Magpie With a Typewriter

Published in City Zine #10

Dedicated to The Longford Family Band.

We were surrounded by empty rooms and fresh memories trussed up in bin liners. Every window was closed and bolted leaving the air standing still. They had dissipated irretrievably like a fistful of leaves scattered to a cross-wind. They may meet again but it would never be like it was; not like it had been around the fire, on the landing, in the kitchen, next door to those neighbours. There had been good wine and bad, tuneful music and broken strings, a bath full of empty cans and a fridge devoid of food. We had piled into taxis and been swiftly whisked towards the hum of town and successions of pubs. We had staggered back to our respective beds only to wake - late morning - with our heads in vices and coffee in our hands ruminating over the night before. We had discovered ‘The Park’ and come to understand the simple bliss of a waterfall in summer sunshine. There had been nights when we had not slept at all and entire days we had slept through; I had fallen asleep drinking wine, woken only to finish the bottle and find the previous evening still afoot. We had mopped-up the endless spillages with clothes for lack of towels and innumerable essays had been smudged by countless cocktails. There were coffee stains on top of wine stains on the coffee table. Naturally there had been the cold, wet days when we hadn’t two pennies to rub between us and life seemed a horrible ordeal, but come spring and pay-day the warming sun would melt any memory of it seamlessly away. It had, all-in-all, been a spectacularly disastrous success.