2011 Competition Results
The winners of the Pentlands Writers Group 2011 Short Story Competition are as follows:
1st: OFF THE BEATEN TRACK, by Andrew McCallum
2nd: FAST FORWARD, by Judith Shepherd
Commended Stories:
Words Don't Say Everything, by Joyce Watson
The Fox, by Andrew Broadfoot
Marooned, by Beth McDonough
Off The Beaten Track (1st) - Fast Forward (2nd) - Judge's Comments
Duffy had passed the fish on his way up the track. It was about a foot long and its silvery scales were covered with dirt. The gill-flaps gaped like two gashes on the sides of its head as it thrashed helplessly in the dry syver. Next to it a boy leaned against the railing, his rod and line dangling out over the floating rubbage and the stream of brown stinking waste that trickled from a pipe in the wall below. The boy wore a pair of baggy plastic football shorts. He was perhaps nine or ten years old, barefoot and grubby, and his skin was flecked with midgie bites.
The fish gasped and made one last convulsive leap, throwing itself in the direction of the river and landing on the track with a dull slap. It lay there motionless for a moment, exhausted by the effort. The boy looked down at it, turned and toed it back into the syver.
Duffy had not paid much attention to the fish. He was preoccupied. He had just been to look at a house and he was considering how he could afford the rent. Accommodation was hard to find in the village and a place like this didn't come up very often. The flat in which he and his wife were currently living was so small that their six-year-old son had to live with his wife's parents during the week. They had been trying to get a flit for two years. He took out a cigarette and leaned against the railing, looking down to where the boy was fishing.
Further along the track two figures were approaching. Duffy watched as they wandered slowly towards him. They looked to be in their early thirties and were obviously tourists; Americans, he would guess. The woman had shoulder-length reddish hair and pale freckled skin. She was slim and athletic-looking. Her partner was tall and flabby, his stomach protruding from under his University of Wisconsin sweatshirt. He wore knee-length shorts, sunglasses and his long hair was tied in a pony tail.
They came slowly along the dusty track beside the scrap yard. Tourists were not uncommon in the village but they usually kept to the pretty part with its Norman church and Victorian corn exchange and medieval footbridge, or took in the organised heritage of the museum. It was rare to see them in the nether regions of the village and Duffy assumed they were lost.
“Look at the poor thing!” the woman said, stopping beside the fish, which lay where the boy had kicked it, gasping its last breaths. She spoke with a lazy nasal drawl.
The boy had not turned around but he had noticed their presence. He stared fixedly across the glittering surface of the water towards the lines of washing in the narrow drying-greens on the opposite bank, waiting for them to go.
“It ought to be thrown back,” the woman was saying. “Do you think he wants it?”
She turned to her companion, who shrugged. He looked nervous.
“I don't like the look of this neighbourhood,” he said. “I think we should get back.”
But the woman wasn't going to let it go. She stood there looking from the fish to the boy and back again.
“You could try asking him,” the man said.
The woman stepped around the fish and approached the boy, who was still looking out across the river. The child's body tensed as the woman came up to him.
“Do you know that fish is dying?” Duffy heard her ask.
The boy looked up at her blankly and then shook his head.
“Dy-ing,” she repeated, drawing out each syllable.
The boy remained dumb, uncomprehending. He fidgeted awkwardly with his feet.
“I don't think he understands,” the woman said to her partner.
The man shrugged.
She looked around for assistance and noticed Duffy watching her. She stared at him for a moment, taking in the black-to-grey faded Lynyrd Skynyrd tee-shirt, the scuffed yellow cowboy boots, the frayed denim cut-offs.
“Do you speak English?” she asked, this time with a more respectful tone than she had used with the boy.
Duffy said that he did but in a voice that gave her no reason to expect his help.
She held his gaze for a few moments.
“Can you ask this boy what he means to do with the fish? It seems so cruel. It ought to be thrown back.”
Duffy looked across at the boy and then at the woman. He wondered if he should tell her about the kind of life this boy led, about the council houses down by the cowp, about the parents struggling to make ends meet. Two days earlier he had read in the Record about a community in the north-east which was being evicted to make way for a new hotel and golf course.
The boy was watching them anxiously.
“The leddy waants ti ken whit fir ye are takkin thon brounie,” he said to the boy. He spoke gently, with consideration.
The boy wiped a dirty hand across one eye and looked at Duffy.
“Ti tirn inti siller,” he replied.
“He intends to sell it,” Duffy told the woman. He tried to make his answer sound final, as though that was the end of the matter.
The woman hesitated, uncertain how to interpret the lack of encouragement in his voice. Duffy observed her confusion. Her eyes searched his face as though looking for some clue.
Her companion shifted nervously behind her.
“Honey, I think we should go,” he suggested. The woman ignored him. He shuffled uncomfortably. “You know, I really don't think you should interfere.”
“How much does the boy want for the fish?” the woman asked.
Duffy glanced at her companion with his stooped shoulders and useless bulk. The woman's determination amused him but he did not smile.
“The leddy waants ti ken whit ye wad tak fir yer brounie,”
The boy named a price, which was five times what he would have got for it in the village. His expression was deadpan. Only a slight clenching of his right hand betrayed the tension he was feeling.
Duffy told her the price, adopting the same tone of voice with which he had addressed her previously. But this time he could not help smiling. She seemed to interpret this as friendliness.
She opened her shoulder-bag and took out some money, peeling off a note twice the value the boy had asked.
“Does he have any change?” she asked.
Duffy translated.
Again the boy's right hand twitched slightly but otherwise his face wore the same expression of innocence it had before. He shook his head.
The woman hesitated for a moment and looked across at the fish. Then she held out the note to the boy, who took it. She stooped down, picked the fish up carefully between forefinger and thumb and threw it into the river.
Without looking at either Duffy or the boy she turned to her companion and they went on up the track together. The man produced a handkerchief and offered it to the woman to wipe her fingers on but she refused it. They appeared to be arguing.
The boy stood holding the note. His expression had hardly changed.
Duffy watched the couple until they were out of sight. They did not look back. He lit another cigarette and returned to his former position against the railing.
The fish had not survived its time out of the water and was now floating among the debris a few feet out from the bank. The boy climbed over the railing and down onto a ledge just above the water line. He began dragging the dead fish towards him with a stick. When it was finally within reach he caught hold of it and tossed it up onto the track.
As he clambered back over the railing he grinned at Duffy. The boy gathered up his rod and the fish and set off down the track towards the village high street.
Duffy watched him while he finished his cigarette. Then he threw the butt down into the dirty water and made his way back the way he had come.
Andrew McCallum is from Biggar and a member of Biggar Writers Group. He almost exclusively writes poetry in Scots and English and has enjoyed some success with this form, being regularly published in magazines and anthologies in Britain and North America. He also edits Biggar Poetry Garden (www.biggarpoetrygarden.weebly.com ), an e-zine which features the poetry that appears on the public poetry boards at the top of Biggar High Street. Andrew's success in the Pentland Writers Group Short Story Competition has encouraged him to write more prose.
Fantastic news – Uncle Ted’s dead. Not so fantastic for him, obviously, though he was blind and quite old (he was Dad’s uncle, not mine) and if you opened his lungs out and ironed them flat they’d be pushed to cover a table-tennis table never mind a tennis court so it was probably for the best.
When I say fantastic, what I mean is, his house is full of record players and radios and whatnot – blind people collect that sort of thing – and all I’ve got is one transistor radio that sounds like sheets of sandpaper being rubbed together, one LP (Bridge Over Troubled Water) and a few scratchy ex-jukebox singles with plastic middles that keep dropping out. And nothing to play them on except the record player in the living room and whenever Dad hears Simon & Garfunkel he says, oh no, not that again... play it when I’m down the club, will you. Uncle Ted’d want his things to go to a good home where they’d be appreciated, wouldn’t he?
Mum, Dad and Aunty Maureen are going round on Saturday for a clear-out. Aunty Maureen wants me go with them but Dad says no, I’d be under their feet. I’ll be waiting, though, singing along to Bridge Over Troubled Water.
I know every word and every note of every track.
There’s a radiogram in the living room. It’s got spindly legs so you can vac underneath it and it lights up when you switch it on but the best thing is... the old record player’s in my bedroom now! I’ve got a better radio too, and a cassette recorder and a massive box of tapes. The tapes are all of people talking (Uncle Ted’s tape friends, like Chuck and Wanda from Sacramento) but I can record stuff from the radio over them... well, I can if everything in the house is quiet (fat chance), and if the DJs don’t burble on when the songs are playing. Tony Blackburn doesn’t know when to shut up. Dad says they’re not daft, they do that so your recordings’ll be rubbish and you’ll have to go out and buy the records. He says I should shift myself and get a paper round like he did when he was my age.
What I want more than anything is Carole King’s Tapestry. I’ve asked for it for my birthday but that’s five months away. A paper round? It’s February. It’s freezing out there... more freezing than it is in my bedroom which is saying something. Maybe I can borrow Tapestry and tape it?
I don’t like school as much as I used to. They mucked about with our classes at the start of the fourth form - re-sorted us into clever, so-so and thick - and now Anne’s got new clever friends in 4A and I’m a 4B so-so. Julie, Karen and Maggie are alright but they’ve been together since the first form and they haven’t asked me along to their Thursday nights yet. They meet up at each other’s houses to watch Top of the Pops and Karen’s dad organizes lifts home so there wouldn’t be a problem with me getting back.
Anyway, Julie’s sister, Lorraine (who’s got long wavy hair like Carole King), is the only person I’ve found who’s got Tapestry. Julie says if I give her a cassette she’ll tape it for me while Lorraine’s out. I thought she might say I could go on Thursday and we could all do it together but she didn’t.
I went into Gilbert Roberts after school to have a look at Tapestry again. LPs are tons better than cassettes - you can actually see the photos and read the words without a magnifying glass - and the ones that have sleeves that open out and extra sheets inside are brilliant.
I’ve just tried to re-create the album cover by taking my socks off and sitting on my bedroom windowsill but I haven’t got any jeans or a cat and I nearly got frostbite and the sill wasn’t wide enough so I fell off and Mum shouted what in God’s name was I up to now?
Julie’s got the tape. She says she’ll have it done for Friday. I can’t wait.
I should’ve known. First it was a bit of giggling, then the three of them whispering and clinking glasses and telling each other to shush and by Track 3 they were stomping round the floor shrieking and being Pan’s People. By the time it got to Beautiful, they were singing their own words, telling me I should get up in the morning, put a bag on my head and stop the world from seeing my face. They can’t have made the words up there and then - they’re not clever enough - they must have figured them out earlier... maybe written them down.
I can wait till my birthday for Tapestry.
Julie tried to make out it was a joke... said if I gave her the tape back she’d do it properly next time. I said no thanks... someone else was going to do it for me. Who, she said, and what was the matter with me... didn’t I have a sense of humour? They always had a laugh together on Thursday nights.
Mum’s always saying I can’t cope with having the mickey taken out of me because I’m an only child and if I’d had three brothers like her, I’d be tougher. Tough is what old boots are... and stewing meat that you chew and chew till you get fed up and have to take it out of your mouth or else you’d be chewing it till the end of time. She says I was no good at rough and tumble either, when I was little. Rough? Rough kids hit you and steal your things and tumbling’s what happens to you when they shove you down a slope.
Why would I want to be rough or tough?
Aunty Maureen’s found a whole load of little cassette-sized envelopes. They’ve got metal catches that poke through a hole in the flap and open out like they’re doing the splits and some of them are addressed to Chuck and Wanda. Aunty Maureen said Chuck and Wanda might not know about Uncle Ted and would I like to write to them? I thought it might be better to make a tape as they’re used to listening to them, so I recorded Bridge over Troubled Water (the song not the whole LP), which is a good choice when there’s bad news to deliver, then told them about Uncle Ted. There was quite a lot of tape left so I explained about the radiogram and the radio and the cassette recorder, then I described everything in my bedroom including my Simon & Garfunkel poster and the papier-mâché flower-power bowl I made in art and my map of the world with red dots on all the places I want to go to when I get away from here. Then I said we were doing Canadian wheat production in geography (my favourite subject) but I’d probably rather go to the Rockies than Saskatchewan - not that I’d turn down the chance to go to Saskatchewan if it cropped up - then I opened the window because there was a police siren and I don’t know if they sound the same in Sacramento.
It took a lot of talking to fill both sides.
I’ve got a tape back from Chuck and Wanda. They said they were real sad to hear about Ted... he was a real gentleman but he hadn’t been well for some time so it was probably a blessing. They said they were glad I’d got his recorder because I sure did sound like a nice young lady who’d get good use out of it and maybe I could tape to them again? Would I like to know about their two daughters, Denice (“with a ‘c’”) and Caprice, and their beagle, Munster, and what it’s like living in Sacramento?
I would.
Denice has recorded Tapestry and Sweet Baby James for me onto brand new C60s. They sound real good because she’s got proper equipment with connecting wires so you can’t hear shouting or doors slamming. I’ll soon know every word and every note of every track and if Julie asks me what I’m singing I’ll say it happens to be James Taylor and I get my tapes from America these days.
Sacramento’s marked in red on my map now. It’s not too near the Rockies but that’s OK - the Sierra Nevada’ll do just as well.
I might get there one day. When I’ve grown my hair long and wavy and I’ve got several pairs of jeans, I might sit with bare feet by a Californian window with a cat next to me and feel the sun coming in through the glass. I might be warm there and happy.
I can’t wait.
Judith grew up in the same part of Leeds as Alan Bennett and is convinced her mum gets a mention in Bennett’s A Lady of Letters. She has been writing for about fifteen years and her short fiction has had some success in competitions. Fast Forward incorporates several of her favourite topics: music, the nature of friendship and the unremitting hell that was adolescence. She wishes she had a regular and impressive-sounding writing routine but sadly, she doesn’t, apart from lying awake in the small hours rearranging sentences. This is an all too regular occurrence.
Off The Beaten Track: "The playing out of this rather slight moment, and the position of the narrator between two worlds made for a very interesting story. Its take on language and silence appealed very much to me, and I particularly enjoyed the under-stated style."
Fast Forward:"I thought this an interesting interpretation of the theme and enjoyed the warmth of the narrator's voice."
Judge’s Observations on Overall Entries:
1. Some of the stories, while intriguing and promising didn’t deliver any sense of resolution and felt like a fragment of something rather than a short story.
2. Some over-stated the emotion which led to a sentimental feeling.
3. Some simply needed more development by the writer to really find and deliver their stories.
4. Sometimes there seemed a rather strained accommodation of the theme.
Judge for 2011 Competition: Linda Cracknell (www.lindacracknell.com)
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