01-21-2011, 12:41 PM
Rowning.
I’m a malicious bastard and I love myself.
That’s all you need to know.
He was a man, a man who liked to juggle.
A man masked by society, hell bent on enjoying its spoils
Who batted away those city struggles?
A man who had with an idea and a man creating a legacy
A man who sustained on a hundred and one different names
A man who never blames
The wheat smelt like lavender that day. There was no perplexing addition to that sentence just the simple scent of something that wasn’t what it actually was; but that’s the entire overview of this tale. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. I was, I was scum without arguable doubt. My hair was a mop that summer, something stuck to my head, blonde like a crown sat up there charming those who graced a look at me. To be fair most people did, look at me I mean, I was that type of person, I still am in ways. I was beautiful, and I knew it. I could have anything I put my hand to and I never thought about the consequences. Thinking back that was the true beauty of being me, underneath all the perfection I’m ugly, and I was smug about it. It would not be me who was held responsible for my actions; I dismissed guilt like the cliff dismissed the ripping tide. There was a very subtle knack to twisting blame to your opponent, yes, that’s the right word, opponent. It was like a chess game where no matter how close their white King and my Dark Horse could get I would find a way to tear that King down and swallow their surprise at my sudden rise to win. It was in death I suppose, it brought my deepest clarity, I had a love of the sight of it. Death made me consume my own ego whole and realise perhaps, no matter how mystifying my personality, I would not live on, there would be something to stop me and when it does, to the world I’ll just be another ant burnt under a child’s magnifier.
It wasn’t intentional when I became so cultish in my behaviour, worshipping my own self, but hey, false idols come in all shapes and perfect sizes. The women hated me, but they fucked me, the men hated me, but wanted to be my best friend. My whole life was a walking, talking hypocrisy, even I was, as I lived and breathed, with the fact that I could explain one view to one person and contradict that in full detail to another person’s ear. It’s all dependant on what they needed to hear at the time and I gave that to them as if offering their inner pussy some high quality cream. Monday, I was drinking in a seedy bar opposite the lock, Tuesday I was still lying in the sweat pit of the girl I’d picked up Monday, by Wednesday I was onto charming an aristocratic man who would hand me Cigars through steel bars of fakery, until he took me home. Thursday I was dreaming on a lion in Trafalgar and Friday I was caught making a sly deal for a weekend fix on the green respiring bush of highs. The weekend was a kaleidoscope that rolled into one magnificent Van Gogh painting.
Stepping outside was like shaking off the rain, accepting resolution from my over erratic mind. I had a deal and nothing interrupted that, not even the previous night’s activities. I had indulged in a little ‘bat and ball’ with the infamous Sera Lark. She had flexed in ways even my wicked mind had not evaluated as possible. Today I was meeting at cocaine station, well, Kings Cross but that didn’t make a spits bit of difference. The streets were filled, distracting, as I liked them. The dawn respiring on a once night sky. Notes were in my cords and my braces were tightened over my back and chest muscles hiding a clean white shirt. I can’t deny I loved my life and all that was sold with it. I wasn’t ashamed to sell every cell in my DNA to achieve everything I deserved, and damn did I deserve it, I worked for it. Approaching the platform with brass in tow and crass emotion in chest I breathed in the sight. So many people were pulled into the modern day life. There were posters on the opposite side of the station telling you to ‘Use floss’, ‘Buy at Ikea’, ‘Vauxhall’. I was a throw back; I owned a 1961 MG Magnette which was never suspicious since it was the only purchase my father had ever offered me for my twenty-first birthday. For a wealthy man he was a tight bastard, I learnt from him. He made me bound by no one, guiltless, a conscience wasn’t on my frequency.
The train pulled in dead on twelve; I liked a machine with good timing, like I liked my women, no waiting around. It was a perfect crimson, a beautiful specimen of PMS on heat. She was long, hard and ready for my mounting. The conductor attempted to ticket check me as I tipped my vintage bowler and slipped him a hundred. I stepped inside his carriage with its blue insides, chequered chairs and confectionery trolleys. I passed the off comers and travelled toward the holdall area, another hundred to the guard. The room was trivial, gloomy; there were an easy thirty suitcases stacked on top of each other, each silent and intentional separated from the common areas view. My valise was tanned with a peeled off label to Henderson. Once I’d shifted this incoming lot that hundred would be water off a ducks back. It simply wouldn’t compare to the amount I was about to take in. Seventeen packages all lined in perfect order and sealed, all for me, all unmarked, my side paid and their side delivered.
The parcels were hidden beneath a wooden oak of fake finish. We were clear. Now it was up to me to budge it. It’d go like a woman’s silk dress when she met me. Forty cut dry was already promised to the train officer, our usual silencer. I felt smug. Smug was my character and I loved the feel of it like new leather shoes.
Ester was a maiden, she excelled common beauty. She was full of shit; I adored that but not as much as her body. I treasured her thin lacy stockings, the way her sweat tasted like cherry juice, the way she eyed me up like I was a childhood dessert that had been long discontinued. She had this time-consuming dirty blonde hair that hung to her breasts; you had to take time just eyeing that over. Her hair was teasing enough to cover those perfect little nipples as she strutted back and forth watching her reflection in the mirror. She was the epitome of wealthy breeding and good riding. There was no marriage material in there, or there was, she married old, she married the nearly dead, she married for cash. She was like me, she fucked for profit and she offered everything to get everything. There was no half-arsed in a business like ours. Money was our bond, and the way those cupid bow lips gobbled my shaft and drank my juice like her usual order of dry Martini. Then again, I was one of her usual orders, she was one of mine and tonight she was on my menu. I had the thing that made her crumble at my feet and she had the thing that made me kiss hers. She was promised a night of E and she offered me a night of blow in return. There was never and nothing between our blue and grey damned eyes, she was a body for my ego and I was one for hers. Fuck buddies – The only brilliant invention the twenty first century has shelled out.
I approached her door while pushing my already mildly risen shank in my jeans. It had been a long day, what am I meant to say? If you know the pussy’s there why not fill it? The only romance I had was one with myself and that was ripe enough for me.
‘Stratton, come in? It’s terribly cold outside.’ She leaned on the doorway whilst blowing her drying nails and in the other hand a cigarette poked from a cigarette holder so not to stain those pretty fingers. Her hair was curled in the Rita Hayworth style I loved. She knew how to wind me up like her own private little drummer doll.
‘Paint your nails for me, Ester?’ I swallowed, my self-assurance burning in my sides. ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’ I tipped my bowler at her as she rolled her rouge lips to make sure all stayed perfect.‘It wasn’t for you darlin’,’ She blushed, her grey eyes positively sparking under the night lights. ‘I’ve an evening with the girls tomorrow.’
‘Sure you do, doll.’ Licking my lips I stepped inside her mahogany door and waited for the world to be shut out. The current, third, husband was away for the week and it was of course when she called. My lips clashed with hers like two rolling, ripping waves that had been long terminated. That rouge was perfect no longer. Her lips tasted older, if in any way they could. As if time had finally began having an effect on her where it had not on me. I shoved one practised hand up one familiar thigh to her garter and my other hand pulled the straps from her peach, silk nightgown as if we were reciting a timeless play.
Breathe. I sparked up. She always had cigars waiting for me, and I smoked the easy night she’d created. Laying a bag of E’s on the table and staring at her slumbered, useless body, I sniffed the sex air and reminded myself how wasteful I was. The room was made for me that night; no candle would have been lit if it wasn’t for my presence. The beautiful, classic pink silk that hung from her slick Nuevo chair would probably not have been purchased. It meant nothing. I sat, smoking, taking in the environment that she had decorated; it looked so much like her. It looked perfect on the outlook but nothing within. This was the essence of her, white curtains that would never get dirty, wooden floor boards that would only be touched by bare feet. There were two side tables with handcrafted coasters for our use. A book was laid on my side, erotica, clearly for me. It made me conceited but also sick, I never took Ester as desperate, I didn’t fuck the desperate. It made her whole complexity suddenly revolting to me. I picked up my shoes, pulled up my jeans and fixed the braces. I was done here, filled the garage now my Rolls was needed elsewhere.
Yet another empty evening under a charlatan sky in Soho, the sun waving a long winded goodbye to the city. I tipped my hat away from the stars and attempted to keep my newspaper dry under a poorly constructed gazebo. It crept out the front snatch of some back alley coffee shop. Roses wove up the drain pipe like the spider up the water spout, and a light swung in the casual breeze as I tried to keep my newspaper under its shine without seeming like a moth chasing a flame. My life seemed such fantasy. I often wondered if I really was where I thought I was or whether I was trapped, wired up in some electronic castle in the air, the last human being. That was a rather sexually appeasing thought if ever I had one.
‘This seat taken?’ I rolled my eyes from the article on base rates and stared up at him. He was no Guardian reader.
‘Go right ahead.’ Sighing, he nervously placed himself without doubt in my presence. Analysing him with short glances I noticed grey hair in a small pigs tail sealed with blue ribbon, his eyes even in the darkness illuminated the smoke-filled air with green irrationality. I folded my paper and slid it onto the table as he sipped his steamed mug and stared out on the city like a puppy’s first sight of the great outside. It warmed my belly like his I assumed, must be from the liquid he sipped.
‘So what, may I ask, led someone like you to London?’
‘Nothing.’ He replied without so much as a second look, the city had hypnotised him quite calmly like the ground would always captivate a horse’s hoof. ‘Have a cigar if you want one.’ Throwing them from his blazer jacket he continued to look everywhere but me. It was utterly surreal. I took two from the packet and rolled one his way whilst placing the other in my mouth, one swift motion. ‘I don’t smoke, Rowning.’ The cigar practically fell from my well practised lips as I stared at him, one brow raised. Few knew my surname, only close associates. I made it my informal duty to provide false identities wherever possible. A reputation was not something I gladly took with my Rowning name.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I do not smoke.’ He reiterated, now staring at me with those green pools as if I were deaf. I observed the lips he wore, dry and course as if he had suffered a sluggish few days. There were wrinkles that attacked his skin but not in an uncomfortable way, in a way of wisdom. I wanted, for a moment, to test out whether he was wise to me.
‘I heard that. Do I know you?’
‘Possibly.’ He smirked, licking his lips before throwing out his pale, dry hand. A black suit did nothing for him; he just looked like a corpse, a rotting one but there was something in his smile... ‘My name is Crisp. Arthur.’ I studied his complexion for a moment whilst taking a deep drag of the cigar.
‘Rowning, but I suppose you already know that.’
‘First name?’
‘I do not bear one.’ I smouldered. No one knew my first name, and I certainly wasn’t going to give that away. Did he know me from Adam? Or was this a simple raise of knowing the family. He looked old enough to be enriched with my father’s presence. Bar the green eyes there was a catastrophe of grey hair upon his head, dull and raspy like a lonely sailor’s uncut rope.
‘Home?’
‘Islington.’
‘No,’ He laughed, creases forming round his retained youthful eyes. ‘Do you want to come back? With me?’ I consumed him and his offer, glaring at him with an egotistical flair before nodding pricelessly.
I left the paper on the table; he left me to pick up the cigars whilst pulling a taxi off the dully lit street. It must have cost him arm and leg, Soho trains ended early so the taxis could stack the stakes up on prices. We sat, silently in the back of a black cab, the driver ogling not only at the road but the tasteless heat that flew feverishly between us. Crisp tipped double the usual price without a bat and I tried fruitlessly to hide the awe. My reliance’s for funds were sourly paid by dirty deals on East End market and the backstreet run-ins with thieves and vagabonds. Arthur opened his own part of Notting Hill similarly to a circus master’s infectious introduction. His apartment was filled with ancient artefacts, a bar, a beautiful, well, Crisp set of green seats that needed reupholstering on the veranda. He was ubiquitous that evening, he was like lightning on a placid naive village and he filled me with rapture. We pulled, we moaned, we moved and in that monumental stage of bliss I was at harmony with my ego, both agreed in the pleasure of another being, another object of fascination. We were also both agreed that the enchanting urn of quiet would end the following dawn.
Crisp flicked out a cigar from his box as we lay sprawled and perspiring upon his Egyptian cotton sheets, I was observant if nothing else.
‘I thought you didn’t smoke.’
‘I was unfilled then.’ He spoke of me like a piece of a puzzle he’d just slid in to slide out until the void was comfortable in its loneliness. I hated him. He reminded me of me. Crisp flipped his legs off the side of the bed and walked gracefully to the balcony lighting up as soon as he reached the door. ‘Let yourself out when you’re ready, Rowning.’ I gulped, like I had gulped down his wine, gulped down his liquid overdose.
‘Excuse me?’ I stammered. He sighed, a long raspy sigh as if I was not getting that I was the butt of his joke, literally.
‘Keep in mind, Rowning, I have years on you and your bold attempts to suck in even the wealthiest and most educated partners. You may leave when you wish but this was of little consequence to me. I needed a wick to light and you were present, easy.’ I had never in my twenty seven years been deemed easy, bearing in mind fifteen of them had been spent sexually active.
This was going to be one of those soul-crushing moments where an epiphany hit and do you know how I knew? Because the flashback was already whirling in my head, the room melted into my mental lock box as I swam on my own memory-filled sea. Bottles with corks and little white letters were bobbing along the water to find some oft shore and be found, spilled, once again forgotten.
‘Come on, hurry up you swine.’ His eyes were like pools of shit-paled rage. He had a tattoo on his shoulder from a foreign sea though we never discussed his sailing days. The tip of my ear was caught between the nail of his finger and thumb. I never realised this would be the ultimate bonding moment that my father and I would share as I squealed and writhed similar to a little girl wanting a pony as she got dragged away. It was one of those moments that would leave an ever burning scar in your mind. My heals were bleeding as they dug into the cobbles. He was far stronger than me through the thick night air, I was frightened. If God existed he would have protected me that evening. Red lights lit up the streets with their sinful studies; girls were sat in the warmth of ‘Open’ unclothed windows. The night of the Devil, and backwards the ‘Lived’ he dragged me carelessly through, silver cars stretched across the streets of the Dam. His breath stank of rich whiskey and rum. I’d been with him as he took those shots straight to the blood stream. He’d forced three down my neck also, and my mind was in a tattered beggar man’s trolley. He dragged me without confusion through a door, that door was terrifying. I knew the innocence that entered that door, wouldn’t be leaving with me. Inside the hall was stained a yellow colour and sheets of navy blue coated the sofas and stairs. A woman dressed in a nuns dress like the nun my mother had introduced me to for bible study greeted us. It wasn’t until she stepped into full light I noticed the two torn holes on her upper chest, the skirt was shorn off leaving a trail of torn thread against her thighs and her head cloak was, in reality, her hair. It was dyed white at the top and long black as a finisher.
‘Dad.’ I whispered. The most I’d ever contemplated with a woman was asking Amelia to the school dance, and I liked her.
‘He’s with me, Zarella,’ My captor, my guardian growled. She nodded not phased, without a look of discontentment at my clear lack of age.
‘We’ve got this one on our books. Though, currently, we are finding need to drug her so she complies.’ Her purring voice dripped a Dutch accent. I only recognised it from films and from the large breasted lady with hair that was dead as the crow flies at a public house father had earlier taken me to.
‘Fine.’ He smirked. ‘Are you free?’
‘Anything for you, Rowning, you know that.’ She smiled taking my hand from my father’s forced grip and leading me up a daunting set of stairs. ‘Just let yourself in little one. There won’t be a problem.’ I won’t deny I did as I was told, my father still close behind me. He talked me through the entire thing. It was only after my unfinished stem was inside the cave of silence that he left me well alone. Breasts weren’t as frightening as first they appeared and kissing a woman, even if there was no reaction was that of blossom in spring. Her eyes flickered a few times though by the time I was in the full throws I didn’t even pay much attention to that pretty foreign face.
‘Please...’ That word dripped out of her lips like mucus. It made me sick, not figuratively, quite literally. ‘Stop...’ I pulled away as her eyes opened like a bunnies on the highway. My body curled into a ‘U’ shape on the bed.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Water was tapping on the rooftop, water was tapping.
I shook the memory away like I had been shaken by Crisp, looking around at my surroundings I was curled in a ‘U’ shape, my body shaking like a leaf under the spell of ghastly rain.
‘Rowning?’ His voice was shallow, concerned and yet void, empty of presence but something told me otherwise. I didn’t savour it, or inhale it. If I let myself think it the rejection I felt clearly mattered to me, which it didn’t.
‘I’m fine.’ I hissed without letting the spasm in my shoulder muscles affect me. I was no one’s bitch. Standing up and dressing seemed unfamiliar to me, there was no way my brain could take me back to such a prominent time in my life and expect me to pick back up here with such a trivial dispute. That was the moment I knew I was well over Crisp’s less than delicate dealing, because I knew there’d been and would be worse. My shirt and jeans felt like they were buttoned simultaneously, one sly look at last night’s partner and I was gone. I didn’t care how he knew my last name, I didn’t care how I still ached, I didn’t care how great the evening turned out to be. He was another scar on a cutter’s wrist. Meaningless.
The street relieved me, an earthy bed to my fast paced mind. People scattered like rats along the pavement and my stride even developed a beat of its own, even if it turned out terrible I had a sex glow no one could deny. Today wasn’t the day to replay a constant reel of one evening though; I was assigned to a final evening with the elegant Ester Lorene and a day working for the Library. It wasn’t for the affection of others that I worked there; it wasn’t to read out of consideration. It was because you could easily deal in a library and I happened to have a rather euphoric relationship with John Wilmot Second Earl of Rochester and all of his literary works. Now I’m well aware my tale isn’t a best seller, it isn’t going to be some great study in years to come but all I can say is that I’ll be damned should I ever be boring, and even something every day like work is interesting when done with me.
‘Hey, Dean,’ I nodded to my boss. I was floor manager but he, he was the Don. He had worked the library for years, sometimes I wondered if he was actually older than the books he loved.
‘Morning boy.’ He smirked from two slits of grey that breached his half-moon glasses; his bald head was always topped by a curved brim Homburg. After six years of servitude he still referred to me as a boy. I thought he always would. Many people had come and gone but I think he found me some solace as I also felt as if I was walking in the wrong time frame. He allowed me to wear my bowler and he enjoyed my late night discussions about Greta Garbo and how I’d have loved to be John Gilbert just to touch that silhouette.
Dean set a page marker midway of his Conversions of Constantine and Pagan Rome by A. Alfoldi. ‘I’m going upstairs. Ring the bell if you need me.’ Dean had attached a bell string that ran from the till to his upper room office. He did not welcome electronics in the centre. Grabbing my key I progressed behind the desk and opened my lock drawer. Even Dean didn’t ask for a key to it since I’d been so responsible for the last few years. I checked it was all there, one kilogram cocaine, two ounces of trichomes, being the crystals that come off the bud and three hundred pills. It was easy shifting in London, or at least easy shifting for a man like me. I dealt onto dealers, long time smokers, you never get grassed up that way, and the circle just goes on and on. Dean, my main man, my boss, my mentor, a practical father, he used to be a cop. He was one from the other side of the board, that damn white King.
‘Hello, Christina.’ I slammed the drawer shut and rested my head on my fist as my elbow held the weight on the desk.
‘How you doing, Cutteridge?’
‘Marvellous,’ I smirked, twitching my nose as if to physically convey the way she made my member tremble. ‘And yourself? You are dazzling today.’
‘And you are a creep, Cutteridge. Now where’s the Robert Stevenson section been put?’
‘Will you ever read anything else?’
‘Perhaps, one day,’ She shrugged as I smoked on the inside. ‘Now are you going to tell me or are we playing cat and mouse again? Really this is getting silly.’ I had, for some weeks now, got pleasure out of reordering all of the books in the library just to move Robert away from easy reach. Watching her search was some way to keep that perfectly proportioned frame in my presence that much longer. She had no idea Stevenson was always found on the bottom shelf so I caught a glance of her Latino frame bending over and to see what lay beneath that blue balling skirt.
‘You tell me Christina?’ I grinned; all white teeth clear in my smile. She sighed, defiantly staring at me with those almost black eyes and stormed away – the opposite direction to Stevenson. My locker said Rowning but to her and every other unimportant person who graced the library I was now Cutteridge, only Dean knew my surname and he received repulsive pleasure from a first-rate secret.
A man with curt coffee hair and a wool waistcoat approached my desk in cocky discipline. ‘I’m returning The Invisible Man and I’d like...’ He paused licking his lips and shaping me up. I must admit I was casually distracted by Christina and her breasts as she reached up and checked a top shelf but I had to tear my eyes away from her, I had to continue the deal - cash was more important than some ball busting eye candy.
‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.’ I finished the sentence for him whilst tapping in the leave of a Mary Shelley copy into the typewriter.
‘That’s right. Thank you. You look well Willsworth, lost weight?’ I caught my breath hoping that first rate looking meat hadn’t heard yet another alias. To Christina I was Cutteridge and that was all she was ever to know.
‘Indeed. You’re welcome Alary.’ I opened the page whilst unlocking my drawer. Eight hundred cash in my hands. ‘This one should make for interesting reading.’ My white teeth shone again under the lights as he opened the book to see pages cut out and a white package hidden in its doors. A nod and he was leaving, I locked the drawer, wiped my face with my cool hand and sat in the burgundy Victorian chair. From my seat I could watch her, worming her way around the aisles like a snake. I also had sight of the stairs to Dean’s office, I had never been up there, and the closest I’d been was ringing the bell which hung from an emerald rope beside my chair. I could also see the main doors with the brilliant light shining in off the street. A bench was outside with an old couple eating out of newspaper and throwing chips occasionally at birds.
The day was going to rush like pigs piss on a hot day. I know you’re probably thinking typical drug dealer but no, I’m doing this to give it to charity and bring world peace...Sorry, that just made me laugh and it’s rare. No, I am a typical drug dealer. I’m not the back alley type though, I like to do it out in the open, I find people notice less when its right in front of their nose but that wasn’t the reason I thought about bringing you to the library with its mountainous books and the draft that entered under the antique door. The books were stacked upon shelve of ancient looking oak and where there wasn’t space stacked in piles behind my desk.
Each book had its own confession, borrowed, stolen, bought, hand in hand, now that’s what enthralled me about working here, the thick glass panes panelled with oak and the way the carpet was coming apart at the seams. It was something that was stable in an unstable environment. It was incognito, hidden in this rat’s race of London Town. Christina approached, looking perplexed and yet self-righteous, book in hand. She placed it down, resting her elbows on my desk, I wished there was more of her on my desk.
‘Frank Herbert?’ I hissed as she beamed, taking in my facial expression, the way my eyebrows contorted, the grey of my eyes silently mystified by this sudden change of heart.
‘Yes Cutteridge. And what have you to say about that?’ My body shook like a fallen short orgasm, she’d blue balled me again.
‘Well, that’s quite a change,’
‘Well, I got tired of your games.’ She mocked, her blonde hair dancing under such witchery. As I typed the withdrawal into the typewriter I wondered if she would really read the Dune or whether it was some false archetype to irritate me with.
‘Tell me what you think.’ I glowered, void of any emotion as I handed over the book and watched that precious heart-shaped face drop fourteen inches. ‘Have a lovely evening Christina.’ She didn’t reply she simply stalked out of the library without another word; her chocolate heels against the blueberry carpet gave me slight relief. I knew it wouldn’t take long for another return; she was clearly gagging for me. I wasn’t going to mix business with pleasure for some infatuated, little reader. No denying I had replayed the image of her bent over my desk several times but I would not ruin my bond with Dean for a blonde escort.
Four more deals were made that day, clearing my depressing lockbox to nothingness. Dean and I shut up together, proceeding to the sordid little bar across the walk for ale. I had whiskey, he had cider. It made my nose feel like vomiting which didn’t help the literal sense of vomit. One whiskey, I told myself, just one and then on to Ester. A night out with her would relieve my strain, the aching Christina Cocktease had administered. No man deserves that, an intentional short skirt and an intentional way of walking. She was as wicked as I was; I adored her daily visits I was just stressed this evening. Dean left dead on eight in his usual way, not a minute before and not a minute after, it gave us an hour to talk and then he was gone. I didn’t actually know whether he had a wife, children, brothers, a mother still breathing but bearing in mind the fact he had never asked questions of me I didn’t ask them of him. The blackberry went on dead on eight as well. Seventeen messages. Fifty one beeps all rolling into each other. I had two messages from Ester, most from barely contacted associates and one, one from my mother.
‘Your father passed away this evening. I would like it if you could keep your phone on at all times. Call me.’ I stumbled off the curb. This was the way my family was. Announcing things in the most uncouth of ways but I had at least had some hope my mother was different. She had separated from my father when I was eleven, her birthday. They publicized it with my mother throwing his clothes onto the unlit street and my father kicking the door through before beating us both senseless. Again I was floating on a never ending sea, bottles of white letters bobbing along the surface as I bobbed along too before being taken under by a crashing wave.
‘Daddy.’ I whispered, my hands were clamped over my ears as mother opened the window and let fresh, icy air in. I always hated the winter, the way it snowed sheets of constant colourless matter. She turned, as if hearing his name made her furious, there was still softness in those stormy blue eyes. Her blonde hair curled around itself looking like a set of wiry knots upon her head and she reminded me of Tallulah Bankhead on a brilliant day. My father was quite the opposite story; I feared getting old because of that man. He was just, just old. He was old school like Marlon Brando. Those drunken eyes he bore were grey like death and he had black hair cascading from his skull; with a chin chiselled by an aggressive artist. In later years I would come to regret my fear, he was a wonderful looking man; it was the inside that was mouldy. The room what was the room like? I had to focus on something, something to stop the screeching that arose from my mother’s throat like a sin. I was all for a distraction technique. Olive walls, one stained black-out curtain hanging from the wooden curtain pole and dark champagne coloured carpeting. It was unheard of for my parents to argue. My father drank but was never violent; my mother cooked but never threw a flame. It was malicious to see them both like this. It was more than any eleven year old should fear. My days of watching black and white movies with my parents were done. It would be the last happy memory I could remember, it would be the last simple thought that would enter my brain.
For weeks after my father left I did not attend school, I sipped my mother’s squeezed lemonade and watched ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ on the VCR to pass the time. He didn’t visit, not once. I didn’t truly expect him to, there were days when I admittedly hoped, but once mother got me back to school I didn’t think much about him. Mother said he left for another woman. I stopped listening then, started paying attention to the girl’s and their disgusting way of charm. By the time I’d reached twelve I was enjoying writing notes to six different girls in my class. It was a tolerable existence, until he paraded himself on our doorstep the day of my birthday. I snorted when mother bickered against his idea of a birthday present. He had planned a trip away and that idea didn’t sound so foul to me. Though honestly, at that time, I was elated just to see him. He hadn’t changed, he said I hadn’t either.
I’d had two flashbacks in one day. Ester would surely enjoy my late night tales as I traced her breast, if nothing else, but there wasn’t a chance she wouldn’t enjoy the night. She favoured an aggressive evening, perhaps because it was the closest to true emotionless passion, either way a destructive fuck was on the cards this evening and the tool that she was would not be disappointed. I didn’t feel like paying attention to her, I didn’t feel like spending hours warming her up for her efforts. I felt like ramming and leaving. It wasn’t even her fault but all I could hear was Bitch. How dare my mother ever leave him, how dare he be dead, how dare I be still going for a quickie before travelling home. I was tempted not to go. I hadn’t spoken to him in years, what was the point? He deserved to have his coffin put down with no one around.
I was out of tune and numb if nothing else. Empty, with a cocky smile still painted on my pale face. She met me under the limelight of London’s Le Gavroche. Ester Lorene, she was positively radiant in the night’s cold air. Most of London had no idea it existed, I booked a table when she called, and a favour with the Chef who was partial to a white line every now and again helps no end. I watched her, her similitude to Ruby Keeler, the way she covered herself in fur to avoid the chill. Ivy laced the door like invitations to an expensive bill and the hall was lit for a winter dining. I can’t explain the vacant feeling that struck me about her faultless physique or the aptness of the evenings booking but honestly I just wanted to take her home and ram the thoughts of death away. There was nothing on the brain bar a spiteful message and the thought of her stripped bare.
She ordered the Lobster Salad for a start, I knew from that moment her intentions were to bleed me dry before clearing my head with loosely fit French lingerie that would deceive my perceptions of wealth. We didn’t speak as we ate. I couldn’t fathom opening my mouth other than to cram the cuisine inside. She tried to talk, swallowing she whispered.
‘In my head it isn’t beef I’m devouring.’ The way she said “devouring” usually would make me tremble but on evenings like this I honestly wished I was with a friend laughing, whilst finishing a bottle of over proof rum. I grunted, my discontentment apparent, her features dropped in a spell of red wine inspired confusion. I didn’t exorcize it. Instead I imagined smoking a joint, sailing on a pretty envy coloured sea. It reminded me of days sat at the dinner table, mother on one side, father at the head of the table and me, waiting to be released so I could run riot with the friends I held dear. I was ten, I didn’t expect my father to leave, and my father was as hard as a coffin nail. He rarely spoke but when he did his words filled me with an eagerness to accomplish something better than him. And now he would never speak again. I could, while sat at that table with the infamous Ester, picture vividly the years when the boys and I owned the playground in Camden. We sniffed poppers on the seesaw, beat each other with height on the swings, our lives were carefree and when Frankie Switch brought a Kaleidoscope to the park we enjoyed hours of neon highs. Now I understand why we called him Frankie Switch, he knifed two fuckers in a parking lot with his ivory handled switchblade. He was a legend, before prison turned brilliance to insanity. I didn’t even know where I was headed with this, my thoughts just wouldn’t clear, not to present, not to a flashback, they were raping my brain of all clarity and waiting patiently to jump like a bunny onto another subject.
I sipped my whiskey with a shaking hand as Ester’s long red fingernails crept like insects across the table. Recoiling from her was similar to pulling from an approaching tidal wave. She was becoming more and more restless with my uncharacteristic behaviour. At least I owed her some response time but the only thought I could get out was that she’d only achieve her desire for attention when she was exposed and I was hard. No one could expose me; I’d be a psychiatrists dream. She however would be written off in a second, there was nothing deep about her, I was beginning to see that. I tapped my fingers on the white sheet that covered the mahogany table, her blue eyes stared at me, irresolute with uncertainty. I liked her that way, mystified with me. I didn’t feel like being anything, I wasn’t going to be the charmer, the player, the wealthy bureaucrat. She either wanted to fuck me or she didn’t and frankly if she didn’t I could easily get it somewhere else. Tonight she just happened to be lucky.
We arrived back at hers around eleven, drunk, well-fed and myself, out of pocket. My head was spinning, my heart pounding two-thousand beats a minute in my chest. It wasn’t her that made this happen; it was him. A time where he was the only thing that could send me into a frantic cycle was now continuous as he was dead he had a one up. He couldn’t ever apologise or buy my forgiveness now he’d just fucked off and there was no way he was coming back. I was a little boy. “You’re just a little boy in a big suit.” The last time I’d seen him he was pale, withered, like a lightning hit tree. He told me that’d unless I got out now I’d just end up like him. I didn’t understand what was so wrong with that at the time. He had screwed the shit out of the world and he was rich, a legendary bachelor and a man with an imagination that could create a world that would turn in on its self.
‘I’m just going to freshen up.’ She whispered as if ghosts were in the walls ready to play voyeur on our adulterous act. I nodded, falling onto her queen size bed. My body contorted as his last words drowned my austere head.
‘Years ago I wanted for you, you to be the quintessence of me. A spitting image, you know?’ I didn’t know. ‘Years phase into one when you’re old, son. I can’t help wishing I’d never broken your mother. I beat the innocence out of her. I took real love and changed it into something grotesque. Son, there will never be anyone who was as implausible as her, and nothing like the love she gave me that was so improbable. I fucked up son, on you, with her and now I’m going to die alone. Don’t be like me, son. You’re just a little boy in a big suit right now son but give it a few more years and that suit will embody you. There’ll be nothing left. You’ll be cold.’
She opened her bathroom door and let the light in the room forcing me right back to the present. I couldn’t pay, in any currency, to be back in Rome listening to my father talk by the fireplace with a scotch and a cigar.
‘You’re not of interest to me tonight, Ester.’ I snarled, though my throat felt raw like a cave to the past. Sitting up I waited for her screaming, she sat beside me, silent for a moment.
‘It’s me, isn’t it?’ Her voice broke whilst her shrugged body, I observed, was close to tears. ‘I made myself too easy. There’s not a game anymore.’ I didn’t agree, I didn’t want to face the fact that she was probably right, if Christina or any other unwrapped chocolate bar was on the menu I almost certainly would have battled through, but this, even now, was all probability. This was a situation I mentioned previously, a sheep was trying to hide in a wolf’s clothing. I turned her face to me, and for once, or for a rare occasion, I kissed her, not in the intention to fuck but with the intention to feel close to something, with someone I trusted. I don’t know why I trusted her, perhaps it was the way those blue eyes filled with tears, or the way the encrusted diamond bracelet hung from her wrist still after I bought it for her before the most recent wedding. Either way, in that moment I loved her, like my mother, like my father, like those miscreants of society that thrilled my bone. She was, for this evening only, and for the last time I would ever consciously seek her out, my partner. We didn’t do aggressive that evening, she moved for me as I needed her to, she was in no denial that she had made herself easy and for this evening only she was a puppet to my needs. It was like dipping my toes into unfamiliar water, someone catering to me for a change. I fucked her against the window pane so the world could face us, upon her martial bed and in her two headed shower and then, after, I left. The cold streets were weeping for me and my damned little soul in the big suit that was London. I had been swallowed whole by London and although I knew its ins and outs more than most I’d be God fearing should I ever be picked up and dropped somewhere new. That which I feared most would be coming true if ever I wanted to face my father’s burial.
I stared out on the after midnight scene. The streets collected dirt like sandbanks and my eyes were foreign to the lamplights that occasionally turned red as they began to lose charge.
‘Don’t look at me like that.’ I hissed as I stumbled off the curb, my comment paid to a dog standing on the opposite side of the street. Mangled, stray mutt, he was. He sniffed the night air, sniffed the air that was filled with my newly lit cigar smoke. With no food he bowed his head and chased his own shadow into an alleyway. I didn’t stand watching the unfamiliar remains of the dog. A shit, a long brick that he left without worry that some drunk maiden may accidently stand in it with her new hundred pound, all in, heels.
The ‘Open All Hours’ sign glittered like I imagined the Pearly Gates would to devout Catholics. I stumbled inside with the hope of a bottle of whiskey and a brown paper bag. I didn’t care what I looked like at this time of night, or morning. The bottle shone similar to the Holy Grail, my Godly references were on fire this evening, perhaps in response to his death. My father’s death, and there in the middle of a back pathway off license my brain collapsed. A tear formed mercilessly in my eye and I batted it away like the pretentious arsehole I was. I wish now that I had let myself feel, but it just wasn’t in my panorama. I was voracious for a good whiskey and a good pussy, not for a good chick flick and chocolate. I was about to fill both of my insatiable needs, first one filled in Ester, second one upon finishing the whiskey. The man behind the counter stared at me for a while with those huge, pill-popping, russet eyes. His hair was greasy like a truck drivers and short too, something I hated. I gulped down some unsavoury comment on his apparel with the alcohol his service provided and put a note on the counter.
‘You got a phone please mate?’ My affinity for common decency excelled me, I smirked whilst tipping my hat at the man in one way to be polite, in another to show the fuck off brass ring that would hit him right between the eyes if he refused. The man nodded, as if he had not witnessed someone of my calibre entering on a late night. Passing me the phone he took a swig from a small flask on his right side, his hands still shaking slightly.
‘Can I have a taxi please?’ I was headed home for the night and in no state for driving there. My MG Magnette would have to wait with Ester’s bell pull I supposed.
Upon reaching my conceited, copious abode, managing to find my key and unlock my door, I turned up the stereo. One twist of the knob on the shower and it was warming up to full heat; I wanted to wash her away, to drink enough to forget her face. You can’t honestly ask me to explain what my apartment looks like whilst drunk as a buzzard so feel free to make it up for yourself. Anyway, I drank in the shower, as I washed away her phizog, her soft mane and those imitation plastic nails. My head was spinning, a whiskey at the Le Gar – Le Gar- where ever it was, three quarters of the on-the-go bottle in my hand and a glass of whiskey earlier with Dean. I was in vertigo, or at least it felt that way as I leaned against the black tiles and allowed my muscles to take a long needed rest. I wasn’t used to a night alone, frankly I hated them, but an hour for a shower was acceptable. The knob on the shower took two attempts to reach and five to turn it off before I grabbed a navy towel and fell over it flat on my face in the bathroom. And damn it, that night I bit my tongue, there was blood everywhere, I really screwed it this time. My father was dead somewhere and I was worried about some sodding cut through my tongue. I pulled my BB from the top of the laundry basket and made a call I hated making.
‘Ester,’ I whispered, my throat filling with blood.
‘What the shit are you doing calling me at this hour, Stratton? Is it seriously a drop and run, you leave in the middle of the night and then call me from your house. You make no fucking sense. Get your act toge-’
‘Come over.’
‘What? No, don’t be stup-‘
‘My dad died today, Ez.’ I don’t know why I told her. I don’t why the hell I told her, next she’d be looking up surnames that would never match, plus I didn’t give a rat’s arse about her. I just didn’t want to be alone vomiting blood and now my eyes felt like two fat, steel buckets on my face. There was some sordid reliance on her that I completely could not comprehend. It felt like a distant façade to adopt, but this didn’t feel like a façade, no, this felt like a pin prick, somewhere dead, sparking something I was unwilling to face. A feeling.
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I will go through and edit again later for now I need bed but thought I'd post this also before I chickened out. Thanks *runs and hides*
LA
an am totally loving Rowling the main character (in me head i have Jude Law in the Alfie film as his character ) he has that old fashioned 'charmer' about him