All stories

Richard doesn’t get it. Here, again? And what’s with all this woman’s work anyway? Even at this stage in our existence we still have balls, don’t we, so…?

I smile placidly as I continue to unload the dryer. Richard’s longest marriage was two years. Mine is sixty-eight and counting. The heavy basket of washing hoists up light as a feather and I go up the stairs two at a time.

Richard’s voice drifts up from below: ‘Mate, at least switch on the telly…’

Me and him, we’ve been friends since we were five years old, since we had that fight over whose turn it was on the slide. Now we have the chance to definitively look someone up and ask them but it’s much more fun to bicker about it.

With the washing hung on the airer I go into the bedroom to find Richard lurking by the chest of drawers that I made.

He’s grinning. ‘Mate, how about this? Pepper in his underpants?’

Another placid smile from me and off I go with the laundry box. Just as the second load goes on a key sounds in the front door. We lurk in the utility room as Colin comes in, kicks off his shoes and then goes into the kitchen.

Colin is twenty years younger than my wife. He still has most of his own hair, and both of his own hips. Here is, letting himself into my home, leaving his shoes in my hall. And the unspeakable things he does in the kitchen. Dairy Lea cheese over digestive biscuits?

Chocolate. Digestive. Biscuits.

Shoes and coat stowed away I go into the kitchen to find it empty but for a mug in which he is making a cup of tea. A sudden burst of chatter from the lounge, and a scream of joy – the television is on. Colin comes through into the kitchen, followed by a crestfallen Richard.

‘Bloody DIY show. Why can’t he pick a channel showing a few good murders?’

Colin fishes the teabag from the mug and leaves it on the worktop.

Richard looks at my expression then grins at me.

‘Or…a good murder here. Go on, do it. You got the power.’

Colin leaves the milk out on the counter too. What does my wife see in him? He returns to the lounge, Richard going with him making ineffectual comedy mimes, alternating between trips and strangulation. I clean up in the kitchen and go into the lounge.

It’s time to go. My wife will be home soon.

‘Go on, kill him,’ Richard says. ‘Push that blanket off the top of the chair. It has a button in the corner, might get stuck in his throat.’

‘I believe that’s frowned upon.’

‘And doing his sodding chores isn’t?’

Richard shakes his head.

‘You’re bonkers, the pair of you. Her for marrying him, and you for making him looking good by doing his bloody chores! Why? It’s madness, I tell you!’

But it isn’t, it really isn’t.

I pretty much spent twenty years turning our marriage bed into a hospital one. My wife ran the house, raised the kids, and took care of her waste of a body frail husband. So what’s twenty years of eternity just making her life a little easier?

Colin bolts upright, hands clutching at his stomach. He jumps from his chair and dashes for the door.

It’s frowned upon, using my connection with this corporeal place, but who could resist it, twenty years of putting laxatives in the guy’s tea?

Cassie stared around in wild panic before she realised it had just been the dream again.

She waited for her heart to slow and for the sweat to cool on her burning skin before getting up to make tea.

She sat on the caravan steps in the pale dawn, breathing in the woodsmoke and hay and damp canvas. The burnt popcorn and incense that perfumed her nights and early mornings. Only the animal keepers would be up at this time; all was still while the clowns and dancers and acrobats slept off their hangovers.

The dream of the man in the long, gold-buttoned coat had come every few months since Cassie could remember and always ended the same way: the man brought Cassie’s death with a charming smile and an outstretched hand.

The coat was an unusual one, like nothing Cassie had ever seen outside of her dreams, with stiff fronting and shining, smart gold buttons in gleaming rows. She couldn’t imagine what sort of man might wear such a garment.

There was no hospital, just a flash of orange fire, a deafening crash, the crackle of electricity in the rain. Then nothing, darkness,

Cassie’s mother, Leah, had worked in the milking sheds before a dashing young acrobat sailed in with the circus to whisk her away to a life of sawdust and sparkles. Leah had learned to read the future in the cards from the toothless crone she came to replace.

It had been the only life Cassie had ever known, and, on the same night her mother died, Cassie picked up the cards herself and the show, as ever, went on.

They thought what Cassie did was simple trickery veiled in cleverness, even when she saw her father’s death at the bottom of a bottle, months before they found him, choked on his own vomit behind the slide in the elephant enclosure. Predicting that death, they said, hardly demanded clairvoyance.

The troupe had set up camp near Mumbles three days ago. Some of the dancing girls had been into town and had gossiped about the bars, the boys, the new electric tram cars and the strange local language. Cassie preferred to stay home turning her cards, watching from the shadows.

That night, as the gates flew open and the crowds poured in, Cassie met young sweethearts looking for marriage in the cards, old women seeking redemption, kids after answers or a thrill, or a fright.

And then one man simply took her breath away.

He came alone, smiling, charming; concerned more with her future than his past; seeing more than kohl-rimmed eyes and veils of chiffon and incense. This man intrigued her. This man saw her.

He wasn’t handsome, or rich, but something about the smile in his eyes made her breath catch in her chest. He was, he told her proudly, a conductor on the new tram car, and when he asked her to meet him at his work the next day she told him yes.

Outside, rain had begun to fall, lightly at first, but as the young man left it grew heavier, settling into a storm that would last several miserable, treacherous days. As he slipped, light-hearted from Cassie’s caravan he pulled on his long, gold-buttoned tram conductor’s coat and headed off into the night.

Eric, a was a self-made builder and nosy neighbour, Phil’s heart sank when he saw him and Lorraine his XL, over-made up wife approaching on that bank holiday morning.

No one was supposed to know she was here. Eric had probably been craning out of the window to see their car returning.

Phil hadn’t even been shopping, he hurriedly put a box of dairy lea on the table and went to get her.

She was in the garden sitting on a plastic slide, rocking inermittently and emitting self-pitying sobs. “Five minutes and they’ll be gone I promise, we’ve got to keep up appearances.” He whispered.

Eric rejected the dairy lea with a meaty palm.

“No ta, I’ve just had a full English! Breakfast means breakfast in our household! HehHeh! ”

Phil saw her wince.

“Heyaar love, catch these, present for you!”

Eric tossed a bunch of flowers at her, which she dropped with her usual lack of co-ordination.

“Thought you were a safe pair of hands love! HehHeh!” Said Eric as Phil bent down to pick them up.

She visibly crumpled.

“Ignore him love he’s only playing aren’t you Eric?” said Lorraine.

Eric wasn’t listening, he was now examining the supporting wall on their extension with disgust.

“Blimey who did this for yer? Lee Van Cleef?” he asked

He prodded the wall. A large piece of plaster came away.

“Strong and stable my arse!!!” He declared. “HehHeh!”

This was the final straw, she slipped sadly to the floor and groaned miserably.

Phil was non-confrontational. He knew action was called for but he didn’t know how.

Luckily Lorraine stepped in.

“Eric stop being mischevy-ous!

Eeeyar love, I reckon anyone d be under the weather after t’week you’ve had, I’ll put you up to bed shall I?”

And with the practised no nonsense approach learned of a staff nurse at Leeds General she scooped the stick-thin woman up and carried her upstairs

Soon Lorraine was chattering bedside with a magically produced slice of parkin in one hand and a cuppa in the other. The colour returning to her patient’s cheeks.

“Don’t worry dearie! Same thing happened to once. 1967 to be exact. I were Miss Skeggy at Butlin’s see. Eee I loved it. I had a sash, everything. Trouble was it all ended when they found out I was sleeping with t’judge……

Eric!

Hounded out we were. They took me crown back in full view of t’other girls!

I’ve never been so ashamed!

But looking back now it were best thing that ever happened.

Right now it feels like you are losing your power but if you look on t’brightside it always leads to something better!

Now Treesa love, you’ve got yer feller, yer walkin, you’re not not short of a bob or two, you’ve got yer ….. dancing! And you should be looking forward to the prime of life without all that nonsense! So stick some slap on, get down them stairs and get on with it!!!!”

---

That evening for the first time in years Theresa felt happy, she held Phil’s hand and they watched a documentary about the Pennine Way.

They had made a pact, Phil would get extension fixed once and for all and she would finally stop looking for ways to revive the withdrawal agreement.