Drew Gummerson, "Saltburn"

Drew Gummerson is the writer of The Lodger, Me and Mickie James, Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel, and most recently, Saltburn. He is a Lambda Award finalist, Leicestershire Short Story Prize winner. His stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4, and in various anthologies. https://linktr.ee/drewgum

About Saltburn, by Drew Gummerson

Saltburn is a collection of six funny sad queer short stories, all set in the town of Saltburn which is in the north-east of England. I start with an apology  

May the residents of the real Saltburn-by-the-Sea and neighbouring towns forgive my mermaids, my nuclear power stations, my foetus museums and so on and so on. They were written with love.

Welcome to Saltburn, an extraordinary town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade. 

In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.

You can read more about Saltburn on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Saltburn

Warriors of the Wasteland

While their parents watched the actual war spin out on the TV news programme, Look North with Arthur Seagull and Molly Splat, the boys, and one other, being neither boy nor non-boy, played war games down on the mudflats. Setting themselves up into armies, Shirts vs. Skins, Terminators vs. Rambos, Circumcised vs. Hooded (Claws in common parlance, as in, ‘Are you a Claw or Non-Claw?’) they took up positions behind old abandoned shopping trolleys, in forts constructed from for-sale signs stolen from the overgrown gardens of long-derelict houses, and in the abandoned crumbling concrete Martello, stinking of tramps’ piss and filled with sad-looking wrinkled used, sometimes unused, condoms. They were Trojans, all of them.

And these poor innocents, they would go at each other with wild euphoric abandon.

Happy days. The country was never happier, more unified, than when it was at war. 

Except, just as in any war, there were dissenting voices.

Those who were not happy. Not exactly. 

For Sven Tosier-Gumshoe, being the smallest, feyest and, perhaps, because of his position as neither boy nor non-boy, when the war games were coming to their nightly close, ragged, careworn parents having started to line up like gulls along the pier rail, shouting out that it was time for their respective charges to hurry home for tea or there would be tanned hides all round, was the one who was, most often, taken hostage. 

A quick resolution was needed to finish the game. 

‘I’m Private Tosier-Gumshoe,’ they would say. ‘Fifteenth Seal Regiment. Identification Number 35654. I won’t tell you anything.’

Usually then they would come at them with a used condom filled with sand, or a live crab with snapping claws, or the rusty speculum Aart Jansen had stolen from his doctor dad aeons before, telling them with faked horror that a speculum was something you used to look up buttholes. 

‘OK,’ Sven would say, ‘I give in. Our army is massed behind the seal fort… Plans are to advance at midnight… The password is Valkensteeg 17. Just don’t hurt me. I’ll tell you anything.’