A small scandal in Port Brokeferry

(As promised, these Port Brokeferry pieces will be posted faster now. I have less than 20 to write for the project to be finished... but more than 60 still to hang up here. For anyone interested, it is going extremely well, and lots of magic coming into how the 'stories' are being tied up. Keep coming here.)

A BLOND GIRL IN A MAN’S SHIRT

Kyle Downs is seen stepping away from a trailer on the green. It is late in the day and he should still be at work, but he has spent the afternoon with a blond haired woman called Lynn. She is thirty-three years old and speaks with an English accent. Kyle didn’t know her before today. She came into his shop, pretended to be looking for a newspaper until the shop was empty and then she’d asked him his name. Just came right out with it.

‘I saw you last night,' she told him. 'At ‘The Ship’. You was drinking alone. I hate that. You was looking like you was in the wrong place. I’d have come over only I was waiting for someone, see. Never showed, though. Someone called Lachie or Lachlin or something. You probably know him.’

Kyle had noticed the buttons undone on her shirt. It was a man’s striped shirt, a little too much room in it for her, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the tails flapping like a dress about her thighs. She was wearing a blue denim bra underneath.

‘This your shop?’

He’d said that it was and had asked then if he could help.

A phone call from the shop had brought Elspeth in to mind things for the afternoon and after a drink or two at ‘The Ship’, Kyle and the blond girl dressed in a man’s shirt had taken a bottle of vodka back to her trailer.

It is Blair that has seen Kyle Downs at the end of the afternoon, still drunk and stepping unsteadily down the four steps of a trailer onto the green. From inside the trailer he hears a woman’s laughter and her whoop and holler. She calls after Kyle. Just the one word, ‘cunt’, and then she laughs again.

Blair has to agree but would have put the word ‘stupid’ in front of what she had called Kyle. There are few secrets in a place like Port Brokeferry and there Kyle was, blind drunk and making a disturbance in the centre of the town.

‘Here, I’ll help you home,’ Blair says and he puts an arm around Kyle’s waist and walks him back to his door. Athol Stuart has heard the noise and seeing Blair struggling under the weight of Kyle Downs, he goes to help.

Blair tells Susan that he’d found Kyle drunk on the green. Just that. He doesn’t say anything about the blond woman in the trailer or what she had called after Kyle.

Susan Downs leads the way through to the bedroom and Athol Stuart and Blair half carry Kyle to the bed. There are few words. As they leave, Athol Stuart walking ahead of Blair, Susan lays a hand on Blair’s arm, like before. She says ‘Thank you,’ so quiet only Blair hears. ‘Thank you,’ for she understands something of what has happened. The shirt Kyle is wearing is not his own. It is a striped shirt and at least a size too big for him and there’s lipstick smudged on the front.