Part 6 – The End

‘You know him? And I prefer Izzie now. Who the fuck are you, mate?’

Most of us are in John by this point. But there’s a new colony staking a claim in Izzie. She’s sliding back towards Isabella.

Dean lies dead between them, face down into what the brochure called hardwood. If he were alive, he would confirm what Isabella knows. It’s cheap, thin plastic.

Izzie doesn’t know who John is. She doesn’t know what she’s done to him. She doesn’t know what she is driving him towards. To her, he’s disposable. Another one to go in the cupboard like Dean, if it comes to it.

John can see it in her eyes. He gets on his haunches and gets real close to her face, studying it. Izzie is unblinking but in this proximity, where he can feel the warmth of her breath, smell the day on her tongue, even see the build-up of coffee and acid on it, he can also hear them inside her head.

It makes him smile.

‘My name’s John and you’ve ruined my life.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘You’re mental. You stalk women and live in the binshed.’

‘That’s rich. You’re the one with the corpse in your cupboard.’

‘He wasn’t my type.’

‘You shagged him on his garage floor.’

That gets her attention. Her head cocks, brow furrows.

‘Oh yeah, I know all about that. You regretted it, sat on your toilet, cold and shivering. Thought yourself a common trollop who puts it about with any man who shows you a modicum of attention.’

‘You peep over a fence or something? Pervert. Hope you enjoyed the show, at least.’

‘I wasn’t watching. You don’t get it. I felt it. I was the one on my back. I was raped. I didn’t ask for this. I’d like to say that was the worst of it, but you don’t care. Tell me, where is it?’

Isabella is a lot of things. But dumb is certainly not one of them. She’s not a scientist and she doesn’t have a grasp on the minutiae of how the button works, but she’s sitting there hearing the word rape, looking into this man’s eyes that are starting to tear up, and she’s doing the maths, as they say.

And yet the primal fear of fear itself keeps her deceitful. It’s not a taste she savours, but needs must.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry if you’ve been sexually assault—’

John slaps her. Hard. ‘Stop it. I’ve watched you. I saw you get off, eyes roll, on pushing that button in the carpark. I followed you home from the bar, coffee house, even that frantic fumble for the clutch as you walked in the park with your mate, the one with the pram. You thought it was unfair she had a baby, thought she wasn’t fit to be a mother because of her weekend cocaine binges. Every time you press it, I get worse. I’m the landlord for your children.’

She bites her lip. Feels her eyes start to water. Her face starts to welt. Blood trickles into her mouth, the taste is sobering. Still, the prospect of ceding her happiness outweighs anything he can say or do.

John stares at her in bafflement. He’s never been an angry man, but he wonders if this was all from the button or if there was always a spark buried deep below the real him.

His own hand smarts from the slap. He changes tack. ‘You’re scared of your own balcony.’

‘I was. I was scared of everything.’

‘Would you have ever… you know?’

‘Killed myself? It’s okay. I don’t think I would have, no. I think my brain just liked to torment me with the idea it could.’

‘Ideas. There’s quite a few.’

‘I can’t go back to how I was, John. I’d rather die. And I say that as someone who is relatively free and easy right now. Hell, I’m tied up in my own house, with a crazy man and a dead body. No offence.’

‘None taken. It’s your crazy. Did you kill him?’

She says nothing. She doesn’t need to.

‘Looks like he was stabbed. Nice wound there in his back.’

Still nothing.

‘Izzie. I have a family. I had a life that’s been upended and twisted into something dark. I fear I’ll hurt them. Images, properly formed, like ready meals. Whenever I look at someone I love, I only see how I could hurt them.’

‘Exactly. Listen to you! You’ve had a life. I never did. My head’s been dirty and contaminated since I can remember. And the button? Well, I see now it doesn’t get rid of them, it just makes my problems someone else.’

‘So, where is it? It’s not right, what you’ve done.’

‘What choice am I supposed to make? Every time I push it, the gaps get smaller. Every time the thoughts start to come back. It hurts. My body aches at the slightest flicker of doubt. If I don’t push it, I’ll die.’

‘I will kill myself if this continues.’

‘I’ll do it if it stops.’

‘You’re already fucked. You’re a murderer, Izzie. What are you going to do? Let him ripen and seep through the floor? Christ, you’ve got him next to a boiler, for fucks sake.’

‘He deserved it. If I go to prison, then so be it. But I don’t think I will.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m a living human trial. The lab will put me upon a pedestal.’

‘You’re not thinking straight. They’ll cut your pretty little head open.’

‘Maybe. But maybe they’d come for you too. Where do the thoughts go? Oh, this man I know. A swell fella. He’s local too.’

‘How’d you know—’

‘The overalls. Think I had my car serviced there once.’

John is on the back foot for the first time. His grip on rationality is weakening. Izzie grimaces, like she’s dipping into a bathtub that’s too hot.

‘They’re growing again.’

‘Na, it’s just my time of the month.’

‘I saw that. That was last week.’ John taps the side of his head. ‘You wanted to rip out your stomach, go to sleep and never wake up.’

She throws her head back at that. ‘Oh, no flies on you. So seriously, every time I’ve pushed that button, they’ve come to you.’

‘Regret over sleeping with him. Anxiety over not replying quickly enough to messages. You’re too fat, you’ve got no bum, your breasts are too small and no one at work likes you. The first batch was bad enough, but you’ve been sending them over like texts. Ping, ping, ping.’ He snaps his fingers until they start to hurt.

‘Alright, I get it. But I didn’t want to be this way. I was born with this shit.’

‘I don’t know about that. I’m no doctor. I got given sodding antidepressants, they just made me feel worse but I’m a good person. I’m a good Samaritan. I don’t deserve this.’

‘You’re pompous.’ Izzie pulls a face and looks him up and down. ‘Who decided you were a good person? What a lovely accolade you’ve bestowed upon yourself. You’re so good that just a few weeks with my brain and you’ve resorted to kidnapping and assault. I don’t know if I’m good, bad or ugly. Well, Isabella does. But for the first time in my life, I know what it’s like to live without pain. And now you’re asking me to forget.’

‘You only got better because you made me sick. Can you live with that?’

‘I can. Like this, I can. One push at a time. It’s science, mate.’

‘I can’t. And seeing as you won’t tell me where it is, we’ll just have to sit here. I did have thoughts of torturing you. I saw a film once, butter knife under the fingernails and all that. But you said it yourself, the thoughts hurt when they start to grow again. I don’t have to lay a finger on you. I just have to wait.’

His smile is saccharine and knowing. She tries not to rise to it, but he’s right. Every second the bubble doubles and her body flexes inward, like torsion, like a rope around her middle being yanked by a horse.

This is it. We have done it. She’ll relent. John will press the button and we will return home. Isabella will have missed us. We’ll show her that she has and we can get back on with living.

‘If I give it to you.’ Yes. ‘Will you try something with me?’ No.

He looks at her, quizzical.

‘What happens if we both press it at the same time?’

No, that’s not the plan. No, it won’t work like that. Didn’t Dean say something about it being a one button, one press situation? If he were here now, we could ask his mush and grime.

John considers it. His mind screams at him, we scream at him, that he must reject. He must press it. She deserves it. She doesn’t get to negotiate the terms. Hurt her if you have to, beat her senseless, but do not do what she wants. He recoils and Izzie sees it. Then at the same time she spasms. The pain rides through her mercilessly. He’ll kill her, leave her here to rot with Dean the liar. Hold out. He’ll make a mistake and then you can defend yourself. Two men attack a woman at home. It’s a house invasion. Listen to us, Isabella. Listen.

John, meanwhile, is seeing images of Janet, Jake and Annie. The ones that make him want to leave them behind, for their sake. The thoughts are coated in blood and disgust. Knives in necks and tyre irons wrapped around skulls. Murder suicide. He cannot risk it. He cannot let any harm come to them. He is the harm. He will be if he doesn’t get that button.

‘I can’t do this. I can’t hurt you. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t let the impulse win.’

She doesn’t open her eyes to that. She takes one deep breath, almost chews on the words and when the ringing in her ear lessens, just a little, she says it.

‘I’m tired, John. It’s in my bra. Do what you must.’

He’s uncomfortable retrieving it. He hasn’t touched another woman’s bra since before the Wonderbra blew up. He even mutters a sorry as it catches on the fabric.

‘We’ll do it together. Then we’ll destroy it. That’s the deal.’

Izzie swallows. The thoughts feel as if they’re manifesting in her gullet. She tastes bile. She’s terrified of what John’s suggesting. But she tells herself for once in her life, she needs to be brave.

‘Deal.’

He unties her and places her hand on his. Their index fingers curve into one another. It’s intimate and for a second they both hesitate.

We try to corral each other; our kin split across two minds. There’s not enough in Isabella and John has pushed his back. We went too hard on his family; it’s given him some sort of protection.

They press the button.

John’s breath catches. Izzie collapses into a heap. They pant there on the floor, next to Dean.

John Draper starts to stand and helps Izzie Richards up off the floor. A tentative smile plays across his face and then one across hers too. They laugh, deep in the belly, and then cry. Tears of relief. After wiping mucky mascara and engine oil respectively, John speaks.

‘I don’t know what you do about Dean, there.’

She looks at the corpse, the thought hasn’t changed, he deserved it.

‘I’m moving away. I’ll leave him here like a chattel for the next tenant. I think when the lab figures out what happened here, they’ll leave well alone. Maybe even clear up this mess for me.’

‘How comes?’

‘Just a hunch.’

‘Don’t want to know. Izzie, are you hungry?’

‘Yeah, what you thinking?’

He stamps on the button first. It shatters into plastic, circuitry and wires. The ruby red button ricochets off Izzie’s shoe cupboard and out of sight. Out of mind, in truth.

‘Chips,’ John says.

That’s what they do. We don’t get to see that, though. The fat pervy old man and the whore of a woman walk away.

When they pressed the button, we were flung at each other. Colliding into sparks of thought and despair. Smithereens of our kin, imagine flesh but of the mind, churned and twisted into the ether. It hurt. It was death on a scale beyond human comprehension.

We knew at once, it had changed the process. Izzie’s thoughts wouldn’t regenerate, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be us. John broke us, tagged us with a new carving in our feet. We weren’t hers anymore, we weren’t his. We were detached. Once again thrown into the cold and dark space, the in-between that is fenced by the perimeter of this god-forsaken hell hole. Stevenage is a prison and we’re left to float around this wasteland forevermore. Orphaned misery, too grand, too large to find a new home. John was a unicorn. John was a stallion. There will never be another like him.

We don’t know how long we’ll be able to survive like this. All we can do is cling to the hope that perhaps one day, one day we’ll find someone.

And this time there won’t be a button to push.

Final Part - In Two Weeks!

Every subsequent push of the button jettisoned a fresh tranche from Isabella.

A new wave, cresting and breaking towards us and John. Isabella was not shy. She mashed the button in her flat with Dean watching on in a stupor.

John was sat on the toilet, head in hands. Just him and his thoughts. Belts and bannisters. Hoses and car exhausts. It would be better for everyone if he just wasn’t here. Even that was weaponised against him. It was selfish; it was for him.

It would have gone that way too if not for Isabella’s growing addiction to the button. There is nothing quite like a mystery to command attention. Nothing quite like a nemesis to focus the fury. A darkened bathroom. A man sobbing. The toilet was a welcome receiver to her transmission. A conduit, if you will.

Isabella had shared a similar low in a similar position not long before. Her tiles were nicer, less body hair, a better ply of toilet paper. But beyond the frills, something connected these two, threaded between them. If it wasn’t a bond, then more an alignment. A syncing of devices and a thinning of walls. We were undressed, parcelled and ready to deliver suppose you could say.

Freshly deshelled like a tortoise sucked out, the thoughts weren’t aimless this time. They had a destination, had a signal to follow. We screamed and shouted as loud as we could. Come to us, find us, John is our beautiful new neighbourhood. It didn’t take long. We welcomed them home; we shepherded them in.

Full of fresh confusion and horror, John felt the nebulous thoughts morph, sharpen, crystallise. He saw a flat. A bedroom. A cupboard. A man standing there. Then the world revolved. John was cold, hugging his elbows in a carpark. It lurched again. He gasped. A tingle ran through him. He was making love. Having love made to him on a garage floor. By a man—the same man who had been looking down on him. And it excited him. He could smell his body odour mixing with cheap aftershave. He knew the fragrance, Jake wore it. It made him sick. Then the man’s tongue was in his mouth, he tasted toothpaste and stale coffee. Despite this, a blanket of arousal draped every inch of John’s body. Warmth flooded upward. For the first time since taking the tablets, he was erect. Stiff. It scared him. He wasn’t like that, he knew.

Then the images pulled back. The foreground widened. Some developed into a bird’s-eye view. He wasn’t himself. He was someone else. He was a girl. A woman.

Then the name.

Isabella.

There was a film that Jake and Annie loved when they were children. We think it’s a story about toys. The owner of the cowboy man carves his initials into his feet, it’s barbaric. He tags him as his own. They spend a lot of the film simply shoegazing, wondering how they get back to their owner. It seems as if Isabella did something similar with us. We were tagged, no, branded. And now John was looking, staring at his feet.

How do I give these back?

Can we get home?

John wasn’t a touch typist, more a one finger prodder. He thought the tip of his index finger might crumple as he jabbed it at Janet’s laptop after he finished on the loo. After smashing enter, he stared in disbelief at the screen. He knew that carpark. Part of his job at the garage was picking up fleet cars from corporate digs. One of the contracts he managed was for Lumora Labs. The woman from his thoughts had been in that carpark. Isabella had wanted something. Something desperately.

‘I’m going out. Don’t know when I’ll be back.’

He was out the door before anyone could say anything. This was middle of the afternoon on an overcast Wednesday. He made it across town and to Lumora in eight minutes. Without much of a plan, more a hunch and a hope, John punched the buzzer at the barrier.

‘Good afternoon, welcome to Lumora Labs, are you a visitor?’

A man had come to visit a company.

‘Yes.’

‘Okay sir and who are you here to visit?’

He closed his eyes. The thoughts were jumbled again.

‘Isabella?’

A pause.

‘Izzie. Yes, no problem. Park up in bay two one eight and we’ll let you in at the guest door.’

John did as he was told. With every inch closer to the building his heart thudded harder and he could feel sweat drip from his armpits down his flank. He spoke to himself, under his breath. More barked. For the flicker of images, the sensations were overwhelming. The garage floor was cold on his bare buttocks; Dean was warm and continued to penetrate him.

‘That’s not me.’

He had to remind himself. It was her. It was always her.

‘Sorry sir, what was that?’

The receptionist was all smiles and teeth sat at her sleek metal desk. Her head was all John could see as he approached the little tablet that had replaced the visitors’ book.

‘That’s me. The fiat in two one eight. I’m—’

He stopped.

He didn’t want to meet Isabella. Not yet. He didn’t need to. What would he even say. I believe these are yours. And then what. Headbutt her. Drill into his skull and try to scoop them out. No. He needed to be clever.

We told him to be clever.

‘I do the cars. MOTs. For the Lumora fleet and Isabella’s is due in. Can you tell me which one is hers please?’

The receptionist’s smile didn’t flinch; her words came out like perfume. ‘Yes, sure, it’s the GLA in bay forty six. Would you like me to let Izzie know you’re here?’

‘No, not yet. I need to do some paperwork back in my car first. No point having her freeze her bits off.’

‘Quite.’

John turned on his heels before he could be asked anything else. At bay forty-six sat a brand-new gleaming Mercedes, tyres coal black with spotless mudflaps. He made a note of her numberplate. He checked his phone. Time left in the day. Enough to disappear and still look normal. He went home, ate a ham sandwich without tasting it and sat long enough to pass for calm.

Around five he drove back out to the lab and found a layby off the roundabout. He switched off the engine and kept an eye on the exit barrier. Half an hour later, the GLA ending KSF trundled its way out. It was darker now, so the beams were on but no doubt it was the same car. He couldn’t get a good glimpse of the driver, but no matter, he had been her, he didn’t need to see her. He waited until she merged into traffic on the roundabout and then like he was back in his dad’s car, shifted the gearstick and rolled forward, following her.

They stopped at one of the cruise ship like developments of flats that sailed the Stevenage skyline. A line of cars as long as the trainline parked bumper to bumper opposite the pavement. It was a horrible evening, rain splashed in indiscriminate puddles and between the glare of car lamps and streetlights, John would be forgiven for calling the whole thing off. The GLA indicated right and turned into the underground parking area. John didn’t want to lose sight of her, he made a split-second decision and pulled in real tight, as close as he could get without bumping her. The metal gates swung open, slow and ponderous, and as the GLA rolled down the ramp, John let his car do the same. With nowhere to park down below, John let his car coast a little. The GLA turned right and swung itself neatly into a reserved bay. John found a pillar and nudged his car up to it, dimmed the headlights and waited.

Izzie got out and stretched. A long limbering reach for the sky. He didn’t think much of her. Her carpark smelt of shit, for one. He didn’t want to shag her, didn’t want to be her friend, or hear her sob story. He just wanted answers. She was about five feet nine and looked like a woman. That’s it. Brown hair, flat shoes, work clothes and she drove a mildly nice car. Good for her. Now what the fuck was her deal and why did John know how she felt during sex.

‘Oh.’

She had started to cry, definite tears. Collapsing into her hands on the roof of her car, she was bereft. There was no one around, this wasn’t a performance, it was truth. The carpark hummed with the amber glow of safety lights. He thought he might be about to get out, go to her and just directly deal with this. We told him to wait. A moment later, she hitched up, wiping her face with long hard drags of her hands. Then she bent and disappeared into her car, coming back with a small bag. Izzie checked over both shoulders and then pulled out a small object. John sat, puzzled, by the fifty pence piece sized red button that protruded thickly from the matte black casing.

He thought it the remote for the gate. He had his head turned back towards it, expecting to see it open or close or do something when she pushed it. Instead, he felt a force so sudden his head flew back into the headrest and he started to cry. If he had been driving, he would have crashed, no two ways about it. He couldn’t catch his breath and all at once he decided he was going to leave his family and never come back for fear of how he might break their hearts if he stayed.

He forced his eyes back to Izzie and she was smiling. It made him wring the steering wheel as if it owed him money. She was breathing exultantly. She was smiling and lolling her head side to side as if she sweetest music was playing. John’s ears pinged and popped with unadulterated rage.

His eyes couldn’t focus; it was like a migraine but one that came with proper images. Once as a kid his father had gotten him into the projection room at the cinema. He had inadvertently caught a blast straight to the face, dazzled and shining for minutes after. This was like that, but with added nastiness. Terry, her boss, was a lecherous pig. Dean shouldn’t have touched it. And you’ve really fucked this up Isabella.

Two words were consistent with each image in this batch.

The button.

He watched Izzie stroll towards the elevator that went up to the flats. She could leave; he couldn’t. The thoughts needed to be squashed, stamped down like a bin that wouldn’t close. Once he had done that, once the rage was contained under a thin veil of mental cling film, he started the car and went home.

But now he knew what he needed to make him better.

We knew what we needed to go home.

’Part Six - The End’ - in two weeks
(The Penultimate PART!!!! remember we’re doing unreliable narrator lol)

Gods did exist.

They’re all dead now, of course. Crumbling fusions of bone and star fading into the dark. Butchered by the ideas that shaped the Earth. Science, progress, the calming influence of logic and understanding, a death sentence to higher powers.

All gone now. Lost forever.

The Pantheon of Pedantry were born.

Not Gods, nowhere near, but still more than Human.

The Auditor, the Grand Time Waster, The Duke of Passive Aggression and their childish runt of a companion, One-Up. Left to live on Earth, left to ensure Humanity could never truly be comfortable, left… alone.

The Auditor, Sebastian, his name tonight, swirled the little stick with the plump olive clockwise in his martini. Spin the bottle, but with an upmarket twist.

It clinked and pinged in the wide-rimmed glass as it came to rest facing a group of four portly, chubby men. Successful celebrated men. At least in this room, at least tonight.

The pinstripe plonks all chuckled in a way that wasn’t dissimilar to pigs feasting at a trough.

Hearty snorts and belly rolls jiggling under tight expensive shirts, where if the buttons were placed under any more stress they might well fire off like a lone gunman spraying the party’s guests.

One in particular stood out to Sebastian. He would make a good pick, a likely source of bollocks and buffoonery.

He studied him now as he gnawed at the olive, morsels falling back into the clear liquid of the cocktail. Flavour for later, what a delight.

The man was holding court. Sebastian listened as he ranted between sips of fizzy lager, declaring things, telling it how it is. Proper men. Proper women. Soft lads. Snowflakes. The whole tired banquet.

Sebastian ate bullshit.

He feasted on arrogant anecdotes, sucked the hyperbole right off the vine. Every embellishment, a little jewel to be fondled, plucked and pocketed as people wittered on about their incredible lives.

This man was dripping with jus.

Sebastian enjoyed this part. Those final few moments before the pageantry began.

He shook himself loose a little, clicked his tongue at a nearby waiter and deftly placed the glass down. Not before finishing the contents, with a slight chew, in one almighty gulp.

‘I’ll have another in five minutes please, chap.’ And without looking, Sebastian plucked a twenty-pound note from his inside breast pocket and let it drop as silent as a leaf in autumn into the young man’s hand.

‘Add it to their tab.’

Two languid strides later he stood shoulder to shoulder with the man who was greying but putting up a fight whilst doing so.

‘Good evening Gentlemen, what an absolute riot this is. The place to be, without question. What are we all drinking?’

The men greeted Sebastian with forced warmth, seeing him as some elite eccentric they vaguely recognised as someone they should respect but couldn’t quite place.

Graham narrowed his eyes.

‘Ah, good to see you again.’

Sebastian considered lying, but lying to a liar always felt wasteful.

‘No worries if you’ve forgotten me. The Auditor.’

‘Right.’

‘Capital A. Definite article.’

‘Like tax?’ All four shifted their weight like buffalo at the watering hole.

Sebastian smiled.

‘No, bullshit.’

The men liked that. Men like that always did.

‘Graham was just telling us about Bangkok,’ said one of them, disinterested enough to lurch back to funnier waters.

The others chuckled.

‘Tell him the story, go on!’

Graham began retelling the anecdote, clearly exaggerated and full of bravado.

A work trip. A free upgrade. A rooftop bar. A woman so beautiful she apparently caused three waiters to forget their orders. Graham, naturally, had handled the situation with the calm command of a man born for international incidents and minibar prices.

His friends added jeers and laughter, throwing in exaggerated details to back him up.

‘And I’m not funny about it,’ Graham said, preparing to be very funny about it indeed. ‘Men are men. Women are women. I like proper women. Always have. None of this soft confusion.’

There it was.

The in.

The bullshit rose from him like frothing coffee.

As Graham got to the ‘climax’ of the story, reality subtly paused. Drinks froze mid-air, someone caught mid-laugh stayed that way, mouth open, head back.

Sebastian smiled, buttoned his blazer and said to himself, ‘Let’s get to the truth of it, shall we?’

A faint ripping-paper sound followed as the room stuttered.

Sebastian appeared in a shadowy, warped version of the hotel room in the story. Time and space were rubbery, logic buttery. Everything was in flux, like a hazy memory.

The rooftop bar went first. Never happened.

The business class upgrade went next. Points.

The three waiters forgot nothing.

The woman had not begged. Nobody had begged.

Then the room settled, smaller and more accurate.

The woman was a man.

Not a trap waiting at the end of the anecdote for Graham to twist.

Graham knew the whole time. Asked specifically.

Sebastian watched the true scene play out.

The sex worker told him before the second drink, even rubbing his shaved Adam’s apple as proof. Sebastian thought of the knees he was shaved from, those of the old Gods and laughed.

Plain as day. Graham nodded. Graham stayed. Graham laughed too loudly. Graham checked nobody from work was in the bar. Graham said he was not that kind of man. Then Graham stayed anyway.

They had talked.

For hours.

About love and life. About how every success felt smaller than the one before.

And disarmingly, staring into each other’s eyes, they shed the performing certainty required by men who had to be like Graham.

The guy listened.

Patiently.

‘Happens more than you think, baby,’ he said.

Sebastian liked him immediately.

There had been no conquest. No roaring masculine victory. No unforgettable display of heterosexual excellence. There had been a hotel balcony, two cigarettes, one untouched bottle of overpriced gin and Graham crying into a monogrammed towel because he had not been honest for so long that the first attempt had made him dizzy.

The climax was beautiful.

Graham giving him the night of his life went first.

Then the gag about not knowing.

Then the line about proper women.

Then the biggest morsel.

I didn’t know.

Sebastian feasted as if it were the halls of Valhalla and he should know. He was there.

And as was his very nature, when Sebastian was finished he even produced his own napkin of sorts. A sheet of dot matrix paper, perforated on either edge directly out of his tummy and in triplicate.

The room popped back into rhythm. Reality resumed.

‘Was that a printer?’ one asked.

‘This is for you, Graham.’ Sebastian offered the print-out.

Graham took the paper in a daze.

‘What is it?’

‘Your claim reduced by 94%. Quite a whopper.’

Graham went to object, pink rising on his face.

But Graham knew.

Graham had stayed.

Graham had liked him.

The group didn’t realise time had stopped. Graham tried to chuckle.

‘No, then I gave him the night of his life—’

He stopped.

Tried again.

‘And then I—’

Nothing.

His mouth worked around the lie and found nowhere to put it.

A small panic crept across his face.

‘No.’

The piggies waited.

‘No, that’s not right.’

‘What?’ one of them said.

Graham stared at his drink.

‘I knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘About him.’

The silence was magnificent.

Graham tried to laugh.

It came out honest, so it barely came out at all.

‘I knew before we went upstairs.’

He stopped again, searched for an escape, found every exit audited and locked.

The room had nothing for him.

No jeers.

No mate, leave it.

Certainly no rescue.

Not even a chorus of pigs.

Only Graham, standing in the tiny cleared space where his bullshit had been.

‘He told me,’ Graham said.

Sebastian chewed.

Graham made one last attempt.

‘It was just a laugh.’

His lips twitched.

The sentence died.

‘It wasn’t.’

There it was.

Better.

‘He was kind to me,’ Graham said. ‘And I liked him. I liked Prasert.’

‘Who the fuck is Pratsert?‘ one of the pigs honked.

Graham deserved this.

Not because being gay was wrong. Quite the opposite. And not because desire was wrong. It made the world go round.

No, because every man there had heard Graham call other people soft. Had heard him build a little throne out of other people’s shame and climb onto it in polished shoes.

‘I liked him,’ Graham said again, because now there was nothing else available.

Sebastian reached into the left pocket of his black jeans. Skintight to his legs, the material put up a fight.

Sebastian slowly retracted his fingers one by one. Clad in yellow rings of potato starch and sunflower oil, he jazzed his fingers at them, wiggled them suggestively, playfully even.

One-by-one he ate them straight from the knuckle, licked the speckles of seasoning right off the skin. He stopped short of sucking his fingers clean, not wanting to come across perverted.

Graham looked at him properly.

‘Who are you?’

‘Sebastian, by the way.’

‘No. What are you?’

Sebastian dabbed at his lips with perforated sincerity.

Sebastian ate bullshit, because he was the Auditor.

And he liked Hula Hoops too, barbecue flavour, of course.

Around them, the room altered by fractions.

A man near the buffet admitted his yacht belonged to his brother-in-law.

Another conceded he had not almost gone professional.

Somebody by the windows confessed that nobody had called him a visionary, not in those words, not even close.

The air improved.

But the world remained full of bullshit.

Business tomorrow looked promising.

Oh, what a shame what happened next.

The Pantheon of Pedantry’s time was coming to an end.

By Louis Urbanowski

A story idea I’ve had for a long time. Every annoyance, irritation and irksome thing about life is because of the Pantheon of Pedantry. The problem is while life without all of this crap sounds pleasant, perhaps we best be careful what we wish for.

Now time for our favourite. We’re rooting for him.

John Draper’s life followed a delightful logic. A simplicity even binary would envy. He had grown up intoxicated by the smell of engine oil, the clunk of a thousand bits of metal stirring into life, and the hum of the garage itself. It was magic, it was a thunder, it was a symphony that exulted him to his very core. At the dinner table, in between mouthfuls of lumpy mash, he’d daydream of cars. He would make it his life’s work. Route one: as the crow-flies-living. If he could, he’d still be going to sleep in the bed his dad had whittled for him, toes bent back against the wood as he outgrew his childhood. That splendid Cortina mark three. He’d talk of banger racing weekends, his face lighting up, hands miming the gearstick in one of his dad’s many motors. The second he finished school he took an apprenticeship, which led to a part-time job at a local garage soon after. He never looked back.

Expecting the dark secret now?

The twist, the gut punch, to explain why he kidnaps Isabella. Maybe he was an immortal demon preying on young, supple women, perhaps he had countless buried under his patio. Every night he sprouted wings, grew fangs and flew high, seeking alabaster necks of virginal teens. No. His life continued unencumbered, free of constipation and doubt. He met Janet when he was twenty-five at the Bowes Lyon youth centre in 1988; a band called The Meteors had headlined a most pleasant evening. The following year they married. Then came Jake and Annie. Same job, same love for cars and his family ever since. His one vice, his most selfish urge, is going down his local, The Poachers, on Saturday afternoons for a few pints and a catch-up with his mates.

He’d get a little sad from time to time. Who doesn’t? But his view on that was simple. ‘I’ll get a good night’s sleep, and everything will be alright in the morning.’

John Draper was a man you could set your watch to. Dependable, loyal and as spit and sawdust as they came. Hell, you could take the watch off, set it down on the pavement—John would find a way to get it back to you and offer to have a link or two removed from the strap, so it could never fall off again.

Don’t take our word for it, either. Google him. Go on. We’ll wait. No, sorry, come back. Here.

John Draper – Good Samaritan – Stevenage Man talks young person down from bridge

He saved a sodding life. On his way home from the station, he pecked at a small bag of chips, extra salt, hold the vinegar. The wind snatched a crisp packet past his face and his gaze followed it to a lone figure on a footbridge ahead of him. A kid who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, Jake’s age, and at first John was worried the lad might simply be blown away. He looked as if he weighed about four stone wet through. The severity then dawned on John. The boy wasn’t there by mistake, he slowly hoisted himself over the railings, peering down at the busy dual carriageway below. The roar of traffic rose to meet him as wisps of steam escaped John’s cooling chips. He had to act, his heart hammered not from fear but from a desire to help.

‘I just asked if he was okay. If he wasn’t, that he could talk to me.’ The article stated.

The kid had told him to leave him alone, that no one could help him.

‘I didn’t want to pretend I could ever assume what he was going through.’

What did John do? How did he get fifteen-year-old Kevin to reconsider?

‘I offered him a chip.’

Enough said. Hero.

It was Friday night when Isabella first pushed the button in Dean’s garage. The day we were born. Born was wrong. Separated. Forced to exist on our own. Orphaned. We hope you can understand our resentment now. She didn’t care about the button’s consequences. She didn’t stop to think for a second about the collateral. She was only interested in her vanity. She would have argued sanity. Fuck her humanity. Pushing that button was tantamount to genocide. What we were was gone. What we became was created.

Before, we weren’t sentient, not in the way we were afterwards. Everything we thought was as part of Isabella. Then she evicted us, kicked us out of our home and erected an iron curtain. We drifted through and then above, the grey streets of Stevenage. There was no wind. No atmosphere. Only crushing sadness. Life was there, but it sat stuck behind a mirror, or a window. We could see but never touch. For a while, we accepted our fate. We would splutter into the ether and fade. But we didn’t. We persisted.

She had been right to ask Dean, as it turned out.

‘Where does all the stuff go?’ Her squeaky, high voice, the one she changed in the presence of men, it rang in our head. Did you know she did that? We did.

We were shunted somewhere else. Through Isabella, we perceived the world like a grand banquet. It wasn’t always our favourite meal, but it was complete. Coherent. That Friday, we spent hours swirling in the void. It was as if the constituent parts had been rendered down, ground into a mush they feed babies.

We had given up control. Until we found John, that is.

On Saturday he got up early, around seven thirty. For the past few weeks he had been doing ParkRun down at Fairlands Valley Lake with Jake. A five-kilometre run from a standing start had almost cracked his knees in two. The sting in his lungs, the metallic taste of his saliva and his top smelling of damp dog, he could do without, but he enjoyed it. To him, they were badges of honour. Like a slow chili-heat: addictive, uncomfortable, but a satisfying sensation all the same.

Besides, it was nice to spend time with Jake, even if only for the first twenty seconds of the run, such was the melange of shoulders as they passed the first bollard. ParkRun started at nine and John liked to ease into the morning: munch a banana, slurp a cup of tea and lunge into a stretch or two. Jake could roll out of bed at 8.30 and bounce round the lake like roadrunner, no problem.

John was alone with the quiet chatter of Saturday morning television when we said hello. He weighed up how suitable a source of glucose the last custard cream in the packet would be and felt peculiar. It was like his stomach had collapsed in on itself, folded open and snapped back in one motion. An accordion like spring of the gut. He didn’t need the biscuit, no. His hand moved to cover his stomach, he let out a sigh and clasped his other palm tight. But it happened again, this time with a thought. A very clear sentence that started as a sticky itch in the back of his mind.

You’ll have a heart attack if you try and beat your time today and if you don’t try to beat your time, why even bother.

His ear burned and he felt a pressure below his waist. He looked down, observing his aching paunch which was obstructed by the waistband of his running shorts. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead, he felt more congregating on his bald head, he was damp in his chair. He grasped for his cup of tea but spilt a little, dribbling it down his sports top. The stain was immediate and stark against the pearl white cotton, impossible to ignore.

Fat, useless cunt.

The words pulled his face into a grimace and every time the television cut to black he could see a look of disgust staring back at him. He turned it off with a porky press of the standby button and was left alone with fat, old man John.

He didn’t feel himself.

But we needed somewhere to go. It was John or it was nowhere. He was the only candidate who was cavernous. The emptiness in his head created a suck, a pulling motion that drew us to him. His mind was the only place open for business. Everyone else, we could see the mush, the grime buried in the reaches of people’s brains. We weren’t compatible. John was clean and ready. John could house us all, and we were so many.

John just needed time to acclimate to us. We were really trying to help him. Keep him safe. Our first collaboration, oh we were so glad, came when he decided to wake his son, tell Jake that he didn’t much fancy the ParkRun this morning and what about a bacon sandwich instead. Being fifteen and an enjoyer of sleep, Jake didn’t mind at all.

Janet found it strange, but not worryingly so, that John stayed on the sofa in front of the television all morning. Jake was a little irked that the promised bacon sandwich came with the small print that he would, of course, have to make it himself. Annie, his daughter, was the only one that broached it directly.

‘Are you okay, Dad?’

‘Yep.’ John’s answer hissed out like steam.

She raised an eyebrow, kissed his forehead, shrugged, and got on with her day.

John’s only regular calendar appointment was later that afternoon. A pint or two with his mates as Soccer Saturday carried on the very bizarre tradition of men watching men watching men play football. That would be around three o’clock and by one thirty, John hadn’t moved, managed a shower, or changed his clothes.

Janet took it to mean that he was taking it easy and saddled on up next to him for a chat.

‘Been thinking about these jabs a little more, and yeah, I think I want to start them.’

John loved Janet. Worshipped the ground she walked on. In his eyes she was perfection and unlike some men his age, he had no difficulty showing how much he fancied her, if you catch our drift. But Janet suffered from self-esteem issues. Perceived or not. Real or imagined. Being a mum brought on ‘mumsiness’, a sense that she should feel different, look different, be different. It invited self-criticism, a constant nudge to measure herself against some invisible standard, even if nothing about her had changed.

She took the last custard cream from the packet. John had wanted it, how dare she. He shook his head slightly. Janet hesitated a moment as she chewed.

‘I’ve spoken to Flora at work, she gets it a bit cheaper than I would, but it’s still only £150 a month. What do you think?’

They had spoken about this before. Their relationship was one of easy communication. So, as Janet sat there on a sleepy Saturday afternoon next to her best friend, her lover, her husband and soulmate, John’s answer caught her so off guard that she spluttered mushy biscuit crumbs onto the carpet.

‘I don’t think we can afford that. You’d have to be on it for ever, and you’d just be sad when you piled the weight back on if you ever stopped.’

‘But—’ She didn’t even manage the next word. John cut her off, stood up and announced they’d talk about it later, that he needed to get ready for the pub.

In truth, he didn’t understand what was happening to him.

His answer had scared him, to the point of running away. He just wanted to hide in the toilet and regroup. The warm water of the shower would give him breathing room, time to think. By the time he made it to the pub, John was certain he was coming down with something. A dodgy meal earlier in the week, perhaps, a funky egg sandwich from Tesco on lunch break. He’d get himself down the doctors on Monday, they’d check him out and he’d be right as rain. One pint, a small chat with the guys, and then an early night. There was a little shop next door. He’d pick up some flowers for Janet too. He had overreacted. He didn’t mean what he had said.

That resolve, that positive mental attitude, lasted all of five minutes. His usual beer was off, so he had to settle for one with a definite metallic twang. He got it changed, but it was still bad, he let it go flat, the bubbles slowing as he slumped into the booth. Gary droned on about his divorce and all John could think of was ‘Well you shouldn’t have been having it away with her mate then, should you?’ Gary got what he deserved. Then the television lost signal. The static was an irritating volume, coalescing with the clammy humidity of the pub. It fucking stank in here and the beer was shit. Someone offered him a game of pool. He shook his head. Darts? He got up and left without so much as a word.

The WhatsApp group checked in on him. He muted it. They called Janet. That enraged him. He said he was just feeling under the weather and to tell them he’d see them next week. He came home without the flowers.

John was in full panic and decided to take the drawbridge to his life up. He went to bed that night miserable, glum and alone, even though his wife lay next to him. The space between them was a chasm. Sunday wasn’t much better, there were pockets of clarity, moments of serenity, but it felt like an eternal tug of war, the other side chalking their hands, redoubling their efforts, refusing to relent.

He clung to the hope of a doctor’s appointment on Monday. Of course, this being Britain, that was unlikely. The scant few same-day slots were snaffled the second the clock ticked over to eight. His voice pitched up, the anger bubbled in his throat, caught and hitched when the lady on the phone told him she could only fit him in late Tuesday at a special after-hours clinic. As if she were doing him the favour. The cheek of it. It meant he had to endure a day of work with his head in a vice and a stomach that threatened to sink him.

He failed a car that could have passed its MOT. He had spent most of the morning hunched, shoulders high and neck stiff, so when an exhaust like a potato gun on steroids fired a few hundred meters away, John’s irritation snapped. He made a point of checking the boy racer’s car himself, deftly collecting his paperwork and ushering the driver into the waiting room like a VIP. A smile that never quite met his eyes clung to his face. ‘Sure mate, be done in a bit.’

It wasn’t the first noisy exhaust and John had passed plenty. He wasn’t there to judge how people spent their money, and as a proud lover of cars, while a modded-out exhaust wasn’t his cup of tea, he could respect it. But he had made up his mind. This car was failing, long before the guy in baggy jeans who stank of weed got out.

‘I said it failed.’

‘What crawled into your arsehole and died, mate?’

‘You can bring it back when it’s fixed. That will be £54.85. Have a nice day, pal.’

He saw the boy’s middle finger as he raced out of the car park. John’s smile was forced; he couldn’t even enjoy his petty revenge.

That evening he continued to keep himself isolated. He didn’t think what he had was contagious, he more didn’t want any opportunity to chew out his beloved wife, or his kids who didn’t know what he was going through. He couldn’t even explain it, the closest he could get was that he had taken two steps back from active participation in everyday life.

Janet tried, again, furtively, to bring it up as they got ready for bed that night.

‘I don’t know.’ John said. ‘Everything just feels like a lot right now.’

‘The doctor will help, tomorrow, he’ll help.’

The doctor prescribed anti-depressants.

John had sat for no more than thirty seconds before the ageing GP closed his eyes, nodded his head and simply said the name of the drug. Sertraline. John was so on edge by that point, he did a double take, whipped his head around the poxy little room. A hideous yellow light buzzed, and he could taste sterility on his tongue. His heart thumped in his chest with anger. Should he leave? But then the doctor stifled a yawn and continued.

‘A low dose, barely anything. Twenty milligrams a day. Come back in a month.’

Barely anything.

John made to get up. The doctor held a finger up to stop him.

‘Mr Draper, you may feel worse before you feel better.’

John rocked back into the chair and waited for the Doctor to explain.

‘It can precipitate very low, very dark, even suicidal thoughts.’

‘Right. Brilliant.’

‘More common is fatigue, weight gain and low sex drive, loss of libido.’

‘And what are the benefits?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘This feeling. These thoughts. They go away in a week. A month?’

‘I don’t know. Everyone’s different.’

And yet John would continue to feel the same.

His weight went up. The scales laughed at him. He slept facing away from Janet, afraid she might reach out, afraid she might want him. The doctor was right. He felt numb.

A week went by and it was a week where he sank deeper into a cycle of negative thought. He made excuses not to eat with the family, excuses to leave work early, excuses that felt thin even as he said them and yet he kept going. He walked aimlessly around town in wind, rain and weak sunshine. Cars passed and he did not look up to clock the make or model. That part of him had gone quiet. The bed would be too small now, the Cortina mark three was an average car.

He could not reconcile the man in his head with who he used to be. He thought of the footbridge and finally understood what Kevin had said.

That no one could help him.

Now, at this point, you would be justified in blaming this on us. But you do not have the full picture. That is our fault, yes. We admit that. But we were trying to help John. If the medicine your soothsayers hand out like sweets makes you feel worse before you feel better, how was what we were doing any different.

This was Isabella’s fault.

And John would soon realise that. Once he did, that would be the real medicine.

PART FOUR in two weeks ‘The Meet Cute’

It’s been a hot minute, Substack. Over a month — maybe six weeks — since I decided to take a step back, reduce the output here, and go hard on promoting my debut novel, The Right Members Club. But I have some things to talk about now.

I mean, that’s the truth, really.

I took a step back from Substack because, yeah, I had a book coming out, but also because it felt like I was creatively empty, and that scared me a little bit.

I started writing full time in October 2024, and I just put my head down and got on with it because I loved it — and I still do love it. I wrote three books, hundreds of short stories, blog posts, and Substack pieces, and I was like, this is brilliant. There’s no stopping me.

I had ideas coming out of my proverbial sphincter, and I thought this would never end.

Then I relapsed with OCD. I lost.

Not so much relapsed. It’s always there, but I always imagined that I’d erected walls. A little bit like that film World War Z in Israel — quite an obscure reference.

I erected these walls, and it started to win. It started to creep up.

Now obviously, I’m having a kid at the end of June, which I am absolutely over the moon about, but also terrified by. Scared, anxious, excited, optimistic — just curious, I suppose, about the seismic change it will have on my life.

So all of these things, plus the imposter syndrome that comes with every author —

God, you quit your career, Louis, to do this. Are you even going to make anything of it?

I was really down on the book before it published. I thought,

Oh, I’ve just ended up spitting it out there. It’s probably not the best thing I could have written. It was the first book I wrote. Should I wait? Should I be patient? But if I don’t do it now, will I ever do it?*

I didn’t get picked up through querying, and all these things were going on in my head.

So the OCD got a foothold, climbed over that wall, and started winning. Started invading.

So I went back on tablets. I went back on sertraline, an SSRI. I went back on my original dose and, for the first four, five, six weeks, you know, it gets worse.

I don’t want to say I had suicidal thoughts, but you get the ideation of it. And because intrusive thoughts work in a way where they latch onto the thing you fear most, it plays and it plays and it plays, and you get into a really dark place with it.

It’s more imagining the scenario rather than willing yourself to do it — to be clear for anyone that’s experienced OCD.

Then it started to get a bit better, but not enough. I still felt the failing of the walls, the falling of the walls, the fading of my fight. I ended up increasing my dose to 100 milligrams, and that’s helped immeasurably.

I’m very happy to say I’m in a much brighter place now than I was back then, but it had a knock-on effect.

Doing some research into it, SSRIs do change your behaviour and brain function when it comes to creative things, and I don’t think I’ve adapted to that yet.

I sit down and I have things that I want to write, but the words do not come. They are chalky, obscured, blocky. They don’t fit.

It’s like I’ve got one of those kids’ puzzles and the square peg does not go in the round hole, no matter how much I try.

But it’s okay. I’m taking steps to try and work through it.

It’s even affected things like reading. The concentration just isn’t there.

However, OCD does have, I would say, almost collateral benefits. That’s what I would call it.

I can laser focus on stuff that excites me, and the book launch — how to promote, market, and grow on social media — has been great fun.

I’ve met some wonderful people. I’ve started a podcast over on Instagram with three other brilliant independent authors. I’ve learned how to talk about my books succinctly. I’ve learned about myself in terms of the issues that I care about.

And I’m really pleased to say that, in just over six weeks — I think, yeah, it came out on the 3rd of April — the book has sold around 700 copies and attained number one bestseller status, which it has held for approaching two weeks now in Political Humour. It even crested to number one in Comedy, which is mind-blowing because that is a big category. Political Humour, not so much.

But yeah, by any metric, as an indie author, selling that many books in this short a time span is a success.

I should bank that. I should use that to build confidence and say,

Louis, you can do this as a career if you want to.

Now the royalties — that’s a whole different thing.

I went with Amazon KDP. I can just about afford a coffee and a croissant when I total up everything I’ve spent on editing, cover art, advertising, and all of that good stuff.

But it’s been a wild, wild ride.

And I think that’s maybe the point of today’s blog post: not to be too rigid. To be adaptable. Life isn’t linear in a lot of ways.

I started Substack back in November 2025 and it was brilliant. I always get excited about new things, and the hype’s there, and I pushed hard. I published three things a week, and I grew, and it was great.

Then the magic wore off a little bit.

And it’s in those moments, where the novelty fades and the honeymoon period is over, that you really get a sense of what excites you and what’s going to last.

I need to rethink my relationship with Substack, and I will.

I do want to write more short stories. I have lots of ideas now. I didn’t have them a couple of weeks ago, but I’m not ready to sit down and write full time again at the moment.

But it will come.

The sequel to The Right Members Club is fully fleshed out in my head, and I have The Milks, my zombie novel, which needs a couple of edit passes but could feasibly be released in the next six months if I sort all of the cover art and stuff.

Factor into that all of the stuff with the baby, and maybe you understand why the OCD started to get a foothold again.

I’m in a much stronger place, as I say. I’m excited about the future, but I’m unsure how to predict it.

I am an author. I’ll always be an author now. Publishing a book changes that.

Let’s see what the next six months brings.

So yeah, welcome back to UrbWrites Weekly — but it’s not weekly anymore. It’s monthly. It’s six-weekly. It’s whenever the hell I feel likely.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep updating The Button, which is my ongoing serial in the Stevenage: Liminal Tales section. I have more plans for Liminal Tales over there, and you will see some shorts from me in the future.

So yeah, thank you to everyone who’s supported me and followed the journey — and you know, the 20 or 30 people that will get the notification and read this.

But yeah.

Thanks, everybody.

Have a good one.

Instagram Post

TikTok Post

Getting the hang of this now.

Isabella initiated the drink with Dean. She had thought it best to get on with her life mid toilet break on a Wednesday afternoon. These normative instructions were frequent. She had come to think of them like pimples, eventually one would be succulent enough to pop. She thinks she fancied Dean, she could convince herself in time, sure. Love was like a slow cooker, a hammy metaphor to tide her over.

The drink, as we’ve described, was a damp squib. Dean Jenkins wasn’t a genius; there was no savant lurking in the depths of his psyche. The aptitude tests that came as part of the application to Lumora were fine, if unspectacular. A lab technician assistant with requisite qualifications and a need to pay rent. He worked a simple, mundane nine-to-five. And he was horny. Oh, so horny. Maybe that’s slightly disingenuous. It wasn’t as if he was a bad person. It makes his death all the sadder. He had a good heart; he certainly didn’t harbour half as many worries and insecurities as our Isabella. So, after the comment to his colleague, he felt bad. He decided he wanted to help, and he thought he knew exactly how to do it.

The next day at lunch, Dean wandered over to Isabella’s desk, his white coat swishing in weird synchronisation with his gait. She felt her cheeks flush, because she knew a lab assistant would have no reason to come all the way up to the seventh. She started to rip a nail off her little finger and pushed her tongue around her mouth to make sure it was clear of sweetcorn from her sandwich. She needed tits and teeth for this.

‘I really enjoyed last night. Could I see you again?’

Isabella was bowled over. The cheeks kept flushing, her heart started to thrum. Her obsessive thoughts snaked out little hands, to fondle and jiggle the idea that Isabella might have hit it off romantically with someone. The chime of wedding bells started to rise, she thought about kid’s names and where to live; as to benefit from the best possible catchment area.

She got ahead of herself, because that’s what control is to someone like Isabella.

That evening Isabella took an Uber over to Dean’s house. A pleasant new build in an unremarkable part of town called Great Ashby. If houses came with screen protectors, like phones did, Dean’s would still be stuck to the double-glazing. She didn’t think she would sleep with him but wouldn’t rule it out. Her handbag still had the rape whistle of course, but now also boasted a prophylactic. She was a full spectrum girl. She rang the doorbell and then gave a little start as the garage door rolled open. After the clunking had finished, Dean poked his head out.

‘In here, got something to show you.’

Whistle ready to go, she gulped and ducked under.

She gave him top marks for how clean and tidy his garage was. The floor was immaculate, pristine white and almost pearlescent in its finish. Where a car should have been, instead were two plastic chairs and on the one closest to Isabella was a small black device, slightly smaller than your average phone, with one singular ruby red button.

We’ll give you the conversation here exactly as it happened, if you so wish. Best for you to form your own opinions.

‘Dean, I thought we were going to get a Chinese, why are we in your garage?’

‘We will. Sweet and sour king prawn balls, beef and black bean and a chow-mein, all on me. But I wanted to show you something.’

‘That, you mean?’

‘Yes. This is the button. I think it can help you.’

‘Dean, is this from the lab?’

‘Yep. It’s what I’ve been working on.’

‘What is it? Like a universal remote for my telly? I have two of them. They don’t work. I also read about the infrared radiation if you have too many remotes in your house, studies show—’

‘—It’s for that. Right there. I lied about last night; I wanted to enjoy it. But I couldn’t. You were just so… worried about everything. This can help.’

‘Oh.’

‘No, I mean I like you. I want to like you. I do. But you said it yourself, you’re unhappy and petrified of getting sick from what may or may not happen to you. That’s what the button’s for. It gets rid of all that.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘How did they explain it—erm—yeah, like the recycle bin on your computer. You know where you ctrl A and ctrl delete a bunch of stuff.’

‘I drag.’

‘Not the point. But yes, imagine that, but for your brain. This button does that, for your mind.’

‘And I just press it?’

‘No, you take it out for dinner, of course you press it.’

‘But it’s red.’

‘Official button rouge, thank you.’

‘Red buttons are always bad.’

‘This one isn’t. No boom.’

‘Hmm, it looks funny. Is it one of those that needs a double press? Like does it get stuck down?’

‘One press, traditional style, classic technique.’

‘Is there a ping?’

‘A what now?’

‘You know, like an alert. It could subscribe me to a newsletter. I don’t want spam. Next thing I know I need to enter my card details and then I’m in a pump and dump crypto scheme and owe HMRC a packet.’

‘Calm down. It’s an isolated-mechanical-one-simple-push scenario. A tactile response for your fingertip and unless your nerve endings are shot—and don’t worry, I know what you’re like, they’re not—then you’ll know when it’s done.’

‘But then what happens?’

‘The instant the button is pushed your mind will be free. No more chatter, no more worry and all anxiety will be drained away.’

‘Where does it go?’

‘What?’

‘I’ve always wondered about losing weight or Wi-Fi. Like, is it in the air we breathe? Or are there just invisible words and calories floating through the sky. Fat sentences. Greasy little adjectives. Look, right above me now, grammar fried rice. Can it get stuck in my lungs, is that what hay fever is?’

‘Which one?’

‘Eh?’

‘Which one do you want me to laugh at first?’

‘That’s not fair. I’m worried.’

‘So, push the button.’

‘But that’s what I’m worried about.’

‘And when you push it, you won’t be. Ta-da.’

‘I don’t get it. My mind will be empty, yes, but what will I think?’

‘Whatever you want.’

‘I want to think about the button right now, to tell you the truth.’

‘Only dreams and aspirations after you push it. What do you want? What excites you?’

‘I wanted to go on holiday to Ibiza but then I found out there was two sides to the island. The party-night-club-drug-fucky-festy side and then the tapas-white-lineny-shirty-sangria part. I was overwhelmed.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Week at home. Crisps and Bridgerton.’

‘Blimey, so okay, you push that button and you’ll just book the holiday and see both parts of the island. Rent a car, probably.’

‘Sounds expensive. And is it a good time of year now?’

‘See.’

‘See what?’

‘All of that extra stuff. All the baggage like sand between your toes. Poof, gone with a single push.’

‘Forever?’

‘No, not quite. See, it’s like clearing your gutters out. All the crap and gunk will slowly build back-up.’

‘I live in a flat.’

‘Flats have gutters, don’t they?’

‘Don’t know. Now I’m worried I’ve neglected mine, cheers.’

‘Christ.’

‘Kidding, kind of. So, I’ll need to push the button again?’

‘In-time, eventually, sure.’

‘Not a one-simple-push scenario then, is it?’

‘You’re impossible.’

‘Charming, I put my nice tights on for you.’

‘I’m trying to do you a favour, I had to pull some strings to get it out of the lab.’

‘Dean, did you steal this?’

‘Borrowed it.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘Of course it’s safe. Look here on my phone, we have all this data from our tests, can you see that? A near zero percent likelihood.’

‘What’s that for?’

‘Potential, hypothetical complications.’

‘Such as?’

‘You won’t care when you push it.’

‘I care now, tell me.’

‘Fine. Infection, bleeding, nerve injury, DVT, PE, death, dural tear, CSF leak, bowel/bladder/sexual dysfunction, paralysis, oesophageal injury, pharyngeal injury, tracheal injury, injury to the nerves of the voice box resulting in a soft voice or a hoarse voice, dysphagia, non-union, persistent, or recurrent symptoms and further surgery.’

‘PE? Like at school? Physical Education?’

‘Pulmonary Embolism.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Blood clot in a lung artery. Nasty way to go.’

‘No, I mean the button, sounds dangerous.’

‘Don’t press it then, forget it, we’ll just get Chinese and call it a night.’

‘Sorry, no, I’ll do it, I’ll do it. I’m just scared; I’m always scared. Every day when I wake up, I’m terrified by what I did the day before, what I have to do that day, and what’s coming up tomorrow. Fear wrapped in anxiety rattling through my brain. Little pigs in blankets of doubt, self-loathing and regret. I eat; I’m fat. I relax; I’m lazy. I work; I’m bored. Being in the moment is like having your fingernails removed by the claw of hammer. What comes next? How can I agonise over that, obsess over the tiny details until I’ve burnt any source of joy or relief in the present and shifted everything over, kicked the can down the road and then stepped in shit as I traipse my way, reluctantly, toward it. You don’t know what it’s like, to be removed from existence, a second out of sync—’

‘What happened? Are you okay?’

‘I pushed it. When I was ranting, I just pushed it.’

‘And?’

They started making out. Isabella dropped her handbag with a clunk, and they did it right there on the pristine floor. When they were finished, they ordered Chinese and watched a film. Isabella felt new but it was more than that. It was as if she could see the world for the first time. Experience it with all her senses. The frankly average takeaway blew her taste buds away. The Fast & Furious film made her laugh and cry in ways she couldn’t comprehend. And Dean was no porn star. Still, the sex was the best she had ever had.

With one press of a button Izzie had arrived for the first time and as the evening wound to a close she found herself with one singular thought in her mind.

‘I don’t ever want to go back to how I was.’

‘Isabella…’

A curt hand, the debut, ‘Call me Izzie.’

‘Izzie, I don’t know how long it will last. That was the first time anyone has ever pushed it.’

That Dean had lied to her didn’t upset her, wasn’t shocking. Before she would have been liable to lob a king prawn ball at him; smatter his white hoodie with sweet and sour sauce. But now she just laughed. Unburdened with needless considerations, free of worry, Izzie was left with just a clear vision on how to proceed.

‘I’ll need to take the button then, won’t I?’

‘Huh. Are you joking? I’ve stolen prototype medical science worth millions. To help you!’

‘To sleep with me. Let’s be real.’

‘Whatever. The point is, it’s my cock on the block if it’s not there tomorrow morning when they start work.’

‘When does it release?’

‘Release?’

‘The shops, when can I buy one.’

‘Christmas. A Christmas, I think. Maybe the next one, if we get it through human trials and approval.’

‘And how long will this last?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But not till next Christmas?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I just don’t know.’

‘I’m keeping it then.’

‘I’ll lose my job at the very least, but you don’t under—.’

‘Not my problem.’

Dean was exasperated, offended even. He got up and stamped his feet, waved his arms and shouted. All needless huffing and puffing. He had the button safely locked in his garage. Izzie wasn’t in the mood for a fight, or a theft, life was good. And besides, she could play the long game. Here was a man that had thought with his dick. Now that was taking a nap, the cognitive function had clearly returned to his brain. His own button, in a way. Izzie chuckled to herself. She didn’t need to convince Dean now. She only needed to wait until his dick woke up.

After that second date, Izzie enjoyed a week of bliss.

She’d wake up fresh as a daisy. Before, as Isabella, she’d barely go ten minutes without worrying about something. Each morning a new batch of alarms would start to blare. Don’t be late for work. You haven’t been to the gym this week. Did you rinse the Tupperware?

For a time, she thought that Dean had got it wrong. The button was a one time, one push scenario. She would see him watching her in the staff canteen, somewhere between afraid and professionally curious. She even got fruity with it, leaving little post it’s on his lunch tray as she walked by. Fancy Ibiza? He kept his distance; it made Izzie laugh. As if he worried that she’d erupt like an unlucky blighter from Alien, the button bursting forth from her chest. She felt great.

Her skin improved, her weight levelled off, she laughed more, slept better and even started to crack jokes. Yakult’s went unopened in her fridge; she wasn’t as anal about the time she left for work in the morning and didn’t feel the pressure to stay on after home time. Weirdly though, some days she did. Because she felt like it. And that was the secret to feeling free and easy. There wasn’t a method to any of the madness. There wasn’t a method to freeness. It was taking things as they came. Living in the moment, yada, yada and all that jazz.

It lasted a week, as we said.

She had needed the toilet, sometime around three in the morning. Half-asleep and unwilling to turn the light on she had flopped onto the porcelain and started to go.

Don’t clip it short, that’s how you get a UTI. What if you had broken your little toe just then, stumbling around in the dark. Is the balcony door locked. What if you can’t get back to sleep. What if you sleepwalk. What if you go up and over and crash down below into the bin shed. Rubbish. Filth. That’s you.

‘Fuck.’ The word came like a bullet.

The thoughts came with a headache and cotton mouth. Like a hangover that pulled at your skin so tight a breeze would rip it open.

She couldn’t get back to sleep that night, tossing and turning as if she could shake the thoughts loose, the obsessive hateful images would sludge out onto her silk pillowcases, like rancid earwax. But they remained. By the time the sun broke above the gloomy cloud cover, they had grown. Isabella was back and she was back in a big, painful way.

She was the first to arrive at the lab that morning and waited in her car. Dean himself had been plucking up the courage to approach Isabella, sorry Izzie, to enquire about the possibility of registering interest for another date. She had been right; the dick was starting to take over again. We’re not completely comfortable with the sexual desires that course through the brain, so maybe we’re doing Dean a disservice, but when you had shown a pretty lady kindness, when you had gone further by expunging all that plagued her, why couldn’t you have a meal and another special cuddle?

‘Can we meet up again? Tonight?’ She blurted out to him in the middle of the carpark.

It being exactly what Dean wanted to hear, he didn’t listen properly or drink all of Isabella in that morning. She was drawn, a bit rough. Her palms cupped her elbows so tightly that her knuckles began to whiten. He missed that. He also didn’t pick up on the desperation in first, her tone and second, her eyes.

‘Of course. There’s the new film—’

‘No, my place. But Dean—’

‘—Yes?’

‘I need it again.’

Dean wasn’t too far up his own arse that he thought she meant him. But Isabella caught the disappointment in his eyes, saw those same eyes take her in. Now he saw it, now he understood. If he didn’t know better, she might have been a drug addict. People had been talking. But either way, this woman was in pain. It’s the reason why he agreed to smuggle the button out down his pants again. It was the only place they didn’t wave the security wand over. And that’s where it stayed all the way to the penthouse’s front door.

‘Where is it?’ No hello, no kiss on the cheek. Isabella was crawling the walls by seven o’clock that evening.

Dean didn’t answer with words. He simply nodded his head forward, gestured to the package in his package.

Misunderstanding him she replied, ‘I’ll do whatever you want, if you just tell me where it is.’

Safe inside with the door shut, he clarified.

‘Get it out. Give it to me now.’

He studied her; she was a harrowing sight. Her tongue kept licking at her lips, but it was her eyes that panicked Dean. At first, he thought it a trick of the light. But no, they had sunk deep into their sockets, darkened by webs of crimson, veins pulsing like worms beneath the surface.

‘Are you okay?’ The best he could manage.

‘No, I’m not fucking okay. I don’t know what you’ve done to me, but I want to kill myself, not because I’m depressed. Depression would be a walk in the park compared to this. No, to shut the fucking thoughts up. They hurt. Why do they hurt, Dean?’

Without saying a word and never taking his eyes off her flickering flesh, Dean shoved his hands down his pants and produced the button. It was warm. It was damp. He flicked a pube from it before placing it in her clammy palm.

She pressed it.

A moan slipped out of her, not sexual, but medicinal, like soothing a burn. She stepped back, then again, like a headrush from a cigarette, until the shoe cabinet ushered her down. Slumping until her chin rested on her chest, she went still. Hand’s splayed and leg’s parted like the red sea, she didn’t look up, didn’t speak. Dean wasn’t sure she was breathing. Her head sagged and the button lay next to her. It was only when he made a move toward it, did she spark into life. Her quiet, imperceptible breaths became big hulking gasps of air.

‘Do not touch it.’ She snatched it up and pushed the button another three times.

When she was finished, she had a smile as wide as a rainbow and the rings around her eyes started to fade, the worms burrowing deep. Her mouth felt sugary and happy. Now her eyeballs had a wet glassy sheen to them like someone had forgotten to rinse the suds off.

Izzie was back. Isabella had been banished. But John, he was coming.

PART THREE coming next time. BIG OLD JOHN!

He decides to take the test two years later, on his eighteenth birthday.

The rest of his year from school didn’t wait. He’s seen the notifications ping like popcorn. He hasn’t counted, but he doesn’t think there are many shadows amongst his former classmates.

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Most present the result, proudly so. Some crow, slightly less.

Naked profiles are rare nowadays. It usually means one of two things: yet to take the test, or dominant criminality.

He balls his fist thinking about the possibility. The neighbour said that only two per cent of the population—globally—are so unlucky.

Major, minor or nebulous. He’d take any. His mother has a friend of a friend whose result came back straddling the latter two: Public Toilet. She still doesn’t know what to do with it, but the council will employ her for life.

When he arrives, the queue is quiet, only three people in front.

This used to be called a chemist, he read about it on his phone. The shelves are bare now; it’s the test centre.

Two teenage boys snicker and jostle as they approach the counter, their book bags swinging around their knees. They’ve come straight from school.

‘Cars, mate. Or maybe like, making food, I dunno. What about you?’ one says to the other.

‘Something with the revenue service, you get guns, innit.’

The first nods, a serious look on his face. He slaps the second on the back as the clerk waves them forward.

The other behind them is an old woman; it surprises him. The news says that over ninety-seven per cent of adults have taken the test, citing the tax and pension benefits.

He’s not doing it for those.

The gibbering teens disappear behind one of the curtains into a cubicle, having paid with smart rings.

The old woman raises a hand, surely not a ring, and no, she drives it into her green corduroy trousers and pulls out a battered ten-pound note. The clerk handles it like a soiled rag and ushers her forward.

Before she ducks behind another curtain, to no one in particular, ‘I’m retired now. Husband thinks I may as well take the test. What harm can it do?’

He’s next and the transaction is swift. The clerk mumbles that he can expect the result on his phone in minutes.

The cubicle is dour, with three paper-thin, wobbly walls and a recessed tablet stuck into a jutting shelf.

There are reams of terms and conditions to get through. He looks for the skip button, but it’s greyed out.

On page thirty-two of thirty-four he declines the short video on the history of the test. He doesn’t need to hear about deciphering junk epigenetic markers again.

He doesn’t need to hear the lies again.

The Great Dismissal was manufactured.

At first, it was just another recession.

The government pioneered a scheme; subsidies for those that reallocated their employees.

If an employer felt someone was not up to task, they could put them back into circulation.

Overnight, seventy five percent of the UK’s workforce were redundant, laid off with faint promise of reallocation.

Everyone laid off had to provide DNA to assess relocation compatibility—nonsensical jargon.

The test results came like a flood, banishing the old world.

People say they understand the test. They lie. All that matters is that people trust the result.

The government wants the result.

It was no longer the people versus the system.

It was neighbour on neighbour. Spouse on spouse.

When people are broken and there is no hope, that lowest ebb just before it all fades to black, that is when they strike.

‘Spit,’ comes the neutral voice from the tablet.

He hesitates.

‘Spit, now,’ the tone insistent.

He gives it his best and covers the screen with as much saliva as he can muster. It’s absorbed by the membrane of the tablet and a big green tick appears.

The clerk grunts at him to vacate the cubicle, so he obliges and leaves the shop.

The temperature has dropped a few degrees; he shivers as he steps onto the street.

His phone buzzes in his pocket. He should look at the result.

But the smells of kebab and the noises from coffee shops distract him.

He decides to wait and look at his phone in the warm with a drink, but as he turns right, the old woman is standing alone.

An urge to procrastinate fights for control over him. He lets it win. He starts a conversation.

‘Happy with your result?’

‘I gave my whole life to my business.’

She didn’t hear him; he asks again.

‘Mother. It came back with Mother.’

‘And is that . . . good?’ He tucks his hands into his jeans. The old woman doesn’t seem to feel the cold at all.

‘Mind your own business.’ As she barges past, he thinks she’s crying.

The coffee shop is quiet.

Like usual, he’s prompted to choose between test-accredited espresso or hobbyist. It’s a thirty per cent difference in price.

He opts for test-accredited in the spirit of things. The taxpayer would always win.

The phone rests on his thigh as he cups the tiny thimble of black liquid, trying to generate some sort of warmth, some sort of confidence.

‘How bad can it be?’ he says softly.

The worst, as it turns out.

His ears ring as his skull fills with pressure.

He wanted a purpose, a direction in life.

The word staring back at him is a hideous dead end.

Murder.

He downs the rest of his espresso. It’s still scalding hot; his eyes water.

Everyone has a talent. No matter how subtle, obscure or niche. It’s there.

The test will find a natural aptitude.

The rest is up to him.

By Louis Urbanowski

Future Britains is an anthology featuring British Substack authors. Short stories about what awaits us as technology and society unravel in chaotic, interesting and sometimes terrifying ways. is the driving force behind this upcoming book. Follow for more!

We’ll give it to you straight.

Can’t stand the evil, lying, fake pretend bitch. And that’s being nice.

Oo la la. Isabella is doing great, isn’t she? She’s rebranded. See her curt little hand fly out, ‘It’s Izzie, actually.’

New and improved but it’s lipstick on a pig. People ask if it was that simple. The name, they mean. A breath of fresh air in a stuffy life. She’ll laugh, flutter those big lashes.

‘Oh, you know, this and that. Everyone’s a work in progress, aren’t they?’

If it were a set of new, impressive, plastic breasts, perhaps people wouldn’t care as much. But it’s that je ne sais quoi that bugs them. Physically she’s still the old Isabella, but to be in her company is to experience a different person.

Izzie, yeah.

Dean, who worked in the lab, went on a date with Isabella. He remarked, mid experiment the next day, rubber gloves up to his elbows, ammonia in his nostrils, that the girl was like a coiled spring. So much as breath in her direction and she’d be liable to take an eye out. Jumpy, uncomfortable and the only topic of conversation to put her at ease was the different maladies she may or may not have. The GPs had her on a special list, you know. For those that sit down and start yapping, self-diagnosis twats. Dean left, having picked up the bill, bemoaning NHS wait times. What a first date.

For now, he had gotten off lightly.

If you got Isabella going, she’d not stop about all the trauma in her life. Her dad leaving when she was five, her mum shacking up with Clive who may or may not have abused her; she’d play that one the right side of vague. But now, she doesn’t talk about the past at all. Isabella is dead, long live Izzie and where are we going for lunch, by the way? Somewhere fabulous and delicious, that’s the right answer for our Izzie. She’s a five-star review of a good time nowadays. We get little snippets every so often, a glimpse into her life. She’s wrong. She doesn’t know what she’s done, but we do.

She travels lighter, did we mention that. Before, her handbags had become glorified Bergens. A girl on manoeuvres. Large, lumbering and full of everything she might ever need. She used to be able to list off the inventory like days of the week, if only, far more than seven.

‘New pair of undies because you never know,’ she’d say, not stopping for breath, before roleplaying a pharmacist. ‘Tabs for travel sickness, indigestion, constipation and its runnier opposite. Then ibuprofen, paracetamol and a tub of daytime valerian root extract. I don’t often carry the nighttime version, I’m not crazy!’

No, Isabella, it’s totally normal to carry around a rape whistle, Chinese mace courtesy of a VPN rooted trip to Amazon, a small truncheon and those little capsules that contain an emergency twenty-pound note. Exhausting but not exhaustive either, it was the shortened version. We used to hear it all, help her with it, even.

But now she’s content with a small clutch, some spangly gold nonsense. She can’t leave it alone. Her dates, nightly and numerous now, notice immediately. If they bring it up, she’s light and breezy. ‘A woman’s mind is as complex as the contents of her handbag, no?’ Some sad saps thought that meant drugs. Sadder ones thought that was cool. They’d be into it. Her algorithm delighted in providing fodder that dug that sort of thing. And no doubt Izzie was the thing.

It’s funny, because as Isabella, she would have been hung up about that. Why was he asking about my handbag. Was I touching it too much. Did it match my outfit. A few times it almost happened. Her insecurities would start to flare. Isabella would gain a foothold. But Izzie would slip a hand into her clutch and all would be okay again.

We’ll join her tonight, in a moment, on the way back from a date that thought he might get his end away. Two for one cocktails at family chain Chiquito’s on a Tuesday evening. Dream on, partner. Izzie just likes to savour the chase. That energy desperate men give off when they think the world revolves around them. As they’re purring over their tats, or waxing lyrical about their big bulging bonus packet, Izzie will sniff it; a better scent than tex-mex fajitas any night of the week.

Perhaps if she had stayed, gone back to his and got it on, then this might have turned out differently. Maybe she would have avoided John—but we’re skipping ahead.

Izzie lives in Stevenage but is planning to move away, somewhere sunnier, with more glitz. When she was Isabella, Stevenage suited her fine. She’s close to two major motorways, the A1 and M1. There’s a direct service into central London, all the way to Brighton in fact and going the other way she could be in Doncaster within two hours. Not that she’d travel by train if she could help it. God forbid. Touching the poles and seats would bring on a bout of anti-bacterial gel scrubbing so intense it would leave her skin flushed and sore.

But for work, it worked. She could totter out of her penthouse flat, take the lift down to the car park in the Monument Court complex, just north of the Old Town, and be at work in ten minutes. She knew exactly when to leave, 8.13, to beat the rush hour jam. By 8.25 she’d be sitting down to open her overnight oats at her desk on the seventh floor of Lumora Labs, before her boss, Terry, sauntered in at 8.37, sometimes 8.39. She knows because she recorded it in a spreadsheet.

Isabella wasn’t particularly enamoured with her OCD.

People spoke of specific variants, like ice cream flavours. There’s the classic, the vanilla, the checking. Touching and flicking light switches. Wrenching the tap every which way and twice on Sunday. Wardrobes that resembled a polyester Pantone chart. Tick, got. She was somehow both a hoarder and a neat freak too. Do not go in that cupboard as you come into her flat, the one with the boiler. You would be crushed by a tonne of crap that straddled the line, neither keep nor chuck. Look deep enough and you’d find half a foosball table.

Those are pedestrian flavours. But what about the maple pecans or the rum raisins of this world. She paid extra for the penthouse flat but obviously she wouldn’t dream of stepping out onto the balcony. No, of course not. That will be because of the intrusive thoughts. The premium shit. Jump, Isabella, fling yourself over and if you do, try and land on your head because there’s a low percentage chance you survive on your back. The balcony door stays firmly locked, even in the sweltering summer heat. The cladding doesn’t work; the insulation’s knackered and doesn’t meet regulations.

For Isabella it was almost as if her mind took a scoop of all fifty-one flavours and blended it. Here, drink this OCD milkshake. Brain freeze, the result. But like anyone that’s ever had brain freeze, you shake it off and keep sucking that straw. Isabella made peace with it. This was her lot in life and she would muddle through.

Once she found a partner, had a kid, settled down and moved out she’d be okay. And there it went again. Why haven’t you found someone. Why aren’t you pregnant yet. Did you know the ideal window to have a child is 28 to 32, you’re 33, Isabella. And can you really sell the penthouse. In this economy. Have you got the EWS1 form. The Grenfell disaster was bad, sure, but what about the mortgage values of the flat. How much to replace all the cladding. You’re a bad person, you ought to donate. Fuck you, Isabella.

So, no, not particularly enamoured.

But Izzie is light and airy. As long as she has her clutch with her. Because the gaps are getting smaller. The windows of bliss, shorter. Now the milkshake is warm, it’s foul and fetid. Oh God, they’ve put banana in it, both Isabella and Izzie hate banana. Get this milkshake out of my sight, I cannot handle it.

‘Have you seen my clutch?’

She repeats it, panicking, another three times before the driver has even got a syllable out.

‘I don’t know. I picked you up. You got it in. Do you need me to go back to the bar?’

Izzie’s hands fly beneath the seat. They come back up covered in crumbs and hair. She wants to gag. Where is her anti-bac gel? In her old handbag, the fucking holdall. The one she doesn’t need anymore.

Isabella is starting to rear her ugly head.

The buckle of the clutch glints at her but it’s not relief that she feels. It’s been too long and they’re building now. Worse than ever. The button has fallen out; the thoughts tell her. You’ve left it at the bar. It’s been crunched under a tyre of some boy racer on the way home. You’re finished and we’ll see you up and onto that balcony tonight. Oh yes, we will.

A deep breath holds them at bay, for now. The button is there, she can feel it bulge in the clutch. She snatches it up, forces her hand in and presses it down.

Release.

She cannot be that careless again. She affects a playful smack on her forehead. ‘Izzie, what am I like,’ before sliding her hand in again, removing the prize and stowing it securely in her bra.

‘You okay, want me to stop?’ The taxi driver is all wide eyebrows in the rear view. ‘Expensive, your bag, I take it?’

The clutch is worth ten pounds, if that. Her phone a little over a thousand. She lets her shoulders relax and slumps back into the seat. Her lacy left B cup now holds the priceless object.

‘Thanks for being so understanding, darling.’ And she’s out the Uber with a wink and a grip of the old man’s shoulders. She even gives him a little squeeze, he’s made up. She can tell.

And that brings us to the present. We’re close.

If the button wasn’t in the clutch, then the agony would have continued to build and it would have started to manifest itself in physical pain. First her neck would tighten, like a braid of hair caught in a power drill. Then her ears would start to feel full and wet. Imagine hot porridge poured from a rusty ladle. All that tension would culminate in her jaw tightening. The temporomandibular joint for those into anatomy. To Isabella it would have been a cue to stop, open her handbag and pull out painkillers. She was known to crunch them, chew them between her veneers. Bitter paracetamol first, then chalky ibuprofen second, washed down with a bottle of overpriced electrolyte bullshit.

And now as Izzie, that stuff is just not important. What a shame. Because if she would have stopped to do it, she might have seen the pair of eyes staring at her from the bin shed. John found it easy to slip inside and wait. Oh, he was in agony himself. Constantly shifting the weight between two feet as if he needed the toilet. But his bladder was empty. It was his head that needed evacuation. She doesn’t see John slide out from the swinging gate of the bin shed, doesn’t see him slip his hand into his overall, and doesn’t see the slightly damp cloth until she’s smothered by it. She doesn’t see anything at all until she’s safely upstairs, in her penthouse.

‘Where is it?’ John demands the second her eyelids flutter open.

She could really do with that painkiller now, she thinks.

No, scratch that. She could really do with slipping a hand inside her bra.

So could John.

John bends, picking up the empty clutch. His eyes bulge as he waves it at her. He smells of grease and sweat. Then comes a desperate bark. ‘Where is it?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Of course, she knows exactly.

‘Turn out your pockets.’ He says it deadpan, flat.

‘Pockets? Clearly not up on women’s fashion.’

John gives her the once over. She winks; he sighs.

‘Fucking airhead.’

‘What, don’t you like my dress?’

He doesn’t fucking care. It won’t be long until he thinks to conduct a strip search and shove a hand into her underwear. Perfect. Nothing like desperation to break the ice. But he’s in a blind rage. He’s only brought Izzie about three steps into her penthouse. Believe it or not, unconscious humans, even petite, weight jabbed women, are an absolute chore to bundle in and out of lifts and through fire doors. She’s on a little kitchen stool, bound and droopy. To her right is the cupboard that should never be opened. The cupboard full of hoarded crap and regrets that didn’t make the clean freak cut. John thinks it’s a fine place to start the search though and almost knocks her on her arse getting to it.

‘No! Don’t!’ Izzie’s cool exterior shatters with a scream. She needs her button, it’s starting again. Everything is starting to build.

And with good reason too. Because fuck the foosball table, as John pulls the handle, out flops Dean, you know, the guy from work. Dead as a dodo.

John is stilled. His turn with the wide eyes now. He looks at the woman he’s grown to hate over the past month, the woman who’s ruined his life, with his mouth slack and tongue fighting to find the words.

When he does, they’re the obvious. ‘Isabella, did you murder Dean?’

She looks down at her shoes. They’re pretty, they match the pocketless dress.

‘You know him? And I prefer Izzie now. Who the fuck are you, mate?’

Right, best we start at the beginning.

PART ONE coming next time. Yeah, weird right?

‘Explanation is the tide by which horror recedes.’

One of Charlie’s takeaways from a video essay about a derelict office building in Bristol. It was not haunted, just squatted by junkies and vagrants. But in this case his punchy maxim feels apt.

There’s not much of an explanation to be had, in truth.

Oh, the dog was a ten year old Shih Tzu.

‘A bitch called Sun,’ her owner, Mark, had joked. ‘Know your enemy and know yourself, and be certain that a dog will piss and shit wherever it pleases, especially your tennis shoes.’

Mark took Sun for a walk every morning around the same time. He lived a few doors down from the space. Charlie saw him on the Sunday, mistook Sun for a Pekingese. Then Mark saw the Range Rover the next day. He would not have given it a second glance, he said; he was not much into cars, if it were not for the sound coming from it.

‘Being burnt alive.’ No joke this time. ‘Like a furnace had found a way to get between your fingernails. Crawl right up your spine. Incinerate you from the inside out and everywhere in between.’

He had stopped, pulled Sun’s leash tighter, and tried to help. First, cupping a hand over the steamed glass and trying to see what was happening. The scream was somewhere between pain and pleasure, but he couldn’t see anything. The door would not open, but it burnt his hand. He remembers that, lotion needed for days.

And this is where it differs. Why none of this makes sense.

He turned to affix Sun’s lead to a lamppost or fence picket. He intended to smash the window in with a loose brick from a nearby front garden, but needed two hands to do it. He could not be exact, but he doubted his back was turned for more than a minute. He never heard the car door open; he never saw Charlie. The pavement is narrow; he would have heard thumping based on how quick Charlie ran on the VOD. After, Mark was shown a series of pictures—candid mugshots of blokes grabbed from social media. Mark could not identify Charlie, not fully, not reliably. He had no reason to lie. He swears blind that when Sun was secure, he returned to the Range Rover and it was empty. Except for the phone.

Police were called, people gathered, but in the end most saw it as a stupid stunt and simply moved on. A week later, no one could even remember.

We checked. Danny didn’t want to talk at all. Too busy, he said. Not enough hours in the day. Sam, before he stopped talking about his brother, bemoaned that someone had changed the password to the channel.

New videos keep appearing, though, once a month, nonsensically named and unintelligible. People say they hear speech or see flashes of something, but people say a lot of things these days.

Formless content from a dead channel. It’s weird, different, and it attracts an audience—for now. One that theorises between hits of dopamine, before something shinier pops up on their feed.

People really will watch anything these days.

Maybe Charlie knew that.

Maybe that’s his hustle now.

Thank you for reading the first liminal tale. Stevenage is not what it seems. See you in two weeks for the start of The Button.

‘Cashier number four, please.’

The little light flashed and, with the sort of sigh that suggests ‘about damn time,’ Bruce padded forward towards the Perspex screen that signified the border of cashier number four’s kingdom.

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‘Hello, yes, I’d like to send these three books, please.’

‘Sorry, sir, you failed to stay behind the yellow line until the cashier was free. You’ll have to return to the back of the queue.’

Bruce scoffed. ‘Good one, right so one of these has to go Scot-’

‘Back of the queue, you’ll have to be patient.’ She flapped a hand at him and pressed her button.

‘Cashier number four, please,’ the sultry robotic woman sounded almost smug.

With that a pug of a woman shuffled forward and splayed her elbows across the front of the desk, getting close to the clear plastic.

‘I’d like to collect my pension, please.’

Bruce was cut out. He tittered and huffed but the cashier was plainly fixated on the stout woman who breathed condensation across her barrier. Perhaps that was what it was there for, to prevent moisture transference.

The queue was a snake with an ever-growing tail. Bruce had waited patiently for some thirty minutes stuck between said barrel lady and a rather tall sweaty man who smelt like he had soiled himself.

The post office attracted such types. Those who had fallen through the cracks of society. Or those who just could not use a smartphone to save their lives.

Bruce smacked his forehead. There was likely an app that could have skirted all this hassle. A pickeroo or parceluber or some such that would come and collect his books and mail them out to the lucky competition winners.

It was all fun and games when he was whoring himself on socials with the offer of a signed copy of his debut novel but the reality of postage and package gave him a new appreciation for his Amazon Prime subscription.

Now at the back of a queue that would make the lines at Disney blush, Bruce stood sandwiched between two blokes that alternated coughing fits and utterances.

Things like ‘blimey, oh boy, wasn’t like this in my day’ and the like.

It was very likely they said no such thing but they seemed the type so Bruce decided they had.

After forty five minutes Bruce was at the front again. He took delicate care to ensure his feet were squarely behind the peeling yellow line. This was not a fucking train station, there was no danger of being hit by an errant first class letter. Still, the fear of having to queue again kept him firmly the right side of the tracks.

‘Cashier number four, please.’

He counted to three under his breath then strode forward.

‘Hello again, did I walk correctly?’

She nodded with a thin smile.

‘Great, so, I would like to get these three books sent out today, please.’

‘Certainly, sir, if you could just pop them in the padded envelopes and put them on the scale.’

‘Sure, do I buy the envelopes here or?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir.’ She wafted a hand that almost clacked the screen. Bruce startled a little. ‘But you need to have purchased your packaging prior to posting.’

Bruce scrunched his face.

‘Okay. Didn’t know that. Thought you had the envelopes, being the post office and everything. I’ll just pop and bring them here and you can blip them for me?’ He nodded towards the scanner on her desk.

‘Unfortunately, sir, this scanner is not configured to scan non post-office merchandise. You will need to pay at the till in WH Smith.’

Bruce was staggered. He turned to look back towards the shop proper. Yes, it was true. Post offices could not exist on their own anymore. Like many failing ventures they had to be crammed into another successful brand like a set of Matryoshka dolls, but without any charm or joy. The post office was the dirty little secret at the back of Britain’s premier, still failing itself, news agents.

‘Can you hold my spot?’

‘No, you will have to join-’

‘No, don’t say it.’

‘-the back of the queue after you have paid for them.’

‘Cashier number four, please.’

Bruce screamed but it did not matter.

A Great Dane of a man bounded up to the cashier and began his business. Something about an overdue gas bill. He was not rebuffed, he was welcomed and aided with all the muster that the post office could deliver. Bruce just wanted them to deliver his sodding books.

Resigned, he trudged to hand pick some manilla envelopes with puffy bubble wrap interior. He queued for a brisk five minutes until the clerk at the WH Smith till would serve him. An acne-ridden boy that Bruce found alluring in the same way he wanted to pop the bubbly interior of his packaging. He found himself daydreaming if the bubbles would produce pus like the boy’s face.

By the time he returned the queue for the post office was probably visible from space. Tied in length with the Great Wall of China. The joke being, of course, that there were very rarely queues to see one of the wonders of the world. No, that was reserved for something a post box had made ever so simple.

‘I could not send them,’ Bruce said to himself some twenty minutes into this latest waiting game.

This twitched the ear of the lady in front of him. She smelt faintly of roses and dirt and looked poodle-like with the pomp of hair that adorned her head.

‘Oh dear boy. You just have to have patience. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well.’

‘It is just a waste of time though. No one is going to read my book. I got like 200 views of my video for the competition. I am a failure and a fraud.’

The imposter syndrome was his queuing companion, it seemed.

‘Nonsense. A failure is someone who spends over an hour and a half queuing only to baulk at the moment of glory. Persist. Persevere. Patience.’

Virtue signalling, but it worked for Bruce.

By the time he reached the front he desperately needed a drink and perhaps a walk around a park.

‘Cashier number four, please.’

Bruce did not speak so much as wiggle his eyebrows in ways that suggested a curious confidence and a despairing distrust of what was about to happen.

But it went well. The cashier took his parcels that Bruce had spent time in the queue scribbling the addresses on. He dutifully plopped them on the scales and was told the weights back as if he needed to know.

‘What are they worth, sir?’

‘About ten quid each.’

‘Okay, that will be £6.50 to send today.’

‘Cool, total?’

‘Oh no, sir. Each.’

Bruce felt his knees buckle. Nearly £21, damn, nearly £25 when he considered the envelopes. All this to get three copies of his book into the hands of people that had simply hit like on a post.

‘Would you like to go ahead, sir?’

Bruce swallowed his rage, pride and irritation like a tasting menu most sour.

The cashier fiddled with her mouse and tapped the keyboard. The sterile white light above her flickered in time.

She pulled a face, somewhere between a groin strain and disappointment.

‘I am sorry sir, but it seems you cannot send this to Scotland.’

‘How come?’

‘It just says you cannot.’

‘I would like to make a complaint, this is ridiculous.’

‘Oh certainly, sir. Here, take this form and fill it in. You will have to get it stamped by me before it can be sent. You can rejoin the queue when you are done.’

‘No, no, wait. Don’t.’ But it was too late.

‘Cashier number four, please.’

Bruce was trapped in a never-ending cycle. The post office would be his forever home.

Then his tail wagged. Wait, his tail.

He felt a pulling sensation at his scalp and all of a sudden he was back.

In the kennel, with Susie the kind lady who brought him his food.

He had a contraption strapped around his head, all wires and soft padding and faintly blinking lights.

‘Well done, Bruce. You did ever so well.’ She ruffled the fur on his head as she unclipped it and put it away.

‘One more session tomorrow and then I think you will be ready to go.’

Patience training for dogs. A simulation of the most excruciating scenario the human developers could think of. An independent author trapped at a post office trying to send copies of his shit book no one wants and no one will read.

You would need the patience of a saint. Bruce the Saint Bernard was a good boy.

By Louis Urbanowski

The Right Members Club releases today! A British political satire about a secret society of disgraced MPs saving the country. A story about a man overcoming his OCD set against the backdrop a country in chaos.

The Kindle and Paperback versions are available on Amazon now!

If you have enjoyed my writing on Substack and can afford to support me with a purchase it would mean the world! Even just a recommendation to a friend or a review of the book would be brilliant.

Thanks to all. My first novel and first step into my new career!

Buy!

The Right Members Club has spent over four hundred years keeping British politics exactly as it should be: slow, ineffectual, and profoundly dull.

Membership is reserved for disgraced MPs. Like Mark Fallow, newly elected, freshly sacked, and nationally embarrassed. An MP for barely a week, his life changes when he is inducted into Britain’s strangest secret society.

But something is wrong.

Following the death of a pensioner that enrages the nation, the Prime Minister is no more. Jackson Pierce is Britain’s new Leader.

And he is good.

Charismatic. Competent. Delivering on his promises. The country thrives under the Pierce Promise.

This has never happened before. The Right Members Club faces a threat it does not understand: a government the people love.

But perhaps the people should be careful what they wish for.

With his marriage crumbling and the nation on the brink, Mark must face the tough questions:
Who is Jackson Pierce?
Does Britain even need Parliament?
And what is wrong with the bacon?

If you’ve ever wondered what happens after a disgraced MP resigns (really?) then this is the book for you!

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The little boy stepped into the road, came from nowhere.

Book bag in hand, untucked shirt trailing below his blazer, he stumbled, struck with fear.

Deerest boy in headlights, Charlie chuckled.

The child was careless, following a ball or a fucking fidget spinner like a fool. No matter. No harm done. The Range Rover had been going the speed limit. Five-star Euro NCAP safety rating. Charlie smashed one of his oversized trainers into the gorgeous brake pedal and came to a stop. Textbook emergency stop. Not a whiff of an airbag.

The car never left the parking space on Walkern Road.

Oh, Charlie slammed the brake. He screamed. Bemoaned a small little prick and waved something away with all the venom he could muster. But the camera saw none of it and the car did not move.

On the VOD, Charlie spoke cruelly: ‘How many points for hitting him?’

His foot hurt. Through the trainer, it hurt. He had smashed it down so hard it smarted now. The pulse of pain roused him and, for a moment, there seemed to be some kernel of truth about the predicament he found himself in.

‘He wasn’t there, was he?’ Crystal clear on the VOD. ‘Pull yourself together.’

And just like that he was gone again.

The rear-view mirror commanded his attention. He turned it slowly. Left and right. Up and down. His eyes locked onto the glass and his heart began to thrum like a wire. Someone sat in the back seat. Relaxed. Chatting to him.

Charlie spun his neck so fast he felt the muscle pull. No one was there.

In the mirror, they were. A gentleman. Kind face. Dulcet tones. Familiar smile.

‘Where to, mate?’ Charlie asked.

The VOD is a one-sided conversation.

Charlie slipped into clipped small talk, like the soundboard of a terrible salesman. Like Barry.

‘That it is, that it is, my friend. Oh yeah? No rest for the wicked, you know what I mean? I met your brother, yeah, yep. Nice gaffe, the pub needs a bit of TLC, though. I’ll be in to see him shortly, after I finish with you.’

Charlie. Stop.

He was panting. The mirror was empty. He needed to give the car back. Take it to Barry. Leave Stevenage. But how to call him? It was only polite. Charlie opened the glove box, looking for business details, a sticker from Pound Lane. Instead, he found a birthday card. Hastily written in smudged ink, the envelope not stuck down properly. It was for a six-year-old, a boy named Ben.

Sorry, I missed it. Mummy is mad at me. Will make it up to you.

Love Daddy.

There were other things. An empty baggie with a marijuana leaf on it. A receipt for ready meals and cashew nuts. A wedding ring. Each widened Charlie’s eyes. They were terrified eyes, full of sadness and pain. He was crying but he did not seem to know.

Barry is incompetent. I’ll be asking for a discount.

He fiddled with the radio again, shut his eyes and hoped he could cling to something. The music was gone, so it automatically scanned for a new frequency. Static at first but then a whistle came through, and Charlie peeled his left eye open and then fully blinked as a sentence, audible and clear, echoed through the surround-sound speaker set-up of the brilliant car.

‘Your dick doesn’t work, Charlie. Why would I go down the aisle with you, if you can’t get it up?’

Claire was on the radio. He was suddenly boiling hot again, the sweat pooling in the small of his back and behind his knees. It came louder this time, the voice hissing, laced with more static. He felt a lump in his throat that only seemed to get larger with each swallow. His fingers went into his ears so quickly he scraped the skin of his canal on the way in. He was hot and delirious, still dehydrated from the food yesterday and after a poor night’s sleep in a shit bed. Yes, that was it. All logical.

‘I’ll start a podcast.’ Charlie tried to latch onto something tangible, with structure. He chose his career. ‘Interview the owners of these attractions that I review. Consult with them live and give them feedback and pointers on how to be the best spooks they can be.’

Charlie thought he said all that, thought he spoke for a good number of minutes on the subject of book deals and sponsorships. Instead, it was simpler, more harrowing.

‘If they don’t listen I’ll die, then.’ A short, sharp laugh. Not one that had been heard by any of Charlie’s regular viewers before.

His head hurt. The noise from the radio wouldn’t stop. It made the car shake now and anything he touched, the steering wheel, the armrest and even the little handles above the seat, everything was vibrating. No, it was laughing at him.

He had to get out. Politely and respectfully: fuck the Royal Oak, fuck ghosts and fuck this fucking car parking space. He unclipped his seatbelt and went to…it wouldn’t unclip. The button did nothing, wouldn’t budge. The door handle was locked solid too.

The button emblazoned with START did no such thing. He mashed the clutch, the brake, yanked the handbrake up and then forced it down with all his might. Nothing happened. His finger started to hurt from repeated jabs of the start button, the unlock button and now even the window button.

‘Power Windoeewwsss,’ Charlie screamed.

He thrashed in his seat, the seatbelt digging into his neck with every movement and his hand thumping from every smash against the interior until his bloodying hands came to rest on the steering wheel.

He was still shivering, on the VOD that is, as the steering wheel slick with blood twisted and turned but to no avail. He looked at his hands, they stung and they burned. No, beyond that, they were melting into the cream leather of the wheel. He could not remove them, for they had begun to merge. Skin became leather and leather became skin, and with it came a smell of burning cow, burning human flesh, it made him hungry.

He was the all-you-can-eat buffet and the parking space was famished.

The radio kept tuning itself, searching for a voice in the dark. Unhappy with each station, as if it were playing a repeat, it was merciless in its discretion.

First there was a man’s voice, old, gruff and tired.

‘Help me.’

Then a woman; she was terrified, her words barely fighting back the tears.

‘Get me out, please.’

And finally, the little boy. He said the least, but in a way, Charlie heard this most. He knew it to be Ben.

‘Get out. Get out now.’

The steering wheel was now joined by the heated seat; it started to clasp itself to Charlie’s legs. He felt his thighs blister as the hair was waxed off with cream leather. The cobalt trim would sew his mouth shut and his eyes would linger in that rear-view mirror for evermore.

He tried again, screaming in agony, peeling his fleshy hand from the steering wheel. Making for the door handle with what remained of his right hand. Moving it only served to waft the smell of his own demise at him, it was pungent and flabby.

With an almighty yank at the handle it gave, the interior lights came on. The door pinged with a plush sound as it pushed open.

Charlie almost garrotted himself in his rush to get out. He thumped at the release for the seatbelt. He flung himself to the pavement and then scarpered up and away, his laboured paces growing quieter as he never looked back.

Charlie Arnold never came back.

‘Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.’

George Bernard Shaw said that.

I don’t have a middle name, ostensibly because my last name is long enough. This is what my mum told me one day. If I could choose a middle name now then I think Bernard would be splendid.

Louis Bernard Urbanowski. LBU. I could pretend to be a university on stationery. But first, of course, I would need to buy stationery. From the desk of LBU. How fancy!

Gentle reader, the time has come to change.

‘It’s the end . . . but the moment has been prepared for.’

Tom Baker’s imperious Fourth Doctor said that upon his untimely unwimely wibbly wobbly death. Of course, not one minute later did he pop back up as the dashing Peter Davison.

UrbWrites needs to regenerate. That’s the point that I’m crawling around, like it’s the M25.

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I started 2026 with goals. I wanted to commit to growing Substack and to do that I feverishly set out to post three times a week.

Monday – Ongoing Serial
Wednesday – Original Short Story
Friday – UrbWrites Weekly

And I’ve managed it. Each week you have had three brand new posts from me. I’ve met fabulous new people and grown my channel to 143 readers.

However, I also wanted to publish my debut novel, ‘The Right Members Club’, as well as market it and give it the best chance for success. And as I near the end of the beginning of that process, publication date looming on Friday 3rd April, I realise now I need to reallocate my time towards my longer form fiction, marketing and plans to be the pre-eminent political satirist, zombie fiction and liminal horror writer that lives in Stevenage Old Town and is called Louis.

Set your stall out early, people. Let them know you are there.

Okay, I can dream a bit bigger. But that’s for another day.

The point is Substack, I fear, has become a bit of a distraction. A game within a game. Writing three high quality, I’d like to think, original pieces each week is doable but it also sucks the life out of my other endeavours, and from what I can tell seems very much on the high end of what most do on this platform.

So I propose a change!

Wednesday – Alternating Original or Serial Story (circa 1k words)
Last Friday of the Month – UrbWrites Monthly

I read a post by the unbelievably talented yesterday that gave me the courage to admit what had been percolating in my brain recently.

Drip, drip, drip.

Substack has become a vanity quest for many, number go up, writing go boom. And whilst I love a game as much as any, I genuinely think I’m better off chasing that growth on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok should I want to grow my audience of novel readers.

Substack is for writers and I love it. I’m still going to write for it and I hope that act alone brings people to me. I do not want to become a slave to viral notes or trending meme formats on here as I think that sells this amazing idea short.

I’ll stick to the places where that is the done thing and continue to make myself look silly on there.

In short, this isn’t farewell but a renegotiating of my relationship with Substack. One that I think will work out for the best in the long run.

My debut novel arrives next week and I couldn’t be more excited to realise the dream I’ve had for many years. People reading my book out there in the big wide world.

I’ll see you next month for the first update and keep an eye peeled on Wednesdays for my fiction!

My socials, should you want to see my silly face every day.

Instagram Post

TikTok Post

See you soon!
Louis

Jacob waited while his tormentors fished the turd from the toilet.

Another boy might have run but he winced at the thought of how he jiggled when he tried.

‘Ready for your special mini roll, you fat fucking fridge?’ Callum asked, head popping round the cubicle.

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Outside the toilets, the screeching of first break showed no signs of abating; there would be no saving by the bell for Jacob and he knew it.

One of Callum’s minions proffered the sweet treat on a piece of single ply toilet paper, so thin and transparent the special truffle may as well have been resting directly on his palm—he wasn’t best pleased about being the courier.

‘Hurry up. Make him eat it, Cal. It pongs,’ a boy with a budding unibrow insisted.

As Jacob pinched it between thumb and index finger it gave a little, like chocolate at room temperature. The pong was indeed pungent somewhere between the dung horses left in the street and sharp cheese.

Cal with his school tie over his nose flapped an arm at his army, ‘Let the man savour his meal, god. Manners.’ And then to Jacob, ‘Think of it like a starter. It’s pizza Tuesday in the canteen as well. Double helpings for you.’

Jacob knew that, of course. His life revolved around the next meal. The next snack, morsel or bite he could snaffle away.

The depressing truth was that his stomach grumbled, even now, holding the bobbled poo in his hand. He saw Cal ball his fist and knew it was time.

The bullies lost interest after Jacob polished it off in a couple of bites. Not so much as a retch or watery eyes.

‘Freak,’ Cal spat at him as they slinked off back into the daylight, back into the jungle of high school.

Of course it tasted of shit. Rotten, turgid, putrid, deep, tragic and rancid filth. Coating Jacob’s mouth like glue and staining the back of his teeth as he swallowed. The taste lingered even after attaching himself to a rusty faucet in the bathroom for a good five minutes.

The slab of concrete that masqueraded as the playground was deserted. Such was Jacob’s infallible, unending hunger his mind was already focused on the toppings at lunch. He would start with pepperoni and finish with the five cheese feast. Or perhaps the vegetable supreme might be preferable.

Miles away, dissociating from the reality around him, he did not notice—not at first—the shadow that crept from the dilapidated climbing frame. Speckled blue from peeling paint chips it sat like a metal spider in the corner of the playground.

From the corner of his eye Jacob now saw a shadow shift from one of the spindles and then another and then another. The shadows became fingers and hands and a leg. Before he could blink twice a figure that had not been there now stood, unfurled in front of him. Adorned in a ruby red cloak and dripping with some sort of vapour that hit the playground and evaporated with a sizzle.

Jacob thought of fajitas. Shadowy savant fajitas.

‘You’re hungry, Jacob, aren’t you?’

He nodded. Always.

‘Thought as much. I have something for you. The gift to your curse, if you like.’

‘Who—’

‘I’m up against it here. I’m a purveyor of the menagerie most cosmic. You’ll have not heard of it being . . . fleshy,’ a wisp of a finger appeared at the end of his robed arm and poked at Jacob’s belly. It rippled satisfactorily. ‘I dispense traits to those who need a leg up. Answer a question correctly, get a premium animal pick.’

Jacob was certain he was experiencing a hallucination brought on by ingesting a parasite in the poo.

‘You’re not,’ the figure’s voice spoke direct in his mind. He gestured to the climbing frame and at once appeared on top. Jacob took a couple of steps towards him.

‘What lives in the sea, has rows of teeth, and never stops moving?’

Jacob thought of fish fingers.

‘Wrong,’ the figure boomed.

‘I didn’t say anything!’ Jacob protested.

‘Have to take your first answer and I can read minds. That’s shark gone. Don’t worry, plenty of good animals left. Next question. What has a mane, rules the plains and its claws inflict pain?’

Jacob hesitated. The rhyme confusing him. He pictured the canteen again. The trays. The queues. The pushing.

‘Dog,’ he thought, too quickly.

‘Incorrect.’

Jacob felt something shift behind his cheeks. Something stretching inward rather than out.

The figure’s tone softened, almost amused.

‘Lion was the answer. But you don’t think like that, do you Jacob?’

Jacob swallowed. His jaw felt wider. He reached up. His cheeks had begun to round, not outward like fat, but fuller inside, as though something had been placed behind them.

‘Final question,’ the figure said, now sitting cross-legged on the climbing frame as if it were a throne. ‘What stores food for later?’

Jacob smiled. This one he knew.

‘Me,’ he said, out loud this time.

The figure clapped once.

‘Close enough, I guess.’

Jacob’s cheeks shifted again. The space inside them expanded, soft but structured, forming compartments he could feel rather than see. His face remained recognisable, but the volume of his cheeks ballooned, pushing gently outward, as if they had been designed for holding rather than speaking.

‘Hamster,’ the figure said. ‘A fine choice for someone like you.’

Jacob blinked.

‘A what?’

‘Hamster,’ it repeated. ‘Look it’s bottom of the bargain bin but hey they’re small, hungry and can store what they take. Keep it safe.’

Jacob tried to speak, but his cheeks resisted, as though something within them had weight now.

‘You’ll find,’ the figure continued, rising now and stepping down from the frame, ‘that you have room for more than you did before.’

The figure drifted closer to the playground edge.

‘The boy who can’t stop eating, can now eat his problems away,’ it said. ‘If you catch my meaning, of course.’

Jacob turned as footsteps approached from behind the building. Callum and his crew.

‘Oi,’ Callum’s voice rang out. ‘Still here, fridge?’

Jacob looked at the figure, but it was gone, leaving only the faint smell of something metallic and sweet.

‘You look weird,’ one of the boys said.

Jacob didn’t answer.

He could feel his cheeks now. Could feel the capacity.

Callum stepped forward.

‘Say something, then.’

Jacob opened his mouth and something took over. That simple movement was enough. His cheeks shifted. Expanded. Not outward in a simple way, but inwardly first—then outward, like something was unfurling from inside him.

‘What the hell—’

Jacob’s cheeks opened further than seemed possible, not tearing but getting ready to welcome something—Callum.

He tried to turn on his heels too late. Jacob’s cheeks closed around him and he felt his nightmare come to rest on the inside of his cheek stretching all the way to just above his shoulder blades.

The others froze.

There was no gore, no further noise. Callum had been inhaled and stored for later.

‘Freak,’ someone whispered.

Jacob turned.

Another step.

Another.

The space inside his cheeks shifted again, ready.

The playground fell silent as Jacob headed for maths.

He thought that was the end of all his worries. If any new ones should pop up he could just pop them in his mouth. But there was a sting in the tail—rattlesnake, another animal he had missed out on.

See, five years passed without much ceremony. Jacob did not grow taller, but his cheeks did not return to normal.

Until one morning, he did not wake up.

Just stillness, the way small creatures end when their time runs out.

The space in his cheeks had long since emptied.

The figure returned once, briefly, standing where the climbing frame used to be.

It looked down at the place Jacob had occupied.

‘Short-lived, hamsters,’ it said, almost kindly.

Then it moved on, already thinking of the next kid standing alone at the edge of the playground, looking for that special something to help them through the day.

By Louis Urbanowski

Regular viewers of Charlie Arnold’s channel would pick up on it straight away.

His manner into the camera was oddly confrontational from the get go. Some, upon seeing it, say it was his subconscious fighting, urging him to get out of there.

‘I didn’t even want to come here, you know? I had picked out some haunted little church tower thirty minutes away. Sam found this place. If you don’t like it, blame him. Don’t edit that out either.’

That opening remark, part of a three minute rant building in sardonic tone and frustration, was peculiar to put it mildly. Charlie waxed lyrical about how he could have slept under the stars at the old church tower in Thundridge, the Cold Christmas Church. It had credentials. It was legitimate. No doubt he would have captured ghostly armies marching in formation or creepy figures lingering amongst the gravestones.

His irritation abated quickly and it is this see-saw quality in Charlie that renders the VODs such a distressing watch.

It was the armrest first. Sensational, according to Charlie. Like a switch had been flicked, his arms unfurled and he began to grope and fondle the cream leather either side of the seat. It made him think of an executive stress reliever.

‘I can’t get over the finish. The material is out of this world. The quality. The attention to detail. Can you see this?’

He picked up the camera and, with a jerk that would make most people nauseous, rammed it towards the armrest and then on to the wood panelling of the console and dashboard, zooming in on the cobalt trim flecked throughout.

‘I’ve been travelling the country like a carrier bag caught in a breeze. Turning up to these places desperate for promotion. Their hearts must sink. The Fabia. The measly ten viewers. Look at me now.’

Once the phone was stowed back in its mount, Charlie kept his eyes closed for a moment. His tongue moved across his lips back and forth like a wiper blade. He grunted, even moaned, then snapped back and continued.

‘The height. Can you see the headroom I’m afforded in here? My old car? Forget about it. Squashed in a tin can.’

His hand flew above his head, gesticulating to demonstrate the space he perceived as grand. The upholstery felt like silk against his skin despite him being fully clothed. He pushed back hard into the seat. A loud thwomp was picked up by the camera. Then he rubbed the base of his neck and scalp like a grizzly itching itself on a spruce. Charlie was lost for a few moments in the ecstasy of it all, until a horn somewhere down the road jolted him.

He was lucid.

‘I’ll pop in and see Danny in a tick. Now we’ve disproved the idea that this parking space is special. I can give him the headlines on what he needs to change. Tell him my rates for continued consultation.’

But it was fleeting.

He turned the radio on. Static hissed, clearly audible on the VOD, but Charlie either wilfully ignored it or heard something else entirely. What he began singing along to was This Charming Man by The Smiths. It was as if he did not quite know the words. They slurred as he muddled through, mumbling and muttering. There was one line he did know and, as it came round, he found his confidence.

‘…pamper life’s complexity. When the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat…’

Flat and tuneless. Unnerving, though not for Charlie, who swatted joyfully at the passenger seat in time with his voice. He was triumphant and, in that moment, genuinely happy. He was this charming man. Claire would agree. Viewers would too. They would flock to his success and it was all down to the car he had purchased. The music seemed to give him buoyancy, a symphony for a victorious emperor.

Whilst many would argue something had been wrong for some time, the first moment Charlie appeared uncomfortable was when he declared the car ‘too hot’. He blamed Barry for supercharging the heated seats as he fidgeted, flexing his bottom as if trying to lift it from a fire flickering beneath him. He hunched, pulling his back away.

The Fabia had no such mod-cons.

‘Feel like I’m pissing myself,’ Charlie said. Sweat gathered and his thighs stuck to his jeans. It reminded him of nights entangled with Claire. That scent of intimacy. The idea that two humans could sleep comfortably stuck together like wiry spaghetti was laughable. He had hated it. He would wait until she was lightly snoring before wrenching her arms and legs off him, retreating to the cooler side of the bed. He had not overheated once since she had left, since they had ended, and that was the way he liked it.

He jabbed at the controls like a drunk wasp.

‘That’s better. Off. They do the bloody job, I tell you. Worth every penny.’

The heated seats were instead turned on, the three notches visibly lit. The fans began to blow hard. It took a moment for the camera to adjust to the new noise. Charlie turned everything on, sat back and promptly began to shiver. Condensation ran down the insides of the windows and he trailed a finger through the steam. He drew a heart, then his initials and Claire’s, giggling like a child doing something mischievous.

‘No.’ He wiped it away with the butt of his hand. Charlie turned back to the phone, stared directly into it and said, ‘I need to be alone for the viewers. That is money.’

What the VOD picks up is horrific.

‘I’ll die, then.’

It was spoken as if realising a great truth, accompanied by a shrug of his shoulders that did not stop. It became a spasm. His teeth began to chatter. The cold felt like a reminder, a call that he must do more, must praise the car further.

Something caught his eye, calmed him. Charlie bent forward, wanting to inspect the gearstick and pedals. He knew they were of the utmost quality but a true journalist must research. He pulled himself toward the steering wheel and down, the seatbelt tightening against his exposed neck and turning it red, turning it pink. He bowed his head, trying to see better. His feet were in the way.

‘The pedals are.’ He abandoned the sentence. ‘The hazards are on.’

They were not, but Charlie was convinced they were. He pressed the button. The small triangle lit up and went dark again. He repeated it five or six times, unsure whether they were ever truly on or off.

‘I can hear them. Can you hear them?’

Interaction with the audience brought him back. He picked up the phone with purpose. The viewers were exploding, from ten to a hundred and still climbing. He smiled. Comments told him he was doing a great job, that he was off his nut and everything in between.

‘But can you hear the hazards, guys?’

He imitated the clunking noise, which was otherwise inaudible.

The chat hung and errored, so Charlie tutted and put the phone back. They did answer. They all said they could not hear anything. He did not see it.

A tapping on the passenger window startled him. A woman stood outside, drumming against the steamed glass. Obscured at first so that Charlie was not sure she was even there. When the tapping did not stop and the figure became clearer, muscle memory made him lean across to roll the window down, but he caught himself.

‘Power windows,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got power windows now.’

She replied but it sounded like gurgling water. Charlie took his time. He whirled his finger above the array of buttons on the armrest as if choosing a chocolate from a box.

‘Eeny-meeny-miny-power-windoew.’ The slur of the last word amused him.

A smooth electrical buzz lowered the glass.

‘You shouldn’t park here, mate. Move.’

Her tone was as friendly as a stranger telling you off can be, though edged with panic. Charlie heard only threat. A bullish interruption. He decided to show his horns.

‘Piss off. I’ll park wherever I damn please.’

‘I’m trying to help you, I’m trying to sto—’

‘If you want to help me, then like and subscribe, otherwise fuck off.’

He told his chat that sometimes people needed putting in their place and, as he raised the window, he waved her away. She stepped back and seemed to melt into the street. He found that curious, then laughed into a shiver.

Still too hot.

Perhaps it would have ended differently if Charlie had heeded her warning. But then again, when you watch the VOD, maybe he was already too far gone.

It only got worse from there.

Can’t stop for long today. I almost didn’t even bother with the weekly but I made a promise to myself this year. No matter how I was feeling. The ups, the downs and inbetweens, I would commit to writing something three times a week.

I owe it to myself even when the demons are winning.

My cat is gone (temporarily). I’m struggling to sleep. And I fear my brain is becoming sand.

Well enough about that. Today’s subtitle is from Jean Chretien.

The fifth longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history, he ranks highly in rankings of Canadian prime ministers. At age 92, Chrétien is the oldest living former Canadian prime minister.

That’s from Jean’s wikipedia, I thought the least I could do was provide some factoids.

I chose the quote because it sums up my mood today.

I received 50 (fifty) copies of my debut novel The Right Members Club.

The Right Members Club is available for Kindle pre-order now and will publish fully, with a paperback option, on 3 April 2026.

This week on Substack:

See you next week.

Louis

At sixty years old Thomas was the youngest of the in-take.

The door of his cage made a squeak as a latex hand reached for him. He gave a growl that matched the one in his stomach and tried to pad backwards but he was already up against the cold, hard metal.

‘Retract your claws. Report back,’ came the call from the cage beneath him.

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Sonny was ninety-two and in charge.

Thomas fought generations of instinct as he tried to take in as much of his surroundings as possible. Everything smelled of sterility, a burn in the nose and throat that made deciphering the scene difficult.

He went rigid in the arms of the vet, Emma, trying to push off her wrist to see more. Each time he craned his head, she tucked him closer. There was an undercurrent of a familiar smell. It was home; the fabrics and bed he had claimed as his own. With his people…

Best not to think of them. The betrayal was too fresh. He should have bolted the moment the carrier appeared. That plastic prison of indignity dared contain his feline fury.

He had been caught mid-ablution, vulnerable. The fools had removed his hiding places with all the subtlety of a marching band.

Run, his mind had commanded. Too late.

‘You’re okay,’ Emma cooed.

‘I’m absolutely not,’ Thomas howled.

The needle proved him right. Claws unsheathed, he braced to make her pay, but his eyes flickered. They were heavy and his chin leaden. His limbs went limp.

When he awoke, he was back in his cage on a drool-stained pillow. A commotion arose from below.

‘Radioactive. You heard her,’ Sonny said.

‘But he wasn’t glowing,’ Mitsy, a tortoise-shelled octogenarian, replied.

Sonny made a thinking noise, cleaned his whiskers, swished his tail. ‘The lights are always on. Turn them off and we’d all glow like lanterns.’

A chorus of wizened agreement.

Thomas sucked at the water nozzle. ‘I don’t remember a thing.’

‘Of course not. Subterfuge,’ Sonny replied. ‘All part of their plan. Enhancement. Vigorous enhancement to see what we’re truly capable of.’

‘Why us?’

‘Look around. Peak specimens,’ Sonny said. ‘Strength, dominance, poise. We are naturally superior.’

Mitsy preened. ‘I am allowed to sleep anywhere I please at home.’

‘Four sachets a day. Unlimited biscuits,’ another added.

‘I flop on my side, humans worship my belly,’ a tabby bragged.

Thomas nodded. Humans were limited creatures. They couldn’t even lick their own bellies.

‘We must escape before it’s too late,’ Sonny declared.

Agreement rippled—until a small voice raised a point.

‘After dinner, right?’

‘Breakfast too,’ someone added. ‘We’ll need strength.’

‘The tray is dirty. I’d prefer to do my business when it’s clean. I don’t travel well with a full belly,’ another reminded.

‘And the scratchy brush lady comes before lunch,’ said Mitsy.

‘Licky sticks,’ Clive interjected, eyes wide.

So it was decided. They would wait. After dinner, after breakfast, after the tray was clean, after grooming, after licky sticks, after all the humans had finished whatever nonsense they were doing. Then, when their powers had fully developed, they would escape.

‘I should like to glow,’ Mitsy said, eyes dreamy. ‘Just a little, at night. Make the others jealous.’

‘Sonny,’ Thomas asked, ‘what enhancements might we expect?’

‘Powers,’ Sonny said slowly, pride in his clarity. ‘With felines of our standing, I suspect anything you should desire to manifest.’

‘Laser eyes,’ Clive said. ‘I’ve trained my whole life.’

‘You chased a dot,’ Thomas reminded him.

‘Opening tins without assistance,’ another whispered.

They tested in fits and starts. Clive stared at a singular treat until his eye watered. Nothing. Mitsy tried to glow, subtle, almost imperceptible, but fell asleep.

Thomas didn’t want to fly. He didn’t want to magic birds or mice out of thin air. He wanted to go home. He wanted to see his parents and resume his lovely life. He tried the door. He pictured it opening. Nothing.

‘Rest Thomas, conserve your strength. You must be famished,’ Sonny said.

Thomas nodded. He was. He could eat the world, such was his desire to return home.

Days passed. Meals came. The tray was changed. The scratchy brush lady arrived. Licky sticks were distributed. The plan was set in stone but thrown like a rock skipping further and further into the vast ocean.

They agreed: they would remain in their cages until their powers fully developed. A stoic determination to bide their time and wait out their captors. Their quiet excitement, barely held in check by the understanding that no one would act foolishly early.

Thomas licked his paws. He felt a prickling frustration as his tail twitched. His only wish, clear and unwavering, had always been the same: the power to go home. That, he now understood, was all he required.

And one day, it happened.

They came for him.

His dad lifted him gently, carried him out. Thomas closed his eyes, felt the pulse of destiny in his paws, and allowed the magic to settle around him.

He was the radioactive croissant, warm, pliable, and going home.

Power had been his all along. The hope that everything would be okay.

And vindicated, Thomas purred.

Happiness, as it turned out, was a new car.

The cars we drive say a lot about us, Charlie thought. He had turned up at the Royal Oak and Danny had been distracted by how spectacularly crappy his Fabia had been. It explained why he had been so aloof, so uneven in Charlie’s company. Forcing him to drive him to the parking space when they simply could have walked. The pause, the hesitation, as he let Charlie sweep away the fishy crisp crumbs from the passenger seat.

A successful content creator, no, an experiential consultant, would not turn up in a car that looked like it was about to give up the ghost. Claire had been right. He needed to get his shit together. He had intended to wait until he was back home to go shopping but then, parked between a battered Beemer and knackered Peugeot, opportunity had knocked.

It was why Charlie had indicated off the roundabout and swung his Fabia into Pound Lane Used Cars on his way to the Royal Oak that morning. It had been the number plate, unmistakable from any distance, that had caught his eye. Then he had felt the first thrill of a rush whirr through him, like a stiff double shot of espresso straight to the eyeball. The video would be huge. Viral. Charlie Arnold would arrive, first in the cobalt blue Range Rover and second as the pre-eminent name in gotcha content.

Barry, the car salesman, leaned forward so his pudgy tummy ate his pinstripe shirt. The office smelled of cheap coffee and vanilla polish, trying and failing to mask damp carpet.

‘Test drive shouldn’t be a problem, no.’

‘Perfect. When did it come in?’ Charlie asked.

Barry was fidgeting and fondling paperwork. His constant salesman’s grin belied a man who couldn’t believe his luck at nine thirty on a Monday morning.

‘Yesterday. In good nick too. We can swap the plate if you want,’ Barry said.

No, it had to stay. Charlie waved a hand.

‘I can recommend some decent dual carriageways if you like, just up Six Hills.’

‘I was thinking around the Old Town, actually. Got a meeting. Walkern Road.’

‘Careful around there,’ Barry said, eyes down in his papers.

Charlie’s interest sharpened and he leaned forward.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Parking on that road is a nightmare. Tight as arseholes. It’s still our car until you sign the agreement. Don’t want to ding it.’

Charlie laughed. Was Barry in on it?

His mind kept going and by the time Barry had fished the keys from the lockbox on the wall he was relaxed, certain about what had happened. Danny had let the air out of the tyres, enjoyed every hiss as they deflated. With an air compressor nearby, refilling them would have been easy. A decent car wash would take care of the dirt and muck, scrub the residue from the windscreen where the PCNs had been stuck.

As for the scratches.

Charlie never actually touched the car. His Fabia windscreen had been steamy. Perhaps if it had not been, perhaps if he had got closer, he would have seen they were nothing more than decals, fancy stickers stuck on and then peeled off.

Voilà. Just like that, the car was back in great nick.

‘What can you tell me about previous owners?’ Charlie asked.

Barry’s eyes returned to him. An actual question that might require effort. He cricked his neck, steepled his hands together in front of his tummy and tried to summon assurance.

‘Never privately owned, I believe. Registered to a company, then leased, then us.’ His voice lifted slightly at the end.

Well, there it was. Danny, like an administrator, managing his fleet of company cars. Pub cars. The ghostly fleet of Stevenage.

Barry gave a polite cough, the calling card of many a salesman when matters must turn financial. The deposit would clear out Charlie’s bank account. That was fine. It would create pressure and friction, and those were the forces a man needed to become successful. The monthly payments would provide structure and milestones to adhere to. But Charlie would drive from pub to church, from ghost to poltergeist, in a symbol of the story that had got under his skin and almost won.

He closed his eyes now and imagined. Charlie was going to savour every moment as he rocked up to the Royal Oak and saw the look on Danny’s face as the Range Rover saddled up next to the fading tarp.

They moved outside and Charlie slid into his prize.

‘Any problems, just bring it straight back. I’ll have all your paperwork ready to go.’ Barry slapped the car’s roof like it was a stallion.

Charlie’s stallion.

Charlie let his hand glide over Barry’s for the shake. He was the customer. He was about to drop a bomb. It was how it should be. Dominant. He waited until Barry had tottered back to the sales office before rooting around the interior. It was spotless. Cream leather with matching cobalt blue trim. The satnav glowed into life as he pressed the ignition. No more keys for Charlie Arnold.

‘Of course,’ Charlie said.

The satnav spoke like smooth velvet as it tried to continue where it had left off, routing the car to its previous destination: Walkern Road.

Smoking gun. Hook, line and sinker. Caught pink handed.

Charlie could barely contain himself, bouncing along, chatting excitedly to his stream. The audience was a measly eight but would soon balloon, he was sure of it. He would have to thank Danny for spurring him on, for giving him the kick up the backside that now meant he was a Range Rover driver. He felt supreme. He felt unbeatable and as he turned into Walkern Road he knew exactly what he would do next.

‘Round two,’ he announced to his audience.

The space was still empty. Danny probably had agreements with local neighbours. Keep the spot free and in return you get a plate of pork belly or a pint once a week. The haunted car parking space would be the most exciting thing to happen on Walkern Road in a long time.

Since the fire that had killed seven at the pub.

But Charlie would have evidence. Would be the first. Parking in the actual car that would go on to be famous across the world. He licked his lips. They were dry and salty. His hand mopped a bead of sweat from his brow.

Claire will want me again. Everyone will.

Charlie Arnold pulled into the parking space opposite the metal railings and switched the engine off.

He had arrived.