10: The Lost Seconds – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

The tenth and final story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is about what might happen if time froze around you for just a few seconds, leaving you out of sync with the world. Here’s a bit from the opening which takes place in the gents toilets beneath London’s Paddington Station: The cleaner’s mop ceased to splash and slap. Cisterns and taps no longer dripped – the background percussion I hadn’t even noticed was there disappeared. I’m now aware of the constant, multi-layered hum of electricity, fans and mechanical devices but at that moment, for the first time, I really knew what silence was… You know how when you pause a film, it looks different? Even if the shot is of nothing – a blank wall, paint drying, still life – when the video is playing at twenty-four or thirty or sixty frames a second, it feels alive. But paused, it loses definition. The grain or pixels become fixed in place, revealing the surface texture and two-dimensionality of the image. During the…