Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) by Christopher Fowler

Author:Christopher Fowler [Fowler, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781473526211
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2015-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

This tale began life as a challenge to write a short story that would allow readers to choose what happened next. Writers hate to throw anything away, and afterwards I thought it would make a perfect investigation for Bryant and May. The core idea came from the fact that I was sent a very glamorous credit card with a private concierge number on it – accidentally, as it turns out. The bank quickly took it back when they realized I wasn’t a CEO, just a writer …

BRYANT & MAY ON THE CARDS

One of the lunchtime customers at the Over Easy Diner in Dalston High Street was driving Ian McFarland crazy. His beer was too warm, his burger too raw, his apple pie too chilled, his coffee too weak. It wasn’t the Ritz; they sold battered saveloys, for God’s sake.

Ian tried to maintain his cheerful demeanour through the increasingly fractious demands. He smiled, apologized, replaced the meal, served a free beer, to no effect. The customer, a raw-faced, stubble-headed bully with small dull eyes, a Liverpudlian accent and an unpleasantly suggestive T-shirt, eventually informed Ian that he would not pay for the meal at all.

That was when Ian lost his cool and tried to throw the customer out of the door. Not acceptable behaviour, even in a dump like the Over Easy. Not only was it not the Ritz, it was one of the least classy dining spots in Dalston, an area which defied description in terms of class at all, accommodating a profusion of dubious social strata too numerous to name. Elsewhere in London you could see drunks fighting on the street at nine in the morning or desperately bartering their last few belongings at the edge of the kerb, but Dalston had that plus everything from artisanal bakeries to Turkish lap-dancing clubs. It was supposed to be up and coming, but never did.

The Over Easy had windows so greasy it was like looking out into a perpetual fog. One had been caved in and was covered in plywood. Inside, the pervasive fatty smell meant that you had to change your shirt after every shift, but it was a job. After his stint in prison Ian had needed something that paid him a bit of cash in hand to supplement the rubbish career opportunity his assistance officer had found for him: planting trees in an area where the kids tore them out of the ground before they’d had a chance to take root and stuffed them through their enemies’ letter boxes.

Ian had handled two tours of duty in Afghanistan, only to return and find his wife and his home gone. Depressed, he’d started drinking a little hard, and had made the one small slip-up that had blotted his record and dumped him at the back of the queue. Before Afghanistan he had always considered himself a sanguine, balanced individual; he knew that life wasn’t fair, and that you had to face its depredations with resigned good humour, but losing his

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.