The Book

First, the book. I just got my first copy of this from lulu.com a couple of days ago, and it’s looking pretty good. I mean, and perhaps I’m a little biased here, I think it looks really professional, like a proper book. And I’m pleased about that because it’s self-published and I did all the formatting and cover design and photography myself.

So what can I say about it? Well, firstly, you can buy it here:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/as-you-and-i-stand-motionless-here-the-world-becomes-very-far-away/13003519

But I’m not expecting you’ll want to go and do that right away, if at all, I mean I know how difficult it can be to spend your hard-earned money on a particular item, especially a self-published one, when there’s so many other things to buy in the world, and so many other books to read. To try and ease that decision, I’ve made the book as cheap as I possibly can, while still making a little bit of money for myself from it, not a lot, but a little.

What it says to me if you do decide to buy my book, whether in print or digital form, is that you care about my writing, you care enough to put a few pounds down on it and spend some time reading it. And that’s what I care about. I’m not trying to get rich from this, I just want to be read. Because, after all, what’s a writer without readers? And if I sell as many as twenty copies, I’ll be happy, because at least that’s twenty people who care about my writing.

But, of course, how can you care about this book if you don’t know what it is? So I’ll tell you. It’s a collection of twenty-three short stories, some longer, some shorter. Specifically, they’re the twenty-three best short stories I’ve ever written. Now, many of them are already available on this site for free, and they’re going to stay here, for free, because I want to be read more than I want to make money. However, many of the stories have been tweaked for this compilation in a kind of ‘director’s cut’ way, and two of the stories are brand new and exclusive to this collection.

Of these two, one is over forty pages long, an epic nestled among the more bite-sized narratives, and I’m particularly proud of it as one of my absolute best short stories. It’s called Emerald and I’d say it’s one of the primary selling-points of this compilation. But it’s not the only one.

The other reason I feel you might buy this book is because it’s nice to own a physical copy of something. It’s all well and good reading off a screen, but I find when I’m reading on the internet, I can’t concentrate on more than a couple of thousand words at a time, there’s just too many distractions going on when you can have multiple tabs open, and it’s just not comfortable for your eyes. And reading fiction for me is sitting in a sunny garden, or by a window, or, most often, lying in bed when everything else is quiet, not hunched over a computer desk, or squinting at a laptop screen. That’s why I hope you might consider buying my book; as a new way to enjoy my fiction.

So what are you buying when you go to Lulu and place your order? Well, if you look at the cover, you’ll see it’s called ‘As You and I Stand Motionless Here, the World Becomes Very Far Away’, a long title I know, but I did deliberate on it for a long time. If you’ve been following my stories for a while you’ll kind of already know what it’s about, but I’ll try to explain it concisely for the uninitiated.

Most of my stories, and particularly the ones in this collection, centre around a couple of people coming together, either by chance or by intention. That’s the ‘you and I’ bit. When these people come together, there’s often very little exterior action, they think and they talk, but often little happens to or because of them, except the occasional, brief physical connection, a kiss perhaps, or their hands brushing together. That’s the ‘stand motionless’ bit.

The idea of ‘the world becom[ing] very far away’ is a theme that recurs often in my work, and I’ve referred to it on this blog before as ‘distancing’. It’s almost an overarching theme of all my work in fact, that people in my fiction are often isolated, or feel as if they are, and they find it difficult to make meaningful connections with other people, but, occasionally, their shared experience of isolation can bring them together. So, while they are together, it is the world that becomes far away, inconsequential even, because they have found this brief connection to someone else.

You see, I’ve thought about this. And I wanted a long title because a) it makes it stand out from the crowd, b) some of the best titles are long and exact rather than short and snappy, and c) maybe I’m a little bit pretentious. With reference to b), on a little side note, some of the titles I was thinking of, that I drew inspiration from were stuff like, “if on a winter’s night a traveller”, “if nobody speaks of remarkable things”, “in search of lost time”, and of course, the shadow that persists over any creator of a short story compilation, “will you please be quiet, please?”

I spent a while creating the cover too, and you’ll see some of my earlier concepts for the cover in a future post, but ultimately I wanted an image that would match the somewhat subdued nature and ambiguity of my writing, and something that would not overshadow my title, which, being as long as it is, would take up most of the space anyway. One of my absolute favourite covers of all time is the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Finnegans Wake, and the cloudy scene on this inspired the rainy scene on my cover. But again, I’ll talk about that in a future post.

All that remains for me to say is that I hope you’ll consider purchasing my first publication and if you do, will enjoy the fact that you will then be in possession of a complete and considered work of fiction that was worth the asking price over a loose array of digital stories. The link again:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/as-you-and-i-stand-motionless-here-the-world-becomes-very-far-away/13003519

And look out for my next post in which I’ll be discussing the other thing I’ve been working on, my new blog about narratives in videogames.

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.

Sat now, alone at the party, my can empty in my hand, dented in several places where I had absently crushed my thumb and fingers into it, I considered getting another one, scanning the crowd for either an opening I could push through, or someone worth talking to, and was just about to stand when an unfamiliar girl threw herself down onto the sofa next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

Her face was thin and sharp, with a narrow nose and green eyes that looked away as I met them; cheeks rose-tinted, vasodilated; hair the colour of dry leaves, or of beer held to the sun, sticking out like straw, jagged and uneven because she cut it herself. In her hands, which rested on the patchwork fabric lap of her dress, she held two slim bottles. I did not think she was pretty.

“Hey,” I said, smiling, pressing the lager can between my fingers until it clicked and crinkled.

“I’m Remi,” she said, laughing nervously. Her laugh was not musical. “My name’s kind of a joke.” She looked down at her hands, tapped her fingers on the glass of one of the bottles.

“Is it?”

She nodded and asked my name. After I told her there was a silence and we both looked down at the open bottles she held, I taking sideways glances at her, noticing that her body was thin, thinner than mine, slight, boyish, until she looked up at me, saw me looking and held out the nearest bottle.

“You want another beer?” she asked, “it’s better than a can.”

I took the bottle, finding the lightly-coloured liquid inside sweeter and less chemical than the lager. We began to talk, the people surrounding us, the party and the music, the bright light, dying away as she told me how she went to the same university as me, studied art, liked painting and bright colours, action and movement, mentioned Futurism, piquing my interest. In exchange, I told her about my writing, about Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Marcel Proust, worried I would sound pretentious, even as I took self-satisfied pride in reeling off their names, but she had not heard of them so could not judge me. She did not read much, or “enough”, she said, but would like to read something of mine some time, if I would show her. Of course I would, I said. She smiled against the rim of her bottle and looked over at two girls a few metres away, who giggled when they saw me looking and turned away. I felt embarrassed suddenly, back in the party, among all the other people, but separate, on the outskirts, with a stranger, an unknown girl who had brought me a beer and started a conversation. I caught a glimpse of Simon through a gap between two people, looking serious as he discussed something, a game probably, judging by who he spoke with, and I felt annoyed, annoyed that Remi should have watched me and spoken to her friends and come over here and sat by me with two beers in her hands and started talking to me. It annoyed me even as I appreciated the gesture, hypocrite that I am, because obviously, drunkenly, she had decided she had a crush on me, on the person sat alone on the sofa across the room of a party, she had said as much, when I made a joke, said that she “liked” me, though she did not, could not, know me, know where I had come from or who my past lovers had been, whether I was single or my girlfriend was absent, what I liked or disliked, whether I drank coffee or preferred cinnamon tea, whether I would rather have come to a party or stayed in tonight, whether I thought verisimilitude was more important in fiction than plot and dramatic event.

There was a break in our conversation, Remi reddened again, I silent, conflicted, looking blankly out across the crowd until I saw a face that was familiar but through several months’ absence had drifted beyond the bounds of immediate recollection, creating a brief pause before a name emerged: Nick. He called to me and came over, asked how I was, looked over at Remi. His hair was longer than when I had last seen it, and dyed black, though he still dressed in the same tight black band t-shirts and skinny-fit black jeans, broken only at his waist by a silver-shining belt buckle shaped like an audio cassette. I asked if he was here with Mike but, no, he said, Mike wasn’t there, they were no longer together but, seeing my face contort into condolence and regret, they were still friends, still hung around together, and it was weeks since they had broken up; they were both over it. I felt Remi’s awkwardness next to me, her sense of alienation, imagined empathetically her desire that I would turn to her and say truthfully, with conviction, “Nick, this is my girlfriend, Remi; Remi, this is Nick,” felt simultaneously still annoyed with her, or with myself, promising myself, as Nick continued to talk, that I would not fall in love with her, not right now, not straight away, not because she had shown some interest in me, whoever she was, adamant because of the beer, for which I had no tolerance, drinking it as rarely as I did, already tipsy and distrustful of my own perceptions, even after only one can and one bottle.

That I might already be falling for her, reciprocating her obvious feelings for the simple act of her coming over and bringing me a beer, disgusted me, but after Nick left, taking with him his great enthusiasm for everything and his overbearing laugh, I continued to talk with her and, as the party began to die down around two, as the hosts began to usher people towards the doors, Simon being lost in the crowd or outside already, Remi’s friends being abandoned or having abandoned her, we collected our coats and walked out together. Perhaps from the shock of the cold night air, or from moving after sitting and talking for so long, Remi suddenly went pale and darted out across the concrete forecourt of the house towards the kerb where she immediately bent over and vomited into a drain. Several people who still lingered in groups, some smoking, others waiting for stragglers still inside, watched the girl with mild interest and surprise, but did not move to help her, perhaps assuming that, because I had been stood with her, I would be the one to go over. When I did she stood and her face flushed, though the bright red of her cheeks was harder to discern in the street-light than the glistening of the watery sick across the bars of the drain cover. I asked if she was alright.

“I am now.” She wiped her mouth with a tissue pulled from her coat pocket, then held out and squinted at strands of her hair to see if they had been caught in the sudden cascade. They shone in the light but appeared to be dry.

“It’s cold,” she said, letting the hair fall back into place and pulling from her pockets some fleece mittens with cats-paw designs on their underside.

“I didn’t think you’d drunken that much,” I said.

She shrugged, “I didn’t eat before I came out,” then she added, quickly, for she had seen her friends come out through the front door, “will you walk me home? It’s not far, just a couple of streets away.” She gestured vaguely in the direction opposite to my house and my mind flashed to the walk home alone, to Simon walking alone also, unless anyone else went that way, then to Don Quixote, to the chivalric knights-errant he idolised, briefly to the characters of my novel, meeting for the first time in a café, spontaneously striking up conversation, embarking so easily, with so little provocation, implausibly even, at the behest of the author, for the convenience of the narrative on the same ‘quest’ together. It must happen, I thought, that people meet at cafés and strike up conversation, just as they do at parties, and that Remi came over and talked to me was proof of that, for which I should thank her.

“Sure,” I said, feeling for my mp3 player and headphones in the inside pocket of my coat. Music, the music of Dashboard Confessional perhaps, who I enjoyed, I told myself, ironically, would be my companion home, while chivalry, ‘being a gentleman’, served as an excuse to walk her home. Remi smiled and introduced me to her friends when they reached us, a blond-haired girl named Alice and the other with dark hair called Helen, who said they were going to a club, did Remi, or both of us, want to come? No, said Remi, she was going home and I would walk her. There was a note of pride in her voice, and the look she shared with Alice was meaningful and private, as if she had said something further telepathically. I watched the two girls leave and looked for Simon but did not see him because, as I discovered later, he had already left.

“Shall we go?” Remi asked.

I turned away from the people outside the house, abandoning my search for Simon and nodded at the girl in the red coat who stood with arms folded against the cold, breath coming in small bursts from between her colourless lips. My hands in my pocket clutching, but not wearing, my leather gloves, we began our walk, in silence, along the monochrome pavement, legs lit up, casting dancing shadows in occasionally passing headlights. I wondered if she understood the thrill of walking down nocturnal streets where the only sound was the distant whoosh of night-time traffic and leaves skittering and stepped-on on the pavement, the thrill of being here rather than anywhere else, at night, moving between amber pools in the darkness, thinking about the people warm and asleep in the passing houses, about the students and workers rowdy in the city centre, drinking, revelling, Helen and Alice gone too, dissatisfied with the party, insatiable, to join them, while Remi and I were neither asleep nor dancing, but here, frosty air on our skin, bodies warm beneath our coats, sharing a silent walk. I could not know what she was thinking, whether she longed only for her bed, in a room I had never seen, if she was too nervous to speak, her confidence and conversation having evaporated with the end of the party, no longer having the people around, her two friends, to support her. Perhaps she still felt sick, I thought as I looked at her nose and saw in her profile a kind of sharp prettiness. I asked her, but she said she felt fine, had “got it all out,” now felt sober and cold. The final word, spoken as she looked at me, as we passed beneath the full glare of a street-light, sounded like an invitation to pull her close and put my arm around her, but I did not.

We passed only two other people on our walk: a man in his twenties with shoulders hunched beneath a black hoodie, who caused me to draw close enough to Remi to brush against her shoulder so he could go by, and an older man, on the other side of a different street, who had a pipe in his mouth and held, at the end of a lead, a darkly-coloured Labrador. To my observation that it seemed late to be walking a dog, Remi smiled and said “this city is full of strange people.” I replied that anywhere you go has strange people. Remi nodded and was silent, ending our brief, meaningless conversation, though with no regret on my part because no longer, now that we had passed who we were, what we did, what we liked, was our conversation forced, instead could come and go as it pleased, comfortably, and was free to be entirely pointless, even if as banal as pointing out that it was late to walk a dog. I supposed we would be friends.

“Here’s my road,” Remi said regretfully as we came onto an even quieter terraced street further away from the main road than the house-party house had been. “I’d invite you in, but my parents will be asleep.”

“Don’t you live with those girls from earlier?” I asked.

“No, I liked my room here too much to leave,” Remi said, leading me now up the path towards a front door overhung with ivy, lowering her voice as if it would rise up through the windows and wake everyone inside. “And I’d rather save on rent and spend the money on art supplies.” She unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Wait here a moment,” she said, disappearing into the dark hallway, fumbling around at a desk for a moment and then returning with a pen in her hand. “I couldn’t find any paper,” she said, “so give me your arm.”

I asked why and she said that she wanted to give me her phone number. When I suggested why not just type it into my phone she giggled, covered her mouth to stifle the sound and said that perhaps she was not as sober as she had thought. I handed her my phone and the keys lit up beneath her jabbing thumb.

“Text me sometime when you’re bored,” she said, handing the phone back to me.

When I had typed in her name and put it back in my pocket, she stepped back out onto her front step, in her socks because she had already kicked her shoes off, and hugged me, tightly, but genuinely, without desperation, so I could feel her arms through my coat, and thanked me for walking her home. I left, mind blank, filled only with the echoing hollow music from my headphones, feeling nothing as I walked, barely thinking about Remi or the night or anything. Back at my own house, through the black metal gate that creaked and the wooden back door that had swollen with the cold, filling the frame so that it caught and protested when pushed open, I found Leo and Simon in the kitchen, both in night-clothes; one in shorts, the other in baggy tartan trousers, both wearing faded t-shirts and flushed with the heat from the radiators. Simon, who leant against the worktop waiting for the kettle to boil, shivered in the blast of cold air from the open door, while I recoiled against the wall of heat.

“It’s hot in here,” I said, squeezing through the doorway into the adjacent living room, past Leo who stood against the frame, noticing, as I pulled off my scarf, let my long coat fall onto the sofa, the wry smile the two of them directed at me, realising that they had been talking. I looked at them quizzically, waiting for an answer.

Leo broke the silence: “I hear you’ve been chatting up girls,” he said.

I pushed past him again, pulled a mug from the shelf and placed it next to Simon’s, dropping, a moment later, a single round teabag into it. Then I leant against the draining-board, opposite and diagonal to Simon, and shrugged. Simon stared attentively at me while Leo pressed the matter, asking who she was, but I said I did not know her. The kettle shook, then clicked, and Simon turned to fill the two mugs.

“You were talking to her for a long time,” he said, looking sideways at me as he swirled the bags around in the darkening liquid, “you must have learned something about her.”

“If you were curious, why didn’t you come over?” I said peevishly. Simon did not answer, instead scooped the limp teabag from his mug and dropped it into the bin, returning the spoon to the counter to allow me to do the same while he reached down to retrieve a bottle of milk from the fridge. I moved over to pick up the spoon and asked him in a less defensive way why he had left so early without telling me. He replied, straightening up and pouring the white liquid into his tea, that it was firstly because he had had the opportunity to walk most of the way home with his friend, and secondly because he had looked over and I was still talking to “that girl”. He passed the milk to me while Leo, bored and impatient, interjected a question about her physical attractiveness.

“She’s more Simon’s type,” I replied, again surprising myself with the defensive tone in my voice. Simon shrugged and sipped his tea. “She was sick after you left,” I volunteered, the ceramic side of my mug hot against my enclosing fingers, wanting again to compensate for the harsh tone that seemed to spring up from the inexplicable and vague annoyance thoughts of Remi created within me. “She threw up in the street, so I walked her home.”

“Did you kiss her?” Leo asked, stretched up now and swinging with his fingertips on the top of the door-frame like a bored child.

“With the taste of sick in her mouth? I already told you I don’t like her.”

Leo shrugged and left, no longer interested in our company, while mine and Simon’s conversation turned briefly to another subject before we each went to our bedrooms. I was tired, and so did not stay up long, but as I lay in bed I thought of Remi’s arms tight around my shoulders, and that brought to my mind my first embrace with Lila, by the creaking black gate on that cold September evening. That had been more than a year before, and had filled me with warmth and optimism, expectation, while Remi’s embrace, genuine as it was, felt insubstantial, inspired in me nothing more than indifference and mild resistance, had been even mildly uncomfortable, squeezing my chest, my lungs, causing me to gasp silently the cutting air. It had barely registered in this gasp how scentless her body was, though I realised now I had noticed only the faintest aroma of shampoo when she pressed against me, no lingering perfume like Lila had worn, no smell of alcohol or clothes or anything, but perhaps that was the cold, blocking up my nose or suppressing all scent so that I could not smell and be repulsed by her vomit on the drain, could observe it detachedly as I now recalled the hug. And yet I wondered why I was thinking about the hug from this girl at all, this girl who I had claimed already to my housemates that I did not like, why I would compare it with my first embrace of Lila, whom I had had strong feelings for at the time. True it did not happen every day that a girl would so blatantly flirt with me, would hug me, but I would not fall in love with her for that, I would not fall in love with her, I was adamant, though it seemed inevitable, and I fell asleep nursing that thought: I would not fall in love with her.

Willowy, slight as one of the twigs bristling at the end of her nostalgically-fashioned broom, camouflaged against the day, she stood, sweeping. In her ears, as if straight into her conciousness, music played through tiny white earphones. Her hips swayed with the rhythm of music and sweeping, her eyes down-turned towards the sodden leaves that plastered the concrete. A black plastic sack rustled next to her, its crumpled surface rippling in the November breeze. It was a warm day, the first after two of wind and rain.

She did not see how it happened, heard only, above the sound of her earphones, the cry of surprise, the sharp scrape of metal on concrete: the sound of a bicycle losing its traction on the decaying leaves and throwing its rider to the floor. She looked up, pulled out her earphones, saw a student lying in the road, curled into the foetal position. She gasped, dropped her broom, ran towards him. There was no one else around. Already the student was picking himself up, assessing the damage. He wore an open chequered shirt over his t-shirt, the sleeve of which had been ripped by the fall.

“Oh you poor dear,” the woman exclaimed, seeing the blood running from his elbow, his knee, the side of his finger.

The student looked up at her, pale, shaken, saw a woman also pale, with freckles across her nose and straight, reddish-brown hair down past her shoulders, helping to move his bike off his leg. The cardigan she wore was tight around her thin arms. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Did you hit your head?” she asked. “Do you need an ambulance?”

“No,” the student said slowly, stretching and contracting his limbs.

“Are you alright to stand?” the woman asked, helping him up. “Come inside, I’ve got a first aid box.” In the shock of the moment she had forgotten her usual shyness.

The student seemed about to protest but, looking down at the rent in his jeans and the blood seeping into the denim, allowed himself to be lead into the small front yard of the woman’s small terraced house. While he stood there, feeling awkward. a cold numbness that was worse and more mysterious than pain gnawing at his injuries, she went back to pick up his bike and bring it through the gate.

“I think the wheel’s gotten bent,” she said as she brought it through, but he had seen that before she said it. He frowned and she looked regretful as she opened the front door.

She lead him through a short hallway and asked him to take a seat in the living room while she went to fetch her medical box. He perched on the edge of a red settee and plucked a few tissues from a box on the low Ikea coffee table, nervous of dripping blood on the carpet or furniture. Through the window, the weak autumn sun, filtered by the remaining yellowed leaves on the nearest of the trees that lined this street, illuminated a silent sitting room that smelled faintly of furniture polish and pot pourri. In the corner near the window stood an inexpensive, though quite large, flat-screen television, in the opposite corner a tall lamp, in another corner, set into one of the alcoves either side of the fireplace, a bookshelf half filled with books and half with DVDs and a few old VHSs. The student did not have time to read the titles of many of these before the woman returned, holding a white plastic box, a beige towel, and a matching flannel that steamed in what the student now realised was the cold air of the room.

The woman sat down next to him, her knees together, turned towards him, the lower half of her legs bent away from him against the front of the sofa. She put the folded towel down on the cushion between them.

“Take your shirt off,” she instructed.

Self-consciously the student slid his arm out through the sleeve, lay the shirt down, bloodied side up, over the arm of the settee, allowed the woman to lift his arm with her slender cool fingers. The warm touch of the flannel against his elbow raised goose-pimples in the surrounding skin. When the woman had dabbed a few times and removed it, an uneven circle of the beige had been stained a watercolour-red. The woman looked up at his face.

“Sorry,” she said, “the house is always cold.”

The student smiled thinly, still looked concerned, said nothing as the woman dried the damp skin with a corner of the towel. This too absorbed some of the redness.

“Oh, don’t worry about these,” she said, “they’re old and I never use them anyway.”

With the blood gone they could both see that the injury was just a scrape; some torn and grazed skin. The woman reached in the box for a pack of sterile gauze padding, tore it open in a quick, neat motion.

“Do you live here alone?” the student asked as she pressed the gauze against his skin, reached for surgical tape and scissors.

She looked up again, surprised at the question, her fingers still clasped lightly around his arm.

“Yes,” she said.

The student thought he detected a sadness, a loneliness, in her eyes, but then felt that, no, it was not located there but seemed to hang permanently around her like a shroud, making her seem older than she was. He worried that the one thing he had said to her had been wrong, so he quickly said,

“Thanks for doing this. I don’t think we even have Elastoplasts at home.”

“Where do you live?”

“A few streets away, near the cemetery.”

The woman put her hand on his wrist and gently bent his arm. The student felt the tape pull tight against his skin, but it did not tear or come away.

“Shall I do your knee or your finger next?” she asked.

The student twisted his hand round to look at the side of his smallest finger. It ached when he flexed it, but did not seem badly cut or damaged.

“I don’t think my finger’s too bad,” he said.

The woman wiped it with another part of the flannel.

“No, it’s not too bad,” she said, “I have a small plaster if you’d like.”

“I think it’s stopped bleeding, it should be alright.”

The woman felt a strong urge to kiss the finger, or the back of his hand, but she resisted.

“Shall we look at your knee then?” she asked.

They both looked down at the bloody patch on the knee. The strangeness of the situation, of being suddenly in this woman’s house, tended by her, had begun to dissolve, but now he felt awkward again. She mustn’t kneel down in front of me, he felt.

“You don’t have to,” he said.

“I don’t mind.”

He guessed she was fifteen, at most twenty, years older than him. If she was twenty years older, that would make her twice his age. She seemed sort of faded, he thought, as if she had spent her life in autumn days; like a violet pressed between the pages of a book.

He bent forwards to pull and roll up his jeans. The friction of the denim, soft as it was from years of wear, rubbed against the cut, renewing its pain and smearing the inside of the material with a thin line of red. It would have been easier to just pull them down, but it would have been too awkward to sit there with this stranger in just his t-shirt and shorts.

“It doesn’t look as bad as your elbow,” she said, leaning forwards to inspect it, “bring it up here and I’ll put a pad on it.”

She moved the towel and patted the cushion next to her. He pulled off his shoe, brought his bare knee up next to her and held his shin with clasped hands. Their heads came close together and a curtain of her hair fell forwards, parallel with his knee. She reached up to tuck It behind her ear and continued to dab with the cooling flannel. Neither spoke nor looked at the other while she worked, only at the knee.

“All done.”

He ran his finger over the dressing, felt the strangeness of its unfeeling mass against his skin.

“Thank you,” he said, putting his foot back on the floor.

“It’s a shame about your jeans,” she said.

“Most of my jeans have holes in anyway.”

“Oh,” she said. The tone of the utterance expressed both concern and sympathy.

“I like them that way, in summer they’re cooler than shorts.”

There was a pause, a silence that stretched beyond the small living room, beyond the cold house, right down to either end of the street.

“Do you have any more injuries?” Her voice was quiet.

“I don’t think so, I suppose I –”

She reached up suddenly and stroked the side of his jaw, feeling beneath her fingers the soft stubble.

“Sorry,” she said, drawing her hand back.

He said nothing. She was looking at him, but he could not read her expression.

“You might stay a few minutes more,” she said, almost as a question, “wait a few minutes before you put a strain on the cuts.”

From his silence she assumed acquiescence, and reached up again, this time to his neck. He allowed himself to be pulled towards her, and downwards, until his head rested on her lap. He could see, sideways now, the coffee table, and beyond it the unlit fireplace, and before it the blurred horizon of her knees, and he could smell the scent of her dress; the faintest aroma of cotton and perfume and dust. On the lower shelf of the coffee table lay a DVD case with the title ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, and on the top of the coffee table was a paperback he had not noticed before, the underside, or topside, of its splayed pages facing him so that he could see neither its title nor author. The woman began to play with his hair, twisting its short tufts around her finger and then tracing winding patterns through the haphazard strands. She was not so very old, but she felt that she had lived here for a very long time.

“Do you read much?” she asked, “does anyone your age read any more?”

“I read,” he said, “but probably not as much as I should.”

His hands were down by his thighs, his fingers and thumbs moving and twisting against each other. He was tempted to reach up and run his hand along her calf, feel the plastic friction of her tights beneath his palm, reciprocate the familiar way with which she had touched the damaged parts of his body and now played with his hair, but he did not.

“In the book I’m reading,” she began, “a man and a woman make love, and start to fall in love, but the man does not like her hands. Her fingers are too short and fat and inelegant. He says they are ugly, calls them child’s hands. He thinks she’s beautiful, but he can’t help but focus on her hands. It’s a really big deal for him, so big that he calls off the relationship, though it’s not yet explained why it was such a big deal. I don’t know if it will be.”

Her voice was quiet, demure, yet passionate and honest. He could imagine, as he lay there, the warmth of her lap rising up through his cheek, her reading a bed-time story to a child.

“Later on, years later” she continued, “the man finds the woman all wasted in a street in Milan. He broke her heart, ruined her, and she turned to drugs and prostitution. Her skin is all grey , her face is drawn, her eyes are dull; he can’t see the spark of life and love that once was there, only a murky cloud of despair. He’s moved to tears as he kneels down in front of her, and she seems only dimly to recognise him, but he takes her hands and holds them and apologises to her. Then he realises that her hands haven’t changed, they’re still just the same, as he remembered them, and now he thinks they’re beautiful. He kisses them and falls in love with them, and with her, and promises he’ll look after her.”

Outside, the sun had disappeared beyond the roofs of the houses opposite and the breeze had become stiffer, causing the black bag with leaves in it to shudder and crinkle loudly.

“That’s as far as I’ve got,” the woman finished, apologetically. “I suppose it sounds trashy.”

A car drove by the house, its tires creating a wet, sticky sound as they rolled over the fallen leaves.

“I’ve always thought I have nice hands, that they’re my best feature. I used to be able to play the piano.”

In the stress she put on the I, there seemed implicit the statement that no one else had ever said so. The student felt that he should reach up and enclose her fingers within his own and tell her that she did have nice, soft, delicate, feminine hands, but instead he was thinking about something else:

“The other day,” he said, “there was this insect on the glass of our back door, which is the one we use to come in and go out by. I think it was some sort of grasshopper, but it might have been a cricket. It was brilliantly, intensely green. It had long elegant legs. I was a little afraid of it. I wondered what it was doing there, and especially at this time of year, but then I closed the door and thought no more about it.”

He could feel the woman’s eyes on him, but did not turn to look. Her hand was now still, fingers curled against the bone behind his ear.

“The next day I noticed it lying on the doormat inside our kitchen. Someone had trodden on it and it was squashed into the material, its long legs sticking out pathetically. Over the following couple of days I noticed it getting more and more trodden in, and soon it had lost its bright green and become brown with dirt. I don’t suppose anyone else noticed it, or they just ignored it. It’s still there now, looking just the same as a piece of chewing gum stuck to a pavement.”

His words trailed into silence, and then he suddenly sat up and looked at his watch. His hair was flattened on the side he had been lying on, but stuck out where the woman had been playing with it.

“I’d better go,” he said, “I was supposed to have been at my girlfriend’s house by now.”

He pulled his shoe back on. The spell of spontaneous intimacy had been broken. Now he stood, and the woman escorted him to the door, watched as he wheeled his bicycled out the front gate. There was grating sound as the distorted part of the wheel passed the break pads, but the sound was only slight. He mounted the saddle.

“You be careful,” the woman warned.

“Thank you,” the student said.

Their final look into each other’s faces was brief. Twilight suited her, he thought, and she was quite beautiful. He pushed down on his pedal, lifted his other foot from the ground, and began a cautious journey along the pavement. The woman watched him until he disappeared at the end of the street, and then fetched in her broom and dropped the half-empty black bag into the bin. She realised, as she went back into the living room to retrieve the towel and the flannel and her white medical box and switch on a light, that she had never asked his name, nor given hers, but felt that somehow it was better that way. As she bent to pick up the towel she noticed on the coffee-table, next to the tissue box, a few crumpled blood-stained tissues; his blood, discarded like leaves from a tree.

It was Saturday morning. Her hair had recently been the colour of candy floss, and before that, shocking pink, but had since faded to the bleached milky hue of evening clouds. Several strands of it clung to the brush. She turned.

“Are you still here?”

It was a joke.

She plucked a tangle of hair from the brush’s plastic spines and nonchalantly let it fall from outstretched fingers into the bin. The previous night’s nail-varnish, chipped in places, still clung to her nails. She was beautiful; he was her audience.

“What shall you do today?” he asked.

Her reflection began to apply eye-liner, its eye very wide open, lashes fluttering slightly.

“I suppose I’ll meet friends in town, or I’ll do some drawing.”

The mirror was set into a dressing table that must be old, but he did not know whether it had come with the room or she had brought it from home.

“How about you?”

She put the eye-pencil down on the untreated pine, where it rolled against a pot of lime-green nail-varnish. She picked up a tube of mascara. The dressing table was integral to her, symbolic of her. It often appeared in her candy-gothic illustrations like a signature. In the drawings it was less cluttered.

“Write, or play videogames.”

He shrugged. Beneath his bare elbow the sheets were still warm, but he could not tell whether from only from his own body-heat, or from hers as well. They smelled of her, and when he moved, the scent was disturbed. Above the bed’s head was draped a line of unlit fairy-lights.

She looked at him, smiled. When he left they did not kiss goodbye. They only kissed when they fucked.

~ ~ ~

He picked at a foil tray of leftover Chinese takeaway.

“That’s been out all night,” Gemma said.

“I like it when it’s cold.”

Sometimes they watched films together. This morning she had asked to use his computer to do some work. He sat back on his bed and watched her. He often felt she worked harder than him, and he admired her for it. Sometimes her work would stress her, she would lose confidence in herself, but she never asked for his support, only his dispassionate love. He was drawn to her independence. He rarely thought of her when he wrote.

She frowned at the screen. Tim put down the empty tray, picked up a conker that lay on his desk, began to toss it from hand to hand. The sky through the window was clear, but the winter sun was weak. He frowned, the conker moved faster. She looked at him, then back at the screen. She was wearing strawberry-mousse coloured pyjamas. Her fingers tapped on the keyboard.

“There was this time,” he began, still looking out the window, “I went to my cousins’ house. They had just moved into this new house on this estate. The house was new, and everything in it was new. It smelled of plastic. I was in the living room and there were my two cousins there as well. I was about eleven and my cousin was five or six, and her brother was just a baby. We never saw them that often. I don’t know where my aunt or my mum were, but it was just the three of us in the living room and I was sitting on this new leather sofa.”

He paused, but did not turn from the window.

“My cousin used to like to sit in my lap, or maybe anyone’s lap. I was sat there, watching TV or something I suppose, and she jumped up and started bouncing and shuffling on my lap. I was kind of ignoring her, watching the TV or whatever, but it felt kind of weird. I guess I got kind of, we used to say a ‘stiffy’ at primary school, and it felt kind of good, then it felt like I needed to pee, so I moved her off me and went into this little toilet-room.

“The toilet seat was made of this really smooth varnished wood. I lifted it up and pulled down my pants. I had sort of a semi, and there was this sticky stuff at the end, I didn’t know what it was, but when I touched it it felt kind of tingly. I don’t know what I was thinking about, not my cousin, not anything really, but I started to rub. My hand was shaking. Then after a few minutes I came, into the perfectly white toilet bowl. But it wasn’t, like, proper, it just sort of dribbled out. I got some on my fingers. Then I washed it off, and I flushed, and I went back into the living room like nothing had happened, but didn’t let her sit on my lap again.”

He looked at Gemma. Her hand rested on the computer’s mouse. Their eyes met, then she looked back at the screen.

“I felt guilty as hell afterwards, like I knew I’d done something wrong, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. I was terrified my aunt or my mum would find out and tell me off, but at the same time I kind of wanted them to, so it was done with and I didn’t have to think about it any more. I really hate that feeling, that sick-guilt when you’re a kid, when you don’t know how the world or anything works and you’re terrified of grown-ups because they have all the power over everything. I didn’t stop being afraid of what would happen if I touched myself until years later. Sometimes I still feel guilty about it, like I did her wrong, hurt her somehow.”

He fell silent. Gemma turned off his computer and stood. When she left, she squeezed his hand. The walls of his room felt tight around him.

(The above illustrations can be seen full size at Victoria Stitch’s blog.)

“I can’t stay long, I’m afraid, but I couldn’t leave again without calling in to see you. It’s not a bad time, is it?”

Jonathan said it was not, invited her in, asked her how she was, if he could get her a drink, apologised for being in his pyjamas and dressing gown. He felt again nervous and excited in her presence, as if those feelings had been lying dormant all these years. He had thought never to see her again. He made tea, led her through to the living room where his daughter sat playing with wooden blocks.

“Hi there,” Michelle said kneeling in front of the child, “what’s your name?”

The child lifted her hand, clenched around a red block, and spoke into her fist.

“Sh-Shelly,” she said.

Jonathan, putting the two mugs on the coffee table, sitting on the sofa, felt colour rise in his cheeks. Michelle told the child it was a pretty name and asked how old she was. Shelly was four. She had her mother’s straight blond hair and her mother’s wide blue eyes. Michelle sat.

“So you married Hannah?”

“Yes,” Jonathan said.

“Is she in?”

“No, she works Saturdays.”

Michelle lamented that she had not been able to keep in touch with either of them, the three of them having been close at university, but since Michelle had gone to Africa to teach, it had been so hard to keep up with all her old friends. Oh, but how rewarding it was to work out there, to see their faces light up with each new wonder revealed on the blackboard.

Jonathan caught only the sense of what she was saying, rather than the words, too lost in the fact that she was here, in front of him, her wavy brown hair, the colour of chocolate almost, but with an inflection of red, shaking as she laughed in the same way she had laughed at university. Yes, Jonathan remembered exactly how she had laughed at university, those days, those sensations, etched into his mind, thought about, not every day, but often, very often. And he remembered how she had cried too, that one day when she came to him, because her boyfriend had left her, and he had held her and thought “now, now’s my chance.”

But it had taken until the final exam party the following year for Jonathan, drunk, to ask her. But they were “just friends,” she said, and those were two words that could change a life in a heartbeat. And he had known even then, even through the alcohol-haze, that he would never get over that: that they were “just friends”. Then, the following summer, Michelle set off to travel the world, to “help people”, she said, which was so like her because she was, she really was, just a wonderful person.

“Well that’s enough about me,” Michelle said, “what about you?”

What was there to say? He had a job as a bathroom salesman, had married Michelle’s friend Hannah, had bought a house, had reproduced. He looked at Shelly, still playing with her blocks, building a tower. Michelle looked too. The child was definitely Hannah’s daughter but, of course, Jonathan had chosen the name because, really, Michelle was a beautiful name that melted on the tongue like chocolate.

“It’s a shame Hannah isn’t in. I’m sorry I missed your wedding.”

Jonathan was too. He had looked for her in the crowd, when the vicar had asked the question, when everyone sat with bated breath waiting for his answer, for those two words which could change a life, though he knew that she was in some far-flung corner of the world helping some poor unfortunate souls. “I do,” he had said finally, after that excruciating pause. And, if Michelle had been there, would he have thought twice before he committed to blond-haired Hannah? He looked at Michelle, whose brown eyes were fixed on her namesake. She’s here now, Jonathan thought, on this Saturday afternoon.
It could not last though, this brief, this significant reunion: like those blurry vivacious days at university it was over all too quickly when Michelle looked at her watch and stood and said,

“I’m sorry, but I really have to go: I’m only in the country for a few days,”

and then they were standing again on the doorstep saying goodbye.

“Perhaps I’ll see you in another ten years,” Jonathan said.

Michelle laughed and hugged him.

“Hopefully sooner than that,” she said, “I’ll try harder to keep in touch.”

She kissed him on the cheek and felt his stubble on her lips. Jonathan noticed that she smelled the same way she had ten years before and realised he never had found out what perfume she wore. She let go of him.

“And give my love to Hannah,” Michelle said.

She was leaving now. Jonathan wanted to say something to make her stay, or perhaps he wanted to go with her. He looked into her eyes, felt twenty again, felt lost and hopeful, felt all the things he had felt when he had held her and comforted her, when he had stared at her across classrooms, across grass fields on summer afternoons, when he had worked up the courage to ask her out. Then there came a clattering from the living room and the wail of a child.

“I’d better go see about that,” Jonathan said.

“Yeah,” Michelle said, “I’ve got to go, sorry I couldn’t stay longer.”

“It’s okay,” Jonathan said, “Good luck with your teaching, take care of yourself.”

“You too,” Michelle said. She turned away and walked to her car. With a wave she was gone and Jonathan was closing the door, walking back to the living room. There he found Shelly sitting amongst scattered wooden blocks. Her tower had fallen down.

It’s hard to imagine the horrors of mustard gas in the 1910s, all those years ago. It seemed that since long before then mankind had been devising new ways to kill each other. Every now and then throughout the sordid history of war someone would invent a defensive measure; a new type of armour, a gas mask, a nuclear bunker. But this would only slow the mounting death-tolls until a bigger gun, a better bullet, was invented. Now he had the handheld laser rifles, and there was something uniquely terrible about their clean ineffeciency. They were bloodless, which made them, falsely, seem humane, and neither of those adjectives have any place in war. War should be bloody and it should be inhumane. Soldiers shouldn’t die in painless delirium: they should scream and writhe in the dirt, and when the people back home see the images on their screens, they should squirm and say “no, that’s not what I want for my children.”

.

-   -   -

I don’t know where this came from and since I currently have little to no interest in writing either science fiction or war fiction, I doubt it will go any further. Still, I kind of like it.

We wake up next to each other, sprawled out and overlapping like we’re each in bed alone, warm but not too hot. I roll over and your hand’s on my back. It’s eleven already. We kiss and I get up to fix you breakfast: Choco-Shreddies swimming in milk. I bring the bowls up, and cups of tea, on the tray with the oil-painted fruit on it. Your hair’s tousled and you get some chocolate on the corner of your mouth. I wipe it away with my thumb. We stream some cartoons on my PC, like we used to watch when we were kids, our knees bent up together like mountains under the duvet. Then we get dressed. You straighten your hair like you like it, even though I prefer your bed-hair. While you’re doing that I take the tray back down and go clean my teeth. When I come back I smooth out the duvet and we’re ready to leave.

I lock the door behind us, noticing as I hold back the handle so it shuts properly, that cracks of naked wood are beginning to show through the faded blue paint. I think maybe I’ll paint it tomorrow. We start walking towards town. The sky’s overcast and the air’s cold. You’re wrapped up in the red-brown scarf and hat and gloves I bought you last Christmas, and your black coat, but you still walk close by me for warmth, and squeeze my arm when a sharp breeze cuts across us and makes the leaves pitter-patter along the pavement.

We pass all the lifeless houses that huddle together in uniform rows, where people who aren’t us live, and reach town a while later. It’s not too busy for a Saturday because we’re not up to the holiday shopping season yet, so we can walk hand-in-hand without being jostled by the bustling people. We take our time. Sometimes we stop and look in shop windows. “Oh, I think your dad might like that when it gets around to Christmas,” you might say, pointing to something in one of the windows. I realise you’re right and say we might come back this way and get it later. We move on.

When you pass a clothes shop, you want to go in. I come in with you and stand there as you pick out clothes. If you hold something up against yourself and ask how it looks, I tell you it looks good, or it suits you, or maybe it’s not so great, but what about this one? When you hold it up in front of a mirror I stand behind you and my reflection kisses the neck of your reflection, even if anyone is looking. Then, if you say that you like it but it’s too expensive, I’ll offer to pay for it, just because.

After that we pass a videogame shop. When I drag you in there you don’t complain, and you try to act enthusiastic as I pick something off the shelf. Maybe, since I bought you that dress, you offer to buy it for me, but I refuse of course; we really ought to save some money. We leave the game shop and I’m only carrying the white paper bag with your dress in.

Later on we’re getting hungry, so we drop into one of those coffee houses in the mall. You like those places because they do coffee just how you like and there’s a nice atmosphere. We order sandwiches and I have tea and you have coffee. I don’t point out how overpriced everything is, and when the waitress puts our sandwiches and our drinks down on the table, I don’t stare at her ass in those tight black trousers as she walks away. And you don’t stare at your coffee while swirling the milk-froth around and around with your spoon. Instead, we talk about something: we passed a travel agent’s earlier, and you say how nice it would be to go on holiday sometime, maybe before Christmas so we could escape the bad weather and the cold for at least a week. I feel bad because I can’t afford it, but I suggest that maybe we could go for a walk in the park tomorrow, or we could go out somewhere else, I don’t know where. Then I remember that I’d told myself to repaint the door. I’ll get up early, I think, and do that in the morning, then we could do something together in the afternoon.

We finish our sandwiches and order another couple of drinks and sit there a while longer, too comfortable to move as we watch the people go by on the other side of the window. But the afternoon’s getting on, so eventually, reluctantly, we get up and leave. We take in a few more shops and mess around in a toy shop, putting on pirate hats and cowboy hats and silly masks to amuse each other. Then we start heading back. On the way we pass HMV, so I suggest maybe we find a movie for tonight. We go in and I pick out a DVD that I want, and you pick out a DVD that you want. We can’t decide, but then we see that they’re both ’3 for 2′, so then we look together for another one that we both want. Our fingers flick down the rows and our shoulders brush each other. Eventually we find something and agree on it straight away because it’s perfect. When we get to the checkout, you insist on paying, but I only let you go halves with me.

We walk back to our flat. The rain’s held off until now, but the first cold drops are beginning to fall from the sky as we pass again those blank houses in our neighbourhood. We run the last half-mile to our front door because the rain’s getting harder, then we stand there, our breathing rapid streams of mist that intermingle in the air as I fumble for the keys. I can’t remember which pocket I put them in, and already we’re soaked. But we don’t care, and just as my fingers close around the keys, you grab me and turn me round. The scent of your perfume hangs on the air, brought out by the rain. You press me against the door as you kiss me. I feel your nose cold against my cheek, but your lips and your tongue and your mouth are warm. When you pull back, you wrap your arms around me and hold yourself against my chest, then I unlock the door and we walk in.

We start to strip off our wet clothes, and I go turn on the gas fire and get out the clothes-stand. You disappear and come back in your dressing gown, drying your hair with a towel. The gown’s open and beneath it you’re just wearing your jeans and a bra. You tell me that we forgot to go back and get that thing for my dad. “Oh well,” I say, “we’ll just go get it another time.” You take the jeans off and pass them to me so I can hang them on the clothes-stand to dry. You loosely do up the gown then you come over to me and hug me. We sit down on the sofa together, and I’m just in my boxers, but I’m stealing your body-heat and the fire’s warming the place up. Your hair’s all wavy from the rain. We start to make out and I slide my hand inside your gown and up and down your legs, but not too far up because affection doesn’t always have to mean sex.

The room starts to smell of damp clothes, so I get up to light some incense. You watch me, then you say you want to try on your new dress. You go get the white paper bag from the kitchen and bring it into the living room while I go upstairs to put on some clean jeans and a t-shirt. When I come down your gown lies across one of the armchairs and you’re wearing the dress. Your arms and your legs and your feet are bare. You twirl so the skirt fans out then ask how you look. I tell you you look beautiful, then I sit on the arm of the sofa to watch as you glide around the room, light as a summer breeze. I’m not sat long before you come over and grab my hand and pull me up to dance with you as if there was music playing instead of only the drum of rain against the windows.

When we’re done dancing, panting like cats, laughing like children, you kiss me on the cheek and thank me with a little curtsey. I smile and bow to you, then you go upstairs and change into a faded t-shirt and those soft jeans that are just a millimetre away from wearing through completely. When you return you ask me to come keep you company in the kitchen while you make dinner. I want to play a game for half an hour, but instead I come into the kitchen and help peel and chop the vegetables, standing side by side with you, our knives moving in unison. As we chop, you look out the window and say “it’s really coming down out there.” “Yeah,” I say. We both know we’re glad to be in this warm flat together. Then dinner’s prepared and you put it on to cook. While it’s cooking we go back through to the living room and you curl up beside me on the sofa as I play on my Xbox. I turn it off when dinner’s ready and we switch over to something you want to watch. I don’t say anything and I don’t interrupt, except in the adverts, until it’s finished. I’m not watching it though: I’m looking over at you, thinking how glad I am that it’s you I’m with and not anyone else.

After that we watch something funny and we both laugh at it. Outside gets dark. The incense has burned down and the rain still beats against the window. I get up to draw the curtains, but first look out first through the glass and the rain at the glowing windows of all our neighbours. I momentarily feel sorry for them all because I know none of them are as happy as we are. Then I sit back down with you. You change channels on the TV and we catch the end of the weather forecast: it’s going to dry up tomorrow, might be some sunshine even. Now the room’s getting too warm, so you get up to turn off the fire and say you’re going to take a shower. I say I’ll join you and you smile because it’s a while since we’ve taken a shower together.

We get under the hot stream. First I wash your back, then you wash mine. Your thumbs massage my shoulders as you rub shower gel onto my skin. When we get out we dry each other off with our big beach towels before either of us get cold, then we go to the bedroom and wrap up in the sheets. The air’s cold in here, but we don’t need a fire because we’re making each other warm. We don’t even need lights; candles will do. We kiss. We don’t know what time it is, but it doesn’t matter. I remember that I meant to get up early. I decide to set the alarm on my phone before we go to sleep, and make a mental note of it before I’m swept away in the moment.

Then we’re making proper, fingers-interlocked, love. I kiss your neck and you go crazy and pull me close like you’re trying to crush us together. We finish at the same time and roll onto our sides, facing each other. I stroke your hair back from your cheek. I don’t know how long we lie like this for, but when I roll over to set my alarm, the candle’s halfway burned down. I blow it out and roll back over in the warm blackness. Before we go to sleep you tell me that you love me and you don’t want to leave me, ever. I tell you that I love you too. And we both mean it.