Short Story Compilation - by Paul Evans.

“Damn, Rod. S, B and damn!”
Nina always wanted to swear at times like these but something in her upbringing prevented her.
“And before you ask, the gauge isn’t on empty,” Rod said, calmly. “Karl checked it only last week.”
“Oh, good old Karl. He’s like the little toy soldier you get out of the box when there’s something wrong. Can you honestly tell me that the petrol gauge itself isn’t faulty?”
Rod knew Nina had often thought him to be bitter about having two daughters and that the Seventeen-year-old rookie recruit at his IT firm was, in her eyes, a substitute son. Even though Sabrina – their eldest – had pulled tank engines apart in the WRENS she’d always said that the ham-fisted youth was, to him, a more reliable bet. He waited for her to remind him about all this now.
“No – there’s definitely petrol,” she said instead, looking at the map. “You filled it up in Sale so there should be at least fifty miles in there yet.”
“You should get Bree to give it a service anyway,” came the precocious voice in the back.
“You’re right,” Nina contended, half turning round to face her younger daughter. Then, realizing she’d cricked her neck: “Ow! S and F!”
“Mum!”
“And stop calling Sabrina that. You know I don’t like it. Makes her sound like a piece of cheese.”
“I’ll call the AA,” Rod said, in his annoyingly calm voice but Nina’s own patience had not got the better of her. She gave up trying to close her map and opened her address book instead.

The AA man only took twenty minutes to arrive but Nina, ever the pessimist, had already phoned a friend.
“Wimbledon Tube’s only half-a-mile away,” she announced to her husband and daughter, without giving too much away. “If Mister Uniform can’t get us going then we can spend the afternoon in Upton Park and get the train back.”           
The AA man checked the petrol gauge. “Needs replacing,” he said, breathing in sharply.
Rod looked at Nina, then at the map and back again.
“So you want to play Give Us a Clue?” she said, sarcastically. “Well let me guess…it’s a film. No, it’s a book. That’s it… Female Map Readers are Crap!”
“Mum!”
The mechanic poured in some petrol from a plastic can and tried the engine again.
“Hmm, it’s not only the gauge. Bit far gone for me to do anything right now. Where would you like me to tow the car?”
“Sabrina’s!” “Karl’s!” Nina and Rod said together.

At Wimbledon station they slipped the AA man a fiver and he put on an act for the frowning taxi drivers waiting for fares outside. “Highly irregular,” he said, as the only female one continued to tut. “But thanks all the same.”
By the time the family arrived at Upton Park the youngest of the threesome had lost count of how many train platforms they’d christened.
“I’m sure we could’ve done it in three,” Rod said cockily to Nina, who was no more at home with Underground maps than she was with an atlas.  
She called the Williamses.
“Hi! It’s Nina.”
“Nina?” said the male voice. It was a full ten seconds before the penny dropped. “Oh, yes, from this morning. I’m sorry you missed the tennis!”
“We’re at the station.” 
“So they haven’t fixed your car?” Paul Williams said.
“They’ve towed it back to Sabrina’s.”
“Who?”
“You know, my eldest daughter!”
“Oh, yes, sorry. You and Rod have a daughter.”
The Williams’s casualness was becoming too painful for Nina. There was too much traffic for Rod to eavesdrop but he got the impression that his family and theirs were in different stress zones.
“See you soon,” said Nina, switching her mobile off. “And before you ask, Rod, no they weren’t about to offer us a lift.”
“Perhaps they haven’t got a car?” Rod offered, being ever the optimist.           

“So pleased to see you. Mwahhh!”
The two women were locked in a phoney embrace while the men shook hands awkwardly.
“And you must be…Selina!”
Sabrina’s sister refused a hug but was too polite to correct Christine.
“I’m the younger one,” she scowled. “Natasha.”
“Oh, Sorrr-reee! Nina and I lost touch after you came along.”
The two families trooped into a front room that looked like it was only ever used for guests.
“Haven’t you got any children, Chris?” said Natasha and Nina gave her younger daughter a look as if to say I’m cross with you because every winter I tell you that the Williams’s can’t have children but then again that doesn’t give them the right to forget you exist.
“Cigarette?”
“Thanks, Chris.”
“Mum!” It was Natasha’s turn to disapprove now. “You don’t smoke!”
“Hah!” Christine Williams scoffed.
“Don’t drag up old times, Christine,” Nina scolded.
“Drag? Hah! Drag is the appropriate word, darling. And ‘old times’, sweetie, is all you and I have!”
“Go on, put him out of his misery!” Paul Williams piped up. “Rod, my old missus is about to give your Natalie a revelation…”
“Nat-ash-AH!” interrupted Natasha.
“Don’t!” came Nina’s one-word desperate plea. 
Christine Williams did.

Nina had some difficulty making her explanation fit the train journey back.
Afterwards, as the family jostled its way down the busy platform Natasha tried to assemble the random events that contradicted the rosy version of the past her mother had always given her.
“So let’s get this right,” she began, not looking where she was going and nearly knocking over two toddlers and an old woman with a stick. “You met Mrs. Williams at Crown Carriers when you were a temp and she was in Sales?”
“Yes,” yawned Nina.
“And she would drag you to the smoking room about twenty times a day…”
“I’ve told you before, Natasha. I don’t like you using that word.”
Her daughter recapped for a moment, wondering which swearword she’d been guilty of. “Oh, drag,” she eventually said. 
“If you must know, I gave up smoking when your father stopped being an alcoholic and then the new boss at Crown gave me the sack.”
“He fired you? Because you smoked? Or because Daddy drank? You didn’t tell me the full story on that train, did you?”
“No, darling, I didn’t. I lost my job when I stopped taking breaks in the smoking room.”
“Well, not smoking in work time is good, isn’t it?”
“The new boss wanted to ban smoking and Christine Williams didn’t so when I refused to back her in her campaign and then stopped smoking with the others out of loyalty to your dad she stopped…”
“Go on, Mum…” Her daughter’s sympathetic tone made Nina go on.
“She stopped doing all my paperwork for me. There, I’ve said it…”
“Mum, you’re dyslexic. I’ve always known that. And you have nothing to hide.”
“How did you find out?”
“Look, writing out all those tedious Christmas cards – including the one to the rotten old Williams’s – well, it may have been a novelty when I was a five- year-old but now I’m fifteen it doesn’t exactly push my buttons. And the other thing that was a dead giveaway – well, let’s just say that you’ve never told me about those friends who shouldn’t be on the Christmas list any longer and the new ones that should. And now you’ve been going to those classes you’re so much better you can nearly read a map and I’m so proud of you but…”
“You think I’ve collected so many unwanted people over the years that amending the list all of a sudden would be stupid…”
“Not now all that effort at your night school is beginning to pay off. Do it, Mum!”
“Anyway, how did you know about the writing classes?”
“I’ve never seen one of your so-called paintings… ever! It’s a bit of a giveaway.”
 

Later that night Rod and Natasha were so exhausted in their beds that they didn’t even hear Sabrina call. But having opened up to her younger daughter Nina felt she owed something to the older one.
“I’ll pick up the car tomorrow, Sabrina,” she said half-an-hour later. Then she crept into the spare room and unlocked the draw of the bureau. She pulled out her Christmas card list, along with the solitary cigarette that had nearly withered away in the packet next to it – the one she always kept in case Rod’s drinking ever returned and she couldn’t handle it.
Then Nina got out a huge pair of scissors and a cigarette lighter from the other draw.
She cut the cigarette into several pieces and set light to the list.