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shorts... The Herald has commissioned me to write a few short stories for its series of ‘mini-shorts‘. Here are three of them:
I wondered at first if he was a street performer, but the hair was a dead giveaway: long, filthy hair. The clothes, too: everything said addict. He lay on the clean cobbled pavement a few yards from where we were having our coffee. You could see Lisbon Castle behind him in the distance. I considered going to check if he was all right, but you never know with people like that. He started making a low wailing noise. We concentrated on our coffee, talked about where we were going to visit that morning. Neither of us wanted to not do anything, but neither of us wanted to either. This wasn’t supposed to happen: it was supposed to be a romantic weekend. “Terrible, isn’t it,” I said. Or maybe that was you. I wondered if an addict would constitute local colour, or whether my lack of willingness to act would be something you’d remember, something that one day would come in your eyes to be indicative of something bigger. We asked the waiter about him. He shook his head. You certainly got the impression it wasn’t good for a business, an addict outside your café. A party of tourists appeared, and I felt relieved. The guide would know what to do. He might have even come across this guy before. They stopped just short of him. The guide started speaking and his party all concentrated on what he was saying. Lovely language, Portuguese. He might have been talking about the man lying - quietly crying - on the pavement a few feet from them, but judging from where their gazes were fixed, he wasn’t. We finished our coffee, tipped the waiter, and went to see the castle.
Old man
He couldn’t tell me what his name was or where he lived, but he could tell me what the foreman was called in the steel works in 1969 and what the tattoos were like on his Commanding Officer’s shoulders in the army before that. It was 11 o’clock at night and he was wearing slippers and a nice cardigan, like the ones my granddad used to wear. I didn’t know what to do with him. I mean, what do you do with an old man? His story kept changing, too. He said he was out getting some air, then that he’d been visiting his son. He even claimed he’d been walking his dog - but there was no dog. Turned out he’d actually been to see his wife - as I found out when the police arrived with his daughter, a woman whose calm and quietly determined manner reminded me of my mother. Apparently he’d let himself out of The Poplars, the home where he lived, and set off to walk the nearly four miles to see his wife. At least, to put flowers on her grave. The old man didn’t know whether he’d made it to the church or was still on his way there. All he knew was that he didn’t have the flowers any more. A lovely bouquet of chrysanths, he said. Just the sort she liked. I shook his hand and he said ‘Goodbye Martin’, which wasn’t my name, and the police thanked me for ringing them and his daughter put him in the car. I watched them drive off and stood in the road for a while trying to work out which was worse: being old and having a family or being old and not having a family.
To see the Irish girl with the blonde hair, the girl who smelt of shampoo and cigarettes, who’d told him after they’d slept together that they were soul mates. Pathetic, he knew, but how else could he find her. This was before mobile phones and, somewhere between the pub and her hotel and his walk home, he’d lost the box of matches she’d written her home number on. He didn’t remember saying goodbye, not properly, which left him feeling dissatisfied - like an itch or a part-healed wound. What he could recall, however, was the way she’d said: ‘Whatever happens, let’s come here - to this pub on this night - every year.’ So he went back the next year - and the one after that and on one final occasion, every time the hope of seeing her decreasing. Then things changed. He didn’t go to the Festival for seven years, until some old friends called. ‘You up for it?’ they asked. ‘For old times’ sake.’ So. The same pub; the same night. And there she was. Carl recognised her immediately. He couldn’t believe it. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, laughing, more drunk than he had been for a long time. The sight of her hair made him want to touch it, touch her. It occurred to him he’d never smelt anyone since who smelt exactly the same. Her smell. He told her the truth. That he’d gone back for three years. That now he had a gorgeous wife and a beautiful son. She showed him a photo of her family. ‘So is it true,’ she asked, ‘what they say about the seven-year itch?’ ‘You tell me,’ he replied. He didn’t remember saying goodbye this time, either.
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