GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24
RUBY OPALKA
‘Spume of the Mouth’
NORA WAKES UP TO THE SOUND OF THE NEIGHBOURS ARGUING. You fucken bitch Jamie, get the fuck out. She rolls over. She sighs. She says to an imaginary Dolores, do you think this means they’re about to have sex? The imaginary Dolores says yes you know it, almost exactly like the real Dolores would. Nora stares at the ceiling, at the drawn curtains, at the wall. The sound of silence before sex, she thinks, is like the smell of rain before water.
—-
The Isle of Portland is at the end of the line and the country, a lank foot hanging by stringy skin. On Portland there are famous beaches and cute campsites and poverty and a prison. Nora’s favourite place on Portland is the quarry. It’s where she and Dolores used to have sex when they were seventeen and it was nineteen-seventy-two. The place then was just a deep open wound in the earth, barely visited, a chalky white land of hidden crevices and almost caves running right up to the coastline. This is our gay underground, they said to each other as they walked through it, this is our enclave of white powder and pleasure.
Sometime later it became a sculpture park.
By the time Nora is leaving the house, the neighbours have finished having sex. She knows this because she sees the boy – a trainee mechanic with orange hair – throwing out the bins. Romantic, she thinks. He is slouching out his front door in low-hanging sweatpants and a t- shirt, lobbing huge bags into the communal skips.
Oh, hey Nora, the trainee mechanic says.
Good morning? she says, playing the part of the older woman. The trainee mechanic looks round at her.
The street outside is breezeless and dank. A horizon of grey weather-smudged houses and dead flowers in hanging baskets. Nora finds the couple next door a baffling pair. She does, theoretically, know their names, but she prefers to call them the trainee mechanic and the nail girl. The nail girl works for her mother in the salon up the road. The trainee mechanic works on the other side of town. Nora’s interest in the trainee mechanic and the nail girl is an arbitrary one and perhaps it is in their arbitrariness that they are baffling, she thinks. In their girl-ness and boy-ness, the nail girl, and the mechanic boy. It seems so queer to her, in the older meaning of the word, to be your given self so wholly and unquestioningly. Or perhaps she is being unfair.
—-
The quarry is hot when Nora arrives, caught under the midday sun. She thinks of the time, back when she was a kid, that she gathered snails to race with a friend at lunchtime in summer, arranging them on a wooden picnic bench. When they returned at the end of the day, the snails had charred and bubbled, a sticky horror beneath their cooking shells. The sight of it made Nora scream at the time, but she wonders if she might be more fascinated now, to see in real time the changing states of a body. Gummy and hard, to mucus-y and soft. Perhaps not unlike Dolores in a way. Nora thinks of the way Dolores’ mouth moves, opening and closing like a tide. All the way in and all the way out, foamy with breath, spume of the mouth.
The quarry is still so vast and beautiful even now, even all these years later, she thinks. Craggy and eaten at. A hungered for, chiselled body, its good rock slurped up and carted off. The sculptures have made it a tourist attraction, a sprawling playground of stone animals and chairs and sculpted heads spitting water. Nonetheless it is the same in its feeling: stark sky overhead, the quickness of coastal air.
The first time Nora and Dolores came to kiss here, they crouched inside the short stone tunnel and every time they made a sound, the wind and the all-around stone threw it back at them, their own urgency of breath mistaken as the approaching of a stranger. Somehow their fear, their pleasure and the wind became one, a bubbling movement, a conglomerate of sound.
Hello.
Nora turns around. There is a small child there, in dungarees, or perhaps there was a small child there, many years ago. At some point time flattened, or otherwise it had ceased to matter. The sky above the child and Nora is beastly and blue, the ground dusty. The child is not speaking to Nora, she realises, but to one of the sculptures, the Fallen Fossil. A tall tulip-shaped groove in the stone and in front of it, a tulip-shaped rock, face-planted on the floor. It always makes Nora laugh. It makes her want to lie face down on the floor like the fossil and have people stare at her and laugh too.
It’s funny isn’t it, she says to the child. The child looks at her.
It’s not funny it’s sad.
You think?
Uh huh. They regard each other for a moment, the sound of seagulls and waves nearby, and then the child suddenly appears shy and runs away.
How interesting, Nora thinks, walking along the one-hundred-and-sixty-three-point-five-million-year-old rock. To be a child with all that potential for change, all that wide open life.
How interesting, how interesting, how interesting.
—-
On the way back from the quarry, Nora stops in at Rohit’s place. Rohit is the only other older gay that she knows on Portland, and also one of the few non-white people. His house is full of odd art and things he collected in antique warehouses when he lived in London. He moved to Portland for an unexceptional man called Peter, who’s biggest pull was that he owned a sailing boat. In the end, Peter took a younger guy off with him in the boat and Rohit never heard from him again.
There’s this couple next door, Nora says at Rohit’s big oak dinner table, that always argue and then have sex in the morning.
That’s not so strange, Rohit says. He looks thoughtful. His face kind and smooth.
I don’t think it’s strange necessarily, Nora says.
Then what?
Predictable. I find it boring in its predictability.
Do people have to be unpredictable?
No, but sometimes I think they’re just so – Average?
Yeah.
Well that’s straight people for you darling.
Hmm. They sit there for a while. Rohit’s house smells like jasmine and lemon cleaning spray. The mess in Rohit’s house is always a clean kind of mess. Used bowls stacked on wiped down surfaces. Miscellaneous objects in small piles. Nora thinks of saying something about the quarry and the almost child, but she can’t decide what.
So I have a new boy on the roster, Rohit says.
Boy? Nora says.
Well, man. He’s forty.
What’s he like?
Submissive. He was married to a woman for a long time and so he wants his first foray into queenhood to be different.
So, his wife was submissive?
I suppose.
And you like that?
You know I do. Or I don’t care at least.
It’s interesting that people can just change. Decide to do something else.
That’s the gift of free will for you.
Hmm. Nora gets up, looks at herself briefly in the gold framed mirror on Rohit’s wall. Arbitrary, she thinks. Arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary. At the table Rohit squeezes his hands together, points his kind and smooth face at her.
And Dolores? he says.
The same.
—-
Back at home Nora is bored. There are new flies in the kitchen, and she wonders if perhaps there is a nest somewhere, an egg farm. Little wriggling awful maggots, almost sweet if you think about it abstractly enough. She tries to imagine being a maggot and ultimately can’t. Dolores found maggots in their hoover once, a mound of them festering. Or perhaps not festering, she thinks, perhaps that was a judgemental human thing to say, perhaps they were having a party.
She spends the afternoon doing mundane, uneventful things, like pulling hair out of the plughole in the shower and eating a lot of jam on toast. Her thoughts loop around; Rohit’s submissive new man, the maggots in the hoover, the child in the quarry. At some point she gets so sick and tired of herself having the same thoughts that she holds a pair of scissors up towards her hair in the mirror. I suppose I should do this for revenge, she thinks, like when people dye their hair after a break-up. She looks around the bathroom, wondering what she could be revenging. The room looks suddenly dated. The faded green three-piece bathroom – did that go out of date at some point? She thinks about herself and Dolores, and about the trainee mechanic and the nail-girl next door. She isn’t sure how they are connected, but she feels that it is something to do with the quarry, something about being used-up.
She starts hacking at her hair while she thinks about these things. Slice, slice, snip. She had other gay friends here once, before AIDS. That brief and small time when Dolores and Nora hosted dinner parties in this very same house and caught Billy and Simon fucking in this very same bathroom.
At the same time, she thinks about the trainee mechanic and the nail girl, how they know exactly what is coming for them in life. Maybe that’s why they do the arguing thing, she thinks, for a feeling of precarity.
She stops and looks at her hair in the sink. Curling white tufts sticking to the damp basin. In the mirror, she looks like her father. Rheumy eyes, desiccated skin, and a smile. I am quite handsome, she thinks.
—-
The next morning, on her way to the shops, she sees the nail girl on the street. She’s wearing a neon tank top and denim shorts, with her hair tied up in a high ponytail. Her long, also neon, nails tap tap on her phone screen. The signal is better out here, Nora has been told.
Oh, hi Nor, the nail girl says, barely looking up. Nora does not understand why the nail girl likes to shorten her name in this way, but she supposes it is friendly.
Hello, Nora says. The nail girl puts her phone away.
Oh, your hair, she says.
My hair.
You changed it! Love it. She studies Nora for a moment. It’s so hot isn’t it, did you cut it for the heat?
Nora doesn’t say anything. The nail girl flaps her hands.
That was intrusive ignore me!
Don’t worry dear, Nora says, channelling the older woman again.
I’m glad I caught you actually.
Oh?
I just wanted to remind you that you do have my number and we’d hate for us to ever disturb you, so like, please do pop me a text if we’re being noisy.
Interesting, Nora thinks. She wonders what kind of conversation they had, considers how bizarre it would be to text them every time they fucked in the morning.
Thanks dear, she says.
The nail girl smiles. Pulls her shoulders up. Great!
—-
In Tesco, Nora buys bread, jam, eggs, and boxed meringues. Then, she browses the charity shop nearby. A woman she vaguely knows works there, the daughter or friend of someone else. Luckily, they unanimously choose to ignore each other.
The charity shop is bright, playing excitable songs from the 60s, which strikes Nora as funny and almost morbid given that the place is full of dead people’s things. She browses the women’s rails for a while and then quickly moves on to the men’s. She pulls a black pin-stripe suit from the rail. She wore men’s clothes for a long time but at some point, she must have stopped. How interesting that I don’t remember, she thinks.
May I try this on? she asks the woman that she vaguely knows. She wonders if the woman will find it odd that she’s trying on the suit, but then again, it’s not really a very odd thing for a woman to do nowadays. In the changing room, she takes off her arbitrary trousers and arbitrary jumper, and puts the suit on. It’s too big but mostly okay. She steps out of from behind the changing room curtain to look in the mirror.
Dapper, the woman she vaguely knows says.
Thanks, Nora replies. She looks at herself and feels quite content and amused. It reminds her of when she and Dolores first moved into the house together. They had both gotten short very lesbian haircuts and the old couple next door kept saying what a lovely, lovely friendship they had.
She buys the suit without taking it off, getting a carrier bag for her old clothes instead. When the woman she vaguely knows passes it over, she squeezes her mouth together in a strange sort of smile and says you have a good day, Nora. As she leaves, Nora tries again to remember who the woman is, but ultimately can’t.
—-
On the way home, the streets are smelling like dry asphalt and frying oil, on account, obviously, of the huge beastly sun and the abundance of fish and chip shops. Nora wonders, idly, about the nature of deep-frying. What a gruesome thing, she thinks, to be coated in sticky beige batter and submerged in boiling oil. You would die from drowning before you died from the heat, perhaps, feeling the blood inside you thicken and char. To change states like that and like the snails in the sun doesn’t seem human, Nora thinks, but at the same time maybe it’s one of the most human things. Maybe, she considers, she has just been led away from the fleshy, malleable quality of humans, into thinking a person is only a bundle of ideas and couldn’t also be alive in the way of a tulip or a sticky shell or a quarry.
Hello, she calls through Rohit’s door as she walks past his street. There is a small potted olive tree outside Rohit’s house that she hadn’t noticed before. Someone was saying they were beginning to plant vineyards down here in the south, a lucrative benefit of climate change, they said. She is about to shout again, louder, when she hears the muffled sound of late afternoon pleasure. Rohit’s new toyboy, she thinks.
She goes to the quarry again instead. She is putting off what she is really meant to be doing, which is going to see Dolores. There is something funny about being an old woman with a man’s haircut and a suit in the quarry, she thinks. She walks to the big stone chair, one of the sculpture park pieces, and sits on it. Around the chair, the ground is ragged and heath-y. Yellowed grass and purple-headed heather like butch girls in clubs. When the chair first arrived, Dolores laughed her sweet Dolores laugh and said that she wished it had been there when they were young. What a spot for teenage cunnilingus. The very stone that dinosaurs walked upon, rewritten from the subtopics to the salt coast.
In front of Nora, a family of tourists approach. Can you get down? the tourist mother says. We wanna get a photo of the kids on the chair.
—-
When Nora gets back, she realises she left her bag of old clothes in the quarry. Perhaps they will fossilise over time, she thinks, or perhaps they will be re-discovered by somebody else, becoming no longer arbitrary at all.
Unable to think of anything else to do, she has a slice of toast and jam and then packs the boxed meringues into a bag to take to Dolores. It is only two thirty, she notices, so by all accounts an ideal time to go.
On her way out, she sees the trainee mechanic cleaning his car out the front. He is wearing sport shorts, a tank top, and a ridiculous headband, squeezing a large yellow sponge into a bowl.
Alright Naww-ruh? he says when she walks past, looking her up and down.
Alright, she says. She wonders if he will say anything, feeling that he is right on the cusp of it, thinking, thinking, but he just waves his free hand and gets back to scrubbing.
The home where Dolores lives now is on the eastern edge of Portland, a dull faded building with a large bay window in the resident’s lounge looking out at the English Channel. The usual man lets her up into the dementia ward, chattering about the heatwave, that we’ll be due a storm soon, saying nothing of her hair and her suit.
She finds Dolores in the lounge, as usual, with the others.
Hello love, Nora says. She sits down in the chair next to Dolores, putting a hand on top of hers. Her skin is soft and sagging, the beautiful weathering of used up rock. Dolores doesn’t move, just stares out at the ocean in the near distance, the barely perceptible transition from blue sea to blue sky. Nora pulls the box of meringues from her bag and places them on the table in front.
Oh, my favourite! Dolores says. How did you know? She turns to look at Nora, squinting and shuffling closer. Nora smiles at Dolores’s face, the melting angles and blurred amber eyes.
Do I know you? Dolores asks.
You know me, Nora says, as usual. I’m your partner.
A partner! Dolores laughs and shakes her head.
A partner, Nora says. They sit there for a moment, breathing the smell of stale tea trolleys and antiseptic and looking at the flattened sea, the sound of Dolores’s mouth opening and closing like a tide, in and out, in and out, foamy with breath, spume of the mouth.
Oh, my mother will be pleased, Dolores says suddenly, stroking the crisp material of Nora’s suit.
Pleased? Nora says.
Oh yes, she will be pleased I’ve finally gotten myself a husband, Dolores says. She leans into Nora, cupping her speckled limpet hand up to hush the noise. You know I had this girlfriend back then, a sweet thing… I barely remember her name… my mother will be pleased. Hey, you! she calls to a man holding shakily to a plastic beaker of tea. A husband!
—-
When Nora gets home, she is feeling quite content and amused again. She is not sure exactly why, but she supposes it is something to do with knowing she is not yet fossilised. In her pinstripe suit, she soft boils two eggs and plops them onto toast with too much salt and pepper. It is still warm outside, the sun just about beginning to come down for the night, so she takes her eggs outside and sits at the table and chair in the small yard. Somebody is having a barbeque nearby. Somebody is listening to the radio.
Next door, she can hear the trainee mechanic and the nail girl out in their small yard too, the gentle clinking of glass bottles and voices.
I saw Nora earlier, the nail girl is saying.
Oh yeah? the trainee mechanic says. I did too, actually.
There is a small quiet. Hearing their voices hush, Nora creeps to the edge of her yard so she can listen against the fence.
She looked, the nail girl says, I dunno, different. I couldn’t tell if it was on purpose. Her hair was different, it looked like she cut it herself.
Oh, the trainee mechanic says. Nora hears him slurp on his beer. Well, I saw her in a suit.
Oh, the nail girl says. Yeah.
She looked sort of like a man. They pause.
It’s interesting though innit, have you noticed how old people all blend together like babies? With their gender I mean.
Mmm. They are quiet again. Makes you think though dunnit?
Makes you think what?
That if you want, you can just do something different, the nail girl says.
I guess so, the trainee mechanic replies.
On opposite sides of the fence, they all sit there quietly, thinking. Overhead, the sun. Not so far away, the tide. In the air, Nora can smell something sweet and full. She thinks about the carer earlier talking about the storm coming. Do you think it’s going to rain soon? she says to the imaginary Dolores. Yes, you know it, the imaginary Dolores says, almost exactly like the real Dolores would. She stretches her legs out, yawns, rests her speckled limpet hand on the pool of Nora’s thighs.
RUBY OPALKA is a writer based in Manchester, UK, where they completed an MA in Creative Writing in 2023. They are currently working on their debut short story collection, which explores queer intimacies, the strangeness and pleasures of bodies and the meeting point of people and geology. Their work can also be read in The Manchester Anthology 2023.