All stories

Dave spots them on the train. Their backpacks and battered sandals mark them out as fellow travellers. I try to catch her eye, but her bald boyfriend glowers and draws her to him. Her eyes never leave the ground.

With the delays after Prague, it’s midnight and pouring when we arrive at the town with the unpronounceable name. I haul our backpacks onto the sodden platform. Thick, glutinous cobwebs gather droplets of rain in the orange glow of the platform’s single light.

There’s a noticeboard under the shelter. Dave suggests we see if someone has an ad for a room or a bnb. It seems unlikely but we have no other option. We’ve spent enough nights on platforms this past month that we’re resigned to huddling here till morning if we have to, despite the spiders. And the mould.

Baldy and Mousy have the same idea. He looks like he wants to get as far away from us as he can, but the shelter is small so he places himself between us and Mousy and settles for staring at us with open hostility. None of the posts on the noticeboard are in English.

When the pale man appears he surprises all four of us. His face is sickly in the oval of his black hoody and he peels himself out of the shadows like a wraith. There is an antiseptic smell about him that permeates the damp musty air of the shelter and he is gesturing for us to follow him. None of us move.

He mutters something about rooms and we all share a glance. Mousy looks so desperate that I find myself suggesting that we all go. There are four of us and only one of him, after all…

Baldy is too big to climb in the back of the tiny car with Mousy. Instead he stares unblinkingly at her in the rearview mirror throughout the drive.

The Wraith drives like he’s trying to dodge raindrops, but the really terrifying moment happens when he wrenches the wheel suddenly to the left and we find ourselves driving along a path through the trees in a dense forest, past broken fences and a burnt out car.

Dave whispers to go for the Wraith’s eyes if the car stops suddenly. Mousy nearly looks up at me, but catches herself in time. Baldy is still staring.

In the end the rooms are lovely. Clean, fresh, warm. The Wraith gestures at food on a table and a bottle of local spirits that seem to be included in the absurdly low price he names. When we’re warmed and dried the place feels almost homely.

Mousy looks like she wants to join us, but a gesture from Baldy sends her scurrying to their room.

It’s three am when I hear the tapping. I peer out. Mousy is standing by our door. She isn’t looking at the floor now, but dead into my eyes. My first thought is that she has come for help and I move to usher her inside.

Then everything happens at once; Baldy lunges out of their room, hurling himself towards us. He is shouting at Mousy to stop, but I can’t make sense of it. Dave calls me, and, as I turn to answer him, Mousy’s arm slams down into me, a sharp flash of bright metal. Pain and sticky red. Somewhere, someone is screaming.

She supposed that running away to the circus made her a cliche but Stan didn’t really mind, for the first time in her short life, she felt she had found her thing.

It wasn’t a full circus, just her and Marco, a trapeze artist from Toulouse and while she had him nothing else seemed to matter.

Her parents had not been interested in her. And she had had nothing in common with the others at her boarding school. Her innocence had made her a target for bullies and her dyslexia encouraged teachers to give up on her.

So when Marco, with his golden dreadlocks, French accent and devotion to street theatre picked her out for “incroyable souppleness” at a Circus summer school she had no hesitation in leaving her old life behind.

She briefly returned to her parents Manor House near Mold, but when she announced that Anastasia fortescue Cleave , daughter of the 6th earl of Clovelly had chosen a simpler “path through the trees”(not to mention a simpler name) and was headed to Europe, for a summer performing at festivals, her mother was, predictably, not pleased.

She opined that Marco was after her money but she’d said that about Owen purslake, the milkboy who Stan had played kiss chase with aged 9. Stan pointed out that her family’s “fortune” now consisted of debt apart from the trust fund she wouldn’t get til was 25 when it would be worth about £20000, why would Marco would stay with her for for 6 years for such a pittance?But thanks for the vote of trust mama, no one could actually like her for being herself!

Marco was patently uninterested in material things. He didn’t have a permanent home, residing mostly in a converted camper van , or with generous friends who had accepted Stan into their circle with warmth despite her youth.

Every night he told her how trust was the best friend of all circus performers how unless they felt safe “in all of life” they could not catch one another at the climax of their show either. She felt safe in his arms, such trust was a wonderful freedom.

They drifted From Bayonne to Basle performing their act before arriving in a village in the Italian Appenines for a street festival, staying with Marco’s friend Chiara in her farmhouse. Chiara’s partner Sebastian was away at a street arts convention in Pamplona.

At the festival they gave the best performance they had ever given to an ecstatic crowd, Marco plucking her from mid air as she plunged from the Belfry of the village church twisting like an eel.She was ecstatic after the show and didn’t mind when Marco, told her he was tired and was going home to sleep. She spent an of hour looking at stalls then wandered home, the night sky lit by a full moon and the flashes of fireflies.

She entered the farmhouse over a small stone wall and not via the broken gate that made a noise so as not to wake her sleeping lover.

Marco tried blame her privileged ways for the proprietorial way she had reacted to catching him in bed with Chiara. He told her she was an animal for the way she had behaved. Chiara blinked sadly from behind a blackened eye. He asked her if she had learned nothing about the notion of trust between circus performers he’d been trying to install in her “stupid brain”. But somehow Stan felt emboldened by the whole encounter, observing Chiara’s desperate make up application in terror of the returning Sebastian finding out gave the lie to his nonsense.

As she hopped on a bus for Rimini, alone, Stan resolved to trust only one person from now on. Her new, surprisingly flinty, self.

That little dance around at the beginning that everybody knows. Antennae up looking for class resentments and prejudices on both sides. Then, if you are really lucky, something sparks a good feeling that turns into cautious trust.

The owner of a nice middle-class suburban home invites someone in, perhaps a whole string of people, with license to knock down walls, dig up drains, leave a house exposed to the elements for days on end and charge them tens of thousands of pounds for the privilege. And all based mainly on a gut instinct, with perhaps a few suspect online reviews to warm your hands on.

That cautious trust initially turns into something more solid. Plenty of tea and biscuits offered, gradually it becomes first names and then only-ever-so-slightly awkward conversations around topics that might just offer some common ground.

‘Did you see the game last night? Keith/Derek/Andy?’

‘I did as it happens.’

‘No midfield at the moment, have they?’

‘Always been the same.’

And so on.

Payment on time is a given. Weekly as agreed. And the work? On schedule. Starting to look nice. Isn’t it Keith/Derek/Andy.

Trust. Such a warm glow. Long-term lovers, your oldest friends, your teenage kids…builders doing a great job.

‘Hiya, were we expecting you this morning?’

The first day they don’t turn up, well, it’s just a misunderstanding. It’ll soon be back on track. Then the second, and the third and then the little extra costs that you weren’t expecting.

‘I thought the painting was part of the quote Keith/Derek/Andy?’

‘’Afraid not. ‘Course its up to you. You can get someone else in.’

Then the broken fence when someone drops a ladder. And no-one let you know. Then the simmering resentment. The slightly irked tone in a text. You don’t want to be seen to be a pushover. Posh tosser.

Twenty weeks in. Five days running and no-one comes. The patch of mold appearing on the ceiling.

A polite enquiry and a complete, slightly irked denial of any responsibility.

Twenty-five weeks in and it’s an all-out war of words that only the practiced cowboy can possibly win.

But this middle-class tosser has trust issues going way back. Burning, raging resentments from broken marriages and friendships to being left out of the team too many times.

He’d seen him once out with his dog up on the mountain. There was a good path through the woods when it hadn’t been raining too much.

Plan hatches. Mad plan? But got to get this out of the system. Eating away. Getting in the way of everything.

Reddit calls it ‘a snare trap’. Somewhere else shows how to do it.

Sunday the usual day for dog walking. Seems regular. Ten in the morning. Some hanging around but it will be worth it.

Rope laid the night before. By nine hidden ready to activate. Ten past ten. Here he comes and the dog is off the lead thankfully. Front foot into the circle and…hoist.

Fifteen stones dangling ten feet in the air.

‘Help. What the fuck is going on? Help….’

T-shirt rides up and big hairy stomach is revealed. A bonus. Loose change scattered.

The next dog walker breaks into a run. Can’t decide whether to laugh or act fast.

Exit middle-class tosser stage right.

‘You can’t trust these septics’ growled The Ghost of John Prescott as he shadow-boxed his way across the junior executive suite of the Washington Ritz Carlton. ‘They can’t even hang on to simple vowels - mold, color, aluminum (he snorts derisively) - and we’re meant to believe they can find a path through the woods of diplomacy. Yeah right’.

Peter Mandelson arched an eyebrow and in so doing consigned this apparition to oblivion. Prescott had been a fine member of the old guard - handy in a pub brawl, maybe, but no match for the vipers and wraiths of the international political world of today.

Mandy was the man for this moment. His quicksilver tongue and arch cadences were expressly designed to bamboozle the oligarchs, tech-bros and botox addicts who comprised the seething world inside the Beltway.

Later that morning as his executive Uber sped through the streets, Mandelson scanned the acronyms in his phone contacts - DJT, JDV, MTG. Maybe that last was less desirable but he basked in his closeness to true power. He had the confidence of the British Government to seal a deal and he had every intention of doing so.

In the West Wing things took a drastic left turn. Or rather he was guided via a left turn away from the freshly-gilded oval office and hustled into an anteroom where Vance waited. In the background Hegseth could be seen chewing on what looked alarmingly like a human arm. Vance got straight to the point. ‘Daddy isn’t pleased. He’s never heard of Hartlepool and he doesn’t care for your government’s offer of shares in British Telecom - they’re not even American goddamit - and an Aston Martin Vantage, one careful owner, low mileage, unused ashtray. Even though you are wearing a suit, to all intents and purposes you are naked. We are to deliver you to the Department of Homeland Security and wish to have nothing more to do with you.’ So saying, he turned on his elevator heel and, casting a grimace at the slavering Hegseth, indicating he should follow (at a distance) - left the room.

As the sun set forlornly over the Potomac, Mandelson found himself in a windowless room with a quartet of burly masked men who stared impassively as he entreated them that there had been some kind of mistake. Whisked into the hold of a military cargo plane headed for places unknown, he realised he had failed. He was no ambassador, just a failed salesman of soiled goods of dubious provenance, a broken fence.