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The Melancholy Of Virginia Sterret: Shortbread's Light Bite

Published 9 months ago

For today's Light Bite we have another brilliant story from the very talented Michael Dhillon. 

The Melancholy Of Virginia Sterret by Michael Dhillon

Virginia Sterret peered over the cliff edge and sensed gravity’s approaching victory as urine trickled down her inside leg. She’d anticipated a sense of the sublime when presented with a bird’s eye view of Beachy Head’s five-hundred foot suicide drop, but had she been told a minute earlier it would look like this she might have walked back to Eastbourne and to a train that would return her to the Ikea comfort of her Balham apartment.

‘Do you have to do this?’ she murmured.

Knowing full well she had no choice, she launched herself into the void.

·

She’d decided to end things the previous evening, a couple of hours after the police knocked on her front door. Clambering from the bathroom window of her first floor apartment and shinning down a drainpipe to her neighbour’s garden, she’d struggled over barbwire-topped panel fencing and stumbled along the half-mile of railway track to Clapham Junction. The 6.32 to Eastbourne from platform 13 had been packed, and she’d sought sanctuary from Standard readers and ticket inspectors in a toilet cubicle.

It hadn’t meant to be like this but Wednesday’s South London Press had dubbed her the Shagging Headmistress of Tooting High which was blatantly untrue considering her lowly status of simple art teacher. But they’d got the first word right: in the past year she’d seduced ninety-six students. She’d been suspended later that day but it was another twenty-four hours before the boys in blue arrived on her doorstep.

Virginia blamed the late Silas Marjoriebanks – her art teacher more than twenty years earlier at Tooting High who’d believed himself a late-twentieth century Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and considered it his duty to deflower impressionable young women or – as the law saw it – girls. Silas’ paint-encrusted fingers unravelled the complexity of Virginia’s purity during a free period in late July 1992 – a hurried encounter within the art-supply cupboard – when he whispered sweet nothings into his student’s cockleshell ear. Careless of the PVA glue and coloured tissue paper adhering to her behind Virginia had been mesmerised by her tutor’s eloquence.

‘Jugenstil,’ he’d gasped. ‘Stile Liberty.’

When Silas murmured Art Nouveau Virginia’s spine tingled with freezing pleasure and their fates were determined. That night they fled Tooting for Paris – the birth place of Art Nouveau – an elopement inspiring a continent-wide search lasting six months. By which time Silas had bounced his nubile lover off the walls and ceilings of apartments in each of Paris’ twenty arrondissements and Virginia knew every trick in the nymphomaniac handbook.

Silas’ funds didn’t stretch to purchasing sufficient condoms to cover his cock for all couplings so it was no surprise when Virginia reported she’d skipped a period. The occasion only briefly preceded French police storming the apartment and pummelling Silas to within an inch of his life then dragging him to the nearest commissariat de police and extinguishing the remainder.

Within twenty-four hours of being reunited with her parents in Tooting, Virginia was having the slate sucked clean at nearby St George’s. In memory of Silas she named the terminated foetus Jugenstil – German for youth style.

If Virginia’s parents hoped to kill their daughter’s passion for older men sending her to Moriarty’s Corrective Crammer School of Roehampton did the trick. Moriarty and his staff of ageing bachelors and spinsters were so vile it wasn’t until the new millennium that Virginia could pass anyone over fifty in the street without wishing to dispatch them beneath the wheels of an approaching Routemaster. But her parents were ignorant of the seed – a passion for Art Nouveau – that had been sown in Virginia’s soul. A passion that grew stronger each time she beheld Edward Everard’s façade to Moriarty’s – winged figures symbolising the spirits of youth and learning and knowledge. And at night – beneath her William Morris stencil duvet – she’d masturbate over Everad’s exterior until she passed out. By her own admission Virginia was an unusual girl.

When Virginia was released into the wild – an Art History degree at Stockwell’s piss poor University of South London – the males and females of the species didn’t stand a chance.

By then she’d assumed an affinity with her name sake – Virginia Frances Sterret (1900-31) an American artist and illustrator whose delicate pictures of haunting loneliness provided a window to an alternative world.

Styling both hair and clothes in accordance with her muse Virginia swept into lecture halls believing she captured the attention of fellow students because of her genius. She never twigged it had more to do with her ill-fitting clothes and the inevitability that at least one breast was always on show.

In between sipping tea from bone china cups at Liberty’s café and infrequent visits to the university’s Portakabin library Virginia founded The Art Nouveau Society – a non-starter in south-west – and published the Art Nouveau Manifesto. The author told anyone prepared to listen that the document – detailing how decaying political and societal institutions would be transformed by an Art Nouveau inspired New World Order – would prove as important to history as Marx. The handful of people who bothered to read it refrained from advising Virginia to get a life.

But it was between the sheets where Virginia enjoyed her greatest success. Whilst straddling or spreading for fifteen hundred lovers she lectured on Art Nouveau’s influence on fashion and design and photography and art. Despite the panting and grunting of young men and women whose features and facial hair echoed Gaudi and Mucha and Beardsley and Toulouse-Lautrec Virginia refused to be diverted from her mission.

Which raises an important question: was Virginia’s mission to get Art Nouveau out of bed or sexual partners into her own? It’s perhaps fair to suggest both were inextricably linked long before Virginia – in possession of a third class degree and unemployable – decided to become a teacher.

Her first teaching post was in Hounslow’s mixed secondary. She was initially popular but it wasn’t long before art lessons became indoctrination sessions and opportunities for seduction. The headmaster encouraged Virginia’s leaving with the promise of a good reference.

A two year stint in Croydon followed – again things began well and she succeeded in convincing a progressive headmistress to decorate the dining hall in a manner sympathetic to Art Nouveau. But her relationship with an Aubrey Beardsley look-a-like proved her downfall when the girl’s mother caught them kissing behind the bike shed and threatened to involve the police.

Brief postings in Mitcham and Wembley and East Grinstead soured. Longer periods in Richmond and Watford proved sweeter. But she lasted less than a week in Barnes where some parents had named their children Mango or Geranium or Clive.

Only when she returned to Tooting High – initially as a supply teacher and later a permanent member of staff – did Virginia experience any sense of belonging. Perhaps it was the memory of sitting within those classrooms. Or the ghost of Silas Marjoriebanks that was rumoured to stalk the corridors. Most likely however was the spine tingling pleasure whenever she set foot in the art-supply cupboard – the location of her deflowering and introduction to Art Nouveau.

The pubescent boys and girls who caught her eye didn’t stand a chance.

·

Slinking through the ticket-barrier in a manner she’d previously considered the reserve of Streatham’s hooded reprobates Virginia ducked through the station exit and headed for the nearest pub.

Tucking herself into a quiet corner of The Sow and Piglets she sipped two pints of lager and nibbled a packet of crisps.

An enormous oil painting of Beachy Head dominated the wall behind the bar. Some joker had drawn a matchstick man peering down from the cliff top to where another figure lay bent and twisted upon the shingle beach.

‘This is the end,’ she whispered.

Wishing not to spend her final night beneath the stars she enquired of the landlord where a half-decent hotel could be found. Chuckling slyly he directed her to The Regency.

The sign outside The Regency promised family-run friendliness. The thick wedge of dust topping the blinking pink Vacancies sign in the front window promised a harsher reality: orange and purple carpeting in the entrance hall and black and white striped wallpaper and a framed painting of a galloping unicorn and Five Star’s System Addict piped through miniature speakers connected to a Sony Walkman circa 1985.

‘Do you require a room?’ a voice enquired.

With creaking knees a painfully thin and grey skinned man of indeterminate age emerged from behind the reception desk. Yellow incisors sprouted from between his thin lips.

With a nod Virginia approached and the man presented a room key.

‘If you can’t sleep,’ he grinned, ‘call me. I enjoy the intimacy of night.’

Without bothering to undress Virginia slipped beneath the coarse blankets. She craved sleep but a guest in the adjoining room groaned their way through hourly bowel-evacuations of such ferocity Virginia’s perineum throbbed in sympathy – the building’s plumbing rattled and plonked – and it wasn’t until the dirty dishwater light of day revealed her chamber for what it was – an eight-by-ten squeeze of sagging single bed and mismatched furniture and cracked corner sink – that she fell asleep.

She missed breakfast but decided upon a final meal. A leaflet in The Regency’s entrance hall lauding Eastbourne’s culinary delights caught her eye and Gismonda – a Michelin-starred establishment specialising in seafood less that a mile from her chosen site of death – was her inevitable choice.

Twenty minutes later the maitre d’ was sliding a chair beneath her lowering buttocks and presenting a wine list as imposing as an Ikea catalogue. Careless of the two-hundred pound price tag she ordered a bottle of the 1945 Chateau Soixante-Neuf.

She started with scallops upon black pudding and pea puree. Then blackened cod with Soya beans and butter sauce.

Her enjoyment was disturbed by a diminutive gentleman at a nearby table who was doing a good job at getting angry with a waitress. His tiny hands – grasping the cutlery like an infant – thumped the table top. His loafered feet swung to-and-fro a good twelve inches from the ground. His thick-rimmed spectacles repeatedly slipped down his nose which served only to antagonise him further.

‘Who is that?’ Virginia enquired of her waiter when he next refilled her wine glass.

‘One of the Two Ronnies,’ he murmured.

‘Which one?’ she queried.

‘The live one,’ the waiter smiled politely.

‘He’s very-’

‘Angry?’ he suggested. ‘Lamentably so.’

At which point he left Virginia to enjoy her meal which was concluded with dark chocolate torte and coffee. When she departed – having told the maitre d’ it was unlikely she’d taste better food – the surviving Ronnie was still going strong.

She walked the green mile to the cliff top. Only for a moment was she diverted from her purpose – when she considered the effect her actions would have upon her parents and elder sister. Her parents would be devastated but would drink their way through the pain – as they had with every disappointment in life. And she hadn’t seen her sister in years – not since she’d seduced and slept with her fifteen year old son.

As she approached the cliff edge Art Nouveau tugged her sleeve – suggesting she turn around and stop being foolish. But Virginia smiled and murmured that every thing would be okay – that Art Nouveau didn’t need her.

‘You’re old enough to look after yourself,’ she said shaking herself free. ‘Just remember me.’

She took the final step to the cliff edge and felt her bladder contract.

·

As Virginia approached her terminal velocity, her eyesight began to fail. The wind punched her ears and filled her throat. She’d imagined going this way would be painless – that the enormity of the anticipated impact would prove too much for her heart or brain and her body would simply switch off. But that wasn’t happening – she was experiencing terror beyond words and the shingle beach was getting closer and closer…

Time stopped. The air pummelled her body but her vision cleared and her breathing slowed. Directly below her a diminutive gentleman was stamping across the shingle. His tiny hands were a blur at the ends of arms that whirled propeller-like. His thick-rimmed spectacles repeatedly slipped down his nose which served only to antagonise him further.

‘Do you have to do this?’ she asked of an unseen power who at that moment removed their finger from the pause button.

For a split second she could believe the answer was no. But then she realised it was too late. So too for the diminutive gentleman whose body would be discovered beneath the unbruised but cold body of Virginia Sterret.

If you have enjoyed reading The Melancholy Of Virginia Sterret, please let the author know. 

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