Imagined Diary - The wrong town

I wrote this before I went to China, let's hope it hasn't come true.
The middle of nowhere is not a place you want to be left stranded. I mean I'd rather not be left stranded anywhere, but if I was, then I'd prefer it not to be here.  I've been to small airports before, Sarajevo isn't huge, Cardiff that big, Lviv's looks like a mid-sized communist train station, but I've never been in a wooden hut, half way up a mountainside. 
I'd got the feeling there was something wrong when the plane I got on was a two prop number with fewer seats than our old school minibus. I was meant to be going to one of China’s major cities. This didn’t sit right. We sat on the runway dwarfed by the Boeings and Airbuses gliding round. Jesus the bus that brought us to the plane was dwarfing us. 
We wobbled into the air and then fought against the wind, at one stage I was sure we were going backwards. Fifty-five minutes later we dropped through the cloud and came to rest precariously on the edge of this mountain, the plane's wing almost touching the steep cliff on one side and overhanging the sheer drop on the other. 
We collected our luggage on the runway and then made our way to the wooden hut where I was expecting someone called Brett to meet me.
Brett wouldn't be his real name, his real name would be Ran, Xu, or something similar but his English name was Brett and he was meant to be waiting for me. I say meant to be because the wooden hut was empty, save one policeman and a cleaner. 
I went out to the front of the airport and watched the five passengers who I had been on the flight with, disappear in the five cars that were parked outside. I checked my phone, no wifi, no signal, no message, no Brett. 
The rain had a sleety feel about it and the top of the mountain was slipping on its cloudy hat. I sat on the wooden bench and watched the door, occasionally checking my phone to see if the situation had changed, it hadn’t. 
The policeman eyed me with suspicion, the cleaner smoked lazily in the corner, I hunched over my suitcase wondering what the fuck was going on. 
It was growing harder to read my book as the light faded outside. Brett still hadn't materialised unless Brett was the cat had wandered through the 'terminal' or one of the few bugs had scuttled across the floor.
I was dreaming of those Elizabethan girls when I was roughly shaken awake by the policeman. I wiped my eyes and took the phone that he was holding out to me. 
“Hello,’ I said.
‘Hi, this is Brett.’
‘Where are you?’ I asked.
“Well, there's been a bit of a mix-up.” 
A bit was the biggest understatement of the day. I was in the wrong Xi'an, not the with the Terracotta Army but a tribal mountain village with just one flight a week. 
“Don't worry Brett said, we'll come to pick you up.” 
“Great,” I said feeling some hope drip into my heart, “how long will you be?” 
“About thirteen hours,” the hope dripped away again. 

One Hundred and One Words

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As the title suggests, this is just 101 words. 
Words, words everywhere. pages and pages, reams and reams. The printer click-clacking away churning out words, more and more words. Horrible, spiteful words. All of those words are created by me. I hate every single one of them. Why do I do it? Why do I fill these pages, these screens, empty the ink cartridges with words that I instantly loathe?

I’ve always hated them, I read my old words and cringe with embarrassment, no, shame. How can anyone read this crap? Not only read them, but hang on them, quote them, study them, then when they’ve consumed them, demand more.

Punctuation

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‘Attention to detail’ my English teacher used to scrawl in red ink all over my compositions. “Davies,” he’d say, “you are a school child in Wales, not an avant-garde literary genius. You can play hard and fast with the rules of punctuation when you live in a converted loft in Manhattan, but until then, please try to put a comma in the right place now and again.” But for all his yelling, I didn’t listen to him. Punctuation was for the swots. I was a rebel, a stream of consciousness writer and punctuation interrupted my flow.

How I wish I’d listened to him now though. How I wish I’d studied the rules for commas, learnt about clauses, and discovered how to use semi-colons instead of sniggering at them. But I didn’t, and I’m paying the price for that insubordination.

Because of my lack of attention to detail, everything I write has to be proofread by a sympathetic third party. Someone who will correct my errors without giving me the full grammar Nazi sneer. And understanding editors are not that easy to find. Proof-readers tend to be supercilious by nature, believing they were put on this earth as higher beings, equipped with a red pen ready to put us mere mortals in our place.

This is where my dad comes in. A writer himself, he’s a willing and encouraging proof-reader. He’s patient, thorough and most importantly, he’s cheap; he’ll do anything for a bag of liquorice all-sorts. It’s a perfect working relationship. Well it was, until now.

You see my latest piece is a steamy, sexy,story; not quite Fifty Shades but maybe twenty-five. I got over the embarrassment of my parents reading my stories years ago, but there’s a difference between reading and proof-reading. You can gloss over the sexy parts when asking your mum if she enjoyed the first draft of your latest novel, but with a proof-reader you have to get down to the nitty-gritty, dissect every aspect. Having my dad insert a semi into a sex scene or insist his colon goes into a steamy moment would be all a bit too much for me to face.

So although I am grateful to my dad for all the work he has done for me, I hope he understands when I look around for someone else to proof-read this latest draft.

The Twin

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Nathan was just about to take a sip of the disgusting filter coffee when he saw his own reflection in the thin layer of scum that had formed on the top of the brew. He threw the coffee across the bar surprising the bored looking waitress. 
“You okay honey,” she said in her fake American accent. “Let me refill that for you.”
“Leave it!” Nathan barked. “Just leave it.” He put his head in his hands and sat stock still. 
He could hear the waitress mopping up spilt coffee. He’d have liked another one, but he didn’t want to risk seeing his lousy, lonely good for nothing face again. He heard the sound of crockery and then the glug of the coffee pot pouring new liquid into his cup. She was a doll that waitress. 
“Thanks,” he said through his hands. 
The coffee would cost a pound, that would leave him with fifty-three pence in his pocket. Fifty-three lousy pence. It should have been five-thousand pounds, but that damned bank clerk had decided to play Superwoman and had refused to hand over the cash. He’d held the gun right up in her face and threatened to pull the trigger, but she called his bluff and he’d only had a seven high. He’d left the bank with his tail between his legs and his pockets empty. He’d walked for miles and miles expecting to get picked up any moment by the police, at least he’d get a hot meal. But the police never came. So he was drinking bottomless filter coffee in a faux American diner that sat on the cliff looking out to sea. 
“Bollocks,” he said making the bored waitress jump for the second time. He’d made a decision. He got out his phone and dialled the police. He’d hand himself in.  
Nathan took a swig off his lukewarm coffee making sure he didn’t look into the cup. At the same time, the man opposite him took a swig of his coffee. Nathan felt like he was staring into a mirror. Both men’s mouths dropped at the same time. They both rested their cups back on the saucers and laid their hand on the counter like a snooker player’s rest. 
“Mark?”
“Nathan?”
They said together. 
Nathan got up and went around to the other side of the bar. 
“What on earth brings you here?” They said at the same time.
Brotherly love, twinerly love, has a strange effect. At first, Nathan felt nothing but affection, love, longing to be back in the womb with his twin. But soon reality started to drip feed into his mind. Mark was not only his identical twin but also the bastard who stole his girl. He hated that git. 
They slapped backs and chatted for a while; Nathan hiding the contempt he felt for his double-crossing wanker of an identical twin brother. 
“Well,” Mark said. “I’d best be off. I’ll just nip to the loo.” He slid off the bar stool and headed to the door marked John Doe. 
Nathan smiled and slipped on his brother’s jacket, picked up his brother’s briefcase and headed for the door. Gently tossing his brother’s car keys in the air as he walked. It wouldn’t take him long to find the car, there was only one in the car park. 
As he was driving out, a police car turned in. Nathan could imagine the scene. His startled brother being confronted by the cop. 
“Excuse me, sir, a man fitting your description attempted a bank robbery today.” 
He smiled, by the time his brother had talked his way out of it. Nathan would have sold the bastard’s car and emptied his bank of cash. It was turning into the perfect day.  Please if you enjoy these stories share them with friends, family, book agents, etc.. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram :-) Thank you.  

The Grey Boots

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“Oh my god,” Georgie said, “there’s this woman in work right, who’s been wearing the same pair of boots for the last two years. Two years one pair of boots. Winter, spring, summer, autumn, the same boots.”

I shrugged.

“Can you believe it?”

I shrugged again. “Maybe they’re comfortable,” I mumbled.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if they were a nice pair of boots, but they’re gross,” Georgie mimed putting her fingers down her throat. “They were gross when she bought them and now they are uber-gross, mega gross, two-year-old gross.”

“What do they look like, these boots?” I said, not really believing a pair of boots could be uber-gross.

“I just told you, they’re gross,” she said.

“Well, I get that, but describe gross.”

“Well, first of all, they’re grey! Who wears grey boots? Not even a nice grey either. Not like a dark misty fifty shade of grey, but a light Ford Cortina grey.”

“So silver then.”

“God no! Not Silver, Silver is nice. They’re grey. And then they’re tatty, scuff marks on the heels and the toes, and along the sides.”

“Well they are two years old,” I said, “They couldn’t have always been tatty.”

“They have been. Tatty, old, grey since grey one.”

“Knee length?” I asked.

“No, get this they are dodgy ankle height boots. Her legs look like tiny bonsai trees in huge, ugly, grey flower pots.”

“I need a piss,” I said and hobbled over to the toilets. As I washed my hands I stared into the mirror. The water ran over my fingers and I rubbed them together over and over like Lady Macbeth staring, staring at my reflection. I was replaying the conversation with Georgie through my mind. My reflection, grey.  The story about the boots, dodgy ankle. My reflection, tatty and scuffed. The story about the boots, two years. I counted up the months we’d been together. Twenty-three. Georgie hadn’t been describing a colleague’s boots. She’d been describing, me.

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