Pizza

 

‘You like it in here then?’

‘Yeah it’s good’.

 

Hannah didn’t know if it was good. Jack had been here last summer with his cousins and Hannah had heard him talking about the pizzas to some boys in class. These days, when Hannah thought about Jack, she sort of froze. But not visibly. Not on the outside. It was inside. Really inside. A deep freeze.

 

Hannah looked around the restaurant. She’d never been to a restaurant at lunchtime before. She briefly caught the eye of an older girl with her friends at another table. They were passing someone’s phone around and laughing, throwing their heads back, wiping their happy tears from their mascaraed eyes. Hannah scanned the table of girls and decided that the one whose eye she caught was her favourite. She gazed at this girl, who seemed so free, so wild, so in her body, and she suddenly felt embarrassed to be here with her dad; this man in his suit, breathing from his mouth, this man that she was half of, who was now looking over at the older girls too. Hannah zoomed out and hovered over the table that she was sharing with this man. She looked down at the pair of them, silently staring at this table of teenage girls.

 

Hannah pretended to sneeze.

 

‘How’s school?’

‘It’s the summer holidays at the moment’

‘Yeah, course it is. What year is it next year?’

‘Seven.’

‘Great stuff. Looking forward to it?’

‘Erm…’

 

There was a scream from the table of older girls as Hannah’s favourite scrambled for her phone in a coral reef of nail varnished fingers. People at other tables turned from their pastas and tiramisus to look. Hannah’s favourite snatched her phone and said, ‘fuck’s sake, Siobhan, you aggy bitch’ and Hannah went bright red immediately.

 

Deep freeze. Hannah looked at her dad. They had the same mouth.

 

She wished she could tell him everything from the beginning, everything about what happened with Jack and everything abou-

 

‘Ah, great stuff’. Hannah's Dad slid his card in the machine and the waitress smiled and stared into space.

 

‘Everything was ok with your food today?’

‘Yeah, great’

‘You’re welcome’

‘Great stuff. What’s your name then?’

‘Agnieszka’

‘Like Agnes?’

‘Erm, like.. Agnieszka’

‘That’s a pretty name.’

Bird Red Head Yellow Wings

(A very short story, inspired by the cover of A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch, and the name of the book's previous owner, written inside.)

No offence, but I don’t think we’d get on. I don’t know why I’m saying that (yes I do). You have nice handwriting and interesting taste in books. But there’s something about your name that makes me feel tense. It’s… teachery. Don’t get me wrong, I had some lovely teachers and actually, one of them had a name very similar to yours. But I’m sorry, the way you’ve written your name down, on that corner of the page, in pen, has irritated me and now I don’t think I like you. No offence.

 

The thing is, I suspect you’re the kind of person who would come in handy. You’re probably the kind of person who would come in handy quite a lot of the time. Case in point: I saw a dead bird today (I’ve realised that for someone who lives in a city I see a lot of dead animals, and I’m starting to wonder what this means, which I’m sure is the kind of self-absorbed, histrionic reflection you have absolutely no time for), but I didn’t know what kind of bird it was. When I got home, I looked it up on Google: bird red head yellow wings. A goldfinch. Of course. I knew that. But you would actually know that, wouldn’t you? ‘Ah, it’s a goldfinch’. That’s what you’d say, and the sentence would roll off your tongue with such ease, it would all come out as one word: ‘ahitsagoldfinch’. You’d stand there for a few seconds, very slightly bent over, with your hands behind your back.

 

I wonder if you’d be sad about seeing a dead goldfinch. Maybe one dead bird isn’t enough. Maybe seeing one dead bird would simply cause the corners of your mouth to drop down, quickly and sharply, for half a second and your eyebrows to be pulled in the opposite direction. Mouth-down-eyebrows-up. Like a movement from an army drill command. There’d be no change behind your eyes.

 

What would make you sad? What kind of dead thing would do it for you? What kind of dead thing in the street would sting you behind your eyes? A cat? A horse? A humpback whale?

 

A severed head.