Cover

Dedication

Dedicated to The Sibs: Helenanne Hansen and Charlie Green

SUMMER 2019

There are three people alive inside the whitewashed family home at one pm on this sunny afternoon in late July. And because not much happens on this quiet road in this quiet seaside town, the first gunshot could perhaps be mistaken for a misfiring exhaust.

But at this time of the afternoon, there is only a young man walking an elderly West Highland terrier on the road and he is lost in the music pumping through high-end, noise-cancelling headphones. Oblivious to the shriek of the seagulls and the rhythmic smash of surf against rock, he doesn’t hear the sharp retort of the gun or the screaming in its aftermath either.

By the time the second shot comes – at 1.34 pm – he is long gone. The only witness to the violence is a seagull perched on the back wall, which tumbles into the air in outrage at the sound.

It is less than a minute later when the gun fires for the third time.

SUMMER/AUTUMN 2018

ELLIOTT

That festival was a big deal in our part of the world.

Just up the road from the seaside town we called home, the End of the Summer event was usually a low-key, family-run affair with a number of acts you’ve probably never heard of.

But this year was very different. For some complicated reason involving a favour by Dave Grohl, The Foo Fighters – one of the biggest bands in the world – were headlining. The band is the mutual favourite of me and my wife Anya and as soon as I heard about it, I knew we had to be there.

Tickets went on sale at nine am on a day in June, when my Year Five class was doing guided reading, followed by maths. I told them they were going to watch Planet Earth as a treat for being good (not true – they had been little bastards the day before) while I endlessly pressed redial on my phone with one hand, the other attempting to access ever-crashing ticket websites on the school computer. When it got to ten am I had to stop briefly to let the class out to play, before racing to the staffroom to continue.

When I got the automated message telling me, with totally unwarranted cheerfulness, that, ‘Due to exceptional demand, tickets to the End of the Summer festival are now sold out,’ I said, ‘Bollocks,’ loud enough and with sufficient heat that some of the older guard in the staffroom gave me pinched looks.

But then, the weekend before the event, a miracle occurred.

My friend at work, Zoe, knew someone roadying, and she was able to get her hands on two extra tickets; one for me, and one for Anya.

We were ecstatic. It was the very last weekend before the schools were back and it felt like a perfect way to end the summer.

And anyway, Anya needed cheering up.