Poole Confessions

Little Jan
I was the only Janet in the office until she arrived but there was no problem until one day I asked Harriet for the long stapler and she said she’d given it to little Jan.
Little Jan. She wasn’t particularly little and I’m not especially big. I didn’t want to be known as big jan, like some bull dyke prisoner. Harriet tried to reassure me; the new Janet was little Jan but I would always be Jan. But they might as well write fat cow on my forehead for all the difference that made. So-called Little Jan is a 12 at least, and not TopShop, more like Marks.
So while recovering the long stapler I told Jan all about fast-track promotion in this place, the people to influence, and how to do it.
Now I’m still Jan but she’s known as stock-room jan and she’s off long-term with stress.

Mum and Trevor were getting serious, what with her new glittery top and the way she stroked the sleeve of his knobbly jumper like it was a hamster. But you can put up with that. When he bought me new trainers my heart sank. The box declared in scrolly italics, Clarks, and when I lifted the lid, pink lights winked through tissue and my worst fears were confirmed.

Cica Lights. A Nike copy with pathetic flashing bulbs in the heels.

I was dead if I wore them. Like the boy who wore a Blue Peter T shirt on non-uniform day and had since developed a stutter and started hanging with the science-fiction lot.

So I told Trevor about the nights my Dad stayed over and Trevor stormed out taking the shoes with him.
My mum was insupportable. But relationships come and go. Your choice of trainer leaves an indelible mark.

How the taste gets in
Barry’s dad didn’t have long left so Barry tried to get him whatever he asked for and you never know, maybe Ewan McCall, poet of canal and factory, did play the Longfield Suite in Prestwich and if he did, maybe he did stick a plectrum behind the mirror in the dressing room.

The doors to the Longfield Suite concert room were clothed with heavy curtains and Barry parted them to reveal a row of wheeled hospital beds on which lay a group of middle-aged ladies dressed in chiffon, bells, and feathers.
Belly dancers.
But the ladies weren’t belly dancing. Tubes in their arms led to plastic bags filled with dark liquid. He wondered whether this was some secret government experiment, but an examination of the posters in the foyer revealed that a woman called Hilary ran a belly dance session every Saturday morning. The blood donor session followed it and the ladies must have agreed to help out.
But who would want belly dancer’s blood? A real belly dancer’s, possibly, but these women? Middle-class council workers with a meaningless hunger for the exotic. His father required a blood transfusion every month, and Barry knew what he would say if he discovered the blood was from a Prestwich belly dancer.
A couple of nurses were laughing with Hilary, the fluffy-haired dancing instructor, who was demonstrating some moves. Behind a screen sat a large blue box with red tape handles.

That night he sat with his feet up on the box of belly dancer’s blood watching Top Gear back to back on Dave and drinking lager. The box wouldn’t fit in the fridge so he didn’t know what do with it.
In an advert break he picked up his lager and went to the window. He looked out at the tomato plants his father had insisted he put in. The brand was Outdoor Girl, so everything fitted, and he took a sachet of belly dancer’s blood outside and dribbled it slowly onto the soil.

A couple of months of this treatment gave him the best crop of tomatoes he’d every seen, and when he took one to his father the old man sliced it in two, lifted it to his nose, and inhaled, long and deep.
‘That, my son, is a tomato,’ he said. ‘I want to know everything you did to get it like that. Sit down and tell me,’
Barry sat and spoke to his father for a long time, longer than he’d ever spoken to him over one single period in his life. The fact that it might have been shreds of Ewan McCall’s plectrum sprinkled into the feed made his father laugh, and it was nice, because he didn’t used to laugh much, at least not when other family members were around.

The Three Daves
Fat Dave thought Budapest was shabby-chic. Little Dave thought Paris was shoe-shop-manager-on-a-midlife crisis. Big Dave didn’t want a repeat of Krakow where they had to put on padded clothing and get chased through the woods by attack dogs. So for a laugh Big Dave suggested they have the stag in Pontefract, where they’d visited the liquorish museum as part of a confectionary campaign. Little Dave said yes right away, and Fat Dave loved the idea. It would be uber-post-post-ironic-out-the-other-side-and-back-into-being-just-ironic. Shoreditch media spods in sarcastically tilted flat caps sipping mini-Bollingers in the street. There was even a Wimpy so they could eat burgers off a plate with a knife and fork. It was Little Dave’s idea to use the stone troughs in the market place, and the president of the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association was so impressed that Pontrefract’s troughs would be returned to something like their original use he gave his blessing right away.
The night before the stag the three Daves donned overalls and went into the town to prepare their troughs. Each Dave had a clearly defined role, set out on Fat Dave’s spreadsheet. Little Dave was to dig out the soil and flowers and fit the plastic liner, Fat Dave was to operate the wheelbarrow, while Big Dave had to deal with passer’s by. But Big Dave didn’t need to deal with passers by because no-one in Pontefract paid any attention to the three Daves at all.
Come the night of the stag each Dave sat on a stool next to his trough and began to drink through a long bendy straw. There were no other guests to cater for because the rest of the Shoreditch crowd had decided it would be more ironic not to come.
After an hour the Daves began to feel cold sitting by their beer-filled troughs. It was quiet too. A few hardy smokers stood outside the nearby pubs looking into the middle distance, but apart from polite nods, they didn’t call across to any of the Daves. No Dave rang or texted any of the other Daves because there was a strict no mobile rule on stags and the three Daves followed this to the letter because stags were about bonding and getting away from the world.

Happy Place
He hated grocery shopping, hated the time it took. But he came up with a method. People bought the same things, more or less. So he would look for someone of his type, sneak up behind them and roll their fully-laden trolley off to the checkout.

It made life interesting. Often there were things he would never have bought; once there was a fat orange pumpkin.

But today he was in trouble. He had been stealing mostly from women because he liked the sense of order to their selections, but his victim had spied him and was stomping over. There were women’s products in the cart, so it was going to be difficult. He decided to pretend he knew her.
‘Darling, I’ll just get eggs’

‘We’ve got eggs’ The woman chirped. ‘Listen, do you want to go out to the car? You look stressed. You can listen to your tape’.

Special Interest
‘Excuse me’ he said. It was the bloke who‘d been creeping around behind me in Woolworths. He had haunted muddy eyes and his breath reeked of curry and tic-tacs.
‘I was wondering, did you pay for those seeds?’
He was right of course. Assorted Summer Blooms, palmed deftly into my secret pocket. But this guy didn’t look like security.
‘What seeds?’
His eyes darted about. ‘Can we go for coffee?’

His thumb stroked my finger where it rested against my Latte. I didn’t move it away.
‘I have a thing,’ he said. ‘For people like you.’
I felt myself redden. ‘Like me?’
He gripped my finger in his hand. ‘Women who steal.’
I pulled my hand away. ‘So I’m just another?’
‘You’re special. I bet you don’t even have a garden for those seeds.’

‘One O’clock, B & Q.’ I called after him. ‘Nails and fixings.’