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My Birthdays, My Parents’ Wedding Anniversaries
‘Got to get you into my life!’ sings Mum. She and Dad have brought me, newborn, from the hospital. She sits at the kitchen table, cradling me, delivering the loud lullaby.
Or so she tells me, when I’m seven. We’re at the table again. I say, ‘I was already in your life. In your tummy and then outside it.’
I’m a literal-minded daughter.
‘I know, but it was exciting!’ she says. ‘And that song was in the charts.’
That was September 1966 and Mum was twenty and married for exactly a year.
‘I loved it. The words, the saxophones. So gutsy,’ she says and blurts, ‘Pa-pa-pa-pah, dah dah!’
I try to pick out the tune but can’t.
Mum is always eager about life. This is mysterious. I like circumspection.
‘What else did you sing?’ I know the answer but we’re in our routine now.
‘”All Or Nothing.”’
That is because, I realise when I’m seven, she fancied the singer who has elfin looks like her own and is nearly as pretty.
*
My father has a square face and a nose thickened by breakages. They met at a dance. ‘Your Dad’s a fine dancer, a nifty mover,’ she has told me more than once.
I make a deduction I’m proud of and pipe up, ‘That’s nifty cos of the boxing.’
‘Yep,’ she says.
*
There are photos of Dad in the ring, a welterweight winning amateur matches. Not quite good enough to turn professional. ‘Not keen enough on the hard work,’ Mum says.
*
In our bathroom I talk to Dad while he’s shaving. In his pyjama bottoms and a towel round his neck he leans over the basin.
‘What’s on at school today then?’ he says, lathered jaw twisted.
‘Dancing class.’ I like the rhythms of dancing.
He finishes with the razor, wipes his face with the towel and turns to face me. ‘Dancing,’ he says, and bounces from side to side on the balls of his feet.
I laugh.
*
I’m eight, setting the table while Mum makes cottage pie. Dad will be home soon. I ask Mum why Dad, an electrician, doesn’t work in people’s houses.
‘The money’s better in offices. And he can’t resist the scent of Tippex.’
‘What’s Tippex?’
‘It’s something a typist uses if she hits the wrong key. With a little brush she paints some Tippex over the mistake so it disappears, the paper is white again. It smells like cleaning fluid.’
*
At school, in English class, we learn about metaphor, but only in our set texts. The teacher doesn’t say it’s something you keep learning in real life. Nor, of course, does she tell us how marriages work, what feeds mutual attraction. That would be too personal and too oblique for the school syllabus.
*
I start a habit of reflection, contemplating, for example, Mum’s use of the word ‘nifty.’ My birthdays keep coming round and so does Mum and Dad’s anniversary. They keep marking out their moves and spaces, their dance with each other.
498 words excluding title
The two records were Top 10 hits in September 1966:
I’ve Got to Get You Into My Life, Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSL73EupKHQ
All Or Nothing, The Small Faces
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa6rZjJ43Js
Everything else in the story is fiction
Thanks, Ath. I haven’t read Charlotte’s Web. It sounds rather traumatic and I’m a wimp about animals. Animal Farm was so long ago at school (did we even read the whole thing?) that I was thinking I should read it again. Beasts of England by Adam Biles, a recent version of Animal Farm, was interesting, worth reading.
I hope you’re able to enjoy some books while you’re convalescing!
Hi Ath, this is great good news. What a relief it must be. I hope you’re able to resolve the remaining issues. I hope you can get out and about a bit too, especially now the weather is improving.
Take care.
Heavens, Ath! I’m glad you (and Mrs Ath) are now recovering. Thank you for telling us what you’ve been through. Take care and take it easy.
Congratulations, Terrie! What a wonderful story. Loved it.
Thank you, Janette, for stepping in. Btw does Ath know he doesn’t have to worry about judging?
That’s a great shame. All best wishes to Ath.
How about finding another judge?
Could anyone else reading this be willing to judge the comp? Five delightful entries. Then the winner can set the April comp.
Running
499 words
My sister’s boyfriend dumped her so she booked a day at a willow-weaving workshop – in the countryside, calming and therapeutic. She’d make a sculpture of a hare though she’d never seen one in real life. Ironic, I thought, as she’d never seen herself either.
I admit the dumping had been nasty. Sis waiting to meet the boyf in a pub, trying not to check her phone while people round the bar studied her with quick, and slower, glances. A young woman alone must be waiting for someone, or maybe she’d some other reason for being there that was worth pondering as an accompaniment to a slow pint. Sis’s phone pinged, she read the screen and everyone watched her eyes closing and when she opened them to collect up her bag and jacket, her lower eyelids, which had dammed tears, couldn’t help let them spill as she rose and walked, almost ran, out of the pub.
In the end she told me she couldn’t do the workshop because of some team event at her office and it was too late to get her money back and so she offered the place to me. I thought the workshop sounded woo-woo and full of people doing pseudo therapy. But losing the money, neither of us going, felt like a win for the boyf, Sis forfeiting something because of that idiot and her not seeing what he was really like. Blindness all round. Anyway, no point me wondering if the work excuse was her invention, off I went to deepest Devon, steeply banked lanes and primroses just like the blurb had promised before it added, ‘Bring your mind closer to nature’.
I’d seen a hare once. Thought it was a rabbit.
The workshop was in a barn next to a farmhouse. Coffee, tea and juice on a side table were available all day, and a lunch of bean stew and dumplings and homemade cheesecake was brought over from the house. Everyone seemed normal, not taking the nature side of things too seriously, laughing at their sculptures, willow ends stuck out like a hedgehog or shapes sitting dumpily like overweight dogs. A screen showed a video of a real hare running along a field boundary, haunches strong like a kangaroo’s, the hare stopping for a look round, eyes at the sides of its skull, sited proud of their sockets, seeming able to encompass the full circle of a horizon. Long, perked ears, listening for extraterrestrial activity or just for threats such as wandering humans.
The more I made my sculpture look like a hare, the more I felt like a usurper, trying to absorb the animal’s senses. I went outside for air, walked down the lane. The bank dipped, the hedge on top was half in leaf and through it I saw endless green fields. With strong legs I climbed the bank easily, nipped through a gap in the hedge, leaped away and ran, lured by a portent of disclosure, my real self revealed.
The February comp has drawn a delightful selection of stories.
@jillsted Jill, you do an evocative encapsulation of Isabel’s memories of different kinds of love. Her memories are compelling, a sense of her moving through a full life. The ending has a twist, if I’ve read it correctly, that adds a shiver to the story, a question of whether Lydia’s actions are for love or not. Love’s layers are complex and here’s an intriguing possibility to end on, something for readers to chew over.
@sandradavies Sandra, this multi-stranded story is also intriguing. You show well the surprise that can come from discovering who people have chosen to marry, and how observers and friends do a review of what they’ve known so far. I liked the atmosphere of a windy wedding day. The story is some way over the word limit so I can’t in conscience treat it equally with the other entries, but I do thank you for posting it. The taking part is as important as the winning, as is providing us all with an interesting story to read. This is an especially busy time of year with the Challenge happening too, so thank you for this entry.
@athelstone Ath, a Teabreak story is always a pleasure. This one has touching indications of his childhood, his character and the delight of maybe first love or something early anyway. Brina’s comment at the end is suggestive of all sorts of scenarios to come, possibly of young heartbreak or at least of growing up. You’ve captured a lot in a short time. A satisfying story.Ath, over to you for March.
Amid the excitement of the annual Den Challenge there’s also the February monthly comp!! A reminder that there are two days left to enter. Max of 400 words on the theme of love.
A reminder of the monthly comp, as we’re over half way through February already.
Here’s the original post:
As it’s February the theme this month is love. It needn’t be romantic. It can be of any sort – for a place, a piece of music, an animal – whatever you like that that provokes a feeling of love.
Max 400 words, deadline midnight Saturday 28th February.
Thank you, Terrie. That’s a lovely surprise! Thank you, Jill and Sandra too. The thrill of a new baby from Jill, with other newnesses too. And Sandra – creative writing books are such a mixed bag. I’m glad you have one which is properly helpful.
I’ll post the February comp later.
500 words
Jim’s ballet exercises weren’t about dancing, they were about muscle fitness, until he was bent over, clutching the Aga rail which was his barre, and the shooting pains in his back were a quiversful of landed arrows. Gasping for breath he thought of that painting of St Sebastian, a dreary affair in his view, inspirational of nothing. But, ha! Sceptics’ revenge, his only view now was downwards to old baggy trousers, feet in thick wellie socks, and a circle of floor. Jessie his dog walked over to add to the small selection of sights.
‘No fool like an old fool, Jess,’ he said to her cocked head and keen blue eyes.
It had started as a new-year resolution to unstiffen his body, the YouTube videos of a ballerina, basic steps she’d said, and him ready to believe, never mind her looking about eighteen with the suppleness to match. Bodies were the same underneath and him being heavy and solid was proof of strength. The years spent wrestling with stubborn sheep, which activity needed many pushes and pulls, which were surely good. Lifting of hay and straw bales: muscle building. Walks over hilly fields: cardiovascular health. But for a while everything had been slower and the getting on and off the quad bike stiffer, especially in the winter cold. Meanwhile, Jess jumped into the back of the bike and leapt out again when sheep needed gathering. Low to the ground she went, stealthy, slinking, beauty in motion.
At the Aga he pushed the tea-towels and oven mitts aside, curled calloused hands into a good grip and summoned the old work-ethic, but for different reasons. The tasks: get to the kitchen table to sit down, but first stand up straight.
Another load of arrows. Or electrical shocks. Down he went, bent over again, forced to it, showing Jess a cruel mimicry of the movement copied from the ballerina. It had started well. He’d stood in first position, heels together, feet Charlie Chaplin, one hand on the rail. Bend forward first with a with a straight back, said the girl, weight going through your toes. Now curve your back downwards. Her free arm had swept widely and elegantly to the floor, like a bloke bowing at some old-fashioned dance.
Doubled over, Jim shuffled to the table while the dancer still sent out instructions. His wife found him a while later, the video thankfully finished. She listened to the tale.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s look at the NHS website.’
What heaviness of mortality was held in those words.
During the next few days he recovered while his wife and neighbours looked after the sheep, and he promised not to try ballet again. From the house he looked across the farmyard, where the cat was sunning himself on the wall in the first hint of warmth January had given. The cat stretched its back, tail up. Jess often did that too. You could learn things from animals. Jim imagined himself on all fours, spine stretched.
Thank you, Terrie! And congratulations on a truly creepy story, Ath. And Jill for a heart-warming, magical tale – exactly right for the time of year.
You asked for a heart-warming tale, Terrie, but my story, after I started it and got stuck, became the opposite. You’re welcome to disqualify it or not read it at all.
Content warning: includes postnatal depression
499 words including title
I Lied When I Said My Daughter Lived Abroad
After that walk up and down a steep crag, I sat beside the fire and stretched my legs. The hotel’s luxurious warmth soothed my aching calves. A glass of mulled wine, passed to me by another woman in our party, diluted some of the lingering discomfort of my mind.
Darkness fell outside and someone said, ‘It’s time for a story or two.’
Others in our little group laughed but no storyteller came forth. I kept a straight face – a mistake.
‘There’s something in your mind,’ one of the men said. ‘Go on, tell us.’
There seemed no harm in saying that I’d been thinking of my daughter, whose favourite places included a Scottish crag or several. I told them how we used to walk together.
‘Used to?’ I was asked. ‘And now?’
That’s when I lied, adding, ‘We don’t see each other often. I’ve no fireside tales, I’m afraid.’
The conversation moved elsewhere.
During our group’s walk a north-westerly wind had bitten at my lungs. During our descent from the crag, small boggy pools at its base had shone black and glassy like mementoes of cold, deep loch water.
In the hotel I must have appeared wrapped in reminiscence, because no one interrupted while I gazed into the fire. My daughter and her husband had lived in a pretty cottage beside a Scottish loch, where sunshine often lit the south-facing house. But on my visits I’d found the surroundings gloomy. Beside the loch, a narrow pebbled beach plunged into the water. I thought how little light there’d be under the surface, even a few metres from the shore. The loch’s depth had been measured but what that ravine might look like was outwith my imagination.
My daughter became pregnant and had a little boy. Oh, what a joyous day six months ago when I drove to the hospital to see my grandson. In hindsight, my daughter was too quiet, too distant from the start. Talking therapies didn’t help her bond with her son. Anti-depressants didn’t lift her. She stopped speaking. A planned admittance to a hospital met administrative delay.
I never envisaged her pouring petrol inside the cottage while her husband and son were out for a walk. That stone cottage had timbers dry enough to stoke any blaze. My daughter, despite mitigating circumstances, was convicted of wilful fire raising and destruction of property, and sent to a secure mental health hospital. She’s still there.
‘I did it to get help,’ she told me on one of my rare visits, for she didn’t want to see me often. ‘I thought the loch was my friend. Its darkness – that’s how I felt. But you’d never liked it and I couldn’t explain.’
I should have realised more, understood better.
Beside the hotel fire, someone started a ghost story and the party waited for pleasurable shivers. I watched the flames licking the logs, their leaps behind and around one another. I was already haunted.
What fabulous entries, all of them fantastical, brilliant and captivating. Halloween has prompted very good stories.
@jillsted – here was an enticing mystery with a comic touch. Told with great pacing and a strong atmosphere of folk tale, it hooked me from start to finish.
@purplewitch (Terrie) – what wonderful creepiness. I loved the rich language and imagery, as well as the story itself. A real sense of other-worldliness and a different set of rules.
@janette – an excellent tale of revenge, a picture so well woven in of an abusive marriage and the hint of mother-in-law as an malignant influence. I loved the narrator’s voice too.
@sandradavies – what fun there is in this story of manipulative game playing, a wronged wife taking advantage of the mischief available on Halloween.
@athelstone – a haunted house inhabited by an unquiet, vengeful ghost. A delightfully tingly and enjoyable take on a classic form. An innocent person about their business and then oof!For sheer creepiness and shiveriness levels within such evocative language, I’ve picked Terrie’s story as the winner. Over to you, @purplewitch
A reminder for anyone who, like me, forget this month’s competition deadline is tonight: the October monthly comp deadline is midnight tonight! You might have a suitable WIP hiding away somewhere…
Thanks, Ath. Yes, I was thinking that writers might collect some AI produced fiction and do something with its tropes, sort of like Pop Art did. I’m vague about this. Am looking for reasons for optimism!
Hi Sandra, I saw your comment about self-pub authors but it has disappeared from the thread. As you say, it’s harder to see how authors could guarantee their own writing. I expect someone will think of something to address this, or try to address it.
I also think some readers will seek out AI novels because AI writing will be reliable. It will tick various boxes, just like real-life authors can do.
And then there will be the writers who’ll use and adapt AI to do something interesting, and be upfront about it.
Some great stories have already come in. We’re half way through the month – plenty of time for more entries.
A reminder of the details:
It’s October and I’m going for the obvious: Halloween. Or All Saints’ Eve or Hallowmas Eve or whatever you prefer. It doesn’t have to be ghostly, though if you can give us all the shivers that would be fun.
Max 400 words, connected to 31st October in some way.
Deadline midnight 31st October.
Thank you, Jill! That was a lovely surprise when I switched on this morning. Such brilliant writing from Knicks and Ath, everything so vivid and pleasurable to read.
This month I’ve gone for an essay, or at any rate not a story.
338 words
Outside my window there’s the small garden and then a field, where a tractor drags a harrow. The harrow’s arms are open and horizontal. Metal discs hang below them, making contact with the ground, and I hear the discs rattling along the soil and bouncing over flints. They leave shallow grooves and break up clumps. In the stubble left from the earlier harvest they’re making a seedbed for the next sowing. This preparation is minimum-tillage: organic matter left at the surface improves the soil while, in darkness below, the undisturbed mycelium recycles carbon and nutrients.
For the first time since spring the morning sun is low enough to shine through the window and on the computer. I close the venetian blind and the room dims. The screen’s content is mundane – a traffic report or an email about a subscription – but life funnelled through the PC becomes more salient now the summer is over. The switch to autumn is a turn towards words. As more time is spent indoors, the days shift to a compensating balance with more reading, and possibly writing too. September, I think, has the feel of a new term even if structured learning isn’t ahead. In lower natural light and the comfort of artificial lighting, any new project can have the sense that a mindful burrowing has begun.
There’s something about autumn’s lack of instant visibility. In Sanskrit and other Indian languages, cerebral letters are consonants sounded by arching the tongue backwards and putting its tip to the palate. These sounds don’t depend on teeth and lips, parts of us obvious from the outside, but are expressions from further back, coming from the mouth’s darkness and shadow.
I could be stretching the analogy here. This isn’t about the mechanisms of any language, and I don’t think occultism of any kind necessarily brings forth ideas of value or useful re-conception. Instead it’s the old human experience of meeting the turning of the year and, subconsciously or not, preparing for spring, and the chance to do better.
Apologies in advance, Sandra. I won’t be doing a story this month. I do enjoy these poetry prompts but a combination of holidays and life admin is swallowing the time.
A great prompt, Sea – I just haven’t had time to write a story this month. Very enjoyable entries from everyone.
I’m sorry to hear about the cardiologist.
That’s such a fabulous story, Seagreen.
I enjoyed everyone else’s entries too. Thank you Ath for the prompt and all your comments.
Moving On
The elderly man picked up a landline receiver. On his desk lay an open, glossy page of Country Life. The man underlined a phone number and dialled.
“Hello, my name’s John Tucker,” he said. “I’d like to sell my house. Could you send a valuer?”
He gave his address. A distant phone voice burbled.
“Two valuers?” said John. “This afternoon. Excellent. My number is my landline. Yes. I prefer it to a mobile for significant matters.”
The receiver back on its cradle, John picked up a file named ‘Benedict’ which was also on his desk. He rose slowly from a wooden antique swivel chair. The chair had a continuous slatted back and sides like a horseshoe, and the cushions to make it comfortable were frayed with age. John put the file in a metal filing cabinet.
He shuffled across a marble-tiled hall and went into a long drawing room whose oil paintings hung in two rows on every wall, scenes of moors or fields or horses. He settled in a chintz-covered armchair next to the fireplace and, in silence, gazed through floor-to-ceiling windows across a terrace.
Later a young man and an older one arrived at the double-leaved front door. Their smiles were alert, the sort meant to look interested but not ingratiating.
When they’d spent an hour and a half in the house and gardens the older man announced a figure.
“Ballpark,” he added. “We have to make it negotiable.”
“Of course,” said John. “Sounds a decent amount to me.”
“Our marketing department will make an appointment to talk through the selling process.”
“Excellent,” said John.
**
A woman arrived at the front door. She smiled.
“Mr Tucker?”
“John Tucker, yes. Come in. We’ll go into the drawing room.”
They walked across the hall, the woman’s heels tapping the tiles.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, looking up the wide staircase to the balcony running round the hall.
“Indeed.”
John was limping as if in pain. In the drawing room he said, “The paintings won’t be auctioned until the house is sold. It would look dreary to have the marks of where they’d been.”
“That’s thoughtful of you.”
The woman looked across the terrace. “Two hectares of gardens. How do you keep them so well?”
“Contractors tend the gardens. And agency cleaners do indoors. I can recommend all these people.”
The woman, smiling, studied the drawing room. “We’ll get some lovely photos. Have you no family who are interested in the house, Mr Tucker?”
“My son has decided it’s too much for him.”
The woman smiled sadly. “I’m sure you’ll miss this house.”
**
When she’d gone John went back to his office and lifted the ‘Benedict’ file from the cabinet. Opening it he laid out letters concerning his son’s trial and gaol term for embezzlement.
“Always trouble,” said John. “I was endlessly bailing you out. Your inheritance will be sold and in my new apartment I shan’t have the things in this house. No more reminders of you.”
496 words exc title and asterisks
Congratulations, Ath. I love your story. Very well deserved win.
Thank you Janette for setting the competition and for everyone’s entries. They are a very enjoyable selection of stories.
Somewhere to Bloom
The cottage on the lane had a garden of pink, blue and mauve flowers on plants she couldn’t name. They faced her in clumps and drifts. On the lane she considered the pretty cottages, each one wearing its garden like a skirt, patterned, pastel – standardised, or something. And, even more annoying, they coped with the early May sun, rain and breezes: changeable conditions.
She and her partner had agreed to marry. Unexpectedly – to her – that meant moving home. They’d come down from London to look around and he was standing with her, silent.
“We can’t afford it,” he said, eventually, as if he’d been testing his patience for at least a minute.
“I wouldn’t want it.”
“We have to leave the flat.”
Without looking at him she knew his shoulders were tight.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Yes, yet. Now.”
She’d thought him good looking and sexy and it was odd seeing him another way. They’d been together two years and the second anniversary, a celebration meal which he’d cooked, had become a discussion. Or rather, a blunt talk. He’d announced they must move, they’d need more space.
On the lane he said, “There are cheaper places than this one. We must move while we can.”
“We could buy a larger flat.”
“You know we can’t.”
She did know. Too expensive. Since the anniversary they’d spent evenings looking online and doing sums.
They turned from the cottage and walked a few hundred metres to a row of terraced houses, each house little wider than the arrangement of its front door and ground-floor window. The gardens were the size of a large double bed; some had a clipped shrub or two, others grew straggly grass.
“They have potential,” she said, thinking at least they were better than those cottages. They had the suggestion of real life in their city-like density.
“There’ll be bigger gardens at the back,” he said.
This was it, the nutshell: children. She’d agreed to the pull of life that had them creating children, who didn’t yet exist, who’d play in a garden, and it wouldn’t just be the young ones growing up. Parenthood itself would be a time of blooming.
In London she always noticed the trees greening, especially the tallest and widest, under which she walked with an earthy sense that everyone else enjoyed them too. But these terraced houses with a back garden, children running over tatty grass, a private space for them, no park or busy street in sight: they’d have safety in a small area, cramped but, all around, the countryside that was hardly open to the public.
In the car going back to London she saw unfolding leaves on the country trees and hedges, the newness that was a repeat of oldness, nature’s determination, its project. Her fiancé – for the first time she gave him this old-fashioned title – he had a project that suited himself.
She dreaded their next discussion. She hoped for what may lie beyond it.
Sandra, this is an atmospheric depiction of the personalities within a family, all so economically written. I’d never heard of furanocoumarins. What an interesting thing to discover! You built tension with all the possible problems resulting from letting children loose in the kitchen, then there was a fine twist at the end. Very enjoyable.
Seagreen, I really liked how you wove past and present together by using the recipe to show what the narrator was engaged in, and introduced the mystery of them disliking parsnips. Then there was the intrigue of the sibling, who was ill or debilitated in some way, and a satisfying conclusion. There’s a lovely rhythm and balance to the story.
Janette, I laughed out loud at this comedy! Village life, competitive neighbours and delightful revenge. You portray them all so effectively in a story full of incident and Cynthia’s ghastliness and strident voice come across well.
Janette – over to you for making me laugh as well as telling a good tale.