Please scroll down to read my recent short story 'The Insect Room'

Or click the sidebar to read the following stories:

'On the Island' was included on John Holding's Fictionfest website in July 2008 and in student magazine, 'Ink'.

‘At the end of the meal’, a (very) short short story, runner up in Biscuit Publishing’s Flash Fiction competition 2007 and featured in ‘Muse 6’, Manchester Metropolitan University’s creative writing yearbook.

'School Run' (previously shortlisted for the Asham Award) was included in the 'Word of Mouth' reading event at Nottingham's Royal Centre, 21st May 2008, when it was read by actress Emma Carlton.

I still dream of ‘The Insect Room’, of visiting the museum with my father. It isn’t far away, despite the years. Sometimes it’s right there, waiting, when I close my eyes. A secret place inside me.

Outside, it was always raining – at least, that’s how it seems when I look back. I remember a pewter rain-light at the window and a constant, muffled tapping. Wet footsteps squeaking on the parquet floor, and a damp smell drifting from the walls . . . Knowing that it was time, I’d slip my hand out of my father’s coat pocket. I would go wandering through ‘The Insect Room’ alone.

I didn’t go far though. "Stay in sight," he’d tell me, although in all those grey and gleaming Sundays, I don’t think I ever caught him gazing back at me. Not once.

But, glancing over my shoulder or from the corners of my eyes, it was always strange to see him there. A giant, surrounded by cabinets and cases of thin, clean glass, by row upon row of tiny bodies. A still quite young man, a fit and handsome man, frozen in this dripping, old man’s place. It was strange, really, to think of him at all.

He wasn’t supposed to be walled in, in quiet rooms. It didn’t suit him. He looked most at home in a pub garden in the summer, wielding a pint and a broad, yellowish smile, surrounded by friends, or family, by kids like me. Leaning forward with his punch lines, his sleeves rolled up - his forearms brown and strong and oddly dusty in the golden, August light. Brushing the flies away with careless fingers. Unthinking, himself.

But there, in ‘The Insect Room’, my father was someone else entirely. His face was serious and his movements awkward as if he had forgotten how to manage his height and bulk. One moment, he appeared to me thug-like - the next, some deep, daydreaming type. His coat didn’t help. As he moved heavily between the cabinets and their shadows, that long, tan, trench coat made him look like an undercover detective, or perhaps a mobster, from an afternoon film. Whatever he was, I didn’t know him there. During those regular visits, he wasn’t mine.

But I would tell myself not to worry, not to panic. I knew that afterwards, things would be all right again. I’d claim him back.

Afterwards, in the car, he always gave me chocolate. Smarties, or buttons, or my favourite, a bar of simple Dairy Milk, those snapping chunks cold from the glove compartment, but quickly warming, melting, in my eager hands. Several minutes had to pass before he turned the key in the ignition, before we drove slowly away, readying ourselves in stages to face the house. He would come back to me during those moments while I ate chocolate and he fiddled with the radio. He’d rediscover his bad jokes along with the right station through the static; he’d find his deep singing voice too and his questions about school. His usual colour would chase the chalk from his stubbled cheeks and the rain on the car window would glitter sharply, a dazzle of beads and tight, bright strings. And, through the rain, beyond the carpark, there would be a gentle, seaweed ripple, the distant sigh of swaying trees.

But studying him in ‘The Insect Room’, as he stooped forward, perhaps squinting slightly and leaving his clumsy breath like a cobweb smeared across the glass, he was that stranger. And I’d turn away, swinging around to view the nearest exhibit. Or else I’d walk off briskly, striding with grim determination deeper into the cloying quiet. I would immerse myself in this Aladdin’s cave, where the treasures were all neatly pinned and labelled, and long dead.

It wasn’t just ‘The Insect Room’ - the whole museum was unnerving. It wasn’t like the wide, white and airy places they had in town with constantly evolving Themes and interactive features, and people called ‘Explainers’ dressed in green. This museum was simply a collection – or a collection of collections, a somewhat random display of stray things and found things, of hunted things mainly. To reach our room, tucked away in its clay-smelling corner of the damp first floor, we had to walk through a menagerie of stuffed animals. There were the predictable moth-eaten deer and foxe, and a single, crouching lioness, with disconcerting amber eyes. Countless boxes of countless birds lined the staircase, many of them suspended as they rose from their nests.  Caught forever, mid-flight.

We scarcely glanced at them. It was always ‘The Insect Room’ we headed for, without exception. The exhibits there never changed, and as I ambled past the filigree paper pockets of an abandoned wasp’s nest, or a winding, giant centipede, or the crickets, or a beetle so gold it was surely fake, I thought the same thoughts every time. Who were the people who put this place together, who wrote out all those labels in that cramped, calligraphic hand? And how did they manage the preservation? Surely you couldn’t honestly stuff a bee?

There was a sense of ritual to such wondering and, with my father left somewhere behind me, when I reached the butterfly tables I always stopped.

Although they were undoubtedly the most beautiful part of ‘The Insect Room’, the butterflies were kept diligently covered. A grey, weighted cloth hung over each glassed board to protect them from the light, or maybe from visitors who weren’t quite curious enough. I would peel the cloths back carefully, almost breathlessly. Reverently. I’d take a moment to step back, before I stared.

There were so many of them, perhaps thirty pinned to every board – there must have been two hundred altogether. And they were all so sad and delicate and pretty. Unique and precious, like separate secrets. Even their names were steeped in colour and magic; sometimes I’d murmur them aloud.

"Brimstone, Orange Tip, Grizzled Skipper, Meadow Brown."

Each one was amazing, both vivid and unreal, like the dazzling scraps that return sometimes, from half-remembered dreams. But I had my favourites and I always saved the very best butterfly, mounted on the middle board, until last.

"Blue Morphus."

Impossibly huge and impossibly frail and all the way from Costa Rica, its silken wings were such a true, clear blue that it made my eyes swim. My heart -

There was no point in trying to resist it. I would think about my mother.

I never wanted to dwell on her, but even back then I think that I understood that it was what my father came to the museum for, what he needed from the emptiness and the gloaming, from the attention to detail perhaps, or the soothing hush. Despite the distance I had put between us, his worries would come scurrying over the cabinets towards me; I pictured them burrowing gently, but persistently, into the sides of my head. Earwig thoughts. There was no escaping them. And there was the memory of her dress too. It was undeniable – it was right there in front of me. That Costa Rican blue.

I only ever saw that dress once, but it never left me. It was long and sequinned, perfect in the way that a tropical lagoon might be said to be perfect. The fabric poured from her fingers, a shimmer of jewelled dragonflies hovering above . . . There was something so complete about it that it almost hurt.

I watched her try it on. Slowly, cautiously – she held it up before her naked body in the same wondering way in which I always raised the covers from the butterfly boards. And she continued to take her time, slithering it on.

The bedroom mirror wasn’t quite long enough and hung awkwardly, and so she had to climb up on to the mattress to see herself full length. I watched her soft, pink heels catching in the sheets. And, through the mirror, I saw her eyes grow huge.

I understood that there was mystery in that dress, as well as beauty – I recognised it from the way in which she took it from her wardrobe, not from a hanger, but from the wide, slim box where it was folded, kept on the hard-to-reach top shelf. From the way that she fetched it after Dad had gone out, when she thought she was alone. She never knew that I was there that last day, that I was watching. Longing . . .

My memory of that dress was so vibrant, so tangible, that sometimes I doubted its reality. Perhaps I had made it up from wanting, from butterfly wings and shadows and the press of silvery light. Perhaps I had simply dreamt it (in the sharp, clean way that I dream of my childhood still).

Except there were other mysteries too. There was the way that Dad wouldn’t touch her keys, still sitting in the bowl on the kitchen table, and the phone calls that used to come for her too late at night. How her hushed voice would flow with the other dark breezes, fluttering among the cool, smooth shadows of the house.

But Let it go, I told myself - although I was actually hoping that he would.

But wishing didn’t help. Nothing helped. Not the bees or the roaches or the locusts or the spiders. Not even the butterflies. You could see it from the weight in my father’s head, and from the way he moved his hands, pinching the bridge of his nose, rubbing his mouth. The cottony strings of his breath, still streaking the glass. I would draw the cloths back down, and walk over to him, knowing that it was time. A marble trapped inside my throat as I anticipated the moment in the car when he’d come back to me.

He always came back to me, I had that still - and I had chocolate while I waited. Rain, like wing-beats on the roof.

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