The Watering Hole

This essay / piece of flash fiction helped me get my A in my English Language O'level, so I will always be grateful to it. It can also be found on my WattPad page.

The Watering Hole by Lorna Wadge

Candy sat in the pub with a double whisky, as recommended by ‘Kerrang’, and her boyfriend, Syd. She looked deeply troubled; since waking earlier that afternoon she found she was profoundly concerned for the future of Rock’n’Roll.

Syd was irritated. He stood up.

‘Where are you going?’ Candy asked.

‘You’re so depressing,’ he growled and left.

Candy was on the verge of arguing that she had not said anything all evening, but she thought better of it.

‘He’ll see the light,’ Candy thought, obviously not on the same wavelength as Syd, who had a mind like a cess-pit.

Syd was in fact the cleverest boy Candy had gone out with, he was ‘brave’ enough to drive a car and was the fastest ‘Rizzla roller-upper’ in the Black Dog. Candy had said of this latter accomplishment ‘you’ve got to have something in this life.’

Supplying the music this Thursday night was a pretentious wimp, who played the synthesizer and sang of love lost, love found and love in similar predictable situations, all of which left Candy seething and in a good mind to select ‘rip it up’ on the juke-box, but now found she was too legless to move.

‘This Evan Williams is strong stuff,’ she concluded, while setting fire to the wrong end of a Marlboro cigarette and struggling with an awkward packet of cheese and onion flavoured crisps.

The time was nine o’clock and the bar was filling up fast. The sound of the synthesiser player became weedier as people chatted about mundane matters such as ‘the washing machine's been playing up again’ and ‘I must see the chiropodist.’

Candy reminisced about the old days.

‘I remember the great guitarists,’ she told herself, ‘Shame about Hendrix.’

She also remembered Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and a joke about necrophiliacs paying death duties.

‘Huh,’ Candy stood up and smoothed down her bourbon stained ‘Pop Art’ dress. She blinked, tried to focus her eyes on the wall and her mind on her usual worries and hang-ups and she staggered over to the ‘Way Out’.

When she had reached the door, she turned.

‘Save Rock’n’Roll,’ she screamed and spent ten minutes trying to make a dramatic exit by slamming the saloon bar door.