Jones has a deep sense of something urgent lately. He cannot think what. The feeling is like a blind pimple he cannot bring to a head, lumpish and inert.
He sits attentive to nothing at his mahogany desk, bought thirty-eight years ago when he became editor of The Alperton Argus. His eyes drift from the battered keyboard, where the A for ‘Argus’ and ‘Alperton’ has worn clean, to the empty Word document blinking in expectation, to the brown paper bag beside his elbow. He knows what is in the bag: pastrami and pickles on rye, an apple and a protein bar.
He knows this because it is Tuesday.
Helen has swaddled the sandwich in honey-scented beeswax paper.
Everything is fine and in its correct order, he tells himself.
The reception phone rings and he now suspects it has been ringing for some time. His eyes drift to his half-open office door, through which he sees Mrs Leoni Stubbs, his longtime receptionist, sitting in her desk chair, still as a graveside mourner. The phone rings out abruptly. Jones is astounded. Mrs Stubbs has not moved a jot. Time was she would pounce on it. She is not her vivacious, chatty self of late.
Good.
She always was a bit too immoderately eager for his liking. It’s her time of life, he concludes, a woman of a certain age, that sort of thing. He doesn’t need to pry.
Jones catches himself nodding off and decides on a walk. He will promenade the main street and perhaps find a topic for this week’s editorial. He shares his intentions with Mrs Stubbs. Her gormless look of reply is disturbing.
A wash of unpleasantness ripples through his mind as he steps out into the morning sunshine. He identifies it numbly; disappointment. He pushes this phantom aside. He has nothing to be disappointed about. Has he not lived usefully: community leadership, marriage, two sons, cricket club president? He strides on.
Inside the barbershop, he has the distinct impression Mr Bertie Thoroughgood is having a senior moment, standing mid-store, scissors loose in one hand, forlornly studying the checkered linoleum floor. The hot towel machine steams robustly. The transistor radio is set to loud crackling. Jones’s arrival brings Bertie to life, but something is lacking in the old man’s banter. He takes forever over the haircut, one tiny snip at a time, his gaze oddly fixed on Jones’s neck.
Bertie is offering a complimentary shave, brandishing aloft a glistening cut-throat razor. Jones declines promptly and emphatically, making haste out the door. That sense of urgency breaks through at last, slick as sweat, as he hurries along the street. The good citizens of Alperton, normally phlegmatic admittedly, are all almost comatose until he passes near them. Old Ted Lunny, a fixture on a bench outside the bank, rises and begins hobbling after him. Soon Mrs Gloria Grub, the publican, joins the pursuit, literally lurching after him like a boneless cat. Jones’s brisk stride turns to a jog and then a bolt towards his wife’s bookshop, expecting safe refuge, rescue, perhaps a sobering cup of tea.
The bookshop door tinkles. He switches the sign to ‘closed’ and locks the door. Through the window, he sees a horror-procession advancing upon them; Mrs Stubbs jerking along in her office chair, Bertie crashing forward, gnashing at the air as if bobbing for invisible apples, ashen-faced members of the cricket club dragging their bats, the entire local amateur dramatic society lumbering erratically in blood-stained costumes, and Rotary Club officials trailing behind, twitching with wide-eyed intent.
‘Helen!’ he cries.
There his wife sits motionless, glassy-eyed, at the counter. The cash register gapes wide and stupefied. She stares at an unruly stack of unsold local memoirs.
‘I’ve been thinking, dear,’ she says, not looking at him. ‘Shouldn’t life be more exciting?’
He struggles to comprehend the question, given the situation. He gestures wildly through the bookshop window.
She blinks at him mildly. ‘I mean…haven’t you spent your entire life trying for same old, same old when actually—’
Then comes a splat. Ted Lunny’s gawping face is pressed flat against the bookshop window, one eyeball swivelling madly in their direction, drool slithering down the glass. Jones spots two cricketers approaching at speed with cricket bats held like battering rams.
He scrunches his eyes shut and screams, resigned to the impact. ‘Helen!’
‘Mr Jones?’ Mrs Stubbs calls as she peers into his office.
He scans about, breathless, at his mahogany desk, the computer screen and brown paper lunch bag. His mouth forms a silent letter ‘o’.
‘Everything all right?’ Mrs Stubbs asks.
‘Perfectly,’ Jones assures her.
He taps the keyboard to wake the screen. He writes the first truthful editorial copy of his career.
‘Editor Has Been Dead for Years’, the title reads.
© Tropical Writers Inc 2026