It was tricky picking a photo for this post that didn't spoil the 'twist' in the tail of my recent 'Hot Air' short story entry (if it works - as you'll see, it may not...), but this one should do the trick.
With the date for the winners to be announced having passed without any news, I have to accept that 'Pots and Locks' hasn't collected any laurels in this competition. I did hope that the mixture of local references and humour might appeal, along with the outsider's eye view of the City (not my own outsider's eye, but another you'll probably recognise if you've read
Severe Discomfort etc), and I deliberately steered clear of politics and controversy. One friend's observation that perhaps it reads too much like the first chapter of a longer story is fair comment, though if I say more about that now, it will be a complete spoiler for the story that follows.
After making the effort to do something quite different to usual it's disappointing not to have made the shortlist but, honestly, would I
really have wanted to win something partly sponsored by
The Sun?
Well, of course I would! I write because I enjoy it, but I also write because I want to be read. Naturally, I hoped that a good showing in this competition might get me a useful spot of publicity for the other books and a chance to trail the forthcoming paperback version of
Limited Capability, to put in a good word for my Citizens Advice Bureau colleagues and even manage a mention for a local organisation who misguidedly have me on their committee as 'publicity officer' (if I say who now, that'll also be a major spoiler - tell you after the story).
So this weekend's Literary Festival isn't going to be the springboard I might have hoped, but I am genuinely looking forward to the events I have tickets for and I might still manage to sneak a plug for my books in somewhere among the
Sentinel comments and
Facebook pages. Just in case, the Kindle version of
Severe Discomfort will be on free download on Saturday and
Continual Supervision on Sunday, so hopefully they'll reach at least a few new readers.
I've always said that I don't write my books for political activists, but that doesn't mean I'm not delighted when an activist has something good to say about them, so excuse me if I share a link to this review from 'Occupy London'.
http://occupylondon.org.uk/severe-discomfort-by-sarah-honeysett-a-review/
And here is the short story...
Pots and Locks
An insistent tapping, close to my ear, woke me abruptly: sharp, metallic, rapid but irregular. Shock knotted my stomach and took my breath as the last snatch of a troubled dream fled. Opening my eyes, the ceiling above shimmered and rippled with strange, inconsistent light.
And still there was that unrelenting tapping.
I had been getting used to the strange sounds of my new home for a week. I didn’t notice them in the day, but at night they were everywhere. Every new noise set my nerves on edge. Pattering overhead. Creaking in the walls. Sometimes a slow, sinister dripping.
But this was something new.
‘What brought you to the Potteries then, duck?’
Mrs Bromley topped up my teacup from a dainty pot with a familiar blue and white chintzy pattern. I hadn’t meant to stay once I’d decided this wasn’t the house for me, but she was lonely and my company was welcome, sale or no sale.
‘We lost my mother here,’ I said.
‘Oh duck, I am sorry!’
She patted my hand.
‘It’s all right. We found her again.’
Of course Dad and I should have kept a closer eye on her when we stopped at the motorway service station. I’d taken my parents on holiday to Devon and, after enough cream teas and scenic greenery for one summer, we were heading for home up the M5. Dad was on lookout, in case Mam left the loos before me, but he failed to spot her, hidden in a huddle of ladies with matching silver perms and pastel raincoats.
The bus was heading for the slip road when I sighted her, waving a cheerfully goodbye to us from a window towards the back. Mam’s fond of coach tours, but she had never actually stowed away on one before..
‘Aw hell, Daphne! What’ll we do na?’ said Dad.
‘Get in the car and get after them!’ I opened the driver’s door.
‘But I haven’ had me lasagne! It were one of them meal deals, with a free cuppa an’ a cookie.’
Dad’s always had an eye for a bargain.
‘Just get in, will you!’
We had the coach in sight by the intersection. It was a distinctive sickly purple, splashed with turquoise. Though I’d spotted its base was Gloucester and scribbled down the first half of the number, we couldn’t guess its destination and as there was no safe way to stop it or get the driver’s attention on the move, we tailed it north up the M6.
‘It‘d be a piece o’ luck if they wa’ headed t’ Newcastle!’ said Dad.
The coach left the motorway at junction 15.
‘Wrong Newcastle, Dad…’ I said, braking for an unexpectedly steep curve.
‘Mebbe it’s Alton Toowers they’re after visitin’?’ he suggested.
‘I doubt it. There wasn’t one of them looked under eighty.’
Not even the driver.
I had an idea we might catch them at a set of lights on road to Stoke-on-Trent, but we found the traffic against us at a roundabout and watched helplessly as Mam sped away along the A500 with her newfound friends. We followed when we could, but they were out of sight.
‘Now what, Daffers? They could be anywheres!’
I knew next to nothing about the Potteries except that there were, well, potteries. That would have been another draw for our Mam; she loves her china knick-knacks.
‘Tourist information!’
I had this daft idea that the City Centre would be called ‘Stoke’. We ended up at a big Sainsburys, where I got an explanation of why I was wrong and directions to where it really was. I did three circuits of a convoluted one-way system, cursing the planning officers of this fair city to the fiery pits of hell throughout, before I found the real City Centre – and tourist office - in a place called Hanley. I left Dad napping in the multi-storey.
‘Have you a coach party up from Gloucester today?’
Not at Wedgwood: not at Portmeirion. Not at Emma Bridgwater and, mercifully for the parental credit card, not at Moorcroft either. We were almost through the list and I was wondering whether to widen the search to stately homes and gardens…
‘You have?’ Eureka! ‘I don’t suppose you could see if there’s a Mrs Randall from Newcastle with them. Upon Tyne, that is…’
They promised not to let her out of the tearoom before we arrived. After a journey up hill and down, up again to the architectural glories of the Mother Town and down through what they called a ‘renewal area’, we found her.
She was in a pretty pottery time warp, surrounded by chintzy china.
‘There you go, Daffy love!’
She’d bought me a blue and white teapot.
‘Have you nothing else, pet?’
Dad, who was still peckish, was after a bite to eat. He had hoped for a change of fare once we’d reach the Midlands, but had to make do with a scone and jam again.
I wandered outside. With a steady chug of its engine and a quiet plashing of water, a rusty narrowboat glided past. The hippy skipper looked faintly piratical. He waved and winked. I suppose I looked like a kindred spirit. I waved back, and then returned to see how the parents were doing.
A discarded newspaper lay on the next table, so while Mam waited for her friends to return from their factory tour and Dad munched his scone, I browsed the news, the jobs and the property pages.
The paper was two weeks old, but gave me a feel for this city in the way that only local stories and letters do. I cannot say why, but I felt drawn to it. It shared some of its past with home; I felt I understood it. I was restless, reconciled to the fact that my life in London with the lovely Bruno was behind me (don’t ask), but not settling back at Mam and Dad’s. I was after pastures new - not that there were any in Middleport. There were open spaces, wild flowers blooming where rows of terraced houses once stood, but they weren’t pastures by any means.
A job vacancy caught my eye: the closing date was only a day away.
I shepherded the parents towards the car.
‘Cheerio Hilda! Bye-bye, Jean!’ Mam said her farewells to her accomplices, and we headed back to the M6 and a long night’s drive north by northeast.
I cannot imagine that the application I flung together online after that was my finest, so I guess there was little competition. Assistant manager of a women’s refuge isn’t everyone’s dream job, after all. But a week later I came back for a surprisingly brief interview and a month after that, started work in Stoke-on-Trent.
At first I rented a flat, as my contract relied on short-term funding. It was a nice enough place and if it was small that suited me; I needed to put less in it to make it home. I could have been happy there, I’m sure, but Andy the landlord gave me notice after a year. He needed to move back in. It seems she wasn’t ‘the one’ after all - or he wasn’t.
‘Stay at mine, shug!’ offered Josie. She’s a fantastic colleague and fun friend for a girls’ night out, but before three months were up I knew that if I didn’t move out soon, I’d be hacking her to pieces and hiding the dismembered remains under the waxed and sanded floorboards of her immaculate semi. I couldn’t cook so much as a boiled egg without her cleaning up, right behind me. If I draped my coat over the back of a chair, she’d swoop at once to hang it in the lobby. I’d get off the settee and she’d be there, plumping up the cushions. She re-sorted the recycling after me. Sometimes, she re-washed my laundry.
She even tidied my room.
I know it was her house, but nobody had tidied my room since I was eight. Fortunately, her life was saved - we got funding for another five years, so I could buy a home of my own.
I couldn’t see myself managing a mortgage unless I settled for somewhere in need of major renovation or high security fencing. Mrs Bromley’s place required neither, but it would never feel like home. A weasel-faced woman had glowered at me from next door’s kitchen window as Mrs B showed me around her gnome-infested garden. I couldn’t find it in my heart to make an offer for the ‘repossession’ either. The views across the city to the Moorlands beyond were dramatic, but I could almost sense the anguish in the empty rooms. I got ‘gazumped’ out of the Victorian cottage overlooking the Cheshire Plain, but it was at the limit of my budget anyway, and would have no cash left to replace the carpets, which reeked of wet dog.
On the night that everything changed, Josie was ‘entertaining’. The house was excruciatingly pristine, a classy dinner for two was in preparation and Jo was done up to the nines. I had foolishly offered to run errands for her, so she could put the finishing touches to the perfect evening with her beau.
‘You were meant to buy beans!’
‘And I did…’
‘Not baked beans! I conner do baked beans with lemon sole!‘
‘The list just said “beans”...’
I never did have sophisticated tastes.
I was to get myself off to the pub and stay there until closing time, but come home before midnight, in case he turned out to be a ‘weirdo’.
‘I could pop back in half an hour?’ I offered, as an extra safeguard. ‘With the right beans?’
The look said not. She would rather take her chances than have the man of her dreams confronted by a squat, middle-aged Geordie with a bag of legumes.
‘They won’t be done in time. I’ll have to use frozen ones!’
The relationship was doomed before it started, and it was all my fault.
It was a clear spring evening with another half hour of twilight, so I took the scenic route to my watering hole. I was tired of moving, of bundling my world into boxes. Had I died, there and then, I would have requested reincarnation as a snail.
That was when I saw the ‘For Sale’ notice in the window. A welcoming light shone from within. A curl of smoke rose from the chimney. It wasn’t yet so late that a visit would be anti-social, so I scurried back across the bridge. I sensed that I had found my new home, even before I stepped inside.
The tapping continued…
I sat up and peered out of the window.
‘Aw hell!’
A pale shape drifted into view through the grey-gold dawn. A malevolent black eye came level with my own. There was a flash of orange.
The creature hissed, and then lowered its long neck back to the water.
The tapping started again.
Swans! I’d fed the last of the old loaf to them the night before, sitting in the bows watching the sun setting over the industrial estate. Now they were back, nibbling the algae along the waterline, tapping with their bright beaks on the steel hull.
After a week, I still had much to learn about living on a narrowboat. Scented candles had dispersed the aroma of wood smoke and weed that greeted me when Pete first welcomed me aboard what was no longer the rusty hulk I had waved to from the Burleigh Pottery, but a sound, proud vessel painted glossy green and gold. Keen to see this labour of love left in safe hands, he showed me the ropes (quite literally) and taught me to moor and steer. I worked through my first locks under his critical eye, finding the confidence to balance along the roof, the courage to climb the slimy ladder out of the damp chamber, and then back at Etruria, paperwork signed and payment made, he entrusted her to me.
My own little home: afloat, in the heart of the Potteries.
