Milky
an excerpt

Maybe not so well thought out, any of this. I could’ve taken a bus, or my own car, for that matter, but I came in with Kate. My sister infamously takes an extraordinarily long time to choose between things like blue or red plastic cups for parties. She takes long enough to choose movies – a half hour is her standing record (and that when she was running late) – I can’t imagine the thought she puts into an engagement party. And really, I’ve been a good sister. Supportive. But she’s in her own world at the moment, and after quite a loud argument, she’s dumped me here for an hour.
I start bouncing on my toes and wrap my arms around my jumper. Damn English weather. It was warmer, earlier; I don’t have a rain-coat or umbrella, even though my cousin, Tobin, re-minds me, every time I so much as pass a door, to bring one just in case; all weather is mis-chievous.
I’m placing bets she’ll be twenty minutes, now.
The street becomes shiny with drizzles of rain and everything is touched with dark blue. Thick and clumpy clouds build and grumble. And then, without warning me, the entire sky, city-wide, erupts in driving, pulsating rain, falling in little ice-cold explosions on my head.
‘Fine,’ I mutter. My voice is completely swallowed in the clatter of rain on the pavement and the tin roof. Icy cold water drenches me through in seconds; it pours down my collar.
Torn between the confrontation of being a drowned-rat with pink hair plastered to her face inside the music store again, or the prospect of standing and shivering in the rain for another twenty minutes before her sister arrived, Meg chose the lesser of two evils, and remained firmly on the steps, facing a brewing typhoon.
I glare up at the sky as if willing it to try something with me. My teeth chatter. I look anxiously down the street and back at the shop, and pull up my collar, releasing a little stream against my back.
What could one do when the only place to go for shelter was those dark and arching doors leading back into a deep hall of ridicule? For the third time anime-head would enter the gloaming. Faces would turn. Laughter would reach clear to the ceiling. There’s that freak again! Hide the children! Some would freak out and escape, others, point and snicker.
Shut up. It’d be nice if, for once, you’d shut up.
Steam escapes my mouth. The rain gets a bit dramatic. I shut my eyes and curse myself.
Then, quite inexplicably, the rain stops. Or I stop feeling it, one of the two.
I give a pathetically helpless look around to understand what’s going on now. The first thing I notice is a big blue umbrella (or, as the English would say, ‘a big blue brolly’. I make it my business to know that.) The second thing I notice, quite slowly, I might add, is that I’m under it. The third and last thing I notice, slower still, is that someone’s holding it.
Let’s now observe as this rare species of reindeer, speckled with peculiar traces of pink, notices her precarious position in the open grazing field has been compromised by the same ferocious stalking lion that threatened to devour her only minutes earlier.
I stifle another jump and give the umbrella-holder a wild glare.
‘Nasty weather, isn’t it?’ the umbrella-holder says with a low whistle.
Too taken with shivering to say something witty enough that it would make everything sud-denly not awkward, I consider galloping gallantly away across the street, decide against it, and muster up a one-word response. ‘Yeah.’
There’s what Tobin would call a pregnant pause (an expression he finds so entertaining, every time it’s said he’ll remind us just how much he finds it entertaining), and I feel the need to explain what the hell I’m doing.
‘I’m not actually standing in the rain,’ I explain, teeth chattering, and watch the side of his face and his hair matted with rain, and realise that, with the umbrella, that much has become fairly obvious. ‘I’m uh... singing. And dancing. In the rain. Rehearsing for a play.’ If you were under the assumption writers are naturally talented at comebacks and charming conversation, you’d be horribly mistaken.
‘Will you be needing an umbrella?’ he asks seriously.
Continuing to shiver, I attempt to give him a baffled look. ‘Oh, no... No, I’m alright.’ I really am alright. Really.
The rain thickens over the umbrella and threatens to create a flash-flood.
‘Er, how about you keep this for a while?’
‘No, no. I’ll be right.’
‘Never seemed to hurt Gene Kelly’s technique.’
We stand in the rain and a surprisingly comfortable silence settles between us.
‘Are you waiting for someone, then?’ he asks, searching into the rain for nothing in particular.
‘I think I’m walking.’
The rain begs to differ, and actually seems to have a laugh at me.
‘D’you need a lift somewhere?’ He checks his watch. ‘I’m off in about five minutes. Unless I’m spotted first, of course...’
‘No, that’s fine,’ I insist and sneeze, less small than the last. ‘That was unintentional, I swear...’
The umbrella-holder laughs and his fiercely blue eyes soften. ‘Well, if you’re walking, you really should keep this,’ he insists back and hands me the umbrella.
‘Oh, I wasn’t trying to...’
He shakes his head. ‘You can bring it back to me next time.’
The thought struck terror in her heart. What struck further terror was that she wouldn’t have minded that much.
There’s one of those pregnant pauses again. If I keep the umbrella, do I have an obligation to come back? The umbrella casts a colourful shadow over his face and draws squiggly patterns on his cheeks. ‘Alright. I will,’ I say.
He smiles warmly in response and straightens up his collar. ‘What’s your name, by the way?’
Thoroughly distracted by his smile, I try very hard to remember what my name was again, and exactly why I have the chance to wonder. I don’t usually get that far. ‘Why don’t you tell me yours?’ I answer, confused as to whether I’m being coy, or paranoid, or both.
He hesitates. ‘Phwoar... I’ll tell you what; if you bring back my umbrella, then I’ll tell you.’
‘Why?’
‘Well I can’t very well be talking to strangers, can I?’ He breaks into a cheeky grin, then mouths goodbye, ducks under his coat and makes a break for it to the top of the stairs.
Naturally, it’s exactly now, when all is said and done, that a car pulls up in a flash-flood puddle and blares the horn. I stare at the umbrella curiously. Might as well keep it. You never know when you need a blue umbrella.