FLASH MY FICTION Seren Morgan

CHERRY

• Susan was forty-two: An anxious age for a woman known for her looks. In her early teens she’d modelled for Freemans and Grattan catalogues; got down to the final eight for a TV-ad for pimple cream when she was fifteen. Her portfolio was a beautifully preserved companion, though in recent years, the plump-lipped fawn in the photographs had begun to mock her. The picture that hung in the hallway - her skipping through the air, (knitting-machine pattern; dogtooth skirt and button-up cardigan, 1987) - reliably made her feel zesty, until recently, when a misguided compliment from a delivery man drew her attention to the fact that she was old enough to be the mother of the beauty in the frame.
• Ron, her husband, was fifty-nine: A relaxed age for a man with money. He was self-made - razor blades manufactured in Bangladesh for the international market - and so they lived in finest Cheshire - detached, five bedrooms – perfect, as it turned out, for losing decades in. Ron preferred to lose what time he had in places where he also lost money: London, Marbella, or on their WAG-clad high street wherever sport was big-screened.
• They survived the marriage by ignoring each other. Susan had been ignoring her husband for many years, but he started it. Susan’s expectations of marriage weren’t spectacularly high; still, the wedding was without doubt the best day of her life, even though she hardly saw her husband that day either. She was the Congleton Carnival Queen all over again. The photographer was thrilled to be working with a professional, went on to use her in his promotional literature.
• Last week she’d found receipts of Ron’s. He’d been to the new lap-dancing club on the high street, buckled in as it was amongst five restaurants, three old pubs, two trendy bars, a dog-grooming salon, a bank, a designer deli, the post office and the hairdresser’s. Hanging baskets bloomed prettily over whitewashed brickwork. By day, club Eden slept silent; Susan parked outside it when she’d had her Tuesday blow at Split Ends. Though the area was affluent, Toni, the Bolton stylist who also had the flat above the shop, reckoned it wouldn’t last, ‘People don’t shit on their own doorstep do they,’ and ‘To think that used to be a bloody smashin butcher’s, it’s the death of the high street, I’m tellin ya…’
• Susan was both in awe of her and thoroughly intimidated. Either way, Toni was the closest friend she had, though they never saw each other outside of the salon.
• Thursday, late-afternoon, and Susan was back on the high street, squeezing her silver BMW up close to the front of the lap-dancing club. She’d booked in for a root tint, a few extra highlights to brighten up for spring. She had expensive blonde hair, the kind that looked stunning on the black-and-whites of her and Ron on the slopes, now silver-framed, posing atop antique furniture. They only went to the French Alps once. Susan’s goggle-tan was not something she wished to repeat, and well, it was cold. Snow, though, is a splendid backdrop for a married couple’s portrait, gives the impression of a full and fortunate adult life.
• Toni was washing a client’s hair, motioned Susan to take a seat. She picked up a magazine, went to the back pages, as often she did, noticed that the clinic where she’d had her breasts enlarged for her fortieth weren’t running her photo anymore. And she hadn’t even charged them for it. Time was running through her faster than the spinach and blueberry juices she’d been pouring down her throat each morning. She would call the clinic, make a Botox enquiry, and perhaps see if they wanted her to model that. Definitely a call for a more mature model, she thought happily.
• Her ears pricked up as a comb went through the brown lengths of Toni’s mystery client.
• ‘It’s only the second club I’ve worked at, but it seems alright,’ she was telling Toni. ‘I won’t work in Liverpool.’
• Toni nodded. ‘In case someone recognises you.’
• ‘No. It’s only a fiver a dance there.’
• ‘Five quid? For taking your clothes off? I’d want more than that.’
• ‘It all adds up.’
• Toni flew around with the scissors, snippets of wet ends filling in the floor space around them.
• ‘What does it cost next door?’ Toni asked.
• ‘Ten.’
• ‘For one record?’
• ‘Three minutes.’
• Susan was captivated. Toni noticed, turned up the Beyonce song on the radio, yelled over it,
• ‘Fancy it, Suze? Fancy making a bit on the side?’
• Toni was the only person to modify her name, and she did it with all her clients; Beverly – Bev; Mrs Privet – Mrs P; Mo from the dog-grooming salon - Maureen.
• ‘We’ve still got it, haven’t we love, we can still shake it.’ And she shook her body like she was holding a pneumatic drill, which made the brunette laugh.
• ‘They do auditions on Fridays. Shall I tell the manageress you are coming tomorrow?’
• ‘I will if Suze will, eh, Suze, you havin it? Fireman’s pole and all that!’
• Susan wanted to know more. Over the top of Marie Claire she studied everything about the girl, from her beat up yellow Converse and pale skinny jeans to her eyelash extensions, which someone had done a very good job of. She was about twenty-two. Her figure was concealed under the cutting robe, but Susan envisioned a tanned and toned midriff. The girl’s nails were long square acrylics, French manicure. Pierced through the little finger nail on her right hand was a dangling bell, a charm, that jingled as she jangled, her hands telling half the story.
• ‘The opening night was great, we all made money. Think half the town was there! Everyone was on the Moet. It’s calmed down now though, so we’ll have to wait and see if it’s worth the drive.’
• Susan wondered if this girl knew her husband, if they were there on the same night. She wondered what the girl thought of her.
• Toni said, ‘You drive back to Liverpool in the middle of the night? How long does that take you?’
• ‘An hour and fifteen if I don’t stop for a pasty in the services, but I usually do!’
• Toni picked up the drier and a round brush, shook her head at Susan, ‘Where does she put it? There’s nothing of her!’
• It was half past six when Susan left Split Ends. The small sign on the door of Eden stated the opening hours were seven pm to two-thirty, Thursday to Sunday. Before, it had been a large old-fashioned butcher’s with plastic cows and sheep in the window, pig and lamb carcasses hanging from hooks. Rents weren’t cheap, plus people were coming to the High Street to socialise rather than shop these days. Susan was glad when the butcher’s closed down. She’d always had to cover her nose and mouth when she passed it. Now, it would smell of perfume and longing; claret and Chablis would flow where once was blood and bleach. Queen Ann legs and velvet upholstery would replace New Zealand legs and pig’s ears, and the five foot plastic chef with blue and white stripy apron that stood on the pathway outside would be replaced by polite doormen in panther black suits.
• She was hoping to see people going in, some kind of a clue, but the door remained shut, and then she saw Mo from the dog-grooming salon locking up. She didn’t want to be drawn into a conversation with her, being as she was, allergic.
• In the garden shed with a G+T and her laptop, she had a good look at the Eden website. Like the girl today (whose midriff turned out to be lazier than Susan had imagined), the dancers were all attractive, provocatively so, and thick with a certain style of make-up, a certain kind of undress.
• Susan dressed elegantly, perhaps conservatively. Today she had on her ‘spring is sprung’ open-toe sling-backs, a pair of cream linen trousers with a white cotton knit and a daffodil-yellow neckerchief to soften the look.
• The club offered pole dancing classes, but the possibility that any one of the women from the village would also have the idea ruled that out. She needed to be on the inside, part of the pack. If this was to work, if she was to pull this off, she had to convince everybody she was just like them – young, sexy, and needing the money.
• Money! What would she do with it? She had heard girls make five hundred pounds a night. Could that be right? That’s a lot of dancing at ten pounds for three minutes. She would put all her earnings in a jar. Immoral earnings! And she would not spend it. This would be money that changed hands in a secret way, and she would want to keep that money to touch now and again, just like her modelling portfolio.
• Susan knew she looked fabulous for her age. Was it enough? She cheated, sent a photo by email. It was an old snap Ron had taken of her in a bikini in Benidorm. Her face was a bit blurry, the lens sun-fuzzed, but her body looked great, and now she was a D-cup, so they could only be impressed. If they called her for an audition, then she would be happy. She had nothing to lose by sending a picture.
• That night, she reassured herself in the mirror, I’ve still got it, dabbing eye contour gel, sweeping throat cream in an upwards motion, then pitter-pattering her glistening cheeks and forehead with her fingertips, as was her routine.
• In the morning, after letting Mavis in with her bucket of cleaning fluids and j-cloths, Susan sat at the bottom of the garden, on the bench under the cherry tree, idly imagining her life was more like Desperate Housewives. She knew which wife she would be. Once, after that thrilling scene where he picks her up and she wraps her legs around his fine torso and his arm muscles ripple bronze… Susan hired a gardener herself! And sat in the conservatory with a pot of earl grey and white lace gloves, watching Bert chuck snails into a bucket, and of course felt nothing, not even a twinge, just a woeful grief that he was trampling the grass at the side of the winding path. Walk in a straight line, you oaf, she bemoaned in her head, then, Mind the dahlia’s with that bloody wheel barrow! So she called the agency and said Bert was maybe a bit old and could they send somebody younger, and then Bert’s wife had telephoned and given her a lecture about ageism, which was horrible, because Susan hadn’t even thought of a gardener’s wife or a domestic situation when she planned to live out her favourite scene. Nonetheless, the agency sent Martin who was early-thirties, but no, he wasn’t it either. His eyes popped out like he was in a state of constant strangulation, and he was clumsy with her roses.
• Ron was at a conference in Bournemouth. On her High Street, there was ten-denier-dancing, music, lace. The world was happening without her. She went to the shed and found her cigarettes, smoked a bit of one and then stumped it out on the side of the bench. She didn’t smoke proper, but occasionally would buy a pack, puff the odd one or two, then end up tossing them away because they dried out. The lawn was pink with cherry blossom. She would enjoy it a few days more, before it visibly decayed, and then she would take her rake to it. In the pond, the gloopy coupling of frogs put her in mind of the cycle of life, how fast spring had come around again. Everything, everybody had its place, its purpose. But her life, the point of being Susan was pot-bound and furring moss.
• Ron’s son, Nigel was coming this weekend with his new girlfriend. Nigel was a pleasant kid; she could hardly believe he was twenty-four already. He’d carried the rings on a satin cushion all the way up the aisle of St Jude’s. From this small age she had him call her Auntie Susan. He had a mother, she reasoned; who needs a step-mother when the real article is alive and well, packing Transformers lunchboxes with squashy cheese sandwiches and Blue Ribbands? And now, that canny move was paying off, for after a girlfriend comes a fiancée, and then, a bride, and then… Susan smirked at her forward thinking when planting that little tree; the last thing she needed in the foreseeable was to be a Granny.
• Mavis polished the glass inside the conservatory. Susan was mesmerised by the swinging wings of her upper arms as she made big circles into little circles, as she made the creamy fluid disappear into the orange cloth. Mavis would go around with the vacuum next, nozzle the cushions on the wicker two-seaters, before making herself a cup of tea and tackling the bathrooms. Susan knew her movements, knew it was best to keep out of the way. They were just too different, and it was a difference best not bridged. Cleaners are there to clean, not move their personalities into your most private space; they glean too much already. Susan wouldn’t do her own housework - she hadn’t married Ron for nothing - but ahead of Mavis arriving twice weekly, she would give the exercise bike and rowing machine a quick lick. Rarely with an effort using more than one calorie, though every now and again she would don the silver sweat-suit purchased from QVC, and cycle the cobbled stones of Coronation Street.
• Mavis called through from the conservatory that there was a delivery. Upstairs, in her bedroom, Susan marvelled at all the new clothes she’d ordered. She squeezed her slim feet into purple stilettos and wished she’d got the bigger shoe on this occasion, because as a rule she wouldn’t wear anything over a five. Gucci’s fives were generous whereas Topshop must be saving money on patent leather this season. Susan was not unused to pain in the foot department and reasoned she would pop a few Anadin-Extra half an hour before the audition.
• After Mavis had left, Susan cat-walked up and down the parquet hallway in her new snow leopard knickers and bra set, the tight stilettoes giving her toe-cleavage, the skin on her breasts shining taut, her belly soft yet firm, like her bottom, not bad at all! She looked better than she had hoped in the hall mirror as she scrunched her hair up and thrust her hips out one way and then the other. Dressed this way, she opened her emails and yes, yes, yes! - She had been invited to an ‘Open-audition between seven and nine’. It was four in the afternoon. She began to apply make-up, slowly, building a flawless mask set off with false eyelashes and a red pout. For company, she popped a bottle of Dom Perrignon from the fridge, poured a glass, and then, because she was so nervous, poured another, took it down to the conservatory. She’d been unable to eat more than scrambled eggs that day and the champagne went straight to her head and she felt fabulous.
• Then the key went in the door. Ron! She rushed up to greet her husband. He looked surprised to see his wife with all this vampy makeup on, in her smalls, half-cocked on bubbly. Of course, he didn’t question it, just fucked her on the hall stairs, right before the front door, the knitting-machine-pattern photo commanding her attention as she bore his twenty-five thrusts. She thought this was rather fun, he rarely desired her quite so, her spine banging against the polished oak stairs sobering her up. Then, in an act of unusual kindness, Ron insisted on taking her out for dinner. They went Chez Phillipe on the high street.
• Across the road from their window seat she kept her eye on the two doormen outside Eden, smoking, chatting away like old ladies at a bus stop. Nobody else went in or out.
• ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Ron said, taking her hand. ‘We should try for a child. Before it's too late.’
• Susan took her hand back. ‘You’re drunk.’
• ‘I am a bit merry. But I’m serious.’
• ‘But I haven’t had a chance to be me yet. It is out of the question.’
• Ron took her hand again. ‘Please, my little cherry-pie…’ he kissed her hands, made baby of his eyes at her.
• So she said she would give it a bit more of a think. She’d been saying that for some years now. Losing her figure would be suicide. Sleep deprivation would be monstrous on her face. Having an older husband kept her forever young. It was all she knew how to be.
• ... to be continued.