Will Eaves

Will Eaves was born in Bath in 1967. He is the author of three novels, The Oversight (2001), Nothing To Be Afraid Of (2005) and This Is Paradise (2012), all published by Picador. His chapbook of poems, Small Hours, appeared in 2006. ‘Silverflash’ is taken from Sound Houses, his first full collection, and is reprinted here by permission of Carcanet. For many years he was the arts editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He now teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick, and is currently researching a novel provisionally entitled The Ancestors.

Not since I was four or five at most and in the first of many striped tee-shirts have I been this close to the flavour of safety. I’m walking into town again, the child of hills. You bought me fish and chips for lunch, my own adult portion because I asked for it, in Evans’s tiled restaurant, the Alhambra of takeaways. Fine living robs the faculties of right judgement; I turned, lost sight of you that afternoon in M&S. Gone, and the unworn self at once puts on habits of wandering. (“Have you seen my … ?”) They stood me on a counter. You appeared and recognition bore away the riderless hoofbeats of fear. Pride claimed me, later, when you praised my instinct to be visible, which soon became the need to be noticed — a confused stage, a knowingness that wasn’t what you’d meant at all! You were relieved to see I’d asked for help, could be that lost and, knowing it, be found. My deep-sea stripes helped you spot me, their colours sliding past, today, in town, the blue and brown and silverflash of cars like keys to some fastness. High ground.