I first encountered this story as a judge of the Galley Beggar Short Story Award. We read fifty stories and this one instantly stood out for me – happily, the other judges agreed and it won the prize. It’s astonishingly brief – 6 pages; 1,500 words – but packs so much in, I kept looking for hidden trapdoors. It’s about a husband and wife who live near Heathrow Airport and let people use their driveway as a parking space. But one traveller fails to return for her car and they start using it themselves – and that’s just the set-up. It’s one of those rare stories where every sentence – bang, bang, bang – does something. It gives us the trajectory of a whole relationship in shorthand. And Johal was some disgusting age like 22 when he wrote it.
First published as a shortlisted story on the Galley Beggar Short Story Award website in 2021, where it can be read online, and as part of the collection We Move, Serpent’s Tail, 2022
A Personal Anthology 