217 Babel Street | Apartment 1
Viv lay flat on her back in the dark. She was exhausted and the little girl upstairs was running around laughing and jumping. Daddy, she called out. Why wasn’t the brat in bed yet? Daddy! Viv pulled a pillow over her head and turned over.
Two hours later she was awake. Had she slept in between or had she been awake the whole time? A strange day she’d had. Her mind was prickly and busy.
Daddy. She switched on her bedside lamp and looked around at the postcards on her walls. He’d promise cards and presents when he went off on his trips around the globe, but they rarely came. Mum rolled her eyes and said she didn’t think they made postcards of Dagenham. But he did bring her a doll from Hong Kong once, a man in a blue cloth outfit with hair in a knot on top of his head. She remembered a postcard from Tallinn and one from Tabasco. Perhaps they’d never even been postmarked. Perhaps they had.
Sometimes she wanted to go after her father and punish him, though he was long dead, and sometimes she forgave him. But at least she had all her postcards now.
Viv put the World Service on.
The economy of the Windward Isles is dependent on bananas but I asked Michael what he thinks the...
And later.
In Iraqi Kurdistan where PKK guerrillas are thought to be training, there is tension of a different kind...
Viv’s thoughts crumbled to sleep.