Sophie was inspired to write ‘Coffee’ after watching a programme on coercive control. She said: ‘It reminded me of experiencing, as a younger woman, the discomfort of being drawn into a relationship I didn’t want because the man in question made me feel I owed him something.’
Sophie worked as a journalist for 15 years. Her stories have appeared in women’s magazines and been broadcast on BBC Radio Wiltshire. She has been long listed for the InkTears flash fiction competition, the Fish Short Story Prize and the Mslexia/Poetry Book Society Women’s Poetry Prize. Her novel, The Green March Hotel, was in the final 12 of the Mslexia first novel competition 2021 judged by Hilary Mantel.
She will be talking about the process of revising that novel with the help of a literary agent at Writers in the Library in Cirencester on Monday, May 13, at 2pm.
You can read ‘Coffee’ on cirenscene.com
Coffee
He said he was willing just to be friends if that was what she wanted; only there were a few details to be ironed out. Like how many times a month was it reasonable to meet for coffee, and would a meeting that included other people still count towards that allowance? He wanted to know if this friendship encompassed practical assistance in troubled times or if verbal expressions of sympathy would suffice. Would it always be coffee? Or would lunch sometimes be permissible? Or trips to art galleries and museums for relevant exhibitions of mutual interest – for instance the work of Atsuko Fujii?
The raindrops were now hitting the windscreen like jellyfish, the red taillights of forward cars lost in clouds of smoky water. He changed up a gear.
He doubted she had fully considered the complexities of physical contact. Was a kiss in greeting acceptable on the cheek? What about the corner of a mouth? If he put his arm around her waist as they entered a coffee shop in a gesture intended to guide her up the steps, would that break the boundaries she had put in place? He needed to know these things because the situation was clearly open to misunderstanding. Also, did the agreement deal only with his public behaviour, or was she seeking jurisdiction over his fantasies too? Was he permitted, in the hot, dark hours of his sleepless nights, to roll away from his bed companion and think of her?
They approached Toddington Services doing eighty-five.
No, he did not want to stop for a sandwich. He turned the music up. They were playing Charlie Mingus. ‘Listen to that bass,’ he said. And now he thought about it; she could not claim to be innocent in this, having already had, by his calculations, four cups of coffee, three paid for by him, while failing to define their relationship in terms that could easily be understood, misleading him, in fact, by omitting to clarify from the start. Despite this, he was quite happy to be friends with her, even though she was self-evidently a fucking, frigid bitch, just as long as she made these things clear. ‘Look at that sky!’ he turned his head to look at her sprawled on the back seat, ‘it has just the sooty overtones of Turner’s ‘Fishermen at Sea.’
‘Please let me go,’ she said.
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