23 - When Sally Met Harry

Harry's handmade shoes felt light upon his feet, close-fitting but with breathing space for comfort. Sharply pressed trousers and jacket with zippered inner pocket to protect his wallet, credit cards, and smart phone, sent out signals of reasonable wealth. Closely shaved, he showed all the signs of the very best of male grooming products, closed eyes betraying to-die-for eyelashes that had some women almost fainting upon meeting him.

Sally did faint when she met him, his eyes still closed. The phone contract and credit card debts adding a certain weight to his position, his suit hanging lopsidedly as if from the burden, and his handmade shoes unable quite to touch the earth beneath his swaying, hanging, body.

22 - Jubilee

After his enforced stay at a hostel, Josh is back on the streets again looking for change. "Spare some money, sir?" he asks, but the punter carries on. On a noticeboard in the hostel was a poster telling him that it was World Environment Day, but the celebrations this weekend have been more earthly and nationalistic. The council street cleaners are about, cleaning up after the merry-making, and they keep moving him on. Into their bins go bunting, flags, Union Jack hats, and red white and blue rain capes, mostly carrying the legend ‘Made in China’. Another passer-by passes by, avoiding Josh's stare and his plea. All Josh wants is some change.

21 - Matching Ties

So I look like a waiter: I've had worse jobs. I just cannot match ties to shirts; even the fact that I want to match a tie to a shirt condemns me. I pick a nice striped tie in shades of purple and I want to wear it on a green candy-striped shirt. It doesn't work, so I try a plainer tie. When that doesn't work, I try a different shirt. When all else fails I try to shop in a store where a trained person has already matched some clothes on mannequins, only to find that they haven't got my collar size.

It just leads to rage, impotence, frustration that I cannot do such a simple thing as co-ordinate the things I wear. Can you imagine how much worse I feel as a writer unable to use metaphor?

20 - Promises

Good friend that you are, I see the pity, the ‘I told you’ look, in your eyes. But his promise meant more than any contract, and I freely endowed him my body, my worldly goods, my health; yes, even my health. When others wouldn’t help him, I signed away my sense for the sight of that smile, the feel of that touch, the dream. And we shared such laughter, such fun, such a child as needed us both and now has neither.

I don’t even have his name to betray: it is mine the bailiffs seek out; mine the social services condemn. He is safe in my memories and you will not carry him off like you did our son.

19 - The Elephant in the Room

"The family were good about it."

"Not your Harry: he commented."

"Oh, that's just him."

"'Awful smell,' he said. 'Why do you put up with it?'"

"He's one to talk; you can smell his beery breath streets away."

"'Not enough room to sit properly, either,' he said. Talks rubbish does your 'Arry, but he wasn't wrong there, was he?"

"I don't care what they say, she's not going back to that zoo."

18 - Authority Figure

“I think you should drop ‘The Phone’.”

“I’m just not sure where it’s going as a story; I think readers will be confused.”

“Yes I can see there’s conflict there, but I’m left thinking: ‘So what?’ A guest asks to use the house phone; the waiter checks with the manager; the manager refuses; the waiter lets the guest use it anyway; the manager balls him out. Yes, there’s conflict, I just don’t see that it’s worth telling.”

“So what, that the waiter is putting the guest first? The manager is thinking of cost, precedent, whatever, and I can see many readers agreeing with him and not the waiter.”

“Okay, it’s autobiographical, but why should we be interested in a minor incident from a time when so much else must have been going on in your life? I mean, we get no sense that this story is happening in Snowdonia: where’s the sense of place? There must be so much more you could tell, of innocence lost or something.”

“How is it that this is about innocence lost?”

“But that’s a different story. The way you’ve written it, your older self’s less challenging relationship to authority isn’t explored at all. There’s no hint of regret or admiration for the younger ‘you’. Don’t you see how it’s all wrong?”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

17 - Fame

Oh good grief not that photograph again. That bloody chair caused me such grief with Peter who knew Jacobsen who’d designed it, and he called me all sorts of names, well beyond the fringe dear. I was the odd-jobs-man in the place, fixing the stages on the bottom two floors, and with Morley renting the studio floor I picked up his odd jobs as well. Some legal types, about as legal as Ronnie and Reggie if you ask me, were up from the film company and said he couldn’t use the chair because we’d get sued, what with Profumo blowing up around her, so one of them calls me over to cut a hole in a twenty-three guinea chair for heavens sake.

Of course these were the same hoods who insisted she stripped for the shoot, telling her it was in her contract, and she did it poor cow. Jacobsen was really sweet about it and insisted we all leave them in peace, me dripping sawdust all over the place in my hurry to get away from Tweedledum and Tweedledee. He told me afterwards that only eleven shots came out on one roll, and being in enough trouble I wasn’t about to mention the sawdust I'd got on his camera.

Not very happy memories, that photograph. Not at all. Didn't even get to keep the damned chair!