Roadworks
(This is a story from when I was sixteen or seventeen, and so not very good. A discussion of why it is not very good follows in the comments below the story.)
I sighed. It had been a long day, made longer now by the incessant traffic. I was forced to stop once again behind two red lights and a cloud of grey smoke. Another car was in front of this one, and another, and another.
I put my left elbow on the edge of my car door, uncomfortably pressed against the window, then rested my cheek on my knuckle, feeling the bones of my fingers press against my jaw. With my other hand I twisted the dial on the radio. A pop song played almost indistinguishably behind a wall of static. I tried twisting the tuning dial, but all I got was static, sometimes with a song phasing in, sometimes with nothing but the electric crackle.
I turned it off, having been up and down the entire FM spectrum without my car budging an inch. It was no good, I’d have to replace the aerial that was snapped off my car soon, or remember to put some tapes worth listening to in my car or maybe even fork out for a car CD player, though that would probably get nicked anyway.
The brake lights of the car in front went off momentarily, creating a little glimmer of hope that I may be able to start moving again. It was false hope though; they came on a second later and the car in front stopped, without even giving me chance to get in gear.
I sighed again and let my hands fall to my knees. As I did this, some far off lights had changed colour, and the chain of cars in front of me had begun to move. I was slow to notice this and took a few seconds to get in gear and start moving. I could feel the impatience of the drivers behind me because it was a reflection of my own feelings.
Not that I really had anything to get home for, I mused as I crept along at twenty miles an hour; just the evening’s TV probably, maybe a movie. At one time on a Friday night I would have been raring to go out to a club with my mates, maybe meet someone and bring her back to mine for ‘coffee’ at 2 am. When did I stop feeling like that?
I suppose this is how it always happens; as a slow, gradual process that sneaks up on you and takes hold before you even notice it. Most of my friends are like this too, although most of them ended up settling down with someone, buying a house, even having kids, while I still lived in my bachelor pad.
I was nearing the lights when they turned to amber, forcing me to stop again. At least the car in front that had been spewing out the grey exhaust fumes had gone. I put my car into neutral and looked out the windows.
Through the windscreen all I could see was blinding autumn sun, low in the sky and right in my field of vision, even with the visor down. Needless to say, I didn’t spend too long looking directly at our nearest star.
To my right were cars all passing by me at a uniform speed, as if they were connected like carriages on a train. A lot of them were four wheel drives or people carriers, with pale kids staring out of the back windows and bags of shopping piled up in the large boot behind them. These dwarfed the smaller cars, the hatchbacks like my Ford, which were driven by just the ordinary people, generally sans passengers. Then, every so often in the train of cars, there came a luxury car, such as a BMW or a Mercedes, driven by professionals in suits and ties with a Bluetooth headset sticking out their ear like some pretentious tumour of superiority.
I looked to my other side when the people on my right started to annoy me, mostly just by the fact that they were in motion while I was stationary. The entrance to a school was on my left side and children of various ages were pouring out of it in green blazers, which were sometimes covered by coats.
One girl, talking and laughing with a group, caught my attention. She was, I would guess, between fourteen and sixteen and quite pretty. Her hair was dark, and so were her eyes because of the eyeliner she was wearing. Apparently she reckoned herself to be a woman, though she was scarcely past girlhood, as shown by the developing breasts held in place by a black bra that was just visible through the thin material of her white cotton blouse.
I realised that I was staring and felt slightly ashamed, though I hadn’t been consciously thinking anything to be ashamed of. I looked at her face again; she looked like the sort of girl I would have been attracted to had I still been that age. That thought made me smile, though it was a sad smile. It wasn’t so many years ago that I was that age, though the years do seem shorter now. Back then, my life stretched out before me like a vast ocean.
I remembered how I felt back then, all those hormones racing through my body whenever I saw a girl like that. That excited rush of chemicals in my body whenever I was around a member of the opposite sex had generally worked to my advantage in my younger days, giving me a desire for each particular girl that my confidence would have been ashamed to fail.
I always found this hormone-fuelled confidence to be my best feature, causing more than my fair share of girls to fall for me despite my habitual acne and uncontrollable hair at that time. I was even luckier at my university when my acne had disappeared and I was able to find a style that used my messy hair to its fullest advantage, while still maintaining the confidence and experience I had with girls at secondary school.
In time, however, my raging sea of hormones became more like a placid lake, and I got less of a thrill being with girls. I became more indifferent to the female species around my mid-twenties and, while I still hankered after the sex, I got bored of relationships and became unable to hold one down for more than a couple of months. As a result, my confidence with women has been reduced and I find it more difficult to talk to them.
My sex drive too seems to have waned even further from the desires of my twenties and thirties to just the occasional masturbatory session as a means of satisfaction. What I do want now, however, is a fulfilling and meaningful relationship.
I realised that I had been staring at the empty patch of tarmac where the girl had passed my sight line, for the last minute. I refocused my eyes through my glasses and then, almost instinctively, looked for her again. She hadn’t gone far and I now saw her breaking away from her group of friends and walking towards a boy maybe two years older and wearing casual clothes; jeans and a hooded top. In his ear I could see a thick black plug and on his chin there grew a fuzzy teenage stubble.
He and the girl exchanged a smile, a brief embrace and then a kiss. I turned away to see the traffic lights turn to amber, a misplaced sensation of jealously clinging at my chest as I got into gear and pulled away at green.
As I drove off I cast one final look at the young pair their lips still locked together and the boy’s hand placed firmly on her buttock underneath her low-hanging black bag. I wished I was that age again; the youthful mind doesn’t understand the cloying fear of loneliness that accompanies old age.
Tags: lust, Old People, old story, Relationships, short story, Teenage, waiting
February 9th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
I must have written this about four years ago, when I was considerably less skilled at writing than I am now (though at times, the present one included, I wonder whether even now I really am any good or not). There are still elements withing this story that define my work in general and always have done, but this story marks itself out as an amateur affair and lacks refinement.
In many ways this story is comparable to my more recent In the Sea, in that in both we have the older man looking at the young girl, recalling feelings of lost youth. While in the sea is not by far one of my best stories, it is at least somewhat superior to Roadworks.
The biggest problem with Roadworks, which is perhaps not entirely mitigated with In the Sea, is the cliche of an old person looking disdainfully at the young and remembering “the good old days.” It is a theme undertaken by amateur writers the world over and rarely succeeds in creating anything more than a one-dimensional caricature or parody of an ‘old person’, though every writer treats it as it is some new and original point-of-view from which to write a story. Why should this be?
Generally, it seems, the writers who write these stories are younger than the characters about whom they’re writing. They are projecting their feelings of what it must be like to be old, without actually experiencing it first-hand. Obviously, being able to put oneself in someone else’s shoes, as it were, is an important skill for a writer, and maybe it is for that reason that all us amateurs think “what better way to do that than to critically examine ourselves through the eyes of the generation that preceded us?”
So, yes, here we have this rather cynical cliche of an old man who is frustrated with life and envious of the young. We start with cliche and then it gets worse, for the style of the piece is poor, peppered with phrases that my seventeen-year-old self thought were profound, but which are instead awkward and ungainly:
“Needless to say, I didn’t spend too long looking directly at our nearest star.”
“my raging sea of hormones became more like a placid lake”
“the youthful mind doesn’t understand the cloying fear of loneliness that accompanies old age.”
Lines like this are cringe-worthy and, to return briefly to my point about the young writing about the old, in that final line there is an kind of arrogance that though the youthful mind does not understand old age, I, as writer, somehow do. Although perhaps the irony of the line was not entirely lost on the younger me.
Worse than the crimes of these overwrought lines is the blandness of the rest of the writing, which leads in turn to a bland character. This character is a series of statements, spoken objectively in a way that no one would ever speak of themselves in natural conversation:
“As a result, my confidence with women has been reduced and I find it more difficult to talk to them.”
On a similar note, and while this is most frequently apparent in amateur works, it is also present in many more well-regarded pieces, and yet bothers me nonetheless, there is no real suggestion of why this piece is written like it is. It is too consciously narrated to be though-process, and yet is not in the style of a diary entry, nor even as if the narrator was speaking out loud to the reader. This is a perennial problem with first-person narrative that can be mostly avoided by using a third-person, and concerns some people more than others. For myself it is obviously a great concern, and I go to great lengths to make what I consider to be un-artificial narratives. Look at one of my favourite of my own pieces, Is this Love?, for example, and there you will see that the stream-of-consciousness-style narrative aims to reflect untempered thought-processes and not conscious narration.
Now, a direct comparison between Roadworks and In the Sea. Without aiming to be crude, these two passages present themselves most readily for comparison:
“Apparently she reckoned herself to be a woman, though she was scarcely past girlhood, as shown by the developing breasts held in place by a black bra that was just visible through the thin material of her white cotton blouse … I looked at her face again; she looked like the sort of girl I would have been attracted to had I still been that age. That thought made me smile, though it was a sad smile.”
“A full bust, that belied her apparent age, protruded awkwardly from her chest, covered by a dark-coloured vest-top. Joe watched her, thought she was pretty, thought she was the type of girl he would once have stared at with a beating heart across the classroom, but not the type of girl he had married.”
The second one, from In the Sea, reveals more, but says less. I use the phrase “stared at with a beating heart across a classroom” to suggest what is said by the more direct “would have been attracted to had I been that age”. In Roadworks this phrase is followed by “that thought made me smile, though it was a sad smile,” which, apart from being a judgment a person might be unqualified to make about themselves, does not say much beyond what it says. “Not the type of girl he had married” on the other hand not only tells us that this protagonist has a wife, but also hints at a slight regret that perhaps he did not end up with his first choice, his preference. The sadness is implied.
This line is indicative of a general refinement in my work over the past few years, with more left open to interpretation and deeper reading. However, taking a broader view, In the Sea and Roadworks are essentially the same story. After follows a similar theme of a relationship between a young girl and an older man, while Child Hands changes the formula slightly and has a younger man coming into contact with an older woman.
From the beginning the theme of, I’m not sure what to call it, illicit or unusual relationships, has been prominent in my work. I’m hardly alone in this area, with Romeo and Juliet being one of the most famous, if not by a long way the first, to undertake the theme. Over the last few years my best work has dealt more with the barriers to love and fulfilling relationships, but there is a significant proportion of my work which deals with, I suppose, taboo relationships. Early on this manifested itself in fantasy-type work that had various combinations of humans and vampires, vampires and angels, humans and angels, etc. falling in love. The stuff Twilight is doing now essentially, though I have a fairly strong feeling that the stuff I was doing at fifteen was at least as refined, if not more, than what Stephanie Meyer is currently churning out.
Afterwards, this developed into more realistic works such as Roadworks and Father, which could be described as having, though I hesitate to use the word, pedophilic overtones. I hope it is unnecessary to state that these stories neither reflect how I feel nor suggest that I approve of older men lechers lusting after young teenagers. From a writing standpoint, however, it is a fairly attractive subject, for there is an inbuilt conflict in such feeling. On one side it is entirely reasonable that a man would be attracted to a younger female because it is evolutionarily encouraged, beyond the fact that people like to be reminded of being young, and such feelings might make an older man feel young. On the other side, there are social and moral taboos about relationships with large age gaps. And so, there is instant conflict, conflict being the backbone of any story. In future pieces, for the same reasons, I plan to look at incest, though I cannot at the moment see any story potential for bestiality.
Have I gone a little of track in what appears to have become an essay? I feel I should bring this commentary round to a conclusion. I suppose if I want the reader to take anything away from this piece I wrote four years ago is that, if you write a story that is as good as this one, you’re not there yet, you’re still an amateur scrabbling around in the dark for an original voice. Don’t stop, keep practicing and, no, I don’t want to say “one day you’ll be as good as I (congressionally) am” because that’s not only arrogant but patronising, rather, you can still achieve a greater level of refinement and quality.