Veedon Fleece - Chris Cottom

It’s 1965 and you’re in the consolation race for over-elevens at your sports day. Despite tightening the laces of your plimsolls, you don’t trouble the leaders. 

Wallop School is boys-only. The guests’ event is an egg and spoon race, won by a ten-year-old with plaits and a fringe as fair as exercise-book paper. Somebody’s sister: Ali or Abby.

~

The ‘Jolly Roger’ is nearly back at Penton Hook marina after a hot summer Sunday on the sleepy brown Thames. Colin, who likes to be called Captain, steers the gleaming cabin cruiser into the gravel pits and roars his impressively enormous twin outboard engines. Free from O-levels at last, you’re at the sharp end with your left arm growing numb around the shoulders of his blonde fourteen-year-old daughter. 

Captain Colin yells ‘Hold tight’. The Jolly Roger shoots across the water, straight for the bank. Abi screams like a Hammer Films starlet and you tighten both arms around her. 

Her dad drops the throttle and the prow sinks down. He swings the boat through a wide curve and gets ready to go again. Abi’s head is hard against your chest.

Captain Colin revs the engines and shouts ‘Last time!’ 

As the boat makes its mad dash, Abi lifts her face to you and suddenly you’re kissing.

~

Abi’s feet scatter riots of golden sycamore leaves in Magdalen Deer Park, her woollen-gloved hand in yours. Her sage-green raincoat is buttoned and belted, while your Civil Defence greatcoat has lost two buttons, maybe three. On the path along the Cherwell the wind whips her long hair so you loop your college scarf around her neck.

Her cheeks are rosy red but cold to your lips as you unlock the heavy outer door to your rooms in Mob Quad, where you’ve got real milk in her honour. You toast crumpets on paperclips fettled to the grille of your electric fire and listen to Van Morrison’s new LP, Veedon Fleece, on your Ferguson record player.  

‘He sounds like a goose,’ Abi says, and her laughter bubbles around your sitting room like water from a hillside stream.

~

Abi and Lorcan invite you to dinner at their terraced house in what the estate agents are starting to call Brackenbury Village, still known by everyone else as Hammersmith. The house is three-bedroomed, all framed posters and Laura Ashley. There’s a neat little garden with night-blooming jasmine and kitchen-handy herbs.

Lorcan leaps up to clear dishes, listens attentively, and relates amusingly self-deprecatory anecdotes. You hate him. 

You’re evidently the spare man for a dark-haired Debbie, who’s nearly a barrister. She probably earns twice your whack but you ask for her phone number anyway. 

Lorcan stands next to Abi, his gorilla arm around her shoulders.

‘Abigail and I have some news,’ he says, smirking. 

Abi smiles and touches her fingertips to her tummy. 

You feel like chucking up your passionfruit cheesecake.

~

You spot her at the Chelsea Flower Show, talking away at the back of a roped-off area of the Sunshine Garden, a terrace of terracotta and spiky cacti. She’s crisp in a cream linen suit, her hair in a sharp bob, the managing director of her own consultancy, Pollyanna PR, which the maverick Moroccan ‘landscape artist’ has appointed to make him even more sought after. 

You hover for fifteen minutes but they’re still busy batting business at each other. You slip away.

~

Abi’s in the papers herself. The now famous Lorcan has been unable to keep it in his trousers. In a no doubt carefully posed picture, in which her hair looks a shade darker, Abi is conservatively dressed, the wronged wife, dignified but hurting, flanked by an unsmiling woman solicitor with a rottweiler reputation.

Your own divorce has taught you it takes two to tango. You wonder who Abi might have tangoed with.

~

The house in Henley is redbrick, a Victorian villa. The young man who opens the door tells you he’s a nurse. He shows you into a large, high-ceilinged drawing room. 

She’s only fifty-three, but gaunt. She raises her arms an inch above the neat covers of her hospital bed, her hands open in welcome. Her hair is dulled and grey.

‘Hello Abi.’

The young man brings tea and indicates that you should pour. ‘Abigail,’ he says, ‘tires easily.’

She shows you photographs of her children, two of each sort, and admires the few of your ex-stepdaughter you find on your phone. She asks about your work, where you’ve lived, countries you’ve seen. She laughs when you remind her of her triumph in the egg and spoon race.

‘Your laugh hasn’t changed,’ you say.

You drift through the afternoon in chat and memory. The light is fading when the young man reappears. You understand it’s time to go. 

‘Darling Abi,’ you say, quite unable to use the word goodbye. 

She places her hand on your arm and rests it there as you lean forwards and kiss her pale dry cheek. 

‘So sweet of you to call me Abi,’ she says. ‘No one’s called me Abi for years and years. You’ve made me feel young again. Like that day on the river, that perfect summer’s day.’

You turn at the door, put your fingers to your lips, and blow a kiss across the room. 

Originally published in the Parracombe Prize Anthology, 2022

Chris Cottom’s work features in Banshee, Barrelhouse, Bending Genres, Fictive Dream, FlashFlood, Flash Frontier, Gooseberry Pie, Leon Literary Review, MoonPark Review, NFFD NZ, New Flash Fiction Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Orange Blossom Review, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fainéant, The Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. Catch him pedalling around Cheshire, UK, and at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom