I stood in front of my friend’s house alone. He’d handed over the keys as though they were nothing more than twisted shapes in cheap alloy, as though the act of supplying me with shelter was as simple as lifting a cup to your lips. Perhaps the act truly was so trivial to him; Ali was many things, destitute was not among them. In fact, of those various wayward souls that had composed our little circle in secondary school, Ali stood out as the Rich Kid. I...

‘That’s the last of them,’ Mark said as he placed yet another cardboard box on the kitchen table. His face shone with sweat and joy, a broad smile parting his moustache from his beard. Ivy paused her self-assigned task of filling the built-in kitchen cupboards with crockery and glassware and glanced at him, smiled. The last few weeks had been a blur. They’d put the offer in, squared it with the bank, gone through the bureaucratic purgatory of...

With helmet in one hand and overladen saddle bags in the other, Ethan charged out into the bitter autumn evening from number 43 and let the door slam behind him. He glanced back at the building, once a large house for an expansive family and now three mediocre flats. One of them, until just that moment, had housed him and Erin. He wiped the wet from his eyes and stepped quickly to the road. His bike, an obedient if underpowered Royal Enfield Bullet 500, waited...

The event was larger than I’d anticipated. Close to a hundred people filled the small University hall, half a dozen or so waitstaff tending to the crowd. Across the other end of the room I saw Chelsea getting balls deep into yet another white wine spritzer. Old stone walls lent the whole affair a grandiose atmosphere and spine-breaking acoustics. Every word became a warcry, every whisper a scream. The main man, Doctor Sullivan Griever himself, occasionally appeared from a dark corner and...

Lucy Hayward placed her mug down on her kitchen table, furrowed her brow, and said, ‘You’re actually gonna do it?’ Chris O’Halloran, a good-natured Canadian from the flat across the hallway, shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, why not? He’s paying.’ He was sitting on the other end of her sofa, sipping water, doing the neighbourly thing and giving her the lay of the land. Lucy shuddered. ‘Albert’s creepy as fuck,’ she said...