Too far away to call out now and in too much of a hurry to catch up, I watched her stride away, her feet kicking up water onto the cuffs of her jeans. The rest of her would have been soaked by now too, were it not for that gumdrop-green raincoat, draped over her, keeping her dry if not warm, and suiting that reserved way she shrugged off encroachments on her physicality. I felt jealous: my umbrella only covered my head, and then barely.

.

When she hugged me at that party I was surprised by her solidity, her realness, and I realised that of the handful of times we had embraced before, I had always been the one to initiate it, never her. For a heartbeat I let myself go, physicality forgotten, bodies mingled. Then the separation and the lingering sense of privilege.

.

The evening’s sky had been metallic purple and seemed to stretch into forever. Now clouded, impenetrable sheets of rain fell from it, muddying the dirt in the gutters and choking the drains with sodden leaves. In the wineglass she placed on the table a fractional pool of aqueous liquid remained, sparkling lightly. I offered to walk her home. Already in her gumdrop-green raincoat she consented and allowed me to hold the door. Once outside, I saw how the distorted refractions of street-lights and passing cars danced across the shiny plastic of her coat, but nothing of her skin or the heart that beat inside her. Even her face, determinedly facing the rain, was hidden by her hood, removing her so far from me and making my actions tense and self-conscious. I could not remember the last time I felt like this, especially with such intensity that I almost could not bear it.

Gingerly my feet pushed through piles of rain-soaked pavement leaves, while my hands moved in and out of my pockets. I felt they might at any moment reach out to prove her corporeality, and held them back only through the fear that she might collapse into dust, else might shy away from this breach of our friendship; this attack on her gumdrop green barrier. And then her hand rose up at the edge of my vision. I turned at the movement to see her tuck back a stray strand of hair that had fallen free of her hood. In the half-light her eyes flickered electric blue. From somewhere there came a bang, or a crack, as something was dropped, or slammed, or hit, or fired. The noise made us jump and my arm moved up without thought. Then my fingers closed on her elbow, water running across them as the shiny plastic crumpled slightly. She turned to face me. Eyes locked she laughed a little. On her fast-breathing breath came the faint scent of wine, reminding me of the Chardonnay she drank in the theatre-bar and the way I had longed to taste it second-hand, mixed in with her saliva and the taste of her skin.

I placed my other hand a little below her right shoulder, my heart beating like a frightened bird against a cage, and hers doing the same only inches away through the green plastic of her coat and her flesh and her ribs. She might have pulled away by now, standing there all surprised and expectant, colouring up a little in the cold, looking so lovely that the bird could no longer be held back: So it escaped, and brought together our lips with awkward force, so that our tongues writhed against each other, fighting their mouth-bound anchorages looking for a oneness, a boundarilessness, while my hands sought the same along the smooth curve of her back, before coming to the warm contours of her cheeks and her neck, and knocking back the gumdrop-green hood. Now, with the rain beating against her exposed crown, her hair curled up into the long loose waves of an Emily Bronte heroine. It was an image that stayed with me as I pulled away and blinked the water from my eyelashes, and might even have stilled my still-beating heart, had she not pulled up her hood and turned away from me, slipping easily as she did so her hand into my outstretched fingers. Then, with a little half-nervous acknowledgement of what had passed between us in the grip of her fingers, and the quick smile of her red lipsticked-lips, our walk through the puddles and leaves of the undulating, rain-drenched tarmac resumed.

]]> http://hbenjaminpetrie.com/2008/12/06/fiction-gumdrop-coat/feed/ 0 http://hbenjaminpetrie.com/2008/10/23/fiction-the-motorist/ http://hbenjaminpetrie.com/2008/10/23/fiction-the-motorist/#comments Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:23:37 +0000 Henry http://hbenjaminpetrie.com/?p=177 It’s a boring Sunday. Rain beats against my windscreen, my bonnet, my roof, like a thousand fingers drumming a monotonous, impatient rhythm against the glass and the metal. The clouds it falls from have cast a twilight over the whole day, but I think now it finally must be dusk, because the streetlights have switched themselves on and are casting an orange glaze over the dark blue tarmac, under the dark blue sky.

I slow down for a junction, indicate, and then come to a stop as I see headlights. A couple of cars go by, and I hear the slow repeating clicking of the indicator over the rain and the gentle whoosh of the cars going by me. Their red tail-lights fade into the distance and I pull away from the junction. The indicator flicks off and the rain beats more rapidly, more impatiently against the windscreen as I pick up speed. The radio in my car’s been bust since I got it, so I can’t drown out this perpetual background noise, but at least the roads are quiet.

I turn the wheel slightly, following a long sweeping curve in the road, then find myself caught up with the cars that just went past me, now stopped at a red light. This red light is distorted every few seconds as large rain drops magnify and refract the rays through the windscreen, but these are then wiped away. The motion of the windscreen wiper’s black arms distracts me for a moment, but then the light turns amber and I slowly apply pressure to the accelerator while releasing the clutch.

It’s nothing fancy my car, just a Ford Fiesta. It hasn’t even got power steering, but it gets me around. Trouble is that tonight I don’t have anywhere to go and am just driving aimlessly, trying to kill some time. As I drive I consider places I could go, even consider stopping at one of the pubs I pass, but then I just drive past them and watch them fade into the rain from my wing mirror. Even if I did stop and go in one, it wouldn’t be like I knew anyone in there, and in those sort of places, at this time on a rainy Sunday, there wouldn’t be anyone my age anyway.

I take a left at the next set of lights, knowing this will take me onto an even quieter road that runs by the river. Before the river though are a few houses. I’m practically in the countryside now, and so, as I pass these houses, I think how quaint they look, even if they are just semis with a few plants outside and the occasionally creeper clinging onto the crumbling brick-work.

Most of them have at least one lighted window, though a few, from the front at least, appear to be in darkness. For a few seconds I consider the people that live in these houses. People I know nothing about, people who I’ve never met, who have their own lives and live in these houses and are completely separate from me. There are a lot of people in the world and it’s kind of weird how there are all these people, and yet most of them you’ll never meet and they’ll live and die, and you’ll know nothing about them.

But in a second they’re gone, and I’m driving past hedges and the occasional tree. I begin to think about the people I know and for a second I put my hand down to the phone in my pocket. Mentally, I run through the names in its phonebook, but no one springs to mind as someone I could just call up now and go see. I put my hand back on the wheel, but now I’m conscious of the weight in my pocket, the phone pressing against my leg, an impotent little bulge in my jeans.

I press harder against the accelerator, then dare myself to let go of the wheel. I’m only doing forty, maybe forty-five, but the rain and my hands hovering a few centimetres away from the comfortable hard rubber of the steering wheel make it feel a lot faster. I find myself suddenly thinking of Fight Club as I do this, that bit where Brad Pitt lets go of the steering wheel and Ed Norton’s trying to grab it, but Pitt won’t let him. And then Brad Pitt shouts to the guys in the back “What do you wish you’d done before you die?”

I couldn’t think of an answer to that question right then though, I was too caught up in the movement of the car, the rain against the windscreen and my hands, aching to grab the wheel. A few seconds later, before I’d even begun to drift into the middle of the road, I gave in and wrapped my fingers around it. I’d never really not been in control, though. I could have grabbed the steering wheel at any time and I did.

I glanced up into the rear view mirror, leaning to the left a little so I could see myself. My dark eyes stared back at me from reflection looking quite despondent, a little cold perhaps, and maybe tired too, I couldn’t quite tell just from the near-black circles surrounded by white, but this was certainly how I felt. I looked back at the road. It stretched out in front of me, no change for maybe a mile, no road markings and no oncoming traffic.

To my right was the river. I looked at this now. It was choppy and reminded me of the sea. It reminded me too of that term from English Literature, ‘pathetic fallacy’. It means when natural phenomenon reflect the emotions of a character. I half-smiled at the thought that there might be some cause-and-effect relationship between the weather and how I felt, but then I came to a corner and was forced to turn away from the river.

Soon I was lead back to a thirty limit road, but I still felt somehow unfulfilled, so I carried on along this road until it came to a national speed limit. I put my foot down and was doing seventy maybe half a minute later. The oncoming traffic whooshed by, nothing more than two yellow strokes on a navy backdrop. In between the whooshes of the passing vehicles came the continuous sound of the rain as it pounded against the screen and, even over this, the sizzle of the tyres on the wet tarmac.

As I drove I felt each little bump and imperfection in the old road, and I felt the puddles that had build up against the grass verge snatch at my tyres and jerk the wheel in my hand a little to the left. Somehow the car felt almost like an extension of my body while I travelled like this, and glancing again in the rear view mirror I saw my eyes now gave a much stronger impression of life.

But then I reached a roundabout and had to slow down. This was a good road though, so I went right round the roundabout and came back again, deciding to go even faster than the first time.

At eighty I began to scare myself a little. I was reminded now not of a movie, but of an experience I myself had had. It had happened a couple of years ago. I had been going down this hill near my house on a skateboard and I had started to pick up speed way too fast. I was never very good at skateboarding so I didn’t know how to slow myself down, and didn’t think I’d be able to keep my balance if I went any faster. So I jumped off the skateboard and was obviously carried forward by my momentum. I tried to run, but after a few steps I tripped and fell hard on my arm, grazing badly my elbow, and then my back, which I was thrown onto by the force of my fall.

The shaking of the car on the road at this speed made me think of the skateboard that day. If I were to lose control now, I thought, that would be the end of me. I would just crash into an oncoming vehicle and the two cars would just crumple into each other. I’d be thrown forward against the seat-belt, probably smash my head into the steering wheel, and then I’d be crushed by it, by the ton of metal and the force of the impact.

I take my foot off the accelerator. It’s a boring Sunday, but it’s not a day to die.

“Can we meet this week?”

“I’m busy, why?”

“I’m going away. It’ll be a long time until I see you again.”

It was a Thursday when they met, the only day she could get into town. A Thursday. It seemed so insignificant and yet as if it couldn’t have been any other day. Only a week ago he’d realised his mistake, that things weren’t all okay, that things were going to change.

“You’re just nervous because of your new job.”

“Maybe,” he’d said. He missed her. He wondered if he shouldn’t have tried harder to make it work: Love is love after all, and absence makes the heart grow fonder, even if distance did its best to break it. Not that there was anything he could do about it now: he’d be gone in a few days and, besides, even if she wasn’t already with someone else (which she was), he’d hurt her too bad. He thought now of all the times she, Arietta, had sat alone, staring at the floor, at the walls, at the ceiling, wondering where she’d gone wrong, while he sat in his house, his parent’s house, writing, telling himself he was okay.

He knew now that he had betrayed her, and for what? Writing he supposed. Writing. His dream, his passion, his first love. It was writing that was dragging him halfway across the country, and his writing that would grow stronger for the pain he felt. He stared at a puddle, at the little intersecting ripples within it. Things might have been different and it might not have rained today.

“Good luck with your new job, I know you’ll do well with it.”

“Thanks,” he replied, “you’ve always been there for me. I wish I’d seen that sooner.”

“Yeah, well, we can’t change the past.”

“I know, but we’ll stay friends, won’t we?”

“Of course, we always said we would.”

Nearly two months later, and they were still close. Josh wanted the best for her, even if it hurt him, and Arietta accepted that, was happy for that, even if he had hurt her. But could they stay that way? Maybe not. He had already been away for two months, a sort of trial at the firm. Before he went they had been very much in love, but his doubts during those eight weeks away from home had all but killed their relationship. He felt that was understandable though; a necessary casualty. He was only twenty after all, too young to settle down long-term, long-distance.

Arietta had believed there was hope for their relationship. Not forever, but for a while longer. It wouldn’t have been too much trouble for her to come down once in a while and visit in between her university work and her part-time job. She always had had more faith than Josh though, and that was one of his problems, and she had told him so.

Trouble was, Josh thought, it was so difficult to know what to believe nowadays. No one really had any faith in the Government, hadn’t for years, and the media hadn’t helped that. With the Internet the love of your life could be just a click away, but so could a psychotic stalker, or another false hope. And even science couldn’t be trusted, Indian-giving the Trojan horse of medical advancement in exchange for the God that, less than a hundred years ago, every one of us could have turned to for support and guidance. He had been the truth back then, just as science was now, but at least His followers hadn’t felt the need to rewrite scripture every time a new discovery was made. Back then the facts had been changed, denied even, to fit the evidence, but now the evidence was in a constant state of flux, dragging the facts along with them, until the confused followers were left scrabbling for meaning in the dust that the scientists, our new priests, left in their wake.

Perhaps Josh shouldn’t be worrying about this, perhaps these were problems too big for one person to bother with, especially when he had smaller ones, perceived or actual, of his own. For example, Arietta would be seeing Tom tonight. He was the future and, now that she had left him on this park bench, Josh was the past. Arietta had met Tom on her university course, back in September. Josh had been away then, working and, although he was certain Arietta’s intent had never strayed any further than friendship, now that Josh had left her, they were together. They would probably spend Christmas together, exchanging gifts, sending text messages while they were with their families. That had been Josh’s place once, but now his place was far away, on his own for most of the holiday in a foreign place, presumably, until he came back for those few days at home.

It bothered him that he felt jealous of Tom, especially since he genuinely wanted Arietta to be happy, with or without him. It bothered him too that she hadn’t returned his kiss, an innocent, friendly peck on the cheek, when they had hugged before she left. Not that he could expect her to, but she might have done, just to be friendly, just to give him something to remember her by. Instead he had received a hurried affirmation that they would remain friends and a hasty wave goodbye as she ran to make her next class, just as it started to drizzle. And would they remain friends? Why should they? They would talk, certainly, online, perhaps even on the phone from time to time, but what kind of friendship would it be when they might never meet again because he was so rarely in her part of the world and she had already moved on anyway?

His cheek felt bare. Cold, even. He wasn’t just sad at her leaving, or just nervous for his new job. He was almost looking forward to that even. It was a more a deep yet vague sense of hopelessness, a feeling that he was lost and alone, that he would never be able to read people or talk about nothing with them, that he would never feel normal emotions without questioning them. Why this? Why that? Why am I sad, why am I happy, how I could be happier, what even is ‘happiness’?

He had been happy a few times, he realised, but only retrospectively. With Arietta for example, even though he had only realised on rare occasions that there was nothing more he had wanted, he had generally been happy, or at least contented, even if he only realised that a few weeks after he broke up with her. It was all so confusing. He had a feeling she had been happy with him too; she had told him so often enough, at least. But he had always wondered how, questioned why. He had never known if he was saying the right thing or just boring her. And what did her and Tom talk about now? What did normal people in a relationship say to each other? What did anyone say to each other?

He looked up. A man of reasonable age had sat on a bench opposite him. Josh might talk to the man if only it was socially conventional, if only he had anything to say. Instead, Josh would most likely end up like the man, old and sitting on park benches in the rain, no different to when he was twenty. And what would it matter? What did any of it matter, any of these things that people said to each other, any of the plans they made or the things they did? What did it matter if people broke up, or if people stayed together and got married and reproduced and lived out their days in blissful contentedness? We were all going to the same place anyway, whether we went there one by one having fettered our lives away, or all in one go following some great catastrophe such as a comet hitting the Earth, or a nuclear war.

With that view, Josh reasoned, it shouldn’t matter that Arietta hadn’t kissed him, or that she was with someone else. It shouldn’t matter how many girls he’d kissed or how many he never would. It shouldn’t matter how many or of what quality any of the relationships he formed in this life were. It did though, or at least it mattered to him, if no one else save for a handful of his close friends and family, and why should it be any other way? It hadn’t for anyone else, for any of the untold billions of people who had lived and died and left no trace behind apart from some bones and some memories, both of which would fade away in time.

There were a few who had left something more behind; the writers and the revolutionaries, the philosophers and the great scientists. They had all gained a semi-immortality, of sorts. Josh felt he could do that, one day, with all these thoughts, if he could focus them in to one good book that would live on after him. Not that that would do him a lot of good: he’d be dead and this life, if the cult of Science was to be believed, is the only one.

The old man stood up with a cursory glance at Josh and proceeded on his way. Even the best of books though, Josh realised gloomily, were subject to changes in fashion and ideologies, just as their pages were subject to mildew and dry rot. Even if books began being edited and updated and computer hard-drives replaced paper, one ferocious electrical storm would see them all off, no matter how long men held onto them, and that was assuming the human race survived long enough to do so.

After all, there was always the possibility of a comet. And if not that, nuclear war, which had been grimly predicted since before the nineteen-fifties. It wasn’t likely of course: it hadn’t happened yet because we were all too resistant to change and, since almost no one could find the time or energy to save the planet, the climate, ourselves, why should anyone go out of their way to blow us all up instead? If anything can be learned from the human race, it’s that we’d much rather kill ourselves by degrees; slowly at first and then ever-increasingly, choking up the Earth until there was no food left to eat and no air left to breathe. Of course, Josh accepted, he could be wrong: It was always possible that some religious fanatic or some power-crazed dictator might press a button and wipe us all out without ever giving the universe a sufficient enough chance to put us out of our misery.

A half hour had passed since Arietta had left and Josh had begun thinking so fatalistically. The world would end one day of course, and now that end was a half-hour closer. But who knew how much further was left to go? Any great disaster might happen tomorrow and then whether Josh had written a book or not, formed a new relationship or won Arietta back, wouldn’t matter because, even if there were any books left when the end came, who would be left with the time to read them? Josh stood up. Today might be the last day he or anyone else had on Earth, or it might just be another insignificant rainy Thursday. With neither of those possibilities any more likely than the other, he may as well get on with his life and make it matter, if not just for himself, then for the people who would come after and read the book he would write.