Park 'n' Ride

This story won the 2022 Swanwick Writers' Summer School short story prize.

This is an introduction to the story. There is a complete reading of the piece at the end of the post.

Park ‘n’ Ride

She speaks with a strange intonation, a peculiar rise and fall in her voice as if the person who taught her English had overlaid upon it the rhythms and inflections of an entirely different language: French, or German, or Pig Latin. It also seems she has never acquainted herself with the full suite of letters in the alphabet; some are intermittently missing, certain combinations compromised. And occasionally, unsure she has got her meaning across, she replays whole phrases - most often with no alteration in the words used or their sequence, as if repetition is the guarantor of understanding.

“I ‘ad chips for dinner, I did. Chips for dinner. Those wavy ones. The ones like waves. But if you cooks ‘em for too long they gets crispy on the outside, and I don’t like crispy chips. Not when I ‘ave ‘em for me dinner.”

Her voice accosts him from over his shoulder. Sitting at the front of the tram, he places her perhaps four rows behind him, the tone of her voice slicing through the air between them as if that were no distance at all, as if she is almost in his ear. He wants to turn and look, to assign a physical form to the voice. Perhaps doing so will remove the threat.

“Me boyfriend, ‘e likes chips an’ all. But not those wavy ones. So I ‘as to do two lots when he comes round for dinner, ‘cos he don’t like those wavy ones. Says they’re a waste of space, whatever that means. They’re just chips, ain’t they? Chips for dinner.”