SPRING WRITING COMPETITION
Dear Readers,
I am hosting a spring writing competition.
The theme of your stories should be FRACTURE, in the broadest sense of the word.
You have until the 21th of April 2025 to get your stories in.
Please post your stories on this thread.
They be should be no more than seven-hundred and fifty words.
Because of the amount of reading that will have to be done, the competition is for paid subscribers only.
Write with freedom, without inhibition.
Your loving writer,
Hanif xx
THE MERIDIAN
—
From the 63rd floor of Bishopsgate Tower, the whole city lies beneath us. The streets are empty. I press closer to the glass, staring through the shifting clouds. We’ve been standing at the high windows all morning, silent, watching Westminster. Three Chinook helicopters hang low and slow over Parliament, circling in wide arcs. Like patient carrion birds.
Rolling news loops the same three stories. A drugs bust on body-cam, Alan Titchmarsh’s obituary, a new American bakery in Islington. In-between, adverts for hair transplants and easy credit. Outside, a heavy tactical drone hurtles past, rattling the glass. It banks sharply towards the caved-in dome of St Paul’s. Londoners call it the boiled egg.
A piercing analogue tone comes from the kitchen TV.
“This is BBC Television from London. We interrupt normal programming for an announcement by the Prime Minister.”
The picture cuts to the Prime Minister. His permanent smirk gives nothing away, but it looks like he’s underground. The office gathers round the screen.
“Citizens of Great London, our city is dying. The cancers of crime, poverty, and acts of terror are killing our Great state from within. This morning, the Hammersmith and Chelsea bridges were destroyed by southern terrorists.”
He leans towards the camera, resting his elbows on the podium.
“Effective immediately, the Northern districts declare unilateral independence from Great London. Our new state will be founded upon the ideals of aspiration, order, and strength. We offer our citizens the right to struggle, to fight, to strive. In return, we offer you stability.”
The office is silent other than the hum of air conditioning. The Prime Minister pauses and looks down the camera with quiet authority.
“Citizens have 24 hours to decide; North or South. All bridges will close at 11:59hrs tomorrow.”
The screen cuts to a new crest. Greater London.
“Fucking terrorists. Slum vermin!” Shouts Mr Andrews, Head of Finance.
“Randolph is a Trafalgarist, Tom. He would say that.” Says a tall man from Corporate.
There’s a muted rush behind me. Colleagues in dark suits and blouses grab what they can and bolt for the lifts, leaving open browsers and warm coffees behind. The man from Corporate sits down at his desk and starts replying to an email.
“I said this would happen,” says Maya, looking at me with interest.
“24 hours?…” I mumble.
“It’s time to decide. Finally! Do ya wanna be N1 or S-LUM?”
I look at the old city. At the new border. The dirty river that, by the time the tide turns, will be a moat.
“My mum,” I say softly, “Casper. I can’t leave them.”
“Of course you can.”
“But this job, Maya… it’s all I have. It’s all they have. All that keeps them safe, down in Brockley. Maybe I could still send them money?”
“I doubt it.”
“I can’t abandon them. But… what about Nye?”
I think of last spring. The day Mum met Nye in Regent’s Park. Casper held her hand.
“Her family are up in Tottenham, aren’t they? Why would she go south.”
The thought hits me. I won’t see her before I leave.
If I leave.
I nod, uncertain. “South….”
“See ya, then.” Says Maya, still staring at me.
Tiny dark figures are massing along the South Bank. The skyline is dotted with drones and helicopters, red and blue lights blinking through the murk. The streets are now swarming with bodies. There’s a tank on London Bridge.
I sit down and stand up again, “Maya — seriously — what the fuck are you going to do?!”
Maya doesn’t move but her eyes are alive.
“You know, Kit. I’m more interested in what you’re gonna do.”
“But you’re from the south too!”
Maya pauses, shakes her head. Her brow softens briefly, then hardens again.
“I’ve got nothing left down south. And neither will you if you go back. It's not about the past anymore. It's about the future.”
Our colleagues are sprinting to the lifts. Some are just standing and staring. Shouts echo from the atrium. As we turn round, Raul, the mild-mannered cleaner punches a woman from Accounts to the floor. She’s trying to push into a lift that won’t move. It’s too full.
The fire alarm blares.
“Attention! Attention! Please leave the building immediately!”
Raul and a day trader are throwing people out of the lift. It still won’t move. Then, with the doors wide open, the lift drops like a stone. Their screams are lost in a second.
I turn to Maya, her face frozen.
“Let’s take the stairs.” I say.
I’ll decide on the way down.
Peach by Laura Smith [Fracture prompt]
She lies on the small sofa in the living room, which is also a kitchen. It is a long narrow space, above a jewellery shop on the high street, in the flat where he lives alone. The street has a historic feel, as though its best days are behind it. But still, it smells of money.
She is young, only 17, and she is naked, and the man is sitting in a chair looking at her, his eyes roving up and down her body. He is smiling a smile she is becoming used to, eyes narrowed, with intent. Large breasts, small waist, a flat stomach that will disappear with age. Sturdy legs that are nothing like Kate’s or Naomi’s. She is old enough to know about the pencil test, but she has never had sex, except with her pillow, quietly at night, hoping that her mother won’t come in. Later, years later, she will think of him and the word lascivious will come to mind, alongside another word favoured by tabloid newspapers even as they print sexual pictures of teenage girls. But right now she feels powerful, desired. More like Rose, asking Jack to “paint me like one of your French girls”.
This flat is the same flat where her parents lived as a newly married couple in the 1960s. They had spent a year in Italy, where William was working in the oil industry and Pamela had joined him, fresh from nursing school. In the daytime, when William was at work, men would chase Pamela – all long legs, miniskirts and a short, straight wig – calling “nigra, nigra”. Back in London, they avoided moving too near the house in Bounds Green where his mother and sister lived, with its red concertina vinyl door separating the kitchen from the dining room. Instead, they rented here, in this small flat with large windows.
The girl takes this as a sign. She is young enough to believe in fate. The fact that this man – who made a beeline through her group of teenage schoolfriends at The World’s End in Camden – lives in the same flat where her parents lived holds a certain power. 'Surely this is meant to be?' she thinks, and she really believes it. She does not consider how well it worked out for William and Pamela.
What she does not yet realise is that the meeting at The World’s End was more a plan than a sign. The man had been watching her for some time – the Saturdays she came into the shop downstairs with her mother, to pick out a pair of lapis lazuli silver drop earrings, one small triangle above a larger one. The shop, where he works a few days a week, is owned by his mother. Her second husband is from Morocco, which is where they source their jewellery. His own father is in a residential home in Muswell Hill. In the months to come, they will go and see him, and she will ask him,
"Do you read much?"
And he will answer, unsmiling,
"Why are you asking me that?"
And she will feel young, and foolish.
Today, the man and the girl do not have sex, but it won’t be many months before he makes clear that he will move on if she won’t – "It’s what girlfriends and boyfriends do" – and she will feel she has to, even though she is not ready. It will be painful, and there will be blood, and afterwards, as he walks her home down the big hill, they will meet her mother driving up it in her white Nissan Micra, determined to save her daughter from the thing that has already happened. It will be November the fifth, Guy Fawke’s Night, and, after she kisses him goodbye she will persuade herself, again, that this too is fate, because it is her parents’ wedding anniversary.
The girl is lying on the sofa because the man asked her to. She has never had a boyfriend before, not a proper one. He knows he only has limited time – she leaves for university in a year – and he will make the most of it. When, on a Saturday night 30 years later, in a new city, she opens the door, and sees him standing there, holding the Indian takeaway she has ordered for her husband and children, this is the thing that goes through her mind. Her, lying naked on a sofa, and him watching.