Character Sketches from April Assignment

JOURNEY TO BRIGHTON

(Characters are in order of appearance)

Together we have written a joint novel using these initial character sketches. There is a complete draft of the Brighton Novel available if anyone is interested in reading it, being our agent or even publishing it.

For further details you can e-mail us at the address on our Contact Page.

You can read a particular members work by clicking on the author's name:

by Mark Beach   by Suzie Powers   by Geoff Rush

         by Anita Loughrey    by Phil Golden    

by Maggie Jamieson   by Di Lawton   by Pat Pycraft

Lenny ‘logo’ Loggins leaned back on the side of the National Express bus, and with a well practised flick sent the dog end of his cigarette spinning through the air to land in a puddle in front of the route 23 bus shelter at Victoria coach station. Christ he hated the Brighton run, especially when it was pissing with rain. Nothing quite as bad as driving a coach load of poofs to the seaside, except having to do it in the rain. But as the depot supervisor had told him just this morning,

 “You’re up on the fuckin’ rota to do it, so stop moanin’ about the fuckin’ poofs and get out there and fuckin’ do it”

 Lenny hated his supervisor. But to give him his due, Lenny was quite possibly one of the fairest men you could ever wish to meet; he hated everyone equally. Apart from gays for whom he reserved a special deep and insecure loathing. Of course not everyone on the Brighton route was gay, but as far as Lenny was concerned far too many of them were. Just last month one of them had sat right in the front row of seats from where it was possible to look at the driver. Lenny had endured 2 hours of being ogled, there was nothing he could do about it, and anyway with his track record he had to be careful, jobs were hard to come by for blokes like him.

 Lenny ‘logo’ Loggins, so nicknamed for the ‘coca cola’ logo he had tattooed across his right bicep. The tattoo was a mistake. It dated from his days as a coke-head, he had wanted the word ‘cocaine’ tattooed on his arm in the same typeface as used on coca-cola bottles. Him and his mates had all been pissed in the tattoo parlour in Hornsey Road and unfortunately the Greek tattooist had misunderstood the instructions. The tattoo story had lead Lenny into quite a few punch-ups over the years, he became known as a bit of a local hard man, and gradually the tattoo story ceased to be mentioned.

 Lenny was now just a month short of his thirty-fifth birthday. He had been driving for National Express for nearly seven years, his parole officer had organised the job for him after a stint in Wandsworth prison following his part in a botched post office raid in Tring.

 Although he was approaching 35, Lenny kept himself in shape down at Mario’s gym in the Holloway Road, but just lately he had been wondering if he was going soft in his old age. His mates down at the Nag’s Head had been winding him up about it. He had admitted to them that he had met a couple of black guys in the pub after the last Chelsea match and that they seemed like good blokes. His mates had taken the piss about it all evening. The following evening they were drinking in the Nag’s Head again, Lenny had been to the bogs for a slash, when he came back to the bar he found a banana in his pint. Everyone, including him, had roared with laughter at the joke, but it worried him. Not the fact that he had thought a couple of black guys might be OK, but the fact that his mates felt bold enough to take the piss like that. A few years ago he would have trashed at least two of them right there in the bar.

 “Bollocks to ‘em” he said out load as he pushed away from the side. Just as he turned to climb into the bus he saw a young woman crossing the coach station concourse. He caught the eye of another driver slouching against the door of his own bus and jerked his thumb in the direction of the young woman,

 “Oi mate, look at the tits on that!” he yelled.

 Lenny didn’t look at the woman again, but climbed the stairs to the driver’s seat. He started the engine and sat contemplating the drive ahead,

 “I ‘ate the fuckin’ Brighton run” he said to no one in particular.

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Ten year old Murray always sits at the back of the bus, his mother sits in front of him, holding his violin case which he hides in a plastic BHS bag.

 Murray is both the youngest – and the tallest – in his year, and for this reason he has been drafted into the reserve football team at his school in Ovingdean.  He hates sport, and barely tolerates after-school practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays, mainly because he has to go straight from there to his extra English lessons with Miss Strickland, a regular twice-weekly session that he finds deeply humiliating.

 Today, like every Saturday, he’s on his way back to Brighton from his lessons at the Junior Academy of Music.  It’s 3.00pm and he smiles to himself, knowing that these music lessons over-ride his commitment to the Saturday school sports fixtures.  And it’s raining, hard, and he thinks of his soggy friends on the pitch.  He smiles again.

 At the Junior Academy Murray has lessons in violin, theory and piano.  He likes violin the best, mainly because he has a crush on his teacher, Miss O’Marney, who is younger than his other teachers.  Each week he deliberately moves his chinrest to the wrong position and each week she painstakingly adjusts it and makes a joke for his benefit.

 On the bus each week he daydreams about compositions he’ll write for her and music he’ll play with her.  Other times he daydreams about ITV’s “Stars in the eyes – Kids”, and wonders who he could be.  He’s always home in time to watch it.

 Murray doesn’t have a favourite composer but likes Mozart – if only because ‘he was a child prodigy too’.

 The bus is usually only half-full at 3.00pm and Murray sits in the middle of the back seats to watch everyone getting on and off.  Today he’s distracted by the rhythm of an empty beer can that keeps rolling across the aisle and by something Miss O’Marney said to him at the end of his lesson: ‘Look at the silver buttons on your jacket, Murray.  They really sparkle, but they wouldn’t stand out so if it wasn’t for the dark fabric now, would they?”

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Marco Favelli checks out the number on the front of the National Express coach. Refers to the crumpled square of paper screwed into the palm of his left hand. Compares the two numbers. They tally. He reads the destination. Brighton. Except that he pronounces it Brig’ton. The presence of the ‘h’ is a mystery.

 With a shake of his head he refuses the driver’s offer to stow the rucksack in the luggage bay. Slips it off his shoulders, boards the coach. He chooses a seat halfway along the aisle, sits by the window, stacks the rucksack on the seat next to him. He doesn’t want company. His is a mute world. He lives inside his head. He understands well enough, but speaks only when he has to. Silence has stood him in good stead for longer than he cares to remember.

 The coach is filling up, a hotch-potch of human flotsam. He stares stoically out of the window, refuses to make eye contact.

 He watches the driver pass below him, hears the hiss of the closing door. Then the gentle throb as the diesel engine pulses into life. As the coach swings out into the London traffic, he tips his head back, closes his eyes.

 The sun is bright against the window, piercing the glass, lasering into his shuttered eyelids. He fidgets in his seat, tries to make his lean frame comfortable. This is alien territory to him. He is more at home in the rear of a Transit, metal side panel rigid against his back, legs splayed out, intertwined with those of the man opposite, the stench of unwashed bodies and cement dust thick in the confined space. He smiles in his half-sleep. Plenty more like him with strong backs, willing to slave for a few measly quid, no questions asked.

 For Marco Favelli is an illegal. Another face in the swelling ranks of the Black Economy. At least he was. What is he now, he wonders? Maybe the man in Brig’ton has the answer.

 The passport in his pocket states he is thirty four years old, an engineer from Perugia, Italy. Two out of the three are true. Actually, he has never set foot in Italy in his life. Nor is his name Marco Favelli. If passports came with a price tag, his would read £2,500, a small fortune in his native Kosovo. The identity has been supplied by the same man who has provided the coach ticket, and the address in Brighton, scribbled on the piece of paper now tucked into his shirt pocket.

 The coach is over the river and out of the worst of the traffic, the low rev grind behind them as they hit clear road. The woman in front of him is pouring coffee from a thermos, the aroma rich and strong in his nostrils. It tweaks a memory. He fights it briefly, slams the door in its face before it can escape. Time has made it easier to shut out the past, but the wounds will never heal completely, he knows.

 Eyes still closed, he fingers the locket at his throat. Sanya. He glimpses her face through the flames. Hears her call his name through the panic and confusion. Not knowing for sure is the heaviest burden of all to carry. Grunting, he jerks his eyes wide open. He needs to touch the present.

 Outside the window, clouds like bonfire smoke have masked the sun. The first drops of rain streak the glass. Somewhere behind him a man echoes his own thoughts, mutters something about the bloody British weather.

 There have been too many false dawns lately in the life of Ludo Vladic. He prays this one will come up with the sun.

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Annie Bishop was running away. She’d packed a small bag and caught the Victoria to Brighton bus whilst her mum popped to the corner shop. The doctor wanted to admit her to a psychiatric unit and if she refused to go they were going to section her. She’d no choice she had to run away.

 She curled her feet under her and pulled the enormous baggy jumper over her knees. She felt cold. She always felt cold. She was wearing two jumpers and she was still cold. Her hands were tinted blue. Annie stared at her reflection. A nineteen-year-old girl with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks stared back at her. But Annie didn’t recognise how pale and wretched she looked. She didn’t see herself in the same way as other people saw her. She stared past the skeletal reflection to watch the trees whiz past.

 Annie had told her mum she would go to the hospital if that was what they wanted and for a change her mum had believed her. She’d hidden her mum’s cigarettes on purpose. She knew her mum wouldn’t last long without them. As soon as her mum had gone out to buy some more Annie had taken the packed bag, her savings and the housekeeping money mum kept in the tin in the cupboard and slipped out to the station where she’d caught the first train to London. There she’d caught the bus, any bus, she didn’t care where she was going as long as she got away.

 Mealtimes had become such a struggle it had become harder to hide the fact that she wasn’t eating her food. She used to push her food around her plate waiting for her moment, when they were distracted by the television or the dog and then hide the food in a tissue in her lap. Now she had to force herself to eat two mouthfuls per meal, which was agonising to swallow. But, since they’d become the Gestapo she’d made the effort to get them off her back. They’d told her she’d looked fine the way she was before she started dieting.

 “Seven stone ten was fine for a nineteen year old who was five foot one,” they’d said.

 What would they know? It had taken her ten months to get to her present weight of five stone four. It was a pity her parents were so unsupportive. She hated being fat. When they’d found out she was throwing up her two mouthfuls everyday they’d freaked. Now she had to have a minder in the toilet. All the locks had been taken off the doors. They’d even tried to force-feed her by making her drink that glass of milk and not letting her go to the toilet for an hour.

 “Look what you’re doing to yourself,” her mum had yelled dragging her to the mirror in her underwear when Annie had refused to the doctor. They’d practically manhandled her to the car and into the surgery. She’d tried to fight them off but they were too strong, or she was too weak.

 No. There was no way Annie was going to let them take her to the hospital. She knew she couldn’t fight them. She had no choice she had to run away.

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Jim was hot and uncomfortable as he squeezed along the aisle of the bus

He had to shuffle, half side-ways, half forwards so his broad shoulders didn’t bump the headrests of the seats on either side.

 His coat was in his left hand, behind him, his bag in his right hand ahead of him, they occasionally brushed against passengers as he passed. George tried to ignore the occasional muttering or muffled curse. It wasn’t his fault that the gap was too small.

At five foot one inch, Jim was about as wide as he was tall. All his life he’d taken stick about his height, yet even now in his fifties, he was afraid of fighting no-one. He’d never pick a fight, but then he’d never backed down from one either.

 Jim’s dad had taught him to stick up for himself. Where he’d grown up, in the East end, you’d had to be tough just to survive.

 Finally he reached his goal; a pair of empty seats, near the back. His grey eyes had not moved from them since he’d first got on the bus. Determined not to share them, he struggled awkwardly into the window seat and with a loud sigh dumped his bag on the seat next to him and covered it with his anorak.

 ‘That’s a good coat.’ He thought, patting it into place. He’d got it off a bloke in the pub last Saturday afternoon. ‘Not bad for a Pony.’ He thought. After all the geezer had assured him that the Gas Board pay more than a ‘Ton’ for them. He’d told Jim it was a genuine Gore-Tex site coat.

 Jim didn’t know what ‘Gore Text’ was, he thought that was what the posers in the pub did with their mobile phones. They were always pressing all the buttons and staring at the screen looking smug, smart. Jim avoided those guys, with their Laptop I. T. s and whatchumacallits. They talked about things on the news that Jim didn’t understand and Euros and Kilos. Jim was afraid they’d make him look stupid.

 He didn’t need new I technology, he was a Painter and Decorator and a good one too. The Housing Association he worked for didn’t employ any ‘Cowboys’.

 Jim’s mates in the pub called him George. Skirting board George to be precise.

 Most nights after work, Jim and His wife of 26 years (on and off) went to the pub for a drink. ‘Here they are’ some regular would announce, ‘here’s George and Mildred. What’re you avin George?’

 Neither of them minded that, everyone knew it was Beryl who was the govnor in their relationship. Beryl didn’t take shit from anybody, least of all Jim. The ‘Skirting Board’ bit was a bit more hurtful to Jim. Some clever wag had once suggested that he was the only painter who needed a ladder to paint a Skirting Board. And sadly it had stuck.

 Still Jim could take a bit of stick, he had a good bunch of mates really, he often thought, well better than his family anyway.

 As the bus pulled away from the station Jim turned and looked out of the window, just as a giant cotton wool cloud eclipsed the bright spring sun. Jim thought about how he was going to miss his friends and even his family.

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“Tak tak tak tak tak” went the wheels of Pamela’s pull-along suitcase as they hit the evenly spaced joints in the paving slabs on the way from Victoria main line station to the coach station.  She found the noise quite comforting, as though a faithful friend were trotting patiently behind her.  She wove this way and that between the stream of people walking towards her, whereupon her little friend became more animated.  “Tak, tik, ticketty tak.”  She was hot and in a hurry, but all the same, she now deliberately sought out bits of irregular paving so that the suitcase performed a kind of Fred Astaire tap dance. “Tik tak, tik tak, tacketty tacketty tacketty tak, tak ticketty tak tak.”  Strangers stepped aside, bewildered, as she pursued her crazy, zigzag course.  “Let them laugh, let them stare”, she sang in an American accent, “What do Fred and I care?”

Her flowing purple skirt kept sticking to her tights and wrapping itself around her legs.  She had to stop every now and then to unravel it.  Her unbuttoned magenta jacket had fallen off one shoulder and was only pinned to the other by the weight of her bulging hessian shoulder bag.  Her thin greying hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat. Her feet were beginning to swell inside her sandals.  But none of this dampened her spirits.  She would soon be on the coach to Brighton.

Pamela negotiated the draughty bus lanes and eventually found the right stand for the Brighton coach.  She went up to the surly looking driver who was lounging against the side of the coach and handed him the suitcase, saying, “Look after Fred Astaire for me, will you?”  He shoved it into the hold, his face showing no sign of curiosity or amusement.  She heaved herself up the steep steps of the coach and into the nearest seat at the front.  The coach was already quite full.  Rummaging in her bag, she retrieved the exhibition catalogue and fanned her face with it.

“My first one-man show after all these years”, she said to herself.  She worried a little whether her most delicate and precious abstract watercolours would be safe in their bubble wrap inside the suitcase in the hold.  The driver had slung it in so carelessly.  And would the bigger items that had been sent on ahead by carrier arrive safely?  The exhibition was to be part of Brighton Festival week, in the “open studio” section.  She had arranged to stay with her friend, Barbara, and use the front room of her tiny cottage off the North Lanes as the exhibition space.  Well, she had a few days to sort everything out and set it up.

The last passenger got on, the driver took up his seat; the coach pulled out of the station and started its lurching sweep around the one-way traffic systems.  Pamela arranged the voluminous folds of her clothes more comfortably around and beneath her, settled herself into her seat and sat back to envisage, in her mind’s eye, exactly where and how she would hang each picture.

Babs would help her, of course.  They had been at Brighton Art College together and had kept in touch, though they hadn’t seen one another now for – what was it? – seven years.  But whenever they had met up in the past it was as if nothing had changed between them in the intervening years.  Through marriages, children and divorces, they had always instantly rediscovered their pleasure in one another’s company and in the spontaneous way they just – well – had fun together.

Since their last meeting, Pamela had certainly got a little fatter and had been for a while prone to sudden, sweat-drenched flushes. “What will Babs make of me when she sees me this time?” she wondered.  In their student days together, it had usually been Babs who’d had the madcap ideas, while Pamela happily went along with whatever schemes she’d dreamed up.  But Babs had become more staid as she’d grown older, whereas what Pamela particularly enjoyed now was the realization that, at her age, she could be as outrageous as she liked.  She often amused herself by seeking out, and even provoking, situations or encounters that bordered on the bizarre.  No, she gave not a fig – she savoured the phrase – for what others might think and was perfectly aware that, on the whole, they gave not a fig, nor any other word starting with “f”, for her either.  These days, she could get away with murder!

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John Thomas was on his way to yet another appointment with Dr. R. Cranium.  The private clinic was a two and a half hour journey from his home, most of which was spent on the Victoria to Brighton coach. 

He was used to getting strange looks from his local neighbourhood but felt a certain amount of freedom once he reached his destination.  Hopefully it wouldn’t be too long before he would be free from all ridicule, forever.

Getting on the bus took a huge amount of effort.  It wasn’t that he was a big man because he was only 5’ 8” and of medium build but he did have certain features that attracted unwanted attention.  Being so self-conscious he desperately looked for an empty seat.  This was easily achieved as there were only seven or so passengers already seated.  Removing his headscarf and slipping off his slingbacks, he put his vanity case on the seat next him hoping that nobody would try and sit there.

A few minutes later the driver started the engine and John was soon able to lose himself in his thoughts.  He’d remember the school playground where the other boys would constantly tease him about his name and he couldn’t understand why they called him dick head.

His parents had had him late in life and he didn’t have any siblings.  Coming from a very religious and very strict background, poor John was very naive.  He’d always thought he was somehow different from his peers and wondered whether it was something to do with the sepia photos of him as a baby, dressed in girly looking angel suits.  It wasn’t until he reached adulthood and was surfing the net that he suddenly realised he was in the wrong body.

On leaving school John had trained as a nurse and five years ago he’d spent the summer doing work experience at a sex change clinic in Amsterdam.  This was a real eye opener and he soon realised that it was indeed possible for men to have boobs and a designer vagina.  

 Both his parents had died three years ago.  His mother first of a heart attach; his father died soon after of a broken heart.  The whole of their substantial estate had been left to their only child. 

Two years ago, after much soul searching, John had been approved by a psychiatrist for surgery and during that time had been referred to an endrocrinologist.  His testicles had already shrunk to the size of peanuts, although not as salty; and his body hair had almost stopped growing, although he still had a six o’clock shadow.  His boob job was a cross between Twiggy and Jordan.  This visit to Brighton was to discuss vaginoplasty, an operation that would take place in about twelve months time.   In Amsterdam he’d found out the hard way that some ‘men’ have a neovagina in perfect sexual working order.

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Tim dived onto the coach just as it doors were closing. He noticed the driver flinch when he handed over his ticket. His mutilated fingers often had this effect. Indeed he sometimes had to fight his stomach contents down, but that was mainly when he thought back to how it all happened. He took a cursory look down the coach and nipped into a seat that was maximum distance away from anyone else. He wasn’t in a mood for conversation. He pulled out his mobile phone and deliberately switched it off. As the coach pulled away he thought it would be a good thing that the Brighton London train had been indefinitely delayed due to signal problems, meaning that he had to take the long winded option on choosing the coach to accomplish his journey to Brighton. On the plus side the coach station wouldn’t have been his brothers’ first choice of looking for him. If indeed they noticed that he wasn’t there, since they had all planned to go dog racing. They should be tanked up on beer by mid afternoon.  Still, ever since it all happened, his twin, Rik, in particular, tended to need him to phone in at regular intervals.

If he thought his flight onto the coach had been an anonymous one he was very much mistaken. A girl at the back of the coach had noted his deep blue eyes almost at once. She had been too far back to notice the fingers and the driver’s reaction to them. His cropped hairstyle flattered his face but yet he didn’t hold himself with the arrogance of knowing he had good looks. If only she knew. Still her interest was borne out of natural curiosity, she was too pre occupied with her own thoughts to make any move.

Tim found the chugging on the engine comforting and he needed all the comfort that he could get. He wanted to confront his estranged sister. Find out the truth, once and for all. His brothers constantly wanted to keep him away from her, so there must be something to it. He needed to know what had gone on back then and so much more to the point, he needed to know why. He wanted to be sure, that if she knew then what she knew now, she wouldn’t have behaved in the same way.

He was totally lost in his own world, not seeing the passing picture flash past. Consequently the coach must have stopped for a good 5 minutes or so before he had realised it. There seemed to be some commotion on the motorway.

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