Tag Archives: short story

Beginnings ?

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There should be a beginning, a middle, and an end, right ? That’s how stories work. So you’re probably wondering what this is ? The beginning ? The end ? Somewhere in the middle ? 

Let’s give ourselves something to work with. I’m clinging to the hand rail on the Severn Bridge, wind blowing in my face, cars rushing past behind me. Does that make this the end ? I haven’t told you on which side of that hand rail I am standing. What did you suppose ? Is this just an innocent walk from England to Wales or the prelude to a plummet into the tidal depths of the water below ?

I’m clinging to the hand rail, retching across the side of the bridge, watching flecks of my own vomit disappear, whipped in the wind, down towards the river. There’s a stationary car behind me at an angle across the carriageway, driver’s door open, headlights on. So perhaps this is the middle ? The reaction to what happened in the beginning but with somewhere still to go.

A hand on my shoulder startles me into pulling tighter on the hand rail. I look round to see a woman, her face furrowed with concern, her car pulled to an abrupt halt behind us, headlights left on to illuminate her route to me. She asks if I’m alright and I note the sadness in her eyes even as the wind wraps her long, dark hair across her face. A beginning then ? Two strangers meeting at the mercy of circumstance.

I want to tell her what happened and why I come back. Why it always leaves me like this; physically sick, violently forcing the memories back out of my body. I imagine that you want to know too. That’s how stories work, isn’t it ? If this was the end you’d already know, if it’s the middle then you’d be finding out, but if this is the beginning then you only know what I want to tell you. Perhaps I will tell her and you can listen.

I tell her that I’m okay. She frowns and I don’t blame her. I’m throwing up over the side of a bridge in the middle of the night. I’m clearly not okay. She asks me again, this time assuring me that she just wants to help. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and let go my grip on the rail with the other. Really, I tell her, I’m really okay. Just a sudden wave of nausea. Maybe vertigo. Now she starts to look annoyed. I don’t know why I bothered lying or at least I don’t know why I didn’t come up with something even half way believable.

She starts to turn away to return to her car. The bridge isn’t busy at this time but I guess she’s suddenly aware that she’s blocking up the inside lane, was in such a rush that she didn’t flick on her hazards. I take a step after her and start to speak. She looks over her shoulder and says that she’ll be back in just a minute. I watch her clamber back up to the road and walk back to her car, a featureless black silhouette in the headlights.

It’s the hazards that do it. I notice them wink on and then off and it all comes back. Lights flashing on this bridge a year ago. Lights that I could see reflected off the thousands of pieces of broken glass, the fractured remains of a windscreen. Fractured as I’d been thrown through it and onto the tarmac on that still, cold night. I thought it was the end.

And so I come back. I come back because it wasn’t the end but it won’t leave me. I am stuck in some kind of middle.

She finds me again sitting and weeping, my head buried in my knees, wrapping myself up tightly against the echoes of the accident. This time she doesn’t ask if I’m okay, she just sits beside me and puts her arm across my shoulders. I tell her about my friends and our trip to Wales. I tell her about the minibus and how I’d taken to slipping off the seatbelt when I sat in the front so that I could turn around to speak to everyone. I tell her that I should have known he was tired, that we should have done more to share the drive home. We were so close to home though. I tell her that I was thrown out when we hit the central reservation before the bus span around in the road, turned up onto its side and was ploughed into by the lorry behind us. I tell her that I only survived because I wasn’t in the bus. That’s what the police said later. They called it a miracle.

Now that you’ve listened to me telling her I guess this is the end ? This is the first time since I’ve been back that anybody stopped, the first time I haven’t stood on the bridge alone. It’s the first time that I’ve told anyone what happened. It’s the first time I’ve cried. With so many firsts perhaps this is actually the beginning ?

She still has her arm across my shoulders, that worried furrow creasing her forehead, and those sad eyes watching me with concern. I wipe my eyes clear of tears and ask her for her name.

……….

This short story is the first in a series of 42 to try to raise awareness and money for Mind, the mental health charity. Please feel free to share it if you enjoyed it. More details here:  https://www.justgiving.com/42shorts/

Are you alright there ?

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“Are you alright there ?” asks the girl with the green hair behind the till.

I set down the books I’m buying on the counter: “Overcoming Anxiety”, “Mindfulness: Finding Peace In A Frantic World”, and “Man’s Search For Meaning”. Oh, and Robin Hobb’s “Ship Of Magic”. Three parts self help, one part pure escapism.

Her question isn’t literal. I know that. It is a very British way of wrapping up “hello” and “can I take some form of payment for those books you’re holding ?”. It doesn’t need a response. Certainly not an honest response; that would be a clear violation of social etiquette. You don’t really tell someone whether you’re alright. Particularly someone  you’ve never met.

But the books… It’s so obvious. It seems too absurd to be asked that question, lay down those books, and not say anything. And she has green hair. I had already decided, in a distracted moment in the queue, that nobody who had green hair could be a bad person.

“Evidently not…” I offer apologetically. “As you can see by my choice of books”.

It hangs there uncomfortably between us. As soon as I say it I feel awful. She clearly now feels desperately awkward. There had been nothing in the Waterstone’s customer service training that covered this terrain. Nothing, frankly, in much of our usual social intercourse amongst strangers that covered it. I was in clear violation of all of the unspoken rules and I knew it and regretted it.

“Well I hope the books help…” she starts. A pause. “I suffer a little with anxiety too so I know what it’s like…”

She leaves it hanging there. What had started as a straightforward transaction – small pieces of paper handed over for larger, bound ones – had turned into a mental health confessional. A tiny, strange connection.

“Books help most things, don’t they ?” I offer back.

“Yeah” she agrees. “And it’s good you’ve got the Robin Hobb. Bit of self help and then a big story to get lost in”. We are silent for a moment as she scans the books and I pay. “Hope they help” she says again, putting the books into a bag, folding my receipt, and handing them both back to me.

“Thanks” I say. Not just for the books but for forgiving my intrusion, for acknowledging my admission, for showing some empathy, some vulnerability, and for liking Robin Hobbs. I didn’t say those bits. My ingrained social etiquette is back in control.

I hope she knew that was what I meant anyway. At the very least I hope I didn’t mess up her day. Our briefest moment of recognition was pretty much the highlight of mine.

Just Write: Week 7, 10th March – part 2

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Week 7 of this term’s writing class pulled together a few of the themes from the last three or four weeks and focussed on one slightly larger exercise than usual. We all, without a huge amount of thought, came up with four potential characters – just name, age, and profession – which gave us a selection of about 30 to choose from. We picked two and then had to write three scenes – or, effectively, two scenes and a brief ending – with some direction.

First up was a scene in which the two characters are at either a wedding or funeral, second was the start of the overall story, and finally a few lines that suggested the ending of the story. We didn’t know about parts 2 and 3 before writing part 1 and, ultimately, we read back the work in chronological order (i.e. part 2 before part 1) rather than as written. I’ve reproduced here in the order it was written, however.

So I picked Joy, a 34 year old book shop owner, and Grace, a 21 year old student. This is what they got up to:

It was on occasions like this that Joy was given to rue her name. There was something toe curlingly embarrassing about introducing herself at a funeral:

“Hi, I’m Joy”.

There was no getting past it, no matter how sad she made her face, how remorseful her follow up words, there it was. “Joy”. On the least joyous occasion.

She was loitering near to the edge of the room, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, desperate to avoid an introduction. It was worse here – she’d barely known the guy, he just used to come into the shop pretty regularly. An avid comic reader she remembered. Thought it was graphic novels now she’d asked him once, you know “all grown up” she’d added with a smile. Apparently not. Comics, he’d declared, boldly reclaiming the word from her projections of childhood and the Beano and all that stuff. She’d barely known him but his wife had come to the shop, said it was his favourite place and asked her to come.

Just then she was startled away from her thoughts by a young woman entering the room just next to her. She’d somehow caught her foot on the small step on the way in and tumbled forwards, landing at Joy’s feet.

“God, are you alright ?” said Joy extending her hand, pulling the woman up.

“Yeah, yeah. How embarrassing !” said the woman.

“I’m…” Joy hesitated. “I’m Joy”. An apologetic smile.

“Thanks Joy, hi” said the woman, extending a hand. “I’m Grace.”

……

“No, no, no !” Grace exclaimed. “It just couldn’t happen.”

“It would !” retorted her uncle, turning back to the pile of comics on the table. “There’s precedent Grace.”

“Precedent ?” she snorted.

“Yeah ! There was that arc where the Marvel guys came in to the DC universe…”

“That was just money” she cut him off. “DC did it chasing sad old fan boys like you !” Her uncle cheerily winked at her. “Just money.”

“So you really don’t think Bruce Banner would team up with Bruce Wayne ?”

She rolled her eyes. She knew he was just teasing but they both loved these conversations, she wasn’t sure when they’d stumbled on a shared love of superheroes and the fantastic but it had kept them close now for a long time.

“Wayne’s a loner. Banner’s a loner. They work alone.” It was her final word. Almost her final word. “Besides, one argument and you’ve got the Hulk smashing up the Bat Cave and trashing all that hi tech gadgetry. Never gonna happen.”

Her uncle raised his hands in supplication, accepting defeat, and delighting in the act they’d created, each of them playing their part so well. Sometimes he thought it was all he had.

……

She found it tucked in his oldest pile of comics; she’d been leafing through, inhaling the dusty pages, remembering him. The pink piece of A4 fell out, a single name written in the middle under her birth date: Grace Jenkins.

The room flipped as she caught sight of her father’s name.

……

I enjoyed this exercise albeit I felt the results were a little mixed. I was pretty pleased with my first piece – okay the play on the character’s names is arguably a little trite but I thought it worked quite nicely. However, having made my characters meet in the funeral scene and, consequently, making it feel like the beginning of the story, I was then a little thrown by the instruction to make the second piece the actual start of the story. The outcome was that I pretty much jettisoned Joy altogether and it turned into Grace’s story and her, as it transpires, father (uncle). I didn’t intend that at the outset – it was making itself up as it went along.

Second scene works less well for me. I don’t know where the comic thing came from in the first scene and I kind of ran with it in the second. I’m not sure I’d stick with it if I was revisiting the piece overall. It was interesting though (to me) that I ended up with what was essentially a close father / daughter relationship that hints at some deep sadness to come – well, not really hints, he ends up dead. Fairly big hint. This is at the heart of the bigger story idea I have with the character of Emily from the last couple of weeks.

So, not an unmitigated disaster… but still not quite right in terms of the tone I’m looking for. Last week of term next week. Not long to get it right (fortunately there are more terms to come…).

It must be the time of year…

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9. December – All About Eve                                                             Nottingham, December 1996.

A short story.

This feels true. It isn’t, of course. I know that. She would know that. The details are all wrong and nostalgia and memory aren’t the same thing. But you don’t know that. All you need to know is that once upon a time we tried again. Failed again.

……

I think it must be the time of year; it had started in late Autumn. Back then we were two chronically shy souls tentatively finding each other; the falling leaves marking our own inexorable falling in love. There was an awkwardness between us, somehow in us, at first which held a certain naïve charm. An innocence. I don’t know, maybe we were just foolish kids. It had ensured that those beginnings had run on from October into December, two months of careful courtship – our painfully slow reaching for each other as old fashioned as that word implies.

So this time of year always brought it back, the magical blaze of the beginning sustained over those months that ran from fireworks to fairy lights – the world alive with lights in the darkness.

It had ended a handful of years later in the same span of months; still those clear, crisp skies, and the aging sun hung low, but now with a snap and bite to the wind. Still discernibly Autumn but withering into Winter.

And now here I was, lost and lonely, reaching for her again across the years, looking for what we’d once had. Choosing to be blind to the reasons why it had failed the first time, the second time, all of the times. I reached for the phone, dialled a number. The brief silence before the dial tone sounded was enough to give me pause and I hung up, put the phone down again, picked up a bottle of cheap red wine and poured another glass.

Eventually I reached again for the phone. Dialled a number.

……

She had stayed for the weekend as usual – it had become our habit over the past six months. She’d even stayed on Sunday night which was less common as it meant an early start for her long drive back south to make it to work on Monday morning. Neither of us could have known for certain that it was our last night together, lying there squeezed together on my single bed. If we had would it have been different ? Would we have made love, reconciled to the end and spending those last moments lost in each other ? Perhaps we’d have talked, spent the time making sure we were right that this was the end, that there wasn’t some way we could make it work that we’d missed ?

I don’t think we’d have talked. We’d never spent our time together talking, never found a way to open ourselves up honestly and ask for what either of us needed. We wrote, that was what we did. Even in those beginnings we wrote to each other, exchanging letters in person, the sender waiting nervously as the recipient read. It was the only way we found to express ourselves. The next day would bring a reply – a conversation played out over days, in slow motion, that might have taken minutes if we’d been able to break the silence. Perhaps we imagined ourselves characters in one of the Austen novels we’d been studying. Maybe we were just foolish kids.

Things had briefly flared again in those last months, occasionally a spark catching flame in the dying embers, but ultimately turning to ash. Picking our way back across familiar ground felt good at first, a small reminder of the rush of being sixteen and falling headlong into first love. But we weren’t sixteen this time. Besides, even when we had been the evanescent rush hadn’t sustained us once that initial thrill had passed. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not denying the truth of what we felt that first time: it was something extraordinary. You only fall first once and we fell so hard we were left gasping for air. But this time ? Could it be taking our breath away again ? Were we just clinging on to the feeling of being in love or were we really in love ? That I even wondered seemed to suggest an answer.

She left before dawn as I slept.

……

When I got up I found that she’d left a letter. Carefully placed where it couldn’t be missed. A letter to say all of things that we couldn’t say. Just like in the beginning, just like always. It was a letter of the future, talking of all the things she would do, all the places she would go, all the dreams she still had. She wanted to move on with her life and was asking if I wanted to come along.

I knew that I didn’t.

I knew but it broke my heart all the same.