Maggie Gee

‘If a human life is described with enough particularity, the universal will begin to speak through it.’
Kenjo Yoshino, Covering

our billion years ago was the real beginning o

Four billion years ago was the real beginning of this story. Long before the cliffs and the crows, long before humans, love and hatred. Long before there was sea between us and Europe. Long before our town was built in a cradle between two cliff tops.

Ravens are messengers, omens who perched on the shoulders of old Norse gods and pointed to past and future. Ravens, the birds who remember.

didn’t look quite human. Everything was slightly shifted, as if in a drawing.

‘I hear you,’ said Winston, with his shy, intelligent, winning smile, pushing his halo of dark curly hair back from his forehead and looking them one by one in the eyes.

who could say ‘No’ to Winston? Who was rumoured to be so sympathetic to others because he himself had a tragic family history – a twin brother who died, some

someone said, but ‘His uncle was murdered. By

. By a racist. Famous case,’ someone else claimed.

ut Belinda Birch hadn’t left. She stood there behind an armchair in the corner of Winston’s office, pulling at her bleached blonde hair which she daily tortured into a thin tight ponytail, the style she had worn twenty years ago when, with her neat, pointy features and tiny waist, she had won Margate Festival Princess.