The Turning Point

A new short story

During the first half of their 20s Joe and Bob were in a band together. Joe, shy and watchful, was the guitarist and Bob, flamboyant and sharp-witted, was the singer. Nothing much had happened to them in terms of success, but neither had quite stopped hoping that it would, and weren’t yet quite old enough to become depressed or chronically dismayed because it hadn’t. One day, when Bob picked Joe up on the way to rehearsals, Joe pulled a little too hard on the passenger door of Bob’s little hatchback car and snapped the handle off. Joe immediately apologised profusely and paid Bob for the damage. Bob knew it had been an accident and that Joe was anything but a violent person and, precisely because of that, he soon delighted in making up stories about Joe’s unhinged attack on his vehicle. “I am telling you, it was fucking scary,” Bob would tell their friends and bandmates. “He would have taken his hideous mood out on anything that came in his path that day. I’m just glad it was my car and not me that got in the firing line.” Sometimes Bob would tell the story to people who knew Joe less well, too. “The worst bit was afterwards, when he walked over to the nature reserve and threw the handle in a wildlife pond while yelling ‘cuuuuunt!’ at the top of his voice,” Bob might say. His stories of the incident were always so wildly far-fetched that Joe never worried that anybody would think they were true, and Bob, a born entertainer, had the skill of a top ranking stand-up comedian when it came to conveying sarcasm and exaggeration via the subtle use of tone. He was also endlessly inventive in his retelling of the episode which meant it did not grate as it might have done in less witty or imaginative hands. Sadly, not long after this, Joe and Bob drifted apart, Joe moving to London while Bob remained in the suburbs of Cardiff, where the pair had grown up. Bob gave up music completely and took a job as the manager of a small theatre but Joe persevered, and, not long after his 30th birthday, just when he’d finally given up hope of ever making any money from his songwriting, he secured a modest record deal.