Cenwick Priory
October 16, 2009 at 5:04 pm (Short Stories) (astronamy, fiction, ghost, ghost story, halloween, originial fiction, reformation, ruins, short fiction, spooky)
Halloween is on the approach! Always a time for fun, mystery and imagination. In honour of the Eve of All Hallows I thought I’d try my hand at a ghost story. I’m reading an exerpt from it at tonight’s ‘Spotlight’ open mic night. The full story is published below. Enjoy…if you dare! Mwahaha
“…we haven’t got long to wait,” Matt’s dad said, peering through his binoculars. “Another twenty minutes or so, I reckon…what are you doing now?”
Matthew snapped his gaze back round, tried to slow his breathing. “Nothing Dad. It’s nothing,” he said, trying not to look back over his shoulder again.
“I thought getting you away from home would be what you needed. But it seems you’re tenser than ever.”
Matt rubbed his eyes. “Honestly, Dad, I’m fine.” His voice in his ears seemed small and dead, like it was freezing as it left his mouth.
His dad moved himself in the folding chair so he could look directly at his son. In the half-light of the low, bloated moon his face turned into a mass of shifting holes and polished bone. Matt resisted the temptation to look away. “This is because of that stupid story from the pub, isn’t it? Honestly, I don’t understand what’s happened to you recently. You’re supposed to be going to university next year, you’re old enough to know better. This old ruin’s no more haunted than your bedroom back home.”
Matt didn’t move but his father held up a hand, skeletal in the darkness. “I know what you think you’ve been seeing but it’s only dreams. You used to get them a lot when you were younger. It’s a shame they’ve come back, but not entirely surprising with what’s happened.”
Matt shrugged his face further down into his scarf and swallowed the useless words as the rose to his lips. He stared at the moon as it crawled slowly, slowly into the sky, large, hollow craters of eye sockets fixed on him.
“Besides, just think about it,” his dad continued, lifting his binoculars to the sky. “Even if there were such things, why on earth would Ben want to come back to frighten you? You were friends, remember?” Matt was grateful for the night masking the blood he felt draining from his face. “Good friends. That’s all you should remember about him.”
…all I remember is the look on his face as I pushed him… Matt shook the thought away.
His dad was referring to his light-up watch. “Ok, be ready with the stopwatch and the camera. It’ll be any minute now…”
Matt looked sharply over his shoulder, but there was nothing there again. Despite the chill air sweat collected a in the palms of his hands. He stood up to disguise the shaking that had suddenly taken hold of his limbs.
“Where are you going? It’ll start any minute…” His dad’s question fluttered at the corners of his awareness.
“I’m just going for a slash Dad, I’ll be back in a minute.” He staggered off behind one of the great shoulders of stone that jutted from the hilltop like teeth. Huddling down in the shadows to get away from the stare of the moon, he held his head in his hands and tried once again to slow his breathing. Even with his eyes closed, it was still there. Everyone said it was all in his mind. Even when he’d opened his eyes to see it bent over his bed, its blurry face a mass of crumpled flesh and bone, inches from his own…it was all in his head…
Forcing his eyes open he tried to ignore the thing that wasn’t really over his shoulder by looking at anything else.
The crooked finger of a ruined bell tower loomed on his left. It had been impressive when he’d seen it earlier that day, in the watery winter sunshine, but now in the frosty moonlight shadows pooled in the cracked stonework and distorted the angles and height, making it look like it was leaning over him. The last time the bell was rung by the living, the landlord of The Old Bell had said, was to call for help that never came. The last holy man to serve at this place had been pushed to his death from the tower as he vainly rang the bell to summon the villagers to his aid. Matt had felt a shiver run through his flesh at the story, Ben’s scream suddenly loud again in his ears.
The bell is still heard, sometimes, someone else in the pub had whispered to them. It was a call to judgement, a call to atone. The villagers had left the Catholic priest to his fate to appease the forces of the Reformation. The soldiers left the place in peace but the priest is still waiting for the village of Cenwick to admit to what it did.
Someone had asked what Matt and his dad were doing there this time of year. There had been an odd silence when they’d explained. The county was famous for its lack of light pollution. Amateur astrologers like his dad flocked to the village all year round to observe and photograph the night skies from the top of Priory Hill. There was always a distinct lack of them at this time if the year, his father had said. He assumed it was just too cold even for the most passionate of them. But this year on this night there was to be a lunar eclipse, and when the moon was passing closer to the earth than it had done in a generations. His father had thought it would be a welcome distraction.
If only leaving home could have let him get away from what had happened. When night fell the familiar cold was at his back again. It didn’t need to whisper in his ear any more for Matt to know what it wanted to say. He stared hard at the bell tower, refusing to focus on something cold and pale that was hovering at the corner of his vision.
His heart clutched in his chest like a fist as the low, dead voice of a bell echoed out into the night. One, two…three times. A high, human voice rang out with it, distorted and weak like it was from far, far away. It dissolved into a sickening scream, clawing at his ears and his head and his heart for what seemed like forever until he was swamped by the silence that followed. The light started to dim. Even though his rational mind knew it must be the eclipse, his heart jerked. Silence and darkness swallowed everything around him and he closed his eyes and ears against it, afraid of what might show itself. He wondered if this was what death was like, sight, sound and smell all fading like existence was being leeched away.
A whole forever later he dared to crack an eye. The moonlight had started to return, bleaching the broken rock bones that were scattered around him. He shook himself, got shakily to his feet. Nothing moved or made a noise.
“Dad,” he called. “Dad, are you there?” He started to pick his way back to his father when something caught his eye. At first it looked like another pile of stones hunched against the bottom of the bell tower. Then, as he passed closer, it looked more like crumpled linen. He found himself edging still closer. It took on the shape of a bent and broken body, awkwardly angled, pale as the moon and utterly still. He choked back the bile that rose in his throat but something behind him wouldn’t let him step back. He found himself bending over the cracked and splintered thing, made even more hideous in the sickly light, only identifiable as something once human by the complete but bloody hands, stretched as if still trying to seize something.
Control returned to his feet and he stumbled backwards, staggered back round the wall. Their chairs were there, illuminated in the moonlight, torches, blankets and bags were all neatly piled where they’d put them. But his dad was nowhere to be seen. He opened his mouth to call but stopped as he got the hideous impression that something that was getting to its feet behind him.
He ran, calling out as he went. No one answered. He raced blindly down the side of the hill, not daring to look back, hardly daring to look ahead, staggering and stumbling on the uneven ground. Trying to stop his ears, he ran down the path into the village. The Old Bell was still well lit on the other side of the village square and he could hear music and laughter from inside.
He paused to catch his breath but then something was breathing, staggering, bleeding close behind him. He took off across the square, nearly tripping over the steps into the pub. He leaned hard against the door after slamming it behind him. The same half-dozen people from before were scattered around the room, staring at him. Cold sweat pooling at the base of his back as he searched for his voice.
“Help, please,” he gasped. “You have to help me.”
“Easy lad,” the landlord said. “Calm down. Where’s your dad?”
“I don’t know,” he sputtered, glancing back at the door. “I don’t know, we were up at the ruins…I couldn’t find him after the eclipse…”
“Now slow down. He can’t have just disappeared. What exactly happened?”
He looked right into the landlord’s eyes. Everyone in the room was quiet. The music had stopped.
“I saw it…” Matt could hardly raise his voice above a choked whisper. “I saw him fall. I saw him get pushed…”
“Told you we shouldn’t have let them go up there, not tonight.”
“Quiet!” The landlord snapped at whoever had spoken. The faces were tense. Knuckles were white around pint glasses. He thought he saw a pale shape beyond the glass of the window, one hand raised to knock, but he blinked and it was gone.
“You need to atone.” The voice wasn’t loud but it hushed everyone. A finger of chill crawled up Matt’s spine as he saw a sullen heavy-browed man staring directly at him. “This is judgement. You must own up…all of you. There’s blood on your hands.”
“Out, William,” the landlord bellowed. “Out now, you’ve been warned before. I won’t have this nonsense in my pub.”
The man left, his gaze falling once more on Matt before the door closed behind him.
Matt’s hands were shaking. “Please,” Matt whispered again. “Help me find my dad.”
It’s didn’t look like the landlord was really listening to him. The man was looking out the window, mouth hanging open slightly. “Shut those curtains over,” he ordered and someone obeyed. Hushed conversation rose, many furtive glances being thrown toward the door and at Matt. The landlord turned back to him and laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“Now my lad, nothing’s happened to your father, ok? He’s probably wandered off and lost himself in the dark and will be back here by morning.”
“Can’t you help me find him tonight? What if he’s hurt? We could search the hilltop – ”
“No.” The landlord’s hand tightened ever so slightly on Matt’s shoulder. “No, I don’t think anyone will help you with that tonight.” He was glancing at the curtained window. “Best sit tight until night blows over. Always best to stay back, sit trouble out, let things take their natural course.”
A foul taste rose in Matt’s mouth. The landlord moved away but he still felt like something was holding his shoulder. He shut his eyes tight, willing there to be only darkness there. But instead he saw it all again, saw Ben on the edge, saw himself pushing, heard the scream that rose and fell and cut off, so like the scream on the hill. Over the whispers in the room he became aware of a tapping noise, like knuckles on glass. Nobody looked up but it got louder. Something pale was stood at his shoulder. He felt the chill on his neck. He saw it start to bend down to look into his face and he shut his eyes tight again.
“It was me, it was me, it was me.” It went round and round in his head. The smell of rain-slicked tarmac roof rose in his nostrils and the feel of the chilling wind goosepimpled his skin. Ben was stood in front of him with that look on his face, that look he got when he knew he’d won.
“It wasn’t and accident…” He couldn’t tell if he spoke out loud or in his mind. He made his mouth move. “It was me…”
“The lad’s gone mad.”
“…shouldn’t have let them go up, not on this night.”
“It’s got the dad, it won’t bother us again, surely?”
“It was me.” Matt tore his eyes open. It was darker in the pub. The lights had been turned down low and all the curtains were drawn. A chair had been dragged in front of the door but the tapping still carried on. “It was me. It wasn’t an accident, it was me. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” He kept saying it over and over. Everyone was staring again but there was a fear in their eyes that was nothing to do with him. “I’m sorry…I did it, I killed him.” Vision blurring with hot tears, his words became thick and he swallowed hard. “I’ll go to the police, anything,” he didn’t even know who he was talking to but he was standing and facing the window. “I promise, I’ll tell everyone, I’ll admit it. Just please let Dad be safe…”
The tapping rose to a banging, an angry fist on the thick wood of the door. Matt moved towards it.
“No, lad. Get back, don’t touch it!” The landlord’s voice was high. Someone moved to stop him but he flung himself across the room and pulled the chair back and threw open the door.
“Matt, there you are! Where the hell of you been, you scared the shit out of me.”
Matt flung himself into his father’s arms and cried into his shoulder like he had when he was a boy. “Now, now, son, don’t be daft. What’s all this? I wasn’t that angry…”
“Get in here now and shut that door,” the landlord ordered, all but pulling them inside by their coats. He bolted the door again, pulled another chair in front of it and drew the blind across the little window beside the door that perfectly framed a pale, hooded figure that stood silently in the middle of the village square.
Everyone retreated back to near the fire. The landlord threw on another log, said they’d have to settle in comfy because he wasn’t opening any door until sunrise. There was no word spoken above a whisper for the rest of the night. There were occasional tappings on the glass of the windows and sometime past midnight a bell was heard tolling in the distance.
Matt felt like a tight band had been taken from around his chest, like he’d not breathed properly days. His sight was clear and nothing hung at his back or at flitted at the corners of his vision. Warmth had returned to his bones and he enjoyed the feel of it under his skin. He and his dad sat in a quiet corner and Matt explained what had really happened to Ben. Towards morning Matt dozed off on the table. He was able to sleep knowing that no matter what happened now, unlike Cenwick, nothing would be returning to him that should stay buried.
Short Story “Under Aletsch”
January 18, 2009 at 8:18 pm (Short Stories) (Aletsch, dark, drama, family, glacier, original fiction, short fiction, short story, twins)
A strange piece inspired by a genuine event.
Under Aletsch
So that was how it happened was it? An oddly quiet way to go. I always imagined you’d leave the world kicking and screaming, like we entered it. It’s suitably dramatic, I suppose. Always knew you’d end early and it wouldn’t be in a nice way.
What did it feel like, Dawn? Was it like going to sleep from the feet up…?
You weren’t destined to last. Even Mum knew it. You could see it in the way she looked at you. Her eyes would go distant and hard, like they were freezing over. Did you never notice? Like the time she found you disembowelling the hedgehog on the lawn to see the roots of the spines from the inside.
I knew you were dead. There was no way you would have left me in peace for thirty-three years if you weren’t.
The first few years you were gone I was afraid you’d show up again, that it was all too good to be true. I half expected you to turn up at my wedding. In fact, I remember now, I stood at the front of the church sweating and shaking. Dad had patted my shoulder with a wise grin across his face, said my cold feet would warm up again soon enough. But I was thinking about how you’d wait until the suitably dramatic moment, just as Marian was pacing down the aisle, a vision encased in the floating ice of veils and rose petals, and then rise from one of the pews in a black hat to laugh and point and screech everything into the church air.
But you didn’t. Of course you didn’t. That was 1983. You’d already been lying still and solid for two years by then, each cell meticulously stiffened and saved from rot.
Marian. My Marian.
That year I found Marian and a house with a little lawn at the back. There were clumps of daisies in the summer, small white islands amongst the grass like icebergs on a green sea. There was a tree and a shed to keep the mower in. Space for a swing set, Marian said, smiling. I smiled back and kissed her, I remember, though I knew there would never be any swings.
I’m supposed to go and see you. They’ve sent me the plane ticket here: SWISS International Air Lines. Business Class. Leaves a week from now. They’ll pay for the hotel, too.
Marian thinks you’re an old flame, you know. She heard the voice message they left on the machine. I couldn’t find the words to explain. I don’t think the words exist. I saw her swallow tears and move to the hall cupboard to fetch a suitcase.
Old flame. I fire that burned once and has since been cooled to zero.
I’ll ring her later. I’ll find some plain, ordinary words that’ll parcel it all up simply. She’ll believe me. She will. Why wouldn’t she? I can make it sound like a perfectly normal story. Why have I never mentioned you? Why, indeed? Were we close? Can one half of you be close to the other, or are you all the same thing?
‘We fell out’; that ought to do it. It’s true, after all. We fell out of whatever we were in. Then you disappeared, like you’d never been there, except for the ache at the back of my head, like a scar inside my skull.
It’s easy to ignore an ache that’s always been there. That’s what the sting of your presence faded to, Dawn: an old wound finally allowed to close a little.
The logo of the airline is the Swiss flag, the white cross on the red, red, red. The same red, unforgiving and artificial, as the dye you used to put in your hair. A chemist down the road sold your favourite colour, unrelenting and plastic, nothing like blood or roses, hedgehog guts or dying sunsets. You’d spend hours perfecting your acrylic face-frame of hair and I’d watch from behind a magazine, each pin-point twitch with your expert fingers arranging it ever so slightly more perfectly. Then you looked at me through your lashes as you blew me a kiss and I had to look away.
You strayed from the path and froze on a glacier. You left the house and got on a plane and flew to Switzerland to wander off the path. Why Switzerland, Dawn? Why on earth…? Did you go on SWISS air?
Most likely it was Switzerland simply because it will have been the first flight out. You will have eyed the clerk up and down, flashed your streetlight smile and said ‘anywhere’ in that voice that is nearly all.
I’m going to go. Of course I am. I was a fool to think I could live without you. I’ll ring the man again in the morning, say I’ll be joining him next week. I’ll make a formal identification.
Mum died in your room, did you know that? She was hoovering it, though no one’s touched the damn place except her in years. That cranky old hoover that weighs a bloody tonne. Dragging it up the stairs and heaving it around the room finished off her little heart.
I hate planes. Always have. And buses and trains. Long, thin people-boxes, one of the most efficient ways possible I can think of to kill off a group of people in one go. Even in Business Class you’re still a billion bloody feet off the ground and the air tastes like it’s come out of a bottle and you have to duck and edge around and purposefully look away from dozens of strange people.
Every single thing I see levers up another paving slab in my mind. All these people breathing the same box of air is like when we snuck onto a train to Manchester in the middle of summer. Mum believed me when I said we were going to a friend’s to study. We’d laughed the whole way and you produced a six-pack of cider that you’d got by smiling at the man in the off-license. Everyone stared at the noise we made but even if we’d been quiet as a pair of curtains they would have stared anyway. We were used to it. We’d come to accept we were unusual, exotic, enticing, two versions of the same thing. You dyed your hair but it just made it look more. When you cut it short like mine and started dressing like me even I found it hard to tell where I ended and you began.
Mum once told me looking at us was like standing at the very point when two rivers meet only to hurtle over a cliff. I copied you when you laughed at that, though I wasn’t sure I liked it the way you did.
You saw a man watching from across the train so you drew me in and kissed me, tongue and teeth and the taste of cider. I could feel his eyes on us as surely as I felt your eyes back at him, even with my own shut.
The police brought us both home the next day, having spent the night in a Manchester cell because you’d screamed and wouldn’t let me tell them where we lived. You’d gone hoarse by the morning whilst I’d lain curled in the corner all night with vomit in my hair and I’d told the policeman the name of our village.
The frozen face, do you remember it? You must have seen it that time, the way the flesh of Mum’s jaw tightened and stuck as the policeman told her what we’d done.
I remember the sting ebbing to an ache. Six months, a year, you still didn’t turn up and it faded and faded even as Mum cried in the evening before she went to sleep. She’d heard our argument, she must have. If I pretend I can say I’ve forgotten all the things I said to you. It was over thirty years ago and I’ve spent all that time forgetting so it’s a believable lie, even to myself. I meant it all, at the time and I’ve spent the rest of my life telling myself you deserved it.
A low, spreading ache. I bathed in its throbbing pulse and as time went on and on, still no word, it spread over all my skin and then down through my mouth and into my guts until it was all of me. When I looked in the mirror and didn’t see you, that’s when I knew you were gone.
I met Marian that very night. She had brown eyes and a soft, soft smile and she knew how to make hotpot and wanted to be a teacher. I sighed out a kind of last breath and settled against her warm breasts and let her lead me somewhere where love wasn’t torture.
You’d have hated Marian. You’d enjoy telling me that she was dull, grey. A cardigan in human form, that’s what you would have said. She’d hate you too, no question, although there’s very little capacity in her for such things. She would have managed it for you, I think. But then she would look from you to me and she’d see the red hair and the lips and eyes and she’d have seen us as one and she’d never be able to look at me again.
But who knows, you might still win. Because here you are again and now Marian knows about you. I might have known you’d find some way to intrude, scratching your way in like claws through a net curtain. Because you never really died, did you? You’ve just been hiding under a thick layer of rocks and ice in my brain.
I haven’t heard you laugh for a lifetime but I can hear it again now, in my mind, ice-clear and fiery. It was the laugh you let fly at Mum when she caught us behind the shed at our thirteenth birthday party. It was the laugh you threw at me when I said I didn’t want to.
You found it so funny that I didn’t want to run away with you.
“Run away? What from?”
“From here, of course.”
“To where?”
“Fucking anywhere.”
You’re not an aunt, by the way. I worked and earned and built and bought Marian everything she wanted to try and make up for what she really wanted from me but that I wouldn’t give. Just think, she said once, just think, a little bit of you, alive with us. But I know two of me is too many. I’ve spent a lifetime pretending, a lifetime’s dedication bent towards burying everything I really am, everything that you personified. A second’s lapsed control and I would feel again in my heart and mind and skin everything I shouldn’t when I looked at you and thought you were beautiful.
I ended up shouting at Marian that day and I caught my face in the mirror, wide mouth open and brow dark and our insane red hair dishevelled. That’s what you must have seen the night you ran away.
Marian never brought it up again, though I saw it in her face sometimes: a melting when we walked past play parks and front gardens in the summer, teeming with sprinklers and happy faces and tiny limbs.
Formally identify the body. Anything and everything and nothing and all of what had been before coming and going, clawing up through rocks and ice to swirl like a blizzard inside my head, parcelled up neatly in four little words.
Yes, that’s Dawn. Look how red the hair is.
Sign the paper, accept the patted back, back to the hotel and, thank God, a mini-bar. Fly home tomorrow. Home to Marian. She’s bringing the Alfa and she’ll meet me at Birmingham International. She won’t say anything, just gather me to her like a child and hold me. I’ll breathe in her smell of violets and ease myself into the familiar shape of her and then I can begin laying a whole new patio in my head.
But that’s tomorrow. Tonight it’s just you and me, again. I’ve come and I’ve disturbed your sleep, just when you thought you’d got rid of me. Just one more night, Dawn, then I’ll spend the rest of the years left to me laying you to rest. I owe you that much.
Short Story – ‘Wayward Farm’
April 22, 2008 at 8:47 pm (Short Stories) (dark, family, farm, fiction, original fiction, short fiction, short story, surreal, wayward, wayward farm)
This is actually the original story which I am expanding into my first novel. In the longer form it is very different but I hope to keep the tone and tension that this one has, as well as the characters and a similar setting. It is one of my personal favourites from all the stuff I’ve done.
Wayward Farm
Gerard dumped the body behind the crumbling greenhouse with glass cracked as old skin, murky with grime and lichen. The plants inside had long since succumbed to weeds and rot and brambles grew thick against the outside. He kicked some loose dirt over the blank face and lolling hands, dulling the pale skin that gleamed even in the rapidly fading light.
His breath silvered in front of him, whisking past his face as he hurried back through barren allotment. He rubbed his hands together, the painful numbness of the greying air soaking through to the bone, cursing the loss of his gloves. He buried his hands in his armpits and reminded himself that he would either have to find some or buy a coat with pockets.
He closed the rickety front door firmly and clicked all the locks home, stuffing rags into the gaps to try and keep any drafts from creeping in around the warped frame. Teeth chattering, he moved through to the sitting room. The fire had died low, throbbed out little but welcome heat. Gerard coaxed it back to life with a grubby poker and some fresh wood and knelt close until his fingers started to sting back with feeling. He would really, really have to try harder to save up next summer. He could not bare the thought of going through another winter without central heating.
His blood finally moving through him with a little more enthusiasm, he shed his shabby coat and pulled off his grubby trainers. The night closed in around the house like fog. Gerard managed to convince himself to turn on one more lamp to chase away the shadows, even though he was painfully aware that electricity did not come for free.
He warmed some milk on the ancient aga in the kitchen and pottered around, picking up the pieces of a broken milk bottle and disposing of them carefully, wrapped in newspaper. He quickly wiped down the cracked tiled floor, straightened up the kitchen chairs and washed up a mug for his cocoa.
Returning to the dingy lounge, he knelt once again in front of the fire with his hands curled around the steaming mug just like he’d done when he was a child. There was even a worn part on the rug where he and his brother used to sit and listen to Dad’s ghost stories before they’d got a TV.
He sipped at the cocoa, hot and thick and alive as blood and felt it restoring feeling to the very tips of his toes. He sighed deeply and relaxed his shoulders, his muscles unfurling slowly in the delicious warmth.
“Gee?” The old back door rattled and a gust of cold made the hair on Gerard’s arms prickle.
“In here, Lewis,” he called. “For the love of everything holy, shut the door. You’re letting all the heat out.”
A slam and Lewis barrelled through into the living room, smelling like frost, flushed and breathing heavily. Gerard grumbled a little internally, seeing his brother’s thick, expensive overcoat and matching scarf and gloves.
A grin spread itself over his Lewis’s face.
“What?” Gerard snapped.
“You look exactly like you did when you were, like, ten.” Lewis shouldered himself out of the long coat and draped it over the back of their dad’s scuffed leather armchair and glanced around. “Jesus, Gee, you’ve got it like a bloody cave in here. Why don’t you switch some more lights on?”
Gerard ignored him, looked back into the dancing flames. “Did you find him?”
“No,” Lewis collapsed in the leather chair, not quite filling it, “but I knew he wouldn’t be there. Dom hates the Crown on a Friday; it’s when all the kids are in.”
“He used to go with you on a Friday.”
“Yeah, when we were the kids,” Lewis replied with a grin. “It’s really weird though. It’s not like him to just disappear off like this without telling anyone. If he’d gone home to nurse his hangover, fair enough, but he would have told someone. He doesn’t just piss off at lunch time, even to the Crown.”
Gerard snorted into his mug. “I don’t like that place.”
Lewis sighed. “You never like anywhere.”
Gerard shot him a look. “It’s alright for you. You got their savings. I got the damn house. Do you have any idea how much money has gone into keeping this bloody place standing up? How much more needs to be done?”
Lewis shrugged. “It’s an old house, Gee.” He frowned a little. “We grew up here, Dad grew up here. You were born here. That’s why they left it to you, it’s priceless.”
“So are the repairs,” Gerard grumbled.
“So get a better job.”
“Living here is a fucking full time job.”
“Steady,” Lewis’s eyes were a little sharp.
Gerard sighed. “It got easier with Victor moving in,” he said a little wistfully. “It really helps when I’ve got someone else around.”
Lewis snarled. “Don’t mention him around me, Gee. Really don’t.”
Gerard shrugged again, idly gazing at the flames reflected in the window. “He’s just been a help.”
“He’s been a creep, Gerard. Always was,” Lewis spat. “Even when we were little and he made us call him Uncle Vick. I didn’t like the way grinned at you, even then…”
The synthetic tone of Lewis’s mobile stung the air, making Gerard jump.
“Damn crappy reception,” Lewis growled. “Always miss calls up here.” He frowned as he listened to the voicemail. Gerard wiped cooling cocoa spots off his already stained trousers.
“It’s from Dom’s girlfriend.”
“Has he turned up then?”
Lewis shook his head. “She’s just got home, he’s not there. But she says he left a message on their machine. Apparently he was heading around here at lunch, to see you.”
Gerard blinked, drank deep from his cocoa and looked back at the fire. “I haven’t seen him.”
There was a silence and Gerard could feel his brother peering at him.
“What did he say to you last night, Gee?”
Gerard ground his teeth but didn’t look up.
“Seriously, I saw you storm out.” The leather armchair creaked as Lewis sat forward, trying to look his brother in the eyes. “Heaven knows it took enough to get you to come out in the first place but you didn’t have to walk home on your own. It was bloody freezing outside.”
“I noticed.” Gerard shook his limp hair out of his eyes and drained the last of the cocoa. He blinked at the shadows quivering in the air outside the window. The wind picked up, groaning through the timbers of the old house. The night danced behind the reflected flames in the windows, the shadows twitching in the restless air.
“Come on,” Lewis persisted, “Dom’s a nice guy. I know he can be a bit narrow-minded, but he’s essentially harmless.”
“He shouldn’t have said it, Lewis,” Gerard ground his teeth. “I don’t care if he was drunk, he shouldn’t have said it at all.”
“Said what?”
Gerard made an irritated noise, clasped his arms around himself and hunkered closer to the fire. He felt his face beginning to flush with the heat but still felt a feathery cold deep in his bones.
“He laughed at me,” Gerard snarled. “Said no wonder I got loaded with this dump since Dad must have hated me.”
“What?”
Gerard looked at Lewis. “He knows Dad wasn’t…well, you know, my father. My natural father. I don’t know how he knows, hell, we only found out just before Dad died, but Dom thought it was hilarious. A big joke.”
Lewis blinked, mouth open. Gerard felt his blood thunder hot in his ears and clenched his fists, fingernails almost splitting palm skin. Lewis blinked a bit more, made a strangled noise but Gerard looked away, back towards the window.
Ice shot up his spine. Something at the window. A flash of pale against the shadows; something moving. He swallowed and rubbed his eyes and looked back, but there was nothing there.
“Gerard,” Lewis finally managed to stammer. “I’m sorry…I…Jesus. I know Dom’s a bit of a prick about this sort of thing, but seriously, if I knew he was going to say…I swear I didn’t tell him, I…he was very, very drunk.”
Gerard tore his eyes from the window. His brother’s face under the expensive haircut was mortified; he scratched his chin, blinked, stammered.
Gerard didn’t say anything, shifted on the rug slightly, fed the fire some more wood.
“You’re right, he shouldn’t have said anything.”
Gerard met his brother’s eyes. “No, he shouldn’t. But he won’t say it again. I let him know…”
There, something, definitely something, outside the window behind Lewis’s chair. Shadows moved against the wind, leant forward. A white hand flicked into the light bleeding from the house. Then it was gone.
Gerard shut his eyes, rubbed his temples, breathed deep. He needed sleep, that’s all. Just sleep. He’d been sat in Dad’s ghost story spot too long.
“Well I’m not surprised he’s reluctant to show his face,” Lewis said, “but this message definitely has Angela saying he was coming round here to apologise. He never arrived? Gerard?”
Gerard looked back to Lewis, eyes wide. “Huh?”
“Dom hasn’t been around this afternoon?”
Gerard swallowed, the cocoa aftertaste bitter on his tongue. He concentrated on not looking out the windows. “No.” He took a breath and another until his heart slowed down. Lewis was giving him a searching look. Gerard met it, scowled. “Victor would be able to find him.”
“Gee,” Lewis raised his hands, quivering ever so slightly. “I’m serious. I hate the way you talk about that freak so casually. I hate the way you don’t see how creepy it is that he’s been sniffing around you ever since you were, like, a child.”
Gerard laughed. “Maybe he’s my real dad.”
Lewis’s anger blazed clear in his eyes for a second and Gerard smiled inwardly. “He’d find Dom, is all I’m saying. He was working the woods around here before we were born. Not that the prick deserves to be found, ever.”
“Aww, Gee,” Lewis softened. “I’m sorry about what Dom said, really I am, but he did intend to apologise. That takes some guts.”
Gerard felt his muscles clench up. He stood, took his cocoa mug through to the kitchen.
“So you think he might be lost?” Lewis followed him. “If he found you weren’t here and then tried to walk back on his own, he could be lost in the wood somewhere.”
“He’s not been round,” Gerard said firmly.
Lewis was silent for a moment behind him. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Gerard shivered as the chilly washing up water gnawed at his hands. “What, you think I’d lie? Or do you think I twatted him with a kitchen chair and then dumped him behind the greenhouse?”
“That’s not funny, Gee.”
Gerard shrugged, drying the mug and turning round from the sink. “It’s a little funny.”
Lewis shook his head. “It’s just so weird for him to disappear. I hope he hasn’t got hit by a car or something…”
Gerard grinned.
Lewis scowled at him. “Don’t.”
Gerard just grinned wider, glanced out the kitchen window. His mug shattered on the tiles with a noise like splintering bone.
“What?”
Gerard covered his eyes. “No, it’s not there, it’s not, it’s not.”
“What?” Lewis sounded a little tense, turned to look out the window. “Gerard, there’s nothing there…”
Gerard peeked out from between his fingers, his skin prickling and his teeth chattering. There was nothing at the window. Lewis was staring at him. He took a few breaths, steadied himself against the counter, peered into the shapeless mass of shadows past the glass.
“What did you see?”
Gerard shook his head. “Nothing.”
“You’re shaking.” He came closer. “What’s going on?”
Gerard screamed. Lewis wheeled back round. The pale figure knocked on the glass twice then disappeared.
“Was that…?” Lewis tried to calm his near hysterical brother. “Gerard, get a grip, keep still, you’ll tread on the broken…Gerard!” He grabbed him by the shoulders.
The handle of the back door rattled and shivered.
“Gerard,” Lewis cried. “Calm down, calm down! It’s only Dom…”
The door opened and Dom walked in with a howl of wind. His hood was pulled up, his eyes were bruised pits in its shadow. His lips were blue, his hands white.
Gerard clutched at his brother and let out a cry. “Oh, thank God.” Nervous laughter shuddered from his chest.
“Jesus, Dom,” Lewis muttered. “Could you have announced yourself in a more traditional manner? You gave us the fright of our lives.”
“Would help if there was a fucking doorbell on this bloody museum piece,” Dom muttered as he closed the back door. “Christ, it’s cold out there. Jesus, Allah, Buddha, is your fire lit?”
Gerard gestured limply through the other room. They trudged through. Dom stood by the fire, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other, blushing slightly despite his shivers. He’d pulled his hood off and his hair was wild and tangled, his eyes bloodshot and there appeared to be straw behind his ear.
“Where’ve you been?” Lewis asked.
Gerard, nearly recovered, froze himself up and glared.
“Yeah, about that,” Dom turned to face Gerard, but didn’t meet his eyes. He scratched his head, blinked blearily at the rug. “I came round, you know…to say sorry. I really am, man…” he laughed nervously. “Yeah, I was sat at my desk feeling like death…shouldn’t have drank gin, man. Should never drink gin. Anyway, I suddenly remembered and…fuck…I was a complete tosser last night and I know it. I don’t really think you should forgive me, but I thought I should at least come round and…you know.”
Gerard eyed him up and down but didn’t say anything.
“I came round at, like, lunch, but Victor told me you weren’t in and sent me away. I couldn’t face finding my way back to town so I sort of…passed out in your hay barn. Not that it helped, my head’s still fucking killing me. I woke up and it was getting dark and couldn’t find the way into the house.”
“Angela’s been calling everywhere, looking for you.”
“Oh man,” Dom rubbed his eyes. “I’m in the shit, seriously. I was supposed to be taking her and her parents to dinner tonight. Look,” he looked back at Gerard. “I really have to rush off, but I think I really need to say sorry properly, so I was wondering, I don’t know, if you want to get a drink at the Crown sometime?”
Gerard crossed his arms. “I don’t like the Crown.”
Lewis frowned at him. “Gee…”
Gerard shrugged. “Sure, whatever.”
Dom smiled, nodded. “Great, I’ll give you a ring sometime. See you at work, Lewis.”
One more eager gust of chill as the back door opened then shut behind him. Gerard shivered and moaned inwardly as more of the precious heat was swallowed by the winter night.
“See?” Lewis said, absurdly pleased with himself. “He can be alright.”
Gerard didn’t answer, knelt and tried to persuade the fire to once again renew its efforts.
“Why did you skitz out, anyway?” Lewis asked. “I’ve never seen you so freaked.”
Gerard blushed. “I don’t know,” he grumbled. “I saw him outside, trying to find the way in and, I don’t know…something lurking outside the house at night…it’s creepy.”
“What, you didn’t think…?”
Gerard said nothing.
Lewis laughed. “Oh my God, you thought it was Victor, didn’t you? You thought he’d come back to life, wondered back from the greenhouse to leer at you through the windows, didn’t you?”
“No,” Gerard mumbled. “No, I didn’t…”
Lewis was laughing hysterically. “Oh my God, Gee. That’s priceless. Didn’t you see the mess I made of his skull? That guy’s not coming back.”
Gerard sighed. “It’s going to be hell running this place on my own again. You haven’t half screwed up this time.”
“I’ll help out more, I promise,” Lewis said. “But honestly, Gee, if you’d heard the things he was saying about you, like he owned you. You’re my brother. Mine. He’s not even family. If you’d seen the way he was smiling.”
“You shouldn’t have come in then,” Gerard replied. “Victor told you I was out. No one forced you to come in.”
“I was going to wait for you, I needed to see if you’d seen Dom. That creep didn’t want me in here, either. In this house, our house – it’s never been anything to do with him. And then to stand there by our kitchen table and talk about us when we were kids and about how you were still doing everything he told you to…”
Gerard paused. He chewed his lip, rose up, tightening his grip on the poker. “Lewis…”
“Hmm?”
Gerard met his brother’s eyes. “What if he saw?”
“What if who saw what?”
“Dom was here all afternoon, in the hay barn…has been trying to get into the house since it was just getting dark…what if he heard? Or saw me going out to the greenhouse? At the very least, he knows that Victor was in this afternoon…”
Lewis’s face went blank. The wind had dropped. The fire’s splintery cracks were the only sounds to break the air.
Without a word Lewis put on his overcoat, scarf and gloves, then was gone through the back door. Gerard sighed and went on another search for his own gloves. He was damned if he was going to do another trip down to the greenhouse without them.
BRAND NEW Short Story: ‘Off-Buttons’
February 28, 2008 at 5:30 pm (Short Stories) (agorophopia, art, comedy, dark, fiction, paint, sedatives, short fiction)
Literally still-steaming hot off the press (wrote it this afternoon) a new short story. Have tried to return to some of my old ideals whilst moving forward with technique and style. What is it that makes someone who they are and act as they do? And what would they do if they were given a way to change it?
Off-buttons
Fuck it. Just fuck it. What a pile of shit. I don’t know why I bloody bother. Piece of crap. Where’s the black? God, I need a drink. Where’s that goddamn black gone.
Oh, for God’s sake. Typical. Bloody typical. Why do I always run out of black? It’s the one I use the most, for God’s sake. Should buy twice as much of the shitting stuff.
This light is terrible. This blind always catches. Come on, open you piece of…there. That’s no bloody good either. It’s lighter, but that just means I can see the damn thing better.
Seriously, why am I bothering? That’s the wrong type of blue, completely. It looks like a gay-assed postcard. Bloody Bournemouth or something. Piece of rubbish. Where is that bleeding black? It needs more black. And some white, some white up there.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Less light. And, what? What? Better blue?
This radio station is awful. Where’s the machine. Where is it? It’s polluting my brain, turn it off, turn it off.
Too bloody quiet now, but fuck it.
More white, more white down here. More…no, too much. Bleeding bloody hell. Is there an extra can of black in the back of that old drawer…? Probably be completely the wrong type. Jet my ass. Looks more like onyx to me. No wonder I shoved it back here.
Maybe a touch up here…where’s that pallet. Mix it with some of this ghastly blue…
Christ, this is awful. This is easily the worst piece of dross I’ve ever done. But they only ever seem to buy ‘em when they’re crap anyway. Might fetch something. Not that it bloody should. I wouldn’t want it on my wall.
Ruth’ll sell it. She always does. There’s always someone that wants one, the worse the better apparently.
I’m not going to meet the bloody buyer again, though. She can stuff that. Worst idea she ever had. Dinner and cocktails with the pillock gullible enough to buy it. What a fucking joke. Not that I care that they’re idiots. I get their money, keeps me in paint and takeaway. I’d just rather not meet them.
That prick had two. Two. Two of worst as well. As bad as they were on their own he couldn’t even see that those two, out of any of them, shouldn’t ever be seen together, let alone hung on the same bloody wall. Rhapsody together with Red Bedlam. You think the titles would’ve at least given him a clue.
I behaved myself, somehow. Ruth was there, shooting me looks like she does. I kept my mouth shut and everyone had a wonderful time. What on earth was that shit they served for dinner? Some lump of green stuff in the middle of a huge, empty plate. I order a takeaway as soon as I got home.
I need better black. This is just making everything worse. There has to be some more somewhere. Somewhere. Come on, please. This place is such a tip. Fucking hell, there’s so much of it, there’s got to be another, newer black.
I’m sick of the sight of that sky, shut that blind again. Stay shut. Stay shut. Fine, do that. Where’s that heavy thing…the thing. The thing I keep paperclips in, weighs a tonne. There’s the bugger. That’ll keep the blind down.
Nope. No more black. Typical. Only this bloody onyx shit. Too oily. Looks like I’m painting with chip fat.
Great, need a new paintbrush now too. If I was going to lose my temper and snap something, couldn’t it have been one of the crap paintbrushes? This one cost forty quid or something stupid.
Can’t stop now. The thing needs more…more black, more white…more depth in this corner, less in this one. It needs more…why did I snap that bleeding paintbrush. It was the last one.
God. I don’t want to out. Why do I always ending up having to go outside? My food gets delivered, why can’t my paints?
Well, Ruth found that one company that would deliver stuff but their materials were even crapper than my usual ones. Of course, the work sold for thousands because of that. Ruth wanted me to carry on using them. A recognised brand, she said. They’ll sponsor, help with marketing and things.
Bugger that.
Is it cold out there? Probably is. I’ve had to turn the heating up to six to keep it right in here. I need it hot. Cold slows everything down, gets me edgy and work gets worse.
I’ll need a coat, then. Two.
I hate the cold, I hate it. I hate outside. Christ, it’s freezing. And naked. The air moves too much. Winter or summer, the air is always loose and moving. Not natural.
Hurry, hurry, hurry. The sky is a vast, blank wound. No roof, no solid layer anywhere. Empty, open. Oh God, stop shaking. Get to the shop, get the stuff, get back.
I can’t breathe properly out here, this damn empty air. And noise. The whole bloody world rattles. Hands clenched around bars, incessantly shaking. Even the ground is rocking, lorries rumbling past.
Stare at the pavement, count the cracks. It’s full of cracks. Everything falls apart out here, eroding and breaking up under the immense pressure of the gaping sky an air.
Count the cracks, don’t look up. The earth is shuddering far above the blank blue. I might fall off at any moment, tumble off into the atmosphere and just fall forever. Careening through the great blue-blackness, suffocating.
Stop, stop…just one second. Need to breathe but…no, I must keep moving. Keep going, get back indoors. Quickly, quickly. Come the fuck on, where is that shop? Has it always been so far away?
I’ll take some of this with me…see if I can just catch the colour of this day’s outside. It’ll go into the paint. The inside outside. Imprison it all in the edges of a frame. I’ll try again to get it right.
It never works. This fucking wide gasp of nothing doesn’t fit into the paint. I keep trying. I know if one day I manage to make it fit, it’ll all suddenly be easy and I can hold the idea of outside safely in the frame of my head and I’ll be able to go out whenever and stand still and look up and not fall.
The sooner I get to the shop the sooner I’ll be back home. Fuck, why do I bother. I already know it’s not going to happen today. The piece is awful. It’s not working. Even going out into out and maybe bringing some of it back is not going to help me try and capture it. I’ve failed again.
But…more black, some better blue. It won’t work, but it has to be finished.
The door is creaky, fitted with a high-pitched bell and the interior smells like too much cleaning product. It’s the brown-eyed girl behind the counter.
A thousand dabs of colour, bald squares dabbed on bottles and tubes. Ultra-marine, azure, cobalt, aqua, lapis-lazuli, ocean, sapphire, indigo, navy, teal, turquoise. Such pompous names. Sky. The sky has never been that colour, I refuse to believe it.
Jet, obsidian, onyx (again), slate, raven, charcoal, ebony, ink, pitch. Just the jet. The rest is just jet with other crap in it. And a paintbrush…where the fuck are they? This place must be a hundred times more organised than mine but still it’s impossible to find the bloody things.
That one. The same one again. Why not? I’m only trying to paint the same thing. Fucking expensive it all is too. Lucky the shit sells, really.
And, back outside, the air is still rattling, rattling right through to my bones. How can anyone stand this? My feet are only staying on the ground through sheer force of will. This is too much, I should have waited. Phoned Ruth. Got her to get me the paint and brushes. I couldn’t wait though. I can never wait.
Home is still so far.
The noise and wind. Stealing breath. Stealing balance. Shouts. Machines everywhere, people everywhere. Yawning hole above me, sucking at me. Fucking hell, I just want to be back inside. Christ, give me a roof. Box me in away from this.
Oh God, I’m going to throw up.
Mustn’t stop moving. Another corner, just one more corner. Swallow it, swallow.
Key-scrabble. Get in, you fuck. Open, damn it. Open.
Thank sweet Christ. Calm, still air. Quiet. Warm. Lock the fucking door. Bolts and everything, I don’t care. Lock it away.
The carpet doesn’t move. It is still, like land after a rough ocean. Noises still filter through the brick and the windows but they’re all safely walled off. Carpet is scratchy on my cheek. Cling to it, catch my breath. Rub my face on it.
I can hear again, the hammering in my ears fading. Sickness leaving. I can breathe. I can smell paint.
They gave me medication for this. I tiny bottle of pills, supposed to make all this go away. Behaviour modifiers. Sedatives. I wasn’t listening, I didn’t give a shit. I was only there because the police told me to go. I put them in the cupboard in the bathroom that I never open.
No way could something like that make this go away. Tiny, round, rattling things. They can’t possibly wipe out a whole world. ‘Sufferer’ he called me. Like it was a disease. Me? A sufferer? Hardly fucking think so. It only ever matters if I need paint. Food gets delivered. What more do you want? No one gives a shit if I’m skinny or pale. Like it bloody matters. Bloody doctors.
Knew I should’ve thrown the clinking, white fuckers away. They look like eyes, peering out of the neck of the bottle. They might as well have smiles painted on them, smiles like the one the doctor wore.
Unnatural.
Have to paint it. Have to put the whole world into paint. Then it won’t be too big anymore. It needs to be a wide, skewed spread across canvas, controlled by me. Not controlled by little white buttons in a bottle.
*
An hour’s drive? An hour? Outside, in a car? Those tin cans don’t hold back the pressure of the sky, especially since they fill the damn things with glass so you can always see out. Why in hell do I have to go to an exhibition of my own work? I’ve seen it all before, haven’t I? I bloody well painted it. It’ll be full of stiff people holding wine, making up words. It’ll be inside, thank God, but an hour away.
Bloody Ruth. Why do I even have an agent? The crapping things sell themselves. Although I’d have to go out, talk to even more people.
Fucking Ruth. She uses stupid words like networking, personality image, opportunity. Like I care.
And it’s an hour away…
No way to get out of it. Already tried. The next level, contracts, the big money. I wish I didn’t have to care about money. But I need canvas. I need paint. Gallons of it. And take-away and delivery services. I need money.
Do I take one? Or is it two? I can’t read this label, it’s too bloody small. What do these people think I am? A frigging beetle or something? How can anyone read this? Two? No, three. Three times a day after meals.
What if you have only one meal? Or five? Depends on the day, doesn’t it. Idiots. Eat when you’re hungry, piss when you need to. I bet these people have pissing schedules too. Four times a day, after drinks.
Fuck it. I’ll have one when I wake up, one half way through and one before I pass out again.
If I have to go to this pretentious suck-fest, then will do it without throwing up or collapsing.
I need a drink. I swear I had some beer. Come on, something to wash this silly white pill down with. Vodka? Is that all I’ve got left? Cat-piss. Typical.
*
The blinds go from black to grey. Pill. I get hungry, order some Chinese. Pill. I drink and yawn and drink. Pill. Pass out.
*
It was fine. The drive was fine. The exhibition was fine. The wine was fine. Nothing special. How long ago was it anyway? A week? Two?
This house smells funny. It’s bloody dark too. Can I get these blinds open? Most have been shut for so long, some of the mechanisms have rusted still.
Pins. Blu-tak, sellotape. That’ll hold them open, if they can’t do it themselves.
The place really does stink. Paint and rubbish. It smells of dank inside and dust. It must have always reeked of paint, but this stale, dust-smell is a new. Opening the windows has eased some of the acid paint stench but it’s lifting the dust up in the air and shifting it about.
These paint tins are like magnets for the stuff. Look, leave the things alone for two weeks (or is it three?) and they’re all covered in it. I need some tissue from all the sneezing.
I need another pill…
The ceiling stares back at me. My breath tastes cool in myself. I wonder if chewing on the end of this paintbrush is sharpening or dulling my teeth…some animals chew on wood don’t they? And it’s good for them. Good for their teeth. Keeps them sharp? No, keeps them worn down. Rabbits and beavers and things. They’re teeth need to be kept worn down. Ah, worn down. It will be wearing my teeth then. Better stop.
For once the cool is nice. I suck it in. Everything feels still. My insides are hidden. I can’t feel the ebb and rush I vaguely remember that came whenever I was moving around, losing things, moving things, thinking about having to go outside.
The outside is in now, isn’t it? I’ve opened the windows anyway. I’ve never done that before. It’s let in the sounds and the smells, but it’s not shaking at my mind-cage.
The ceiling stares back. It’s really rather low. This whole room is really rather small. Strange, I’ve never noticed.
I thought I was going to stop chewing. Stop chewing, start painting. Been lying here all morning. Barely touched the new paints Ruth got for free from someone or other last week. The ten new canvases in the corner smell of clean, even from here.
But it is rather comfy here. I’ll have some food in a minute. Indian? Nah, had enough of that. Had Chinese all last week. Pizza?
There’s a new pizza place, in town. The flier is somewhere in the hall. It popped though…sometime…last week. I usually chuck restaurant fliers straight away. I keep the takeaways with free delivery fliers pinned in the kitchen. This one is still lying in the hall where it fell, I think. At least I think it was there when I went to the bathroom for my second piss. It doesn’t deliver, this new pizza place. Pain.
Where are my pills? Bathroom cupboard. Take them with me. Yeah. Take the bottle with me, wander out to the new restaurant, have one with my pizza, have some wine or something, wander back. Should kill a few hours.
I’m quite tall, I think. Never realised I could see over people’s heads in a queue for the zebra crossing.
I wonder if Ruth will take me along to another exhibition soon. I’d like to have something to do. An evening out of the house. Free drink and they usually they take up the whole evening. I’ll get in past two, drunk, take a pill, pass out.
I should get a TV for the house. How do I not have a TV? Everyone else in the world does. That’s how they fill the hours. I can ignore the blank canvas staring at me.
People slide by me, the pavement slides by underneath me, cars and lorries slide past me on the road. Everything slides past like I was covered in a layer of oil. It all slips past, in a dream, without touching. My eyes are heavy again. I’ve already had two naps today, how am I tired again? I could go home, fall asleep on that couch in the studio that’s so comfy. I used to use it to stack paints on. Can’t believe I never sat on it before.
No. I want my pizza. Get to the place, eat and then wander back. It’ll all slide past slowly, on the outside of this weird, sleepy bubble.
If I try, I might be able to make this trip out last until it gets dark. The restaurant’s on the other side of town. Must be almost an hour’s walk away. Yeah, get in when it’s gone dark and then I can say the light’s too bad to paint.
One little white stone swallowed with a glass of house white. Posh pizza, this. Posh place. Olives? On a pizza? Parma ham rather than just chunks of pink salt? The restaurant is loaded with smells. Smells of…what? My brain is fuzzy. Stuff…foody stuff.
It all slides down easy enough. One bite, two bites. Each slice about six bites, six slices. A nice symmetry there. Thirty six bites, it should it. Works out closer to forty but…never mind…didn’t factor in…
What was I thinking about? Pizza?
Another pill. Or did I already have one? One with meal. This is a meal. I’ll take one, just in case.
Just a few loose ones in the bottom of the bottle. Will need more very soon. How did I get them in the first place? Did Ruth give them to me?
No…doctor. The doctor will give me more. I must have the phone number somewhere. Ruth’ll know it.
*
No pills left, Ruth. Need more. You said the appointment was on Tuesday. No? Next Tuesday? Well then, when? The ninth? But I’ll run out. I’ve only got enough left for tonight. No, Ruth I need more. It feels weird if I’m even late with one. Things start buzzing. What? What do you mean it doesn’t matter? Well the doctor’s wrong. There wasn’t two month’s worth in that bottle. And I’m running out of money. Where’s all my money? I usually have more than this. Well, no, nothing new yet. I’m still thinking. Hello?
I’m tired anyway. The air in the house is cool on my hot cheeks. I’ve left the windows open again. I don’t care. Bed’s too far away. The couch in the studio is closer.
Eyes so heavy, limbs so heavy, lungs…so heavy. No, I need another pill…before I fall asleep. One more little button, the calm button that I push and then everything’s flat and easy.
One more…the last one.
*
Buzzing, buzzing. Noises clawing at skin and lungs and the inside of my head. Where are the noises coming from? I can’t see. Violent shivers in thin, loose limbs. The buzzing.
I need a pill. I remember the empty bottle. No, I need one…everything’s moving. No, there’s none left.
Wake up, you idiot. Wake up. No, it’s all coming back, all the ups and downs. The flatness is quaking. It’s all coming back, crowding up behind my eyes.
Blinding, buzzing. Breath tastes sharp. Get up, get up from the floor. No, can’t move. Shivering. Breathe, once, twice, three times. Light. Too much light. The air is fucking moving around me. Help, Christ, help. It’s all moving, the light, the air, the sounds, the smells. Outside, it’s like lying outside…I’ll fall off, I’ll fall off into the sky. I can feel it pulling everyway. Everything’s moving, everything’s moving. Stomach rocking. Shit, going to be sick.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Why didn’t I hold it? Just two most steps and I’d’ve been in the toilet. Fucking hell, this stinks worst of all.
Christ, it’s so cold. Shut these fucking windows. The wind’s getting in, the noise is getting in. It’s shaking everything. Shut it away, shut it away. And the blinds. Too bloody bright.
Bloody hell. What time is it? What fucking day is it? Can’t stop shaking. Breathe, you idiot. It’s all shut away now. Gotta turn the heating up, quick. What? I turned it right down to two? When did I do that? Might as well live outside.
Christ, outside. I let it in. The door’s not even locked. The kitchen curtains are open. All the fucking windows were open. What the hell, why on earth did I do all this?
My skin feels really raw, like it’s buzzing, like I’ve been scratching at it without feeling it.
Christ, I’m hungry. Indian, something hot, magma-hot. To deliver, please. There’s a tenner in my trousers, that’ll be enough.
Where’s the red paint? I need the red. The really bright one. I’ll mix it with a bit of that ochre, it’ll make it all fiery. The sky was fiery. It was burning me this morning when I woke up. Got into the house and was burning me. Must make it burn in the paint.
No, no, that’s fucking crimson. Bloody shit-twee colour of fucking valentines roses. Disguting. Scarlet, where’s the scarlet. And the ochre. And the paintbrushes.
Why the hell is everything in here? I never keep stuff in the paint cupboard. Fucking stupid place to keep stuff. It all needs to be out and about, to hand, grab-able.
Quick, quick. Need to mix it. The fire’s still burning behind my eyelids. Need to get the colour right, get it down. A big sweep of it, a blinding sweep all across the top and down the right edge. Yes. It needs to be brighter. Canary. Fucking gay colour. Mix some white in it, no. Needs some black.
Shite, this is utter shite. Have to keep going, have to make it work. Can’t believe I opened the windows. I might have been sucked out, pulled out into the vaccum. Scary shit. The pills pushed it all away behind that weird, oily layre but it was still there and here it is again.
Must put it in the paint, must get it down, contain it. It’s shut away now, behind the blinds, but I can still feel it in me and I have to get it out. Continue to get it out, pour it out, over and over, over and over.
Yes Ruth, there are some new ones. No, they’re fucking shit. Of course they’re shit. Yes they’ll bloody sell. What? What appointment? Cancel it, for fuck’s sake. The hell I’m going outside for anything.
Short Story – ‘Felicia’s New Shoes’
January 28, 2008 at 11:32 pm (Short Stories) (alternative, art, coming of age, dark, expression, fiction, prose, revelation, shoes, short, short fiction, short story)
Felicia can’t understand why her control over her drawing seems to be slipping. Something is effecting her style but she can’t quite figure out what…
Felicia’s New Shoes
I managed to distract myself for a while by idly mapping out veins on my skin with a corkscrew. Not too deep; the wicked little point dragging lightly across the inside of my arm, trailing a little white scratch of not-quite-broken skin. Humming, I drew it down and around, across the back of my hand, picking out the little forks and junctions, telling myself not to worry.
But it was no use. With a growl of frustration I got up from the sofa. My shoes squeaked strangely loud on the kitchen linoleum. The drawings from that day were on the table. Five out of the seven customers I’d got that morning had wanted their money back. And I couldn’t really blame them. I slouched on a backward chair, tapping a squeaking rubber sole against the table leg and scowled at the drawings.
It used to be effortless to find the customers’ defining characteristics, exaggerate them, enlarge them, warp them if necessary, but still manage to maintain the fact that they were supposed to be funny, cute, not offensive. I’d been a caricaturist for longer than I cared to remember and never had a problem with making people look adorable, ridiculous or simply amusing without being…well…psychotically scary.
These drawings from this morning and over a dozen more from the last week or so were just plain nasty. I’d made a petulant little girl in pink scrunchies, a miniature Nike tracksuit (also pink) and a sulky pout into what looked like a cross between the product of an inter-family marriage and one of the underworld’s nastier minions. Underneath that one was one of a man I’m pretty sure couldn’t possibly be as bloated and corpse-like as I’d rendered him and then there was some lad’s trashy girlfriend who, from this drawing, you’d assume hadn’t changed her clothes in a month and had a penchant for hard drugs.
They were dark, dirty, twisted….nasty. The only reason I didn’t have all of them back from the last week, I’m sure, is because some of the idiots were just too polite to demand their money back.
I rubbed the red welts that were starting to swell on the skin of my arm and tried to figure out what it was that had caused this slip. It wasn’t like I hated people; I was generally just indifferent to those who decide, for a laugh, to get their caricature done to make up for the crappy weather dampening their stroll on the beach. I enjoyed doing it too, or thought I did.
It definitely enjoyed it more than my job, working part-time stacking shelves at the local supermarket. Whatever else I’d been doing, I’d always drawn. At school I was a chronic doodler and it just never occurred to me to stop. I must have been pretty good too because, sometimes, on really nice days, I even got people queuing.
It was practised, easy, like the smile I wore and the banter I threw around as I did it. Years, man…years of generally satisfied customers. And now…well, what the fuck?
As I frowned down at a sketch of a teenager who appeared to have just stepped out of the make-up truck ready to do his bit as an extra in a low-budget horror film, I mentally backtracked to try and see what had made me snap.
Bert had packed and left, but that was well over a month before. And I didn’t care. Ten years we’d been together and I can honestly say I don’t miss him. He used to be here, now he isn’t. Big deal. I mean, for the love of God, the guy was called Bert.
All I remembered thinking was, glee, no more hair on the soap. He’d been an awful lot like my Dad, when I thought about it; I had just nodded and said “Yes, dear,” as he lay on the sofa and reminded me we needed milk.
So I was pretty sure I wasn’t mourning the death of a relationship that had just been a decade-long shrug.
The front door rattling open made me jump.
“Hey, Felicia…Jesus.” Molly blinked at the pictures.
“Yeah.” I sighed and scraped all the drawings into a pile, turned them face-down on the kitchen table.
Molly smiled and shook her head, dumped her shopping bags on the counter. “Oh dear,” she said with a bit of a smirk. “Still can’t retrieve the Disney muse?”
I winced a little. “No,” I replied, turning away from the table.
“You know what they look like?” She scratched her forehead. “They look like your other stuff, you know, the stuff from your big sketch books, the stuff Bert didn’t like. All twisted branches and red ink. The stuff you do for fun.”
I rocked a little on my chair, chewing on my lip. “I know. It’s like that darker stuff’s bleeding through.”
“It’s never happened before.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I know.”
Molly packed away tins of spaghetti and bottles of wine. “Perhaps it’s the world’s way of telling you, you know, it’s time for a change of scene? Time to go for something…I don’t know…more stable?”
I frowned at her back. “Don’t start on this again. I know I can get it back, I just have to figure out what’s wrong.”
She gave a shrug. “You could pay for this place on your own, if you finally got a decent job. I can’t stick around forever. I still think you should have gone for that magazine thing. Jim knew what he was talking about, clearly.”
I growled, shoved myself up off the table. “Yeah, but he clearly doesn’t know me if he thought I’d accept.”
“He’s your brother – ”
“My younger brother. Much, much younger.”
“So?” She turned to face me, hands on hips and smiling broadly. “He’s in with the times, he’s,” she did that annoying punctuating-the-air thing with her forefingers, “‘with it’. He knew exactly where to send your portfolio. He knew what you could use the twisted, gross stuff for. He knew they’d want you on their design staff.”
I stood up. “I didn’t ask him to do any of that. He shouldn’t have gone behind my back. I’ll figure this out.” I twisted my fingers. “I will.”
She sighed, gave and exasperated gesture then turned back to unpacking the shopping. “Fine, it’s your life.”
I moved back towards the living room.
“Oh, by the way,” Molly called from the kitchen, “I love the new shoes. Nice to see some colour on you at last.”
I blinked at the wall for a minute before looking down. My shoes…my new shoes. I tracked back in my head…ten days. Ten days of screwed-up drawing, ten days of not being able to control the way my pictures came out.
Ten days exactly. Also exactly how long I’d owned these shoes.
I shook my head.
I went through to the living room and curled into the corner of the sofa. I clicked on the television but stared at the ceiling. Something clearly had to be different. Something had dissolved the wall that kept all the darkness safe, locked at the back of my brain. I scratched at my neck idly with one sharp nail, twirling blood-bright laces around the finger of my other hand. I chewed my lip, sat up.
With a frustrated sigh I swung my legs back round and leant down and unlaced my shoes. I placed them, side-by-side, on the coffee table before slouching back onto the cushions to stare at them. I tried desperately to maintain the casualness of my scrutiny, pretending I was just idly indulging a ridiculous fantasy. But as I looked at them, it swamped my mind. I sat up, leant forward and peered at them intently, frowning.
They weren’t all that outlandish, not really. Bert would never have wanted me to have them. Dad would certainly have thought them vulgar, tasteless. But I didn’t think they were really all that outrageous. Made of sturdy canvas stitched onto thick, black rubber soles, they were comfy though not awfully practical for the beach. Each was half black-and-red striped and then half red-on-black polka dots. Scarlet laces like purposeful serpents, only slightly grubby after ten day’s wear.
Ok, so they weren’t the sort of thing you’d wear to a funeral, but at least they weren’t knee-length or made of PVC. I don’t even know what made me buy them. I was looking through one of Jim’s magazines, just curious to see what exactly it was he wanted me to be a part of (I’d thought it all rather rough and raw) but I saw this advert in the back. I’d picked up the phone and ordered a pair before I’d even stopped to think why I wanted them.
I narrowed my eyes at them. The television babbled to itself in the background. The shoes just sat there, dark and light at once, exciting and plain, daring and simple. When I blinked, they were on the inside of my eyelids, silhouetted against the flashing TV.
“You’re cursed.”
For a second longer I stared then I shook my head. I took them off the table and went and threw them in the wardrobe, shutting the door firmly.
Molly brought some wine into the living room and we sat with our feet up on the coffee table, watching cheesy soap operas. We laughed a little at the characters, I said sorry for snapping at her. She said it was fine, that it was nice to see some actual emotion in me for a change.
I blinked at the living room through my wineglass. The room stretched and warped through the glass and the deep red of the wine. I sighed a little, saw how beautiful such ordinary shapes were when twisted and daubed in darker colours. I could see my feet in white socks, up on the coffee table, bloated and stained through the liquid. They looked like strange leaves, tortured and blood-coloured, stretched and unhealthy.
I lowered the glass and then they were just feet. Just feet in white socks, one tiny hole in the left one, near the little toe. Ordinary, boring. Safe.
Retrieving my new shoes from the wardrobe I wondered what exactly it was that was telling me to do it. I fished them from the back, put them on. I laced them up tight, returned to the living room, propped them on the coffee table. I didn’t need to look at them through the glass for them to be exciting now. The made me smile a little.
I’d never really thought about making something as ordinary as my feet exciting before. The only things to make interesting, dark and dangerous, were tiny, secret parts of my mind and the pages in the big sketchbook. The sketchbook that Bert didn’t like, that Dad didn’t like. The sketchbook that the magazine designers had loved.
But it really was this easy. Enclosing them in something a little different, suddenly they gained something, became something else. Something a little extraordinary.
I frowned.
“What’s wrong?”
“They are cursed.”
“What?” Molly topped up our glasses.
“The shoes…”
“What about them?”
I reached for the corkscrew, twirled the point on the pad of my index finger. Chewing my lip, I frowned at the shoes a little longer. “They’ve…changed something…”
She just gave me a look, shook her head and passed me my wine.
The next day, I marched down onto the beach with my easel and my stool and fixed myself up in my usual spot, next to the pier. There was a slight breeze, but the sky was clear. I laid out my laminated samples on the sand, weighted them down with rocks, perched on the stool and, with grim determination, waited for a customer.
On my feet were some very plain, brown sandals.
When the man sat down, urged on by an over-enthusiastic wife with a lot of yellow hair and huge sunglasses, I knew that if anything was going to test whether or not I could still make people look good, this guy would.
Clearly not liking the idea in the first place, his expression did not do anything to brighten a face clearly designed for radio. I’m sure if he’d smiled he wouldn’t like quite so dispirited or look quite so much like a moose. And not your average moose, either. A down-on-his-luck, pessimistic moose, a moose that clearly was not hugged enough as a calf and that might, just possibly, have a rather uncomfortable urinary infection.
I rolled up my sleeves, pasted on a pleasant smile, and got to it.
It worked. My pencil flowed like I remembered. I chatted and smiled. I brought out his eyes, shrank his ears. I tufted up his hair a little, bulged out his cheeks, but only slightly, so he looked like cartoon chipmunk and not a drowned body. I watched the caricature unfurl down the paper as easily as an ink spill and felt something inside me sink lower and lower as it grew.
They both smiled when I handed it over, gave me a little extra money. It had brightened their day, it would go on the wall, couldn’t wait to show their kids, they’d think it a scream.
I blinked at them blindly, my grin aching.
They left and I stared until they were out of sight. The beach was empty. I felt cold despite the sunshine. I looked at the laminated samples, the childish portraits, the drawings I did so easily in my brown sandals, making ordinary people look sweet strange in a very safe way. They grinned up at me, leering.
My exposed toes bruised and my toenails cracked as I kicked away the rocks weighting them down. The breeze picked them up eagerly, sweeping them off along the beach. They skidded and skipped, scuffing scratchy sand into the air. I collapsed my easel, grabbed my stool and walked stiffly away.
I stood under the bridge, merging with the shadow and the streetlight. I rather enjoyed the way the night and the electricity vied silently and statically for space in the air. The bricks under the bridge were a mass of sandpaper shadows and orange-polish highlights.
I moved back and forth carefully, moving lightly on my feet, once again laced firmly into their new shoes. My toes were sore and split but I sort of liked the way it felt. I had my hood up against the cold and fingerless gloves on my hands to allow for manoeuvrability.
I had scattered all the twisted drawings from the last few days about my room. They lay on my bedroom floor like a contaminated snowfall. I’d started roughly sorting them, finding bits I liked, bits to change, ideas to play with. The big sketchbook was open on my pillow, dug out from its place under the bed. I’d turned on the main light in my room as well as the desk lamp so I could see it all at once, the mass of blacks, reds and browns, the twists and the sharpness, the shadows and the scratches.
It had made me breathe easier, somehow. And smile.
A fresh spray can hissed in the night as I discarded the empty one with a toothy rattle onto the ground. My face was still split in a genuine grin and I rushed back and forth, widening the reach of the spray-paint vista until it swamped all the graffiti and nearly covered the whole underside arch of the bridge. I would have to come back with a stepladder the following night to finish the bits I couldn’t reach. That would be if I could find time, in between starting off a new portfolio of designs for the magazine and helping Molly pack.
An abusive yell rang in the air. Heavy footsteps running toward me. With a laugh, I threw away the can, turned and sprinted off into the night.
Short Story – ‘Screaming’
January 14, 2008 at 3:56 pm (Short Stories) (comedy, edward munch, fiction, fun, munch, original, scream, short fiction, writing)
Something a little more light-hearted now, to ease in the new term. Do you remember when Edward Munch’s The Scream went missing a few years ago? I got to wondering how and why such a thing might come about.
Screaming
It was the kind of day when you ponder how it’s really all too easy to cut your tongue on your own teeth. Seems like a basic design flaw, that. Whose idea was it to have something so soft and sensitive housed in the same orifice as naked, sharpened bone?
Tongue protruding slightly (maybe I thought air would help numb the pain) I stared at the blank computer screen with my fists balled in my hair. I don’t know how long I’d been like that…collectively during the last month I’d guess about a fortnight, although at this point it was about two in the afternoon so I must have only been out of bed for about half an hour.
The air was as uncommitted as tarmac and the vague sunlight lay like cold dust all over the room. If I’d been able to think of a couple of similes like that at the time there wouldn’t have been so much of a problem. I may have even got dressed to celebrate, though I can’t promise anything.
There was a character forming on the screen in front of me. Well, ‘character’ in the loosest sense of the word. There were a few words coming together to form some semblance of a fictional personality, but it was slim pickings. Three pathetic paragraphs and an over-enthusiastic word-processor cursor. I managed to muster up the energy to glare at it.
With a report that almost had me sailing through the ceiling tiles, someone announced themselves in no uncertain terms on the woodwork of my front door.
“Please, dear God, be someone interesting.”
I shambled down the hall whilst doing up the tie on my dressing gown and wondered idly who would be calling at my flat at this time on a Sunday. My publishers were perhaps the only people I knew less committed to writing than me and wouldn’t fly out here to do what could easily be accomplished in an abusive phone call. As for friends, well, just…ha.
I peered through the peephole, leant back, wiped it with my sleeve and tried again.
“What the hell?” I yanked the door open and stared dumbfounded before repeating, louder this time, “What the hell?”
“Dearest sister.”
I didn’t dodge in time and was shortly and, it seemed, irretrievably enveloped in a cold and not-entirely-pleasant smelling embrace. It was even clumsier than usual due to the rather large and flat package he grasped in his left hand.
“Doug,” I croaked. “Doug, get off!”
He pulled off and ginned at me idiotically.
I stood there, stammering. “Well, what…why?”
“No need to look so surprised,” he shook his head at me. “Can’t a man visit his little sister when in her neighbourhood?”
“Not when her neighbourhood is downtown Moscow. What are you doing here?”
He sauntered down the corridor and settled himself in one of the large but grubby armchairs in my living room. He looked about himself appraisingly.
I spent a moment trying to disentangle my confusion from my anger before shutting the door noisily and moving through to the living room. I stood with my hands on hips and tried to look intimidating. “Doug, the probation officers are really not going to like this,”
“One might think you weren’t pleased to see me from your tone, young lady. Jesus, you look like crap.”
“Well you smell like you spent the night in a cattle truck.”
“I did.”
I took a deep breath, adjusted my glasses and formed the question again, slowly. “What are you doing here?”
He shrugged, still grinning. “I just thought it was about time I came and visited you out here in the frozen wastes.”
“Is that so?” I slumped onto the sofa opposite him. I felt that he really was in no position to be telling me I looked like crap. Not only had he seemingly slept in a cattle truck but also in his clothes and, from the look of him, for more than a couple of days. He needed a shave, a bath and to be about one and a half thousand miles West.
“So how you doing?”
I blinked at him. “Same as ever.”
He nodded, scanning the ceiling. “Your latest is doing well back home.”
“I should think so too, they bugged me enough for it,” I paused. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here? Don’t pretend any more. It must have been almost five years now…”
He looked at me and finally the silly grin slid. “Yeah, I know.” He stared at me and far in the backs of his eyes I could see the laughing that had been ringing in the air when he used to give my piggy-backs around the garden and help me steal biscuits from the top shelf. But then it fled, whisked away like pollen on the breeze to be replaced by something a little colder. “It’s been too long, don’t you think?”
It was a simple enough question, but it asked more than I felt I should have to answer.
I scowled at him. “Don’t talk to me like that,” I snorted. “You’ve no right to be angry at me. You stopped talking to me.”
“And why do you think that was, Chris?”
“Well how the hell should I know?”
“You never bothered to find out.” We glared for a moment until he rose and paced through to the kitchen. I followed, my attempted righteous indignation somewhat lessened by my threadbare dressing gown, uncombed hair and smudged glasses, but I still gave it a gutsy try.
“Well, come on then,” I growled at his backside as he rooted through my fridge.
“Christ, Chris, how old is some of this stuff?”
“Don’t change the subject. If this is the moment of revelations, why did you stop talking to me?”
“Well,” he rose with a still fairly edible apple and a cold sausage, “leaving the country wasn’t exactly the best way to keep close with friends and family.”
“I hadn’t had so much as phone call from you since you got out, that was a year before I left.”
He sighed, spattering some semi-masticated apple onto the counter. He looked at me, brow slightly furrowed. “You’d abandoned yourself.”
I had crossed my arms and prepared a good response to ‘you didn’t visit me in prison’, but for this all I could do was blink some more. “Stick who in the what now?”
He waved his sausage in the air demonstratively. “You weren’t you any more, you’d abandoned everything that was important to you.”
“I didn’t abandon you.”
“Not me, you pillock,” he scowled. “I know you would never visit me in prison and I really don’t care. I wouldn’t have wanted you to see me like that either.”
Well, that took the wind right out of my sails. I stood there, rather deflated and struggled to come up with a retort.
As I stood there doing a fairly passable impression of a goldfish, he continued, “I don’t know, you lost all your life once you’d had that contract less than a year. You got into writing for a reason, Chris, but there’s nothing of you left in your books. You changed and it…disappointed me.”
“Let me get this straight,” I took a couple of deep breaths. “You come all the way out here, unannounced, turn up at me door stinking of what I can only hope is cow shit, insult my life choices, take my food and then insult my work?”
“Pretty much,” he returned to the living room, propped his filthy boots up on my already filthy coffee table and clicked the television on with the remote.
I could think of no curses foul enough. I tried anyway, whilst searching around the kitchen for something to hit him with. Returning to the lounge brandishing a ladle I asked, “What right do you have to come all the way out here and say these things to me?”
“I’m your older brother,” he laughed. “It’s my job to tell you when you’re life’s gone down the crapper.”
“My life is not down the crapper,” I forced myself not to yell, that was what he wanted. “I’m a successful writer, you prick. I make money, lots of it. Don’t let the outfit fool you, I’ve got stacks of cash now, and you know it, so how can you say that?”
“You’ve lost yourself in the game, Christine Faver, Authoress Extraordinaire,” he laughed again, flicking through all the Russian channels. “You made a success through writing what you wanted but then you learned you could still make money writing whatever. I read your last one. It’s selling, yeah, but there’s nothing in there that you used to sneak into my room when we were kids and tell me about.”
I lowered my ladle.
He clicked off the telly. “I mean, seriously, Chris. Which was the last book you actually enjoyed writing?”
I rubbed my eyes. I knew he was right. If anything that just made it worse. My books sold through clever advertising and some model’s photograph on the inside of the jacket. Even when I just had to get away, they told me to move to Moscow to be inspired by the history, the landscape, the people. But I barely ever went out if I could help it, spent most of the time sleeping and just churned out as little as I could get away with.
“I’ve lost it Doug,” I slouched on the sofa. “Lost it ages ago. I’ve forgotten how to enjoy it, but it keeps a roof over my head and buys me chocolate and shampoo so I don’t complain.”
He leant forward and patted me on the knee. I looked up and he was gazing at me comfortingly. “I lost it too,” then he was grinning again and I was really starting to get annoyed with him. Here he had opened a wonderful new window for me to jump through and roll about in self-pity and he wasn’t even going to let me enjoy it.
“Well, I didn’t lose it, they took it away from me when they shoved me in that dump.”
“‘It’? What ‘it’? You don’t have an ‘it’.”
“Course I have an ‘it’,” he looked offended. “How do you think I ended up in there?”
“You broke into an art gallery,”
“Yeah, because I do what I want, not matter what people think,” he seemed absurdly pleased with himself. “That’s my ‘it’, my freedom, my wanting to appreciate the arts and screw opening times.”
I shook my head. “Doug, that’s not an ‘it’, that’s just insane.”
“It’s sort of an ‘it’,” he said, a little abashed. “The point is, I stayed true to myself. They wouldn’t let me in during the day, because I looked like I may cause trouble. They had fliers with my face on, for some reason,”
I rolled my eyes.
“But I wanted to see the exhibition. It was my right. I was not going to cause any trouble, I just wanted to look at the paintings. So I broke in.”
“So, you’re comparing you breaking and entering to me not being faithful to myself?”
“Oh no,” he quickly stated. “You’re much worse.”
I fingered the ladle.
“But look,” he pulled forward the brown paper parcel that he’d propped against his chair. “I’ve made up to myself all that time inside. The time I couldn’t be who I really was, couldn’t run around and know I was being who I was born to be.”
“What is it?” I took it from him. It was large and flat, wrapped in layers of brown paper.
He blushed a little. “It’s sort of the reason I had to leave.”
A cold dread filled my stomach and started to seep through my veins and out through my skin. I stared at the parcel in my hands and then tore the paper off.
“Oh Holy Jesus,” I stammered. “Holy Mary, mother of Jesus. Holy fuck…” My hands were shaking. It took a lot of effort to track down my voice. “Douglas Faver,” I started slowly. “Please, please, please tell me you didn’t steal Edvard Munch’s Scream.”
“Good, isn’t it?” He grinned. All I could do was gape. I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes with my grubby sleeve. But it was still there when I opened them again.
“You’ve done it this time, Doug,” I found my voice, somehow. “Seriously, this is not small-time stuff. You’re so deep in it you really shouldn’t open your mouth in case you suffocate.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad,”
“‘Not that bad’? ‘Not that bad’? Doug, this is beyond bad, this is international infamy bad, this is…bloody hell this is fucking say-bye-bye-to-Europe bad…”
He was still grinning, damn him. “I’ve got that side of things figured out,” he said, casually. “I really just popped into to see you on the way to…wherever it is I end up.”
I dropped the painting on the floor, lifted up my hands, ducked down my head and clutched at my brow like nobody’s business. I couldn’t even decide on which was the best groan to go for, so I tried a few. “You’ve done it this time, you idiot. This is it for you. You’ll have to go to bloody Timbuktu or something.”
He leant forward and patted my knee comfortingly. “Now, now, don’t panic. It’s fine, it is. I’ve got it all worked out…sort of. I didn’t come here to get you to bail me out or anything.”
I sat up. “Then why the hell did you come?”
“Well,” he said, mock insulted. “One, to say goodbye to my little sister who I practically raised,”
I rolled my eyes again.
“And two,” he picked up the painting, smiled at it strangely, then handed it back to me. “To give you this.”
“You have got to be yanking my chain,”
He shook his head and his eyes were so sincere it made me want to punch him out.
“I thought you said you didn’t want me to bail you out? I won’t do it, Doug. This is your mess, I’ll be damned if jump in it too.”
He shook his head more fiercely. “No, it’s not like that – ”
I shifted my glare from the painting to him.
“Well, maybe it’s a little like that,” he shrugged. “They’re probably not too likely to search for it in some crummy bedsit over a crappy liquor store in the cruddy end of Moscow, it’s true, so that’s that problem sorted. But mostly I just want you to have it, you know, as a present.”
I blinked at him and tried to find any trace of laughter in his eyes to let me know this was all some terribly unfunny joke.
“Please, Chris,” he smiled. “Take it, it’s for you. Hang it on the wall above the telly. Let it remind you of taking chances for what you believe in.”
The new book’s not selling all that well in Britain and is only doing tolerably well stateside. But damn, I enjoyed writing it.
Short Story – ‘Bubble on a Mud Puddle’
January 7, 2008 at 9:25 pm (Short Stories)
Imagine if you knew you were dead, but couldn’t remember how it happened? Would you want to remember?
Bubble on a Mud Puddle
No one knows that that bubble on the mud puddle they call a pond is me. I died a week ago and no one seems to know yet. I’m sitting at the edge, staring at its grimy surface and rimed edges and it seems intimately familiar. But I can’t quite remember if I waded in on my own, ignoring the cold water and oozing mud. Someone might have pushed me, I suppose. I may have tripped. Maybe I was drunk, stumbled into the stagnant water and gave up swimming.
It’s tempting just to drift on forever determined I was pushed, fume with righteous anger and haunt to buggery the guilty party or parties involved in my murder. But that leaves me the whole issue of who was it?
Sounds a little too much like effort. Maybe I’ll just wait around and wait for someone to find my body. Not like I’m going to die of exposure or anything.
Now I’m dead maybe I should turn over a new leaf; use this whole death thing as a lesson. A lesson about what? Don’t go wading in murky water? Don’t antagonise people strong enough to hold you down in murky water?
How about appreciate life? Bit late for that lesson perhaps.
If I really concentrate, perhaps I can remember what happened. Not entirely keen on that idea, though. If I did this to myself, there’s probably a good reason why. Why relive it.
Also, if I remember it was just an accident, that’d be even more depressing; dying for no reason other than a slippery path is not exactly much up on being miserable enough to take your own life.
Might as well not bother trying to remember. This isn’t all that bad. Maybe it is pretty grim sitting at the edge of the pond where I died, but hey, no one’s complaining. Only got me to worry about now. At least I’m not cold. Not even sure if I can get cold.
I wonder if I’ll forget even what cold and hot feel like. If I concentrate hard I can probably remember. But I still have this worms-in-the-gut feeling that I don’t really want to remember too much. If I look too deeply I may see bits of myself I never really wanted to; lonely, stale parts, painted over with peeling whitewash in the dusty corners of my brain.
Well, not my brain literally, obviously. My real brain’s all lovely, gooey and swollen inside my shattered skull at the bottom of the duck pond. The duck pond with no ducks. Although, since my skull was shattered, perhaps it wasn’t actually my fault this time after all? It’s always possible I hit it diving in, with whatever intention. Or some inconsiderate little kid could have cracked it throwing rocks in after I’d already been lying there a couple of days.
I thought bodies floated. Mine’s not. Maybe I’m weighted down, stones in my pockets or maybe I was trussed up to a rock or something. But that doesn’t help me figure out whether I did it myself or someone did it to me. Or if I stumbled and part of my ragged clothing is hooked underwater on some foul, unseen obstruction. Another body perhaps.
I should really stop looking around for someone to blame. It’s just that there’s not an awful lot else to do.
I wonder if it hurt.
Am I actually supposed to do anything about it? Still, if no one’s thought to look in the pond after I’ve been missing a week I can only guess no one really cares where I’ve gone.
I suppose the whole world must be a little to blame. Even if I did technically walk in on my own, I bet I felt the hands of a hundred people pushing me forward then holding me down in the mud. It’s all too easy to feel alone; it’s even easier to give into it. I’m more alone now than I ever could have imagined. How lovely irony is.
Even though I can’t feel the biting air, I shudder. That’s a little weird, didn’t think I could shudder. Maybe I just think I’m shuddering because I feel I ought to; even though I don’t want to remember, flakes of my life are floating through my mind like fish scales. I remember grey walls suffocating me. A room closing in silently to strangle me with its emptiness. But better alone in an empty room and alone amongst others.
I’d built that prison strong. Boarded up my windows, locked the door. Installed a hatch for deliveries.
It wasn’t so much people staring that made me want to escape them forever, it was the whispers. The more subtle the comment, the more easily I could tell it’d been made.
A disgrace. Despicable. Sub-human. Catching a disease like that.
Maybe someone did kill me then. A mercy killing, even? Although I’m sure they didn’t actually ask me, whoever they were. To be fair, I don’t think I was the most likeable person even when I was healthy. I never really thought about it when I was alive and shrouded in my fine clothes with my fine friends and imported drink. I suppose I was perhaps too big a part of my life.
Guess I’m paying for it now. I’m sat here more alone than is truly comprehensible and I’m fairly certain no one’s playing my requiem on their blood-smeared piano, mercy or no mercy.
Although, if I was going to be disagreeable, I would argue that I seem to remember that the confinement, solitude and agony of my last few weeks on this miserable planet were more punishment than any uncreative murderer could have dealt out.
I thought I wasn’t going to think about it.
Death must be something that would get a lot of people down but I’m sure that if people forgot about life’s perception of death, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. I’m sat here, issues such as comfort and company are just not important any more and all you have to do is sit and think.
Think about what? My life, the deeds I did whilst I was inhabiting that slimy, purpling hunk of flesh decomposing happily to itself at the bottom of a stagnant water hole?
Maybe this is hell.
Would have thought people may have been a little curious as to where I’d got to. I’m not entirely sure how long I’ve been sitting here now, but it must be a fairly decent helping of time. Surely the man that delivers my food must have noticed something fishy when I stopped collecting my parcels from out of the hatch?
I can just about make out the ugly black hulk of my house; a darker shadow amongst the dark shadows on top of the hill through the death-grey trees. No one’s come looking, I’m pretty sure. I’m sure I would have noticed.
If something doesn’t happen soon I’m afraid I’m going to just give in and start remembering again. Maybe I want to know what happened to me. I suppose that’s reasonable.
Although I’m either going to find out that my life was so bad that I ended it or that someone thought I was bad enough to end. Unless it was an accident, which of course would be just lovely.
Maybe I went mad, that’d be fairly exciting. God knows those last few weeks were enough to send anyone mad and then some. Hell, now I’m definitely remembering. I had to grope my way around, my joints pulsing with pain. I couldn’t find silence anywhere, the agony constantly screamed through me.
It must have only been someone knocking on my barricaded door, but I was convinced something was in my head, scratching at the insides of my skull, and not quietly either. It’s all very blurred after that and even if it weren’t I’m sure I’d rather it was.
I wish I could feel the cold now. The memories of the heat are so suffocating a decent chill would be refreshing.
How long have been sat here trying not to think? Trying not to, but the pain is there again, clamouring at my door with bloody fists and diseased teeth, waiting to tear me apart as soon as the wood splinters away. I don’t want to remember and if I try hard enough I’m sure I don’t have too.
Thank God, a leaf fell onto the pond. Ripples, movement. Something to watch.
It’s so curious how the leaf travels across the surface of the pond even though there’s not a single breath of wind. Maybe water is constantly moving, no matter how still it seems. I wonder when the shadow of the leaf will pass over my body? Just about there? Or maybe there?
I can’t remember the difference between day and night. No wonder I don’t know how long I’ve been here.
If I could, I’d ball my fists in my hair, clench my eyes shut and rock back and forth. But I have no hair, no eyes, no fists. Nothing to fight back the memories I can feel clawing at the edges of my determination, memories of the pain, a black shroud with a pulsing heart of madness slowly bleeding through my tissues, threading every inch of me in my own poison. A shroud of splintering gauze pulling tighter and tighter over my vision, foul humour running down my cheeks and no matter how I pulled at my hair there was still some left.
And always, the black thing with foetid fingernails scratching away at the inside of my skull, determined, rhythmic stokes, each as loud as the last.
I try and stay focussed on the brown pond water in front of me, the single free-floating leaf meandering on the grimy surface. Why should it matter, now? Why should it matter? Why? I can’t feel any of it now, the pain, the madness, the isolation of the blackness that flowed through my blood from myself. The stuff in me they called filth, the despicable disease for the sinners.
I can’t bare it, I haven’t any eyelids to shut against this onslaught. Time, space is all lost. Everything swirls screaming into the pit of me and I cannot fight back anymore the memories of those last few days. They close in, I can see, smell, feel it all, all of it, again and close and real…
I can’t take it again. This must be hell.
The bubble on the mud puddle pops. I scream and hurl myself into the murky depths, desperate to drown my own screams. I don’t make a ripple.
No one knows that that bubble on the mud puddle they call a pond is me. I died a week ago and no one seems to know yet. I’m sitting at the edge, staring at its grimy surface and rimed edges and it seems intimately familiar. But somehow, I can’t quite remember if I waded in on my own, ignoring the cold water and the oozing mud. Someone might have pushed me, I suppose. I may have tripped. Maybe I was drunk, stumbled into the stagnant water and gave up swimming.
