Little Gold

Liquid sky pouring over the glass roof,

streaming and blurring,

her gaze down the tracks.

Shrinking, shrinking

away to nothing,

the vanishing

tail of a

leaving

train.

Lying face down on her bed, relishing the cool of the cotton against her cheek, Little Gold feels her body vibrate with the receding wave of adrenalin and yawns burst from her mouth, one after another like a knotted chain of magician’s scarves.

Pain acknowledged is pain borne. Pain fought will always defeat you.

Change will come, barely perceptible shifts in her understanding that she will be too observant to miss and too honest to deny. But she will never stop coming here, because some connections are never broken.

bed with clean sheets made of two slabs of marble. On the vertical slab, the name and simple numeric dates are marooned in too much space. No

This is a book about individual struggle that manages to be both life affirming and triumphant.’

Such a wonderfully moving and atmospheric novel, full of very real and very touching relationships

mmer in the 1980s.’

Catherine Hall, author

The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

pegged in every sky like paper cut-outs;