The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout the remainder of 2025. For September, we are delighted to publish a new piece by Penny Simpson.

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There are no lemons, no toilet rolls and no jars of Branston pickle left in the supermarket. Leah passes on the solitary, bruised turnip in the vegetable aisle and arrives at the checkout with a bottle of wine and a pack of pan scrubbers. She queues to pay inside a box measured out by yellow and black tape like a miniature crime scene.

‘It makes my day this does,’ the till assistant says, holding up the pan scrubbers. ‘Seeing what people end up with. Like a game show with weird prizes.’

‘Am I losing or winning?’

‘No idea. But that wine is nice, and you’ll be doing loads more washing up now you’re at home.’

Ah, there’s the rub, Leah thinks. Home. Absence of. Or, more correctly, absence of what some might think of as a home. Leah has moved into her studio to save on rent. It’s in The Art Works the creative hub she has set up for other artists and hot desking designers, except Leah had opened for business just days before the emergence of a new and deadly virus. As she cycles home to The Art Works along the Newport Road, she can’t help but reflect on the irony of her choice of business title. Since the pandemic began, work has dried up for her tenants who all rely on freelance contracts. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Leah’s inspiration to set up the studios was her late grandmother Cassandra Bird, a graduate of the Slade School of Art. In post-war London, Cassandra had established Cornucopia, a self-proclaimed artist’s colony in a crumbling lodging house in Ladbroke Grove. Inhabited largely by refugee artists from Europe, Cornucopia lived up to its name in spirit if not reality. Despite broken windows, bad plumbing, and pigeons running amok in the attic, art had been made and on occasions even sold.

Cassandra’s stories of life in Cornucopia captivated Leah who had moved in with her grandmother following the death of her parents in a car accident. At sixteen, Leah struggled to live up to her example. At thirty-two, she senses she will never be like Cassandra. Arriving at The Art Works, she makes her way to her studio via the sky-blue fire escape in the backyard. At dusk, the yard is lit with fairy lights; by day, Leah works to turn it into a garden. Plants and herbs fill a collection of old butler sinks, tin baths, and caterers’ jars. In one corner, there is a collection of mismatched garden furniture and a fold-out picnic table for meetings.

Leah’s studio is on the first floor. It’s a compact space, with room for her bed, a clothes rail, and a desk. She settles at the desk but is distracted almost immediately by a text from Cal: Let’s talk. She goes back downstairs and finds Cal sat on a chair in his studio doorway. Leah takes the chair he’s placed opposite. She really doesn’t feel up to discussing business. ‘Just spit it out, Cal.’

‘I can’t pay my rent – well, not yet. But the good news is, I got that contract with the mail order company. Assuming the new bowls sell, I can probably get something to you by August. Sorry I can’t be more definite.’

‘I’ve not really got a choice here, have I?’

‘Look, it’s going to work out. Jack told me yesterday he’s coming back. He’s working for Deliveroo.’

‘It’s hardly the stuff dreams are made of,’ Leah says.

Cal is about to reply when they are interrupted by the arrival of a stranger. He spots them through the bars of the gate, enters, and gives a small bow.

‘Good afternoon,’ he says. ‘My name is Shehzad. Please, who are you?’

Leah introduces herself and Cal, then invites Shehzad to take her seat.

‘It’s a pleasure to be here,’ Shehzad says. ‘You know, back home, I also had a garden. I grew many flowers. Every colour you can think of.’

‘Where’s home, Shehzad?’

‘Kabul.’ He looks down at his trainers. They have mismatched laces and one of the soles has come loose. ‘But now I live in Cardiff. In the Salvation Army Lifehouse.’

‘But that’s…well, that’s quite a walk from here,’ Cal says.

‘I like walking.’

Leah offers Shehzad a cup of Earl Grey tea and apologies there’s no lemon to go with it. ‘Our local shop is pretty much empty,’ she says.

Shehzad tells them he used to run a teashop in Kabul, but it was looted many times. He explains that the last time it happened because there was nothing much in the way of goods left to steal the looters had taken the old serving counter. ‘The teashop is in my family for three generations, and the counter was made by my grandfather. It makes me sad I might not see it again.’

His sadness is palpable, and Leah and Cal fall silent. Shehzad plucks a stem of lavender from the tub by his feet. He rubs it between his fingers, releasing its scent. Leah shows him some sheets of paper she’s made, thickly woven buttercream sheets, filled with petals in shades of dusky rose, apricot, and caramel.

‘This paper, it’s like a little field full of flowers,’ Shehzad says. ‘Just like the ones at home.’ He asks if he might visit again. ‘I can help with the garden. I’m a very good gardener.’

Leah jumps at his offer of help. She always hoped the garden would become a communal venture once her tenants moved in, but since lockdown, she’s found herself fighting a solitary battle with weeds and a very determined squirrel who keeps digging up the bulbs. They arrange for him to come back the next day, and Shehzad departs with a pot of lavender to put on the windowsill of his room. On his return, Leah must confess she still hasn’t been able to track down any lemons. Shehzad says he likes the taste of her tea just as it is.

‘And I’m an expert, Leah. My teashop was the best in Kabul. Our speciality was mint tea with almonds served in little silver cups. But this was not why my shop was special. It was because it was run by a family over a long time. My customers watched my son Farid play under the apricot tree in the garden, the tree my late father planted the day I was born.’

‘It sounds wonderful,’ Leah says.

‘It was, but the shop is closed now. Too many battles, too few customers. My Uncle Khalid rings to give me news about the old place, but it’s not often good news.’

Shehzad appears reluctant to continue his story. He picks up the trug at his feet and selects a pair of secateurs. ‘You know, tulips are my favourite flower,’ he says. ‘Very versatile. You can eat the petals or cook with them instead of onions. What is your favourite flower, Leah?’

‘Snowdrops. They were flowering by the staircase when I first moved in, and I took it as a lucky sign. It’s too late for snowdrops now of course, but they’ll be back.’

‘I look forward to seeing them,’ Shehzad says.

They garden for the rest of the afternoon and then Leah gives Shehzad a socially distanced tour of The Art Works. The tour ends in her studio where Shehzad expresses his concern she lives alone. He’s alone, he says, because he’s no choice. His application for asylum has stalled. There’s nothing to do but wait amongst strangers. He admires Cassandra’s portrait of Leah which hangs above the desk. She explains her grandmother painted the picture for her sixteenth birthday, that she was a well-known portrait painter when such a thing was still in demand. In The Teenage Eve, she has posed Leah with her knee-length hair spread out around her like spilled blood, an apple in each hand.

‘The way you look in this painting, you remind me of my son,’ Shehzad says. ‘Farid was also brave on the outside. But what I see in this painting: I see your inside sadness.’

‘It’s a sadness I’ve long left behind me,’ Leah says, rather defensively.

Shehzad has touched a nerve. Since lockdown was imposed, she feels she’s reverted to her sixteen-year-old self. Raw with uncertainty, as if the years between then and now have folded into each other and she’s back in that portrait, only able to look out at the world. Is this how Shehzad feels? And what about Farid? Leah asks what has happened to him.

‘Roya, my wife, tried to take him to her parents in Paris,’ Shehzad says. ‘But she was killed by a landmine just outside Kabul. The Taliban found Farid. He was eleven years old, but still they gave him a gun. I only know this because he made his way home eventually. But he didn’t stay long.’

Leah looks at her portrait. She remembers Cassandra painting it, an Amazon in a kimono, dozens of bracelets clanking on her arms, and a pair of paintbrushes in her hair. She demanded Leah grip the apples as if they were hand grenades and she was about to blow up the patriarchy. If Leah looks closely at her portrait, she knows she will see the sadness in her eyes.

‘There has been no news since then,’ Shehzad says. ‘But there is something else I can tell you. We have snow flowers in Kabul too. They made a carpet on the ground the day Farid was born. He came early; it was so cold, birds fell dead from the sky, but inside, we gathered round the stove and celebrated with a feast like kings. I held my son, and my hands they smelt of the lemons I put in the salads. When I visit here, this is what I remember.’

‘Then you must come whenever you can,’ Leah says. ‘This will be your garden too.’

‘I’d like that,’ Shehzad says.

They make their way down the fire escape. Hearing voices, Cal emerges from his studio, carrying a new bowl he has designed for the mail order commission. The grey-brown glaze reminds Leah of the fields which surrounded Cassandra’s last studio set up in a converted school in Monmouthshire. In winter, the fields were a sea of mud, seemingly permanently marooned in thick fog. Leah sat for her portrait in late February when the wood in the stove was slow to catch, her skin had been riddled with goose bumps and Cassandra her usual demanding self: ‘You’ve moved! Don’t move!’ And Leah, defiant for once, had moved; she’d crossed the room and piled logs into the stove, creating a fierce blaze. Cassandra hadn’t said a word.

After Shehzad leaves, Leah returns to the studio. She picks up the blue and gold bowl which she keeps on the windowsill, so its glaze catches in the light. The bowl contains six silver rings, some set with stones, others etched with tiny insects. Before she died, Cassandra gave Leah the rings, slipped them on her fingers and kissed each in turn as she relinquished them to her granddaughter’s care.

‘Some gifts we make our own,’ she said. ‘To my way of thinking, they’re the best kind.’

Cassandra approved of her granddaughter going to art college to study book art. No doubt she would also have approved of Leah using her inheritance to set up in business. Act, and think later, Cassandra’s mantra when she created Cornucopia in a condemned house and filled it with strangers in the aftermath of a world war. She lived on potatoes and weak tea for years. But all Cassandra made of life she gifted to Leah. And now Cal is back, Jack will follow, and Shehzad will help with the garden. Leah, encouraged, returns to her desk. It’s close to midnight when she finishes stitching the cover of a new book and gets ready to go to bed. Only then does she find the lemon left on her pillow.

 

Penny Simpson is an author, researcher, and creative health practitioner. Her publications include two novels and a collection of short stories. Recent creative writing projects have been commissioned by NHS/Arts Council Wales and Home-Start Essex’s Thriving Communities project. Her short fiction has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Best of European Fiction 2010, Mslexia and Bath 2023 Short Story Award Anthology.