The Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I 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.

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.

Queue long in the supermarket, was lunchtime though, and it’s sunny. Supermarkets always so much busier when it’s sunny, don’t people eat when it’s cloudy? Felt bad letting Sam pay for everything, but he insisted, he’s sweet like that. How much was it though? Twenty-something, most of that was the Malibu. I said “get the cheap one,” but “no,” he said, “the cheap one’s nasty.” What else? French sticks, yes, and olives and Greek cheese, well he likes those more than I do, beef jerky too, I’ve never had it so I don’t know, but he likes that, said he hadn’t had it since he went to America with his dad years ago. Think he misses his dad sometimes, especially the way things often are between him and Jake, and the other house-mate never around, always out or working or sleeping, I’ve only spoken to him about twice. Still, he’s got me. Squeeze his arm, there. He’s smiling at me. It always seems to be sunny when I’m with you.

Yes, there’s the park, at the end of this road. The food’s in Sam’s backpack, the blanket and the Malibu are in mine. Not a blanket: the cover from the sofa in the living room. Jake was sitting on it when we got in, playing Nintendo games, but when we started making the picnic in the kitchen next door, talking and laughing, he disappeared. There were no blankets: we stole the cover. Mm. This is happiness, this, the park, the picnic in our backpacks. What else? Coca Cola to mix with the Malibu, and plastic cups to mix it in, cheese and pineapple on sticks, picked up a whole pineapple at first, that’s what gave me the idea, then saw a tin of chunks and remembered the last time I tried to carve a pineapple, that was back, when?, November, me and the girls not long moved in, like a fruity murder scene Lou had said, so I left it in the bread aisle. It looked ridiculous, all leafy and ridgy in amongst the Hovis and the Warburtons, had to laugh, and then one of the staff was looking at me so I ran away.

Oh, in the shade of this leafy tree: a chill breeze. Always sunny with Sam except here, makes me think of autumn, reminds me of those days when Sam seemed an eternity away, the girls and I walking to those parties with bare legs, or with legs as good as bare in black tights, our glittering dresses sparkling in the street-lights, thinking about Sam, looking for him in the crowd, wondering where he was if I didn’t see him, if he’d found someone else before I’d had my chance. Silly, I suppose, to fall in love so quickly, so determinedly, though I’d only known him since September, but I couldn’t help it, even in the clubs, when guys used to flirt with us, and Lou would go off with them and grind up against them on the dance-floor, and Frances, though she got picked less often, even she found a boyfriend, for a while, amongst the flashing lights and the loud music, and they asked why I hadn’t, but I didn’t dare tell them about Sam, because I wanted it so much, I was scared that saying it would make it not happen. He seemed so far away.

But then there was that afternoon in the Student Union bar, and though he hurt me without knowing, he brought me closer to him, because then I came round his house, to see Jake of course, but it was still his house. And it was that one afternoon when I was round and Jake went out, he had a lecture or something and said he’d be back in a couple of hours, and I could wait there for him if I wanted. He must’ve thought something was going to happen between us, always reaching for my hand like that, but I never lead him on. I never.

Sam was in, so of course I said I’d stay and I’d wait for Jake. Sam was reading on the sofa downstairs at the time, what was it then?, something big, Proust, I think. He said it was a classic, but then he says that about everything he reads. So I got the book I had with me out of my bag and it was Harry Potter and sat with it in the arm chair. We read together and I kept looking at him and then I asked what he was reading. “Proust,” he said, and then “Remembrance of Things Past.” “Oh,” I said. He told me it was French, and that it was a classic. Then we both read a bit more, and then I said “swap.” He said “what,” and I said again “swap, let’s swap books.” He thought about it a moment, then “okay,” he said. I started reading the first pages of Remembrance of Things Past and Proust was going on and on about going to bed early and then not being able to sleep and all the things he heard and the things he thought about, and I suppose it was interesting, in a way, but not if the whole book was like that, and the sentences were all so long you had to read them twice.

“You really like this stuff?” I asked. He said he did. I told him I thought he was just showing off. He smiled at that and said maybe he was. I still wonder sometimes if he really enjoys reading, or if he just does it because he feels he has to, because it’s good for him somehow. I asked then, “so what did you think of my book?” sitting on the sofa now so we could swap back. “Well it’s a kids’ story isn’t it?” he said. “What’s wrong with that?” I asked. “Nothing,” he said, “it was alright, easy-going anyway, perhaps I’ll read it when I’m done with this.” He tapped Proust with his fingers and I thought I saw a slight shake in his hand. He wasn’t looking at me. Then he looked up and he saw me and it felt like he was seeing me for the first time. We kissed and then. And then we had to keep it from Jake for a little while and break it to him gently.

Sam told it to him a few days later, and then they didn’t speak for about a week I think. The first time I came round after that, and Jake saw me, he stared me down all accusative. I had to look away, and then Sam glared at him, “back off,” he said with his eyes, or “don’t.” I felt bad for Jake, of course, I thought he was okay, perhaps if Sam wasn’t there, if things had been. No, maybe I just feel sorry for him; it hurts, that. Perhaps I should introduce Frances and he, maybe that would work. Oh, another shady tree: it’s warm now, but it’ll be cold later, maybe should’ve worn tights, brought a cardie, no, we won’t be out that long, and you’ll keep me warm, won’t you? Even in autumn we’ll walk through this park again, my arm around yours like now, and you’ll still keep me warm.

“Over there, by the lake?” Sam says, pointing.

I nod.

~ ~ ~

Feel the grass on my elbows through the sofa-cover, tummy full with food, sun on me, I am happy. And drowsy again, like this morning. The Malibu is warm, the Coca Cola too, though we put them in the shade to keep cool, still, another glass, to sip. The lake looks nice, dreamy.

“Do you want to go for a swim later?” I say, jokey.

I smile. I look at him, we’ve been quiet, he’s not smiling. For a moment I’m back in the Student Union bar, coming towards him and he’s not looking up from his book.

“What’s wrong?”

Now he looks, hollow smile.

“I liked the pineapple chunks with the cheese on the sticks,” he says, “I don’t think I’ve had them before.”

Mum used to make them at my childhood birthday parties, but that’s not what he’s thinking about.

“What’s wrong?”

He looks away, what’s he looking at now? Not me; some ducks.

“Is this love?” He says.

“What?” Off-guard, didn’t expect that.

“This: going to the park together, watching TV, sharing baths. Is this what love is?”

“What else would it be?”

Not now drowsy, not now dreamy and happy. I sit up.

“Don’t you love me?”

Rum and cola in my stomach all sickly now. I wait, I wait. Speak.

“Why haven’t we had sex yet?” He says like the question is choking him and he has to spit it out.

He looks down and starts playing with some grass.

“Is that what this is about?” I ask.

I can fix that, I want to, ready now, ready now, wasn’t before, but last night, this morning, ready now, haven’t left it too long without, haven’t made him lose interest, can fix it, ready now.

“No, not really,” he says

“What then?” Breathe in, not a little girl any more, just words, he’ll tell me, we’ll fix it.

He shrugs, looks away like he’s trying to read the lake.

“I think I might go home for a few days next week some time,” he says suddenly, “I miss watching films with my dad and my nan’s baking.”

“Okay,” I say.

Let him change the subject, nothing wrong. Move closer, afraid, he can see that, I don’t need to say. Hold his arm, he won’t slip away. Look at me.

“I do love you,” he says.

There, except there’s something else.

“But?” I say.

“Nothing. I love you. I want to look after you.”

I don’t know what he means, I don’t know if he knows what he means, but this is love, he reads too much, he’s close, his arm is warm and shakes as he coughs. There are no shadows across the flat lake. We’ll walk here again in the autumn.

All.

Awake now, open eyes, bright!, scrunch into warmy pillow. What’s that against my ankle? His leg, all hairy and bony. Still asleep? In this light? Not facing it like I am though. Cotton all blurry in my eye, seeming to stretch out for miles before it reaches him. Is he dreaming? So peaceful. He always looks so serious when awake, even when he’s not, but now he looks carefree, like a little boy. Little cherub. Was that a frown? I’ll kiss him. Oh, his hands are in the way, stuck out in front of him, one on top of the other, like he’s praying, or pleading. They’re warm. I can reach his neck now. There; where he’s tender, between his Adam’s apple and his tendons. Felt the cartilage of it against my lips, and his stubble against my nose. Hope he shaves today, otherwise he’s all scratchy when we kiss. He hasn’t moved. Is he dreaming? Wonder why he sleeps like that; foetal position: I like to stretch out. Oh, he wrapped around me in the night, I wonder if he remembers. Don’t think he woke up, but he certainly woke me. Thought I was being crushed! One arm around my neck and the other across my chest. Had to prise him off. Perhaps he was in a dream.

Wonder what he’s dreaming now, if he is. The way his head’s against the pillow makes me think of that day in the Student Union bar. When was that? February I think; five months ago now. He had his head against the back of the sofa then, just like that, though he hadn’t been there long (I knew he hadn’t been there long because his mug was nearly full and still steaming). He’d invited me so I’d come. I was only five minutes late but already he was reading; he’s always reading. What was it? Something I would never read. And then I thought he didn’t want me there, because he didn’t look up from his book, right up until I was nearly in front of him, though he knew I was there because he’d waved to me when I came in. But then I sat down next to him on the sofa and he put a bookmark in and I supposed he’d only been reading to the end of the page and not deliberately ignoring me.

Well we talked and we drank tea and most of the time he was looking forward, at the people coming and going I suppose, but every so often he’d ask me a question or he’d answer one, and he’d twist his head round to look at me, and the sun fell across his face through the window as it’s doing now and there was the warm smell of incense on the air. I was looking at him the whole time of course, my head lolled against the back of the sofa and my leg drawn up on the cushion, kind of twirling my hair around my finger because I was nervous. I can’t remember what we talked about, but then he asked me if I’d met Jake. I hadn’t so I said no, and he asked if I wanted to, so I said sure, why not.

Then Sam said that Jake was looking for a girlfriend, knowing that I was single, and I’d like him if I met him. I did like him, well enough, but not like I liked Sam. But he didn’t realise at the time, being a boy, being always in his books, striding around so seriously, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked me. It hurt me. It hurt me. I thought he wasn’t interested in me and that was his way of telling me, and then I’d said I’d meet Jake so I couldn’t suddenly back out, then Sam would ask why, and I’d have to say because he was trying to set us up, and Sam would ask why not, and I’d have to tell him; give the game away. I couldn’t do that: too nervous of what he’d say, how he’d change towards me. He should’ve just known really, without my saying anything, would’ve saved some trouble. Still, together now, aren’t we? Oh, why’s he still sleeping! he’s had as long as I have, and without being woken. Perhaps another kiss, on the lips, will wake him, sleeping beautiful.
Move my hand to his waist, got a brush of. There, now he’s waking too.

“Mrnah,” he says, drawing in his shoulders, friction as his hairy leg brushes mine. Smile; he’s still dreamish.

“What were you dreaming?” I ask.

“Mrah?”

Skin tightens on his waist as he shrugs. I shake gently his ribs: encourage.

“My name was Santiago, like in, like in.”

His voice is crackly then he trails into a yawn.

“Hemingway.” (like that makes a difference to me) “I was fishing on a beach, I caught a fish, started to eat it – ”

“Raw?”

“Yeah, then a bone’s in my throat and I fall onto the sand and I look up and there’s a, a lighthouse on a cliff and I’m in its shadow, ’cause the sun’s,” he yawns again, “the sun’s behind it and then I was scared. That’s it.”

“Aw.”

I pull closer, palm against his back, kiss closemouthed his lips, feel brush against my legs the tip of his. He pulls away to cough, twists round for his bedside glass. He lies back on his other side. His shoulder-blades push against the white cotton of his t-shirt. I pull myself close again so my breasts press flat against his back and I push my knees into the backs of his so there’s no space between us. I kiss the back of his neck, where his hair is fine and feels fuzzy like that white fluff some plants have. The black hairs under his belly-button are like that too and I slip my fingers under his shirt to stroke them. I kiss his neck again. Almost, now, almost ready, since the bath, if he’ll just.

“I need the toilet,” he says, getting out of bed.

I feel a breeze on my arm. Why’s he got his back to me as he puts on his dressing gown? I know what he’s hiding, felt it just now, and last night when I leaned back. Hrmpf. Perhaps we’re not ready, perhaps it’s just my. When was it last? Three weeks already? Must be. Well, that’s more reason to then, if I have to wait another week, it always makes me so. But it’ll be our first time so want it to feel right. Last night would have been good, but he was tired. I was too, but not so tired. He never does sleep well though, says he’s not used to sharing, as if I was, but you get used to it, and I like someone else there, him, a warm body.

Again, he should know without me saying, and make it feel right, ’cause if I ask then I feel like I’m begging, can’t do that, have to let it happen. Oh, he’s back. Perhaps he’ll come back to bed, no, he’s going to stand by the window. What’s he looking at? He knows what’s out there, same as ever; the concrete and the dandelions, the barbecue with rusty legs, the old shed behind it. With that light against him he looks more like an angel now than a cherub. What’s he looking at? Must be some way of telling him I think I’m ready without actually telling him. Like before, should have been some way of telling him, but then, no, I never did tell him, I had to show him, that afternoon when we read together. He’s turning. I’m waiting.

“Looks like a nice day,” he says.

“Yeah?”

I suppose he doesn’t really go for it in the morning, only at night, but I wouldn’t mind, all snug and sleepy under the duvet.

“We should go to the park later.”

Park nice.

“Okay.”

“You want some breakfast?”

“Sure.”

“Want me to bring it to you?”

“No, I’ll come.”

He drops his dressing gown on the chair, I see for a moment his boxers hanging loose before he pulls up his jeans. Hrmpf, rather stay in bed, but not alone. Least the air’s not cold. Take his gown though, in case anyone else’s up. It’s furry and smells of him. Music is that? Coming from Jake’s room. Could hear it last night in the bathroom too. Sam says he’s always listening to music, or doing something noisy, singing to himself if there’s nothing else, though he can’t sing, says he thinks it’s because he had brothers so he isn’t used to the silence. Sam likes the quiet though, gets annoyed sometimes. He asked me before what it was like having a sister, if it made me always need noise. I said I wasn’t sure, that I didn’t mind it but I didn’t need it. Then he said sometimes Jake felt like a brother to him, because they’re forced together by sharing the same house and sometimes they get on really well and sometimes they fight. It must be hard to know what brothers and sisters are like if you don’t have them, like me thinking what it would’ve been like without Claire, but I imagine it gets lonely, especially for Sam, parents divorced, his mum not around much.

Oh, the floorboards in here are cold, except where the sun’s been. Tiles in the kitchen cold too, water sloshing against the sides of the kettle.

“You want cereal?” he asks.

Nod. Can I help? Tea, yes. He likes the mug with the tiger on, I’ll have. Oh, not in the cupboard, dirty, or in someone’s room, the stripy one then. Teabags, there. Hold him now, press against him again from behind. Water in the kettle: a lake. Why’d I think of that? The dream, yes, that was it: a lake flat like a mirror. Now it begins to boil: the bath last night. Splash. Oh, his hands moving across me, gliding with the soap, stopping where my breast begins, something about that spot makes me. I almost couldn’t take it, had to lean back and kiss him, felt him pressing against the base of my spine all hard, that turned me on more. Almost could’ve turned round there and then, if there’d been more space, felt almost right, thought we might’ve afterwards.

Sam. His back’s against my cheek, cotton like the pillow. Kiss your neck again if I could reach easily, without going on tippy-toes, feel your ribs under my fingers. Suppose it’s not the same for boys there though: only sensitive in one place. Most of them anyway. Something different about Sam, way he doesn’t react always to that. Click of the kettle. He’s pouring now, but I won’t let go, not yet. He might’ve taken advantage last night when I exposed myself like that, might’ve slipped his hand down, been all fingers and forgetting about the rest of me, but not he; he carried on massaging me, soaping me all over. Not had a bath like that before, not even shared one since I was a kid, Claire in there with me, waving plastic ducks in front of me so I wouldn’t cry when Mum washed my hair.

Through to the next room mug and bowl in hand, cold milk sloshing with chocolate rings, turning pure white to marbled brown. Sam’s turning on the TV, what’s on at this time? Weekday so, Trisha I suppose, or some other talk-show. Nintendo 64 next to the screen, gathering dust as the TV whines and flashes on. Sam plays it sometimes, but Jake owns it. Talk-shows, thought so, horse racing and an old movie too. Don’t get Channel 5 so well round here. Why’s he standing up there to do it? Oh, no batteries in the remote.

“Any preference?” he asks.

Weetos in my mouth, I shake my head. He leaves Trisha on, comes to sit next to me. The sofa sinks where he sits and the tie-dye cover stretches. Who’s this now? Some love triangle: he cheated on her and got her pregnant but wants the first one? Hope I never end up on this show, no, why would I? Have to want to go on. English ones aren’t so good as the American ones, not funny like Jerry Springer. Maybe just because of the yokel accents. Perhaps they think the same about. Whose that coming downstairs, through the door? Jake. Best not look at him, he makes it too awkward. Snuggle down into dressing gown, make it tight around me, look at Sam. Sam’s looking at him. Couldn’t imagine them as brothers: too dissimilar. Neither’s speaking, just a quick nod from each at the other. Jake, he’s not looking at me, he’s going through to the kitchen. Sam’s looking at me though. Smile. He’s not always like that, Sam says, just when. I don’t think he finished but he was going to say when I was around.

Well I never led him on. We hung out. What did we do? We watched movies, he cooked for me once. I didn’t ask him to, he said, “you wanna stay for dinner?” and I said “sure,” being hungry, thinking he’d pull a pizza out the freezer, perhaps some garlic bread, then he goes and starts making some pasta dish with cheese sauce and chopped bacon, garlic bread too, and he opens a bottle of wine which, “sure, I’ll have a glass,” since he’d already opened it. I didn’t flirt; we were friends, and it was a way to spend time with Sam, since he was there with us more often than not. Did he begin to suspect then that I was in love with him? Perhaps, he said he liked it when I came over and then he said I was like a sister to him, which was an odd thing to say, but he says things like that sometimes, probably ’cause of the books he reads, maybe.

Sometimes, when Sam wasn’t there, Jake would reach for my hand as we watched a movie and I’d pull away. Well what do you say? “No, don’t do that, I don’t like you like that?” It’s just a hand, and he’d never say anything, or properly ask me out, then I could’ve said, “no,” or “I like you, but really I’m in love with Sam.” Awkward that one time when he reached once and I folded my arms, then he reached again, my hand tucked under my elbow, and started stroking my fingers. Didn’t do it long at least, but afterwards, looking at the screen, could still feel his eyes on me, wanting me to turn. Perhaps he’d have tried to kiss me then if I had, and then I could have rejected him straight, rather than just hinting. Oh, he’s coming back with tea and biscuits, biscuits for breakfast?, look at the TV. Sam’s looking at him though. They say nothing. Now he leaves, alone again, Sam, I.

It hurts him, I think, but he doesn’t say it. I wonder if they talk about me ever. Do I want them to? Depends what they say. “Got a good view of Abby’s tits in the bath last night, rubbing them down with soap.” Ugh. No, Sam’s not like that. I hope he does talk about me in a good way though. Hope he thinks about me. Do you think about me? His brow’s furrowed, he’s still thinking about Jake. Lean over and kiss him. Quick, not passionate, loving. Comfortable. He tastes of tea and milk. No, hope he doesn’t talk about me with Jake actually, Jake hates me enough already, doesn’t need to hear more from Sam. Hmm, last Weeto always so hard to get, have to chase it round the bowl with the spoon. There.

“I should get dressed,” I say now, white-brown milk emptied of Weetos.

“Yes,” he says, “then we could go to the park.”

“Mm hmm,” I say, “and take a picnic?”

“Sure, if you want, but we’ll have to go buy some stuff for it.”

~ ~ ~

Read Part Two

Anyway, I just watched The Shipping News, which is based on an Annie Prolux novel of the same name, and it is the best movie I’ve seen since… Once Upon a Time in America (not that I’m sure how many films I have seen since then). It was on BBC Two. It might not have even registered on my channel scanning, except that I recalled mention of it in one of Randy Smith’s articles in Edge magazine, where he talks about the power its narrative had had on him.

So the story basically focuses on a man, played in the film by Kevin Spacey (who I expect my reader(s) to remember from the superlative Alan Ball film American Beauty) who returns to his ancestral home in Newfoundland after losing his wife. Admittedly this does lead to the somewhat cliched outsider ingratiating himself into a tight-knit, isolated, rural community, meeting the typically eccentric locals scenario. Now this, and the slightly less credible coincidences and events that occur throughout the film, do threaten the plausibility of the plot, and echoed, for me, aspects of Terry Gilliam’s too-weird-for-its-own-good Tideland (though that may be the criticism of someone who’s been flitting between Woolf’s Modernism and Carver’s Realism rather a lot lately), but never threaten to undermine the masterful character development and the sharp, often subtly funny, dialogue.

Speaking of dialogue, the final line of the film, read as a voice-over by Kevin Spacey (much like in another brilliant movie) is perhaps the best I’ve ever heard in terms of plot resolution and simple expression. I shan’t repeat it so as not to spoil it and because it won’t make sense outside the film’s context, but the film is worth seeing just for that line, in my opinion anyway. Perhaps people won’t agree that a single line can make a whole movie, but I feel the same way about the “I’ve seen things you people couldn’t imagine” monologue from Blade Runner, or the stolen On the Waterfront “I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am” monologue from Raging Bull.

Well, that’s about all I have to say on The Shipping News, at this time of night, except that I recommend it, it gets my seal of approval. Now, I’m going to go purchase the novel off Amazon. Good night,

Henry.

“Dragonfly,” he said.

“Mm?” said Jenny.

“Dragonfly,” Mike repeated.

“What about it?”

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

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

“Oh,” said Jenny.

“I guess they used to hatch there.”

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

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

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

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

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

“At what?” said Jenny.

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

“Oh,” said Jenny.

A breeze drew back the leaves in the tree above.

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

Mike looked at her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” Jenny said, “it’s cruel.”

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

“Mm,” Jenny said.

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow was a film I wanted to see for a long time, having first heard about it in the booklet for the Grandaddy album The Broken Down Comforter Collection. One of their instrumental songs, my favourite on the album, Fentry, begins with a sample from the movie and in the CD notes they credit as being taken from “a nearly perfect movie made in the seventies.” Eventually I found the movie on Amazon as a Region One DVD for considerably more than I would usually pay for a DVD (about £19 I think), so I bought it, and watched it, I think, on New Year’s eve.

“Nearly perfect” is as good a description as any, but it’s a sad movie as well, one of the saddest movies I’ve ever seen, but in a good way more than just a depressing way. In a way it’s a love story, but not a romance, just about human devotion and, more than anything, human suffering. The title comes from a line at the end of the original story which sums up the main theme of the story:

“The lowly and invincible of the earth – [who] endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

It’s the kind of story that I like, that Hemingway and Carver also write, of the struggles of ordinary men living their lives.

Both the film and the story have well-written lines, though they are narrated in quite different ways, but perhaps my favourite passage from Faulkner’s original story is this one:

“Quick told it, sprawled on the bench beyond Uncle Gavin, loose-jointed, like he would come all to pieces the first time he moved, talking in a lazy sardonic voice, like he had all night to tell it in and it would take all night to tell it. But it wasn’t that long. It wasn’t long enough for what was in it. But Uncle Gavin says it don’t take many words to tell the sum of any human experience; that somebody has already done it in eight: He was born, he suffered and he died.

“”It was pap that hired him. But when I found out where he had come from, I knowed he would work, because folks in that country hadn’t never had time to learn nothing but hard work. And I knowed he would be honest for the same reason: that there wasn’t nothing in his country a man could want bad enough to learn how to steal it. What I seemed to have underestimated is his capacity for love. I reckon I figured that, coming from where he come from, he never had none a-tall, and for that same previous reason – that even the comprehension of love had done been lost on him back down the generations where the first one of them had had to take his final choice between the pursuit of love and the pursuit of keeping on breathing.”"

I suppose the real brilliance of Faulkner in this story is the way he tackles these big themes of love and human experience in such simple terms, with such a simple narrative, although that seems fairly common to fiction set in the American South when you consider superlative works such as To Kill a Mockingbird (which remains my favourite novel), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Green Mile.

Now I suppose I ought either to eat or analyse this story. I recommend you, reader, if you feel so inclined, to check out either version of Tomorrow, particularly if you’re in America, since the Region DVD comes with the original story.

“Classics are the books nobody wants to read, but everybody wants to have read.”

the second, rather more blunt one, is:

“Big book: big bore.”

I love novels: I’m reading three at the moment (although perhaps the fact that I start new novels halfway through ones I’m already reading suggests that I find something lacking in the ones I have begun reading, or that I feel impatient for the end of the novel, for the experience of reading to have ceased and the experience of having read to have begun), but there’s definitely something very attractive about the short story.

For Raymond Carver, and I suspect too for Ernest Hemingway, and presumably many other of the short story writers who made their living not soley through their fiction, the attraction was that the short story “could be written and read in one sitting.” This was important to Carver through necessity, because he only had so much time for writing, but doesn’t that resonate strongly with our current proliferation and importance on instant entertainment? When there’s so many quickfire bursts of audio-visual experience at our fingertips, who is inclined to commit the twenty or so hours it takes to read a novel to sitting there, taking in printed words?

I know a lot of people, even on my writing course, who say they should read more, and, even in the university environment I’m in, I suspect there are a lot of people who don’t read it at all. Certainly I myself begrudge the time it takes to read a novel, not because there are necessarily better things I could be doing with my time, just because it takes so long. I have about twenty books lined up on my shelf that I’m looking forward to reading, and a lot of these are big six-hundred-pages-plus books, like Middlemarch, Finnegans Wake and Don Quixote. I just don’t know where I’m going to find the time for all those. Added to which, I feel that I’m quite a slow reader. I don’t know why, but if I read fast I feel like I miss to much. Sometimes I feel like I can write at the same speed I read, if I have my ideas planned out beforehand.

The other problem I have with novels, which the short story seems to escape, is the problem of comfort. It’s so difficult to get comfortable when reading for the extended periods a novel requires because it’s so awkward and unnatural to hold a page and tilt your head at an angle you can see the words. I can sit like that for maybe ten minutes before my neck starts to ache or my leg goes to sleep or whatever. Italo Calvino discusses this problem in the opening pages of his novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

With the short story I also find there’s a certain exhiliration to the narrative that is different in quality to that felt when reading a novel, like the difference between looking at a Polaroid picture and at a grand painting, just because the narrative has to be so fast and tight to get all of the story across. It’s nice to be able to sit down and absorb a complete narrative experience “in a single sitting”, rather than piecing together meaning across a series of readings to come to a complete understanding of the characters or the plot.

Of course, both Hemingway and Carver are exceptional writers, and their minimalist style is well suited to the short story; I couldn’t imagine Carver writing a novel, and I have not yet read any of Hemingway’s novels. What I find particularly interesting about Carver is the contrast between him and Virginia Woolf (whose Mrs. Dalloway I am also reading). Their styles couldn’t be more different: one uses the fewest words possible to convey meaning, while the other uses thes most adjectives and subordinate clauses to convey a totalness of experience, but they pretty much write about the same things, just at different points. What I mean is, Carver in his stories often examines the single, often minute, event that changes the life of his protagonists. For example in Neighbors there is the husband and wife finding out that they both separately liked to go over to the neighbours’ house and imagine what it was like to be the neighbours, and this will have obvious, though ambiguous, repercussions for their relationship. Virginia Woolf too focuses on relationships, but she examines them at great length after such an event, looking at all the repercussions and how they have affected the characters.

I realise this entry is getting a little ecclectic because I didn’t really plan it out: I was just hit with this sudden appreciation of short stories. What I think my ultimate point is, is that, though I have always assumed novels to be, if you will, the ultimate written form; complete wholistic entities, that every writer should aspire to, I’m beginning to realise, after five years of writing them, that the short story can be a poignant and fulfilling narrative medium as well.

“Is Elle in?” I asked.

“Rob, right?”

I nodded.

“No, she’s not in,” Nick said, “I think she went to college.”

“Oh,” I said, “she doesn’t usually today.”

“No,” Nick said, “she had to hand something in or something.”

“Oh.”

I rocked back on my heels, pushed my thumbs into my jeans pockets, looked at the door-frame.

“I think she said she wouldn’t be long. Have you tried texting her?”

“I don’t have any credit.”

Nick looked past me for a moment. I turned to see a lady in a brown coat walking a long-haired dog. I turned back round.

“Do you want to come in and wait for her?” Nick asked.

“Sure,” I said.

Nick stood to the side and let me pass. He closed the door behind me. I stood in the hallway not knowing where to go. Looking down I saw a pair of Elle’s high-heeled shoes, not the ones she wore every day, in between pairs of trainers, some worn-out converse and some slippers. I bent down to untie my own shoes. Nick walked past me and stood on the stairs. I looked up at him. He was skinny. I put my shoes with the pile and followed him upstairs.

“Do you want to sit in my room?” He asked.

“I don’t mind waiting in Elle’s,” I said.

“She might. I don’t know. You can if you want.”

He shrugged and walked into his own room where I could hear a TV playing. I looked through the open door into Elle’s darkened room. Some clothes lay on the bed, a bra among them. I walked into Nick’s room.

He sat on his bed with a laptop across his legs and his back against the wall. On the TV there was a cooking programme. He looked up when I came in and patted the bed next to him. I looked at the office chair by his desk. It was piled with clothes. I sat next to him on the edge of the bed and looked at the TV. I didn’t know Nick that well, only that he went to university in Nottingham and he was older than Elle. I’d met him a couple of times before, but he usually wasn’t around.

“Check this out,” he said, suddenly picking up the remote and turning the volume down on the TV. He nodded towards his laptop. I moved back on the bed and closer to him. He tilted the laptop towards me and hit the play button on a movie-editing program. Our shoulders touched as I leaned in to look. A video started playing: an animation of a cartoon dinosaur going to a supermarket. Some jaunty music played in the background. It only lasted half a minute.

“Did you make that?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Nick said, “it’s part of my project for this semester.”

“What course do you do?”

“Film and Animation.”

I looked at his hands, gripping the sides of the laptop. They too were skinny. On his wrist he wore a music festival bracelet and some brightly coloured beads. He smelled of shower gel.

“What’s uni like?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“It’s good,” he said, “you meet new people, you go out and get drunk with them, you do some work. Are you in the same year as my sister?”

He looked at me.

“Yeah,” I said.

I looked at him. There was something delicate about him, like plasticine moulded over wire. He continued to look at me. He had the same eyes as Elle. I looked down at the laptop again.

“You want to see another of my videos?” He asked.

“Okay,” I said.

He brought up a folder and clicked on a file. This time it was a stop-motion video of a wooden man running and jumping over hurdles. It was about the same length as the last.

“How long did that take?” I asked.

“A couple of weeks,” he replied. “That was when I was just learning how to do it.”

“Oh,” I said.

I looked at the silent TV, still showing people in coloured aprons running around a kitchen, mixing things in bowls. I could feel Nick looking at me again. I turned to face him. He leaned towards me with the slightest motion. His breath smelt of toothpaste. I nearly pulled away. I had never kissed a boy before. His tongue felt slimy against mine, but tasted of mint. I was a little repulsed, a little excited. I thought about Elle.

Nick pulled away. He put the laptop down on the floor, then kind of pulled me down so we were lying on the bed, facing each other. I didn’t resist. He kissed me again, briefly, without tongues this time. I looked at his eyes, the same eyes as Elle.

“I’m not gay,” I said, after a few minutes passed in silence.

“No,” he said.

He started to play with my hair, then stroked my head gently, like you would a cat. His hips were only a few inches from mine. I barely felt anything. I sat up and looked at him. He looked comfortable. I was going to say ‘sorry’, instead I asked

“Do you think I have a chance with your sister?”

“I really couldn’t say,” he replied.

He sat up, picked his laptop up from the floor and began working again. I looked at him. Without looking away from the screen he reached for the remote and passed it to me. I took it and continued to watch him. He turned to smile at me, then looked back at the screen. I looked past him. Elle stood in the doorway.

“I thought those were your shoes I saw in the hallway,” she said, her dark eyes on me.

She was wearing that navy blue double-breasted coat of hers. I put the remote down and stood up. I could taste mint.