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Adaline
The traffic in the city crawled along at a snail’s pace. I swear these drivers had bike envy. Half of the drivers gave me enough room to pass on the inside and the rest pulled in just a little too far that I couldn’t pass. It’s not my fault that Brighton is popular and they’re stuck in nose to tail traffic. I give them the finger and cycle on the pavement. One of these days, I’ll get caught and fined. The cycle lane is brilliant until the car drivers are arseholes. I got through the seafront traffic and past the Pier. It only took another five minutes to cycle past The Pavilion, and then up the steep hill to my shop.
I shouldn’t call it a shop yet as I haven’t opened it to the public. My preference was to deal with my customer’s requests online. I had this notion I would open a small shop for the customers who wanted to browse magazines I collected over the years. When I was at University, I bought and sold rare comics and magazines to pay for my education. While I studied, I partied little. I dated, a lot. Getting a degree and then my masters in the States, I loved the American way of dating. In the UK, men were a little on the shy side. There was no time to have long relationships, plus I moved to a different part of the United States for each year of my degrees. Having a high IQ meant I could choose which University to attend, with plenty of places at the best Universities on offer. Book smart didn’t always make me street smart in my case. There was no point falling in love, I’d move on and leave them behind. It was the way I liked it.
These days, it’s lonely, the dating scene is abysmal. My new adventure into online dating has resulted in finding the most unusual men Brighton offers. My choice in men has been the source of amusement for Steph and Elliott every Thursday. Steph cooks, Elliott plies me with wine, and I tell them about my dates. There was a bloke that wanted to watch me cut my toenails, and then there was the man who wanted to know what I was thinking every other minute. The date who said before he took off his coat he never wanted to have children. The list was an endless list of hilarious dates. There were the rare occasions they lasted long enough we both ended up naked. I loved sex, but saying that out loud to men was a huge no-no. I never got a call after I revealed this a few times, so I stopped telling them.
I was my parents’ genius child. They paraded me around every junior competition, they could find for me to win cash prizes. Any quiz they could enter me in, they did. Spelling contests were their primary focus. They told me the prize money would go towards my University education. Like a good child, I went along with their plans, dreaming of the day I could escape being their puppet and run off to a far-flung university and away from their intoxicating lifestyle of laziness, drinking, gambling, and complaining. I messed up a few times when the quiz master sat in the dark. My parents never knew the truth, it was bad enough they punished me when we returned home. They never struck me, but their words hurt. Dad called me girlie when he wanted to take me down a peg or two. Mum ignored my existence. This meant I had to feed myself and make sure my school uniform was washed and ironed.
Often on school nights, the three of us would get on a coach and travel to wherever the competitions were being hosted. I was falling asleep in classes the next day. The teachers called my parents each time, concerned. Mum and dad told the school I refused to go to sleep when told.
Lack of sleep made no difference to my education or my grades. By the time I reached sixteen, I had an accelerated learning plan for my education and had already passed my A Levels. My parents thought putting me in the advanced classes would help them and their bank balance. Mum had never worked a day in her life. She told all her friends it was important that she stayed at home to take care of her special child. I was an only child. My dad made it clear as soon as I understood that I was special. So much so, that they were to make the most of me because my complicated birth prevented my mother from having any more children.
In reality, there was no medical reason I caused for her to not have any more children. The secret sterilisation she had after she gave birth was the reason. I saw a conversation when I was ten when my parents were drunk, arguing with each other. My mum told my dad what she’d done, but he didn’t remember the next day. He never forgave me for my mum not giving him any more children. My parents were arseholes, and I’d dealt with that realisation a long time ago. It was me against the world.
I enjoyed being locked away in my bedroom studying, I could pretend that I had loving parents that wanted a bright future for me with no strings.
My dad hadn’t worked in years, he had ill health from decades of working in factories and later developed asbestosis from renovating attic houses in the old part of Brighton. He spent his days in the betting shop or on his arse in the armchair watching horse racing. My mum spent her days arguing with my dad, chain smoking on the front doorstep as she gossiped with her neighbours.
When my teachers told me it was time to choose a University, I had plenty of scholarships on offer both in the UK and in the USA. I wanted to go to the USA, the Colleges would pay for my education, but I had to fund my living expenses. I shouldn’t have got angry when I got the cold shoulder from my parents for months after asking for my education fund. For two people who tried their best never to leave the house, they went out early in the morning and came back long after I had gone to bed. I cornered them, and they confessed that they had spent the money. Fifty thousand pounds of prize money earned over ten years, spent. They were in debt on several credit cards too. Their only income they had was their government benefits and my dad’s pension from his factory job.
With my shattered hopes and with the help of my friend Steph, I applied to a University in Boston, Massachusetts. When I started comprehensive school, I had jumped two years. On my first day of school, slumped down in the seat next to Steph, I waited for the headmaster to address the school. From that moment on, we were the best of friends.
It wasn’t until my final year at school that Steph encouraged me to get my hearing checked. She made fun thatpardonwas my favourite word. I brushed it off as not concentrating, but with an IQ like mine, I couldn’t get away with it. Steph and Elliott were my only friends. I couldn’t understand what people said. I could hear they were speaking, but understanding the words was a problem. It was only men with deep baritone voices that filtered through to my brain. There were few of them in my life.
When I received the results, I cried for hours. It wasn’t breaking news but confirmation of what I already knew. I wanted to work for NASA and so did my parents. Our reasons were poles apart. They wanted my money. I wanted to send rockets into space. My dreams had once again escaped my clutches, I couldn’t risk mishearing an instruction when men and women in a space shuttle depended on me. At the grand old age of twenty, my hearing was akin to an eighty-year-old. The doctor told me, it would get worse over the following ten to fifteen years until I lost my hearing altogether. I was ahead of the ageing process for my hearing. If I were a spiteful person, I could blame my dad and his myriad of ill health before I came into this world. The balance in the universe dictated that I was years ahead in my education and intelligence, but in falling apart too. It was at that moment, that it solidified that Steph and Elliott would be the only people who would know and with the boom of the internet I could get away without speaking to anyone face to face if I didn’t have to. My expertise in coding, website building, and app development became my focus. Honing my super sleuthing skills came next. One evening after I had left Steph and Elliott, I came across a chat room. I needed to finish a website I had built for a customer. Procrastinating was my best friend in those days, deciding about whether to go home to my parents for Christmas Day lunch. I was home for Christmas break in my first year at University, and Steph let me crash on her sofa.
To avoid the decision-making process, I surfed the internet. The chat room was for people looking for rare magazines. I thought I would search to see if I could find it. Five hours of solid searching the world's shop windows via the internet and I’d found my first magazine. It was at that stage I’d got the bug for super sleuthing, and my business began.
It didn’t take long to pay back the loan Elliott had given me to enable my move to university life and make money of my own. The thrill of tracking down an editorial that a client wanted gave me that buzz I needed. I could do it all from my rented room. Studying electrical engineering and Aerospace, was fascinating, but once I got my masters, I’d already decided that I didn’t want to be a rocket scientist. Much to my parents' disappointment. I was their meal ticket, and I didn’t provide.
Every time I went home during my University days, they had their hands out for money. What they thought I was earning I had no idea. They couldn’t wait for me to graduate, they had planned which house they would get me to buy and their wide-screen TVs. I didn’t own a TV now let alone buy them one. When I decided I would not follow my original dream and work for the space program, I didn’t tell them for six months. I blurted it out one night when they wanted me to pay for their takeaway dinner, and I refused. We had a blazing row, many harsh words were yelled back and forth, none came from my mouth. My dad told me how selfish I was not to get a job that provided them with financial security as they had done for me when I lived at home. Something in me snapped. They did not understand the stress I was going through with my hearing loss and the diagnosis. I hadn’t told them either, they didn’t deserve to know. Plus, they would have turned the situation around to their viewpoint, and it would be my fault, anyway. I wouldn’t put it past them to apply for benefits in my name for my disability. I told them I would not work for NASA, backed out of their living room and passed the delivery guy at the front door.
Marching down their concrete pathway, I never looked back. That was five years ago. Never a day went by I wished I had parents who had supported me, but it wasn’t enough for me to go back and see how they were doing. I got a text every few months from my mum saying I should visit once in a while, but never did she ask how I was.
I used my savings to buy the shop I now lived above. It was all mine, I owed nobody anything, but I also had no spare money to repair the place. I thought I could rent out the second flat and that money would go towards the repairs, but something always came up. I did not understand how much it would cost to keep a shop running. The roof needed replacing as did the guttering and the windows. The frames were rotten. When the storm like no other ever seen before arrived in Brighton, my roof fell into my spare bedroom. It took six months to fix the roof, the progress hampered by my inability to get new clients. I lived almost hand to mouth as each magazine sold I could get the next part of the repairs done. Two winters in and I needed the windows replacing. The plastic homemade double glazing didn’t hold its appeal when I had to go to bed with three layers of clothes. The money pit that is the shop had a never-ending list of repairs. Once I’d finished the upstairs, it was my plan to fix up the shop, I still had that plan, but the tenants I seemed to attract had no respect for the premises and don’t mind losing their deposit. I wasn’t sure which was worse, my choice in tenants or my choices in dating men.
The ground floor was at street level, the front door on a corner of the main street and a side street. I had the whole block of the small side street. At the end, two large double wooden doors opened to the yard that housed a closed in garage and a concrete back area. My car was in the garage, under a tarpaulin. I loved the marine blue open top sports car, but couldn’t afford to run it. There was no way to get into the backyard apart from the side road. The shop used to be a newsagent until a few years ago. It had a basic layout, with floor to ceiling shelves around the edges of the square room and nothing in the middle. All the windows had plywood nailed up from the outside and black plastic stuck to the windows from the inside. The counter at the back was on a raised platform like a DJ’s sound booth. In the rear was a small kitchen area, a storage room, and a toilet and sink.
It would need an overhaul. The single light fitting hanging by its bare wires cast shows over the grey walls that didn’t have windows. Upstairs were two flats, mine and the one I rented. Both were two bedrooms, bathroom, galley kitchen, and a living room. A balcony that overlooked the back yard joined the two flats. It was my only connection to my tenant. Over the years I’d used many blockades to stop them wandering over to my side.
My next tenant would be an older gentleman, that liked to listen to the radio and play chess. A widower maybe that went out to social clubs for the retired and was home by nine.
The problem with attracting a respectable person to the flat, I had to repair the mess that my previous dickhead tenant made. It looked like he’d smashed every piece of furniture he owned in a fit of rage. I’d no idea what he did with the doors to the cupboards in the kitchen, but he had removed them all. His bed was in bits in a heap in the corner of the bedroom. The curtain pole was out of its holding and slumped half way down the window. What it all meant was a hefty bill, and I needed to get a new customer who wanted a rare magazine. Every day the flat stayed empty was a step further to an empty bank account. My current customer’s request required me to head over to Canada in three days time. I had to pay the expenses of getting to these destinations. If the leads fell through, then I was out of pocket. So far, my leads were solid and my pay day would come in about two weeks. That’s when I’d be in a position to repair the spare flat and then let it out. Unless the person coming tomorrow would wait for me to fix the place up, then I could use his deposit to complete the makeover.
I parked my bike in the back yard, slammed the door closed, and walked around to the front of the shop. The magazines I’d bought this morning were heavy. I dragged my feet up the stairs to my flat. Heading straight to the bathroom I ran a bath and decided ordering Thai takeaway would be perfect for my night of diving into the charity’s email account for the gala ball.
Callum
The community centre where I spent my youth was playing host to an afternoon of ballroom dancing for the over sixties. As far back as I could remember there was always an afternoon tea dance on a Tuesday. The centre belonged to the teenagers of the area on Friday nights. We used to smoke behind the building on the small football field. I had my first proper kiss, in the dark, near the football posts. She grabbed my hand pushed me up against the post and pressed her lips to mine, shoving her tongue into my mouth. Nothing much had changed in the last fifteen years. I still let women take the lead.
Pippy Feeney was the unofficial boss of the community centre. Nothing got past her, and she knew everything. When I left University to start my apprenticeship, she made me stay in touch and update her with my projects. Once I worked abroad, she followed my progress online by reading my blog updates for the charities I worked with.
I refused go into my father’s firm to learn how to be a CEO, it didn’t feel right to do that when I lacked any confidence to lead a board of directors. I had no experience in anything else. My mum understood. By the time I passed my apprenticeship, my father had died.
I was their surprise miracle baby. My mother never thought she would fall pregnant after trying for a baby for so long. My parents loved each other so much, it was clear in everything they did. Dad was nineteen years older than mum. Their joint birthday party showed every doubter they were madly in love. Mum was twenty-one and dad was forty at their joint party. They’d eloped and announced their marriage at the birthday party. I missed my dad every day. I regretted that I couldn’t take over his business, but I had no wish to be a chairman of an electronics company. Instead, Elliott, my best friend ran the business along with the other board members. I had money in the bank, but I couldn’t care less.
Pippy knew I was coming home for good and that I had no plans to work abroad again. She’d suggested that I take on a young lad as an apprentice. Pippy said it would give the lad a trade to learn and give me purpose. She called herself my second mother and treated me like one of her sons. I’d come to the centre today to meet him. Scottie Morgan had answered my advert for an apprentice although I suspected Pippy did it for him and told him later. We’d had a few conversations on the phone, and once I was sure he would take the job seriously, I set up a meeting upon my return.
