When I quit my job, I had to move. I had been living in a shared house – a nice big house – with other people like myself: middle-class twentysomethings with a future. I couldn’t nearly afford it. But I found a place around the corner – a little 2-bedroom Georgian terraced house that some unscrupulous buy-to-let profiteer had carved into 6 bedrooms. A bedsit.

I went to check the place out. I had assumed the guy I had spoken to on the phone – loud, something like a subcontinental accent, broken english – was the landlord, and it was he who greeted me when I arrived. Turned out he was a tenant. He was shaven-headed, of indeterminate race, impossible to age. He looked a bit like Yul Brynner, I thought. His name was Javed.

The first thing he did was offer me food. Not biscuits, or crackers. A meal: beef stew, with rice. I’d just met the guy, and there was something odd about him. He spoke too loudly, and had a peculiar turn of phrase. The beef was stewed on the bone, which struck me as weird. I felt that if I ate more than a couple of forkfuls, I’d wake up gagged and bound in the cellar. I’d read about these things. But it was delicious, as good as anything I’d ever tasted, and I ate the lot.

While I ate, Javed – very nicely – interrogated me. Where was I from? What did I do? Did I have a girlfriend because if I did she couldn’t stay here.

When I finished he said, “I forgot to tell you, this is a strictly non-gay house!”

What?!

“That’s fine,” I said. You homophobic psycho.

I moved in, and though I tried my best to avoid him, I discovered before long that Javed was not only homophobic, but anti-Semitic, anti-American, pretty racist in almost every way, sexist and rude. He ran the house with what he called regimental rules, which meant you couldn’t drip on the bathroom floor, or leave cutlery draining by the sink. I always suspected the purpose of regimental rules was to allow Javed to pretend to himself most of the time that he lived on his own. Well, not entirely on his own. Javed’s best friend was a Pomeranian called Billy (a pedigree – Billy’s full name was Bill Clinton). Javed shaved Billy from the neck down, so he looked like a tiny lion. Billy hated everyone but Javed.

Other housemates came and went. There was a French guy, a couple of Italians. There was a Polish guy who only lasted two days because Javed wouldn’t let him cook all of his meals on the patio using a foldaway barbecue he kept in his room. Javed scared most of the other tenants away. If someone left, it was because of Javed.

Me, I worked all day, went to drama school in the evening, rolled in late. I hardly saw Javed so I lasted longer than most. Sometimes he would treat everyone to dinner, buy lots of wine. We’d all get pissed and pretend like Javed was a normal guy.

“Eat, drink, laugh, fucking hell,” he’d say.

One time Javed invited round a former housemate – someone who had lived in that little house for years, someone Javed referred to as a friend. I imagined a boor – someone as rude and racist and wrong as Javed. But the guy who came round was young, professional, polite. He was just like me. And he spoke to Javed like an old pal.

That was the first time I remember thinking there might be something to Javed I had missed.

The following summer was a period of relative stability in the house. We had a cohort of housemates who for one reason or another could tolerate Javed. It was hot. We ate outside a lot. Javed cooked for everyone. And he could cook. God, he could cook. Sometimes, the other guys would bring their girlfriends round, and Javed would be charming, polite and courteous. People liked him.

One night, Javed and I got very drunk, and he pulled out a big pile of photographs. “The women in my life,” he said. They were just pictures of Javed with women. I’d guess they went back ten years or so. Many looked to have been taken in far flung places. He looked exactly the same age in every one.  They all seemed quite happy to have had their picture taken with him. Not as happy as him, mind. I can’t remember if it was before or after that I found out he had been married and lived in Germany for many years. It seemed to me that these were just pictures of women Javed had met in passing, but he remembered many of them by name.

One day, after a few drinks, Javed said: “I am a prince, you know.”

He went on to tell me about his family in Pakistan. He was from an upper class Karachi family. He had cousins in England, New Zealand, Canada. He told me how as kids, he and his siblings would take ripe mangos from under the tree, squash them, and then suck the juice out of the unbroken skin through a hole they made in the end. He still ate mangos that way, and for a while I did too.

I asked him why he chose to live in a bedsit in Finsburk Park. He said he couldn’t go back while Billy was alive. Another time, he said he wouldn’t go back until the country was politically stable.

One night, the other housemates were out and Javed had some friends round. All, old, wealthy Pakistani men like him. One of his friends brought his wife’s nihari, a spicy beef stew. Javed invited me to eat with them. They put the pot in the middle of the table and we each had an empty bowl to fill and a plate of bread.

For reasons I don’t understand, nihari is quite hard to get in the UK. It is probably the most flavour-packed dish I’ve ever tasted. Cheap cuts (typically shin) are stewed on the bone with various spices. Traditionally, the dish is slow cooked overnight and eaten for breakfast with lots of bread. Done right, it’s so tender that you can lift the bone out of the bowl and the meat will stay in the gravy.

I tucked in. After a minute Javed said quietly, “remind me to tell you about Pakistani manners.” I had been pulling huge chunks of meat out of the pot and leaving the gravy. The meat is the expensive bit, and I’d been hogging it.

He was an old fashioned sort of guy. One of the housemates, a really good lad whom Javed was particularly fond of, convinced Javed to let him have a party. It was clear Javed had misunderstood what this had meant when the boy’s mates showed up with their decks and soundsystem. But he went along with it. About an hour into the party, Javed took the microphone from the MC and announced that there was lentil soup and bread for whoever wanted it. Everyone laughed. Javed looked confused.

He worked nights, driving a minicab, not because he needed the money but because he liked the conversation. One night, he pulled his cab to the side of the road and told the young women in the back that they would have to make the rest of the journey themselves. When they protested, he  asked them if they wouldn’t mind calling him an ambulance. He’d had a stroke.

I lived in that little bedsit for several years, only leaving when it was time to move in with Grace. (“Princess Grace,” Javed called her.) And it surprised me to discover that I missed the old bastard. A couple of years later, when Grace was heavily pregnant, we swung by Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park to see if we could see him. He’d go down on a weekend for no other reason than to wind up the zealots. (It turned out that none of Javed’s objectionable views were very strongly held.) And we found him, Billy under his arm, yelling at a fundamentalist Christian that “Jesus was a Jamaican”

Here’s some footage I found on YouTube, from last year. Javed’s the one in the cap, causing trouble.

My new union, the FDA, likes to negotiate. Our members include some of the most senior officials in Whitehall. Not only do we like to negotiate, we’re usually pretty good at it. The FDA has balloted its members on a strike only twice in its 92-year history. We don’t like to do it, and we don’t usually need to. We like to negotiate.

This Government does not like to negotiate. It thinks negotiations are a bit of a joke, not to be taken seriously. When my union officials reported with dismay the inept approach to pension negotiation they witnessed coming from this Government, I believed and trusted them, because this is a union whose track record shows that they take this stuff very seriously indeed. They’re not militant. They’re not prone to rhetoric. They wanted desperately to reach an agreement.

It’s important to us in the public sector that we have unions who will negotiate on our behalf. In the private sector you can negotiate for yourself, name your own terms, make a case for better pay. You can do all that face to face, with your employer. In the public sector we can’t, because our employer is the taxpayer. So we have grades and pay scales and all this crap that seems bureaucratic but is actually designed for fairness and to keep control of how public money is spent. We’re given a grade, and we take the pay and the conditions that come with that grade, and we trust our unions to protect that pay and those conditions, by negotiating on our behalf.

My union believes the taxpayer can afford our pensions. Why? Well, the cost to the public purse of public sector pensions has peaked. It’s already falling. Left alone, according to the best estimates, the cost of public sector pensions as a proportion of GDP will fall, year on year, every year, for at least the next fifty years. The Government knows this. It’s in the Hutton report, which they commissioned. But we’re living longer. We’re enjoying longer retirements. Depending on certain social factors, some degree of reform may be needed to make these pensions sustainable. This is Hutton’s argument. It’s a fair one. And there, you have a basis for negotiation.

But the Government isn’t interested in negotiation. Until this very month, they had made not one serious concession. Despite repeated requests made by my union since negotiations began in the spring, they would not release the costings data for the pension schemes until the middle of last month. And despite the fact that meaningful negotiations could not possibly even start until that data had been received and properly analysed (and this isreally complex stuff), they then set an arbitrary eight-week deadline to conclude negotiations.  There’s a term for the approach the Government have taken. It’s calledplaying silly buggers. And it betrays the fact that, for them, this was never about making pensions more sustainable. It was about something this Government takes far more seriously than the future welfare of public servants. For them, it was always about their commitment to deficit reduction, which they’re desperate to do as quickly as possible to placate the financial markets.

It’s just my view but, done fairly, I support deficit reduction. However, it’s a short-term goal. Pension reform is forever. And making permanent changes that will have negative consequences on people’s quality of life many years from now to solve a short term problem today isn’t fair, isn’t clever. And saying it’s about fairness and sustainability isn’t honest. It’s a downright lie.

It isn’t necessary, for the sustainability of pensions, to switch indexation from RPI to CPI, cutting at a stroke the value of pensions by 15%. It isn’t necessary to impose a levy on employee contributions amounting to 6% of salaries from next year, in the middle of a public sector pay freeze, when inflation is running at 5%. These are brutal, short-termist,deficit reduction measures, which will lower the living standards of many public servants by 20% over the next few years.

Here’s the kicker. That increase in employee contributions? The money raised is going straight to the Treasury. It isn’t even going to be used to make pensions more sustainable. It’s a levy. It’s a tax. Again, this is about deficit reduction, not sustainability.

Some will say public sector pensions are considerably more generous than private pensions. That’s because private sector employers have shafted their own employees by squeezing their pension funds in search of bigger and bigger profits. What has happened to private pensions is a scandal. I don’t want to live in a society where employers and the State race each other to see who can treat their employees the worst. That way, everybody loses.

Some will say it’s time for the public sector to take its share of the pain. The planned increase in employee contributions equates to a levy of £2.8bn. The levy on the banks equates to £2.5bn. So who’s taking the bigger share of the pain?

I live in an average household. We have a slightly lower than average household income and we live in London so our outgoings are pretty high. Since George Osborne’s emergency budget last year, we have suffered the total loss of our Working Tax Credit, as well as the effects of my pay freeze against a background of high inflation. These changes amount to the loss of a very large proportion of our household’s disposable income. Next year’s increase in pension contributions will be another sizeable chunk. For a family like us, living in London, with childcare to pay, these measures hurt like hell. They hurt me, and they hurt my kids. And my reward? According to the Government’s calculator, when I retire I can look forward to drawing £10,000 less per year.

So when the unions are trying earnestly to protect me and my family and millions like us, and the Government start dicking around with the negotiation process, trying to play hardball, play chicken, I feel insulted. When they offer last minute concessions and don’t give anyone the time to analyse them properly and work out what they mean, and then blithely threaten to take them off the table again, I feel insulted. When the Prime Minister gets up in Parliament and describes as irresponsible this action that we have tried so hard to avoid, I feel insulted. We have been treated with contempt. We have tried, repeatedly and with increasing desperation, to avoid this action. But here we are.

I don’t like going on strike. But I think industrial relations matter in the public sector. And for me, that’s what this is about. More than pensions. It’s about protecting the process by which we have always made sure our public servants are treated fairly as servants of the public, who don’t ask to be paid the same as they would in the private sector because they see the value in what they do, not in how much money it pulls in, but in how it improves lives. More than our pensions, it’s that process that I feel is under threat here. People say unions are anachronistic, or that they’re trying to drag the country backwards. But I’ve seen first hand how hard unions work to promote gender equality, diversity and work/life balance. I say we’re pushing things forward. But we can’t do it unless we’re treated respectfully. That’s what previous governments have done. This one needs to start doing the same.

I have a confession.

I sometimes want to eat fast food. Ugly, greasy fast food. The kind that appears on a plastic tray, mere seconds after you’ve ordered it, accompanied by some syrupy soft drink in a paper cup with a straw that squeaks when you put it to your mouth. The kind that comes with lukewarm fries. Not chips, mind. Fries.

I don’t enjoy it. But sometimes I want to eat it. I’m sick.

I was there the other day, in the food court. What a hell. There was a mother, facebooking on her iPad. Her 4-year-old son sat opposite, looking around the room for something – anything – to draw his interest. There was a West Indian woman, shouting at the entire queue in front of KFC for not going when they shouted next.

It smelt of bleach. And a bit of sick.

I perched with my tray at a sort of bar. I read my newspaper while I ate. Head down, in case I should look up and make eye contact with someone I knew.

A man sat opposite. He must have worked in the shopping centre somewhere because he was wearing a fluorescent tabard. He ate his chicken and stared into the middle distance.

Another man sat down. They both stared.

“Best part of the day,” the first man said to the second.

“What?”

“It’s the best part of the day.”

“Yeah, man.” He picked at his fries. “Except for home time.”

“Yeah, second best part of the day, innit?”

On the other side of it, I’ve been critiquing other workshop members’ stories and that’s been really valuable too. You get a strong sense of the common traps and, when you see a technique that works well, you can nick it… I mean, you can see if you can learn from it.

The new story is taking shape. It’s not like anything I’ve written before, but it has a lot of me in it. I’m just about ready to start scribbling down a first draft.

World Tree Surgeon was inspired by a flash short I wrote in the summer,  but has come a fairly long way from there and there’s nothing left of the original story. I’m putting it out to workshop in the next couple of weeks – the first time I’ve ever done this ever. So we’ll see what comes back.

Spearfishing with Murdo Scott-Campbell is also very loosely inspired by one of my flash shorts. The story comes in at around 2,500 words. I’ve just finished it today and I’m really happy with it. It’s the first time I’ve used an unreliable narrator, which I had a lot of fun with.

Gardening Leave used to be called The Tower of London. It’s too long as it stands and it has a subplot that it doesn’t need. I shall prune it back and see how it looks.

Next… something light, I think. I do have another story which has the working title of As Dreamers Do but it’s little more than a title and a few half-baked ideas at the moment. It needs to cook a bit in my head before I see how it looks on the page.

I’m planning to go through the 31 weekly flash stories. Those that work well as flash fiction, will stay up. Those that could do with being developed into longer pieces, I’m going to take down and develop. Those that fail completely, I’m going to mothball.

I started this because I wasn’t getting anything finished. I had run out of ideas, I was spending weeks arranging and rearranging stories in outline. I wanted to feel like a writer again.

In that respect, this has been a huge success. I’ve finished 31 stories this year and had several great ideas that I’d like to develop further. So, in one way, I’ve freed myself up as a writer. But in another way, I’ve started to find this exercise horribly restrictive.

Some of these stories don’t want to be written in a week, and in doing so, I feel that I’m clipping their little wings before they’ve ever had a chance to fly. This week’s story is a case in point. I’ve got a great setup, but six hundred words in, I’m still not into the story proper, and I’ve stunted the character development something rotten. I’m just not ready to put this story up, but if I don’t, I’ll be a week behind.

Well, I’m not doing it. This story needs to breathe, and breathe it shall.

I’m dying, dying, to write something longer, meatier, with proper characters and a story that doesn’t just go from A to B, but stops off at C on the way.

And that’s the plan.

Mum says I was born broken. That was how she found me: a bruised bundle in a pile of old rags left under a footbridge. I cried for the first two years, she said. I don’t remember that. But my first memories are not of her. They are of the blue-eyed bird. He has always been around. The day I turned up, when Mum crawled under that bridge to see what in that little heap of linen could be making such a hellish noise, Goodfellow was there too: sat on the wall, singing like the sun was coming up. Mum says he’s my guardian angel. He keeps me out of trouble, she says.

Only, it’s the opposite. Every time I’ve got into trouble, it was because of that bird. All I have to do is follow him. He takes me to the parts of the Glen no one knows: the villages of stone that disappeared when the forest spread west; the forgotten orchards where fruit just falls to the ground and rots; the old palaces that lie abandoned beneath the towns of Warnock and Greenlaw. Once, he took me to the crossroads at the bottom of the Glen and I watched from the long grass while four men from the Cities, in their shiny suits and breathing masks, set upon a couple of traders.

Goodfellow never looked twice at another person before Heather, and then it was like he had discovered what he’d been missing all along. I’d find him in Greenlaw or thereabouts, following her through the fields our just watching her from a way off. Such was his fascination with her that if I saw him first, I’d start looking around for Heather because she’d nearly always be there.

So now there are three of us. And I realise that I was missing something too. I took Heather to some of the places no one knows. And Mum made her biscuits and told me later that she wasn’t like townsfolk, that she had a wisdom about her. Sometimes Heather asks me where I’m from. I tell her that it doesn’t matter where anyone is from. All that matters is where they are, and a little bit of where they’re going. But mostly where they are.

Vari stands at the edge of the clearing. Her bow is drawn. In the snow by her feet is a spot of blood. Behind her, in the shelter of the pines a wolf, a young male, cowers. The winter sun is low and weak.

She whistles and the wolf comes to heel. Vari commands the wolf to go forward, out of the trees and into the sun, after the quarry, but he whimpers and lowers his tail.

“Cailean!” hisses Vari. The wolf takes a hesitant step forward but stops as his paws touch the snow.

At the far side of the clearing, something shakes the bracken, sending puffs of frozen powder into the air. Vari releases an arrow. Another cloud of snow. She hears the quarry – a doe reindeer – fall to the ground.

“Go on, Cailean” she says to the wolf. The wolf circles her feet.

In the centre of the clearing, the snow is broken by a large black rock, an almost human figure like a stooping giant. She recognises it, not by its appearance but by its character. It was described to her only months ago. And then she realises where she is, and why the wolf is afraid.

Vari crouches beside her companion, places one hand on Cailean’s back and the other between his ears. She buries her face in Cailean’s fur and feels the rapid beating of his heart against her cheek. She pulls the wolf’s head roughly towards her own and places her forehead on the bridge of his nose. The wolf licks her face.

“I know you’re scared,” she says, “just follow me.”

The sun will burn her skin in seconds. She wraps her scarf around her face, pulls her hood down over her eyes and walks steadily into the clearing. Even through her cloak, she can feel the prickling light on her neck and shoulders.

“Come on,” she says. After a moment, she hears the wolf’s feet in the snow by her side. “Good lad.”

Then they come to it: the rock; the place where her brother fell. When Innes was found, the flesh of his forearm was torn where Cailean, then his wolf, had tried in vain to drag him out of the light. But if there was any relic – any trace of the event – it is now buried beneath the fresh snow. There is no reason to pause, nothing on which to reflect.

The deer lies where she felled it. She crouches, pulls her arrow from its throat and heaves its carcass over her shoulder. From there, she takes the shortest path to the cover of the trees and lowers the kill to the ground. She draws a knife from her belt, makes a small cut in the deer’s abdomen, reaches through the incision and plucks out one of the deer’s kidneys, which she tosses to the wolf, before lifting the carcass into her back.

“Good lad,” she says again.

She whistles twice and the wolf bounds into the forest.

The walls of Greenlaw had been built, neither to keep strangers out, nor townsfolk in, but to remind locals and visitors alike that here was a boundary, the crossing of which implied a sort of change. Outside the wall, nature’s law was in force. The grass grew long and wild, narrowing the roads. Inside, the laws were those of men: fragile and short of reason.

Heather knew the outside better. This was a world where events that seemed arbitrary and strange had simple, sensible explanations. At home, even everyday events often had no explanation at all.

But Heather knew why doe rabbits sometimes would kill and eat their young. She knew why field mice sometimes would go stiff and fall to the ground when startled. None of this knowledge meant much in Greenlaw. She was well known and liked by many of the older townsfolk, but other children thought her contrary and gave her little time.

As such, she was alone and outside the town walls whenever she had nowhere else to be, and she was a mile from Greenlaw late one afternoon, watching a kite circling over the Glen, when a sparrow, with deep blue eyes like sloe berries, fluttered onto a low-hanging branch above her head, blinked at her and took off again. It was a funny little thing and she followed it from one tree to the next until she reached the river Dovern and realised that she had come too far. The blue-eyed sparrow had perched on a rock on the opposite bank, where the edge of a dense old pine forest – like the wall of anther town – was all that could be seen upstream and down.

She made a decision. She was already lost. To go a little further couldn’t complicate her return journey a great deal more. And she had never seen the forest but there were stories – myths – of fey folk who lived deep inside it, fleeing the light and running with wolves. She could cross the river here, just to step inside the forest for a moment and see it from within, the way the mythical figures of her imagination might.

There was a crossing of sorts: a chain of large, round boulders, evenly spaced between the banks of the river. She was confident on her feet, hopping from one stone to the next, until, more than halfway across, her attention was drawn to a flash of silver in the trees in front and she lost her footing. Before she landed in the water, she glimpsed a hooded figure in the forest and, at its feet, a wolf.

The water was icy and strong. The cold squeezed the air from her lungs. Without air she was unable to swim and the current dragged her away.

*

She found herself on her side on a shore of shingle. The river was wider and more placid here. The blue-eyed sparrow stood on a nearby rock, bobbing its head.

“He likes you,” said a voice. She sat up.

And that was how she met Simon Crumb.

Simon was holding a fish by the tail and beating its head against a large stone. He had thick hair like curls of shaved wood and a long brown coat. She guessed that he was the same age as her or younger. He was not from Greenlaw.

He told her that he had been led to her by Goodfellow. Goodfellow, she learned, was what Simon Crumb called the blue-eyed sparrow. He gutted the fish quickly and held it with a stick over the embers of a small fire he had built. She said she had to go home. She had come too far and would be missed.

“Do you know where you are?” asked Simon Crumb. She shook her head. “I’ll walk you back to Greenlaw,” he said.

“How do you know I’m from Greenlaw?”

“Of course you’re from Greenlaw.”

She knew that people lived outside the walls, in the wild parts of the Glen. There were travelling folk and outcasts from the larger towns, bushmen and rangers. She wasn’t sure if this boy was any of those. He seemed more delicate, like an elf, if such things existed.

He offered her the fish and she dried herself by the fire while she ate. The meat was soft, oily and tasted good. When she had finished, Goodfellow hopped onto Simon’s shoulder and they made their way through the gorse and bracken back to Greenlaw. It seemed to Heather that Simon’s mind was only half-present. His eyes flitted between the ground in front of them and the far horizon, and he spoke only when prompted. She managed to establish that he lived in the lower Glen, in a cottage with his mother, and that he regarded the sparrow – Goodfellow – as his pet (“although it sometimes feels as if I’m his”). She asked if he had a father but instead of answering he drew her attention to a black cloud hanging over the upper Glen.

When they were just in sight of the town gate, he stopped and took his leave, but before turning her back to him, Heather said, “Was it you I saw? In the forest, with the wolf, before I fell?”

“No.” He laughed, and then he must have seen that she was embarrassed because he said, “But folk do live in there. And they do keep wolves. I’ve seen them myself.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Most likely.”

The sparrow jumped from Simon’s shoulder and landed on her head. She felt herself blush again. Simon held out his hand and the bird hopped onto his index finger. Then he smiled, turned and walked away.

As she passed through the gate and into Greenlaw, Heather was aware that a change had taken place, because she felt she was returning to a world of safety. A world she understood better.