Short Cuts

By sam mccoll

I QUIT: There's nothing unusual about waking through the slime of a dream about rape and loss and misery, but when I grope the pillow beside me for my fags, the first as yet unformed flutter of panic forces my eyes open.

It’s true then. A feeling as intense as the death of a loved one...

SALT CUTS: I could see them swagger down the hill, bulging poly bags thumping against their sides, like a warning.

MARTIN AND ME: We never noticed how the tide had rushed silently past and sunk the banks behind us ...

THE RIVER: Come on, Liam, show us your doggy paddle...

HAPPY FAMILIES: Aiden, my four year old tells me to take some deep breaths - annoying little shit.

THE PROPOSAL: I sneak a glance at the faces of our loyal audience and it's blindingly obvious that they are already feeling terribly sorry for me.

ANYONE FOR DARTS? Aiming the wretched pencil directly at Ross's head, he shut one eye and flexed his forearm delicately and at a decreasing angle until it came to a threatening halt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: sam mccoll
• Release date: May 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386723721

Book preview

SHORT CUTS

Sam McColl

McEllisons

Edinburgh

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

About the Author

I Quit

The River

Anyone for Darts?

Salt Cuts

Black Mountain

Martin and Me

Happy Families

The Proposal

More by Sam McColl

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by McEllisons, 4/6 Hillside Street,

Edinburgh, EH7 5HB

Copyright © Sam McColl 2018

Sam McColl has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

About the Author

Sam McColl is married, has three grown-up children and lives between Edinburgh and Tarbert.

I Quit

THERE’S NOTHING UNUSUAL about waking through the slime of a dream about rape and loss and misery, but when I grope the pillow beside me for my fags, the first as yet unformed flutter of panic forces my eyes open.

It’s true, then. A feeling as intense as the death of a loved one sweeps through me. Frozen, I stare at the wall and tell myself to calm down. Peter, my friend, is dying of lung cancer at the age of forty-nine and I decided a few weeks ago in a responsible manner, along with Sophie (flatmate and fellow puffer), to choose life. Since her mother died she’s gone from a meagre five or six a day to over twenty. I smoke forty – at least. We planned this. We’re going to do it. We applied our first nicotine patches at twenty-three hundred hours last night, smoked our last cigarette at twenty-three thirty hours and flushed our last smokes down the pan together at midnight.

The memory makes me feel a bit bitter – I mean better. I get out of bed and shower. The urge to call Sophie and see how she’s doing nags at me, but she’s on early shift – it’ll go to voicemail.

Walking to work has got me through a lot of withdrawals, it’ll get me through this one too. Amazingly, at this time of morning it’s still cold enough to see my breath and for all of a minute I blow out great funnels of the stuff and smirk at the irony. I’d be on my third by now. There it is again, the death of another sibling – just for an instant. I try to reach back to it, grab it so I can spit in its face before mashing it, but it’s the devil itself, and dances off gleefully, flicking at my gut, threatening unimaginable loss, forcing me to search for the early openers as I reach the beginning of Raeburn Place. First newsagent I come to I stop dead and stare at the small ads in the window. Do we need a washing machine? No. So I study the picture of someone’s lost cat, Nov 2004 – be dead by now. A Ford Fiesta – no thanks. Between the ad for a twin buggy and a pair of budgies I can just see the rows of cigarettes. No