Stet! of Mind
by Siobhán LaneI always wanted to be a man. If not for the shorter queues at festival loos, or more obvious patriarchal privileges (higher salary, lighter mental load and ability to babysit my own child without much criticism, for a start) then definitely for the ‘one fight and done’ mentality. They didn’t have a labyrinth of mind games to navigate. Pettifoggery and emotional gambits were to blame.
It took me two rounds of therapy over three-and-a-half years to realise that my own inferiority complex came from behind enemy lines. Classic drama three-way. After all, triangles were always my favourite shape. Three Fridays after The Incident, I’m back in the pub, this time with Sahid and Leona from Billing. Fan of a distinctly clinical ambiance, Cal is probably compulsively tidying the house again, knee-deep in grout cracks and caulk dust. Post-work drinks are a godsend. There’s a half decent tribute act on: Sultans of Sting. You can’t tell where Mark Knopfler ends and wor Gordon Summoner begins. Good craic.
‘Down it! Down it! Down it! Down it!’ chants Leona.
A pervy middle-aged man with a hand sweeping Leona’s inner thigh, and an oddly attractive bald lass with a neck tat join in. Girl crush potential. I clock an excessively dolled up Janine at the bar. I shunt her a polite, tight smile which I suspect she doesn’t see.
I gag, necking the remainder of my flat pint. Fuck’s sake, man! I mentally position the apostrophe just after the ‘k’. The sake belongs to one singular fuck, not multiple.
‘Deaf bitch! Cal been jammin’ it in yer again?’ the old letch shouts.
‘Piss off, man, you prize wanker,’ hurls Sahid. ‘No one insults me fag hag but me!’
Dirty laughs erupt and I dart to the bathroom, clenching my pelvic muscles. The toilet door and my bladder burst open, instantly soaking my Topshop 3 for £12. I squat-shuffle to the seat praying the yellow stains are from bleach. Lilac tanga elastic digs into my peri-orange-peel skin while I tug my pants to my knees. They graze the piss-stained tiles before I flick them clean into the sanitary bin with a leftie back heel. My pointy, bunion-breeding toe box pins down the pedal, lateral pressure twisting my kneecap past its safety lock.
The closest I usually get to the ‘Roxanne’ drinking game is spinning class at PureGym. Sad-ist-ic. But at least it doesn’t give me throat burn like the lingering Dettol stench of Cal’s OCD hands or the sambuca shots do.
Half my bodyweight depressing the hot tap, a sparkly coral claw clip a few inches up glints at my reflection. Of all the lasses in this place, it just has to be Janine.
‘Staying for last orders, Jan?’ I mutter.
‘Probalies. Why?’ No eye contact.
‘JD and Diet Coke for the road, as per… No?’
‘Aye, rights.’ She flicks excess water off her hands and barges out. Flummoxed, I buy two JDs and take one to her.
‘Here, man… woman. It’s on me.’ I wait patiently to be thanked.
And now it is. On me. And I am. Thanked. With coke, ice cubes, JD, sticky glass shards, the lot.
‘What part of ‘fuck’ and ‘off’ is so fucking...?’ she squeals, something about being thick, or a dick. Maybe, prick. Couldn’t be ‘heretic’, not with her lexis.
Fizzy blood runs down my cheek. Tinnitus static muffles Leona’s drunken shrieks. A chorus of ‘Hang the DJ’ emerges from the auditory foreground. Deafening. Time stops.
I cling to Janine’s straggly hair, stomping a shiny clip into the exposed floorboard. Sahid rips me away, saviour-style, clumps of mousey hair in my fists, his salmon pink shirt now crimson tie-dye. He drags my dead weight over the fake Persian rug, its Mina-Khani now embellished with glitter and artificial crisp flavouring.
*
The evening of The Incident, Hades set to work. It was a regular boozy weeknight in the pub. We had loose-lipped conversations about shows watched, degrees studied, and men dated, most of which were gravely overrated. Julie spent half an hour playing victim in the smoking area. She wasn’t a pal of mine, but I tolerated her all the same. I even invited her to my Master’s graduation barbecue. Ashley insisted on a ‘more the merrier’ approach. Merrier meant drunker. I never made it to best mate status with Ash because of her sister (understandable, I guess) but I was damn close. She had lugged me out of depression – the SAD type – twice and I owe her to this day for that. For six long autumn-winters after The Incident, I suffered mild to moderate SAD and had no one well-versed enough in the nuances of my mental health history to help.
I often recoiled at the punchlines of Julie’s lewd jokes, not perturbed in the slightest by the vulgarity but by the itchy syntax and scratchy pronunciation. I cavilled at her Mackem-cum-Smoggie addition of ‘r’ in ‘toilet’ and ‘y’ in ‘home’ and genuinely wondered how someone with such poor verbal grammar and incomprehensible an accent could have achieved a 2:1 degree in an essay-based subject. These thoughts remained undisclosed to everyone but my diary which was, ironically, written in impenetrable foreign language mashup code and hidden behind the PVC bath panel.
Losing friends was convenient in the short term. I had more time to complete my Master’s assignments and brush up on Italian for my cultural exchange. Fewer social events equalled less crap to deal with! However, not knowing what it was exactly that I had said or done played on my mind. I obsessed over it. No one who witnessed The Incident replied to me. Two-faced cows. That wasn’t how friends were meant to behave. I scoured Facebook for a whiff of a clue, only to find that I’d been blocked by four of them. I rang ginger Amie. Nothing. Nikki. Nothing. Fiona responded but said she couldn’t talk long and I wasn’t to call back. Blocked.
What on this godforsaken planet had I done that was so unforgivable? Those lasses were savage on nights out. There had been garlic sauce-smothered fisticuffs, rivers of tears at wedding do’s and one purportedly incestuous affair. Little geeky me couldn’t have possibly topped any of that. Could I? I was drunk, not ‘palatic’ but tiddly enough to cause several hippocampus SD storage card issues. Some words exchanged that night were scorched into my lexis, but most of our nebulous conversations were a blur. We definitely had a random laugh about Joe from the corner house being collared by Scientologists on Fawcett Street. And I think we made provisional plans to see Interpol. I must have believed so, because I spent the last eighty quid of my overdraft on a ticket and a Megabus seat at 1.23am the next morning. Callum was going to kill me. I had used the joint account.
*
It is Saturday morning, three weeks and one day after The Incident. I wake up at 9:30am, alone. Callum’s out with his dog. I feel crumbs on my heels and my teeth ache.
A message from Kim, Janine’s sister and Cal’s old school mate-cum-teenage fuck buddy. Another bane of my parochial life: Don’t even think about pressing charges, dickhead. It was 50 50 m u will cum off worse. Maybe you shouldn’t have a fight when ur commando. SLut!
I ring Cal immediately. No answer. I know he’s at Kim’s house. Probably apologising to Janine on my behalf, betraying me again, siding with the Bingley sisters.
Yea Cals here. He said ur mentel when you hav more than two drinks. Dont u fuckin dare touch my sister again or al hav this allowa facebook.
I run into the sitting room and grab my car keys. Adrenaline, my only friend. I speed over to the monument, fluffy dressing gown tie trapped in the car door. ‘Fucking hell. Shit. What the fuck. You stupid, stupid idiot. Fucking hell, woman!’ I shout, barely recognising my own voice.
*
Three and a half years later, I received a run-of-the-mill text from an old friend who hadn’t been in touch since The Incident. None of them had. She needed a reference, and I was the only ‘professional’ she knew who wouldn’t slag her off. This was the ideal opportunity to employ the quid pro quo information exchange I’d perfected over the previous few years. I found out that everything was because of a seemingly quick-witted pun I’d made. It was unfortunate that she had a deep-rooted, secret complex about her intelligence. I should have refrained from verbalising this un-witticism. But my ego came first.
Always.
It was quite rotten of me.
Pettifoggery and emotional gambits.
That’s what it came down to.
In my defence, the etiquette of correction lacks clarity. My social syntax was remiss. But I was oblivious. I deserved to be punished, but this was pitiless. Julie never spoke to me again. Neither did my best mate, Ashley. Worse still, I’ll never know how funny my pun was and if it was all worth it.
Author’s Note
I was always corrected as a child, verbally. I maintained a perfect linguistic record. H-dropping disgusted me as much as the backwards ‘Я’ in ‘Toys Я Us’ that I vowed to boycott for life. I would revel in shouting ‘stet!’ in response to attempts to add an apostrophe to my possessive ‘its’ but I’ve been told that it would be inappropriate.
Any opportunity for lexical punctiliousness and I used to be their there quicker than anyone could shout ‘dangling preposition!’. My innate desire to correct people’s SPaG is rarely selfless. It is an exhibition of intellectual appetite with a hint of misjudged academic superiority. Despite suspecting that I will be met with acquiescence at best, I still sometimes brazenly enunciate words in their original language with near-native pronunciation. I wince at choritso [sic] and expresso [sic], /ʧəɹˈiːtsəʊ/ and /ɪkˈspresəʊ/, respectively. I revel in showcasing my enjambment to any unsuspecting stalker-scroller on my socials. I can’t even purposely write an incorrect spelling herein for fear of someone unwittingly reusing it, thus rendering me culpable for their faux pas. I will not be part of that.
Now, I delight in sending error-strewn messages to my friends and family because errare humanum est. You have to pick your battles in life, and I choose to submit to autocorrect. It is a rare privilege to communicate freely with other humans without either party feeling judged, and it is easier to facilitate this in relation to language than subject matter. I am no better or worse a human for allow my purist alter ego to ride or die. Moreover, explanations of comma splice rules are vitality-guzzlers; I prefer to save some energy for calling out bigotry and hatred, a lifelong obsession.
This short story 'Stet! of Mind' was initially published by Dualis Literary Magazine and also here with non-exclusive rights, where it lives forever with its fantastic counterparts.
© 2026 [Siobhán Lane]. All Other Rights Reserved. Moral Rights Asserted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Excerpts may be used with full credit and a link back to the original post. Full reproduction prohibited without written permission.