click to play OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE mp3
Read by Alicia McKenzie
I hold my breath as best I can, but my heart is beating so hard I'm sure they'll hear it through my chest. My head's spinning, my skull feels like it's in an industrial press and I feel like puking. The most exercise I've done in the last ten years is forty minutes' jog on a treadmill twice a week after work. I wonder where my self-respect has gone. Sprinting through a muddy forest with a paintball gun in my hand is about as far from my idea of a perfect date as I could imagine.
But then, the boy is cute.
The boy is cute in that chiselled, child-like, gayish New Kids On The Block kind of way. With hair that's somehow both short and floppy; his physique that magic blend of lithe and wide-shouldered. I was sure when I saw his picture that if he was not naturally smooth-backed and -chested, he would be carefully waxed at great expense. In short, he was everything I wanted when I was fourteen years old.
On the other hand, he doesn't half talk shit.
I could tell without having to wait for it to happen that after the game, I would be subjected to him and his creepy, vaguely unpleasant-smelling friends talking about the finer technical details of various cyclical-firing, automatic reloading, magical murder-toys they would never, ever, be entrusted to play with by any army, whilst alternately trying to patronise me and eye up my breasts with about as much subtlety and pleasantness as the weekly six a.m. visit from the garbage truck.
Steve is the worst. He looks like some bloated, pimple-ridden toad, and spits flecks of froth when he gets excited. He tends to turn his head and look out the corner of his eyes at me when he thinks he's making a sly sexist witticism. He is overly enamoured of an intellect he simply does not possess. He's the type that would shoot you in the face with a paintball even though it doesn't score - it's just dangerous and hurts like hell. He is also the type that would cheat.
*
They would all laugh about me, my sex, my lack of interest in the obsessions of man-children. They would laugh about the fact that every time before, I've been 'killed' at the beginning of the game.
The boy will either pretend this isn't happening, or perhaps he genuinely is so thick he won't realise it's happening. Bless.
The boy's cousin Dan is a close second in terms of annoyingness. Although he thinks he has good intentions, he has that desperate desire to be down with the black man that results in creepy fawning and an insistence that I chat with him about the latest dancehall album he's bought from iTunes, no matter how many times I tell him I'm more interested in Sisters of Mercy.
Meanwhile, I would be far, far, away thinking about work.
*
I lied about my career on the dating website. I called myself a paralegal and cut my pay by two-thirds. I didn't want to be a sugar-mummy or scare off those who'd feel threatened, which basically cuts out 80% of men at my career level.
It's like I always have my mother's sighing in my mind: "What we gwan do wit you, child?", when I got bad grades, "When you gonna get a husband, child?" when another short-term relationship broke down. It seemed I was always hitting walls with no way through or over, and I had to just pile through but my body was too weak.
I can hear shouting about a hundred yards away. There isn't much ground between me and the enemy flag, but according to my mental tally of people I've seen covered in yellow paint, there isn't much of my team left. I try to gather my body up closer behind the tree trunk and reload my magazine. So far, I've managed to survive. This, in and of itself, is an achievement. I could just give up here.
But now an idea comes to me, more a coalescence of a warm feeling … probably the high from the endorphins. I'll try to win this game, even if it is stacked against me. I will go out gloriously. I will at least touch that fucking yellow flag.
Where I am is in a bad situation. My mamma always used to say: "If ya hand in da devil's mout', ya got to tek it out!"
I let myself have a small mental holiday of witty banter, sipping Cosmos and flaunting a pair of elegant heels in that new bar in Bermondsey before making a break for the flag.
Witty banter and cocktails are not the boy's forte. He's more of an enthusiastic, brain-damaged puppy than the proud and elegant Lion of Judah I was led to believe was somewhere out there. Unfortunately, so far in my life the closest male felines I have come across are deranged, vicious stray cats and one glacially undynamic Bagpuss of a man.
I make a break, trying impossibly to run both fast and quiet. I hear shouting and duck low and then the whistle of a paint ball behind my head and the smack as it splatters yellow across a tree trunk.
Fuck. I start to zigzag like in the movies to make it harder to get shot as the forest vomits paint at me. I head towards a tree, not sure if I should keep running or hide behind it and instead smack hard into it – this will later ripen into a nice big bruise – careen off it, turning to let off a couple of wild shots, and run pell-mell into the next tree trunk on the other side of the clearing.
I feel like a pinball going from one bumper to another, just like my love life. I graduated university with a first class degree, my first STD … and my first broken heart, of many. Eventually I became numb, as hard and shiny as a chrome ball. I reflected back what I was given in relationships, and it was never pretty.
After university, I sat at home applying uselessly for jobs and baking bread out of boredom for 10 months before I got a PA job. At least to begin with I was making headway with my career – for the last five years I've been more and more frantic with work, but making no progress. It seems more than a coincidence to me that despite being top of my field, both firms I've been with have gone into partnering freezes just as I was up for promotion.
I need to get fitter. I'm sweating like a fat man in a sauna and it's getting into my eyes. I push up my goggles for a second to wipe it off with my sleeve.
I hear jeering as the dogs come closer – I imagine I'm the last or the last of two from my team left. I stumble around the tree and wait, letting off three shots at some dude scuttling past me in TV-show 'tactical' style, covering the back of his torso and arm in red. He looks dazed, like a pensive cow chewing cud, before dropping his gun in defeat. It is the boy.
They're all on my tail now, with their flag ahead of me and to the west – that girl-guide shit finally paying off as I break sharply north-east in a big circle and drop into the bunker from behind.
Inside is Steve, facing the wrong way. He spins around and I shoot my last ball in his tubby belly, knocking him back and down, him firing shots uselessly to the side as he falls.
I grab the flag. He points his gun at me.
"You're cheating - you're dead!" I shout.
"No one will believe you …" he chuckles, the little fassy.
I notice he only has one ball left.
His reactions are as slow as his wit as I grab his hand and aim his gun towards my goggles. His jaw drops in disbelief as he carries out an act his reactions aren't quick enough to stop.
Yellow, then black, then agony, and ringing in my ears as I drop to my knees, my face covered in paint, still holding the flag. I hear the rest of the two teams and the marshals excitedly coming near.
I stand up, peeling off my goggles and grin at Steve.
"Head shots are illegal."
"But… but… but… you cheated!" he says with dismay. "You grabbed my gun!"
"No one will believe you." I wink and toss my gun to the floor. I hoist the flag aloft as I carry it back to the lodge.
© Ala Anvari, 2014
Despite being a stroppy child inside, Ala Anvari is old enough now to have a few white hairs – and also, perversely, has had the same number of jobs, degrees, and psychiatric admissions.
Alicia McKenzie: Trained at Identity Drama School and an alumna of National Youth Theatre and National Youth Music Theatre. Theatre includes Rapunzel (Lawrence Batley Theatre), The White Witch of Rose Hall (Broadway Theatre), Ring a Ding Ding (Unicorn Theatre Victory – New York and national tour), In a Pickle (Royal Shakespeare Theatre).
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