Free Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 by Isobelle Carmody

Gibbons and Cold Comfort Farm , and the power of the poem and of the whole collection would have been compromised by the comic echoes. He agreed and made the change, even though his family had never burned turf, but ash and beech cut from their own extensive woodlands. It hadn’t troubled him at all at the time. No one would ever know, after all. But it now seems to him that the lie was a road sign pointing to greater lies within.
    He passes a tube station and thinks, for the first time, of turning back. But the shock returns and the memory of what awaits him there, and he continues to walk, still heading north. In any case, he is struck by a strange sense that he is heading towards home and not away from it. He tries to analyse the feeling, but it is elusive. It is certainly not a blissful childhood hearthrug-and-hugs sense of home, and nor is it his current sofa-nest-and-popcorn one. It’s a darker feeling; a primal, disturbing, instinctive kind of longing. For what, though? Death? No, not death. Nothing as dramatic and final as that.
    A few drops of rain fall tentatively, the advance party for a deluge, checking that the sky corridors are clear. They are, and the downpour follows. He steps into the doorway of an all-night supermarket and lights another cigarette, keeping the hand that is holding it outside and upturned, reminding him of how he and his brother used to conceal their smokes like that, in case their parents happened along.
    Maybe ‘lies’ is too strong. The poems are fine. They are good. Everybody said so, bar the one.
    A security guard inside the shop is staring at him. He turns to face the street and takes another drag of his cigarette. The poems are as well crafted as any of his earlier work. Better, perhaps, because he is constantly working and perfecting his technique. Yes. They are good. Technically, they are just about perfect.
    But he knows, deep down, that this is all whitewash, designed to conceal a truth he is unwilling to face. He glances over his shoulder. The guard is still watching him. He throws the cigarette into the street, where it sends out a trail of sparks like a small firework, then he turns and goes into the shop. He strides towards the guard in a confrontational way but then averts his gaze and walks straight past him and in among the shelves. He picks up a bottle of water, and at the counter he buys a third packet of cigarettes.
    {1 1 }
    Looking back on it, she can see that her first move towards defining her true self was not exactly revolutionary. He laughed when she told him about No Sandwiches, and at the time it bothered her. It’s easy now to see that it was not the great leap into darkness and chaos that she expected it to be, but it was a small step forward and all she was capable of at the time.
    The idea grew out of her increasing disenchantment with the sandwich as a lunchtime staple. In the years since she had gone freelance she had eaten lunch out nearly every day, and nearly always in the centre of London. Some clients required fancy restaurants with proper meals, but more often than not her midday meetings took place over a sandwich, and her non-meeting lunches consisted of a sandwich on the run. Despite the changes they had gone through with the introduction of fancy breads, there was still no disguising what they were. And she was well and truly sick of them.
    So she came up with the concept of a café that had both eat-in and takeaway sections, and was open from mid-morning to office closing time, and that didn’t sell sandwiches. Instead it would offer a huge range of delicious alternatives: pasties, pastry rolls with a variety of fillings, quiches, spanakopita, Spanish omelettes, Indian and Middle Eastern snacks. The only bread would be pita to go with dips, and organic brown rolls to go with the soup.
    It took far more research and organisation to get off the ground than she had expected, and there was a time when winding down the old