I was invited to read a short piece at a writers’ workshop, recently. The theme for the event was mental health and most of those in attendance were students of an online Masters programme in creative writing. There were some really good entries and I was more than a little nervous when my turn came… but they made me welcome. (Thanks for that…)

To match that mental health topic, I wrote a short story called Moodswing. To read for just five minutes, you have to write just 750 words: brutally short, but it does make for an interesting exercise in deciding what to leave out.

If I can get the hang of this truly nasty new WordPress editor… perhaps I can share the piece that I performed…

I bumped up my sincerity.

“Please,” I said, “let’s just give this one more chance!”

She scrolled, paused, scrolled and tapped twice.

I could guess what she’d called for. I use the same app: Moodswing. We’d both been regular users when we met – and on our first date.

That choice, though.

“Resolve?” I shook my head. “Then your mind’s already made up?”

She smiled sadly. “Yes.”

That was cruel. The sad smile: an emotion on a knife-edge of perfect calibration. How did she do that? I’ve searched all the menus and I’ve never found the right combination to let me project that. Those moments of acute equilibrium were what I first noticed about her.

“A mind made up,” I said. “How… old-fashioned!”

Bitterness? Where had that come from? I hadn’t asked for bitterness.

It felt almost natural – which was, in itself, distinctly unusual. I felt intruded upon; gatecrashed. Almost without thinking, I turned to Moodswing for an infusion of happy.

Once, there had been whole evenings when we’d dialled for happy together. We’d twirled on the waterfront, laughing in the rain, buzzed on borrowed endorphins.

Damn the expense, we used to say: we can worry about that tomorrow.

But tomorrow comes.

We were at the zoo when it happened. Admiring the animatronic polar bears.

“Don’t you ever worry about someday having to come down?” she asked me.

“I never worry about anything,” I laughed, waggling my mobile in front of her. Moodswing displayed a calm, carefree face with a hint of naughtiness.

It had been precisely the wrong thing to say. Emily had pondered for a while, still pawing at her mobile as we strolled among holographic chimpanzees. Presently, she said she was moving out.

Her phone showed strong levels of decisiveness, so I didn’t argue: not then. Plenty in the days ahead, as we went through the mess of unravelling lives that had snarled together. Perhaps my determination to remain upbeat undermined my appeals that she should stay.

At last, nothing remained. The flat was half-cleared and if I had allowed it I would have been miserable. Her one concession, that we could meet up once in a while, since (she said) we were parting as friends.

She joined me for coffee, though I spoiled it almost at once.

“I agreed to come here for old times’ sake,” she said, “but perhaps the old times are no good without the old feelings?”

“I have the old feelings saved,” I started to say, but I sensed that this was a blunder. I managed to change it at the last moment:

“I have the old feelings… still.”

Her distaste was obvious; moreso in the telltale orange glare of high-end organic LEDs. (A new mobile?)

Denial, I hazarded.

“I’ve hurt you,” I said – despite thinking that since hurt is avoidable, any hurt you choose to feel is basically self-inflicted – “but I can be better!”

“Perhaps,” she conceded, carefully, “if you weren’t so…”

She shrugged.

I tried to call up enthusiasm, but the damned app said I didn’t have enough credit. How much did I have left, then?

I swiped. Four hundred and fifty-two points. All that money and all my frequent user bonuses: how had I burned through it so quickly? Christ: somehow, I had to live through the remainder of the evening on four hundred and fifty-two points. That wasn’t even enough for mild optimism.

“Listen, Emily,” I played for time. “Do you mind if I… make a call?”

Two minutes: that was all I needed. To shift some funds around; load my Moodswing account with enough credit for some fortitude, maybe dignity…

“You can do what you like,” she said, but as I began to thank her she went on: “– with the rest of your life.”

She rose, the chair clattering away. She hadn’t touched the coffee and now she was heading for the door.

It was checkmate. I didn’t have enough credit to prepare myself for the conversation I wanted to have; didn’t have time to load up on credit before she disappeared into the night.

There must be something I can do, I thought, but nothing came to mind. Paralysed by indecision (another freebie, like the bitterness?) I watched her go.

Later, from the cut-price moods still available to me, I chose paranoia. It was better than feeling nothing at all – and might offer somebody that I could blame for all this.

ENDS