Author: maleghast (Page 13 of 35)

The cold floor under his feet made it real finally. One quiet moment away from the others, looking out at the wall of mountain summits against the deep blue velvet of the sparkling night sky. He rolled the cheap tumbler between his hands and smiled; first night in the Alps in far too long, a dram of malt and a belly full of a good meal cooked by someone else, and good friends.

The next day was going to bring adventure and fun, just as it always did. There were many joys in his life, but very few of them stacked up against the feel of wind in his face and the sound of his skis on the snow.

There is no way to describe the feeling of flying down a mountain under the power of gravity and body control, working both in harmony and against one another at the same time. In the past he had tried to explain the sense of release that he would feel as the edges bit and he set his body into a long sweeping carve across an empty piste. That perfect moment is beyond the ken of anyone who has not experienced it.

Time for bed.

The shouts and whistles of the crowd were as a low hum to him as he stood in the wings, waiting for the signal to take to the stage. The satisfying cold weight of his guitar’s body laying in the small of his back was his anchor. He focused on the picture in his mind’s eye of his lover’s face and imagined her resting her hands on his shoulders, squeezing gently and wishing him a good show.

Music had kept him sane when she had died, well music and his family of music. The band had been amazingly supportive and understanding, as had their fans, but in the end there had been a lot of good material to take from his grief and, feeling sure that she would have approved, he saved himself from his grief by telling the world about her.

The signal was given and he walked out into the lights. The roar from the crowd was genuinely palpable; it made him rock back on his heels and he could feel wave after wave of excitement and adoration. He turned to check that everyone was in place, plugged in and stepped to the microphone.

The grit in the clay was biting into his hands as he centred it, elbows locked on the rim of the wheel to make a triangle with its point over the centre. Even now, doing this simple task that he had done a thousand times before he could not push his anxiety away. It was going to be another six days before he would hear about the test results, and he needed to be able to live for those six days.

The clay centred, he started to create a simple bowl, pulling the clay from the centre between finger and thumb. He focused in on the bands of clay that he needed to flatten as he raised the wall of the bowl between his hands. The muscle memory, like the wisdom of his body, his hands, guided his movements and allowed him to perform this delicate task, while his mind raced with the whats and wherefores of his condition.

He finished the lip of the bowl, the wheel moving at half speed as he curled the edge down in a movement that reminded him of the way that a tyre is rotated onto a rim; if he had cancer he would fight it.

The sizzle of the onions and the garlic, as he chopped the meat, was all that he needed to shuck off the stress of the day. The pressure that he was under was the very last thing that he had expected when he had taken the job, but the truth of that was really just his own naiveté.

The meat chopped and the rice on to boil he poured a glass of wine from the bottle he had opened for the cooking and leant back on the surface across from the stove. He could hear the shower, upstairs, and smiled. He had been so engrossed in his cooking that Harry’s return home had gone unnoticed; he decided to pretend to be suprised when his lover came into the kitchen fresh and clean, the city washed away in his own very personal ritual.

He lit the candles on the table, and tried to resist the urge to re-straighten the napkins. Perfection was in the company and the food, not place settings, and anyway he did not want Harry to even suspect that this was a prelude to anything more than a re-kindling, a way to make time for each other.

He passed it from hand to hand, enjoying the chilly, smooth feel of the rook against his palms. He loved playing in the park at this time of year, his set always felt like they were carved out of ice during the clear winter days.

His opponent was following his hands while he considered his move, as if trying to understand his thinking. He knew that his opponents were often distracted by this habit, but it was not calculated to throw players off their game. In truth he did not know why he did it, and more importantly he rarely noticed that he was doing it until he saw the person opposite’s eyes moving from side to side.

The game was six moves from mate in his favour; this guy was not any kind of challenge. They never were all that tough any more in the mornings; it was as if the real players were sleeping in during the cold weather. The game wrapped, exactly as he expected, and he took the money, shook the guy’s hand and started to reset the board.

“Xavier Crown?”

He looked up; this new guy was not there to play.

“Come on, you can tell us. Let’s be honest you’d have to be trying pretty hard to shock either of us two!”

Kit sighed and tried to work out how he had ended up having a conversation about unfulfilled sexual fantasies with Sheena and Paul, his two most sexually accomplished and broad minded friends. All he could come up with was two bottles of red wine and perhaps an unconscious desire to share, maybe even to see if they would seduce him. Without really knowing why, he steeled himself and decided to admit something that he thought they were not expecting.

“I’ve always wanted to go down on a man. There you go. I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but there you go.”

Sheena did not say anything, she just smiled a wicked smile and then flashed a look at Paul. He nodded;

“I’m up for it, Kit,and I know that Sheena won’t mind. In fact she really likes seeing me with men.”

“I do, really. Do you still want to?”

Kit nodded. He did not really understand it, but suddenly he was filled with resolve rather than remorse.

“Yeah.”

I remember it like it was yesterday. Sundays were dry beach parties at that time; none of us were old enough to get alcohol from the Spar, not even on the blag, and so we would load up on cigs and anything that any of us could lift from our folks. Dry Sunday parties always started early too, before dark.

I was lying on my back in the sand, watching seagulls wheeling overhead and working my way through the second of my Marlboro Reds, when a face I did not recognise appeared above me.

“My goodness, an Angel!”

The words had left my mouth before I had even considered them, like a reflex. For a second I waited to be laughed at, or hit by a jealous and insecure boyfriend, but neither expected payback was forthcoming. Instead Fate made her smile at me;

“It’s good when men notice that I am heavenly without me having to tell them.”

Sure now, looking back, it’s hard not to think that she was an uppity bitch to my bumbling sycophant; actually it was all without artifice.

As the sun sank an hour later we were sharing a smoke.

“RE-VALLEY! RE-VALLEY!”

The banging on his cell door would have woken him if the shouting had not. Talk about cruel and unusual, to have to be awoken every morning by the COs not only banging on his door but also murderingthe language of his home. Reveille; re-valley? Why was it so hard for them to say the word the way it was meant to be said?

His lawyer had been unwilling to explore the possiblity of petitioning for his return to France, but then what had he expected from the public defenfer’s office? Now here he was, stuck in an American gaol; bad food, bad mattress and oh God the food.

The cell door popped and he knew that there was less than a minute before he had to be dressed and stood by the door, that or face a beating from whichever CO was checking cells that morning. He swung his feet out onto the hard, painted floor; cold. Uniform pants and t-shirt, they were quick to throw on. Then socks and pumps. He was stood up mere moments before the CO came in. He had time to realise that the morning was cold.

The cold air outside the club was not helping. When someone had suggested a breath of fresh air he had assumed, as everyone else had, that it would clear his head and make him feel a little better, but it really was not all that useful. For a start he did not have anything warm with him; he’d been expecting to be inside a hot nightclub so he had just worn a t-shirt. As the cold nipped at his bare arms and his nose, not to mention the slightly more insidious cold that was creeping through the back of his jeans where he was leaning against the wall, he tried to decide why he had not simply gone back inside.

Tina was still in there of course, but then he did not really want to admit to anyone that had not already worked it out that her arrival on the arm of his former best friend had anything to do with his ‘funny turn’. It had been months since Rich and Tina had sat him down and been all adult about the fact that they had fallen in love and had never meant it to happen; when was it going to stop bothering him?

He stood on the corner, his breath turning to a thick fog in front of his face in the cold, and watched them walk away. It was very good to see her happy. He smiled, and nodded. He was acknowledging that she would remind him that she was not just happy because she had found Lee. She had been sad when George had left two years ago, but she had dealt with the loss well and apart from the odd slip of the mask had covered her loneliness quite adroitly.

They disappeared around the corner of the gaol wall and he turned in the opposite direction and started to walk towards his appartment. The cold air was not really moving, there was not even a breeze, so the cold air just seemed to settle hard on his shoulders, like a wet blanket, and naturally he had not worn a coat.

He was crossing the last part of the road – the junction between town and the block which included his flat – when he realised that there was someone watching him, and more to the point this watcher was not burdened with good intentions.

“Who’s there?”