It is fair to say that Hedley Hill was no stranger to death. Death had furnished him with the funds to establish his business in that long cold winter of 1863 when the old world was choking on the new, with locomotives rumbling under Paddington and disease tearing through the city from East End to […]

In the small hours, Greg likes to put the machines on. When there’s no one using whichever of the Scrub Club branches he happens to be visiting, he sticks all the washers on for a spin, all the driers on a fast tumble. Their downtime health check, he calls it. You can tell a lot […]

Your mother teaches you the rituals of bathing. First with a rubber duckie, then with Mr. Bubble, then with rose-scented crystals that come packaged with a satin bow on top. No one was ever allowed to bathe you but her. She didn’t trust anyone to follow the rites. These are the secrets that must be […]

My mother was the first one to tell me about the river. When we arrived in this town, she went to a bookstore and bought herself a little book about the place’s history—as we were so strangers to Southern culture, and the way my mother tried to make herself acquainted to something was through books. […]