In his 2022 short story collection, The Man Who Loved Typewriters, Neil Leadbeater created worlds in which the bizarre lurked in the recesses of the everyday. The effect was of a black-marketeer with bottles of dubious whiskey hidden in the folds of his capacious coat. In the eighteen stories that make up Cycling to the End of the World, novelty again lies in wait to trap and enthrall the reader. So too do comedy and sadness, poignancy and compassion. For some of the characters here, startling revelations confirm their suspicion that life is a rum old proposition and no mistake; for others, they mark a profound turning point in existence.

The stories vary in length. In the shorter ones, a portal effect frequently operates: humdrum activity becomes a conduit through which a character enters a world exceedingly rich and strange. ‘Alice was not expecting any adventures,’ reveals the narrator at the start of ‘Alice in Slumberland’. ‘She was after a new mattress because she wanted to get a good night’s rest’. But the title promises otherwise. Alice is soon swamped by re-versioned characters out of Lewis Carroll; even so, madcap capers lead her, improbably, to make the perfect purchase. In ‘Spin’, meanwhile, we are in the world of wordplay. In a launderette, Rosalind and Sandy are treated to a woman loudly holding ‘the conversation to end all conversations’ on her phone. They are shocked – but should they be? This is, after all, the ultimate arena for washing dirty linen. The woman is the very picture of self-assurance, as is Sid Sorrell, the department store lift attendant in ‘Going Up In The World’. His pronouncements, however, aid rather than astonish. Like an archetypal taxi-driver, he is part functionary, part philosopher (he even thinks of the lift as his ‘cab’). He soon learns to read the quiddities of those whom he ferries up and down: ‘the man who kept straightening his tie…the boy with the unabashed gaze who looked in awe at everything’. Like a London taxi-driver, he perfects his version of The Knowledge, condensing what each floor exhibits to one or two words for his passengers’ enlightenment, ever mindful that he is performing for them, ensuring that ‘The tone would change from day to day according to his mood’.

One thing that makes these stories appealing is the relationship between narrator and material. Leadbeater allows their impact, humorous or otherwise, to emerge naturally. There is no nudging, no flagging up of an imminent joke or moment of tragedy. This is particularly the case when the focus is on a character whom life has marked with solitude. ‘Green Bottles’ is a meditation on fragility: of glass and of human existence. Pip, something of a loner like his Dickensian namesake, ventures into a bottle factory next to his school. Once, when he’d visited it on a school trip, it seemed like a place of disquieting mystery: ‘The heat in the factory was like something from Dante’s inferno. Pip hadn’t reckoned on God placing hell so close to the playground’. Now it’s abandoned – but something draws him back. Or is it abandoned completely? At the end of a long corridor, he makes a discovery that he can never unsee, that forcibly ushers in the next phase of his life, symbolized by a bottle that he knocks off a shelf during his confused departure: ‘It was one of the few that had been left behind and it smashed into pieces the instant it hit the ground’. Something that can never be unseen also characterizes Sarah’s appointment for an eye test in ‘The Examination’, where the optometrist’s unhurried routine, his professional proximity to her, morphs into a hellish memory: ‘Could he see what she had seen when the stranger had entered her room? She’d screamed then, more out of pain than surprise’.

In some of the stories the prose is worked closely, almost taking on the compression of poetry. In ‘Viridian’, divers come upon ‘a beautiful bronze sculpture’; their minds racing, they wonder if ‘she was Salacia, the goddess of saltwater or Amphitrite…wife of Poseidon’. Once positioned on land, in the Abbey Gardens on Tresco, she exhibits a mesmerising restlessness, her glaze alternating ‘between Tiffany blue and Persian green’, her mouth a birthing ground for hosts of butterflies. Immobile herself, she is the site of endless fluidity. In ‘Cycling to the End of the World’, the narrator addresses the reader directly. A meditation on time and distance, the story offers a triangulation: our thoughts on where the world ends (having long ceased to be flat); the delirious illusion of speed and distance created by a fixed exercise bike; and Carl Orff’s ‘final musical statement to the world’, De Tempore Fine Comoedia, or A Play on the End of Time. The story concludes with a powerful image: hearing Orff’s opera while sending the speedometer off the dial on such a bike. Managing to do that, it could be said, you have thwarted distance and reached the end of time – all without leaving your room. ‘What a way to go’, remarks the narrator as if, between them, Orff and the bike have conjured the ultimate journey and time cannot hope to contain it.

One of the most moving stories in the collection is ‘Red Letter Days’. Blake Eddison is a baby boomer, a term still suggestive of youth – in terms of hope, at least, if not reality. In fact he is a widower ‘in his mid-seventies’ but he does not live alone. His past is at large in his house: in a printing press, in newspapers and school reports, on examination papers – and, most tellingly, on old reel-to-reel tape recordings, three of which are central to the story. (That his name echoes the famous inventor’s is fitting, given the presence of so many artefacts from bygone times.) But the story isn’t a variation on Krapp’s Last Tape. Eddison is not a counterpart of Samuel Beckett’s obessive, rancorous listener. Instead, he selects particular tapes from key points in his life: when he began to understand what makes people tick, when he became attuned to the sights and sounds of the world, when he found himself on the threshold of a whole new phase. Here he is on Spool ‘20/36’, a holiday job on Uncle Remy’s fish van, learning of customers’ habits and the importunate ways of cats – until a change in those habits causes Uncle Remy’s downfall. Here he is on ‘Spool 20/47: Landscape Gardening with Eddie Snape: Holiday Job: Summer 1970’. He’s just about to go away to College; shortly, his world will move up a step. Sunbathing in one garden nearby, a woman goes the full come-hither, but Eddie gets between her and Blake’s hormones: ‘It’s best to take no notice. You don’t want to get involved with that sort of thing’. Notwithstanding the free love and dishevelled carelessness that ‘baby boomer’ connotes, it’s advice that has served Blake well all his life; in fact, he keeps a radio on in the house to make up for the loss of his wife. Finally, he listens to ‘Spool 56/25: Mr Price: Ironmonger: Fireworks: November 1960’ – a fitting choice, given that the story is set on the fifth of November. Now, once again, he loses himself in the array of fireworks that, like a licensed Mephistopheles, Mr Price sold to eager children ahead of the big night: ‘It was his rockets that I liked the most. I thought every one of them would reach the moon but some would only chortle in the neck of a bottle without ever leaving the ground’.

‘Oh well’, thinks a character at the end of another story, ‘Glass Half Full’, ‘stranger things happen at sea’. It is a testimony to Neil Leadbeater’s breadth of curiosity and inventiveness that he captures so much strangeness and sets it down in these pages. But always the strangeness has a purpose. His characters start the day thinking that the world is like this; by the end, they cannot deny that it is like that, and it is a testament to their fortitude – or capacity for hope – that they reshape their behaviour accordingly. Like Pip in the bottle factory, they cannot unknow what they discover. These stories are by turns humorous, wistful, reflective; always they are absorbing. The result is a bicycle ride that cries, Alice in Wonderland-style, Jump On!

Michael W. Thomas’s latest poetry collection, with Tina Cole, is Nothing Louche or Bohemian (Black Pear Press). His latest novel is The Erkeley Shadows (Amazon KDP / Swan Village Reporter). His reviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The London Magazine and Writing in Education. For several years he was Poet-in-Residence at the Robert Frost Festival, Key West, Florida. www.michaelwthomas.co.uk

Neil Leadbeater is also one of our Ink Pantry reviewers, and published poets. You can find more of Neil’s work here on Ink Pantry.