‘What about all the stuff you said about not changing history?’ ‘People aren’t history,’ said Adela scornfully. ‘Good grief, why didn’t I listen to anything anyone told me when I was young? As long as the Ministry rises to power, then history happened the way we said it did.’

Cardingham’s features curdled. It occurred to me that Arthur (who was either gay or bisexual, had been marginalised in his own lifetime) and Graham (an explorer whose life had required flexibility and forbearance) had ill-prepared me for how a male ‘historical figure’ might react to me. Cardingham was disgusted. He thought I should be below his

Within the action of this story, these memories mean little. After the first time Graham and I went to bed together, they are symbolically all of a piece. I could have written to you without including them; after all, the things that happen between lovers are lost to the work of history anyway. But I wrote it down because I need you to bear witness

For ease of adjustment, the expats were only given immediate, applicable knowledge. He came to me knowing the basics about the electric grid, the internal combustion engine and the plumbing system. He didn’t know about the World or Cold Wars, the sexual liberation of the 1960s, or the war on terror. They had started by telling him about the

You don’t look Cambodian, one early clown had said to me, then glowed like a pilot light because the interview was being recorded for staff monitoring and training purposes. He’d get a warning for that one. People say this to me a lot, and what they mean is: you look like one of the late-entering forms of white – Spanish maybe – and also like

My sister maintained that her work was a sort of reclamation, a space-taking practice in protest of a childhood spent in squeezed spaces. That all she was telling was the truth, as if the Truth was a sort of purifier that turned mud and plasma into clean water by judicious application. I didn’t know who read her writing, other than people who

Despite being out of uniform, he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font.

Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.

What to do with money? Social media was full of stories of mothers keeping sewing kits in biscuit tins and filling childhoods with biscuit-related working-class/immigrant malaise. I’d laughed at all of them, of course, because they were aimed at people like me. Making do ceases to be habitual and becomes a matter of conscience.