A big thank you to everyone who entered our short story competition to celebrate the launch of the Guardian Masterclasses blog. We received a huge number of submissions in response to our writing prompt – and were blown away by the quality of your stories.
The challenge was to write a short story with this line as the first sentence:
He spent his last £30 on a plate of oysters and a glass of champagne.
We received stories of romance, crime, emotional trauma and human triumph. Over copious amounts of coffee, the Guardian Masterclasses team read all of your stories and decided upon one winner and two runners-up.
Congratulations to Geoff Lavender who has won a masterclass of his choice worth up to £450!
And well done to runners-up Ruby Kitching and Robert Duncan who have received a £99 course each.
See below for Geoff, Ruby and Robert’s stories. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did!
The winner
Geoff Lavender
He spent his last £30 on a plate of oysters and a glass of champagne. He’d had it up to here with the job centre, the sanctions, the weekly humiliation, the sheer pettiness of it all. No more. Fuck the lot of them.
He sat in his coat at a marble-topped table, swilling the last mouthful of champagne around in his glass. No more of this either.
He left the oyster bar and entered the alleyway under a darkening sky. It was late afternoon. Dusk. He buttoned his coat and made for the seafront. He used to come here as a child, usually with his grandparents who would bring him on the coach from their home in Acton. Years later, he would come here with his wife, Janice, catching the train from Victoria on a Saturday morning and returning late in the evening, tipsy from all-day drinking. They were happy back then.
Palace Pier seemed to have shut down for the winter. He’d been hoping for lights and music, the fairground in full swing. He and Janice had had some good times here. He descended the steps to find most of the shops and cafes in Kings Road Arches closed. I could murder a pint, he thought. But he knew full well that, if he had money in his pocket, it wouldn’t stop at one drink. That’d been his problem - or one of them - for a while.
Above him the incessant roar of traffic on the main road. To his left, another kind of roar, as waves broke on pebbles, then receded with a raucous sigh. It was hard going, walking on the pebbles, but he was in no hurry. At one point, about halfway to the water’s edge, the beach shelved steeply and he found himself pitching forward and rolling down the slope. He got to his feet, laughing. He could taste blood in his mouth. He felt ridiculous. Surely he couldn’t bugger this up as well.
The note Janice left him had been short and to the point. She’d never been one to waste words. A closed book in many ways.
I can’t live like this any more.
Love, Jan.
Well, he couldn’t live like this any more either, which was why he was staggering around on an empty beach in the middle of winter like Lear on the heath.
He stood at the water’s edge waiting for the first wave to hit him. It was nearly dark. Above the horizon the sky was salmon pink, turning to grey-blue behind the skeletal remains of West Pier. The water was up to his calves now. It was even colder than he’d imagined. Above West Pier he noticed for the first time a murmuration of starlings, something he’d heard about but never seen before. There was something miraculous about these unremarkable birds, some of them from as far away as Russia, putting on this display just for him. It almost made you glad to be alive.
It was dark now. The sea was up to his waist. There were stars in the sky.
Runner-up #1
Ruby Kitching
He spent his last £30 on a plate of oysters and a glass of champagne. Decadent Graham had never been, and placing such a fancy order at the City bar was his last attempt to coax a more sophisticated man out of the Yorkshire lad.
The train was due to leave in twenty minutes and instead of stocking up on a more sensibly priced sandwich, packet of crisps and drink combo, he had opted to splash out on a meal, which would neither satisfy his appetite, nor quench his thirst.
After he’d placed the order, he imagined how his more extreme northern alter ego would have handled the situation:
“Hold the pork scratchings and pint of ale, mucker. Half a dozen oysters and your finest champagne (for under thirty quid) please!”
The thought made him chuckle out loud.
After spending twelve years in London trying to suss the place and its people out, he was returning to his motherland.
It wasn’t his girlfriend, Tania; it wasn’t the job. The south just never felt right. It was always too warm.
Ordering champagne and oysters was the sort of thing Tania had wanted to do many times, but Graham had scoffed at the idea of paying so much for a drink that was more gas than alcohol and consuming what appeared to be a malformed foetus in a crusty shell.
He pictured her balancing a tray in one hand, which was piled up with oysters and two glasses of bubbly, much like the character in that Dr Seuss book, “Green Eggs and Ham”.
“You may like them. You will see. You may like them in a tree!”
Tania was a giggly mass of blonde wavy curls and long legs and her ability to brighten up a room had complemented his darkness. But even he could tell that her light was dimming the longer she was with him. He’d made the decision to break up with her yesterday. Setting them both free, was how he saw it.
When he first arrived in the Big Smoke - when the bustle and mayhem was noticeable to him, and walking down Oxford Street felt like crowd-surfing at a rock concert - he was in awe of London. Its vibrancy, its history and the amazing views across the Thames, had taken his breath away.
Whether it was London, or whether it was something hardwired into him, he was never able to settle and was always looking back and seldom forward. So, soon after New Year (when the snow had failed to settle, again) Graham gave into his yearning to return to Yorkshire and its proper snow and life-affirming blasts of cold air.
He looked around the dimly lit room and took in its tile-clad walls and worn out tables as the waiter presented him with the oysters and champagne.
“Try them! Try them! And you may. Try them and you may, I say.”
Did the waiter really whisper those words? Part-time barman; part-time mind-reading cabaret act - anything was possible in London - it was one of the reasons he had stayed for so long, just waiting for the anything, the something, to happen.
He gazed down at the plate, his stomach slowly turning over with the prospect of consuming the alien flesh, and the growing anxiety of looking silly in the process. He checked his watch and was thankful that the time was fast approaching when he would have to leave.
He picked up a shell. He placed it down. He took the tiniest sip of champagne, his lips unnaturally pursed to fit into the narrow flute. He picked up his bag and the winter coat that had never been worn in all the years he had lived and worked in the capital.
He closed his eyes and pictured the warm vapour of his breath bleaching the cold air white, the mist still hanging above the moist green fields as he walked back to the house. The fire blazing and the pot still warm. All Graham could think of was how great it would feel to come in from the cold.
Runner-up #2
Robert Duncan
He spent his last £30 on a plate of oysters and a glass of champagne. Jimmy would have approved.
“One day, Eric”, he’d said, “the world will be my oyster. And on that day, I will treat you to a plate of oysters and a glass of champagne.”
“I’d sooner have a fish supper and a glass of whisky”, he’d said. “And spend the rest on paintings and books.”
“Ah, you see the fish supper as the definitive working class dish”, said Jimmy. “You despise oysters because you associate them with privilege and ostentation. But 250 years ago, oysters were a staple of poor folks’ diet hereabouts. They took them from the Forth like mussels or buckies. The oyster cellar was the fish and chip shop of its day and Robert Fergusson’s ‘Caller Oysters’ were ten a penny.”
“Aye, that was then.”
But Jimmy died. He was gripped by grief. Not AIDS, with the dignity he had sometimes seen amongst his friends. Not cancer, which gave you time to talk and prepare at least. No. Just a stupid heart attack and he was gone. Not half a mile away, while doing his round.
And then the family came in. No will, and no divorce, so no defence against them. They set about reclaiming Jimmy with pitiless politeness.
The wife took charge, and sent in the son and daughter to sort out Jimmy’s things. He hadn’t a legal leg to stand on. They insisted on organising the funeral, wouldn’t let him pay a penny. But it wasn’t generosity. It was the first brutal step towards taking him back.
He would have had him cremated and scattered his ashes, if he could, from the train, going over the old red bridge. Or at least in the waters beneath it, free to swirl away to wherever the tides took him. They had him buried in the clay of a city cemetery. They put up a stone with their names and his, which they could visit every so often to reassure themselves he was still in his place. Even better, they knew that if Eric wanted to be with him, he too would have to come here, where they had put him, and read their names.
Civilised. Polite. Killing.
Of course, the flat had to be sold, so that the children could have Jimmy’s share. His possessions - those they saw fit - had to be sold. They took a few things, they said, for old time’s sake, for the memories. But most of all, they took him back - back from Eric. Then they said goodbye. Thank you and goodbye. And even the thank-you was a cold knife, an unacknowledged but conscious act of murder.
Then they were gone. And he was alone, for the first time in fifteen years. For the first time since he opened the door to take delivery of the book too big to go through the letter-box. The first time he set eyes on Jimmy.
They had their money. They had buried the body. They thought they had taken everything. But he had the memories. And there were some things they couldn’t claim. Some books. Some pictures. Some CDs they couldn’t say were Jimmy’s and, because their strategy was to kill without showing emotion, they couldn’t ask or argue about. Those they left. And the second bed - they didn’t even want to think about that.
He gave the bed to the community furniture service. Then he went through the rest of Jimmy’s things and picked out some that hadn’t been theirs long enough to become part of them.
They raised £65. The last of Jimmy’s money.
He dedicated a tree in Conon Wood, in Uig, where they went on holiday; and another in Glen Devon, where they’d often walked. £15 each. He gave £5 to the plant-a-tree fund of the school across the road from their old flat. They said they would plant a sapling for every £5 raised.
Then he went down to the Caller Oysters bar in South Queensferry. Jimmy would have been happy. He ate the plateful of oysters slowly, sipping the chilled champagne and gazing across the waters of the Firth of Forth, past the old bridge, towards Fife.
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