Fiction

Trin Trin Trin

I’ll tell you about Brit. She is medium build, tall, likes her hands but feels that her feet don’t live up to her height. For many years she wore her hair cropped short like a little helmet and dyed a glossy black. A long time ago, however, when she was still very young, a much older woman who Brit then worked with at a busy sandwich shop had said that she’d regretted hiding her silver hair for so many years with dyes, so Brit stopped dying her hair once it was more or less all grey.

Everyone in the world seemed to flood into the sandwich shop on their lunchbreak. Another woman working there was named Sandra. She was about the same age or a couple of years younger than Brit and was much more politically astute than Brit could ever have hope to be. One day, just before the lunch customers scrambled through the door, Brit and Sandra were talking about the musician John Coltrane.

Although Brit knew perfectly well that his name was John Coltrane, she’d once said it when she’d been a little girl as John Coltrin and somehow it had stuck in such a way that at times when she was within the bubble of a conversation she wasn’t entirely comfortable with, out it would come as John Coltrin. Sandra was visibly furious after hearing Brit mispronounce the musician’s name a second time and blurted out, it’s Coltrane not Coltrin. Trin Trin Trin, Sandra said, clutching her head in venomous disbelief. The syllables were little punches in Brit’s throat.

Even today, so many years later, certain sounds restore the echo of the Trin Trin Trin, such as an empty drink can blowing across a hard surface or when schoolchildren incessantly pull at the cable on the tram. The ding ding ding becomes the Trin Trin Trin. If at such a time she’s seated, she wants to slide onto the ground, wrap her arms around her legs and tuck her fingers into her socks at the shame and humiliation. But I knew how to say his name, she’ll say to herself.

Her every incongruous utterance and every stupid little thing she’s ever done will then charge through her consciousness in pursuit of the Trin Trin Trin. This glut of error is the grand sum of her self. Down on the floor, the acid first melts away her skin, dissolving her ears so she can’t hear the sounds that become the Trin Trin Trin. Then her flesh and finally her organs turn to a fine slurry and vanish entirely, including her brain and its wretched store of memory. She is that neat, small pellet of bones an owl coughs up after eating a mouse.

Now will I tell you about Wesley. Wesley has thick ankles that he didn’t like when he was an adolescent, as they instantly gave away his lack of athleticism, but that now he likes, as they seem to suggest a certain stability. He has a wide, generous face. Sometimes he feels that he can be generous, but when he feels less generous this face of his only gets him into trouble. Although he has always thought of himself as easygoing, he’s never been comfortable in linen, the way it seems to airily float above the skin. He prefers a thicker, coarser material.

Recently he’s noticed a certain lack of awareness. He’ll be in a supermarket looking at the various types of soap, say, and someone behind him who he hadn’t seen approach will start tut-tutting him for blocking the entire aisle. When did this begin happening, this failure to notice the presence of others, he wonders? After the first few times, he tried to make a joke of it by waving his arms around like a goalkeeper to block their way, but this only made the other person more agitated. Now when he’s doing such mindless activities in public, he reminds himself to look around to see if he’s blocking anybody’s path.

This is the story I was telling you about. Brit and Wesley know each other and have been playing badminton at a local sports hall together for almost three years now. They play casually, with neither one of them playing too hard to win. Sometimes they roughly keep score but most of the time they don’t.

The other day when they were playing, the shuttlecock flew high up in the air and suddenly Wesley moved to slam it with all his might, but somehow after he swung he felt the shuttlecock land softly on his shoulder before it fell to the floor of the court.

Wesley knew that Brit was giggling in solidarity with him, but all the same he was embarrassed. He saw himself with his right foot a little off the ground and turned out, the knee bent, looking dainty when really he had been trying his best in that brief moment to look strong. After they finished playing, although he was evidently flustered, Wesley was unusually chatty with her, perhaps to bury his shame beneath conversation. Charmed by his embarrassment and the clumsy way he’d moved on court, Brit was just as talkative.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 31, 2025 as "Trin Trin Trin".

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