Room 2D

From Fessée 4, featuring Minnie Champ The giggles are the same; the dialogue uncannily familiar. Even the vices are unchanged: cans of beer and cigarettes consumed over an endless stream of girlish bitchery. Hard to believe that six years have elapsed since their last heart-to-heart. There’s a lot to catch up on. ‘So, is Colin still in publishing?’ asks Nella, deliberately getting the name wrong. Magda giggles. ‘Yes. He’s doing poetry these days. Callum couldn’t tell a rhyming couplet from an iambic pentameter if his life depended on it, but most people can’t and so he gets away with it.’ ‘No regrets about marrying him?’ ‘Not really: he’s as good as most men and earns enough for his defects to be overlooked. I could’ve done worse.’ Their eyes meet at the unspoken rider. ‘and nearly did — several times!’ Nella doesn’t blame her friend for marrying Callum, but she does resent the way Magda capitulated so easily to his demand...

Story from Februs 31.   Colin Weaver’s sequel to  The Institute Girl The stretch of pavement in front of the Birley Institute is about fifty yards long. Lucinda Horton had walked along it twice, and was in the middle of her third preoccupied perambulation when she became aware that someone had fallen into step beside her. She turned her head and looked into the pale, plump, bespectacled face of a fiftyish man with the general appearance of an undertaker’s chief clerk. ‘I was wondering’,’ said the man, with a grimace meant for a smile, ‘if you were — er — looking for business, love?’ After a moment’s stunned surprise, understanding came to her, and the expression on her face was obviously an adequate answer. The man backed away hastily ‘Sorry!’ he said. ‘My mistake! No offence meant!’ He was almost running as he turned away and crossed the road. Staring after him, Lucinda uttered two explicit words which would have...