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.

The man walked through to the first room on the left, which had once been the living room. As he entered he saw a spider dash across the floral white settee that looked as if it had been worn-out for a long time. It must have been comfortable though, must have been sat in hundreds of times as the family gathered around the TV that now sat impotently against the wall to the side of the fireplace. The man put down his backpack on the sofa as he went to inspect the TV, his body distorted along with the room as he moved closer to the reflection on the lifeless grey glass of the screen. For a second he fancied he could see reflected behind him the family who had lived here, sat together on the settee and its two satellite floral armchairs, but he knew no one was there, so he did not turn round. Instead, he continued staring into the dull grey screen.

It reminded him suddenly of a time many years ago when he had been twenty or so and he had walked through a large graveyard on a summer’s evening. He had stopped now and then to read the names or the eulogies inscribed on the headstones, but had not lingered long at any one until he came to a stone in an older part of the graveyard. Tall grass had grown up around it and an old tree extended a single drooping branch above it as if to shelter the rock from the pitiless onslaught of sun and rain. The man stood inert as he deciphered the eroded letters.

It was the grave of a fifteen-year-old girl dead for a hundred years. The man looked down at the tall grass and thought about the small corpse that lay beneath, probably no more than bones and tattered fragments of cloth by then. The thought had made him sad, the thought that this girl, shorn of life on the cusp of expectation, was never able to grow up and marry, as she might have dreamed of doing, and even love had been nothing more than an intangible ghost to her; a feeling half-promised on the whisper of the wind and in the stirrings of her own body. And yet had she lived she might have had children, and they might have had children, and her grandchildren might have come to visit from time to time, and stood over her as the young man had. Instead, passing by on a summer evening’s walk, he was the only one who stopped to mourn for her, for she had no one else. But that did not matter now, just as it did not really matter who had lived in this house before; all that mattered was if the house could be lived in again.

The man left the living room and walked around the rest of the house. There were not many rooms: three bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom, a toilet-room and a kitchen with dining area besides the living room downstairs; and all were the same beginning stages of creeping decay, but certainly with some care and some time this house could be quite habitable again. The beds upstairs still held their springiness, and there were some books on the shelves in the master bedroom that had not yet succumbed to mildew, not that he would have been unable to get those from a bookshop or library in the city, but it was somehow reassuring to know that the people who had lived here before had kept them. The man stood now in the garden, which was overgrown but running wild in the best possible way, with snowdrops and daffodils poking their bright heads up through the tangle of grass. Since there were no other houses around for quite a way, the garden seemed to stretch out all around, apart from a fence that suggested its border, until it disappeared into some trees thirty or so metres from the house. Like the house, the garden would again be nice with some work. The man could see it now, if he cut himself a patch of lawn amidst the wilderness: himself sitting there in the summer, reading. Winters were less agreeable, but at least there was that fireplace in the living room.

He looked back at the house with its cracked once-white roughcast walls. He would paint those sometime, but the inside needed doing first, before he could worry about that. He decided to make a list of everything he needed, and then he would drive into the city. He went back in and walked around the house, going through each room again meticulously noting down everything he could need, like cleaning products and new sheets, some furniture for the garden, more books, food, candles, fuels, buckets, paint, brushes, and bottles of water. His list complete he left the house and walked back down the hill, looking for a car. Eventually he found a Volvo parked on the drive of a semi-detached house. He walked into the house and found the keys on a table by the front door. From the keyring there hung a minute photograph taken at a theme park of a young couple on a roller coaster, both screaming with exhilaration. The photograph was held in a transparent plastic case sealed from time’s encroachment like those insects that are preserved in amber for millions of years. The man removed the photograph-keyring and left the house, closing the door behind him.

When the man first turned the key in the ignition, the car choked with the wheezing strain of disuse, but rather than slipping into a smooth rhythm, the radio came on, blaring static at full volume. The sudden hissing sound made the man jump, since he was unaccustomed to loud noises now that the world was almost silent. He recovered himself and switched the radio off, then tried the ignition again. This time the engine came on and the man was able to pull out onto the road and head towards the city. As he drove he wondered how long it had been since he had been in a car. At first he had driven everywhere, just because he could, but when he had realised he was not going anywhere and driving had taken on a hollow feeling of futility, he had started to walk. Now that he was anchored to a place to live, he felt safe driving again.

He pulled into a petrol station and filled the car’s tank. Petrol pumps seemed to be one of the few things that still worked. The man pulled away again and continued his drive towards the city. He did not miss the traffic, but even now he did not like cities. Still, he stopped outside each shop and took what he needed until that car was full and he had everything he needed, then he headed back to the house, his house. He worked for days, and then weeks, until the house inside and out, seemed to have had life breathed back into it. Even still he continued working, digging out a vegetable garden through the wild grass so that he would have something other than canned food to eat when summer came, and when he was not working, he painted, or taught himself the violin, or read, these being things he had never had time for before.

And so his life fell into a pattern: he would wake early, when the first light of day streamed through the windows; he would wash in the cold water he collected from a stream in the forest; he would work most of the morning and sometimes the afternoon, and in the evenings he would read or walk or drive or some other entertainment until bed. Sometimes, at night especially, he would feel lonely, though he had often been alone when he was younger, and then he would masturbate to the remembrance of women he had known. Otherwise he rarely thought of the past, and in the timelessness of those days he often felt inconceivably ancient, as if he had always existed like this and always would.

There was a change to this pattern however, that was both significant and minor, which occurred on what his watch told him was the twenty-first day of what must be either July or August, but might have been as late as September of the first year he lived in that house: a girl appeared in the garden while the man sat reading. He stood when he saw her and they looked at each other for a long while before either spoke.

“I used to live here,” the girl said.

“Oh,” said the man.

He was unaccustomed to speaking out loud, or hearing any voice other than the almost wordless thoughts in his head. Again they looked at each other silently.

“Is -” the girl began.

“Yes?”

“Is my room still the same?”

The man looked up at the house, its windows silver and impenetrable as the sun reflected from them.

“I redecorated,” the man said.

The girl nodded slowly and looked at the house, then they both spoke at the same time.

“Do you want to -” the man said.

“How are you -”

They both stopped. Neither smiled.

“There’s not -”

The man interrupted her again.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The girl looked up at the house again, then slumped to her knees in the grass. Tears began to run from her eyes. The man walked over to her and looked down at her.

“I’m hungry,” she said quietly.

“Come inside,” the man said.

The girl stood and followed him into the kitchen. Where the oven had once been he had put a barbecue with a brightly coloured gas tank attached to it by an orange tube. Sometimes it reminded him of his grandmother who, before she died many years before, had lost a lung through smoking and had to have an oxygen tank attached to the back of her wheelchair. It had been difficult for her to speak, so she had never said much to him, but the tank had kept her alive. Now the man lit the grill and put an open can of soup on it. Both the man and the girl were silent as the soup slowly came to the boil.

When the soup was bubbling, the man removed it with an oven glove and poured it into a bowl. He put the bowl on the table in front of the girl along with a spoon, but she ignored the spoon and picked up the hot bowl. The first sips burnt her lips, so she put the bowl back down and used the spoon. After a few minutes of tentative sipping however, she again picked up the bowl and drank the whole lot down in a couple of big gulps. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then began to breathe heavily as if she were about to cry again. Instead she looked up at the man, who had watched her eat in the same way that he might have once watched a squirrel bound across a park and dart up a tree.

“Can I see my room?” she asked.

The man nodded. The girl stood, walked past him and began to ascend the stairs. The man followed her, all the way up to the room at the far end of the landing.

“I didn’t like pink,” she said when she stepped through the door and looked at the white-yellow walls.

“There was mould in the corners,” said the man.

“There used to be…” said the girl pointing vaguely at the wall by the bed.

“Sorry,” the man said, “a lot of it was no good any more.”

The girl nodded.

“What about my clothes?” she asked.

“I threw them away.”

The man could not see the girl’s face.

“This doesn’t smell like my room,” she said.

“There’s clean sheets in the wardrobe,” the man said, “and there’s some shops in the city that still have clothes. We can go tomorrow.”

The girl sat on the edge of the bed.

“Yes,” she said.

She looked out the window. The man looked at her.

“I think I’d like to alone for a little while now,” the girl said.

The man nodded and went back out into the garden.

* * *

Weeks passed and autumn established itself in the air and the earth as it always had and the man’s vegetables became full and ready to pick. Against his expectations when he planted them however, he now had someone with which to share them, for the girl had remained in the house, living in her old room, working and reading as he had learned to do to pass the time. She had also taken to running, and was no longer so scrawny as she had been when she first appeared in the garden a couple of months before.

Often they would sit together, in the garden when it was fine, inside otherwise, usually in silence for there seemed little new each day to talk about and there was an unvoiced but apparent rule between that they never speak about the past. Neither of them even thought about the past much any more as it was painful to remember and easier to forget. Yet one day, sat in the garden, the girl was suddenly reminded of a morning several years before. She was wearing a dress at the time, and it was the coolness of the autumn breeze on her bare legs that triggered the memory.

In the memory she was sitting in this very garden eating breakfast at an old wooden table and watching her sister get ready for school. Her sister had had an exam that day, her last one, the girl supposed, and she knew that her sister planned to meet the boyfriend her parents knew nothing about afterwards. She had seemed so grown-up then, the girl had thought, as she slipped the lipstick which her parents forbade her to wear into her school-bag, though she had only been the age the girl was now. Then her sister had had to wait around for a lift to school from her father, and the girl had drawn up her legs onto the wooden seat because they were bare beneath her shorts and a cool May breeze had blown through the fine blond hairs that covered them, bringing with it the scent of dewy grass. Her sister noticed and said,

“You’ll have to start shaving your legs soon.”

“Does it hurt?” The girl had asked, drawing her legs in tighter.

Her sister laughed.

“No, it feels nice, at least afterwards it does.”

Their father had come out then and her sister had left with him.

The girl sighed and looked over at the man, who looked nothing like her father. She looked at his hands, which were rough.

“Were you married?” she said suddenly, breaking the silence that stretched out all around.

The man looked up from his book.

“No,” he said.

He started reading again.

“I had a boyfriend once,” the girl said.

The man nodded slightly, but continued reading.

“But not any more,” the girl continued. She looked at him. “I don’t remember what it was like.”

“Don’t remember then,” the man said quietly so she almost did not hear.

“We never -”

The man put down his book.

“Of course not,” he said.

They looked at each other for a minute or so, then the man picked his book back up and began reading again. The girl was still staring at him, thinking intently. She came to a decision and stood up. She walked over to him and stood in front of him with her legs either side of his knee. He looked up and she bent down towards his face. He put his hands on her shoulders and stopped her.

“What are you, fifteen, sixteen?” he asked, “I’m old enough to be your grandfather.”

“I’m older than that,” she said.

“Not much.”

“Old enough.”

Her shoulders still pressed into his hands. With outstretched fingers she clasped his arms.

“What do you expect will happen?” the man said, almost flinching at her contact, “That we’ll repopulate the world, that we’ll bring anything back? It won’t make anything any better.”

“I don’t want that, I just want to try it.”

“Do you think there’s any contraception around that’s still any good? Do you think there’s any doctors to fix any mistakes? This is no world to bring a child into.”

“We’ll be careful.”

She was beginning to feel desperate now and the corners of her eyes became moist.

“We are being careful, we never were before, but we are now,” the man said.

Slowly the grip of her fingers on his arms loosened and she became a dead weight against his hands. The man supported her weight as best he could from the awkward angle as he sat her on the grass, then he leaned forward and pressed his elbows into his knees. With a small, choked voice the girl asked,

“How old are you?”

The man did not answer so she looked up at him. He shrugged.

“I suppose we’re all a lot older now. I feel old,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘all’?” she asked, “are there others?”

“Oh, no, I suppose I meant us, or perhaps I meant me. We are all now.”

The girl breathed in and held herself against his knee. The man looked down and began to stroke her hair. When he had put his hands on her shoulders a moment before, it had been the first time they had touched since she arrived. He thought about this as he watched his fingers move across the yellow strands of her hair. He thought too how she would ask again sometime, and, though he would refuse her again, she would never forget about it and one day, amidst those long seasons that stretched out before them, she would ask and he would not resist. For now though, in the failing light and cool air of this autumn evening, she would hold herself against his knee, and he would stroke her hair, which felt like straw beneath his rough fingers, and she would cry if she needed to, and neither of them would speak.

There are several aspects common to all of these, such as a relationship between a boy (or a cat) and a girl, a theme of separation and longing and getting on with life in spite of them, and a sort of intangible sentiment along the lines of “I am here / awake / alive” or, rather nicely put at the end of She and Her Cat, “this world… I think we like it.” There is also this incredible purity of vision in each of them that comes from the fact that, the first two at least, were almost exclusively the work of Shinkai who wrote, drew, animated, and voiced She and Her Cat and Voices of a Distant Star himself, with his wife providing additional voices and his friend composing the music.

In each of these there are some really heart-rending moments, my favourite of which is in The Place Promised in Our Early Days where the protagonist is talking about living alone at university; how, in a city where nearly thirty million people lived, there was no one he wanted to spend time with; how he would sometimes stand for hours at the train station pretending he was waiting for someone; how he had moved there so that he would no longer be able to see the distant tower that was the literal ‘place promised in their early days’, but on clear days it was still visible and it reminded him of the girl Sayuri; how he comes slowly to the realisation that though Sayuri is far away and unreachable, she is still dreaming of him as he dreams of her.

These beautiful moments are accentuated by Shinkai’s splicing together of single, mundane and yet evocative shots in quick succession, such as a classroom, a train carriage and some steps the characters used to walk up when they were younger. Unfortunately I think Shinkai’s work is almost undermined by his imagination which, although it produces some novel situations in which the characters are separated from each other, occasionally borders on the absurd. For example, in Voices of a Distant Star, which is set in the near-future after aliens attack the Earth, the female protagonist decides to join the army and pilots a mech into space still in her school uniform. Naturally this leads to some typically animé space battles, but it also creates a unique kind of separation: because her unit is following the aliens to their home planet in the next star system, occasionally at faster-than-light speeds, her text messages, which are her only means of communicating with her distant lover (though you have to question the roaming charges on that, and even which provider’s willing or able to carry texts across the galaxy), take longer and longer to be delivered. At first the delay is just a few days, but by the end of the short film, when she’s on some planet in Alpha Centurai, it takes a few years for the messages to be delivered. Not only that, but because she’s been travelling so fast, she has only aged by six months, while back on Earth her lover has grown several years older, and has given up waiting for her messages. It’s very sad and very beautiful, but also a bit silly.

The other thing I feel lets down Shinkai’s work a bit is his character designs. They’re well-written, but in the lush environments he draws, they often seem flat and angular and under-detailed. I suppose they’re not terrible, but after the fluidity of Studio Ghibli’s character animations, and even the similarly realistic designs in Neon Genesis Evangelion (which, by the way, seems somehow more credible when it blends mech-fighting with drama and deep characterisation), they seem lacklustre. Then again, I think Shinkai is an amazing environmental artist, demonstrated particularly for me in a this one scene in The Place Promised in Our Early Days where the boy and Sayuri are riding the train home together. There is a single shot that lasts for perhaps a minute or more where the viewpoint looks out from the luggage rack and the characters are only tiny figures in the bottom-left corner at the other end of the carriage. Their dialogue can be heard over the rhythmic clack of the train’s wheels, but the only movement is the scenery outside the windows and the regular beads of light that run along the metal supports and fixtures before flickering and dying at their ends. The whole scene is so beautifully drawn and detailed that you just want to soak it all in, and there’s several images like that throughout.

As you might have guessed by the length of this post and my possibly hyperbolic statements, I’m a fan of Makoto Shinkai. In fact, I would go so far as to say that The Place Promised in Our Early Days is one of my all-time favourite animated films and, as I tend to with almost all my opinion pieces, I highly recommend it along with both its predecessors, even if animé isn’t usually your thing. Also, I apologise if that started to sound like a primary school essay:

“Even though I think the character designs aren’t very good and a tower that tall and two kids building a high-tech plane is a bit silly I think The Place Promised in Our Early Days is very good and I would recommend it and I would give it nine out of ten.”

“So there’s this girl,” Matt said suddenly, having taken a sip of his tea and now clasping the mug with interlocked fingertips.

Wondered why he was quiet so long. Here we go.

“She works in Sainsbury’s.”

Her.

“You wrote a story about her.”

He nodded. He always gave Viccy his stories to read. She liked guessing which bits were real and which bits he had made up.

“I gave her a rose.”

February. Valentine’s Day. Bunch of roses from Jack. Dinner out. Chocolate mousse for desert. No more or less than a girl could expect. Some time between the sheets afterwards. No more than a boy could want. Wish he was. But I get too snappy at him this time of month, always can’t keep his hands to himself. Can’t blame him. I would too, if I wasn’t. Talk to him later. See him in a couple of days.

“Oh.”

She meant it to sound like a question.

He looked down at his tea, which was ochre-coloured, or was it more beige, like, like, no, it was no good, he was thinking about the rose and the girl too much. ‘I gave her a rose’. That was the gist of it, the most important part, there really wasn’t anything more to say. And yet there was the beating of his heart and the awkward way he gave it with a question: ‘Can I give you this?’ rather than ‘I want to give you this’. And then afterwards the beating of his heart never abating, growing more tumultuous and making him half-crazy and laughing. The way he had felt on the walk home. Was Viccy interested in it, or, now that the most important part had been said, was there nothing more to tell?

“Shall we go sit in my room?” Viccy said.

“Sure.”

He nodded and followed her through the living room, to the far door and up the stairs.
Jeans look soft. Frayed tear below the pocket. Can see her. Stripy. I’d love to. Not with her. The rose. ‘Anna’, her name-tag said. Rich atmosphere in this house. Because it’s old. Comes from the oak stairs, and the ivy by the door, and the light that comes in through that window at the top of the stairs highlighting the myriad dust-motes, and the moss in the gutters that you can see from Viccy’s skylight. This house has character. Viccy too. Quite unlike my house. Spiral staircase, I wonder if the novelty wears off.

They entered her room.

Music, sounds familiar. She sat in the computer chair by her desk, put her tea down on the desk and tucked her knees up. He sat on the bed, looked out the skylight. Sky, cesious like her eyes, no, greyer, sadder. Cold like the ocean. She clicks her computer mouse. Click. The music went down. What is she looking at? A white rectangle reflected in her eyes, like a blank piece of paper, full of potential. He looked around the tidy-messy room. Everything is full of potential. The rose too? He looked over by the door. Do I tell. What’s that? All splintered and fragmented, silver balls in the grain of the boards.

“What’s that?” He asked.

She looked at the plastic shards.

“A puzzle box.”

“What happened to it?”

“I solved it,” Viccy said with a wry smile.

Solved it? One way of solving something, I suppose. Viccy. Almost intimidating sometimes. Want to tell her more, want her to ask.

He looked at her looking at the computer screen.

Somewhat rounder in the face than. Oh, the surprised look in her eyes as I gave it to her, so lovely, like a deer, no, like a cat, no, what’s more. Like a shrew. Rodent. Rabbit. Is rabbit good? Her eyes shone, no, glittered, under the fluorescent supermarket strip lighting, putting me in mind of a rabbit. No, no good: mixed imagery. The flush of her cheek like the blush of an apple, an English Cox. Better, no, cliché. Ought make a note of that, work on it, write it in a story, might sound better than saying it face to face. Have to describe something as cesious, and something else as acataleptic. Ay-cat-a-lep-tick: incomprehensible. And what was that other word? Meant shadowy. Umbra something. Penumbra? Adumbral. ‘I stepped out into the still, adumbral night air, my heart quivering violently, the memory of the rose still in my fingers, small nervous laughs bubbling up on occasion as’.

“So you gave the girl in Sainsbury’s a rose?”

Now she asks. Rather write it in a story now. Might help to talk about it, get another opinion, balanced view, third-person omniscient, not first-person limited. Might write a story about me telling it to her, frame narrative, like Heart of Darkness. The Horror! The.

“Yeah.”

“On Valentine’s Day?”

“No, the day before.”

Friday the thirteenth. Unlucky. The Horror! Ironic really, bequeathing (is that a good word?) a rabbit-pretty rosy-cheeked girl a rose on Friday the Thirteenth. The horror of it though. It was terrifying, ‘his heart beating against his throat, threatening to choke him, the awkwardness with which he handed over the rose, unable to meet her blue’, no, in the story they would be ‘cesious’, like Viccy’s, ‘eyes’. Never hurt to use a modicum of artistic licence, makes for a better story. He could change ‘can I give you this?’ back to ‘I want to give you this’, like in his original script too, and make it more definite that in the fleeting glance back she was smiling as well as blushing her rosy-apple-red cheeks. Still, it was terrifying at the time, waiting in the queue, rose on the conveyor belt in amongst the bread and the lemonade and the eggs and the chocolate. Nothing so terrifying as the everyday situations, the common interactions; waiting at a supermarket queue to give the checkout girl a rose. He would have to make a note of that. It could be the first line. The Horror! The Horror! A whole book and all anyone remembers is two words repeated twice.

“So what did she say?”

She said ‘for me’ and I said ‘yeah’, and then I left. ‘What did she say?’.

He shrugged.

“I don’t know what she said, I ran away. I waited there, and a man queued up behind me, and I watched a kid swinging on his mother’s trolley, and it made me smile, and I smiled at her, and I gave her the rose and then I left. I tried to not look back, to not look over-eager, I was embarrassed, but I did just once, when I had nearly left, and I saw her blushing and-”

She was smiling.

“- she seemed to be smiling.”

“Oh,” Viccy said.

Matt studied her.

What is he looking for, what are his eyes asking? Eyes turning away, now what is he looking at, silent and contemplative? Oh, the painting. One of Walter’s best: A child sat upright, his head tilted slightly forwards because of the backpack on his back weighed down with a teddy whose arms and ear and eye stuck out horizontally from its lid. A wooden sword in one of the child’s hands at an acute angle to the straight lines of the floorboards, while in the other he holds a ball of string which arcs along the floor to loop around one of the vertical wooden columns supporting the roof behind him. Parallel to the child, at a roughly thirty degree angle to the bottom edge of the wide canvas: a red and blue oriental-style rug overlaid on another rug causing a slight depression where the edge of the lower rug cuts across the floorboards. On top of the upper rug, between a globe slightly larger than the child’s head and an upright-angled telescope on one side, and an erect bust in the Ancient Greek style and a model ship on the other, leans a painting partially covered with a white cloth, that seems to give out its own light. This light strikes a horizontal shadow that reaches a radio, some crayons and some drawings pinned to a box upon which a cat sits, again behind the child. Even for Walter the detail’s impressive, if a little overdone. Funny, how he should go in for this rich detailed fine art, while I chose clean, minimalist technical, architectural drawing.

“Did your brother paint that?” Matt asked.

“Yeah,” Viccy said, “he gave it to me for Christmas when he came down at the end of January.”

Matt stood up and moved over for a closer look.

Child staring at a painting of a distant castle by a mountain, a wooden sword in his hand and his teddy bear in his backpack as if he was about to go on an expedition into the painting. He looks determined and he holds a ball of string, tied to a column so he doesn’t get lost. It’s very beautiful, so detailed. He wears a jumper the colour of a rose. On one side of the painting there is a toy wizard and crayons and child-drawings of a cat and a snake and the castle, on the other side are the artefacts of old-world adventure and expedition: a globe, a telescope, a bust of a bearded old man, a galleon. Clever that, it tells a story. Like the passage from childhood into, well, adventure I suppose. The boy looks fearless. He could look steadily into her cesious, no, blue, eyes with confidence as he handed her the. What do I say to her next time?

“I don’t know what to do, Viccy,” Matt said, after studying the painting, after staring again at the grey sky, after slumping back on her bed.

“About what?”

“About the girl. I’m so, I’m terrified. I’m so nervous and excited: I build up these ideas, all these romantic ideals and these day-dreams, me charming her and our relationship being perfect, and then it all breaks down because I have all this, all this cynicism about the whole thing, and I don’t believe in relationships, and I don’t believe they solve anything or make me feel any better or turn out at all how I want them to, and I always get hurt. I wish I could just believe in them, and not worry about it, and be charming, and have it work out perfectly with a movie ending, but I don’t believe any of that. And she probably thinks I’m crazy anyway, because who does that? Who just gives roses to random checkout girls?”

What is he talking about now? Need to be in the right mood for Matt. Why’s it such a big deal? Could turn the music up, drown him out. Rather have Jack. He’ll be in a lecture now.

“Viccy,” Matt whined.

She was still looking at the screen. She looked at him, he was looking at her, again with that pathetic questioning stare.

For fuck’s sake.

She wheeled her chair over the floorboards, running over some papers that lay scattered on the floor. The papers crumpled. Sitting now in front of the bed, with a decisive awkward motion she lifted her right hand and spread her fingers across his left shoulder blade. She felt momentarily the hard dip where the bone joined the back of his ribcage as she pulled him towards her. Without giving him time to resist, if he even would have done, she kissed him aggressively, moving her hand up his neck, to the start of his short hair and the point where, beneath the skin and the tendons, the last vertebrae flowed into the base of his skull. Her tongue writhed against his. Either this or punch him, beat my fists against him, she thought. Hate the taste of sweet tea on someone’s tongue, too unnatural, sickly.

She pulled away. Matt smiled nervously at her.

“What,” He said, “what about Jack?”

She sighed frustratedly.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said, “nothing means anything. Just ask her out if you want to, or don’t. And if she says yes, then she says yes, and if she doesn’t she doesn’t.”

Matt looked down at the crumpled paper on the floor, which crumpled again as she moved the chair back over it. They were quick sketches of houses.

“Sorry,” she said.

Little hard on him. Not sure what I was thinking. Still, might do him some good. Jack kisses better, though not fair to compare really. Hope it works out for him. Shouldn’t have done that maybe, see him looking at me sometimes, see myself in some of his stories. Suppose that’s usual. Hate creased paper, have to throw it away, have to clear up that puzzle box sometime too, stupid thing, present from, from an aunt?, two, three years ago. Shouldn’t have broken it really, not its fault, shouldn’t have kissed. Not after he. But that was six months ago, no, more, eight. Just started seeing Jack, so I had an excuse. Think it hurt him, but we’re okay now, when I’m in the right mood anyway. Not the right mood today. Ought to get out the house, fresh air make me feel better, him too.

“I want some sweets,” she said, “do you want to walk down to the shop?”

He looked up.

“Sure,” he said.

She spun round idly in her computer chair. Cloudy, through the skylight, day for staying inside. I like days like this: cloudy, I like, but I don’t like. Her stomach seemed to throb and she felt like punching it. Wouldn’t do any good, make it worse probably, like hitting the keyboard, not the keyboard’s fault. She reached for her mug that had previously contained tea (camomile and spearmint). It was an elegant bone china mug, the lower portion shaped and painted like a tiger. Tiger, tiger, burning. Faded now though: too many times through the dishwasher. The tiger’s tail curled up to form the handle. Where had it come from? Present? Perhaps Mother had bought it, or it had been Nan’s and found in her cupboard after she died.

She put the mug to her lips, tipped it. Nothing came. Hate it when that happens, think there’s something left and there isn’t. Such a disappointment. Still, always make another. She spun again, the other way. Her knee collided with the desk. A small stack of coins fell over with a little jangle.

“For fuck’s sake,” she said, louder than John Williams, who conducted his orchestra through her computer speakers.

She stroked her knee, which was bare because of a hole worn into the jeans, and, as she did so, heard a rapping from downstairs, that came thrice irregularly. Who? Too early for Daddy or Mother to be home from work, and they would have a key. Jack didn’t say. Don’t feel like people today. The knocking came again, four times this time, and louder. Best go see, get some more tea while I’m down there. She hooked her finger through the tiger’s tail, stood up. Through her bedroom door, down two flights of stairs, one spiral, one straight. Halfway down the stairs is the stair where I. What was his name, Kermit’s nephew?

She reached the front door, put her hand on the once-gold, now-tarnished handle, hesitated a moment. The chain hung limp against the frame. Should she. No, if someone tried to push their way in, well, she was ready for a fight. She pushed down the handle and pulled back. The door scraped against the frame and came free with a grunt. It caught up the cellophane-wrapped magazines with its motion, causing the plastic to bunch and wrinkle. Now open, she saw outside Matt standing in the arched porch, grey clouds above him, red-brick Victorian terraced houses across the road, below the clouds, behind him. He was standing on the welcome mat on the red, red, black tiles of the arched porch. The Matt stood on the. She furrowed her brow. Robert, was that it?

“Hey,” Matt said, “are you up to much?”

She shook her head, said nothing. He said nothing.

“What was the name of…”

Robin! That was it.

“What?”

She shook her head.

“It doesn’t matter.”

There was a weight in her hand. What? Oh: Tiger Mug. She looped a second finger through the tail. Don’t want to drop it. Favourite mug, I think, as far as one has favourites.

“Can I come in?”

He looked at her cesious eyes, which had dropped down to an empty mug she was holding, but now looked back up at him. Really quite enchanting, eyes like that, made you want to get lost in them, like in a wide ocean. She shrugged. Slight shoulders, bony, like the ribs in a horse-chestnut leaf. Was that a bad simile? They weren’t really like that, he thought, but there was something about her shoulders that reminded him of horse-chestnut leaves, after they have fallen and curled and gone hard, though she was young and willowy.

“Sure.”

She stepped back, he stepped forward. She turned round, walked up the corridor and spoke over her shoulder.

“Do you want some tea?”

I was just about to make some, she was just about to add, but she cut herself short. She liked Matt well enough, but today was not a people day, and it would take some time to warm to him. Hopefully he wasn’t having one of his crisises. Crises? She couldn’t put up with that today and might snap at him. She felt snappish.

“Um, yes, please,” he said.

They went into the kitchen. The Tiger Mug clinked as it was put down on the counter. Sounded a bit like the coins falling over. Usually she would have stacked them back up straight away, put them all in line so that they formed a tapering cylinder, a cone almost, the five-pennies at the top, the fifties at the bottom, she was particular like that, but not today. She tried not to think of it. The kettle was still warm, slightly, but without enough water. She removed it from its stand, feeling the slight warmth against her palm, and poured the water down the sink. With a click the lid popped open and she filled the kettle from the tap, noticing first the thin layer of limescale that had formed around the elements at the bottom of the white plastic jug, and then her bladder, inside her somewhere behind those hot waves of stabbing, aching discomfort.

“I’m going to the toilet,” she said, pushing the kettle down onto its stand and pressing the button that lit up orange.

A short passage, barely more than a cupboard, and used as one for storing the mop and the bucket and a few other miscellaneous items, led off the kitchen to a toilet room. She stepped in, closed the door behind her, pulled down her jeans. Love these jeans, she thought, as they slid down to her ankles, wouldn’t go out in them, too shabby, but they’re comfy around the house, and fit just right so I don’t need a belt. Boxer-shorts next down, love the feel of them, especially now, pretty too, with rainbow stripes and stars for buttons. She sat. Cold seat. Ought to shave. Tomorrow maybe, no one’s going to see until at least then. A few seconds passed. Grey-white light filtered in through the irregularly-ridged window that looked as if it was made of glassy paint, all dripping down.

She squeezed a little inside, or relaxed. Hard to describe what goes on inside, no point of reference really: can’t compare it directly to anyone else. It was about to. There. She felt the pleasing trickle, heard it ring against the porcelain. Glancing down she saw a red taint to the yellow-clear water. Better change it. Remember the first time. This very room. Blood in my knickers, then the drop in the bowl. Couldn’t go for a minute, put it on hold while I examined the dark red stain, still wet, smelling quite strongly of iron, even though the window was open and there was a fresh breeze. Must have been terrifying in the old days, before the teacher sent all the boys out in the last year of primary school and told you about it; growing up a bit and suddenly bleeding. Poor girls.

She unrolled a couple of sheets of toilet paper, doubled them over and wiped, then pulled at the dangling strand of cotton until the crimson-stained mass came out and swung wildly once, twice, before she closed a couple of white paper sheets around it. Has a weight to it, she thought as she lifted it out from beneath her and held it over the bin by the side of the toilet, and a warmth, like something recently dead. She lowered it into the bin. She liked the feeling of removing it, despite the pain and the soreness, it was satisfying, like peeling off a scab.

Poor girls, she thought again, reaching for the cardboard Tampax box from the top of the cistern. How frightened they must have been in those days, and what did they do? Stuff a bit of dirty old rag in their knickers? And did their mothers tell them it was going to happen when they reached a certain age, did anyone, or were they just left to find out for themselves? Must have been awful, and we complain about a few days of.

“For fuck’s sake!”

She threw the empty cardboard box to the floor and hitched up her shorts, her jeans, buttoned them aggressively. Some more upstairs, she remembered, catching sight of herself in the mirror as she washed her hands. No, wait, will I make it upstairs without. Better make sure. She unbuttoned her jeans again, unrolled and doubled over another few sheets of toilet paper and stuffed it down the front. Don’t want to stain them. Bad enough on the bedsheets.

She left the toilet room, went through the passage into the kitchen. Matt was leaning in the door frame, looking troubled. She barely noticed. The kettle had boiled, but still her Tiger Mug stood apart from it, and no second mug had been brought down from the cupboard, and no teabags and no milk gotten out and nothing had been done with anything.

“You make the tea,” she said, striding past him, “I’m just going to – I’ll be back in a minute.”

She had nearly reached the far living room door, and Matt had nearly reached the counter when she turned back and said:

“I want the spearmint and camomile one, you get whichever one you want.”

She went through the door, ascended the first flight of stairs. There’s no other stair quite like. The song in her head was lost in a snatch of the Indiana Jones theme that drifted down from her room. She entered the bathroom, locked the door behind her. There were five left in the box in here. Have to tell Mother to pick some up later, or tomorrow. Enough for another day or two at least. She unwrapped the white tampon from its crinkly green plastic. Want a sweet now. Some Yorkshire Mix, like Daddy used to buy. What do they taste of? Hard to say. Always seem to be different.

She pushed the cotton up inside her, feeling her finger follow it in a short way. Wish I could, she thought, not naming her desire; with Jack.

She withdrew, sure it was firmly lodged, and pulled her shorts and jeans back up. Better wash my hands again. Funny how one never reads about it in the old days. One knows all about the dirt and the disease and the squalor, about the sewage systems and the workhouses and all that, but never about what young girls knew of puberty and menstruation. Suppose that’s what comes with history being written by men. I can’t be dealing with one of Matt’s problems today. I wish Jack was here and I wasn’t. But I am. Maybe there’s a special degree in women’s history. Too late for that now though. Didn’t do it at A-level either. She dried her hands and went back down to the kitchen. Matt was stirring his milk-and-sugar tea.

“I didn’t know how strong you wanted it,” he said, pointing to the Tiger Mug where a dark green teabag floated in a dark green liquid.

Too strong.

She opened the drawer and extracted a teaspoon with which to remove the teabag. She removed the teabag and let it fall off the teaspoon into the bin. Matt then disposed of his teabag in the same manner and she realised that it had still been in the mug when he had been stirring. Something wrong about that, she thought; putting the milk and sugar in before the teabag is out. She sighed into her hot tea, then inhaled and took in its smell. Sort of like new-mown grass and summer gardens and countryside fields all rolled into one. Peter Rabbit used to drink camomile tea. Or, no, it was the Flopsy Bunnies, after they nearly got eaten by, what was his name? The fox. Mr. Todd. Mother Bunny made it for them. I remember Nan reading me the story sometime, when I slept over at hers, or else she stayed at the old house and saw me to bed. I remember the cotton of the duvet pressed up against my chin and the smell of the fabric conditioner that Mother used to buy (she must have switched brands at some point) and that blind I used to have in my room with the brown silhouettes of trees and the dark brown silhouettes of trees and the light brown silhouettes of trees against a white background.

Read Part Two

“Dragonfly,” he said.

“Mm?” said Jenny.

“Dragonfly,” Mike repeated.

“What about it?”

Jenny turned her head to look at him through her sunglasses.

“Nothing,” Mike said, “Just I just saw one and it reminded me of when I was a kid, back where I used to live. There was this lake and we used to cycle down to it and sometimes it had all these dragonflies over it, hundreds of them.”

“Oh,” said Jenny.

“I guess they used to hatch there.”

“Yeah,” said Jenny, sitting up. “Pass me that lemonade please.”

Mike passed her the bottle. As she drank from it, through a straw, Jenny watched the plane skitter through the air like some demented insect, all the time droning its mosquito-whine.

“I wish that plane would shut up,” Jenny said, screwing the cap back on the bottle, laying back down.

Mike looked at the plane. He was still thinking about the dragonflies.

“We used to throw stones at them sometimes,” Mike said.

“At what?” said Jenny.

“The dragonflies. We used to throw stones at them, and sometimes we hit them, but usually we missed.”

“Oh,” said Jenny.

A breeze drew back the leaves in the tree above.

“The sun’s moved,” Jenny said, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glare, in spite of her sunglasses.

Mike looked at her.

“Once there were these two dragonflies fucking, kind of flying around with their tails stuck together, and I threw a stone at them and it hit them.”

Jenny was wriggling back on the grass, trying to get back into where the tree’s shade had moved to. Mike was still looking at her.

“They kind of spiralled down into the water then, like, we used to call them helicopter seeds, what are they?”

Jenny saw Mike was looking at her and shrugged her bare shoulders. One of the children on the field cheered as his brother sent the cricket ball arching through the air.

“Sycamore seeds,” said Mike, “these two dragonflies went spiralling down into the lake like two sycamore seeds that had got stuck together.”

Jenny shuffled, trying to get comfortable. Mike had not moved.

“I guess they drowned or something,” he said. He paused. “Don’t you think that’s cruel?”

“Yeah,” Jenny said, “it’s cruel.”

“But not cruel like this kid Harry used to be though. He caught one of them once and you know how some kids like to pull the wings off flies or the legs off spiders or whatever?”

“Mm,” Jenny said.

“Well, he got this dragonfly and he pulled two of its wings off on one side, and left it with the two on the other side. Somehow that was worse, ’cause it just kind of flapped around pathetically and rolled over. Harry watched it, but I couldn’t stand it, so I got a rock and crushed it.”

The plane banked around again. Jenny propped herself up on her elbow and watched it.

“That was cruel, pulling two wings off like that, wasn’t it?” Mike said.

“Yeah,” said Jenny, “I wish that damn plane would shut up. I don’t get what the point in it is, flying it around and around in circles like that.”

Mike watched the plane and the man flying the plane, and then he looked past him at the father playing cricket with his kids, and then he thought about the two dragonflies drowning in the lake, and about the one broken half-winged dragonfly crushed into the earth.