Sandrine - a short story by Adam Carlton

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Sandrine

She stands by the bus stop at the ferry port. It's a warm, blustery evening, with just the occasional squall of rain arriving on a gust.

She's waiting for her fella.

She met him last Saturday in a bar near here. She's quite fearless, happy to enter a dockers bar at half past nine and wait for the right guy to make the move, buy her a drink. She can do spiky: turn on the ones who don't get the hint; entrance those she really fancies.

Kind. She likes them kind. And burly, confident, sure of themselves. The kind of guy who won't get challenged over his gorgeous girlfriend.

I am gorgeous, she thinks, perhaps a little too tall, but I only come up to their shoulders. I'm cuddly, plenty of curves - they all like that. 

She looks at her little black dress, remembers the half hour fixing her makeup. 

She feels like she looks: ready for a good time.

She's late but he's later. A couple of days ago she borrowed the downstairs flatmate's car. Her guy was off-shift and was taking her shopping. Buses don't work when he's buying for you.

Yes, they drove round this port city, visiting the emporia so he could be generous. But she's the first to admit she's a terrible driver. They were quite shaken up when she hit that curb near the mall.

Parking is difficult: everyone says so.

It hadn't driven straight after that. But he didn't seem to make a big thing about it when she handed it back.

He's not her type at all. Too thin, too quiet, too middle-class. Although he can be funny in his way. Like her, he doesn't take things too seriously. Smart too, although she usually doesn't get his wry asides. Waste of breath, she thinks.

He looks like a longhaired student, although he's actually training, he said, to be a computer programmer. No idea, she thinks, but who cares.

On a whim, a couple of days after that, she got him to take her to a rough harbour dive. Her fella was at work, and in the early afternoon the place was deserted.

She sat on the window bench in one of the side rooms, overlooking the water. He arrived with their drinks and sat beside her. She wondered how he would react as she prepared to smear her lipstick over his smile; how interested he might be in her warm, carnal self. There seemed no reason to rush this experience, and, unobserved, the experiment took most of an hour.

Since then, she's encouraged him upstairs to her own attic flat. It's rented, just room for a single bed but that's not a problem because he doesn't need to stay. She thinks he's good because he's easy, expects nothing of her, and everything's relaxed and fun. She likes the break from the heavy stuff. No, there's nothing there in the longer term, she thinks, nothing at all.

And now her guy is rolling up. He's enormous, towers over her, calls her ‘doll’. They'll go to a bar and then maybe get a late night meal in a diner somewhere in port. And after that who knows? 

Maybe she'll be feeling generous.