how I briefly brought a woman back to life through reading at her deathbed. I’ve been working through a lot of modernist (brodernist) prose. Conrad, Proust, Thomas Bernhard, Beckett, Sebald, Saramago, Geoff Dyer, Jordan Castro. Does Ben Lerner count?

It’s fun to draft in that brodernist voice. I had an existential experience which I describe in “The Immortals”, which made me think I love and have no choice except to write like Bernhard, Saramago, Jon Fosse, etc. As soon as I wrote the first draft of the story, Naomi Kanakia posted an excellent essay about how everyone wants to write like Thomas Bernhard. So now I have a brodernist voice, just like everyone else.

I gave my short story, “Dante in Love”, to one of my writing groups. I gave my short story, “Be Fast”, to another. I hadn’t touched Dante in a year, and then I rewrote it very quickly from scratch. I spent about two weeks on it, then emailed it to my group. I felt bad sending it off in that state, but I was past my deadline. I thought it might be unhelpful to receive feedback on something so obviously still in progress. I thought the problems would be plain to everyone in the group. But the feedback mirrored my own thinking: a lot of people thought it needs to be shorter; several thought it could be a novella. I, too, think the story could be shorter, or become a novella. I’m leaning novella.

“Be Fast” was the first complete story I tried in that brodernist voice, inspired by Saramago and before I’d read any Thomas Bernhard. I didn’t think I knew how to revise it, since it came out by itself, without much thought or craft. I knew there was something compelling about it, but I was terrified of editing the story. I thought editing it would kill the voice. But the feedback didn’t take issue with the voice. I was so worried about the voice, I’d missed glaring mistakes in the storytelling.

I no longer feel terrified that I’m going to kill my stories. Now I think that a story is a kind of performance. Every draft becomes a single artistic act, or as close to it as possible. Even this newsletter: I drafted it over several weeks, on my phone walking to buy bread, or in spare moments in my notebook. Now I’m retyping it into Substack. I imagine this is a completely new performance, as if I’m an actor on stage and I have to recreate Macbeth from scratch.

The biggest problem in revision is when new ideas creep into the text. They stand out the moment you look back through: awkward, blocky shapes with joins you can see, where they meet the fabric of the story. Like patches to cover a torn rug. The more you retype the story, weave it again completely, the more these additions disappear into the weft. Or they fall away, creating absences, spaces for new ideas to fill.

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Reading

From the sidelines, I’ve been cheering on Naomi Alderman’s “Couch to 5k” style reading programme. Alderman’s idea is to treat reading as a positive habit that builds over time, which is my experience: the more I read, the more I want to read, and the more obstacles I remove, the more I read.

I’m nearly finished with Swann’s Way, the first book in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation. For a writer whose name has become a watchword for a particularly baroque style of European prose, the remarkable power of Proust’s storytelling comes from his restraint. Each idea is explored fully, but only as far as necessary in the moment. Details that seem meaningless suddenly return with tremendous weight.

I found several masterful stories in Samanta Schweblin’s collection, Good and Evil and Other Stories, translated by Megan McDowell. I’d read “A Fabulous Animal” previously, through George Saunders’ Story Club, and “A Visit From the Chief” when it was published in The New Yorker. “An Eye in the Throat”, a strange and disturbing story about a father who blames himself for his child swallowing a button battery, was another standout. Schweblin’s stories circle parenthood, guilt, the death drive. But I came away from the collection slightly deflated, as if the parts needed to sum up to a greater whole.

A story pairing for you: Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” and Raymond Carver’s “Errand”. Both appear in the collection of a hundred stories chosen by David Miller, That Glimpse of Truth. Chekhov’s story was inspired by his move to Crimea, where he was fighting the tuberculosis which would eventually kill him, six years later in 1904, at the age of forty-four. Carver’s story was published in 1987, only a year before his own death, at fifty, from lung cancer.

(Incidentally, “Killing Chekhov”, my historical Chekhov story inspired by “Errand”, is available to read on my Substack. No issues with my lungs just yet, but my sinuses are a little bloody.)

Death Drives

I had dinner booked with Francis. I thought I shouldn’t go. The baby was sick, and so was Lena. I wouldn’t go, I decided. But I didn’t text Francis to cancel, just in case. Just in case what? In case I could get away with going.

Is there anything else? I asked Lena, after I’d made dinner and loaded the dishwasher. Lena asked what time I was meeting Francis. I told her I had a drinks first. I was debating taking the tube.

You’ll sweat through your shirt, Lena said.

I ordered a taxi. I knew I shouldn’t. I knew it was a waste of money. But as soon as I climbed inside, the taxi driver announced: I’ve put the aircon on. Implied in the driver’s tone was that he’d put the aircon on for me. He thought I might be wearing a jacket, he said, since it was evening and I was heading into town. And in fact I was wearing a jacket.

I thought you might be going to an event, the driver said. I told him I was going for drinks at the London Library, before dinner with a friend.

The driver’s name was Sam. Because I was going to an event at a library, Sam volunteered the information that he had trained as a neurologist. When Sam was a teenager, he had a girlfriend who suffered from bad thought syndrome. That was what Sam called it. Bad thought syndrome. I wanted to correct him, since I had friends who suffered from intrusive thoughts. But Sam was the neurologist, not me.

Before Sam’s girlfriend died (the implication was that the girlfriend died by suicide), she saw a psychologist, and sometimes Sam and his girlfriend visited the psychologist together. This psychologist told Sam about another patient, who suffered from a repeating earworm. The patient heard the same old song in her head. Every day for ten years, the song entered the patient’s head. Nothing else was wrong. It was just the earworm.

One day, Sam’s girlfriend’s psychologist followed the patient. The patient often woke up without the earworm, but the song was always in her head by the time the patient arrived at work. So the psychologist followed the patient to work. The psychologist told the patient: stop walking and raise your hand when you hear the earworm. Sure enough, the patient heard the song and stopped walking. Look behind you, the psychologist said. The patient was standing outside a bakery. Twenty years before, the psychologist explained to Sam, the patient worked one summer as a baker, making bread with the radio on, during the period when the earworm was in the charts. It was the smell of bread, Sam explained to me. People don’t realise how smell can trigger memory.

The Proust effect, I said.

No, Sam said. This is real.

After his girlfriend died, Sam studied medicine, with a focus on neuroscience. You’re probably wondering how I ended up driving a cab, Sam said. In fact, I was wondering exactly that. Sam had a motorcycle accident when he was in his twenties. A car smashed him into the other lane, where another car pulverised his legs.

Amazing you want to drive a taxi after that, I said. But Sam didn’t hear me.

In the hospital after the crash, there was a nurse who’d spent time in the military. The nurse happened to be passing Sam’s bed, and noticed his foot. Can you feel this, the nurse asked, squeezing Sam’s big toe. But Sam couldn’t feel a thing.

That’s when I became an emergency, Sam said. They rushed him to surgery and removed his legs.

Sam lost everything in that crash. He dropped out of neurology, his new girlfriend left him, and he had to move in with his mum. He didn’t leave the house for three years. He had to learn to walk, to shower, to dress. From scratch.

When the accident happened, Sam had a medical journal in his rucksack. Before she broke up with him, his new girlfriend brought the bag to the hospital, and Sam read the journal in his hospital bed. One of the studies was about London taxi drivers. How London taxi drivers have hippocampuses, hippocampi, which are bigger than all the other hippocampi in the world. From bed, during that three-year recovery, Sam studied London road maps. He had nothing better to do, so he learned The Knowledge.

After three years, Sam recovered enough to go to a bar with his friends. It was his first time out of the house, and a woman approached him. She asked about Sam’s prosthetic legs, how he’d come by them. Sam told the woman his story: the one car smashing into him, the other car pulverising his legs, the nurse who spotted that he was an emergency. He’d died twice on the operating table, Sam told her. His heart stopped for thirty-three seconds. Then it stopped for forty-four seconds. He was showing off.

The reason I asked, the woman said, is because I was in a car crash. Everybody in the car survived, but the woman also died during surgery.

I died four times, the woman said.

The woman became Sam’s wife. He lived with her for three years, and they were happy years, but his possessions kept going missing. His phone, his keys. Sometimes his wife would move his keys, and Sam wouldn’t be able to find them to go to work. Sam’s wife never admitted that she’d moved the keys, and they used to have arguments.

Then I realised, Sam said. She’s got no short-term memory. The crash must have taken it away. After he decided this, Sam stopped arguing about the missing items. Eventually it stopped bothering him. They’ve been together twenty years.

It must be my bad memory, Sam says, when his keys disappear.

This is you, Sam said. The taxi was parked outside the library. What am I supposed to do now, I wondered.

I went into the library. All the desks had been taken out of the reading room, and people were standing around in clusters of three or four, pressed together near a drinks table. I glided between the groups for a little while, but didn’t recognise anybody. Pouring myself a glass of water, I offered the jug to a man who was waiting beside me. The man had electric hair and a gentle face. He took his water to the back of the room and stood by himself. I circled once more, and then went and introduced myself to the man.

The man’s name was Quentin. Quentin retired three years ago, he told me. Where did the time go, he wondered.

Maybe you’ve been busy, I said. Or maybe the opposite, I said.

You’re going to be embarrassed, Quentin said, but don’t be. My wife died.

I’m sorry, I said. I didn’t feel embarrassed, but I appreciated Quentin’s thoughtfulness. I thought Quentin must have learned over time to put people – strangers, friends he hadn’t seen in a while – at ease like this. I felt I’d made a good choice speaking to Quentin.

Before she died, Quentin told me, his wife made him move from London to Wales. Their plan was to see out their retirement together, he said. They moved into a house that was too big for two people, and a year later his wife died. Now the house was too big for one person, but Quentin still lived there.

You’re going to regret talking to me, Quentin said.

In fact, I didn’t regret it. I had more questions I wanted to ask. They can’t have been questions Quentin hadn’t heard before, but he didn’t mind answering them. When Quentin’s wife was alive, he told me, they’d spent their days working in different parts of the house. Nothing much changed after she died, and it was easy to forget, most of the time, that there was nobody else at home. Only when evening set in, especially in winter when it got dark so early, and his thoughts turned to cooking dinner, did Quentin remember all over again that he was alone, that his wife was dead.

That’s when things get a little weird, Quentin said.

What does weird mean, I asked.

Are you sure you want to know? Quentin said. His expression was anxious, but then a noise interrupted us. A man was standing on a platform above the reading room, beginning a speech. I read my watch and saw that I was about to be late for dinner. I felt bad that I would have to cut short my conversation with Quentin, and took out my phone to text Francis about my lateness. My phone was vibrating. I thought Lena was calling, that there was a crisis with the baby. But it was only my cousin.

It came back to me that I had arranged to phone my cousin while I walked to the tube, because my cousin’s husband had died suddenly, from an undiagnosed heart condition. My cousin and her husband had been going through divorce, but after his heart attack, my cousin remembered how much she loved her husband. She was devastated, and it was my turn to check on her. But I had taken Sam’s taxi instead, and forgotten to call.

The speech lasted a long time. Finally, it finished, and then there was a reading. Behind the reader was another reader, holding printed pages, waiting to read. I was becoming later and later, and for two different events, the dinner and the call. Plus Quentin. I texted my cousin, keeping my eyes on the reader on the platform, not wanting to appear rude. I sent the message, then glanced at it. The message was a jumble of incoherent symbols and letters.

The readings finished. You wanted to know what weird meant, Quentin said, continuing our conversation. I apologised several times, while Quentin smiled. I did want to know, I told him. But I had to leave. Quentin seemed relieved not to have to talk to me any more.

I dashed outside, but it was too late to walk to the restaurant, as I’d originally planned. Francis had texted to say he’d arrived and was waiting for me, and so when another taxi passed, I threw out my arm.

I hoped this new driver wouldn’t be as chatty, but when I climbed on board he asked how my evening was going. Strangely, I told the driver. Every conversation I have is about death.

About death? he repeated.

I’m sorry, I told the driver, but I have to make a phone call.

I called my cousin. She answered in a whisper, her voice furious. My cousin was in synagogue, in the period of thirty days’ mourning. The service had already begun, and my cousin couldn’t speak, because she was praying for her husband. She was so angry, I almost laughed. I could imagine myself laughing, the way I sometimes laughed during arguments with Lena. I could imagine my cousin saying, Do you think this is funny? I imagined her voice as Lena’s voice, exactly the way Lena would say it.

I really am sorry, I said, controlling my voice. I let my cousin hang up.

So I suppose you don’t want to hear my story, my new taxi driver said.

Yours?

About death. I don’t suppose you want another one.

If you like, I said. I didn’t want to hear this driver’s story, or any stories. I only wanted to sit in silence, to calm down, to find a way of arriving at dinner that would allow me to tell Francis, calmly, amusingly, about the weirdness of my evening.

No, the new taxi driver said. Better not.

If you don’t want to, that’s fine, I said.

Well, the new driver said.

The story involved Elton John. The taxi driver’s brother died on the drive home from a Watford game, in the days when Elton John owned Watford Football Club. Elton John sent a Watford rosette to the taxi driver’s brother’s funeral. Elton John believed the brother was a Watford fan, because all the other people who died in the crash were Watford fans. But in fact the brother supported West Ham. At the funeral, all the colours were claret and blue, West Ham’s colours. Except for this one orange Watford rosette.

The death destroyed my family, the new taxi driver said. His parents died very quickly, one after the other, still in grief, leaving the taxi driver alone.

I was no longer in control of my face. I imagined the man, all by himself, without any of the family he’d known as a child. I could have wept for him. Instead, I was trying to stop laughing. Do you think this is funny, I said to myself. I set my face, but it broke into laughter. What could I do? I set my face again.

The taxi was passing through Trafalgar Square. Out one side, people were sitting in the evening sun, eating from foil wraps. Pigeons walked at their feet, pecking at crumbs. There were laughing faces, smiling faces. On the steps, families leant back, warming their closed eyes in the setting sun, babies asleep on their mothers’ chests. Through the other window, my taxi was passing a shopfront. The dark reflection shimmered in the glass, carrying me away.

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive. Feel free to provide feedback through my Complaints Form, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next time, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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“I just wanted to check if you’ve recovered from last night?” the family friend says. He describes a nightmare: it’s the final day of the season, Arsenal are losing, Manchester City have won the title again. He woke sweating. “I think you need therapy,” his therapist wife told him. “You’re losing sleep over a football team.”

I can’t cope, the head of the parents’ network texts. I am drinking, want vomit, texts a Canadian friend I helped turn into an Arsenal fan, I need a new hobby after this season. Quantum mechanics, I want to suggest. Open heart surgery.

“Doesn’t someone have to win?” Stef asks. “Why does anybody care?”

I was seventeen and hungover when the final whistle blew at Highbury, 15th May 2004. Arsenal had been Champions for weeks, and I had spent the night before at a party where I’d drunk until I threw up, then kept drinking. I didn’t want to stand for ninety minutes in a screaming crowd, in the glare of the afternoon sun. I wanted to be at home, curled on the sofa, sipping water to soothe my stomach, losing myself in the strobing colours of MTV.

I wasn’t expecting, when the match finished, crowds of stewards to rush the pitch, carrying poles and hoardings. They were constructing a platform, while the players waited, while the crowd stayed in their seats. Eventually, the Premier League trophy, a large silver jug with handles, topped with a crown, was brought to the stage. Slowly, one by one, the players walked past it, kissed it, took their places behind it. Finally, the captain, Patrick Vieira, grasped the handles. As he raised the trophy, fireworks exploded, the crowd roared, acid surged into my throat.

Can we go? I wanted to ask, as the players paraded around the four corners of the pitch, walking in slow motion, stopping to wave and applaud the fans. Can’t we just leave?

What seventeen-year-old thinks of a moment as precious? Or sees joy as a rare treasure, easily lost, forgotten, buried under years, then decades of disappointment? In May 2004, Arsenal had been Champions for nearly a third of my life. That season, they won without suffering a single defeat, the Invincibles team that played inventive, surprising football. It was not yet a joke, one of many at their expense, but a fact that Arsenal could pass the ball into the opposition goal. Even then, sick, desperate for comfort, I wondered: could this be the last time? How long would I have to wait until it happened again?

When it became apparent on Tuesday night that Arsenal were going to win the 2025/26 Premier League, their first title in twenty-two years, I was reading a novel aloud in my five-year-old’s bedroom. My son had spent the day off school, vomiting, floppy, panting. Too weak to walk, or even at times to lift his head. My clothes, Stef kept reminding me, were vomit clothes, sprayed with droplets, a towel for my son’s naked, shivering body.

My son lay on his mattress, knees pulled up to ease his pain, his face tight. From the rocking chair beside his bed, I read a page, fed him water, read a page, fed him Calpol, read a page, brushed his teeth, offered him the sickbowl, read a page.

Here we go, texted a friend, a recent convert to Arsenal. I think tonight is the night.

In the panic about my son, I had forgotten the match between Bournemouth and Manchester City. City’s penultimate game, they needed to win to have any chance of overtaking Arsenal, of once again winning the title on the final day of the season. On my screen, the replays were showing the goal Eli Junior Kroupi had scored. Bournemouth were winning 1-0.

For the last few weeks of this season, as Arsenal and City raced towards the final day neck-and-neck, my mind kept returning to the same period of 1999. Then, as this season, Arsenal were in a footrace, but with City’s derby rivals, Manchester United. Then too, the outcome was in Arsenal’s hands. If Arsenal won their final five games, they would be Champions. But in the penultimate game, on a Tuesday night in Leeds, Arsenal slipped to a loss.

At the time, it seemed that defeat had not been fixed by a late header at Elland Road, but weeks earlier, in a replayed FA Cup semi-final. Against United, the eventual treble winners, Arsenal’s Dutch magician Dennis Bergkamp missed a last-minute penalty. In extra time, Ryan Giggs scored a breakaway wondergoal.

I was eleven years old, allowed to stay up late, to watch till the final whistle. I went to bed weeping. My parents came in to comfort me, one by one. A few weeks later, my mother would tell me they planned to separate. By the time the new football season began, my father would be sleeping in the spare room, before moving into another home entirely. The family breakup would be commemorated in the four season tickets I still share with my father and brother, the fourth seat that first seemed to mark the absence of my mother, then the presence of my step-mother, and which for two decades has passed among friends, the occasional subject of debate or negotiation, waiting for somebody – my son, perhaps, if he wants it – to claim it as a birthright.

As I lay crying, I replayed the match in my mind. Bergkamp stands over the penalty. He sends the ball the other way, and the full-time whistle blows. The wayward pass falls to Ryan Giggs, who cannot beat the Arsenal defender, or trips, injures himself, fluffs his shot. It’s the Arsenal players lying on the turf, spread out in joy, the United players who sink into crouches, squeezing the tears from their eyes. I was crying the way I had cried as a child, uncomplicated, free-flowing tears, because I was still a child, if only for a few more weeks.

“Just be glad you’re crying,” my mother said, sitting at the foot of the bed. “There’ll be people out smashing windows.” The emotion, was her point, would come out somewhere.

On Tuesday, after my son fell asleep, I showered and sat in bed, in pyjamas, watchful for any churning in my stomach. The Manchester City game played on my phone, beside the baby monitor, a grey-and-white portrait view of my son’s sleeping body. Unless City scored two goals, Arsenal would win the title. Arsenal, a team that had fallen short for twenty-two years, that had become the butt of endless jokes about failure.

What am I more afraid of, I wrote in my notebook, Arsenal losing the title, or winning it?

Twice, the Bournemouth right winger, David Brooks, was put through on goal. He tripped over one shot, sent another flying into the post. I wanted another Bournemouth goal, something to put the result beyond doubt. Perhaps if I had half an hour, twenty minutes, I could relax, I thought. Get used to the idea Arsenal were going to be Champions.

In April, Erling Haaland, the fastest player to score a century of Premier League goals, twice a title winner with City, mocked Arsenal’s loss to Bournemouth, proof that Mikel Arteta’s team were spent. Now, in injury time, Haaland put the ball in the Bournemouth net. 1-1. City needed one more, with only two minutes left to play.

Surely they couldn’t. A last-minute, last-gasp winner. Surely it wouldn’t happen again.

I feel sick, I wrote.

I’ve been calling this the Schrödinger season. Every certainty has proved uncertain. Arsenal pulled nine points clear, a decisive lead that evaporated. They lost four times in a month, twice to City, going out of two domestic cups (City won both). We’re toast, I texted friends.

Toast. Champions. We would be one or the other. For weeks, months, we were both.

Stef came into the bedroom carrying dirty bedding. Our daughter had the virus, and Stef’s stomach was beginning to turn. “How’s the football?” Stef asked.

“We’re Champions,” I said.

Already, people were texting, congratulating me, as if my angst had helped the team to victory. Telling me they were going to the Emirates Stadium, where crowds were already gathering.

I don’t know what to do with myself, one friend texted.

Experiencing the moment through my phone, atomised, disconnected, listening to my son panting through the monitor in his bed – wrapped in worry, who would care for our sick children if we got sick, who would care for us – I knew I could not go through this alone. I needed to get to the ground, to be surrounded by smiling faces, to lose my weak voice in a chorus of chanting.

Pictures were arriving. Flares, flags, faces lifted with glee. A video of Ian Wright, once Arsenal’s top scorer (ten years old, I watched from the stands as he lifted his shirt to reveal a Nike-branded undershirt, 179 – JUST DONE IT). Wrighty danced through the scrum, accepting hugs from everybody he touched.

Never experienced anything like it, texted my Canadian friend. He, too, had hugged Ian Wright. Was like a healing.

In the morning, everyone is well except my son. He seems better when he wakes, chatty, smiling. He drinks a glass of water, but he’s too weak to stand, and the effort makes him lie down, pressing his face into his mattress, clutching his stomach, moaning. Shortly afterwards, he throws up water, filling the sickbowl.

He can’t eat, I write. Can’t stand. He should be beating this by now. Why won’t his temperature come down? Why isn’t he getting better?

My son asks for food and refuses water. I bring him a pinch pot of dry cereal, which he finishes. He drinks a glass of water and asks for more food.

“Not yet,” I say. I have refreshed the sickbowl and place it beside him. I watch warily as he climbs out of bed and walks to his desk.

“Let me see if I can walk to the other room,” my son says. His footsteps pad across the floorboards. His subvocalised commentary comes murmuring through the wall. I made it to the chair, he says. Look, I made it to the bed. My face relaxes. I am smiling. My son has beaten the virus. And Arsenal – Arsenal are Champions.

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Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive. Feel free to provide feedback through my Complaints Form, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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Right at this spot, the driver says, he once picked up two men, one in a wheelchair. I can’t turn left, the driver told the men. Wait there, I’ll drive through the lights and make a U-turn. It was late at night, the men were drinking whiskey, very strong, the driver could smell it through the window. When the light changed the driver pulled away, and one of the men grabbed at the car, catching the petrol tank cover. He ripped it off, the driver says, completely off, gone.

I listen, or half listen, distracted. It is Saturday night. All week I’ve been waiting for it, the steady buildup that produces a voice I have no choice but to transcribe. Then a frenzy of revision, retyping until I can tolerate the words on the screen. Or, Sunday morning rolls around, the kids come bouncing into the bedroom, grabbing at my laptop. It’s too late to do anything but publish. But publish what? I have nothing.

I am paying a price for the feverish energy that took over my last few months. Taking part in a writing course, publishing these pieces. I knew I couldn’t keep up the pace, there would have to be a crash. In the middle, I told myself: you won’t crash if you don’t stop.

On the Euston Road, an ambulance pulls around the Uber. An impassive paramedic gives my driver a thumbs-up. It’s a sarcastic gesture, but the driver doesn’t notice, he’s still talking about the men who broke his car, what kind of animals do this, why?

The Uber drops me outside the office of a film production company. I interned in that building, and during my brief career as a producer, I screened a short film in the basement. Now, the stone is blasted away around the door number, and construction stickers labelling the windows have been torn ragged by wind and rain. But the pub across the street has been renovated. Petals stencil the mirrors, and wine glasses hang upside down above the bar.

Dan moved to London just before Christmas, and the table is made up of his friends from work and the gym. All men, the WhatsApp specified no wives, no kids. I met him twenty years ago, on a film course.

I tell an eye doctor I’m a writer, and he pulls out his phone. You’ll want to see this, he says, and shows me pictures from his work, cataracts, what he calls manky eyeballs. Irises and pupils, both washed the same radioactive green. Ignore the dye, the doctor says, and points to black circles, explaining that the cornea has melted. The circles are the iris bubbling through.

He offers me the wine bottle, and I cover my glass. All week, pain has built in my temples, in my upper molars. You have a pressure problem in your head, a GP told me. She prescribed amoxicillin, saline rinses to flush my sinuses. For days, the contents of my skull have drained into sinks, bright green and clotted.

Dan tells me the plot of a novel he wants to write, based on Heaven’s Gate. Dan’s cultists believe a comet is a spaceship, calling them home. They eat barbiturates dissolved in apple sauce, washed down with vodka. In Dan’s telling, they die with smiles on their faces.

It’s no secret what causes brainwashing, Dan says. Forced confession, sleep deprivation, isolation.

The eye doctor lays a tray of vodka shots in front of me. Sleep deprivation and isolation, the doctor says. You must be talking about fatherhood.

This is the last thing I remember from the pub, but Sunday morning, without warning, the voice arrives. I’m leaning on the kitchen counter, scribbling into a notepad one of the children discarded under the table. My pink pen doubles as a fidget toy, plastic spindles that click as they fly across the page. You’re not meant to drink on antibiotics, says my violent hangover. My hand shakes the dirty bowls in the sink.

A wail drowns out the scratching of my pen. A child is crying outside, a child on the street, and the noise spikes my temples, pressing bruises inside my cheekbones. Ignore it, I tell myself, keep writing, and an image comes to me of my own child, fallen, injured, bleeding. Is that my child? I write and my pen answers that the crying child is outside the house, and my pen answers that they sound alike, crying, laughter, they sound exactly the same. Is that my child? I write again, and the pen flies across the line like a comet leaving a trail of promises, there is still time, your child is laughing, it’s not your child.

Make up your mind, I write. I am laughing, I write, or I am crying, I write. My pen answers, make up your mind.

Will the child be okay? I write.

Either way, my pen answers, keep writing.

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Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive. Feel free to provide feedback through my Complaints Form, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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Three of the cards you left waiting on the mantelpiece have covers from past issues of The New Yorker. Opening the third, you think, Everyone’s writing in The New Yorker, everyone except you. This is your first hint that turning 39 has made you the tiniest bit bitter.

The alarm on next door’s scaffold goes off, reverberating through the kitchen like the marching of a mechanical army. The handwriting in the card is dense cursive, a struggle to decipher, and the name has been smudged beyond recognition, which cannot be an accident.

Telepathy, the note seems to say, is far from abnormal. The idea that feeling travels over distance is more than normal, it’s to be expected. A nursing mother goes to work and her let-down begins suddenly, in the middle of an important meeting. She calls home and discovers her baby has had a small accident. People, the card says, are entangled the way atoms are entangled. Ask yourself: don’t you know who this card is from?

You believe you do.

The children come into the kitchen fighting, and you snap at them to stop. This is a mistake. It was only playfighting, but now they fight for real, pulling hair, scratching, spitting. Suddenly, a wail, you think it’s the scaffold but it’s the boy, he is holding his eye. His sister is crying. I didn’t mean to, she moans, he made me.

Are you tired because you didn’t sleep, or is this burnout?

It is a bright spring morning, with pollen in the air. On the walk to school, you pass Tom Stoppard. You saw Arcadia recently, and you try to explain the play to the children, but all you can remember are the sex jokes, they are somehow wrapped up in quantum physics and you cannot untangle them. To divert the conversation, you ask if we choose our actions or if they’re chosen for us. There is a part of your mind, you tell your children, that exists solely to make sense of the present moment: where you find yourself, what you’re doing.

How old is Tim Stopper? the boy asks, and you remember that Tom Stoppard is dead.

You fall into step beside Imogen and her mum. Your daughter links arms with Imogen. We’ve lost three nannies, Imogen says, stepping onto a zebra crossing. One went down the stairs, one has a stone in her ear, and one fell over in hospital, dead.

We’re beginning to think it’s us, Imogen’s mum says, walking beside you. You know where to look for her name on your phone, but how would you do that without being obvious? At another time in your life, your early twenties, you had a drunken conversation with this woman in a smoking area. A cigarette is a defensive weapon, she told you. I hold fire in my hand, I disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Another scaffold alarm is ringing.

Imogen’s mum wants to write, she says. Really, she wishes she could vomit out a novel and go on book tour. She asks what you are working on, and you tell her about an earthquake from 1908, which destroyed Messina and created a tsunami. Forty-foot waves swept away the Reggio waterfront. A hundred thousand died, maybe more. It registered XI on the Mercalli scale, you say.

That sounds high, Imogen’s mum says.

Before the catastrophe, the scale only went up to ten.

Can I sleep in the cage tonight? Imogen asks, stopping at the steps outside school. Her mum glances at you. The cage is our name for the cellar where we keep our dry goods, Imogen’s mum explains.

And our gorilla, Imogen says.

You kiss the backs of your children’s heads and they run up the steps. Imogen’s mum is waiting by a scaffold hoarding, wondering if you’re coming on the bus. But you have exhausted your capacity for conversation.

Happy birthday, your daughter says, poking her head past the teacher on the door.

Glorious day for it, Imogen’s mum says, waving goodbye.

You walk back the way you came, blinking an itch of pollen that has found your left eye. A man in high-vis orange exits a building site. He is carrying a drill with a meter-long bit, and you take out your phone to capture a photograph. There are too many bodies in the way, people going to work, children arriving at school.

The man with the drill turns the corner and you follow. This street is clear. The drill bit glints in the sun and you wonder if it’s legal to walk like this. You snap two shots, and a man standing smoking outside a shop catches your eye. Crossing the street, you wonder what you are doing, chasing a visual symbol with your camera.

You read through notes on your phone as you walk. A friend told you she’s started baking during Zoom meetings. This week, camera off, she made lemon drizzle cake during a three-hour HR call, and a chocolate Bundt in a seminar on redefining KPIs.

On Monday, you type, during an HR meeting, I make lemon cake. A motor buzzes behind you. The man in high-vis is on your heels, spinning his drill, once, twice, the bit swinging as he walks.

You speed up, almost running, and the man’s footsteps follow. Up ahead, a friend is coming towards you, the friend who wrote the birthday card. You wave. Except it can’t be your friend, just as you can’t have seen Tom Stoppard this morning. Across the street, a child is clapping. His mother stalks ahead, stern-faced, shoulders sagging. It is after nine, they are late. But the child walks with his head up, turning this way and that as a bird might, his face beaming with pride. His claps echo all along the street.

Perhaps you have a guardian angel, you think. The footsteps have stopped. The man with the drill has vanished.

You raise your hands, bringing them together. You sense you are not alone in this. Somewhere far from here, someone else is smiling, confused, alarmed. You feel it in your wrists, how this other person’s hands fly together, ignoring the urgent commands from their brain. Pain strikes their palms, an eruption of sound. They tell themselves this was what they meant to do, and it makes no difference if they chose to clap or if you chose for them, just as it makes no difference who chose for you.

You’re smiling because it’s your birthday, you explain to yourself. Happy Birthday.

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Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive. Feel free to provide feedback through my Complaints Form, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

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We are sitting in the stalls of a West End theatre. The play is politically legible, predictable from the first scene. The scent of perfume is overpowering, I am too hot, experiencing shortness of breath. Claustrophobia, trapped in the middle of the row.

When he used to read other people’s fiction, David says, he felt afraid for them. They were giving away their words. Really, it was shame he felt, he says. Shame, mixed with envy. How come they could do it and he couldn’t?

David does not know about my Substack, though there is no reason to keep it from him. He has more subscribers than me, his pieces seem more coherent. His characters are both real people and rich metaphors for the state of society. Secretly, I wish he would adopt me, introduce me to his followers as a fellow traveller.

When he started sharing fiction, David says, he discovered there’s no trick. He only had to start listening, paying attention to runs of words, rhythms that passed through his mind. He captured them as faithfully as possible using whatever medium came to hand, a receipt, the margins of a paperback, his phone. What’s different about this, he wonders, from what ChatGPT or any other predictive AI does? Nothing except for some internal human music. The beating of the human heart, he suggests, modulated by the movement of breath, dictating the rhythms of prose.

I nod, my expression stiff. My own method has gone on strike. I have been finishing the final workshop piece for a course, a story that I captured in exactly the way David described, transcribing words without criticism. But when I came to revise I found myself writing a completely different piece, rewriting and rewriting, dreaming in sentences. I’m exhausted, and I won’t know if it works until I have distance, six weeks at least to clear my head.

How long have you been putting your own fiction on there? David asks. He smirks, watching my confusion.

He says he enjoyed my last two especially, the false-autofiction story that’s part of my Patrick Beckman cycle, the Russian pastiche about assassinating Chekhov – although everyone knows it was tuberculosis that got Chekhov in the end, he says. Perhaps I’ve read Carver’s “Errand”? He also didn’t much like my theme park comedy. Clever of you to use a pseudonym, David says. Keep your real name out of it.

How did you find me, I want to ask. Why didn’t you say something sooner. But I’m interrupted by our neighbours returning to the seats beside us. The lights dim. The actors are on the stage.

Isn’t it exhausting, David whispers, performing all the time? But I don’t know any other way to live.

At the curtain call, the woman beside me leaps to her feet. David taps me. He answers my scowl with a nod to the seats around us: everyone else is standing. I rise to my feet and put my hands together. On the stage, beaming with sweat on their faces, the actors take their bow.

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Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive. Feel free to provide feedback through my Complaints Form, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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Dmitriev had forewarned Elena Petrovna of his return, but the only sign of his wife was cold ashes in the grate. Reaching for his paper knife to open his friend’s letter, Dmitriev noticed several ink spills on the desk blotter and remembered he had written to Anton Pavlovich from Siberia, promising to read Chekhov’s latest story on his journey home. However, “The Butterfly” was divided across two issues, and Elena Petrovna’s letter containing the second part had missed his departure. The conclusion of the story was lost somewhere between Moscow and Irkutsk.

On his hard and icy journey, Dmitriev had many times turned the pages of North and stopped at “The Butterfly”. He had nothing better to do than read it, nothing except sit on a hard bench scratching his flea bites, closing his ears against the creaking of the cart. His failure to keep his promise appalled Dmitriev, but that was nothing to the misery of reading the complication, only to be denied the satisfaction of the climax.

At his desk Dmitriev spread three prescription slips in front of him, licking his thumb to separate the papers. Several friends lived nearby and kept up with the latest publications. Carrying his messages, he went down to the street and whistled at the youth in the shabby cap who lingered on the steps of his building. Dmitriev fished a few kopecks from his waistcoat pocket and threw them for the youth to catch. “Wait for their replies,” Dmitriev growled, handing over the notes. Bowing to collect the coins, the youth looked up with an infuriating smirk. He should have chosen another boy, Dmitriev reflected as he climbed the stairs. This one was always on the doorstep, no doubt awaiting Elena Petrovna, hoping for a smile, a generous glance.

The youth returned an hour later and let himself into the apartment. He placed the magazine on the table in front of the fire and lingered beside the armchair as Dmitriev read his friends’ replies, which the youth had slipped into the pages of North.

“Yes?” Dmitriev said.

The youth wore the same contemptuous expression. He tapped North. “I can read, you know,” the boy said.

“Can you now? Let me fetch you a kopeck.”

The boy held out his hand and flinched as Dmitriev raised his palm. Screwing his cap in his fists, the boy left the room walking backwards, his eyes darting to the bedroom door, no doubt hoping for a glimpse of Dmitriev’s wife.

Dmitriev picked up his envelopes. Under the letter from Chekhov, he had found a second, from a beautiful sculptress whose husband had died under Dmitriev’s care the previous autumn. He had opened neither while waiting, hesitating over which was the more urgent. Now he opened the letter from the widow. In careful, childlike script, she wished him all grace and good health and offered her forgiveness for her husband’s death. I know you did everything you could, she wrote. I do not blame you in the slightest. She repeated the sentiment near the end. It was God himself who made me a widow. I know you gave everything in your power.

He picked up Anton Pavlovich’s letter, but set it aside and instead took up the edition of North which his travel case had rendered dog-eared and dirty. He turned to Chekhov’s story, but this too he set down again. There was a decanter of port on the drinks trolley, which Dmitriev had left before his long journey, a custom he’d developed since Elena Petrovna despised port. He was pleased that the decanter had survived his absence, and now he brought it to the fireplace, with one of the fine crystal glasses Elena Petrovna’s uncle had given for their wedding. He drank a small measure, poured another, and settled down to read.

The first paragraphs made Dmitriev chuckle. The story was about a doctor, happily married to a woman who moved in artistic circles. “Wait until Lenochka reads this,” Dmitriev said to himself, refilling his glass. “She’ll laugh her cheeks red.”

By the time he picked up the conclusion of “The Butterfly”, however, Dmitriev was pulling the hairs from his beard. His good humour had vanished, and his fingers shivered as if the blood had fled his extremities and was gathering to reinforce his heart. His shaking hand lifted the decanter and found it empty.

When Elena Petrovna returned home late that evening, smelling of vodka and burnt tallow, Dmitriev was drunk. He had removed from the wall a ceremonial duelling pistol that had belonged to a cousin of his, a youth of twenty who’d fallen through ice near Petersburg and either frozen to death in the lake or drowned.

“I hope that’s not for either of us,” Elena Petrovna said, taking in the empty decanter, the slivers of magazine paper that littered the hearth and clung to the bars of the fire. Dmitriev hoped she hadn’t noticed the fragments of cut crystal among the coals.

“I must murder a man,” Dmitriev said unhappily, leaning his temple against the muzzle of the pistol. Elena Petrovna removed the gun and tipped it out onto the desk. A ball and powder fell onto the leather.

“You’re a medical man, not a barbarian,” she said, tutting, allowing Dmitriev to clutch her waist and kiss her wrists. “I’ve been listening to the dreariest poem of Fet’s. All leaves and forests, like a grandmother’s letter.” She pushed his head away. Two dark circles dampened her skirt. “Won’t you pull yourself together? I can’t come home to a weeping husband.”

“You haven’t seen it,” Dmitriev said.

“Seen what? You’ve lost your mind, is that it? The Siberian cold has finally cracked you?”

“We’re ruined, both of us,” Dmitriev said. He bent for a torn sheet that had fallen to the floor and thrust it at his wife. “He’s ruined us.”

“Ruined?” Elena Petrovna said with a chuckle. Her eye, scanning the page, slowed. “A coincidence, that’s all I can see. How many doctors does Anton Pavlovich know? You forget he’s a doctor himself. What does it matter, anyway, if he bases his character on his old friend Stepan Olegovich? A compliment, if nothing else.”

“You’re there too,” Dmitriev said, mastering his dismay. “Lenochka, I cannot believe that you have ever, in my long periods of work outside Moscow, done me any disrespect. And yet he calls you… He suggests…”

To his horror, Dmitriev’s wife laughed. “But I haven’t given you any disgrace, Stepan Olegovich. You know that as well as I do. So how can this man insult me?”

“And yet he has,” Dmitriev said, gesturing at the ashes among the burning coals.

“This?” Elena Petrovna threw the page she was holding into the grate. “You must go and speak to him, Styopa. You are a rational man. This can all be straightened out in an hour.”

“You’re right,” Dmitriev said, doubtful, “I know you’re right.” He wiped his eyes and crossed to the desk, where he swept the powder into his palm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is no kind of reunion.”

“All the same,” Elena Petrovna said, “it is a reunion. Come, darling one. Tell me about Siberia. Was it as monstrous as before?”

Later that night, Dmitriev returned to his desk. It was the doctor’s idea that he would visit Chekhov’s apartment the following afternoon, and it was for the purpose of writing a reply that he tore the seal of his friend’s letter. But the contents dismayed him. Anton Pavlovich had left his apartment on Malaya Dmitrovka, the letter said, indeed he had left Moscow entirely, sinking a fortune into a country estate, where your friend and colleague would be delighted to welcome your visit, Stepan Olegovich, should you find it in your heart to make the journey.

At once Dmitriev composed a reply, his fingers still shaking from port and rage. The guttering candle gave a fragile light, spewing black smoke. Elena Petrovna’s snores from the adjoining bedroom accompanied the scratching of Dmitriev’s nib. Before long, he too was drifting into sleep and when he awoke, his cheek clinging to the blotter, the doctor found he held in one hand an envelope addressed in unsteady pen he scarcely recognised as his own, and in the other the polished walnut grip of the ancient duelling pistol.

{~~~}

The week that passed before Dmitriev took the train from Moscow to his friend’s estate did nothing to cool his fury. At the long Easter service, he heard several whispers about a scandal of a married woman and an artist, and at a drinks party he found himself in conversation near a loud matron in heavy rouge and furs, who wanted to shoot “that great pander, Anton Chekhov.” Chekhov, the woman said, had raided his latest story from the adventures of her youth.

Addressing himself coldly to the woman, Dmitriev asked her, “Do you know Anton Pavlovich?”

“Not myself, no,” the woman said. “But he must have heard about me from our acquaintances in common.” She wore several crosses on chains, and reminded Dmitriev of those devout women who call themselves criminals for the slightest crime of imagination. It disgusted him the way the matron seemed to boast of her insult when his own wife only laughed and denied any offence. This encounter was a morsel he chewed over again and again on the rattling train, while he debated what to do with the pistol, which he had thrust into his travelling case at the last possible moment before departure, so that Elena Petrovna did not notice and stop him, and which he could not now easily lose.

Dmitriev was met at the station by an inane peasant in a poorly made cart, drawn by a mare that had barely survived winter. It was a long drive to the estate, and the oval wheels and pitted country lane jostled Dmitriev painfully. The driver would pat the mare and address her in his thick accent, “Easy now, Anna Petrovna. Take care, Anna Petrovna,” in which Dmitriev heard each time the mocking echo of his own wife’s name.

It was a relief to stand on the verandah of the rough wooden house that was his destination, watching the cart retreat through an avenue of trees towards the road, listening to the chattering birds, the rustling of leaves, the ripples of fish in the dirty pond which lay in front of the house. Two men were at work digging up paving stones in the garden, and Dmitriev recognised Chekhov’s brother, Mikhail. The older man with a long beard, who never stopped humming to himself, must be the father. Through the window of a barn, Dmitriev caught sight of a rudimentary stove tended by a woman in an apron, Anton Pavlovich’s sister, Mariya.

Dmitriev sat himself in a wicker armchair and awaited his friend’s return. The family were too busy at chores to greet him, but Mikhail did look up from his stones and wave at the verandah. A magazine had been left discarded on a chair, and reaching for it, Dmitriev was startled by a distant explosion. It was a rifle shot from the direction of the meadows beyond the lime trees. He opened the magazine and discovered another story of Chekhov’s, which Dmitriev felt too bitter to read.

As the sun drew towards the tops of the trees, two figures appeared in the meadow, trudging through the mud. Dmitriev at once identified the taller man as Chekhov and sprang to his feet, though his host was still far from the house. Pacing the verandah, Dmitriev tried to make out what the men carried over their shoulders, some variety of game he guessed from the guns they balanced on their elbows. Dmitriev held his case in his fists, cursing himself for locking it on the train. At the door to the kitchen, Mariya appeared carrying a samovar on a metal tray. She seemed alarmed to see Dmitriev, and the tray rattled as she carefully carried it up the half-laid path. Nodding her head in greeting, she said, “We did not expect you, Stepan Olegovich.”

“But I wrote to Anton Pavlovich a week ago,” Dmitriev said.

“That explains it then. The demands of the estate are great, and Antosha has become neglectful. My brother at least sent the driver?”

“He did.”

“Then there’s no harm,” Mariya said, smiling. “Let me fetch another cup.”

The two huntsmen were now entering the garden, arguing playfully. Dmitriev could just catch that the other man had seen a play in Moscow which he felt to be a work of genius, for which Chekhov was mocking him. Spying Dmitriev, Chekhov stopped walking, shedding his rifle and a small bird he was carrying. Setting off at a sprint, his face overwhelmed with joy, Anton Pavlovich leapt onto the verandah and grasped his friend’s shoulders, saying, “You? Here? What am I dreaming, or is it really so?”

Being shaken by his friend so violently and with such obvious delight caused Dmitriev some panic. Wasn’t he carrying a pistol in his case? Hadn’t he come to Melikhovo to confront Chekhov? But he remembered his Hippocratic Oath, and saw that Elena Petrovna was right. Sinking into the armchair, Dmitriev scarcely noticed the arrival of the other man, a lean youth with a dark beard and melancholy eyes, until Anton Pavlovich said, “But you know Levitan?”

The pair shook hands. “My pleasure,” the other man said, with severity.

“But you know his work?” Chekhov said. “Levitan paints landscapes, the countryside, the spirit of the earth. But Stepan Olegovich, you look pale, was the journey a bad one?”

“Not at all,” Dmitriev said. “I’m still not recovered from Siberia.”

“This place will restore you,” Chekhov said, coughing as he filled the teacups. “I myself had influenza all winter, two months without relief. I’m hardly over it.”

They drank, and the host and the painter debated an event from their hunt, addressing themselves to Dmitriev as judge. Levitan had shot a snipe, wounding its wing. Chekhov had rescued the injured bird from a pond.

“It looked at me like I was its lord and master,” Anton Pavlovich said, “and this madman stands there saying, ‘Kill it, kill it, h-hit it on the h-head, I can’t bear to look.”

“W-what is a bird without a wing?” Levitan said. “For what life would you spare such a creature?”

“An intelligent bird,” Chekhov said. “The way it gazed at me, as if it understood exactly my dilemma. And this man wants me to bash its brains with the butt-end of my gun.”

Dmitriev looked toward the garden, wishing the other men would join. But Chekhov’s relations had left their work and had gone somewhere else, no doubt leaving their brother to his guests. “Did you put it from its misery?” Dmitriev asked.

“As if he had a choice,” Levitan said. “H-he blames me, but we’ll eat snipe for supper all the same.” He drained his glass and stood up. “Absurd, isn’t it? The things a man will feel shame for.”

“What does he mean by that, I wonder?” Chekhov said as Levitan disappeared indoors. Coughing, Chekhov slid into the painter’s chair and said, “I’d have thought your wife would have wanted to make the most of your return to Moscow, Dmitriev, after so long away.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“No, nothing, nothing. Shall I pour more tea?”

“She is going to her uncle’s estate, the textile merchant,” Dmitriev said, holding out his cup. He’d detected performance in Chekhov’s joyful greeting. Now, Anton Pavlovich was mocking him. “But I am dying to talk about your story in North,” he said.

Chekhov dropped Dmitriev’s cup to the tray, spilling the steaming tea. He raised his hands as if he meant to wring Dmitriev’s neck, but it was his own throat Anton Pavlovich grasped, massaging his carotids as if attempting to ease his fingers under a noose. He coughed nervously.

“Please, keep your voice down. I have succeeded in distracting our friend, but at any moment his suspicions could return.”

“Our friend?” Dmitriev said. Was this another of Chekhov’s games, an attempt to placate him?

“Yes, Levitasha. The business with the snipe, he intends to punish me, you see. Vengeance, would you believe it? Over something completely negligible, a silly sketch.”

“My apologies, Anton Pavlovich,” Dmitriev said. “I am not following…”

“The painter in North, the lover of my butterfly. Levitan has taken offence. As if half the painters in Moscow don’t have mistresses. Under the skin, as you and I know, Dmitriev, what is there to tell one man from another? We doctors need have no illusions.” Chekhov chuckled, but this caused him another fit of coughing.

“You are not over your influenza.”

“It’s close to beaten,” Chekhov said. “With the spring, and this clean country air, it cannot chase me much longer.” He beat his sternum with his fist. “But come, let me show you the house. You’ll forgive its rough state. And then I must retire to my writing desk to earn a few kopecks, or my family will have no bread this winter.”

{~~~}

On a cot in the corridor that night, Dmitriev lay awake, shivering, disturbed by the coughing that seemed to echo through the bones of the house. He had drunk the old man’s homemade liqueurs at dinner, distracting himself from Chekhov’s father’s relentless religious humming. The corridor was draughty and gave him little warmth under the winter covers, which crackled with hardened dirt.

It was the pistol that kept Dmitriev from sleeping. To have brought a gun to Melikhovo, where guns were plentiful as was typical in every country estate, struck the doctor more than ever as an act of madness. If the pistol were found in Dmitriev’s possession, the only assumption would be the correct one, that Chekhov’s latest story had created a motive. Hadn’t Anton Pavlovich said something similar, that a gun must always have a purpose? No, Dmitriev decided, throwing off the bedcovers and feeling around the rough boards for his boots. He must rid himself of the weapon.

The moon gave only a murky light to the shadows as he felt his way to the door and out into the damp air, the pistol wrapped inside his coat. Dmitriev peered across the lawn, debating whether he needed light. He didn’t want to lose his way in strange countryside at night, but set against that was the possibility a lantern might be noticed. Then how would he explain himself, skulking in the dark with a pistol like a common burglar?

He felt his way across the garden, tripping on the corners of paving stones and the divots in the dirt road. He had in mind to conceal the pistol in the wood which lay beyond the meadow, where he imagined it would not be discovered. But the going was hard on the mud, where stalks of old hay scratched his ankles and invisible wings buzzed his face. He saw his mistake. Second only to being caught with a pistol would be for a strange pistol to appear in a bush in daylight, demanding explanation. Perhaps the suspicion would fall on the painter, but Levitan would know the truth and could accuse Dmitriev in turn. At once it seemed obvious that the gun could disappear without difficulty into the dirty pond beside the house, where it would tarnish quickly into a rusted artefact, harmless if discovered.

Stumbling through a dark thicket that hid between the lime trees, Dmitriev became aware of a glint ahead. In the direction he believed was the house, he saw the moon reflected amber in some muddy stream. That must be the pond, he thought, but stopped in fright when the moon, which had lain rippling, turned and cast a glow across a breadth of water, revealing the verandah fifty arshins to the left.

It was a lantern. Somebody had followed Dmitriev, perhaps Chekhov himself, a thought which chilled the doctor, that Chekhov had divined from Dmitriev’s demeanour this exact course of action. Retreating, Dmitriev’s temple crashed against a branch. He gave a muffled cry of terror.

“Wh-who’s there?” called a soft voice, and the beam swung towards the trees.

Caught, shielding his eyes, holding the pistol in his belt, Dmitriev staggered down an unseen bank towards the figure, who was calling, “Who’s there? Is that you, Misha?”

“Who is it?” Dmitriev whispered. “Who’s shining this light to blind me?”

The lantern turned, revealing Levitan.

“I thought you were Anton Pavlovich,” Dmitriev said. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see the pond,” Levitan said, his voice boyish, as if caught in the act of stealing apples. “It was a s-silly idea.”

“No, please,” Dmitriev said, understanding he was lost. These artists could excuse anything with a few words, I was inspired to look at a pond, Anton Pavlovich, that is why I was creeping about in the dark, but what’s my excuse, Dmitriev thought. A mere doctor roaming the night with a pistol. At once, an idea occurred to him. “You must be wondering why I’m out here, Isaac Ilyich.”

“It’s that damn snipe,” Levitan said. “It did it to taunt me, I’m certain. My shot was true but at the last moment it spun away. Never mind it could make no difference, it was that creature’s fate to die. But then Anton Pavlovich with his w-w-weeping…”

“I have been wanting to speak with you, Isya,” Dmitriev said. “It’s my reason for coming to Melikhovo, in fact.” They were standing beside each other, and by the glimmering light he saw Levitan’s confusion. “The fact is, Moscow’s talking about you.”

“Talking?” Levitan said, directing the lantern across the water towards the house, catching dark wings of shadow.

“You do Anton Pavlovich a great honour, shooting his game and sharing his table. His latest story—”

“You see me in it?”

“All of Moscow sees you in it, Isya. They call our host a criminal to transcribe your life for his own ends. They say you deserve satisfaction. But of course, it’s not cowardice to keep out of petty games of honour.”

He felt the painter stiffen. “It is a work of fiction,” Levitan said. “Where do you hear this?”

“From my mistress,” Dmitriev said, surprised at his creativity. “You see, Isya, there are no secrets between us. It was another unfaithful wife who told her, but where the women hear it, I cannot say.”

“Chekhov is like a brother to me,” Levitan said. “What’s done cannot be helped.”

“Then I have my answer,” Dmitriev said. “I came here to offer my support, should you desire it.”

“You don’t mean… as s-second?” Levitan’s wide eyes darted between the house and Dmitriev. “This is madness, you can’t mean—” Levitan, stepping backwards, found the slope of the bank.

“Careful, Isya,” Dmitriev said, catching Levitan by the elbow. “Here, let me show you. Lower your lantern. You see?” Dmitriev opened his coat. “Not here,” Dmitriev hissed. The painter had reached for the gun. “But you’re shaking, Levitan. Let’s go inside.”

Dmitriev began to walk, and after several paces, the other man followed. They passed the pond in silence, the swinging lantern making shadows into creatures that reared across the lawn and swallowed Dmitriev into their darkness. His heart beat rapidly and he gripped the smooth wood, his fingertips touching the cold metal barrel. Dmitriev could sense the change in the painter from his footsteps, his resignation to necessity.

“What, after all, have I really done?” Dmitriev whispered to himself, entering the garden. The feeling was no different to caring for an incurable man, shepherding him towards his end. Imagining the letter he would write Elena Petrovna, Dmitriev remembered what Anton Pavlovich said: that a gun once shown must eventually fire.

A barrage of coughs broke the stillness, echoed by a shout of the old man’s prayer. The lantern’s shadows moved back and forth over the house where Chekhov slept. Inside, nothing woke him, not the coughing nor the pain. But the father was singing again, a holy song, a lullaby. Medicine to keep the evil one from the door, a balm to bring peace to his son’s tormented dreams.

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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I had a vision of a man about my age and build, five foot eleven and a half, salt-and-pepper curls, alarming blue eyes. He stands in the island’s phone booth, the sole link to the mainland. The booth smells of sour milk, which the islanders produce themselves, claiming it tastes of icing sugar. The man, Patrick, has become entangled in the islanders’ morally ambiguous lives, which tolerate no intrusion from outsiders. He suspected this would happen as early as the train to the coast. Now he’s trying to reach someone he loves, someone who would understand that the line is monitored, who would read between his words to divine his hope for a saviour.

The inspiration for the phone booth came from a magazine. I was searching for an image to animate my story when I found an interview with an old friend. I haven’t seen this friend in twenty years, and if I’m honest, I don’t know that we were ever truly friends. Our parents knew each other growing up, but now lived in different cities, his in Tel Aviv, mine in Notting Hill. Between our infrequent family gatherings, Mark and I would exchange the occasional email. Mark often dropped the thread of these conversations, for which he’d apologise the next time we met in person. He begged me not to take offence, and I’d forgive him. But the next time I sent him an email, he wouldn’t respond.

The incident I’m thinking of happened in the noughts, in 2003 or 2008. Mark (I’m calling him “Mark”, but of course this isn’t his real name) was still living in Tel Aviv, and I was visiting for Passover, staying in a hotel, sharing a bedroom with my older brother. That’s if this happened in 2003. If this was 2008, I was staying in an expensive apartment overlooking the beach, which belonged to a family friend. My room was at the furthest end of the building from the bedrooms where the family and servants slept. In either case, the phone stood on a side table between two twin beds, and it was from the left-hand bed that I made my calls. Unless my memory has reversed the image, I held the phone in my left hand and dialled with my right. It was late in the evening, shortly before or after dinner, the bedside lamp making a chiaroscuro scene.

I had Mark’s number written on a piece of paper in my own handwriting, which I sometimes have trouble reading. It was the number for the apartment Mark shared with his parents, somewhere in the bohemian quarter. If I was in a hotel, I imagine I had to dial 9 for an outside line. A woman answered. “Can I speak to Mark?” I said.

“Speak to who?” The woman’s voice was American-accented, with Hebrew inflections.

“Does Mark Levy live there? It’s Patrick. Patrick Beckman.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “This line is terrible.”

“Miriam? It’s Patrick.” I spoke loudly and slowly, almost shouting. “Juliet Beckman’s son. I’m trying to reach Mark.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman repeated. “You have the wrong number.”

~

In my story, the strangeness does not begin immediately. But already on the train, travelling towards the coast, things are beginning to go wrong. Because Patrick, my character, has sensitivity to sound and smell, and because it’s Easter, he buys a ticket for first class. Really, this is so I can make him dislikeable, complicating the islanders’ desire to destroy him.

Patrick was supposed to spend Easter with his wife, Helen, and their three children. This is the first Easter since the divorce, but at the last moment Helen cancelled their plans and took the children to Geneva to stay with Gabriel, a man she has been spending more and more time with. It was Gabriel who once told Patrick about the island – they were at Oxford together – and it is through a mutual friend that Patrick found himself invited to rent a cottage on the island. My character is in denial about the meaning of this, and about how much it upsets him. Reflecting, his thoughts run as if it was he who cancelled the plans, in order to protect his children from pain. He is unaware his story does not add up.

Instead, Patrick focuses on the carriage. He has become addicted to dating apps, which will not work on the island, and it is a frustration to him that the tables are filled with retired couples and widows. Patrick experiences a thrill when an aristocratic single mother arrives, leading four children. She has arrived late and had to fight her way through the length of the train, and this gives her a flustered, attractive look. The woman’s ticketed seats are divided among several tables. Her five-year-old daughter takes the window seat opposite Patrick.

Also at Patrick’s table is an older couple. The wife, a woman in her seventies, takes an interest in the child. She tells the five-year-old that she and her husband are travelling to the sea to look after their grandson, who is also five. The boy’s father, the son of the couple at the table, is a surgeon, the wife says. Her son saves lives by sawing open people’s ribcages and playing around with their hearts.

In my hotel room, or in my family friend’s apartment, I read the number I had scribbled on the printout that contained all the information I needed for my journey. I had printed this in case my mobile phone didn’t work abroad, which was prescient. Carefully, I retyped the number into the keypad, pressing 9 or not as the situation required.

“Hello?” said a woman’s voice.

“Miriam?”

“Who’s that?” The voice was challenging, either amused or annoyed, in some sense both.

“It’s Juliet Beckman’s son, Patrick. Is –”

“Patrick! I heard you were here. Where are you staying?” I told her. “I’ll fetch Mark. But afterwards, you speak to me, okay? I want to see you. You really don’t visit us enough.”

I agreed.

“How’s your mother?” I remember her asking, then or another time. Perhaps she already knew how my mother was and where I was staying. Perhaps she’d seen my mother for lunch that afternoon and given her the number I held in my hand.

“I’ll fetch Mark,” Miriam said again, and after the beating of footsteps, the line went silent.

~

My characters are often writers, more obviously flawed than I am, but experiencing greater success. Patrick, this character, has published several chapbooks and is regularly invited to poetry events. Nobody minds or notices that his publishers are cleverly disguised vanity presses. People accept him at face value.

“I’m a poet,” is what Patrick tells the aristocratic mother. She has moved to the table to soothe her daughter, and the girl, now calm, sits on her mother’s knee, sucking through the straw of an empty juice carton. The woman, Patrick has already learnt through eavesdropping, has a venture capitalist husband whose parents have a house on the island. The woman’s nanny has fallen sick, right on the cusp of the Easter break, and it’s for this reason that the woman and her children are making this last-minute dash. “I never normally agree to go,” the aristocratic mother says. Her husband’s mother is a bit of a battleaxe. She finds it creepy, being so cut off.

“Do you have children?” she asks Patrick, but before he can answer, the heart surgeon’s mother returns from the toilet and resumes their conversation.

“Why don’t you swap places with my husband?” the surgeon’s mother says. “He won’t mind sitting on his own, and you can have some space with your daughter.” The way the surgeon’s mother says this, glancing at her husband and then at Patrick, makes Patrick think she is trying to frustrate his attempts to get to know the aristocratic mother.

While the two women conduct a polite negotiation, one refusing and the other insisting, the little girl unwraps a toffee which the surgeon’s mother has spilt onto the table. The child begins to choke and, in her distress, knocks over her carton.

“Please, let me move,” my character says, snatching up his laptop, eyeing the girl in case the noises she’s making mean she might vomit. He has plenty of time to get to know the woman, he believes. There’s the train and the boat, and later the seclusion of the island.

On the phone, Mark’s voice had an enthusiasm that put me at ease. He was delighted I’d called, he said. He’d heard I was in Tel Aviv and he’d hoped I’d get in touch. “What are your plans?” he said.

Whichever year it was, my answer would have been pretty much the same. My nature is essentially passive, almost parasitic. I would as soon sit, read, think, stare into space. I marvel, or in those days I marvelled, at people who feel a compulsion to act. Lately, I’m more likely to pity them.

I told Mark that my mother had arranged some dinners, or I told him that my parents’ friend had created an itinerary of experiences an Oxford undergraduate might enjoy. In either case, I was at Mark’s disposal.

“Then let’s hang,” Mark said. He laid out some options for nightclubs, beach raves, friends who were artists, musicians. He even had a cousin who was a stoner philosopher.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s a terrible connection.”

“I thought it was me,” Mark said. “I can barely hear you.”

“Why don’t I hang up and call back?” I said.

“Cool.”

“Don’t go anywhere. I’ll call right away.”

I hung up. I dialled Mark’s number carefully. The phone rang. A woman answered.

“Is Mark there?” I said.

“What are you, stupid?” the woman said. “I told you already. It’s a wrong number.”

~

The aristocratic mother’s seat is at an identical table closer to the toilet, opposite another of her children, a boy of about ten wearing what look like professional DJ headphones. Patrick smiles at the boy, thinking he might ingratiate himself that way. “What are you watching?” he says. The boy silently turns a dial on a small metal case that connects his headphones to his tablet.

The window seats are taken by a retired couple, who keep directing glances at Patrick in relation to the boy. Patrick takes these to be complaints about the noise from the headphones, which emit bursts of gunfire, explosions, animal grunting. Eventually the woman tuts at her husband, and the man nudges Patrick’s elbow.

“I know,” Patrick says. “I pity his poor ears.”

“Won’t you do something?” the man says.

“In a heartbeat if he were mine,” Patrick says. This confuses the man. “My children are in Geneva. With their mother.”

The man’s wife smiles and links fingers with Patrick across the table. “You’re abandoned,” she says. “Are you visiting our island?”

On the phone in the hotel or apartment, I dialled the number again. Again, I reached the woman. I kept dialling. “Please,” she said. “Stop calling me.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, the next time she answered. “I don’t understand why this is happening.”

“Stop now,” the woman said. “I’m putting the baby to bed.”

“I promise you, this number just worked.”

“I can’t keep coming to the phone. Please. Stop doing this.”

I promised her I would. I sat on the bed. I thought of Mark, sitting beside his own phone, waiting for my call. Why didn’t he call me? He could have found my number. Perhaps he’d already called, and kept getting the engaged tone while I argued with the woman. Perhaps he thought he’d offended me.

I brought the paper close to my eye. With my finger, I went digit by digit from the page to the keypad. I made certain to enter the number exactly. There was no answer. I pressed redial, and when the phone rang out, I pressed it again.

“You promised,” the woman said.

~

The old couple on the train have no children of their own. The husband has worked his entire career in manufacturing, until last summer when his partners bought him out. The husband hates spending money, the wife explains, but she’s persuading him to enjoy himself. They have more than enough to see them into their graves.

“And what pays your bills?” the wife says.

“I’m a poet,” my character says. The woman looks alarmed.

In the middle of the night, the phone rang. I was asleep, and the room was in darkness. The ringing phone entered a dream in which I tried to reach Mark, who was confined to a medical facility. A succession of nurses and doctors barred my entry. When I finally found my friend, Mark was wearing a hospital gown with an open back, dancing across the waiting area to music only he could hear. Suddenly, a siren sounded. There was a fire. Sprinklers sprayed from the ceiling, showering Mark, who was weeping.

The siren was my ringing phone. I sat up in my twin bed, and if my brother was in the other he said, “What’s happening?”

“Mark?” I said.

“Who is this?” It was a heavy voice on the line, male, Israeli, a little drunk-sounding. I told him my name. “You like to mess with my wife?” the man shouted. “Is that it? You like to prank a person?” I covered the earpiece to muffle his volume. If it was the apartment, I also listened for some sign, a click or breaths, that my parents’ friends were listening. Perhaps the man already knew my name. Perhaps he’d asked the hotel operator for my room. Perhaps he just started shouting.

“It was a mistake,” I said. “I promise you.”

“I know what your promises are worth,” the man said. “Well, two can play, friend. You think I can’t find you?”

“Please,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll be seeing you, Patrick Beckman. It’s a promise.”

After he hung up, I lay in the unfamiliar dark. Somewhere, a phone was ringing, and I knew at any moment, as soon as I fell asleep, my phone would ring again. I tried to picture myself on a desert island. I tried to count my breaths. I tried to imagine myself kissing a succession of actresses. Eventually, the sun pierced pinprick holes in the metal shutters, creating bands of dusty light. I threw off my covers and splashed my face in the bathroom sink.

~

I know my character goes to an island, that the island destroys him. I don’t know why. The island remains a mystery. Patrick remains on the train. He has set aside a magazine in which he read a surprising interview, and is conjuring the island he will soon reach. In his mind, he wanders its mazes of muddy lanes, chews its hard rustic bread, pets its inscrutable sheep. Sensory impressions, the rattling carriage, the voices of his travelling companions, the scent of burnt coffee, mix with a creeping sense of dread to interrupt and overwhelm his typing fingers.

The boy has moved to a different seat, closer to his mother. The family play a complex card game, their shouts filling the carriage. The old woman has fallen asleep, a closed book lying untouched on the table in front of her. The old man watches a war movie, wearing disconnected headphones. The movie plays through the laptop’s speakers.

Presently, the train becomes stuck. An announcement explains that there is a breakdown ahead. Minutes tick by. A second announcement apologises for the delay, and then there are no more announcements. The old woman wakes and sits motionless, her eyes absorbing the scene through the window: the sun setting over green fields, the hazy roofs of a shabby village, a network of roads and powerlines. Like the story, like all Patrick’s stories, the train has failed. Patrick keeps typing, trying to make poems from words that have no meaning, no letters. Night falls. His fingers strike nothing.

In Tel Aviv, the morning after my sleepless night, I lost the printout containing everything I needed for my trip. As I reconstructed the phone numbers and names of restaurants, I also tracked down Mark’s number. I made my mother repeat it three times into the phone, either from her room on the floor above or from her office in our house in London. When I finally called again – I waited three days out of terror – it was Miriam who answered.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and I knew from her voice that her regret was genuine. “I’m sure Mark told you, he has to go back already. It’s such a shame you haven’t connected. He had such ideas.”

“That’s a pity,” I said, and wished Mark luck at university or in the army, whichever it was. Miriam and I agreed we’d have plenty more opportunities. The long future lay before us, our whole lives. But the next time I visited Tel Aviv, or the time after that, we didn’t connect, and I heard Mark came to London without calling me.

~

Patrick thinks of his children. He imagines them in another man’s home, shouting, running. Gabriel is a generous host, he delivers small chocolates from his pockets. Behind ears he discovers small trinkets from the jewellery shop, a pocket knife with a sharp blade for the boy. When the children become absorbed in a game, Gabriel pinches Helen at the kitchen island. Blushing, she turns from the herbs on her cutting board. Her smile is warning and invitation. She has grilled lamb cutlets in honour of spring.

There is no seat, no train, no light. Only Patrick’s imagination. Silent tears streak his cheeks. He wishes he could wipe them, but he has no hands and, soon enough, not even eyes.

Mark and I spoke again only once, over email. We were in our late twenties, seeing the women we would eventually marry. The pressure of coordinating so many diaries was too great for our small desire to meet, and from that day until this afternoon, Mark never once entered my thoughts. He is less than a ghost. But the man on the telephone in the dark, he is with me, as much now as he was then, or even more so. He is as he has always been, the constant shadow over my sleepless nights.

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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I’m working the Easter Vac, researching my thesis. Easter’s too short and too early in the season to fully staff up, but the Centre’s as busy as the August bank holiday, Gary tells me before my first shift. Funny, the things people will queue an hour and a half to get: an autograph from a pothead in a bear suit, a hot dog from a vat, a shot at a urinal. The Centre is full of hungry, angry people walking too fast, looking for relief. Gary takes his break over lunchtime, leaving newbies like me to figure it out. Lunchtime is especially unpleasant.

My thesis takes issue with fiction set in theme parks. Events in theme parks don’t follow metaphorically-rich narrative patterns, goes my argument. Just because a child has a catastrophe on a rope swing doesn’t mean the place is going to end up an inferno. I took the job at the Centre – the closest thing to a theme park within bus radius of my university – to prove that theme park labour is no different to any other low-paid job under Late Capitalism, and deserving of no less sincere literary attention.

On my first day, a kid’s finger comes off on the raft slide.

It’s a textbook case, exactly why they trained us. The kid’s parents were attending a Cocktail Umbrella Happy Hour in the Grog Grove (18+), Gary tells us at the debrief, leaving the kid to its own devices. Protocol was followed precisely, the kid having ignored instructions to keep its arm inside the raft, to go down feet first, not to crowd the slide or cut in line, not to throw pool noodles or pour chocolate milkshake down the tube. The guard excluded the kid from the Wet Zone, informing security. At that point, it’s on the kid if it chooses to sneak in through the fire door, climb the exit steps, and throw itself headfirst into the slide with no raft. The access hatch is a known failure point, Gary says. That’s where he guesses the kid’s hand got stuck. Under usual circumstances, that’s a manageable delay. The guard won’t send down the next raft until the previous clears the slide. Contractually, the guard gets the green light from below, he sends downs the next raft. That’s his job.

Shame we have to keep this one quiet, Gary says. It would make the perfect deterrent.

The debrief takes place in the Snake and Eagles in the village. Afterwards, one of the veterans, Dawn, buys me a Lovebite. She says, Sorry about your thesis.

That’s okay, I say. I never claimed theme parks are free of incident. My point was that, violent or otherwise, involving or not involving a middle-aged postal worker crashing into a kid who’s hanging from a metal wedge by its favourite middle finger, incidents have no intrinsic narrative meaning. Theme parks are markets where capital is exchanged for experience, sugar snacks, and low-wage labour. That’s my thesis’s thesis.

You’ve got Lovebite on your shirt, Dawn says.

The next day, a Saturday, Gary falls off the speedboat, backwards. They have to close the marina and pump in blue dye, and even then the lake’s still purple.

I take two days off. On the phone, I sense my new manager, Dawn, suspects I’m faking my stomach flu, so I make a performance of my gastric stress. Dawn’s too polite to say it, but I think my diarrhoea impresses her.

In bed, I read an essay about deterrence. My thinking is that safety in an Adventure Centre goes beyond warnings and guards. The essay suggests it’s not enough to focus on the costs of rulebreaking. You have to consider the rewards. For an effective deterrence strategy, you have to think about the costs and rewards of doing what you’re told.

Back at work, I present Dawn with an action plan to improve safety. This includes a crèche attached to the Grog Grove, and stickers with every hot dog purchase that act as speed passes for the toilets. Dawn loves my suggestions so much she locks them in her safe. For their protection, she says. She promotes me to Tea Shack. I haven’t been working the milkshake machine fifteen minutes when a grandmother chokes on a marshmallow.

Why do they call it Tea Shack? I ask Dawn that night at the Eagles. She gives me a look like a university education is a waste of good vending years.

But they serve pizza, I say. And curry.

It’s company policy to give the consumer what they crave, Dawn says.

And marshmallows, I mutter under my breath.

I’m planning to call in sick the next day, but that night, walking through the village, tipsy from the three Lovebites Dawn bought me, I pass the Centre at one of those algorithmic angles the architects must have generated on their laptops. In the moonlight everything glows, and the weathered wood and crumbling brick only add to the beauty. This, I think. I can write about this.

The next afternoon I’m back on milkshake duty at Tea Shack when a teacher leaps up shouting for buckets. At her table, the students are showering each other in strawberry-coloured vomit.

Are you sure you washed your hands? Dawn asks when I report the Salmonella outbreak in her office. My hands are spotless, and it takes a moment to catch that Dawn means my phone performance, that she swallowed my diarrhoea.

Tomorrow’s Good Friday, Dawn says. How about we try you on the Tunnel of Lovers?

Are you flirting? I ask her.

She points at her heart, a gesture I misread. What she means is that I have vomit on my apron.

On Good Friday, the queues are twice as long. Yellow puddles spring up at the bases of trees and walls and bear costumes. At least the Tunnel of Lovers is safe, I think, chewing on a marshmallow, wondering which of the two stopped clocks inside the Ferris wheel is closest to correct. I’m debating who I’d most like to see choke on a marshmallow – the husbands who whistle at their wives to hurry up, or the teenagers lip-syncing TikToks in front of the Cupids – when a great screaming of gears, brakes, and Lovers erupts inside the tunnel. I hang my apron on a peg. The right clock, I decide, is the clock showing break time.

I think I’m becoming desensitised to violence, I tell Dawn that night, in her bed in the grace-and-favour flat above the Eagles. The flat is still full of Gary’s training manuals and Gary’s WW2 posters and photographs of Gary smiling with his kids. We’ll make a manager of you yet, Dawn says, tweaking my nipple. Ow, I say.

That night, I dream I’m writing my thesis in the boathouse, using an oil lamp for light. The only clock is Gary’s water clock, which makes me want to pee. When the water clock freezes, I pour the lamp on the clock, but the oil spills off into a tangle of ropes beside the shed where we store fireworks. It’s viva committee policy to give the narrative what it craves, Dawn says, filming the flames.

The next morning, I quit the job by text message. The message vibrations wake Dawn. While I dress quickly, she opens her phone, but only to play a mantra-meditation of German political speeches. I slip out while she dozes, murmuring to herself about strength in joy.

I finish my thesis and call it Deterrence: Against Terence. I style the paper as an autobiography of a man named Terence. At my Viva, my supervisor, a Latinist in his nineties, calls my diarrhoea jokes an insult to Terence, the Roman comedian.

Isn’t he dead? I say.

And still funnier… Terry… than this worthless autofiction, the Latinist says, between fits of wheezing.

I contain my anger by chewing sugar snacks from a wholesale bag I stole from Dawn’s bedroom. I wonder what she’s doing. Out the window, the spring trees are unnaturally green. A man’s head zooms past, becoming a white plastic bag swooping on a horizontal breeze. I feel nostalgic for the rope swing.

I am a human being, the Latinist quotes. Through thick glasses, his big eyes follow my bag of snacks.

Let me delight you, I say, giving the Latinist my biggest, most customer-satisfying smile, offering my hand. His large eyes grow greedy, his dentures slip, his shaking fingers reach into my palm.

I adore them, the Latinist says, as he swallows my marshmallow. I love them… more than life itself.

At least, I think that’s what he said, I tell Dawn later at the Eagles, and later again in her bed, where she makes me repeat the story, her fingers resting lightly on my throat, laughing at all the wrong moments.

I think that’s what he said, I say. The choking made it hard to tell.

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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It’s a dark night. Above the towpath, passing the estate, Toby finds himself accelerating. The walkways of the block are brightly lit. A police van loiters, brake lights glowing. Toby slows, alert, but the scene is peaceful.

Soon he is passing the floodlit football pitches. Toby captained the firsts at university, and he still keeps his foot in on Saturday mornings, coaching local boys. He knows the families in the townhouses opposite the park, and the muted lights of the bedroom windows make him imagine himself running up the front door steps, pounding the knocker, sweating, shouting, “Help, help, help.” Bleary dads brightening as they open the doors. “Tobes. You’re out past bedtime.” Leaning their bald spots through the doorway to survey the deserted street, the mocking crescent of the moon.

*

Toby was sober when he left the house earlier that evening, stepping into unexpected dark. It was the tail of March, a time of year that made him think of the pandemic, those early lockdown sunset dinners in their terrace garden, warm and safe in their prison. But a cold snap had blown a chill into the evening.

On the street beside his own, Toby paused to take a photograph for his Instagram. There was no method behind the pictures he posted, just the things that struck him as he walked the streets. Usually, empty roads, dark shadows, an unexpected gleam of neon.

Tonight, it was a fridge, an integrated fridge-freezer, left beside a builder’s hoarding, facing the parked cars on the diagonal. Approaching headlights made the fridge a white canvas showing Toby’s silhouette: the contours of his hair and ears, the stiff shoulders of his overcoat.

As he took the photo, footsteps came around the fridge, a hunched figure. Toby quickly turned and walked away, aware of being followed, imagining the person tapping his shoulder. Excuse me, did you just take my picture?

*

At the photography exhibition, Toby took a glass from a waiter’s tray, telling himself he’d only have the one. He’d been invited by his university friend, Chris. With his hand shaking on the stem of his wine, Toby scanned the crowd on Chris’s behalf. Chris and his fiancée, Madeleine, had been known as the codependent legal couple who did everything together and agreed on nothing. They’d been together since law school and nobody, least of all Chris, who’d instigated it, had seen the breakup coming.

The cause had been a car crash. Chris wasn’t in the car with Madeleine, or even in the same country. Maddie was visiting her brother in Singapore when her taxi turned over. She texted Chris from the ambulance: I want you to know I love you. The text reached Chris in Prague, around the time a stripper was pushing his face inside her bra. It was a stag do, and when he discovered the message in his inbox the following lunchtime, marked read, he understood that Madeleine had thought she was going to die. I told her straight, he’d texted Toby at the time. You deserve somebody who cares enough to stop the lap dance.

Since the breakup, Chris had been scouring Substack newsletters for gallery openings, regionally authentic industrial-estate restaurants, clubnights with sadomasochist-coded themes. These last three months as wingman were the most Toby had seen Chris since graduation. Toby’s girlfriend, Fi, had him under instruction to keep an eye on the women Chris hooked up with. Fi had taken Chris’s side in the breakup. He’d behaved badly, she conceded. But she’d never liked Maddie to begin with, and since the proposal, she couldn’t stand her.

*

Walking away from the fridge, footsteps clipping behind him, Toby wondered about his responsibility. The steps sounded like a woman’s nervous haste, and he worried that if he kept walking ahead he’d be contributing to her terror. He stepped to the kerb, planning to cross, and saw that the person following him was a broad man in a puffer jacket, trailing a thick-necked hound.

Toby raised his phone, but there was nothing to photograph on the dark street. Only closed curtains, puddles of light from the streetlamps. He let the man with the dog pass, the dog’s panting, the man’s quiet grunts. The pair stopped at the corner in a cone of light and Toby swung his camera, but too late. They were gone, around the corner, lost to the night.

Toby followed. He was standing on the same corner, debating whether to turn left and risk the sketchy park with the floodlit football pitches and the dark canal towpath, or whether to continue straight down the hill to the main road. From somewhere ahead in the dark, a weak voice, a sickbed voice, called out, “Help. Help. Help.”

*

At the opening, Chris told Toby about a case he’d won, a woman who sued her employer for workplace bullying, harassment, discrimination. They were standing in front of a photograph through the window of a flat, four paint syringes sitting on a draining board beside a plate of blackened toast, two police officers in yellow vests reflected in the dusty glass, looking over their shoulders at the photographer.

There were emails and text messages, but Chris had managed to exclude them. The case rested on the woman’s testimony, which was heartbreaking. She cried describing the tampons her supervisor had left in her tea, the pinup photograph, her head superimposed, blu-tacked inside the urinal. Chris was sure he’d lost, but the tribunal found against the woman. Even after watching her cry.

“What about her?” Toby said, waving his empty glass towards a woman in a bright blue overcoat, her hair dyed blue, yawning in front of another window photograph, this one of a sill crowded with crosses, each carrying a Jesus who faced the backside of a closed blind.

Chris sniffed. “She’d have found against me, for sure.”

“You feel responsible?”

“It’s my job to defend my client the best I can. Who’s to say the panel got it wrong? Maybe the whole thing was a fantasy.”

*

The words still echoed in Toby’s ears on the street corner, as he peered into the darkness of the falling hill. Help. Help. Help. There was something unusual about the voice, something he couldn’t penetrate, as if the night itself had produced it. He thought he could make out some sort of activity in the shadows across the road. On the far side of a streetlamp, there, against a white wall. Limbs. Movement.

Slowly, Toby pieced together figures. There were three bodies pressed close around something in the darkness. The bodies were short, skinny, dressed in black. Teenagers, Toby thought. Their voices indistinct, angry. They surrounded something he couldn’t make out, perhaps only the wall itself. A flash of light might have been a mobile phone in one of the youths’ hands.

“I’m filming you,” one of the boys said. Or Toby thought he said. “Bruv, I’ve got you on camera.”

*

One of Chris’s clients was fired because a customer accused him of being a pervert. Another was a delivery driver beaten up on a sink estate by a gang filming for YouTube. “It didn’t seem real,” Toby said, in front of a photograph of a glossy magazine devoted to the stoic philosopher, Seneca. A pair of sunglasses, missing one arm, lay across the title of the magazine, casting amber shadows.

“Guess who I came up against in court,” Chris said, typing into his phone.

*

Toby had his phone in his hand. He could photograph the scene. The youths were still surrounding the old man, pushing him, pulling him – if there was an old man. If it wasn’t a silent shadow that separated the boys from the wall. Across the street, near the entrance to the dog park, a woman stood a few paces apart from another man leading a dachshund. Both of them watched the boys in the shadows, phones in their hands.

Surely one of us will do something, Toby thought. Surely I’ll do something.

*

“Did you call 999?” Chris asked, clicking his phone into standby. He flipped it up to check it again, then slid it into his pocket.

“I called the other one,” Toby said. “Non-emergency. I thought, let them decide. I don’t know what I’m witnessing. I went through these menus and a recorded message said: if you think you’re witnessing a crime, hang up and call 999.”

“Were you witnessing a crime?”

“That’s what I keep asking myself. All these people suddenly came by, a crowd of them. Some were walking, some were on bikes. They were going past the boys, and I left. But all the way here I kept thinking about the old man. What if those kids kill him?”

“It was teenagers giving someone some hassle,” Chris said. “They’re not going to kill anyone. Anyway, next time, call 999 and be done.”

*

After hanging up, Toby typed 999 into his phone. He stared at it, walking down the dark street beside the estate tower, where aggressive dogs barked from balconies. A television sat on a wall, the screen an explosion of jagged shards. You have always felt safe in this city, he told himself.

On the towpath, a bright light swung at him. A cyclist, texting on his phone, eyes on the screen, swerved. Toby flattened himself against the wall, his ankles in weeds.

Reflections from the far bank glimmered on the water. Shadows slid into the light and took shape. Ducks, silent, gliding between the canal boats. Further ahead, a lone duck cried in a quiet, high voice. A lost baby separated from its mother.

*

On the street outside the gallery, Chris lit a cigarette. A cool gust brought blossom petals swirling into an updraft. “I didn’t know you were smoking again,” Toby said.

“Listen,” Chris said, “I’m seeing someone.”

The way he said it meant something. In truth, Chris never hit on anybody, or not in front of Toby. Nor had they seen any art together that either of them had liked, or eaten any dishes that Toby would try again. Still, if it meant his wingman days were over, Toby felt a stab of grief. Everyone was settling down, buying houses, arranging weddings. There were hints he couldn’t ignore much longer, questions Fi left hovering in the atmosphere.

“Who is she?” Toby asked.

“I’ll give you three guesses,” Chris said. “Her name’s something you can eat.”

Toby guessed wrong twice, then he knew. “So what was this? An interlude?”

“Maybe,” Chris said, satisfaction in his smile. “I don’t know, mate. It’s a powerful word, isn’t it? ‘Wife’. Wife.”

*

Crossing the road on the walk home from the gallery, Toby stops to photograph the headlights of a car. He stands on the tarmac, and as the camera struggles to focus he understands that the car is going to hit him. All the same he waits, takes the photograph, and only then steps onto the pavement.

As the car slows for a speed bump, the driver rolls down the passenger window. He watches Toby, interrogating him, searching for intention, meaning.

Toby has arrived, as he must have known he would, at the place where the old man was accosted. It must be the place: the whitewashed wall, the streetlamp. There is no sign that anything happened here. The only unexpected thing is a hire bike, tipped on its side in front of the far pavement. Whatever took place left no mark.

He is about to leave when a sound stops him. The pitch repeats, intense, high. He walks backwards, searching for the source, then forwards two paces. The cry comes from a patio garden belonging to the whitewashed house. A plastic device flashes in a plant pot, blinking red. To deter birds, Toby decides.

He raises his phone. On the screen there’s nothing to see: a wall, a plant pot, a metal railing, a veiled window. Instead, he photographs the hire bike, thinking of Chris’s case, the tribunal. Chris had tried to argue there was sexism at play, but Maddie wouldn’t allow it, since the panel was three women. “You know the flaws in your own case the best,” Chris said.

Toby wondered how he’d break it to Fi about Madeleine. And he imagined describing his cowardice. Fi would be practical, dismissive of his guilt, of the tears springing to his eyes. He’d done nothing wrong, she’d reassure him. If he told her. He opened his photos and deleted the fridge, the canal, the bike. You are not the victim, he said to himself.

A noise behind caught his attention. A dog in a cone had nosed its way under the blind. The dog was brown and white with shaggy ears. A family dog, feeble, injured. Its big eyes watched Toby’s camera. Paws on the sill, the cone, the wet stare. Toby’s reflection, the ghost in the glass.

Hesitantly, as if out of duty, the dog bared its teeth. With no malice in its expression, even with resignation, it lifted its muzzle and barked, barked, barked.

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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At night, on your sofa, you imagine you’re a city. This part, the part that plans, that comes up with ideas, this is the tyrannical government. Committees see to the trains and the streetlights, and everything, more or less, runs on time. In a crisis, a blocked sewage line, a breakdown on a thoroughfare, the government dispatches the full force of its attention. Nobody sleeps until the problem is fixed.

In an accent you cannot place, the man with the cane tells you his name is Murdoch. He eyes your cardboard coffee carrier with its three empty berths and offers you his flask. You drink something harsh and earthy, like rotten foliage. You take another swig to wash away the first.

A city must be more than its government. There must be citizens. Productive members of society. Someone must unclog the sewer, tow away the school bus, deliver the children safely to their homes. You cannot imagine all the activities involved to lie still, at a steady temperature, listening to your breath in the dark.

Murdoch came here as a tourist, he says. He was living in a hotel with his wife and baby. “She’s a generous, beautiful woman. But how much can somebody spend on dry cleaning?” One night, drunk, he had it out with her. He woke up to find she had taken his son, that smiling insomniac with his milky fists. And not only his son. Hard drives, bank records, shadow ledgers. Dirty laundry delivered into the hands of his enemies in the city from which he is now exiled, a political refugee. “You cannot imagine,” he says. Where he’s from, the police will break your nose just to look inside your wallet.

In any city, there are bound to be malcontents. Not every citizen will produce. Some refuse every opportunity to work. They plot against good organisation, like children refusing to sleep and dress and eat. Bombs are defused in garbage trucks, statistical offices, government limousines. Rarely is the wrong wire cut.

There is a rip in Murdoch’s trousers, beneath the pocket. His boxer shorts have cats, the Japanese kind that waves its paw and brings prosperity. Murdoch folds up his sleeve. On his wrist, a tattoo of the same cat beckons through clingfilm. The tattoo artist gave Murdoch a baggie of magic mushrooms. “I should have tripped as a teenager. My mind was pure, but now it’s too late.” Murdoch knocks his temple. “Nothing but trouble in here.”

Other times, on your sofa, you know you cannot be a city. You cannot cook a dinner your children won’t throw. Your wife once wept at your gentleness, and now she rages about your narcissist cruelty, your humiliations. All you can do is mutely ruminate in your kitchen, dripping beans. Like the house where you lie on the sofa at night, listening to the empty silence, you have a vast, dark basement. You can put anything in this basement. You could put your filthy kitchen, your children’s food sculptures. You could put your wife.

“The pyramid is a stable shape,” Murdoch says. He looks along the terrace, the drooping lace curtains, the dark living rooms. He says, “Unless you stand one on its head.”

The door to your basement is thick steel, but the floor is sand. You should have had it concreted when your family left you. Now it’s too late. At night, awake, you try not to think about them beneath you, your prisoners. You try not to picture fish finger tentacles burrowing into sand, the chasms they could scrape out, nightmares waiting to be excavated.

“Where did he go?” Murdoch says. He has ripped away the cling film, and the cat has gone with it. In its place is only a tangle of knotted skin. There’s a snarling outrage in Murdoch’s expression, as if the cat were real, as if you helped it escape. His face collapses. He wears no shoes. His chipped toenails, like a broken smile.

You are awake on your sofa one night and the floor slips from under you. Everything tilts to a forty-five-degree angle: the dusty window, the dining table piled with dirty plates, the chandelier that no longer lights. The sofa crashes into the wall. The plates slink off the table and shatter on the tiles.

You lie there, in your canted house, on your canted sofa. As if you were a ship adrift in a storm. But it’s your life that’s canted, that’s slid out of reach, that’s shattered into fragments. You stare at the photographs on the staircase. Instead of trusting faces smiling with innocence, what remains are rectangles of cream paint and pictures of the sea: grey skies, grey waves, photographs you took on windswept beaches, alone in winter. The horizons form a jagged line, spreading from corner to corner, parallel with the bannister.

“I won’t go back,” Murdoch says. “You can’t make me.” He lunges at you, spilling your latte, and collapses onto a heap of rubbish bags abandoned against the postbox. Murdoch holds up his fist. A seam of blood drips from his palm. His cane stands in one of the sacks. A shard pokes through the skin of another, the jagged point of a broken plate.

You sit with your arm around Murdoch, his sandy shoulders. His thin body quakes. The sun sits high above barren trees, and the silence is the silence of an abandoned city. While the gargoyle gleams in the rubbish sack, the two of you shiver like the sails of a tormented ship. You have nowhere to be. Nobody cares that you are here, gripping this weeping refugee, shaking with his grief. Nobody expects you at home.

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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In fact, they’re both Jewish. Her grandmother left Germany as a baby. Juliet’s great-grandfather stayed behind to keep his shop on a Munich boulevard, repairing eyeglasses.

To give them relaxation time before the conference, Karl switched their flights at the last minute. As they came in to land, a day early, something flashed past the starboard windows. Karl took a photograph of the smoke trails racing into the sky. When their taxi dropped them, tongues of flame licked from a blackened hole in the tower opposite their hotel.

Because of the rockets, the conference is cancelled, but so are flights. Their room is on a high floor overlooking the ocean. Through the pink and purple dusk, pillars of smoke rise from distant missile launchers and arc over their heads. Karl fetches a bath towel to sweep up the broken glass. “It was a joke,” he says. “Kristallnacht. It doesn’t symbolise anything.”

There’s a room service trolley Karl ordered, but Juliet can’t eat. She sits on the sofa scrolling the news. The stress has done no harm to Karl’s appetite. He smears butter onto a crust of baguette, while an American with pink eyes and liver spots tells her war is an ocean current, it swells and ebbs. When the video stops, she becomes aware of an ominous tone repeating through the walls.

“Do you hear that?” she says, remembering too late they aren’t speaking.

“Hear what?” Karl says aggressively. He’s always accusing her of hearing, smelling, seeing things that aren’t there. He takes a bite out of a club sandwich and flinches. Bacon, tomato, slices of chicken slide onto the tablecloth. A siren from a movie is screaming. The military base is under attack. A nuclear power plant is in meltdown. The alarm comes from Karl’s phone at an excruciating volume. Then it comes from Juliet’s phone.

“It’s okay,” Karl says. “I asked Grok.” The emergency message tells them to seek urgent shelter, away from high floors. “There’s a shelter down the street.”

Riding the lift down, she wonders what they will find outside. Is there panic? Or has the city reorganised itself for post-apocalyptic survival? Will she be obliged to loot?

The deserted avenue smells of lime juice and barbecued hair. Everyone’s safe inside basements, carparks, panic room bunkers. Car engines hum in the distance, and she hopes the engines only belong to cars. Karl steers her down an alley of bins and across another main road. They enter a network of tarmacked passages. “This is it,” Karl says, rapping a shutter.

Against the building, someone has left a cat climber. It’s marshmallow pink and shaped like a furry birthday cake. A yellow streak of dog urine, she hopes it’s dog, runs down the outside of the cake and between their feet. “It must be a hallucination,” Karl says. He puts his arm around her while he asks Grok for another shelter, a real one. She thinks that’s a bad idea, but if she speaks she’ll cry.

A light shines in her eye, goes out, then shines again. They are standing at a crossroads between six passages. The buildings are wedges, and from a first-floor window a curtain is pulled back, exposing a spotlight. A figure peers out, calls something, and closes the curtain.

A shutter beneath the window rattles halfway open. “In here,” a hunched woman says, crouching to speak. “It’s not safe on the street.”

They scramble under the shutter. The building is a library, full of people. They are in the storage stacks, metal shelves that move on wheels. People have fitted themselves into every nook, families with children, youths in sports shirts, a group of white-haired men with matching silver earrings. The hunched woman leads them, speaking into a headset. “That’s good,” she says. “That’s good. That’s good that’s good that’s good. It’s good.” In the lobby, teenagers have made a tennis court out of books. They use books for paddles, beating balled fliers over a book net. In the reading room, families make sleeping arrangements between the shelves, piling up books for walls and beds.

The woman takes them upstairs to a corner high in the stacks. Stuffed animals and toy cars and sports bags full of pyjamas already lie on the metal walkway, and the woman shuffles them into the corridors without checking which family they belong to. She ends her call and introduces herself as Maria, the librarian. “You’ll have to excuse my rudeness,” Maria says. “I’ve lost a word.”

Karl picks a book off the shelf. Their section is Greek drama. “You’re in the right place,” he says.

They sit on the floor, while the families pile up books to wall them in. Through the holes in the metal, Juliet hears mothers mutter about cleanliness, sleeping arrangements, where everyone will wash and eat. Children question one of the fathers. Are pigs mammals? Are humans? What is the difference between a hero and a god? Each time the man addresses one of the children, the others howl. “I wanted you to answer mine first.”

Juliet picks a Sophocles revenge tragedy for a pillow. Karl chooses Aristophanes, the women who withhold sex to end war. She can still taste the hotel wine. Her wrist still carries the perfume she sprayed before the Uber to the airport. They were halfway across London when the app crashed, cancelling the job. “How can we live like this?” the driver asked Juliet, meeting her eye in the mirror. They could have turned around and gone home, she thinks, lying on the walkway, the hard metal scratching through her T-shirt, catching on skin and bone.

As she sleeps, phones buzz, alarms start chirruping. The noises are nothing like the emergency alert, but people scream anyway. “It’s very disturbing,” Karl calls out, waking Juliet from a dream. She remembers it in the morning. She and Karl were Greek gods, invisible monsters. In the dream, they went from place to place, trying to get back to Mount Olympus. As they went they turned into eagles or visiting strangers, whispering promises that filled the people they met with furious passions. They had to pass their flat in Clapham, just as a rocket came streaking down from the sky. Juliet turned it aside with the hem of her robe and Karl caught the rocket in his great fist and hurled it into the sun.

The book walls have grown. When Juliet stands, she cannot reach the top. Neither can Karl, even when he jumps, even when he climbs the shelves. They lean their shoulders against the spines and heave. Children, attracted by their grunting, peer down from the tops of the walls. They throw down duvets and pillows. “You’re our prisoners,” they call. “We want you to be comfortable.”

“I’ve bought a typewriter,” Karl says. They are sitting on the duvets, back on their phones. “They’ll deliver it next week.”

“Here?” Juliet asks, but he means home, London.

“These wars don’t last forever,” he says. “They’re like the tide.”

She can feel the tears rising again, but the children are watching from the high walls, taking turns with binoculars. “Why is everything the opposite of what it should be?”

“Don’t cry, Eva Braun,” Karl says. He bends to inspect a box, and Sophocles flies over his head. “They gave us a chessboard.”

He stacks books for a table and sets up the pieces. As he plays, his expression tightens with grief. He hates to beat her, and she does not know she’s beaten when he inhales sharply.

“Is that checkmate?” she says.

“You tell me.”

“It’s not even check.”

But she’s wrong. Karl moves the pieces back, replaying the last moves. “Pay attention,” he says. “You’ll see how easy it was to stop me.”

Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW

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Recorded violins rise and fall, and two young women at the next table discuss naval bases, drone swarms, explosions at airports. They pick leaves of rocket from their sandwich crusts, raincoats thrown over empty prams. “You shouldn’t be relaxing and going on social media,” one of the women decides, as a man stops in the doorway and smiles at the barista, “not with all this going on.” The man unbuttons his suit jacket. “Nice and calm in here,” he says.

Felix asks about my writing. I say I am trying something new, smuggling observations in small fictions – an invented dinner party, a brief journey. Shaking his head, he says, “Great, great.” His cousin has a horsebox on her driveway, and now her neighbours believe she’s a horse person. Strangers knock on his cousin’s door, imagining she serves coffee or cooks pizza in a wood-fired oven, asking if she’s open.

“Do I play with fire?” Felix asks. He is back on his job. One mistake and he could be liable. He feels exposed, abandoned. “Don’t risk yourself,” I tell him.

We walk to the station past an alley of tents. One has a clear plastic panel in the roof, giving no view of the heavens. On bright days it might catch a glimpse of late-afternoon sun, reflecting in a skyscraper window. “I opened my door this morning,” Felix says, striding without looking, “and the pavement was an ocean of fox diarrhoea.”

At the escalators, he climbs to the Overground, reading his phone as he walks, while I thread myself among the businesspeople and international travellers descending into the belly of the station to board a waiting train.

Pulling away, the carriage jolts a man across the aisle. He was caught in the act of sitting, and now he flies into the empty seat opposite. Righting himself, he grins, as if the train solved a dilemma that puzzled him.

A youth in a scarf, watching, seesaws his fingers: almost – you almost styled it out. The youth returns to his tablet, where a musical score scrolls past the screen. His thumb and index finger, pinched in an O, trace the swells of magnificent, silent music. Straining to hear, I catch the ghost of a tune.

Thanks for reading One More Draft! You can catch up on the complete Pocket Lint Archive, or dip into the Best of Lint 2025. And if you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it.

Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,

LW.

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