Category: Fantasy

Maddie didn’t argue with Gertie about who should drive them home to Pendurran. Instead, she settled back into the passenger seat and allowed everything she’d just learned to filter through to her senses. All these new and novel thoughts needed to marinate in the soup of her brain. It wasn’t easy to put emotions aside.

They all drank their tea and ate their saffron buns. Maddie didn’t even taste hers – she was in a dreamlike state. ‘So many questions,’ she said. ‘I’ve got so many that need to be answered. Confusing things that I can’t get straight in my head.’ ‘I imagine so,’ said the matron. ‘And I’ll try

‘Are you expected?’ asked the girl who answered the door. She looked very young, as if she’d just become a teenager, but then all young people looked like that to Maddie now, a symptom of getting older maybe. ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ answered Maddie. ‘We’d like to speak to someone in charge,’ said Gertie. Her

Maddie drove the car in silence. She didn’t feel like speaking about any of it, about either the meeting with the young man who called himself her son, or the way her friend Gertie had forced her into this trip to St Agnes. To the house that held such potent memories for her. She found

The sound of Gertie throwing logs on the fire pulled Maddie from her reverie. It catapulted her brutally from the past and her memories of Rudi, the time they’d spent together, to the present. The day after her fortieth birthday, sitting here in the farmhouse parlour in her beloved Cornwall. She was cold, didn’t know

The sound of Gertie throwing logs on the fire pulled Maddie from her reverie. It catapulted her brutally from the past and her memories of Rudi, the time they’d spent together, to the present. The day after her fortieth birthday, sitting here in the farmhouse parlour in her beloved Cornwall. She was cold, didn’t know

‘His name was Rudi?’ asked Gertie. ‘The guy in the Old Forge?’ she added, when Maddie looked as if the words were in a foreign language. Maddie was disoriented. She stared at her friend, searching the worried face beside her for a clue, watched Gertie’s hands tighten on the car’s steering wheel. ‘Look, I know

Maddie counted the waves as they crashed dramatically onto the rocks. Every tenth wave sent up an enormous blast of white foam thrashing into the granite backbone of the beach. She always counted the wave-sets there and they were rarely the same. Some days you’d wait five minutes for a huge titanic wave to batter

Maddie waited in the room next to the garage. She wasn’t alone. Lots of other drivers and mechanics were hanging around waiting for their assignments as well. Some were sitting, like her; others were caged lions, pacing back and forth. The lance corporal who normally handed out the rotas was nowhere to be seen. The

They’d just finished eating a gloopy macaroni thing for tea. Maddie had almost heaved, but she’d eaten it anyway, for it had been kind of the cook at Inglis Barracks to think of them. She often sent strange leftovers back home with Gertie. Giving food. A sign of love. Not to be dismissed out of