“…Why do they even put backwards-facing seats into railway carriages?” asked Shaw.  “Nobody likes them.”
“Well, I don’t think they are backwards all the time are they?  I mean, when they get to where they are going, they don’t actually turn them around to come back, do they?  They just pull them from the other end….”
“No, of course not.  I know that,” snapped Shaw, who felt that he had to say something, but really just wanted to concentrate on the fact that he was distinctly unhappy at having to watch where he had just been slip silently away into the distance.  Knowing that his future was looming up, unseen, behind him made him anxious and, as everyone that knew him would testify, an anxious Shaw was a spiky Shaw.  For the moment, he occupied himself by staring malignantly into the distance, but Dinah recognised the signs, some kind of irrational outburst was just around the corner.  “Would you like a coffee?” she asked, all smoothing oil on troubled waters.
“I would,” said Shaw, “but that’s another thing: no buffet car.  A two hour journey and no buffet car.  What do they expect you to do, drink the sweat from your own brow?” 
Dinah recognised the warning: a troubled sea fanned by a full-on anxiety storm.  “I’ve brought a flask,” she said.
“A what?”
“A flask.  I’ve brought a flask of coffee.”  She unscrewed the little metal cup and poured the black steaming liquid, watching as Shaw’s bottom lip began, petulantly to protrude.  He opened his mouth to speak, but Dinah was ready for him.  “Milk and sugar are in the bag,” she said.  Shaw’s mouth made the slightest twitch towards complaint.  “And biscuits,” added Dinah.
“What kind?”
Dinah allowed herself the faintest of smiles.  “Bourbon, of course.”
Shaw looked into Dinah’s smiling eyes as passed the cup towards him and he felt the tension leave him in an instant, tingling away from the nape of his neck, although he was in no mood to admit that yet.
“So, do you mind telling me where we are going – and why?”
“There’s something we’ve got to see,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, where then?” persisted Dinah.
“There’s the thing…”
Dinah sighed deeply.  “You don’t know do you?”
“Not exactly, no, but I think I’ll know when we get there.”
“How?  How will you know?”
“The man in the tartan hat,” Shaw nodded, indicating the man on the seat behind him.  “He’ll be getting off there.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, he has to get off somewhere, hasn’t he?”
“I suppose so, but why him?  Why are we following him?”
“To see where he gets off, of course.”  Shaw sipped his coffee, indicating that, as far as he was concerned, the matter was closed. 
Dinah, as ever, absorbed and understood, but ploughed on anyway.  “I mean, you must have some reason to want to know why he, in particular, is going to get off the train, wherever he might choose to do so.  And you said that this was a two hour journey.  How can you possibly know that if you don’t know where we’re going?”
“Did I say that I didn’t know where we are going?”
Dinah tried to remember, but being with Shaw always played games with her memory.  “No,” she said at last.  “Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Know where we’re going?”
“Of course.”
“Where then?”
“I told you, wherever he does.”
“But…”  Dinah floundered.  She knew that she would get nowhere other than where Shaw thought that they might need to be, so she decided to let it all go, but refused to allow her face to inform Shaw, who drank his coffee ever more slowly, eeking out the silence as long as he could, hoping that the man in the hat would save him further interrogation by making a move.  Finally, his cup empty, he sighed resignedly – determined not to have to explain the motives he did not have –  and said, “So, do you think we should be following somebody else then?”
“Well, no,” Dinah stuttered.  “That is…”
“Good,” said Shaw, settling back in his seat and revelling in his moment of triumph.  “That’s settled then.  We’ll stick with my original plan.”
Despite a billion reservations bouncing around in her head, like a zero-gravity hailstorm, she decided that the time had come to just go along with the flow and enjoy the day out.  She would have said ‘watching the world go by’, but she had to agree with Shaw, there was little fun in watching a world that had already gone by.
Slowly, imperceptibly, she surrendered to the steady sway of the train, and her head sagged steadily towards Shaw’s shoulder.  She drifted off into a soft, dreamless sleep, unaware of the gentle rhythmic snoring of Shaw in her ear…

…They both awoke in the otherwise empty carriage to the first lurch of the return journey.  Outside the carriage, the world was impenetrably dark.  “Typical,” said Shaw.  “We’re facing the right way, and now there’s nothing to see…”
“But what about the suspect?”
“Suspect?”  Shaw looked deeply puzzled.  “There’s nobody else here… Have you got any of that coffee left?”

First published 19.09.2020 as ‘A Little Fiction – Train of Thought’

I usually leave these reposted fictions alone, but I have toyed with this one a little bit. I remember thinking when I originally wrote it that Dinah & Shaw might get more readers if the stories were shorter and more concise, but I was wrong. I really liked the concept of this episode and I felt that the characters became a little more real – even in a surreal situation – because of the slight tetchiness between them. I have now smoothed over one or two cracks, but I really wish I had given them more time here…

In Shaw’s long experience, nothing quite matched the pain of toothpaste beneath the contact lens.  The eye, it would seem, was no more designed for the absorption of fluoride than his teeth were designed to withstand the Cif with which he had inadvertently cleaned them that morning.

He had not had a good start to the day.  His alarm at waking in an unfamiliar room had been of such magnitude that the hotel staff had alerted the management who, in turn, had despatched Security to handle the situation.  By the time the man in uniform arrived at his door, Shaw had recovered some equilibrium with fast returning Tarantino-style flashbacks of an over-indulgent night in the hotel bar, but his own renewed calm was not matched by that of the generously proportioned man in the over-tight suit who blocked out the light in his doorway.  Indeed, Shaw’s own mood was darkened further when the be-suited Neanderthal pushed past him and insisted on looking around as ‘there had been reports of something that sounded like animal abuse,’ from the room.  Shaw did not care for the pointed remarks about his lack of luggage, nor the persistent bone-headed references to ‘people of your kind’.

Eventually, satisfied that the room had not been the scene of some bestial ritual sacrifice or perverted sexual practice, the shaven-headed behemoth returned to his dot-to-dot book and Shaw sat heavily on his bed to think.

He had been doing this ‘job’ for many years now and had, during that time, woken in many places far more alien than a hotel bedroom, but never in the state of agitated disorientation in which he had awoken on that morning.  He felt around his body, searching for signs of injury or attack but, save for the extreme discomfort of a severely over-extended bladder, all was as usual.  Of course, there was the issue of the hotel bedroom itself.  Shaw presumed that it must have been paid for, but he had no recollection of how.  He, himself, never carried more than a few pounds in cash – it was a matter of principal – and the only credit card he had ever possessed had been eaten by an iguana in 1999.  He claimed ‘eaten’ – it had actually fallen into the animal’s terrarium (or ‘lair’ as he insisted on calling it) and Shaw, having witnessed the lizard’s scaly little swivelling eyes in action, was too freaked out to retrieve it.  Even when the friend had returned the card to him, he refused to keep it and posted it instead, back to the bank in an envelope marked ‘Sanitisation Department’.  The bank, for their part, seized the opportunity to withdraw the card from the man who had run up an overspend somewhat in excess of a developing nation and who possessed more aliases than a Sicilian telephone directory.  He had never had a credit card since.

He rifled through the detritus from his trouser pockets and attempted to assemble some sort of coherent chronology to the previous night’s affairs from the crumpled papers he retrieved.  There was a name and address he did not recognise, several old bus tickets and a National Lottery ticket from almost a decade before, but no sign of a receipt for the room.  It was not until he found the neatly folded slip of paper in his shoe (he always took special care with Dinah’s phone number) that he realised he had also lost his phone.  Dinah would know how to handle the situation in a manner that he was unable to fathom – e.g. without causing an incident that required the presence of police from three different counties – but there it was; she was not available to him.  ‘Just goes to show,’ he thought bitterly.  ‘You just can’t rely on anybody.’

He couldn’t pick up the phone in the room and ask reception to put a call through for him: he just knew that the ape of a security guard would be there right that second, uncovering the fact that the room had never been paid for: polishing his knuckles and devising his excuses.  Dinah would have to wait for now – although he made a mental note to speak to her about unreliability – while he considered how he could extricate himself from his current predicament.

He could, have course have crept downstairs and made a run for it as soon as he reached the hotel lobby, but he remembered, with some pain, the consequences of his last attempt at such an exit, when the revolving doors had spun him straight back into the room and deposited him at the feet of the receptionist who had gripped him in an arm-lock so severe that he had suffered from pins and needles for months afterwards and before dousing his face in the depilatory spray that she had mistakenly put in her pocket in place of mace.  It worked just as well.  He certainly wouldn’t be able to talk himself out of the situation as he had done back then – the face that had launched a thousand ships looked as if it had done them all with a head-butt this morning – and not even a protagonist of more advanced years would ever find her head being turned by a man who had absolutely no idea why he was wearing odd shoes.  Besides, he feared the only head-turning to take place would be his own, at the behest of the muscle-bound troglodyte at the door.

No, it was clear now.  He knew what he had to do.  Stealthily he traversed the wall, past the still un-noticed partition door – on the other side of which an ear-plugged Dinah slept soundly with both of their phones and her credit card beside her – past the ceiling CCTV (actually a long-disabled smoke alarm) and to the sanctuary of the curtain, from the shelter of which he deftly slipped the catch and opened the window.  Good, only three floors up.  All he needed to do now was to reach the drainpipe…

First published 15.08.2020 as ‘A Little Fiction – Morning is Broken’

Having exposed some of Dinah’s vulnerabilities in episode 3, I thought it only fair to take a look at Shaw in episode 4 and I began to realise that these two could only properly operate as one…

Typical!  It was one of those rare days when Dinah found herself with time to think and she could think of nothing at all with which to occupy her mind.  Since meeting Shaw she had become used to finding her head full of the kind of clutter that resembled his life, but today it was full of the kind of void that she always imagined lurked between his ears…  No, that wasn’t fair.  He had more going on in his head than anybody she had ever met.  It was just that none of it ever made any sense.  Every time she thought she had started to get the hang of him; thought that she might guess where he would go next, he would lithely side-step her, leaving her stranded, like a cataleptic jelly fish abandoned on the ebbing tide.  His quantum leaps of illogic were, at times, truly stunning.  His arrival at a point of resolution confounded all reason; even he only seemed to know he had reached it after he arrived there.  Right through his haphazard progress, whatever that might be, he proceeded in a manner that suggested total conviction of purpose.  He never showed doubt.  Even when people shouted at him, ‘But that’s not what I paid you to do!’ he would look them straight in the eye and say.  ‘But it is what you wanted me to do.’  Heated argument often ensued, bills were often ripped-up and tossed into the air, but Shaw simply smiled, took a step backwards and waited for the anger to subside.  ‘You have my number,’ he would say, ‘if you change your mind.’  That’s another thing that Dinah had never got used to; the way that cheques would turn up in the post, days, weeks or even months later, generally with no explanation, just, more often than not, a simple ‘Thank you’ paper-clipped to them.  Whatever Shaw had found for them, it obviously took them some time to discover it for themselves.

It wasn’t strange that she’d never met anybody else quite like him – she wasn’t certain that such a person actually existed.  Even physically he was perplexing.  He was thin to the point of an Estate Agent’s morals and, although barely taller than Dinah herself, he always appeared to tower above her; permanently bewildered.  He had a face that actively discouraged ageing – his features flitted between old man and schoolboy.  He was always heavy-eyed; giving the appearance of someone who most certainly could do with more sleep.  He had a small room behind the office that appeared to be his home, but she didn’t recall ever having seen a bed in it.  She wondered if he slept, like a bat, hanging from the light fitting.  More often than not, he actually slept in her chair, at the desk – most often with his head across her painstakingly sorted paperwork.  When he was awake, he was always on the move.  He always had something that had to be done, but he was never quite sure what.  His pace alternated between laid-back and languid.  She had only ever seen him agitated once, and that was when he was looking for a pencil because he had developed a buzzing in his ear – which he feared might be a bee.  He was terrified of bees.  She’d spent hours trying to educate him about them: their sociability, their vital importance in propagation; their reluctance to sting, when he eventually looked up at her from darkly hooded eyes and said, ‘Earwigs, I meant earwigs’ and terminated the conversation with an airy wave of his hand, before sensing her annoyance and announcing, ‘Cake.  Let me buy you cake…  Do you have any money?’

What most annoyed her about Shaw was that he did what he said: he helped people find things – even if they did not know they were missing.  Mostly, she had to reflect, what they found was themselves.  In Shaw, Dinah had found what was missing in herself, although even now, she was unable to quantify it.  She did not know what she had found, only that it was missing before she found it.  You know when you try so hard to be one of those girls at school that everybody likes, only to find out that that is exactly why nobody likes you?  Well, she’d stopped that now.  She’d realised it was no way to get friends.  She’d realised that might be why she didn’t have any.  For the moment she had Shaw and today, she had to admit, she had never been so pleased to see anyone in her life.  ‘Yes, yes,’ she had said in feigned annoyance when she first saw his lopsided quizzical smile.  ‘That’s fine.  Laugh now, but then go and find ladder to get me out of this tree…’

First Published 27.06.2020 as Little Fiction – Another Return

I like this episode, it makes me smile because I think it’s the first time I managed to put a little flesh on Shaw’s bones – even though he isn’t in it until the very last line…