Short story competition

This morning when you got up I stayed in bed. It's dark outside. It gets darker every day. You watched BBC News 24. You boiled the kettle. I guess you drank a coffee; that's what you drink. It's on your breath, on the rare occasions that we talk now. I always recycle the coffee jars. You just throw them in the bin. You don't notice that I sort our rubbish, do you?

I lay in bed and listened to you brushing your teeth. You brush them the same every time. Like a ska rhythm. I like it. When it starts I know when it will end; like listening to a favourite song. You flushed the toilet and turned on the shower. You sang a tuneless song. Today it was a Beautiful South song; that one about a pencil case. Sometimes it's Deacon Blue. You fill the whole house with you. And I love you until I ache.

I walked into a room which smelt of school dinners and disinfectant. Nan was sitting in a high backed chair like a queen about to utter pearls of great wisdom. She looked up at me and pronounced.

'You need to get out of those wet clothes before you catch your death, Claire. Go and run yourself a nice hot bath.'

'I'm fine Nan, don't worry I'll have one later,' I said.

I reached down, flipped back the flap on the top of the shopping trolley and took out the shoe box.

'What have you got there?' asked Nan.

'Ne shoes for you' I said, and bent down to kiss the top of her head.

'You OK?'

'I'm fine' she said. 'But I think we're running out of milk.'

Oh my God. How did it get to this? I have at least found the tablets, and maybe they will fix everything. Six left. What was it about six? It must take six to fix everything, that must be what it was.

I'll pour myself a shot first, though. I feel like I haven't had a drink for a week, although you wouldn't think so from the state of the place. The furniture has been smashed to pieces, there are books and CDs scattered all over the floor and there are burn marks on the carpet.

There is also a body in the hall. It's a young woman. She's pretty, in an unsophisticated sort of way, and if all things were equal, I might fancy her. She'd probably be my type, if I had such a thing as a type. But, as I said, there's no point in fancying her, because she is, after all, dead. Slashed to pieces.

Dear Who's the Man,

I feel rather formal starting my emails like this. Unlike the rest of my generation, I have stood out against using email, preferring the old-fashioned standards required of letter writing and, perhaps, the romance associated with receieving handwritten post. I now see how out of date and irrelevant that has become, particularly as I only have your email address and, I am ashamed to admit, not even your name.

I was pleased to get your email accepting my apology, although I certainly didn't expect one. My comments at the exhibition were out of character, but maybe our earlier chat, when we bumped into each other by the rather disconcerting paintings Jail-bait and Hard Times, had relaxed me in your company. Although I would never have presumed that you'd reply to my email, I did wonder whether I might have reconfirmed for you that anyone over 40 has a closed mind and heart when it comes to art created today. Rest assured on this point; having talked with you if my mind had been at all closed, it is now reopened. Thank you for that.

It was on the fifith when Bessie lifted the oars clear and leaned close to the water, looking down, down into what Drew did not know, though he had done the same before., looked into the glass of the sea. Maybe the creel-line is caught, he thought, snagged on rocks, must be. Bessie stood in the boat, stepped out of her skirt and pulled her sweater over her head, and Drew followed the dance. Then she dived, not fell, into the chopped sea. Drew saw in his head the water pulled through her hands, and her feet kicking it behind her, and the black rocks in the cold dark of deep water. He'd been there, following wet rope looped round a jagged tooth or tangled with strings of weed, his breath in his full cheeks and almost bursting.

Drew counted, the seconds, his song cut into numbers, and the quickening pulse in the clutch of his torn hand, and he thought he was counting his own beating blood and counting too fast.

'Caramba, Senorita! Tell me, I turn you on, no?'

On the table in front of me, dark-eyed, slim-hipped Enrique, wearing nothing but white pants and a Spanish waiter smile, thrusts to an imagined Europop breat and gives me a knowing wink.

'I'd rather you turn on the kettle and make some tea, Enrique.'

The heating hasn't come on yet, so I pull my tracksuit top tighter around me. At the end of the day, we're not on the Coast Brava, we're in Wakefield. It's November.

Enrique isn't a Spanish waiter, although he tells me he once went to Mallorca for a stag weekend. He's plastered in fake tan and was born in Doncaster. He told me he got called 'Enrique' because his mum had an affair with a Polish lorry-driver she thought was Spanish. But his boyfriend, Martin, says that this is bollocks. 'He'll never tell you this, but he'd really called Darren.'