All of This Could Be Yours by Kate Griffin

Wasafiri is proud to publish the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize shortlisted pieces. These poems, essays, and short stories detail a range of emotions and experiences, produced by promising new writers from all over the globe. In this fiction piece, Kate Griffin explores working class identity through an absurdist sprint from birth to adulthood. 

The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open until 30 June 2025. Read the full guidelines and submit your work.

My mother gives birth to me on the floor of a Sainsbury’s. I rustle in aisle thirteen — crisps and confectionery, leave blood marks on the linoleum that trollies wheel through. She sits me on a conveyor belt till, hands me an aubergine and a toothbrush as though I can grab, smiles at my confusion as they tumble onto the belt, and flails her scrawny arms out. 

‘One day, this will all be yours!’ she says. Her hands slap into the chest of a woman in a dressing gown cradling a two-litre bottle of Frosty Jacks. 

‘Watch yersel!’ she snaps, red hair wobbling in a bun. My mam adds the rest of her shopping slowly. She stays longer to talk to the woman on the till. Sue; that’s what her name badge says. She looks like a Sue, even my baby-brain can make sense of that. Her face is kind and lightly wrinkled. She has blonde hair, and a smile that’s tight and witholding at first, but then she opens up, and talks about Spain gleefully, while my mother bundles me into a carrier bag, adjusting items so I’m safe among inflated bags of quavers and boxes of dumpling mix. Only in the parking lot, does she stop to cut the umbilical cord. I don’t realise it’s attached until she pulls on it, a link between us, like a limb, fatty and coiled. 

‘It won’t hurt,’ she says and pets my head. She finds a sharp grey stone from the ground and makes distance between us so the cord can lay flat over an empty parking space. The yellow line paints through us. She’s right. There’s no pain. I watch her saw the stone through until we’re two people instead of one. She holds me up triumphantly and kisses me before slotting me back into the bag where she walks us through a sea of ancient Fords until we land in a place, that I learn is called home. 

At home, there is no carpet, but there is a father who promised to get one. Most nights, he leaves close to 7:30. Without him the house is mostly the same, a little more empty, a little less waiting for something bad to happen. The floor is cold concrete. Air comes in through the cracks in the windows and the bit that’s duct-taped flaps open in the corner. Mam heats three kettles and lets them whistle in the living room because she’s heard it pretty much has the same effect as heating, but it doesn’t. I’m crying and I realise so is she. I know that our cupboards are just tin cans, an aubergine, and a toothbrush. I know that she is stuck here with me in this, while my father is in other rooms, which later, I too will venture into, learning what it means to live in spaces that sway and taste like absinthe. 

I am three years old. I watch my mother become a woman, while I grow into a human. My hair reaches my chin and she gets a job in the place I was born in. Her uniform is maroon, with a fleece jacket. It’s warm, so she wears it in the house, always. I find it hard to recognise her when she’s not in brand colours. I struggle to imagine the last time I saw my mother in green, or yellow, or her own skin. When I see her, I think of baked goods and barcodes — scanners with red lights. 

‘Just three days a week, little chick. Enough to get us more of these,’ she winks, feeding me spaghetti hoops from a plastic spoon. From her, I see what a home means.  

My dad is a sleeping figure. I only know him in two modes — tired or drunk. I watch him fall asleep to Newcastle shooting penalties, his hands down his pants while my mam takes a half-eaten plate of mashed potato away. She covers him in a wool blanket and swears at a series of bleeping the electricity box makes. The TV ads show us holidays: boats in the Mediterranean, men in polos eating prawn cocktails from what looks like wine glasses. A blonde in a bodycon waves her hands over offers on the bottom of the screen, saying ‘this too could all be yours,’ and my mam cries into a gingham tablecloth. 

At five, my mother and grandmother take me to church. We dress well. I learn quickly that poor women know how to do this best. In a white fur coat, I check my arms on the pews. They’re soft. Immaculate. I feel like a lie. The coat says, look how well we’re doing. Look how beautiful our lives are. I hate the coat and its false mouth. I make it dirty on purpose; let other children throw me in the mud when we play tag. I don’t want to look like something I’m not. My mam tells me that the goal is to sing loud, but soft in church because God has to hear you, but also think you’re nice. I work hard at finding the balance between loud and gentle, but never seem to get it right.  

There’s a back room in the church where I see a priest kiss a thirteen-year-old girl. Millie. I’ve seen her around the newsagents and Dhillon’s Fish Inn a few times. 

‘If you’re good and quiet, this could all be yours,’ he says and rattles the bowl of church donations. She is good. She is quiet. The money is poured down into a collection box, lock and key. Millie leaves, crying in her white coat. I wonder if God can hear her. I wonder if he thinks she’s nice. 

High school introduced me to Marni and Yas. In the Easter holidays, Marni pierced my ear with a needle in her bedroom. I bled over her desk and a sheet of scrawled algebra. At Christmas, Yas kissed me under a bus shelter. We melted the plastic seat with the heat of a lighter. It burned until it was half-formed, flaking into ashes on the ground.  

‘Aye, there’s not much here in Throckley,’ Yas’ dad told us, splitting a sausage roll with a fork and giving us each half. ‘You have to make your own fun, but it can all be yours.’ Taking it to heart, we make Throckley our playground. Twilights claim us where after-school hours are spent leaping over neighbours’ hedges. Before lessons start, we steal sandwiches from corner shops, then ride off on whatever bike we find abandoned by the chippy. I come home drunk too much. Usually, I fall asleep on the sofa in some kind of disgraced heap, limbs half out of blankets, clothes askew. Mam covers me in a wool blanket. When I wake up, she is crying on the gingham tablecloth.  

At eighteen, working in an office, everyone I know calls me lucky. Lucky me there’s desks and not bricks. Lucky me I can wear a blouse and get a coffee. I am lucky. I know. My grandmother reminds me I’m the product of mines and bricklayers, that she herself gave birth to my mother by a coal mine where the men wore dusted clothes and carried pick axes, where my mother’s first welcome to the earth was rubble, but here I am with a life where I can go and write something or look in an art gallery and piss away my time on nice and lovely things. I feel guilty so often that I get a standing delivery to her door: roses, delphiniums, orange irises. I want her to feel lovely. I want my mam to feel lovely.  

At twenty, I bring them into the office for brunch. We take the lift to the roof. Mam looks scared to be in my office, afraid she’ll break the buttons in the lift or that the glass walls will crack if she touches them. I give birth on the fifth floor. Account managers step over me to reach the coffee machines. They come away, hands full of cups of steaming milk and sugar and dark strong-smelling beans. My daughter crawls out of me. I don’t get a chance to push, she’s already spreading her hands out on the ground, her fists on the clean white floor. She leaves a trail of blood that stilettos walk through. My mother puts her hands on her head like a false priest. She looks like one too in her black coat, skin a white strip of a collar. 

‘You’ve done well,’ she tells me, approving of the small me by my ankles. 

‘Very well,’ my grandmother says. I know I have. 

‘We have,’ I tell them, crying on mam’s shoulder. Wool and a warm forehead against mine, she folds me into her chest. We’re still while the office rushes by, the odd flash of pink of someone delivering reports. As I cry, I think of gingham and tablecloths, but there are none here.  

It takes us six more floors to reach the rooftop. Eight men in suits step off the lift to get to Uber on the floor below. 

‘Congratulations,’ one says leaving, smiling as he sidesteps us. 

‘Miracle,’ my grandmother winks at him. To her we all are.  

We gather on the rooftop where the sun hides behind the shielding of a thick grey sky. Someone eating from a carton remarks that it looks ‘heavy.’ Another comes back with, ‘London always does.’ Neither of them are wrong. We walk through the cluster of tiny tables. People curl into their chairs over chicken salad and sandwiches. My walking is slow and painful, between my legs throbs and every few seconds I’m reminded of the cord that attaches me and my girl. From my arms, my mother takes her, and holds her over the skyscraper. For a moment we are all linked, all touching some part of each other, holding each other up, as we always have. 

‘Look,’ she says, pointing to The Gherkin in the distance, the sharp points of The Shard, a coil of people snaked on the pavement waiting for dim sum. ‘This could all be yours.’ The smog hits my child and leaves bits of grey in the tunnels of our noses. Here it is, the city on our plate, half electric, half burned.  

She grows fascinated by heights and people carrying briefcases. I ask her what she wants to be. 

‘Rich,’ she says, and it guts me. Her growing up is different to mine. Inside is her playground. A PC screen becomes a portal where I watch her build herself into a display, face a mosaic of pixels, body an animated skeleton. She retreats, lives in this world instead of ours, a distant avatar I only see in rooms from time to time, recharging. I learn the reasons that make a mother cry into a tablecloth.  

When I open my first office, I take everyone out to celebrate: my mother, her mother, and my daughter. We eat from canapés: rolled salmon, caviar, lemon tartlets. We go somewhere we can watch London through a headset that makes it look like outer space. In it, my daughter takes on the shape of an asteroid, bright and flaming. I hear her breathing adjust to the outside like she’s forgotten how to inhale. I take the headset off. London returns and with it comes the smoke and smells of deep fried chicken. My grandma makes eye contact with a man in the street. He tries to sell her a bracelet, then fails to peel her handbag off her shoulder. She shrugs him off, and shouts until he scurries out of sight. I get it. Finally. The mines, the shops, the offices, the screens. None of this should be ours.  

I take them all to the country. We drive for hours packed into the car. My mother sings old hymns. My grandma sleeps on the passenger window. When fields roll out, vast and evergreen, my daughter reaches for horses through the glass. It’s the first time in years I’ve seen her drawn to real life. I wind the windows down so she can see better. 

Outside there are only fields for miles and miles. We sit, all of us on this land, reclining. The smog is long gone, belonging to a city too far for us. The shops, mines, and houses that never felt like homes have shrunk on this side of the earth. Replaced by trees that have withstood hundreds of years and fleeting rabbits that dash in and out of sight. My daughter points at them. She scrunches grass in her hands, collects daisies in two pink palms. The land offers us a home, the way it does for all lost animals. We watch it all, knowing we are all that's here, that with us life is as big and small as it should be. 

‘Look,’ I tell the women I am made from, hands out to the rest of the world. ‘All of this is ours.’

The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2025. Submit here.

Photo: Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Prosser's Clasped Hands in Lap, 1933, Gelatin silver print, 9.2 x 11.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Georgia O'Keeffe through the generosity of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997, via Wikimedia Commons