The English Soil Society [Paperback]

The stories of Tim Nickels defy easy categorisation. They might be folktales from an alternate world, modern-day myths or eccentric fables written by creatures under the earth or from the stars. Yet, despite their elusive, amorphic qualities and dextrous, lullaby prose, they are also rooted with an intensity of emotion that aptly characterises the human condition, expressing both the personal and collective anxieties which affect us all.

Tim Nickels' fiction is playful, dangerous, fiercely original and knockout funny. To read him is to know what fiction can and should be about. He is a storyteller of rare ability - wild, unconventional, yet relevant – and there is nothing out there remotely like the tales you'll find in this book. Be grateful for that - Conrad Williams, author of Head Injuries and London Revenant (Serpent’s Tail)

Elastic Press publishes the best in short fiction.

Excerpt from "The Hungry Shine"

Amoeba green girl on the road again. She’s been so many times.
Can’t walk, you see. Like Blanche in the play, like a glamorous cripple, she relies on the kindness of strangers. She finds her friends in the car parks of motorway services or in saloon bars by the sea. She needs a hand up into the cab: or a helping arm to slither her into the passenger seat; a black plastic bag beneath her bum to stop her dripping on his wife’s groceries.
At first – in the early days – she whispers to them: "Take me down the coast road, sweetheart – take me to the headland with the single ash tree that free-floats like the seaweed forest of my youth."
But later – her phantom profile hangs in the green glow of the dashboard lights – she merely moans lightly, her mouth open to reveal a hundred white (tiny white) teeth... And she leans closer to the lorry driver or the commuter or the quietly-married man – her mouth touches his ear – and says: "Just take me where you’re going..."
And her mind might be full of the anticipation of white toilet tiles as she prays that this man’s bathtub is big enough, that his wife won’t mind the fish scales around the Wash & Go when she returns from her mother’s.
And then there are the dark days with the hauliers from the northern hills: a frightening unwashed time of heatwave many miles from the sea. She desperately flushes the lavs behind the transport café, her tail convoluted around the U-bend as she tries to splash her dry peeling body...
One man asks her name once. She doesn’t even try to smile as they drive through the grey suburbs of the dull seaside town.

*

And she dreams of deserts... Of unbelievably big skies. Of a dryness bigger than the universe. She starts up and finds herself sitting by the payphone in a Little Chef, the receiver dangling from her latest call to some long lost trucker lover... ...one of the few who left his number... ...who may or may not come and pick her up before her tail desiccates and crumbles off the end of her body.
People don’t look at her much. She has developed a fine stooping huddle whilst seated, an army greatcoat covering her lower body. It is August now as she sweats a gallon of salt onto the floor by the telephone. Her pale glare tries to pierce the perspex window into the outside where the A303 snakes across Salisbury Plain.
And she prays he won’t be late.
She can imagine him with his mates in the coffee room of the dispatch office, the lorries neatly lined up outside. His friends will talk about Michael Owen and bloody mad cows and the pissing French dock workers and the phone will ring for him and they’ll say: "Oh, Frank’s got that call again. You know. From that crippled sea girl hippy-type. Off you go, Frank. Got a clothes peg for your nose, mate? She could stink the arse off a bloody pig stye, that one."
And all the time, the hippy sea girl – with sad ear barnacles for hippy flowers – will shiver away by the payphone that other customers are now scared to use because this girl’s got this look, y’know? And a couple of coppers are having the all-day breakfast in a corner and the waitresses are thinking: Maybe it’s time, maybe it’s time...
Suddenly, Frank is here with the girl in his arms and glaring at the manageress as she rushes a little too quickly to open the door that leads to the outside and the chalky desert wideness of Salisbury Plain.
Frank glances at the girl as they get up into the cab. "Where to, sweetness? Can I get you something from the chemist?"
And of course she just looks and looks at him and whispers: "Just take me where you’re going..."

*

They drive west.
Hay bales litter the yellow hills. Green valleys with water: she can smell the alien sweetness of the fresh rivers – enticingly familiar, an invitation to pleasurable suicide.
They come to a cathedral town. It has recently been pedestrianised. Frank parks up at the regional office on the outskirts and carries her in over his shoulder. They pause by artificial shrubs and speak with Big Issue sellers.
Carefully checking the progress of Hoppa buses, Frank prepares to cross the road but she stops him; tugs gently with her cold moist hand on his hair.
He turns and they catch themselves captured in a plate glass window. He is ruddier than her, a fully-clothed lifeguard. In the reflection, she is reaching out, tries to extend her long luminous arms; tries to claw her way nearer through the air to the silver shoes; the black black – midnight black – boots behind the glass...
He strides confidently into the shoe shop and observes the colour drain from her already monochromatic face. The eyes; the sweet mouth collapses and wriggles into the features of some ecstatic saint forty days out in the wilderness. As he gently sits her on a stool among teenage assistants, he swears that a quiet halo gathers about her seaweed brow...
"What size does the lady take? Is it a wide fitting?" The girls fuss like seabirds as she stares through them at the handsomest, darkest pair of blackest boots in the shop. She sways slightly on her stool. She sways a little more and he gently catches her and whisks her back into the outside in one graceful movement as her eyes slip up into her skull and reveal a shock of white.
The rain starts to fall as Frank begins the long trek back to his lorry. Scooped up from the distant sea, the rain falls now on one of its children: so far from home; so far...
She whispers, she starts to whisper... but then just curves her tail around his body and cries...