Encore!

  'What's happened to the pub?'  Wayne Reynolds stared about him, then jumped in shock at the sight of the alien glass in his hand.  'And what the fu...?'
  'It's wine, Wayne,' his wife Marie explained patiently. 'It won't kill you.'
  'What's it doing in my hand, though?'
  'You're drinking it, babe.'
  'But why would I do that?  I'm an Englishman!'
  'Because we're all in a cafe in Paris,' Daphne Randall explained.  'Since we only exist in our author's mind and she's over here in France for a few days.  If you've noticed, man, my beer est disparu as well.'
  'Oh Tom!  How romantic!' sighed Hilary, grasping her husband's hand.  'We do so love Paris, don't we darling?'
  'We do indeed, my love!'  Dr Appleby pressed his lips to her hand.  A smouldering look passed between them.  Tom took Hilary's other hand and kissed that too, never taking his eyes from hers.
  'If I was our author, I'd tell the rest of us to bugger off and stick with writing about those two,' Wayne said to Toby, with a nod towards Hilary and Tom.  'That's the kind of stuff that sells, innit?  She could knock twenty years off 'em and turn your man Tom into a millionaire banker instead of a boffin, and she'd be quids in.'
  'But that's absolutely not what she writes!'  Sally objected.  'We're the opposite to all that, an antidote to that stuff in fact, with heroes who are poor and ordinary, women who are courageous, wise and confident, and rich people who are slimy and dishonest - like they are in real life!' 
  'That's true enough, pet,' Daphne replied.  'But us characters still get to enjoy a bit of a bonk now and again, don't we - yourself and young Danny included!'
  'I know!' Sally laughed.  'But ours is sort of fun bonking, messing about and trying to sort out how to do it properly.  I bet there isn't a market for novels about that!'
  Daniel suddenly seemed even more fascinated by the views of the city from their Montmartre vantage-point, as he turned to face the window, but Sally could tell he was blushing as his ears were pink.
  'He's getting much better,' she added.  'Really.  And I am.'
  Dan's ears darkened.
  'Whatever,' said Wayne.  'You and the nipper might not be that hot, but Hilary and your decorator are a different matter.  She's missing a trick, I tell you.'
  'You've got a point, mate,' Toby agreed.  'It'll be just her luck if someone nicks those two for inspiration and rattles off a fan-fiction best seller - Fifty Shades of DLA, anyone?'
  'No chance!'  Tricia argued.  'Some of her readers already disapprove.  Don't tell H, but one reviewer says their romance is nauseating.'
  'Nauseating!  She would be well pissed off!'  Martin laughed.
  'That is somewhat uncharitable,' said Vaughan James.  'But I suppose if one bought the books for serious political and social comment, one doesn't expect to find two of the principal characters gallivanting around the garden in a state of undress.'
  'Or snogging in public - even in fucking France!' Wayne added.  'Oi!  You two!  If you're going to carry on like that, get a room!'
  The hand kissing had escalated.
  'Don't be so bloody British, man!' Daphne chided.  'Let them kiss and cuddle in peace.  You're in Paris, after all.  I certainly wouldn't say no if our author fancies sending me over here for a racy little adventure, investigating crime on the Canal St Martin with a dishy gendarme or two.  In those circumstances, I could even cope without a decent pint!'
  'You aren't headed anywhere more exotic than Manchester Piccadilly, from what I've heard,' Harry Biddulph grumbled.  'And, before anyone says anything, I aren't stripping off for her readers, neither.  I'll leave that full-frontal malarkey to the Appleby lads!' 
  Daniel was suddenly overcome by the need to photograph the view, rushing outside with his camera, while Tom was evidently oblivious to everything except the sweet lips of his beloved Hilary.
  'I don't mind doing a sex scene, ladies!'
  A stocky man in his fifties, wearing square glasses that really didn't suit him, wandered in to the café.
  'What are you doing here, Fishy?' Sally demanded.  'You're supposed to be in Woking, redeeming yourself by working for me, not making disgusting suggestions!'
  'Yeah, yuk!' Tricia said.  'You've totally put me off my steak tartare, creep!  If I was in publishing, I'd pay our author not to write that scene.'
  'I don't know, Tricia' teased Vaughan.  'Aren't you curious to know exactly how the night ended when Mr Pike and I shared a room, courtesy of the Hampshire constabulary!'
  Gary Pike fled the café, ashen-faced.
  'Actually, he's absolutely not my type...'  Vaughan insisted.  'And if anyone suggests otherwise, I will sue!'
  'I'm glad that horrible man has gone,' said Lyn.  'I quite like it here.  I've never been abroad before, and it is pretty and romantic.  I wouldn't mind spending a few days here.  We could do one of those little riverboat trips, and have a look in some of those nice shops, and stay in one of those elegant buildings George's son was photographing, before Sally went outside and started kissing him.'  She smiled fondly at the young lovers.  'What do you think, Terry?'
  'We've got to go, Lyn love,' he said.
  'Go where, Terry?  Why?'
  'Back to the book - she's writing again, and we're in the first scene.'  He coughed loudly in Hilary's direction.  'You too, darling!'
  Hilary disentangled herself reluctantly from her husband's embrace, smoothed down her hair and straightened her dress.
  Lyn swiftly swilled the last of her wine. 
  'See you all soon!' she said

Waiting for inspiration...

A group of characters who may be familiar to you wait to be summoned back into action...

   ‘She’s hardly written a word since the election, you know!’  Hilary Carrington took a generous sip of her merlot, reluctantly allowing a frown to furrow her brow.  ‘Naturally, we’re all deeply disappointed with the result, but she can’t leave us in 2013, still full of hope and determination, just because 2015 turns out so badly in reality.’

    ‘At least she’s left us all in a pub while she decides what to do next,’ Terry Walker said to his caseworker.  ‘You can’t say fairer than that.  Cheers darling!’

   Hilary's scowl deepened. 

'Just as long as it's not the pub in Life on Mars and we're only in here because we've already been killed off!'  Toby Novak was generally the joker of the team, but there was a hint of genuine anxiety behind his comment.
   ‘It’s not to be wondered at if she’s lost her way forward for now,’ Daphne Randall said.  'She's got a lot to worry about.'  It was always good to catch up with her friend Hilary, even if she had no idea how she came to be with her, her colleagues and a random selection of southerners just then.  She caught sight of Terry’s glass of Carling, shaking her head in pity and disapproval.  ‘Look on the bright side though, man.  If we’re stranded here for a while, at least I can try to re-educate your taste buds.  How you can drink that pitiful excuse for a pint when they have Titanic on tap, I cannot imagine!’

‘I don’t it’s right calling a beer after that poor ship, luvvie,’ Lyn Walker complained.  ‘One of my great uncles was lost aboard her.  Darren’s Paula found out all about it.  He was only a little nipper, too.  They took him on as a bell boy, the poor little mite…’

‘Another victim of grasping capitalism and the selfishness of the ruling classes,’ Martin Connolly remarked sourly.  ‘That’s what we’re up against – the rich grab the lifeboats, the rest of us get a bit of wreckage to cling to if we’re lucky.’

‘Applying that analogy, we’re more like the crew of the Carpathia,’ Sally Archer suggested cryptically. 

‘What are you on about?’ Martin asked his former colleague.  Much had changed for them both since they had first met as trainees at the Solent Welfare Rights Project, but not her tendency for weirdness.
   ‘The Carpathia was the ship which rescued the survivors from the Titanic,’ explained Terry.  ‘I saw a documentary about it.’

‘So what’s that got to do with us?’

‘Our author writes because she enjoys telling stories, but she was telling our story to try and stop people voting for parties that supported more benefit cuts,’ Sally explained patiently.  ‘Only it didn’t work and in our future, where she is now, she’s got to put up with another five years of austerity.’

‘But from our author’s point of view, that’s five more years of bloody good story material, isn't it?’   Wayne Reynolds was downing ‘shorts’, as the drinks seemed to be free, even though he wasn't in his wife’s pub.  ‘If I had five years of guaranteed work to look forward to, I’d be laughing!’

   ‘I don't think she wanted to spend five more years writing “welfare rights lit” stories,’ said Hilary.  ‘She was writing our story towards a proper conclusion this time.’

‘Why?’ asked little Amy Walker, on the verge of tears.  'Doesn't she like us any more?'

‘It’s not that, luvvie,’ Lyn said, comforting her granddaughter.  ‘She likes us all very much – so much that she doesn’t really want any more bad or sad things to happen to us.’

‘So we’re supposed to live happily ever after, like Cinderella?’

‘I always hated that fairy story,’ Sally laughed.  ‘Who wants something as dangerous as glass slippers, a coach that turns into a pumpkin and rats at midnight and a stupid prince, when you can have just as much fun dancing in massive safety boots, driving a car that runs on chip fat and loving a poor but brilliant architecture student!'  She smiled at Daniel Appleby.  'But your Nana is right, Amy.  We were supposed to live happily ever after.’

‘So why can’t we?’

‘Because, in the real world, a load of stupid bastards voted for the fucking Tories.’

‘Thank you, Martin; I’m sure Lyn’s granddaughter doesn’t need to hear your bad language.’

‘Sorry H.’

‘But if the author was going to give us a breather, what was she going to write instead?’ asked Toby.  ‘She can’t spend all her spare time gardening.  She lives in the north.  It rains too much up there!’

‘All the better to keep our waterways topped up, pet’ Daphne said.  ‘And I do believe she had some more adventures in mind for me.  After all, that funny little thriller she dashed off last autumn does better bringing in the biscuits than your “welfare rights lit” tales.  It even got her a mention in her local paper.’

‘I aren’t surprised!’ Harry Biddulph laughed, finishing his own pint of White Star.  ‘That’s a bloody clever tactic to get publicity, starting a story with your leading lady seducing a local journalist!  No wonder she got an interview!’

‘There was none of that, man!  She made it quite clear she was happily married and there was no beer or boat trip on offer.  And anyway, who says I seduced you, Harry Biddulph?  As I recall, you were the one who chased me home along the towpath.’

‘But you were the one who dragged me to the pub, woman!  That’s the trouble with the author letting you be narrator – readers only get your side of the story.  If she's stuck for new ideas, I've got one for her -  I reckon she should rewrite Grand Union, from my point of view!’

‘That’s the absolute crappiest idea for a book I ever heard!’ Sally declared.  ‘What’s the point of retelling the same story from someone else's view point, when everyone already knows what happens?  No-one's going to buy the same thing twice!’

‘You'd be surprised, pet.’  Daphne answered.  'After all, people voted the Tories in again and, as our author's remarked before, you'd think they'd be fed up with being screwed by sadistic millionaires by now.'
'Evidently not,' sighed Hilary.

To be continued...

Hot Air and Cold Water

Stoke-on-Trent has just held its second literary festival, and I missed it.  To be fair, there was only one of the invited authors I would have liked to hear speak, and by the time we got home from our narrowboat trip around Birmingham and the Black Country, the tickets for Michael Palin had gone on sale - and promptly sold out. 

The other big names - 'spin doctor' Alistair Campbell and politician Alan Johnson - didn't appeal, and I couldn't really justify buying a ticket just to thank them for their part in persuading me to join the Green Party, though I'm sure my fictional rebel councillor Daphne Randall, lead character of 4mph thriller Grand Union would have elected to do just that!

I also failed to get an invitation via my short story entry - again!  I haven't seen the shortlisted entries, so don't know whether sulking is in order or whether I should graciously concede defeat to a better wordsmith, but either way I can't complain because despite my previous grumbles and despite 'Daphne's' merciless critique of the Six Towns Gazette a few pages into Grand Union, I was lucky enough to get a photo and article in The Sentinel, its non-fictional counterpart and festival sponsor, a couple of weeks ago.  If you've read Grand Union, you'll appreciate that Richard the journalist might have wondered what he was letting himself in for when he made contact, and probably considered himself fortunate to have escaped without being invited for a beer or boat trip!

Still, here's the 'also ran' short story.  Expect to see it recycled as the foreword to another Daphne Randall story one day - but probably not the next one!

Lock 37

The Trent and Mersey Canal takes a varied course south from its shadowy summit in the ferrous depths of the Harecastle Tunnel, past Westport Lake with its vociferous wildfowl, modern and Victorian potteries at Steelite and Middleport, the wasteland that was Shelton Bar and the soulless regeneration of Festival Park, before dropping through five locks that nestle in the heart of the Six Towns.

Etruria deep lock and its shallower companion are numbered 40 and 39.  They form part of the picturesque industrial scene beside a boatyard and a bone mill, still supervised by master engineer James Brindley, his statue retired to a sheltered housing scheme and his wig powdered white by disrespectful pigeons.  Twyford Lock - number 38 - is unremarkable, though below it the waterway passes ominously between the living and the dead.  Modern housing faces a graveyard; long-dead generations sleeping beneath their marble covers a sombre reminder of mortality as the flat-dwellers rise and draw their blinds to each new dawn.

At the neglected southern boundary of the cemetery you reach the unlovely and unloved lock 37 where, crushed beneath iron girders straining under the main line to Manchester, the canal descends from a landscape of dereliction into darkness.  Corroded railway bridges bleed rust through faded, blistered paint, tattooed with mindless daubs of vandalism unworthy of the name ‘graffiti’.  Livid green algae cloaks the walls of the lock chamber, flaying away in sheets of slime as the water level falls and the tattered wooden gates open to the unquiet waters ahead.  A seething by-wash boils and hisses in the gloom and thin, bony stalactites reach down from the blood red girders of the bridge while, too close above your head, trains howl and screech like angry demons.   It is always a relief to be through this dismal lock; to duck carefully under the skull-splittingly low railway bridge while peering through the dank gloom beneath, before motoring briskly away into even the dullest wet day’s light. 

Mr and Mrs Entwhistle’s first attempt on lock 37 unexpectedly ran into trouble.  A shuddering and clanking from their narrowboat’s propeller and the realisation that though the water level was falling steadily and levelly, their vessel was not, caused a moment of panic before Mrs Entwhistle loyally followed her husband’s instructions to close all the paddles and then carefully refill the lock.  With the prop still sluggish, they towed the boat backwards through the grey morning’s light spring rain and moored in the pound above.  The skipper delved about in the weed hatch, removing a quantity of fabric and fluff that might once have been part of padded jacket, but a second attempt took them no closer to the bottom of the lock, before the propeller snagged and the boat began to tilt again. 

Surmising that there must be an obstruction beneath the surface hindering the boat’s descent, they refilled the lock, reversed again and called out the Canal and River Trust, whose lads made the gruesome discovery that lock 37 had been the portal to Purgatory, if indeed there is such a place, for one Mickey Mulligan.    

In death, as in much of his forty-seven years of life, the fates had conspired against Mickey Mulligan.  Lock 37 usually leaks to empty through its moth-eaten mitred bottom gates, but the crew of the last boat ascending on the final evening of his life must have left one of the top paddles raised in their haste away from this God-forsaken spot, allowing the lock to stay full.  Mickey might yet have found a full lock less deadly than a drained one, had his tattered rucksack and the pockets of his ragged anorak not been stuffed with stolen goods, but these had dragged him to the bottom without even a brief scrabble for freedom; the post mortem revealed none of that lurid slime from the lock’s cold walls under his nicotine-stained nails. 

But gold is a remarkably heavy element and Mickey Mulligan was drowned in possession of a substantial quantity of it.  In fact, once the items retrieved from a pains-taking fingertip search of the reeking mud at the base of the lock were reconciled with those still in the dead man’s pack and pockets, the police could account for all but one item stolen in the armed robbery on Mohammed Zia’s jewellery shop, eight days before Mickey was dredged out of the lock.  What they couldn’t account for was how the proceeds of that crime came to be in Mulligan’s possession, when both the witness statements and CCTV suggested the suspects were two young men of Asian origin, a description which in no way matched the corpse in the canal. 

Most likely Mulligan, a persistent but incompetent thief with addictions to fund and debts to pay, had stumbled across the haul when scouting his neighbourhood for unlocked doors or ill-fitting sash windows, and had stumbled again as he tried to short-cut across the lock on his get-away.  Apart from where the boat had struck his already lifeless body, there were no wounds to suggest foul play, and his fall had surely been an accident; had anyone helped him into the water, they would certainly have searched and emptied his bag and clothes of the loot first.  So the police publicly ascribed Mulligan’s death to ‘misadventure’ and privately attributed the shortfall between what was found and what was reported missing to an over-zealous insurance claim by Mr Zia, despite his most earnest protestations that the missing necklace was a precious heirloom, purchased as a wedding gift by an important customer.

Delayed in the Potteries for a couple of days, Dennis and Marjorie Entwhistle completed their third and final descent of lock 37 on a bright spring evening, chugging on in their trusty Maisie Joan to the grim concrete of lock 36, where an angry dog barked them down onto the drain-like channel to the Trent aqueduct, and so on to Trentham and the sixth lock out of the city.  Whichever route Dennis plotted to get them from there to Birmingham, the long-suffering Marjorie knew she would have to wind the paddles up and down on at least thirty more locks, and then the same again from there to Stratford, before she had to wrestle with those massive river locks on the Avon all the way to Tewkesbury and back up the Severn.  It would perhaps have eased her labours if occasionally he showed that he appreciated her hard work; their ruby wedding anniversary had passed without card or present a week before as she had slogged up the Marple flight in biting sleet, windlass in hand, for no more reward than the offer of a nice cup of tea.

Dennis had in fact belatedly remembered the occasion, a little while after they first reversed out of lock 37.  While groping about in the weed hatch, removing the remnants of poor Mickey Mulligan’s anorak, a glint that was not the brass of the propeller had caught his eye through the murky waters.  The clanking noise he had heard in the lock was explained as he carefully and nervously disentangled an intricately formed necklace of thick golden chain that had wrapped itself around the prop-shaft.   On a whim, and quite out of character, he slipped it into his pocket.  It was hardly Marjorie’s usual style, being rather ethnic looking, but when he had the chance to examine it more closely, while his wife was getting the groceries, he decided it could be worth a stroll into the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter to get the dents and scratches repaired. 

It would make a perfect if belated anniversary present for ‘the Missus’, and she need never know it had cost him next to nothing and was only second-hand.