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.

Both versions follow exactly the same plotline: a slightly naive fourteen-year-old boy, Ben, invites his friend to spend a night with him in a haunted house and Ben’s friend invites some other people. Ben is obsessed with ghosts and with seeing a ghost and photographing it. The other kids don’t care about ghosts, but just want to have a party in this abandoned house. Tensions rise between Ben and the rest of a group because he’s something of an outsider. Two of the group, Gavin and Michelle, go off together and have sex in an adjacent room. Naive, over-imaginative Ben mistakes the sounds of their sex for the moaning and bumping of a ghost, and so convinces himself that he has had a paranormal encounter.

The difference between the two versions is that one is written as if it had been written by fourteen-year-old Ben and the other is written as if it was written by an older Ben looking back on the experience. Purely looking at the writing style, the second, alternate version, is clearly superior; the sentences are more considered, the vocabulary is more expansive, and the imagery is evocative. This version, we’ll call it Version 2 to save confusion, was written more in my ‘natural’ writing voice; it was written in the style of someone who is, say, studying a BA in Creative Writing.

I had taken my tutor’s advice on board and written a ‘better’ version of the story, and it went on to achieve either a first, or a high 2:1. So I should have been happy with the story, only, I wasn’t, because, although the writing was better, it left a huge flaw in the story that I was never able to fully address with the more accomplished writing style: the crux of the story is the misinterpretation by naive, innocent Ben of the sounds of sex as the rattlings and moanings of a disembodied spirit, and of the regretful, tired face of Michelle the next morning as the traumatised and haggard visage of someone who had come face-to-face with said spirit; a mistake that fourteen-year-old boy who was a bit obsessed with ghosts and who hadn’t matured quite as fast as everyone else, might make. But not the sort of mistake an older person, looking back on and writing about the experience would make. So Ben, as the narrator, ultimately lacks credibility in Version 2.

Now what was my tutor’s criticism of Version 1, the version written as if by fourteen-year-old Ben? Ironically, it was the very effect I had sought to achieve: the story read as if it had been written by a fourteen-year-old, ie. badly. It’s a valid criticism: from a technical standpoint Version 1 is badly written: the pacing is off, there is a lack of detail, and the information the narrator gives us is often superfluous or contradictory. The only part of the story that could be argued to be well-written is the dialogue, as the narrator is only recording rather than describing this, but since dialogue counts for probably less than 20% of this story’s word-count, that would hardly recommend it, as a ‘badly-written’ story, to a high grade. One might even accuse me, at age nineteen, on a writing course, of being lazy when I say “oh, it’s badly written because I meant it to be.”

Laziness was not, however, my motivating factor when I wrote Version 1. On the contrary, I did quite a bit of research in order to develop the voice of my narrator, looking at the style of the Goosebumps books I used to read when I was young and which I assumed Ben would look to for stylistic inspiration; looking at the sort of writing I did when I was fourteen and fifteen, how I used to phrase things; and looking too at Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time a superficially amateur book written by a fictional autistic narrator. So what was my motivation for writing a ‘bad’, amateurish story?

Authenticity. I wanted the story to read authentically as if a fourteen-year-old boy had really written it, and the reason for this was that I wanted to prevent a skewed and biased viewpoint for the reader to question. I never spell out that Ben actually heard Gavin and Michelle having sex rather than a ghost because Ben doesn’t realise it and I want the reader to go “hang on, is this a fairly bland, clichéd ghost story, as the name implies, or is it actually that what the narrator is telling me is wrong and there’s something more?” It’s not an original idea; I basically lifted it from Mark Haddon, and I’m he was hardly the first author to present the reader with pieces of a puzzle from a limited narrator that the reader can then place together to complete the story, but it was my intention, and I think it’s why I still prefer the ‘inferior’ Version 1.

That brings me to a dilemma the contrast between these two versions has caused me to consider, though not for the first time: Which is more important, authenticity or readability? I suspect the answer is different for different works and for different people depending on the goals they want to achieve and the stories they want to create/read. But must the two necessarily be in opposition, are they mutually exclusive? These questions deserve more space and time than I can give them here today, but just from a cursory consideration, I seem to think they are opposed, and therefore that one or the other must be chosen and one or the other might be more important. Because if I write from the viewpoint of a fourteen-year-old amateur writer, not in a To Kill a Mockingbird retrospective way, but in a The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time immediate way, I must sacrifice readability for authenticity. For if I write well, in an easy-to-read way, then the authenticity of the fourteen-year-old’s writer’s voice is lost.

Generally, I think I’m more attracted to authenticity than to readability. Let’s take as an example (anyone who’s read my posts before can guess what’s coming next) James Joyce. I believe that the four episode of Ulysses, ‘Calypso’, which is the internal monologue of Leopold Bloom as he makes breakfast and gets ready for the day, is possibly the most accurate representation of representations of the conscious human mind in all of literature. It’s not very readable. It feels ‘authentic’ but you wouldn’t sit down and read it to your kids as a bed-time story. I think Virginia Woolf bridges the gap between authenticity and readability in some passages from To the Lighthouse well, but then she uses third-person free indirect style in that novel, which is different to the character’s themselves writing their stories. In The Waves she has the same ‘problem’ as Joyce; she goes for the more authentic stream-of-consciousness voice, so that book is harder to read as well.

Vladimir Nabokov, I’m told, does voices well, particularly in, I believe, Pale Fire, but I’ve not read that. That novel features the voices of a poet and a critic though, so they’re already writers. What I’m really talking about, before I start going too far into literary esoterica, is the difficulty of writing well in the voice of someone who is writing their own story, but is not a writer. Perhaps I’m a little hung up on ‘authenticity’ , on ‘reality’. I did my entire third-year dissertation on which group of writers ‘most realistically represented reality through fiction’ . I’m much more attracted to ‘realistic’ over ‘exciting’ characters who live excitingly readable lives; I’d much rather read about Leopold Bloom, Mrs. Ramsay and Marcel than… blast, what’s popular with normal people these days? Edward Cullen and Harry Potter and James Bond. No, they’re not great examples, but you get the idea.

And this is why, in stories such as ‘The Ghost of Sycamore Avenue’ I prefer the badly written ‘authentic’ version over the more well-written ‘readable’ version, and why in certain other stories, such as ‘My Ideal Saturday‘ and another one I wrote recently, I was conscious not to ‘over-write’ them, to leave them slightly rough, with a few awkward sentences, a few under-precise descriptions. Well, I like awkward sentences anyway, sometimes they’re more interesting than regular ones.

One final point on ‘authenticity’ over ‘readability’: the other problem a writer faces by writing badly, is that if the reader doesn’t get that this bad writing is a literary conceit, or they start to notice, say, spelling or typographical mistakes, there’s a danger they would think that writer was a bad writer, and not want to read any more of their work. Satisfied as I am of them, I wouldn’t like someone to read either The Ghost of Sycamore Avenue or My Ideal Saturday in isolation from my other stories. My Ideal Saturday particularly I feel has been a misunderstood story, and if it is read purely on a superficial level is very bland. I think it only works in the context of my other work, because, I assure you, it’s not really about a boy and a girl who live together in perfect bliss going out and having a nice day.

Okay, that is all on this subject, for now. And now that I have access to the internet again, I might even treat you all to some further updates in the near future.

This book is uncommon on account of the obscurity of its subject matter; it’s a synopsis and critical discussion of James Joyce’s final and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake. Outside of literary circles I doubt it was ever widely read and the book’s been out of print for years. My copy is from 1947, making it only slightly younger than the oldest book I own, a 1944 copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

I like this book on two levels: Firstly, it has a very pure bookish sort of quality. The cover is blue, the pages are slightly yellowed, though still in good condition. If it ever had a dust-jacket, that’s been long-lost somewhere down the years, leaving only its plain blue hard-cover. The front and back offer no clues to the book’s identity, the title being printed on the spine only, and there in gold lettering only distinguishable from the sun-bleached fabric by its metallic sheen. It has a charming anonymity.

Considering its age, it is in good condition, having been kept on a bookshelf where, for several years, the sun struck the spine and front at an angle, fading an L-shaped block of cloud-white into the cover. Obviously the books either side of this one where smaller, their imprint left in a rectangle on either side of A Skeleton Key that must be closer to the cover’s original colour. Inside, the book smells of what it is: old paper; the same smell that the case of an ancient Zenit camera I used to own had. There’s no smell of dust or tobacco or food. I like to think it was kept in some airy study somewhere.

I don’t think it was ever read though, not all the way through at least, because the final page of the conclusion is uncut. (I don’t know exactly how books used to be made, but I think they were printed on sheets bigger than the pages and then cut in half after they were put in. Sometimes pages must have been missed). Inside the front cover, someone has carefully written the number 47 in pencil, and on the following page is an indecipherable signature, probably of the previous owner, certainly not of one of the authors. Otherwise the book is unmarked. The following two pages are blank, and then there is the title, alone on a page in plain Times New Roman font. The next page has a slightly larger title with the authors’ names and the publisher’s information and then the book begins.

Here we move onto the content, which is what makes this book elitistly obscure. People who read my site or study literature are probably aware of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Some of them might even have read it. Further afield I would guess, and this is a complete guess, that fewer than 1% of English-speaking people are aware of Ulysses. Much fewer had read it. Of the people who are even dimly aware of Ulysses, I would guess that fewer than half are aware of Joyce’s fourth novel Finnegans Wake, and probably fewer than one-in-ten of the very few who read Ulysses have even attempted to read Finnegans Wake. I bet a tenth of those never reach the end.

And so, of that tiny proportion of people who are inclined to read the nearly unreadable Finnegans Wake, how many do you suppose are inclined to hunt down a book that discusses the novel? Naturally such an elitist challenge piques my interest, so now that I have finished university, I have set myself the ‘summer project’ of reading and understanding Finnegans Wake. Last year I read the first fifty or so pages, but comprehension escaped me, so I moved on to something else. Now I’m making the time for a second, proper effort at the book, with my guidebook, my skeleton key to Joyce’s secrets, firmly in hand. I’ll write about the novel itself at some later date.

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.)

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.

I don’t feel that’s entirely my fault: I was called into work unexpectedly and have only just, fighting through post-work, food and shower drowsiness found the time to make the final edits of this story, which I fear might not actually stand up to any hyperbolic statements I may or may not have made about it (I’m really too tired to remember what I said about it, if anything). Regardless, it is a good story, possibly a great one, and I think there’s a fair bit going on in it, which I hope will come across in subsequent re-readings of the story, if not the first time through.

So, yes, I am proud to have this as my one hundredth post, and I hope you all enjoy it,

Henry.

The New House

“Hey,” said Kate, “hey, stranger.”

She grabbed Jay’s arm, brought him to a stop in the cloying heat of an August Saturday as he picked his way through the crowd. People continued to push past, making little, if any, concession.

“Hey,” he said, looking at her, surprised.

“You nearly walked right past me,” she said.

Large sunglasses obscured her eyes, and she had cut her hair into a neat bob since the last time he had seen her, a few weeks ago, just after the start of the summer holidays.

“I didn’t know you were back yet,” he said.

“The weather wasn’t great, so we came back a few days early.”

“Didn’t you enjoy it much then?”

“It was okay, but we just ended up going in the arcades and stuff every day. It was too rainy and miserable to go on the beach.”

She pulled off her sunglasses, revealing blue eyes. Jay grimaced sympathetically.

“It rained here last week too,” he said.

He paused awkwardly and rubbed the back of his neck, which was slick with sweat.

“Hot today though,” he continued, “stuffy.”

“Yeah, it is kinda. Anyway, how are you?”

She reached up to rub the side of his arm.

“I’m okay. Sick of town; too many people and I couldn’t find -”

A man bumped into him and carried on walking, but did not say anything. Jay watched the man disappear back into the crowd, shook his head.

“We should probably get out the way,” Kate said.

The two moved aside, against the white stone wall of a bank.

“What were you looking for?” Kate asked.

“A desk,” said Jay, “for my new room.

“Doesn’t it come with one? I thought student rooms always came with desks.”

“Yeah, well it does, but it’s not a nice one. I don’t like it.”

Kate nodded, then squinted as a momentary break in the clouds illuminated the wall behind Jay.

“Have you moved in yet?” she asked, shading her eyes with her hand.

“No, not yet, I picked the keys up yesterday, but I’m just moving my stuff across bit by bit at the moment.”

He reached up to brush his hair away from his forehead.

“So what you up to now?” Kate asked.

Jay shrugged.

“Nothing really, I was just going home.”

“Shall we go get a cup of tea somewhere?”

Jay looked around, felt sweat in the lines of his palms. He liked Kate’s eyes.

“Okay,” he said.

In the café, cold drinks stood in neat lines on the shelves of a glass and metal cooler, condensation clinging to their slender-necked bodies. Jay grabbed a bottle of sparkling pear juice. Kate ordered a latte. All the outside tables were taken, so they sat opposite each other at a small round table by the window, and their knees brushed against each other as Kate told Jay about her family holiday in Cornwall. When she had finished they both took a sip of their drinks and there was silence between them. Jay looked around, thinking of something to say. He could feel his t-shirt sticking to his back with every movement he made.

“It really is hot today,” he said.

“Yeah,” Kate said.

Jay scratched at a scab on his elbow, his fingers curled into claws.

“How’d you do that?” Kate asked.

“Basketball,” said Jay, “I tripped.”

Kate leaned in close to examine the wound. It was only small, but stood out vividly against his pale skin, accentuated by a salmon-pink halo. Jay watched her, felt too hot. Once outside, he pushed his hands into his pockets and rocked on his heels. Kate looked at him.

“Wanna see my new house?” he said, finally.

“Sure,” Kate said.

The cloud-bank shifted uneasily in the sky and let out a few drops of rain. Jay felt their coolness on his skin and smiled. Kate was looking at him, smiled.

“I hope it rains,” Jay said.

Kate frowned.

“I’m sick of rain after last week.”

“I love summer rain,” Jay continued, “it’s so refreshing.”

“I like summer to be hot and sunny,” Kate said.

Jay looked at her. He still felt sticky with sweat. He wondered if she had noticed.

“Here it is.”

They stood outside a terraced house with a blue front door and a gated alleyway leading up the side. Dirt clung to the walls, clumped together in irregular veins on the white-painted walls. At the back there was a concrete yard, divided by four timber steps halfway along its length, which ran up to a gravelled rectangle with regularly placed slabs like uniform islands in a gravel-sea. A couple of small trees with sharp yellowish leaves brought colour to the yard.

“Nice garden,” Kate said.

Jay was flicking through the unfamiliar keys to find the one for the back door. He raised a gold-coloured key and tried it in the lock, but it did not fit. The keys jangled. He tried another and the door came open. They stepped into a small kitchen which had black and red tiles across the floor and faux-marble worktops. He was not used to the smell of the place, did not yet identify the smell of dust on the static air with home. He felt like an intruder, a stranger.

Next to the kitchen was the bathroom.

“I need to go wash my face,” Jay said.

He closed the bathroom door behind him and took his t-shirt off. In the mirror he saw himself, skinny, nervous. He had always thought Kate beautiful. The water ran off his face, dripped into the basin. The sky looked washed-out through the frosted glass. Jay wondered if it would rain more as he reached for a towel, dabbed at his face and under his arms. He put his t-shirt back on. It smelled of sweat.

He opened the bathroom door. Kate had walked through to the living room.

“Have your house-mates moved in yet?” she asked.

“No, Andy’s home this weekend and Neil’s working so they’re moving in on Monday, and Tom’s gone home for a few weeks, so I’m not sure when he’s moving in.”

Kate nodded.

“You going to give me the tour then?” she asked.

Jay showed her round all the rooms, mentioning who would be taking each one, finally ending with his own, which was furthest along the corridor at the top of the stairs. The room was smaller than the rest, though not by much. Against one wall stood a small computer desk with a silver-grey plastic covering. In a corner was a chest of drawers, opposite which was a wardrobe. On the same wall as the wardrobe were some shelves, which had a few books and DVDs piled haphazardly across them. The bed stood by the wall with the window in it. Kate went over to this first, and knelt on the bed so she could see through the glass.

“It’s a good view,” she said, pulling off her shoes so she wouldn’t get them on the bare mattress.

She turned back round to see Jay at the wardrobe changing into a clean t-shirt. Jay was conscious of her watching him.

“It’s so quiet here,” she said.

Jay turned round.

“Yeah,” he said.

They looked at each other across the room.

“Come here,” said Kate.

Jay sat down on the bed next to her and she kissed him on the mouth. She drew back, smiled, and kissed him again. Their tongues met and moved against each other. She put her arms around him and held him close, then their lips parted and she pressed her cheek against his neck. She began to kiss his neck, but felt his shoulders tense beneath her palms. She pulled back and looked at him.

“I must stink of sweat,” he said.

“No, you’re fine,” she said, moving close to him again, kissing his neck, his cheek, his lips.

She swung her legs up over his knees so she could move closer to him and continued to kiss him passionately, almost desperately. Instinctively Jay’s hand moved to her waist and then up her back as they kissed, then it began to move around the front, pushing her away almost, even as he pulled her closer. Her lips smiled against his, and so he continued, rubbing gently at first, then grasping her breast more firmly, with the same awkward desperation of their kissing. Apart from her bra, he could feel nothing through her t-shirt, so he pushed his hand up under the cloth and pulled down the cup. He reached back up and felt beneath his open palm her nipple, hard and round and firm as a blackcurrant. He continued to massage the warm flesh.

In response she moved her hand down from his waist to his crotch, where the head of his penis strained against the thick denim. As with her breast through the t-shirt, the sensation was muted. Still, Jay felt a twinge of raw physical pleasure with every movement she made, but he did not smile: his expression remained serious, almost pained with concentration. Kate did not notice; her eyes closed as her lips moved between his neck, his cheeks and his mouth, her fingers dancing towards the zipper on his jeans.

“Wait,” he said, pulling his hand out from her top.

“What?”

Their eyes locked, stayed locked as a second passed.

“The bed’s not made… it doesn’t feel right.”

Kate looked down at the bare mattress.

“Really?” she asked, adjusting her bra.

Jay shrugged and stood. There was still a ridge in his jeans and his heart pounded as he moved towards the chest of drawers to pull out some sheets. Kate got off the bed too and watched Jay spread a bottom-sheet over the mattress. He took a long time smoothing the sheet out, so she began to stuff the duvet into its cover. He helped her, and their hands brushed against each other, then she pulled him close, wrapped him up in the duvet and pushed him back onto the bed.

“Happy now?” she asked.

Jay shrugged. She lay down on top of him and kissed him again, then rolled under the duvet herself and pulled off his shirt. She kissed his stomach and Jay felt again, inevitably, the tightness in his jeans. Kate felt it too and, covered by the duvet, pulled off her own top. She lay back on top of him again. Jay felt her breasts against his chest and her crotch against his. The heat of her body was irresistible. He pushed her onto her side, unhooked her bra and kissed her breasts as his hand slid into her pants. His fingertips came against the short-trimmed pubic hair, at once familiar and alien, and then pushed further down, following the curve, closing around a warmth that was delicate and internal, distinct in the dirty, muggy heat of the air.

Meanwhile, Kate was already fiddling with his belt, pulling his waist-band apart so she could reach inside. He felt her fingers close around the shaft and pull once towards her, as if trying to take it for herself, and then push down, pulling the skin back. He bit his lip, felt his heart race, felt sick with excitement. There was a pause, a momentary lull balanced on a knife-edge, as they both looked into each other’s eyes and lay perfectly still, her hand closed tightly around his penis, his fingers inside her pants cupping the soft flesh of her labia, before he suddenly pulled his hand away and yanked her jeans and her pants down to her ankles in one feverish movement. She kicked them the rest of the way off and sat up to pull down his jeans and boxer shorts.

Then he was on top of her, kissing her all over, pressing against her even as she pulled him close and dug her fingers into his back. She had to fight against herself to push him away even for one moment, just to ask in a rapid whisper,

“Do you have any condoms?”

Concern clouded Jay’s face, made him pause.

“No,” he said, “they’re back at the old house.”

The passion in his body, the erection of his penis, began to ebb. He felt oppressed by the stark walls, by the haphazard books on the shelves and a crumpled plastic bag on the floor. The silence of the small room, like the heat of the day, was all around, inescapable, smothering. Jay pushed himself up on his hands and Kate leaned up to kiss him once on the chest, before falling back to the pillow and staring at his troubled face.

“I don’t care,” she said, “I can’t wait, I’ll get a pill later, I want you.”

She tried to pull him back down, but he resisted, as if teasing her. He had suddenly become again concious of the ugly computer desk that loomed by the bedside on its skeletal silver legs. Kate mirrored his concern in her own features and shifted her feet against his under the duvet. A question trembled at her lips, but was held back by a shapeless fear. She squeezed his arms and he looked down at her, at her eyes, at her nipples, offset by the weight of her breasts like two cherries on swirls of melting cream. Whatever the internal conflict that had raged inside his brain during those seconds of hesitation, lust had emerged dominant, and now gorged itself on the sensation of her breath on his cheek, of her thigh against his penis, of the sapphire shine in her eyes.

When Jay pushed inside her, Kate gasped and pulled him closer and further up as if she wanted the entry to go on forever. It could not and so, reaching the apex of his thrust, he stopped and pulled back slowly, savouring each second, each minute tingle of sensation. The fear that had been embodied a moment before in the ugliness of the computer desk now hovered ghost-like beyond the moment of ejaculation, obscured by distance but drawing ever closer as Jay pulled down, down, almost until he came free, and then again up inside of her. Kate gasped, kissed him, rubbed her breasts, jerked her hips, and he gradually went faster and faster, until his loins burned with the strain of holding back the release. In a final attempt to avert the cataclysm of his climax, to outwit the nameless dark spectre, Jay pulled out and his semen sprayed over the bed-sheet and the inside of Kate’s thigh.

For several seconds, Kate was oblivious to the warm liquid running down her leg, and continued to crush Jay against her, aching to have him back inside her, demanding that it would not end like this, so soon, that she would not be denied the final wrenches of pleasure when she was so close to orgasm. But he was spent, hollowed out, and, as the waves of ecstasy rippled away into nothing, she became aware of the semen cooling on her skin. It did not disgust her, as she lay beneath Jay’s hot body, but he felt sticky and wanted to shower. Both of them were panting, and could feel the other’s hot breath, but they did not kiss. Jay’s fingers clenched the loose cover on the pillow. He wondered how many people had had sex on this bed before, wondered if it mattered. Slowly he allowed his muscles to relax and slid down by her side.

“I hope nobody saw us,” Kate said, remembering the window.

“Mm,” said Jay.

He realised that his elbow was raw, so he propped himself up to inspect it. At some point in the throes of passion, Kate had caught the scab, and now an edge of it had been separated from the skin beneath. He picked at it gingerly.

“Did I do that?” Kate asked, “sorry.”

Jay nodded absently and continued to pick.

“Hey, don’t do that,” Kate said, “it doesn’t look ready to come off.”

She put a hand up to his, but too late: Jay yanked off the crystalline skin with a grimace. A crescent sliver of blood shot to the surface, but did not pool up enough to run down. They both looked at the irregular circle of taut pink skin that had been revealed, then Kate lay back down to look out the window at the first heavy drops of rain which had begun to fall. Jay lay down behind her and wrapped his arm across her chest, so that his hand rested across her collar-bone. Past the side of her head he could see the indifferent backs of the houses opposite, which rose high above his bedroom window and stretched up towards the low grey sky. He wondered who his neighbours were and felt the wet patch on the sheet against his leg, the curve of her buttocks against his hip, the weight of her breast across his arm.

“I love you,” she said suddenly, after several minutes of silence.

She took his hand and kissed it and waited for a reply. Jay said nothing, but stopped thinking about the neighbours.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, twisting round to look at him.

Jay shrugged and did not look at her eyes for a long time. Eventually he did look, and she was still watching him, so he said,

“I was wondering if we should break up.”

Kate’s face went pale and she looked away.

“Why? Because I…?” she paused, “that was months ago.”

Jay moved so he was not lying on the semen patch any more.

“I told you about it straight away, said I was sorry.”

Kate waited for him to respond, but Jay continued to stare at the backs of the motionless houses opposite.

“It was one time. We were both drunk,” she pleaded, wide-eyed, “you said you forgave me.”

Jay looked at her, felt a pang of guilt, thought he was stupid, knew he had gone too far, shrugged. He had never asked her about her past lovers, and she had not told him.

“You never did, did you?”

When he did not answer, she hit his shoulder with her palm and drew the duvet tight around herself, then she started to cry, silently, and rubbed her leg. Jay watched her. She had taken most of the duvet and he began to feel cold and disgusted.

“So what was this?” Kate demanded, semen cold and sticky against her fingers, “one last fuck before you dumped me?”

“I don’t know,” Jay said, “I didn’t expect to see you today, I thought you were still in Cornwall.”

“Maybe if you texted me once in a while you’d have known. I missed you, you know, even though… I felt guilty about our fight, but it was your fault, you started it. You. Oh, just fuck you. Give me my clothes.”

Sheepishly Jay gathered up her bra and t-shirt, and then dragged up the crumpled pair of jeans with her pants still inside them from the bottom of the bed where she had kicked them off. They both got dressed, lying sideways under the same duvet, in silence, then Kate crawled awkwardly past Jay, who drew in his legs to let her pass. She stood.

“Why didn’t you just say you couldn’t forgive me, instead of pretending everything was fine and never talking to me about it?”

“I didn’t want to keep making you feel guilty since there was nothing you could do about it.”

“Yeah, well I did feel guilty about it, for ages, but I thought we were getting over it. I thought I’d go away and come back and everything would be like it was before, better even, we’d be stronger for it.”

Jay shrugged apologetically.

“Fine,” Kate said, “I’m going. I hope you’re happy here.”

She opened the door.

“I’m sorry,” Jay said before she walked through, “I couldn’t help it.”

Kate turned round and looked at him hard for several seconds, still sat on his bed. She could still feel the warm wetness inside her and the way it made the cotton of her pants sticky and tingling when she moved. She shook her head.

“You weren’t even drunk.”

She turned away and Jay watched her leave, heard her close the back door, which was below his window. He rubbed his elbow. For a while afterwards he lay there, looking at the rain, and at his new room. It was bare, almost stark, and very silent. Jay breathed in. The air was fresh and cool from the rain. He closed his eyes and saw the room with a new desk, with his books and films all neatly on the shelves, with posters on the wall. This room belonged to him now. It was his room. He stood up and stretched out, then went downstairs to shower. He could have been anyone.

“Rachael.”

“What?” She uncrossed her legs, hopped off the pink My Little Pony sheets of her bed and went over to the door frame where she hung off the door, letting it swing with her body-weight and felt the smooth white paint under her fingers. “What?” she repeated.

“Come downstairs,” her mother said. Rachael sighed, flicked her head back towards the TV. The adverts were on now anyway: blonde girls dancing with glittering plastic hoops in the sunshine, spiky-haired boys in sunglasses chewing gum, blowing bubbles. Rachael slumped downstairs, letting her bare feet fall heavily on each step, while, in the cramped kitchen her mother tried to comfort Michael, Rachael’s baby brother, and unpacked shopping from white and green Asda bags. Entering the kitchen Rachael began to root into one of the bags, searching for sweets and chocolate, making the thin plastic crinkle as her slender hands moved over a packet of mince, a bag of carrots, some folded up magazines.

“There’s nothing for you in there,” her mother said, gently slapping her arms away.

“What’d you shout me for then?” Rachael asked.

“Because I have a job for you,” she replied, bouncing Michael up and down in the crook of her arm and rattling a colourful little Humpty Dumpty with a bell inside its stomach for him. Rachael sighed. For a few seconds the toy quieted the chubby little boy, then his wailing began anew.

“I want you to take this bag over to your Nan’s” her mother said, abandoning the toy and raising her voice above the noise, “she rang me up earlier and asked me to pick up some Lemsip and a couple of other things for her because she felt ill. I meant to drop it off on my way home, but what with Michael and all the traffic I forgot.”

“Why don’t you just take it now?”

“Rachael, please, I’ve been working all morning, then I had to go shopping and pick Mike up from nursery, and the traffic was bad, and he’s been crying ever since because he’s teething. And what have you done all day? Sat in your bedroom watching cartoons. It’s not healthy. So you can do this for me and get some fresh air while you’re at it.”

“Fine,” Rachael said. Argument being futile; mother, stressed, being absolute. She scampered upstairs and pulled on some socks, then searched through her drawers and the piles of clothes on her bed and chair and desk for her favourite jacket, a denim one that was once upon a time a violent, strawberry red, but had since faded to a lusty salmon pink.

After switching off her TV she ran back downstairs and slipped into her battered trainers, the ones with the red LEDs in the soles that lit up with every step. They flashed their way to the kitchen where Rachael’s mother handed her the bag and gave her a pound to buy some sweets on the way back.

“I’ve just rang Nan, and told her to expect you knocking at her door, so don’t dawdle your way there.”

“K, Mum. Bye.” Rachael said, leaving.

Outside the sunlight was bright, brighter than the primary-coloured cartoons, as it reflected off the pavement and the windows of the surrounding semi-detached houses. Rachael turned away from the glare momentarily, sun-spots in her eyes, to bid her mother goodbye and close the door. Instantly the wail of her brother was muted and now came those myriad suburban sounds to her ears: the shouts of children playing, the hum of traffic, the car alarm somewhere, the lawnmower somewhere else. Into this world of light and sound Rachael had now stepped, and would have to walk about a half mile to reach her grandmother’s flat.

Halfway down her own boring street, Rachael glanced into the shopping bag she was carrying. In it was a loaf of bread, a bottle of milk, a packet of Lemsip, some cakes (Cadbury’s) and, beneath the purple cake packaging, a pair of apples in a transparent plastic bag. Apples reminded Rachael of Snow White. They were always showing Snow White on the Disney Channel. Rachael, impatient for sugar, decided to buy the sweets before going to her grandmother’s, and so turned left, instead of right, at the bottom of her road, so she could walk to the Newsagent. Walking the other way down this road was a man, Rachael noticed, with greying hair and a large gut hidden under a dark blue polo-neck shirt. As she neared him he stopped abruptly and began to speak to her.

“Oh, hello,” he said, “how are you? How’s your mother?”

“Uh, do I know you?” Rachael asked, looking at him, at his thick brows that perched wolfishly over his dark eyes.

“We’ve met before, yes?” he said, “I’m a friend of your mother’s. She introduced you to me, but it was a while ago. What was your name? Uh, L…Lucy, yes?” His smile encouraged her to speak, so genuine it was, and so Rachael shook her head and spoke her name, even as she noticed the yellowed teeth, the hairy arms.

“Ah yes, Rachael, that was it, yes” he had been leaning in close to her, she hadn’t even noticed, but now he straightened up. “And where are you off to, Rachael?”

“To see my Nan,” she said, “I’ve got to take her this food.”

“Ah, of course. And how is your Nan? It’s quite a while since I’ve seen her.”

“Well, she’s a little ill at the moment, that’s why I’m taking her this food and some medicine too.” Rachael was a friendly and talkative girl, in spite of her better instincts.

“Oh,” the man said, his thick brows sinking down over his eyes “I’m sorry to hear that. I shall have to go see her sometime. Yes. though I can never remember what number she lives at, my memory not being quite what it used to.” He smiled again: a practised charm.

“Twenty-seven B,” Rachael said.

“Ah, yes, Twenty-seven B, at, ah…oh now I can picture the place but I just can’t remember the name of the road…twenty-seven B at…”

“Hansel Court.” Perhaps she shouldn’t have said that, she thought as soon as the words left her mouth.

“Yes, that’s it, of course. Yes, I might pay her a visit later. I really ought to be on my way now, though,” the man said, “tell your grandmother I said hello and shall see her later. Yes?”

“Uh, yes, I mean, okay, Bye,” Rachael said, glad he was leaving. The man turned away and carried on walking, a slight spring in his step. Rachael watched him but he never turned back, and then he disappeared around the corner. Rachael put him out of her mind: sweets, now.

Soon a Sherbet Dip Dab and a Milky Way joined her grandmother’s groceries in the Asda bag. She ate the Dip Dab first, awkwardly holding the yellow packet in the hand that held the carrier bag while she used the other to plunge in the scarlet lolly, like a cat’s tongue lapping up the tingling sherbet. Eating in such a manner, stop-starting so she didn’t spill sherbet, wiping the white powder off her red jacket when she did, meant that it took her twice as long to reach her grandmother’s as it ought to have done. Eventually she was climbing the stairs in Hansel Court to knock on her grandmother’s front door.

“It’s unlocked,” a man’s voice said from within. Unsurely Rachael opened the door and took a single step inside to see the man she had spoken to earlier sat, one leg across the other, on her grandmother’s settee. “Come in, come in,” he said, “close the door, you’ll let all the heat out, and your nan’ll be getting cold, yes.”

“Where is she?” Rachael asked, still hovering apprehensively in the door frame.

“Ah, she’s asleep. I came over to see her, a little earlier than I’d planned, and we talked for just a little while, then she said she was tired and went for a lie down. I made sure she was alright, and was about to let myself out, when I remembered that you’d be coming. I thought it’d be a shame for you to knock and wake her up when she was feeling so rotten, yes? So I decided to wait for you and let you in myself.”

“Oh, uh, okay,” Rachael said, slowly stepping inside, into the musty smell of static dust, and the stuffy warmth of the electric fire, closing the door behind her. “I’ll just go check on her, see if she’s awake.” She felt awkward.

“I really don’t think you should disturb her,” the man said, standing, “she needs her rest, yes? Why don’t you go put some of those groceries away for her? It’ll be a nice surprise when she opens up her cupboards, yes?”

“Uh, okay.” Rachael said. She noticed that the man was moving incrementally towards the door, but felt all she could do right now was as he suggested, so she went into the kitchen, put the bag down on the counter. In the other room she heard the rattle and click of a chain. She leant towards open door to see what the sound was, but was greeted by the man, stood now at the entrance to the kitchen.

“You didn’t put the door chain back on. You should always put the door chain on, because you never know when there might be a wolf at the door, yes?”

“Oh, right,” Rachael said. It wasn’t the unfamiliar turn of phrase that made her uncomfortable: it was the eyes she could feel moving over her body, making her skin tingle, even through the red jacket, like the sherbet had made her tongue tingle. She would have to look soon. Glancing up quickly she met dark, hungry eyes. She did not look again.

From outside drifted in the distant hum of traffic, the rustle of leaves as a light breeze blew through them, insulating the oppressive silence of the kitchen. Rachael had never remembered Nan’s house to be this quiet; always Nan would be talking, usually to Rachael’s mother, usually with the TV on in the background. Even when she nodded off on the settee she would snore loudly. Where were her snores now, the comforting rumble of musty air through ancient nasal passages?

“You’re a very pretty girl, Rachael.” The man said, “very pretty. So pretty I could just…eat you up.” A pink tongue poked out between his thin lips as he said this, ran across them, leaving a saliva trail like an agitated slug, and then he shuffled ever so slightly towards her, making her body tense and her mind freeze, like a doe cornered by a wolf. Rachael took a step back, watching him warily. “I bet you have all the boys chasing after you at school, yes?” He smiled, chuckled slightly. The afternoon sunlight sparkled in his eyes, bright like the sun in children’s adverts. Rachael felt sick.

“Why don’t you, uh, why don’t you come here and show me why, yes?” he said, taking a very deliberate step towards her. It was enough to make her run, though since he stood at the only exit, it was towards him that she ran, and he grabbed her by the collar of her red jacket. “Now, Rachael, don’t cause a commotion, yes, don’t make a lot of fuss and noise; you’ll wake your Gran up. Why don’t you and I sit on the sofa and have a little chat, yes? It’ll be all the better for everyone if we just do that.”

Rachael screamed and slipped out of her red jacket and made for the front door. Grabbing the handle she wrenched at it with her slender, skinny arms, pulling it only a few inches before the chain pulled taut. She reached to unhook it, but already the man stood over her, a hand on the door, so she ducked under his reaching, grasping fingers, and ran, tear-blurred, to her grandmother’s room where she slammed the door behind her.

“Nan. Nan!” she screamed, shaking the old lady in her bed, wrenching the white-sheeted duvet from the fully-clothed figure, revealing the lolly-pop red stains in the window-blind-dappled light. “Nan,” Rachael sobbed, slumping down from the bed onto the floor.

“Don’t cry, Rachael,” the man said, having casually crossed the sitting room and entered the bedroom, “I’m here. I’m here for you. Yes I am.”

Rachael screamed again, and tried to pull herself under the bed, kicking the bedside table as she did so, causing something fall off: her grandmother’s little panic button with its long white neck-cord. Quickly, she snatched it up, and jabbed the smooth plastic again and again as she wriggled further under the bed. A light lit up on it, but it made no sound, then Rachael felt a hand around her ankle as the man, having gone around the other side of the bed, tried to pull her out from under it. She kicked at his hand, her trainers flashing wildly through the air as they connected again and again with flesh and bone. After the fourth or fifth hit he let go.

“You little bitch,” he shouted, momentarily losing his temper. “But I know you’re upset, yes. Don’t worry; I still want you. And I can wait for you to come out. Yes. Yes.”

“Go away go away go away,” Rachael sobbed, curling up into a ball under the bed, hugging her skinny knees to her chest and feeling still the grip of fingers at her ankle.

“I-” the man began, when he was interrupted by a sharp rapping at the door.

“Mrs. Hudson?” a concerned woman’s voice called through the door, then the letter box, “Mrs. Hudson, are you alright?” The woman called twice more, then tried the door handle. The door opened a little way before it was stopped by the chain. “Mrs. Hudson, it’s Linda, are you home? You pressed your panic button. I…I’m going to try and get in now.”

The man was silent. Rachael thought she heard him move, but any sound he made was drowned out almost immediately by the social services worker throwing her weight against the door. Eventually the chain was pulled from its fixture, or snapped, and the door flew open. Linda stumbled in and went to the bedroom. She screamed when she saw the old lady, and gasped when the little girl crawled out from under the bed. The man who had attacked them both, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen, having escaped through the bedroom window and disappeared like a wolf into a forest, leaving behind only the red-stained sheets of a dead woman and a mark the colour of a faded red jacket on the ankle of a terrified girl.

I particularly liked the bit in the Christmas episode where the cast go for a walk in a ‘winter wonderland’ and as they stand looking over a lake, a snow machine starts up and sprays them with movie-snow, as if they have their own personal snow cloud amidst the bright lights, clear sky and cool air of a Los Angeles night. And the stars themselves seem something like this, almost like charicatures of themselves, all trying to fill a role either of protagonist or supporting character, friend, girlfriend or boyfriend. They’re not actors, and yet they are, all working to an unconcious script dictated by the place and time in which they have grown up, by what they see on TV and read in magazines, and what they think other people want to hear. It’s like a lot of the time, I feel, especially when they’re emotional, such as while in love or during a breakup or consoling someone who is upset, people say these certain clichéd phrases, as if they feel they’re expected to. Like in one episode of The Hills I think Lauren says “love is not a maybe thing” which sounds like a rehearsed line, but presumably isn’t. People in real life say these things too, narrating their own lives and feelings as if in fictional terms.

The way people talk is influenced by the fictions they consume, and vice versa. There’s a humorous example of this in the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski where the main character keeps repeating things he’s heard other characters say before, just slipping them into conversation every now and then. A better example though is a quote I once read about Ernest Hemingway, I can’t remember who by, that was something along the lines of: it is said that Hemingway had a good ear for speech, and yet no one spoke like Hemingway’s characters and until after they had read Hemingway.

In my fiction, often, and especially with speech, I try to aim for absolute realism as much as possible. But speech is difficult. Good dialogue and believable speech don’t always intersect. When speaking people pause in awkward places, searching for the right word, or they make mistakes and start again, or they pepper their speech with hesitancies such as ‘um’. Depending on the kind of piece I’m writing, I often include these, even, to an extent, if they could be detrimental to the literary quality of the piece. Perhaps I’m going off at a tangent here, but I occasionally feel, for some works, the presentation of what is real can be more important than what makes a good book (not that they’re necessarily mutually exclusive). For example, I was thinking yesterday how the extended piece I’m working on at the moment, doesn’t really have a climax or, if it does, it’s about two thirds of the way through, and at the end it starts to kind of dwindle out, like a burned-down candle. Then I realised that I was fine with this, that that’s more realistic: Life rarely has climaxes, and I don’t think a lot of Modernist novels do either (Mrs. Dalloway has a character kill himself fairly near the end, but this seems a sort of minor occurence that little effects the title character except in a passing thought). In my piece, the lack of a climactic ending, which is actually different from what I originally planned, mirrors the feelings of my protagonists, who wanted something more dramatic.

Anyway, I’ll talk about all that, and how I’m blatantly obsessed with aspiring towards the ideals and proficiency of James Joyce, in another post. Right now, I shall just add that I think Raymond Carver also is good at realistic speech, and you can see my attempts to emulate his style in stories like I Couldn’t Really Say and Dragonflies, but his speech is a certain type of speech, specifically 1980s American, which is quite different to modern English speech, primarily because of the differences in attitudes between the two nations; most broadly: Americans tend to be frank and direct, while the English are more reserved and indirect.

So it’s interesting that in The Hills there’s this interplay between real dialogue and these kind of stock phrases that sound scripted, which I suppose is the real reason I like The Hills. Yes, it seems strange, certainly impressive, that the film crew managed such intimate access to every part of the stars’ lives, and that the stars should all be so comfortable saying things in front of them, not seeming to play up overtly to the camera any more than they would to anyone else. And though this might call into question the validity of the show’s ‘reality’, other comparable shows, such as Channel 4′s Big Brother, on the few instances I’ve been unfortunate enough to have been exposed to, seem to contain similar types of speech, though more shamefully British and less naturalistic since the people are forced together.

Certainly, that’s one of the things The Hills does well: it does feel very natural, and this returns to my first point about the show providing a voyeuristic look into American life, or at least a very specific type of American life; that of the young priveleged elite. For a lot of people, to live somewhere where the sun shines constantly and the beach is just down the road, to be rich enough to always be comfortable and never have to worry about money, is an ideal existence, and yet still, Lauren and her friends constantly find problems to rock the boat of their idyllic lives, whether stemming from their jobs, their schoolwork or their relationships, all of which are petty compared to the stresses and strife the vast majority of the world’s people face. It’s a reminder that drama and conflict are a part of human existence, one of the few constants through all the stories we’ve told through the years. Even in a perfect utopia people would find something to complain or fight about.

So, in conclusion, or, as they say on the internet, tl;dr: The Hills, despite the questionable merit of watching spoiled California girls obsessed with shopping, fashion and boys, who inflect the end of every sentence, is an interesting programme if only for it’s unusual blurring of reality and fiction and the way it develops concise characters from real people.

Collective Student First-Year Dream

I’m terrified.
“You’ll make lots of friends.”
The words sounded hollow. What if school had been a fluke, all my friends until now exceptional people, not like the rest of the world? The words came true though: I made lots of friends.

We watched a film together, she and our friend, huddled on floor cushions, the screen illuminating our faces, a spring breeze through the open window. Our friend fell asleep, and it was like we were alone, alone and complicit when he gurgled in his sleep and we looked at each other. I thought then of putting my arm around her, but I didn’t. Had we been properly alone, then I would.

How many nights had I sat with him in his darkened room watching him play videogames, sharing his pain in each failure, his joy in each success, thinking ‘is this what a relationship is’? I suppose that never crossed his mind: he only had eyes for her.

Last night I dreamt she came to me amid a crowd of our friends. We embraced and it was as if it were the for the first time; I felt the solidity of her narrow shoulders, the firmness of her back below her ribcage. And then we stood like that, and we looked at each other, as friends except I could feel her breath on my lips. I tried to resist; people were watching; desire threatened to overwhelm me. She leaned forward, touched my lips with the gentlest flick of her tongue, barely perceptible. I pushed forward, our tongues writhed like an ocean in a storm, I was surprised by the wetness, the warmth. I woke.

The rain was warm as I walked across the campus. I felt the weight of each drop on my skin. My whole body ached for him. There must be more, the physical stuff, more than just a feeling, but he might never show me that. I wished that I was pretty like her, but at least I was here.

Summer’s nearly here, soon we will be torn apart, forced to leave behind our new friends, our crushes, for the brightest part of the year. See you in September. Keep in touch. Please keep in touch.

“You can’t just sit around waiting for love; you have to go for it.”
Okay, okay then, I’ll tell him, no more waiting, I’ll tell him.
“He rejected you? Well, you can’t just make love happen, you have to be patient.”

Strange. Had she always felt like that?

Sometimes I wonder if he fancies me, but no, I think he’s just like that. Nine months isn’t very long to know someone.

A year already? I remember standing at my own back door as I stand here now, and the clouds were grey and wind blew through them then, as now, and “soon,” I thought, “soon my new life begins.” Now it must lie dormant, as if dead, for three months? But how can I go back now?

Summer passes, passions fade. Emails erratic, cursory, IM arbitrary, the few public interactions, text on screen as well. Handwritten letters too old-fashioned. We all agree we miss it, but we wouldn’t go back, we’ve moved on.

They were all beautiful though. I thought you were all beautiful.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

(Also, as a script. Which anyone can feel free emailing me about, should they feel so inclined to shoot the movie.)