John Tranter

We met at the bar concealed behind a false front in the alley behind a curtain dyed purple and green down the stairs to the shuttered room baking in the Summer of Love, a country girl, dark glasses, twelve feet of cedar bar stacked with drinks

but we already had those drinks, and it seems in the pool of liquid on the bar surface, after I finished pawing at her soft willing body, I could see...

To her the kissing group of husbands and wives was like a gang of schoolgirls in the laundry, all fuss and bother, no proper theory of how sexuality is conditioned by the economic strictures of society and not by the games shows and the sporting programmes or by the lies that stain the pages of cheap paper, for example, when her friends told her she was a rotten writer plumping up the pillow...

It seems so long ago – tell me, did you bring your family to our marriage of convenience and regret? I remember your hearty cousins fresh from the Home Counties, so pleased with their good selves, ready to chance an arm, their knack with spoon and needle an astonishment. Didn’t you find time for a quick shot of something with the blokes? That one with a noticeable tic, that other...

God, here I am, hungover inside the little café near the markets, jittery, scribbling a babble of sentimental language in my purple notebook emotion container – no, buy some strawberries (fruit market) in the sun from the old Italian women who mutter ‘Thank you, signora, it’s a pleasure to serve even a rich and impious Anglo lady such as yourself, take another punnet,...

Christmas, Grandad came down from the mountains, and we had to go fishing, on the ornamental lake. The ornery mental lake, that’s what I call it. ‘Do I have to, Pop? It’s just animal death!’ Fishing, fishing, till everything is killed.

‘How’s the love-life?’ Grandad asked. My father was having trouble, some affair that was going wrong. He shook his...