The Writers Bureau Short Story Competition 2019
Home enter rules courses How to write for competitions

3rd Prize – Hazel Osmond with:

How To Fall Off A Soapbox

Back then, I wanted to kiss Margaret Thatcher. I knew she’d done for Jeff’s lot like she did for the miners and I wanted to pucker up and press my mouth to that powdered, adamantine face.

Didn’t of course; knew my lips would have stuck to her like Gail Holdsworth’s tongue stuck to the ice cube tray that time she licked it during double cookery.

All the same, I would have liked to have thanked Margaret somehow because I thought she’d started the beginning of the end. One day soon I would watch that posturing bloke with his own loudhailer turn back into Jeff and maybe he would stop fighting everyone else’s battles and start putting in some time on the home front.

Or even my front.

Of course, it wasn’t like that at the start – it never is, is it? Otherwise no one would ever start anything.

In the beginning, we stood united, indivisible, as one. I’d spotted Jeff on his soapbox down by the park when I was twenty, a crowd nodding their heads every time he punched the air to underline a point and the guys selling The Socialist Worker looking hacked off that he was making more progress with the proletariat than they were.

Soapbox? Funny how the old words stick. Upturned beer crate with a plank on doesn’t have the same pull, does it?

Anyway, whatever he was standing on, he lodged in my eye. He lodged in my ear too – I came from a family of monosyllabic males and a mother devoted to wordless martyrdom. I didn’t know whether I was more fired up about ‘the unfair practices employed when setting shift rates’ or the way the muscles moved in his arm.

All that passion.

I set about diverting it my way, but it wasn’t easy. He was focussed on class struggle, with a heart that largely belonged to Marx, and I wasn’t the only one after him. He was a catch no doubt about it. Men looked up to him (particularly when he was on his soapbox) and I was handicapped by a family who hadn’t had a trace of dirt under its fingernails for generations. My safe job in the council (flexi-time and 20 days Annual Leave) didn’t help either, no matter how much I tried to remember to drop my ‘aitches.

It just meant I ‘ad to try ‘arder.

Jeez how I tried; how I worked to be working class enough, handing out leaflets, putting up posters, nodding, nodding, nodding at his point-making and scoring. I fetched the beer, washed the plates. I
picketed his house, subtly.

If I felt myself faltering I imagined him stripped to the waist at work and it spurred me on.

The day that the factory had its first walk-out, Jeff addressed the men outside the factory. It was hands-in-pockets bitter, getting dark, and they stood before him, eyes fixed on his face. I could see their breath rising into the night. It seemed to me that they were smouldering; set alight by the
righteousness of their cause.

‘My’ Jeff fanning them into flame.

Whenever I think of that scene now, those men remind me of cattle waiting in dumb ignorance for the truck to the abattoir.

That night, Jeff and I finally got together, him miles high from his own rhetoric and me lying far beneath him, as mute and adoring as the men had been.

The men. They were out for weeks and I joined them, packing in my job to stand in front of the factory, stamping my feet against the cold and the unfairness of the management. There I was again - proving I was more committed than anyone else who might be tempted to put in a bid for Jeff’s attention. It makes me sick to think back on it. How many pans of soup did I stir? How many slogans did I write in Magic Marker on poxy bits of cardboard? Was that really me addressing the

‘Wimmin’s Groups’, showing solidarity through nut loaves and knitted clichés?

Yes, yes, all me - because I thought he was worth the struggle. Because I was winning the fight when Jeff planted his kisses on me in public like official stamps of approval.

So what if some of the women, the ones my mother would have called ‘coarse’, looked at me as if I was a do-gooder in a poke bonnet?

When the strike officially ended with an agreement brokered by Jeff and sold as a ‘victory’, he proposed to me. I accepted, imagining us marching together into a fairer future.

At our wedding reception in the local Club - my mother perched on the edge of her seat as though sitting any further back would give her piles - Jeff said he was looking forward to marriage; after all, he was a Union man.

Oh, how we laughed.

‘Behind every good man…’ his mother said to me as she zipped me into my ‘going away’ dress. It was only later I saw what a trite little sop of a sentiment that was - an acceptance of inequality tricked out in a pretty compliment.

I expect at the time I just nodded.

Home for us was a damp flat on the Parade, the hall filled with Union paraphernalia, but we were hardly ever there. Jeff’s success had got him noticed and we spent most weekends travelling to TUC events. He would disappear into rooms for ‘a word’ and I would scuff my heels with the other women until the door opened again and Jeff would emerge trailing smoke, fired up by congratulations and promises.

Those were our best of times. Even in corridors, scrummed about by people debating and disagreeing, Jeff would put an arm around my shoulders or my waist. He had rough hands then, his skin at least, holding true to the working man he had been.

How did I slip through those fingers?

I could say gradually, death by a thousand cuts, but that’s the public version. Things began to change when I did not get pregnant. When I kept on not getting pregnant.

How could this be? I was Woman. I was meant to labour, labour, squat and deliver, get up and do a full shift.

Soon our lovemaking felt more and more desperate, a form of work without perks or benefits. I grew to hate every contour of that Artex ceiling.

Jeff said all the right things, but there was something about his delivery that suggested a mirror and a rehearsal had been involved. Happier providing support and consolation on a grand scale, he couldn’t cope with despair as it stood weeping in his own bathroom every month. I would reach out expecting solid comfort and end up with two hands full of shirt. The best he could offer was a wispy patting that fell somewhere between my shoulder blades.

It reminded me of a baby being burped and the resonances washed over me like acid.

Around that time was when I first saw Jeff’s ‘look’. It was a little facial shorthand suggesting I was the one with the body that wasn’t co-operating. When that was confirmed and we learned that the inconceivable was non-negotiable, I caught something more distasteful coming off that ‘look’. It spoke not only of me being unproductive, but also - quick hop, skippity, synapse-jump forward - disenfranchised.

When I needed him most, another stoppage at the factory took him away. When he returned with his disciples, I could not be in the same room with all that noise and life. Sitting on plastic, sweat-inducing chairs at meetings, I would feel the weight of an undandled baby on my lap.

But times they were a-changing. The long-drawn out death rattle of the miners; an end to secondary action; restricted picketing, injunctions. Suddenly the unions were losing the old battles again.

They lost them big time when the company shut the factory and transferred production abroad. The town began to look blank and closed in on itself. It smelled of standing water.

I thought that was going to be the moment I’d get Jeff down off that bloody soapbox.

I didn’t twig he’d already fallen. He took a phone-call. Promotion to Union Headquarters pulled him on to a life raft.

Turned out it was a life raft for one.

‘Shafted you an’ all,’ my neighbour said when I saw him in the queue at the Social.

I denied it, but on the way home I finally shrugged off that poke bonnet. With an un-blinkered view, I could see I had sold myself a pup - a mirage created from scraps of DH Lawrence and disdain for my parents. For months that knowledge filled my chest, leaving little room for my heart to beat or my lungs to fill.

When Jeff left the marriage finally, formally, I returned to work and let the management walk all over me. Alistair his name was – good looking in a collar and tie kind of way. Clean fingernails. He had a breathtaking understanding of the rules of supply and demand, but which one of us was doing the demanding I couldn’t honestly say.

I still see Alistair round town, me getting off the bus, him parking his car.

And Jeff? The only time I see him is if I don’t hit the TV remote quick enough. There he is, puffed up and puffed out, mouthing the new mantras. I’m sure if I looked hard enough, I could see the gravy on his snout.

No doubt there have been plenty of other women happy to stand behind him.

Poke bonnet firmly in place. Nodding.

The Writers Bureau
8-10 Dutton Street, Manchester, M3 1LE
0161 819 9922

Copyright © 2000 - 2020 The Writers Bureau. All Rights Reserved. 8-10 Dutton Street, Manchester, M3 1LE, England

Cookie Policy Privacy Policy Data Collection, Usage and Storage Policy

 

Home enter rules courses