Silenced

The train pulls away from Erdington station and I look up from my scavenged copy of the Metro to see where the music is suddenly coming from.

She makes her way along the half-full carriage and then takes a seat opposite me. She looks about twenty and is wearing jeans and a white tracksuit top, with her hair pulled back in an aggressively tight ponytail. Her phone is in her hand, blaring out tinny dance music of such painfully poor sound quality that it would be unpleasant even if I liked that kind of thing.

I look up at the sticker on the carriage window and then look at her. Our eyes meet and I can see that she is ready for me, and defiant.
I know I won’t win but I still feel obliged to say –

‘This is the Quiet Zone you know.’

‘Well shut the fuck up then,’ she replies.

And I do.

This story first appeared in the online magazine Birmingham Words in 2007

One Down

‘C_n_i_e.’

‘A fitting farewell. It’s a trick, with one plus one plus one minus zero (7).’

Bloody crosswords. Why does she have to make one clue impossible so you can never finish the things? It only took me half an hour to do all the rest of it, and now I’ve sat here for another half hour just trying to figure out this last one. Who does she think she is, the compiler for the Sunday Times or something? It’s only for the bloody parish gazette. What’s the point of making a clue so hard that none of the handful of our fellow pensioners who actually bother to look at the thing will be able to do it? She’s most likely just showing off.

I stare at the hand-drawn puzzle, rattling through the short list of words I can think of that fit there, and trying yet again to see how any of them might have a connection with the clue.

If she gets back from that witches’ coven of a book group and sees that I haven’t finished it then she’ll have won a petty victory over me. Well let her have it, I can’t be bothered anymore.

I toss the piece of paper onto the coffee table, next to the half-eaten plate of sausage egg and chips that has long since turned stone cold. I pick up the fork, idly skewer a piece of sausage with it, and then hold it up to watch a blob of fat drip slowly off the end. I put it back down with a sigh. On the other side of the table lurks a glass of my horrendous damson wine. I only drink the wretched stuff out of principle. I started making it with the idea of getting something for nothing, ‘owt for nowt’ as my old dad used to say, and now that it’s ready I feel I ought to get through it, otherwise the end result will be nothing for something – all that effort for no return, and as a Yorkshireman it’s not in my blood to accept such a thing. But at the moment the thought of it seems to make my stomach wince.

I pick up the remote from the arm of the sofa and switch the TV on. Antiques Roadshow! I had forgotten all about it. This is more like it! I settle back into the sofa and relax. I could watch this programme every day for ten years and still learn nothing, but for me that’s not the point. I love the enthusiasm of the team, and the etiquette with which the show is conducted. That is how life should be. None of those charming people will go home tonight and find themselves sitting on a threadbare sofa, picking at cold food, drinking nasty wine, and gazing at the TV over the top of their propped up feet, with one toe sticking out of an undarned sock.
On the screen an elderly couple are being told that their collection of garish clay pots, made by a long-deceased distant relative, should be insured for around two thousand pounds. They beam at each other and nod their thanks to the sagacious man in the tweed suit and red bow tie.

When was the last time we looked at each other like that? When was the last time we really looked at each other at all? Silence and sniping are the ways we communicate nowadays – everything else has withered away after thirty-nine years. Like that old joke goes, I could have killed her and been out by now. Could have killed her maybe three times over. That woman has been a millstone around my bloody neck.

I think I’m as fair-minded as the next man, but sometimes it seems to me that the world was a more sensible place before womens’ lib. came along. These days every woman must have the right to try and upstage and belittle her husband at every opportunity.

‘C_n_i_e.’ What the hell is it?

But then again, what is the point in fretting? We are both too long in the tooth to change our ways now. This is how things will be until one or the other of us pops our clogs. Probably me.

Lord, how I depress myself sometimes! I brace myself and then pick up the wine glass and knock the contents back. It leaves a coating on the inside of my mouth that feels as if it could take the skin off. I decide that I’d better have a glass of water to wash it down with and so I heave myself up and head for the kitchen. As I’m returning there is the sound of footsteps on our gravel driveway. About time! She must have been gassing to her cronies again. But the letterbox flaps once and then the footsteps recede. I frown and make my way to the hallway to find that there is a glossy leaflet awaiting me, extolling the virtues of a new pizza delivery firm. I drop it back onto the floor and return to the sofa. The last one of those we tried had so little flavour that we may as well have eaten the bloody leaflet instead. What a con!

Con?

The word rings a bell somewhere in my head. Yes, of course! That could very well be the ‘trick’ part of the clue!

I pick up the sheet again and see what progress this makes. If the first part is ‘con’ then the whole thing probably means ‘a fitting farewell’, while the last four letters somehow signify ‘one plus one plus one minus zero.’ A standard clue for the letter ‘i’ is ‘one’, as in Roman numerals, so that is probably one ‘one’ taken care of.

‘Con_i_e.’

Confine? Confide? What kind of farewell begins with ‘con’? I wouldn’t put it past her to use Latin or some other foreign language. Au revoir? Adios? Auf wiedersehen? Nothing even close. I stare across the room at the tattered old dictionary sitting heavy on the bookshelf. Can I be bothered? No – there must be hundreds of words beginning with ‘con’.

On the TV a middle-aged gentleman is having his collection of distinctive walking sticks examined. He has about two hundred of the things. Whoever would have thought there would be so many different types worth collecting? He owns one ancient stick which has a gargoyle’s head on top of it, and which was apparently once owned by royalty.

But I can’t concentrate. That damned clue has wormed its way into my brain. I’m so close now; all I have to do is get the dictionary and start ploughing through the ‘con’s and sooner or later I’ll have the answer, and then the victory will be mine.

The gentleman is being told that his collection could be worth up to six thousand pounds. Six bloody grand! I look at my own plain old stick propped up in the corner and sigh as I get up to fetch the dictionary.

I pull it down from its perch, find the ‘con’s, and then begin to scan through for any that are seven letters long, ending in ‘e’. The first possibility is ‘concise’. This can also mean pertinent, and could therefore perhaps be the ‘fitting’ part of the clue, but there is nothing that could be interpreted as meaning farewell.

Next comes ‘confide’ and ‘confine’, which are similarly unhelpful. Then after a couple more pages I find the odd-looking ‘coniine’. The double ‘i’ leaps out at me straightaway – ‘one plus one’. And the ‘ne’ on the end could be ‘one’ minus ‘o’. But how is this ‘a fitting farewell’?

The definition is: ‘n a liquid, highly poisonous alkaloid found in hemlock (Conium). – Also conia, conine or conin. [Gr koneion hemlock]‘

I can’t see a connection there, and yet the rest of it seems to fit so well. I ponder over this for a minute and then throw the crossword down again in frustration. I’ve had enough of the bloody thing. The silly old mare has probably made a mistake anyway.

I stand up to put the dictionary away, but find that I have to sit straight back down again, my head is spinning and I am suddenly short of breath. What on earth is going on? My mind starts to race.

Should I phone a doctor?

Could I even get to the phone?

Maybe I should give it a minute. Maybe it will pass.

But the panic just seems to make my breath grow shorter still.

I look up at the clock. Twenty past seven! Where the hell is that bloody woman?

This story was short-listed for the Fish International Short Story Prize in 2005, and appeared in Raw Edge magazine in 2007