Sean Lusk’s Final Score won the 2025 HWA Dorothy Dunnett Short Story Competition. It’s with great pleasure that we publish it here in Historia.
The competition judges called it: “A brilliantly-crafted and poignant story set in the wake of WWI. The dry, courageous narrator delivers a heart-rending and thought-provoking story of a veteran playing piano for the silent movies.”
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I don’t know whether it was Laurel or Hardy that killed him. Both, I shouldn’t wonder. I never thought they were funny anyway.
He was ‘quite a catch’. That was what Mabel said. ‘He’s quite a catch, your Alfie-boy.’ She called all the men names like that: ‘Bertie-boy’ and ‘Charlie-boy’ and ‘Billie-boy’ and sometimes anything that took her fancy; sometimes not even proper names at all, names like ‘Horsey-boy’ or ‘Squinty-boy’ or ‘Mother’s boy’. Hers was ‘Georgie-boy’, even after they were married. She was the first of us. It was just like Mabel to take so little care.
Alfie did seem quite a catch before the war: awkward but eager, like they all were. Even my mother said he were a handsome lad, though she managed to make his good looks seem something to disapprove of. When I told her how nicely he played the piano she said: ‘Very nicely does he… yes… I shouldn’t wonder,’ with a sneer, as if I’d just told her that he stuffed cats or knitted all his own clothes
Alfie’s mother wasn’t any better with me. She never quite looked at me, her eyes always seeming to be on my left ear or my neck as I spoke to her. She used to sniff when I said anything, even when I said ‘How are you, Mrs Harris?’ She’d pause, look just past me and make her big loud sniff – a sound like a backward sneeze, before saying ‘Oh, I can’t complain, Alice. I can’t complain.’ I don’t know why she called me Alice. My name’s Grace. But Alfie would just smile his distant, slightly pained smile. After we’d left, he’d say that she had funny ways and that they weren’t worth worrying about at all.
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He was still a boy, really. They all were – they all seemed so much younger than us women; it was as if we already knew the hardness and numbness of life, of what it had in store. I think, now, that’s why we wanted them to join-up. Join-up and grow-up, we must have thought, me and Mabel and Doris and the others. We all wanted them to enlist, to fight the Hun, to come back to us as men. But they didn’t come back to us as men – those that came back at all. They came back to us like broken toys, reproaching us with the memory of what they’d been and what they might have become.
I had a good idea of the things he’d seen, the things that made him quake in his sleep and weep at nothing and lose his words for me, and his patience. But when I tried to tell him that I understood, when I tried to ask him questions or hold his hand, he’d just look at me a little askew (his mother’s look) and say: ‘What’s it to you?’
No, they weren’t such good catches when they came back from the war. Mabel told me that her Georgie-boy wasn’t much of a boy at all when it came to it, if I got her drift, which I did. She said she’d woken up one night to the sound of him sobbing and the smell of piss, and she’d held him gently to him, his legs cold and wet against her own, for what else could she do? My Alfie never wetted the bed, but he would rage about the littlest thing – about the pepper pot missing its lid, or about wet laundry about the house, or about Mabel dropping by. About once a month he’d throw something at me: his dinner, his bicycle clips, his wages. But he never laid a finger on me or the child. Perhaps it would have been better if he had.
I knew what was making him so angry. We all knew what was giving them the shakes and the furies – my Alfie, Mabel’s Georgie, all of them. If they’d had the words for what they’d seen, maybe it would have been different.
It was me who heard about the job at the Rialto, and I wanted him to take it. I thought it would be good for him to start playing the piano again. His silence in the house each evening was hard to take. I thought he could take it to the pictures instead and fill the darkness with music; music in place of all those words he didn’t have.
He grew predictable, or so I thought. His routine was this: up at four-thirty, out of the house by five, home from the sorting office by three o-clock, dinner at five and off to the Rialto by six, ready for the early show, his music under his arm. Mabel and I went on Sundays. Georgie wasn’t one for the pictures, and I could hardly sit next to Alfie. His piano sat on the stage at an angle to the screen so that he could see what was happening and play along to Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd or whoever it happened to be that week. The cinema would give him the music for the following week’s picture on the Monday or Tuesday, and Alfie would study it solemnly. Yet he’d still be out-of-sorts all day on a Thursday, the day of the new picture. Thursdays would be his fork-throwing day, his shouting day. He did say to me once that it was hard to play along when you hadn’t seen the picture, that it was always easier to play along by the Saturday or the Sunday. I asked him whether the sheet music didn’t help. It was called United Cinemas Music for Moving Pictures, and all the moving picture house pianists in the country would get a copy if that particular film was playing that week. ‘Sheet music won’t tell you what way Charlie Chaplin’s walking, will it?’ he said. I thought then that he must be right.
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It was six years before the picture that killed him. For those six years we always had the same routine, Alfie’s anxiety building and building as Thursday drew near, turning to words spat out and purple fury on the day itself. He’d not eat or speak or even look at me before he went off on his bicycle at six in the evening for the Rialto, sick with nerves. But he always came back happy: he’d tamed another picture, would live another night.
The music for You’re Darn Tootin‘ when it came looked thicker, more squiggly than usual. I said to Alfie: ‘That looks quite a piece.’ But he just grunted. It never meant much to him, the sheet music; that much I did know. His mood was no better and no worse that Thursday than any other I should say, and he went off on his bicycle at six looking a little sick, like he always did.
I went to the police station the next morning to report that Alfie hadn’t come home, the littl’un in the pram, the older at school, thank goodness. The sergeant noted Alfie’s details. He said men sometimes didn’t come home, and he gave me a look as if to say that I should know better than to come to the police station telling tales on my husband just because he’d decided to spend a night with another woman.
It was his bicycle they found. A woman had spotted it while walking her dog along the beach below the cliffs. I think she might have seen something else, too, but they spare widows details like that. I was just told about the bicycle and that, after a search along the coast, they found his body washed-up. They got his mother to identify it, because by then I was already a little beyond recognising him. He’d ridden it over the cliff’s edge, just where lovers sometimes leap.
I never went to see You’re Darn Tootin’. Never will, now. I heard what happened at the Rialto that night only in pieces; a word here, two there. Alfie had played along at first, a little hesitantly as was not unusual for a Thursday. But right at the beginning of the film is a scene with an orchestra where Laurel and Hardy play instruments and get all the music wrong. Getting music wrong is harder than getting it right, I suppose. Alfie’s piano fell silent. He must have thought everyone was laughing at him, not at Stan Laurel. Perhaps they were. He got up from his piano stool, made his way out of the Rialto in the silver light of the projector and rode straight to the West Cliff, his ears full of laughter. It’s that that I can’t stand – that he thought everyone was laughing at him. That he was killed in the end not by a shell or a mine but by a bit of slapstick.
‘What are all these, Alice?’ said his mother when she came to fetch some of Alfie’s things.
‘That’s his music, isn’t it?’ I said, thinking it was pretty obvious what it was, with all its crotchets and minims and quavers and all.
‘How odd,’ she said, and she looked at me – right at me, for the first time ever, and in her eyes there lurked something like triumph. ‘He never could read a note. Didn’t you know, Alice? Didn’t you know that?’
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Sean Lusk, winner of the 2025 HWA Dorothy Dunnett Short Story Competition, is the author of two books. His debut, The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley, was a BBC Between the Covers Book Club pick and Sunday Times Historical Fiction Book of the Month as well as being longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2023. A Woman of Opinion was named Saltire Fiction Book of the Year in 2025. He’s also won several other awards for his short stories.
Find Sean at:
seanlusk.com
Instagram
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Here are some features Sean’s written for Historia connected to his books:
How Mary Wortley Montagu and other great 18th-century women were forgotten
The strange death of the Levant company (and how a clock taught me about it)
You may also enjoy reading another feature, The Ghosts of Silent Film by Essie Fox.
See more about the six stories shortlisted for the 2025 HWA Dorothy Dunnett prize, including Sean’s.
You can read all six stories in our 2025 Short Story Competition anthology, available as an ebook or print-on-demand paperback. There are also anthologies from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019.
Read the stories that won the HWA Dorothy Dunnett Short Story prize in past years:
2024: St Kilda Bird Song by KF MacCarthy
2023: Hecate’s Daughter by Jo Tiddy
2022: Collapse by Chrissy Sturt
2021: His Mother’s Quilt by Naomi Kelsey
2020: The Race by Alice Fowler
2019: The Daisy Fisher by Kate Jewell
2018: Nineteen Above Discovery by Jennifer Falkner
2017: A Poppy Against the Sky by Annie Whitehead
The 2026 Short Story Competition will open for entries in the Spring.
Images:
- Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, photograph by Harry Warnecke: US National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Private William Cecil Tickle, 9 Battalion, Essex Regiment, 1916: IWM Collections (IWM Non-Commercial license)
- Poster, Women of Britain say — “Go!”, May, 1915 (restored by Adam Cuerden): Wikipedia (public domain)
- Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!, 1923: PublicDomainPictures.net (public domain)
- Charlie Chaplin in the last scene of the film The Tramp, 1915: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Poster for the film You’re Darn Tootin’, 1928, starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy: Wikimedia (public domain)
