In January, I did a grim all-nighter at Gatwick airport to finish off writing a story about collateral damage, the prison system under New Labour and, strangely, giant, living moths you could order from the internet. It started like this:
So I’m slagging off England. Saying how on holidays, you can be in the roughest, dullest, worst part of town and your place will still have a balcony. But back home? Balconies are certified fancy. You have to pay good money to get a look at our streets. I wanna be On Show, paraded, but my brother’s all what about Canada House? We had a balcony there, in the council flat we lived in for the first years of our lives, bugs living in the carpets, and the balconies there were small, enclosed ledges with tall iron rods and people only used them to store broken bicycles, tables with missing legs, and when the neighbours looked out from them it was as if we were all stuck inside little square prisons.
For the past 6 months, I’ve been writing stories set in and around an imagined Canada House: the since demolished flats I used to live in before we moved to a different house on the same council estate. It was my big sister, Anouska, who reminded me of Canada House last summer - in the middle of my accusing England of only ever having balconies stuck to the front of fancy buildings.
Round my dad’s last week, I found a framed, dusty pair of atlas moths, battered wings, the ones I remember him bringing home from work when I was a teenager. He’d got the tropical moths from another scaffolder who’d been rearing them in his own home. This fella would order the moth eggs from abroad, from some website, then they would hatch into caterpillars at his house and spin a chrysalis and come out as these massive moths, fly around his place for a couple of days, then die of old age. I used to think about it all the time, how mad it was that these mental creatures would live their whole life span in a scaffolder’s kitchen in England.
So I’ll leave ya today not only with (hopefully) a clearer picture of what I’m been working on with the Canada House collection, but also with a deleted scene from the Gatwick airport story - before I started killing off all the moths. Gotta say, it was hard to kill my darlings. A minute’s silence plz for the lost moths of this story 🙏
The atlas caterpillars grow so big they eclipse the whole match box, stretch until the skin splits, worm their way slowly out from the old skins. It takes half an hour, like getting out of size 6 jeans, then it knocks off its whole head, I mean it, a bigger, smarter head waiting to spring out from under the old one. And underneath is like disco caterpillar. Translucent green with blue legs. Kicks all the shed skin right off like a Halloween wig, munches on it too after resting for hours to recover from all the stretching and straining, summoning the will to pull out your clip in hair extensions in the throes of a bone stopping hangover. The skins are elastic, and they have 5 malts and after the first they grow this powdered cocaine overcoat, look like little white rhinos, and they eat and they eat.
See ya soon X.X.X