16:30 - 17:30
Sean Rafferty presents a selection of music and guests from the arts world.
The Verb - Short Story Competition |  | |
The wait is finally over for the results of The Verb’s short story competition! We asked for short stories of no more than 1000 words that made the most imaginative use possible of the names of Radio 3's Composers of the Year - Haydn, Handel, Mendelssohn and Purcell. Thanks to all the very many talented writers who sent in stories: Judges Ian McMillan and Radio 3 Breakfast's Rob Cowan were hugely impressed by the range of excellent writing. But there can only be one winner, and that's Darrell Lloyd, for his story A Little Night Music, which bowled the judges over with its imagination and style. And Darrell wasn't the only writer to impress the judges - honourable mentions go to: That Going to the Zoo Thing by Tessa Sheridan Winners and Losers by Jan Dickson Alex P Hamilton's Composers of the Year The last light bulb in the house goes so I pop out to buy one. I get the last one left in the shop. Returning home I find that a furniture store has been built in my garden. I wander in. A beautiful assistant politely takes my light bulb, putting it in a side-room with all the other checked-in light bulbs. I browse. Before me, an array of exquisite armchairs, each uniquely shaped and upholstered. “Relax” says the assistant, “Pull up the Mendelssohn.”. She gestures toward a white, wing-back chair with dove feather cushions. “Take a load off” she says. I have mud on my boots. I don’t want to get mud on a chair named after a composer. So I continue wandering among the chairs: the Shostakovich and the Mahler with their loud colours, the Vivaldi (choice of four), and the Haydn which, as a sort of joke, is not a chair but a footstool. Surprisingly comfortable, the tag says. Disappointingly, there are no suites. Usually the correlation between composer and chair is clear. With less well-known composers, however, it’s difficult to avoid letting the chair’s features inform one’s view of the artist – to judgementally imagine, perhaps, that Smith was fat, Schliemann had big feet, so-and-so no arms, or that someone wrote something with an unlikely title, like Comfy But Very Expensive. “Visual aesthetics aside,” barks a man, “this doesn’t say Brahms to me at all.” He stands and marches off toward the Sibelius. The assistant whispers to me: “They work like seashells.” I understand. Where others were cynical, I used to hear the sea in a shell perfectly. Gently rocking it, I even got waves breaking. You must listen with your heart’s ear. Accordingly, I sit and close my eyes. But I hear no aria in the Puccini, no Piano Trio in the Mendelssohn. I detect something in each armchair, but merely incidental sounds: the lighting of cigars, nibs scratching on manuscript paper. All I get in the Elgar is him tramping up some slope in the Malverns. I’ve become a failure, I think, as I listen to Handel doing the washing up. In another room is the moon. Curiously, it’s still bright white, illuminating all corners of the hangar-like room. The armchairs are wheeled in there and arranged for moon-viewing. The gentry arrive and take their seats. A string quartet tunes up behind the moon, then they come out and stand in its light and go into Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. They do that thing musicians always do – smiling at each other at certain points and you don’t know why. Following their example, I smile at the assistant for some reason. A lot of tense people are queuing to relax in the Mozart chair. I get in line. Everyone looks at my muddy boots. Feeling inferior, I leave by a side-door and begin walking aimlessly across the desert. With the moon missing I can’t see where I’m going, nor even orientate myself by its position. Eventually: exhaustion. I stand where I am, wherever that is, defeated and confused. From nowhere – ding – I get an idea, sudden and bright like a cartoon light bulb over my head. I race home to get the thing I need. I find my house and find the thing and grab it and set off back to the furniture store. My winding garden path leads me through endless, barren wasteland. I’ve walked miles before I realise another mistake – instead of the thing I need, I’ve brought a chair. Worse still, it’s the spindly, wonky, worm-ridden, wooden chair from the kitchen. It’ll have to do, I think, even though it’s a wholly different item from the thing I meant to collect. I try heading what I think is west. As I run, the rickety old chair starts falling to bits. I have to keep stopping and going back for rungs and legs and what-have-you, and scrabbling around in the dark for screws and dowels. I search everywhere for one particular mislaid piece, eventually remembering that it was already missing when I bought the chair second-hand twenty years ago. Amazingly though, a minute later, I find it. I go east(ish), vaguely north, and sideways. Still cannot find the shop. The chair parts fall from my arms, making a dry clatter in the night. Presently, a tiny glow shows on the horizon. It draws nearer, and I begin to hear footfalls. It’s the assistant carrying a lantern. I hope she’s locked the bulbroom. There’s nothing worse than having your idea nicked. The flame dances in her dark eyes. I start trying to fashion my chair components into the thing I meant to bring. It’s tricky. My first bungled attempt looks more like a bicycle. I remodel it. Except a helicopter isn’t what I’m aiming for either. Haphazardly, I reassign tenons and mortices, producing increasingly erroneous configurations: a Victorian bedstead, a Victorian bandstand, a victorious handstand, various farm animals, a miniature Eiffel Tower, a giant claw, a croquet set, a lute, a flute, some fruit, and a cubist portrait of Henry Purcell. Bizarre, grotesque shadows of my creations reach across the desert floor, skittish in the flickering lamplight. Meanwhile, completion of each ludicrous assemblage prompts a little burst of delight from my audience; she jumps up and down, clapping and squealing, as if I’m putting on some impromptu show. Hazy now about what I even set out to construct, I persevere – helplessly, frantically, feverishly composing in sticks. Finally I pass out. The brilliant moon suddenly appears in the sky, like a planet having an idea. I wake with clarity, both of vision and thought. I’m illuminated, enlightened. And in a flurry of sand, splinters and furniture-beetle dust, I confidently assemble the chair parts into…the chair. I dust it down, lay my sweater on the seat for a cushion, and stand back. “This chair…is named…after me,” I say, still panting after my exertions. “Please,” I say, and gesture for her to sit. The going to the zoo thing can go one of two ways, depending. With Gerard it went like this: He doesn’t ring for nineteen days and five hours. Then he rings and says we need to do something and I say yes! we need to do something about our relationship!, which is a line I read in a magazine at the doctor’s. I never thought I’d get the chance to use it. But then I hear him like an echo and what he’s actually said is let’s go to the zoo. So I’m thinking this is a long way of doing a short thing. I’m wondering how he’s going to handle it. We’ll be strolling past the chimps and he’ll go: sometimes I think we’re like chimps, you and me, we look like we’re smiling but we’re just not. Or: like the funnel web spider knitting in its lair, this is something we must mend, else unravel. Or: let’s face it, Jude, I’m the antelope type, but you’re 95% ibex. On the antelope versus ibex front it’d be hard to disagree with him. Me with my orange roots where the dye didn’t work; him with his tortoiseshell glasses and his childbearing hips. But when you’ve finally got a boyfriend the important thing is to stop him going away and becoming someone else’s boyfriend. I’m not exactly sure why because the answer was in part two of the magazine, which was when the doctor called me in. So I made a list of the positives: One: he was a boyfriend. Two: we shared hobbies. Gerard’s hobby was thinking which was Sartre’s favourite hobby. He shared thinking with me a lot. Although he did it quietly so that’s just a guess. My hobby was talking. Gerard was someone I could talk to. Orat least I talked when I was standing next to him, which is roughly the same thing. I told him, we’re a good match, you with your thoughts and me with my words. Together we could make sentences. Gerard said I had to do my own thoughts. Looking back, maybe that’s where the rot set in. I’m not cut out for a life of the mind. When I left school I wanted to be a caterer. Not in the conventional sense. I meant more catering as an idea. The idea that appealed best was catering to the needs of monks. These could be any kind of needs, including sexual. I’m not prejudiced. The monk would have the need and my job would be to make the need go away so I could stay on the island and watch the puffins. That was how I saw it in my mind. But the careers lady said perhaps the fish factory was a way to start, to get on the career ladder was how she put it. Which was a nice thought I reckoned I could try out one day on Gerard. I met him where you’re supposed to meet boys: at a bus stop.I’d been going there for months ever since I’d found out this was the place. I went after my shift and stayed until the last bus went. He got off the 176 one night while I was away in the bushes taking a pee and I had to run to catch him up. It was pretty dark and I made a little grab at him as he crossed the road. Next thing he’s holding out his wallet and screaming take it take it don’t touch my glasses! I knew right away that was the kind of story the best man would tell at the reception. How we met, Jude and Gerard. There’d be a line at the end, something like: and she’s been jumping on him ever since! That was the way it was supposed to go. But it must’ve gone another way because here we are, going to a zoo to do the breaking up thing. Even so, I’m getting pretty excited. I’ve never actually been to a zoo. Mother said she was allergic to them, that’s why we had to go to church instead. To prepare myself I skip up and down the landing. I do this to wear myself out so I don’t do silly immature things which are beneath me, like that business with the elevators which I won’t go into now. In version one, Gerard doesn’t turn up. Dumping me outside the zoo would be a kind of code. One of his little thoughts. In that version I’d wait all day, then go home to bed and stay there for months playinghide ‘n’ seek with the cockroaches, trying to crack the code. And I’d end up in a mental home going la la la to the wallpaper. But version two is what actually happened. He met me inside and we walked about a bit. Then he sat in the picnic area near the snake house and cried. I didn’t know what to do so I ate my Jaffa cakes. He said he felt alone and unloved inthe world. He felt constricted and misunderstood. I could feel a thought coming on. Like a snake! I said, perhaps a bit too loud. Like a snake in… in a fish bowl! I had to laugh, I was so happy I’d done that thought. But Gerard just looked at me through the tortoiseshell glasses and after a bit he shook his head like I was something stuck to his eyelash. Then he carried on staring at the sweet wrappers in the grass. After a bit I got cold, so I left him there. On the bus back I found some straw in my pocket. I’d picked it up in the pig pen, meaning to feed it to the hippos if we ever got that far. We never did. I keep it in my purse. Hell is other people they say but they never say exactly who they mean. I think it could be me. __________________________ © Tessa Sheridan may ‘09 In my line of work, you make enemies. But Mr M. ain't just any enemy. Big Johnny Mendelssohn's one this fair city's top bookies. And yours truly owes him. Big-time. So in the interests of keeping my kneecaps intact, I'd been maintaining a low profile. Then this slob shows up. 'Find my Betsy. Please. Find my honey and bring her home.' The crying's getting to me. I pluck a tissue from the box and hold it out to the sobbing bear of a man presently seated on the other side of my desk. 'Got a photo? Full name, last known whereabouts?' 'Purcell...' He sniffs, wipes his nose on the back of the biggest, knuckliest hand I've ever seen then fumbles in his inside pocket. '...Betsy Purcell.' My grizzling grizzly-bear grizzles on. I stare at a photo of the most beautiful creature ever created, wondering what a looker like Betsy sees in the punch-drunk brawler opposite me. Then Laughing Boy pulls out a massive wad of cash and I stop wondering. I take his generous thousand dollar retainer, give him a receipt and push the box of tissues over to his side of the desk. He blows his nose, starts detailing addresses and places of employment, diamond rings and undying love, and I start to get a Handel on this Purcell dame. The more Laughing Boy talks, the more I get the feeling his Betsy's already three states away by now, in hot pursuit of the next mark with dreams of matrimony and bottomless pockets. Soon as he leaves, I'm back to the sports paper, my attention shifting from one fleet-footed filly to another. No Haydn Place makes her début in the 3.15 at the Aqueduct this afternoon. Now, I've been following this two year-old since January, tracking her progress via trainers and stable-boys, studying her strengths and weaknesses. See, some people tell themselves it's instinct. Some say it's luck. Me, I know it's all in the form. With last night's rain, the ground's gonna be too heavy for her. Next week at Saratoga could be a very different story, especially with those long, 20-1 odds. Laughing Boy's ten Benjamins wriggle in my fist. But business comes first, so I make a few calls. Betsy Purcell moved out of her apartment last Friday owing two months' rent. Betsy Purcell quit her job as a dance-hall hostess a week ago. Betsy Purcell – AKA Brunhilda Purkovsky, Beatrice Purstein, Bathsheba Peterson and Bel inda Pavlova – has a record as long as her elbow-length evening gloves, for everything from bigamy to grand theft auto via extortion and prostitution. She gets around, this Purcell dame. Laughing Boy's not the first sucker. And he won't be the last. On the radio, No Haydn Place fails to finish. I let her odds lengthen further and when they reach 40-1, I phone in my bet. Laughing Boy calls three times a day. Then four. I tell him I'm on the case. I invent leads which lead nowhere, sightings of beautiful women who could be Betsy Purcell but invariably aren't. I reassure him. I give him hope. Hope's what he wants, after all - what we all want. But by Sunday night even Dumbo's getting suspicious. I know I'm gonna have to tell him. And I will: soon as that generous retainer's done what I need it to do. Monday afternoon I take the Amtrak out to Saratoga Springs. After a week of sunshine, the going'll be light. Laughing Boy's ten Benjamins show all the signs of becoming forty big ones, courtesy of No Haydn Place. Things go wrong the minute I hit the trac k: I clock a huddle of Big Johnny Mendelssohn's biggest, meanest-looking boys. Then I clock Big Johnny. Worse still, he clocks me. And guess who's hanging on his arm? I do a double take as Johnny Mendelssohn tenderly detaches himself from the most beautiful creature ever created and lumbers scowlingly towards me. Thanks to the crowds I manage to dodge him and the boys, but I can't avoid them for ever and it's still a good half hour til No Haydn Place romps home and I collect my winnings. Then I remember Laughing Boy. And those big-knuckled hands of his. I remember how much he loves his Betsy. And what he might well to do to the guy who's taken her away from him. Four o'clock and I'm in the terrace bar, sipping champagne and watching six of New York's finest only just manage to get the bracelets on Laughing Boy and bundle him into the back of a squad car. Paramedics are still trying to revive Big Johnny Mendelssohn but it's not looking good. I make a mental note to send a wreathe: maybe lilies. Hell, I can afford it. Might even make a contribution to Laughing Boy's defence. And the Purcell dame? =0 A I raise my glass. 'To fleet-footed fillies!' Betsy takes my arm, wriggling up to kiss my cheek. Every guy in the bar wants her, everyone girl wants to be her. For now she's mine: until the forty grand runs out. See, I don't believe in instinct and I don't believe in luck. You're gonna bet on a filly, make sure you know her form. | | Related Links on radio 3 on bbc.co.uk on the web The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites. |
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