The Monday FictionFest

Good morning, everyone!

You may have noticed the blog has been dwindling down to one post a week at the moment... it's November, National Novel Writing Month, and I've been working my NaNo project.

Last Thursday saw the launch of the Writers in the Rafters' third anthology, 'In Sight of Fallen Walls', being a collection set in and around Leeds' Kirkstall Abbey and Abbey House Museum.  I'll be posting the story on here in a few weeks, so that my friends who are getting copies won't read it here first.

So in the interim I will present to you a story that remembers warmer days and which was written after my return from my first ever trip to Crete. It incorporates the titles of three song tracks.

Oh, Shirley Valentine, What Have You Started…?

Her earbuds connecting Ruth to her laptop’s music library, she selected her album-de-jour, opened Word, and created a new document.  Music filled her ears, astounding sounds, amazing music she’d almost forgotten was there.  She felt ready, poised like a gymnast on the asymmetric bars at the apex of her swing, perfectly balanced and about to fall into a world of her choosing, her creating.

She closed her eyes for a moment, riding the waves of sound, surfing the instrumentals, allowing her fingers to rest on the keyboard… a lyric chimed with her mood, suggested a theme, and her hands danced, counterpoint to the melodies, harmonising with a manic finger-drum accompaniment to the bass, and she typed and typed, not stopping to correct anything, emptying, translating herself into the screen.

So engaged was she in her world of music and mind that she didn’t notice Niko take a seat opposite her, wasn’t aware that he’d spread out a collection of brightly coloured leaflets on the table.

Niko sighed.   Ruth was different, intriguing, and he enjoyed spending time with her.  But she seemed so much more interested in her writing than she was in him…  Losing patience, he picked up the flyers again and pushed one over the rim of her laptop so it slid down the screen.  Ruth jumped, looked up, and smiled ashamedly as Niko waved the rest of the leaflets at her.

‘Sorry!’ she exclaimed, a little too loudly because of her earbuds.  ‘Just a minute…’  She clicked on the keyboard and pulled the earbuds out.  ‘Sorry, sorry… I had an idea and I just had to get it down…’

She slid along the bench to make room for Niko; he took the hint and joined her, and she found her breath catching in her throat.  There was something about Niko…  In some lights, he was nothing, just another pretty barfly, spending his afternoons allegedly helping his cousin Maria who owned the place, but really only occupied in filling and refilling his beer glass and smoking horrid hand-rolled cigarettes. Yet, catch him at the right moment, the right angle, and he was drop-dead gorgeous, with eyes far too blue for the climate, hair bleached light and perfectly tanned caramel skin.  Sitting so close to him now, she could feel the heat coming off him, drawing her in.

England had been so very cold when she’d boarded her plane three days ago.

‘So,’ Niko began, ‘I promised I would bring these – things to do, places to go… We could go over to Ierapetra , if you like.  It won’t take so long... I have my wheels…’

She looked at him with raised eyebrows.  NIko’s ‘wheels’ comprised two in number, and were part of a very old, very noisy scooter.  Granted, before Ruth set off on this trip, she had given herself permission to be silly if she wanted to, but there was a difference between silly and stupid.

‘Or we could get a bus,’ she suggested.  ‘That way, if you wanted to have a drink through the day, you could.’

‘What is it with you English and say drink but not drive, or drive but not drink?’ he said, trying to sound amused, not annoyed.

‘Well,’ she said, shifting in her seat so that he could see he had her full attention.  ‘We English also say; you’re a long time dead, Niko.  I haven’t finished playing with life yet.  Oh, what’s this one?’

She fished a leaflet out of the stack.  Across the top, in violent purple script, was the legend ‘Kadu Excursions – See With Us What Others Miss’.

‘… I like the sound of this one! ‘Malia Palace Archaelogical Site… The Unspoiled Knossos…’  It’s a lot of money to go with these people, but it says the site’s on the main coast road… if you really want to take me out for the day…?’

‘Let me look.’ Niko picked up the Kadu flyer and turned it over in his hands.  ‘But you said you’d been to Knossos?’

‘I know… but this palace hasn’t been rebuilt by a crazy Englishman.  It was hard, at Knossos, to get a real sense of the age of the place…’

‘And you don’t want to go to Ierapetra  instead?’

‘Later in the week, maybe? It does sound lovely… could we do Malia Palace first?  Please…?  Come on, Niko!  I’ll pack us a picnic?’

He shrugged, giving in. ‘Yes.  If you want, tomorrow.’

‘Excellent!’ Ruth exclaimed.  ‘I’ve still got the bus timetable I picked up in Iraklion… will around eight be too early for you? Oh, wait, the site doesn’t open until ten, so…’

Niko let Ruth make the plans, happy to go along with her obvious delight in the trip.  Presently, however, he judged the topic worn out, and he gave her shoulder a little nudge with his arm.

‘How is the writing today?’ he asked.  ‘You seemed to be working very hard!’

‘It’s going well,’ she said, nodding enthusiastically.  ‘I had this idea about a kerb crawler… he gets more than he bargains for when he picks up a transvestite and drives out into the countryside with her… him…’

Niko shook his head.  ‘My English is good, but not that good…’ he said.  ‘Transvestite I know… Paul O’Grady, Lily Savage, yes?’

‘Pretty much, yes,’ Ruth agreed, and went on to explain what a kerb crawler was. 

Niko looked at her in stunned amazement, and then burst out laughing.  ‘But why would you write about something like that here?’ he asked, waving towards the hillside.

She took his point; it was a beautiful spot.  The road climbed from the little holiday complex up into the hills where two or three old villages lay, their houses scattered like white Lego bricks against the green and grey of the mountainside behind.  From where she sat, Ruth could also look down over the town’s picturesque urban sprawl to the great sweep of the bay and the multiblue hues of the Aegean.  She shrugged.

‘People are generally the same wherever you go,’ she said. ‘It just came to me.  Maybe I’ll get more appropriate inspiration tomorrow.’

‘Of course.  And have you finished your writing now?’

Much though she wanted to just shut the laptop and follow Niko wherever he wanted to lead her, Ruth forced herself to shake her head.  ‘I’ve another half hour or so before I get to the point where I can email it to my editor and finish for the day.’

‘All right.  I’ll go over to the pool where I can smoke.  Come get me when you’re done.’

Ruth smiled and nodded and turned her attention to her laptop again, trying to appear focussed and in the zone.  Almost, she was tempted to turn the short story into a novella, just to prove to Niko she didn’t care about spending all her time with him.  No, she admitted.  To prove to herself.

Briefly she wondered how long it would take him to get bored with her…  Probably not quite as long as it would take her to get bored with him, but then, she was a person who found so many things interesting…

Over by the pool, Niko sprawled on a sun lounger like a hen party’s dream date and lit a cigarette.  He waved casually in her direction, and Ruth instantly gave her kerb crawler a twenty-a-day habit and a caramel suntan.

To her surprise, when it was time for her to go home, Niko suggested she stay on.

‘Another week; there’s room…’

‘I’m sorry; I have deadlines and…’

 ‘You can write here and send in the emails…’

She’d sighed and shaken her head.

‘I’m sorry. There are people at home who need me.’

‘But what if I need you?’

She’d smiled, not believing him, and got into her transfer coach.

The English climate came as a spiteful shock; spatteringly cold rain slapping Ruth’s face as she disembarked from her flight.  She was very glad to get into her friend Peg’s warm, waiting car.

‘How was it? Peg asked.

‘Oh, you’d love it!  Wall to wall heat, appalling bathrooms… ‘

‘And did you get to play at Shirley Valentine?’

Ruth smiled broadly.  ‘I did indeed; Niko. He was very pretty and very sweet…’

‘Oh?  Tell me more about Niko?’

Ruth sighed happily.  ‘Half Duracell bunny, half Greek god… ’

‘Ruth!’

‘Oh, he has his faults.  Smokes like a bad barbecue...  Mostly rollups… and the occasional reefer…’

‘Madness!’  Peg laughed, shaking her head.  ‘Utter madness!’

‘Oh, I didn’t indulge; I’m odd enough as it is…’

‘So… really, how was he?  It?  The trip, I mean…’

Ruth laughed, and elaborated on Knossos and Malia Palace but was thinking about Niko as she summarised.  ‘In a word: Astounding!’

‘Sounds amazing…’

Music interrupted, Ruth’s ringtone, her agent calling. 

‘I’m glad it’s you… listen, how about if I emailed you my final draft?  Great!  From Crete..?’

Her grin broadened, imagining his face. 

Shirley Valentine had a lot to answer for.

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I feel I ought to add a post script, here; many of the Monday stories have been originally written for specific deadlines and word counts.  With this one, one of my readers has just queried the ending; yes - Ruth does, indeed, decide to head back to Crete to see what might happen...

One of my many must-do plans is to take these stories and write them to the length they need to be to really round off properly... but there are so many works-in-progress...