All stories

Millie and Sam, out for a delightful Sunday afternoon hike, when disaster struck. Or rather, what struck was Terrance the bull, hyped up on the indignity of having to watch some of his charges being serviced by a specially hired in stud bull. Millie was rhapsodising about an off-pink peony and thus she did not notice for at least five seconds that her brave and noble one day fiancé to be was legging it sharpish down the track.

As Terrance drew breath for a mighty bellow he instead gagged on the mixed haze of Sam’s eau de cologne and Millie’s fourteen different perfumes. Millie was an eighteen-inch heel girl and this had built up an impressive lower body strength that allowed her to soar like a hot air balloon shedding its ballast and find safety in the lower limbs of a chestnut tree. There was no sign of Sam.

The dickhead had left her.

After six hours or so, Terrence was no longer such a hyper bullock, and he bull slunk away, surely sending that Millie’s rage had her on the verge of dropping from the tree and snapping his neck with a squeeze of her muscular thighs. The same fate was destined for Ben the farmer, but he was one of those ridiculous sorts of chap who is so open and charming. Through profuse apologies he explained that he had been busy, setting the bones in both of Sam’s broken legs, and then single handedly carrying the poor fellow across his broad back up the stairs to nestle him in Ben’s own feather bed.

Guilt assailed Millie. Her brave soldier, injured as he fled to her rescue. She ran to him. She soothed him till he slipped into a gentle slumber. She tucked the covers around his gently heaving chest then crept from the room.

Guilt had also assailed Ben the farmer. Those bloody tanks, his father’s obsession, a mix of British and American second world war era field tanks.

Millie’s train of thought derailed on the cold hard buffers of reality. From Sam’s coat she took his tank spotting diary and leafed through it to the most recent pages. Sam was a die-hard Tankie. He made meticulous notes of every tank he ever saw, right down to the exact date and time of the sighting.

He had been looking at bloody tanks for three hours while she had been stuck in the tree. He hadn’t broken his leg rushing to save her. He had slipped from a sodding tank.

Millie ended things properly with Sam. She also took the time to explain to him that Ben the Farmer was a single chap, no wife or girlfriend, and the farm was a quiet place. That low sound he could hear from downstairs? This place was so peaceful what he was hearing was Ben the Farmer humming as he waited for the toaster. There would be nary a sound to disturb Sam’s bedridden convalescence.

Millie was a little irked that Ben the farmer had given up his biggest and softest bed to Sam, but actually, in hindsight, the tiny little bed in the room next door with its creaky frame and loose headboard, they were a winner.

Tommy was the kid in our class whose dad could do anything better than your dad. If you had some new trainers, he had limited edition ones from New York. If you were going on holiday with your family, he’d been there twice. If you got a birthday cake, Tommy’s had been the biggest cake in the whole world, signed in icing by Man Utd.

You know the kind of kid I mean.

“I had the new Action Man for my birthday.”

“Oh yeah, which one?”

“His eyes move and he comes with a knife - he’s really cool.”

“Oh that one’s pretty good yeah. My dad got me him ages ago. He’s bringing me the real new one back from New York next week. Comes with tanks and a machine gun and a parachute.”

“Woah - no way! Can you bring him to school so we can all have a go?”

“Nah, he’s limited edition, so I won’t be able to take him out of the house.”

And Tommy sauntered away humming the theme tune of The A Team

It happened that my mum was friends with Tommy’s mum. I knew that she sometimes popped round there, but I never went. Tommy and I weren’t best friends or anything. I tried to steer clear of him outside school. But that night, when mum said she was going over I had an idea.

“Can I come too, Mum? I can play with Tommy. He says he’s got a cool new Action Man.”

Mum frowned. “Really? Well alright, but I’m not staying long, just dropping some bits in for Julie.”

As soon as we pulled up outside his house I knew that Tommy had been lying. About all of it. Paint peeled from around the window frames and an upturned pram rested in their garden surrounded by piles of rubbish bags. The front doorbell was broken and inside the paper was yellowing and peeling from the walls.

His mum was putting bread in the toaster for their tea and Tommy’s face dropped when I followed my mum inside. We were shooed out to go and play while the adults drank their coffee and Tommy could not meet my eyes.

“Can I see your Action Man?”

Tommy muttered something about the attic and not being able to get the ladder without his Dad. Instead we kicked a deflated football around the overgrown concrete behind his house until my mum told me it was time to go.

The next day in school, Tommy wouldn’t look at me. At break when Jack Turner said about the scooter he had for his birthday, everyone automatically looked at Tommy, but he scuffed the ground with his shoe and said nothing.

Now was my perfect opportunity.

“I went to Tommy’s house last night.” I piped up, and immediately, all eyes were on me, eager, hungry, desperate to know. Tommy looked like he wished the ground would swallow him whole.

“His Action Man is amazing. And I saw the Nikes - it’s just like he said. So cool - limited edition and everything.”

The eyes turned away from me, disappointed, disinterested now. But Tommy looked up briefly and flashed me a grateful smile before launching into a story about the electric scooter he was expecting from New York that very week...

He looked at me when he entered the room. Or rather, he looked at the paper in my hands, I was inconsequential. As though an audience were still watching, he deliberately placed a large tumbler and an unopened bottle of brandy on the coffee table before laying himself on the chaise lounge; it was 11 am.

He lifted a recently dampened flannel from where it hung over his forearm and delicately draped it flat across his face.

‘Go on, hit me with it,’ he said, in a tone suggesting he felt obliged to ask.

I took a sip of coffee, smoothed out the paper, and cleared my throat.

‘A triumphant tour de force!’ It seemed as good an opening as any.

He folded his arms onto his chest and interlocked his fingers.

‘Nigel Huntingdon captivated the audience from the moment he stepped onto the boards.’

I took another sip of my coffee.

‘The character under scrutiny has scuppered even the most scholared actors. Yet the provocative incite brought by Huntingdon was such that it is impossible to reconcile any audience has seen him portrayed in his true form ever before.’

Even after the opening, that felt like a reach.

‘Though the set design was minimalist.’ There was no set design, there had never been the budget. ‘The audience’s shared perception of the World War I tank which served as imaginary backdrop was crystal clear.’

Nigel had simply walked onto the empty stage and said, ‘Oh, hello old tank,’ before sitting down.

‘We were carried on a 50-minute journey through a 25-year life and we lived every bleakly beautiful emotion which made the latter so vital to our understanding of the man, the war, and of humanity.’

I could see Nigel affecting indifference, even beneath his face cloth.

‘Bread alchemist and role of best man, seven letters?’

‘Toaster,’ he replied reflexively. Before adding, ‘What?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I brushed his question away as I moved my pen across the paper. ‘Any audience members not reduced to tears by the programmed performance found themselves helpless in the face of the forty-minute recital encore of what Huntingdon referred to as “The words in which his soul shall forever live, until the Earth’s body crumbles around the man’s, making the two forever inseparable, physically, as they are in spirit.”’

He actually said that.

‘If this is Huntingdon’s only performance,’ I reached the conclusion. ‘It will forever be transcendent. If it is the start of a career, it is exhilarating.’

I picked up my coffee to signal the review was over. A dampened but satisfied humming emerged from beneath the sodden flannel.

‘Well, I think that calls for a celebration!’ Nigel announced after he felt an appropriate amount of time had passed for humility.

‘I’d say so,’ I replied, making my final marks on the paper.

I stood, placed the paper on the coffee table with the freshly completed crossword face down, and left to fetch the champagne I knew I’d find on ice in the kitchen.

Nigel Huntingdon’s performance of ‘Wilfred Owen: To Die For One’s Species’ had been performed on a Thursday night in the backroom of a Salford pub. Why he thought The Guardian had been there to review it was a mystery.