Found in an old notebook in the middle of a French oral exercise

Sitting on the floor in underwear and big jumpers and cardigans and blankets and thick socks
We cheered the fireplace to lick the bricks and warm our toes and noses and help our soggy denims dry a little faster.
Matthew brought the wine, cheap and dusty, and there was only one glass for us.
My side was stained red lipstick, his side dotted eyeliner beard.
His girlfriend sat in the chair clutching the mug of mixed spirits she’d smuggled down the road
tossing crude remarks and age old teases my way and his way as we sat cross-legged on the floor.
Excited he babbled new projects and stories and I told him my own.
Did you send it out?
I sent it out.
Doesn’t count if you don’t send it out.
I know, I know.
Our angel steps from the kitchen, halo of energy-saving light bulbs breaking our gloom.
She brings bread and peanut butter and homemade jam.
She brings multipack crisps and abandoned biscuits and mints from Canadian cousins.
We are hiding from Halloween, remains of costumes lie on the floor, parties were found lacking.
We have sought peace for a second, a pause, a breath.
Screams from outside in the purple night, the orange streetlight night, can’t reach us here.
We are on strike from reveling, peering out tired with hangover eyes.
The wine makes my eyelids drooop but Matthew lights up, laughing and waving his skinny wrists.
His girlfriend remembers a half-forgotten story and flaps her chicken arms.
He staggers over and falls on her mouth.
Our angel frowns over the fireplace, frowns over the crumbs, frowns over the spills
But she isn’t mad, she’s just tired.
Our angel rushes hummingbird busy. We warn one day her wings will simply fall right out of her back.
We curl up like a pile of cats and kittens in this Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead
Day of the Dead
Evil Dead
and the Sin Eater at our angel’s insistence
and the Blob at my own insistence.
Perhaps saying something about our tastes in men.
Our ragged friend in the chair gnashes her teeth at her taste in man and asks if there is any vodka left.
Also she is hungry.
For cheerios.
Will she settle for pizza?
Matthew pulls me up, popping my shoulder, and untangles four legs of sodden jean, two for me, two for him. We set out intrepid voyagers to the off-license by way of Domino’s with smeared costume make up and begged monkey nuts and penny sweets from laughing students who dropped their loot down university avenue, trailed down university gardens and then we were assaulted by ghosts.

Dinner at the Doherty’s

“She’s not home, Tom. Did she know you were coming?”
“I called.”

The two stood on their respective sides of the door. Tom tried to keep his head straight by holding the gaze of the cat licking itself on the stairs behind Mrs Doherty’s lined smile.

“I’m pretty sure I called.”

Mrs Doherty nodded slowly, her grip on the door slackening as she shuffled in her slippers. She wanted to shut the door on this tragedy of a teenage lover and she looked like she very much wanted to shut the door on him. Tom sweated in his jacket under the porch light and the stares of too many pairs of eyes lurking behind the matriarch’s bulk. Every twitch released a stale, sweet stench from the creases of the leather. His arm swung out suddenly and caught at the longest curl at the back of his head. The woman sighed at the nervous habit and stood ever so slightly aside.

“We were just sitting down to dinner. Why don’t you join us?”
“Oh no, no. Thank you. I couldn’t.”
“You can wait for Suzanna and wait on a full stomach.” With further such maternal logic Tom was ushered into the Doherty residence and found himself seated between the eldest and the youngest of the family. Directly across from him, wedged between the parents, sat Amelia Doherty. Amelia was fourteen years old with long skinny legs that kicked him from salad to dessert and a pile of the same streaky blonde hair that adorned Suzanna’s hot-tempered head. His leg jerked every time Amelia’s clammy foot collided with his knee but there was little he could do surrounded and scrunitised as he was.

“Amelia,” her mother elongated the vowels giving her an air above the neighbourhood. “You haven’t touched your dinner.” Twice more Mrs Doherty informed the girl with an edge of an ugly scene dancing through the air until everyone paused with ice cream cold spoons raised. Half-way through the sharpened third time, Amelia stuck her finger into the middle of her mashed potato and the family plus one stared deep into the hole she created.

“May I be excused?”
“No, you may not.”

The conversation turned to the year ahead when Tom and Suzanna faced colleges and some pretense of maturity. Decisions were weighed, comparisons made, advice given and all the while Amelia was digging her toes into Tom’s shins and staring venomously at her heaving plate dinner plate.

“May I ask what you’re doing here, Tom?” Amelia arched her faint eyebrows and pulled her face into a miniature sneer. She was shushed in all directions until it sounded like a warning snake or a slowing train. She merely shifted her gaze from peas to boy until the latter shot out an arm and caught the longest curl on the back of his head.

“Your mother invited me.”
“Yes, but what are you doing here, Tom?”
“Amelia, that’s enough.” Her mother wanted to command her daughter to eat but feared a scene in front of company. Nevertheless she tried to hiss a quiet warning while her husband resumed the conversation. Amelia turned slowly, tugging a little on her long sleeves that hung off her wrists.

“You don’t frighten me, Mother.” Amelia had always unsettled Mrs Doherty. In her quietest, most secret moments she wondered whether they were even related. She remembered much of the birth of course, but the nurses had whisked her away so suddenly. She wondered now if there hadn’t been some mistake.

“Now, darling. I’m not trying to frighten you. Silly. But you must eat something or you’ll get sick. You don’t want that. Do you?” She asked too forcefully, barely concealing the anxiety or the far greater curiosity. Did she want to die? Or was this a smaller worry, a worry dealt with in magazines and on TV these days. The size zero debate. Such a comfort to be found in that word. Maybe she wanted to be a model like other girls. Compromises could be bought: a burger for a portfolio. Macaroni for an agent.

“I am on strike.”

The table turned to the little protester and the youngest daughter stole a spoonful of dessert from the guest’s plate. In the silence that followed, none of them dared to swallow. Even the cat beneath the table seemed to hold its breath. Tom burst forth spraying his plate with confused flecks of half-swallowed crumbs with a confounded:

“Why?”
“Why are you here, Tom?”
“To see Suzanna.”
“But she’s not here, Tom.” She spat his name with that tiny sneer that so contorted her face.
“She must have forgot.”
“Forgot about you.” She clasped her skeleton fingers under her pointed chin. Her skin was faintly yellow as she leaned forward into the light a little more. The puffy bags under her eyes were so grey they bordered on purple but her eyes shone. Two car lamps piercing Tom’s denial. “Do you want to know where she is, Tommy? Want to know how she could have forgotten when you called this afternoon to remind her? Aren’t you the slightest bit curious?”

“She’s on a date, Thomas. I’m very sorry.”
“She is not,” Amelia hissed in her mother’s direction. She finally held her legs steady; her biggest toe clutching his jeans. She scooped a fingerlength of cold potato. “Our most loved angel of a sister will most likely be on her way home from the clinic.” She viewed the congealing mess on her finger skeptically. “If all went well she will have removed a certain unwanted growth from her greedy belly.”

“Enough!” The cutlery rattled along the table as Mr Doherty slammed his hand onto the wood. “Go to your room, disgusting girl. Suzanna is on a date, God knows why you are here.” Tom faltered under the man’s attack but Amelia saved him with an audible suck of her potato-heavy finger.

“I have not finished my dinner.”

I tend to work out storylines when I’m in bed. Or in a general lying down position when it is dark. Not always convenient. It means there are a lot of notes on just about anything that resembles paper. I was looking for something I had written in my notebook (that is really my diary but diary sounds so DEAR DIARY that I hate to use the word) and I deciphered “She leaned on the bridge beside an old woman’s elbow. Eiffel Towered beside them and below them in a reflection broken by a series of stones dropped from the sighing woman. Her daughter jumped. Umbrella carried her away. But she won’t jump. Not today. Every splash made Marie flinch but she had to admit it was romantic. Even the mother admitted that.”

Which is fine as notes go. We’ve got key points, half images, basically a whole chapter right there. But the thing is I really can’t remember why and it’s really the whys I need.

I followed it with “Jealously has a handbag of spite. Her skintight dress has a label reads Bitterness. I’ve personified feelings. How nice for me.” I wish I wrote down the things I really need.

Oh Casualty, you do have your uses. Entertainment is not one of them.

She slid down the kitchen cabinets, the small of her back falling into the grooves of the door detailing. Her left leg curled awkwardly to the side but she was too distracted by the bottle protruding from her neck to straighten it. Her eyes glassed, swirling with inky mascara and the smallest of gasps escaped from her bubbling lips. A shudder pushed the blood out faster, pooling from her neck and sticking in her hair on its way to the linoleum floor. It boiled up through the neck of the bottle too, dribbling out the mouth like thickened wine. That’s when he started to laugh. Tears streaming down his cheeks, bent up double, holding his gut, laughing.

“Shall I get a glass? Hmm? Want a glass, sweetheart?” His face creased into a mess of lines, laughing his filthy ass off. “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that. What did you say?”

But she couldn’t croak out anything anymore. Repeating herself seemed a waste of energy. Instead she gurgled in his general direction, not caring if he understood the sentiment. And all he did was laugh as her red stained the floor, dripping from the bottle and clotting through her hair.

I shouldn’t write after watching so many noirs late at night

Chapter Third

“You really oughta wear a seatbelt.”

I raised my firecracker headache to see David swinging a baseball bat round his Mexican cartel boots. I tried to laugh but my throat slipped hollow coughs.
“They lose more lives than they save.” My tongue probed my mouth but despite my face throbbing so hard it awakened muscles I’d never been aware of, I was intact. So too was the rest of my body. I was merely tied to a chair, minus jeans and shoes, in what looked like the leaky basement you learned to fear in films and novels of wrong place, wrong times. He pushed my forehead back with the flattened top of the bat, the abrasive varnish knocking flakes of dead skin down to my knees.
“Might have saved you some pain.”
Sneaking stares around me I noticed I was in a conservatory, blacked out by heavy curtains. An ominous knocking I’d attributed to the bat on the floor came from the swinging door. I spied a tiny black patent foot kicking it back and forth.
“Hey! HEY! You! This boy’s crazy!” David started to laugh; the bat swung a breeze above my barely protected balls and I shouted louder, shuffling away. A curly-topped smile peered round the heavy folds of fabric. Freckles tumbled over the floor as skinny little fingers wormed through the knots about my wrists. She was tying them tighter. The little girl jumped on my lap and kissed my cheek.
“Davey, he’s funny. Can we keep him?”
“I hope so, princess.” He sat cross-legged now in front of me, the heels of his boots clutching the bat. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just have to know I can trust you.”
“If you’re divine, surely you know already.”
“Don’t act like you know anything about me.” The kid pulled my ears for my impertinence. “All I need to know is whether I can trust you or not.”
“Yeah. You can trust me.”
“I don’t know. Are you convinced, princess?” She shook her head. “No, neither am I.” Thunk, thwack, doomk. My shins burned and my knees shivered and flinched and swelled.
Can.
DOOMK
I.
THUNNK.
Trust.
KAKUNK.
You?
Sssssssssh past my ear, the edges curling into the drum, into safety.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. YES. YES.
Two tiny thumbs wormed up my nostrils and pulled me piggy, gurgling happy. Those scuffed patent shoes stood hard on my thighs, wobbling on the fat and slipping too close as I was conquered. A sticky kiss on my eyelids granted my freedom as David sliced the rope around my wrists and threw my trousers over my head.
“Come on, princess. I want to say thank you to your mummy.”

I met him in the kitchen where a hunched grey woman poured me a glass of orange juice and led her tiny torturer to her nap. David pushed a plate of biscuits towards me.
“She makes them herself. She amazing, always feeding me. Rent’s high but it’s worth it. Try one.” I crunched one away in seconds.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I have a plan. I need you but I have to trust you.”
“So you took me to a strange girl’s bedroom, stole her underwear, knocked me out cold and kidnapped me?”
“Yeah.” He licked the icing off a biscuit and placed it back on the plate. “You’re still here.”

So I was. He spoke at length about the increasing need for him to know Natasha. He was worried; he needed to be prepared for the worst scenario. And for that he needed her. And to get her he needed my help.

So our first-draft plan was this:

Step one
Find an excuse to invite her away with us
Step two
Convince her step one is not a terrible and creepy idea.
Step three
Hot Ruski sex (I’m paraphrasing).

I still wasn’t sure why I had to be a part of the plan.
You killed my mother.
Oh yeah. I owed this guy something.

So many drafts, so much utter nonsense

Two black circles watched as I turned up the driveway. They stared over my head as I checked inside the bins and pulled the newspaper from the letter box.

“Come here, quick!” Jen called from behind the circles. “They’re still sitting there.”

“Have you been here all day?” I ran my hand along her soft stomach, feeling the weight she still hadn’t lost shift against my added pressure. She squirmed slightly but let me stay there.

“What do you think they’re doing?” She was avoiding the question.

“I don’t know,” I sighed into the dark down on the back of her neck. “What does it look like they’re doing?”

“Plotting,” she bounced slightly, her muscles tightening between the back of the couch and my chest.

You know I could have written her completely silent and then the twist is she’s a cat. Now that I’ve thought it, it’s all I’m going to think about and god he should not be groping a cat. Although…

Oh, oh now it’s gone. Well that didn’t last very long at all. Dang.

Drop a coin into the sea

I think I have a mental block against similes. I don’t know why but I’ve noticed I rarely use them. It could be that I find it easier that way to avoid cliché but I think it’s why I can bogged down imagerywise. I mean it’s kinda difficult to read anything that’s metaphor after metaphor but I have this leaning towards certainty. Something is something else rather than just being like something else. Means I have a whole lot of solid certain images that make up this wishy-washy abstract nonsense. I suppose I should put it on the list of things I have difficulty with and thus must overcome. Self-improvement is such a tiresome thing.

I feel like I am constantly trying to recreate. I went for a walk yesterday before it rained, same route as I’d walked a few weeks before when everything made some semblance of sense in my head. It wasn’t that I was unhappy but there was something missing. I think sometimes I seek so hard to recreate in order to wipe clean the original. Let’s not go psychological. Anyway my point is there is something off and I can’t describe it. Therein lies the trouble.

Straight, no chaser

We sat indian style round the fat wooden table. The table with my initials scored on the underside, embraced in a love heart and joined with a series of others. AF, KW, M-E J. Carly wondered that I didn’t start a new heart for every girl I committed to wood. I was saving that for her, was my answer every time, followed by a twist of her square nose. It was the table burnt in the middle from the candles I’d bought to set the mood for my first girlfriend and forgot about sometime after she removed her bra but before her fingers found my belt buckle. We sat around this table as bottles of varying emptinesses towered above us and Carly’s hair draped into a sticky puddle.
“We have successfully,” her voice stumbled and shook along the wood towards me as she steadied herself against the hiccup. “Drunk a shot of everything.” Her arms twitched like a marionette out to each side to wave at the bottle line-up. “What now?”
The answer lay in the cupboard. I crawled, not daring to raise my head up too high and chance the dizziness after the first time, and returned triumphant with round two.
“Chocolate or strawberry?”
She blindly snatched and snapped the top. Thick bitter gloop twisting around her tonsils and she cursed me for buying dark rather than milk. “My teeth are fuzzing,” sticky words, dribbling from her lips. We swapped. The strawberry fell from the nozzle faster, painting her lips red and shiny. The chocolate clogged my gums. I was still scraping it off the valleys and peaks of my mountainous molars by the time Carly had filled her shot glass with melted butter and mine with tuna brine. 1, 2, 3 throw back, don’t throw up, slam victory onto the table that seemed to swell up higher as the night drew on. I swallowed one shot of single cream, one shot of mustard and water, two shots of cherry mouthwash, the contents of a decaffeinated teabag and four-day old pasta pot water, my palette cleansed inbetween with a mouthful of tequila. For her part, Carly devoured the best part of one shot of mayonnaise, one shot paprika mixed with vodka, one shot taken from the glass of water under my roommate’s bed complete with what she chose to believe was sock fluff, one shot of ground coffee and the water from a jar of jalapeño peppers. She rinsed her mouth out with flat lemonade and whisky.
“You’re one behind me, Carlos.” My mouth tingled from the mouthwash but nothing had removed the tuna breath and she wrinkled her nose at my every word.
“There is nothing left! Nothing that won’t kill me and I refuse to die for you, Scott Bradley.”
“Shot of piss.”
“God! That’s disgusting!” Her hand covered her eyes and her shoulders shook with another hiccup. “Yours or mine?”
“What’s worse?”
“Can’t answer. I answer and you’ll make it be that one.” She groaned and pressed her forehead along the edge of the table. Her silence gave my tongue time to feel the layers eroding my throat. Her glass rolled along the rug leaving a trail of green coffee-spotted stains. “It counts as two though and you have to drink whatever I say.”

So it was that we sat indian style round the table with all my hidden loves and a space for the last and only, while the one working lamp shone through my urine and cast a golden glow over the residue of our game. She broke the moment with a moan as she gingerly wrapped her spindly fingers round the glass.
“It’s warm,” she elongated the adjective with a sputtering cry. I offered to bring her ice, joked about refrigeration, but she kept shaking her head and exhaling seriously. 1, 2, 3 and she gagged twice, dropped the glass between her thighs and the vodka bottle disappeared down her throat. Tongue out and her hands curling up to her eyes, a shudder ran through the length of her body.
“I hate you.”
“What’s my shot, piss-drinker?”
“Fuck. You.” She drew her knees up and adjusted her top several times; her face sloped into a slippery smile and the mouthwash tingle was spreading through my stomach. “You have to drink a shot of your own ejaculate. Sperm shot.”
“No.” I considered it for a moment. “No. It doesn’t count as one and then you’ll be behind and I can’t top it. Not without repeating.”
“Do you forfeit?”
“No.”
“So you’ll do it?”
“No. Pick something else.” My toes pushed her stinking glass around the floor, pushing against her legs. “Pick something else.” But she didn’t say anything even when I kicked her. Instead she slumped down violently and shuffled under the table. Her legs quivered along with the shapes her fingers drew on the underside. AF, KW, M-E J, HP, R and D and other half-remembered alphabet markers. I dived under and rested my head on her stomach. The tingling was shifting further through me, dragging a wake of cramp. I was torn between wanting two things: to take up position by the toilet bowl or to work my head down a little further and breathe in the lacy edge of Carly’s underwear. She stretched out a hand and came back with my glass.
“Sperm shot,” she rattled it over my head. “Shot of sperm.”
“You are a disgusting girl. Truly revolting.” We wrestled claustrophobic in the confined safety of the undertable until the glass cracked under our weight. Seizing the biggest wedge Carly dragged her initials into the wood.
“So you’ll remember I was here, at least.” The heart I drew around her was crooked and angular but it made her smile fall with her hands about my neck.
“Like I could forget,” and I sank towards her mouth. Her lips formed a tight seal around my gums and she spat a shot of burning piss-spit up through my teeth. 1, 2, 3 throw it back and round three began, wriggling out of our clothes watched by all the girls I ever kissed.
“I love you,” I whispered against her ear and she wriggled away from my breath.
“Then we’re going to need a new glass.”

Today it writes

I finished a book this morning, a book with a satisfactory ending so I was in a good mood. Getting up and washed and dressed didn’t ruin it and it’s one of those mornings out there that makes everything taste better. I have a craving for marmalade now. But, alas, we have none. Not even any honey. I made do with toast and sunshine.

And I’m at that point in the story when everything I write is perfect. I don’t care that I haven’t read over it yet and that my first paragraph is the first paragraph of something completely different, at this moment I am bloody good. Really that’s all that matters.

I think I just gave a book an erection!

Oh imagery, you so crazy. I don’t know why I associate with you, dragging my reputation into the dirt as you do.