Short stories by Luke Darbyshire
To Remember and To Forget
Eyes like a dog’s anus: deepest darkest brown; he remembered that much. He could no longer be sure what he remembered as memories age like good wine and truth like meat. Nonetheless, he could remember that and could cling onto it and had long emblazoned the backs of his own lids with those eyes and looked into them in his sleep, at his desk at work and on the bus, missing his stop most mornings.
He pulled the last strands of tobacco from the pouch like the curly short hairs from between the buttocks of some kindly old man who, obliging most graciously in silent discomfort, would without intention make the endeavour all the more exhausting simply by the nature of his constitution. He let the plastic case fall from his hand onto the formica coffee table, falling to its side and spilling the spoils too worthless to roll, to roll upon the imitation wood amongst sandwich crumbs and crumpled tissues. He placed these strands across a paper he had taken previously from its packet and ordered them into a cylinder, using his fingers and the sides of the paper, presently removing a small cotton white cylinder from its own package, everything with its and in its own container and place. With a caprice of curiosity, he imagined it to be like a miniature tampon, having never examined one too closely himself, as he placed the small cotton-white cotton cylinder at one end of the paper, contiguous to the brown threads, brown like anus eyes. With deft dexterity of digits too delicate to describe, he wrapped the paper to envelop the adjoined adjacent cylinders of cotton-white and eye-brown. With a flash of moist tongue, he finalised the seal and soothed it smooth with his right hand’s thumb and first finger, which then proceeded to take a lighter from the table and strike it bright and mad.
He heard the fizzle and the crackle of the paper and tobacco and remembered how much he loved to smoke in the snow, the cold white world so silent the semi-silent sizzle was amplified like a fart in an auditorium and the hiss and the fizz of the nub extinguishing in the mass of solid white water when discarded. Lips cold white, too, under smears of bright red lipstick, under eyes of squat canine. Perturbed, he perceived a piece of tobacco philandering, protruding past the paper and filter seam. Delicate and long like the lashes that flank the eyes of deepest darkest brown in ranks curled and bulbous with thick black makeup. Unwilling to be smoked, it gave way as he pulled at it, removing it from his cigarette and placing it in the ashtray: a gravedigger napping on the job. The compliant strands granted him their inheritance of flavoured, intoxicating smoke that he amassed in his mouth with the cigarette to his tremulous lips before flexing his arm at the elbow, letting the forearm rest upon the knee, the cigarette penitent, as a few fine wisps wafted out his mouth before he could inhale them in. Breathing life — fresh new life — into the fingertip inferno, he continued until the cigarette, so short it tingled his fingers and tingled his lips, he stove into the ashtray. He would see her soon.
He sat hiding in the abject darkness, the dark of the night outside darkened further by the half-shut blinds and neither the light hanging down from the ceiling nor the lamp standing up from the floor having been powered. He sat there in the roaring silence and thought about his father, whom he hadn’t seen since he was in his early teens on account of him being dead. He thought about his black suit, and he thought about his grey suit. He remembered his blue shirts and his white shirts, of simple cotton with breast pockets and single cuffs. He pictured his red-and-dark-blue neckties, his striped and spotted neckties and his green-and-black neckties. He wore all of these things, on different days, to a job in insurance in the centre of the city where he had grown up. His mother had believed this was a managerial position, with an office with a minimum of six corners and its own door that closed and locked. She believed that this was how her beloved financed a town house with four bedrooms and its own reserved parking space out on the street in front where they stored their clean new car.
The silence was interrupted by the falling of rain upon the window pane, and it sounded like steaming sticks striking a snare. The car tyres sloshed and splashed through the streams gathering in the gutter.
He thought about his mother, too, and, of course, her.
The rain was so regular and relentless, it became silent nothingness, intangible and unreal; his mind was left to pick its way through the bottom of its dark closet without distraction.
He remembered his mother’s dresser in his parents’ bedroom. A frame decorated in its entirety in mirrors with beveled edges and frosted patterns on the drawer fronts. He remembered the tubes and canisters and cartons and tubs and jars that trimmed its top and how she pored over them every morning, taking up each a number of times and assessing them carefully, eyeing them all over under bright lights with her countenance concentration-contorted. She would do this for a whole hour and a half each morning, as if they were not the same tubes and canisters and cartons and tub and jars that she had pored over the previous morning, and the morning before that. There were tables either side of the large bed, similar in constitution to the dresser, that housed romance novels with card covers that housed pulp on pulp and supported lamps and clocks and decorative boxes of tissues. There was a mirrored wardrobe, too. The doors could be opened to expose a multitude of coloured dresses and blouses and jackets and skirts that were hanging packed tight together like fabulous rainbow bats.
There was all that and, as his mother later found out, overdrafts, bank loans, credit cards and 120 percent mortgages in different names. All fully drawn and drawing in on his father. By the time she discovered this, it was too late and the police were questioning him on multiple accounts of fraud. Their accounts were then frozen, and she had to feed the family on money borrowed from her mother’s pension.
His father was released on bail pending his trial and in silence helped his mother pack boxes of what they thought they could keep in preparation to move in with his mother’s sister. The night before the van would come to transport these boxes to the spare room of a familial home, he sat up drunk in the kitchen and his resolve hardened until he took the car, now owned by one of the various banks he had burned, and veered out into the night and drove it into a lake, making no attempt to get out; the police, having dredged the lake three days later, found him sat at the wheel with his belt still on.
He had never been able to comprehend why his father had fastened the belt in the first place that night.
His mother had heard, half awake, a car in the street outside that night, but assumed it to be one of their neighbours and, too sleepy and too comfy warm, didn’t go to the window to look. This troubled her, not because she thought guiltily, out of desperate loss and misery, that perhaps she could have intervened and saved him from himself that night, but because she did not feel this. She just lay there in bed holding the only piece of jewelry she had concealed when her possessions were repossessed: a diamond necklace she had bought herself and knew was worth more than the rest put together, including their wedding rings.
* * *
He adjusted the broach that decorated her lapel and smoothed the fine wool, woven into a distinguished black herringbone, over her breasts with careful open palms exuding love. She smiled a blank thank you back without altering the position of her lips; her countenance had been set for the event, and she would not be the one to change it.
He watched his feet sweep across the carpet, across the room, as if they were the attraction these people had amassed to observe, until he found a chair and reclined in it. Despite the discomfort of the cushionless wood, he was grateful for the unquestioning support it granted him. He placed his left leg upon his right, crossing his legs, and tilted his left foot at an angle so it was not obscured from his view by the leg it was attached to. Black Oxfords resplendent in a rich layer of reflective shine. The rim before the toe tip that trimmed his foot just in front of the arch reminded him of a circumcision. They reminded him of his circumcision: button-nosed 13 with an infection. Afraid to piss for weeks. Afraid of his own body like that of a stranger in the dark.
He could hear her relatives in the kitchen, attendant at the makeshift counter bar: “Yes, I’ll take ice, and he’ll have a Guinness.” Plastic cups. Paper plates. Sandwich quarters.
“Never too early, never too late — that’s what I say!” a rotund red-faced man said, guffawing crumbs and tuna mayonnaise down his black shirt as he struggled with a tumbler of cheap whisky and a plate of sausage rolls and warm quiche that, sat on cold porcelain at 3 a.m. the following morning, even redder in the face from burst blood vessels, spewing a red/brown mixture similar in consistency to poorly made risotto from a torn sphincter, he would dearly regret. “You hear that, eh?”
“Hey, at least maintain we’re here out of respect,” the red-faced man’s friend responded in a murmur. He glanced back at the bar, eyeing her sister who was stood beside it in determined resolve, focusing her entire essence into emptying each can into its glass and serving each slab of ice with subtlety sufficient to prevent the liquid from rising forth in response and, achieving height greater than that of the sides of the glass it had been placed in, forming alcoholic puddles across the counter. He hesitated for a second, studying her eyes, and continued, “Darling, could you give me a top up on this; it’s all head.” She opened another black-and-white can — choking down a sob, all too noticeably — and tilted her head to inspect her work as she poured. She scanned the room self-aware from under her fringe before handing the glass back. “Thanks, dear. We were all so sorry to hear; you must be doing terrible,” he dissimulated, tilting his head, narrowing his eyes and arching their brows in kind pity, noting who noticed in his peripheral vision. She nodded, and the corners of her mouth crept up her face, but the main stretch of pink tissue held flat, firm against her teeth, “Yes,” and continued to gaze through the strands of her hair cast across her forehead:
Present: George and Sam, the couple who met in hairdresser college and bonded over bondage before opening their own salon, which they now live above in decadent degeneration.
Present: her brother, Mark, and Amy, his latest, who was squat and ugly and didn’t have much time left before he would adorn his arm with one more becoming.
Present: her mother and her father, stoicism personified, holding back their crushing sadness but holding back their lustful guilt and wanton desires also, his arm around her waist where the belt of a strap-on would later be tied.
Present: cousin Tom and his reclusive, retiring and repulsive-in-the-face wife, Charlotte, dressed for the occasion in a nylon black skirt suit with a leather-studded veil, revealing only her bottom lip and chin. Nonetheless, the face flesh on display appeared to him reminiscent of the ceiling, a stucco and makeup mix-up.
Absent: close friend and confidant Jen. Long-legged and large-breasted Jen. Dark-haired and sultry-eyed Jen. Uncomfortable around him when closely eyed Jen. Call ahead and make excuses Jen.
Absent: Steve from the school she worked at. Kindly Steve who let the children call him ‘Stevie’ and would take them to see the unworldly wonders in the storage closet at the end of the corridor of science classrooms. Stevie, whose wife recently left him under mysterious circumstances.
Absent: Stevie’s wife, who hasn’t been seen for two months — suspected missing, suspected dead, also.
Absent: him, sat there, his spirit at least, if attendant in body.
Back in the kitchen, between sips of his dense black ambrosia with a fine foam head that lapped up his lips like the white surf of waves that came in and went out again with the glass, leaving behind creamy flotsam and jetsam amongst the groin bristles of his moustache, he continued to mutter to his fat friend, “You hear about how it happened?”
“The basics” — breaking off to solemnly nod in respect to her father who was moving across the room to the door, “So sorry, Frank. If you need to talk, you know” — looking back at his associate, “what people are comfortable saying within earshot of each other. And don’t forget what was on the news: two years, suspended. . .”
Interjecting impetuously, “Oh god, yeah . . . I wonder how her old man took that? I bet it destroyed the poor old bastard, don’t you reckon?”
“God knows what it did to that poor bastard, too,” motioning to him sat there, cross-legged in the corner, shoulders collapsing in on his chest. “I dunno how much he was to blame, but any way it works, he’d have to come away from it with much more baggage and guilt than he went into it with. Let’s try to talk to him later, get a few drinks in him to get him talking.”
“Just don’t ask him to drive us home!” They snickered at the snipe and rocked their upper bodies back and forth in some form of joint appreciation, but their celebrations were truncated and soon silenced by the eyes drawn to the noise, including those of him sat there awkwardly.
Her mother walked over, and he stood up for her. Having to reach up slightly, she buttoned his top shirt button and tightened his tie. He felt her father watching from across the room; he looked over to catch eyes with him for a long second before he slid out the door, presumably for a cigarette. Her mother was moving her mouth, he noticed, but he couldn’t be sure for how long she had been doing so, and he only caught her trailing off at the end of her monologue: “. . .so the town car is full, and you’ll have to make it there on your own.” Her mother straightened the now tight and tidy tie in his wide cutaway collar and turned to take her leave without a smile or farewell. He followed in her mother’s wake, pulling at his cuffs so an inch showed under the sleeves of his suit, so his cufflinks could be seen, resplendent in onyx. He followed in her wake to the jamb of the door and shoulder-peeked back at her, laid there, hands clasped, eyes closed, musing at the ceiling.
* * *
“Fat. Downstairs, definitely,” he cogitated through the static of strangers’ headphones and the rattle of ’70s machinery over potholed treacherous tarmacadam. “Deffo . . . one-nil,” he continued as he shuffled his buttocks uncomfortable, spreading their hemispheres across the rough, brown-patterned (as if his trousers had been a fantasy that morning) fabric of the seat he sat on.
The engine gurgled as it guzzled a drink of diesel, requisite to the slow, jerking acceleration that pulled these bodies collectively and together in time down this street and up that hill. He felt the engine’s heat in his buttocks, sat on the back seat, and the warmth aided his anal ailment, but the vibration turned his sphincter and stomach like a mercury tilt switch operated by rock hammer. Yes, he was tough enough to sit at the back of the bus, downstairs.
Velocity made his torso tilt forward at the waist, requiring his arm to swivel at the shoulder and bow at his elbow and twist at the wrist to land his hand upon the metal handrail that trimmed the seat in front of his, careful to avoid the chewed-up chewing gum and picked and licked and flicked and dried dark green-brown bogies that decorated it, to support his frame. As the deceleration settled into stasis, the union of his spine and the back of the seat resumed, as did his game. . .
“Eighty with shopping and barely any of his own components left in his body — easy — downstairs,” the man, almost bent double in decrepitude, flashed a photo and a card and proceeded past the driver. He pondered how a human could collate so many bags of goods at this hour of the morning and was cantering to the cusp of confirming a two-nil score line when — shock horror! — the defiant decrepit snatched glory from the jaws of defeat and made a run up the right wing of the bus, up the stairs, in the dying seconds of the game, and potentially his life. The game was now tied and really hotting up.
“Hard-hat, glazed-eyes stoned in a fluorescent tabard over torn tracksuit bottoms and a paint-stained T-shirt, about to spend the day operating heavy machinery devoid of his insignificant, at the best of times, faculties. Upstairs” — with a narrowing of the eyes and arching of the brows — “just like in his maisonette, I imagine, to his pregnant-with-her-second- (his first, she conceals from him) partner, preparing for her 17th birthday party with daydreams of limousines and Babysham whilst neglecting, with a mix of equal parts malice and absent-minded ignorance, the interracial child at her side, swaddled in stained blankets and too young to have been exposed as a simpleton — yet. Bet he didn’t pay his fare, either. Two-one.”
The last one at this stop stepped up from the curb with outstretched arms stretched out to the bars placed strategically to assist the elderly and useless in the adventure of boarding and traveling on a bus. He stood attendant at the driver’s door window and struggled through his bag for his wallet and then struggled through his wallet for a card that deemed him old enough to travel for free — “too inconsiderate to have got it out ready before he got on, save wasting our time. Selfish.” Dare he take the obvious option? What if it’s a bluff? Or indeed, a double bluff? Now the men are separated from the boys, the grand masters from the mere advanced tacticians . . . thoughts interrupted again by the ongoing melodrama in his trousers: “However did she ever manage?” he asked himself before refocusing his mind as best as he could back on the game. “I’d have been glad to go myself,” he concluded with a lack of self-control.
Breathing deep to recompose his composure, or at least his facade of composure, which is a form of composure at least, he found he had fluffed it in front of an open goal and the old man was now proceeding down the aisle of the bus between the upright handlebars like a pathetic Tarzan. Too late to call this one . . . surely it’s cheating once they’ve passed the foot of the stairs. . . “Three-one,” nonetheless.
The engine gargled as it gulped a drink of diesel, requisite to the slow, jerking acceleration that pulled these bodies collectively and together in time up this road and down that incline. Full time. Three-one. An acceptable win. Now a few minutes to gloat greedily in the victory before the bus stops at his stop for him to alight and walk to work with a cigarette, alight also. He let his eyes close, allowing her eyes to capture him, staring him down, only he couldn’t look away, hard as he tried. Yellowed whites marbled with red, like fault-lines emanating from the warm brown epicentre, set in panda sockets. The only way to escape the stare was to escape from his escapism back to the world around him, back to the bus, the bus where he has just missed his stop and started to frenetically gather himself together and get to the front of the bus to exit, save missing the second stop also. The bus slowed to a stop, and the doors folded open for him to use his feet and legs to step down from the vehicle onto the pavement, beside the iron upright of brittle paint blue of a small steel placard that augured the bus’ arrival in this place.
The pavement was, despite the term, composed of tarmacadam, and he could not play one of the numerous games he had based on counting the paving stabs he stepped upon, with varying rules concerning the treatment of cracks that depended on his mood and indeed the score line as he came close to the office where he worked. He missed the bus and watched rheumy-eyed in love-lost nostalgia as it faded into the distance, around a corner past a chemist’s. He loved the bus: truly transient, undefined by where he had come from and where he was going and, in the company of those strangers (who did not recognise him; only pastel drawings allowed), undefined by himself. Alas, he was now left to himself and guilty shadows of her, and as he began the walk to work, he pulled at her thong uncomfortable through the back of his trousers.
* * *
He tried to remember how many days it had now been since he last went to work, how many days since he let his mobile’s battery run flat, how many days since he had unhooked the telephone and how many days since he had last answered the door or ventured into the hall to check the mounting pile of papers and envelopes and letters that grew larger each morning there upon the doormat. When he last changed his clothes. His last shower. His last meal.
He raised his right hand to his face and, making a half fist, inspected each of his fingernails in turn. They were long, and those of his index and middle fingers were stained yellow and brown from nicotine. He had used to use bleach to clean the stains from his fingers, never sure if the mark had been removed or was just masked by the angry red the bleach made them. He hadn’t done that for a long time now. He moved the hand closer to his face and took the nail of his index finger between his teeth, ready to clamp them down and break the brittle and discoloured sheet that tipped his finger. Hesitating, he took his hand from his mouth and paraded his fingers once again in front of his face, his nails long. He would see her soon. He dropped his hand into his lap and looked over at the dark window with salty discoloured water tracing the contours of his face from eyes to the corners of his mouth.
He gazed out into the bleak and heavy sky: no moon nor stars, just purple dark with red clouds passing by. He wondered of all his old friends, how he’d love to hold them, or at least to know that they’re well. Where and what they are, who and how they’ve been. It’d been a good long time since he’d seen any of them, and as he looked out at the unreal sky, he wondered if any of them were staring up likewise, thinking of him. The more he thought, the less he was sure. Like the sanguine clouds, his thoughts drifted. . .
They had stayed at his aunt’s for two weeks when his mother stopped speaking. She would sleep in late and scarcely get out of bed during her waking hours. She would not join them for meals, rather making trips to the kitchen in the middle of the night to take what was her wont and stand at the sink eating through sobs and leering out into the garden overgrown. No one was too sure what she was eating at night, but they could tell it was insufficient as her face became gaunt in a matter of weeks. Her eyes became dark and grey like thunder clouds and, once they had grown too heavy to maintain their form, would rain in the caves of their set-back sockets. Her face sagged and her flesh was ill-fitting, as if was not her own. Her hair went grey within a month. It made him cry at nights, lay in bed on his side, sobbing silently as she lay there in the same bed, lay on her opposite side with her back to his, sobbing likewise.
Until one morning he woke and she was already up, sat at the foot of the bed with her hair combed back, applying makeup with her right hand and holding a compact in her left, inspecting her work closely. He sat up.
“I’m leaving today.”
“Where we going?”
“I don’t know where I’m going, but you’re staying here.”
She got up and left as he slumped back onto the bed. He never saw her again, his aunt and uncle becoming his legal guardians soon after. He still didn’t understand why he didn’t get up and chase after her or at least muster the will to say something. He was sure that he had loved her then, but knew too well that memories don’t hold water so you shouldn’t use them like a dam.
He rubbed at his face and tried to think of other things, easier things to remember. He could remember the first time he was beaten up in school for a minor insult to a major bully and was forced to, upon bent knee, apologise to the bully through tears and blood and two rapidly darkening eyes, for the fear of further violence should he refuse. He could remember the time he got drunk at a barbecue and passed out sat in a plastic garden chair and his friends put raw sausages in his mouth and used the processed cheese, bought to adorn the burgers, to adorn his head like some form of dairy helmet. He could remember how, as they stood and admired their handiwork, he turned his blue jeans black between the legs. He could remember how they howled and laughed and cackled and cooed and chuckled and roared and guffawed and every other synonym he could remember. He could remember how glad he felt to hear that Jim was back in town, and he could remember how quickly that notion passed, too.
* * *
He turned his collar up against the drizzle and stood self-conscious on one of the slabs of concrete outside the bar they were scheduled to meet in. He drew his right hand from his right jacket pocket where he had placed it (stowing it in the left jacket pocket had proved impractical and uncomfortable) and, after using his left hand to hold back the sleeve, as to expose his right wrist to the night and to the rain, he looked at said bare wrist. He was sure Jim was late.
He repeated this each time someone would walk past or step outside the bar for a cigarette, the amount of time spent angling his face at the flesh and hair of his forearm dependent on how long it would take him to register his audience as registering him. He had been lighting a cigarette every time someone passed him when he first started waiting; however, he was short on tobacco and hated rolling in the rain. If they didn’t notice him within a few seconds, or he didn’t notice them noticing him within a few seconds, he’d let out an impatient sigh and shake his head (three times left, three right) and place his hands back in his pockets.
He was sick of waiting and was ready to go home, glad he had chosen not to go into the bar as to avoid walking out alone after sitting at the bar alone and consuming two drinks alone. He checked his wrist for one last time and waited for a couple sharing a cigarette in the doorway to go back in the bar. He turned on his heels so that he was facing the direction of home and started to walk.
After a few paces, his mobile crowed with a piercing bleep like a futuristic cockerel at dawn. Jim. He answered:
“Hey, Jim. How’s it going; where about are you?” His voice was calm but broke into a fine high tenor at times.
“Ah, not bad, just on my way now. I haven’t kept you waiting, have I?”
“No,” he looked over each of his shoulders in turn, “I just got here myself.”
“(Incredulous) then you’re late! (Self-righteous) at least I called ahead. (Playful) still inconsiderate, (matter of fact) I see, (subdued) Bobby.”
He stuttered and stumbled his way through a false start, as if piano wire had been stretched across a jogger’s front door frame six inches up from the floor. He paused; he continued: “I guess. Fuck it,” he concluded; two men were laughing in the bar window behind him, he observed: “Say, this place is packed; you fancy meeting somewhere else?”
“Why not. How about the Butterfly? You know where that is?”
He did: “I do.” He was ready to get a drink: “Well, I’m ready for a drink.” He signed off: “So, I’ll sign off now and see you in there.” The walk would take five minutes: “I’ll be ten minutes.” He didn’t like spirits: “I’ll have a rum and coke.” He would see him in a minute: “See you in a minute.”
“Cool. See you there.”
He pressed a red button that adorned his phone and placed it back in his pocket. He’d text her when he got there; she may still change her mind.
He pivoted on his heels once more, this time in the direction of the Butterfly, and started walking, leaving the bar he had been stood outside of behind him and half empty. It had been years since he had last seen Jim, and he didn’t know how he felt about their meeting; sometimes he looked forward to seeing him and thought it would rekindle the Good Old Times and he would again fall for his enigmatic charm and his drunken foolery would become endearing once more. Sometimes, like then as he walked the streets growing ever nearer to Jim, he worried it would rekindle the Bad Old Times and Jim’s charms would be concealed enigmatic and his drunken foolery would descend from the irritating to the embarrassing, finally becoming worrying and too much to bear.
As he turned the corner, he turned down the pleas for money from the homeless couple who sat outside the same corner shop each night in dull routine: he on his feet working the street alone as she, wrapped in a stained and torn sleeping bag, lay on the stairs that led to the unused and locked (they tried the handle every night) back door to the shop. He liked to watch the homeless and observed them from buses like he was on safari, terrified when one would charge at the bus and gain entry that he would lose his life to their savagery and hunger. He remembered with livid indignation the time he was on the bus and one he saw regularly outside a sandwich shop he had erstwhile frequented got on also, a few stops after him. He remembered the time he saw the same man swapping dogs with another homeless man one morning and how they kept each other’s dogs for a week. He remembered one man who with a hard cast around his ankle went about town in a wheelchair built for a child that was too small for him to operate the wheels with his hands so, out of sheer crack-addled ingenuity, he would use his good foot (at least, the foot not bandaged) to push the chair backwards, with him looking back over his shoulder and shouting warnings like a drunken lorry. He remembered how he noticed the bandage change foot from time to time and how he would occasionally see a woman using the same chair. He remembered her face: ugly and contorted wide as if it had been squashed in childhood or the top of her skull had caved in, thanks to her brain having rotted away from heroin. He remembered seeing one outside Sainsbury’s having spent the spoils of those who had walked past the last few hours on a large trifle that he ate with his natural spoons, squatting in the middle of the road.
He smiled momentarily before realising he was stood at the door of the Butterfly, and he could make out Jim at the bar placing their order through the beveled glass squares that punctuated the dark wood door.
The doorman opened the door, as was his job, and Bobby entered, as was his obligation. He proceeded to the bar beside Jim and took a deep breath, eavesdropping on the tables he passed as he walked:
“And now I just don’t know what to do, and I’m pretty sure I’ve nowhere else to go to. You know I wouldn’t normally ask.”
“I know.”
“So you must see how bad things have got.”
“I see; I can’t say I understand, but I see. If you’re gonna ask this of me, though, you at least owe it to me to start from the beginning, wouldn’t you agree? Put yourself in my shoes.”
“Well, you won’t like it; I sure don’t, so I can’t see how you will. Anyway, here we go. . .”
The voices faded into the distance as the voices of others came into earshot:
“I was like, well, like totally shocked at it; I couldn’t believe what he was saying. It was like, like, so totally unlike him.”
“I, like, could never understand why you liked him in the first place. You were like totally all over him, and like I was like ‘duh’.”
Through the inanity, another voice came to him: “Ah, Bobby! Still a fan of pastry, I notice?” Bobby wiped at his mouth and patted down the front of his jacket. “Ha! I’m calling you fat, you soft bastard!”
Bobby smiled: Good Old Times. “Still fat and wet, Jim, glad you noticed,” taking in his right hand the drink Jim offered him with his left. “Cheers, mate,” motioning to the back of the bar. “Shall we see if we can find a table?”
“Lead the way, squire; it’s packed in here, so you can be like the cat’s whiskers, feeling ahead to see if I can fit through. I’ll have no problem if you can. What about here?”
He understood that it wasn’t a question and placed his glass on a mat and his jacket on the back of the chair and himself on the seat of the same chair. He took a long suck of his drink through its straw, and the dark liquid tasted like alcoholic caramel: dark rum. “Well, how you been? When did you get back?”
“Good. Not long.” He looked to the door. “Anna been delayed?”
“Not too sure where she is.” She was at home watching whatever televised dross was available and able to pass the time. “I think she’s busy though this evening. That reminds me, I’ll text her to see what’s happening.”
“Yeah, do. It’ll be good to see her.” He may have paused his mouth to concentrate on thinking or maybe you just couldn’t hear what he was saying for those few long moments over the grating electronic whirr of his mind dialing up thoughts. “Maybe I should text her; give me her number, Bob.”
Bad Old Times. “It’s okay.” He selected the option to write a message from the menu. “I’m already halfway through the text.” He abstained from the strained pleasantries for half a minute, fugitive behind his phone, continuing to hit buttons rapidly, randomly, for seconds after the message was sent. Bad Old Times, indeed. “So,” he started, laying the phone on the table but, like a chess champion, before taking his fingers off it, picked it back up and pocket-stowed it, which required him to lean back in his chair to access the tight openings in his jeans, “what you been up to?”
“Not much! Went down to London originally to find whatever was out there waiting for me and find, I guess, my future. At some point, I really can’t remember when, it may have even been on the train there or it may have been in a slum flat after two months spent in bed, blind drunk and wishing myself dead, I honestly can’t remember, I decided I wanted to be a chef.”
Bobby, sat forward with his elbows on the table and his hands in his hair and his straw in his mouth, released the black plastic tube from between his teeth and let it fall into his drink and looked Jim square in his square face. It was, his face, large and red with a bulbous nose and had become mean over the last few years.
“I could vision it, stood at the pass of my own restaurant, inspecting each plate before it got dispatched, throwing any of them that were imperfect and even, on occasions, those that were perfect, so they don’t become complacent, you see, back into the chefs’ faces. Earning real respect and deciding, should I see it fit, to send out a complimentary platter of week-old oysters to any poor unsuspecting bastards I see in my restaurant and feel deserve it. Making a fortune whilst doing so, as well. A great dream. Of course, options are limited when you’ve no experience, and I soon realised that it was just a dream and I didn’t have the necessary work or will in me to make it real and ended up as a pot washer in some dive Italian place run by Poles; I shit you not: run by Poles. And I can tell you, they knew as much about pasta and spaghetti and whatever as we do about the sausages and shit they eat back home, and the food was terrible, truly, barely edible. Which, I quickly realised, was a turn of luck for me as plates would get to me sometimes still half full, and I’d mix up all the different plates of leftovers into a plastic lunch box and take it home to eat. That stuff was even worse when it was hours old and cold, but as long as you were blind drunk, it went down. And eating this shit meant I could divert more funds to drink, which worked out well as it meant I could eat more of that shit and buy more drink with the money I saved, and so on.”
Bobby held the straw between his teeth and moved it with his tongue: all along the orifice to its left corner, where it would be held momentarily; then all along the orifice to the right corner where it would be held momentarily, and repeated. He grew bored of this and tongued the straw to the left corner of his mouth and held it in place under his left canine, between his tongue and the side of his mouth, before biting down so it formed a figure eight with a tiny loop each side of the tooth. He wished he had a third eye in the back of his throat, fitted by a pervert doctor when he removed his tonsils, rubbing his crotch against his shoulder during the procedure, so he could inspect the figure eight and give it marks out of ten.
“And it went on like this for months, it may have been a year, and I was, I think, enjoying my life fine. Then, the restaurant was still going and — the only thing I can place this on is that London is such a big place, even if everyone who goes tells their friends to steer clear, there’s still plenty of people willing to go there — was getting quite popular. So, with all the extra business and me in no state to work harder — but, you see, they could smell the booze on me and could see it in my pallor and yellow and red eyes, so took pity on me and let me keep the job, just never once gave me a pay rise — so they needed with all this extra business to take on another pot washer. Now, they’d had their fingers burnt with this lazy English drunk who they couldn’t sack out of pity — the Poles, pitying me! — so they took on one of their own, a Pole, a safe bet to work hard. Magda, she was called, and let me tell you, she was the most beautiful girl I’d seen since Anna started seeing you; she had long dark brown hair that was brittle and so delicate, and her skin was dark, and her eyes were, too. She had a mole on her top lip, and her English was terrible. Her arms were furry with these dark little hairs, and they looked like a man’s when it was her turn to wash, and they got wet up to the elbow and, I kid you not, I could barely hold onto a plate to dry it. Well, I spent a lot of time stood next to Magda at that sink and kept talking to her and started helping her with her English. It started with cutlery, you know, knives and that, and moved onto plates and bowls and glasses, and soon we ran out of stuff in that kitchen I could help her with. She had tried to reciprocate with telling me the Polish for each of the items I showed her, but I wasn’t interested in her language, and she soon stopped and focused on whatever I was saying to her. Well, soon we ran out of stuff in the kitchen to teach her, so I asked her back to my flat to teach her some new words in a different context. She agreed, and I think she already knew my intentions. Once we got back there, I was pleased to see that, although she may not have known what the word was for it in English, she sure knew what to do with a man’s penis. We spent hours together in that flat just fucking. Neither of us had much money, meaning we could never go out, but that never mattered to us. And I cut down on my drinking, initially to improve my performance and satisfy her, but I quickly saw I didn’t want to be drunk when I was with her, dunno why, I just plain didn’t. So before too long, she moves in, and it’s amazing and we started to get some money together and, despite both being paid a pittance, between living together, eating that shit from the restaurant and me not drinking any more, we started to get quite a bit together, two grand before too long.”
He released the figure eight from between his teeth, and it once again became a straw. The mouthed end was worn thinner than the rest of the length of plastic and was shaped like a square with curved edges. Concerned that he may no longer be able to drink through it, he took an emergency suck. It seemed okay . . . a second, longer suck at a higher pressure confirmed this. Nonetheless, this had been a warning; he decided he should pay heed and make the most of this second chance. Accordingly, he took up the straw, this time in his hand, and started to stir the drink, anti-clockwise two turns, then clockwise two turns, stabbing and withdrawing the straw so that it forced the remaining cubes of ice, now reduced in size significantly since the drink was poured, to sink to the bottom of the glass and then rise again.
“And I was happy then and was thinking what to do with this money. Part was thinking to use it as a deposit on a nicer place where you didn’t have to flush the toilet by filling a bucket and chuck it down and a place with two sinks, one for plates and one for hands after you’ve had a shit. Or maybe even a holiday. But then she just came out with it and asked me to marry her, and I was so surprised, partially because I was sure I hadn’t taught her it in English but part because I had secretly wanted it so bad but was too afraid to suggest it, having been rejected so badly before. But of course, I said yes, and she started the planning of it, and she truly amazed me with how she organised things, and I couldn’t believe how quickly she picked up the fineries of arranging a wedding. She seemed like she had been born to do that, and I’d never loved her more that those few weeks before we married. She was worried about money and insisted on getting it done in a registry office with just no guests other then the witnesses, you know, making it more intimate, and you wouldn’t believe, Bobby, just how intimate it was.”
He looked up and took the hint and called an interlude to his latest game, holding the straw with his left hand and inserting it into the deep dimples in the ice, a result of the manner in which they had been made, and tried to lift them by pushing them against the side of the glass.
“Well, seeing as it was the biggest day in both of our lives, I wanted to go and celebrate with a nice meal and sure knew some great places we could go, having applied for jobs at all of them and being turned down. She said all she needed was me and took me home, and we had the most amazing sex that night; she was acting as if we’d never touch each other’s bodies again, which, the following morning, I realised was true, waking up alone, without even a note. I was scared and, I’m not ashamed to say this, I cried. Once I got my shit together, I started just thinking she wouldn’t have left me and that something terrible had happened, and that gave me all sorts of grim thoughts that turned my stomach and started my crying again; you know, some Poles she’d burned in her home country, who she owed money to or her old old man who she’d run away from, had tracked her down to our hovel and had taken her away to torture and murder and rape her and in that order. I scrambled around the bed, looking for some sort of clue and, finding nothing except a few of her hairs on the pillow, I cast the net wider to the whole of the flat. It was then I found that half of the wardrobe was empty — her half — and her case was gone. I can’t even remember how I felt then. I knew, I think, that she had used me and left but couldn’t bear to deal with that and thought that maybe I’d catch her at the tube or at Euston. I went to get some money from the jar in the cupboard to pay for a cab and a ticket and got an equally bad shock when I looked in there into an empty shelf. She hadn’t even left the jar. I slumped on the bed and didn’t know what to do or think. I went to the restaurant, seven miles, on foot, and spoke to the owner, and it came as no surprise to him. I told him about the money and the jar, and he gave me an advance on two months’ salary. I shook his hand and looked him in the eyes as I thanked him. I felt bad for what I was about to do, but even while I was telling him I’d pay him back as soon as I got the money together or take double shifts to work it off, even then I think he knew what I was about to do. I think he was sad, too, not for what I was about to do to him, but to see me back on the slide, having seen me get good and happy over those last few months. Well, I spent a week on my back, drunk, and then came back here. It must have been two months ago. Moved in with my folks and started to get my head together and cut down on the drinking. See, Coke.”
Jim had poured his heart out to him like the Coke he was sitting sipping, and Bobby knew he wanted, almost as much as he needed, a kindly response offering up some profound beauty that would inspire an epiphany where he sat and blur those bad and strange times into the corners of the frameless canvas of one’s life.
“Wow.” He looked to the door for her, he looked to the bar for her and, disappointed on both counts, looked to the table for his drink. He took the empty glass in his hand and said, without looking at Jim, “I’ll be at the bar. Same again?” He didn’t wait at the table for the response and joined the queue at the bar.
A hand took him by the shoulder, and his knees bent in a relentless reflex that enriched his cheeks (face) red. Looking over his shoulder at the hand and following up its wrist, forearm, elbow, upper arm, shoulder, collar, neck and face, he saw it was Anna: “I thought you weren’t coming.”
* * *
He sat forward in his chair, elbows on knees, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet, and busied his fingers with rolling another cigarette. He watched his fingers move deftly as if they were not his own, their long nails decorating them daintily. He remembered when she had taught him how to roll:
The summer sun was at its peak and basked in its own august August glory, sharing its bounty with all sat in that beer garden that afternoon in delighted magnanimity. They were sat around a picnic bench of empty pint glasses and pitchers. As Jim went to the bar, he crushed his cigarette box empty, and she offered him a cigarette of her own. She was with Jim at that time, but whenever Jim spoke, he would notice her in his peripheral vision staring blankly over her left shoulder out of the beer garden onto the street, at the cars that sometimes sped past and sometimes queued stationary at the lights. He was sure then that irrelevant of his own actions, she would be leaving Jim before too long, so he might as well make his move. When it came to pass, she made the first move, and as he watched her slender long fingers with painted long nails and yellow tips roll him a cigarette, she explained to him each step in the process. When she offered him the finished cigarette, the significance of it seemed overwhelming and difficult to understand, as if they had made some sort of pact to one another and his taking of the cigarette and lighting it became the seal. Jim returned to the table and didn’t even notice the dazed disconcerted looks on either of their faces as he carelessly filled their glasses from the pitcher, spilling beer through the slats of the table onto Anna’s and Bobby’s legs, the beer he managed to get in the glasses mostly head.
They took out their mobile phones and exchanged numbers that night as they sat on a half-height wall in front of the pub, unaware of the taxi trading-floor waving and shouting in front of them, with dozens of drunks, including Jim, waving their arms in offbeat unison at the cabs that intermittently drew up.
They would speak to each other, using the phone numbers exchanged previously, a couple of times a week, each with different reasons but both with reasons motivated by drink. Anna would call from Jim’s bathroom as he lay passed out on the bed, dribbling sick and spit that flowed down his T-shirt like lava that would set into a white crust by morning. She would call and confess how much she hated Jim and how she hated going anywhere with him even more. She admitted she was ashamed at being seen out with him, and when he asked her why she stuck by him, she couldn’t answer and just paused in thought, amazed like a blind man given sight, and he would have to ask if she was still on the line. Bobby would call her, too, drunk in bed back from a bar, alone and despondent in alcoholic misery, and she would comfort him.
The calls grew more regular and turned into meetings, a coffee at lunch, a beer afterwork, a fuck after Jim had passed out at a house party, and before too long, Jim realised and, without any fights or bust-ups, quietly left Anna and Bobby to one another and silently left town.
Jim always said that it had nothing to do with his decision to move away. He never knew whether to believe him, despite him taking Jim’s girlfriend, regardless of how low the fruit was hanging. Jim had always been good to him and could never wish him ill, and whether or not it had motivated the move, he would not want Bobby to think that it, and therefore he, had.
But these thoughts were too heavy for his head and made the air sting his eyes. He stood up and waltzed into their bedroom and into his bed without a thought to his lost friends, posture and pride. He lay on the mattress and took a few seconds to pull and tug and build up a sweat that soaked into his pillow like pissing on a bathroom mat. With his sheets adjusted, he was free to be still. The dark here was thicker than the other room and was viscous in its viscosity like gasoline, and he could feel the ripples of time in the gasoline upon his skin emanating from the centre and fading into the distance, where they met him. The streetlight outside the window, in the street as would be assumed, poured floury light through the sieve of the green curtains and cast dull green powder through the room in swathes and seams. The accordion of some street musician, in the street also, with the street lamp, as would be assumed, poured in with the floury light like water that was separate from the gasoline darkness. The squeezing and stretching was inconsistent, and the sound squealed and screeched off beat, and it took whoever it was, with their inconsistent and offbeat stretching and squeezing, three attempts to start the song. He wanted to go to sleep and be washed clean by the gasoline and water and let them flow away with the memories and the flesh that were his constituent parts, and then he could be happy. He couldn’t sleep.
Restlessness sat him up on the edge of his bed with his legs dangling off the side and his toes rubbing back and forth across the carpet, the left leg extending forward as far as it could without the toes diverging from the thick pile of the green carpet and then drawing back until the heel struck the frame of the bed, then repeated with his right foot. His shoulders, retreated into his torso and chin, rested on his chest, and he rocked his head side to side and could feel the rough hairs on his chin catching on the stained T-shirt like it was trying to comb shit out of a dog’s coat. He raised his head and looked at the green window and followed the join of the curtains down their length to the dressing table that sat in the bay.
He stood up and walked the few paces to the dressing table with heavy heels and sat himself on the stool in front of it. He saw in the dull green light the surface was mottled with dust, and he frenetically fumbled his fingers about the table in a panic, casting plumes of old skin off the edges and to the carpet. In his panic, he disorganised the tubes and tubs and canisters and cartons and jars that trimmed its top, indeed, knocking some to the dusty floor. He set about rearranging them methodically: first he ordered them in height, from left to right, starting on the left initially with a tube of mascara that refused to comply on its end so, on its side, was sent to the right hand side of the counter; he was, however, unsatisfied with this order as the only assessed attribute was height and the shape and width were not accounted for, so he proceeded to arrange them, again left to right, alphabetically by brand (and then by product within each brand), and he liked this order more.
Nonetheless, upon further inspection, after an hour or two sat on the stool silent, he decided that the arrangement was based on superficial matters and showed no real understanding of material being arranged. Rather, he thought, they should be arranged left to right, in order of use. He quickly took to ordering the tubes and tubs and canisters and cartons and jars that trimmed the dresser’s top: from foundation through blusher to lip gloss. Satisfied, he relaxed his spine into a slump and sat with his elbows to his knees, gazing across his accomplishment like Alexander. He would see her soon. The true beauty of this arrangement, he felt, could only be truly appreciated in the use of the tubes and tubs and canisters and cartons and jars that trimmed its top. He opened the foundation and, applicator in hand, leered into the mirror purposefully.
* * *
“Well, I suppose I owe it to him.”
“You owe him nothing; he got what was coming to him.” As he said this, he looked back to the table, self-conscious to ensure he was still out of earshot. “Anyway, what you having?”
“I’ll have a Black Russian,” she requested, looking over to the table where Jim sat, having followed Bobby’s eyes previously, and saw him sitting there tearing a bar mat carefully: initially in half, creating two rectangular halves that were again each split in half-length ways into quarters, which were torn this time across their narrow width into eighths that were torn two further times, once across their length, once across their width, becoming a fraction too complex to comprehend. “Hey, let me get these; you go and keep him company.”
“Oh, cool.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he looked back to the table. “That’s cool.” He leant over and kissed her on the cheek, placing his left hand on her right buttock as he did so. “Love you; see you back at the table.”
“Sure.”
He started back to the table, stealing snatches from the same tables as he moved across the room:
“Well, I told her I loved her. I don’t know why I did it, but I did. I guess I was just blind drunk, and I know that’s no excuse. My mouth was running, and I was listening to it like it was someone else, and I can’t say where those words came from, but I suppose I was enjoying listening to it so much, I got carried away and let it say whatever sounded good and entertaining. I just hoped that it had only settled with the dust, to be blown or wiped away, but I soon found out I’d cast those words in iron shackles that I’d placed around us both.
“We were sat there in the back of a bar, drinking scotch and cocktails and sat close together laughing. Both mostly drunk. . .”
Almost back to the table, the voice faded into the background chatter under “Run Run Run” by the Velvet Underground on the jukebox and, in a blind panic that enflamed his mind with blood rushes and adrenaline like a lighter flame and a fart, he absconded to the toilet, finding himself a cubicle and locking the door.
He attempted to dry the sweat from his forehead, initially with his hands and then with a few pieces of crumpled toilet paper. Realising this was no good, he began to rub the sweat back to his hairline to be absorbed and dye his hair black. How long could he stay there? He asked himself this question, looking into the mirror above the toilet, and through the cracks and chips observed that the white remnants of the tissue were decorating his brow, and he set to picking them off, individually, shifting his weight between his left and right foot all of the time to avoid them becoming too stuck to the floor for him to leave; although eternity, or at least until closing time, stood there, stuck to the floor thanks to some urine-based contact adhesive, was not as daunting as returning to the bar, to the table and to Jim.
He cogitated that he could not bear to think what Jim would be doing at that exact moment of time back there in the bar with the love of both their lives as he was shivering in a toilet cubicle that would leave piss stains around his shoes like water marks in a bathtub. He thought that he could not bear to, but he pictured the scene nonetheless: leant in with his elbows on the table, playing delicately with the straw of his drink, delivering the lines he had been practicing in his sleep, on the toilet and stood at a kitchen sink the last months and years, coyly switching his eyes between his drink and her captivated countenance, punctuating them with a subtle flutter of his lashes.
He left the cubicle and then the toilet, walking into the bar and looking across the room at the table: Jim and Anna gazing at their feet and three full glasses.
* * *
“I can’t believe you made me come tonight.”
“Well, I can’t believe you came.” Bobby looked up from his feet into her face. “I can’t believe how much you drank, either.”
Anna giggled and scrunched her face while doing so. “Well, one of us will have to drive.” She let out a laugh like a warning shot, straightened out her face and looked over Bobby’s shoulder (attempting to look him in the eyes). “’Cause I have got the car with me.”
“Where?”
“Oh, it’s about.” She motioned to her handbag on the floor between their feet. “The keys are in there, the car maybe, too, but I don’t think it is, probably.” She took a step forward and placed her left hand on Bobby’s chest to support herself. “I am sure I can trust you. But I will be watching. Drive me home fast.” As the distance she had walked from Bobby started to exceed that of her reach, she stroked her hand across his front. “’Cause I want you.”
“Where are you going now?” he asked as he leant down and picked up the handbag previously between her feet.
“Try and find Jim. I’m ready to go now. He should have said his goodbyes before he went to the toilet. He must be having a poo.” She laughed and ceased the forward movement with her feet, although the upper half of her body was late to realise and leaned forward at an angle. She looked back to Bobby, turning at the waist rather than the neck. “He’s on his way now,” turning back at the neck rather than the waist. “Good poo, Jim?”
“My, you are sloshed, dearest.” He took her arm in the crook of his elbow as he walked over to the door, over to Bobby. “The man-bag suits you.” Smugness set about his face as he walked out of the bar, still holding Anna like a man-bag all of his own. Bobby followed.
“Indeed, Jim.” He always found these throwaway comments, muttered mercifully in retort to humourless jokes or banal observations, the hardest: the fear of humiliating yourself by making a humourless joke or banal observation in response when most magnanimously trying to save their embarrassment. “You know, Jim, the first time I heard that phrase, I thought it meant the scrotum; how funny, eh?” Jim either didn’t hear or didn’t find it funny.
“I assume you guys’ll jump in a cab with me,” remarked Jim as he held the door open for Anna, releasing it for Bobby.
“Well, Jim,” before continuing, he brushed back his hair, passed the handbag from his left hand to his right hand and started to play with one of the shirt buttons pressed against his chest with the now-available left hand’s fingers, “we’ve got the car in town and,” he stepped towards Jim and hooked his left arm around Anna’s right, Jim clinging to her left, “I need to drive it back.” He started to pull her away from Jim but felt resistance, either from Jim trying to hold on or from Anna’s slumped weight mass. “But your place is a bit out of the way, and I’m not comfortable going all that distance, you know, after the drinking.”
“Ah, I see, Bob boy.” He released Anna, and she fell to Bobby’s side, almost slumping to the ground. “Never mind. Good to see you, anyway; you’re doing good.” With a bow of his head, he added a soft “Anna” and waddled across the paving slabs into the mad ether of the night and Bobby’s mind.
“. . .you’re doing good. . .” Compliments are the cruelest comments that can be cast: insults are merely ignored, however, compliments are like tapeworms and can eat away at your insides without your knowledge; a compliment must be analysed to determine its status as a compliment or veiled insult or simply sarcastic, and even then, true compliments must further be analysed to judge their sincerity. Nothing can shake a person like a carefully conceived compliment.
* * *
He flicked the switch of the lamp, and light greeted his eyes and afforded vision, the cool plastic of the switch granting his fingertips sensation, and his heavy toes felt the softness of the pile of the carpet beneath them. He made his way across the lit room to his desk, dodging the coffee table and several recent and suspect stains on the carpet, blinkering himself to the surrounding squalor. He affected the effects about the desk so sound came from speakers. He turned the sound down and the light off, returning to his seat.
His ears heard the music on some level, and his fingers felt the fabric of the garments he wore, rubbing the lace of her underwear against his thigh like sheet metal on a light bulb, blinking randomly at the suns, self-conscious and melancholic sad like a porpoise reading Brecht and breathing air heavy with incense, the flavour of women’s screams and children’s pleas like cars playing guitars made of onions to the sound of a bad simile.
He blinked his left eye hard shut for several seconds, the selected solution for the stinging that pained him, resultant from running makeup, and he could smell the slow rot of the breasts of chickens held against his own by the same wire and fabric that had held hers previously. He had taken the term literally. He had taken them from the fridge four days ago.
* * *
“Close my door for me, Bobby baby. Have you still got my handbag?”
Placing it on her lap, “here it is,” closing the door and entering the car himself through his own door. “Hey, I really don’t think this is a great idea.”
“Look me in the face.” He looked her in the face. “Hmmm, well, I’d say you’re fit to drive, driver; driver, drive on.”
“You’re not fit to say that.”
“Well,” she tried to lean over to him but failed, slumped against the window, and had to pull him by his jacket closer to her, “I’ll give you this now.” She kissed him on the cheek “in case you fail to get me home in less than two pieces.”
There is no more an effective way to undermine someone’s confidence than to say you trust in them totally.
* * *
1. The hob ring spluttered gas through grease and scented the air sickly until the clicking of the spark caught a flame.
1.1. He adjusted the esoteric and mad knobs and dials that adorned the front of the grey/silver appliance in a clockwise fashion, turning the flame small and blue, licking the air on the breeze from the window ajar.
2. He took a dirty kitchen knife from the sink, the stainless of the steel embellished with dried tomato and public-toilet-seat cold.
2.1. He got a glimpse of a reflection in the blade through the grime, blurred and faint, but it was her, to the bone without breaking the skin.
3. He could still hear the record from the other room playing out and coming to its end: the double tracked vocals, the acoustic drums and the acoustic guitars.
4. He refocused his mind on the flame and on the knife, for he would see her soon.
* * *
Initially, he thought he had died and was walking towards the light at the end of a dark tunnel in some pleasant cliché, but as his eyes gradually widened open, he disappointed realised it was the aching, phosphorescent glow of a light set in the ceiling above his head. He did not recognise the regular and repeated pattern of tiles that constituted the ceiling and, after some seconds of careful analysis, realised he was not in a familiar bed. He lifted his head to inspect its surroundings but found it to be bound to the thick hard pillow beneath it. He could smell iodine and taste blood.
“Hello. Can you hear me?”
He replied in the affirmative by aiming his eyes at his questioner and giving a pathetic nod.
“You’ll remain dazed for a while, but you should be okay.” She had blonde hair that made a halo in the lights above her head, soft features and a milky pallor. She was dressed as a nurse: she was a nurse.
“Anna.”
“Now, your arm has been set in a cast due to a fracture, and you’ve three stitches on your forehead. A bit of a concussion, too, which is the cause of the dizziness.”
“Anna.”
“Okay, I’d best get the officer who came in with you.” Her face moved out of his vision, and he heard her feet soft and rapid on the linoleum. An indeterminable period of time passed, between thirty seconds and two aeons, before he heard feet and indistinct voices, low and quiet, approaching his bed once more. His left arm felt clammy and trapped, his forehead stung his brain with pain, as if the wound had penetrated skin and bone to molest his grey matter in person.
“Can you hear me, sir?” A moustached face, thick set and all jowls looked down onto him.
“Anna.”
“I’m Officer Stension. I came in with you after the crash. I know it’s difficult, but I will need to take a statement from you at some point.” The officer felt a hard glance from the nurse strike him from across the hospital bed, “but that can wait until morning.”
“Anna.”
“Yes, your companion,” pausing briefly and leafing his notebook deliberately, “Ms. Conrad. Well sir, I’m afraid to tell you she didn’t make it: she had passed by the time she had been cut from the wreck; it hit on the passenger’s side, you see.”
“Hit?”
“The lorry.” He cleared his throat and leafed his notebook once more, although he did not appear to read the words that emblazoned the lines like flies on a windscreen. “From the statements gathered at the scene, it would seem that when you crossed into a box junction, a goods vehicle ran the light. The driver had exceeded his hours. Although not clear yet, it could be conjectured that he may have been sleeping at the wheel. I’m sorry to have to inform you of this. Now, I’ll come by once you’ve recovered from the concussion further, the nurse will attend to in the meantime. You were quite lucky with your injuries,” he blinked for a conspicuously long time, “for what it’s worth.”
“Worth?”
“Indeed.” Guffawing, he looked at his shoes and turned to walk away. After one step, he turned on his heels to look back. “By the way, the accident doesn’t appear to have been your fault, despite the alcohol levels in your bloodstream . . . which is something which will need to be discussed further later on. We’ll speak soon.”
He dug his finger nails into the hard plaster of the cast and his teeth into his tongue and asked the nurse for morphine.
* * *
The mirror above the sink was smeared and stained, speckled also with white droplets cast by the careless cleaning of teeth several days ago. He looked through the grease and grime to try to gleam a glance of the reflection looking back at him; it was alien: he couldn’t recognise it as himself, however, her neither.
Therefore, it was necessary.
He tightened his grip of the knife and decided this would be the place to do it: the sink level with his crotch.
He would see Anna soon.
Luke Darbyshire, 21, who lives in Birmingham, England, but spends as much time as he can in Edinburgh, left a career in corporate finance earlier this year to focus on writing. His sabbatical will end in September 2009 when he attends university to study toward, most likely, a career as an English teacher. He admires the short stories and poetry of Ernest Hemingway and Allen Ginsberg, respectively, ‘and my only dream is to write a piece as perfect in its constitution as any of their works.’ This first short story is planned as an installment on a five-part collection currently under the working title Short Stories to Read and Repeat.