Woodcall

Mike Hoinville

Description

This collection begins with the tale of a boy with a musical talent driven on by his mother's ambition; Great Expectations always seem to end strangely don't they? Ah - England! A mecca for tourists from all over the world... and not only this one it seems. Then a different mother with the same proxy-ambitions for her talented balletic son... and he reaches breaking point too but finds relief with a little help from... well, from somewhere. Then a short one about a Nurse who finds a little love in a short affair; shorter than she might have imagined it turns out. Finally, the title story that takes us from Dorset to France; back in the history of Mother Church... and far further than that in Time... for some, the Quest goes on....

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 16 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785381010
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Publisher Information
Published in 2015 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Mike Hoinville to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2015 Mike Hoinville
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Finger Exercises
The growling and crashing brought him out of sleep. It went on for minutes - long enough for him to get out of bed and stand, naked as he was, to peer out of the kitchen window at the council rubbish lorry with its scurrying, careless crew; all dour faces and acid yellow safety waistcoats. It was Wednesday. He lingered on at the window heedless of the occasional passer-by. No one ever looked up and the Bingo Hall opposite had been empty for years while the garage diagonally opposite was still not open yet.
As he was about to get on with his normal morning routine he paused as a man came out of the entrance to Market Walk beside the bingo hall; a shabby, short figure in what was once a neat grey suit. The man simply stood there ignoring gaps in the traffic, simply staring ahead and turning left and right from time to time as if lost or deciding which way to turn. To Luke, from his vantage point, the stranger looked out of place compared to the normality of life in that little market town - and anything that broke the repetitiveness was welcome - plus the fact that Luke could not be seen and this added a kind of cool detached pleasure.
A large lorry came out of the market entrance and slammed to a halt with a loud hiss of air brakes. The scruffy figure recoiled against the wall and his hands came up under is chin, elbows tight to his ribs and fingers rapidly scrabbling in the air - the whole impression most insect-like - a wood lice on its back, a vertical millipede. Luke stood transfixed till the truck lurched off, all blatting diesel noise - to leave the little figure leaning back against the sunlit red bricks, his hands still defensively up under his chin but the fingers now stilled to a watchful curl. Luke could see the lips move silently, as in prayer, the head nodded once, twice...a decision seem to have been silently made as the figure peered rapidly left and right and trotted across the now empty road with a speed that was unexpected. Soon the figure was out of Luke’s sight.
Odd, Luke thought and during his routine morning he found his thoughts returning to the figure he had seen and keeping an eye out for him as he wandered around the few streets of the town centre.
Coming home with heavy supermarket bags - beer cans mostly - Luke spied the distinctive little figure once again coming around the corner from the large Church on his left at the junction of the two main roads. The man stopped at the corner of Luke’s street with downcast eyes, fingers plucking slowly at the hem of his jacket, obviously avoiding contact. ‘Hello’, said Luke. The man raised his eyes - dark brown, almost black - and gave what could have been the beginning of a smile before turning round to stare vacantly; seemingly finding something interesting in the road surface. Luke shrugged and moved on feeling the man’s eyes following him but not turning back to check.
Normally Luke could not be considered to be either sociable nor interested in the comings and goings of the town around him. When he worked at all it was only a series of random jobs - he had long given up on the thought of a career after a bitter few years in advertising. But occasionally and for no apparent reason he followed some meandering avenue of thought in between employments for as long as his small wage-savings would allow him to. So it was that he had delved into the history of the local park, the local castle and the coats of arms in the driveway there; another time it had been the long history of the nearest small city...all fairly random amusements.
Now Fingers had awoken his curiosity. He had dubbed the man “Fingers” from his first observation of the frightened insect reaction the day before. He decided to start a man hunt; a real target for sleuthing and the challenge was as much in the fact that he knew nothing about his quarry as the fact that it had to be done without raising either suspicion in the man himself nor in...well, the Police for example. So where would he start? The man had to live somewhere - he did not look so much like a tramp yet he also did not look like he had money. Unless he was some lost son of a millionaire after years on the road he had finally found his inheritance? Luke wandered around this thought for a while; after all, this inbred little town was as likely a venue for that scenario as anywhere.
His first idea was the Citizen’s Advice bureau; but advice on what? He soon went off the idea of describing why he was looking for a complete stranger who was no relative of his...even if he made up some complex fiction the trouble seemed greater than the rewards. Police were out - they would start investigating him ! The local pub - in this small town this seemed as good a bet as any and luckily there were three local pubs within five minutes walk as the town was historically blessed with a local brewery in years past and once boasted an extraordinary number of pubs whose clientele was mainly the mill workers from the local factory - and though the factory was not what it had once been and even though the brewery had closed long ago, still there remained this strong information resource of some dozen or more pubs.
It didn’t take long to find what Luke was looking for.
Older bar members had quite a lot of memories of ‘Fingers’ - though nobody remembered his name. Comments on his dictatorial and extremely Puritan-minded mother were plentiful but Fingers always seemed to figure as some walk-on part at best and, at worst, as some sort of shadowy appendage to his mother’s occasional trips to the town shopping. A small, neatly dressed boy, usually in grey of some description who did not seem to go to school as far as anyone remembered; maybe he was taught at home? Seemed likely as the mother was very educated and ‘came from up country’ - which, in local parlance could as easily mean Taunton as Manchester.
The mother was a war widow, or left by a drunken husband, or was that most scandalous of things for those days, an unmarried mother. The boy’s father was a brutal drunk, an American soldier, a rich shop owner who ran off with his senior assistant, a handsome farm labourer who was not ‘good enough for her’, or a local doctor (or vicar) whose ‘shame’ was to see his illegitimate son paraded around the very town the man lived in. Thus the ‘poor woman’ was a victim, just another war statistic, a revengeful harpy...or a bit deranged with a mixture of grief and unremitting anger.
She drank a lot - or not at all. She dressed well in an old fashioned way or had ‘let herself go badly’.
But apparently two qualities did seem pretty certain. She had independent means enough to buy (or rent) the cottage next to the ‘old chapel’ on the edge of town - maybe that was the alleged vicar connection? She was also either a musician herself or was determined to make her son one as piano music had often been heard from the cottage and a fairly unmusical voice (female) from time to time.
Nothing else much. The woman had not appeared to have any regular visitors or friends and had not worked locally - probably not all having a young son. Luke was soon discouraged enough to give up on the idea of solving some mystery - he lacked mental stamina for problem solving in general and this was too...well too everything really. He put Fingers on his mental ‘back burner’.
Then on Saturday, in one corner of a long bar with pop music blaring out and slot machines flashing and tweeting, Luke came across an elderly man eating a sizeable plate of food that belied his age and thinness. They were alone as far from the flashing lights and music as the bar would allow; linked by a distaste for the garish and a wish to find quiet - and perhaps, by a slight bemusement as to why either of them were in that place at all; at least the old man had his food as an excuse.
Saturdays were always quiet in the majority of the town pubs; they came in two sorts - the music and food (in its loosest sense) based emporia which catered for the young (and too young) element. These venues were the quiet ones in daylight as the towns’ youth (and bigger children) had easily fallen into the ‘Fun means Friday and Saturday nights; formula and thus they saved up and pooled their meagreness for those nocturnal revels only. The other pub category was for the more elderly town shoppers and retired farmers who used the Saturday chauffeuring of their wives to supermarket as an excuse to ‘catch up on business’ with their cronies in one or two drink-but-sorry-only-crisps-or-nuts bars on the main street.
Luke stretched his pint out until the man had finished eating and had put his plate on an empty table, made a call on a new-looking mobile phone and drank from his small glass with a neutral nod of acknowledgement to Luke as he did so.
“Bit noisy eh?” Ventured Luke.
“Indeed.” Came the calm reply, “Reminds me of the fifth year music project.” The man smiled at this private joke, shaking his head gently at t