Two Litre Rita & Tequila Sue - Short Story Part 3
Please read Part 1 “The Little Red Suitcase” HERE
Please read Part 2 “My Little Runaway” HERE
Pru didn’t wait to wonder who the woman in a tight turquoise coat with matching white hat, handbag and shoes was waving at her from down the platform, the sheer relief that at last someone had come for her was more important than who or what they were. Her legs almost folded under every step from the stored up cortisol that had been tearing through her body with nowhere to go, but at absolute last they were on the move.
SUE: “Hello pet, did yu not hear uz calling for yu? A was wavin for ages?
PRU: “I’ve been waiting for an hour, I didn’t know who was...”
SUE: “Ah well never mind, ha way, wa late”
PRU: “I was wai...”
With that the bubble-hatted woman waddled off whilst chatting away to Pru and crew behind her. Kings Cross station was heaving and it felt like a chaotic labyrinth full of man sized worker ants all steam powered by the knowledge of what they were doing, where they were going and who they were with. Pru had no clue what she was doing nor where she was going and never let the white bubble out of her sight, like a shiny white plastic beacon leading the way home.
Her home for the next stage of her journey was Islington, North London, N1. She had unquestioningly bobbed and dodged her way through the throngs and followed Sue into one of the many burrow holes where the pace picked up even more than before. Sue was chirping to her, but people tripping over five dog leads, yelps and scuttles from stressed schnauzers, overhead tannoy announcements, and the huffs and puffs of the people she inconvenienced had left her temporarily deaf to the high pitched instructions. Not to mention that she couldn’t understand a word of it in the most comfortable of circumstances. She wondered if the bubble lady was from the country she thought she might be headed? It hadn’t crossed her mind until now, in the company of foreigners, that Mrs Rossi had made her a passport for good reason.
Pru’s racing thoughts of international jetsetting while racing through the station were interrupted by a sudden halt. In a moment she found herself stood still, descending. Beneath her feet were the thin wooden slats of a rolling step, in front of her Sue grew shorter and behind her a man grew taller. For a moment she was moving but motionless, two dogs in front of her met her at eye level, looking back at her over each of Sue’s shoulders, and behind her at eye level, two under each arm of the middle aged man in a well worn wool suit. She had the little puppy at her chest, she checked.
They all survived the dismount and entered into a seemingly endless underground cavern of random tunnels. She had no idea where she was going nor how anybody could ever know where they were ever going, how could they possibly know?
The air was thick and warm down there as they seemed to take random turns and curls around curved corners but eventually the climate changed and cool air brushed across her skin.
SUE: “Quick chop it’s in!”
Sue and Pru and the schnauzers scurried around the final bend and jumped through the closing doors of a brightly lit carriage thick with cigarette smoke. It effortlessly rattled off and into total blackness.
SUE: “Owa’s is Angel. We’re gettin off at Angel. It’s not far. Few stops on the Northern Line then wa there”.
PRU: “Where did your friend go?”
SUE: “What friend pet?”
PRU: “Your man friend. He picked up two of the dogs?
SUE: “He wha? Who wha? Whaddidee look like? Where are the? How many’s hea?!”
PRU: “They’re all here, there’s five, I thought he was with us.”
Sue looked out across the carriage from under the peak of her white bubble cap. Her piercing ice blue eyes steered across the seated seascape of mediocre men in bland brown suits as if her gaze could seer through their broadsheet news papers each being held aloft like an invisibility shield.
Without breaking her eyeline, she opened the snap on her white patent plastic dolly bag and took out a cigarette from a gold tone case and lit it with a lighter she slipped out of her coat pocket with her other hand. It was a slick manoeuvre. Prudence gazed at her pixie-nosed profile. She had seen women in her magazines that looked like Sue and wondered if she worked in a fabulous London fashion boutique like Chelsea Girl. Her turquoise eyeshadow arched over them icy eyes and her perfectly round plump cheeks where coated in a thick powdery pan stick. She looked like a doll, but an old smoking doll with electric peach lipstick that stuck to the orange butt end of the cigarette like an ownership cattle brand. That cigarette belonged to her now as much as an engraved sword belonged to a warrior.
Prudence thought she saw Sue lock sights onto an enemy target, glide towards them and in silent slow motion burn down the centre fold of the newspaper with the smouldering end of her cigarette revealing the victim as if parting two silk drapes. Reaching both hands through the curtains Sue leant in and squeezed the last breath out of the throat of the man behind the paper with the cigarette still between her fingers.
The screech from the breaks of the train interrupted the kill. Still in her seat, Sue scrunched her pixie nose up and down just once, like a coyote, silently indicating her disappointment her prey got away.
SUE “hawa, it’s owa stop”.
At a much more leisurely pace they ascended the cliff face of escalators at Angel Tube station and emerged into the night, lit by taxi headlamps and the glass rotunda of the florists on the corner.
The sky was high, so high, the highest sky prudence had ever seen and it needed to be. The towering terraced streets that split off in all directions from the tube station were majestic. If this was London, she loved it.
The walk up Liverpool Road was serendipitous to Prudence. It was the first time she’d ever been out of Liverpool and the first time she felt the prickle of excitement in her soul. She was in London, the buildings were huge, the trains were fast and the streets were full of life and people, people everywhere. Colourful clothes, busy cafes and big characters. Speaking of which, as they reached Sue’s basement flat in a four story terraced row, standing on top of the stoop framed by the huge front door was Two Litre Rita and her bicycle. A tall slender woman, Rita was what they’d call a handsome woman - powerfully beautiful, kind and warm and salt of the earth. Born and brought up on a narrow boat, she owned the Barley Mow pub in Docklands which she had won fair and square in an arm wrestle battle with some gangsters from Bethnal Green.
RITA: Where the fackin hell have you been? I flew down the commercial road and up the canal on me bike for naffink. I’ve been stood standing here for fackin ever. Fackin hell Sue you’d be late for your own funeral.
SUE: you’d be late if I was early.
Sue and Rita were squaddies together during WW2 and Tequila Sue famously saved the lives of the entire squadron, not intentionally, but by being late, and as a result they avoided a bomb explosion. From that fortuitous moment on it had given her a false sense of entitlement to be as late as she liked whenever she liked and for as long as she liked.
RITA: Sue is a Geordie Prudence, meaning she has both a superiority and an inferiority complex at the same time - she will kill for you, but she won’t die for you.
PART 4 COMMING SOON!
Thank you so much for reading, I hoped you enjoyed it. If you did and you would like to read the next instalment, I’d be extremely grateful if you could leave a ‘kind’ message in the comments, share it with your friends and follow me on any social platform you prefer. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
DISCLAIMER: This story is entirely fictional and bares no resemblance to any person or thing living or dead. Any similarity to anyone or thing is entirely coincidental. It is a work of fantasy , none of it is real, and I made it all up.
