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A disagreement about The Cure

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We had disagreed about The Cure. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me but you were pretty militant about it. My position was that they had done so much poppier stuff in later years that you couldn’t credibly call them a goth band anymore and this was clearly a problem for you. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is not a goth record and that was 1987 so it’s not like it’s even a recent thing. It’s got trumpets. Surely the least goth instrument unless it’s in a Wagner symphony or something. I’m a bit sketchy on classical music. Would Bauhaus have been improved with a parping trumpet solo in the middle of Bela Lugosi’s Dead? Well, okay, maybe but that’s not my point. You countered that it wasn’t just about the music, it was about the aesthetic and the attitude. I think you said something about how it was like when you saw goths at the beach: they might be in their swimming gear, probably getting sunburnt, but they didn’t stop being goths just because they happened to be playing frisbee. Robert Smith didn’t look like a frisbee guy to me, I reckon he’d want to be buried in sand, just his mop of frizzed black hair left sticking out of the beach like a mass of gnarly seaweed. 

If I’m honest the conversation hadn’t gone to plan. I’d spotted you pretty quickly after arriving at the bar and clocked the dark hair, dyed a deep (dare I say blood) red at the tips, framing slightly sharp features, high cheek bones, slightly pronounced, pointed nose. A cascading array of ear rings, a series of studs and loops around, seemingly, the entirety of the outside of your lobes. Looked pretty cool. You had large, hazel eyes. They made me think of the Well Of Souls but I decided that this would be a terrible first line, even my own inner monologue was telling me that it was dreadful, and figured that the Cure tee-shirt (Boys Don’t Cry) you were wearing was a safer place to start than a cave where the spirits of the dead await Judgement Day. How wrong I was.

I didn’t actually get to start with a line. You watched me walking towards the bar and, evidently, clocked that I was wearing a Nirvana tee-shirt and stole my conversational opener. Do you actually like them or is this a zeitgeist bandwagon thing? It wasn’t exactly that but you said something like that and the inference was very much that I was a zeitgeist bandwagon rider rather than a genuine fan. I didn’t mind. Other than the tee-shirt I wasn’t really looking like an archetypal grunge head at that point, just jeans and a pair of trainers. I’d had my hair cut a couple of weeks ago and had gone very respectable in anticipation of the end of term and trying to find some work over the summer. So I was looking less Kurt Cobain and more trainee-accountant-on-the- weekend. Your scepticism was justified I guess. I hated people that wore band tee-shirts for bands they didn’t even like or know so I actually thought this was a good sign that the conversation had started like this. How wrong I was.

I told you that I had liked them from the start, which, in my head, was Bleach, but you seemed to know some obscure stuff that pre-dated that and had, apparently, seen them on the tour they did with Tad and Mudhoney, I felt less sure of my fandom. Obviously I knew who Mudhoney were but who the hell were Tad? You seemed to sense my sudden hesitancy and declared that you’d lost interest in Nirvana after Nevermind came out; production was too polished and poppy, you couldn’t get on board with the whole poster boy for an alienated generation stuff. I wasn’t ready to completely give way on this point and suggested that maybe it was a good thing that more people would get into some great music. You started to sing the chorus to In Bloom by way of response. He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs and he likes to sing along. At this point perhaps I should have called it quits and slunk off to see if my friends had showed up yet but it was going so far off plan that I thought it probably couldn’t get any worse. How wrong I was.

I needed to get the conversation away from me and onto her and the obvious pivot was the one that I’d planned to start with. Talk about The Cure. You obviously like The Cure. This will be a failsafe route into a chat in which you hopefully discover that I am a good guy, not likely to hit you with a line about the deep abyss of sorrow in your eyes, and we exchange numbers, say that we’ll hook up in future. In retrospect it was a mistake to pivot to The Cure by suggesting that they were, just like Nirvana, equally as guilty of softening up their sound, playing to the pop crowd, and that, maybe, just maybe, they weren’t a goth band anymore. You watched me make my series of statements with a bemused, slightly detached air. I felt like a fly flitting around one of those plants that seems benign and then eats them, jaw like leaves sliding shut efficiently, smoothly, dispatching their prey. Something to do with Venus but I didn’t really pay much attention in biology. Or mythology. You stayed silent, waiting for me to finish and so I prattled on a bit longer about how Friday In Love could practically have been the Friends theme song such was its sunny peppiness. I don’t think I actually said sunny peppiness but I was babbling by this point so all bets are off. I finally stopped talking. You raised an eyebrow. Perhaps this was a considered reappraisal, an eyebrow that spoke of seeing something familiar from a fresh perspective, a perspective from someone that you were now thinking was pretty okay. How wrong I was.

I went to a lot of lectures that year. I was a good student and even stuck around for the optional stuff on tax law that was like listening to an atonal dirge of noise for an hour. Quite a lot like how I felt about The Cure before they went poppy if I was honest but I felt this wouldn’t help to say out loud. All of those lectures were as nothing compared to the exceptionally detailed dissection of The Cure’s career, songs, principles, importance, and place in alternative culture, that you gave me over the next ten minutes or so. It was impassioned, frequently sweary, oddly sexually charged when you talked about Robert Smith and men wearing make-up, and pretty unambiguous in whether I was right or wrong about the whole pop sell-out thing. It was magnificent. The only trouble now was that I had started out mildly curious, attracted by those well-of-souls eyes, and now I was in deep. You were glorious and I had blown it because I didn’t know who supported Nirvana in the UK in 1989 and I thought The Cure had some tunes that milkmen would cheerily whistle. Not even goth milkmen either. You were fierce and intelligent and absolutely gorgeous and I had no chance. How wrong I was.

We had disagreed about The Cure. You said later that you were just messing with me and wanted to see if I’d stick it out whilst you unloaded all that stuff about dark majesty and direct lineage from punk that was more legitimate than Nirvana’s Beatles meets Pixies marriage of convenience. I don’t think you were entirely messing with me. You do have an inordinate amount of Cure records and that enormous poster of Robert Smith over your bed still kinda freaks me out a bit when I wake up in the morning. I told you the eyes thing after a couple of weeks. You rolled them in response so at least my instinct to keep that one to myself early on was correct. You’d be a decent point of judgement for the dead though. As long as they liked The Cure they’d be fine. I grew my hair back out but you shaved yours off. It suited you. I said it made you look like Ripley in Aliens. Alien, you said back. Well, I think Aliens is the better film, I replied. 

How wrong I was.

Almost at the end of July and almost at the end of my 26,000 words for Great Ormond Street Hospital (fundraising page here).

This one was just a bit of fun but has its roots in an incident, a very long time ago, when I argued the merits of Lenny Kravitz with a woman at University who had a large poster of him on her wall. I still think I was right but it was probably a situation where it was better to be wrong…

Dirt Dawg & The Highway Hound (Marv’s Song)

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When he got to drinking Marv liked to think about the old days, back when he and Hal had more hair than sense and they had no worries beyond whether their tyres would last until the next race meet. Dirt Dawg and the Highway Hound. First time they’d each showed up at track with their new names emblazoned across the top of their windshields they’d been laughed at by the old hands, the guys that had been on the circuit for a few years. They stopped laughing soon enough when they stopped seeing that windshield and only saw their taillights pulling away from them, left to pointlessly chase the newcomers through clouds of kicked up dust. It was all unofficial. You heard from somebody that knew somebody when the next meet would happen, either on some marked out piece of scrub land or, sometimes, late at night on streets that would probably be quiet enough to be safe or where a local sheriff had been paid off to close the place down. Marv liked the off-road tracks, Hal the streets. Hence the names.

They were good. It wasn’t just the drink talking, they were really good. Some of it was won in the garage, both of them spending hours tinkering with their cars until they were set just right, tuning the engine, tweaking the suspension, stripping out anything not bolted down that was just excess weight. Hal was the first to strap a nitrous oxide booster to his engine and he’d blow everyone away in drag races on the long stretches that they sometimes ran north of Culbertson, up by the cemeteries. Then they’d sit around laughing, inhaling the remnants of a leftover canister of the stuff; too young to buy beer but buzzing on the same fuel that had injected their victory. Not all of it was technical though. Even without the gizmos and gadgets they were the best drivers. Marv liked to say that they were too stupid to be afraid of dying and that gave them an edge. He’d throw his head back and howl and Hal would match him, their signature announcement before the start of each race, steadily matching their howls with the revs from their engines until they’d whipped up a furious frenzy of noise, men and their machines in harmony.

It had changed when Marv met Anne-Marie. She had loved the racing, it wasn’t that, it was that he suddenly felt a little less stupid and, as a consequence, a little more afraid of dying. There were corners he braked for a little earlier, racing lines he ceded to others that he would never have ceded, gaps between cars that now looked too narrow that, before, he would’ve forced his way through. He lost his edge. The Dirt Dawg got a little less dirty, less feral. She’s tamed him. He knew that was the whisper round the circuit but truth was that he’d tamed himself. He could see more in their future than stripped-down, souped-up Chevy’s, wanted more than the accolade of being the fastest thing on four wheels in Hitchcock County. Maybe the whole of Nebraska. Whatever, his horizons were a little broader now and stretched beyond the State line.

They’d married with a small ceremony at the local church. They didn’t have any money but Marv had persuaded Frank to let them take over the bar for the afternoon and into the evening. It started respectable with some speeches and a buffet spread that was all they could stretch to and it ended less respectable with tequila shots and a slurred singalong to ‘Jack And Diane’. Hal was best man and had insisted on driving them from the chapel to the bar. One last drag race, for old time’s sake. The Dawg and the Hound. He’d gunned the throttle, held the car on its parking brake until the tyres started to smoke, and then released it, hurtling them forwards. The ride of your life. Hal had shouted it halfway down the street, eyes locked on the road in front of him. In the back Anne-Marie had nestled her head into Marv’s shoulder and whispered this ain’t the ride of your life, honey, you wait until later.

That was the last time him and the Hound rode together. Hal couldn’t or wouldn’t leave the race circuit alone and didn’t seem to notice that younger guys coming through were getting quicker whilst he was slowing down. He used to feel like he was the still point as the world moved around him, perfectly calm in the eye of a storm. Only now he didn’t feel quite so fixed, was getting buffeted by the storm whilst he was trying to navigate it. Before everything happened in slow motion, the road out front a series of photographs he could hold in his mind, place himself and his car in, but slowly everything started to blur, like a faulty VHS machine that was stuck on fast forwards, dancing lines of static obscuring the picture. Marv had told him to stop. Nobody else, maybe, could tell but Marv saw him miss racing lines, watched him half a second off the start line, fishtailing because he’d left his braking too late, misjudged another bend. They’d argued about it and drifted apart. Last time Marv had seen him had been at Frank’s. He’d walked in and Hal was drunk at the bar, picking the label off his beer bottle, railing to nobody in particular about how Clinton was a phoney. He’d got up when he saw Marv, pushed past him to the exit. Another phoney. Whole damn country’s full of them.

Marv heard about the accident from some of the old crew still on the racing scene. There was a cross country run they still did sometimes that he knew from back when he was the king of off-road. Some fields east of Trenton, couple of circuits and then a sprint finish in to Massacre Canyon, barrelling under the railroad bridge marking the finish line. It was a challenging run, especially when it had been dry for weeks, the tracks hardening into a series of uneven jolting bumps, the cars jumping, drivers fighting to keep tyres on the floor. Back in the day it was the kind of run that the Dirt Dawg owned, the kind of run that made his name. Hal had never liked those races, he’d always preferred the surety of tarmac and the straight line speed down an empty stretch of freeway. Maybe he was trying to prove something that day, Marv didn’t know. All he heard was he pushed too hard in the final sprint, opened up his nitro way too early, way too far, hit a rise and lost control, stacked his Mustang into the side of the bridge. If he’d been wearing a helmet they said he might have survived but the Dawg and the Hound never wore helmets.

If it was one of those afternoons that started with a beer and then stretched into the evening, time marked out in a growing stack of bottle caps on the bar, then Marv might get to thinking that his whole life had been one long drift, too much power early on and then just trying to find some balance to stop the whole thing spinning out of control. Anne-Marie died about ten years after Hal, summer of ’94. She was no age and he didn’t really understand what they told him in the hospital in the short time between diagnosis and her passing. He understood the bills. For all Clinton’s promises it didn’t seem to make much difference to people like them and none of his driving gigs came with medical insurance. It took him ten years to pay it all off, taking a long-haul truck job, spending his days and nights traversing the country, hoping the noise from his twin twelve cylinders would drown out his grief. He made some kind of peace with it and settled back in Trenton because he didn’t know where else to go.

The truck wash had been an idea he’d been turning over in his mind in the last couple of years of driving. There was pride in the community of truckers ploughing the highways, they might not come right out and say it but he’d watch them take a rag to polish up a bumper or vacuum out their tractor. Sure, they were all a little rough around the edges but they liked their rig to be smooth. He’d opened Dirt Dawg’s Truck & Car Wash in the Fall of ’05, figuring that he had enough money to make it through that first winter and then demand would pick up into the summer, no rain to rinse away the dust and grime from the road. The name had seemed obvious and, maybe, he hoped there were still some around who remembered the original young buck that had worn that title, remembered when nobody could touch him across the county dirt tracks, remembered when nobody could touch his partner on the streets. Just glory days. No-one seemed to remember except him and Frank. You’re like that song, Marv. Holding to glory days. Frank would put it on in the bar sometimes to amuse himself, usually on those nights where either the stack of bottle caps or Marv would topple over.

He was tired. He knew he was slowing down and he wasn’t resisting it, he wasn’t interested so much in raging against the dying of the light as fading down the dimmer switch himself. His days of being on full beam were done. He took on that kid, Johnny, to run more and more shifts and he saw something of himself in the boy, something of who he used to be. A certain restlessness, a certain attitude. They never spoke about the future but Marv thought that perhaps he could pass the business on, let himself be bought out by this pup, let the old dog finally rest, finally stop drifting. Johnny had other ideas.

The night Johnny and Diane pulled their Bonnie and Clyde stunt, jumped town with the pick-up, Marv was drinking at Frank’s. He’d only had a couple. Frank was regaling the bar with his story about travelling up State to see the Trump rally and how he was going to bail out the little guys, the forgotten guys, the American guys. Marv didn’t want to hear it all over again. He’d stopped wearing the MAGA hat that Frank had got him after a while; the more he saw of this guy the more he just thought he was the same as all the rest of them. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. None of them had done anything for him or for Anne-Marie. Hal would have called him a phoney and he reckoned he probably had it about right. He left the bar and decided to check that Johnny had locked up as he had to pass the truck wash on his way home anyway.

He noticed the girl first. She was sat on the sidewalk, hugging her legs up to her chest. Something about it reminded him of Anne-Marie, how she used to sit up on the hood of his car in the same kind of pose. It used to drive him mad and he’d yell at her to get down, shout about the rivets on her jeans scratching his paint work, but she’d just laugh at him and chide him for loving his car more than her loved her. And she knew that wasn’t true. He thought he recognised this girl, she looked like the one that had been helping up at Cindy’s, had moved in there for a while after that nasty business between Cindy and Randall. Cindy said she was a nice kid. Marv never thought of himself as the smartest guy but he saw the make-up, saw the cropped top and the too-tight jeans, saw the girl trying to front up as a woman, hanging around beside a known stop off for groups of men. He saw what this was. Saw someone else drifting and about to spin out of control.

You steer into it when you’re about to spin. So he gave her something to steer into.

“Come see me tomorrow if you want work,” Marv said. “I think I might have an opening. Dress for washing cars though. You know, appropriate like. It’s honest work and I got more demand than Cindy does. Place like this, dogs go out of fashion but trucks and cars? They seldom do.”

He thought about Johnny, out there running the highway, and decided to let him go. He could understand why a young man might want to get of Trenton. He figured he’d abandon the pick-up along the way and there couldn’t be many Dodge Rams on the road decorated with Dirt Dawg decals and a horn that blasted a whistling howl. He’d get his truck back but, even if he didn’t, some things were more important. He’d lost the Hound and he’d lost Anne-Marie, damn near lost himself, but he wasn’t going to let this girl get lost too.

This concludes the loosely entwined trilogy about Trenton, Nebraska. I guess it’s mainly Marv’s back story. You can decide if Jennifer sticks it out and eventually takes over Frank’s bar or not. I like to think she maybe does.

This is another story in my 26,000 word commitment for Great Ormond Street Hospital in July ’23. Fundraising page here

Jennifer Harlow

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It’ll pick up. That’s all that Cindy would say as she sent Jennifer home again, another busted shift because there weren’t enough bookings. It’ll pick up. They’d been busy, too busy really, in ’20 and ’21 when it seemed like the whole town bought a dog and competed with each other to see whose could be the best turned out. Trenton hadn’t suffered much with Covid but they’d shut down the places people could meet just the same, Frank’s Bar, the Community Room, the library, everything except church and even that was emptier than usual. Everyone seemed to decide that dogs were the answer. Jennifer thought they were just scared of having to spend any time alone confronting their reality in this town, facing in to all their little insecurities that they usually drowned out by speaking to each other. She didn’t speak much to anyone.

They shouldn’t really have been open in ’20 but they figured out a system, dogs dropped off in a small holding pen that Cindy had put up on the side of house and then they’d wait for the owner to push their horn when they were back in their car so they knew they could go out and get their pet. Cindy was on her own by that point, Randall had upped sticks on her and moved to Enders with Sandy Michaels just as she graduated. Nobody could ever prove anything but the word in town was that he must have been seeing her before she turned sixteen. People said they saw them down at Swanson Lake that summer, her in cut off denim shorts and a tiny bikini top, him in jeans, white shirt unbuttoned all the way down, holding hands, kissing, but nobody saw anything more. Randy and Sandy. That used to make Jennifer smile. Jesus, this town, man. 

Jennifer had known Sandy at school, she’d been the year above but had still been one of the girls that had made her life a misery after the hair incident. She’d been into Nirvana but thought all the conspiracy stuff about Courtney Love was crap and wanted to do something to look like her, she thought Courtney was pretty cool but mostly she thought that she didn’t take any shit from anyone and she could use a bit of that. She should have gone to Beauty Marks and talked to Stacey about it but when she was hovering around outside, deciding whether to go in, she’d seen a friend of he mom’s in there and it would all get too complicated trying to explain. So she’d done it all herself, full on peroxide treatment to banish the boring brunette and emerge as a bottle-blonde bombshell. Don’t try for more than two shades. She knew that now. As it turned out the number of shades was the least of her problems as she had some kind of reaction to the peroxide; her hair turned orange and then, a couple of days later, which she’d spent trying to style the whole thing out like she’d always wanted orange hair, it all started to fall out. The best she could salvage was a fairly dramatic buzz cut which left her the laughing stock of the school for weeks. Everyone pivoted over night from picking apart Diane Flint’s apparent Disney princess obsession to picking apart her new look. All graceless stuff about lesbians or cancer mostly. This town, man.

She didn’t regret dropping out. Mostly didn’t regret it. Courtney got expelled when she was growing up and things worked out okay for her. Why stay somewhere you don’t want to be and where nobody else wants you there? Just for a piece of paper saying you can do math and knew who George Washington was. Maybe she could have stayed, sometimes she thinks that Diane was open to being friends and maybe that would have been enough. But she was always hanging out with that Johnny guy, the older one who stayed down a year, and he seemed kinda intimidating, like he didn’t want anyone intruding, so she’d kept her distance. Besides, everyone said they were screwing and she didn’t want to get in the middle of that. Dropping out had been easy, as simple as not showing up anymore. The aftermath had been harder as her mom kicked her out and she’d spent a couple of weeks sleeping in the Community Room, hiding in the toilets until they locked up and then creeping back out to lie down on the floor until morning. Cindy had taken pity on her, maybe she just wanted company after Randy left her, but she let her stay at hers for a while, gave her some shift work grooming the dogs, and, slowly, Jennifer had put enough money down to rent a room in a pre-fab up near the 34. It was cheap because there was highway noise through the night, it wasn’t so bad except when the eighteen wheelers whipped past  and the room would shake, the loose piece of glass in one of the widows would rattle against the frame, and the screen door would swing open if she hadn’t remembered to jam it shut.  They had a steady stream of Big Rigs passing through the town. Sometimes she thought about thumbing a ride and taking off but she had nowhere to go.

It was getting harder when it should have been getting easier. In her head she’d thought that if she could keep the shifts at Cindy’s until she turned twenty one then things would open up a bit, she could take a bar job, worm her way in at Frank’s. He wasn’t getting any younger and she knew he had no family. It wasn’t much of a plan but it gave her something to hold on to, an imagined future where she owned the local bar and all those losers from school would have to pay her to drink in the only place in town to hang out. She figured she’d change the name, maybe to “Jennifer’s” or maybe to “Love’s” in a little nod to Courtney, and she’d put a proper jukebox in, get rid of all that bro-country that Frank had on all the time, put in the pool table everyone wanted but Frank said he couldn’t afford, stop watering down the beer, have open mic nights for singers and comedians. It was when she got to the open mic nights part of her fantasy that reality usually crashed in. This town, man. Nobody in Trenton’s coming out for slam poetry at Love’s on a Tuesday night. She was two years off twenty one and the dog boom was over, Cindy was barely making enough to make her mortgage, let alone enough to give up any shifts and pay someone else. It’ll pick up. Will it, Cindy, will it?

In her darker moments she wondered if her only option was to screw her way out of Trenton. There were a lot of truckers passing through, probably lonely, criss-crossing the country, no ties, no need for alibis. What would even be the going rate for something like that? There wasn’t anyone she could ask. What was it worth, half an hour of fucking? What was she worth? She’d never really been with a man before so it felt like a desperate leap. There was that time with Bobby Davids when they were both fifteen, he’d tried to take things further than she wanted to and she’d spent most of the evening moving his hands away or refusing to join in as he’d pulled himself off. An entirely different version of events went round the school the next day and she’d stayed away from boys after that, wrote them all off as assholes. Not much dissuaded her of that view before she dropped out.

One evening she’d fixed her hair up, pulled it away from her neck, and dressed in a tight, low cut top, spaghetti straps and cropped at the stomach. She’d squeezed herself into year old jeans, slightly too small for her now but they accentuated her hips, and stopped to check herself in the small mirror above the sink in her room. She practiced what she thought was a confident, sexy smile, pushed her lips into a pout, tried to look casual. Her eyes betrayed her, blinking slightly too often, unable to maintain eye contact with herself, she would look away, around the room. It was okay if she caught a glimpse of this girl in the mirror, this stranger, familiar but different, but it wasn’t okay if she stared her down, realised that she was looking back at herself. She thickened up her mascara and applied some more eye shadow, like she was building defences around the source of her betrayal, and took the edge off her lipstick, blotting her lips against a tissue, leaving the imprint of her mouth in scarlet. The suggestion of a kiss.

She’d walked into town and made her way towards the truck and car wash. Some of the freight from the 34 stopped off in town, they could get their wagon freshened up at Dirt Dawg, chat to Marv, or, more likely, go join him at Frank’s for a beer. She didn’t really know what she was going to do, thought she would just walk around for while and see what happened. Maybe they would know what to do and things would happen naturally and she could pretend that this was all just a regular night for her. Fifty bucks. That was what she’d settled on in her head. That was her worth. Fifty bucks for everything, maybe thirty bucks for hand or mouth, and she absolutely wasn’t doing anything other than those things. Fifty was a week’s rent. Twice a week, maybe she could get by doing this twice a week, maybe things would pick up a bit at Cindy’s, and that would get her through.

There was a light on in Dirt Dawg but it was closed, the main shutters to the garage were down. As she came closer the shutters screeched into life and began to rise, on the other side was Marv’s pick-up, headlights blinding her as the barrier rose higher and higher. She shielded her eyes and moved to one side.

“That you, Jennifer” came a voice from the pick-up. She blinked, squinting, eyes adjusting to the flood of light from front of the truck. Was that Diane Flint?

“Hey, yes. It’s me. Diane?” 

Someone else had walked over to stand next to her and she noticed that the driver door on the truck was open, presumably whilst someone had been opening the garage shutters. She recognised him as Johnny.

“You won’t tell anyone,” he said. Jennifer wasn’t sure if it was a question or a demand.

“Tell anyone what?”

“Johnny, she’s cool,” shouted Diane. “Let’s get going. We should put some miles on before it gets too late.”

Jennifer pieced it together. “You’re leaving town, right? You’re taking off?”

“It’s not your business whether we are,” said Johnny. “You sure she’s cool?” This was directed back at the pick-up.

Before Diane could respond Jennifer interrupted. “You don’t need to worry about me. I won’t tell no-one. I haven’t really got anyone to tell anyway. But even if I did, I wouldn’t. Go on, get going.”

Johnny nodded to her, the briefest acknowledgement, and jumped back into the pick-up. He and Diane spoke quietly, Jennifer couldn’t hear them over the sound of the engine. He was shaking his head, Diane was gesturing and doing most of the talking, both of them seemed to be getting frustrated. Jennifer broke the stalemate. “If you’re arguing about whether to ask me along then quit it and get going. Three’s a crowd and I’ve got plans in this town.” Jesus, this town, man. Diane raised her hand, a small, sad wave that she barely had time to give as Johnny gunned the accelerator and left Jennifer standing there.

She didn’t really know why she waited. There was something about the truck wash being left open, unattended, that bothered her so she sat on the kerbside, stared up at the street light, and just waited. That was where Marv found her, about an hour later, when he came back from Frank’s. It had been a quiet night, Frank was in a bad mood, so he’d only stayed for a couple before deciding he should check on how much Johnny had taken in the afternoon. He was a decent kid but Marv knew his heart wasn’t really in it. Marv’s heart wasn’t really in it these days either.

He took in the scene quietly, mentally putting it together. The shutters were open and his pick-up wasn’t there. There was a girl – and she was definitely a girl much as she’d tried to dress up like a woman – on the sidewalk. He thought he’d seen her around town. She might be the one that helped Cindy out from time to time, Cindy always said she was a good worker. He went inside and checked that nothing else was missing. It looked like Johnny had left the safe, the day’s takings still inside, he’d just taken the truck. No note. Had he just borrowed it for the night? Taken someone up to the lake, maybe? That didn’t seem right, he’d have asked if it was just that. Marv figured he’d split town. He was about to pick up the phone, call the sheriff, when he heard a voice behind him.

“Everything okay, now? I… I waited ‘cos I noticed the place had been left open and it didn’t seem right.”

Marv turned round. “You see what happened?” He didn’t expect her to tell him the truth. She didn’t.

“No, I didn’t. I was just coming in to town to… well, to have a drink, but I saw it all open like this.”

“You seem a little young to be coming to town to have a drink,” said Marv. He slowed on the word drink, raised an eyebrow. “If you want my advice then I’d stay away from drink.” Again, he was deliberate on the word. More gently he said, “You don’t want to be messing around with that.”

Jennifer suddenly felt exposed. The night air had cooled and she was aware of the chill on her uncovered arms, her shoulders, her stomach, her neck. The change in his tone, its softening, had pulled away any last remnants of forced confidence, of fake front, that she had left. Fifty bucks? Was that really what she thought she was worth? She felt tears pricking at the edges of her eyes, sensed that the mountain of mascara she’d applied before was about to dislodge in a black avalanche down her cheeks. She wanted to run away, back to her room, sit and sob listening to the sounds of the rigs rattling past, all those truckers she thought she was prepared to give herself up to disappearing into the night. She turned away.

“Come see me tomorrow if you want work,” Marv said. “I think I might have an opening. Dress for washing cars though. You know, appropriate like. It’s honest work and I got more demand than Cindy does. Place like this, dogs go out of fashion but trucks and cars? They seldom do.”

Jennifer didn’t turn around again. She didn’t really want him to see her like this anymore. It wasn’t who she was. She wasn’t completely sure she knew who she was but she knew it wasn’t this.

“Thank you,” she said, back to him. “I think I’d like that. I’ll be back in the morning. Some honest work.”

She left and Marv watched her walk back up the street before he closed the place back up for the night. He thought about calling the sheriff but decided it could wait until tomorrow; get to wherever you think you’re going, Johnny. He flicked off the lights.

I decided I had unfinished business in Trenton after my earlier story: here. I may round out a loose “Trenton Trilogy” and tell Marv’s story at some point. Anyway, Jennifer deserved more than the couple of lines she got first time out, hopefully things work out for her from here. I think I may have switched tenses towards the end but that’s the sort of thing an editor is for, right?

This is another in the series of stories for my Great Ormond Street Hospital (UK children’s hospital for my non-UK readership, yes, both of you). Donations welcome here.

A secret never told

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“Rain later, apparently.”

He didn’t turn as I approached. The two of us leant against the gate, looking out over the meadow. A solitary magpie landed on a scrubby patch of grass in front of us and began to peck at the earth.

“Good. Field needs it. It’s been a hard summer.”

“It’s still uneven.” I gestured at the patch where the magpie continued its restless scouring of the ground. Two others broke from their circling overhead and joined their companion who greeted them with an angry, rattling, staccato cry. 

“People don’t see it like you do. It’ll grow over again given another year.”

“I guess. You sure it’s being left as pasture?” 

He nodded without averting his gaze from the field. “Won’t be ploughing this for three or four years. Needs to lie fallow for a good long time. They might put some sheep in there next year I reckon once the grass takes hold properly.”

“As long as you’re sure?”

“I was always sure.” 

I pushed myself away from the gate, feeling my weight through my arms, and looked up at the darkening sky. John was sure. If he’d been trying to reassure me it hadn’t worked. Hearing footsteps behind me I turned my head to see someone from the village approaching. She was followed by a dog, sniffing eagerly at the hedgerow. Jet black. Perhaps a labrador cross. I’d never really known about things like that. Another part of country life that I’d need to learn. I acknowledged her as she passed and bent to pat the dog as it barked in greeting. Over the fence the magpies scattered at the noise.

“Looks like it’s going to rain,” called the dog walker. “Come on Rosie. Here girl.”
Rosie ignored her owner and scrabbled under the gate and went bounding into the open field, tail flapping in the rising wind. She paused where the magpies had previously settled and pressed her nose to the ground. She began to bark.

“Daft dog. Must have caught the scent of something,” said the walker coming up to the gate. “Here Rosie. Come on. Good girl.”

“There were some birds in the field earlier,” I said. “Magpies.” 

“How many?” asked the walker in between continuing to call back Rosie. I started to join in. John briefly touched my arm, his hand firm. I stopped calling for the dog.

“Anne’s new to the area. She won’t know what you mean,” he said. “Doubt she’ll know about our little country superstitions.” 

She didn’t seem to hear, wrapped up in shouting at her disobedient companion. The dog had barely moved, still sniffing the earth. I gripped the gate, knuckles whitening.

“What am I going to do with that creature?” she muttered. Reaching in to her coat she pulled out a biscuit but Rosie didn’t appear to notice until it was thrown towards her, into the field. Then she trotted back towards us and snapped up the biscuit, crumbs scattering around her as she chewed. Another proffered biscuit was enough now to tempt her back and I watched as Rosie and owner disappeared up the path again. I relaxed my grip on the gate and turned to look back at the field. 

One, then three, then, finally, seven magpies alighted back in the meadow, squabbling over the remnants of dog biscuit. John was staring straight ahead again and something in the set of his jaw told me not to ask him what it meant.

Embers

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Marylebone Platform Six: Arrival

Is it too late at forty one? It was the first question that Jane wanted to ask, impatiently thumbing a magazine in the waiting room. She had read the literature, seen the changes in risk profiles past certain ages, heard the opinions of friends, family, strangers in forums on the internet, and the consensus was that it wasn’t too late. It wasn’t, perhaps, ideal but it wasn’t too late. She wanted to hear it out loud from a professional. She wanted somebody with a medical certificate on their wall, preferably wearing a white coat, to spell it out to her.

The waiting room was the same as she remembered it from the only time she’d persuaded Paul to come. Curved, vertically slatted, wood panelled walls framed the space, a light wood that softened the room and retained the light. They’d talked about it when they’d sat here together, a distraction from the real reason they were there. He thought it looked like somebody’s idea of the future from the 1970s, she thought it was Scandinavian and designed to evoke a sense of calm. Now she wasn’t so sure, sat there alone. It wasn’t helping the knottiness in her stomach or her quick glances around the room each time a door opened or the receptionist shuffled a set of papers or the printer on her desk hummed to life or the telephone rang. She didn’t think Paul had been right either. If this was an imagined future then it was not one she would ever have imagined for herself.

There were six other people in the waiting area with her, all couples, all sat quietly, two of them holding hands, the other sat side by side, her with her head leant across his shoulder. Everyone had acknowledged each other every time somebody new arrived, usually a silent nod or smile, a tacit sign that whilst nobody knew the details of everyone’s story they did understand the gist of it, understood that they had all reached an inflection point where they were all looking for the same happy ending. Jane had found that smallest moment of connection oddly moving and had immediately bent over to rummage in her bag, pretending to look for something important, so that she could compose herself, hold back the tears that were threatening to run down her face.

Jane watched two of the couples, in turn, be called to another room ahead of her. In their absence she imagined the myriad of chance events that could have played out that led them here, the arbitrary sequences where biological collisions were missed or cellular reactions spluttered and faded or genetics were just wired, unknowingly, against the hopeful protagonists from the start. She tried to read their faces as they came back into the waiting area but everyone carried the same pensive, considered look that they had as they entered. Maybe they didn’t know anymore than they did before. Maybe everyone realised, out of respect, that this wasn’t the place to show more than cautious optimism. Not everyone would leave with the news they wanted. Jane had read enough of the statistics to understand that.

Her name was called and she was directed down a corridor towards the back of the waiting area, and then into a room, marked simply with the name of her fertility consultant and the assorted set of letters after his name. MBBS BSc MD DFFP MRCOG. She didn’t understand any of it beyond the BSc but was reassured in its impenetrability, in its length, in its blank capitalisation. She hesitated and then tentatively knocked. If Paul had been her she knew he’d have hung back, waited for her to make things happen. The thought galvanised her and she didn’t wait for a response, just pushed the door open and stepped through.

Doctor Jacobs – Andrew, please, call me Andrew – was the owner of the various initials on the door and Jane listened as he talked through the potential IVF pathways open to her, detailed the risk profile information that she had already exhaustively googled, and gave her an honest appraisal of her chances. It’s a physical and emotional commitment, Mrs Roberts, and there’s no guarantees but you’re healthy, all your indicators are as good as they can be, so it’s certainly not a situation where I’d be looking to dissuade you.

“I prefer Jane,” said Jane suddenly. “I’m just finalising some paper work but I don’t think of myself as Mrs Roberts anymore.”

Andrew tilted his head slightly to the side. “Your ex-husband. Of course. I am so sorry about his death, Jane.”

“Thank you,” she said. “We were actually divorced but there was some admin to finalise and then he died. It was all very unexpected.”

“He explained it to me,” said Andrew. “I really am so sorry, I was so caught up in explaining the processes and the details that I usually cover. I really should have started with that.”

“He explained it?”

Andrew opened a file on his desk and picked through the sheets of paper inside it, eventually finding what he was looking for, pulling it out and placing it in front of her. “He wanted you to have this. He wanted me to give you this.”

Jane stared at it for a few moments, caught between curiosity and a sense of deep apprehension. She’d sat on the train on her way in mentally preparing for what she thought was every possible permutation, every way in which this conversation might go, every choice she might be offered, but none of that preparation had included a letter from Paul. She’d consciously walked rapidly down the platform at Marylebone, fixated on nothing but the exit barriers and the passage way to the street, deliberating screening out all of the small reminders, all of the tiny emotional cues that the place prompted in her. She’d deliberately avoided the station since the disposal of his ashes and had wanted that to close it all off, to end their story in the same place it began.

Curiosity won. Jane read Paul’s letter.

Dear Jane,

I am not foolish enough to seek your forgiveness. I know you too well and, more importantly, have come to realise that what I did doesn’t deserve that you forgive me. I regret it all deeply and that is something that I have to carry.

Perhaps somewhere you can appreciate the irony in the formality of this letter, now that we’ve parted and will lead separate lives. Do you remember that we started with Pride & Prejudice and I misquoted Mr Darcy, a vain hope that I would not lose your good opinion lest it be lost forever. Clearly I have lost it forever and I have only myself to blame for that. Know that I am sorry. I know that will probably not mean much, after everything, but know that’s it true all the same.

When you left me in 31 Below, that last time I saw you, you said that I owed you. I’ve thought a lot about that since and I think you’re right, I know you’re right. I’m due for my surgery in a couple of weeks and, after that, I will disappear. I don’t want to bounce around London anymore, bumping into the places that were ours, regretting what I let get away from me. I don’t know exactly what I will do but I’m going to move away, going to start again somewhere else, see if I can find a small village cricket team that will have me. But that’s all about me and not about you. And you were right, I do owe you.

The surgery will stop me ejaculating. I tried to think of a more poetic way to say it but drew a blank. No puns intended. Perhaps you realise how difficult this is for me and remember that we used to laugh at things like this? Used to laugh at so much. I’m sorry if it’s too late for that. How would Mr Darcy have put it? I guess Austen painted him as a study in quiet, simmering virility so I suppose it’s not a line she would ever need to have grappled with. What I’m trying to say is that after the surgery the one last thing that I might be able to do for you will be denied me.

I’ve donated my sperm to this clinic and arranged for it to be frozen. I finally made good on those conversations we had, those things I owed you. All the paperwork is taken care of. If you want to use them as a donor then they are yours – and only yours, this is something I should have helped us do together and it’s something I only want to help you do alone. If you choose to. I would completely understand if I am the last donor on earth that you would want to entertain.

This is no recompense for the damage I’ve done, Jane, but I hope it is, at least, something. I loved you. I didn’t honour that and, for that, I’m sorry but I did love you.

Yours, Paul.

Jane read Paul’s letter and stared at the paper, in silence, for several minutes. Andrew sat watching her, fingers pressed to lips, mindful to give her space. She looked up at him.

“This is not how I imagined this would all work, you know? I was so sure about everything, so certain in what I wanted, what I went after, what I got. Life was a series of things to achieve, things in my control that I could… I don’t know, that I could bend to my will. And I had a lot of will. And this… this is something that I can’t.”

“I wish that it were different,” replied Andrew.

She asked her question. “Is it too late at forty one, doctor? Sorry, Andrew. Is it too late?”

“There’s no guarantees but it’s not too late,” he said. 

“Am I crazy to do it alone?” It was the other question she had played over in her mind; the one for herself but which she asked quietly now, almost as if he wasn’t there.

“You can’t bend fertility to your will,” he said. “But if we succeed then I have no doubt, no doubt at all, that you can bend parenthood to it. It’s not crazy at all. It maybe takes a special kind of stubborn but it’s not crazy.”

Jane held his gaze. “Stubborn I can do. When can we start?”

Part six and the conclusion of the Marylebone stories. I am aware that the ending, technically, remains ambiguous so I may write a coda/epilogue for it at a later point. I know what I think happens to Jane but you are free to imprint your own version…

This continues my 26,000 words for Great Ormond Street in July ’23. Any and all donations to fundraiser very welcome on this link.

Old flame

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Marylebone Platform 4: Connection

“I’m staying over. I have a room, here, tonight.” She said it casually, holding eye contact throughout. 

“I’m just here for the day,” said Paul. “There wasn’t much on the agenda for tomorrow that I wanted to see.”

“Are you rushing off? Do you have time for a drink at the end?”

Paul hesitated. He’d promised Jane he wouldn’t be late. The appointment was tomorrow and she was quite nervous about it. Originally he’d suggested that it’d be easier for him to stay over at the conference, save him coming back into Marylebone in the morning; the clinic was close by and he could meet her there. She’d been upset and he’d acquiesced.

“Sure, that’d be great. It’d be nice to catch up,” he said. “Meet back here?”

She smiled, touched the back of her head. “Sounds like a plan.”

The morning sessions had passed by slowly. Paul hadn’t really taken them in as he was concentrating on his own presentation, re-reading his cue cards and silently practising his opening couple of lines in his head. He hadn’t really wanted to do it but he’d seen the last couple of promotions come and go, passed over for other people who were doing all the extra-curricular stuff that he’d never had the inclination for. It kept Jane happy as well. She seemed to have the next phase of their life mapped out and mid career free wheeling wasn’t part of her plan. She kept sending him links to job adverts for things that she thought looked suitable. Head of Logistics. Supply Chain Director. He insisted things were fine where he was and she’d give him the speech about how they’d take a hit when she was on maternity, how he would regret it if he didn’t try and challenge himself. He knew he was comfortable and coasting but it suited him.

His session had gone well. It was a pan European conference and his opening joke about Brexit had pulled everyone on side from the start. Whilst the audience were laughing he noticed her. Third row. She was looking directly at him and gave a small nod as she saw him recognise her. She looked essentially the same as she had at college; her hair was cut a little shorter but still tied up and back in ponytail; her suit was sharply tailored, skirt sat just above her knees, one leg crossed over the other; her face didn’t seem to carry many traces of the passing of the last fifteen years. It was her eyes that he remembered and the way she looked at him, a sense of wry appraisal and amusement, as if she was always judging him and finding it funny. Catherine Adams. Maybe not Adams now but that had been her name when they had danced round each other all those years ago.

It had never been serious. There’d been one night when they’d kissed at the end of a party, a couple of years after they’d left college. He’d invited her back but she’d rebuffed the offer and they’d settled into a brief exchange of phone calls, talking about anything but the kiss, and never really seeming to go anywhere. Paul had felt like she liked being chased but had no intention of being caught and so it had fizzled out, his enthusiasm ebbing away like the retreating tide. They’d only seen each other once since then, at a mutual friend’s wedding, shortly after he’d met Jane. She’d been with a plus one, some tall, dark haired guy he couldn’t remember the name of now, and he was in the first flush of falling in love and so they’d just had a pleasant conversation, no teasing lines, no sparring. There was a small moment as they’d stood at the side of the dance floor, watching the new bride and groom take their first dance, when she’d leant in and asked him how people knew, how do they know this is the one, this is what I will settle for? He remembered the ‘settle for’, remembered thinking at the time that she was wrong, that it wasn’t about settling but about certainty. It wasn’t about stopping because you were tired of searching, it was about starting because you knew you were found. He said something like that back to her and she’d patted his arm and said that she envied his perspective. She walked away before he could respond.

After almost ten minutes of waiting Paul was about to leave when Catherine appeared, detaching herself from a group of delegates and walking across the lobby to join him. He stood a little straighter as she approached.

“Well hello again,” she said. “Come on, let’s get that drink before I get dragged back into another discussion about border control implications on freight through Dover.”

“Not a conversation I suspect we’d have thought we’d be having back in the day,” said Paul.

“God, no. I expect our younger selves would be extremely disappointed in how boring and sensible we’ve become.”

“I’m sure you’re not always sensible.”

“Let’s find out,” said Catherine with the briefest flash of a smile.

They sat at the bar and ordered drinks. She’d caught the attention of the barman with a quick wave of her left hand, Paul noting the lack of rings. She seemed to clock his thought process and held her fingers up between them. “Unattached and very happy about it. No strings.” She was holding his gaze.

“I’m glad you’re happy,” said Paul.

“I didn’t say I was happy,” replied Catherine. “I said I’m happy to not be attached. Everything else is complicated. You can’t just drunkenly kiss someone at the end of a party and make it all go away now. Things were a bit simpler then.”

“Any you miss that? The simplicity of it?”

“Simple fun? Who wouldn’t miss that? Don’t you think about those times?”

“I guess,” said Paul. “They didn’t always feel so simple to me. I felt like I was chasing you for a while there. Especially after that party.”

“I did like the chase.” Catherine sipped her drink, placed it back on the bar. “These days I’m easier to catch.”

Paul was about to reply when they were interrupted by a group of people, one of them calling Catherine’s name as they came to stand alongside them at the bar. It was the delegate group she’d been with before. They started to order drinks and were continuing what seemed to be an ongoing conversation about the absurdity of some bureaucracy relating to food imports between Britain and Ireland. Paul’s phone vibrated in his pocket, a couple of missed calls from Jane and a message asking what time he would be back. He stood up and said that he probably needed to get away. Catherine motioned for him to wait a moment and pulled a business card from her bag, flipping it over to quickly write something on the back. “If you want to keep in touch,” she said, handing it to him face up to the side she’d written on, eyes never leaving his. He took it, slipped it into his pocket along with his phone. As he took it he saw that she’d written ‘room 316’, the number underlined.

Halfway up the platform at Marylebone he stopped as his phone rang again. The train home was just ahead, bumped up against some out of service carriages. He pulled out his phone, the business card coming out of his pocket at the same time. It was Jane again. He waited for it to divert to voicemail. He tapped a brief message about an incident on the line, delays, would be late, nothing to worry about, and then turned his phone off. He turned the card over. Her name on one side. A room number on the other.

Back at The Landmark he waited a moment outside room 316, closed his eyes, exhaled. Then he knocked on the door.

Part 4 of the Marylebone set of stories. I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to do this and decided to leave the misdeed itself unwritten.

Halfway through the month and I am roughly half way to my word target of 26,000 for July in aid of Great Ormond Street Hospital. Fundraising page here.

Sparks

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Marylebone Platform 3: Arrival

Over time their meeting was embellished and embroidered. The story was changed each time it was retold, contradicted by whomever was telling it, reshaped to suit the audience. Did it matter if the details weren’t true as long as the overall sense of it was? Did it matter if he thought she suggested the drink or that she insisted that he had? Whether they kissed? I’m pretty sure we kissed. No, we definitely didn’t kiss. That she had scrawled out her phone number on the back of a receipt with an eyeliner pencil or that he had run over to WH Smith to buy stationery just to make sure he could capture it. But didn’t you have phones? Did it matter if a little romantic license ran through the details of their first encounter? If the actual facts were correct? How it felt was the important part. What it signalled. What it started. Whether there was chemistry. Whether there were sparks.

This is how he tells it:

I think our eyes met across a crowded train. Obviously not that, I’m kidding. That stuff doesn’t really happen, just like all those ‘meet cutes’ you see in Rom Coms don’t really happen in real life. People bumping into each and spilling coffee, people rescuing other people from awkward situations by pretending that they know them, people agreeing, as total strangers, to car share across America. None of that stuff. Harry doesn’t meet Sally like that in real life and I didn’t meet Jane like that. She’s a lousy driver anyway so any hypothetical road trip we would have made would have ended in disaster. It’s hard to make witty small talk about the impossibility of platonic male-female friendships when you’re grabbing the wheel to swing the car out of the path of an oncoming truck. Even a hypothetical one.

It turned out, although I only found this out much later, that she really hated Meg Ryan in that movie. Thought she was a bit too much of a mess and a bit too ready to take Harry back at the end. She was right when she said he was just lonely. She should never have taken him back. I never would. This is not relevant to our meeting but is relevant to understanding Jane and why I liked her, eventually why I loved her. Not because she was right. She really wasn’t right – it’s a great movie and they’re clearly meant for each other – but because she had an opinion and she wasn’t budging. There was a certainty about her from the start that I was drawn to.

I didn’t have much choice but be drawn to her. Stuck behind her might be accurate. I was rushing to try and catch a train home and saw, unusually, that all the barriers to the platforms were fixed, all set with a red light indicating they weren’t in use. All except one where a woman, maybe late twenties, early thirties, with a shoulder length, black bob, pale green sweater, jeans, was arguing with a station official. He was blocking her path through the only working barrier and she, in turn, was now blocking mine. I’m not buying another ticket. I have bought a ticket, literally from that machine over there – wild gesture over her shoulder, her arm making contact with my chest – and you’re not ripping me off again. Brief pause as the contact registered. I’m sorry. This guy won’t let me through. She turned slightly to acknowledge me and apologise and I saw green eyes, some fairly heavily applied eye shadow, pale skin. A frown, lips pursed. And then she was back to berating the official as if I wasn’t there.

Jane is stubborn. As I said I found it attractive, then at least, and if she’d been less stubborn we never really would have met. I gently asked whether, maybe, I could just slip through as my train was right there and about to depart and the next one wasn’t for another hour. She either didn’t hear, didn’t care, or both, as she continued her lengthy and detailed explanation to her jobsworth train guy on how it was patently ridiculous that a ticket could change from off-peak to peak in the time it takes to walk from the machine that sold the ticket to the train. He dug in and just repeated that it was now peak travel time and her ticket wasn’t valid. I asked again. This time she did respond. Look, I’m sorry but it’s a principle now. I have a ticket and he has to let me through. I know it’s inconvenient but it just underlines how ridiculous he’s being and hopefully it will make him see sense. I didn’t entirely follow her logic but she had fully turned to face me this time and there was something compelling in the determination in her features, the way she opened her eyes slightly, nodded towards me, as if to pull me onto her side. I felt like I was being invited in to something. I picked a side. It wasn’t a fair fight: officious station man versus beautiful, intractable stranger. 

We didn’t win. I watched my train depart platform three, the hiss as it released its air brakes and a sudden, jarring blare from its horn temporarily drowning out the latest front in the argument which had now shifted to the inherent profiteering at the public expense by privately run rail networks. He had an RMT pin badge so perhaps she had thought this tactic might work, might eke out some solidarity, but, instead, he escalated things by radioing for security. 

I stuck around. I’m not sure if it was because I had a lot of time to kill now, wanted to see how it played out, or if I genuinely wanted to make sure security didn’t mess with her. It was probably a mixture of the three but I dial up the empathy and care angle now when I tell it. I needn’t have worried as something seemed to shift in her as a couple of guards wandered over, one muttering into an intercom on his lapel, the other smiling broadly as if he could defuse the whole thing through sheer optimism. And, weirdly, he did. Or something did. Jane backed up, offered a final, you know what, fuck this, and started to walk back across the concourse towards the tube barriers. She told me later that she had decided she’d rather not go at all than give them the satisfaction of buying another ticket.

Are you okay? I think that was what I said. It’s not a line Nora Ephron would have written for Billy Crystal, I’ll grant you, but we write our own scripts, in real time, and usually they’re pretty mundane. She stopped, turned, and looked at me for a moment. I think it was the first time she really saw me so if there were any eyes meeting across any crowds then it happened then. I’ve had better days. How about you? God, I’m sorry you missed your train, I get pretty, er, focussed when things go like that. 

It was impulse. I had a lot of time to kill and nothing to lose. Let me buy you a drink. I’m Paul. I’ll buy you a drink and you can tell me about rail privatisation. That stuff was pretty interesting.

She tilted her head, folded her arms. I sense you are teasing me, Paul. One drink. And if you thought that was interesting then just wait until you hear about what they did to the coal industry…

This is how she tells it:

I don’t even remember the argument now, if I’m honest. I’m someone that stands their ground so things like that happened to me all the time, especially with men in supposed positions of authority. It was usually bullshit and I was usually happy to call them on it. I know Paul tells that part of the story like it was the most important bit and super revealing about my essential character but, for me, it was just another minor infraction in my ongoing battles with nonsense. He would say that I later referenced the patriarchy but I doubt I did. Obviously it is all the patriarchy but I’m not sure, back then, that it was a phrase I used. I was through my Camille Paglia phase and I think I was channeling more of a PJ Harvey thing for both my look and my brand of feminism. 

The important bits all started after that. I mean I didn’t really properly look at Paul until I caught up to him afterwards and asked if he was okay, apologised for making him miss his train. He didn’t seem to realise I was behind him and so I reached for his arm, just enough to make him stop so that I could say sorry. He was attractive. Not my usual type at that point in my life, a little straight compared to my recent dates, but undeniably good looking. I wasn’t sold on his hair. He was rocking, or presumably thought he was rocking, a fringe that kept threatening to part in the middle like his eyes were the play and his hair were an elaborate set of curtains ready to reveal the main act. His eyes were the main act, though. A watery blue, thick, quite feminine lashes. They softened him, took the edge off a square jaw, high cheek bones, a narrow, sharp nose. Quite classically good looking. As I say, not my usual type at all.

We spoke for a bit, I asked him when his next train was and then offered to buy him a coffee while he waited, by way of a proper apology. I know when he tells it that he says that we had some banter about public sector privatisation but none of that was true. I guess it might be possible to flirt over Arthur Scargill and the betrayal of the British working class but, if it is, then it’s beyond my skills. I think he likes his version of it now because it made us sound clever and quirky and I’m okay with that. We were both pretty clever. He always saw my stubbornness as one of those quirks whereas I thought of it as who I was. They’re only quirks if you see them in someone else but not yourself.

The actual flirting happened over coffee in the very romantic surrounds of Marylebone station, pigeons pecking at discarded sandwich crumbs on the floor, the station PA periodically telling us not to leave baggage unattended, and the regular ebb and flow of people in transit. I don’t remember any lines but I imagine my plan of attack involved sarcasm and undercutting any of his bravado. That was my style and it tended to sort out the men from the boys. I was pleasantly surprised that he rose to the challenge – I had sort of assumed he wouldn’t which was, to be fair, an entirely biased misjudgement based on him being good looking. Despite my protestations of cleverness I was guilty of assuming that his looks were going to be offset by his personality. Stubborn and judgemental. He says quirks. I say solid character traits.

We jousted for a bit over the usual topics. Work, spare time, a conversational detour down cinema, music and a brief dip into cricket. Brief as he clocked, quickly, that I had zero interest in it. I think he clocked it when I said it was interesting that the only time large groups of men got together and dressed entirely in white was in cricket and at Klan rallies. Like I say, my plan of attack at the time was largely to attack. In retrospect it’s clearly not a fair comparison. Institutionalised racism on the one hand and the Klan on the other. I’m joking. Obviously I’m joking. He didn’t look like he found it very funny but also changed the subject pretty quickly.

There were sparks. That’s what everyone always asks when they ask how we met. Were there sparks? I fought against it but I liked him. He was self-deprecating but confident, listened to my attack lines, defended them valiantly. He was funny but not in an attention grabbing way, more in how he responded to the things I said. And he had those eyes. If I’d been measuring the sparks at the time it was more like someone striking flints together rather than one of those industrial lathes you see where there are just molten rivulets of fire running from them. So there were sporadic sparks, ones that had to be worked at a bit, ones that were going to need some time to catch light. 

I thought they were the best kind. It felt like cheating if it came easier than that. I didn’t believe in any of that love at first sight stuff. I wanted to work at it, wanted to fall into it gradually, wanted to fight it a bit with every ounce of my stubborn soul. Wanted it to set ablaze but didn’t want to get burned in the process. All of that happened but that was all later. For a while, for quite a while, we were nurturing sparks.

Next Marylebone instalment which, for reasons that made sense in my head, I have elected to tell out of chronological order. Feel free to rearrange when I have finished, like you would with the Star Wars prequels.

Fundraising for Great Ormond Street continues here. I am close to half way through my target word count for July, aiming for 26,000 by the end.

Flame

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Marylebone Platform 2: Connection

Meet on the concourse beside the flower stall. Midday. He’d been very specific about it which was unusual; they typically met at Marylebone anyway and just found each other under the departure boards. Five dates now, six if you counted when they met, and the station was equally convenient for both of them. Bakerloo from Willesden for her, mainline from the Chilterns for him. Jane thought that he quite liked the romance of meeting at a station as well, the second time they had met there he’d enthused about its Edwardian architecture and would have possibly still been talking about Neo-Baroque features now if she hadn’t interrupted and suggested they get a drink. She hadn’t found it dull, she liked that he was passionate about something, but she had always found the people at stations more interesting than the buildings. In transit, intersecting briefly, thousands of stories to imagine.

Jane was slightly late and took the escalator two steps at a time, the posters on the adjoining walls passing in her periphery. Jersey Boys. Multivitamins. Clinique. The Mamma Mia movie. Mental note to not see that. eHarmony. Mamma Mia again. Her phone vibrated in the back pocket of her jeans, it would be Paul wondering where she was. She slowed for the final few steps, partly to navigate the end of the escalator and partly as she didn’t want to arrive flushed and out of breath. Date five felt like it might be the time to be flushed and out of breath but at the end of it, not the start. They’d kissed last time, briefly, he’d been rushing for the last train, and it was evidently an audition they had both passed as here they were.

Paul stood, as arranged, in front of the flower stall. White shirt, blue jeans, he’d had a hair cut since last time and Jane was relieved that he’d abandoned the fringe that he’d kept running his fingers through for something closer cropped. He smiled as she approached.

“Sorry I’m a bit late. Tube was busy, seemed like everyone was trying to get out of Willesden today.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Paul replied with a smile. “Don’t worry about it, I’ve only just got here anyway.” He took a step towards her and leaned in to awkwardly kiss her on the cheek. “Hello, you”.

Jane looked up at him, saw that he hadn’t moved away. She wasn’t sure if it was in hope, expectation, or if he had committed to a pre-rehearsed greeting that hadn’t quite gone to plan and was now stuck in no-man’s-land, wanting the ground to swallow him up. She put him out of his misery.

“Hey, you. I think we’re a bit past that now, don’t you think?” She leaned up and kissed him on the mouth, closed her eyes and took in the scent of his aftershave. One of the CK ones, maybe One, she wasn’t sure and was having a hard time concentrating on anything other than keeping her balance as she was up on her tiptoes and whilst he seemed to be enjoying the kiss it hadn’t extended to him putting his arms around her. She sank back on to her heels and pulled away. “Hello. I should’ve worn heels.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be. Just, next time, you are allowed to touch me. Even if it’s just to stop me falling on my face. It’s not a Jane Austen novel.”

“Makes sense and, er…,”  he tailed off. “I was going to say something clever about sense and sensibility but it got away from me.”

“Points for trying,” said Jane. “Pride and Prejudice is the one people usually know so I’m mildly impressed that you didn’t go for the obvious.”

“It was on TV earlier this year,” he said with a grin. “BBC. I watched the first episode but it wasn’t for me. Someone twisted an ankle, that seemed to be as dramatic as it got.”

“The drama is in the relationships. What’s said, what’s unsaid. It’s a delicate dance of manners and protocol. I should warn you that I really like that stuff so you might want to change the subject if you’re about to reveal that you thought Pride and Prejudice would be better if it was called Pride and Extreme Prejudice. Some action movie about a former Marine who did jobs for the downtrodden and wronged, killing his enemies with excessive force and pithy one liners.” 

“That sounds pretty good. Too similar to the A Team but Hollywood doesn’t have a problem with reusing old IP so you could be on to something.” He was laughing and raised his hands, palms up. “Don’t worry. I’m joking. Half joking at least. My cultural bandwidth takes in a range of frequencies. I am not a total meathead.” 

“Cultural bandwidth?”, said Jane, eyebrow raised. “Has someone been reading the Saturday Guardian supplements?”

“Perhaps I just have hidden depths,” replied Paul. “Still waters and all that. Anyway, now that you’re here and we’ve established your love of formal courtship rituals…”

“I didn’t quite say that…”

“Close enough. Now that we’ve established all that. What’s your favourite flower?” He gestured at the stall behind him, a blaze of colours popping like a firework display, frozen in place. “I don’t know anything at all about flowers so I thought I should consult you before I bought you something.”

Jane walked up to the stall and smiled at the woman behind the counter, gave a gentle shrug to acknowledge that she seemed to have heard most of their exchange. There was a large bank of peonies,  pinky white, in the middle of the stall surrounded by, variously, lilies, some red roses, burnt orange tulips, and several taller stems she didn’t recognise. Gladioli maybe. Had she been the heroine in an Austen novel then clearly she would have learned all of them after long afternoons flower arranging or practicing the piano whilst the gentlemen talked business and smoked cigars. She liked looking back at it but had no interest in being anyone’s accessory or adornment. 

“It’s a lovely thought, Paul, but let’s not get flowers now,” she said. “We’ll have to carry them round all day and they need to be in water. You know that much, right?”

“That’s about the extent of my knowledge,” he said. “You sure? This was my whole plan to impress you at the start.”

“I’m sure.” She saw him waiting for something else. “And, okay, I’m mildly impressed and noting that this is the second time on this date that I’ve been mildly impressed.”

“There’s got to be some kind of multiplier on it. Two lots of mildly impressed equals quite impressed?”

“Nope, just two lots of mildly impressed. Otherwise what incentive have you got to raise your game?”

“I see,” said Paul. “Okay then, we won’t get the flowers but for future reference, what would you have chosen?”

“Probably the tulips,” said Jane before pointing at them as she realised that he didn’t even seem to know which ones they were. “The orange ones. But, for future reference, they can come in many colours.”

“Confusing. I like the ones that are easy to remember. Sunflowers. Looks like the sun, is a flower. Easy.”

“Hidden depths, eh?,” laughed Jane.

They walked out of the station and made their way along towards the main road that cut right across the top of London, from the Westway through into the heart of the City. It was busy, cars concertinaed between traffic lights, stopping, starting; the occasional angry horn, electronic beeps from the pedestrian crossing. They crossed to the south side of the road and walked past some office buildings before Paul stopped them outside the Town Hall, by one of the stone lions, faced raised into the noon sunshine. A small group of people, dressed in suits or summer dresses, hats and fascinators, stood clustered on the stairs leading up to the entrance.

“Imagine getting married here,” said Paul. 

“It’s a little early for a proposal,” replied Jane. “You haven’t even bought me flowers yet. But I think you’re right about the venue, it’s great. Wonder what it’s like inside?”

“We could sneak in,” suggested Paul. “Join this wedding party and check it out.”

“I’m not really dressed for it,” said Jane. “I would definitely have worn heels if I’d known we were attending someone’s wedding. Come on, we should get out of their way.” Whilst they’d been talking a vintage double decker bus had pulled up and more guests, along with the groom and his immediate entourage, were alighting from the opening at the back. On the other side of the lights, further up the street, they could see a black cab adorned with ribbons. The guests had seen it too and quickly began to make their way into the hall.

“Last chance,” said Paul. “I’m sure I’ve read that they can’t legally stop you attending services in public spaces.”

“Legally, no,” said Jane. “But I’m not about to crash someone’s special day just to see what it’s like where Paul McCartney got married.”

“Really? Did he? Which time?”

“To Linda. He was local I think at the time although I’m not quite sure. He was definitely living with Jane Asher round here before that so I guess he must have stayed after they split up. It’s not that far to Abbey Road.”

“Paul and Jane,” said Paul. “What are the chances?”

“Given they’re pretty common names I’d say the chances are quite high,” said Jane. “Besides it didn’t end that well for Paul and Jane, you need to be looking out for your Linda if you’re after the love of your life.”

“I’d never be able to give up bacon,” said Paul.

“That wasn’t really my point,” said Jane, smiling. “Speaking of bacon we should get some food.”

They ate lunch in a small cafe on Marylebone High Street, chatting idly about work and plans for the rest of the summer. They stepped around it lightly, each of them hinting that there was enough space for the other in those plans but neither presuming that it would play out like that. After lunch she dragged him into Daunt Books, it was her favourite shop in London and she wanted to show him. Maybe she wanted to stress test those hidden depths a little too. She watched as he browsed the sports section, picking up various cricket biographies of people she didn’t know. Ian Botham. He sounded familiar. Otherwise she was stumped. She lost sight of him as she flicked through the latest Kate Atkinson which had been stacked on a table towards the front of the shop, a handwritten note of recommendation from one of the booksellers detailing its virtues. 

She saw him again paying for something at the counter and walked over to join him.

“I got you something,” he said, handing over a book, freshly placed in a canvas tote bag, emblazoned with the shop’s logo. She took it from him, said thank you, and slid the book out. It was a copy of Pride And Prejudice, a Penguin classics edition. “I was going to write something inside but you caught me too soon.”

“Tell me instead,” she said. “What were you going to write?”

“I hope not to lose your good opinion, for I suspect it would be lost forever,” he replied, smiling.

“How very Darcy of you,” she said, gently bowing her head in what she hoped was a mock approximation of Elizabethan courtesy and courtship. “You haven’t lost it yet.”

They mooched around Marylebone for the rest of the afternoon, she hooked her arm around his   and they wandered with no fixed destination in mind. He wanted to find John Lennon’s blue plaque but neither of them knew where it was and so they speculated, instead, on where he might have lived, where Paul and Jane lived, in some imagined, heady, swinging sixties version of the streets they were walking now. They stumbled into hidden mews, small, brown bricked Georgian houses, tightly packed in the midst of the city. A film crew had set up in one of them and they peered over barricades trying to catch a glimpse of someone famous, looked for hints of what they might be making. It’ll be something like Notting Hill, something that makes the rest of the world think that all of London is like this. As they were discussing the perspective that the rest of the world may or may not have on the capital city she pulled in a little closer to him.

“Maybe I should show you something a bit more real, then. Would you like to see Willesden?” In her head it had sounded more flirtatious, more casual. Out loud it was difficult to imbue Willesden with much by way of sexual intrigue or mystery. 

“I never thought I would say this but I would really love to see Willesden,” he said. “We’d better get a move on though, I don’t know what time all the trains back run.” It hung there a moment.

“You won’t be needing the trains back,” said Jane. “Not tonight at least.”

Next instalment in the series nobody is calling The Marylebone Six (as there are six platforms). Happier times for Paul and Jane. Apologies to Willesden but I did used to live there so it’s meant with a certain degree of affection…

This is another in the series to write 26,000 words for Great Ormond Street Hospital in July ’23. All donations, however small, welcome here.

Ashes

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Marylebone Platform 1: Arrival & Departure

The train slowed and stopped. Jane closed her eyes, hand resting on the bag on the seat next to her, listening as the driver announced that they were being held outside the station for a few minutes whilst he waited for a platform to clear. She had promised that she would do this for him. She had promised and she would fulfil that promise despite how it had all turned out. Despite the divorce, despite the deceit, despite the drift and damage of their separation. It was more than he deserved but she had long since concluded that she had been more than he deserved. She ran her hand across the top of the bag that contained the ashes of her dead ex-husband.

Paul had always loved cricket. Promise me, if I go first, promise me that you’ll scatter my ashes at Lord’s. That had been this thing she’d signed up to. All their other promises to each other had been peeled away over the years, exposed as empty, but she could still hold true to this one. She had never really understood the appeal, if she was honest. She’d even misunderstood when he’d first asked her, assuming he was looking for some kind of salvation and wanted to go to Lourdes. He’d laughed at her and asked why she thought he’d believe in all that musty old religious nonsense. She’d silently weighed pointing out that the MCC seemed to have more than its share of musty nonsense in its own rituals and uniforms and adherence to baffling, unwritten codes and principle, but had decided the resulting argument wasn’t worth it. He took all of that stuff very seriously and didn’t appreciate it when she poked fun at it. He hadn’t spoken to her for several hours that time he tried to explain field positions to her and she kept referring to silly point as what’s-the-point and suggested that it’d be more fun if the positions were more literal. People in the slips would have to wear slips, people at gully would have to be in a gully. She was about to explain how deep extra cover would work when he stormed out of the room shouting that she wasn’t taking it seriously.

She felt now that’d she’d indulged it more than she should. If she’d known how it would play out – which, in cricketing terms, was very much a rain-stopped-play conclusion – then she would’ve said no to more things. When they got married he’d arranged for wickets to be placed at either end of the aisle and all of the ushers were dressed in their best whites. She had half expected to arrive to see him waiting, padded up, bat in hand, as if she was going to send down a yorker, try to sneak one under him for a surprise dismissal. All the surprises were to come though. And they were all to come from him.

He had saved the rest of the cricket references for his speech. The importance of a long partnership at the crease, how she was a great catch, how he’d been bowled over, hit for six, that kind of thing. At the time she had enjoyed it, laughing along with the rest of their family and friends. It was genuine. He had loved her, she was sure that part was real. The opening partnership was strong and secure but it had been a shock how quickly their middle order had collapsed. 

The train moved forwards again, its initial lurch prompting Jane to open her eyes. She watched a departing train pass on the adjacent track, saw her face, translucent, appear momentarily in the glass as a reflection. She glanced at her phone, checked how she looked using the camera as a makeshift mirror. There were a couple of strands of grey hair that she made a mental note to sort out but, save some fine lines across her forehead, she thought time had been kind. Smiling she wondered if she’d left one of the filters on the camera and she was kidding herself but, after checking, was reassured that the face staring back at her wasn’t subject to any technological support or softening. Could pass for thirty two. Okay, maybe thirty five. Her real age didn’t bother her other than the sense that biology was going to eventually time her out of the thing that she’d always wanted from Paul; the thing that he had stubbornly resisted. Is it too late at forty one?

She left the train and strode, almost marched, down platform one as if she wanted to dispense with this final promise as quickly as possible. There were too many memories around Marylebone and she didn’t want to be blindsided by nostalgia, didn’t want to be reminded of the better parts of him, of them together. She was done with regret and just wanted it to be done. Lift a finger in the air, declare him out. It was busy on the station, there was a crowd milling around the departure boards waiting for platform confirmations and a steady ebb and flow from the mainline concourse through to the tube barriers. She didn’t pause. Paul had always loved this station; he’d stand and stare at the vaulted roof, sunlight streaming through the glass panels picking out the cherry red pillars until she’d pull at his arm, impatiently, and encourage him to move. They had met here but thinking about that served no purpose now. 

Outside the station it was quieter and she walked up past the small park in Dorset Square. She vaguely remembered that there might be a shorter route the other way, picking through backstreets, but she didn’t properly remember it and decided to take the main road. Wandering aimlessly around these streets was another thing they had done together. Back then she could afford to get lost with him, now she was on her own and knew exactly where she wanted to go. The traffic noise rose from a low, intermittent thrum to a constant pulse as she turned left onto Gloucester Place. Black cabs passed on both sides of the street and she momentarily considered flagging one down to save time. She checked her phone again. It was half one and her guided tour was booked for two so she’d just be waiting around at the ground if she didn’t walk.

The tour was something Paul had always wanted them to do together but she had always refused, it had seemed a waste of money on something that held no interest for her. Well, now we are going to take the tour. Sit in the dressing rooms. See the Ashes urn. Walk through the Long Room. Step on to the outfield. She hadn’t really thought through how she would manage the scattering. How or where. The place he would have liked, she assumed, would have been on the pitch itself but she didn’t imagine that she’d be allowed to just pull out her own makeshift ashes urn and start sprinkling powdery remains everywhere. Even powdery remains that really, really liked cricket. So where? The closer she got to the ground the more it bothered her. Perhaps this whole idea, like so many of his ideas, was ridiculous and she should have just discretely scattered him at the local cricket club. There was a large oak tree by the boundary rope that would have been perfect if you overlooked the fact that it was also quite a popular spot for dog’s to relieve themselves. Actually that makes it even more perfect.

Perhaps it would be enough for him to be close to the ground? Within the vicinity of cricket’s spiritual home, if not entirely inside it. She was at the entrance now, wrought iron gates between stone pillars. She paused to read an inscription next to the gate: “To the memory of William Gilbert Grace. The great cricketer. 1848-1915. These gates were erected: The MCC and other friends and admirers.” She composed a brief accompanying eulogy to Paul in her head: “To the memory of Paul James Roberts. The great deceiver. 1982-2023. There’ll be no gates for you, no admirers, and we’re no longer friends.” It was longer than he deserved. “Paul. Goodbye you unfaithful bastard.” Better.

Jane took the tour. She had paid for it and decided that it might be interesting. They hadn’t come here together so there was no danger of any fond, residual memories spinning her emotional compass away from its set position of resenting him and their time together. She knew, in reality, it was more complicated than that but, for today, just wanted the surety in casting him as the villain. She hadn’t been surprised that there was a bag check, she’d had enough savvy to predict that and prepare. Paul had been decanted into a thermos flask for his final journey. The security guard had seemed happy enough to give it a brief shake and wave her through. 

She didn’t enjoy it. She was out numbered by middle aged men, all of whom had decided to wear chunky cricket jumpers over an assorted assemblage of pastel shaded polo shirts. Most of them had a lot to say about the ground, the current state of English cricket, the current state of the country, and all spent too much time laughing at their own jokes. She kept quiet and stayed towards the back of the group, looking for an opportunity to leave Paul to his final resting place. The tour had paused and the guide was gesturing up at the roof of one of the stands. Jane looked up to where he was pointing and saw a weather vane, it appeared to be a depiction of Father Time or, to Jane’s eyes, Death, removing a bail from some cricket stumps. The sun glinted off the tip of his scythe. 

Is it too late at forty one? She stared at the weather vane for a few moments, felt her heart beat quicken, a sick feeling in her stomach. She closed her eyes, felt the breeze on her face and focussed on her pulse, the chatter of the rest of the ground fading out of her hearing as she thought about her breath rising and falling in her chest. She felt still. She didn’t know the answer to her own question but she resolved to stop asking it and find out.

Jane left the tour group and, on her way out of the ground, left her bag, and Paul, behind in the toilets. He hadn’t said where at Lord’s he wanted to be and whilst she knew that an unattended bag would possibly end up being destroyed she also realised that she didn’t care anymore. She had fulfilled the last promise she would ever make him.

She checked the time. They wouldn’t see her today but she could make an appointment. She knew she could call but something in her wanted to see it again, wanted to check that it was still there. If she hurried she might be able to reach the clinic before it closed.

Next piece for July’s GOSH fundraiser – details here. I have sketched out an overall six part story for this, of which this is part one, so will see how it pans out over the next week.

Apologies to any cricket fans for abuse of terminology…

Smiling Assassin

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She was a professional. Human Resources. Emphasis on the resources rather than the human. Her colleagues had nicknamed her “the smiling assassin” and whilst she gave no outward expression, beyond that signature smile, that she either agreed nor disagreed with the moniker, inwardly she liked it. Inwardly she also silently chalked up who was a little too keen to keep calling her it. Chalked up, filed away, took a mental note to take them out at the knees when an opportunity presented itself in the future. And it would. It always did.

She had not agreed with the new behavioural framework for the organisation. She’d maintained a steely, tight-lipped smile as her peer, the Head of Employee Experience, had taken them all through the briefing. As a general principle she didn’t believe that employees should be having experiences anyway; experience was something you gained, incrementally, steadily, painfully if necessary. Not something that was gifted to you, wrapped in a bow, from a team trying to smooth out all the rough edges of work. There was a reason it was called work.

The new framework – or “our behavioural contract” to give it full title, complete with the need for mandatory signature to signal “buy in” – was, on the face of it, simple. Be candid. Be respectful. Be brilliant. Be you.

She wasn’t having difficulty with any of the statements individually although was still disappointed that her suggestions of minor tweaks had gone unheeded. For the record they were: be brief or be gone, be good or be gone, be you unless you is insufferable and unable to understand acceptable parameters of professionalism in a modern office. She hadn’t actually voiced that last one despite the new desire for everyone to be candid. She’d judged that it might be perceived as not being respectful and therein lay the issue. Individually the statements were all fine – if a little soft – but entirely contradictory in practical application.

Being candid she wanted to regularly let everybody know that she was singlehandedly covering for their woeful performance. Being candid she wanted, specifically, to tell the Head of Employee Experience that, no, she wouldn’t like to be reverse mentored by a sixteen year old to learn about the lived experience of Gen-Z and how she could extend her profile via Tik Tok with a self-deprecating rap about the menopause. And, no, she didn’t think that giving everybody a day off on their birthday was a good idea and, no, she didn’t want to join in on fancy dress day and come in attired as a pirate. Being candid she wanted to put two thirds of her peers on performance measures, or, in the spirit of real candour, just get rid of them all via a compromise agreement. The compromise, on her side, being that she hasn’t just called security to have them escorted from the building without notice because the in-house employment lawyer (who was within that two thirds of peers) wasn’t prepared to play who-blinks-first at the resulting tribunals. Being candid she thought that the competency framework was better expressed as an incompetency framework given the examples at hand from the people around her. The idea from the Head of Talent to bring in an actual bicycle to brief everybody on the talent cycle (“it’s a metaphor, if people pedal really hard around here and steer well then they can succeed”) was, candidly, the most ridiculous thing she had heard since the same person had suggested that the potential axis on the talent grid could be changed to run from un-nurtured acorns to mighty oaks. She had given up trying to explain that all the potential was in the acorn. Not that she cared about potential: you can either do it now or you can’t and if you can’t then please refer yourself to the “be good or be gone” behavioural standard. Being candid she wasn’t entirely sure that she agreed with dress down Fridays, flexible working, the “Shining Stars” recognition scheme, time to work on your development, and, to be honest, lunch hours. Obviously people need to eat. But do they actually need an hour to do it?

She felt like saying all of those things was her being brilliant, being her. Be brilliant. Be you. So, you could argue that she was completely delivering against three of the four behaviours. Seventy five per cent. Crushing it. And if she delivered all of that candour, all of that brilliance, all of that “you”, with a firm, determined smile then surely that meant that she was also being respectful. Four out of four. One hundred per cent. Exceed on her end of year performance rating, top right box of the talent grid, earmarked for greatness on the succession plan. A mighty oak if we really must use the officially sanctioned scale.

She was a professional. She kept these thoughts to herself and with-held her candour. The Head of Employee Experience was pregnant and she knew that she was the obvious candidate for her maternity cover. Twelve months to unpick this madness and take them all out at the knees.

She smiled.

So this, I think, got caught trying to decide if it was funny or mildly sinister and didn’t entirely settle on either… which is my way of saying I’m not entirely happy with it but am also writing on a deadline and have no recourse to an edit. There are bits that work, I think. It’s probably informed by some past experiences but, thankfully, bears no relation to the brilliant people I work with now.

Anyway, internal critic aside… this is another 1,000 words or so towards my pledged 26,000 words in July for Great Ormond Street. Donation page here