Evenings and Weekends

by Oisín McKenna

She never told them that she liked the crowds, the way they surged around and made so many things seem possible. Even if nothing ever actually happened, it never stopped feeling likely, inevitable, that your life was about to change, if you turned a street corner, struck up a conversation, got off the Tube a few stops early to see what the buildings looked like

His dad carried his body from place to place as if carrying a rubbish bag on the verge of exploding on the pavement, dripping onto his slippers, and at fifty years old, lungs crowded with tumours, the bag finally burst a metre from the bin and now look: eggshells, vegetable peel, plastic wrapping, and if Ed doesn’t clean it up, then who will?

She’s prone to mining every situation for analysis, so much so that she can’t go to Sainsbury’s to buy, for example, hummus, bananas, washing-up liquid, without asking: what broader cultural forces are at play here? How can I describe them – all in lower case – with irony and insight to my 2,000 and climbing Twitter followers?

Cynicism is a safety valve: if you accidentally place too many eggs in an unfashionable basket, you need to be able to pretend that the relationship between eggs and basket is, and always has been, part of an ironic metanarrative.

To say she grew up in a house full of women is to discount her father, but he was only around until she was twelve, and before that just occasionally, basically invisible except for the times that he was suddenly, horrifyingly there, like a repetitive strain injury you don’t notice for years until one day you rearrange your weight the wrong way and then: excruciating pain for the rest of your life.