Read by Charlotte Worthing
She tells him not to, but he even does it when they are fucking, which is horrible: the voices coming out of the closet, from up on the ceiling, from under the bed. He is looming over her with a letterbox grin and the voices are oozing out from between his teeth. She knees him in the ribs and he drops back with a gasp.
What’s the matter with you, he says, can’t you take a joke?
His voice, his ordinary voice, is flat and nasal — Essex or thereabouts — but at least his lips are moving. He rolls over and reaches for his cigarettes. He doesn’t offer them to her so she snatches the packet out of his hand. They lie side-by-side without speaking and the twin streams of smoke spiral upwards, like tendrils, without touching.
She has heard people say this in films, where it sounded profound. The boys at school would never get it, but he nods as if he understands and feeds the butt of his cigarette into the mouth of a beer bottle. The butt hits the dregs with a hiss. Later, when he lifts the bottle to his lips and gags on the ashy soup, she will almost piss herself laughing.
She’s not even sure why her little sister wanted to see the show in the first place, only that it’s the summer holidays and there’s nothing else to do. Going by the posters it looked irredeemably naff, primitive almost, a relic from the world of those old TV clips with blacked-up faces and handsy milkmen. Still, here they are, in a swelter of restless kids and mums, the barnyard stink of unwashed feet and stressed maternal armpits, salted breath and baby wipes. Every round of applause is just one whoop of air, one pained bleat short of hysteria.
Afterwards, her little sister wants more, more, more, she wants to meet the funny man with his funny doll. They don’t have to wait long. He exits the stage door still holding the dummy in his arms. His eyes slide over her body as her little sister coos and strokes the dummy’s face, and she feels like ice-cream, melting.
There is another show in the evening, for grown-ups only. For the hens and the stags who are out roaring along the promenade. The audience is drunk and sparse and the jokes are crap. She is on her own this time, with her feet on the back of the chair in front. The dummy wears a bikini and a union-jack hijab.
At the stage door, she sees him before he sees her. Instead of carrying out the dummy like he did before he has stuffed it into a holdall, the navy-blue nylon taut with spastic limbs. All he needs to do now is dispose of the body. She steps forward, a willing accomplice.
I remember you, he says.
I can’t stay, she says, although he hasn’t asked.
He is thirty-four and has lines around his eyes. She traces them with a fingertip and calls him old man until he smacks her hand away.
What’s the matter with you, she says as she helps herself to another cigarette, can’t you take a joke?
They’re in his hotel. It’s the shabbiest of all the shabby places along the front, which means there’s an ashtray on the bedside table, cut-glass and heavy as a rock.
He has gear, just like she knew he would. When he hesitates to pass her the rolled-up tenner she tells him she’s done it before and she likes it, the spangle in her head. One of these statements will turn out to be true. She tilts her chin and sweeps her hair over, so that her best side is caught in profile, but in the circle of her pocket mirror she is monstrous, boggle-eyed, her nostrils twinned black tunnels.
She is seventeen and he is thirty-four. They have found each other at an intersection, a moment of perfect equation, if 2x=y and x+y=51, then solve for x. She wants to know what he was doing when he was the age she is now, in the year she was born. The way he tells it makes it sound as if he’s been doing pretty much the same thing his entire life: cans of cider in the precinct, dirty puppet shows to make his mates laugh, watching schoolgirls on the bus. She says, so you like them young. He says, you look twenty-five, at least. She knows that she does not.
*
Look after your little sister, her mother says, and during the day that’s exactly what she does, they play crazy golf together and drink ice slushies that turn their tongues blue and argue less than either of them might have expected. She looks after her little sister from eight o’clock in the morning right the way through until six o’clock in the evening when they dawdle back home. Lying on her bed with the curtains drawn, sun-drunk and sand-sore, waiting for her mother to get back from work while her little sister crushes ants against the front step. Then she goes out alone to sit in the dark, watching his lips barely moving.
For the final act, he waits until he has three fingers inside her and this time the voice is her voice, and she is frantic and twisting and scrambling up off the bed, yelling fuck you, fuck you! She can’t find her knickers, her favourite pair, lime-green lace with a pink ribbon trim: commando it is then. She is shrugging on her dress and he is watching her from the bed with his mouth open. The holdall is by the closet and she aims a hefty kick at it as she runs past. He’ll have something to say about that all right, but the only voice she is listening to now is the one in her head, saying should’ve worn your Nikes, girlfriend!
She snatches up her shoes by the ankle-straps and gallops down the stairs.
Out on the street she slams headlong into a hen-party, a consternation of fairy godmothers with LED wands. They pick her up and dust her down, they press strawberry-daiquiri kisses to her eyelids and feed her handbag with coins until its satin belly creaks before magicking her into a taxi. In the morning her toes are bruised and there is glitter on the pillow.
Knuckle down, they’ll tell her when she goes back to school. She’s heard this before, of course, but now she thinks she understands what she needs to do, even if knuckling down sounds unattractively simian. Simian: this is a word she has learnt only recently. There are other new words to go with it, words like lupine and viperine and selachian. She remembers his smile, his terrible teeth. She thinks of herself as the one that got away, darting quicksilver from between the closing jaws.
Zoology? she wonders. She could dare for Russell Group. She searches Ebay for her lime-green knickers, twenty times a day at first, then five times a day and then not at all. Unexpectedly, her mother gave her fifty pounds for minding her little sister all summer, so she blew the lot on a set of fancy new underwear. The knickers — like the bra — are ivory silk with just the tiniest hint of lace, and they are her favourites now.
She writes a story, double-spaced in a serious font. Her English teacher tells her to stay behind after the bell. He perches on the edge of her desk and asks her if everything is all right. She drags her gaze away from his too-close, bunched-up crotch, looks up into his face to where his features are arranged into a careful mask of concern, and says, I just wanted to write something real.
I see, he says, even though she knows that he does not, he cannot think what else to say to her. Whatever. All of this stuff seems to matter less and less already: she is knuckling down, she is moving on up, she is speeding further and further and faster and faster away from this place and everyone in it, she is accelerating like a star.
(c) Sally Syson, 2017
Sally Syson is based in North West England. Her short fiction has been listed for competitions including the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Bath Short Story Award and The London Magazine Short Story Competition, and has been published online in The Manchester Review.
Charlotte Worthing trained at The Oxford School of Drama. Her theatre work includes roles at Arcola Theatre, Southwark Playhouse, The Bush and Theatre503 as well as touring productions. Radio work includes BBC Drama series Chain Gang, The Private Patient and Road to St David’s in which she was typecast as a 10 year old Welsh boy.
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