Runner-up: ‘Black Habits’ by R.M. Duffy

I wondered if I should stay. The man with the fat hands and the jacket with the three pens in his breast pocket told me to come through. So I did. In the brown leather chairs, he looked at me, his head at an angle.

"How would you describe the feelings?" We drank warm sweet tea and stared at the cups.

"Do you ever feel like harming yourself?"

I told him about growing up without a mother. Or a father. I told him about the women in their black habits. And the white collared men with their needy, sudden whines.

"Were there others?"
"Not that I remember."
He reminded me how I didn't really remember anything. I agreed. He took a pen and scratched it onto some forms, my name stretched across the top like chewing gum on a shoe. "If you take these down to the dispensary they'll give you what you need." Then he handed me a card.
"And here's my number. In case you need it."
I won’t need that number, I thought. I will leave and make it work. Or, I might stay. I collected the package from the dispensary and took a bus. Outside the moving windows, the wind was blowing piles of dry leaves up into people-like shapes. They danced and cavorted and looked happy. Behind me the sky was dipping itself into the shimmer of evening gloam. I was tired and the tips of my fingers ached.

Before bed I thought about ringing. My thoughts were all twisted in with my hand movements and I noticed I was holding the phone. I pressed all the numbers but hesitated before I pressed the last one. I looked more carefully at the number I was dialling. It wasn't his number at all. I had put in the number of the home. I dropped the phone into the toilet, took another gulp of the liquid and slid into bed.

The next day I went to work. The others didn't ask me anything, choosing instead to stand in huddles and eye me at strange angles, their hands occupied with appropriate small jobs. They polished shelves, wound clocks, rearranged items and removed thumb marks from the counter glass. I knew they knew. We continued as normal.

"And the one in the window, would it be a bit cheaper, being out of its box so long?

I smiled and told the customer I would need to check with someone. In the back there was no one so I asked Darren. He looked at me with the same eyes he had on him the night of the party.

"How the fuck would I know?"

I began to cry so he comforted me. He held me tight in the toilet cubicle, my blouse got torn again but not as bad. He told me he didn't like to do it but it was the way things were, a phase he was trying to work through.

At the next session we had tea again. The leather of the big chair didn't creak as much this time. The pens in his pocket were different and I was glad to think of him running out of ink. I saw him walking into a pen shop, his squat wife tutting at his indecisiveness, she distracted by hand-made sheets of pastel writing paper or an advert for knitting classes.

"Would you describe this action as spontaneous?

I nodded, sipped the tea and nodded some more. This time he had a woman sitting with him. She sat in the other chair near the window.

"You don’t mind?"

I said nothing. She had a red pen and red shoes. When I looked up, her eyes drifted off me like a lighthouse beam in sea fog. Her pen made a different noise than his, the grain of her paper heavier. Her hand got fast when his got slow, the scratching was some kind of inverted harmony. I liked the proportionality of the pattern between them, the correlation. I knew what it meant.

"Do you think he has feelings for you?"

I moved slightly on the leather. The woman in the red shoes got up and poured more tea, her eyes all angles and flitting reflections.

"Not anymore."
"Do you think the tablets help?"
"I don't know. Some days they do, some days they don't. But I can't tell which." The woman in the red shoes leaned forward and whispered in his ear.
"Of course." She got up and left the room. He asked more questions and I gave him mostly the answers he was after.
"I think that's us then." The woman in the shoes came back in and whispered in his ear again.
"Maybe a depot, if the tablets aren't working."
I thanked him and said I'd try harder from now on. "I'll try harder from now on."
"Yes, try harder from now on."

He smiled and nodded. She made a face with little expression but pouted her fire- engine lips and did a no-eyed stare.

On the way out the receptionist with the sparkly nails and pearl necklace smiled up from her typewriter.

"You look less dishevelled than before." “Thank you.”

At work Darren prowled the counters. He was sweating minute mercury beads and his eyes looked like someone had poured angry paint through them. He answered people with a varying tightness, like a rope holding a boat in a wavy breeze. As the shop quietened the door burst open, a gust of autumn air spilled in. A robin pip-popped into the shop on the breeze. It looked angry, it's red breast ablaze, tail twitching, spindly legs askew. Darren and the others looked for brooms to get it with. They ran and whooped and snarled their ugly teeth at it. It flew up into the front window with a dull thump and fell onto the magnolia floor covers. Its neck was at the wrong angle and its eyes stared at nothing.

After they flushed the body they all stood around. They smoked outside the back door, shoes grinding out the butts, spewing laughter. I knew it was time to go; you can't stay in a place like that; not with people like that.

I fucked Darren before I left and managed to tear his shirt a little around the front breast pocket, where the ink stain from his leaking pen was. Then I screamed and knocked all of the other worker’s tea cups from the counter, their lunchtime tea dregs drooling down off the staff-room worktop, making little splashy noises on the Lino, a spotty brown history of me on the sheen of the floor. I hung my uniform in the locker and left the key in the lock, my dollar shaped key ring swinging.

The train was pumped full of people in suits. They had paper heads and leather shoes and made snapping sounds at unpredictable times. I worried their jaws would break off their faces as they clattered at their phones, multitudes of fingers tip-tapping the Formica table tops like manic timpanists. I got off the train when I was ready, when it felt right. From the high station I could see the town below. An elegant older woman on the platform stopped me.

"Are you the girl who rang about the room?"
“Y es.”
She was beautiful in an exquisite way and walked with an uprightness I hadn't seen before. She wore a pale blue pastel skirt and matching top. The pearls were real. We walked and talked.

"And over there is the doctor’s office.”
She smelled of bergamot and lemons.
"And on that side is the dentist, the abortionist and the butchers. They do nice pork and leek sausages."
The room was bright and spacious and overlooked one of the main thoroughfares. She told me her name was MaryFrances, all-one-word. She tended roses and drank gin in the afternoon. She liked the early songs of Jim Reeves but not the Christmas collection.

"Consumer balderdash," The crackle of the radiogram threw dim light over the parlour air for us. I knew we would get on.

"And what do your parents do?"

I told her my father was a salesman, denim and lace mostly - but sometimes linen if the demand was there. She told me it was cloth that had made this country great again. Her son was in jewellery, another noble profession she said.

"You're not one of those people who tell other people what they want to hear are you?"

"Lord knows I have some faults but lying is not one."

We told our lies to each other for some time before I decided it best to go to my new room. I would need all my strength for the times ahead.

The road outside the front steps of the house was a popular route from the outlying areas to the centre. It trundled and sang metallic sounds from before six and didn't sleep again until well past midnight. I learned to follow its routine, it's beat. I'd sleep when I could, exhaust crackles or badly sprung trailers my cockerel call. I loved to sit and watch bulbous charabancs of workers passing through the sooty haze of morning air. Their window-skin faces were knitted into dark twisted shapes, measures of their work days ahead. I decided it best if I watch them all day to see if I could ascertain what it was I was searching for. I did it day after day and sometimes night after night. I noted all the details of each trailer load of people. I wrote the particulars into hardback notebooks, recording my observations by date and time and lunar phase when appropriate. I recorded facial features, demeanour, the slope of a shoulder. My notebooks soon filled to the edges and became a talking point over dinner. MaryFrances all-one-word was almost too interested in my notebooks, choosing to talk of almost nothing else whenever we met. She mentioned money on occasions too and her voice during these conversations was often unbecoming of a woman of such social stature.

One Monday afternoon I decided to go into the town. MaryFrances all-one-word was now in the habit of shouting at me about notebooks and money and washing myself. I walked along the tree lined avenues and streets, unsure of my new way of moving, my legs stiff, my feet unused to shoes. I crossed at the junction between the main road east and the main road north and started looking at the signs in the windows.

Cleaner required, the first said. Not me, although I recalled being taught the art of scrubbing by the black habits.

A rusting paint shop, a hotel-cum-gherkin bar, some second-hand clothes kiosks that smelled of moth-balls and pipe smoke. A Cambodian take-away was after a washer-upper but I remembered how the skin on my hands had never properly recovered. As I stopped at a busy junction I spied a glittery little shop with a window sign which looked right. It said they needed a jeweller’s assistant for an immediate start. I went in and was brought through to the office by a somebody. Another somebody came in. He was dressed in an off-white gabardine coat with a speckled fur collar and was huffing and blowing like a chill Atlantic breeze. He offered me tea. I accepted. He was especially interested in hearing about what trade my parents were in and if I was on any medication. He agreed to give me a trial.

On his desk he kept a selection of ashtrays, snuff in a delicate silver box and some pens in a hollow tusk container. He also had a stuffed dead animal with orange fur and beady, clickety-click eyes that appeared to follow my gaze. I ignored it. Beside the animal was a door lock and some screws.

"The jewellery business can be hell," he said, spittle-mouthed, "I hope you have a hard heart!"

His breath smelled of wild goats and menthol and he wore his hair in an oily flick. I thought I might like to work with him, maybe I would love him one day. I knew he would love me. Then, as one of his many clocks began to chime, he told me he had to run. He said he had to clear out some junk and change a lock for his mother but that his assistant would deal with me. He picked up the lock, smiled and ran out the back door, all coat-tails and smoke-trails. His assistant was left with the scribbly paperwork, the detail, as he called it, tutting.

I began to worry that my medications were getting low. I had not been away from my tablets or from my room for this long in months, possibly years. I missed my note books.

"Do you have any note books I could make notes in?"
The assistant said we should go to the back room and check. My blouse got torn.

I left the shop content with my future in place. I went back to the house.
MaryFrances all-one-word was at an upper window, cheroot-handed. The jeweller was beside her, his jaw vibrating like a cat seeing a bird. She eyed me sideways and blew a tube of ochre cheroot smoke out into the evening air.
"What?" She was looking disappointedly down at me.
"But I thought we were good?"
"Young lady, we were far from good."
"But the afternoons beside the hum of your radiogram?"
"Poppycock. You lied to me, there was no Renaissance in lace making during those years."
The noise of the charabancs and jalopies began again as I tried to concentrate on her words. The honking of horns and belching of exhausts got tangled up with the words and I frowned. The jeweller cleaned out some detritus from under his thumb nail with a small jewellers’ screwdriver, flicking the cache out into the swirl of the evening, go-home, air.

"But."

As she tutted through her beetroot lipstick, she slid the sash down with a clouty wallop. High above me in the evening air the two put gin glasses to their lips, smiling long teeth as they threw their heads back laughing, moving away from the window, toughing each other’s skin.

I wandered around. I had no books to write my familiarities down in. I took to repeating the details over and over in my head, the way I would be able to recall it later.

It was exhausting. Trying to get all my thoughts into alphabetical order while keeping an eye out for a familiar trait from the passing transport was taking up all of my days and most of my nights. It was while running through the list of things beginning with F that I fell into their sights.

"Flat feet, forehead, fleeting eyes, finger length, foetal abnormalities."

I got too loud on the foetal abnormalities part again. I had tried to keep my voice down on that part but it was getting the better of me. Losing two children had left deep jagged ridges that I kept tripping on. Even though I was trying to manage the situation by only doing the F's in the middle of the night, the house under which I hunkered had a person who was awake late. He was watching international mixed-doubles poker tournaments. He heard my calls and then he alerted the authorities, his viewing interrupted by my constant F words.

The men in the coats, had long arms, long nails and twisty, fire spitting tongues. There were so many of them I needed to blink repeatedly just to focus. I asked if they had any notebooks I could write in. They said that they didn't. They gave me a new blouse, my old one being damaged as they protected me from myself. I drank the warm sweet tea and agreed with them and their relentless questions and answers. They brought me back to the city in one of their vans.

"To a safe place."
“That would be nice.”
The safe place they brought me to was very like the other safe places I had been brought to. It had the same hollow-hearted statue of a woman in blue flowing robes over the front door. A man in a black suit with a silver watch chain told me it was a place where I could come to no harm.

“This is a place where you can come to no harm.”

He said I needed to believe him. So I did. He twiddled his watch chain around his sausage fingers as he spoke out over his gold framed glasses.

"Now," he said, "how would you describe the feelings?"

I took a moment and tried to think of some other things to make up to pass the time that we had together but I felt as if I had done enough work and so I closed my eyes. The images flew at me from all angles in the dark of my eye lid world.

"The bed sheets were of the finest cotton with a hand-woven lace finish.”
He shuffled the leather.
"The little bits of afterbirth got caught in the circular nets of their design. I still have bits under my nails. Can you see them?" I held my hands out towards him. "Can I wash my hands now?"

The women in black floated about me, scratching my name across paperwork like chewing gum on a shoe. They asked if I knew how to twist a mangle, crank a steam press, disembowel a dryer. I told them I didn't. They looked at the skin on my hands and called me a liar. Then they cut my hair. I was brought to see the man with the pocket watch one more time.

"I believe I know what's best for you."
I drank warm sweet tea, stared at the cup and nodded. Then I made the decision. I decided to stay.