A Little Fiction – The Custodian of Time

The Custodian of Time sat, open-legged on the heavily brocaded settle, smoothing the creases from his satin pyjama trousers and picking the loose threads from the cushion on which he rested his arm. His movements were leisurely, but his eyes skipped around the room and he spoke as if time was of the very essence, which, of course, for its Custodian, it was.
“I suppose he wants more does he; they all do?” The words jettisoned from his mouth without warning or prevarication, in a way that would have caused his attendant to leap from his skin – if only he had some.
The acolyte was, in fact, a small ectoplasmic fog, slightly purple in colour – lilac possibly – and nervous to the point of dissipation. It was his/her’s (we’ll assume her for ease) very first day on duty and her first time alone in the presence of the Custodian. She had been told, “Pass on the request. Wait for the reply. Leave.” Simple. She hadn’t been led to expect a question. She hoped it was rhetorical.
“Well?” said the Custodian. Obviously it was not.
The attendant’s stress-level passed critical. She was aware that she was starting to precipitate. She coughed nervously (as only a lilac ectoplasmic cloud can). “Erm… that is… well… I think so. Actually no, not really. No. It’s more of an assurance he’s after I think, not more time, just an assurance that he won’t get less.”
“Less than what?”
“Well, less than he expects, I think.”
The Custodian picked at his teeth with the corner of the written request (parts 2 and 3). His eyes betrayed no clue to the activity that whirred behind them. Eventually, with a sigh, he removed the paper from his mouth, flicked an errant sesame seed from it, before smoothing it out across his lap.
“He understands, does he, that what I give to one I must take from another?”
“I don’t know,” said the blob, emboldened by the hesitation he detected in the Custodian. “I don’t think that he wants more anyway. He just, as I understand it, would like an assurance. He was led to believe, from birth, that he could expect to live to one hundred years of age, and he just wants to be assured that that is what he will get. He doesn’t smoke, he’s a moderate drinker, fit and well. He just wants some certainty.”
“Has he told you what he plans to do with this certainty?”
“I’m sorry, I…” The gossamer orb was in full-fluster once again.
“When he knows that after Wednesday he no longer has anything to lose…”
“Wednesday?”
“Wednesday? Did I say ‘Wednesday’? Just a slip of the tongue – probably. Not at all the kind of assurance he was looking for, huh? Tell him ‘Carpe Diem’ baby; tell him ‘Seize the day’. Tell him only one person knows what time has in store for him and, for every good reason, he is keeping that knowledge to himself.”
“But, what if he wants to do good things?”
“Then nobody’s stopping him,” said the Custodian and, with a wave of his podgy little fingers, he dismissed the cloud, which hesitantly turned (I think) to go.
“Come on,” barked the Custodian impatiently. “Tempus Fugit, baby. Get a move on. Time waits for no amorphous entity.” And with an audible ‘Pop!’ the attendant disappeared.
“Wednesday,” chuckled the Custodian. “Wednesday. I’m such a wag… Now, where’s the cloud with my supper?”

First published 07.07.2019

I don’t know. Perhaps I’d been eating cheese…

A Little Fiction – Winnie-the-Pooh and a Head Full of Kapok

IMG_2592 (2) — When you realise – too late – that the image you had planned to use is copyright, and you have to draw your own…

Having passed pristine through the hands of Christopher Robin and relatively unscathed through those of his children, Winnie-the-Pooh was now in the hands of the grandchildren and feeling the strain. The daily bump-bump-bump of his head on the stairs was taking its toll. He did not find thinking things through nearly as easy as he used to, and now he thought about it, he had never found it particularly easy in the first place. ‘Perhaps,’ he thought, ‘that’s what comes of having a head stuffed full of kapok.,’ although he had not the faintest idea of what kapok actually was and even less of a clue if that was what a bear of a certain age had stuffed in its head at all. Whatever it was he had stuffed between his ears, he was pretty sure that it was not nearly as densely packed as it used to be. ‘Perhaps that’s why I can’t erhm… can’t… Oh dear, what is it I can’t?’ thought Pooh. ‘Oh dear, I can’t remember. What is it I can’t remember? I can’t remember. Oh dear…’ Pooh sat on the bottom stair to collect himself. ‘Kapok,’ he mused. ‘Was it kapok? Oh dear, I forget. What is kapok?’ To calm himself, Pooh hummed a little hum he had just composed.

What is kapok? Goodness knows!
It must be something I suppose.
Perhaps it fills my head and toes
And possibly my down-belows.

Or is it sawdust in my head
That’s drained down to my feet instead
And trickled out through loosened thread
To join the fur-balls that I shed.

Whatever is inside of me
Is falling out as you can see
And taking consequentially
What little brain there used to be.

Pooh was very happy with his hum and he would have given it a tune if he hadn’t forgotten the first verse before he hummed the last…

Some time later, Pooh was tramping across what remained of the Hundred Acre wood – a small area of scrubland, bedecked with broken bicycles, burned out cars and soiled and soggy bed mattresses, in the middle of a semi-derelict housing estate – when he bumped into Piglet. ‘Where are you going?’ asked Pooh.
‘Why,’ said Piglet. ‘I’m not sure, but I believe I am going to the same place as you.’
‘In that case,’ said Pooh ‘I shall join you.’
And so Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet tramped off together to find out where they were going.
‘How do you think we will know when we get there?’ asked Piglet.
‘Well, I suppose that after we get there we will start going back,’ said Pooh. ‘So then we’ll know.’
‘Why of course,’ said Piglet. ‘I would never have thought of that.’

Presently, some time after Winnie-the-Pooh had stopped to pick some dog shit out of his fur with a stick, Owl fluttered down beside the friends. Having lost all of his forebears to poisoned rodents, Owl was attempting to embrace a vegetarian diet – and it was not agreeing with him. ‘In the old days,’ he moaned, ‘I could cough up a pellet the size of a Mars Bar. Full of fur and bone. You really knew I’d been there. Now what do I cough up? Don’t know? I’ll tell you. Seeds! That’s what I cough up now, seeds. Nature’s stealth bomber, that was me. The silent killer. The nation’s favourite raptor. And what am I now? I’ll tell you. A budgie, that’s what I am. A bleedin’ budgie.’ He swivelled his head evilly through 360°. ‘I miss the taste of pulsing flesh, blood and bone,’ he said and licked his beak in a way that only owls can do.
‘I miss honey,’ said Pooh sadly. ‘I’ve written a little poem about it.’
‘Oh Gawd!’ said Owl.
‘Would you like to hear it?’
‘No!’ chorused Owl and Piglet.
‘Very well,’ said Pooh, clearing his throat with a little cough.

Soft and yellow, sweet and sticky
Eating it with paws is tricky.
After just a jar or two
I would be stuck up like glue

Long ago, in times that’s been
I would lick my paws quite clean,
But now everything I eat is
Governed by my diabetes.

‘I hate flippin’ porridge’ said Pooh with a distant look in his beady glass eyes. ‘And I really miss honey.’
‘And I,’ grumbled Eeyore, who had been following them quietly for some time. ‘I miss my tail.’
‘Eeyore,’ said Pooh. ‘I didn’t know you were there.’
‘It would seem to me,’ said Eeyore morosely, ‘that that is the story of my life.’
‘What is?’ asked Piglet, who had been momentarily distracted by an earwig under his vest.
‘Nobody knows I’m here,’ groaned Eeyore. ‘Or cares…’
‘I care,’ said Pooh. ‘You still owe me a fiver.’

Owl had fluttered around to the rear-end of Eeyore and was examining his rump closely. The button that had once held Eeyore’s tail in place was long-gone, leaving just a stub of severed threads. The tail itself, it was said, lay amongst various bags of assorted household effluvia at the local landfill. A small open seam close to its original location was held together with a rusting safety pin.
‘Perhaps,’ said Owl, ‘we could pin you a new tail there.’
‘Oh could you?’ said Eeyore. ‘That would make me so…’
‘Happy?’ suggested Winnie-the-Pooh.
‘Happy,’ said Eeyore. ‘Whatever that might be.’

So, whilst Eeyore stood beside a rusting shopping trolley contemplating his posterior, Winnie-the-Pooh, Owl and Piglet began to search for something that would make Eeyore a new tail.
‘It’s a shame Tigger can’t be here to help,’ said Piglet.
‘He seldom leaves his house,’ said Pooh. ‘His top is still made of rubber, but it’s lost all its bounce. His bottom has no spring…’
‘We should go and cheer him up later,’ said Piglet.
Too late,’ said Owl, looking at a watch he kept tucked under his wing (God knows how). ‘He’ll be on the outside of a bottle of Scotch by now and sleeping it off under a tree as usual. We could try tomorrow.’
‘Perhaps I could hum him a cheerful hum,’ said Pooh.
‘No,’ chorused Eeyore, Piglet and Owl, just a little too quickly for Pooh’s liking.
‘I think he just needs rest,’ said Owl.
‘But…’ began Pooh, when Piglet interrupted him excitedly.
‘I’ve found just the thing,’ he cried, holding up a short length of frayed, orange nylon rope. ‘It doesn’t quite match the rest of you, Eeyore, but it will hang down just like a tail.’
Eeyore almost smiled. ‘Do you think anyone will notice that it isn’t really a tail,’ he asked. ‘Me being grey and it being orange and nylon and all. Will it make me look younger? Will it turn back the sands of time? Will it make me more desirable to other donkeys?’
Owl polished the thick, bottle-glass lenses of his spectacles, rested them back on his beak and looked earnestly at Eeyore. ‘It will look,’ he said ‘just like it had never fallen off… in an orange, nylon kind of a way. And at a fraction of the price of a transplant.’

First Published 05.09.2019

I love these little parodies, but they only work when they keep as close to the original in style as possible. Winnie the Pooh was my go-to book right through childhood and I wanted this to be an affectionate piece, but I was aware that time had moved on…

A Little Fiction – The Unseemly Abasement of Miss Timmins

There was barely a static pair of net curtains along the whole street on the day that the police came to visit Miss Timmins. Nobody wanted to appear nosy, but they also did not want to miss out on anything that might form the basis of a succulent little nugget of scandal for some future discourse. Not that it was likely with Miss Timmins. I’m not sure that anybody actually knew her age. She looked about ninety with her straight, grey hair scraped up into a bun on the top of her head and the blue gingham housecoat which, as far as anybody could see, she never took off except for her weekly trips to the church hall beetle drive, when she wore a threadbare old cardigan over a paisley blouse of such florid hues that the bus driver insisted that she sit on the top deck for the journey home. It was rumoured that she had first worn the blouse in the sixties when, as legend had it, she had auditioned for Pan’s People, but had not got the role on account of being far too quick for Jimmy Savile. Others claimed to have seen the blouse before, in an episode of The Avengers on ‘girl behind ray gun’, whilst yet more claimed that it had once been a hotel bedspread.

In fact, what little was actually known about her had been smuggled, illicitly, out of her little terraced home by such visitors who had dared to brave the gloom and stifling heat of the spinster’s house. She had a photograph album that she kept on the table in her dingy little lounge and those that claimed they had dared to peak into it when she left the room to brew tea in the kitchen, reported that she certainly had a dancer’s body as a young woman. Unfortunately it was accompanied by the boxer’s face that continued to lower out from under her hairnet today. Whilst she had, as a young woman, a body that turned heads, it was accompanied by a face that did a similar thing to stomachs.

Vera Timmins was a woman who deplored ‘frilly’: the crinoline lady that sat astride her toilet roll was void of all fripperies and not even her paper doilies were allowed lacy edges. Those unfortunate enough to overlook her washing line reported that her underwear was never more (or less) than strictly functional. In fact some claimed that if you looked really hard, you could still see the Utility Mark stamped onto the waist band of her more-than-ample knickers. She was a thin woman and yet she somehow managed to wear nether garments that could house a pack of cub scouts. Truth be told, there were few, outside of the vicar (who could often be heard offering up the fervent prayer that it might never happen again) who were ever invited into her home. Mary Maguire was one such and perhaps the most willing to discuss the contents of Miss Timmins photograph album. It was her firm opinion that Vera had been spurned by a man in her youth – the album, she claimed, was filled with roughly torn half-photographs, some of which revealed a distinctly male-looking hand nestling on her waist – and from that moment on had decided to make herself as unattractive to the opposite sex as she possibly could. In that one respect she had been supremely successful.

No man had been allowed to cross her threshold in living memory. The rent man, the milk man and the grocer’s boy all picked up their monies in envelopes left by the gate. She had an elderly tom cat, but that had not been allowed under her roof until the vet had removed its undercarriage. It had grown fat and lazy, but to its credit, it still managed to spray on the cushions whenever she wasn’t looking. So it was with a seismic level of surprise that the assembled net twitchers of the whole street watched her beckon the two young male policemen into her home. None could tear their eyes away. Most felt it a nailed-on certainty that the unfortunate uniformed fodder would never be seen again.

This opinion had solidified amongst those still fit enough to be standing with gimlet eye to gossamer crack when, some two hours later, they were still to reappear. Most had given up. Some had already been on the phone to Mary, but such was the intensity of her vigil, she would not be drawn away from the window to speak and as Ted, her husband, had taken her mobile to the football match having left his own in the compost tub with his spare socks at the allotments, she could not both speak into the ancient handset that hung in the hall and maintain eye-contact on the front door at number thirteen. They would all just have to sit it out. She would be quick enough to report when anything happened.

In fact she missed the actual moment when the police van arrived to take the lachrymose old maid away, owing to the fact that she had, over the first fifteen years of her marriage, been on the outside of fifteen children and was not within reach of anything on which to squat in her hour of need, but, undaunted, she was outside speaking to the constable who had remained at the door even before Mrs Timmins had dragged her second leg into the constabulary vehicle. He was, of course, not supposed to pass on the information, but she knew his mother so what was the point of keeping quiet? He would have to tell his mother what he had been up to if he wanted to be fed and it was certain that half of the Bingo Club would then know about it within the hour. What harm could it do?

“It was a romance scam,” Mary Maguire told the assembled throng some time later.
“Oh, poor soul,” cooed Mrs Rodgers who, in the excitement, quite forgot that her teeth were still in the glass in the bathroom and covered Mrs Maguire’s spectacles with a fine dusting of PG Tips and simnel cake* . “She never seemed the kind did she?”
“The kind?”
“To be looking for romance. I mean, if we’re honest, she didn’t really seem to have much time for men at all, let alone be lured by one pretending to want to share her life. Did he get much from her?”
“Certainly not money. I think you misunderstand,” said Mrs Maguire, a thin smile creasing the scar where she had once been bitten by a parakeet in a Morecambe bar. “She’s been passing herself off as a forty year old male property developer. Apparently she’d been using half of an old photograph from her photo album for a profile picture, until somebody clicked that it was actually Patrick McNee without the bowler…”

*Which my spellchecker insists should be ‘semen cake’. Clearly it does not know Mrs Rodgers.

First published 15.04.2022

In retrospect, I feel that I should probably have given this tale a little longer to develop, but I am always very conscious that these tiny tales do not run on too long – few enough people make it all the way through anyway!

A Little Fiction – The Trouble with Meeting Any Tom, Dick or Harry

There is, apparently, an epidemic of loneliness amongst the middle-aged and elderly. Opportunities to meet other single people in an ‘organic’ manner are vastly reduced as we get older and for some people, many of whom may have been in a stable relationship for many years, the whole business of meeting new people can be a bridge too far. It is with some surprise, therefore, that I learn that Speed Dating, the most synthetic and pressurised mode of social intercourse that humankind has yet devised, has, for an increasing proportion of ageing singletons, become the preferred manner of meeting people and, perhaps, finding a partner. I tried to imagine how this might work…

DING!

Mary: …Are you alright?

Tom: Yes, it’s these chairs. What’s the point of the arm rests? It’s a bugger of a job to get into them without popping the front of your shirt out of your trousers – not ideal when you’re trying to make an impression; especially when you’ve not really had time to change your vest since last Sunday’s gravy incident – also, could put your hip out; twist too far trying to get your knees under these tables…

Mary: Right… well… I see. Yes. Well, I’m told that the best thing to do, because we’re obviously time-limited, is to get the personal details out of the way first, so, I’m Mary, I’m a retired teacher. I like walking on the beach in the early morning. I love music and books – clichéd I know, but true – and I’m allergic to cats. You?

Tom: I’m… ooh, excuse me. I had beans for lunch. Always do that to me, beans, still, better out than in eh?

Mary: Well… I suppose…

Tom: Tom. I spend my time in the pub mainly. Don’t have many friends, that’s why I’m here: thought that I might be able to get a bit of… well, you know, woman of the world and all that. Teacher. Don’t just learn about such things, if you catch my drift, eh…

Mary: Er… well, I don’t really… Oh, there’s the bell.

Tom: Bell?

Mary: Yes, the bell. Time to move on I think.

Tom: I didn’t hear a bell.

Mary: Really. I definitely heard the bell.

Tom: Nobody’s moving.

Mary: I am…

DING!

Mary: Hello.

Dick: Hello.

Mary: How are you?

Dick: I’m ok, thank you.

Mary: I’m Mary.

Dick: Dick.

Mary: And this is?

Dick: Ah, this is my mother, bless her. Can’t leave her at home on her own – don’t want her setting fire to the beds again, do I hey mum? Always bring her along to these things, don’t I? Yes, gives her a bit of a day out… doesn’t it mum?

Mary: So… you do this regularly then?

Dick: Oh yes, every week. We get a nice cup of tea – although it could do with a bit more milk if I’m honest – and a biscuit, and mum gets to meet all of my new lady friends, don’t you mum?

Mary: Lady friends?

Dick: Oh yes. Like to check people out, don’t you mum? Spends hours when we get home going through people’s Facebook accounts. I think it’s so important that older people have a hobby, don’t you? Do you have a Facebook page?

Mary: Oh, there’s the bell.

Dick: No, we have another two minutes and fifty-two seconds yet. Must have been somebody’s phone.

Mary: I definitely heard ringing. I’m sure it was the bell… Actually, I feel a little hot. I must just go and powder my nose. Don’t wait; I might be a while… and can I have my phone back please. I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with your mother licking it…

DING!

Mary: Hi, I’m Mary.

Harry: Harry.

Mary: Hello Harry. Look, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but do you do this sort of thing often, only I…

Harry: No. No. This is my first time. It’s been a couple of years now since my wife died and I…

Mary: Oh, thank God!

Harry: Sorry?

Mary: No, not thank God that your wife has died… obviously. It’s so sad, I… It’s just that you’re the first person I’ve met here who actually appears to be sane.

Harry: Oh, I see… I’m sorry, I’m not very good at this…

Mary: No, it’s fine. It’s my first time too. Although my wife hasn’t died. Well, husband… probably. That is, I have never had either, so they couldn’t have… died… at all… How old was she? No, you don’t have to answer that. I don’t know why I… Look, just so that you know, if I’d had anyone that might have died, then it would be a husband and I haven’t. I had a partner, but he isn’t dead, unfortunately. He’s in Tunbridge Wells with his wife. I made him choose, you see – so he did.

Harry: I’m sorry…

Mary: No, don’t be. I’m over him. I’m better off without him. I… oh bugger, now I’ve made my lip bleed again.

Harry: I think you bit it.

Mary: Yes, yes, I know, thank you very much. It’s just something I do when I… It’s just something I do. So, you say your wife has been dead for two years now…

Harry: Yes

Mary: How do I know I can believe you?

Harry: I’m sorry, I…

Mary: How do I know you haven’t got her tied to a chair somewhere? How do I know she’s not waiting back at home for you with a freshly opened bottle of Chardonnay and a packet of those wrinkly little black olives? How do I know that you don’t have half a dozen children waiting for you to read them a bed time story? I know your kind. You’re all the same, you…

Harry: Oh, there’s the bell…

Mary: Bugger…

First published 14.09.2019

It is not unusual for me to find that things do not end quite where I originally intended them to…

A Little Fiction – Party Impolitics

Carol had been working at the Wilton Tribune for seven years, never allowed to report on anything more glamorous than the Ryland cat show, the local ‘am-dram’ production of ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ and The School Friend’s Fancy Dress Disco, Barbecue and Charity Beetle Drive. She was officially titled ‘Community Correspondent’, but known amongst her colleagues as ‘Our Man at the W.I.’.

Today she was scheduled to be reporting on the long term affects of a burst water main outside the Wilton sub-post office. The leak had been cleared up over a week ago and as far as she was aware, the only long term affects had been felt by a cardboard box-full of Reader’s Digest ‘You may already have won…..’ cards. Still, it was an assignment and it didn’t pay to argue with the editor. It would get her name in the paper and if all else failed she could always make something up. Perhaps if she tried really hard, she would be able to find a water damaged water bill…

Not to be. The Tribune’s senior leader writer had been taken ill with something that the whole staff sincerely hoped would be fatal and a replacement had to be found to cover the annual Society Bash. Carol was to hand when the Editor went ballistic and was duly despatched, party frocked and coiffured, to the local conference centre.

It was a nightmare. Wall-to-wall swank… and swankers. A room full of the kind of people that only ever get to fill a room of this kind. Carol stood, spiral bound notebook and pencil in hand, and watched as the dinner suits and sequined frocks wafted by: all designer-label mating-plumage, silicon-breasted, botoxed and lipo’d, carved and padded, a room full of semi-clothed and penguin-suited egos and shoulder chips. A human menagerie, doused in expensive perfume and naked ambition, smelling of pride and envy, jealousy and impotent rage.

She had tried to get a ‘star’ interview. She had tried to get any interview. She had tried to get some inside information from the caterers, from the waiters, from the bar staff, from the cat….. It was impossible; no-one willing to talk to a reporter wearing a borrowed frock and less-than-expensive perfume. No-one willing to talk to a woman who was asking questions that didn’t appear on the crib-sheet. No-one willing to talk to a woman who was ever-so-slightly tipsy…

She yearned for her long-since burst water main and its all-too-difficult-to-find water damage. She began to crave her W.I. meetings, lukewarm tea and soggy biscuits, interminable lectures, dried flower arrangements and crocheted blankets. She began to ache for the company of people in pleated dresses, high-necked woollies and sensible shoes. She began to long for gin and tonic. A very large gin and tonic, with very little tonic…

Then salvation arrived. It was in a face she knew. It was wearing an expensive dinner jacket of immaculate fit. It was looking cool and comfortable in a silken shirt and bow tie. It was tall, slightly ungainly, but none-the-less relaxed and at home in these opulent surroundings. Damien West, the most eligible boy in the whole class of ’99 strode easily through the gathered throng towards her.

“Carol… It is you, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” she said, aware of the banality of her answer and desperately eager for the floor to swallow her up. He laughed. He laughed! Joy of joys, he laughed. She wanted to laugh too, but embarrassment led her to try and hide it and, in doing so, she merely succeeded in contorting her face into some kind of grotesque halloween mask. She feared she might be dribbling. “Save me, God. Please save me…” And then she remembered that he had crossed the room to come to her. Of all the people in the room, he had come to her. And he’d remembered her name.
“So, what are you doing at this boring old lot?” he asked. He sounded friendly, he sounded interested and Carol felt closer to heaven than she thought she had ever been.
She took a deep breath, determined to speak without stumbling over her words. She looked up into the crystal blue eyes and knew that it wouldn’t be possible. “I just, that is I… I work for a newspaper. I have to cover this… I have to get, that is, I have to try to get some interviews. I haven’t done very well up to now. Nobody wants to talk to a nobody. I might have had a glass or two of wine…”
“You could interview me,” he said before leaning in and whispering conspiratorially into her ear “I don’t blame you, I don’t think anyone can make it through one of these evenings sober.”

Carol studied his face. He meant it, he really meant it. She smiled in gratitude, hoping that it didn’t look too much like a gloat. And then she noticed for the first time the elegant woman at his side. Her blonde hair was expensively styled, her clothes had obviously been designed especially for her, her perfume was intoxicating. She was every inch the professional woman, every man’s dream and every fibre with Damien. She leaned towards him and whispered into his ear before slipping away into the crowd. He smiled and nodded before turning back to Carol. “Do you know, at school, I used to loiter around the corridors, waiting for you to come along, hoping I would be able to speak to you, but you seldom came my way. When you did, I could never think of anything to say.”
“I was hanging around some other corridor, waiting for you. I could never speak to you either.”
“It’s strange,” he said. “When you look back, things could have been so different.”
“Would you have wanted them to be?”
“Not everything, for sure, but you always wonder, don’t you. ‘What if’s’.” His colleague/agent/companion/partner/wife (bitch, bitch, bitch!) appeared carrying champagne. She handed a glass to Carol and one to Damien before taking up station once more at his side.

Carol coughed her thanks and stared hopelessly from her notebook to the floor, to Damien and his tall and perfectly proportioned odalisque and then back to Damien, who was looking at her expectantly. She took her cue.
“You’re a famous person these days. A well-known and respected author. Is there any facet of your fame that you find difficult to handle?” An obvious, but sensible attempt to get the interview back onto some sort of professional footing.
“Evenings like this,” he said. “Usually…”
“…I used to stand in the trees, you know, watching you playing football,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Well, I know that you used to stand in the trees. I presumed you were watching somebody else.”
She laughed, more loudly than she should have. “Half the Sixth Form was in those trees,” she looked down.
“I didn’t realise teenage girls had a ‘thing’ about uncoordinated boys with gangly limbs and knobbly knees.” Embarrassment flashed across Damien’s face. He turned to his companion who smiled benignly, like a mother. Suitably assured he turned back to face Carol and she realised she had shocked him. Oh God, she didn’t want to blow it now. She had to get a decent interview. “I’m sorry.” She was stammering again.
“Don’t be,” he said. “It’s erhm… flattering, I guess.”

Carol coughed, nervous and excited. “Did you… Have you based any of your characters on people that you have known?” She was trying again, to get the interview back on track, but at the same time, she couldn’t help but fish.
“No.” His answer was definite and a profound disappointment. “But you’ll be in my next book, I promise.”
“The villain?”
“The love interest.”

He smiled. She swallowed and felt her whole body flush red. In her mind, they were now alone, the crowds around them ethereal, insubstantial. For reasons she did not understand she was overcome by anger and hunger and injustice and need… mostly need.

“You must have known how I felt about you then, but I suppose I was just one of many. Besides…” she was becoming indiscreet and she knew it. The couple of glasses of wine were actually many and they had been washed down with an equal number of gins. They had fortified her resolve, galvanised and empowered her ragged self-belief and honed her indignation into a dagger. Carol Massingham felt herself rising. She prickled with resentment and exhilaration. “…You had someone special, don’t you remember? The skinny redhead from the fourth form. She had the most awful buck teeth. She wouldn’t leave you alone, stuck to you like glue she did. You must remember. I wonder what ever happened to her?”

“I got myself a dentist,” said the goddess at Damien’s side. “Put some weight on; dyed my hair…”

First Published 12.09.20

It’s a hoary old joke I know, but I quite like the telling…