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I was a wild kid, and when I got older, I thought back to certain incidents and adventures, dangers I’d put myself in, and bloody hell, sometimes I had to laugh. I liked that about myself, was never one of those ones that did everything by the book. Everything was so bloody boring growing up, especially in that school by the motorway. It was so dead there most people just went through it by car or the train, and the faster they went through it the better.
There was that cliché thing at parties of all the coats being on the bed. I had a clear memory of not wanting to do anything, of saying it, but feeling knackered from something more than Bacardi Breezers. And then I was awake and for some reason couldn’t talk.
Waking alone there, the coats all gone, I knew this was more than a hangover, it was almost like blindness, a stickiness around the eyes.
I realized I couldn’t tell anyone, even though I was hundred percent about what had gone on. And the longer I left it the harder it got to say. They already thought of me as the bike of the village. His word against mine.
You saw it on the news often enough, women getting dragged through the courts and even if they win the case the bloke only gets a year or something. So that would happen, if we got the conviction, and it was a big if, but yeah, say we got the conviction, then after a year he’s back in the village.
I went on cruise ships, all over the world. Caribbean, Greece, Cyprus, all the sunny places. What happened didn’t ruin me, I was determined about that, and I drank as much as I wanted, wore whatever I wanted. That wasn’t the problem. Sometimes there were men that were alright, like the one I almost got married to until he started acting weird. They always started alright, but I guess there was just something about me that changed them into arseholes.
About Neil Campbell
From Manchester, England. Included three times in Best British Short Stories (2012,2015, 2016). Four collections of short fiction, Broken Doll, Pictures from Hopper, Ekphrasis and Fog Lane. Two poetry chapbooks, Birds and Bugsworth Diary. First novel Sky Hooks came out in September 2016. Sequel Zero Hours out now
