These three stories received a Special Mention in judging of the July26 quarter of our Short Story Prize. Head Room by Fred Johnson, What A Scream by Carl Hughes, and I Need To Tell You About Arnold by Grant Wandle.
Head Room
by Fred Jonson
I’ve enjoyed my life so far, it’s had its ups and downs, as you might expect, being a hat, but I’ve definitely enjoyed it.
I should say right from the start that I’m a man’s hat, a working hat, flat, foldable, stuff in the pocketable. I don’t envy ladies’ hats. They might be flashier but they’re usually one of dozens, only get out once in a while. And as for wedding hats and the like well, they’re mayflies, have their day in the sun – or rain, as the case may be – and then that’s it, back in the box, lid on and wait for the moths to come calling.
That’s not to say they don’t know how to enjoy themselves given the chance. I was at a wedding once – well, I was pushed in the pocket of a raincoat, so I didn’t see the bride – but my man, Sam, left with one of the guests. It began to rain so on goes the coat and out comes the hat. His arm goes round her, and her head rests on his shoulder and this fancy fascinator starts tickling me with her feathers. I knew I wasn’t her sort, she’d have been happier with a fedora, but I played along because I could see that under her larking about she was sad. I’d have been more at home with a woolly hat, one with a pom-pom would be fun. But this was her day to show off. Like as not she’d end up being pulled apart to make a costume for a Halloween party or a nativity play. I tried to be as lively and pleasant as I could, so I hope she had something good to look back on.
But as I was saying I’m a worker. I protect from the sun, keep out the rain and keep out the cold. I’m a nice grey in a herringbone pattern – classy. One of the best things about being a hat is the most obvious – you get a really good view. Sam’s a photographer, mostly wildlife and countryside but when he’s a bit short he takes on other work. Some of those nice pictures of plates of food, or bunches of flowers are his. But he never did weddings or portraits, too much hassle he said, birds and trees didn’t argue about the framing; he was happier on his own.
I’ve been up a few fells in my time and done a bit of fishing – though sticking hooks into me wasn’t much fun. Sam got me because he was starting to go bald. He shaved off the rest of his hair to make it less obvious, but being outdoors a lot meant he needed a hat, and that was me. He tried more flamboyant hats but he wasn’t comfortable, just as he’d never buy a pair of two-tone shoes. He’s basically a steady sort of guy and feels happy with me.
So I was surprised when he hit it off with Chloe. It was at an exhibition where Sam had some of his pictures. He was looking at one of his own – a lovely snowscape with an owl in flight – he still had me on, he often forgot, when this gorgeous cloche came alongside. What a hat! Sleek, black felt with a crimson rose appliquéd above the left ear. I thought, I wouldn’t mind hanging on a peg next to you.
Chloe, the owner of the hat, says to Sam.
‘That’s a lovely picture. I wonder how long it took to get that shot.’
‘About three and a half days,’ says Sam.
She looks at him.
‘You took it?’
‘I did. I was wet, hungry and so cold I could barely trigger the camera, but I did get the shot.’
‘Have you any others in the show?’ she said.
That was how it began. Chloe was French, very chic and extrovert. Not Sam’s type at all – but she found him different to her usual crowd, not full of himself or trying to be clever. And she was happy to be able to relax and stop being vivacious or trying to make up smart remarks to poke fun at other people. Once Sam realised Chloe genuinely liked him, that it wasn’t some sort of passing fancy, their friendship blossomed. So, I got my wish and spent many a happy night hanging next to the cloche in the cupboard under the stairs.
But good things can come to an end. Chloe had to go back to France a few times, then for longer until one day there was a suitcase in the hall, a cab at the door, some tears and Chloe and her hat were gone.
That was the last I saw of that lovely cloche. Her scent, orange blossom, lingered for weeks. I’d catch the fragrance and look over – but her peg was always empty. Well, Sam and I were both down, and that’s how I came to be lost. He’d been at the pub and took a bus home. He was half asleep, nearly missed his stop and in the rush to get off I slipped from his pocket and fell on the floor. It was scruffy down there. I didn’t much care about that, but Sam had gone.
In the end I was picked up and sent to lost property. You’d think it would be the obvious place to go when Sam found I was missing, but there I sat for three months with nothing to talk to but a couple of tightly wound brollies and a pac-a-mac. Sam never came, so I never found out whether he got back together with Chloe, it would have been nice to meet up with that sweet cloche, but it wasn’t to be. What did happen was that I was sent for ‘sale or disposal’ – I didn’t like the sound of that, but it turned out to work very well for me, apart from one unpleasant experience.
A drama student, Anna, very nice girl, was looking for props for a college production of Peaky Blinders; I was perfect. It seemed to go well, though the lights were so bright I could hardly see anything, but my luck really changed at the post-production party, that’s where Anna picked me from the props basket and tried me on. Now, there is a little-known fact that women can look chic and stylish in a man’s hat – of course her being a lively, pretty, twenty-year-old didn’t do any harm – and when Anna looked in a mirror and saw how we looked together a new friendship was born.
It almost ended before it began because the first thing she did was wash me. That’s the unpleasant thing I mentioned. I was bundled up and chucked in the washing machine with a load of well, everything, she wasn’t a whites and colours sort of girl. I’m not sure how I survived all that tossing about in soapy water, then the rinse and, worst of all, the spin. I think I must have blacked out because the next I knew I was being pegged out to dry. I was cross eyed for a week, and I think I shrank a bit, but I must say it got rid of the greasepaint.
We got on well together, I was all the rage for a while. The parties we went to were quite something, and the things she got up to, well let’s just say that if I was a blusher I’d be well camouflaged on a pillar box. But, of course, it couldn’t last, and the end came because of someone called an ‘influencer.’ The line this one was selling was that you couldn’t achieve your dreams unless you had neat cupboards, or something like that. Anyway, it led to a great clear-out. Books, ornaments, enough electronics to kit out an aeroplane, and clothes – lots of clothes. I don’t know whether I was meant to go, I like to think it was a mistake, but I ended up in a black bag dumped in a charity shop.
There was another bag that went to the tip. If I’d been in that I could have been recycled into paper and you’d be holding me now, but that is a fate that has not yet arrived. I don’t know what happens when my time comes to an end. I don’t think there’s a hat heaven – a silky grey topper in the sky watching over us – so maybe ending up as a sheet of paper might not be too bad.
The charity shop put me on a shelf priced at 50p and I was bought by a nice feller called Tom. He spends a lot of time outside the Coach and Horses. I’m usually on the pavement, it’s a bit strange as I’m used to being up high, and the ground can be cold, but the money’s good.
What A Scream
by Carl Hughes
Great-Grandma popped her clogs on a Tuesday afternoon in April, leaving her two cats to her favourite niece and her debts to Alice and Joan, the companions who’d thought she had a fortune stashed away and that they’d inherit if only they buttered her up. The cantankerous old trout was laid to rest in the family plot and that would have been that, except for the locket.
The thing had been in the family for generations. It was only a cheap trinket, picked up in Blackpool from a market stall, but no one had the courage to chuck it out. Great-Grandma used to wear it for weddings and funerals, and she said it contained a sepia photograph of some long-forgotten person whom no one recognised but who had dabbled in black magic. To look at the picture was to induce madness. It had happened time and again, and it was true that a streak of insanity ran through the family.
For instance, Great-Uncle Oswald stripped down to his Y-Fronts and sang the Hallelujah Chorus while standing in the civic fountain on the day after Great-Aunt Maud took a peek inside the locket. Maud didn’t get off lightly either. She went as mad as a baboon on speed.
Which meant that no one had since opened the thing. Wear it, keep it shut and satisfaction was guaranteed. Or at least you didn’t go mad. But Great-Grandma also used to say that something monumentally nasty would happen in the family when the stars aligned, all due to the locket’s influence. Unfortunately she didn’t say which stars had to be in alignment so her warning proved to be pointless.
Julia, great-granddaughter of the trout, found the locket while sorting through the old woman’s belongings. She chucked it out ready for disposal, then had second thoughts. What if the legend were true? You couldn’t be too careful with these things. So she resolved to keep the locket, shove it in a drawer and forget about it.
Unfortunately for Julia, she possessed a streak of curiosity as wide as the Thames at Richmond. She didn’t shove the locket in a drawer after all but decided to wear it. And perhaps one day she would garner enough courage to look inside at the sepia picture, perhaps spit on the black magician and everything would be hunky-dory ever after.
As a child of the noughties, Julia regarded herself as a cut above the likes of Great-Grandma and her companions. She came equipped with the wisdom of a new millennium, not to mention the sagacity of all young virgins with acne and a perpetual odour of sweat. She regarded tales of curses and madness that lurked in lockets as things to be scorned, wrapped in a blanket of old wives’ tales and scattered to the winds.
However, she did have one superstition, if such it could be called. She read her horoscope avidly and learned that something of great significance was about to happen. Her favourite astrologer, Pluto Rising, wrote in the celebrity magazine to which she subscribed that she might come into a pot of money or there again she might not. It was possible she could meet someone of influence, or maybe someone who would try to take advantage of her. Watch out, that’s my advice, Pluto Rising wrote.
He was hot on omens, was Pluto. He believed in shooting stars presaging doom and that kind of stuff. Julia reckoned he might be on to something there, being so intellectually superior. So what would he make of Great-Grandma’s warning about the stars being in doomful alignment? She decided to write to him.
Dear Pluto Rising, she wrote. The stars are going to align, or so Great-Grandma said, but I don’t know which ones. Can you enlighten me? The thing is, something rotten’s going to happen when they do and I want to make myself scarce. Look forward to hearing from you.
She didn’t get a reply, which disgusted her as much as a walrus’s halitosis.
‘Bugger it,’ she told herself. ‘I don’t believe in all that bullshit anyhow.’
But that Thameslike curiosity fidgeted in her mind, chafing away. What was really in the locket? She couldn’t give a tuppeny toss, she thought. Still, it would be nice to know. And as a child of the noughties, free of superstition, she could show once and for all that old trouts like Great-Grandma were as irrational as kids who feared bogeymen in their wardrobes. After all, a silly trinket couldn’t come equipped with a curse like something treacly wrapped in putridity.
Right then, she’d do what Great-Grandma always said shouldn’t be done. Tomorrow she’d open the locket and show that a girl in this age of wifi and net zero could explode age-old myths.
That night she left the locket on her bedside table and wondered why her nerves were stretched as taut as a bodybuilder’s abs. Stuff the locket, she thought. She stood at the window, gazing at the stars and she saw that Jupiter and Saturn were in conjunction. Or perhaps it was Mars and Venus. Something out there anyway. There’s a lot of space to get muddled in so she didn’t blame herself for not being sure.
She slept restlessly, waking up any number of times and finding her gaze drawn to the locket as it lay in a patch of moonlight. It seemed to give off a lurid green glow as if it had been marinated in cabbage juice.
Morning came. Those abs were now at breaking point. Perhaps the stars had aligned. But no, of course not – that was just Great-Grandma’s stuff and nonsense.
She told herself to be patient, that there was no rush to get on with her resolution. Have breakfast first.
‘Stuff that,’ she said. ‘I’ve waited long enough.’
So with trembling fingers she opened the locket. And what she saw made her laugh and laugh and laugh. For the thing was utterly and completely empty. It was the biggest joke since God were a lad. In fact it made her scream with laughter.
And she was still screaming and screaming when the ambulance arrived.
I Need To Tell You About Arnold
by Grant Wandle
Every morning Arnold would set down his overpriced latte, pat the pockets of his faded jacket, locate his reading glasses and dutifully leaf through his newspaper. He couldn’t tell me why, but the news had gradually stopped making any sense to him. He read that a number fell yesterday after it rose last week, that an angry person said something angry, that a celebrity went to a party and met other celebrities. He always made notes, trying to cross-reference one item to another. It still meant nothing. His feet would take him home and he would add the newspaper – neatly annotated – to the others in the latest of several unsteady piles on the floor.
Arnold told me that he had lost the ability to cry. He might see a toddler having a tantrum in the supermarket, throwing her head back, screaming, tears and snot streaming down her face. When Arnold tried to cry, one eye would water very slightly whilst the other did nothing. Passers-by, if they were to think about it at all, would probably assume that he had just got something in his eye.
He sometimes found himself looking hopefully at buses. In our neighbourhood the buses generally offered to take him to Elephant and Castle, Peckham library and Dulwich. Arnold did not want to go to Elephant and Castle or Peckham library or Dulwich. After some thought he realised that the place he wanted to go was 1979, where his mother would be waiting for him with a glass of milk and a slice of Battenberg cake.
Arnold loved to walk. “Close enough!” he would declare, and off we would go. As he walked, Arnold sometimes imagined that the earth was hollow, inhabited by millions of giant caterpillars. They did not mean us any harm, he explained. They were just hungry. They had eaten all the soft parts in the centre of the earth, leaving only a thin layer on the outside, like the unappetising dry crust of a pizza. Every loose paving stone hung over a black void stretching all the way to Australia.
Wandering through the railway station, Arnold would look at the destinations. The next train might be going to Malden Manor, Tolworth, Chessington North and Chessington South. None of the trains was going anywhere near 1979.
One morning Arnold noticed that his body was constantly pierced by radio waves: enraged phone calls to customer service departments, chatter from overworked taxi dispatchers and radio talk show hosts. His body felt insubstantial, almost transparent under this barrage.
He went outside into the drizzle. The lampposts writhed as he passed, preparing to strike, but when he looked round they had all locked themselves into deceptive immobility. His footsteps drummed on the pavement, reverberating into the emptiness below.
He made it to the coffee shop unscathed. He had no newspaper that day, so he just watched the raindrops chase each other down the plate glass window.
“Would you like this? I’ve finished with it.”
Startled, he saw a stranger offering his newspaper as he left. Arnold took it, mumbling his thanks. He was surprised that, despite the rain, the stranger took off his coat as he stepped into the street. Then the stranger spread his immaculately feathered wings, made a slight leap and flapped his way above the buildings and away into the clouds. For some reason, this didn’t surprise Arnold in the slightest.
Arnold looked around. Nobody seemed to have noticed anything unusual. The newspaper was an unfamiliar one. He scanned the headlines: “Local Man Has A Nice Day”, “Woman Smiles After Visiting Grandchildren, Wipes Away Tear”, “Couple Hold Each Other For Long Silent Moment After Making Love”.
He stopped reading. To his left, the student with the fat textbook was holding his pen absolutely still as he understood something for the first time. There was a ping on the other side of the room and a girl’s face lit up as she received a text from a friend. Arnold realised that this was the real news. He folded the newspaper into his jacket pocket, knowing that he no longer needed any of the others he had been collecting so diligently.
Arnold told me all these things when we last met, and for the first time in years he seemed happy. There was a long silence as he waited for my response. Just what should you say when a friend tells you that he meets angels in his local Starbucks?
So I told him that I was happy for him and he was still beaming as we hugged and said our goodbyes. But as we set off our separate ways I started thinking about the most appropriate form of psychiatric intervention.
I was distracted from these thoughts as a bus rumbled by, and I caught its number from the corner of my eye. Then I realised that no bus has a four-digit number. What I had seen was its destination: 1978.
I turned and saw that down the street Arnold had seen the bus approaching. I knew what he must be thinking: “Close enough! I can walk from there”. He put out his hand and the bus hissed to a stop beside him. Without a pause or a backward glance Arnold stepped on board, the door folded shut and the bus pulled off down the street and out of sight.
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