I’m playing the villain tonight. It’s a touring thing. I was fair maiden in the morning don’t tell my dad coz I asked Gary and I kept asking and eventually he said fine but I had to be clean shaven, rouged-up, and far away from the audience. I said It’s not a gender thing, I just want to know what it feels like to play all the parts.
I had a dream I was the horse once.
Fine fine. And come tonight I’ll lift this headpiece off with its gentle orange veils and lock the silver helmet firm against my skin. I heard it chafes if you’ve got high cheekbones. I heard you have to lift the visor while you’re riding and make obscene gestures at the crowd. I know from the caravan beforehand that the villain wears more make-up than the maiden. Black pencil and they’ll twist the edges of your moustache, if you have one. To look grotesque and merciless, they said, it’s important. Coz no one cares when Clark playing Arthur or Valentin playing Gawain or me, Sonny, playing whoever, goes dangling off the side of their horse. (We keep our feet in the stirrups, but we make the wounding look realistic). In jousting no one cares about the heroes. But the villain, the villain
(and they put the villain on Vigo, who’s skittish, so the panic’s real in all of us whether she’ll spook and tear and charge at the crowd) the villain on Vigo could hurt everyone so we always make a big show of killing him at the end. Me and Clark and Valentin. But it’s a pity when he’s been slain coz then everyone has to go home. Back to work.
You should have seen my dad when I said I was going to join the Knights of Royal England for a living. And then when they wouldn’t have me, Gary’s Gallant Knights. Who were more jaded, wearied, making cups of milky tea and staring at the torn-up hay bales on the ground when I asked if they were hiring. In a better version of their lives they were actors, they said. Well, I said, and I sipped my tea too, the night blue-dark as it closed over the valley. It made me smile: the sound only of horses sneezing and former actors sighing and the woven costumes of people and horses slipping onto the ground.
Before I dreamt I was the horse I used to go home in the breaks and read old accounts of jousting in the bedroom of my parents’ house. I’d feel my skin rustle the same way I knew theirs would have. Velvet. Leather. I didn’t tell anyone.
We don’t usually do night shows. I don’t know why, coz the gentleness of evening is lit up when we lower candles into lanterns and light the torches, one by one. And just now I had to get Percival, whose actual name is Percival, or P, to lace me into this tabard in the caravan. He left his hand too long on my ribcage. I noticed it. I shut my eyes and leaned into it, warm and firm. A second but no more, coz P’s thirty-nine and me I’m eighteen. So he patted me on the shoulder and said, come.
You aren’t old (he says) but you aren’t young. He’s pressing white powder into my forehead with a damp sponge. Is this worry? he says, feeling a line, faint and tiny, in my forehead. No, he says, Can’t be.
I know it was. Biting my hands off when I told dad I wasn’t going to go uni. So much shouting down the phone I had to hold it at a distance from me.
I’m on Vigo now, watching the whitened and wet faces of the city crowd. They’re in a bad mood coz a kid went missing earlier at the fair and no one found him. Percival said use it. I’m tall and wind-licked like god. An old god, and evil as well. The moon’s playing along also. The clouds are black soot and the moon a sick red-yellow. The clouds are smoke and the moon’s a dark sore.
I like this bit. The girls that can’t ride skip around with branches on their heads, ornate, spindly, woven with leaves to look like antlers. They’re meant to play our deer, our hunted. Mostly they jump around for a couple of minutes then complain about the warm beer at the fire later.
Kelly trots in all fair maiden again pretty red thick across her lips this is good coz after I asked if I could play the dame she said I was taking her job and what was there left for women in this place? I said, but you get to play the knight. You get to fight for me. She called me names and asked me to mind my fucking place, then she plunged our plastic plates into the washing-up tub.
Kelly was strange when I stepped out the caravan with my grotesque and merciless face-lacquer in place. She waited for P to be out of earshot then she put her pretty calloused fingers on my arm, clutching black tunic. I took the helmet off to hear. I don’t know why you two are so buddy-buddy, she said. He asked Gary last night not to let you play the villain. Says it’s his part.
The moon is a yellow mouth. And the clouds are doing this cool thing where they pass translucent over it. I ignored Kelly coz after we’d walked to the tesco express, me still dragged a bit girlish up, Percival sat on a tree stump and smiled at me in a long and sideways way.
Do you think I’ll be a good villain? I said.
No.
I dreamt I was the horse once.
He shook his head. Called me a freak. Said I liked this too much.
I said ‘course I do. It’s ceremonial. (I’m grinning all around me now, high rises making teeth in this fake country skyline). And these city folk are the best. Coz P, they’ve never seen a six-foot bloke like me fall and dangle wildly off the side of a horse that’s running. They can’t believe it when I use all my core strength to heave my body back into the saddle.
He’s shaking his head so much now he’s not even looking at me. He’s not having it.
They’ll fall in love with you, he said. It’s no good. We’ll never get you out of here.
Which is funny coz I don’t want to be anywhere else. Not when all our horses are grunting in front of these city people and we’re lining up to fight. Sufficient obscenities from me. Then I bare my teeth and yell into the air. And a thick fat rain starts falling. I’m sweating under my helmet and what with the wind and rain chapping at everyone, all our makeup starts to run. Proper metal shit. The preamble is done. It’s time to joust. I line up at the tilt and chop up Gawian’s black and white shield with my red and devil lance. Then I go about missing Arthur’s and make dang and blast gestures with my arms.
I egg it up when the booing begins. The rain streaking grey through everything.
And sir Percy looks good in the pink, valiant and soft. His tabard stitched with a silver spiral. He doesn’t look at me when I snipe past on Vigo but I think it’s his modest act. It’s cute. He doesn’t do it often enough, Gary’s made him the villain a hundred times. I’m remembering what P said, coz it’s all coming to an end now and we’re gearing up for the pass where he kills the villain. We ran it over in the field an hour before. So I lift my visor up to give this miserable crowd a good look at my dying face after,
I’ll have my eye-whites showing, arms grazing the ground if I can manage it.
P’s going to get me in the shoulder blade and the arm. I’m padded up in case (only bruises) but I practiced falling before he touched me and they all agreed it looked good, even Kelly. So he makes his horse paw at the ground and rear. I’m like, okay, and shaking my evil head. Crowd booing, and the jousting line stretches out in front of me.
(my heart in my mouth suddenly).
And Vigo goes before I do, she knows the score, and I ride with my shoulder tilted so far back. Percival’s angling in, his pink and silver lance bouncing before him. This pass is going to be perfect, hooves tearing up the floor. I’m near enough to begin my fake-fall, but before I do I see the end of something.
Black and round.
It’s the end of P’s lance. Raised too high and the rubber tip worn through. It strikes. I’m struck. My face, I’m hit and bleeding straight away. In the mouth. Thwacked in the jaw. I’m like what? coz he missed my fucking shoulder by a long way. The crowd goes OOH, like they’re not sure. Skin swells and I go fuck, thwack and whack again coz I, falling and un-gripping and another world where my soul is still up-down riding, hit the ground. My body on the ground. And the city crowd still cheering.
Percival, I can hear him, does rounds of the metal barrier ring. Canter. Galloping. I am lying on the floor still and shocked and not thinking. Staring straight up. Rain spitting. I don’t want to move my lip coz half my front tooth is resting against it and I don’t want to swallow it. All the blood in me pounds in my ears and all my skin’s rising to meet my eyes. Whiteness threatens at the corners of everything. I don’t want to move coz I could just be a bag of bones and not know it. I wonder when P will get off his horse and come rescue me.
Then I am still lying on the floor, in the same place, but they’re lifting my head and neck into a fluorescent brace. I keep my eyes on the moon, which is hot and bleeding. Women with short hair lean over my face and tell me not to move a muscle, love. I want to say I wouldn’t anyway coz it hurts like it’s still happening. Like there’s a wooden stick still crushing my face at a cob’s top speed, and the impact’s ringing with me. At one point, I have to take a big breath through my mouth and all the bottoms of my teeth move with it. There’s air and blood and rain meeting my gums in new ways. I want to ask the women to call my dad and tell him that I’m sorry but they’re busy. They make walkie-talkie calls and ask one another if it’s worth trying to take the poor kid’s helmet off.
In the dreams after I dreamt I was a horse, I’m still lying here. And Gary’s Gallant Knights still stand under a shelter, gossiping. They want to know where Percival, who could be seen dismounting his horse then jumping the metal barriers on foot, ever ran off to. And how, they reckoned, once he reached the park’s gates and tore the tabard off, he managed to become every other guy just trying to get home and out of the rain.
*
At the university I go to, they make the English students do this thing once a month. An anonymous student whose name is drawn out of a velvet bag has to submit a piece of writing to be discussed by the rest of the class. And the rest of the class have to act like the anonymous student is an acclaimed author and they analyse the writing accordingly. I am not sure what the aim of this is. From what I can tell university is sitting talking to a bunch of people that nothing has ever happened to. So they have to say stupid things like I like Iago. They all lose their shit for Iago coz they say it’s excellent, excellent, to be a motiveless villain. Nobody liked it when I said it was a good thing that Othello and Emilia and Roderigo and Desdemona were all dead coz they wouldn’t have to spend the rest of time wondering why one person one day just decided to ruin their life.
Coz I was sick of all this and also coz my name SONNY was pulled beautiful and calligraphic out of the purple bag, I wrote everything down and sat slumped with my legs hanging out on one of the plastic chairs in the discussion circle. I wasn’t expecting everyone to wander in with theories. Some girl, owl-eyed, hickey, thought Kelly spooked P’s horse presumably coz she was mad that I was some cross-dressing abomination. She said, why bother mentioning Kelly otherwise? A lot thought Percival loved me so hard he had to kill me. I said I think you’re bringing some twentieth century shame-shit to this piece. Everyone in the story is an adult. And owl-eyed hickey girl turned soft and slow to me. Some wondered if it was an ego-motive, like, in whatever formulation, Percy was always going to try and be the villain. Or it was a group effort, and none of the has-been actors liked me anyway. And I’m guessing, said one guy, this Percival went to prison? No No. Some fuck with glasses pushed them into his hair and said Look at the story. Look at the rain. Obviously it was an accident. They’re a third-rate touring jousting company, nobody in this scene can be a winner.
It definitely wasn’t an accident. I didn’t mean to say this but I did. Now everyone was giving me the same look the owl-eyed girl had given me. I looked at the cracked and paint-thick ceiling and ran my tongue along the join where bonding and filler met my real teeth. Someone through the silence motioned that we should think about the literary value of the piece too. Mmmm. And they all agreed that I, me, Sonny, no, the author, should have tried to spell things a bit better. Which made me laugh. Afterwards, I told the owl girl in the corridor that I spent six months waiting for my ribs and face to heal before I came here. She scratched her hickey and said it was good I got to live a normal life now. I looked at her in the sterile corridor. The most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her was that someone thought she was nice-looking enough to suck a bruise into her neck. Not really, I said.
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‘I, me, Sonny’ was shortlisted – and highly commended – for the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize 2026 and is included in the annual anthology of shortlisted stories, Brick Lane Bookshop New Short Stories 2026, which is now available.
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