Excerpts from stories by Ben Harrison
Full texts will be published here after the final performance on Sat 28 September.
Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me
Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me
Fourteen Hands High
The powerful muscles ripple under the shiny black coat. The hearty, be-jacketed girl scours and rubs at the coat like an enthusiastic cleaner with OCD. Why does she have to do this at the crack of dawn? My teenage body needs morning sleep. The horse looks clean and shiny enough to me. She is so fierce with her hand strokes. The horse must be getting a great massage. I’d love a massage like that. I mean it wasn’t that he could be any cleaner. You can see your face in the shine of that coat.
I remain unmassaged, stood in the corner of the stable. Off stage. Glumly wilting in the corner. All limbs and fumble. Unlike her horse. Few muscles. Very few. Blackheads and terrible glasses and hair over the collar and a paisley shirt. It is the mid Eighties…
Cathedral Close
In later years he would be happy that he was still slim as others spread literally into middle age. But as a youth, in the Eighties, to be skinny was a curse. It was the age of gyms and body builders and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the skinny or femmy look was definitely not in. Unless you were Prince or Boy George. And even then…
But she didn’t mind his skinny boyishness. In fact it was probably what turned her on. She was five years older than him, the magical age of 21 so beloved of pop magazines like Smash Hits and Page 3 of the Sun. Even better, she was in the music industry and was a session player for the punk group The Damned. He could not believe it. How was she with him? How was he with this incredible being? Why had she chosen him?
Trafalgar Day with Lenin
They had got up early, SO early for teenagers, six am or something ungodly. The world looked dark and unfamiliar. Giggly, they rode the first bus of the day to their school, pulling out the red flag from the school satchel from time to time to take a nervous peek. The satchel was one of those Army surplus ones where kids painted an image of their favourite band on the flap at the back in bold paints or thick felt-tip pens. The red flag, secret rebellion, like the scraps of pornographic magazines they swapped at the school. A leg was ten pence, a breast twenty pence and so on. The tallest boy with the deepest voice got the mag from the WHSmiths. He was tall enough to reach the highest, forbidden shelf.
The Little Shoes
I sit on the bench in the June sun and see the young couples in Chapelfield Gardens smooching, and feel sick. I want to be like them, snogging in the sun, fingers tentatively fumbling under bra-straps. Levis 501s, stiff buttons coming undone.
I look the other way and I see the drunks starting early on their pre-lunch cider and think about joining them. That would be better than this…
Five and Nine
The theatre was the answer to his sporting failures, something physical he could excel at. Harpagon in The Miser, Frank in Kvetch, Robbie in Wrecked Eggs, Vasques in ‘tis Pity She’s A Whore. He delighted in these roles, directing himself with teenage arrogance and carrying the other company members along in his wake. As the decade turned, he was accused by an Edinburgh Casual, on South Clerk Street, dressed in a Renaissance shirt he had stolen from that same five and nine theatre, with an actress on each arm and fuelled with Snake Bite from the Cellar Bar on Chambers Street, of ‘Being wide with yur birds!’
The Black and The Red
Once upon a time there was a little boy who had a black and red bedroom. Prefiguring the gothic tendencies that would emerge in his mid-teens, when his mum had asked what colours he would like to use to makeover the Grannyish floral pastel wallpaper in his room, he answered straight back: ‘Black and red.’
Sickbed
A comfortable, warm and porridgy pillow, with the texture of a facial scrub. I drifted awake, realising to my then sudden horror that the pillow was composed of my own sick.
Knitting In Kilwinning
When I look at their album covers, I can hear their music. It’s cinema for the ears. That’s all I want to do really, stay in my room listening to music and designing album covers. There’s not much else to do here really. I don’t like football, I get the fear. I like to pretend I’m not there when I’m on the football field. Basketball’s okay, it’s more like dance, but we don’t get to do it much. I don’t like boys. Well I do of course, but….
Eulogy
At the tender age of sixty-five, which seemed considerably older in the Eighties, my grandmother decided to take up gliding.