various fragments of old half-done stories that were too rubbish / badly thought out / rushed to go anywhere (except here, i guess)
Wake up with fingerprints all over me, and an arm that isn’t mine sticking out from somewhere that I can’t make out. I’m on my back and the hand on the end of the arm keeps making a grabbing motion. Fingers fling themselves out and wrap themselves around thin air, then relax again, sullenly. Shifting, I see the rest of Linda. She’s wearing fishnets but has no pants on, and I don’t think this is how she imagined last night would turn out. I reach for my phone and unlock the keys, lock them again, then place them back on the bedside table, next to a cartoon-pink alarm clock. After a pause, I pick it up again and place it between Linda’s yearning fingers. This seems to calm them, and the hand drops to the duvet, docile once more.
After all the troubles getting here, and the weird mood once we did, maybe we got lost. Aimed for ballrooms and champagne and ended up smudged across someone’s little sister’s bedroom. I think about the little sister and whether she’d be okay with this. There’s a half-packed suitcase on the floor and all of her clothes jumbled up with ours. I think about the little sister and whether she’s okay at all. I wonder whose house this is, or why we even got invited to the party. We’re the people who didn’t want to leave, I guess. Linda is snoring but its jerky. I go to wake her but then reason -five more minutes. Outside there are sirens mixed with just silence.
From that room to the stairs to the front garden and its obvious that things have worsened overnight. On a bit of lawn there’s a guy my age laughing, but I can’t work out what at. Turning to Linda (who doesn’t look like a Linda, but maybe looks like she’d have the type of mother who’d name her daughter Linda): ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Shall we stay here?’ She’s maybe frightened, but maybe just tired.
‘Okay.’
‘Or maybe we should go.’
I squint and look up and down the road. The middle distance seems like a safe place to rest my gaze but I’m not sure why. All I end up thinking about is lead singers at rock concerts, impotent but for a fixed stare during the instrumental moments that don’t involve them. Embarrassed, I turn back to Linda. ‘Yeah… Maybe.’
We walk down the path, amongst empty cans and bottles. Someone must have been letting off fireworks too, our shoes are scuffed with soot by the time we reach the gate. We latch onto a group of four or five people standing in the street arguing about things like -what the hell are we going to do now? Someone starts saying something about getting a ‘plan of action’, but their voice retreats deep inside its own embarrassment at the phrase before they can even finish their sentence. Every so often, each individual glances up at the sky for a few seconds, maybe cocks their head slightly. Someone else says something about helicopters, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any. Linda takes hold of my hand, and I look down at her to see her giving me a quizzical look. Maybe I grabbed her.
So there’s a crowd that we’re a part of, and everyone is talking about moving but fixed to the spot. I recognise everyone; I don’t know their names. Two of the group break off into a ferocious embrace. I shift from foot to foot. Linda brushes against me and I don’t know where to look. No helicopters. Last night, when the world wasn’t like this, we decided that maybe we were in love, or that maybe we were not, and this is what I’m thinking about again, when from somewhere back up the path a voice goes:
‘We’ll head north.’
I groan (not him, not here, not now). There are mumbles though of consent, and the shuffle of feet grinding into motion. Everybody listens whenever he speaks. Purposeful steps down the path. Past the laughing boy who hasn’t stopped laughing but might as well have. Dr. Jack Only reaches his congregation and his pulpit is a kerb.
‘We’ll head north. Yes that is what we’ll do.’
‘Why?’ I say, but no one looks over. Linda is already trailing along and up the street. Somewhere nearby a window shatters and we all jump. Except for Jack of course. The gait of a cowboy and a newly recruited posse to match. I put my hands in my pockets and follow behind them.
Jack Only is a lecturer at the liberal arts college I attend. He is in his mid-forties and perhaps best known for his seminal book, ‘“We’re Really In The Shit Now!” The Role of the Faecal Metaphor in Contemporary Fiction’. He thinks of himself as able to exist both in the staffroom, and at student parties, which is why he’s here now, obviously. Fast approaching Elephant and Castle and immersed in twenty year olds still trying in vain to get some sort of signal on their phones. I haven’t seen mine since this morning, when I gave it to Linda, but it doesn’t seem appropriate to bring that up now.
Jack taught a writing class that I took a year ago. He talked a lot about the importance of ensuring a good author photo on the dustjacket, and once told me that the female characters in my stories were too sympathetic. He has been married three times. This knowledge would be imparted weekly, with varying emphasis on either the anguish these women caused him or the relish with which he was able to ‘dispose’ of them.
I never liked him. I didn’t want him to save me. Certainly didn’t want him to save Linda.
Everybody sort of naturally slows down as we pass an overturned ambulance and I catch up to Linda, who is talking to Jack. The lights from the top of the ambulance which is now its side hurry across their faces. Staccato leaps of blue.
——
‘You’re not taking the car,’ said Ted. He held the keys aloft. Embellished the whole, triumphant moment, framed there in the doorway, with the merest flick of his wrist. The sound of the keys jangling against each other just about carried itself down the short garden path to Mary.
‘Ted. For goodness sake.’ Mary stood for a moment, legs shoulder-width apart. A cowboy without the energy to quite muster a drawing of pistols. It was windy today, as it was every day, and her hair blew relentlessly across her face. Between greying strands that flickered in and out, stood Ted. Steadfast in his latest victory. Behind Ted was the house that used to be a barn.
They first came across the barn that became a house five years ago, on a walk across the moors. Ted was doing research for something, and Mary was newly married, eager to gain a glimpse into the creative process of A Writer. The barn was a black dot against brown everything, and then a smudged charcoal lump against purple heather. Finally, it was a barn right there in front of them. The wood was fractured, and hemorrhaged a tree right out from its east-facing wall. After some pleading, Mary managed to persuade Ted to come and take a look inside. He was red in the face and demanded a cereal bar before even considering taking one tentative step towards the place.
‘There are probably things in there that we shouldn’t disturb,’ he said. ‘Owls?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Mary said, laughing. She took his hand and then together, they prized open the great oaken door. There were creaks and gloom and cobwebs, and a kiss, and all the other things that made it so perfect finally clicked for Ted. The entire journey home he talked of nothing but his plans for the renovation - which he would undertake singlehandedly, and which would also serve as invaluable research for his next novel. That night he told her he loved her and he was surprised by how much he seemed to mean it.
Finally, storming back up the path: ‘Ted. Ted. Give me the keys.’ Something buzzed in Mary’s ear. She swatted, and crushed her toe into a rock at the same time. She stumbled, went to one knee, almost at the door. Through gritted teeth and wincing, ‘for fuck’s sake.’ And then:
‘Mary. You never swear like that.’
And she looked up at her husband, the perfect curation of a writerly image. He wore tweed, and there were leather patches on the elbows for no practical reason as far as Mary could ascertain. He had a beard, and of course it was disheveled, wisps scattered everywhere. It couldn’t hide the lopsided leer that his mouth had managed to twist itself into. Mary wasn’t sure whether to
——
‘I think that maybe I should have helped her,’ is what I hear myself trying to say over the music. William is doing a dance move and shouts at me: ‘help who?’
‘Mary,’ I say again, and William repeats: ‘Mary.’ I know he never liked her, so I wasn’t expecting much of a response, but I can still feel myself getting angry. Maybe angry isn’t the right word but one eye twitches and I check my hair nervously in the marble table we’re both leaning against.
‘She didn’t look good. She looked… bad. Just lying there with her eyes glazed over. There might have been blood, you know. Well. There was blood.’
‘Sounds cool,’ William says, looking over my shoulder at the two girls who have just walked in. He changes up his dance move to something a little pacier and I struggle to keep my train of thought.
‘If it was her, she’s definitely changed her hair,’ I murmur.
‘Sounds cool man, sounds cool.’
William ghosts past me and then there’s nothing but a huge empty space around me filled with models and hairdressers and video-artists and one guy who had a part in some film that won an award for some thing at some festival somewhere last summer. I watch him nervously trying to chat up a tan lifeguard who I think I recognise from the club, and who is way better looking than the actor but isn’t an actor.
I look down and there’s a drink in my hand which I don’t remember getting. Whatever is in the cup is a deep blue. I’m peering into it so intently - thinking about Mary, on the side of the road, just after whatever happened happened - that I jump when someone taps me on the shoulder.
William’s back and he just stands there for maybe one minute or an hour, not really doing very much. ‘You’re not being very… interactive, you know, dude,’ is what I end up saying. I don’t know what I mean by that exactly, but it seems to fit. William is wearing a black leather jacket that looks quite like mine but cost a couple of hundred pounds less. He flickers one hand upwards and smoothes back his hair, and instinctively, infuriatingly, so do I. A girl comes over and then another one and everybody seems to be whispering, though I can’t imagine how they could possibly be making one another out over the music. None of the girls look like Mary, and I wonder where she is right now. I assume that she’s at a party, then straightaway realise that’s not even remotely a possibility, and suddenly she seems very alien to me again.
——
The first time I notice the tall guy at the far end of the room, with the straggly, blackish hair and awkwardly erect pose, is through the wildly flailing arms that Myles so often uses to illustrate his increasingly boring stories.
Myles is an aspiring furniture designer, who had a breakdown after Ikea ‘stole’ his last three designs for children’s furniture that Grows With The Child. He’s recently re-emerged from God knows where, slinking into any party that seems even slightly willing to accommodate his constant thirst for validation, as a designer, as whatever. He’s wearing obnoxious penny loafers in patent black and herringbone grey trousers tailored to just above the ankle. He grabs repeatedly, self consciously, at his tight, black polo neck sweater (Dover Street Market, 600 pounds in the sale) as he tells me, for the third time this week, about the school desk he’s currently working on. It will, he assures me, ‘revolutionise the state education system.’
‘It’s like, they’ve forgotten everything, man.’
‘Uh huh.’
Myles waves his arm theatrically across the room and to his brow. Through the blur, the tall guy keeps glancing nervously towards the cluster of people directly beside him, who are laughing at some terrible anecdote - about fucking, no doubt. Even from here, I can see him flinch when one of the group – an emaciated creature with a faux-antique cigarette holder and a see-through top and no tits – accidently brushes up against him. He disappears behind a column and I struggle to revert my attention back to Myles.
‘It’s like, remember Dieter Rams, man. Remember Dieter, you know?’
I’m suddenly conscious of Myles’ fingers digging into my suit, and the flushed red rising out of his polo neck, as he continues his raspy tirade against whoever. He’s saying something about toaster ovens, and how there are too many colours nowadays.
I tell him sure, too many colours, and briefly an image of a girl I once dated, a black girl whose name I can’t remember, who never returned my calls (back when that still used to occasionally happen), her image flashes across my mind. I have no idea what he is talking about. I tell him sure, again, and edge backwards across the grossly thick carpet before he can start begging me to put in a good word for him with the designer Tom Dixon, because he knows that he designed some furniture for the sets on my last film and he knows that we still see each other socially. I suddenly have an overwhelming desire to vomit all over this shrunken little man, and I turn my back to him, clutching the top of my champagne flute with both hands, as though it were a walking stick.
I’m casting my eyes around the room for the tall guy. I can’t place him here and I can’t place him in my mind, but I’m certain that I know him from somewhere. Something about his shit beard and buck teeth reminds me of someone, maybe an extra from one of my films, or a waiter from one of these horrendous parties, maybe. Inadvertently, I stumble into a tired conversation between Emily Wolfe and some faggot film producer, whose name I can’t remember.
‘Jonathan! How lovely to see you,’ says Emily. Emily is an ex-model, who has recently started getting supporting roles in Steven Soderbergh films, just because she wrote an article about the fashion industry for the New York Times, and says things in interviews about being ‘the world’s first existentialist to appear on a Calvin Klein billboard’. Last week she lay on her stomach, on my bed, reading aloud from ‘The Gay Science’, whilst I ate out her arsehole with only moderate enthusiasm.
‘Jonathan, hello! We were just talking about this new Hirst exhibition up at the Wallace Collection, have you seen it?’ The producer lowers his voice theatrically, conspiratorally, as though what he’s about to say isn’t the common consensus amongst almost anyone who takes an interest in such things. ‘Between you and me, I don’t think too much of it, hey? His paintings are better when…’ He pauses and blinks a couple of times. ‘His paintings were better when they weren’t paintings, when they were… the shark,’ he finishes, feebly.
Emily says, ‘have you started shooting yet?’
I tell her, ‘no, I think I’m going to have to do a redraft as well.’
‘Oh?’ Emily just about manages to enquire.
‘The final scene, it needs crying, and my leading man – who the studio insisted on, of course – he’s really bad at crying.’
‘Oh.’
‘He swears that how he’s doing it, that’s how he cried when his mother died, that it’s the best crying he can do.’
‘Oh?’ The vowel sound is elongated into nothingness as Emily’s eyes glaze over. They look watery, as if she hasn’t blinked for the entirety of the conversation so far.’
‘The shark… or was it a lamb, too.’ The producer lisps, or at least I think he lisps, but maybe I’m just projecting.
‘Anyway, hopefully, we’ll get things rolling by the end of next month at the latest.’ I think I spy the stranger over by the bathrooms.
Emily doesn’t say anything, water is bubbling over her lids and I realise how dilated her pupils are.
‘I liked the dots too,’ says the producer.
I turn and look at him, this time it’s me who leans in close.
‘You know last week, Emily here demanded that I stick my tongue deep into her arsehole, as far as it would go, whilst she screamed Nietzchean quotes at me and refused to bring me to orgasm.’ The producer squeals with laughter and slaps me on the wrist, telling me how simply awful I am, that I mustn’t tease the poor girl, and he giggles as he nudges Emily in the ribs telling her that she shouldn’t just let me make such vulgar jokes, just because I’m famous now. Emily smiles I think, and I can almost hear her lips cracking with the effort, but I’m halfway across the room already, moving steadily in the direction of the bathrooms.
‘I liked the dots too!’ shouts the producer, dissolving, for some reason, into a fit of terrifying guffaws.
The man is not in the bathroom and I curse, annoyed at the thought of having to go back out there and converse with more of those people. I head to the bar, and order a whisky on the rocks, only to be told by the barman that the champagne has now run dry. Due to the companies sponsoring this party, I am restricted to the choice of either vodka and cranberry, or some new beer from asia that’s currently big in Brooklyn. When did parties in people’s homes turn into such corporate affairs, is what I ponder, aloud, to no one in particular. In fact, all my ruminations end up doing is misleading the barman into thinking that I want to talk (to ‘chat’) to him and he proceeds to tell me all about his supporting role in an indie rom-com called December Daffodils. According to Village Voice, it was the ninth best tear-jerker of 2002. I tell him that everyone’s tears are better than mine at the moment and then realise that that statement doesn’t really make sense, and I laugh, then choke on some ice, then order another vodka and cranberry.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve noticed a guy in here who doesn’t really… look the part, have you?’
——
I think the last time that I saw Mary was about five years ago at a party in a house on top of a hill that looked over some other houses. The houses got increasingly less desireable the further down the hill you went. I remember she made some joke about immigrant labourers. Her joke was framed in the backdrop of a giant television showing MTV, and I started to panic about never watching the news, or reading newspapers or knowing who was in charge (of anything).
‘Pretty funny, right?’
I told her -yes. Behind her, a slightly fuzzy, life-sized black guy in mock-army clothing was strutting down the steps of a gleaming private jet. I squinted, and tried to work out if he was in slow motion or not, and then I realised that my brow was damp with sweat and I asked Mary, whose eyes looked wider than they should be - ‘who’s in charge?’ - and she laughed and leaned in close and told me that no one was in charge, and that I was silly, and that I was handsome. She said all this as though each statement was somehow profound. Behind her, the life-sized black guy was sitting in a jacuzzi, having his cigar lit by a beautiful woman wearing just a bikini and a bow tie.
We left that party and I can’t remember what happened after that (realistically, nothing), except that I don’t think I saw her ever again, until tonight. She was a girlfriend, of sorts, though I don’t think I ever loved her. I don’t think she ever loved me. We had sex at William’s house the first time we met. William had been downstairs and he gave a nasty little smirk when we emerged. Mary threw a glass at him and he stormed out clutching his face, screaming (‘bitch!’). Left a half-eaten sandwich in his wake. I don’t know how they knew each other and still don’t really, I guess. William didn’t come back for three days and in the meantime I stayed there with Mary. We played videogames and she talked to me as though fashionable people didn’t exist.
——
Finally then, some time later, in a field somewhere far: the two of us alone, pressed against damp grass. It’s cold, of course, and feels like it might be dusk but when I look up there’s no sign of any of that. Sky is grey and so is land and everything merges at the horizon where one black tree is ruptured from the earth. Linda murmurs something I don’t hear and makes my armpit a nest. Her teeth start to chatter and I try to drown out the sound by replacing it with a -did you say something? Her head turns and her eyes are still big even though her lips are cracked and her hair is matted. I muster a smile.
She asks me faintly, why in all those stories I ever wrote, she never featured. Everyone we knew was in those stories, she sighed.
I start to tell her that I don’t know, but then suddenly, maybe for the first time I do know. I stop and I draw her in. I tell her that she was always better than that world, and suddenly there are stupid tears wetting my face. I’ve never felt more grateful. Her eyes close and I wonder if she knows what I mean. It is hard to say these things. Nowadays especially, but I hope she knows what I mean. My head drops gently against hers. Her breathing is soft and sparse against my hand. My hand is blistered and, it seems, trembling intermittently, involuntarily. I clench a fist and then release it. I couldn’t get sick out here. It’s too good for me.
