He tries not to get the three confused.
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He tries not to get the three confused. |
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Home Recent Publications Fiction HIV and the Developing World Opinion Reviews Miscellanea Another World gay life on five continents Stand Alone an atheist's challenge to believers martin@martinforeman.com Appeals to your wallet: Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com 
Page last updated 16 September 2003 |
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This story was - hold your breath - Joint Fourth Winner, Moonshine Prize for Fiction 2001, the first prize I have won since I came runner up in fiction competition at school when I was seventeen. It's reappearing this month in a newly published anthology of ghost stories, Queer Haunts. Smokers in particular may experience a shiver as they read... Friday. Half past seven on an autumn evening. A bar in the city, one of a chain, pine floors, Irish script and bar staff in white and black. Words and laughter echoing, multiplying, ricocheting. Couples and groups, mostly young and employed. Clothing from quiet to fashionable, accents from gentle to anonymous. Men and women lean towards each other, eyes locked. Friends and workmates get drunk, mock bosses, judge popstars and sportsmen. Into any silence questions are thrown: what to do now, where to go, what to eat. Drinks pass from hand to hand, bottles and glasses are emptied. Cigarettes burn slowly. Smoke wafts in the air. At a table by the window chairs and benches are pushed back, coats pulled on and bags collected. The conversation moves towards the door and the night. Around the table silence gathers. A waiter, twenty-four, blue-eyed and dark-haired, with an admirer at the bar and broken hearts all over town, removes stained glasses and crumpled crisp packets. A half-fulll cigarette packet remains. He wipes the table, picks up the pack, looks round, sees no claimant, drops it back onto the glistening surface and returns to anonymity. The chairs and benches slumber. The table, ashtray and cigarettes wait. The door opens. Three men, three women all in their twenties. Four settle at the table, two offer drinks. Names emerge, attach themselves to faces. Duncan is short, scruffy-haired and almost handsome. Ellen is petite, blonde, pretty, uncertain. Tom is tall, sharp-featured and piercing-eyed, a should-be model. Shona, the oldest, close to thirty, is statuesque and calm, a welcoming port in any storm. Rick, returning from the bar with designer lager, wodka and stimulant, is the gay man recently separated from his lover but beginning to think life is worth living again. Clara, bringing the last of the drinks, is the cynic. "Thank God for this." "Cheers." "Ta." Glasses raised. Conversation restarts. "I've had a hell of week." Clara. Expressions commiserate at orders not delivered, phone calls not answered, burdens that no-one should have to bear. Shona rummages in her bag, puts it down, disappointed. With relief she reaches for the cigarette pack, waves it in the air. "Anybody's?" “No.” Heads shaken. “No.” “I thought you’d given up.” Rick. “I had.” She offers the pack round. No takers. The cigarette at her lips, she finds a lighter, flicks the flame into life and inhales. The first cigarette she smoked, at a friend’s house at thirteen, an exercise in adulthood, hit her with the impact of a lorry smashing into a wall. The most recent, puffed in the street an hour ago, had no more taste than water. This one has the scent of Araby, the sparkle of champagne, the mist of distant moors. She looks at the packet. A brand she does not know. “My great-aunt died of lung cancer.” Duncan. “You don’t seem too upset about it.” Ellen. “She left me money.” “I have no intention of dying or leaving you any money.” Shona smiles. Duncan grins back. “Don’t need it.” “It’s a filthy habit.” Tom’s beauty allows him latitude that women grant to few men. “Your breath stinks, your clothes stink..” “Which is why God invented chewing-gum and washing-machines.” Duncan. “Cigarettes can be sexy.” Rick. “Bette Davis, Marlborough Man.” “Lung cancer. Emphysema.” Clara. “Everything’s bad for you.” Ellen. “Even drink.” “I once had a cousin who drank forty Benson and Hedges a day.” Duncan. The conversation swirls as slowly as smoke, dissolving into some sport and the national team. Tom fascinates Ellen with a comparison of the merits of watching games live or on television. Rick, Duncan and Clara move on to film and Hollywood stars. Shona sits in the middle, watching, listening. To read the rest of the story, you'll have to buy the book. Click the cover on the right. |
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buy the book: 
  World Copyright © Martin Foreman |
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