Biscuit - Flash Fiction

Mike just wanted to have his cake and eat it and I wasn’t the cake. I was just a biscuit that he liked to nibble on sometimes. I didn’t even know if I was the only biscuit he liked and was I a Bourbon cream? Or a Lincoln biscuit, the one you nibble the dots around the edges? Hope I wasn’t a Garibaldi, all those squashed flies!

I first met Mike down the Bull Hotel. Not at the bar, girls didn’t go in bars then, it was in the back room where there was a folk night every Friday.  The Folkies weren’t welcome in the bar either, not really but the landlord wanted their money so he sent a boy in to take orders, then carry them back on a mucky tray. If you didn’t have the right change for your drink it would cost you. Pints of mild or bitter was all they’d sell. I drank a half of mild, it was ten-pence and I could make it last all night. I used to go with Billy, he’s my brother and he’d buy me the half and tell me to make it last. I didn’t really mind, I was only sixteen and I wasn't that keen on the beer anyway.

I did like the music though. There was a girl singer, she had long, dark hair. I so wanted hair like hers, mine’s ginger and fluffy and I can’t hardly tie it in a ponytail, like the other girls there. Anyway this girl, she sang like Joan Baez and she was good but I preferred the guys singing. Then that night Mike appeared, with his guitar, he wasn’t a boy he was older and he had a man’s voice and he sang like Johnny Cash.

I got off with Mike, even though Billy said he was married and I should stay away from him. So when he came back, after I hadn’t seen him for weeks,  I just told him we was finished. So that was that.

Come to think of it Mike probably had thought I was a biscuit,  I was his ginger nut.