The story of my birth could have been the stuff of family legend. First babies are supposed to take their time arriving; malingering in the birth canal, reluctant to leave the only home they have known. Or maybe it’s the mother’s body that holds them fast, unaware until then that the tenancy was always destined to be temporary. Either way, first babies are not supposed to rocket out into the carpeted foot well of a Ford Granada being driven with stately smoothness by a man wearing open-knuckled leather driving gloves and an expression of closed determination. That man being my father. I don’t know he was wearing his driving gloves, of course, but given that he has done so each and every time I have seen him get behind the wheel, I think it’s a fair assumption.

Late to the business of parenthood, neither he nor my mother realised things were progressing so quickly. The midwife was called and they were instructed to get to the hospital. ‘We were so worried you’d be born at home, we didn’t even remember to lift your mother’s hospital bag,’ my father said. ‘Not that it mattered, in the end.’

‘Would it have been so bad,’ I wondered, ‘being born at home?’

My father had looked at me across the top of his newspaper. ‘Not the done thing,’ was all he said.

So, the story continued, my mother was bundled into the back of the Granada and off they went to the hospital. But I was very insistent, apparently, on making my way out and, driven by instinct more than decorum, my mother swung herself around to brace her feet against the front seats. ‘Cross your legs, Sofia!’ my father instructed her, sliding panicked sideways glances into the rear view mirror, wanting to know, but at the same time, not (I imagine. He retches if he finds the Sunday chicken has come with a bag of giblets secreted in its belly, I doubt he’d have dealt well with a full-frontal view of my mother spread-legged and bloodied in the back of his precious motor).

So, to cut a short story shorter, out I came and my mother scooped me up, held me fast, still attached to her via cord and placenta. A placenta that refused to evict itself as it should and turned my mother inside out. She’d bleed to death before they ever got to the hospital and the Granada was a right-off.

That’s the story, more or less, oft retold, or variations upon it. And the thing is, none of it is true, not a word…

Read the full story in STORIES FOR HOMES 2. All proceeds from the Stories for Homes anthologies go directly to Shelter, the housing and homelessness shelter. You can buy Stories for Homes 2 here.

When you fly into Heathrow, you can see the whole of Britain. That’s what Dawn’s boss always said to new members of staff. His little joke, he said. Most of the workers in the coffee shop in Terminal Five had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Don’t believe me?’ he’d say to their bewildered faces. ‘Dawn knows what I’m talking about, don’t you, Dawn?’

And Dawn would smile and nod and say nothing. Dawn was a local girl, unlike most of her co-workers, having lived in Hillingdon all her life. She knew he was talking about Little Britain Lake.

‘Shaped just like Great Britain it is,’ he’d continue, ‘a mini sceptered isle.’ (He fancied himself as a bit of a scholar as well as a joker). ‘Just north of the airport, pretty much all the planes circle over it at least once.’

Dawn remembered walking around Little Britain Lake when she was younger, holding her mum’s hand, and looking up at the planes stacked up in the sky, a string of graduated pearls. She used to worry that the big planes and the little planes were going to crash into each other, until her mum explained that the planes were all the same size, but some were much higher up and further away, so looked smaller. And they were all going in circles anyway, so they couldn’t crash into each other. Dawn wanted to ask her mum why they were going round in circles when they were supposed to be going places, but she didn’t want to push her luck.

These days, as Dawn rode the bus to work at the airport, she would press her face to the window and watch the planes coming in to land. They dropped slowly out of the sky in lazy, loping descents, like they didn’t really mean it, like they might at any moment change their minds and swoop back up. And why wouldn’t they, Dawn wondered, when they saw where they were landing? When she thought of Heathrow, she thought grey: light grey concrete buildings, dark grey tarmac roads, planes and cars and buses coated in a grey fuel-infused dirt. And too much sky. Dawn didn’t like all that sky over her head.

Inside the airport, too, things didn’t have as much colour as they should. Dawn supposed it was something to do with the lighting – white fluorescent light bouncing off white tiled floors, bleaching everything in between.

It was different in the coffee shop – cosy, warm, all natural wood and plum-red walls. It smelled warm too. Dawn usually worked the first or last shifts, fitting them around her classes at sixth-form college. Early shifts were her favourite: she liked brewing up the first coffee of the day, before the machine started to overheat and scorch the coffee. She took her role as a barista very seriously and when there was time (which wasn’t very often) she would linger over the ritual of brewing the espresso: waiting for the machine to heat up; drawing off a scant cup of hot water to prime the pump; carefully tamping the coffee into the holder so the water would flow through at just the right speed; steaming the milk until it was creamy and dense or frothy and filled with air, as required.

It was on one of the slow early morning shifts that Dawn first met Audrey. She was sitting at a small corner table, lingering over a rapidly cooling latte, a small black carry-on suitcase tucked behind her legs. She looked to be about the same age as Dawn’s mum, which meant she was probably a good deal older. Dawn’s mum looked every inch of her forty-four years, and then some. This woman took care of herself – she had the sort of skin where the edges of aging had been blurred out by a lifetime of good habits. Her hair was neat and her clothes looked expensive, if a little out-of-date.

She’d been sitting at that table for a while, which wasn’t so unusual. There were two types of customer in the coffee shop – those with time to kill and those with no time to spare. This woman wasn’t checking her watch or leaning out to check the departures board outside the coffee shop. She was sitting quite still, elbows on the table, coffee cup cradled in mid-air, eyes gazing into the unseen distance. She looked, Dawn realised, relaxed. Like there was nowhere else she needed to be…

Read the full story in 33 WEST

It’s the quietness that wakes me.

I have been turning over in bed for some time, denying wakefulness, refusing to check the clock. It feels early – certainly too early to get up. But, as always, the very act of fighting for sleep drives it away. As my senses start to tune into the waking world, I notice it – the wrongness outside my window. I can hear the occasional car outside – nothing unusual about that. But there is something not right about the sound they make as they pass. It’s as if they are tiptoeing down the street.
I give up on sleep and open one eye. Daylight – it must be later than I thought. But it’s a soft, diffuse daylight, tinted at the edges with a hint of sodium orange from the street lights. I turn my head to check the clock. 6:59…7:00. The alarm goes off. Wah, wah, wah.

I slap the off switch and swing myself out of bed. As I stand and stretch, I rehearse the plan in my head. Timing is crucial. Lover-boy Danny will be waiting for me on the other side of this day. I need to stay focused. But there it is again, the soundless sound of a car coming down the street. Mine is a typical London street, lined with jerry-built Victorian terrace houses, two down, three up, pretensions above their class. It’s used as a rat-run all day, all night, a shortcut to the station car park for the commuters, a cut through to the high street for impatient lorry drivers. The sound of vehicles rumbling down the hill has been white noise in my life for the past six months. But today there is something missing, and when I pull back my curtains and look out, I see what it is: friction.

It’s easy to take for granted, friction – that sticky little force that teams up with gravity to make our world a usable place. A little grit in the works helps the world turn. But not today – a light rain has fallen on already frozen ground, creating a thick slick of clear ice that tops the road and pavement, railings and gateposts. The few cars that are on the road inch their way down the hill, their engines growling in low gear, their wheels moving silently.

This is not good. I have to get the nine-thirty train. That’s the plan. But there’s no way the ice will be gone by then – the temperature has barely risen above freezing for weeks, and today is going to be no exception. I will have to drag my suitcase down the hill, holding on to garden railings and fences as I go. Maybe I can swing myself from lamp-post to lamp-post, like a grounded gorilla. Or maybe I will just sit on my case and ride it down the hill, toboggan style. I smile to myself and head for the bathroom. I can make this work.

I have just finished my shower when I hear one of my neighbours let out a yell from outside. I get back to the window just in time to see a small red car silently pirouetting down the street. I catch glimpses of the woman driver, wide-eyed and silent, hands gripping the now-useless steering wheel, as the car turns sideways, then backwards, sliding down the hill with a lazy grace. Her car clips another parked on the far side of the street, turns again and crashes straight through my low garden wall. I lean my forehead against the window and close my eyes. Not today…

Read the full story in The Tipping Point.