A Taste of Honey - Parts 1 and 2

“It’s drivin’ me bleedin’ mad not knowin’, I’m tellin’ you straight” Speck confessed for the fourth time, picking nervously at his fingernails and biting the flecks of grubby skin off with his few remaining teeth. He shifted his weight from one buttock to the other, sniffed wetly and began to jiggle his skinny legs in a manic sofa-bound dance.

Sharona sighed. She loved the bones of him; at least, she supposed she did. Seven years must mean something, right? Seven years of grimy bedsits, dole queues, shared spiffs and Pot Noodle wasn’t exactly the Posh and Becks lifestyle she sometimes longed for, but he was good to her in his own way. He bought her little presents too from time to time – there was that pretty glittery purse he brought back from a car boot sale, and once she’d wiped the vomit stain off the sides it was good as new. Only last night he’d come home holding something behind his back and grinning.
“Guess wot I’ve got ‘ere?” he teased.
“A nelephant!” she shrieked (because she’d read somewhere that humour kept a couple together).
“Don’t be so bleedin’ daft, woman” Speck laughed. “’Ow big j’er fink me pockets are?” Turned out he’d picked up a lottery ticket, which had been sitting on the chip shop counter, obviously left behind from someone’s wallet.

And now it was lottery night. They’d memorised all six numbers on the ticket, read them out loud so many times Sharona reckoned they could recite them even after a bottle of vodka; not that they had a bottle of anything, it being in between dole days.
12 17 23 40 42 and 3. It was the first time either of them had ever played the lottery as all their cash was swallowed up almost before they climbed the broken stone steps to their room, and they’d spent most of the day making ever wilder and more outrageous plans for their glittering future as multi millionaires. Speck was torn
between an enormous yacht, a villa in Spain and unlimited access to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, until Sharona reminded him that a yacht would look pretty daft in Tower Hamlets, he hated foreigners and Chinese food gave him the trots. Still, it was a good laugh pretending, and as she kept telling herself, someone had to win, some lucky bugger won every week didn’t they? Why not them?

Six o’clock, and Speck shifted, fidgeted, picked, sniffed and danced on the spot with nervous excitement. With the air of a conjuror preparing his highlight act, he slowly picked up the remote control, glanced sideways at Sharona and pressed the “on” button. The TV stayed stubbornly blank. Speck swore – badly – and tried again. This time, not only did the TV remain blank but the remote control began dripping a viscous and faintly scented liquid all over his jeans. Speck, never one to quail at the unknown, stuck a bony finger into the gloopy mess, touched it to his mouth and declared it to be honey. As if to prove his theory, the remainder of the honey, plus the half empty jar, lay wedged in the corner of the sofa, bleeding gently onto the shiny cushions; onto the very spot where the remote lived. Usually.

Re: A Taste of Honey - Parts 1 and 2

Meantime, unseen by Sharona and Speck, an hysterical, outrageously busty and perma-tanned small-time celebrity in a tin foil dress was shrieking out the winning numbers as they rolled sluggishly into their allotted spaces. She felt she had earned her fee tonight; Jeez, but she couldn’t stand her co-presenter with his fluorescent teeth and his minty breath, and if he tried to grope her on air again, she’d ….
Sharona and Speck slumped in their growing pool of honey, dull-eyed and disbelieving. “Wot now then?” said Sharona. “I dunno if we’ve won anyfink or not. Christ Speck, we could be rich and not know!”
“Nah” said Speck moodily. “It’s God’s will, that’s wot it is. God’s will. We weren’t meant to ‘ave the ticket.” Somehow invoking the Almighty’s name disturbed and frightened Sharona even more than the thought of trying to scrape honey off the bum of her micro skirt. To her way of thinking, if Speck considered the ticket to be bad luck in some way, that was good enough for her. She looked up to him as a purveyor of profundity and wisdom, or as she put it to herself “’E knows wot’s wot, ‘e does. ‘E went to college once.”

“We could go and find someone’s telly an’ get them to check it for us?” Sharona suggested diffidently, loath to relinquish her tenuous grip on a life on a yacht in Spain.
“Oh yeah, that’s a plan, that is” Speck sneered. “’Scuse us, d’you mind if we just borrow your telly? Oh yes, makes a lotta sense does that. Now let’s see, ‘oo do we know? P’raps ‘Er Majesty’s in? Nah, forget it. Wasn’t meant to be.”
“But we’ll never be sure now, though, will we?” Sharona tried for the last time; Speck however was now bent at the fridge door hoping for a beer, and chose to ignore her.

So it was that Sharona and Speck’s rather crumpled lottery ticket bearing the numbers 12 17 23 40 42 and 3 came to be resting 20 feet below their tiny bedsit, balanced half on and half off a litter bin and secured on one edge by a small blob of chewing gum.
Martin paused on the pavement, chewing a corner of his fingernail wretchedly. This was the third time he’d stopped in the street, trying desperately to consider his next move. What the hell should he do? He’d never been much of a decision maker, preferring always to let life carry him along unobtrusively, always favouring the path of least resistance. Lily livered, his father called it. His father – muscled, tall and
aggressive; nobody messed with his dad and lived to tell the tale with all their dental work intact. How I must disappoint as a son, Martin thought. Thin, spare, shy to the point of reclusiveness, and gay. The final straw. “What I need is a sign,” Martin said to himself. “Something to make a decision for me – like a big finger pointing down saying DO IT!” He smiled. A finger? Like in Monty Python? Like that was an everyday occurrence. “I’m, stony broke, no car, and a bloody pigeon’s pooped on my only suit. What chance do I have?” Dabbing at his lapel with a tissue, Martin turned to drop it in the bin when he spotted the discarded lottery ticket. Crumpled, with one corner stuck down and what looked like something gluey staining an edge. “Some other unlucky sod who hasn’t won a fortune” Martin thought. A sudden painful rush of memory overcame him – a playground taunt, bigger lads pushing and shoving him, the sense of exclusion and other-ness that marked all his school years and early teens.

Martin had grown up in a household consisting of three sisters, all older than he was, and while he harboured a certain admiration for their confidence and close knit sisterhood which had them spending what seemed like hours closeted in one bedroom or another giggling and whispering, he had also been more than a little frightened of their overt femininity, their shrill voices and the vague sense that they were privy to some worldly knowledge denied to him. His mother on the other hand was a timid and introverted woman, totally in thrall to her husband, who spoke rarely and then in such an apologetic manner it made Martin want to scream. He had asked her once, when he was around twelve and feeling he would go insane with loneliness and alienation, “Mum, is there something wrong with me?” His mother who had been laying the kitchen table with her usual deferential downcast eyes and nervous movements (“Like a bloody prisoner of war” Martin had thought) paused briefly as if surprised that someone in the family had actually asked her opinion. She carefully placed his father’s fork at right angles to his spoon and murmured soothingly “I don’t think so dear. A haircut, perhaps?”

Nobody asked their father anything, although he demanded a direct answer to all of his ad-hoc questions which he threw at one or other of them with no warning. Conversations with their father followed worryingly random directions – “May!” (that was mother) – “You haven’t used up all the housekeeping I hope?” or occasionally he would glower over at his eldest sister, all perfumed and primped and clearly itching to get out the door, “You have five minutes to get up the stairs, come back down looking less like a tart and more like a Godfearing woman. Clock starts NOW.”
With Martin it was much worse, because he didn’t get spoken to at all. It was as if the disgust and crushing letdown of having such a son was too much of a bitter pill to swallow, and if he denied his existence long enough then one day he would just vanish.

And so Martin had slowly withdrawn more and more and become what he felt to be a grey spectre, a filing clerk with little to look forward to and nobody to share the precious free time he had.

He walked on, past the row of bed-sit terraces with their narrow front doors and banks of bells that didn’t work, past the park where local kids weren’t allowed to play in case some weirdo should get within 50 feet of them and through the doors of a pseudo Victorian pub whose windows shook with the bass notes of some ear bleeding guitar on the juke box. Martin desperately needed company, was so sick of being on his own and was determined to put a stop to the dreary treadmill his life had become. Hell, what did he have to lose? “Brave words, you wuss”, he chided himself, “Now all you have to do is magic up a decent bloke.” He approached the bar and a plump middle aged barmaid with greedy eyes and crepey skin waddled over and tried out a flirty smile. “What’ll it be, love?” she leered hopefully.

“Just a pint please” Martin replied politely. God, was she barking up the wrong tree, he thought, and smiled a little to himself. He turned his back on the sticky counter and shyly looked around. Two young girls in the corner, already drunk, screaming with laughter at something on their mobiles, some old fellow near the door who appeared to have his coat on inside out, a group of office workers at a long table obviously hating each other’s guts and pretending to bond corporately, and a fair haired man around Martin’s age standing alone and casting covert looks his way. Martin felt terrified – elated – and braver than ever before in his life. Perhaps this was the sign? At least if not a sign, then a chance to start a different sort of life, one with warmth, friendship, maybe love. Hell, he was going to introduce himself and if he was beaten to a pulp so be it.

The man’s name was Luke. He had little round glasses like a teacher, his hair wouldn’t lie flat and when he laughed you felt as if you could drown in its volume. As they strolled out into the evening an hour later, Martin bent to pick something up from the pavement. “A fiver!” he exclaimed incredulously, “Blimey, I’ve never even found a penny before. A fiver! How about that?” Luke laughed his wonderful warm enveloping laugh. “Bet you feel rich now, don’t you?”

A couple of miles away, winning lottery ticket 12 17 23 40 42 and 3 lay mud spattered and half hidden in a culvert with filthy rain water eddying round it like a tiny paper yacht on an iridescent oily sea.

© Aug. 2011

Re: A Taste of Honey - Parts 1 and 2

Another lovely story, Eccles. I did enjoy that.