Cherrypicked stories

I was perched at the bar with Sherlock. We'd just got our second pints in and things were starting to bubble nicely. I'd been giving him the lowdown on work ' such as it was. The false starts. The saggy middles. The sentences written in gold in your head, but which turned to crap on the page ' a kind of alchemy in reverse. I had got one idea, though, that I was running by him. A play. Something inspired by my midnight walk around Mariner Plains, with all those dark, empty rooms.

A fox came to my street Sleek backed, His spine bone china Beneath the heel of my Outstretched hand.

Old stuff - a rare rhymer

“Hey Mary, you’re home. I didn’t even realize you came in. I’m concentrating really hard on this new story.” “You haven’t written one in a while, have you? What’cha been up to?”

You had ten, I was skint to patching point and lord knows only two of them get aired or submerged on a regular basis anyway. Anyhow, you'll like the buyer. He brown-papers parts of dead saints

"There's something about the place, Al, he told me one evening over a beer and a game of lop-sided snooker. He spoke very softly, almost reverentially. "It's the history or something. You can feel it in the air. It gets into you. Like fag smoke. Like, right in the blood. And it suits me. Being alone with it. I wouldn't want to live any other way now.

You won't hear these words, the voice in you head doesn't have a sound really, and if tissue box perforations have ever looked like teeth ready to devour the time you waste, but then again, if we are to believe in all that we see,

We drank in silence for a few moments. Then Sherlock rolled his shoulders and sniffed. He lifted his deerstalker, turned it around, put it back on again ' tugging at the peaks like an admiral. Something was coming. "I'll give you a story, Al, he said. He took a last, lung-stuffing drag on his fag and blew his smoke at the bar top, where it spread out in a layer like dry ice. "Did I tell you¦ I actually was a detective once.

(I was young then - living the irretrievable moment, though earthed enough to know it)