Spellbound - Stories of Women's Magic Over Men

by Joel Willans

  Table of Contents

  Stories

  One Bright Moment

  Shoot Yourself Dead

  The Wrong Bus Girl

  Opportunity Man

  Buy Ma Biscuits Or Kiss Ma Fish

  The Cost of Advertising

  Five Reasons For Leaving

  Lola’s Chair

  Estrella and the Gringo

  Burnt

  One Long Queue of Zeros

  The Grounding of Tiffany Hope

  The Sheriff of Love and the Rainbow Girl

  Purged

  All For Just Fifty Baht

  Break a Brick

  Skin Against Skin

  All Because

  Acknowledgements

  Joel Willans

  Route

  Spellbound

  Stories of Women’s Magic Over Men

  Joel Willans

  First published by Route in 2012

  PO Box 167, Pontefract, WF8 4WW

  info@route-online.com

  www.route-online.com

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1901927-56-6

  Joel Willans asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book

  Design: GOLDEN www.wearegolden.co.uk

  All rights reserved

  No reproduction of this text without written permission

  For Anna Maria

  Stories

  One Bright Moment

  Shoot Yourself Dead

  The Wrong Bus Girl

  Opportunity Man

  Buy Ma Biscuits Or Kiss Ma Fish

  The Cost of Advertising

  Five Reasons For Leaving

  Lola’s Chair

  Estrella and the Gringo

  Burnt

  One Long Queue of Zeros

  The Grounding of Tiffany Hope

  The Sheriff of Love and the Rainbow Girl

  Purged

  All For Just Fifty Baht

  Break a Brick

  Skin Against Skin

  All Because

  One Bright Moment

  We were children, not lovers, but as we lay on the grass, staring at stars, she took my hand and said that a moment can change everything. When I think of Sissy Zaleski, and I do now more often than ever, I always remember her that night. Splayed out on the earth as though floating just an inch above the ground, she told me in the strange quiet of the countryside, where silence is made up of infinite little sounds, that there would be signs, forever.

  ‘I’m not tricking you. You know that, don’t you? I’m just telling you how it is and how it’s going to be. When we get older and we’re not friends ’cause we’ve gone away or got a job or got married, I’m going to send you signs to remember us now, this very second. Do you believe me?’

  ‘What sort of signs?’

  She was about to answer when the lamplight came through the leaves, but I was already on my feet, tugging her up, dragging and scrambling with her hand tight in mine, keeping low to the ground as the lamplight swept to and fro, a hulking shadow stomping behind it.

  ‘Sissy, you better not be out here with that boy! You hear me?’

  Even now I can see her dad. A stomper, always a stomper, with dark eyes and a darker brow. And always dangerous, with tools in bulging pockets. That time he stomped the earth, and we rushed into the night. In the trees, near the stream, we stopped and sat on our haunches, breathing hard, breathing the woods. We stayed liked that, frozen in our fear, until I moved closer and whispered in her ear:

  ‘Why does he hate me so much? I ain’t done anything wrong.’

  She moved closer still. ‘He thinks if it weren’t for you, I’d stay indoors more with him. Now Mum’s left.’

  I looked into her eyes. Then, like idiots feeling safe and holding nothing back, we hugged together, so close I could feel her heart next to mine. I don’t know who kissed whom first. But once, years later, in a room in Blackpool, watching as my wife combed her hair, ochre red like Sissy’s, it came to me with force as crushing as gravity. If I’d kept Sissy closer, if I’d never let her go so easy, it could have been her combing herself in front of me then. I wonder now if that was the first sign, or if they’d been there all those years and I’d just blanked them out, pressed them down, scared of what they said.

  I’ve had no worse parting than that night. I didn’t want her to go, but once we finished, and we realised what we’d done and how now I was more, much more than a forbidden friend, she was shaking so hard I thought she might die on me. With the taste of her on my lips, I sneaked us out of the trees. We scurried close to the ground, as fast as we could, and I took her back to her dad’s lair. I kissed her again, in the shadows. It was the bravest thing I’d ever done. I wanted to show her that even though she was going back, I wouldn’t desert her. Not ever.

  She didn’t come to school for a few days after that and then I found out it was she who was leaving me. Going back to Poland, that’s what my friend said, to the motherland of her ancestors, as far as the stars for me. I didn’t believe him at first, how could I? Since that night, she’d been in every one of my thoughts, colouring them like ink spilled in water. But then they announced it at school, last thing in assembly, after the morning prayers. And when everyone else filed out, I just sat there. Cross-legged and dazed.

  I saw her once afterwards. She sneaked round to my house; she couldn’t stay long, she said. She threw herself onto the sofa and started wrestling cushions, banging her fists and asking me that if there was a God, then what was he doing to make her dad so mad to leave? I wanted to say things to make her feel better but I couldn’t, because I knew that it was me who’d caused it. I wanted to kiss her again too, but my mum was lurking, so I just held her hand and said I’d write every day.

  Look out for the signs, she said before she left. Little things, I’ll send them and you’ll remember me. I know it.

  And I did to start with. I looked out all the time, but as I changed from boy to man I stopped searching or maybe I just stopped seeing. Life clouding things over.

  So why is it only now that my life is drowsy with dreams of her? And what does it mean that a smell, a word, the single sigh of an owl can make me think of Sissy? Nearly a whole life I’ve lived without her, got jobs, gone away and been married, but only now do I see that she was right. That one moment, one bright culmination of everything, can change you from children to lovers and that you can never, ever, go back again.

  Shoot Yourself Dead

  I’m in the Spotted Horse, a year to the day that I did a John Wayne and told Natalie a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Why here, in a nicotine-stained pub with ripped tartan bar stools and trill fruit machines? Not to celebrate, but to stare at the No Children Allowed sign and provoke my muse. And, I hope, to finally purge myself of the self-pity which has been hanging off me like a wretched suit. This place was an oasis once, now it’s just another grimy drinking den. Still, after a couple of pints, it does its job. I grab my pen and begin writing notes for the main feature of the September issue of Sorted.

  A dumb name for a dumb magazine. That was the first thing Natalie and I agreed upon. Like a kid trying to work out my age, I count on my fingers. It’s nearly three years since we met. Zanadoo Publishing’s Christmas Ball, me shooting pistols on the dance floor to Fatboy Slim, Natalie spying me from beneath her black fringe and shooting back. Afterwards she’d sauntered over, wearing the fulsome grin that I later knew meant mischief, and checked out my nametag.

  ‘Hello, Henry Jones,’ she said in mock posh tones. ‘I’m in sales. What do you do?’

  ‘I have the great privilege of working as a journalist and film critic on the
esteemed gentleman’s monthly, Sorted,’ I replied in an accent that would’ve put the Queen to shame.

  When Natalie laughed, she clenched her fists and rocked on her heels, and I noticed she had the most outrageously beautiful neck. By 2am, I was kissing it. Seven months later, we were living together.

  I never thought I’d shack up with an ad salesperson. They’re too boisterous and brash. Ask any journo who’s had to share office space with an ad team and they’ll tell you the same. It’s like trying to write whilst sitting in the middle of a playground. On a Friday afternoon with a deadline looming, the last thing you want is a football bouncing off your bonce.

  On our first date at Natalie’s favourite cocktail bar, a cellar with blue neon lights, intimate coves and TV screens above the urinals, I asked her why sales people were so hyperactive. She held up two fingers.

  ‘Rejection and acceptance. If your entire day yo-yoed between those two extremes, you’d regress too. Sales is a game and every month you either win or lose. You think the sales floor is like a playground, because it is a playground.’

  ‘Nothing to do with the copious use of Colombian marching powder, then?’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, that’s just to stop us keeling over with boredom during the breathtakingly dull lunches with marketing managers.’

  Her cavalier attitude towards cocaine unnerved me. While I’d always been fond of a drink, I had problems with the white stuff. Not only did it make me spout a monologue called ‘Why I’m so fucking great’, it also made me less discerning when it came to ladies. One morning, after waking up beside a girl who had so much steel in her face I wondered if she was a human magnet, I decided enough was enough. No matter how great the temptation, or my insecurities, I’d never fire up my brain with charlie again. The ad sales team either didn’t share my symptoms or didn’t care. Come 5:31pm on any given day, the toilets of Zanadoo Publishing would be busier than Oxford Circus. Still, everyone has their bad habits, and Natalie was too fantastic in other ways for a line or two to get in our way.

  I can’t say exactly when I realised things were getting serious, but I first told her while watching Casablanca at the oldies night at the Odeon. When Humphrey Bogart walked off into the moonlight, I whispered in her ear. ‘This may seem like a cheesy moment, but I really want you to know that… well, I love you.’

  With the credits rolling, she hugged me closer. ‘You know what. That’s made my day. Please, say it again, Jonesy.’

  And old romantic that I am, I did.

  I was thirty-three and I’d fallen in love for the third time. Now, I’m not one for lucky charms or superstition, nor do I know much about numerology, but this trio of threes seemed too much of a coincidence to ignore. Perhaps this was third time lucky, my chance to finally land a lady for life.

  We were jogging through Bishop’s Park six months after we’d become live-in lovers, when the subject of kids came up. I was gushing over her crossword skills when a couple jogged past, pushing one of those ridiculous three-wheeled buggies that look like mini-dragsters. The thought of Natalie and I accompanied by another tiny jogging partner suddenly filled me with a whisky-warm glow.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ I said, nodding in their direction.

  ‘Bloody stupid. That dwarf Tom Cruise might get away with it, but anyone else should be put away for fashion crime.’

  ‘No, not the bizarre pram, but kids.’

  She stopped and began jogging on the spot. I did the same. ‘Are you asking me what I think of kids in general?’

  I nodded. ‘Why? Is that a problem?’

  ‘No, as long as it’s just asking rather than wanting,’ she said and sprinted off. I followed on behind, admiring her rear while wondering what exactly the problem was with a question I considered the epitome of sensitive New Age bloke talk.

  I discovered the answer a few weeks later while watching Natalie do her yoga. She’d had to attend one her magazine’s award ceremonies the previous evening and was trying to purify her body of any remaining champagne. Sitting cross-legged on the sofa, writing a review of the latest car-chasing-blood-spilling violence porn spewed out of Hollywood, it dawned on me that I had no idea what her favourite film was.

  ‘Hey, Nats, can I ask you a question?’ I said as she realigned herself into the sun salutation position, legs spread, arms pointed skyward.

  ‘If you must.’

  ‘What’s your favourite movie ever?’

  ‘Moulin Rouge,’ she said, breathing out through her nose. ‘Yours?’

  ‘The Sound of Music.’

  She dropped to the floor laughing. ‘Jesus! Are you serious?’

  I nodded. ‘It’s the third highest grossing film in history for a reason.’

  ‘Hang on. You’re the film critic for one of Britain’s most laddish magazines. You write features like “How to Assess an Ass” and you’re telling me your favourite film is about a singing nun and a bunch of German kids?’

  ‘They were Austrian, and, yes, I am telling you that.’

  She slapped the floor, which made her breasts jiggle, which made me want to join her on her yoga mat and invent a brand new position. ‘Why, for God’s sake?’

  I held up two fingers. ‘One, I love the tunes.’ I started to sing: ‘Do, a deer, a female deer. Re, a drop of golden sun. Me, a thing I call myself. Fa, a long, long way to run…’

  ‘Please! I still have a headache.’ She held up her hand like a traffic cop. ‘I know the tune all right.’

  ‘Two, I’m an only child and when I was a kid I always wanted to have loads of siblings, to be part of a tribe of singing and dancing Joneses. Okay? Is that good enough for you?’

  ‘You have no idea how lucky you were.’ She took three deep breaths and exhaled. ‘Can you imagine there was much singing and dancing going on with my three brothers and three sisters?’

  I shrugged. I’d only met one brother and he seemed like a nice-enough bloke.

  ‘No, there bloody well was not. Ever wondered why I eat so quickly?’

  ‘I always thought you just got hungry easily.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with it. It’s an instinct I learnt and can’t shake. When I was a kid the dinner table was like a war zone.’ She made frantic shoveling-in-your-mouth gestures. ‘If I didn’t eat my food quick enough it would get snatched off my plate. Every meal time, my mum was like a referee at a rugby match.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s why you don’t want to be a mother? You’re scared.’

  She ignored my question, rearranged her body into the next pose and began breathing through her nose like a sleeping Darth Vader. She carried on like that for another half an hour. Finally, with her ying and yang back in balance and her body purged of the evil humours, she clambered back onto the sofa and laid her head in my lap.

  ‘You should have seen my mum before she died. She was fifty-seven, she looked seventy. That’s what I’m scared of.’

  I stroked her hair. She had the same perfume on as when I’d first nuzzled her neck all those months before. ‘I don’t want seven kids. I just want one, with you. Think how cool it would be to have someone running around, half you, half me.’

  ‘What, like a centaur?’

  I grabbed her face and licked her nose. ‘No, not like a bloody centaur. Like a brand new person with my good looks and your incredibly bendy body.’

  She smacked me in the face with a cushion. ‘Okay, I’ll think about it.’

  I wanted to punch the sky like Rocky after he bounds up a hundred steps. I wanted to run along the beach like those guys in Chariots of Fire. I wanted to shake my booty like Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. Instead, I kissed her forehead and sang, ‘Natalie is one of my few favourite things,’ only stopping when she whacked me with the cushion again.

  Okay, I admit it. I’m something of an obsessive individual. When I was a kid, I would spend hours lining up toy soldiers in phalanxes of a hundred, only so I could destroy their perfect symmetry with a marble bombardment. If I found a
particularly fine sentence in a novel I would read it over and over again. When Adam Ant burst onto the music scene, I had to have every single record by the dandy highwayman. My mum blamed my lack of siblings. Another reason why I hoped our one child would become two, maybe even three.

  My obsessive nature kicked into gear once Natalie agreed to Project Baby. For a start, sex changed. I’d always prided myself on my Zen-like lovemaking, but now I became more demanding. Sex became my second job. By flooding Natalie’s ovaries with my little swimming fellas, I was confident a triumphant declaration of pregnancy would only be a matter of time. It didn’t cross my mind that Natalie might be on to me, until one night after a particularly sweaty session, she asked me what I knew about ovulation.

  ‘What do you mean, for women?’ I asked, wondering if this was a precursor to the announcement I’d been waiting for.

  ‘No, for elephants. What do you think, Henry?’

  ‘I know you produce eggs every month and they float around in your body. That’s about it. Is there anything I’m missing?’

  ‘So you don’t know that there are only three days a month when the one egg, singular, can be fertilized?’

  ‘Three days?’ I said, thinking that yet another symbolic three cropping up in my life had to be a good sign. ‘I had no idea. When are your three days?’ I sat up and grabbed a pad from the bedside table.

  ‘Are you writing an article about it?’

  ‘No, I’m just making a note.’

  She sighed. ‘They began last Wednesday. Does that mean I can only expect such careful attention three times a month now?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, but as soon as I had a chance I made a note in my diary.

  It was during the next month’s egg days that we had our first argument. Unsure whether Natalie was doing it out of spite or genuine forgetfulness, I confronted her when she rocked up home late on the first evening of Egg Day One. The way she strutted through the front door at 2.17am, I knew she’d been enjoying more than champagne and cocktails. She flung her coat on the stairs and gave me a sloppy kiss.