Category: Uncategorized (Page 25 of 44)

“Do you hear my voice, Olivia? Is it familiar to thine ear?”

She stirred, her heavy eyes eventually yielding to her will to see. As she looked around she realised that she was not in her bed chamber. Not only was she not where she expected to be, but she was tied to this bed and that was definitely out of the ordinary for her. In the dim light she could see several indistinct shapes; were they people watching her?

“Have you remembered me yet, Olivia? Does my voice move your memory?”

She looked around, trying to find the source of the disembodied voice and her eyes fell upon Sebastian. She wondered why he was not moving, and the longer she looked the more she started to realise that something was wrong. He was not blinking,and his head was at an odd angle. She struggled against her bonds to get a better look;

“Ah you have spied your husband, I see. He screamed for you as I lifted his heart out of his chest, you know. Here, have some more light so that you can see.”

More light fell upon him and she screamed in pain.

“You have to help me get into his office. He’s hiding something, and I think it’s got to do with the disappearances that have been happening.”

I could not believe what I was hearing. My normally perfectly sane friend Sandra had clearly been abducted and replaced by a character from an Enid Blyton novel or a Nancy Drew tale. I raised an eyebrow;

“San, are you seriously telling me that you not only want me to help you break into the Head of English Literature’s office, but that the reason you want me to do that is because you think that he’s the one abducting cats, even though no one is willing to confirm that there is any evidence of cat abductions? Honestly, San, have you been drinking Red Bull again?”

She looked at me with that angry, stubborn stare and practically fizzed with frustration.

“Stop talking at me like that, okay? I know you think I’m crazy, but I saw him from the staffroom window yesterday. He thought that no one was watching, he was out by his car, and there were three dead cats in his car boot.”

So it’s not all glamour. When I tell people that I am a freelance photographer the first thing they ask is how on Earth I make money; to be honest I am very cagey about that, after all there are far too many of us already. Once we’ve talked briefly about the ins and outs of why it’s a lot of hard work and you’re only as good as your last shoot, then comes the question that they’ve been dying to ask. I should clarify that this question is not asked by everyone, but it is not exclusively asked by men, either.

“Do you fuck / sleep with / shag [delete as appropriate or add your own cliché here] loads of hot models then?”

Let’s clear this up once and for all; owning a camera is not a license to be an asshat. Sure I’ve had the odd tumble, but it’s been with people I’ve got to know, on long trips, not as a coda to a quick two hour shoot for Marie Claire. Let’s clear this up too; models are not whores. Some of them are promiscuous, some of them are not, just like people of any other profession; the women and the men.

“It’s only a book, you know. Don’t look so shocked. If it were the word of an all powerful god don’t you think it would be less inconsistent? More to the point, don’t you think that the book itself would be inviolable? As it is I can show you how it’s been edited and altered by man to fulfil man’s agenda…”

Peter grunted as he interrupted;

“Oh good heavens, not this again! The bible has been altered so it can’t be the word of God? Did you ever consider that it might have been the Grace of God within chosen people that led to the refinement of the bible? The point is that you don’t believe in God, so you assume that there are no good reasons for what you see as inconsistencies in the Bible. I on the other hand believe in God and that the Bible is the Word, I am just not smart or holy enough to fully understand it. So anyway how do you want your steak? Everything is ready and the pan is hot.”

“Medium rare, please Pete. Thanks.”

Peter turned away and placed the first steak in the pan;

“Why don’t you pour some wine?”

Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe, but sometimes it is an egg whisk. I had been wondering whether or not the apparent flirting coming from the guy who lives over the road was real flirting for well over a week before I finally decided to do something about it.

As usual I was setting off on my morning run, at about half six, when I saw him coming out of the house, already dressed for work. I did nothing different; simply waved and smiled, but he stuck his hand up and before I knew it he was coming over.

“Hi there. Going for a run, huh?”

This was a fairly safe gambit; it was not like he wandered over and said “I’ve worked out you’re gay and I’d like to invite you over for dinner and maybe a good hard fuck”. Still the body language was all there. His whole body was slightly inclined towards me and as I stopped to answer him he reached out with his hand, his eyes were dilated… He was a really good looking guy; I was more than a little flattered by the attention. I was about to take his hand;

“Can you sign this for me?”

This had been a good idea through all of the planning phase. Now, sat behind a wall in the freezing November night, waiting for the others to arrive, hoping to not be found by a security guard, Alan was starting to feel some uncertainty creeping in.

It had been two months earlier when they had all taken a few too many drinks and decided to fake a Banksy on the walls of the new Magistrates’ Court. All of them had lived in Bristol for years, some of them remembered Banksy’s first works appearances. They had been joking about how much they missed his work since he had become more famous, and then Frank had simply said;

“Why don’t we do one for him, huh?”

It was elegant in both its power and simplicity. A graffiti installation apparently by a reclusive and secretive artist would appear on a new building in his old stomping ground. The local reaction was likely to be pleasure and satisfaction that the ‘old boy’ has come back to the home range, and even though it would be publicised it would be hard to out as a fake.

“What do you mean, you ate reindeer sausages? How could you do that?”

Frank shook his head and swallowed the derisory comment he had been about to spew forth. Instead he took a moment to remind himself that the high moral ground was easily lost, but easier to win if never surrendered. Besides he quite liked this girl and making her look stupid, or trying to anyway, was bound to work out badly for him in the long run.

“Well, they were on the menu, and I’d eaten venison sausages before, so I thought that I’d probably like them… I suppose I fancied some game and there it was.”

Judging by the look on her face cheap humour may have been the better option; at least there would have been the outside chance of making her laugh.

“That’s sick that is. I mean it’s bad enough that you think eating Bambi is okay, but Rudolph! I can’t believe I ever liked you!”

This had to be a joke! Was she seriously going to lose it with him over sausages? He was starting to sweat and shift in his seat;

“You pillock! Had ya!”

She was smiling.

The stream of tail-lights stretching away into the distance was really quite soul destroying. If Della had been awake they could have talked, maybe even kissed; it was not as if the traffic was moving.

She snuffled and brushed her wrist across her nose in her sleep and he felt himself melt in the face of her cuteness. Why was it that this woman, this person was cute to him when she flailed about in her sleep and made odd noises and even talked in her sleep sometimes? When he had to share a twin with a work colleague on a sales trip, or go somewhere with the softball team on an away game, the similar foibles of other sleepers would annoy him rather than make him feel happy and affectionate. Of course it was because he loved her, and he knew that, but it amused him to play with the uneven treatment he gave to people who were not Della.

“Richard? Come back to bed Richard.”

Suddenly he did not feel happy and secure and loving towards her. Now all he could do was wonder who Richard was, what with his name being Tony.

The moonlight, reflected on the underside of the bridge by the ripples in the water made it seem as though they were walking into a tunnel of water. She gripped his hand a little more tightly, suddenly worrying that they were in a dark and lonely place.

“Hey there. You scared baby, or have you just noticed that no one is around?”

His smirk would normally have annoyed her, but something about the light, the way his voice sounded bouncing off the bridge and most importantly the fantastic bottle of wine that they had just shared at the restaurant. She shot him her best playful and cute look and yanked him towards the wall. For a moment he hesitated, double checking that he was right about their being alone and then he followed her lead.

She pulled his hands inside her coat as their mouths met and once he had got the basic idea she slid one hand around his waist and the other snaked its way into his trousers. As she found what she was looking for he let out the little gasp that she loved so much. She squeezed more.

“Turn left up there.”

I shot her a quizzical look;

“And why, pray tell, do you think that left is the right course of action? I mean you do have the map upside down.”

The look I received in return was less quizzical, more homicidal if the truth be told. We had been orbiting Sudbury for some time now, trying to find the right arcane combinations of turnings to end up on the market square in order to pick up the third member of our party from a pub called The Monkey Wrench, where he had been staying the night before.

“Well, don’t turn left then. See if I care. Of course we’re going to be late if you don’t start listening to me instead of just randomly turning ‘the way that feels right’ as we come to junctions.”

She did have a point, and I was starting to dread the endless ribbing I was going to receive from Ferdie, when we finally picked him up. He was not going to care about being kept waiting, or even arriving late to the wedding. That would not stop him needling me about it all day though.

“Okay then, left it is.”