Liars' League

Girl with Palmettes by Martin Pengelly

Girl with Palmettes

Read by Mac Forde

In front of the painting at Tate Britain, Bateman realised that he and Melissa had now not been having an affair for six months. Before that, they had not been having an affair for about thirty years and, presumably, after this they would go on not having an affair for about another fifty. Then one of them would die and they could go on not having an affair forever.

 If you would like to read the rest of this story, please check out London Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other London-based stories from the League archives, appears.

Lavender Bunny and the Big Brother House by Quintin Forrest

Read by Will Goodhand

'Can Lavender Bunny come to the Diary Room?'

'He says no.'

'Michael, Big Brother is ordering Lavender Bunny to come to the Diary Room.'

'He says he doesn't like it there. He says it smells of despair.'

'Michael, if Lavender Bunny does not come to the Diary Room immediately, he will be severely punished.'

'You better go, mate,' said one of the others; there were five of us sunbathing out on the lawn.

'LB says what are you going to do, put him up for eviction? He says that didn't work last time, did it? Or the time before.'

'Michael, if Lavender Bunny does not come to the Diary Room, Big Brother will have no choice but to take him into custody.'

'He says you'll have to prise him from my cold, dead hand.'

Stag vs Sandal by Iain Laurie

Read by Silas Hawkins

In AD20s Nazareth there was only one make of shoe worth wearing – ‘Stags’.

Your Stag was a lightweight shoe with a hardened camel skin soul and thin linen upper, not dissimilar to the modern slipper. They were always tan in colour, making the wearer appear shoeless from a distance. Despite their thinness, a pair of Stags were rugged and durable, and in conjunction with being the only make of shoe on the market, became the automatic choice of the consumer. Stags sold like hot cakes. (When hot cakes were finally invented some 80 years later the phrase ‘selling like Stags' was coined. When hot cakes started to outsell Stags in terms of sales per minute the phrase was updated.) Their only drawback was a tendency to become clammy and sweaty, but this was to be expected in the scorching heat of the Nazareth sun. Every man and his donkey wore them. You wore either Stags or nothing. And the only people who wore nothing were the   poor and the very lame.

Entanglement by Lyndsay Kerwin

Read by Lynsey Pow

A train approaches a fork in a deserted area of the woods.  Three people are walking in its course and will be hit if it continues on its path.  There’s no way to warn them and there’s no way they can escape.  However, you can save them if you pull a switch that changes the direction of the train, but there is someone walking on that track also.  He would have to die.  Do you sacrifice one to save three?  Or do you allow fate to take its path?