Exquisite Corpse

by Blackfriars

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

Loughborough Junction, summer 2013. A shopkeeper has gone missing and rumour is rife. What happened to him? Who has the motive and who the means to do him in? Has he been done in? And where will everyone get their fags, booze and lottery tickets without him? Local artist Beth Lamb sets out to investigate. But when you play detective in your own neighbourhood, things are bound to get complicated... Exquisite Corpse: Or, How Not to Kill Your Neighbours is Southbank Centre's first ever novel, written on Twitter by members of the public as part of the 2013 Festival of Neighbourhood. Curated by ten leading novelists - Stella Duffy, Alex Preston, Kamila Shamsie, Stuart Evers, Naomi Alderman, Vanessa Gebbie, Marcel Theroux, G Willow Wilson, Matt Haig and Joe Dunthorne - this unique publication brings together ideas of collaboration, participation and community... and is a thrilling read too!

Release date: September 7, 2013

Publisher: Blackfriars

Print pages: 108

Sample

It’s been a glorious summer so far. Warm days with people standing or sitting on the street, sharing music, sharing the sun;
days that become short and sweet summer nights, the air full of barbecue and jasmine, spilled beer and the occasional waft
of strong South London weed.


Tonight, Beth Lamb is heading late to her bed. She’s had a decent night out, and an easy walk home down the length of Coldharbour
Lane where cars and flats vie with each other for the deepest bass, the fiercest sounds. She is almost home, almost there:
Loughborough Junction – half Camberwell, half Brixton, half nowhere. The bit in between.


Beth loves that she lives in the bit in between. Her wallet loves it too; flats round here are so much cheaper than the cooler,
groovier Brixton ten minutes up the road, where she’s been all night, and where she will go again tomorrow.


For now though, home, bed, sleep. She should be sleepy, it’s been a long week and a long night, but Beth is craving a fag.
She is done with her self-imposed daily quota of only two fags as an abstinence reward. It is just too damn hard being a good
girl, good Beth. One left in the packet – she’ll have to get some more in the morning.


As she opens her front door she hears the clicking warning from the railway lines on the bridge above the road: train coming
through. She climbs the steps to her flat. The shop downstairs is closed tight; no hair weaves, nail gel or party pieces to
be had now. At the top of her twisting stairs the window looks across to Loughborough Junction station. It’s too late for
people to be getting trains home, too early for the early-bird flights from Luton, the St Pancras-to-Paris romances. This
is just a goods train, red lights cutting through the orange sodium, her own home the beginning of a rainbow.


Copious glasses of water drunk, makeup off, blinds pulled, Beth gives in to the welcome cool of her bed. In a small flat,
above what was once a dry cleaner’s, Beth falls asleep to the long song of London sirens.


* * *

Sunday morning arrives, summer-early, the sun reaching over Denmark Hill down to the muddled clutch of shops at Loughborough
Junction. The hair salon that was a dry cleaner’s that is now a nail bar and an internet cafe too; the new Glomco supermarket
around the corner from the old convenience store (which has dressed itself up for the challenge, a face off for the competition);
the food shops that sell fried chicken, or rice and peas, Portuguese cod, Jamaican patties, Chinese noodles or even good old-fashioned
wedding cakes – all held together with a stretch of tired bunting from that day when the Olympic torch came through.


The newsagent’s too. The newsagent’s that should be open, is open at six thirty most mornings.

Shutter, shop door, newsagent’s bike – these are Beth’s early morning sounds. But not today, and not for most of this past
week. Beth stretches in bed. That shutter has been her alarm for years now. It’s not like him not to open up, or not to leave
a note stuck to the door, even if he’s popped out for just five minutes. The old man opens that shop every day of the year,
no closures for Ramadan or for Christmas. No closures.


Beth’s purple notepad is lying on the floor, where she let it drop last night after writing down who she’d seen at the party,
what she’d heard on her way home, three quarters of a shopping list, and the beginning of a design for her next piece of work.
The notebook is part diary, part notice board, part workroom, and sometimes those parts get confused. She means it to be neat
but it ends up messy, thoughts and lists mingling. Only she could understand what is meant by double knot red/2 tins tomatoes/Admiral
B&H/Sam smiled/Joan sang.


Beth likes to notice, to pay attention, and she likes to note what she has noticed. She is an urban birder. She sees what
lives in the cracks of buildings. Her favourite bird is the peregrine falcon. Her favourite dog is the German shepherd that
lives with that Polish lady on Luxor Street. Her favourite cat is the fat tabby that sleeps outside the Hero of Switzerland.
And her favourite newsagent is that old guy over the road, who told her he came to the UK as a refugee after the fall of Saddam.
He has a running joke about how he arrived in this country on the back of a lorry, ‘unlike my ciggies which are strictly legit.’


Beth flicks through her notebook to see when she last spoke to him. Tuesday. Beth doesn’t feel good about this, but nor does
she feel bad enough to stay awake for much longer. She adjusts the blinds to block out the ferocious sun, drinks another glass
of water, and lays her head down.


Three hours later, when the nicotine cravings have pulled her from an on-off sleep, Beth showers and dresses and heads downstairs,
over the road, her front door slamming behind her.


The shop is still shut. She squints through the glass. The cash till is undisturbed but, weirdly, the lottery terminal is
missing, as if wrenched out. Ruined play-slips litter the floor, each filled in with thick pen strokes, nightmarishly forming
the word ‘REPAY’.


Beth steps back from the window and takes a deep breath. Her artist’s imagination is running away with her. She ruffles her
jet-black hair and leans in once more.


Something definitely isn’t right.

Almost a year ago now, the newsagent decided to stock fruit and a few vegetables. Yes, there was the halal shop on the opposite
corner which did a good lot of veg, as did the convenience store, the one trying to keep up with the interloping Glomco, but
the newsagent knew he had his regulars. They liked to pick up a couple of bread rolls with their Guardian, a packet of chocolate digestives with the Sun, a pint of milk. So why not branch out into fruit too? Beth loves avocado. . .