Our town is in a county no one wanted. Dad says to me, ‘Julie, Humberside was formed to put us on the map,’ but he still calls it East Yorkshire. Even with a new name there’s no reason to visit, and when people move here the question is always ‘Why?’ So when Gordy joins he’s treated with suspicion, and it’s a dead cert someone will fight him. That person is Mark, our unofficial head.
Turns out Gordy grew up in Muirhouse and is one of four boys, so he’s not one to shirk from a scrap – bad news for Mark but good news for us kids, who egg them on in the playground braying like demented donkeys. It’s a good fight, thick with kicks and punches, until Mr Boswell storms out of the science block and pulls them apart. He orders them to wipe their bloody noses and shake hands and to the crowd’s surprise (and disappointment) they do. Even more surprising is seeing them an hour later, chatting like they’ve known each other forever.
Mark and Gordy are two years above me, in the same year as my sister, Lou. We’re all in love with Mark, his deep brown eyes and his long lashes. He’s so cool he makes the other boys’ balls ache with envy, something us girls find hilarious, but if you saw how he treats his little sister – pushing her buggy down the High Street while their mum’s in the pub – you’d fall for him, too. Soon enough, Gordy is Mark’s new wingman and girls start to leave notes in his locker, too. Gordy isn’t interested, though, because he fancies Lou.
Lou fancies Gordy, too. She likes his hawk nose and Scottish burr. God knows she needs the attention – her last boyfriend dumped her when our mum got sick. In July, Gordy asks her out, so she squeezes into her denim shorts and tells me to come with – I follow at her heels.
We find Gordy and Mark cadging free chips. They’re full of casual confidence, beaming a sureness that’s beyond me. If Lou’s nervous she doesn’t act it; she’s a natural flirt, like dad. I’m in awe, though I’d never tell her that. We stand outside the chippy and they chat while I smoke. I don’t speak because I can’t think of anything to say, so I stare into sunlight until I see halos around their silhouetted faces. After a while, we go to the playground and drink warm cider. I close my eyes and bask in the boozy buzz. Mark goes off to see a girlfriend, leaving me feeling like a proper gooseberry, so I sit on a swing singing while Lou ignores my evils and snogs the face off her new boyfriend.
In November, Gordy has his 18th birthday at The Black Swan. I’m underage but get invited because of Lou. I take my friend Fi because she’s a) popular, and b) looks 18 so she can get us drinks. Lou warns me against being friends with Fi in case I get a reputation, but Fi’s a virgin. When I ask her why she leads boys on, she says it’s to balance out the universe since her dad left.
Lou wears a magenta top and pleather skirt and I wear a paisley dress and my dead mum’s high heels. Gordy’s second-eldest brother Scott has curly hair like Tom Hanks in Big – he feeds me shots of Jägermeister and kisses me at the bar. In the snug, Fi snogs Mark. He’s wearing ripped jeans and a Vanilla Ice t-shirt. When she spots me, she pushes him away and drags me to the toilet.
‘Are you going to shag Scott?’ she asks. Her white lipstick makes her look like she’s got frostbite.
‘Yeah, probably,’ I lie.
‘Are Lou and Gordy shagging?’
‘Dunno, she doesn’t talk to me.’
‘You look like your mum.’
‘Ta.’ I hope she means healthy mum not dying mum.
‘You must miss her. I know how you feel, you know, I was devastated when Poppy died.’
‘Your dog?’
‘Devastated I was.’ Fi checks her eyeliner in the mirror.
‘Dad’s so quiet these days,’ I say. ‘Sometimes it feels like I’ve lost both parents.’
‘Let’s get drunk,’ she says, and she grabs her bag with one hand and my wrist with the other.
A week after his party, Gordy’s driving back from his weekend job, and you expect boys to drive too fast with music and the stink of weed spilling from their cars, and you expect prangs or whiplash or even a smashed collarbone, but that’s all.
I learn young that grief doesn’t owe us. Losing someone doesn’t make you immune to losing someone else. This is what Lou learns eight days after her boyfriend’s party, and 11 months and 13 days after mum dies.
Two weeks after his 18th, we bury Gordy. At the wake, his parents put on the mix-tape that was playing in his car when he crashed; Technotronic pumps up the jam, Lou Stansfield can’t find her baby, Madonna expresses herself. Lou, in the same black dress she wore to mum’s funeral, sits at a corner table in The Black Swan, her friends fussing like crows over roadkill. According to Fi, Gordy took a corner too fast. No one faults him – at the buffet I even hear his uncle say ‘boys will be boys’ as if all Gordy did was play a prank, like balance a bucket of water on top of a door.
Pink-eyed, pale-faced Scott brings me Sambuca after Sambuca. I hate the aniseed taste but drink until I feel fuzzy and kind. His tight curls remind me of pubic hair and his arm on my shoulder is a hefty weight, but when he leads me to his car I go. He kisses me, then he starts crying. His tears stain my bra. When he slips his hand in my knickers, I don’t care enough to say no, but my stomach has other ideas and I throw up on the backseat.
The gossip that follows in the weeks after the funeral is constant and cruel. I hear that Gordy reached into the footwell to grab a piece of pie he dropped, pie his mum made, and veered off the road. He was so maimed his brother fainted when he identified him. Andy – who’s top in Physics – draws a diagram with stick men to show what happened: this is the speed Gordy was driving at; this is the angle he was at when he hit the chevron sign.
My sister doesn’t get it. She says he was the most sensible of all her boyfriends (all three of them). Within a week he’s been canonised and God, the Police, the car are all blamed and raged at. Grief – who knew? – is a big turn-on, and Mark shags even more girls than usual. We don’t see much of him for a while but when we hear that Gordy’s parents have taken him in, we instinctively know that Mark’s filling a vacancy in a clan that thrives on size. Then, one freezing night just before New Year, he strolls into The Black Swan to tell us he’s joining the army.
It’s Lou who rings to say Mark’s dead. It’s been two years since Gordy’s funeral. She’s at uni in Newcastle and I’m doing A-Levels. I hear tinny sobs through the receiver.
‘Another car accident, can you believe it?’
‘I read it’s the leading cause of death in teenage boys.’
‘For crying out loud, what’s wrong with you?’
‘Sorry.’ I’d heard about Mark an hour earlier – Fi came round to tell me – but I let Lou talk. Lou explains that Mark was driving to his barracks in Catterick when he overtook a lorry and hit a Vauxhall Corsa head on. I think about the lovely curl of his eyelashes and how no one will see them again.
‘Are you listening?’
‘Yeah. You OK?’
‘It keeps happening.’
‘What keeps happening?’
‘Death.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ although I don’t think she’s being daft.
‘I daren’t get close to anyone,’ she says. Why would you want to, I think. I tell her I love her and hang up, then I walk into the living room and sit next to dad. He’s watching Inspector Morse with the sound turned off. I glance at him and try to work out the maths; how long it will take us to recover from losing mum. But I suspect our DNA has been damaged and we’ll never be ourselves again.
‘Lou OK?’ he asks, eventually.
‘She’s upset about Mark.’
‘Aye, it’s a sorry state of affairs.’
‘She misses mum.’
Dad doesn’t reply, as I knew he wouldn’t.
‘She’s homesick.’
‘I’ll send her some money.’ He gets up, stops at the door, turns and says in what seems like an afterthought, ‘Do you need anything?’
A dad who can step outside his grief for five bloody minutes?
‘Driving lessons.’
I fail test after test. Dad blames my lack of spatial awareness and says it’s got nothing to do with what happened to Gordy and Mark, but it still takes me six goes to pass.
Born and bred in East Yorkshire, Debra now lives in Brighton and works as a features writer. In 2020, she graduated from Goldsmiths with an MA in Creative & Life Writing.
Debra writes short stories, autofiction and flash fiction. In 2020, she won The Bridport Short Story Prize and, in 2024, The Letter Review Short Fiction Prize. Debra has been shortlisted for the Bath Short Story Award, the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, the Pat Kavanagh Award, Wells Festival of Literature Short Story Prize, and the Exeter Short Story Prize. She was a finalist for the London Independent Story Prize, (flash) and highly commended for the Writers and Artists Working Class Writers Prize. Her longlists include the Manchester Fiction Prize, Anthology Magazine, and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme.
Debra has been published online, at Litro, LISP, and The Letter Review. Anthologies include: Bridport Prize 2020, Bath Flash Fiction V.5, Bath Short Story Award 2022, thi wurd’s Earthly Rewards; Transformations (Oxford Flash Fiction); and Motherhood Uncensored.
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