Blue
Bridport Prize 2024 - Short Story 'Highly Commended'
Happy Christmas! A detour from all things Thinkery, and as mentioned in the previous newsletter, here is my short story ‘Blue.’ It won’t bring you much in the way of festive cheer (sorry!)…
I shut off the gas, take in the A-board and take an extra turn around the trailer to check the locks. I shout ‘sorry mate, I’m done for the day’ to a slowing Range Rover and receive one horn pip and two fingers.
Fuck’s sake.
I head for home with the day’s bloated, stinking binbags wobbling and farting in the back of my ’00 reg Fiat. A lawnmower with a roof if there ever was one.
Home is filled with identical women. They are engrossed in a ritual that involves powder blue balloons and powder blue bags spewing powder blue tat. Irritability grates away at whatever is left of my energy levels. A loaded version of Chinese whispers follows me as I run the gauntlet of fake tan and terrible eyebrows, through the living room and into the kitchen. My girlfriend is leaning against the chipped laminate worktop. She is wearing grey marl joggers, pink fluffy slippers with unicorn horns and a white crop top that declares the wearer to be ‘sorry not sorry’ in silver glitter. Behind her there is an A3 poster that says ‘but first, coffee’ in passive aggressive swirls.
Every room of my tatty one-bed flat has been branded with demands. The bathroom tells us to ‘relax’ and the bedroom tells us to ‘rest’. When I suggested we replace them with ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ I got told to grow up, babes.
‘Oh. You’re back.’
Her eyes are downcast, taking in her fluffy unicorns. She sounds a bit pissed off. I passed pissed off somewhere on the A66 and am now heading towards rock bottom.
‘How long are they going to be here?’
I jab a thumb back at the balloons and tittering.
‘It’s my cousin’s baby shower.’
That wasn’t what I asked.
She brushes past me to re-join her herd, throwing ‘I thought we’d talked about your beard, babes’ over her shoulder as a verbal hand grenade. It detonates on impact because I’m exhausted, I stink of fried things and I’ve been flipped off by a vacuous knob driving a Range Rover. I snap at her messy bun.
‘You mean you talked, while I tried to watch the telly.’
The messy bun turns and I notice that she has, at some recent point in time, been crying. I feel I have to say ‘what’s the matter’ even though my current emotional location is a fair few miles away from giving a shit. So I do, and she promptly produces a fresh fountain of tears. Great.
‘Don’t you ever think about what I want?’
‘Fuck’s sake. It’s just a beard.’
‘It’s not just the beard though… is it?
She sniffs and snots and mascara drips down her face. Without makeup, she is beautiful. I shrug.
‘I dunno. I honestly don’t know what the fuck you’re on about.’
‘Oh babes…’ She tries on a simpering smile, moves towards me, her hands held out in an imploring gesture. I think she wants to kiss me and I flinch. I don’t think this is working. ‘I want a baby. With you, babes. I can’t keep waiting…’
We have been together for eight months. She is 22, I’m 24. Waiting is an option.
I take a step back.
‘Jesus, you’re not still on about that are you? It’s a person, not a baby. The baby bit lasts five fucking minutes. We can hardly pay the bills as it is.’ The coven of gossipers has fallen quiet. They will be frozen with their heads tilted towards the kitchen, and at least one phone will be capturing the audio for a we-told-you-so What’s App group. Flippancy kicks in as a self-harming defence mechanism. ‘And what if it’s born with a beard.’
The living room gasps at about the same time a pink slipper-shaped unicorn hits me in the face.
Getting to the apology stage was a long haul. But by the time evening rolled around we had agreed I didn’t need to find bedding for the sofa. I take a shower to scour stale fat out of my pores. The beard is still full of soapy suds when the electric meter runs out.
***
I kick a pizza box under the hedge and squidge the A-board over last night’s condoms. Is this a dogging spot now.
Fuck’s sake.
I force myself into work mode. My muscles go through the motions. My soul says look at you and your shitty shoebox flat. Your shitty lawnmower car. Your short showers and your shortcomings. Time develops the consistency of wet cement.
Long hours hold even longer minutes.
On more than one occasion my elbows thudded into the dinted stainless counter as my head sank into my hands. My red oily fingers ploughing furrows through my hair, my body aching with the pointlessness of everything.
Amidst the state of despair, the usual customers come and go. Salesmen - silver tongues wearing well-cut suits driving German cars. Truckdrivers grateful for a calorific bap of grease. At about 2pm I text my girlfriend six hot dog emojis and the sweaty face emoji. As my phone sprinkles me with alternating pink and white love hearts, a rusting LWB Transit heaves itself into the layby.
Its windows are draped in swaying, faded mandala fabric and a comical stove pipe sticks up proudly from the roof. The van stops with an exhausted judder, the driver’s door creaks open, a female figure uncurls itself from behind the wheel and heads my way. A lope, rather than a walk. My kneejerk appraisal is Mother Nature on crack, but as she gets nearer, I can sense a warm energy that would perhaps be lacking in a cocaine snorting deity. She’s wearing a sheepskin coat that looks twice as old as I am. A deerstalker pinning down curling strands of greying hair. A long skirt and thick boots.
She places a pound coin on the counter.
‘Just a tea, luv. Black. Usually make my own but I’m out of gas.’
‘Annoying when that happens, eh.’
For some reason I need her to know that I too, understand this dilemma, and that we are in some way alike. I pluck a cup from an unbiodegradable stack of empties. Chuck in a teabag, fill it from the water urn.
‘May I?’
The woman holds up a pack of tobacco and a box of filters. Clinging to her is an aroma similar to the shop in town that sells all that hippy shit.
‘Sure.’ My 4/5 hygiene rating sticker catches my eye and I add. ’Just maybe not, you know, near the…’ I point at the processed meats, spitting and bubbling in their pools of watery fat. ‘…food.’
She says no worries with no conviction, cradles a rolling paper between her fingers and thumb. Sprinkles in some tobacco. Rolls a neat cigarette with one hand. I slide the tea over to her. The polystyrene cup is sweating beads of condensation on the inside. The liquid is about as black as my 3am thought processes.
I nod towards the van.
‘How do you do that then? I mean, live like that?’
She looks at me.
‘You buy a van.’ She takes a silver lighter from her pocket, her greeny brown eyes nudged into a teasing glint by the laughter lines below. ‘Then you live in it.’
‘Yeah, but… how?’
She holds her newly formed rollie between nicotine-stained digits. Her nails look a little dirty. She gestures at my trailer in a manner reminiscent of Captain Jack Sparrow. Or Keith Richards. If they weren’t men.
‘This yours?’
The free-flowing hands reach her face and her lips close on the cigarette.
‘Yes.’ And then, oversharing like a total idiot. ‘My mum helped a bit. I still haven’t paid her back.’
She takes the roll-up out of her mouth, and she meets my eye. The gender fluid Keith Sparrow mannerisms start again.
‘Sell this. Square up with your mother. Buy a van.’
‘It’s not worth that much.’
It really isn’t.
‘Buy a cheap van.’
The cigarette goes back between her lips. She angles herself away from the trailer, dipping her head as the lighter clicks. For a brief moment I can see the top of the deer stalker. It has bits of dried grass stuck in the fluffy bits.
I rest my forearms on the counter and lean towards her.
‘Then what?’
I’m all childlike questions and simplistic body language. I’m Peppa Pig asking Grandpa Pig why the sky is blue. She frowns, a little, but her eyes still have a grin in them. The glowing roll-up stays in place and it wobbles with her words. The lighter hand continues to live the life of a pirating guitar god(dess).
‘Then you live in the van.’
I nod. Impatiently, perhaps. Yes, yes. But.
‘But what about money, and all that stuff?’
‘You can cook, can’t you?’
I glance to my left. An artery clogging tryptic of thin buns, neon margarine and tepid burgers. I look back with a shrug.
‘Sure.’
‘There you go then.’
As if we’ve just combed through a five-year business plan.
Maybe we just have.
***
The next few weeks pass like skid marks.
An infinity loop of arguments, silences, make-up sex.
WeBuy(almost)AnyCar.com didn’t have much to say about the Fiat, but the catering trailer was gaining traction on eBay. I dove deep into eBay > Campervans & Motorhomes > campervan conversions, resurfacing when required to buy apology flowers from Tesco Express.
The day Buy It Now was clicked by DelBoy66, I emailed PixieUnderTheStars about their ’02 reg self-build some work needed. I arranged a date and time for both.
I bought two mandala wall hangings from the hippy shop and hid them in my underpants drawer.
***
The trailer shines full asking price in a fresh coating of raindrops.
I should have done a more thorough stock take. In my desperate enthusiasm I appear to be gifting hundreds of pounds worth of everything included. Industrial quantities of salty sachets, thousands of tomato ketchup slugs. Squeaking polystyrene tentacles surrounding stacks of single use plastic. So many forks. DelBoy66 is getting a better deal than I thought he was.
Fuck’s sake.
I squirrel a catering pack of teabags and most of the sugars into the boot of the Fiat.
The time is 3.47pm. We had agreed on 4pm. I was to watch out for a maroon 4x4 pick-up.
My phone vibrates in my hands. A message preview pops up. It’s the girlfriend. ‘We need to talk, babes.’ Alternating blue and pink heart emojis. Four kisses. I shove the phone in my back pocket. Not now. Later. After.
My arse buzzes again, and again. Then it starts ringing. At first, I try to ignore it, but it could be my buyer. Stuck in traffic or landed in the wrong layby. I glance at the notifications. Five text messages, two missed calls and one voicemail, all from the girlfriend. I delete the voicemail because I never listen to them and swipe through the texts.
Hearts, kisses and niceties fade from the messages fairly early on. Call me babes, babes where r u, wtf call me, u bastard, fuck u. I squint at the screen, puzzled and prickly. Is there a way to retrieve deleted voicemails.
The sound of gravel being scrunched by a maroon 4x4 pick-up is quick to divert my attention. Whatever it is, it can wait. I raise a hand in greeting and a shadowy figure proffers me the classic finger-leaves-steering-wheel salutation in return.
The truck growls to a halt, sidelights left to illuminate the diagonal slashes of deteriorating weather, idling engine left to grumble. Del Boy walks towards me through the greying day - a bulky man gripping a bulky envelope, both dotting with rain. My skin tightens, my heart pounds faster and I can feel damp patches spreading under my arms.
Goodbye greasy everything.
Hello mandala wall hangings.
My phone burps forth another notification
Fuck’s sake.
I open the message.
A photo this time.
Two blue
lines
.
© Linnhe Harrison 2024
Loved this, Linnhe. Congratulations on your award! 🥂🥂💜