Just Imogen

A short cosy story with a happy end…

 

Imogen went to open the dishwasher to put her empty cereal bowl in, then remembered she didn’t have a dishwasher anymore.  The six-bedroom house she’d lived in, and loved, for the last twenty years during her marriage to George had all the modcons.  But since his affair with his secretary (why did he have to be so obvious!) and their subsequent divorce, he’d insisted on selling the house. 

Little had she known at that time that the business was failing and debts had been building up.  After the sale of the house everything they’d owned had been paid back, leaving very little to split between them.  Now, here she was in a small rented flat with only herself for company.

She felt the familiar sting of tears, and batted it away.  She abandoned her bowl in the sink to wash up later. She couldn’t risk being late for work on her first day.   

She glanced longingly at her Ford Fiesta as she walked past it.   It was a miserable January morning and she was tempted to jump in and drive to avoid the twenty-minute walk in the rain, but now she was having to fend for herself, money was tight, and petrol didn’t come cheap.  She squinted against the driving rain, and forced herself to get on with the walk.

The closer she got to Sheila’s Cafe, the more the nerves clawed at her.   She hadn’t worked since becoming pregnant with Jody a year into their marriage.  Then Ben followed soon after, and she’d never even thought about returning to work.  George said it was important she was there for the kids and she’d agreed. By the time they’d become old enough to fend for themselves, the world had moved on and her skills were outdated.  She couldn’t have re-started a career even if she wanted to.

But now needs must, and the only employer who hadn’t regarded her with either distaste or pity was Sheila, the nice smiley lady who owned the local cafe round the corner from her new flat.  It wasn’t going to make her rich, but she didn’t need a fortune as long as she could cover her bills. Now the kids had both flown the nest, George didn’t have to pay her much, so she was on her own for the first time in her life.  Just her. Just Imogen.

 

Her breathing was heavy by the time she arrived at the cafe.  Her married life had been admittedly luxurious, and she’d barely had to walk anywhere.  The downside was that her waist had thickened over the years, but George always said he liked curvy women.

 

“So how come he chose Davina, the size six stick insect, to have an extramarital with?”, she said to herself through gritted teeth.

 

‘“Talking to yourself, love?’”  Sheila appeared from the kitchen.

 

“Oh, sorry, I was just putting the world to rights.”

 

“You’ll get on fine here, then,” laughed Sheila.  “The customers love a bit of a natter.”

 

The work was hard, and Imogen’s legs ached by the end of the day, but she felt strangely elated when it was time to go home.  The day had flown by. She’d enjoyed serving and chatting to the customers, and had even noticed the man with the kind brown eyes looking at her.  

 

After a few weeks, she was slowly starting to settle in to her new single life.  She’d had to make changes, such as shopping at the budget supermarket rather than her usual upmarket one, but she found it didn’t really make a difference to her quality of life.  Walking to work every day had even meant she’d lost weight. There was no danger of her becoming a size six, but at least her trousers fitted better these days. And she could eat what she liked without worrying about George’s fussiness.

 

The kind-eyed man came into the cafe several times a week, and always gave her a bright smile and the warmest thanks when she took his slice of cake over.

 

‘“Steve likes you,” said Sheila, nodding over at where he sat.

 

“Don’t be silly, he’s just being friendly,” Imogen replied, although could feel her cheeks  flushing.

 

“He deserves to meet someone nice like you.  His wife left him years ago. Don’t think he’s had any romance since.  Shame, he’s a lovely man.”

 

Imogen glanced over, and Steve’s eyes twinkled back at her.  She looked away, embarrassed.

The next day he came in the cafe later than usual, and was still there when it was time for Imogen to go home.  She was just about to leave when she heard a voice.

 

“Erm, excuse me.”

 

She turned and realised it was Steve addressing her.

 

‘“I wondered if you’d like to have dinner with me one day.”

 

Flustered, Imogen muttered an excuse about not liking to eat out, and quickly let herself out of the door.  She cursed herself all the way home. She had really wanted to accept Steve’s invitation, so why hadn’t she?  And to make some stupid excuse about not liking restaurants! He must have thought her so rude. She cringed at the thought.  

 

Decades of been George’s wife had eroded her confidence.  She thought she’d been been happy with him, but a month on her own and she realised the real Imogen had been stifled in their marriage.  She was starting to get to know herself again, but wasn’t yet at the stage she had the confidence to go on a date. Would she ever be?

 

She sighed and let herself into her flat.  It was humble but comfortable. She’d filled it with the things she loved.  It had been refreshing, not having to worry about what anyone else thought when she decorated, not like in their old home when George had liked everything to match perfectly.  Imogen preferred a more homely, higgledy-piggledy style.

 

If she was honest with herself, living alone wasn’t turning out quite as bad as she’d feared.   She loved her job at Sheila’s and was getting to know some of the regulars, but when she got home the nights were long and lonely.  Jody and Ben were busy with their own lives, and the friends she’d socialised with when she’d been married seemed to be avoiding her, as if things were awkward now she wasn’t part of a couple.  

 

She settled down on the sofa with a glass of wine and a cheese straw left over from the cafe.  She used to love cooking but there didn’t seem to be any point now it was just her. She sighed.  Another Friday night alone with the TV for company.

 

She was just dropping off in front of the latest celebrity fly-on-the-wall documentary when the sound of the doorbell startled her.  Who was that at this hour? It was past seven O’clock, and she barely got any visitors these days even during daylight hours.

 

Jody stood at the doorway, suitcase in hand.  Tears were streaming down her face. “I’ve fallen out with Jenny, Mum.  Being her flatmate is a total nightmare. Can I stay here with you for a while please?  Just while I find a new place.”

 

“Of course you can, darling!’”  Imogen said, pulling her daughter in for a tight hug.  She’d just finished making Jody a mug of cocoa, which seemed to cheer her up no end, when the doorbell rang again.

 

“Mum, do you mind if I stay for the weekend?  I needed to get away from uni for a couple of days.  And I’ve missed your cooking. I never thought I’d say I’m sick of junk food, but, well, I guess I am.”

 

She ruffled Ben’s hair like she used to when he was little.  “Of course you can, love, come on in.”

 

An hour later, Imogen smiled as she looked at her grown-up children on the sofa laughing at a comedy together.  She was just wondering how to make a decent dinner for three out of her stock of microwave meals when the doorbell rang again.

 

She opened the door and was met was a handsome man with twinkly brown eyes.  “Steve. What are you doing here?”

 

“Sheila told me where you lived.  I hope you don’t mind, but when you said you didn’t like eating out, I thought you might prefer to eat dinner in.”  He held up two plastic bags bursting with cartons that smelt spicy and delicious.

 

“That’s so kind, Steve,” she said, touched at his thoughtfulness.  “But I’m afraid I can’t. My two children are here visiting.” Although she was delighted Ben and Jody were there, she was surprised how disappointed she was to turn Steve away.

 

“There’s more than enough for four,” he said.  “I didn’t know what you liked, so I got a selection.”   His hopeful expression quickly faded. “But don’t worry if you’re too busy.  Sorry, I shouldn’t have turned up unannounced.” He turned to leave.

 

“No,” she said, quickly, gesturing for him to come in.  “Please stay, that would be nice.”

 

Ben and Jody were quiet at first but Steve soon started chatting to Ben about football, which broke the ice, and Jody seemed to relax once Steve told a funny story about a flatsharing disaster he’d experienced as a young man.

 

Steve had even even brought a couple of bottles of wine with him.  George would never have done that, thought Imogen.  Food and shopping had always been left to her in their marriage.  Steve poured wine into her glass, and she smiled. She never imagined she’d find herself middle-aged, divorced and working in a cafe, but now she was, she realised she hadn’t been this happy for a long time.  

 

“Steve”, she said, as he was leaving.  “I was nervous earlier at the cafe when you asked me out.  I love restaurants, and I’d love to accept your invitation, if it still stands that is.”

He bent down to give her a peck on the cheek.  “It certainly does. How about Thursday evening?”

 

“Can’t wait,” she said, and when she closed the door behind him she grinned, realising she really couldn’t.

New Novel Beginning

Here’s the opening of a crime novel.  Or it could be a short story in its own right.  I wrote it for a competition, but it didn’t win, so rather than waste it I thought I’d share it here.

Just a warning – it’s a wee bit sweary, so if you don’t like bad words, don’t read it.  And if you don’t like bad words and choose to read it anyway, that’s your bad!  So, here it is…

Child of The Sea

“I killed her.”

“What?” Eve spins around, an empty mug in each hand.

“ It was me.  I did it. I murdered her.”

“Who?”

“The woman whose body was found washed up on the shore yesterday.”

“Right.”  Eve rolls her eyes, and turns back around.  “Is this kettle another one of your eco-friendly contraptions?  How do you even switch the bloody thing on?”

I get up from the seat at the kitchen table, and flick the kettle on, then walk over to the window.   Eve’s fiddling about with tea bags. She has her back to me.

I close my eyes and press my forehead against the freezing glass.  It cools the sick-laced sweat that builds inside me every time I think about what I did—how the woman’s bright blue eyes flooded with blood, and she clawed at my face as I squeezed the final drop of life out of her.  I belch silently and the acrid taste of vomit fills my mouth. You had no choice.  Reminding myself of that usually relaxes me, but not this time.  Panic is still dancing in my head.

I need to calm down.  I need to play this out as per the chapter says.  Otherwise everything I’ve put myself through over the last six weeks will have been for nothing.  

I open my eyes to gaze across the road at the sea.  It’s my favourite view, and the reason I moved to this shitty flat in this shitty town—it allows me to see the sea at its most rugged, it’s most real, it’s most beautiful.  And I know more than most how ugly it can be.

In the dreary winter blackness all I catch is a flash of white foam as a single wave thrashes the edge of the pier.  Even that’s enough to provide me with the reassurance I need to carry on.

Eve’s chattering on about something, but I’m not listening.  All I hear is the swoosh of cars driving through the rain.  I make a conscious effort to tune in to her.  I need to follow what the chapter says. Word for word.

“…why you’re acting so weird.  I mean, we know you’ve always been—well—different.”  Eve laughs down her nose. “But recently, you have to admit, you’ve been acting weird even by your standards.  Now you’re spouting some nonsense about killing people. For God’s sake, Helena, what’s the matter with you?”

She turns around and heads for the table.  Her skirt swings as she moves, unlike her highlighted blonde hair, which doesn’t budge an inch.  I shove my short mousey mop behind my ear. How are we sisters?  

“Mum and I haven’t heard from you for over a month, you haven’t been at work for ages, according to Sinead, and when was the last time you went out?”

I go back to the table, and plonk myself on a chair.  “This morning.”

Eve peers at me from under her fringe.  It strikes me it’s the first time she’s actually looked at me since she arrived ten minutes ago.

“I mean out properly.  With friends.   If you’ve got any, that is.  I know you’re always out in that boat of yours.  I don’t know how you do it, go out rowing like that, not after—.”

Her voice trails off.  She doesn’t need to say any more.  We both know what she means, but we don’t talk about it.  We’ve never talked about it. It’s as if we don’t mention it, we can pretend it never happened.

“It’s not a boat.  It’s a canoe. Besides, it helps me deal with things.”

Eve puts my stripey teapot down on the table, and liquid sploshes out of the spout onto the newspaper beneath.

I swipe the tea off the paper with the sleeve of my woolly jumper.  It seeps through and scalds my skin. I wince, but otherwise don’t react.  I deserve the pain for what I’ve done, and for what I’m about to do.

“Eve.  I asked you here so I could tell you something.  I need you to listen. Please, just listen.”

“I’m all ears, little sis’,” she says, but she’s turned her attention to pouring the tea.  She’s not looking at me anymore.

“Her.”  I jab my finger at the photo in the newspaper of the smiling woman under the headline, Body Found under Fleeston Pier.  

That day I killed her, did she wake up knowing it would be her last?  

Is that what Eve’s thinking now?

I watch her pull a Canderel out of her handbag, and press the top so a tiny pellet of fake sugar drops into her tea.  

Who am I kidding?  She hasn’t got a clue.  I’m glad. I might be a killer but I’m not a psychopath.  And whatever contempt I may hold for my older sister, we still share the same blood, the same secret.

She taps the teaspoon against her mug so it makes a delicate chink sound, places it on the table, and only then does she look where I’m pointing.  “Who’s she?”

“The woman I murdered.”

She picks up her mug and takes a tentative sip.  “Now, why would you do that, Helly?”

I hate it when she calls me that.  I can tell from her patronising tone that she doesn’t believe me, but then I don’t blame her.  I’ve never so much as shoplifted sweets from a newsagent. I’m going to have to do a better job of convincing her.  The book says she has to believe me before I can complete the chapter. And if I don’t follow the rules, I know what will happen.

I lift the book from the seat of the chair beside me.  “Because of this.”

Eve pauses, her mug halfway to her lips.  She cocks her head and reads the words on the cover.  “The Child from The Sea.”  She shoots me a wary look.  I know what she’s thinking. It’s what I thought when I first saw it.  

“Have you told someone what happened to us?  We promised each other we’d never tell. Helena, what have you done?”  Her voice quivers, and I know why. If anyone found out about that day, her life would fall apart.  So would mine, if I had one.

“Of course I haven’t told anyone.  It’s a coincidence, that’s all.” I put the book down on the table in front of her.

She chews her thumbnail like she always used to when she was a kid.  She picks up the book and turns it around, but the back is blank. “Well, if that’s the case,” she says.  “It’s just another book. You spend your life with your head in them. Always have done since you were little, and now you work in a library, where you’re surrounded by them.”  She drops the heavy hardback back onto the table. “What has this got to do with that poor woman whose body was found on the beach?”

I press my back against the chair, and cross my legs.  I’m starting to relax now I’ve got her attention. “It was delivered to me six weeks ago.”

“By whom?”  She pronounces the ‘m’ deliberately, as if making a point she knows the correct grammar, which is hilarious, since she couldn’t even pass her English GCSE.

“No idea.”  I lean forward and run the nail of my index finger along the indented title letters.  “It just turned up outside my door one night. There was a knock, I went to see who it was, but no-one was there.  Just this book. And a note.”

“A note?”  She raises her eyebrows.  She wants me to hurry up. She has things to do.  Children to feed, a husband to look after, so she constantly reminds me.  I’m sure she says it just to make me feel inadequate at being single and childless.

I open up the front cover to reveal the note tucked inside.  Eve narrows her eyes at me, then reaches into her handbag to retrieve her glasses.  She lifts up the piece of paper, and scans the typed words in silence. The crease between her eyes deepens the more she reads.

“What the fucking hell, Helena?”

That takes me aback.  I haven’t heard my sister swear since she married Mr Middle Class, and started pronouncing every consonant.

“Please tell me you didn’t,” she says.

“Not at first, no, but then things started to happen, just as the note says, and I realised I had no choice.”

“So for the last six weeks you’ve done whatever this book told you?”

I nod, and smile.  For the second time in a week, a spark of euphoria breaks out of my bones and seeps into my blood.

“Helena, are you saying this book ordered you to kill someone?”

I nod again.

She reaches for my hand, but I snatch it away.  “Helly, are you okay? Do you want me to call the doctor?”

“No.  I’m fine.”

Eve shakes her head.  “You don’t really expect me to believe this, do you?  It’s creeping me out. Why are you doing this to me? You know I suffer with my nerves.”  

Here we go again.  Always about her. Here I am confessing to murder, and she’s talking about her bloody nerves.  Precious Eve and her poxy anxiety. We were both there on that day—the one we don’t talk about—so how come she’s the only one who’s screwed up as a result?  

“Like I said,” I lean back again, and fold my arms across my chest.  “I had no choice. I ignored it at first, thought it was the young lads who live upstairs playing silly buggers.  But then things started happening, bad things, the things the note says will happen if I don’t read the book and do what it tells me.  So I read the first chapter, and my luck changed. Then things just got better and better. You’ll never guess what it says will happen when I get to the end.”

“Has your depression come back, is that the problem?”  A drop of spittle flies out of her mouth as she talks. It lands square on the photo of my victim.  I watch it splodge and disfigure my victim’s fresh young face. Funny, she looked a bit like that when I was killing her.

“The only problem,” I say, and roll up my sleeves, “is that in order to get to the happy end, I need to get through some difficult chapters.”

“What are you talking about, Helly?  You’re obviously not thinking straight.”  She shakes her head.

Why does she have to keep calling me that?  “I mean, I have to kill again.”

“That’s it.  I’m calling for help.  Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.  We’ll get this sorted.” She picks her mobile phone off the table, jumps up from her chair, and leans against the kitchen counter so she’s facing me.  She’s frightened of what I might do. Just as the book said she would be. This might be easier than I thought.

“Waste of time”, I say.  “The signal here’s crap.”

She holds the phone to her ear regardless.  Against the deathly quiet of my flat I hear the no-signal tone.

Slowly, she lowers the device from her ear.  I notice a strand of her cardboard hair has become misplaced.  

“Have to kill who exactly?” she asks me.  

Hmm, no whom now.  The blood’s drained from her face and she’s so pale that she complements the white goods in my kitchen remarkably well.

I shift my gaze to the knife block a few feet away from where she’s standing.  She follows my line of sight and clocks what I’m looking at. Her eyes widen so much they look like they’re going to pop out of their sockets.   She already knows the answer.

 

Top tips for writing erotic fiction

To celebrate the release of my new erotic short story, Secrets of the East Wing, I thought I’d share some tips that I’ve learned along the way of writing erotic fiction.  Here are my top five.

  1. Don’t leave it too long before the first erotic scene takes place.  Readers of this genre are looking for the action scenes, so give them the first one as soon as possible, ideally within the first few pages.  If you leave it too long before your characters leap into bed (or wherever they choose to do it), then you risk losing your audience.
  2. Start as you mean to go on.  It’s unlikely (although not impossible) to open your story with a sex scene, but you can pave the way for what’s to come with your choice of language.  For example, if your female character is getting ready to go out, you might talk about how her hand skims her breasts as she’s dressing.  This gives the reader a flavour of what’s coming up – so to speak.
  3. Don’t forget the plot!  Although you’re writing erotic fiction, it’s important to remember it’s still a story and needs all the ingredients of any other, i.e. conflict, resolution, and the black moment, not to mention dialogue and emotion.  Even the most enthusiastic reader of erotica will start getting bored with the sex scenes if there’s no story to back it up.
  4. Pace yourself – and your characters.  Leading on from the previous point, your story needs to be a healthy balance of erotic scenes and plot/story line.  If you have too much of one and not enough of the other, it could annoy your reader.  Although erotic literature has its name for a reason, too much action between the sheets will have your reader glossing over the scenes in search of your story.
  5. Don’t hold back – go for it!  The question I’m asked most often is “Where do you get your inspiration?”  It’s always said with a cheeky smile and a wink, as if they suspect I spend my days living out the scenes in my books.  For the record, I don’t.  Having the time and energy would be a fine thing!Funny, because no-one asks crime writers if they’ve committed murder.  Like any fiction writer – it’s mainly about imagination.  If you write erotic literature, you’re laying your imagination bare for the world to see in all its glory.  No-one will ever look at you the same again, and if you have teenage children, you being a writer of the genre going to embarrass them no end.

    If this is an issue, consider a pseudonym.  I tried one, but kept forgetting my adopted name!  Then thought, to hell with it – go for it – who cares!

 

Secrets of the East Wing, published by The Wild Rose Press, is now available for pre-order https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secrets-East-Wing-Gina-Hollands-ebook/dp/B07HRY5LLV/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8