Glasgow Student Short Story Prize 2009

Judged by A.L. Kennedy
Edited by Elisabeth Ingram, Rebecca CF Bradburd and Jose Velazquez

The Triangle and Odd-Shaped Creatures

Nora, not yet sixty and still at the same caper, neither luck nor time on her side and neither rhyme nor reason desiring her company since she fancied autonomy and struck out from her mother’s womb, looked up from the clothes line. It was such a strange colour for the evening to take - navy, a navy inky evening - that the rain couldn’t be far off and the clothes were still damp but better save them from the battering of a night’s rain. The close, with its barren washing lines running back and forth across it, sewing the tenement walls together, offered no sound to Nora save the rhythmic lift off and landing flutter and thud of her clothes in the wind. She looked back down from the clouds to the other end of the clothes line then back past the tea towels, the bath towel, the skirts to finally the vest in front of her. She moved her fingers onto the pegs when she felt the first drop. She should hurry, come on and hurry and be back inside before it really starts. But the first rain was immediately followed by the sound of a match being struck behind her and when she was able to hear the crackle of tobacco burning on the first drag her fingers could not move. Not one solitary item belonging to a man pinned to this line but yet she was still cursed by them!

    Nora not yet dead was not yet for the scrap either. This tiny rectangle of the earth held two admirers who watched her and to varying degrees felt what they presumed to be love for her. The first was the smoker who now stood behind her, another dilapidated tenant in the building past its prime. On establishing his presence she immediately looked across the close and up to the kitchen window belonging to the second, a near-geriatric who upon noting four years ago that Nora was a woman alone and he only some bit older thought that as good a reason as any to love. Though they had never spoken he had overheard her speak to neighbours and was relieved she didn’t swear, though she had cursed him often in the safety of her flat. He looked across at her regularly, had waved on the odd occasion at first but reduced the gestures to glances when he received no responses.

    The kitchen blinds were up, the windows open but there was no light from the room. Still not showing any response to the first she decided to tackle again the laundry. As she went to free the vest she looked to the rings on her marriage finger, headstones on her own body. She suddenly felt exposed by her garments the way they were lined up as if a welcome code on a mast, flags of invitation. Her whole life things happened and didn’t happen for no particular reason, but was this intrusion her fault after all? She had thought herself caught between two sentry men, a queer triangle in this box of a world. But was she protector of old men’s desperation?

    Turning to the first, the darkness now of early night surprised her and were it not for the cigarette blushing amber at his mouth she would have difficulty placing him. His shape though was recognisable, small and slanted by the back doorway - the odd shapes sadness takes before her. He lacked the dull-eyed stare of the geriatric but shyness still kept him in the shadows. She had realised his interest soon after her husband had died, various advances were gently rebuffed. They had only ever shared one complete conversation, the day he had returned from the doctor after having his ears syringed. For over twenty minutes she stood by her front door hearing about such an amount of wax that an ear could yield that even the doctor was amazed; and the difference now; and all the things he’ll be able to do now that the wax had waned! How he laughed at his joke. But the detail and desperateness of the conversation left its mark on her and since then she kept things at a kind and loud hello, in case the wax was back in the ascendancy. But now she spoke very quietly.

    ‘Are you alright?’

    ‘You could use a hand?’

    He flicked the cigarette butt from his fingers and its dying embers made the faintest orange arc before landing on the ground. The weight with which it fell reminded Nora of her father’s cigarettes always leaden with spittle by the end and the hiss it made in the fire. A light was on in the kitchen across the way now, both watchmen standing to attention and she could no longer bear it. These men making eejits of themselves, did they not realise what they were asking of her? It had been natural to love her husband, the potential and ease of him and when it transpired he couldn’t live up to early promise, habit had kicked in by the end anyway. And what kind of comfortable potential could she offer now other than bony buffer to the cold? Loneliness is a weak and flimsy glue, her own parents had left her that.

    He stepped closer to the line so that she could smell the cigarette off him. The rain was running in criss-crosses down the clothes and if one of the towels had the fortune to hit him with the wind behind it now it would be a sore strike. ‘Go inside’ she said and again up towards the window. She did not wait to see what movements occurred but turned back to the line and removed all the pegs, leaving the line still laden with soggy offerings. Without another look she went inside and closed the back door behind her. All her life things happened for no reason she knew.