The sad teenage stud must tend to his ruinous habit. Before school, he heads to the supermarket to buy Pepsi in bulk. “Same as usual, huh?” says the cashier. When he returns home, he arranges the cans of cola in the fridge, before taking three into bed with him, where he daydreams of living in Arizona or Hawaii, doing nothing except sinking three hundred sodas a day—a freedom apparently unattainable in his home city of Malibu. This reverie is cut short by thoughts of his ex, a cheerleader named Peggy, whose name is scrawled ten times in pink paint across his bedroom door. He tries to drown out the thought of her by guzzling the drink he has christened “the high life.”
So begins June-Alison Gibbons’ The Pepsi-Cola Addict, originally published by a vanity press in 1981, when the author was just 16. I read the novel in 2023, after coming across the republished version in a bookstore; my curiosity piqued by the title and the blurb on the back, which declared the book to be “one of the great works of twentieth-century outsider literature.” Despite its many linguistic deformations and failures in cogency, I loved Gibbons’ stiff sentences and strange tone—at once kitschy, pervy, ridiculous, and tragic. Clichés piled up, yet I kept reading, enraptured and laughing. The novel struck me as a great, wild work of juvenilia, the product of an isolated British teenager gorging on American culture and regurgitating it as something sick and thrilling. With its makeshift landscapes of obsession, nihilistic knavery, and hot, horny schoolboy brutes, the book’s lineage seemed to go right back to Jean Cocteau and his quintessential 1929 teen text Les Enfants Terribles.
Back in the early 1980s, June-Alison Gibbons and her identical twin sister, Jennifer, captured the attention of the British public as enfants terribles themselves. At 18 years old, they were the youngest patients to be committed indefinitely at Broadmoor, the United Kingdom’s most infamous psychiatric hospital. They were guilty of arson and petty theft, but their institutional detainment had less to do with their crimes than it did their refusal to speak with anyone except each other. Today you’re likely to find the sisters’ story encrusted in the sludge of true crime podcasts or YouTube channels, where teen bloggers superimpose their own heads over the Gibbons’ schoolbook photos, and package their segments with outrageous headlines like “The REAL reason these twins refused to talk” and “SHE CHOSE TO DIE SO HER TWIN COULD LIVE.” Elsewhere, in books, plays, and films, the Gibbons have been fetishized as human anomalies, turned into symbols of state failure, deployed as a cautionary tale against the dangers of profound, profuse closeness.
In a profile for the New Yorker in 2000, Hilton Als nimbly diagnosed the issue, writing that activists and theorists had misappropriated the sisters’ story in order to “pose questions about the nature of identity and the strange birthright that twins are forced to bear.” Since their rise to media infamy, the Gibbons have been spoken for—and spoken over—despite a surprisingly prodigious written output: an array of novels, short stories, poems, diaries, and letters. While the republication of The Pepsi-Cola Addict has resulted in a smattering of critical interest in their writing, it remains rare to find the work placed in lineages that go beyond the mad and the bad conferred by the “outsider” label. The reissue of the novel, alongside this year’s posthumous publication of Jennifer’s 1980 novel Discomania, offers an occasion for rehabilitation.
About a year after I first read The Pepsi-Cola Addict, I caught the train from London to Hastings, on the southern coast, to rifle through the Gibbons’ archive—an assortment of boxes filled with papers, letters, and notebooks at the house of artist Ania Goszczyńska and musician David Tibet. A rare book collector, Tibet had befriended June-Alison in 2018 while trying to find an original copy of The Pepsi-Cola Addict. Since then, the trio have been working together to publish the Gibbons’ novels.
Goszczyńska and Tibet’s house was up a skinny road in the heritage listed part of the town, where centuries-old cottages were perilously squished together and the air stunk of rotting wood. Tibet, a genial man in his sixties, with a long wiry beard and fingers weighed down by bulbous rings, showed me around. Their place was a musty paradise of esoterica. Every visible cranny was stuffed with cherub figurines, antique theology books, and phantasmic artworks, many attributed to a range of celebrity occultists and witches (though my favorite was from an unknown artist—a giant painting depicting Jesus on the cross, surrounded by hunky, nude male disciples, that looked as if it could descend into an orgy at any moment). The only surface without clutter was their bed, so for several hours I worked there, spreading out the twins’ archive on the duvet. A row of bug-eyed dolls watched on as I arranged literary fragments in an attempt to piece together an oeuvre.
The twins were born in 1963, ten minutes apart, at a British army hospital in Yemen. Their father, Aubrey, was a technician in the Royal Air Force who, along with their mother, Gloria, had emigrated to the United Kingdom from Barbados a few years earlier, chasing valor, abundance, and other promises of empire. But life as dictated by the British forces was less grand and bountiful than they had hoped. After returning to the UK in late 1963, the family (which included the twins’ elder siblings, Greta and David, and a younger sister, Rosie, who would be born in 1967) were shuttled around to different bases, often in small, unwelcoming towns unaccustomed to foreigners—no less Black foreigners. In their infancy, the twins were typical enough, giggly and cheery, but as they turned into toddlers speech largely eluded them. On the rare occasion they did open their mouths, they spoke in quick staccato flutters that no one could comprehend.
In Majorie Wallace’s The Silent Twins—a heavy-handed but ultimately comprehensive and well-meaning account of the sisters’ lives and plight—the British journalist charts all the failed attempts by institutions to yank these wordless outsiders into the realm of chatty childhood. They underwent lessons in grunts and whistles, were subject to diction correctives and tape-recording tasks, and even endured invasive mouth surgery (one doctor speculated that they were tongue-tied). By the time they were 8, they had tired of trying to make themselves intelligible. “If you can’t hear us now, you can hear us never,” June-Alison recalled, in the 1994 BBC documentary The Silent Twin: Without My Shadow, of the pact she made with her sister. Huddled under the opaque blanket of twinship, they turned their attention to slow amusements and games of will. Neighbors would catch them walking home in a line, performing a perfectly synchronized goose-step. In a glitchy, black-and-white video, taken by the hospital staff where they were receiving speech treatment (and aired in Without My Shadow) they are caught eating soup concurrently, at such a comically drawn-out pace, I first thought I was accidentally watching the clip at half-speed.
At school, peers took to pulling their braids and hurling slurs. For all their teachers’ efforts to coax a sound or two from the twins, very little attention was paid to identifying the reason behind their refusal to speak. It was easier, it seems, to conflate silence with a lack of inner life. In a school report quoted by Wallace, the twins are presumed to be “content to do very little. They show very little initiative or imagination.” Racist accusations of voodoo magic and witchcraft are scattered across accounts of their early life. In Wallace’s book, a medical officer administering tuberculosis shots to schoolchildren, startled by Gibbons’s black arms in a throng of white, remembers one of them as such: “It was not like the casualties I had seen in the army, not like anything I had experienced in my life before. There was nothing there. The word ‘zombie’ came to me then and does now. The little negress looked through me as though she were in a trance.”
But their bodies were communicating something. They weren’t just two little voids, walking in sync. To cast your eyes down, to stand back and not answer when you are called, to move as a pair, army-like, stripped of all individual peculiarities—these are not expressionless actions. They’re dramatic gestures of rejection and distress. Perhaps the twins knew the future alienations that awaited them and had decided to isolate themselves before anyone else could. At 16, both sisters dropped out of school. They sequestered themselves in their bedroom, only leaving to pick up their welfare checks. Communication with their family was conducted through scribbled notes of instruction: “We want to see ‘Top of the Pops’ tonight at 7:00 p.m. Please leave the living room door open.”
From the sisters’ self-imposed isolation, they would transcend the tedium of their days by constructing an imaginary universe. Think the Brontës’ Gondal, but instead of kingdoms and princes, the wastelands of suburban America, where dying from eczema and naming your child Carrot Cabbage Winters is par for the course. (Inspiration was gleaned from US television shows, various celebrity hunks, and actual Americans living on a nearby naval facility.) At first, this vision was funneled into radio plays and the creation of an elaborate doll society. But soon character, place, and plot would be transplanted into a more lasting and structured form—albeit one no less capacious or corruptible: the novel.
To realize their writerly ambitions, the twins cultivated a voracious literary appetite. They devoured the classics (Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, D. H. Lawrence); wrote lists of long, complicated words and their meanings; and enrolled in a creative writing course by correspondence as a single student—number 8201. “When we first set out to write, we wanted a teenage audience more than anything,” June-Alison told me. “We did the exact opposite of what was respectable because we wanted to be true to ourselves and set our own terms.” She and I spoke a little over email, with Tibet serving as the mediator, passing on my questions about her writings and her sister. Her answers were brief, littered with rows of exclamation points, and freighted with the cosmic implication of our correspondence. When I asked about Lawrence, she said she had just been thinking of Gudrun and Ursula from Women in Love, and wondered if I was psychic.
The Pepsi-Cola Addict, June-Alison’s only novel, was written in January 1980. At the book’s seedy center is Preston Elvis Wildey-King, a despondent 14-year-old living in Malibu, who cares for nothing except gulping down one Pepsi after another, and lusting after Peggy, who continues to love him despite her “virile” new boyfriend. Troubled and foolish, Preston inadvertently puts everyone under a destructive, erotic spell. His best friend, the randy rascal Ryan, is always trying to pet and prod him. His mother, a pill-popping Jehovah’s Witness, fawns over him constantly, despite his accumulating misdeeds. There is some vague sexual tension with his older sister, Erica, with whom he constantly brawls. He is deflowered by his schoolteacher Mrs. Rosenberg—for some reason, a dead ringer for the Greek crooner Nana Mouskouri—in a scene that ends with her caressing his chest and proclaiming, “You’re so sensual so mature [sic] . . . You’re the best—you’re the king.”
No awkward fumbling in the dark, no failed maneuvers, no humiliating slurp sounds slipped out in the throes of passion—even a middle-aged beauty crowns the novice to be a carnal “king”! Have you ever heard of a more seamless first time? Then you remember this is a book written by a teenage girl who’s never been kissed, let alone had sex.
This is precisely the pleasure of ThePepsi-Cola Addict: its great, gaudy artifice. Reading the novel is like living inside Preston’s recurrent dream in which he floats in a pool of Pepsi—it’s discombobulating yet refreshing, a descent into someplace fizzy and dark. Bobbing in the book’s waters is cultural flotsam, cast adrift from melodrama (“Look at me Preston. Can’t you see that I’m passionately in love with you?”) and pornography (“He has a liking for pretty guys like us. So you better watch that little ass of yours, unless you want it tweaked”), that recalls the cruder, campier edges of American teen cinema.
The story progresses with Preston looting a store—he pinches, what else, Pepsi—a crime for which he does time in juvie, where he must dodge the shivs and sexual advances of his fellow prisoners. It ends with his suicide. Distraught after Peggy tells him her family is moving to San Francisco, he swallows a fistful of his mother’s barbiturates. As he draws his last breath, kids on the street outside his bedroom are busy kicking around an empty Pepsi can:
He was falling, floating in an empty black tunnel….. like a rocket trapped in space, a can of pepsi cola came twisting and turning toward him…. it crashed….Preston slept.
Outside, below the steps, at this moment, three young boys were playing kick-the-can with an empty pepsi cola can. It had fallen from the over-piled trash-can, parked in a nearby corner. The smallest of the dark-haired boys made a big kick, the can rolled away. “I love pepsi cola,” he yelled. Jumping up, he raced after the can. The two other boys strolled away; the small boy stared down at the can. Some remaining liquid slowly trickled out, emerging onto the street. He stooped down, dabbed his finger into it, then ran aimlessly down the street, licking it.
The pepsi cola stopped running as it came to the edge of the street. It lay there invisible to all passers-by, where it dried up silently under the radiation of the burning sun.
For all of its narrative absurdity, The Pepsi-Cola Addict is electrified less by its plot than the conditions of its creation. The novel’s jerky aliveness reveals a novice author acquiring, and relishing, language. On each page, there is a word or phrase that has the wet, slippery sheen of recent discovery: “Onyx mirror,” “sorghum grass,” “flounces” (someone is always flouncing!), “cloche-shaped,” “peal.” The deployment of these terms is frequently awkward. They stick out of sentences like stray, static hairs that have yet to be brushed down. While I delighted in the novel’s pulpy, homoerotic hijinks, in the end I was more taken with the simpler thrills June-Alison has unintentionally chronicled: the glee of rolling around a new word in your mouth, repeating it in your head a couple of times, before committing that new, pulsating expression to the page. How something kinked and wonderful shoots out from this freshly laid soil—“Sea-gulls flapped their wings like dried paper”; “elaborate silence”; “The waves whispered back angrily.”
After completingThe Pepsi-Cola Addict, June-Alison sent the manuscript to British vanity press New Horizon; to pay for the printing, the twins pooled together their welfare checks. For the dust jacket, Jennifer took dozens of photographs of her sister pouting and wearing wigs.
Meanwhile, Jennifer busied herself with her own short stories and novels. In her 1980 story “Blessing in Disguise,” found in their archive, a teenage girl named Irene gets together with Shane, a leather-clad hottie she meets at the cinema while gazing up at Kirk Douglas’s gorgeous chin dimple. The only problem? Shane keeps on forgetting their conversations, something he puts down to an odd bout of amnesia. After a bloody motorcycle accident, it’s revealed that Irene has not only been dating Shane, but also his identical twin brother.
Jennifer’s first novel, The Pugilist (1980), follows the downfall of a doctor who transplants his dog’s heart into the body of his ailing, infant son. Discomania, her second, was rejected even by New Horizon for being “too violent, too sexual and too futuristic.” Even the fabricated blurbs she included with her manuscript—“The world’s bestseller, the book you just must read,” claimed the imaginary Australian Press, while the New York Times supposedly dubbed it “The book every teenager is going to be acclaiming”—failed to convince the vanity publisher. (A third novel, The Taxi Driver’s Son, was destroyed after the twins failed to get in contact with a prospective publisher after their arrest.) Discomania remained unpublished, and was thought to have been lost until Tibet discovered that June-Alison had a copy of the manuscript.
If The Pepsi-Cola Addict is all about sexually frustrated “flouncing,” then Discomania is concerned primarily with “flying the coop,” a phrase that appears more than any other in its pages. The novel is a picaresque following a ragtag group of teenagers as they crisscross the United States in search of freedom and the next discotheque. These journeys are narrated by “disco queen” Olivia, whose dance moves rival John Travolta’s, and who loves nothing more than to write in her diary and fantasize about kissing her troubled boyfriend, Seth. On the lam and uncertain of where to head, the teens must rely on the goodwill of oddball adults, who instead lure them into consecutive episodes of perversion and entrapment: The father who invites the teens into his home to eat breakfast is a cop, the truck driver who gives them a ride turns out to be a crazed pedophile with photos of young boys plastered all over his apartment walls.
The Discomania gang’s most persistent existential threat, however, is not the law or the lawless but teens themselves, driven ultimately to bloodlust on the dance floor. It’s the music that does it—a beat drops and suddenly a sadistic bacchanalia breaks out. “Drug peddlers” fling their wares onto the floor like confetti and teens scrounge around on their knees, trying to shove as many pills into their mouths as possible. Heavy petting descends into biting, strangling, slashing, and “killing for the fun of it.” Boys get their brains stomped out, while others wield sharp bits of broken vinyl to stab “their best freind’s [sic] to death.” The police show up eventually, with guns and water cannons, which leads to more murder and calamity. Desperate to escape the crime scene, the teens take to the road. Here, Jennifer injects her story with even more grim, geographically challenged drama: deadly pneumonia, fatal car crashes, break-ins, acid trips, arson, pregnancy, and gang warfare throughout the West Coast and the South (all of which, I should note, is revealed at the end to have occurred within one week).
Despite the sisters’ imitation antics, their individuality on the page is stark. Jennifer is a coarser stylist than her sister, more prone to grammatical blunders. Common sayings are mishandled, and consequently twist into hilarious, blunt expressions. A character is told to “pipe down,” otherwise his “ass will be broken off.” A mother announces the near-death of her daughter with this bone-dry one-liner: “Season is’nt feeling to well. She’s just tried to commit suicide.” In an effort to keep the texts as close to the original as possible, Goszczyńska and Tibet worked with their publisher to retain such misspellings and faulty grammar, seeing them as markers of an eccentric personal style. This was a frustrating reading experience at times, and I was unconvinced that, say, a misplaced comma added much to the novels’ feeling or tone. Yet in some instances, those mistakes brought forth all sorts of surreal images: In Discomania Jennifer repeatedly misspells “red diary” as “read dairy,” which caused me to imagine leather-bound journals with dripping, creamy pages, or girls sipping blood-red milkshakes.
Discomania and The Pepsi-Cola Addict are wobbly monuments, committed to playful experimentation over coherence, made without the sturdy architectures of patterned thought and intellectual inquiry. It’s as if the twins ransacked the house of novel-writing and took their amenities out to warp in the sun. Thrown together in a heap and stripped of their usual usefulness, they produce a glimmering aberrance.
By 1981, the twins had tired of the publishing game and abandoned their writing life. What they wanted now was experience. They began to roam around the Royal Air Force military estate in Haverfordwest, where their father was stationed, trying to hunt down boys who might rid them of their virginity. They bought books on the occult and sought to beam their crushes into their bedroom. (“I command my subconscious mind to bring me whatever I desire. I know what I want. I want a tape cassette with songs by ELTON JOHN,” wrote June-Alison in a book of manifestations that I found among their materials.) That summer fate finally caught up with their fantasies. They found the American boys of their dreams, of their novels, in a set of three thuggish brothers from a nearby Welsh town, aliased as “the Kennedys” by Wallace in The Silent Twins. The sisters stalked the brothers until they gave up resisting and allowed June and Jennifer to trail them to barnyards and bridges, where they would sniff glue and slug rum.
This period of their lives marks the invisible seam of The Silent Twins. From here on, the journalist cedes much of her overwrought play-by-play to quoting their journals at length, of which she is in awe. As she writes in the book’s introduction:
Every sentence was written in such a compelling way that it was impossible not to finish reading an entry once it was started. I was sucked into the minutiae of the twins’ daily routine, and absorbed by their thoughts, dreams, reflections, and often startling imagery. When they felt cold and tired, so did I. My moods swung to their rhythms. So detailed and vivid are the descriptions, I was able to live through their experiences and understand something of their troubled minds.
In their diaries, the Gibbons log every pleasure and pitfall of opening themselves up to others. “[The Kennedys] are the key to my life. Everything that occurred was magic. It has brought a new awakening in me. It is like God gave me a chance, a chance to prove who I really am. I have a feast of remembering now,” Jennifer wrote in her diary. Carl, the youngest at 14, indulges them after his brothers cast them aside. First he sleeps with Jennifer, in a chapel late one night as June watches on, jealous. (“I saved all my life, all my speech for Carl,” Jennifer wrote.) Then June-Alison a week later, with Jennifer forced into the role of witness. Their lives only stop revolving around the Kennedys when their army father is posted back to Virginia and the boys ship out at the end of summer. In the Kennedys’ kitchen, the girls cut off locks of hair and present them as offerings.
Emboldened by their adventures with the Kennedys, they spent the latter half of 1981 reveling in similar miscreant acts. They stole bikes, tussled with knife-wielding boys, scuffled with one another, had sex in sheds, daydreamed about making bombs, and broke into schools to steal whatever useless items they could. One evening, they set fire to a tractor dealership. Afterwards, taunted the police with anonymous calls about their crimes, until they were finally caught throwing a brick into the window of a technical college. Their diaries were used to arrest them, and later to brand them as dangerous psychopaths at their trial.
“[It] is a somewhat bizarre document,” said the prosecutor John Diehl, before reciting from June’s journal, “Yesterday we broke into Tasker Millward canteen. We nicked food, swiss rolls and pies . . . I’m going to be the biggest arsonist around.” Then he stopped, saying other excerpts were too disturbing to read out loud in court. The twins’ lawyers had counseled them to plead guilty and display remorse as vigorously as they could, hoping this would lead to their institutionalization, not incarceration. When the time came, all they managed to muster was a quiet and quick “yes, yes” under their breath. They struggled to focus on their trial because of some unforgivable sartorial decisions that were made against their will: “We wanted [to wear] our long flowery shirts. But what was laid out for us were these horrible brown corduroy trousers, horrible shoes, horrible checkers that I’d always hated . . . So that ruined the whole day for us. That’s all we thought about,” June-Alison told the 2024 BBC podcast Voice of a Silent Twin.
Jennifer and June-Alison would spend nearly a year at the female remand center Pucklechurch awaiting trial, and then eleven years incarcerated at Broadmoor. During this period, they produced a few manuscripts and poems, but their most compelling work, seemingly, was in the journals they passed on to Wallace (later lost en route back to Broadmoor) and their letters to one another. The latter, recently rediscovered by June-Alison, were exchanged across their separate cells and are now among their papers. In these writings teen melodrama hangs itself on the rack of grim circumstances, creating shadows that are both frightening and funny. I see Gudrun and Ursula of Lawrence’s Women in Love, proselytizing about freedom, women’s freedom, but these concerns no longer have the lightness of metaphor—for the twins there are real cages, real walls to climb. Meanwhile, the industrialists and school inspectors Lawrence cast as his love interests have been replaced by astrologically compatible fellow patients: girlfriend-killers and mobsters.
Take this paragraph from June-Alison, on summer in Pucklechurch, which evokes all the dayglo ferality of a Martin Parr photograph:
I blame the daffodils. I blame the daffodils for the misery and depression that has suddenly been forced upon me. Who wants to hear summery sounds while they’re in prison? Who wants to hear summery sounds even when they’re free. Not me. I hate summer. The same old outings, happy people (but are they really happy?) Going on long-planned holidays (turn out to be disaster and tragic). Children sucking icecream, pregnant women wearing large, blousey dresses, feeling sticky and hot. Men in shorts and vests, bare-chested, sun shades . . . You’ve got to think, haven’t you, what summer really means. It’s a damn desperate race for September. Who actually comes out unscathed to reach that cool, quiet month? Who will survive the holocaust this summer to feel cool, sweet rain on his hot forehead? What lucky family will pack up their last summer picnic and actually drive home to face September? Sometimes I’m filled with a morbid gloom when on a terrifying hot day everyone seems to have deserted the whole face of earth.
According to Wallace’s book, the sisters were sold a vision of Broadmoor as a kind of luxe sanatorium, where they could sip lemonade on green lawns while they tended to their psychological ills. But their incarceration, especially in the early years, was brutal. June-Alison tried to hang herself. Jennifer tried to make a run for it, sprinting across the Broadmoor lawn, before being tackled by a pair of nurses. They fought, were separated, starved themselves. Their rebellion was stamped out by a hurried schizophrenia diagnosis and a cocktail of antipsychotic medications, which loosened their mouths and got them talking, but whittled away what was left of their literary ambitions. They were often too tired, too foggy, to write more than a few lines. Their remaining energy was siphoned into the hospital’s loaded social calendar of discos, parties, and fetes. They became society girls, nicknamed by fellow patients as the “Queens of Broadmoor.”
Wallace first heard of the twins when she was assigned to cover their criminal trial for the London Sunday Times. While interviewing their parents at home, she discovered mountains of garbage bags, recently returned from the police, stuffed with notebooks. She then began visiting the twins in Broadmoor, where she proposed writing a book about their diaries in the hope it might fast-track their release. On the BBC podcast, Wallace remembered a Broadmoor psychiatrist passing her a newly filled set of pink HMSO exercise books with contempt. “You can read this pornographic rubbish if you want to,” the psychiatrist told her. “They are wasting our time here.”
In 1986, Wallace’s The Silent Twins quickly became a bestseller, drawing instant public attention to the Gibbons’ case. Yet the twins remained in Broadmoor, forsaken to solitude and detention. Despite their fame, Wallace’s efforts and June’s many letters to the Queen pleading for release, it wasn’t until 1993 that the twins were transferred to a medium security facility back in Wales.
This is when the story swerves toward myth—a detail that most cultural commentary on the twins clings to with conspiratorial curiosity. On their last day at the hospital, the sisters sing loudly at their final church mass. Jennifer makes jokes about being knackered—she’s dying, she says. But the next day, on the bus to their new facility, Jennifer falls asleep on June’s shoulder and can’t be roused. She is rushed to a nearby hospital, only to die thirty minutes later. A postmortem revealed Jennifer had been killed by acute myocarditis, sudden inflammation of the heart.
In June-Alison’s diary, the daffodils appear again:
I saw those daffodils in your room and I smelled death. I saw those daffodils swaying their heads as if to mock me . . . and on your chest was a Bible opened with a single red rose on top. You looked peaceful. I wept.
In the aftermath, June-Alison told Wallace that in the future she hoped to write books of quiet power, full of granulated, icy language—“like frost on green glass, like sugar on cornflakes.” But in the years that followed, she would tell others she couldn’t see the point anymore. Now that she could talk, writing felt superfluous. But since the republication of The Pepsi-Cola Addict and her sister’s posthumously published Discomania, she’s felt motivated to pick up the pen. Now in her sixties and living in Pembrokeshire, she gets up at dawn to write. She is working on a new novel, another one about a young, troubled man living in California—but this time, she’s opting for the more subdued surroundings of Sacramento.
A few months ago, Tibet sent me June-Alison’s latest short story. It’s about the loving gesture of a prank, the shaky borders between the dead and living, reality and fantasy—more realized, but no less bombastic than The Pepsi-Cola Addict. In the story, a man wakes up one morning to find a photograph of his dead brother blinking and smirking. Then the phone starts ringing off the hook. The brother, bored in the afterlife, is looking for a little amusement. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asks, “the Fox and House, at 6pm?” Over and over, for days on end. During one phone call with the dead, the air freezes and the sun dips beneath the horizon. A pair of birds go on giggling.
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