Ellis picks up the brick he plucked from the front garden wall and tosses it a few inches into the air and catches it, and he repeats this action a couple of times. He wants to appear as if he’s testing the weight of the brick, calculating the exact force and trajectory required, like an athlete or a mathematician would; but this display is unnecessary, as his friend doesn’t care why he’s doing it. Billy, the only person who would be stupid enough to accompany Ellis on a night mission like this, is focused on only one thing, practically drooling with excitement, waiting eagerly for Ellis to smash the window and bring the insides of the old haunted house on Ickleton Road within their grasp at last.

   The brick glides through the single pane of glass almost soundlessly, the thud of it on the floorboards beyond louder than the smash of its forced entry. The boys look at each other, and though Ellis’s face shows no more emotion than that ubiquitous dark smile of his, Billy’s eyes grow wider still, his open-mouthed grin stretching further like he’s overdosed on laughing gas or had something large inserted where it didn’t belong or perhaps both. Ellis is the first to enter, and he drapes his jumper over the window frame to save himself from glass cuts as they both climb into the living room.

   ‘See?’ Ellis says, pointing the flashlight from his phone at the cobwebs and the dust that line every piece of furniture, ‘I told you, it’s not been lived in for years.’

   ‘Do you reckon it’s actually haunted?’ Asks Billy from behind him, his voice sounding a little too apprehensive.

   ‘Course it fucking isn’t,’ says Ellis, lifting a book from the top of a coffee table and blowing off the dust from its cover. He says it, but he’s not sure of it.

   Ickleton Road is a line of terraced houses so narrow and cramped that one would think by looking at them that they were once much wider, before they had all been squashed together by a god or a giant. They have tiny front gardens, no more than a couple of square metres each, and no driveways. The pavement that runs along the front of these houses has space for about half a car per house, and as a result, parking on the street is always a nightmare. But to kids like Ellis and Billy, so accustomed to the cramped flats on Broadman Way and the Hiddleston Estate, Ickleton Road’s houses are spacious, and to have an extra floor would be a dream.

   So this one house on the end of the road, the only detached house within about three miles, looking like it was built in the 1800s and last lived in a hundred years before that, has always been a mansion from a different time and place, on their doorstep, begging to be explored. From its overgrown lawn to its half-torn, age-stained curtains hanging limp and still in all the windows, its wooden panelled façade to its ornate knocker hanging on that thick, oaken front door, it has been a mystery to every kid in the area for the last three generations. But until now, no one the boys knew of had been bold enough to venture inside, not after hearing all the stories about what lay in wait in there.

   Which is why Ellis had to. Ever since that night two years ago, when he and his friends killed that puppy and all Ellis did was cry and cry and then hit one of the boys so that he bled out of his skull and then run away and cry some more, and more and more, for weeks on end… ever since then, Ellis has felt a constant need to prove he is stronger than that, harder than that, more capable of doing dark and horrible things than you’d ever think such a sweet kid could be. So the old haunted house with the tower poking out of its roof like you see in castles in fairy-tales that no one had ever dared to break into… that seemed as good a way as any.

   Quite who he’s proving it to, he has never been sure. He doesn’t need to prove anything to Billy; Billy is already wrapped around his finger. Slightly dim-witted and always grinning and nodding, Billy is the sidekick Ellis never asked for but had always secretly wanted. He’d stick around whether Ellis thought up these stupid schemes or not. But no, his opinion doesn’t really matter.

   It might be Ellis’s own conscience he’s always trying to prove himself to, or it might be his mother, or it might be Candice, that girl he’s been messaging and whom he plans to bring here one night after he’s done his initial casing of the joint, with a view to finally taking her pants down in privacy. It could be any of these, all of them, none of them. Whoever it is, they’ll never be satisfied. Not the way Ellis sees it. He’ll always have to keep reaching.

   In darker moments, analysing his own neuroses in his bed at night, Ellis wonders if it’s the fact that the police never came, that made him like this. The absence of punishment for killing that boy – because he had killed him, he saw the body bleeding out and the life drifting away and the news reports that said it was probably a mugging that went wrong that took the life of this sweet, innocent schoolboy – had left him wondering why no one had come for him, whether they were always watching, if their hands were already, and always, inches from his shoulders. So maybe all this acting up, all this proving himself, is really a cry for punishment. Giving the authorities more to punish him for, so they’ll bring it more swiftly. Perhaps he itches to be caught. Maybe, or maybe not.  When these thoughts take hold, that’s when he’ll get up and sit on the windowsill, smoke a cigarette, look out at the night’s sky.

   ‘Do you reckon there’s money in this place?’ Billy says, opening and closing the drawers of a writing desk by the window.

   ‘I doubt it, it’s a shithole,’ Ellis says, ‘and if there is, it’s probably too old to use. Roman coins or something.’

   ‘That’s worth something, ain’t it?’

   Ellis shrugs, grunts, walks out into the hallway.

   Billy follows, his heavy steps in a half-jog clomping loudly on the old floorboards.

   While Ellis empties the cupboards in the dining room at the back of the house, finding only piles of old magazines and cardboard boxes of all sizes, the sizes of wedding rings and shoes and flatpack furniture, all of them empty or else filled with dust and more magazines, Billy goes into the kitchen and searches the cupboards for booze or food, something he can steal and consume. After a short while, a few minutes of cluttering about in there, he lets out a yell that jolts Ellis out of the glass cupboard he has his head in and sends him running into the doorway of the kitchen.

   ‘What happened?’ He says, expecting Billy to be bleeding or crushed by the fridge or else killed by an apparition.

   Billy just stands there laughing, a throaty, dumb laugh that comes right from inside his heart. ‘A rat run out from under one of the units,’ he replies, ‘nearly made me shit my pants.’

   Ellis smiles, doesn’t tell Billy that his heart is racing and he was ready to run out of the house if he’d found his friend injured.

   ‘There ain’t nothing in any of these cupboards, place is bare,’ Billy says, kicking a kitchen unit. ‘I’m gonna go upstairs.’

   And as Ellis follows Billy up the stairs, their hands blackening from the dust lining the ornate handrail, Billy keeps talking. ‘You know ‘Arrison from the estate says he’s seen an old bloke coming in and out of here?’ He says, ‘Says he don’t use the front door, just slips through a little gap in his back fence.’

   ‘Sounds like bullshit,’ Ellis replies, as he would have even if it hadn’t sounded like bullshit, ‘Harrison is a prick anyway. I don’t know why you even talk to him after what he did to your sister.’

   Edward Harrison didn’t do anything to Billy’s sister, but the rumour that he stuck four of his fingers in her anus and then in her mouth and then told all his friends has gained enough traction with the kids in the estate that Billy has begun to believe it, and stiffens at the mention of it, as if he is constantly forgetting it and being reminded awakens a deep, uncontrollable rage in him that has to be contained at all costs. On this occasion, he is too concentrated on exploring to stiffen as much as he usually would, so he just grunts, ‘Yeah, he’s a cunt,’ and wanders into one of the huge bedrooms.

   The bedrooms are more of the same – nothing to steal, covered in dust, abandoned and rotting, like a very rich family once lived here but vacated several decades ago. A wave of disappointment washes over Ellis, so sure had he been that inside this house it would be pristine, untouched, gleaming and ready to be turned into a second home for the boys to retreat to whenever they found a nice girl, or an alright girl, or any willing girl, who didn’t want to give it up behind the garages at the yard or in the alley behind the McDonalds on the high street, who wanted to be treated a bit more special than that. Or, you know, for when they wanted to throw a party. But no girl would want to take her clothes off in here, and nor would anyone want to attend a party in this old place, with its cobwebs the size of your t-shirts and its cupboards bare of everything, particularly alcohol. With no redeeming features, Ellis wonders why this old building was so inviting in the first place.

   Negative emotions – disappointment, sadness, anger – weigh heavily on Ellis’s heart. Whenever they take hold they consume all, and his whole experience of the world is tainted by them. He becomes sullen, introverted, self-loathing. Suddenly, his skin feels itchy and he feels like he wants to peel it off and be someone else. This is something that has always been the case, one of the few defects he has which he doesn’t blame on that night in the alley. But the fear of reprisals after that night, all those bedtimes spent reliving in his head that moment when Stephen’s body hit the ground and the jagged crack in his skull started pouring out steaming hot blood like a saucepan boiling over onto the hob, those were the nights when that weight pushed down on his shoulders so hard that the only way out that he could see was to end it all, to put a knife to his own wrists and just push down, all the way from hand to elbow, and let all that pain seep out into the night and be gone forever. Only, after a sleep, in the blinding light of day, he would be amused that he had ever felt like that, suddenly so sure that everything was going to be alright and there was no situation that couldn’t be overcome. This was a cycle that continued for months – suicidal nights and overconfident mornings, mood swings from happy to devastated and back again, on and on and on for months and months until the night in the alley was a distant memory and there were now so many more things to be ashamed of and afraid of (not that Ellis would admit to ever being afraid of anything or anyone), like losing his virginity to a girl who might have been asleep or might have been in a drug-induced coma, or stealing his friend’s car and driving it into a stream and then denying all knowledge of its final whereabouts. It is an endless, pointless pile of lies and betrayals and failures that Ellis builds up to prove he is and always was big enough to overcome his mistakes. He’s so big, he can make a thousand more, and still stay standing.

   But this one, breaking into a haunted house without any ghosts, money, booze or any kind of entertainment, isn’t even one to be proud of.

   Why. Bother.

   Billy’s enthusiasm is waning too, albeit at a rate far slower than Ellis’s. He starts to drag his feet, pull back the covers on the dusty old beds without even looking to see what’s underneath before he starts to walk away. It’s only when he reaches the first step of the wrought iron, spiral staircase in the front bedroom, the staircase that leads to the room in the tower, that his excitement reignites.

   ‘Did you hear that?’ He whispers, hunching over as if becoming physically smaller will make his voice quieter.

   ‘Hear what?’ Ellis replies, standing in a doorway to a bedroom, shrugging as if he hadn’t heard a slamming door.

   ‘A door, downstairs.’

   Ellis approaches the bannister on the landing and leans over it, that dark smile spreading across his face once more. ‘Let’s go down and investigate.’

   ‘I don’t know,’ says Billy, stepping away from the staircase that leads to the tower as if he knows that they’re surrounded both up and down by threats.

   ‘Come on,’ says Ellis, strutting towards the stairs, seizing the opportunity to demonstrate his fearlessness.

   When they reach the bottom of the staircase, they find the ground floor to be as they left it. The brick they entered with sits untouched on the floor of the lounge, the cupboards they left open remain open, and no one sits waiting for them, undead or otherwise. A shower of rain that neither of the boys had noticed beats against those windows which survive unbroken, and the boys look around in puzzlement for what might have made the sound.

   It’s only once Ellis shines the flashlight from his phone onto the wooden floor that he notices a trail of wet footprints from the back door of the house to the tiny door under the staircase. Without even consulting Billy, he opens the door and heads down the stairs inside to the basement.

   Beyond the ceiling below, revealed a little further by each slow step, is a bar like one would expect to find in a fancy theatre or hotel from a time that only Hollywood remembers. All gold trim and mahogany surfaces, red velvet and soft jazz. There are tables spread around the room, which is as big as an entire floor of the house above, and each table has two or three chairs. The wall to the right holds the counter, shiny as the day it was installed, and stocked up with all the alcohol a man could never need.

   The bar is unstaffed and completely empty, except for an old man who sits at a table in the centre of the room sipping a brownish liquid from a small glass. The man is dressed in a suit and his hair is slicked back, but he doesn’t look like his clothes have ever been fashionable. His eyes have been swallowed by the wrinkles on his face, and his hair is as thin as it is pure white. He looks too old to be sitting up, let alone drinking.

   Ellis keeps walking to the bottom of the staircase after noticing the old man, thinking that the man must be blind with those tiny sunken eyes and deep brown liver spots; but when Billy notices the man, he stops dead on the stairs, stiffens, and whispers, ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ as if spotting the old man has consequences.

   The two boys stand still and watch the old man take a long drink. Once he has emptied the glass into his mouth, he places it noisily on the table and sighs, dabbing his mouth with a handkerchief he pulls from his pocket.

   Carefully folding up the handkerchief, inspecting it for stains and imperfections, he says, ‘I suppose you boys think you’re the first to break in here, don’t ya.’

   He receives no answer.

   ‘You ain’t. I get boys coming in here once or twice a year. The biggest, meanest year eleven from over at Goodman’s usually wants to prove himself in here. Sometimes he does, too. Sometimes he don’t.’

   The old man stands with no small amount of effort, and carries his glass slowly behind the bar. Picking up a bottle filled with more of that brownish liquid, he points the neck at Ellis and Billy and says, ‘You boys from Goodman’s, are ya?’

   Ellis says nothing.

   Billy, loosening up more as the man talks, says, ‘Rowe’s,’ and edges toward the next step down. It’s true that they’re in year eleven at the local comprehensive, but as Billy says the name Ellis sighs and rolls his eyes. He’s irritated that the old man was nearly right on all counts.

   The man chuckles as he unscrews the cap of the bottle and pours himself another drink. He screws the cap back on with shaky hands and then leans on the bar as if the exertion of pouring the drink was too much for him and he needs a rest from resting. After a short while of standing like this, he seems to regain his strength, and he stands to look at the boys again. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘since you’re here, you might as well have a drink.’

   Ellis shakes his head, remaining in his spot and still not making a sound. Billy, on the other hand, loosens up completely, bounding down the rest of the steps and approaching the bar without a moment’s hesitation. ‘You got beer?’ He asks.

   The old man uncaps a beer, hands it to the boy, and makes his way slowly back to his seat. From the state of his skin, his weathered face, his vacant look, one would guess the man was pushing ninety; but his back is not nearly as bent as it should be, and his steps nowhere near as delicate. He is either fitter than his years, or looks older than he ought to, and this is what Ellis notices as he sidesteps slowly toward a seat in the corner of the room, not taking his eyes off the old man with the drink.

   ‘I know why you think you’re here,’ the man says as he lowers himself cautiously into his rickety seat. ‘You think you’re here because you ain’t afraid of nothing. You’re the hardest lads in the borough, and there ain’t no haunted house that can scare you two off.’

   Ellis frowns at the man, involuntarily. Without real reason, he feels angry, and is seething more with every word the old man says, building up a hatred that has no foundation and no firm base, but will always stay standing. He hates that this man has spoiled his fun, and he hates that the man thinks he knows Ellis when he couldn’t possibly. Because what does this old man know? Nothing. To the world, this man doesn’t even exist.

   ‘Did you go in the tower?’ Asks the old man.

   Billy shakes his head vigorously, the neck of the bottle of beer fully in his mouth. ‘Nah,’ he says, swallowing mid-utterance, ‘we was about to, when we heard you get in.’

   Ellis rolls his eyes again. The gesture goes unheeded.

   ‘I’ve set up a little scene in there, gets a few of em,’ the old man says, chuckling to himself. ‘All fake blood and whatnot. Probably dusty now, I haven’t been up there for weeks…’ he seems to trail off, staring down at his shaking hand and getting lost in a thought he can’t seem to keep track of. The boys look at each other, and Billy grins.

   ‘But no, no,’ the old man says, waking up from his stupor, ‘that ain’t why you’re here. We all know that. You don’t go breaking into an old haunted house because you’re not scared; you do it because you are scared, and you’ll do anything you can to deny you are. You two are here because you’re the sissiest pair of ninnies in a five mile radius. That’s the truth.’

   Ellis sighs loudly, but remains silent. Billy seems more concerned with swilling the remaining beer around the bottom of his bottle than actually listening to the old man.

   ‘But it ain’t just you. We’re all scared. Why do you think I’m down here? I’ve barely left the house in twenty years because I’ve been terrified for the last fifty years that there’ll be a nuclear war and I’ll be caught in the middle of it. Said out loud, it sounds insane even to me; but in my head, it’s as real as you sitting there with that frown on your face. All I do down here is worry, think over how I’ll survive in the aftermath, wonder how we ever let such raving psychopaths run our countries, and it’s all wasted energy, thoughts that’ll never get me anywhere. Worry and worry and drink and worry and drive yourself mad with the worrying…’

   The man drifts off again, staring at the table in front of him, the corner of his mouth twitching spasmodically; but begins again with a couple of seconds.

   ‘But what does all that mean, after the bomb drops? Where can I say it got me, if the thing I’ve been worrying about all these years comes true, and I spent all those years doing nothing but worrying that it would? The truth is that those are wasted years, whether my fears come true or not. I imagine an afterlife where we’re all in the queue and everyone would have something to say like, “Well, it’s a shame I had to go like that, but at least I had fun while I was up there. At least I did all I wanted to do, seized every opportunity and that,” and all I’d be able to say is, I knew this’d happen. I spent years in a basement thinking that this’d happen.

   ‘And imagine how much stupider I’d feel in that queue if the bomb ain’t what did it.

   ‘What I should be doing is going and living up there, like I used to before Greta left. I should be living some kind of life. I shouldn’t be wasting energy being scared of things I have no influence over.

   ‘But I’m just a slave to my fear, like you boys.’

   Ellis, now silently livid, doesn’t consider whether anything the old man has said is true or not. He doesn’t take the time to weigh up whether all of his actions these past few years have been driven by fear, whether the very reason he entered this spiral was through the fear of not being liked or whether every time he commits a minor crime or destroys something beautiful can all be rooted back to a deep fear of failure, of falling, of living an empty alternative to the life he’s filled up with chaos; and he doesn’t consider this, because right at the back of his mind, in the part of our brains where nothing but chemicals and hardwiring can control, he knows that it’s true. And this makes him angry. Angry and scared. He wants to throttle the old man, jump across the tables with all the force of a pouncing cheetah, and rip out the man’s throat. But this, he knows, would also be driven by fear. Fear of facing up to his fear. Fear of fear of fear of fear. Which makes him want to cry, run home to his mother, sleep forever. Which, of course, also scares him. Stuck in a cycle of fear and loathing, he bites his nails and frowns tightly and all these thoughts tumble around his head and his eyes start to water, and all the old man does is sit there.

   Billy is now staring at his empty beer bottle, slouching on his barstool. His face is sullen, as if the old man’s words have got to him, too; but Ellis can’t see any of the same disastrous sadness in Billy’s expression that he can feel in his own heart. In a room where two others are mulling over the same emptiness as Ellis, he feels completely alone.

   ‘The worst part is,’ the old man continues, now mumbling as if he doesn’t care if the boys are listening any longer, ‘that the worst decisions you’ll ever make come from that place. It’s nothing but destructive. You only have to read a single book to know the kinds of toxic relationships people stay in because they’re scared of being alone, or the kinds of degrading jobs people will do out of fear that they’ll sink under their debt, the crazy stories people will believe to quell their fears of death, and this is all considered normal. We’re a culture bred on fear, raised on fear, and it rots away at our core every single day. I could talk til my throat was sore about the fear I’m crippled by, and it wouldn’t change a thing.’

   The old man keeps mumbling inaudibly, until his chin sinks into his chest and he slouches further in his seat and his hand stops shaking. Ellis thinks he sees a tear rolling down the crevices in the old man’s face, and this pleases him. The man is so still he could be asleep or he could be stone cold dead, and either way Ellis wouldn’t care.

   Billy doesn’t turn to face Ellis, but speaks to the bar knowing that he’s addressing the whole of the room. ‘He’s right Ell, if I think about it. I’m scared every time I go out with you. I think we probably both are. But he’s also a bit wrong because, I think the fear makes us excited. I get this feeling in my belly like I’m terrified but I want more of it. Remember when we slashed the tyres of that history teacher’s car? I felt sick that night from worrying, but I was out stealing beer from the offy with you the next night. I think he’s right that we’re all scared. I was shitting myself coming in here. But I don’t reckon it ruins anything. I don’t think I make bad decisions because I’m scared. Do you?’

   And the genuine wonder in his voice, and his wilful ignorance to the destruction his fear has caused, and the way the old man saw through Ellis like a sheet of thin glass, and the way we’re all the fucking same and all sinking down down down and never coming up for air, all pile on top of Ellis, and all he can do to stop himself from crying and crying and eternally crying is to get up and walk out of that basement, leaving the sleeping or dead man and his dim-witted friend to sit and drink and talk and feel sad, all of which Ellis wants no part of.

   ‘Ellis?’ Billy calls, as Ellis climbs the stairs.

   ‘Ellis, where you going?’ He calls from the basement, as Ellis collects his jumper from the front room.

   ‘Ell! Ellis!’ Shouts Billy, his voice fading, as Ellis slams the front door, and walks out into the night, leaving all of his fear and his anger and his need for destruction and punishment and hatred and violence behind him, closing the door not only on that house haunted by the ghost of an old man who no longer exists to the world, but also on a form of himself which, as of this moment, will also be gone forever.

The book is called Brisingr, and is written by Christopher Paolini. I haven't read it, and to be honest, I have no desire to (soz, Chris); but it was in the charity book sale at Sainsbury's and the pages looked like a good size and the book was in good condition, so I snapped it up. Little bit of PVA and water (some of which you can see glistening in one of the above photographs) and a nice sharp Stanley knife, and the job's a good'un.

And no, it's not an original idea, it's been done, but I don't do DIY so I'm just pleased it went well, alright? Get off my back. Jees.

   There once was a lamb called Kip.

   Kip had a big white coat and little black feet and tiny black ears. His eyes were big and his mouth was small. 

   He also had one leg shorter than the rest and one of his eyes didn’t work as well as the other.  

   If all of your eyes work and both of your legs are the same size, this might seem unusual to you; but to Kip, it was pretty normal. Nearly everyone in his flock had one leg shorter than the rest. Some had two legs shorter than the other two, and some had one of their legs completely missing. There were sheep with eyes so bad all they saw was a blur, sheep with ears that rang as loud as a payphone, and lambs in his flock who heard voices that were never there at all.

   Everyone in Kip’s flock was unusual, and this is why they were happy - because all their differences were what made them interesting sheep.

   The flock had a king, and he was the most unusual sheep of all, because he was a dog. A sheepdog. The flock did what he said, and trusted him to always lead them the right way. 

   The king lived in a house with his pet human and never stayed with the sheep, but they all liked him because he was a natural leader and he always had a clear vision of the direction in which the flock should be heading. He held his power well, but always seemed friendly. Everyone in the flock thought that if they were allowed in that house with the king, they'd probably be his best friend. 

   One day, Kip's mum gave birth to a new little brother for Kip. The first time Kip saw him (through his good eye), he fell in love with him. And he never stopped loving him. To Kip, his little brother Mal was just perfect. 

   And in a way, Kip was right - Mal was perfect. All of his legs were the right length, both of his ears and both of his eyes worked, and he never heard voices that told him to do things. He seemed to be the luckiest sheep in the flock, because everything on him was in its right place. 

   The trouble was, he grew up thinking that this made him better than the other sheep in the flock. He didn't realise that everyone has issues and we all just need love, so he treated them like they were strange and repulsive, and this made them sad. The flock didn't like Mal much.

   Kip still loved him though. Partly because Kip was such a nice lamb, and partly because they were brothers and you always have to love your brothers, and partly because Kip recognised that it was all because of the way Mal had been brought up. If their mother had taught Mal that everyone was equal, no matter how different they look, then he wouldn't think he was better than anyone else. 

   But that wasn't their mother's fault - she learned all she knew from her own mother, who learned it all from hers, who learned it from hers, and it went on and on and on back to the very first sheep mummy. The point was, Kip recognised, that everyone learns very bad habits from their parents that are very hard to unlearn, and the one that Mal had learned was the delusion that his physical attributes somehow elevated his status in life. 

   One fine summer’s day, the king of the flock hurt his leg, and his pet human had to take him to an animal doctor to have it fixed. He was gone for hours, and the flock started to worry. Rumours started flying around that he was never coming back and that he'd gone to live in the sky with someone not many of the sheep had heard of called Biggie-and-Pac. Tensions were high, and as the day gave way to the darkness of night, the sheep became very nervous and restless.

   Mal saw this as his big chance, and climbed onto the biggest rock he could find to address his flock. 

   'My fellow sheep,' he baahed, in a silly posh voice they'd never heard him use before, 'As you've all noticed, we have been deserted by our king. He has left us with no direction and no structure. We feel pointless and used. Our civilisation is in tatters. We need to rebuild, start again, rise like a phoenix from the flames...'

   The rest of the flock were uneasy in their agreement. They didn't know if they'd put it as dramatically as Mal had, but they did feel a little abandoned. They had felt like they had no purpose all day. They hobbled closer to the rock on their wonky legs and the ones with gammy ears pointed their heads at his mouth to hear him more clearly.

   'But who, my friends, will lead us to the light again? Which of us is capable of rescuing us from these ruins?'

   He pointed at the flock's only one-legged sheep, who sat on his sheep bottom painting a very accurate picture of the whole event, and said, 'Surely not those with missing legs, for they can't be expected to run the flock when they can't run across the field...'

   He suddenly spoke very quietly, and said, 'And surely not those whose ears can't hear all those that would hurt us...'

   Then he spoke very loudly, and gestured toward certain other sheep in the crowd, 'And surely not those whose eyes can't see threats as they arrive...'

   And then he addressed the entire flock again, as he said, 'But if not any of those, then who?'

   Mal scratched his little lamb chin and made a very big show of pretending to think. Kip, along with many of the smarter sheep, already knew what he was going to say next.

   Then Mal shrugged and said, 'Well, I suppose I could be our new king... After all, I am the strongest, smartest, most physically capable sheep in the flock...'

   And the sheep murmured in agreement. Although he shouldn't have been so arrogant as to declare it himself, he was right - none of them were as fit or as capable as he was. No one raised a baah of objection. 

   So Kip's brother Mal clapped his front legs together, for he too was sitting on his fluffy lamb bottom by now, and said, 'Right-oh! That's decided then. I'm our new king. Sleep soundly now, comrades, for we are no longer festering in the ruins of anarchy.'

   And they did sleep soundly, each of them satisfied that their flock was no longer doomed to a futile future. However, the next morning, they discovered how much worse than that their current situation was. 

   Mal was not a very nice ruler at all. 

   First, he set up a class system in which the most physically capable, woolliest sheep were at the top and the most wretched, prickly-skinned sheep were at the bottom, and their quality of lives were directly affected by their position on this ladder. Number of legs and ability to hear being things that can’t be changed without surgery or prosthetics (neither of which sheep have much access to), this left a lot of sheep with no hope of living happily ever again.

   He put up wool taxes and made grass more expensive, so everyone had less wool to spend on the food that was getting more expensive.

   He branded female sheep 'second-class citizens' and said that it was 'okay' if anyone wanted to spit on lambs whose favourite colour was pink.

   Then, he paid some of the sheep to listen in on all the other sheep’s conversations, all because he claimed some of them were wolves dressed up as sheep. He also paid some ewes to present the rolling news which told all the sheep, all day, about the terrible atrocities the wolves were committing in the fields next door, creating a constant culture of fear in the community of sheep, who used to be so oblivious. 

   All the while, of course, he was selling tooth sharpeners to the wolves for extra profit.

   Lastly, he stole the girlfriend of Lenny, the nicest guy in the flock. When Lenny protested, Mal said that he was more important than Lenny, so Lenny should shut his woolly mouth and put up with his master’s decisions.

   He might as well have outlawed cuddling. Now that they were all scared and suspicious of each other and resentful that they were missing out purely because of the bodies they were born into, the sheep didn’t feel so much like a community anymore. They felt sad all the time, worried that their worlds were going to end at every turn. Most of all, they felt bullied by their new king. 

   But being sheep, all they could do was follow; none of them rose to dethrone Mal.

   Every time lovely little Kip squinted at his brother and said, ‘You should really be nicer to these sheeple,’ Mal just told him he’d rather listen to Ed Shearing than hear Kip’s stupid voice.

   The flock used to be so happy, so blissfully unaware that there could ever be sadness in such a sunny, green field; but Mal had made it feel more like a warzone than a field. Where once, every sheep was equal and cooperation and teamwork came naturally, it was now a sheep-eat-sheep world where helping each other out was weakness and inequality ruled all. 

   And all this, he did in a day.

   Another couple of nights came and went, bringing more misery with them; until one morning, the sheep on patrol at the perimeter of the farm, looking for threats from neighbouring farms (who were all now the enemy), sent word that the old king’s pet human had arrived home, in his lit-up metal wagon. 

   Mal knew that this meant that either the old king had returned, or his pet human was alone and the king was gone for good; so he brought all his best men to the fence that faced the house as a show of force. Whichever it was, Mal was the king now, and he wasn’t going to give up his throne easily.

   But the old king had returned, and although his bad leg was bald and scarred, he looked as strong as ever as he walked out of the door followed by his human. He was tall, and elegant, and had hair more fine and smooth than any sheep could ever hope to wear. It was obvious that Mal, who stood at the fence giving the old king evil looks, was just putting on a brave face, and that he was actually feeling woolly-headed.

   All the way across the drive, the old king came; until he was face to face with Mal. The two stood there, staring into each other’s eyes, their noses not an inch apart, and the rest of the flock looked on in silence. No one knew what would happen. Was there going to be a fight? Would Mal lash out, seeing his leadership threatened? What if Mal won, and they were stuck under his despotic rule forever more? You could have cut the tension with a knitting needle.

   After a couple of minutes had passed of the sheepdog staring aggressively at Mal and Mal staring aggressively back, the old king’s pet human let out a whistle, and the old king’s back straightened. He breathed in, his chest inflating like a furry bouncy castle, and let out one short bark.

   ‘WOOF,’ he said. 

   And Mal jumped out of his skin. Instantly, he started crying.

   The rest of the flock started laughing, which made Mal cry even more. He had been humiliated in front of the flock he hoped to rule, and now nothing could console him. He would have sit there and cried forever more, but the sheepdog let out another bark, as loud as the first, and Mal forgot all about his resolution to stand strong and fell into line with the other sheep, who were happy to do exactly what their rightful king was telling them to.

   The king had returned! Long live the king! The flock had never been happier.

   Later, when the king had gone to bed and the flock were alone, the sheep who had been wronged by Mal practically lined up to insult him. While he sat there in floods of tears, wishing he had been nicer to all those sheep who were now no less special than he was, they called him a goatface and a cowpat and a horseshoe, and they spat in his tea and poked holes in his favourite sheep socks. Lenny, whose girlfriend now suddenly wanted him back after Mal’s fall from grace, even threw a handful of his poop at Mal. (He also decided to stay single and wait for someone who would treat him right – he could do better than a wooldigger, he said.)

   But there was one sheep who still had time for Mal. After everyone was done, Kip came up to Mal and gave him a great big hug. Mal flinched at first, sure that his brother was going to take revenge for all the mean things that Mal had done and said; but after he felt the love that his brother was giving him, he hugged him back and cried into his arms for a long while.

   Pulling away from his brother, Kip said, ‘You’ve been a very baaaaahd lamb, Mal Henry Wilfred Sheepman. But I forgive you. Tomorrow, you can apologise to all the sheep whose feelings you hurt, and they’ll understand. Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s never too late to take them back. I love you, and if you show them that you’re truly sorry and give them time to heal, they will too.’

   Mal looked up at his big brother with eyes wet with tears, and nodded. Of course he would do that. Of course he was sorry. He’d been a prize idiot, but now he’d seen the light. The kindness his brother had shown him when he least deserved it but most needed it sparked a flame in him, and his heart was warmed by it. He’d learned something today, something that Kip had known all along: that it’s nice to be important, but infinitely more important to be nice.

   Prepare yourselves fellow humans, for I'm about to argue in favour of the humble, old-fashioned Polaroid instant camera. And I'm going to do so without mentioning jazz bars in Shoreditch or shit bands that are cool purely because they're unknown, without telling you that you should check out this secret cinema that only shows foreign films in some shithole backstreet of East London or letting you know which charity shop is best for buying your tweed jackets or oversized spectacle frames.
   Yes, I'm going to sing my praises of Polaroid cameras through a megaphone, from the raft on which I am floating directly through the middle of The Mainstream.

   Anyone who knows me will tell you that this is somewhat out of character for me. I'm usually so enthused by modern technology that I'll waste money on gadgets I know I'll never use, just to play with them for the first few days. I reject DVD and VHS because nothing compares to Blu-Ray.  I won’t use a smartphone that isn’t a ridiculous colour. I'm the kind of guy who wants Google Glass, just so that he can Wikipedia every conversation topic as it's happening and correct his friends' factual errors on-the-fly. I own two tablets when I only really have a need for half of one. I kind of want to buy a Microsoft Band, for crying out loud.

   So why would I suddenly be handing myself to the past? Well, it could be that sometimes, modern technology solves something that I just didn’t see as a problem. Kindles and other e-readers are amazing, skillfully designed gadgets that fit their purpose beautifully; but why would we ever want to lose the infinitely more beautiful sight of a full bookshelf? Who’d be happy to see printed books made extinct? Not me. No sir.

   However, that's not it. I’m not about to claim that the digital camera is just another Kindle. I’m not saying that the Polaroid is something that shouldn’t have been replaced. There are modern cameras I lust after, all new and digital and shiny with more features and less maintenance. Of course they’re better; that goes without saying. The Polaroid, compared to those, is cumbersome and heavy, designed for a different time and aging disgracefully. It has no technical support now that most of the good models are discontinued and the newer models nobody wants. You can only find it at car boot sales, on eBay, in your nan’s loft. The pictures are often of very poor quality, and you can only tell just how poor once you’ve waited for them to develop, and by then the moment’s passed. And perhaps worst of all, with this new Impossible Project film, photographs cost nearly £2 each to snap.

   They have charm, though, as any hipster will tell you. There’s the retro appeal, the shabby-chic-ness of old, obviously inadequate technology dusted off and used today. There’s the little white bar at the bottom of each print, begging to be written on, to be filled with the caption of the moment. There’s the uniqueness of the format, in a world where everything is standardised and packaged up and perfectly formatted for sharing online with friends and advertisers and the government. It’s a set of cameras that hark back to simpler times, when pictures we took weren’t instantly viewable on a little screen, when we couldn’t snap twenty-three photographs in a row and pick out the best one (or just shrug and upload all of them to Facebook without regard for who actually wants to see them).

   But these aren’t the reasons for my love. My two reasons were broached two paragraphs ago, in amongst all the cons.

   Firstly, I love them because the quality of the pictures is so poor. And this isn’t one of those I love vinyl records, they’re just so warm and raw bullshit arguments that idiots use to excuse their desperate need to be different; or maybe it is just that. It’s because I have a terrible memory, and even times that I’ve really enjoyed and cherish in my mind are shrouded in doubt and barely-even-half-remembered events. My memory isn’t full-colour and crystal-clear, it’s out of focus and tinged with a dark-grey shade of I’m not sure I recall that. What I’m trying to say is that my memory isn’t 41-MP jpg, it’s Polaroid 600.
   Why would I want to look back on a perfect, bright, crisp version of the past, when a much more accurate representation of it as I remember it can be fed out of the front of a £30 camera I bought from a guy in a field on a Sunday morning?

   Secondly, and definitely more importantly, is the price of the film. Digital cameras and smartphones have made storage for photos cheap, and the taking of them as quick and easy as pressing a button; and there’s no denying that this fact is great for anyone who wants a full and accurate record of their life on a hard drive. But as part of one of the first generations who have grown up with this technology, I can tell you that there’s a hell of a lot of shit out there, taking up gigabytes (terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes…) of hard drive space that will never be looked at and never be claimed back. Take a look at the Pictures folder of any average noughties teenager and you’ll find folder after folder of pictures of nights out, days in, relatives, outfits, ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, new cars, hotel rooms, pets, and streets of foreign cities; all of which will never be looked at again.
   If you do catch one browsing through those folders, once in a blue moon, you’ll even occasionally hear them say things like, ‘Why did I even take that photo?’ or, ‘I never want to see him/her again!’ or, ‘I really need to clear some of these out…’ but still those jpegs all remain, undeleted, sitting sorted in their folders, ready to be looked at by no one ever.

   With Polaroid, however, and the new (and expensive) Impossible Project film, a photograph has to be special. You can’t take eight pictures at once and keep only the one where you look absolutely reem unless you have the money to spunk on all that film and forty minutes per photo to wait for development. You have to seize the moment, click the shutter, and hope that you got it right. If you didn’t, you throw the photograph away or accept its flaws. And if you're like me, you'll always accept those flaws. A hair out of place, a smile that looks a bit like a grimace, the subject looking away because they think the photograph has already been taken… these are the things that make real-life moments. We don’t always look perfect, we’re not always on-point, we’re not forever ready to be on the cover of a magazine; so why should our photo albums make us look like we are?
   With a Polaroid camera, a moment is captured, and all of the flaws that make us beautiful human beings are put on paper, and unless we’re millionaires without other hobbies, that’s the moment we have to settle for. The memories we no longer cherish, all those ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends we shouldn’t still be keeping around, places we'll never revisit, photographs we forget were ever even taken, these don’t all sit in a folder on our computers wasting space and offending the senses; they go exactly where they belong: in the bin. The times we enjoyed, the people we love, the places we want to see every day, the parties we wish we could still be dancing at, these things all get pinned to a noticeboard and written on and displayed in our houses for all to see.

   No photograph left behind, nothing hidden away waiting to never be rediscovered, just our most important memories, recorded just as fuzzily as if our brains had done it themselves, on a square print in your hand. The way nature intended. Probably.

   I’m not saying modern technology is crap and we should all revert to decades-old cameras, I’m just saying that shabby old Polaroids, like so many things we've almost forgotten, have their place alongside all our modern bells and whistles. But that’s just the way I see it. Maybe I’ve made a case for investing in a technology you can’t really buy anymore, or maybe I haven’t. Maybe you’ll see the same charm that I do in those little square prints of love, or maybe you still prefer your bulging Pictures folder. Maybe – and this is most likely – all I’ve done is add to the yottabytes of shit articles written by nobodies on the Internet. But you should feel more foolish than me, because you just sat here reading it.

   Peace out, bitches. I’m off to try out Windows 10 and fly my drone from a hoverboard.

The story I am about to tell

Takes place in a land just south of Hell,

Where whether you whisper, talk or yell

Nothing untrue can be said.

Further south from this place resides

A land where tiny porky pies

And massive, stinking chunks of lies

Are all that is heard, instead.

I found myself in True-Tell town

When I aimed for Hell but fell straight down

And bumped my head on the stony ground

Of the land where no one lies.

A dark and morbid place, it was.

The faces all wore frowns because

Their lips were bound by physics laws

To speak without disguise.

“The weather’s crap, and so are you,”

I heard from a man that I disliked too,

And I had no choice but to tell him, “You

Are a brute, and your belly’s too big!”

No one was nice, and depression surrounded

The people whose mutual resentment was founded

By their enemies’ mouths which repeatedly sounded

Critiques, nitpicks and digs.

Demoralised, I left for Lie Land

Hoping to bury my head in the sand

But instead, I found more sadness and

Deceit that stretched for days.

See, not a noise they make is true

Not even the laugh of a child of two

You'll find mayo in your tube of glue

And signs that point wrong ways.

I asked how to get out of there

For I was slipping into despair

A woman stopped and said, "Nice hair!"

When I knew from her face she’d hate it.

I tried to run home, but quickly saw

My sense of direction was lying more

Than the “EXIT” sign on every door

But after years of struggle, I made it.

And now, I’ve learned from those two towns

That there’s a kind of middle ground

A balance that a few have found

And here’s the lesson, brothers:

No matter circumstance or wealth,

Height or weight or mental health,

You only have to be true to yourself

You can lie to all the others.

What follows is a poem I wrote for a reading I did at the wedding of two of my best friends, Karl and Hannah. I set out with the aim of trying to capture on paper the kind of love you feel for someone you want to spend the rest of your life with. When I read it at the wedding in front of their 23,000 guests, there were tears and wailing and old women holding their hands up to the sky and children praying that they'll never hear another poem again and singing in the streets for days on end. I was carried through London on the shoulders of my admirers and everyone forgot that a wedding was even taking place. It should be noted that I'm writing this introduction before the wedding and setting this blog post to publish itself on a schedule.

 

I met a man who asked me why I’d ever want to be wed.
It’s the biggest waste of time and money on this earth, he said.
He told me all a wedding was was some rings and a piece of paper
And my time would be much better spent on some alternate caper.

 

I thought about the question, til my thinking bone was sore,
And then I came out with some words that I had never planned
Like, life is just a birth, some jobs, a death and nothing more
So why we bother with it, I’ll never understand.

 

War is just some bombs, a thousand limbs and two ideals
And no one ever questions how a soldier fighting feels.
Business is just money, and religion is just words
Yet people follow those two things in masses, swarms and herds.

 

The simple fact is this, I said: that everything boils down
To something pretty small if you cook it long enough
But the way I feel, forgive my heart, is simply like I’ve found
One person in eight billion who’s made of better stuff.

 

Laughing isn’t just laughing when I have her by my side.
It’s feeling so sensational I get all warm inside.
Sadness isn’t just a tear and anger not a scream
Because, to me, she means so much, they’re both more than they seem.

 

I’d literally do anything to make this woman smile,
And the icing on the cake is that I know she’d say the same.
I’d like to spend with her every minute, hour, while
And share with her my everything, from gladness through to pain.

 

So I’m afraid I don’t agree that marriage is just that,
A day in tails and fancy clothes and a silly hat.
The paper acts as wrapping and the rings act as a bow
To decorate the greatest gift of love I’ll ever know.

   What if the world you think is real is just a creation of your mind? 

   What if you’re a being, stuck in a box, imagining all of this? 

   If you could, would you dream up a better world? You’ve wondered this ever since you were a kid, what change it would make to your life if you knew that you were the only thing that mattered and everything else, everyone else, was just a prop or a character you’d made up to fill the space.

   Would you worry less? Sometimes you worry yourself sick about things that don’t even seem to matter at all only a month later, under a new light. You spend so much time now wondering which of your towers is about to topple and land on top of you that you’re too scared to build any more; so what if you knew that they were creations of your own, and completely under your control? What if they were never to topple, and even those that did wouldn’t leave a scratch, because you’d already decided they were weightless? Your mistakes buried, past truly in the past, laid as a foundation for your future, perhaps you could move on from the things that you fear will come back to haunt you. Maybe you’d even realise that some of them were imaginary. You’re sure you read somewhere once that someone wise once said, ‘some of the worst things in my life never even happened,’ and that struck you as so applicable to yourself, so incredibly personal that it must have been written for you. What if it was? What if Mark Twain was just the name your mind gave to the part of its circuitry that came up with it?

   Would you feel less angry? Less stressed? Less hard done by? Would the world feel suddenly fairer, when you realised that it was all inside of your head? The injustices of your times, the people who’ve wronged you, the anger you’ve stored up, letting it build and build until you feel like a racecar tyre on its hundredth lap, just about ready to burst… surely all of that would fade into nothingness, drift away like a mist, when you realised that you made it all, and you could take it all back. Anyone you couldn’t forgive, you could just forget, and imagine up somewhere nice to meet someone to replace them. It wouldn’t be that hard, if you think about it, to just cut out the people who hurt you, to stop visiting the places that remind you of dark times. So why not do it, when the world is yours to shape? Why not replace those places and those people with somewhere and someone much nicer? You’re sure you would, if you carved out the horizon.

   And what if this world of yours, this elaborate dream, was shaped by the energy you fed it? What if it sipped up your negativity and held it in its mouth, ready to spit right back? What if the positivity you pointed at it was reflected right back at you? Would that change your attitude? Would you reassess the way you treated your imaginary friends, valued your imaginary possessions, lived your imaginary life? You’ve always known the areas of your life you’d like to change, the aspects of your personality that need tweaking; but you’ve never felt strong enough to do it yourself, never known exactly how it should be done. What if you decided? What if you set your own strength level, wrote your own self-help guide to patching up a chipped personality? Would you do it straight away, knowing that the positive effects of the change would be immediate? Would you be more open, telling the world how you feel, or heighten your guard, protect yourself more than you did when you were young and naïve and way too trusting?

   These are all things you’ve wondered as you stumbled through life, barely aware of what was in front of you, never planning more than a few days in advance because so much of your time was spent cleaning up, either mentally or physically, the mess you were kicking yourself for making yesterday. This is what you spent your time thinking about when you were boiling with rage at that girl who said that thing you didn’t like, or that boy who you knew would never be right for you but you liked anyway. You wondered it even when you were happy, wondered how you could grab hold of that feeling and keep it there forever, never have it kicked out by the darkness you knew would come one day.

   Schoolyard arguments. Punishments you were sure you should never have received, but did anyway. Unfair grades, and the smugness of those who achieved more. The awkwardness of teenage years, the spots and the hairs and the periods and the way your body changed differently to the other kids’ and the way they noticed it and made fun of you even though they were far from perfect themselves. The rejections, the puppy fat, the hormones, the way you always felt like you’d blossom tomorrow, but never did. Sexual experiences you regret, sexual experiences you yearn to relive, sexual experiences you wish your lover had never had or had at least never chosen to tell you about. Sexual experiences you’ve never had, but wish you could. Skills you never had, skills you have but can’t use, skills that everyone else but you seems to enjoy. The fact that one day, you are going to die, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Wasted careers, wasted years, wasted friendships and wasted effort, all combining to make a life, to build the person that you think you are, this mind stuck in a box, with a world it created living inside of it. What if all of these things that sound like obstacles, all of these horrid brick walls between you and happiness, all these mountains to climb, could be forgotten in an instant? What if they turned from mountains to speedbumps, because you said it should be so? Would you make it so? Would you be brave enough to do that? It sounds like it would be easy, but to decide that everything that used to hold you back is no longer a restraint at all is a brave step forward for someone like you. For anyone.

   An imaginary world. An elaborate dream. Everything not quite as it seems, or as it has been sold to you. Maybe I’ve painted the picture of a world that’s way out of your grasp. Maybe I’m just imagining, myself. But what if I’m not? What if the world is already like this? What if, when you clean your glasses, open up the box you’ve been living in, you find that this is all already true? It could be. Maybe tomorrow would be a better day, if you decided that all of this was already the case, because you’d made it so. Maybe we can shape the world, all of us, because it is ours to shape. Maybe we are all just minds stuck in calcium boxes, cultivating our own view of the world we all share.

   Or maybe I’m drunk. I don’t know.

   The woman watched her lover’s face as he slept, watched his eyelids twitch and his mouth hang open, looking as peaceful as if he’d died at the happiest moment of his life, and her heart swelled. She loved this man, she was in love with him, she was sure of it. She’d never be the first to say it – he’d say it first, and she’d follow – but she knew, deep down inside, that she was in love with him, and she would do anything for him. Of all of this, she was more certain than she had been of anything. So why, when she was left alone with her thoughts, did she spend so much time unhappy? Why did she worry so much? Why did her love feel laced with regret? 

   This is the bitter thought that gave birth to the frown she wore as she drifted into sleep.

   The next she knew, she was in a concrete desert, nothing natural in sight, except for the steady blanket of heavy rain that fell from the black sky above her. She had no hood, and the thick raindrops soaked through her hair as quickly as it had her clothes, drenching her from head to toe within seconds. The water was cold. Her teeth chattered in time with her kneecaps. She held her upper arms with her hands, looked around her in silence, searching for a sign or a landmark or anything that might place her.

   She found nothing. So she picked a direction, and began to walk.

   Soon enough, a ghost walked with her. It wore the skin of a human, but not its opacity. Light, rain, air all passed through it, as if it wasn’t there at all. But it was there. The woman knew that, and she didn’t mind. She walked with the ghost, and she listened to it speaking.

   ‘Hello,’ it said.

   The woman squinted against the sheet of rain as heavy drops clawed her eyelids downward, kept walking as quickly as she could.

   ‘Where are we?’ She said, feeling like she was shouting over the downpour.

   ‘Where does it feel like we are?’ Said the ghost.

   ‘The future,’ replied the woman, ‘or maybe the past. Anywhere but now.’

   ‘I suppose you’re right. That’s kind of when we are. But not where we are. Where we are is inside of you.’

   ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ the woman said, changing direction slightly so that the rain wouldn’t be blowing directly into her face, only to find that the rain would always change direction with her. ‘Why is it raining so heavily?’

   ‘It’s always raining here. I’ve only seen the sun a few times, locked up in here.’

   The woman let out a short laugh. ‘That doesn’t surprise me too much either.’

   ‘So,’ said the ghost, with a hopeful voice, ‘are you going to fix it?’

   ‘I don’t know if I can,’ she said. ‘Everything is going perfectly. I have every reason to be the happiest I’ve ever been. I don’t know why it’s still raining in here.’

   ‘Something repeats itself in your head. Something is holding you back from feeling that happiness.’

   The woman nodded. Of course the ghost knew, it was a part of her.

   ‘Show me where it is.’

   ‘Why?’

   ‘I want to tear it down.’

   ‘I was hoping you’d say that. We’re nearly there.’

   They walked on in silence, the woman fighting the drops of rain that threatened to crawl up her nostrils and down her throat and into her eyeballs, the ghost just drifting forward, never looking back. It seemed that they could walk forever and never reach anything. Finally, the woman became frustrated with their eternal trek, and stopped dead. ‘I’m sick of this,’ she said, ‘where are we going?’

   ‘We’re there now,’ replied the ghost, who had stopped a few steps ahead, and was now pointing at something behind the woman. ‘There it is.’

   The woman turned to see two black tombstones, each ten feet high, and made of something smooth and reflective as glass or marble. She asked what they were.

   ‘One is your past and future, rolled into one. The other is his.’

   The woman turned back to the ghost. ‘What do you mean?’

   ‘This is why you worry, is it not? This is what you spend your time obsessing over, all that time thinking about. Well now, you can tear it down, and stop this rain.’

   The ghost was right. That niggling feeling at the bottom of the woman’s heart which had been preventing her from feeling all the goodness that her new lover brought was a deep regret, and an infinite fear. She hated the things he’d alluded to about his dark past before her. Thoughts of his exes made her feel sick, and the sexual experiences he might have had outside of those relationships disgusted her. She loathed how careless he sounded, before they’d met. How many bad decisions he’d made, how it seemed like he’d been so much the opposite of the man she’d now fallen in love with.

   But underneath all of that, she hated the things she’d done that might come back to destroy them. The mistakes she’d made with past lovers, the friends she’d always known were mad about her but she’d never had the heart to turn down. She regretted everything about the loves she’d lost and the life she’d wasted, and it terrified her to think that he might learn it all and fall out of love with her, knowing the kind of person she could be when she lost control.

   And because of this, her future was shrouded in darkness. She’d never get over all of this because it’d always be there, hanging over yesterday, threatening tomorrow. There was no way to get rid of her past or his, and that made her sure that their future was doomed.

   Except, now, in this dream, just this once, there was a way to eliminate their pasts. And she wasn’t going to waste the chance.

   ‘Go ahead,’ the ghost said.

   She looked down at her hand, and found it to be filled with the handle of a heavy hammer, its head dragging along the floor at her side. She walked toward the tombstones, and lifted it above her head.

   On impact with the first stone, she knocked off a fist-sized shard which exploded into the air around her, cutting through the rain drops, and she ignored the pain that shot down her arms as best she could. No matter how hard it was going to be, she was going to destroy these blocks. She lifted the hammer again, and proceeded to batter the stone, knocking shards and chunks and lumps into oblivion with all the rage she’d stored up over all those hours of worrying away in the dark. Hitting until she couldn’t hit any more. Then hitting some more.
   Again and again, she hacked away at the past, smashing her mistakes into oblivion, furiously unaware that she was smashing herself too.

   With every blow, the rain grew thinner.

   But so did her skin.

   In fact, it was only when she’d destroyed half of that first ten-foot tall pillar that she noticed that she was turning pale, translucent, becoming a fog that nothing could touch. She panicked, dropped the hammer, and turned back to the ghost with tears in her eyes. ‘What’s happening to me?!’ She asked.

   The ghost approached her, placed its hand on her shoulder.

   ‘Don’t you see? Isn’t it obvious?

   ‘Your past made you who you are. Every single little thing that happened yesterday, the day before, ten years before now, all added up to make you just the person you’ve grown into today. Without your past, you’re not you. Destroy all that, you’ll destroy yourself.’

   The woman slumped to the floor.

   ‘So I can’t do it. I’ll destroy us both.’

   ‘Is there an alternative?’

   The woman began to sob. ‘I don’t know.’

   The ghost raised an eyebrow. ‘I mean… you could, y’know, just accept that the past is passed, and move on. Every day is a new day, and all that.’

   ‘If only I could.’

   ‘What’s stopping you?’

   ‘The things he’s done. He’s made such poor decisions. He’s been such a different person. How can I know that he won’t be like that again? I can’t be in love with people like that.’

   ‘Do you think he would want you if you woke up as who you were at seventeen? At twenty-two? Do you think your past is so much better?’

   ‘No. We all make mistakes, I know. It’s just, people have so much of a harder time forgiving other people’s.’

   ‘Why don’t you give him a chance to try? Why not give yourself a chance too?’

   ‘I have been! And all I do is worry about it!’

   ‘Is the issue here really the things he’s said or done? Is it really the things you’ve said or done? I’d bet it’s neither.’

   The ghost was right. What the woman was really afraid of was having her heart broken. She was afraid that this man might just be pretending to be the man she’d fallen for, and was due to snap back to some imaginary old ways at any moment. She was terrified that who he was when he was young and naïve and stupid was actually who he was underneath, and that that young and stupid boy would come out and rip her heart out without warning. She was scared that everything bad she could ever imagine about the life he had before her would come and destroy her just when she let her guard down, even if it really was just her imagination that created it. 

   ‘What if he feels the same way?’ Asked the ghost. ‘What if he’s just as afraid that your stupid mistakes will come to bite him? What if everyone is trapped in the fear that their hearts will be trampled on, and love is the only answer? Don’t you think that giving in to the love you feel for each other, accepting that everything that came before your meeting was meant to be because without it you wouldn’t be who you are today, would fix all of this?

   ‘Isn’t love enough for you people?

   ‘Jesus.’

   The woman laughed at the ghost’s frustration. It had a point. She’d been so wrapped up in the fear of tomorrow and the shame of yesterday that she’d forgotten to just drink in the joy of today. She was in love with the kindest, gentlest, most attractive man she’d ever met, and he was in love with her. They were happy, and young, and free, and nothing held them back from enjoying that. So why did she worry so much? 

   Well, she didn’t. Not anymore. 

   When she looked up, the sky was blue, and the rain had stopped.

   When she woke, the woman watched her lover’s face as he slept, watched his eyelids twitch and his mouth hang open, looking as peaceful as if he’d died at the happiest moment of his life. Her heart swelled. She loved this man, she was in love with him, she was sure of it. She’d never be the first to say it – he’d say it first, and she’d follow – but she knew, deep inside, that she was in love with him, and she would do anything for him. Of all of this, she was more certain than she had been of anything. When he woke, she would kiss him, and hold him, and never let him go.

   ‘I often wonder,’ the man said, as he slid his arm under his girlfriend’s head and pulled her curled-up body closer to his, ‘why nearly every minute of my life just feels like wasted time.’

 

   And, yeah, he did often wonder that; but the question was whether it actually needed to be said. The problem was that his post-coital mind would convince itself that it was wise enough to philosophise, to come up with big ideas and throw big statements around as if they were deep ideas no one had ever had before. He had the habit of believing that his trains of thought were worth spewing out, after he’d just made love. As is the case with a lot of men, the biggest loads of bollocks that had ever streamed from his mouth all followed the biggest loads that had ever streamed from his bollocks. Not that this was necessarily one of those times, it’s just worth remembering before we really get into this story.

 

   He continued. ‘Whenever I’m at work, I’m wishing I was somewhere else. I’m wasting the time I could be spending furthering my career on wishing my life away. That’s most of my week, nearly every week, for pretty much the rest of my life, written off.

 

   ‘When I’m not at work, I’m lying around, doing nothing. I’m thinking, or I’m worrying, or I’m wishing I was doing something useful. I never do what I need to do.

 

   ‘I know I should be cleaning the house. This house is never clean enough, and by the time one end of it is, the other end needs cleaning again. But even that would feel like a waste, when there are more important things to be getting on with.

 

   ‘I should be writing. I don’t write anywhere near as much as I want to. I really enjoy it, and it falls by the wayside. Although I suppose that’s partly because I just haven’t had any inspiration recently. I don’t know what to write about anymore.

 

   ‘Plus, there’s just no time to write, when I should be studying for my qualification. When my company folds, which it’s bound to sooner or later, how am I going to get a job anywhere else if I keep putting these exams off? I need to just get studying, accept that that’s what I need to do with my free time, even if it isn’t fun or exciting.

 

   ‘But god, that’s hard when there are a million things I’d rather be doing. Making stuff, watching stuff, reading stuff, exercising… Seeing you…

 

   ‘Do you know what I mean?’

 

   He stroked her arm, kissed the back of her neck as he spooned her; and she mumbled, he assumed in agreement.

 

   ‘Well, now that I mention you, I think that’s the real reason my time feels wasted. I don’t want to study because it doesn’t interest me. You do.

 

   ‘I can’t write because the only thing I want to write about is you. I construct these cheap, transparent stories in my head that are quite obviously all about us and are too soppy to put onto paper because no one would want to read them and they’d be about as entertaining as a train delay, but they’re all I can think of. The way I feel plays on repeat in my head, so it’s no surprise that it’s the only story I can come up with.

 

   ‘I don’t want to do anything practical like cook or clean when you’re not imminently arriving, because you’re not here to benefit from it. I’d live like a tramp, if you never came around. You’re the only reason this place has ever been Hoovered.

 

   ‘And as for work, work is just what passes the majority of the time between our meetings. My life has become a countdown to seeing you next, and that doesn’t depress me at all. What depresses me is when the countdown starts too high. It’s always too long until our next date, our weekend, our holiday, whatever. You’re all I ever want to see, activities with you are all I ever want to do. All the thinking I do, that’s thinking about you. All the worrying is worrying that you’re somewhere far away, forgetting about me – or worse, going off me.

 

   ‘I should be working to earn money to buy you things. I should be studying so I can earn even more of it. I should be cooking and cleaning so that you’ll never have to lift a finger. I should be writing to impress you, to keep you interested. I should be exercising to stay the way you like me. But I’m doing none of those things. I’m just wasting every minute of my time, wishing I was holding your hand, looking into your eyes.

 

   ‘…Is that creepy? Have I said too much?’

 

   Perhaps the bollocks comment was unfair. Maybe he just wanted to let that woman know how he felt. Maybe it would have been the most romantic thing she’d ever heard, and maybe it would have made her night.

 

   But as he leant over her head to look into her eyes, he realised that all that monologuing, all that heart-pouring, had just been wasted time.

 

   She’d fallen asleep, right at the start.

 

   Which was probably for the best, he realised. It was a bit creepy, after all.