First Prize
All The Things I Have Never Done, by Jaime Gill, Cambodia
Santa is For Life and Not Just For Christmas, by Richard Hooton, Lancashire, UKT
he thee stories will soon be added below! Enjoy!
Another Parting by Cath Saincliffe, Manchester, UK
All The Things I Have Never Done, by Jaime Gill, Cambodia
Santa Is For Life and Not Just for Christmas, by Richard Hooton, Lancashire, UK
Another Parting, by Cath Staincliffe, Manchester, UK
No Place Life Home, by Jaime Gill, Cambodia
The Wall by Ann Tudor, St Mary's Isles of Scilly
The Bet by Wendy Hood, Tyne & Wear, UK
All The Things I Have Never Done, by Jaime Gill, Cambodia
Santa Is For Life and Not Just for Christmas, by Richard Hooton, Lancashire, UK
Another Parting, by Cath Staincliffe, Manchester, UK
No Place Life Home, by Jaime Gill, Cambodia
The Wall by Ann Tudor, St Mary's Isles of Scilly
The Bet by Wendy Hood, Tyne & Wear, UK
The Other Mrs Roberts, by Gill James, Lancashire UK
The Seven Swans, by Rebecca Hurst, Bristol, UK
Walking Backwards Off the Pier, by Sue Smith, Poole, Dorset, UK
Countdown to Midnight, by Dianne Bown-Wilson, Exeter, UK
Today, I’ll do two things I’ve never done before: welcome a man into my home, and serve him a meal I’ve cooked.
It’s all a terrible, terrible mistake.
Not just inviting Patrick for dinner, though my day’s been dogged by a growing certainty I’ve got things wrong and tonight will end in awkwardness or humiliation. Mostly that, yes, but also the meal itself.
I can’t cook and don’t much care about food. For me, it’s a necessary inconvenience. Since leaving my family home in Northumberland and moving across the country to Manchester, I’ve subsisted almost entirely on toast, jam, and tinned sausages. What possessed me to invite this stranger for dinner?
Oscar Wilde’s ghost, perhaps.
***
It all started when I discovered “The Picture of Dorian Gray” nestled among a small pile of library books I was stamping out. I glanced up to see who’d chosen this illicit treasure, expecting some subversive literature student, and was startled by the man’s height and handsome, oddly lupine face. Too old to be studying, by a few years, I guessed. He noticed my expression and turned his face towards mine with a smile which made me drop my gaze instantly.
“I hope you enjoy your read,” I said as I handed him his book, something I always do, though this time I instantly worried it might be misinterpreted.
“Oh, I’ve read it before. But I always find Wilde worth spending more time with. Don’t you?”
I nodded a sort of businesslike agreement, but didn’t meet his eyes.
A week later, he set down Woolf’s “Orlando” on my desk, that intoxicatingly strange tale of a man becoming a woman. I stamped it and again looked up. This time he was staring right at me, smile so wide and warm I wanted to live in it.
“Is this one any good?”
“I – I don’t know. I’ve never read it.” My blush betrayed the lie, but I was terrified this was some trick or trap. He was too ordinary to be a homosexual, surely. Not that I’d ever met one, myself excepted. He opened his mouth to say something but I pretended to remember an urgent task that required my attention in the book stacks behind me. When I turned, he was mercifully gone, though I later worried about my rudeness. I hadn’t told him to enjoy his read.
Five days later, James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” slid onto my desk and a tiny, localised earthquake struck beneath my chair.
“This isn’t ours,” I stammered. I’d read of the furore this tale of tragic homosexual love had triggered in America, but that was a different, brasher country than ours. The idea of it being published in Britain, even now in 1956, seemed shocking and improbable.
“This is my own personal copy, actually, I bought it in London. I thought you’d be interested and we could discuss it some time.”
I’ll never understand what happened next. His kind eyes made me feel - just for one moment - safe. “Oh. Okay. Yes. Let’s. Over… dinner?” I pictured two men dining together in public and could barely breathe. “At… my place?”
“How wonderful.”
I scribbled my address with fumbling fingers.
“Perhaps I should have your name, too?” he said as I handed him the scrap of paper. “Mine’s Patrick. I work at Barclays. The bank, the one on Market Street.”
“Yes, right, hello. I’m Alistair. I work…” I glanced at the books all around me, and laughed at my absurdity. Mrs. Peterson, one of our most regular borrowers, shot a disapproving look from the romance aisle she usually haunts. For the forbidden noise, I hoped.
Patrick held out his hand and I rose and shook it. He delivered a perfectly ordinary, perfectly firm handshake, and then nodded as if a business deal had been satisfactorily agreed. He left the library with a brisk, springy step.
My brief sense of safety walked out with him, leaving me aghast at the risk I’d taken. I remembered that lecturer at the university, the science boffin said to have done something important during the War. There were whispers about an arrest, that he’d been caught in a compromising situation with a man. I’d wondered if the police had entrapped him somehow, but how could you find out such a thing without declaring your own guilt? The lecturer died soon after that, two years ago. There’d been local rumours that he’d taken his own life.
In comparison to that fate, my non-existent culinary skills were a minor worry - but consumed me nonetheless. I borrowed a cookbook from the library but at home realised it must have been written before the War. All of its recommended dishes were full of exotically rare ingredients and required an oven I didn’t possess.
I went on a miserable trip to the grocer’s and the butcher’s, trying to find anything reasonably fresh I could conjure a meal out of. Rationing had ended last year, a full decade after the Reich’s demise, but scarcity still reigned supreme in the shops. I returned home with a depressing haul of carrots, pork chops and eggs.
***
I’m chopping when the doorbell chimes. We never heard air-raid sirens in Northumberland, but they surely couldn’t have alarmed me more.
As I unlatch the door, I imagine him waiting in police uniform, accompanied by a smirking colleague. Silly, even I know that. Cooking for a man isn’t a crime.
He’s standing alone, wearing a freshly pressed white shirt and that smile.
I apologise for my poky flat and he says his isn’t much better. I suspect this is a kind lie. A banker’s salary can surely stretch to more than a one bedroom on Whalley Range.
“I’m just finishing the dinner,” I say with a confidence no atom in my body feels. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Leaving him in a worn armchair in my living room, I glance back and realise he’s the only beautiful thing I’ve ever had in my home. There are beautiful worlds inside my books, certainly, but this man is real and he is here.
In the kitchen I start boiling the carrots, ease the chops into a simmering frying pan, and crack eggs to make my first ever omelette. All the time, I fret about what Patrick is doing. I hope he’s looking at my bookshelves and not the dull paintings my mother insisted I bring to Manchester with me, under the misguided belief these cloying watercolours of fox hunts and fly fishing might brighten my life or – perhaps - impress women.
I beat the eggs competently enough, but the butter must be too hot and I smell burning within moments of pouring. I try flipping the omelette but it disintegrates.
My moan must be audible because Patrick calls, “Is everything okay?” Oh, these thin walls!
“Yes,” I squeak, as the boiling pan froths orange, and - nightmarishly, simultaneously - the chops begin burning. I grab the pan to move it but it’s scalding and my hand jerks away, knocking the cooking oil so that it splashes across the stove. Flames leap in a roar like judgement. You’re a fool, they gloat.
And then he’s here with me, throwing a tea towel over the burning pans. The fire fades and dies as he calmly dials the gas off. He pulls away the browned tea towel like a magician, revealing a tableau of disaster. The chops are charred, the eggs blackened wreckage. I reach for the spatula, hoping to somehow salvage something, but he places his hand over mine - stopping me, calming me.
Nobody’s touched my hand so gently since I was a child.
“I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but is it possible you’ve never done this before?”
I somehow laugh, a little.
“Well," he says languidly. "I wasn’t in the mood for chops, anyway. Do you know what I hanker for? Bread and butter. Don't suppose you have any?”
We sit in the armchairs, chewing on our pauper’s supper. We talk politely about what brought us to Manchester. He was old enough to serve in that final year of the War, but says he’d prefer not to discuss it. He found work in Barclays afterwards, in the outer London suburb where he was born, and was then offered a promotion in Manchester. “Dull work, but dull didn’t seem so terrible to me after the War.”
“Wasn’t it difficult to leave your family behind?” Behind my question lies another: are you married?
“Well, we both seem to have left our families behind, carelessly enough. Or perhaps wisely. Actually, my parents and I aren’t close, and they’re very busy with the grandchildren my older brother is producing for them at a prodigious rate. I had nothing tying me down. I still don’t.”
I don’t dare to look at him after he says this, though he looks at me fearlessly: I can feel his eyes on my face. The memory of his hand on mine glows but doesn’t prove anything except kindness.
As we finish the bread and butter, he comments on my collection of Thomas Hardys and asks which I like the best.
“No, you first. What’s yours?”
Does he look briefly embarrassed?
“Well. Terrible to confess, but I haven’t read any. Should I?”
“Maybe the Mayor of Casterbridge? The others do tend to be a little… dramatic. You can borrow my copy.”
I’d like to talk about “Giovanni’s Room”, which I read in a hot-faced tumult over the previous two evenings, but I don’t know how to begin and he doesn’t mention it. Perhaps he’s forgotten that was why we said we would meet.
Perhaps it never meant what I thought he did.
An awkward silence passes over us like rain clouds, as if we’ve both realised at the same time that I have nothing interesting to offer him. I understand now that I’ve harboured another fear about this evening all along, something almost as terrible as embarrassment or humiliation. Disappointment.
Perhaps it’s for the best that we let this evening peter out into polite silence. What future could there be, anyway? We met through Oscar Wilde, after all, and his life reveals the dark, lonely place where these lesser trodden roads lead.
Patrick looks for a moment at the fox hunt painting, his expression slightly puzzled, and I bite back my urge to apologise for it, to apologise for me. He notices me fidget and smiles, brightly and unexpectedly. It’s as though the clouds just surrendered to the sun. And when he speaks I hear cheerful bravado in his voice, as if he too knows fear, but – unlike me - knows how to best it.
“Alistair. Did you know you’re rather handsome when you’re flustered?”
I shake my head. He regards me with a strange, kind sadness.
“Do you know you’re handsome at all?”
No. Nobody has ever said such a thing to me.
“What a terrible shame. We’ll have to do something about that.”
This can only be a dream. This world has never given me much of anything, so it’s impossible it would now hand over everything I’ve longed for, just like that. But if this were a dream, would I still be able to smell lingering smoke from the kitchen?
He pushes his plate aside and steps toward me, hand outstretched. I rise, my fingers shaking in his.
“Can I kiss you?”
Another thing I’ve never done before. So many things I’ve never done and long ago accepted I would never do. Like they lay at the end of a tunnel that had collapsed, trapping me alone in darkness on the wrong side.
His free hand takes my chin and lifts my face so our eyes meet. The darkness is breached.
Santa Is For Live and Not Just For Christmas, by Richard Hooton
Something was wrong. Will looked across at his mum but Ruth was just staring at a grey building that blended with the slate sky. His older brother, Liam, seemed oblivious, engrossed in his mobile. Ruth had picked them up from school and declared they were going food shopping. But this wasn’t the supermarket with its bright colours, fun trolleys and busy car park.
Huddling inside his duffle coat, hand covering its missing toggle, Will kicked at the snow that had settled around his scuffed school shoes. He’d heard it was going to be a harsh winter. He thought about his mum’s warning, not to get his hopes up: there might not be many presents this Christmas. The empty feeling returned to his stomach. He hadn’t done anything wrong.
‘Santa will come,’ Will had said.
Liam had scowled. ‘No such thing as Santa, stoopid.’
Will realised there was something about going to secondary school that had made his lean and lanky brother grow meaner. He crouched down and tried to scoop enough flakes to make a snowball, but it was all slushy, not the sort that would stick together and create something impressive. He threw the slop anyway. It splattered against Liam’s arm.
‘Hey, pack it in!’ Liam glared. ‘Mum, he’s throwing crap at me.’
‘Boys, behave.’ Ruth grabbed each child’s hand and drew a deep breath of icy air. ‘Come on.’
She marched them to the door of the grey building and let them push it open. They followed her inside.
Will lingered in the doorway, duffle coat swamping his skinny frame. Hesitantly, Ruth approached a counter. Behind it was a woman even older than Will’s gran, wearing a green apron as if she was a dinner lady. Liam loitered in a corner, attention snared again by his phone. Will looked around. One flickering strip light. A concrete floor. Stark white walls. Pushed against them were metal shelves that reminded him of the Meccano his granddad had convinced him was better than Lego, all nuts and bolts holding everything together rather than sleek interlocking bricks. Much stronger this way, Gramps had said. The shelves were loaded with tins, packets and cereal boxes, but it wasn’t like any shop Will had ever been in. No price stickers or special offers. Just plain and dull. It smelled earthy, like sawdust and Brussels sprouts. Still, it was warmer than outside.
Ruth was gabbing away to the old woman. She gave her what seemed to be a voucher. In return, the stranger handed over some plastic bags full of shopping, then glanced at Will.
‘You can come in, sweetheart.’ A genial smile lit her face. ‘I don’t bite.’
Will hopped, skipped and jumped to Ruth’s side.
‘Here, I’ve something for you.’ The woman pulled a small bag of sweets from the apron’s pouch. ‘Make sure you share them with your brother.’
Will almost snatched them from her.
‘What do you say?’ Ruth pursed her lips, eyebrows raised.
‘Ta,’ said Will, ripping the packet open and placing a cola bottle on his tongue, tasting the fizzy sweetness.
‘Thanks ever so much.’ Redness rose in Ruth’s cheeks, contrasting with her pale face. ‘You’re a saviour.’
‘It’s a pleasure, love. We’re here to help.’
Will returned the woman’s wave as he chewed on a sour worm.
They left the building. Outside, a man with a television camera on his shoulder was standing beside a dark van with a young woman in a thick coat.
‘Excuse me.’ The woman stepped across Ruth’s path. ‘We’re doing a piece for the local news on the cost-of-living crisis. We’ll be filming the Foodbank volunteers but it would be fantastic to get the views of people using it too.’
Ruth’s mouth dropped open but no words emerged. Will could see panic crawling into her eyes. What was it she always said? Why can’t I ever just say no?
‘It would be a huge help to speak to you about it.’ The woman flashed a toothsome smile. Her perfume made the air smell flowery.
The cameraman sidestepped, one hand twisting the lens to zoom in.
Ruth nodded, though the colour had now drained from her cheeks.
‘Fabulous. Let’s get your lovely boys in too. Everyone together.’
Will found himself ushered to his mum’s left, his brother to her right. Liam’s head drooped. A curtain of hair shielded his face.
The woman hovered a furry microphone below Ruth’s chin. ‘So, how long have you been using the Foodbank?’
‘Er, this is the first time.’ Ruth grimaced though Will wasn’t sure why. Maybe the bags she was clutching so tightly were heavy and he should offer to hold one. He’d suggest it once the lady had finished.
‘And what’s your situation? What brought you here?’ She uttered the word situation as though it was as delicate as the snow turning to slush around them.
Ruth stared down the black hole of the camera’s lens. She swallowed hard. ‘I do work. I’m a carer. I visit people with disabilities when the boys are at school. It’s just, after paying for all the diesel and what with the gas and electricity going up along with everything else, it’s been a bit of a struggle recently.’
The woman’s bright red lips scrunched into a pout. She looked down at Liam. Liam’s gaze remained fixed on the ground. She looked at Will and thrust the microphone towards him.
‘And how does it affect you?’
Will looked up, petrol blue eyes wide. ‘I worry about the bills.’ He thought about his mum’s expression whenever those brown envelopes hit the doormat. ‘When I’m bigger, I’ll get a job to help pay for them.’
‘Oh.’ The woman seemed stuck for something to say.
‘I don’t want him to worry about things like that,’ interjected Ruth. ‘He shouldn’t have to.’
‘How will Christmas be?’ The woman had found her voice, though it was tentative.
‘Difficult.’ Ruth’s face curdled.
‘I’m not expecting much,’ added Will. ‘Not even from Santa.’
Ruth stroked his mop of mousy hair. He could feel hope evaporating like the snow on the ground.
***
Will’s knife scraped his plate as he cut into his beans on toast. He shovelled a forkful into his mouth, saccharine tomato sauce coursing his chin. Ruth was sitting opposite at the dining table in the cramped kitchen, hunched over Will’s school trousers, the flash of her silver needle and black thread magically stitching the cotton ripped at the knee back together. Her telling off still rang in Will’s ears: he should be more careful, they couldn’t afford a new pair.
Will finished the piece of toast and prepared to devour a second slice. Then he stopped, realising he hadn’t seen his mum have any tea. He put his knife and fork down, then pushed the plate towards Ruth. ‘I’m full,’ he said. ‘Don’t want any more.’
Ruth tied a tight knot at the end of the thread, held the trousers up and gave a nod of approval at her handiwork. She folded them neatly and draped them over the back of a plastic chair before looking at the chipped plate where a piece of lightly-browned toast lay smothered under a layer of syrupy beans.
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah. You finish it.’
Will pulled his Christmas list and a pencil from his pocket. The shimmering fairy lights and colourful decorations adorning houses on the journey home had given him renewed hope. Maybe this was the year that Santa delivered that bike after all. Or a PlayStation. Or some games they could all play together.
Ruth polished off the food.
‘Love,’ she said. ‘You know you won’t be getting much.’
‘I can still write a list to Santa.’ Will crossed out the bike. And the PlayStation. His stomach rumbled. He wrote down chocolate in his best handwriting.
Ruth turned the TV on. Will glanced up but it was just the news. ‘Boring.’
‘We might be on.’ Ruth put the empty plate in the sink. ‘Though I hope not.’
It was just dreary people droning on about politics. Then Will saw a building he now recognised and the kind woman in the green apron explaining how she divided donations into packages that would feed a family for three days. He yelped as he saw himself, his mum and his brother.
‘God, I look awful.’ Ruth covered her eyes. ‘The camera adds more than ten bloody pounds,’ she muttered. Will didn’t know what she meant. She just looked like … Mum. Though he was pretty sure he was taller than that. The camera panned into a close-up of Will as he spoke about bills.
‘Marvellous.’ Ruth stared at the paint peeling from the kitchen wall. ‘School run’s gonna be great tomorrow.’
*
Will finished his breakfast of chewy cornflakes with a splash of milk. He preferred the ones with the tiger on the packet but hadn’t been allowed them for ages. Still, it was a Saturday, best day of the week. Liam was texting someone. Ruth was finishing her own cornflakes.
Something thudded onto the doormat. Lines striped Ruth’s forehead.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Will.
He picked up the pile of letters. The envelopes weren’t brown, but an array of colours. He handed them to Ruth. She stared at the bundle as if they were alien. Ripping one open, she pulled out a card with a painting on the front of three wise men presenting the baby Jesus with gifts below a large star shining in the night sky.
‘Who’s it from?’ asked Will.
‘Someone we don’t know wishing us Merry Christmas.’
Liam’s head jerked up. ‘Why’s someone we don’t know sending us stuff?’
Ruth opened a second envelope, another biblical scene. Her eyes watered. ‘It says I’m blessed to have two beautiful boys, to hold them close and always remember that.’
‘Uggh.’ Liam pretended to puke.
The third was a letter giving advice about saving money by switching broadband provider or using less electricity or cutting down on non-essentials. From the fourth one a gift card fell out. The fifth had a crisp twenty-pound note inside.
‘Oh!’ Ruth put a hand over her mouth.
A rap on the door. Will rushed to answer it. The postman was in his shorts, despite snow falling around him. He held a stack of boxes. ‘These are for you, too,’ he said.
Will took the snow-flecked packages, thinking it must be Christmas Day.
‘Hang on, there’s more in the van.’
The postman piled more parcels into Will’s arms, then took a photo for proof of delivery. Will felt as if he was a celebrity.
He staggered indoors and dropped them on the kitchen table. Liam joined him in tearing them open like hungry wolves.
‘Careful,’ said Ruth. ‘Let me see who they’re from.’
‘Tracksuits each.’
‘And new trainers.’
Ragged cardboard flew noiseless flights. Paper packaging became confetti strewn across the kitchen.
‘A football.’
‘Handknitted gloves.’
Shrieks. Squeals. Ruth watched with a goldfish expression.
‘Selection boxes.’
‘Board games.’
The brothers leant back, exhausted.
‘They’re from people who saw us on telly.’ Ruth seemed less slumped, lighter. Will wondered if the camera had somehow removed ten pounds from her shoulders. ‘They want us to have a happy Christmas.’
‘Come on.’ Will beckoned his brother. ‘It’s snowing.’
They rushed outside where festive lights twinkled.
‘How’d those people know where we live?’ asked Liam, on their white-blanketed lawn.
‘Santa knows where everyone lives. Told you he’d get us something.’
‘They’re not from Santa though, are they, stoopid? Why are people giving us stuff anyway?’
Will thought long and hard as he scooped a handful of fresh snow, the sort that sticks together satisfyingly. ‘Maybe there’s a little bit of Santa in everyone,’ he said.
He threw the snowball, hitting Liam smack in the face.
He waited for the retaliation. But Liam just brushed it off with a grin. The boys laughed together as they played while their mum watched over them, her smile returning.
Another Parting, by Cath Staincliffe
She sees him arrive, watches him step out of a blue Ford Cortina. She’s looking through the kitchen window at the side of the club while the urn comes back to boil for the first of the teapots.
Her hands grip the edge of the sink, taking in all the ways he is familiar and all the ways he is strange.
Ten years.
He looks taller but his suit, slim and black, probably accounts for that.
His hair is even longer, below his shoulders, dark, glossy. The woman with him is dark haired too and almost his height. Have they travelled up today? Where was it, Coventry or Wolverhampton? Somewhere down there.
She takes the teapot and hot water through to the clubroom and sets them beside the buffet. The platters of sandwiches, sausage rolls, stand pie and quiche Lorraine are covered with white linen cloths. Cups and saucers in muddy green utility crockery at the ready.
She can hear voices from the hall. People shedding coats, visiting the toilets. The first of the funeral party.
‘All set?’ Her mum is behind the bar.
‘Yes. I’ll hop on now?’
Her mum nods.
He doesn’t come to buy drinks himself. She concentrates on pulling pints and opening bottles of Pony and Babycham. Greeting members of his family, neighbours and friends. Listening to the chatter about the service, about the location of the plot at the graveyard and the weather, the rain holding off. And how it’s a blessing really when she had been so poorly.
He is sitting at one of the tables at the far side, opposite the bar, where the large windows give views onto the moors.
The edge of nowhere, she thinks. The day is dull, the sky overcast, with clouds like boulders. The hills a hundred shades of brown. Dun coloured grass and spikes of rusting dock. Here and there a spill of moss, vivid green.
That summer they spent hours up here, hot and giddy. Time snatched from holiday jobs and chores. The prick of grass on her shoulder blades, his hair falling in curtains as he kissed her. The air thick with insects. The rushing of the beck and the burble of songbirds.
He looks across now, straight at her. Tips his head, with a ghost of a smile. Her mouth dries.
She wipes her hands on a bar towel and says to her mum, ‘Shall I do the buffet?’
There’s a pause, the slightest pause, then her mum says, ‘Yes, if you like.’
She brings out the trifle and the gateau from the fridge. She is watching herself perform. Aware of the set of her shoulders, the belt at her waist, the curve of her arm as she plucks cloths from the trays of savouries, piling the fabric over one arm.
Keeping her chin level she walks to his table.
He stands to meet her.
‘Tina.’ He smiles, tremulous.
‘Jed. I’m sorry about your nan.’ The woman who raised him.
‘Thanks.’
She is aware of the table taking in their encounter. His cousins, his wife. Does she know? Has he told her?
‘The buffet is ready. I’ll just bring fresh tea.’
‘Thank you.’ His fist, at his side, is clenched tight, knuckles white.
As she moves away he taps his beer glass with a teaspoon to quieten the room and announces that they are to please help themselves.
She fetches the tea and more water for coffee.
Max Bygraves is replaced by Dusty Springfield, the volume low so people can hear themselves think.
She can smell her own body odour in spite of the roll-on she used first thing.
In the ladies she wets paper towels, adds a daub of soap. She strips off in the cubicle to wash her armpits.
He is still beautiful.
People are laughing, sharing anecdotes, the volume level rising as they relax, as the food and drinks go down.
She takes a turn on the bar while her mum has a break. Then they swap.
Outside she sits on one of the cast iron benches and smokes. Watches the rooks, beaks stabbing at the ground. She feels a fine spot of rain on her cheek, then another.
She twists round at the sound of footsteps.
‘Hello,’ Jed says. ‘Great buffet.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Who should I pay? I’ve a cheque.’
‘My mum ... or I can take it.’
He rummages in his inside jacket pocket, pulls it out.
She takes it, folded.
‘You’re not going to read it?’
‘I trust you.’ She laughs. Then feels stupid. Why? She does trust him. Always did.
‘Got a spare cig?’
‘Sure.’ She hands him the packet.
He sits, uses her lighter to spark up.
‘You’re married,’ she says.
‘Four years.’
‘She looks nice.’
‘Yeah.’ He clears his throat. Then he turns to her. ‘She’s expecting,’ he says. A flash in his eyes. Fear. At the fact of it? Or at how she’ll react?
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Congratulations.’
‘You’ve not …?’
‘Not yet. We’d like to, obviously.’
‘Back then…’ he says. His eyes fill with tears. Her nose waters in response.
‘I know,’ she says quickly. ‘We were too young.’
‘Maybe,’ he says, a break in his voice.
‘We were,’ she says. ‘Kids ourselves.’
She takes a final drag of her cigarette, crushes the tab end underfoot.
‘I would have—’
‘I know. But it was best all round.’ She has to believe this or she would go mad. She wonders who the child favours, but briefly, fleetingly. It’s not something to dwell on.
‘I best get back,’ she says.
‘Look after yourself,’ he says. He sniffs hard.
When they are done and the place cleared and cleaned she takes the rubbish out to the bin.
Her mother locks up.
‘You all right, Tina?’ she says, buttoning up her coat. And her eyes settle on Tina’s, searching.
‘I’m fine, Mum,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine.’