Four

 

The room was full. They were all there to listen to a chap talk about gladiators. But before it began someone called out my name. I was surprised, but I did not allow myself to become excited. I guessed there were others in that room whose names had also been called out and checked off a list just to see if they were there.

The lady who had sold me the ticket for the event was so lovely. “I told you she’d be too modest to say anything,” she said.

The festival organiser was there and smiling. “You shouldn’t have paid for your ticket,” he said. “Have you come alone?”

The person who’d been sitting next to me looked hopeful as if I might claim back his ticket too, and then crestfallen when I confessed that yes I had come alone.

I was given a refund and then told that I’d won the short story writing competition.

I was thrilled.

“Oh dear,” the organiser said. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

I could have hugged him. I could have hugged everyone in that room. I was delighted.

“Just look surprised when they call your name out,” he said.

He points me out to a curly-white-haired-woman and I stand up to say hello. I get her mixed up in my mind with a woman I met the previous year as I gabble about how pleased I am.

Then the gladiator man begins his talk, and I’m aglow, but also nervous I will have to go to the front at the end of his talk and look surprised.

At the end of his talk when Rome is sacked and burnt, he calls my name and I step forward. He is a lovely person. He surprises me by picking out an obscure section of the story as if it was the main event. He is sweet about my description and I step back and listen and after his kind words he returns the story that I’d posted to them. There is applause and I sit down. People are now getting up to get their books signed by gladiator man.

The curly-white-haired-woman comes and sits next to me. “It’s not finished you know.” She had a school ma’am imperious voice.

I have no idea what she is talking about, then I realise she means the story. She goes on to criticise it at length. You don’t make enough of this or that. The ending was disappointing.

I try to take it all with a good grace. I am all “I see,” or “Oh!”

I’m disappointed. I wanted her to say I really liked this bit, or the turn of phrase there. I wanted her to be enthused with what she enjoyed but it is not to be.

I had been told that the gladiator man was the judge. As her criticisms continue I glance in his direction.

“I was the judge,” curly-white-haired-woman declares, as if reading mind.

“Oh,” I say.

Once my bubble is well and truly deflated she leaves, and I’m left wondering why my story was chosen as the winner if she felt like that when they have hundreds of stories to choose from in such competitions.

I thank the festival organiser again. He is in conversation, but I am desperate now to know something and unfortunately I rudely interrupt.

“How many entries were there?” I ask.

He blinks, “Four,” he says.

“Four!”

It seems it wasn’t well advertised. I only knew about it because I saw someone win it the previous year.

“Four,” I laugh.

But for my hollow victory I won £100.