By: Brahim Laaraibi

Summer on a Short Leash is a story about a widowed father who fights rising prices and shrinking options to give his children one more real holiday, and discovers how love, grief, and money can all pull on the same tight lead

Tim has promised them a week away, once the kind of trip that lasted two.

Not the abroad‑abroad they remember: no flight boards, no blue lines sweeping across maps on the in‑flight screen, but something, at least. A drive. A different bed. A stretch of motorway that doesn’t end at the same three exits he takes to work. 

The station forecourt shimmers. Heat stands up from the tarmac like something trying to leave.

He pulls in under the canopy, brakes gently. The car gives a small, tired shudder as if the journey has already happened and this is the end rather than the start.

On the digital board, the price blinks in cold, brutal numbers. Per litre, per gallon, it doesn’t matter. The maths is fast and savage. It climbs.

His son leans forward between the front seats, squinting at the sign.

“Is that right?” the boy asks. “It was, like, twenty pence cheaper last month.”

His daughter, older by a year and, lately, by a decade, snorts softly.

“That’s the ‘summer getaway warning’ thing,” she says, parroting a headline she scrolled past the night before. “They said it would go up when everyone tries to leave.”

He opens his door. The heat outside is different from the heat inside. Inside, they own it—a bad fan, a clogged vent, something fixable. Out here, it belongs to the world. He feels it on the back of his neck the way he used to feel sun on airport tarmac, the way his wife once stood laughing in a line of suitcases, pointing at planes and pretending to choose one.

He tries not to think about her when he walks towards the pump. He fails.

In the years when the children were small enough to sleep across seats and under tables and in the crook of any adult shoulder, holidays were something they planned by looking at maps, not at price caps.

Back then, he and his wife would sit on the living‑room floor with brochures spread like bright leaves. Beaches and old cities and train routes. The cost of petrol appeared on the news sometimes, but it lived in the corner of the screen with the weather and currency exchange rates: background noise, not plot.

She had a way with numbers, his wife. Not magic, not high finance—just a kind of patient, stubborn competence that made things stretch. She would go through their accounts with a pen that clicked when bills annoyed her.

“We can do two weeks,” she had said once, tapping a column. “If we don’t replace the washing machine till autumn.”

He had laughed, easy then. “Who needs clean clothes abroad? They have water there too.”

She had rolled her eyes and taken the joke into the budget, shaving something somewhere else, making it work.

Flights. Hired cars. Hotels where breakfast came in buffets so generous the children thought the whole world ate like that.

The kids grew up knowing that sometimes they were in France, sometimes in Spain, once on another continent entirely where the air felt different, amplified, as if it had been tuned to a higher setting.

Then she died.

And prices went up.

And everything that used to be background noise stepped forward and spoke in full sentences.

He holds the petrol nozzle in his hand like a tool that sometimes pretends to be a weapon. The pump is already awake, green light unblinking, waiting.

He slots it into the tank and pulls the handle. The numbers start to move.

They do not tick; they sprint. A small, private meter, running in parallel to everything Ofgem prints on its website, everything the government announces about caps and ceilings and typical usage.

His phone vibrates in his pocket. He knows without looking it is not his bank sending a windfall. It will be a generic warning from the supermarket app, something about “fuel prices climbing again as the summer holiday season begins.”

The digits jump from ten to twenty, thirty, forty. He hears his daughter laugh behind him, sharp, disbelieving.

“Dad, seriously, you’re not filling the whole tank, are you?”

He should stop at thirty. That was the plan last night, when he lay awake adding up food and rent and gas and the stubborn little number that came at the end of every month marked Arrears.

Thirty would get them out of the city and home again. Thirty would mean day trips, not distance.

He pushes past thirty.

Forty. Forty‑five. Fifty.

He lets go at fifty‑five because something in him flinches at the number. It is more than last year by a neat amount, almost exactly the extra the radio man said people were paying now to fill a family car.

He replaces the nozzle, walks back to the driver’s side, the receipt fluttering in his hand like something that wants to escape.

“Is it that bad?” his son asks.

“It’s what it is,” he says. He tries to sound casual. He fails.

At the till, he stands in a small queue of people who all look like they are performing a swallow. Not of food, but of figures.

A woman in a building‑site jacket mutters at the display, shakes her head once. The man ahead of him, shirt sticking to his back, stares at the sweets and energy drinks with an expression that calculates whether sugar is still an impulse purchase or has become a decision.

Behind the glass, the clerk’s smile is bright and tired. She repeats the total as if it is the weather.

When his turn comes, he slides the receipt across.

“That was… fifty‑five,” she says, confirming the damage.

He nods.

“And you wanted the meal deal?”

Tim had picked up three sandwiches almost without thinking: cheese and onion, chicken and salad, something with hummus his daughter might pretend to dislike and then eat anyway. Holiday food. The first thing they would eat “on the road.”

He sees the price blink on the small screen. He thinks of energy unit rates, gas standing charges, rent due on Monday.

“Actually,” he says. “Just the fuel today.”

She nods, unoffended, and scans only the pump receipt.

Walking back to the car without the sandwiches feels like walking back without tickets.

His daughter watches his empty hands as he gets in.

“No lunch?”

“We’ll get something later,” he says. “Closer to where we’re going.”

“Where are we going?” his son asks. He has asked this three times already: last week, yesterday, this morning. Each time, the answer shrank.

“Out,” he says. “Towards the resorts. The suburbs. There’s that lake with the pedalos, remember? And the park with the zip‑line.”

His daughter looks out at the road beyond the forecourt. It is heat and haze and, eventually, a ring road.

“We used to go further,” she says. “Remember when Mum took us to…”

He cuts in, gently.

“We can’t afford a flight this year.”

“We could train,” his son says. “Or a coach. Somewhere that isn’t just… you know. Near.”

He does not say: Trains cost more now than some flights did then.

He does not say: The cap went up again and the landlord’s letter did too and I am choosing between your week away and keeping the heating on in January.

He says:

“There’s more to this place than the city centre. Mum liked those suburbs, remember? The little cafe by the lake, the arcade with the old machines.”

His daughter closes her eyes, and for a second, he sees her at eight, hair tangled with wind from a foreign beach, fingers sticky from an ice cream that dripped faster than she could eat it.

“Mum liked airports,” she says. “And stamps in passports. And saying ‘this year we try somewhere new.’”

Silence spills into the car like another cost.

On the way out of the station, he sees a man standing by his boot, arguing with a friend, their voices pitched low but sharp.

“If you hadn’t filled at the motorway services,” the friend says, jabbing at the receipt, “you’d have saved a tenner. There’s a cheap place three miles back.”

“I wasn’t going to drive round comparing boards,” the man replies. “I’m not turning my holiday into a fuel hunt.”

At the far pump, a woman counts coins before opening her tank, lips moving. Behind her, a boy about his son’s age leans on the car, expression a mixture of boredom and something tighter. Their eyes meet for a fraction of a second, an acknowledgement that they are all in the same queue, just at different tills.

People are not shouting. Nobody is stealing petrol or pushing each other. But he can feel the strain between them like an extra pressure in the air: suspicion about who is “wasting” money, resentment at big cars, silent judgement of anybody heading towards the motorway with bikes strapped to the back.

Friends and neighbours used to talk about destinations. Now they talk about caps and tariffs, about who got a deal and who didn’t. They know, in numbers, who is falling behind.

He signals and pulls out.

Later, on the ring road, the car thrums in that way older vehicles do when you ask them to pretend to be new.

He drives past the turn‑offs that, in another life, would have been their route to the airport.

His daughter watches each slip road like a page torn from a book.

“We’re really not leaving the country, are we?” she says.

“No,” Tim replies. “We’re going to discover our own.”

“You always say that when you want to stay near,” his son says. There is no malice in it yet, just a budding adult’s knack for hearing the spin in a sentence.

He breathes once, deeply, the way he did at his wife’s funeral when the vicar said financial contributions in a voice that made it sound like a footnote instead of one of the pillars of their life.

“She used to make it possible,” he says quietly. “The big trips. The long distances. I… can’t do what she did. Not now. Not with everything costing what it does.”

He expects an argument. His daughter surprises him.

“Mum said once,” she says, softer now, “that people in the suburbs forget how close they are to beauty. Because it’s not branded or far away.”

He glances at her.

“When did she say that?”

“At that park,” she says. “By the lake. When you were moaning about the price of the pedalos.”

He laughs, properly this time, a sound that catches him off guard. He had moaned about the price of the pedalos. He had stood in the queue making bad jokes about a levy on breath, about how one day they’d charge extra for the wind that helped the boats along.

Outside the window, the city begins to loosen. Houses spread, then thin. Trees appear between shopfronts. The air changes in ways that are more about scent than about temperature.

He signals for the exit that leads to the lake.

His son lets out a breath through his teeth.

“It’s not abroad,” the boy says.

“No,” the father replies. “It isn’t.”

“But is it a holiday?”

He doesn’t answer immediately.

He remembers cheap flights and big maps. He remembers his wife’s pen making numbers behave. He remembers standing in a supermarket aisle last week, staring at the price of pasta, and thinking: “If we were still going to Spain, this would be the cost of a drink at the airport bar, and we would have paid it without noticing.”

“It will be,” he says at last. “If we let it.”

His daughter looks at him sideways.

“Is that the grown‑up version of ‘we make our own fun’?”

“Yes.”

She smiles, small but real.

“We’ll try,” she says.

At the lake, some things have changed; most have not.

The pedalos cost more. The cafe has a new sign, chalk instead of printed menus, and the price of lemonade makes him blink.

But the water still remembers how to hold boats, and the air still remembers how to skim over skin.

Families sit on blankets. A group of young men argue good‑naturedly over who pays for the next hour on the water; one of them pretends to storm off, then comes back, laughing. A woman offers to watch a stranger’s dog while they both go to get drinks. A boy about his son’s age gives directions to a lost couple trying to find the car park, drawing the route with his finger in the air.

Nobody is handing out free holidays. No neighbour steps forward with a spare ticket to another continent. But people are doing what they can in small ways: sharing shade, sharing directions, sharing jokes that soften the feeling of money tightening around everything.

His son and daughter stand at the edge of the water, looking out. The boy is quiet. The girl’s shoulders, for the first time in weeks, drop away from her ears.

“It’s not bad,” his son admits. “For near.”

She nudges him.

“Don’t say ‘for near’ like that. It’s not the suburbs’ fault dad can’t afford a flight.”

He winces.

She turns to him.

“I mean,” she adds quickly, “that it’s not our fault, either. Or yours. It’s… everything.”

“Everything,” he agrees.

Tim watches them step into the boat. He watches his son take the pedals, his daughter lean back, head tipped to the sky.

He feels, absurdly, that each turn of the pedals is not just movement over water but a kind of vote, a small act of saying: We are still here. We are still making something of this.

The cost of petrol, of food, of housing, of gas, stands behind them like a silent, tall figure. It will be there when they get home. It will be there when he opens his bank app, when school starts again and winter bills arrive, when his neighbour asks next week, “Did you get away, then?” and waits to hear whether away means abroad or simply not the kitchen.

But for an hour, the levy is paid and the breath is theirs.

He closes his eyes and listens to them laugh.

It is not the sound of airports.

It is enough.