Budleigh Salterton/Audify Creative Writing Competition 2017
Winner 12-16 Category
Lily Rachel (age 16)
Let’s set the scene. A dirty yellow sky on a hot night. It’s late summer and the moon is a faded orb hanging low over the streetlights. Beneath the sky the city sleeps, or so it seems. The watchful eyes of the stars observe an infinity of happenings below; drunks stumbling, girls crying, couples kissing. Cats scrap down lonely alleyways under the shadows of disused warehouses and way up above grimy pigeons roost on the guttering. Beyond the backstreets, into the centre of town and a blaze of electric light cuts through the darkness, mingling with the purr of late night traffic and the shouts of intoxicated revellers. Travel further to reach the residential roads, sleeping peacefully. Somewhere inside this maze, you choose where, a lone figure is walking the road.
He’s tall, thin and has a shock of black hair. You don’t need to know his name, it’s unimportant. Not that he’s irrelevant, much the opposite; he has a story to tell, as does everyone, and without him these words would be left purposeless.
As it happens this man has a love of words. In fact, he devotes himself to them. So much so that he cannot remember a time when he has not surrounded himself with books; only a brief study of his lively eyes is enough to reveal the wisdom of the innumerable characters he has discovered over the years. Individuals that have allowed him to access worlds far beyond his reach.
But wait, why does this man walk alone at such a late hour, the reader asks? Answer: he is going home. The night’s work has ended and he is traipsing his way back across the urban sprawl to a place he can call his own. You see, the man who has read of a wide world has never seen much of it. It’s been blocked to him for a long while now and it seems he’ll never be able to get from his glittering school career to any job he really wants. Someone always beats him to it; he never had any contacts, you see. The closest he can get to his beloved books is working as the night cleaner at a library many miles from home.
But let’s leave this sorry tale and travel across the city, a sprawling, smoke-stained wilderness. Through the tangle of mouldering estates, past locked park gates and down streets and streets of empty cars, away across a river weeping years of silt and rubbish. Here to find a hospital and in it a woman.
No, she’s not dying. Not yet anyway, so long as the work doesn’t kill her. We’ll watch her for a while as she rushes to and fro down endless bustling corridors. Lives hang in the balance in this line of work and she can’t slow, only for desperate relatives seeking kind words. For them she stops and her concern is real. As she listens she takes the time to smooth down blonde hair in need of re-dying, exposing lines of purple ringing her eyes. Despite these seeming imperfections she is quite beautiful.
So let’s find out about her. Let’s trot out the same tired story of the girl who cares enough to toil away the years in order to make better the few lives she touches. Recently, it’s felt harder and harder to achieve this; sometimes she catches herself wishing the work would cease. But she chases away these selfish thoughts and continues on long after her shift has ended.
So it appears that both these stories are sad. Could they be called tragic? Let’s wait and see; there must always be light to create shadows. We’ll turn back to the man and find out what’s become of him.
He’s tired, as he always is. Tired of a lot of things, not just the late hour. But so surely as his steps start to drag they begin to quicken again as he gets closer. Reader: closer to what?
She’s waiting on the steps as he turns the corner. The white lights of the hospital illuminate her from behind and he can hardly see her face until he is standing right in front of her. They are still for a moment, expressions mirrors of each other. Then she goes to him and rests her head in the crook of his shoulder. He puts his arm around her and they begin the long walk home.
Neither speaks for a while and their silence is filled with the sounds of the city. Cars hum, lights buzz and fallen leaves rustle the pavement. She tells him she’s tired. I know, he says, I am too. They don’t talk further but both are thinking.
The man thinks about the library. He loves the world of towering shelves and musty, hidden corners. Yet it feels like he’s there for the wrong reasons. He wants to be a part of the place; studying, writing, questioning, not an outsider on the periphery. Not just being there, but belonging there.
The woman thinks about the hospital. She wonders if she’s really making a difference. She has so little time to focus on individuals, the sheer mass of numbers blur the differences between people. It upsets her. She tries not to cry whenever she gets a spare minute alone. What is the point of my work, she thinks, if I can’t be there for people?
The couple walk home through the night, the remains of yesterday’s heat clinging to them. The streets aren’t quite empty despite the late hour. They pass a posse of giggling girls dressed in party clothes, further on they cross the road to avoid a speeding cyclist and a few streets along a scrawny tabby cat growls at them from its perch on a high brick wall. At one point they share a bus stop with a man who smells faintly of urine as they wait for a night bus which never arrives. They stare up at the sinking moon for a time until they decide to carry on walking.
Eventually they reach a block of flats. Cold and impersonal as the building is it’s home. They climb the stairs with weary feet and knock on the door of the flat opposite their own. Their elderly neighbour opens it. She’s an insomniac who spends the night obsessing over her dead husband and watching trashy television. She is also kind and lets the girls stay at hers when the man and woman are both working late.
The youngest one’s asleep when they enter the darkened bedroom but the older one is awake, just. She smiles with eyes half closed as her parents approach her. I told you we’d be back, he murmurs to her, I told you we’d be here. She smiles again in response. The man takes her hand and leads her out of the room as behind them the woman picks up the youngest. On their way out they whisper their thanks to the neighbour who crinkles her eyes in response to the family which has brought her just a little happiness.
Outside in the hallway the family pause before entering their home. The man who loves words, the woman who loves to heal and their two daughters who have a future to fill.