From London’s N19 to Paris, a story of dreams lost and found‘Rich, poetic, painterly, wise and tender’ Maggie Gee

‘Hugely readable and quietly profound’ Beatrice Colin‘Heather Reyes writes with tremendous verve and wit’ Jill Dawson

I manage to wait until he’s gone downstairs and slammed the front door before bursting into tears from the

sudden, overwhelming feeling that this is someone else’s life I’ve strayed into. Georgina Hardiman was supposed

to travel the world and be free and become a great writer! How … How could I have let this happen? I’ve

never held a baby before. Then the tiny, odd creature in my arms begins to shift about inside her shawl, a livid surge coming alarmingly to her face, then subsiding. She begins to turn her head, nuzzling. I stop crying, sit on the edge of the bed and feed her with my coat and boots

still on: the flat’s freezing

My name is Eloisa Gabrielle Hardiman.I am 9 years old. I live in Miranda Road, London, England,Europ, the World, the Galicksy, the Universe.I have brown hair that is curly and long.I have brown eyes.My skin is a bit brown.School dosen't like me. I do not like other childern much.I don't have a Daddy but I would like one.I live with my Mum. Her name is George (really Georgina).When I grow up I want to live in a very big house and have some money not like my Mum. She only does storys.The picture I drew is my Mum with her tipewritter and me beside her. I am asking her what she is writting about. by Eloisa Hardiman

I was hopping and watching the little ghosts come out of my mouth and blend with the cold, misty air when I turned a corner and saw a big stone head staring down at me - the wide face, big eyebrows and bushy beard of a stern father.

(Was mine like that?) I sounded out the letters of the name carved into stone beneath the enormous head.

‘K-A-R-L M-A-R-X’

The Tuileries. Sudden snow. Hardly anyone about, just him and me, and a couple of old Parisians … The two of us

shouting and dancing to an audience of blank-eyed statues being steadily clothed with snow

The world my mother made for the two of us seemed so different from other people’s way of going on that I was confused. I longed for a life that was more normal than mine. A Janet-and-John life. A house with a garden and

resident puppy. Brothers and sisters (well, one at least). A daddy with a car and a mummy who baked cakes and cleaned the house properly instead of pulling stories out of her head like bright silk scarves from a magician’s sleeve

(those sheets and sheets of paper she pulled up out of the mouth of Qwerty).

C-O-L-L-A-B-O-R-A-T-E-U-R-S

… containing, for the French, CUL (as in 'mon cul' – 'my arse': so 'arsehole'); RATS

(which speaks for itself); OR ('gold': how much of it was done for greed?); BOL (as in

'bol alimentaire' – a disgusting gobbet of chewed food, from the Greek 'Bolos', a clod

or lump) … leaving an A and an E (Adolph Eichmann in any language) and also another O

('Oh! … Oh! …'). And A's for the other Adolf, obviously, and also for Auschwitz and ash

and abbatoir, for 'ARBEIT MACHT FREI', for absence, abyss and abomination, for 'adieu'

and anguish, for agony, anger, annihilate, appalling, for Azrael the Angel of Death.

Then all the Es come tumbling … evil, eugenics, enslave, experiment, emaciated,

expendable, extermination …

It drips and drips and drips.

C-O-L-L-A-B-O-R-A-T-E-U-R-S

Amaranth Oort was enormous: large and sturdy as a Dutchman (her father), exotic as an Indonesian (her mother). Not fat, just very large all over. ‘Amaranth’ was the name she’d given herself in later life because no one could

pronounce her Indonesian one. She told me how lucky I was to have such a lovely mum … to have any parents at all. Hers had died most horribly in a car crash when she was three: something involving a ravine (A person who looked like her just wouldn’t have been connected with run-of-

the-mill deaths in bed.)

A locket hangs in my head like a small gold watch: open it and a tiny skull says ‘tick-tock: tick-tock’.

One life.

That was then. This is now. I still have a future to fill.

Some, anyway.

Like a full moon, I know the past will always come round again - again- again … though growing paler each time, lately … turning into a monument.

An in-creeping tide is finally filling the impress of feet that have, anyway, been walking away over the dunes for years now. Above are small, high clouds like white handkerchiefs of goodbye.

Dresdens of the heart.

Miranda Road by Heather Reyes is published on 10 May 2014 by Oxygen Books. Paperback original, £8.99, and e-book. She is the author of An Everywhere: a little book about reading (‘a brilliant guide to the city of books’ Helen

Dunmore), a novel Zade, and her short stories have appeared in many magazines including Fiction International, Ambit and Mslexia. She is the editor of the city-pick travel guide series. For a review copy of Miranda Road please contact malcolm.burgess3@btopenworld.com Tel: +44 (0) 1277

263770 www.oxygenbooks.co.uk