Author: maleghast (Page 33 of 35)

Jacob looked out across the forecourt of the filling station, trying not to be bored. He was searching for anything even remotely out of the ordinary to take his interest for even a moment. He was sick to death of midnight to eight shifts. Keeping the door locked for security purposes meant that he never got to talk to any of the tiny number of customers. They did not tend to like being locked out either.

The person filling up a motorbike on pump five was annoying him. They had not taken their helmet off despite the signs. Through the drizzle and the bad sodium light he couldn’t see whether or not the car parked at three was even planning to take on fuel. The driver was still inside after five minutes – what was that about? He glanced back down at the till sheet that he was getting ready for the shift change, but when he looked up again there was a shotgun pointed at his head through the glass he knew to be less than shot resistant, despite the brave stickers claiming that it was. Of course it was the biker.

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I keep going back to that moment, trying every time to work out exactly what happened. We were driving home, Sara was in the passenger seat next to me, her hand nestling in the back of my neck idly stroking the hair at my nape. We were talking about the wedding; who we would invite, what the food should be. We even had a silly argument about who should DJ the party and then we were laughing about how we would need ten hours to get all of our friends a decent set.

I have driven that road so many times. I have driven it since; there should have been no surprises. We were happy, and then the car was sliding. I still don’t know what happened, but I must have lost the back wheels on some oil or perhaps some black ice – it was a cold night. Time slowed to a crawl. As I threw all of the right-hand lock on to try and get the tail back I saw the fear in her eyes. I locked her eyes with mine and tried to tell her that it would be okay. I couldn’t recover the slide, and in the moment that I knew it we hit the wall.

—

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Oscar stared out at the rain, hitting the pavement so hard that there seemed to be a wave of splashes up to the pedestrians’ knees. He wanted to be out there, bathing in Nature’s rinse cycle. He had loved to run in the rain until he was out of breath and then stand, arms outstretched, face to the heavens and let the falling drops drench him and wash him clean.

He turned away from the window, and gripping the wheels on his chair he propelled himself back to the computer. With home-help and a better chair and indoor modifications to pay for there was no way to blow work off and go out in the rain; besides Annie would have a fit. He had to show her, somehow, that he was not made of glass just because of the accident – that going out in the rain would be almost as joyful as it had always been. That having to dry out a wheelchair as well as his clothes was not really a terrible disaster.

He keyed the computer back to life and logged into the server.

“Back to the accounts!”, he thought to himself. He smiled.

—

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Peter mopped his brow again and squinted in the torchlight. He was supposed to be on the A303 , on his beautiful bike and probably exceeding the speed limit if the truth be known. Instead he was holding a drill, and sitting next to an unexploded bomb from the Second World War.

Even as far as he was concerned, the job he did was a job for a madman. In the same way that only firemen run into burning buildings, only bomb disposal experts crouch in cramped spaces next to a thing that could level a whole block, and then fiddle with it. Most people just get as far away from the damn things as they can; why did he get into this? He pushed away the recriminations and tried to concentrate; his team would be back with better lights soon, and they would want to know his thoughts.

He ran his hands along the cold metal looking, or rather feeling, for a casting seam that might give away which type of device it was or where it was made. There was none to be found; was it his imagination or did the casing feel too smooth?

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Serena settled back into the cushions and waited to see if Tim would bite. So far the evening had been one of truth-telling, but would he confront the issue that she had just raised, or change the subject?

“The thing is, Serena, you are right. Sex without a condom does feel much better, but not for the obvious reasons.”

Oh he was going to bite! Marvelous!

“What do you mean, huh?”

“It’s simple. If you care about someone enough to get tested and wait while they get tested and then trust each other enough to be monogamous and also that there is some form of contraception being used, then you can have sex without a condom, right?”

She nodded, not wanting to admit that she had simply rolled the dice and ignored all of these perfectly sensible precautions in the past.

“Well there is nothing between you, so the connection is complete, and you can come inside her, which has an incredible emotional and physical pay-off; it’s about the chance of procreating in the end.”

She smiled. She was right about him.

—

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Mike looked again at the portfolio of pictures, trying to find some indication of the model’s character from a series of photographs that while accomplished felt cold and empty to him.

It was getting to a point where all he did towards his goals was look at modeling sites on the internet and then fail to contact any of the models who piqued his interest. He would find himself initially hooked by a look, or a face, or a body, only to find that he could not imagine the model’s personality, or that based on their pictures he didn’t like them.

He knew that he had to get over this blank spot, that none of the models that he was dismissing so easily were actually bad or shallow people. Hell he had friends that also modeled and they were friendly, cool, creative people. There was just something slightly seedy and at the same time artificial about ‘choosing’ someone to shoot from a series of pictures on an internet site. It felt just one step away from picking a hooker and he did not relish that prospect any more.

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Stuart lit his cigarette and peered out into the gloomy drizzle that was falling outside the shop. As usual, he was killing time until Felix arrived and he could go and buy some lunch. Monday was never a busy day for them. He had tried to make the argument that they should just not bother opening on Monday, because no one was going to buy enough DJ gear to make it worth their while, but Bob did not like the idea of missing those one or two sales that sometimes just wander in. Besides he like being the owner of the only DJ shop in the West End that was open seven days a week.

Stuart took another deep drag and tried to focus on how much he was enjoying the smoke and not on how bored he was with what he had originally thought would be a great job. As a middle-weight DJ he made some money on the weekends doing early sets at the smaller clubs, but not enough to live on. When Felix had told him that Bob was looking for another shop-hand who knew his stuff it seemed more attractive than carrying on as postie.

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Naomi stared down at the coffee that she had been stirring for far too long at this point. She let go of the spoon and it clattered around the rim of the mug for a moment and then came to rest like a skiff-poll in a muddy river.

Peter had no right to talk to her that way, but how was she going to confront the ‘little incident’ that they had just had without looking like the token woman in the development office that she had often felt that she indeed was? He knew nothing about her life, he had no right to publicly interpret her good mood as having ‘gotten good and fucked’ over the weekend. She had no desire to answer his question, but more importantly she wanted and needed to stomp on the conversation that was now happening back at their little cubicle island whilst she made herself a coffee. She had heard this conversation about male colleagues; “I bet she was fugly” or “It doesn’t count with hookers…”, and registered her displeasure about that talk at work. Now it was about her and she was very angry.

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When I arrived home from work, Sara was in the bedroom; there were no lights on. Initially I had thought that I was the first to get home, but then I heard the sobbing; why was she crying?

I followed the sound, my heart breaking with every step; her pain flowing through me, not like a stream, but like short pulses of hard, icy water. I had never heard such sounds come out of her.

I pushed open the bedroom door and there she was, her entire face wet with tears, the knuckles on her left hand white where she was almost crushing her phone, and her whole body shaking with grief. She looked up at me, her eyes like deep wells in the cold ground of her ashen face and just said;

“Dad’s dead.”

The next moment she threw herself at me and clung to me so hard that I was on my knees in the doorway before I knew anything else. She was still shaking; my neck was already wet with her tears. I pushed my fingers into her hair, gently stroked her head and kissed her forehead;

“I’m so sorry darling.”

It was all I had.

—

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Jonas stared at the mixer, trying to work out why he had said that he would DJ. It was one thing to put sets together in his room at home, where there was no one to hear his amateurish beat matching and no one to groan out loud when he mis-cued a track. William was finishing his set, and the crowd were already worked up into a frenzy. If he had not been concentrating on the first three tracks that he was going to spin Jonas would have been as carried away by Will’s set. It was an easy trick to play, but hard to knock based on how good a reaction he was getting; he was looping a key-change section that built toward a crescendo and mixing in a good complimentary beat underneath. It was the mixing equivalent of bringing the crowd to the brink of orgasm and then slowing it down again and going around one more time.

“You ready to go? I’m going to build this one more time and then you need to cue-up for your takeover, ok?”

Jonas nodded, trying to look cool, to not sweat so much; this was it. Time to prove it.

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