I Lied When I Said My Daughter Lived Abroad by Elizabeth Leyland, bitter coffee

After that walk up and down a steep crag, I sat beside the fire and stretched my legs. The hotel’s luxurious warmth soothed my aching calves. A glass of mulled wine, passed to me by another woman in our party, diluted some of the discomfort of my mind.

Darkness fell outside and someone said, ‘It’s time for a story or two.’

Others in our little group laughed but no storyteller came forth. I kept a straight face, which was a mistake.

‘There’s something in your mind,’ one of the men said. ‘Go on, tell us.’

There seemed no harm in saying I’d been thinking of my daughter, whose favourite places included a Scottish crag or several. I told them how we used to walk together.

‘Used to?’ I was asked. ‘And now?’

That’s when I lied about where she lived, adding, ‘We don’t see each other often. I’ve no fireside tales, I’m afraid.’

The conversation moved elsewhere.

During our group’s walk a north-westerly wind had bitten at my lungs. During our descent from the crag, small boggy pools at its base had shone black and glassy like mementoes of cold, deep loch water.

In the hotel I must have appeared wrapped in reminiscence, because no one interrupted while I gazed into the fire. My daughter and her husband had lived in a pretty, rented cottage beside a Scottish loch, where sunshine often lit the south-facing house. But on my visits I’d found the surroundings gloomy. Beside the loch, a narrow pebbled beach plunged into the water. I thought how little light there’d be under the surface, even a few metres from the shore. The loch’s depth had been measured but what that ravine might look like was outwith my imagination.

My daughter became pregnant and had a little boy. Oh, what a joyous day six months ago when I drove to the hospital, heart pattering, to see my grandson. In hindsight, my daughter was too quiet, too distant from the start. Talking therapies didn’t help her bond with her son. Anti-depressants didn’t lift her. She stopped speaking. A planned admittance to a hospital met an administrative delay.

I’d never envisaged her pouring petrol inside the cottage while her husband and son were out for a walk. That stone cottage had timbers dry enough to stoke any blaze. My daughter, despite mitigating circumstances, was convicted of wilful fire raising and sent to a secure mental health hospital. She’s still there.

‘I did it to get help,’ she told me on one of my rare visits, for she didn’t want to see me often. ‘I thought the loch was my friend. Its darkness – that’s how I felt. But you’d never liked it and I couldn’t explain.’

I should have realised more, understood better.

Beside the hotel fire, someone started a ghost story and the party waited for pleasurable shivers. I watched the flames licking the logs, their leaps behind and around one another. I was already haunted.

About the author

Elizabeth Leyland writes short stories and microfiction and lives in the UK. She has been published by CaféLit, 50-Word Stories, Paragraph Planet and Fairfield Scribes among others. 

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Flirting

by Ann-Marie Swift

a cup of bitter coffee

When I leave the house Luke is asleep, curled in a fierce ball, fists clenched tight in front of him.

It’s a cruel hard hack into work, from grim downtrodden Tottenham to wealthy riverside West London. Today is a good drive. I get to the office early – though you can never be early enough - and listen to a slew of messages on voicemail, all urgent, some desperate. Waiting for my computer to boot up, I start phoning people back. Nothing unusual so far today – forgotten passwords, computer doesn’t work, where’s my new laptop, there’s a new secretary starting in one of the project teams.

The rest of my Team start arriving, slotting into their offices across the different buildings.  I initiate the edgy daily process of trying to delegate jobs out to my team and them saying, ‘Well I’ll try’ and me saying ‘Yes, but when?’ and they then take the opportunity to pass things over to me that they don’t really want to do themselves, and by 9:30 I’ve got slightly more to do than when I made the first phone call.

After the unsuccessful delegation process, I make a jug of strong coffee, which I drink over the course of the morning.

All the time the phone is ringing and the emails are coming in and it’s not until 11:30 that I realise that I’m wearing a really old pair of opaque tights which are wrinkling and bagging around my ankles. Vesey is in my office explaining everything about a new brand of router to me.

When Vesey releases me, I go through the messages that have been coming in. Tim Briscoe, head of a lot of things including shoelaces, and who doesn’t like me at all, has left a message telling me that eight new people will start this afternoon, and will all need everything right away. I call him back to ask who they are and discover that in fact none of them have been hired yet and so Tim is embarrassed and seizes the opportunity to shout at me.

Claude Westmoreland’s message is self-consciously self-deprecating, his voice rather mellifluous and ever-so-slightly affected, I think. While ­perfectly wonderful, he has found that Alice – our dubious secretary/trainer – is unable to answer absolutely all his questions about the system and it appears that only I, Holly, in the whole of this marvellous company, am equipped to answer his complex yet interesting questions and would I mind coming over to the building where he works to rescue both him and the rest of his group from almost certain commercial failure.

If I don’t go, Claude Westmoreland may well tell Tim Briscoe that the computer department is unresponsive & Tim Briscoe will seize yet another opportunity to shout at me. Tim is recently back from a placement in Dubai where he – according to office rumour – lost his wife to a tennis coach and this is partly the reason for his constant bad temper. I must act.

I put on my coat– brown, shabby from too many years of being my favourite and only coat - and walk over to the building where Claude Westmoreland is waiting for me to set his world to rights and sponsorship for athletes’ shoelaces will be forever in safe hands.

The Shoelaces project team resembles every other Team here; two boys in their early twenties, a little spotty around mouths and noses, proudly wearing clothes that they appear to have been chewing all night; three girls of radiant, if largely interchangeable, beauty; two slightly older deep-tanned senior men in loafers, white socks, open-necked shirts, wearing expressions of utter emptiness.

As their project progresses, the spotty boys will develop passionate crushes on the beautiful girls and the beautiful girls will want to believe that the vacuous but wealthy men are in love with them, and quite possibly one of the vacuous men will actually leave his still-beautiful wife, causing heartache and scandal, and the other will stay with his wife, causing a cheaper and different kind of heartache and scandal.

Despite the urgency of his call, Claude Westmoreland is unavailable and occupied in another office for the next fifteen minutes.

When he does eventually emerge, he surprises me by not being a vacuous man with loafers. He’s tall and nice-looking, and is wearing a perfectly ordinary jumper and jeans, and his feet are in trainers not loafers. I can’t imagine how he has been hired.

It’s not unpleasant to answer computer questions when asked by a handsome man with very hazel-coloured eyes and a nice olive-y skin and a slim but quite sexy mouth. Claude Westmoreland’s computer problems are strange, vague and slightly irritating but it is fun to try to unscramble his spreadsheets and I find myself trying to place his accent and wondering about his home life, even while he asks me computer-related questions which I answer, or think I do. But whenever I think I have answered something, instead of moving on to the next thing, he shifts the question so that it isn’t quite the one asked in the first place and eventually I feel as though he is deliberately shifting the questions until he can find one where I definitely don’t know the answer, which finally is exactly what happens. However, I am protected from the shame and humiliation of not knowing everything about spreadsheets because my phone goes and a server crash in the main building forces me to rush back.

An hour later the server is restored to life and I have gone some way to calming the panic in the main building so revert to responding to emails and phone messages.

In among the mass of communication – mostly panicky, some actively angry as if I have personally engineered the brief collapse in computer functionality - is a message from Claude Westmoreland. In charming and relaxed tones, he tells me how tremendously helpful I’ve been, and could I possibly pop over again tomorrow as there are one or two things he still needs clarification on. I have seven meetings with suppliers the following day so call Claude Westmoreland back – getting voicemail of course – and leave a message that no, I won’t be able to do that.

At 7pm I ignore the ringing phone, get into the car, put on some T. Rex, loud, and try to get myself mentally organised for an evening of domestic harmony with Luke.

Next morning, I find myself – fearful of receiving another shouting from Tim Briscoe - heading back over to the building where Claude Westmoreland works. It’s a cold, icy day: I had a hard drive across London this morning, my favourite run-throughs iced over forcing me to stay on the slow and busy on main roads.  The wind is raw and bitter, making my eyes water and almost certainly my mascara will run. I am not uncomfortable in my clothes; the skirt and jacket are relatively fashionable, and my flat boots are comfortable, though the smooth leather soles mean I have to concentrate on not slipping on the ice.

When I get to his office, I find that Claude Westmoreland doesn’t really have a problem. He has questions and then more questions, and I end up building him a suite of frighteningly complex spreadsheets which I am not sure that he will ever use. I start to fret about all the other things I’m not doing especially as lunchtime comes and I see the afternoon stretching ahead with no prospect of food until dinner with Luke.

‘I really must go,’ I tell him, though I’ve enjoyed the slightly pointless challenge of the spreadsheets and he is nice company. ‘There’s so much I need to get done’.

Immediately he is grace, gratitude and concern. ‘I’m so sorry; I’ve taken up all your day. You should make sure to get some lunch – where will you eat? You should go to The Dove, it’s not far, they do a good pie there. You should go there. I’ll come with you.’

The way he says this leaves me feeling uncertain. I don’t know whether he’s proposing to come for lunch with me or if he’s thinking of just dropping me at the door, and the last thing I want to do is sit alone in a pub in the middle of the afternoon eating a pie, when I’ve got heaps and heaps of work to do.

So I tell him – untruthfully - that I can get something in the building I work in, not to worry, and he says that he’s just got a couple more questions and will walk down with me and out he comes in the raw wind, coatless and charming, doesn’t ask anything more about spreadsheets and instead makes small talk all the way to the building I work in. It turns out that he listens to the same music as me – all the stuff that Luke hates so much – and we spend a few cheerful minutes discussing our feelings about the Human League and I am utterly amazed when he mentions Cabaret Voltaire and then of course I am so enthused to be talking to someone about Cabaret Voltaire that I forget I am walking on sheet ice and suddenly I slip hard.

Immediately Claude’s arm is there, I grab hold and just about manage not to fall and feel really foolish and as I am righting myself, somehow I am looking directly into his hazel eyes and he’s half-smiling and looking directly into mine, and that’s when it happens.

In a flash I feel we are poised on the edge of a magical, life-changing kiss. I expect him to kiss me right away. I pull myself away from his hazel eyes. I thank him, hotly embarrassed, and keep my eyes firmly on the icy ground.

Since I met Luke again and we found that we loved each other more than we had before the terrible things happened, and I had – we had – decided to spend the rest of our lives together, I thought I would never feel this terrible love-desire-infatuation feeling for anyone ever again.

It’s just because of the way I slipped and where Claude’s arm was, I tell myself. it is a simple question of the physical correlation of our bodies in space. It was the first time our eyes had met so directly, at that angle and I mistook the angle of a glance for something else. It was the cold outside air playing tricks with me.

I can’t turn my mind to anything else. The combination of hunger, too much coffee and now this overwhelming desire for Claude Westmoreland, leave me incapable of attending to my work. I find myself thinking that I don’t want to fall out of love now, now that I’m happy with Luke. I don’t want to leave Luke and start all over again. I don’t want to hurt him and for us to have terrible rows and to feel sick all the time. I don’t want to fall in love with someone I hardly know.

And then I remember that all it was, was a look, a movement, a moment not even of chivalry, just a person being humanly concerned, and that this is extremely unlikely to lead to me leaving Luke even for half an hour. I try – and fail - to put the whole small event out of my mind. I leave work at 6pm, which is early, and drive home slowly, listening to Cabaret Voltaire, thinking of Claude Westmoreland’s hazel eyes. When I get home, I am almost immediately overwhelmed by a devastating migraine. 

After two days I return to work safe in the knowledge that I will never again answer Claude Westmoreland’s phone calls and that even if I did, everything would be okay because now I am over it. I get into the office, take my jacket off and sit down. The phone rings and it is Claude Westmoreland.

By spring the situation is that I have lunch with Claude Westmoreland pretty much every day. We don’t always eat.

Sometimes he wants me to go to the shops with him, to help him choose something; a pair of shoes; a belt; a book; a CD. I like this, it makes me feel kind of wife-y, as though we have a long, established, relationship. ‘Thanks for your help’ he’ll say afterwards ‘I owe you lunch’

So then, we might go out to a pub where we are likely to bump into some of the people he works with. Claude becomes very involved in his conversations with his colleagues or whoever we happen to bump into and takes less notice of me - in fact sometimes he takes almost no notice of me at all.

What with the walking over to Claude’s office and the waiting for him to be ready and then the walking back to my office, lunch can take as long as a couple of hours. I never used to take a lunch break at all and even then I was only just on top of my work, so I have to make that work up somewhere, somehow and I think that Luke will be suspicious if I start to get home late every day – but what could he be suspicious of? What is there for him to suspect?  I try to work harder, faster, smarter, get in earlier in the mornings but I am always tired, and weary of thinking always and only of Clause Westmoreland and some evenings on the way home, down one of the side streets, I pull the car into the side of the road and turn the music up as loud as it will go and lay my head on the steering wheel and cry for a while.

Which doesn’t help. I arrive home late, and Luke tells me I am working too hard.

Claude phones me a lot in the summer. He phones me in the mornings while I am in the car to see when I will be in the office. He phones me at the office, in the afternoons to discuss Excel. He phones me at home when he knows that Luke will be out (because I don’t talk about Luke, but I do somehow mention when he won’t be there) to talk about nothing in particular and ask me what music I am listening to.

I am sent to Paris, where the only time I can work on the servers is when everyone has gone home. Late at night, while I am alone in the empty office, Claude Westmoreland phones and we talk while I wait for the servers to upgrade, until the early hours of the morning and the first glimmers of grey light are showing across the roofs of the sixteenth arrondissement.

The magic is, we haven’t kissed. We haven’t done anything. I am faithful. I have not betrayed Luke.

Though I have found a thousand reasons to bicker with Luke. Though Luke tries harder and harder to make me love him, with treats and surprises. Although I spend every waking minute either with Claude Westmoreland, talking on the phone to Claude Westmoreland, thinking about Claude Westmoreland or dreaming of the moment when something finally will happen with Claude Westmoreland.

I want him to make the move. I believe, sometimes, in my naïve and lying heart that we will have one kiss, or maybe even sleep together once, and then somehow I will be over Claude Westmoreland and will return to Luke from whom I have never been away and everything will be fine.

I want Claude to declare his love for me and then I can refuse him.

I want Claude to declare love for me and I will accept. In these scenarios Luke has gone painlessly away and I am waking up in the beautiful house of Claude, next to Claude in the white and beautiful bed, which I have never seen but am sure exists, sleeping in the arms of Claude, smelling the daily smell of Claude, Claude’s loving and treasured partner for ever. I will live, forever, in Westmoreland, a fabulous country where the sheets are always white, conversation flows endlessly, and love is all around.

It’s August, a hot summer morning. I’m driving into work when Claude phones me. ‘I’ll come over and meet you for lunch’ he says. ‘I need to do something over there’.

I’m so pleased that he will come to my office. Until now, I have always walked over to the building where he works. He has never come over to where I work. He will sit in my office and wait for me and we will be laughing and joking and the people I work with will be surprised and impressed at how much I am liked by handsome men in the company.

At 11:30 he calls me on the mobile and says that things are running a bit later than he’d planned but what about 12:30? I agree and try to find something useful to do with the unexpected time.

By 2pm I am exhausted with the stress of not having lunch with Claude Westmoreland. He phones, again ‘I’m on my way’ he says, ‘why don’t you just meet me outside Reception?’

Disappointed that now he won’t see my cool taste office décor or meet my Team, I hurry down to reception, hurrying like I always do as if I think he might go away and change his mind.

And so, arriving just before I am expected, I see him at the corner of the road; standing just as he stood when I slipped and gazed into his eyes and haven’t been able to sleep properly since. The girl has her back to me; she’s standing where I stood that icy slippery day, her beautiful long red hair cascading down the back of her cream blouse. She’s not stumbling or falling, the ice is long gone now, and she doesn’t look the type to stumble and fall.

Claude Westmoreland takes her hand, just for a second – but a second more than he has ever taken mine. He leans down and kisses her briefly, his lips barely brush hers, but they brush hers more than they have ever brushed mine.  I fix my smile and walk towards him. 

Dangerous Words

by Allison Symes 

bitter coffee

The biography of my long dead great-aunt whom I cared for, it was over a decade in the end, was a revelation, a bloody one at that.  No wonder she didn't want this coming out during her lifetime and I'm heartily wishing I hadn't been sent this book.  Someone wanted me to have it but who and why?  And why send it now?

Frankly, I'm not sure what I want to do with this.  The logical thing would be to burn the wretched book but how many copies were produced?  How could I find out without revealing what I know? And whoever sent this is expecting some reaction I guess.  There's nothing to stop them sending me other copies either.  Have they gone to the police?  Well let them... I've done nothing wrong except be a beneficiary to a sick old lady whose family abandoned her.  Except I now know why they dumped her.  Has one of them finally decided I ought to know? Or are they going to try to take my inheritance from me?

What did I find out?  That my great-aunt knew quite a bit about biology as it turns out and where exactly to stick the knife. She wasn't always crippled with arthritis!   Said knife ended up right in the backs of anyone to whom she was a beneficiary.  Collected quite a sum in the end - well over £500 K.  People have been killed for less than that.  What I can't figure is how she got away with it.  All I know is I'm keeping that money and I am getting out of here now.

About the author 

Allison Symes is published by Chapeltown Books, Cafe Lit, and Bridge House Publishing amongst others.  She is a member of the Society of Authors and Association of Christian Writers.  Her website is www.allisonsymescollectedworks.wordpress.com and she blogs for Chandler’s Ford Today - http://chandlersfordtoday.co.uk/author/allison-symes/

Pro?

by Keelan  LaForge

bitter coffee

 

Double blue lines came up in the window, like part of a bar code for something Lily couldn’t afford. Pregnant? She hadn’t believed it until the test window proved her wrong. It was Dom who had talked her into taking a test after finding her asleep on the sofa after work, every day for three weeks. She’d had no appetite either; Dom was perceptive about those things. He was her flatmate and their relationship purely platonic. Lily didn’t have a partner. Hell, she barely had a job or a solid plan for her future. Her boss was cutting down her work schedule daily, cutting back her hours quicker than she could cut cloth. She was a seamstress. She loved sewing, it was the one thing that gave her a sense of purpose. But it seemed that more and more people were going to furnishing chains for their curtains these days. Why repair a dropped hem when you could replace the entire thing for less than the cost of a spool of thread to fix it? It seemed that the business was slowly moving towards closure. Lily would have to reassess her options. There was enough on her plate without adding another helping of problems to it. Lily felt sick to her stomach, worry more likely the culprit than morning sickness.

So, how did she fall pregnant? She had met a friend of a friend at a party. He was the kind of guy who talks you round with kisses around your neckline. She had no romantic interest in him, but he’d plied her with compliments and drinks. He’d been a gentleman when it came to the refilling of her wine glass, at least. Lily hadn’t so much consented to accompany him to the bedroom as not made a forceful decline. He was the pushy type; the kind who didn’t take rejection well. She wondered if she had the opportunity to return to that night if it could have had a different outcome. It seemed unlikely without putting on a fiercer front. Lily was timid and loathed confrontation, especially behind a locked door. She put that night behind one in her mind too, compartmentalising it. Better to hide it away than to repeatedly revisit it, torturing herself. She would be forward-facing, she decided; that was her only choice.

Lily lived in a small town near Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. She was on the coastline, looking out of her little boxed-in town towards the expansive sea. Living in a different place would have opened her options up, she thought. But she couldn’t go to that dark place in her mind. She was pro-life, always had been. She’d protested loudly against abortion since growing up in a strait-laced Catholic family. She’d gone to an all-girls school where the virtues of abstinence were spelt out to her, in science, in religious education, in assembly, every day of the week. The girls’ skirts had to be below the knee and boys’ hands had to stay there too. Makeup and heels were banned; if you didn’t draw attention to yourself, nothing bad happened to you. Everyone in her vicinity thought pro-choice was pro-murder. She’d fought against the eighth repeal herself, spouting vehement venom to all who supported it. However, she realised, it was somehow easier to plaster a rule on a placard than it was to stick to it yourself. She’d never thought of the matter becoming personal; it was merely a concept with which she’d been taught not to agree. She had reacted instinctively, with the exact wording she’d grown up hearing. Lily suddenly felt a huge surge of sympathy for all the women who’d suffered at her expense, the ones she had vilified. Things were black and white in her small town; grey wasn’t allowed. Life had to be painted in sharp images with clear contrast between black lines and colour; blurred edges didn’t exist. If you were in the pro-choice camp, you were an automatic atheist.

Dom walked into the room, sitting on the sofa next to her. His eyebrows raised in surprise, his mouth puckering into a smirk.

“This is the first time I’ve seen you awake in a month,” he said. “Did you start drinking caffeine again?”

“Yeah I’ve had five cups of coffee today.”

He laughed.

“Seriously though, you were right. I’m pregnant.”

“Shit,” he said. His head snapped back like someone had smacked him.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” she said, tailing off. She really didn’t.

“I think you should ring that jerk and tell him,” he said. “It’s his fault you’re in this situation.”

Dom was her male confidant; he knew all the ins and outs of her love life. Lily hesitated, glancing at the phone. Maybe that was the answer: share the load so she could manage to carry her half of it.

She lifted the phone, scrolling through her phone-book for his number. She knew she had it stored somewhere but struggled to remember his name for a moment. She had blotted it out, with all other aspects of that night. She found it: Ben. She’d known it was a one-syllable name, like Dom’s name for him: jerk. The phone rang so many times she almost gave up on an answer. As she went to disconnect the call, he picked up. “Yeah?”

“Hi Ben, it’s Lily.”

“Who?”

“Lilly, Coleen’s friend.”

“Oh yeah, you were at that party at Coleen’s. We should hang out again some time. What’s up?”

“I just thought I should ring to share some news with you – I’m pregnant.”

“- So why are you ringing me about that?”

“It’s yours.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it really is.”

 “You’re wrong. Don’t phone me again.” The line went dead. Silence stood in front of her like a surgeon quietly waiting with a sharp scalpel.

“Well?” said Dom.

“Don’t ask,” she said. “He hasn’t changed my original opinion of him, I’ll say that.”

“You know, you could always get a you-know-what.”

She looked at him in disbelief, like he’d never met her before or heard her repeat her mantras millions of times.

“Well, what will you do if you keep it?” he asked.

Lily thought about her life and the little she had to offer a child: fifty pounds in the bank, a job she was on the brink of losing, a shared flat that wasn’t much bigger than a studio. She felt like the answer presented itself to her without her even posing the question. But, the judgement: that was what she feared most of all. Her town was small and stuck in the past, it didn’t have the open-minded outlook of a major city. She hoped no one would find out.

A week later, Lily was in the hospital bed alone. The room was utterly blank, like looking death right in the face. She lay with her feet in the air, held up by stirrups. The sheets were starched and abrasive under her bare legs. People said it was letting a woman keep her dignity, giving her the power to choose. Nothing in the room felt dignified. She felt open to public view. Surgeons and nurses passed in and out of the room like it was a thoroughfare. Metal implements lay on a trolley in front of her; a row of weapons. A doctor with a surgical mask came into the room. She could see his eyes; eyes that were hollow and desensitised to the whole experience. He didn’t have empathy for her either. His face would remain a mystery to her: like he didn’t know her as intimately as he did. But his eyes would haunt her forever. She shut her eyes tight until the whole thing was over. She couldn’t watch it unfolding or she’d run from the bed. Decision and doubt wrestled each other in her head, the pragmatic one winning out. She would deal with the latter later.

Lily walked out of the room a short while later, with a painkiller in her pocket and a pat on the shoulder from the nurse.

“You did really well, love,” she said with her soft smile. She looked at her like she was her star pupil, on her way to greater things in life.

Lily wondered if she’d be able to face the rest of her changed-life with the same bravery. Walking out the door of the hospital, the doors clapped closed behind her. She hoped they would contain the pain and her memories. Walking along the street, she passed a group of university students. She’d confronted them in a protest over the eighth repeal, just weeks before. Lily thought of their banners, worn-out and marked as the undergarments she’d worn that day. She looked at them with their fresh faces, untarnished by the truth that comes with time and experience. Now she could see that Pro-life wasn’t allowing women a choice, but Pro-Choice didn’t feel like one to her either. From then on, she made one choice: that she’d remain on the side lines, keeping her opinions to herself. 

About the author

Keelan LaForge is a mum of two and a writer. She writes for Terror House magazine and used to write for Vintage Life Magazine. She has a personal blog https://thefunkythrifter.com/ She has written three novels which she is working on getting published.