It’s a very windy day in fact, and even though the golden-skinned umbrella boy has worked hard to make sure that each one of his big stripy parasols is properly canted into the wind – its heavy cotton-fringed shade angled low to the ground, its sharp metal spike dug deep down into the sand and securely buried – you’ll understand how easy it is for an especially violent gust to snatch one of the umbrellas up and send it cartwheeling along the beach like a tomahawk or an accessory in a knife-throwing act or something thrown by a gladiator across the dusty floor of the Coliseum.

You’ll understand, also, that there’s something about the low-slung design of an old-fashioned deckchair that makes it difficult for someone like Sibyl Hadley, in their mid to late sixties, to get out of one in a hurry. You’ll understand that she is indeed about to die; that in these last split-seconds the whole of her solitary and unfulfilled life is about to flash before her in a quick grey kaleidoscope of drab and joyless scenes.

And yet you will know, too, in your heart, that some very big, very fat men are also surprisingly fast runners – you will know that when Wade Abello has finished shaking the flaky crumbs from his croissant out of his napkin and onto his plate in the dining room of the Hôtel Mercure and pushed back his chair and walked outside and begun to make his lumbering slow-footed way along the boardwalk carrying what looks like his lunch in a paper bag – you will know that when he sees what’s happening he will break at once into a thunderous sprint of astonishing power and velocity and when his enormous right hand finally hurls away the bag with its dusty cake of hand-made soap inside and his outstretched fingers reach out and grasp instead the spinning cotton fringe of the murderous parasol and he falls to his knees in front of Sibyl in the sand – you will know, then, that Sibyl was wrong about the future, and that this, is just the beginning.

Notes & Acknowledgements

Notes & Acknowledgements

My thanks to the editors of the publications, anthologies and online magazines where a number of these stories (sometimes in a slightly different form) first appeared: The Dublin Review; Granta New Writing; The Hippocrates Prize; Love Sunday Magazine; New Short Stories 3 and New Short Stories 4 (both Willesden Herald Prize anthologies); The Manchester Fiction Prize; Prospect; Red Room New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës; The Royal Society of Literature Review; Salamander; The Ship; The Stinging Fly; The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories. Special thanks to Brendan Barrington and Declan Meade, to my agent Rachel Calder, my editor Jen Hamilton-Emery, to Chris Hamilton-Emery and to New Writing North for the financial assistance of a 2013 Northern Writers’ Award, supported by Arts Council England.

Note on ‘Bonnet’

Note on ‘Bonnet’