A FLASH OF lighting exploded, illuminating a dark, dismal Artikian sky, followed almost instantaneously by a crash of thunder; it was loud, it was close. James Levan liked a good thunderstorm, and in his opinion, the only way to experience one would be to stand at an upstairs window in total darkness or with the back door wide open. Although there was no back door that led to a crumbling stone yard, twenty feet in length, sided by seven feet high walls, lashed with cheap magnolia stone, several large tubs of winter flowering pansies and some sort of climbing rose.
His mother had told him the name of it many times, but he could never remember. ‘Flame’, ‘Fire’, it was something like that. He remembered the places they lived in – they were rented , he remembered them, but wished he couldn’t. Most were hovels, disgusting, etched into his brain, more horrid than the ugliest of nightmares. Smoke and dog odour hit you in the face upon opening the front door, courtesy of the previous tenants.
Carpets reeked so badly of urine and faeces that they ripped out, leaving them to walk on bare floorboards, which seemed to be laid by amateurs, with enough gap between the tongue and groove to fall into and be lost forever, and mismatched carpet squares, carpet roll end, hand-me-downs made their accommodation into something which resembled a giant patchwork quilt.
Damp ridden walls had the wallpaper torn off, if it hadn’t already peeled away, to be quickly painted – apricot whites pale blues, lemon emulsions gone tragically wrong, purchased for next to nothing. Plaster, which was fast decaying, could easily be picked away with a single fingernail. His mother would plug the holes with shreds of paper, mix plenty of sawdust into a glue-like paste,
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