Serious Sweet by A.L. Kennedy

an ability which had atrophied into, at most, a show of pursed lips and perhaps firm but appropriately crafted comments, delivered at apposite moments, or kept in reserve, kept in perpetual reserve.
    Nonetheless, as he waited for the cab to progress from Chiswick to Westminster, Jon pictured the way he might grin as he stepped from the taxi and dragged the driver out by his lapels, ears, by something available, and punched him, threw him into the path of oncoming traffic without a helmet or relevant licence, because there was no relevant licence, you don’t need a licence to be crushed.
    As he racked up another three inches towards his workplace, Jonathan Sigurdsson cleared his throat, ‘What do you reckon? Much longer?’
    â€˜No idea, mate. Not a clue.’
    â€˜Ah, well.’ Jon rubbed his thumb across the pads of callous he was growing on the fingertips of his left hand – small areas of invulnerability which were helping him learn to play the guitar. Rhythm and blues. He felt that was a style which might forgive his lack of skill. And his love. It was a place to indulge his love with an entity which would neither care nor take advantage.
    It’s an outlet.
    D7 – that’s a troubling chord to form. It makes me all thumbs and no fingers.
    Done D9. I can manage that, get into it quite smoothly. Which was worth it. I think. It’s useful. Sounds useful. But putting everything together … the transitions … and by myself … I have a book, but I am by myself …
    I am aware that I’m no good.
    But it is an outlet.
    The traffic did not move.
    His phone started ringing.

09:36

IT WASN’T LOST on Meg – the humour of steering herself about from one hospital to another, her semi-regular trips. Although the Hill wasn’t really a hospital and maybe only seemed like one because of her thinking and where she was with her life just at the moment.
    Where she was this morning was a genuine hospital: mall-style food court with a range of options, frequent opportunities for hand sanitising, slick floors that seemed to anticipate the spillage of shaming fluids. There was none of the medical smell she still expected from medical buildings: the disinfectant reek that used to set the scene so unmistakably, used to make the whole of yourself clench, even if you were healthy. Nowadays you walked into any of these places and there was only an aroma of cheap coffee and beyond that perhaps the scent of a low-class office block or a cheap hotel. The overall banality of what you were inhaling made your surroundings seem less professional and therefore more frightening. And then maybe there were traces of something nastier that you didn’t quite catch, not fully, something to do with used bedding and uncontrolled decay.
    And she was frightened – more in her body than her mind, but both communicated, she couldn’t prevent it. Back and forth, they whispered, they bled.
    As she’d climbed the stairs – the lifts here always seemed unclean and were too obviously big enough to contain trolleys, biers, bodies – her muscles had seemed to soften and become unhelpful.
    And then there was the form to sign and the multiple confirmations of her birth-date – as if she might have changed into somebody different from one end of each corridor to the other.
    In the waiting room where she finally paused were the usual telly and posters pledging to do nice things very nicely and threatening that any violence would be met with prosecution. One woman was already there with – it was only a guess – her supporting male partner. A second outpatient sat between uniformed and, most likely, less supportive female warders. It took a moment to notice the second woman was handcuffed to the warder at her left.
    The warders chatted desultorily. They wore cheap and shapeless black pullovers and trousers which were ill-fitting. They