‘New Rose’

Nick Hewitt is a writer and photographer from Eugene, Oregon, whose work explores liminal spaces, urban solitude, and the surreal beauty hiding in ordinary scenes. He is currently working on a novel about grief, memory, and myth. Instagram: @yerboihuey

New Rose

        The mirror atop the dressing table was speckled with dirt and lipstick smudges as she craned her neck to twist strands of brittle hair into waxy knots. The DIY dye job was completed the day before, 19th September, as it was every year. Red this time. Rocking back and forth on her mum’s old wooden stool as if daring it to topple, she took a pull from a bottle of merlot with practiced, sloppy elegance.

        Dull thudding on the wall separating their rooms signaled her brother’s unhappiness with the volume, so she reached over to turn the knob on the CD player until his impotent protest was buried beneath an avalanche of pounding bass and Siouxsie Sioux’s breathless vibrato spurts. Nobody was going to spoil her first birthday without her mum. 

        Today would be hers and hers alone – no changing of tubes or bedpans or clothes. No hoovering, dusting, enduring her mother’s browbeating about pills and perceived past abandonments. Each glug of wine escalated her mental civil war between melancholy and unburdening, memories superglued together as a fractured mosaic of rosily reimagined donkey rides on the beach, or afternoons paddling in the fairy dell. Then the sharp, seething clarity of their last embittered decades together. These songs kicked up daydreams like dust from old boxes in a streak of late afternoon sun. What if she’d stayed in London, ignored her mother’s plea to come home after the stroke? 

        Back then, the pull of obligation towards the woman who used to wake her at 5:27am on her birthday – the exact time of her first earthly cry – and bake her dinosaur cakes, was too much to bear. Now, she wished she’d been more callous. Sure, her mum would have hated her even more for not coming back, but the result would have been the same. Those decades of resentment would still have dissipated with her last thin breath into the iodoform air of Ward 6A at the Pilgrim Hospital. The other expiring women beside her probably supported their daughters in chasing dreams and becoming themselves, she speculated with another swig, warm cloak of inebriation draping itself around shoulders that began to sway as the carnival keyboard intro of Subway Sect’s Ambition broke through the tinny speakers.

        She still had the t-shirt from that magically chaotic night in September 1976 – the 100 Club Punk Special, and her eighteenth birthday. Though worn out and discoloured, sleeves cut off long ago to accommodate the years that seemed to attach themselves like barnacles to her upper arms, the words The Damned were still just visible in permanent marker across the chest. An effortlessly stunning American girl named Chrissie, who bummed a cigarette in the mammoth queue along Oxford Street, collared Dave Vanian before the show to fashion a nonchalant introduction that suggested he was lucky to be meeting Rose, rather than the other way around.

        “Dave, this is…what’s your name, sweetie?” she drawled between drags and leaned against the bar, arm draped around Rose’s neck in a manner entirely unfamiliar, but exhilarating.

        “Rose,” she giggled, then tried to cram it back down and mirror Chrissie’s aloofness.

        “English Rose,” Chrissie blew smoke off to the side, grabbed a pen from behind the bar and handed it to Vanian, whose beady eyes briefly flicked up at her from the depths of makeup-shadowed sockets. “She’s from Skegness, wherever the fuck that is. Here, write on her tits,” then after a pause as he began lazily daubing, “but she’s a sweet little thing, so if you try anything, I’ll cut it the fuck off.”

        “You’d have to beat Laurie to that,” he scoffed, finishing up the inscription and handing the pen back. “Skeggy, eh? Welcome to London, Rose. We’re all mad here,” he winked, before running a hand through his jet-black oil slick of hair and turning to rejoin his bandmates.

        Bewitched by this vampiric boy in his leather jacket and turtleneck, Rose stood mouth agape for a moment, inhaling the thick, stifling musk of cigarette smoke, sweat and spilt ale, until Chrissie tapped her on the shoulder and thrust a pint of flat lager into her hand.

        “Get this down you, English Rose. Just promise me, whatever you do tonight, don’t let any of these morons near you with their grotty dicks.”

        Throughout the first two acts – Stinky Toys and Chris Spedding & The Vibrators, neither of which Rose had heard of – an increasingly frenetic energy fizzed through the faceless crowd. Unlike any collective force she’d experienced, the room was a tinderbox, waiting for the strike of a match that might send the night soaring to the stratosphere or sinking into the deepest pits of hell. The only guarantee was that it wouldn’t be boring.

        Not long after The Damned started the penultimate set of the night, a glass shattered against a pillar at the front of the stage, and it kicked off. Someone was screaming and her friends were hurrying her out through a black mass of confusion and hostility and Dave began berating and interrogating the crowd, to no avail. Eventually two policemen – bobbies in the hats Rose had only seen on the telly during her mother’s soaps – arrived to wrestle a snarling, scrawny man with spiky black hair and a choker out into the night.

        “Fuckin’ Sid,” one of Chrissie’s associates shook her head, “what a dickhead.”

        “Yeah, but he’s our dickhead,” Chrisse sighed, “and if you’d grown up like that kid did, you’d be fucked in the head as well.”

        Once the commotion had settled, Dave dedicated one of the earliest known performances of “New Rose” to her, and she blushed visibly, lifting her hands to her cheeks like the girls in the movies, until Chrissie slung an arm around her shoulder and licked her ear. Rose shoved her off and Chrissie smirked and returned to swaying her bony shoulders and pouting – not in the glossy magazine or page three way, though. This was a pout that oozed nonchalant confidence – no concern for the male gaze. Everything about her suggested that she had seen all life had to offer and had yet to be suitably impressed, that she knew she could do it all better, someday. Her stringy arms hung bare and loose from a black waistcoat and a straight fringe obscured her eyes, settling above cheekbones that protruded like shimmering tumuli beneath the searching stage lights. Embarrassed, awestruck, confused, Rose turned back to the stage, stifling a smile, practicing a pout of her own.

        When the lights flicked on and seized the heartbeat of what would later become known as the genesis of British punk, Rose’s ears were ringing, her feet ached, and the world she’d left behind by the North Sea, with everything she’d ever been conditioned to value, had been levelled by a hydrogen bomb. It was impossible to think that just a few nights before, she’d been in the Mardi Gras Club, nestled above a sweet shop down an alleyway in Skegness, watching the girls from school parade around in a circle to “Isn’t She Lovely” as button-downed men sat and smoked and leered like hungry black eels. In the middle of one of the booths at the back, guffawing and swilling ale around a pint glass with his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his sweaty, bristled chest and gold necklace, was Derek Harris, who owned the sweet factory that had laid off Rose’s dad a couple of years before and set the clock ticking on her childhood. With each passing day of unemployment, he sank further into the armchair, gazing absently at the telly fizzing away in the corner. The whole exercise was conducted to determine which smiling golden girl would win a bottle of plonk. The women she was brushing against in the 100 Club would have flipped the tables, grabbed the bottles and smashed them around Harris and his mates’ ruddy chops..

        Having disappeared to the toilets, Chrissie found her again through the sweaty smoke haze and took her by the hand as bodies spilled out into the shouting and car horns and neon lights. Swept up in Chrisse’s cyclone of fizzy reckless charm, Rose followed the crowd absently into a cab to an afterparty in Soho. It was an apartment off Dean Street full of boys with spiked hair and leather jackets who looked nothing like the boys she knew, who’d tumbled straight from school into factory jobs – if they were lucky – and begun the slow harvest into their parents’ breed of sluggish, sepia conservatism. It was like the town was forever looking back at the fifties as some gleaming coastal citadel built upon post-war patriotism and the nuclear family, only to be reduced to rubble by her ungrateful, spoiled generation. Their parents in mines and factories across the midlands had been first on the chopping block during the recession, forcing their kids to live on canned beans in power blackouts. Yet still bedazzled by the wartime spirit of sacrifice, they considered themselves economic foot soldiers rather than pawns, wondering why those kids wanted to rip up the system and start anew.

        In the dark, deafening destruction of the 100 Club, Rose had found hope that England could be something better, something fairer. Their anger was rocket fuel, propelling the country to a future in which girls like her would no longer live and die in these faded towns, passing without protest from maternity wards to kitchens to assembly lines to bingo halls to graveyards. 

        She shuffled nervously around the stale, smoky flat after Chrissie, swaggering between groups of lads who recoiled with both beguilement and terror in her presence, reduced from the carefully curated image of rough-and-ready jackals to the confused boys they were. She had an uncanny knack for pulling back the curtain on people’s inner selves. Rose was introduced to people through the drunken clamour of crowds at breakneck speed, so grateful to be acknowledged as an equal by these characters she’d only ever imagined meeting from the corner of her bedroom, flicking through pages of Melody Maker, that she immediately forgot their names. Only after meeting them several more times over the next couple of years would the words Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, Steve Strange and Viv Albertine scorch themselves indelibly into memory. 

        Seeing Chrissie Hynde in action that night stripped away Rose’s trepidation, sliced through the years of taught and practiced deference to men. There was no rulebook here stipulating that women be kept from the frontlines of this act of mass cultural rebellion, dutifully cooking, reproducing and supporting men as they went forth to build the new frontier. This was about ideas, attitudes. Every affectionately snarky, disinterested comment, every puff of smoke, every languid lean of Chrissie’s body told her that this was her time. This was their time.

        *

Heavy clouds painted the sky outside granite as Rose applied the last of her makeup, cursing the stubborn blemishes and pockets of sagging that even her capable artistry could no longer obscure. Sixty. She squinted into the mirror, searching for the girl that threw a bunch of clothes and records into a bag after her father’s funeral in ‘76 and ran for the train station. Faint and fading memories of families with handled suitcases, the last of the summer holiday stragglers, heading back inland to their mines and furnaces until next year. Time and cosmic chance had granted her life and were now conspiring toward its reclamation. On the wall above her reflection, her friend Chrissie gazed down from a weathered poster, smoky eyes imbued with a resoluteness that seemed to say “go on, girl.” Unable to remember when they lost touch, Rose wishes they’d taken pictures together. She would have placed them along her narrow bedroom windowsill, beside the one of her dad in his Sunday best, leaning on the wall outside the ex-servicemen’s club with his brothers, all holding pints of bitter and cigars. The only remnant of their friendship was a crumpled piece of lined paper Chrissie once scribbled on and handed to her while they were wankered on vodka and mushrooms in some Bermondsey warehouse. She’d started playing in a band everyone was excited about, and Rose scarcely saw her sober again.

        When the night falls on you, baby

        You're feeling all alone

        You won't be on your own

        She extracted the note from her dresser drawer and read it again, smiling closed-lipped and gazing up at the flaking stippled ceiling to blink away salty pools forming at the base of her eyes. She then folded it neatly and inserted it into the pocket of her battered leather jacket, still adorned along the lapels with pin badges, pulling it on and checking her hair one last time.

        Silence from the adjacent bedroom, beside the annoyingly chirpy hum of daytime telly adverts for life insurance and cremation, indicated that her brother had been pacified for now. 

        “Paul, I’m just off out for a walk. D’you want anything pickin’ up from the shops?” she called through the door, reluctant to enter lest he decide to accompany her. His walking stick slowed her down and his tics embarrassed her, the sudden outbursts of shouting drawing the unwanted attention of tracksuited teens who roamed the town centre like packs of stray dogs.

        “Could do wi’ a cider,” came the raspy reply, “you sure you’re alright on your own?”

        “Yeah, course I am,” she prickled at his patronising concern.

        “You took your pills today? Remember the nurse is comin’ tomorrer,” he groaned and she heard him shifting on the foldout bed, spondylosis gnawing away at his spine.

        Lacking the patience to deal with his deepening confusion since their mother’s demise, she hurriedly swiped her keys from the kitchen counter, along with a few slices of green-spotted bread for the ducks, almost tripping on a bubbled piece of linoleum floor in the process. Throughout their small ground floor flat, the lingering fust of pre-mortem decay, talcum powder, decades of cigarette smoke and unwashed cupboards seeped from the floral patterned wallpaper and soured in her nostrils. She clattered out of the screen door into the courtyard, a weary topography of fresh-cut lawns and paved footpaths between identical rectangular blocks of grey-bricked sheltered housing. Two old dears sat outside the neighbouring bungalow in mobility scooters, smoking, sipping tea and nattering away the sagging afternoon light.

       Neglecting the usual shortcut through Morrison’s car park, Rose strutted along Alexandra Road past the rows of two-up two-downs and turned right at the Cod ‘N’ Cockerel, savouring the warm, homely blast of battered haddock and chips from the vent in its murky whitewashed wall. She sped up past the job centre, unnerved by the gaggle of bedraggled, toothless men slouched with cans of industrial strength lager along a broken bench outside, and peered with nostalgic curiosity at the grey chasm of the quaint train station from whence she once sought her new life. Luxuriating in a first unaccompanied walk for as long as she could remember but needing shelter from the wind, she beelined for the High Street, known to many locals as Chip Pan Alley. 

        The first unit on the right was once Herrick Watson’s, the record shop where she bought that copy of Melody Maker in ‘76 and found out about the Punk Special. Opened in 1932, the plucky little family business had survived a World War and six recessions, but not Silicon Valley. Rose paused to gaze in through giant wash-swirled windows to the exposed grey carpet littered with remnants of CD and vinyl racks, strips of old poster. A lighter square metre in the far corner marked the former home of the in-store record player, where she and many generations of teenagers throughout the shop’s eighty-seven year lifespan spent many a rainy afternoon. Nobody ever kicked them out or questioned their loitering – they understood the need for kids to enjoy and discover music without having to part with their folks’ hard-earned currency.

        At some point unknown to Rose, the once-bustling retail thoroughfare had morphed into a rundown string of pawn shops, high street casinos, bookies, a Salvation Army and a couple of bargain clearance warehouses selling knock-off trainers and tacky t-shirts: TRAINEE TAXIDERMIST – I’LL STUFF YOUR BEAVER FOR FREE.

        Though grateful that a few of the old chippies and the butchers at the end had stood the test of time, along with the workingmen’s club behind the shopping precinct – chalkboard sign advertising karaoke and some football match on Sky Sports – Rose wondered how much longer it would all last. Articles she’d seen on Facebook said youngsters were ditching fried food and booze-filled nights in favour of phones, fitness trends and gaming. Towns like this weren’t built to withstand a great retreat from life’s more folious pastimes, and she saw little by way of efforts to arrest the decline.

        Taking the usual route down to the boating lake, she threaded a narrow path between the bowling green and the crazy golf course, each once alive with the joy of people at time’s opposing bookends, now abandoned to weeds and overgrowth, spray can manifestos inscribed across chipboard windows of crumbling clubhouses and kiosks. She remembered sitting with her nan on the uneven concrete steps as a child with an ice cream from the Lakeside Cafe behind the clubhouse, watching her grandad play bowls. The cafe was now a hollow brick husk, tables still laid for the wistful ghosts of the seafront’s past splendour.

        Navigating manmade rock formations, vine hedgerows and dead flower beds that once welcomed long childhood summers in glorious technicolour, the acrid stench of green algae from the lake found her before she could lay eyes on it. She skirted the periphery, dodging constellations of goose excrement, as a lone couple with their young daughter lapped the untended island in a rented yellow pedalo. Extracting the bread from her jacket pocket and tearing off a piece, she scrunched it in her hands, the way her dad taught her when she was six. “Travels further that way,” he said, neatly-pressed trousers uncrumpling themselves as he rose from the bench, loosened his shoulder with a crack and launched a kneaded ball of dough out past the tip of the island, shirt sticking to his back in the summer heat. The bread whistled above the heads of a rough-looking family in a rowboat, who glared across at them in unison.

        “Ah lighten up, you lot – we’ll all be brown bread soon, eh?” he cackled as they shook their heads and the patriarch steered them away in the direction of the ice cream kiosks at the far side.

        Low-hanging sun glazing the murky lake in a maudlin amber, Rose spotted a family of ducks emerging from beneath the arched bridge, set her handbag down and stepped forward to cast her first Warburton bullet.

        Splat.

        A stinging, thumping thwack on her left shoulder. The bread slid from her hand and tumbled down the slimy bank into the lake as she yelped and clutched at it, feeling gooey fluid cling to ringed fingers. Howls of laughter erupted from behind the bushes as she noticed the eggshell lying broken by her platform boots.

        “Eggs up, mental Marge!” a young boy’s voice called as a phone protruded from the top of the bush like a periscope as she turned to trace the sounds, flush moisture rising along her cheeks and hands trembling. Another egg sprang from the hedgerow and descended straight toward her. She stepped back instinctively, felt her back foot give way in the green slime of the bank, her knee crash into the concrete. Arms windmilling and lungs shuddering with panicked cries, the ice cold filth and algae coiled itself around her stockinged legs and soaked them to the bone. With a desperate lunge, a spindly top knuckle found momentary purchase in a jagged groove in the cement at the top of the slope. Rose wailed for help through a broken dam of tears and snot as the cackles drew near. Multiple pairs of trainers. Coyote shadows looming in the half-light.

        “Oi!” a coarse, hacking cough of phlegm burst forth from along the lakeside. The laughter intensified but became panicked, legs in her eyeline turning and scattering through the bushes. “Leave ‘er alone, you fuckin’ little cunts!”

        As she whimpered at the sharp cement imperfection drawing blood from her labouring fingertip, a lopsided, hobbling figure approached Rose in a pair of familiar battered Adidas Sambas. He dropped a walking stick and lowered himself with a sigh. Two tattooed hands wrapped Rose’s fingers in a firm sandpaper grip and began to heave. “Come on,” he groaned. Boots pedaling in the sludge for a hint of friction, she nudged up onto her elbows and allowed herself to be hauled from the water, finally settling prostrate to sob into her hands. 

        “Bloody ‘ell, duck,” the old man panted rattling breaths from lungs corrupted by decades of L&B Blue fumes. “Knew I shun’t ‘a’ let you come out on your own. Here y’are, you’re alright,” her brother placed a firm hand on her back, patted her shoulder. “Little bastards need a good hidin’. We’d never ‘a’ behaved like that in our day, eh? Dad woulda belted fuck out of us.”

        She lay still as he crawled to the nearest bench and pulled himself upright, gathering his walking stick and reaching down to grab her forearm.

        “Come on, up ya get.”

        She slapped him away, wiped her face and clambered to her dripping knees, allowing him to take her arm and lead her to the bench, where she sat with her face in her palms. He collapsed beside her, sighing the weight of the world into the splintering green panels.

        “Just sit ‘ere for a minute, eh? Then we’ll get you ‘ome and dry.”

        She said nothing, just shook her head, tugged at her hair. How did it all come to this? She was supposed to do so much. Paul shuffled. She could sense he had turned to face her. She hated how people reoriented their broken bodies to denote sternness, pretend things mattered.

        “Look sis, I found all your pills in the cupboard, that’s why I come lookin’ for yer. You’ve not taken ‘um since mum died, ‘av you?”

        “Fuck you on about?” she sniffed.

        “Well, you’re s’posed to take ‘um, and suddenly you’re back dressed in all this weird old clobber, dyin’ your ‘air and that. Nurse told me to make sure you din’t end up like this again, d’you know what I mean? I’ve gotta look after yer. Yach!” his jerked violently as a tic took hold.

        No sooner had they planted their mum than he was trying to convince her she was sick so she wouldn’t leave. For too long had she allowed her family to manipulate her into sacrificing her own happiness at the altar of their convenience. Everyone ended up dust, at best a transient memory in the minds of one or two more generations, their own consciousness soon-to-be extinguished. Family obligations were nothing but a marketing campaign to whittle away people’s squared edges and slot them into the economy’s round holes, a distraction from optimising one’s own time on earth in service of the system. Time to tear it all down.

        “Fuck off, Paul,” she mumbled into her knuckles, “you just don’t wanna be stuck ‘ere on your own until you kick the bucket. I’m not letting you guilt me into stayin’, just like mum.”

        “Jesus,” he sighed, extracted a pack of fags from his jacket pocket and silently offered her a nicotine olive branch, which she declined. “You’re right back in it, aren’t you?”

        “Right back in what?” she lifted her head to glance up at a face empurpled by long, falling years of drink and misery. “I’ve had enough of this place. There’s nothin’ for me ‘ere. I wanna go back to London.”

        “This is the fantasy you always go back to, about London and all them music folks. I saw you’d put your pictures back up. Nurse said you might ‘av a regression or whatever after mum died, especially if you stopped wi’ the pills. I’m sorry, duck.”

        A coldness whispered through her ribs and clammy terror percolated in her veins. She studied his eyes, surrounding skin melting away like old wallpaper, hunting some malignant spectre of her mother, but found only irritating faux sincerity. Paul was better than this, or so she thought. Their mum must have brainwashed him before shuffling off her mortal coil. For years, she tried to wear Rose down, convince her that up was down, black was white, that she was ill and decades of physical, auditory, sensory experiences – the joy and chaos and love and fury of the Big Smoke – never happened. That she never met Chrissie, any of her old friends. The capacity to conjure such evil toward one’s own flesh and blood frightened her.

       “You…I can’t believe you’d do this,” Rose leapt up and backed away, eyes widening and handbag clutched tight to her chest.

        “Do what?!” Palms upturned in appeal, he peeled himself from the bench. “Look sis, I din’t wannoo ‘av this talk ‘ere, but fuckin’ ‘ell, you’ve never even been to London! Think about it – why are there no pictures a ‘ you with all these musicians? Why an’t you got any a’ their contact details? It’s all in your fuckin’ head!”

        “What about this?!” She extracted Chrissie’s note, unfurled it and waved it in front of him.

        Clutching the bridge of his nose between a calloused thumb and forefinger, he sighed, turning to gaze out over the lake.

        “Look at it again,” she studied the flowing lettering, the familiar heart-dotted i. “Wankered rockstars always write in perfect italics wi’ Parker pens?”

        Rose stared, straining to recall Chrissie’s glazed expression and tired drawl as she slid it into her pocket, Malcolm twirling her through silhouetted bodies and blue light in The Roebuck.

        “Rose, listen to me, I know you’re in there – you must remember summert,” Paul shifted to face her again. “You never left mate. You found dad after he’d done ‘himself in and it fucked your wirin’ up, so you locked yourself away and convinced yourself you’d gone down south, wrote that note and a bunch of others. You an’t mentioned any a’ this for years so I thought you were past it all. I’m sorry, kid. I dunno what to tell yer.”

        She scoffed, lip curling into a trembling sneer. “D’you honestly think you’re gonna convince me the forty-odd years never ‘appened?! You know I left after dad’s funeral and came back after mum’s stroke. After all I’ve done for you Paul, fuckin’ ell, why are you doing this?!” she shook her head, welling upand lifting her gaze to the iron sky closing in on the North Sea coastline. “What next, gonna tell me the sky in’t blue? Grass in’t green?”

        Paul threw his arms aloft, huffed through his nostrils like a bull, inhaled and exhaled slowly.

        “Rose, look – I love yer. You’re my little sister, but I need you to think about this. I were workin’ down the ball bearin’ factory, remember? Mum ‘ad that job cleanin’ B’n’Bs on the seafront, so you used to come ‘ome from school first, when dad was outta work. D’you remember? Most days you’d find him glazed in front a’ the telly with a can, but that one day…” he stopped, waited, turned back to the lake.

        “No,” Rose shut her eyes until it hurt, teeth grinding, fists clenching.

        The wilting summer heat of early September. First week of term. The Two Ronnies crackled from the TV and through the one-up, one-down terraced house, as always. But there was something in the silence. The absence of a can’s crack and hiss, shuffling of an armchair, leaden sighing or clearance of throat. Undisturbed hallway dust captured in a blade of late-afternoon sunlight. A shadow cutting through it. A creak. Rhythmic.

        “No!” she shook her head again, trying to shatter the memory against the walls of her skull.

        “Now, do you see?” Paul rose, limped forward, leaned to peer into her eyes, searching for a flicker of recognition.

        “No!” Rose stopped backpedalling as he advanced, walking stick scraping and a forlorn, pitiful expression on his face, then charged. 

        “Rose!” His cry was snuffed out as her shrieking mass collided with his shoulder and sent him spinning like a top, stick clattering down the bank and drifting away on the lake’s gentle ebb and flow. Rose kept running, glancing back just once. Her brother lay moaning, shuffling through the duck shit to drag his jaded legs back to the bench. Rose kept running. Back through the path to South Parade, through the piss-drenched alleyway between the chippy and Wolfies bar, up the cracked back road behind haggard rears of redbrick commercial units. 

        The groan of a static two-carriage East Midlands Railway train on the right of the two tracks barely audible over her giant heaving breaths, Rose padded sopping wet through the desolate station toward the ticket booth. 

        “Single to London,” she barked at the attendant, a bored woman with a peroxide blonde bob, who regarded her with a fear both insulting and intoxicating. Rose tapped her dead mother’s card as the woman frantically printed out the orange stubs. Grantham. London King’s Cross. She brandished them at the inspector without breaking stride and clambered onto the train, the conductor's lonesome whistle whining her final farewell to this dead-end stretch of coast. 

        Slumping into a window seat, Rose studied the corrugated iron structures and cluttered yards of the industrial estate for the last time as the train began its gentle ratatat inland. Eyes closed, heart slowing, she visualised her arrival back in the city, the old bars, tracking down old friends, finding Chrissie, reclaiming four stolen decades. The window melted from rust, timber and brick into a vast green expanse of ancient Lincolnshire fenlands, and Rose smiled.

Elliot Smith is a British journalist and writer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Much of his fiction is set in and around his hometown of Skegness, on the east coast of England, and explores themes of class, socio-economic inequality, masculinity and community.