September Nice To Meet You by Caragh Medlicott
Shortlisted for the third Lunate 500 competition
‘This microscopically observed flash made our teeth itch; it will do that, particularly if, like its stumbling narrator, you have more than a passing familarity with the Six Towns. Maybe your traditional working class upbringing played out not in the Potteries but in an equally grey and unfashionable Midlands town? It takes little to instil a lifelong sense of imposter syndrome when your peers… are not your peers at all. And never will be — living not in towns but counties. But it’s not just Caragh’s unsparing dissection of class privilege that earns her story a place on the shortlist, it’s the pinpoint inventiveness of her language: ‘flummox’ as a brand new verb; a roster of ‘but-you-can-call-me’ names; rising panic ‘conspicuous like woodsmoke.’ Wonderful writing. A sweat-inducing joy.’
Lunate editors
***
They guard class conversation like black oil Dobermans. The first seminar is a prospectus collage sticky with sun-softened glue resin.
I see seats peopled with swishy balayage ponytails and pastel-branded polo shirts. There’s a replication, some kind of family resemblance in the complexions coloured by high living (foods and sports I can’t name or imagine).
My mouth is dry like old toothpaste, my lips clamped and word-locked. I am, all at once, aware of my tongue housed in its jaw; baby hairs go damp on my forehead, nails bow to molars. The smiley seminar tutor – white-white eyes, pogo stick energy – wants us to go round and say our names, where we’re from, when we fell in love with literature. Clockwise, I’m last.
Everyone has ‘but-you-can-call-me’ names – Roberts who are Bobs, Charlottes who are Lotties, Griffins who are Finns. Their homes are contained villages, neat and surreal like collectable doll houses, so they just say the county, oh Berkshire, rolling off the tongue in a thick lacquered hum.
The literature epiphanies are worse: Lear at the RSC, reading Menelaus and Paris’s duel in classics class, brought along one truant school day to mum’s meeting with her agent. I burn, conspicuous like woodsmoke, dread beating through me in a cardiovascular rattle. My mind scrambles for a befitting fabrication, turns out drawers, squirms under the tide of introductions waving closer.
I’m two people away. A floppy haired Hugo flummoxes, letting slip an incredible lie, more involved than a dog at work on its own balls. Well, when I was seven, I stumbled upon Pa’s Kafka collection. It’s ludicrous, enough to be relief-inducing. I scan eyes trying to catch and share a moment of contempt, the class nods soothingly, perhaps not in belief, but certainly in acceptance.
And you?
My voice is missing, I try and speak anyway: Alice. It’s a spectre noise, flimsy croak. I clear my throat (too loud, too loud – my face fills with blood). Sorry, I’m from Stoke. Their eyes glaze, not an assault of judgment but a resignation of interest. Well – my brain shudders – I suppose just reading, as a kid, reading, um, Jacqueline Wilson, getting attached to the stories, just books, really. A girl lets out a small, rippling sneeze. The seminar tutor thanks us all. Class moves on, a consensus of pace over stutter.
Today we’re discussing Great Expectations. Dickens – a poverty tourist? My mind’s ideas bob below the surface, never deigning to trace my lips. When I go to speak, I find the sound swallowed by the booming voice of some boy or other, their every opinion prefaced by an arrrrr, which I think is meant to be like errrrr.
My thoughts whistle through me, not caring to stop in formation. It takes me twenty-three minutes to clock that the ideas being declared are shaded with shadow intellect. Sparknotes with a thesaurus. The seminar tutor nods and nods and nods and I keep saying nothing.