The Shocking Price of a Pair of Shoes by Andy Tilley

Author:Andy Tilley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Satire
Publisher: Troubador Publishing
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

15

Over the next few days me and Reggie finalise the details of Operation Highwire. We spend at least a couple of hours each day working up a list of materials, based on the various sketches and ideas that we exchange. It’s a welcome distraction for me from a nagging anxiety that’s not quite tangible enough to keep me up at night but does churn my stomach periodically, should my mind be freed to wander.

Reggie’s laptop does run out as expected but thankfully not before we have agreed the ‘devil in the detail’. Good job too because it turns out that the natural fibre rope I had ordered wasn’t to Reggie’s liking: too fibrous, too likely to grab and snag the wheel of the castor under which the cargo will hang. Luckily I was able to modify the order, swap it out for a lighter-gauge synthetic cord before my package was dispatched. So, Tuesday held good for the charger transfer as long as the wind doesn’t blow above a very specific twelve knots, whatever that is. This ‘go, no-go’ test is put in place at Reggie’s insistence, based on some ‘very hairy’ first-hand experience from his navy days.

It turns out that midshipman Reginald Mullen was indeed in the photograph of the ship-to-ship cargo transfer that he’d sent me earlier. When challenged to pick him out I had to concede defeat pretty quickly as the bright white sailors on deck all look the same: wiry teens with cropped, jet-black hair. Even when Reggie pointed out that he was the third person in a line of men pulling supplies across to HMS Bangor (the minesweeper on which he served) the fifty feet between us today and a gap of seventy-five years proved far too much for me to connect his two faces. HMS Bangor was also where Reggie had been given the gun I’d seen on his balcony wall, the name of his ship scorched into the shoulder stock by crewmates who had awarded it to him for a selfless act but about which he would say little more, other than that it had also earned him medals.

Reggie’s mission during the war had been to trawl explosive mines from the North Atlantic shipping routes and I guess that’s where he developed a, well, let’s say rather conservative sense of humour, dark enough to black out the horror that he witnessed. I think it’s a bit rich that these days, in spite of his bravery and sacrifice, we don’t allow Reggie to express those 1940s working-class values anymore, his right to do that having been a casualty of the war he won. Instead, we force him to keep hidden deep any thoughts that society deems to be politically incorrect. Thankfully, as trust builds between us, the real Reggie rises steadily to the surface: a warm and witty submariner coming up for air, his vessel crewed by gollywogs and krauts and women who like to do housework whilst their men drink beer and eat steak.

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