Michael Allen - A Writer's Guide To Everything Important - The Omnibus Edition Of Seven Essential Guides For Fiction Writers

‘Hello!’ said PC Moreton with a smile. ‘How are you?’ And he said it with such genuine concern and affection that Bertie’s Mummy could no longer speak. But she didn’t need to speak, because he could see how she was. He could see that she was trembling from head to foot, and a tear was running down her left cheek.

And now Bertie’s Mummy abandoned all hope of resistance. She just covered her face with her hands and began to sob, violently and uncontrollably. She fell forward into PC Moreton’s arms.

PC Moreton hugged her tightly to him, and stroked her hair and kissed her cheek and shushed her, and he promised that everything was going to be all right soon, really it was, he promised. And at one point it seemed to her that he told her how beautiful she was, and how much he loved her. But that could only have been imagination, for it was what she had so much longed to hear these months past.

After that, when the shaking and the sobbing had subsided, and Bertie’s Mummy had returned to being at least a smudgy carbon copy of her normal self, PC Moreton took her into a nearby coffee shop and bought her a large black with an extra shot. Then they sat down at a small table, opposite each other, and PC Moreton held her hand in his while she told him all her troubles.

For every sentence she spoke there was a juddering sob and a generous eyeful of tears. And she told she told him how she couldn’t stop dreaming about the cellar floor and the ropes that bound her and the tape over her mouth. And now she was frightened of the dark and she couldn’t look at strangers and she couldn’t open the front door without peering through the spyhole, and not always then.

Her husband, she said, was a decent man and a brave one, and he had fought hard to defend her from Sid and Dick, but there were two of them and one of him, and they had clubbed him to the ground and then kicked him into submission. He had never touched her for months, even before she was kidnapped, and now they slept in separate rooms.

‘I think he’s gay really,’ she said, ‘but he just hasn’t faced up to it. So I’ve got no one to comfort me, no one to talk to. I feel as if I’m going mad,’ she told PC Moreton. ‘I feel as if one day I’m going to start screaming and tearing my hair out, right here in the High Street, and then they’ll take me away and lock me up again and this time I shall never get out.’

‘No, no, no,’ said PC Moreton. ‘I would never let them do that to you.’ And he held the back of her hand against his cheek and kissed it. ‘Everything will be all right again soon, I promise you. Really it will.’

And so it came about that PC Moreton spent the rest of that Tuesday being kind to Bertie’s Mummy. And he was kind to her every Tuesday, and she to him, for a long time afterwards, with no harm done to anyone.

After a while, with PC Moreton’s help, Bertie’s Mummy stopped being frightened of the dark. Mostly. And she learnt how to answer the front door again, because he put a security chain on it for her.

And then one day her husband asked her if he could have a divorce so that he could marry his friend George in IT. And Bertie’s Mummy said yes he could and welcome, because she was thinking of making other arrangements herself. Which she did, in due course. And it turned out that Bertie liked his new Daddy better than his old one because he played football. And drove a police car.

And from then on, every day when he came home from work, PC Moreton puts his arms around Bertie’s Mummy and held her tight and made her feel safe and happy.

So he really did make it all come right in the end. Just as he had promised.

***

Reminder: The Rescue of Bertie’s Mummy is told from the omniscient, third-person point of view, with a good deal of author comment, offered subjectively.

This story has already been published as a stand-alone ebook. It is also included in my collection of short stories, Four Pretty Good Ones.

APPENDIX 2:

Daphne before She Died

Michael Allen

Daphne before She Died is a novel about two passionate love affairs. It is set in the 1950s. Forty years after the events described in the novel, our narrator looks back at his own love affair with a French girl. Wisely or otherwise, the narrator’s widowed mother invited Suzanne to stay with them for a few weeks during the summer holidays.

Having Suzanne in the house, and for a whole month at that, was not quite as exciting as it sounds.

True, we were friends. And we were lovers also. I certainly was in love with her. I was fascinated by her physical appearance, and could gaze at her uninterruptably for half an hour at a time. I had to discipline myself not to grab her and kiss her at every opportunity.

I was easily aroused by her presence (fourteen-year-old boys can achieve an erection in a remarkably short time), and there were many occasions when I had to be careful how I went about standing up.

A partial solution to the erection problem was provided by one of Papa’s old army jackets. It was an item of tropical kit, I think – a light linen affair, with capacious pockets. I was big enough for it to fit me; it reached almost down to my groin, and certainly managed to make me a bit more respectable on a number of occasions.

I won’t go on about my physical urges – it would be tiresome – but at the same time I wouldn’t want you to underestimate their power or their persistence. Close acquaintance with Suzanne’s body did not lessen their intensity; rather the reverse.

And perhaps this is the place to record and consider the mystery of Suzanne’s attachment to me. Because mystery it is, in a sense. Why did she allow me such liberties?

Was she in love with me? Certainly not. Not in the way that she (presumably) had been in love with the bank manager; and not in the way that Daphne loved Pete.

No, Suzanne’s attachment (a word I have used twice because I think it best matches the facts of the case) was based upon a number of factors, some of which we have already identified. Such as loneliness, and the fact that she was an exile. But to my surprise, I found that she was also quite impressed with me as a person; she was actually flattered that someone of my distinction (as she perceived it, I hasten to say) was paying attention to her.

I am not, perhaps, the most suitable person to explain this, but since there is no one else around to undertake the task, I am obliged to advance this immodest explanation.

Physically, I was as big as she was. I may have been young, but in her eyes I was a young man, and not a young boy. Second, I was, I suppose, reasonably presentable in appearance; I was courteous and well-mannered, at least when I put my mind to it. Third, I had displayed a certain athletic prowess on the cricket field, with Suzanne as a spectator. Fourth, I obviously thought that Suzanne was fabulously beautiful, and never disguised the fact; and women are not usually discouraging to men who think that they are beautiful. And, finally, I was pretty good at doing what she wanted me to do to her in bed. I was a ready learner and a co-operative partner, not yet experienced enough to demand my own selfish satisfaction at the outset, and then roll over and go to sleep.

So there it is. Odd, but true. My relationship with Suzanne was one of those strange liaisons which one cannot quite understand but which are demonstrably there, in front of one’s very eyes.

Apart from our physical relationship, Suzanne and I did not have a great deal in common; she had more in common with Maman than with me. And so in the first two weeks of the holiday, the daily routine which developed in our house was centred at least as much around Suzanne and Maman as around Suzanne and me.