Look to the Lady
by Bill Kirton
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: Karen changes role models from Madonna to Lady Macbeth, but her Thane can't cut the mustard.
_____________________________________________________________________
Up until November, Karen’s role model had been Madonna. Then she’d heard about Lady Macbeth. Madonna didn’t hang about. She was fine, self-assured, macho. You didn’t usually get that in a woman. That’s why Karen liked her. But then she’d gone all Penthouse and Playboy and done her Erotic things and went and bought kids from Africa and ended up a slag. A rich slag, but still a slag. And that was just the time when Miss Bickleigh, the English teacher, had started doing Macbeth with them. Karen liked the fact that Macbeth’s wife was the boss. You had this soldier with all these great titles like ‘Thane of Cawdor’, but then he starts whining about Duncan and he’s just a wimp. So she steps in and says some great things; complains about all the ‘milk of human kindness’ in him, tells him to ‘screw his courage to the sticking place’. Great stuff. And then the speech about unsexing her and the other one about dashing out the baby’s brains; brilliant. Made Madonna’s lyrics sound really wet.
Karen read all Lady Macbeth’s scenes lots of times. She thought it was a pity about the nightmares and the hand-washing stuff but it was Macbeth’s fault, wasn’t it? He let her down. She starts things going, plans it all, goes back and splashes blood on the servants and all he can do is jump up at the dinner table and talk a load of crap. No wonder she cracked up. But, before that, it was the way she said, ‘OK, we’ve got this great castle, but we can do better’. That was Karen’s style. You only lived once, so you had to go for everything you could.
It was Saturday morning and she was working at the Asda check-out. (She did all day Saturday and three hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school.) She was having trouble with the bar-code on a packet of muesli. She leaned across to the microphone, clicked the switch and said: ‘Mrs Henderson to check-out seven, please. Mrs Henderson. Check-out seven.’
She smiled at the skinny little woman buying the muesli and said: ‘Sorry about this. Won’t be long.’
She looked out at the car park, sweeping her eyes along the rows until she saw Brian’s fair hair and his black and silver L. A. Raiders jacket. She’d been going out with him for three months but the sight of him pushing great stacks of trolleys in front of him still excited her. That was his job, collecting the trolleys that people left everywhere and bringing them back to park them just inside the shop’s covered entrance.
Brian wasn’t part-time. He was on the permanent staff. He’d left school just after his sixteenth birthday and Karen told him about the vacancy at the store. He really wanted to be a scaffold rigger but, with the way things were, he was glad to have got a job at all. He was different from the others. He didn’t wear the coat thing they were all given with the store’s name across the back. He was always in his Raiders jacket. And he always wore a tie. Karen thought that was classy. Better still, down the front of his jacket, in long rows, he wore badges which he’d bought in all the places he’d been; Warrington, Blackburn, Rhyl Safari Park and lots of others. Almost all the front of his jacket was covered in this shining metal, like a sort of breastplate.
At the moment, he had eight trolleys tucked into one another, snaking along in front of him. He could manage up to twenty-seven but he never risked that when it was busy because the last twenty yard stretch to the entrance was steep and he needed to get a run at it to make sure of getting through.
The job bored him. There was nobody to talk to and the wages would never let him get the Honda 250 he craved. Saturdays were better because there were more people around and he knew that Karen was either watching him or had just been watching him or was just going to watch him. He pushed the fingers of his right hand through his hair, using only his left arm to steer the trolleys and concentrating on showing no signs of strain or effort.
Karen, still waiting for Mrs Henderson, watched him lean into the trolleys as he hit the final slope up past the six specially reserved parking spaces: one for the manager, two for the departmental supervisors and three for disabled drivers. His fingers were still clutched in his hair and Karen felt a tingle as she thought of where that hand had been yesterday evening. She didn’t let him go all the way, of course. Not nowadays. Not with AIDS and things. That’d be crazy. She didn’t even do that in her Madonna phase. But what they did do together was exciting and satisfying and made them both hungry for more.
Her breathing was shallow as she watched him flick the metal row straight in front of him and, with a nudge of his hips, push it into the nest of trolleys already there. The movement was easy, disdainful, a waste of power. Karen knew it. He was worth more, needed bigger challenges.
She was still thinking about it as they had their lunch on the loading bay wall. Brian was starting on his fourth Twix bar. When he spoke, his voice, thick with chocolate, surprised her.
‘Ah had a dream last night,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Aye. Dreamt about this place.’
‘Nightmare then.’
‘Nah. Dreamt Clunie asked me to be stores supervisor.’
Clunie was the manager. The stores supervisor was a man called Cowie who looked as if he ate mostly lard.
‘What did ye say to him?’
‘Told ’im Ah’d think about it.’
Karen was disappointed. Brian unwrapped a Mars bar.
‘Dirk,’ said Karen.
‘What?’ said Brian.
(She called him Dirk because he’d asked her to. He didn’t like the name Brian and there weren’t many Dirks around so it made him more special.)
‘What if he did ask ye really?’
‘What?’
‘You know, to be stores supervisor.’
‘He winna, will he?’
‘No, but what if he did?’
Brian bit into the Mars. It crumbled.
‘Dunno,’ he said.
Karen used her little finger to push the crumbs of chocolate from around his lips into his mouth.
‘Why not? First step up the ladder. Promotion.’
Brian nodded slowly.
‘Yeah, Ah s’pose so. Never thought of it.’
Karen leaned closer to him. The facets of his badges caught the sun and flashed up at her. This was her Thane of Cawdor, a man she could inspire, a man whose courage needed screwing. She remembered Lady Macbeth saying that she was going to pour her spirits into her husband’s ear when he got home. Her lips were brushing Brian’s cheek. A picture of the fat, unhealthy Cowie came into her head. He was just the type to have a heart attack or get the sack through fooling around with kids or something.
‘You should think of it,’ she said softly. ‘You’re miles better than Cowie. Everybody kens that. Why d’ye no ask? See what chance there is.’
Brian shook his head.
‘Ye canna just ask,’ he said. ‘No like that. Ye have to be ... in the frame.’
Karen’s heart beat faster.
‘Well, get in the frame, Dirk. Make a name for yersel.’
‘How?’
‘Clunie. Make sure he knows who ye are. Put yersel about a bit.’
He could feel her breast hard against his left arm and sensed the urgency in her.
‘Ye reckon?’ he said.
She slid her hand over his thigh and upwards.
‘Yeah, Ah reckon,’ she said. ‘He usually gets back around two.’
As they kissed, there was a new element in their arousal. Neither knew where it had come from but it stayed with them as they went back to work. Karen’s fingers flew over the buttons on her register. Outside, Brian collected his trolleys with a flourish, twirling them together like a matador.
At five to two, Cowie got off the bus and waddled up past the bottle bank to the side door. Karen and Brian both saw him and Brian looked towards the check-outs, although the reflections on the store windows prevented him seeing in. It wasn’t Cowie he was waiting for anyway. It was Clunie. And he was timing his trolley collection to coincide with his arrival.
By two minutes to two, he had a record twenty-nine trolleys interlocked like a long metal lance in front of him. Karen saw him as he came round the bus space and began to breathe faster with pleasure and anticipation. The trolley/lance was enormous and Clunie’s black Mercedes was just turning off the main road. The car swept past Brian, reversed into its space and Clunie watched, impressed by the strength and dexterity of this employee whose name he didn’t yet know.
An old man said to Karen: ‘You fergot the Pedigree Chum.’
‘Shut up,’ she said, not even looking at him, absorbed by the spectacle outside.
Like a metal arrow, the trolley/lance was speeding up towards the entrance. There was no chance of pretending that this didn’t involve effort. It did, and Brian was bent forward, thrusting hard against the load. He risked a quick glance over to where Clunie was still sitting in his car. And that glance was all it needed. It made him shift his weight slightly off the main axis of the load and a hideous slow motion began.
Karen, her fingers now gripped hard round the Pedigree Chum, stood up as she saw the end of the lance bend and spread a long ripple back towards Brian. Momentum had been lost. The lance became a very pliable snake and, with a dreadful accuracy, it whiplashed first to the right, then to the left, where the leading trolleys curved straight into the side of Clunie’s Mercedes. Three long parallel gouges appeared in the paintwork before the trolleys ricocheted onto the next car and pushed the slithering, panicking Brian back down the slope towards the bus space.
Karen handed the tin of dog food to the old man and left him standing at the check-out as she walked slowly and with great dignity along the front of the store to the ladies. There, she looked at herself in the mirror. She had to fight hard to stop herself crying. It wasn’t easy being a woman, to stand helpless as men trampled blindly, uselessly over your dreams. She turned on the taps and began to scrub angrily at the chocolate stains on her little finger.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Karen changes role models from Madonna to Lady Macbeth, but her Thane can't cut the mustard.
_____________________________________________________________________
Up until November, Karen’s role model had been Madonna. Then she’d heard about Lady Macbeth. Madonna didn’t hang about. She was fine, self-assured, macho. You didn’t usually get that in a woman. That’s why Karen liked her. But then she’d gone all Penthouse and Playboy and done her Erotic things and went and bought kids from Africa and ended up a slag. A rich slag, but still a slag. And that was just the time when Miss Bickleigh, the English teacher, had started doing Macbeth with them. Karen liked the fact that Macbeth’s wife was the boss. You had this soldier with all these great titles like ‘Thane of Cawdor’, but then he starts whining about Duncan and he’s just a wimp. So she steps in and says some great things; complains about all the ‘milk of human kindness’ in him, tells him to ‘screw his courage to the sticking place’. Great stuff. And then the speech about unsexing her and the other one about dashing out the baby’s brains; brilliant. Made Madonna’s lyrics sound really wet.
Karen read all Lady Macbeth’s scenes lots of times. She thought it was a pity about the nightmares and the hand-washing stuff but it was Macbeth’s fault, wasn’t it? He let her down. She starts things going, plans it all, goes back and splashes blood on the servants and all he can do is jump up at the dinner table and talk a load of crap. No wonder she cracked up. But, before that, it was the way she said, ‘OK, we’ve got this great castle, but we can do better’. That was Karen’s style. You only lived once, so you had to go for everything you could.
It was Saturday morning and she was working at the Asda check-out. (She did all day Saturday and three hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school.) She was having trouble with the bar-code on a packet of muesli. She leaned across to the microphone, clicked the switch and said: ‘Mrs Henderson to check-out seven, please. Mrs Henderson. Check-out seven.’
She smiled at the skinny little woman buying the muesli and said: ‘Sorry about this. Won’t be long.’
She looked out at the car park, sweeping her eyes along the rows until she saw Brian’s fair hair and his black and silver L. A. Raiders jacket. She’d been going out with him for three months but the sight of him pushing great stacks of trolleys in front of him still excited her. That was his job, collecting the trolleys that people left everywhere and bringing them back to park them just inside the shop’s covered entrance.
Brian wasn’t part-time. He was on the permanent staff. He’d left school just after his sixteenth birthday and Karen told him about the vacancy at the store. He really wanted to be a scaffold rigger but, with the way things were, he was glad to have got a job at all. He was different from the others. He didn’t wear the coat thing they were all given with the store’s name across the back. He was always in his Raiders jacket. And he always wore a tie. Karen thought that was classy. Better still, down the front of his jacket, in long rows, he wore badges which he’d bought in all the places he’d been; Warrington, Blackburn, Rhyl Safari Park and lots of others. Almost all the front of his jacket was covered in this shining metal, like a sort of breastplate.
At the moment, he had eight trolleys tucked into one another, snaking along in front of him. He could manage up to twenty-seven but he never risked that when it was busy because the last twenty yard stretch to the entrance was steep and he needed to get a run at it to make sure of getting through.
The job bored him. There was nobody to talk to and the wages would never let him get the Honda 250 he craved. Saturdays were better because there were more people around and he knew that Karen was either watching him or had just been watching him or was just going to watch him. He pushed the fingers of his right hand through his hair, using only his left arm to steer the trolleys and concentrating on showing no signs of strain or effort.
Karen, still waiting for Mrs Henderson, watched him lean into the trolleys as he hit the final slope up past the six specially reserved parking spaces: one for the manager, two for the departmental supervisors and three for disabled drivers. His fingers were still clutched in his hair and Karen felt a tingle as she thought of where that hand had been yesterday evening. She didn’t let him go all the way, of course. Not nowadays. Not with AIDS and things. That’d be crazy. She didn’t even do that in her Madonna phase. But what they did do together was exciting and satisfying and made them both hungry for more.
Her breathing was shallow as she watched him flick the metal row straight in front of him and, with a nudge of his hips, push it into the nest of trolleys already there. The movement was easy, disdainful, a waste of power. Karen knew it. He was worth more, needed bigger challenges.
She was still thinking about it as they had their lunch on the loading bay wall. Brian was starting on his fourth Twix bar. When he spoke, his voice, thick with chocolate, surprised her.
‘Ah had a dream last night,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Aye. Dreamt about this place.’
‘Nightmare then.’
‘Nah. Dreamt Clunie asked me to be stores supervisor.’
Clunie was the manager. The stores supervisor was a man called Cowie who looked as if he ate mostly lard.
‘What did ye say to him?’
‘Told ’im Ah’d think about it.’
Karen was disappointed. Brian unwrapped a Mars bar.
‘Dirk,’ said Karen.
‘What?’ said Brian.
(She called him Dirk because he’d asked her to. He didn’t like the name Brian and there weren’t many Dirks around so it made him more special.)
‘What if he did ask ye really?’
‘What?’
‘You know, to be stores supervisor.’
‘He winna, will he?’
‘No, but what if he did?’
Brian bit into the Mars. It crumbled.
‘Dunno,’ he said.
Karen used her little finger to push the crumbs of chocolate from around his lips into his mouth.
‘Why not? First step up the ladder. Promotion.’
Brian nodded slowly.
‘Yeah, Ah s’pose so. Never thought of it.’
Karen leaned closer to him. The facets of his badges caught the sun and flashed up at her. This was her Thane of Cawdor, a man she could inspire, a man whose courage needed screwing. She remembered Lady Macbeth saying that she was going to pour her spirits into her husband’s ear when he got home. Her lips were brushing Brian’s cheek. A picture of the fat, unhealthy Cowie came into her head. He was just the type to have a heart attack or get the sack through fooling around with kids or something.
‘You should think of it,’ she said softly. ‘You’re miles better than Cowie. Everybody kens that. Why d’ye no ask? See what chance there is.’
Brian shook his head.
‘Ye canna just ask,’ he said. ‘No like that. Ye have to be ... in the frame.’
Karen’s heart beat faster.
‘Well, get in the frame, Dirk. Make a name for yersel.’
‘How?’
‘Clunie. Make sure he knows who ye are. Put yersel about a bit.’
He could feel her breast hard against his left arm and sensed the urgency in her.
‘Ye reckon?’ he said.
She slid her hand over his thigh and upwards.
‘Yeah, Ah reckon,’ she said. ‘He usually gets back around two.’
As they kissed, there was a new element in their arousal. Neither knew where it had come from but it stayed with them as they went back to work. Karen’s fingers flew over the buttons on her register. Outside, Brian collected his trolleys with a flourish, twirling them together like a matador.
At five to two, Cowie got off the bus and waddled up past the bottle bank to the side door. Karen and Brian both saw him and Brian looked towards the check-outs, although the reflections on the store windows prevented him seeing in. It wasn’t Cowie he was waiting for anyway. It was Clunie. And he was timing his trolley collection to coincide with his arrival.
By two minutes to two, he had a record twenty-nine trolleys interlocked like a long metal lance in front of him. Karen saw him as he came round the bus space and began to breathe faster with pleasure and anticipation. The trolley/lance was enormous and Clunie’s black Mercedes was just turning off the main road. The car swept past Brian, reversed into its space and Clunie watched, impressed by the strength and dexterity of this employee whose name he didn’t yet know.
An old man said to Karen: ‘You fergot the Pedigree Chum.’
‘Shut up,’ she said, not even looking at him, absorbed by the spectacle outside.
Like a metal arrow, the trolley/lance was speeding up towards the entrance. There was no chance of pretending that this didn’t involve effort. It did, and Brian was bent forward, thrusting hard against the load. He risked a quick glance over to where Clunie was still sitting in his car. And that glance was all it needed. It made him shift his weight slightly off the main axis of the load and a hideous slow motion began.
Karen, her fingers now gripped hard round the Pedigree Chum, stood up as she saw the end of the lance bend and spread a long ripple back towards Brian. Momentum had been lost. The lance became a very pliable snake and, with a dreadful accuracy, it whiplashed first to the right, then to the left, where the leading trolleys curved straight into the side of Clunie’s Mercedes. Three long parallel gouges appeared in the paintwork before the trolleys ricocheted onto the next car and pushed the slithering, panicking Brian back down the slope towards the bus space.
Karen handed the tin of dog food to the old man and left him standing at the check-out as she walked slowly and with great dignity along the front of the store to the ladies. There, she looked at herself in the mirror. She had to fight hard to stop herself crying. It wasn’t easy being a woman, to stand helpless as men trampled blindly, uselessly over your dreams. She turned on the taps and began to scrub angrily at the chocolate stains on her little finger.
About the Author
Bill Kirton was born in Plymouth, but has lived in Aberdeen for most of his life. He’s been a university lecturer, presented TV programmes, written and performed songs and sketches at the Edinburgh Festival, and had radio plays broadcast by the BBC. He’s written three books on study and writing skills in Pearson’s ‘Brilliant’ series and his crime novels, Material Evidence, Rough Justice, The Darkness, Shadow Selves and the historical novel The Figurehead, set in Aberdeen in 1840, have been published in the UK and USA. He's recently started writing children's stories and the first, Stanley Moves In, has just been published. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and Love Hurts was chosen for the Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 2010.
His website is http://www.bill-kirton.co.uk/ and his blog’s at http://livingwritingandotherstuff.blogspot.com/.
His website is http://www.bill-kirton.co.uk/ and his blog’s at http://livingwritingandotherstuff.blogspot.com/.