Unfinished Story #2

I’ve sprawled out on the seat of the train, but I don’t know this yet.

There’s the sound of white noise. An intense, thunderous burst of hisses and booms - my eyes open and immediately I’m groping at the control panel in my wrist.

“F***ing thing,” I say.

Digging my nails further into the skin I manage to switch off the main circuit. A hush as my eyes adjust to the empty carriage.

Silver walls dully reflect the artificial light. The air is murky and damp. Strange, as these trains are usually air conditioned. It must be on the blink. That or a deliberate act of vandalism.

My hand moves to the holster under my coat, and my gun is still there. I take it out, checking the settings, then lay back, gazing up at the ceiling’s videoscreen to see an image of doves flying above. A moment later they morph into bats, then stars, then footballs, and then as the map of our progress is displayed in a brilliance of colour I see that we’ve just past Kowloon.

“Shit.”

I sit up, look left and right to double check that I am alone. A humming from the train replaces the silence, and as I stand the humming becomes louder. My stress levels have increased and there’s the beginnings of a headache.

“What the hell?”

Instinctively I look to the control panel in my wrist to see how long I was out, but it’s off, because I switched it off, and when I painfully turn it back on using the manual lever the display reads four zeros, which blink at me stupidly.

I press the call button and a distorted image of Frank appears on screen for all but a few seconds before fading into nothingness.

“F***ing thing,” I say again. So what now?

Unfinished Story #1

Nothing overly special going on in my last class. I write a couple of sentences on the board, then get them to repeat a few times in between throwing a ball at each other. They take out their books, write a few more similar sentences, do the spelling test, we read a story about a cat getting stuck up a tree, play a game of Marco Polo and then I’m outta there.

It’s Friday night and I’m in the mood to get wasted. Like there’s anything else to do? I hear myself thinking. Heading home amongst once so unfamiliar surroundings, I marvel at how quickly one adjusts to this new environment. Crowds of dark, smiling faces, side stools selling everything from fried intestines to confectionated chicken feet to mango and ice cream kebabs. I purchase a king sized plastic cup of tapioca milk tea; already immune to the stink of steaming, putrid drains, I happily sip at my beverage, dodging through the rush of scooters, taxis, bicycles and car horns. If you’ve ever been there you know the score. We’re in any Asian city so I may as well leave it at that. You’re far from home, and how quickly us foreigners fall into the expected stereotype of becoming alcoholics in a distant land. A niche we fit into so well. For those of us who are able to survive out here for more than a year of this weirdly addictive loneliness, it is but a necessity.

Beneath towering Skyscrapers, I continue my journey home. Attractively modern buildings mix with shorter, more hastily built concrete obscenities - and these in turn seem out of place next to the few remaining ancient temples that shine with a proud but humble determination amongst the glittering neon lights. Wading through this regular conglomerate of ancient and modern, of past, present and future, I’m making my way into a Seven-Eleven to grab a bottle of local medicine wine, a preheated chicken burger and packet of chocolate corn chips. For me the place is a whirl of incomprehensible language, both audible and visual, but being used to such an environment, I’ve found there’s something relaxing about it too. I stand apart, and mostly I’m ignored. I’m like a ghost, coming from a different world, another dimension, and due to my ignorance I’m able to remain in that world apart. I slide silently amongst the other customers, happily immune to the surrounding babble. This is the way it’s always been, and this is the way I like it.

Whilst queuing up to pay, I’m therefore disturbed and rather put out when I receive a tap on the shoulder from a girl standing behind me who’s keen to ask where I’m from.

“Where are you from?” she blurts, in a twangy accent. High spirited, false friendliness; it’s

Story 30 - The Wooden Bicycle

There was this one time years ago when I saw a bicycle that was made completely of wood. The pedals, chain, handle bars and everything. Even this wooden bicycle bell which sort of rattled when I used it.

I was outside my friend’s house, who wasn’t my best friend, although he lived across the street. There was an alleyway and if you walked up about halfway you’d find a house on your right whose garden was overgrown with weeds and the gate was all rotten, with a distinctive smell I can still remember now. A nice fragrance that came from all the plants I suppose. The whole alley smelt like this and it all, the scent, definitely adds to my memory of the bicycle.

I was in the garden outside his front door one day, calling on him to see if he wanted to go out to play.

It was before I’d even rung the bell that I was looking all over this strange creation. The same size as a normal bike; at least as any normal bike was to me at the time – now I have no idea. Brown, wooden, not shiny or anything…

My friend came to the door and I asked about it as soon as he answered and he said it was his brother’s. I knew at once he meant the brother who’d died but being a child I didn’t feel any need to move away from the subject so I carried on talking and asking if it was ok to ride, if he’d ever ridden it and how come I hadn’t seen it before. In spite of my enthusiasm though, he simply replied that his dad was using it for something without answering any of my questions. I still don’t know if anyone ever rode the thing.

I’d been in my friend’s house sitting in his front room when he’d first told me about his brother. Can’t remember exactly what we were doing in there ‘cause he was much more of a playing outside on the street or in the woods kind of friend so it was unusual in a way for me to be in his front room on this or any occasion. There was this picture of a guy standing next to a motorbike looking like some kind of hero or film star and it might’ve even been black and white. When I’d asked my friend who it was in the picture he’d said that it was his older brother and that he’d died in a motorbike accident.

So anyway, my friend called back to his mum that it was me at the door and he was going out and then we were sort of back in the alleyway walking to the end into the park with the swings and slide and we hung around there for a while before going to call on another of our friends called Wayne Stevens who had a younger brother we also played with from time to time. We went round their house for a bit and played with toy cars in their front room; their mum made us a sandwich each. After that I remember us, the four of us were playing cricket in their driveway.

It was a nice day actually. And I never saw the bicycle again until about three or four years later when my friend was having a kind of garden sale which would’ve been a garage sale if they’d had a garage but they didn’t. They were moving to another place up the other side of London and getting rid of some of the crap they didn’t need. I’d forgotten all about the bicycle but there it was lying under their apple tree next to an old rocking horse and as soon as it caught my eye the memory of seeing it a few years before came flooding back to me. Suddenly I could feel myself standing there knocking at my friend’s door and playing in the park, woods or round each other’s houses, playing with Star Wars toys and Transformers, watching cartoons and all those things we used to do.

Things were different then of course. Like, I was still mates with almost all of the same people (in fact I think his garden sale was the beginning of my first experience saying goodbye to any of my friends) but the stuff we did was… well I must’ve been about twelve or thirteen by then.

I think at that time a typical social experience so to speak would have been football after school, computer games at youth club, with the odd night of cigarettes and cider on the way home.

Before even announcing my presence to my friend or his family I’d already picked up the bicycle from the grass and was looking at it remembering stuff about my friend’s brother, how he’d died and everything in a road accident.

The bike was still in a fairly new sort of condition. A polished wooden seat, wooden spokes, and instead of tyres the rims of the wheels were thick with a darker coloured wood.

A bicycle once belonging to a boy, who somewhere had long ago rotted in his grave, was still here in the house where he’d lived. Like, here it still was, surrounded by neighbours slowly drifting around the garden, hunting through boxes of household items, possessions spread across the grass.

And the way the bike was now patiently sitting there propped up on its wooden stand, avoiding, not partaking in all the commotion surrounding it, it seemed sort of beautiful; but lonely too in a funny sort of way. And I remember it seemed weird, a little wrong how they were selling the thing. In some ways it was like someone’s heart or his soul which was being forgotten, neglected and discarded.

To be honest the whole thing made me feel a bit sick.

Story 29 - Bears

I’ve always been scared of bears. Ever since I was a kid. There was this TV programme for us younger viewers which had a sketch with a bear jumping around trying to catch a bunch of children who were running away smiling and screaming and it was all meant to be humorous I think. The bear was a guy in a costume. People, adults, would come out to hit the bear on the head with bats and he’d stumble around dizzily, crazily, and as I think back now I’m sure it was supposed to be wildly amusing. But to me it was terrifying.

My mum locked me out the house. In the back garden to think about what I’d done. She needed a break from my unruliness, my energy, whatever it was, and I was standing there by the kitchen door, standing on the patio alone. A bear was coming around the corner. It would be here any moment. I could hear it, feel its presence. Bear footsteps, growling, and I was banging on the door screaming for my mother to open up and save me.

There I am, shouting for help over and over again in a complete fit of panic until finally she unlocked the door and I was in her arms crying about the bear that was trying to eat me. And my mother was my mother again, telling me not to worry and that I was being silly, reassuring me that of course there was no bear; how could a bear be in our back garden?

But she let me in too. In no time at all I had her love back - I remember being given a yoghurt, or some such treat from the fridge and being allowed to stay in the kitchen, sat on a chair behind her while she finished off the dinner and washing up.

 

 

Story 28 - Waking Up in the Middle of the Night Story

It was a gradual feeling of realisation that I’d been moving around, changing positions for at least the past twenty, thirty minutes; though I couldn’t be sure. My damp half of the duvet was completely drenched in sweat; bladder aching with a dull and strangely comfortable pain; which funnily enough, I wasn’t so desperate to relieve at once.

Instead I lay there on the edge of cloud-cuckoo-land, trying to remember what the hell kind of world I’d only just been dreaming about a few moments before - swirling into and out of semi-consciousness, shapes and voices moved slowly away, barely out of grasp.

My girlfriend on the bed next to me was giving off heat like some kind of burning radiation device. My own personal living, breathing hot water bottle. The last thing I needed in the middle of summer in a place like this. And then, as the sweat continued to ooze from my pores I began to notice a familiar buzzing in the room. The high pitched wheezing noise of a mosquito we must have missed earlier on. Now there was no way of me getting back to sleep.

I picked up my Casio watch from the tiled floor beside me and pressed the light.

2:33.

This meant… not counting her reading, me reading and our usual goodnight, I’d been asleep for hardly an hour.

I moved on to my back, then again to the front, flattening my face against the pillow. Then I was pushing the palm of my right hand against the smooth floor, hoping for some of the coolness to filter through my body, allowing my bare foot to do the same and it helped a little; but not enough. I needed a cigarette. A glass of milk. A piss. I needed to get up, out of this bed, this room.

Sliding silently out from under the duvet, I grabbed a t-shirt, glanced briefly at the lump in the bed to check my girlfriend was still asleep, carefully opened the bedroom door and before I knew it was standing in front of the fridge in the kitchen searching for milk, water, some juice, a beer, something to quench my sudden thirst. All I could find however were the remains of my girlfriend’s unfinished vodka and lemonade; the tumbler carefully covered with cling-film, preventing, I supposed, the last few remaining bubbles from escaping so easily.

I ripped the film from the glass and downed the contents, looking around afterwards for anything else to drink, rechecking the fridge before settling for a cigarette and mildly painful piss in the bathroom.

I ran the tap, opened the window, flicked ash into the sink and outside intermittently … considered risking a couple of gulps of tap water before deciding not to and taking a few deep breaths of outside air instead.

I dragged on the end of my cigarette, wondering what to do next. I didn’t feel like going back to bed. Maybe a bit of TV for a while would go down well. Though without anything to quench my thirst … possibly I was gonna have to think about hydrating myself as a priority.

I flicked through the TV channels anyway, being careful to hit hard on the decrease volume button as soon as the screen lit up. News, a cooking programme, shopping channel, some girls playing pool in bikinis, another girl telling me about her likes and dislikes whilst suggestively playing with her bra-strap, baseball, more baseball, wrestling, yesterday’s basketball game, news … back to the girl telling me about her interests who was now down to just a bra and panties. I gazed at the monitor knowing exactly what was gonna happen next but waited anyway. This girl liked long walks on the beach, eating sushi and going to the spa. She had a tattoo of a purple rose on her thigh, long fake eyelashes, deep blue eyes, short thick dyed yellow hair and red underwear. She had the thumb of her left hand hooked around the top of her panties while the other hand was waving around in rhythm to her giggles as she let me in to knowing all about her secret love of swimming naked.

And there it was, straight to adverts just as her hands were moving up to behind her bra: Adverts with lots of other girls waiting for my call or text. So I switched off the TV, knowing that yet another girl would only be appearing after the break, all ready to tease me into reaching for my credit card which I had no desire or need to be getting myself into.

I returned to the bathroom to grab my cigarettes, pulled a pair of jeans off the back of the sofa; checked the pockets for money, finding a couple of decent notes inside. I took another look in the bedroom to see if my girlfriend was still asleep; which I guessed from the look of the lump that she was; but I whispered, “Just popping down the 7-11, be back in a while,” anyway.

Review - The Dead Beat by Cody James

Awesome book. Such a shame it's out of print. This is a real rock'n'roll novel that makes compulsive reading. Reminded me of Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman for its sense of atmosphere and beautiful, honest prose. I can't recommend it enough - but as I say, it's almost impossible to get hold of a copy these days. In 2011 it was up for the Guardian's Not The Booker Prize and due to the overwhelming amount of positive reviews from bloggers there was an inevitable backlash from the literary community. A few harsh words were written and Cody James pulled the book to its current out of print status. Totally undeserved. This book could've, should've become a cult classic.

Story 27 - Frisbee

Played Frisbee this afternoon. I’ve often see all these people playing it outside the library on Wednesdays. Never realised before today that it was an actual proper Frisbee club. They join up every Wednesday afternoon and throw the Frisbee at each other, then go for a drink afterwards at this pub in Falmer village. Sometimes they even go away for weekend trips too. Devon or somewhere like that where they camp and throw the Frisbee.

I’m taking the piss a little, but that’s not to say I don’t appreciate how friendly they all were when I wandered in amongst the group. All I needed to do was sort of mope around nearby when the Frisbee suddenly came flying towards me. I caught it and then it was simply a matter of throwing it to someone else to be included in the game. Didn’t think too much about who I was throwing it to. There were a couple of fit girls and I considered aiming it towards one of them more often than not but the whole concept seemed a little silly and Neanderthal so in the end I didn’t. Plus I generally felt a little shy too. Voiced a few, “Ah, missed it,” sounds but finally the only person I ended up talking to at all was the leader (who’s name was Nigel – all confident and sporty looking; a total Mr Popular amongst the Frisbee gang). He asked what year I was in, what I was studying and if I wanted to join them in going to the Lion Inn pub in Falmer; but I declined ’cause I’m up for a proper getting-wasted-and-going-to-the- union evening.