Opinions please.

DublinWriter

This is a little side project I've been working on. I'd be grateful if you let me know what you think of the first chapter. It's a very rough draft at this stage.

Chapter 1 – The Red Shoes.


I see the red shoes. I see the red shoes walk precariously across the tarmac surface of the car park. They are patent leather. They are high-healed. I see slim white bare ankles and calve-muscles working under strain walking altogether towards a minibus full of feral school children.

The owner of the red shoes is twenty-two and her name is Jenny. Perhaps she was christened Jennifer but everyone here calls her Jenny. I am confident that right now Mick, head of security, officious in his peaked cap, is busy at his work in the CCTV control room training at least one camera on her tight-skirted behind.

Jenny is an intern, or what we used to call ‘unpaid’ in old money. I watch her through a dirty window in the canteen. She is carrying a clipboard and looks professional beyond her years.

How do I feel? Not turned on in the slightest. Jenny, or Jennifer, or maybe even Jen to those who know her the closest, has the body and eyes of a gazelle. Thirty years ago I would have been all over that, but not now. Unshackled from the lunatic by the virtue of age and some serious anti-blood pressure medication I have long since waved my younger libidinous self goodbye. I see Jenny objectively.

So objectively what do I see? I take another sip of unagreeable Northern Television canteen coffee and I consider Jenny further. She doesn’t get on with the other women and girls here. This I know because I heard one accusing her of dressing like a Canal Street whore behind her back. Of course it’s all just jealously, but not for the obvious reasons. Jenny you see, is what they, in Manchunican terms call ‘up-herself’, or posh to everyone else.

Like me, she’s a displaced southerner ‘oop-north’ earning a crust. Unlike me, she’s a recent graduate of Cambridge with a double first who, rumour has it, turned down various offers to work in government and business circles to come to Manchester and work as an unpaid runner in a second rate television station.

Maybe that’s why all the guys (and some of the girls) want to **** her. It could be that rare juxoposition of posh and cheap. Also, London is ‘exotic’ up here. I take another sip of Styrofoam coffee and remind myself of the time some thirty years ago now when this used to be the silver-service junior executive canteen, one of only seven canteens in the building demarked by corporate rank. Now it’s the only remaining canteen and I’m its only customer at the moment, neither executive nor junior.

I’m a semi-professional gambler and I know the ‘tell’. In the case of Jenny, it’s the slight double chin that is her undoing. I’m the only one who sees it and knows her pitiful secret - Jenny was a childhood fatty.

How do I know, or rather, infer this? Elementary. Years ago, when the studio instructed me to shift the gut, I found a screaming queen of a fitness instructor by the name of Ricardo Nolens. It was 1986, precisely a year after the death of my wife and I was hitting the pies and beer with uncharacteristic aplomb.

Ricardo Nolens was a genius. To call him a fitness instructor would be like calling Einstein, well, I don’t know, what do the lower rung of physicists actually do?

Ricardo was Brazilian, taut, in his mid thirties, with the physique of a career ballet dancer. All the hoofer-queens used him as a trainer. I remember turning up early for the first appointment and watching him in the studio-cum-consulting rooms, executing the most detailed and limb wrenching contortions in front of a wall length mirror.

Ricardo taught me a lot, trained me even more. He spoke about low-carb diets, Pilates and low impact exercise years before they become hot topics on daytime TV. The little annex off the dance studio was filled with volumes of medical texts that made the place look more like the office of a solicitor suffering from recent marital and mental health problems coupled with a recent break-in.

Six months later I was back on the straight and narrow. Ricardo took me aside, grinned at me, then studied my face. His expression changed.

“Diss!” he said, slapping me gently, yet robustly under the chin, “DISS!”

“What?” I replied, slapping him comically back in the style of one of the Three Stooges (the darkish one, with the pudding bowl haircut).

“I have thought you everything, everything, but this, this chin grow, no exercise, no calinetics, nothing, can get rid of, OK?”

That much I now know. Ricardo and I spent six months of a customised exercise programme that I now know to be based on the US Navy Seal fitness regime to get me back to my usual svelte self. I felt good, better than I ever did. I kept up his prescribed exercises that he meticulously copied into an A4 folder with my name typed in front and double spaced – H E N R Y W O R T H – all meticulously ring bound.

Three years later and I’m living a world solely owned by Stock-Aiken-Waterman, Australian soap operas and attending the funeral in St. Mary’s Salford for a guy called Richard Nolan, late of Galway, Ireland. Trained and qualified as a medical doctor, one of the best of his generation according to one particularly tearful orator, but stuck off for malpractice early in his career for reasons unspecified, and who later moved to Manchester and died of AIDS related complications due to phenomena.

It turns out that Ricardo, nee Richard, came to Manchester to reinvent himself. I watch Jenny lead a line of straggly nose-picking schoolchildren from the bus, clip-clopping them to reception where the Friday afternoon studio tour will commence from. Two hours’ duration maximum. I take another sip of Styrofoam coffee, feel under my chin. She’s reinventing herself too and realise so did I, not so long ago.

I see the red shoes.

pickarooney

I really enjoyed that. op the bit about Jenny's real name being Jenny or Jen as it's a bit redundant. There are a few typos and autocorrect errors such as healed for heeled and phenomena for pneumonia but no major problems

DublinWriter

pickarooney wrote: »

I really enjoyed that. op the bit about Jenny's real name being Jenny or Jen as it's a bit redundant. There are a few typos and autocorrect errors such as healed for heeled and phenomena for pneumonia but no major problems

Thanks a million - I thought as much myself - it's a very rough draft and I just wanted to see if I had initially established a strong voice for the narrating character.

alfa beta

hey this is nicely written and improves as it goes

i like your narrator - bit of a prat but there's something about him, if you know what i mean!

the one thing I found odd was an early line that read 'How do I feel? Not turned on in the slightest.'

when i read this, I was sorta thinking to myself - why would he be turned on - why would anyone be turned on by watching a woman walk to a bus full of school children - so maybe you ought to up the 'sexiness' of Jenny prior to that line so that the reader is a bit surprised that the narrator isn't 'turned on'.

otherwise, I thought it read well and I for one would read more

Agent Weebley

Hi DublinWriter,

I liked it. It was a good read. It flowed well. The transfer off Jen and onto Ricardo and Richard should have been explored a little more before you posted it, as it was very "Jen" focused; he was bordering on leering.

I'm glad the guy changed from a 1st person pronoun to H E N R Y W O R T H, but it would have read better with a couple of spaces between his first and last name, as it sounded a little Woolworth's . . . ish.

This Henry guy . . . it sounded like he was inadvertently turning himself off and on again, judging by the way he was constantly looking at her, his imagination gone wild, even though it was through a dirty canteen window. Dirty. Sounds dirty. Especially him going after Gazelles in an earlier part of his life . . . you may want to re-word that part. He sounds like he could easily be a Cheetah.

And Jen with the red shoes? Really? I remembered the gnarly toes thingy from the way back machine.

One question though: was Henry, by any chance, working alone too much . . . maybe his office was behind the red door?

Anyway, all kidding aside, it was a good read, even though Henry seemed a little bestial.

Oh, one last thing: I think Manchunican should be Mancunian.