Sulking in the storeroom of the worst discount supermarket on the planet, Ange is discovered by her workmate Tina...
‘Christ. What’s up with you?’
Ange peeled her hands from her mazzy-splattered face and waved her friend away.
‘Fuck off, Tina.’ [No reason this needs its own paragraph.]
‘Okay. Suit yourself...’
She watched Tina hop away over the detergent palettes and thought again. Her insides hurt and she was mad with her supervisor - but it wasn’t Tina’s fault. She’d only asked.
‘Ti.’
‘What?’
‘Soz.’
For a moment, there was silence, and then, footsteps.
‘Duck’s back, gal,’ said Tina, peeping from behind the racking. ‘Don’t tell me. You’ve been bollocked again, ain’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Has she sacked you or what?’
‘Fuck off, has she. I’ve still got one written warning left and she knows it, the fucking cow.’
‘What, then?’
‘It’s them tinned prunes she had me stacking. I rammed the trolley into some fucker’s guide dog.’
‘Christ!’
‘Not on purpose, you dozy bleeder. It was an accident.’
She [Who?] wiped her hands on her overall and wrestled a crumpled cigarette packet from her jeans.
‘You want one?’ [No need for a paragraph for this, either.]
‘Go on then.’
Tina pulled up a sack of cat litter beside her and they both leant back against the wall, blasting at their fags till the embers squealed.
‘What about the dog?’
‘Fuckin’ ada, Ti. Who gives a fuckin’ shit about the pissin’ dog? It ain’t dead. Alright? And it ain’t just been fuckin’ bollocked, neither, ta very much.’
‘Sorry.’ [Soz?]
‘Nah. You’re right. It was just its tail, that’s all. Didn’t stop the woman going mad, though. She must have thought some fucking kid had kicked it or summat. That’s when You-Know-Who come tearing out from the freezer section. It’s the third time she’s had me since yesterday.’
Tina stubbed out her cigarette and tossed a stick of gum into her mouth.
‘Fancy going out on the piss at the weekend? Nothing like a shag to cheer you up.’ [No new paragraph. What Ti says can go along with what Ti does.]
--Whirlochre
[I should have specified that submissions were to be in English. Hey, just kidding. Actually, I find the scene more interesting in the dialect. But let us know who's talking occasionally.]
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13 comments:
it's pallets, not palettes. Unless it's a much more eclectic store than I realized.
This one made me laugh.
A good read, WO. I think I've met these women, in a Tesco's in Swansea.
I think I've met them too. Snappy and intriguing setup, and I'd read a bit further out of curiosity.
Paragraphing dialogue with the actions of the person speaking it, instead of separating them, would have eased my intermittent confusion, though. Has somebody taken too much to heart the 'writing rule' about starting a new paragraph whenever a new character speaks?
I have a relative who works at Sam's Club with these two gals. It's scary how true to life they are, accent and all.
Great dialect, great attitude. Liking it muchly. One thing: you dozy 'bleeder' didn't seem to fit. 'cow'? 'pillock'?, 'bitch'?
I thought I had a good handle on the dialect (lived in England for a year) but some of the terms mystified me. Mazzy-splattered meant nothing to me. I know what bollocks are, and what "oh, bollocks!" means, but I don't know what it means to be bollocked. At first I thought "fired," from the context, but then she said she wasn't. I know what it means to be completely pissed after a night out, or to be pissed on by rain, but "going out on the piss" and how it relates to being shagged eludes me.
So, the dialogue felt very real and funny, but a whole book of this would tire my brain after a while--you can't exactly look this stuff up in a dictionary.
Tesco's in Swansea? That's posh! Rumour has it they serenade you with Tom Jones while you stock up on loo roll.
I'm glad the girls sound authentic - something very bizarre happens to one of them later on and she needs to enter the scenario sound as a pound.
Thanks for the formatting and typo alerts - I've just ordered another couple of alarms to hang over my writing desk.
It's intersting, as I read through comments elsewhere, that the subject of dialogue/accent has arisen. It's annoying in SF novels when the characters have their own language and the final 50 pages of the book are a mini dictionary, but no-one speaks the Queen's English (or the President's American)* all of the time and most speak it none of the time. Is this a Q&A for EE, I wonder? The acceptable use of dialect/accent? I mention this because all of the 'ain'ts' in this snippet have been toned down from (their more realistic sounding) 'een'ts'.
* !
I LOVED this!!
Toward the end, I wanted more action/description with the dialogue, but other than that I thought this was great!
(I just read an opening you submitted a few weeks ago, but I didn't comment on it back then. I liked your opening too)
Point taken, Ali - but with no universal language of discourse to account for every dialect, it's difficult to know what to do.
If you were Simon Cowell's hairstylist and you accidentally cut off one of his ears, you'd 'get a good bollocking' before he sacked you, and though 'dressing down' might be more universally decipherable, it wouldn't fit in here amongst the bleeders, oohyahs and ain'ts. This was one of the reasons I submitted this - to see how the verknackerular would play.
As for going on the piss and getting shagged - it's a weekend hobby for most UK twentysomethings, especially if they're holidaying in Ibiza as a gang: you drink until you can hardly stand, you find someone to have sex with and then you throw up all over them.
Ha! WO, I'm pretty sure that may have happened (to other people, of course) when I was in my twenties here in la la land - but I can't remember all that clearly.
Robin
I enjoyed the exchange between the two. We learn a lot about their world and attitudes from the dialog, which is great. I liked the strong slang element, but did have to work at following the conversation. Terms like "on the piss" aren't used this side of the pond, but we can figure it out from context.
The pace of the dialog is great. Even if you're messing with us and made up half the words, it was enjoyable.
Bill H.
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