Short Story / Turquoise Ribbons
Nick Watson was thirty two, and had assumed he ought to be past these sort of things by now. Waiting and pacing and putting up with it all out of politeness. Spending days dreaming of every way in which he hated her. Delia was pushing lipstick into the corners of her mouth with her fingertips, leaning into the mirror, all breasts and eyelashes and tousled fried white-blonde hair.
She winked at herself. Her eye looked like a great black wound.
He sighed, pulling his green sweater down over his hands. He didn’t deserve this sort of shit, and, to be perfectly honest, neither did she. She came from a different world than him. Everything in her manner suggested swirling Tokyo lights and wild parties and a life clawing at the years, holding them to her chest and trying madly not to let their steadily increasing numbers slip through her grip.
And Nick loathed it all.
Each morning she tied her legs into tall silver-studded black patent leather boots, and every night when she tore them away her feet were angry red and swollen. The color almost screamed against her expensive white silk sheets. She woke up before the sun to paint her face, and Nick woke up with her side of the bed cold. Something entirely different kissed him goodnight than what kissed him goodbye in the morning.
She hummed as she examined her butt in the mirror, and stood at different angles in the light to see which way she would look best. She had let him make her chocolate chip pancakes in the morning after their first night together. After that he discovered that she didn’t eat carbs.
Her mechanical notes froze as she made her way over to him, sitting on the bed and staring at his worn and un-lacquered wooden floor. Her boots drove little plushes of dust out of the fake, cheap Persian carpet and into the rare May morning sunlight streaming through the window.
“D’ya mind doing me a favor?” she asked him, tilting her head and turning around to face the wall. Her tongue twisted around strange Australian vowels. Having done this for her too many times to ask, he lifted up her shirt and wound the thick strings of her corset around his hands, sighing into the inch of flesh between her constricted jeans and the corset. He pulled as she dug all of her weight into her patent leather heels to keep from falling backward into him. He tugged with every ounce of his effort until he was sure every bit of her that could be had been imprisoned inside of it, and then neatly tied the strings to be sure they wouldn’t come loose.
He turned her around and wound his arms around her so that his hands met at the small of her back. He could feel her chest struggle against the corset with every intake of breath, and when she leaned forward to kiss him goodbye, she didn’t feel like a person at all. The thick, unyielding fabric transformed her into a machine. She whispered “Goodbye Nicholas,” into his ear, bumping her sharp cheekbone into his unshaven face, unwilling to let her lips touch his for the sake of the expensive lipstick she was wearing. She always insisted upon calling him Nicholas. She said it made him sound dignified, the way a real Englishman should be. His attempts to explain to her that he was Welsh, and that the only thing important about Wales was that they tied Argentina in Rugby failed. She heard what she wanted to hear, and insisted on calling him by that poofy name.
He didn’t bother to say anything as she walked out of the door. His accent was even thicker than hers, and she never understood a word he said. He’d have had to repeat himself three times just to say “I love you.”
And here they were, staring at each other, waiting for the end of the world.
The London they lived in lay over the land like the wide gray rain. Things hid inside of her architecture, secrets and shadows flitted through her nooks and crannies and alleyways. Thugs flew through her on whistling trains, speaking their own secret tongue, snaking and cascading through her basement, he quivering and shadowy underground. Withered old men, huddled in apartments with their wives.
On one street, near the center of town, sat a miserly apartment building, flourished on trims and edges with warm, cream-colored cherubim, blowing their trumpets up through the cloud cover to God. A staircase wound up through her heart, oaken and leaning, with the knobs placed on the handrail at each landing broken off. They sent a forest of sharp, naked bayonets into the thick, cold, and dusty air.
A little more than halfway up the stairwell, in front of a worn, floral rug the color of baby-vomit or olives, laid the door of Delia Roberts and Nicholas Watson’s apartment.
Inside, the home gave off an aura of being stubbornly and resolutely gray. The walls had been whitewashed, once, but by now had accumulated a layer of grime to stand in solidarity with the rain clouds outside. The rooms had been filled with expensive furniture, colorful throw pillows, bright candles, and flowery and musky incense smoke. The home itself looked broken, the furniture an invading army, holding loud and forceful power over a dark and unfamiliar people.
As soon as he saw her car drive off through the curtain, he commenced his daily ritual of doing everything he imagined she would hate, if she had bothered to tell him.
He wandered around the flat in his underwear without bothering to close the curtain. He fried potatoes and eggs for breakfast and loaded them each with salt. He listened to the radio, at top volume, the cheap love stories that played for old widows midday. In stead of searching the paper for a job, he made war against alien insurgents on the computer screen with a plasma gun. He ordered porn and prayed (to what God he didn’t know) that Delia would find it. Any excuse to send her skinny blonde and ignorant arse walking out the door.
He glanced from the curtain. The rare London sunshine had dissolved into the all-too-common London rain.
Nick felt that he would love any woman anymore. It didn’t matter what she looked like. He wanted her to laugh and be unafraid of showing wonky teeth. He wanted her to let him touch her stomach. He wanted to make her fucking pancakes in the morning, that’s all. It’s not too much to ask for, is it?
He violently pressed a button on the remote control to switch off the writhing bodies playing across the screen, curled up inside the expensive bed and pressed his eyelids against the cool fabric. His whiskers scraped against the white linen and he let himself drown in the sound of his body in the sea of white and the scream of rain against his rattling and fogged window.
A picture of them had been tucked in the dusty and windblown corner between glass and wall.
Nicholas Watson felt fundamentally and momentously betrayed.
Everything had been a betrayal, looking back on it. Even when it had seemed perfect beyond expression.
She had been perfect that night, as with every night. Ribbons had been wound through her hair. It was brown then, and piled into a heap on her head, secured by come invisible force that let strands of hair hang around her face like tassels. She saw everything in the room, winding herself around the writhing bodies with ease, spreading herself and the cocktails in her hand around to all the light-headed and giggling people.
Nick was drunk then too, looking at the crowd from the doorway. He’d been invited here by some woman he’d met on the train. She’d been obnoxious and loud, with a voice that seemed to gather in volume as her story wound. She insisted that Nick come meet her publisher. Maybe she could make a name for him.
He had already met this woman and given her an example of his work. She flipped through it and told him that it was wonderful, it really was, and his talent was obvious, but there just wasn’t a market for this sort of thing. You understand, I’m sure. Then she flitted off to laugh, loudly, with violent red lipstick and large white teeth to all the beautiful people surrounding her.
Nick considered for a moment, and assumed it would be pathetic to go home from such an outrageous party on a Friday night. There was nothing waiting for him at his flat except for the fold out couch and the dog and his typewriter. He loathed the thing, he hadn’t written in weeks.
The expensive bed, the furniture, the decorating. They were all put in place by Del.
Nick found a discarded bobby pin tucked into a corner of the white plush carpeting, and used it to pick the lock on the liquor cabinet. There was an open bar, but it was comprised of the same brown men with spiky hair and large teeth, handing out colorful and overbearingly sweet drinks to the colorful and overbearingly sweet crowd. Nick needed something bitter.
Now he was staring out into the room from a doorway, hand around a glass of bourbon, watching the girl float around the room like a dragonfly. She flitted in between them, almost managing to disappear before being caught again in a glint of the turquoise ribbons in her hair.
The same woman from the train stumbled her way off to Nick. She was stammering drunk, in a manner that was in no way amusing or beautiful. She pushed her face into his chest and laughed loudly, with a strange mule-like scream, and inhaled so violently the wind made a snorting noise in the back of her throat. Her breath smelled of strawberry Jell-O.
“I’m so sorry about my publisher,” she said, her tongue thick around S’s and B’s. “She can be a real money-hungry bitch all the time. I don’ even know why she still works for me. I could do so much better.” The woman began to twirl her hair, the carrot orange of baby food or vomit, around her carefully manicured finger. Nick stepped back.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, doing his best to imitate a truly content and grateful nod, and ducked out of the room. He followed his way down a dark hallway, feeling with his fingers through the house until his ear rested against a door that didn’t reverberate with the wet and violent sighs of some drunk and reveling pair.
He fell into the dark room and crawled with his bourbon into the pristinely made bed. It was stiff, smelled of dust and had obviously not been occupied in years. It was surrounded by the relics of a place reserved only for death and disaster. The empty dresser, the collection of unread classics on a bookshelf in the corner, the vanity glaring evilly at him from opposite the bed. Through the thick darkness he could see the walls and bedspread were all a sickening combination of maroon and pepto bismol pink. He lay down on the bed, dug his way under the crinkling covers, and kissed his forehead to his knees. His breath and body quickly transformed the cool, unfamiliar air into a warm, dark pocket of breath.
He heard the chinking of metal and felt a wet nose on the back of his hot neck. He didn’t move, and a small dog crawled up over him, frightened and trembling with the strange noises and smells that rocked the home outside. Nick stroked his back, and found the poor thing could very nearly fit in the palm of his wide hand. It buried its head in Nick’s chest, and he allowed it. They lay there together, Nick’s mind swimming with liquor, until he heard a muffled footstep.
A crack of light appeared at the door and the dog went yelping. Standing, silhouetted against the light, was the girl in the turquoise ribbons. He could see more than her head now outside of the crowd, and her body had been tightly wrapped in a luminous turquoise dress that shimmered with embroidered roses.
“Everyone alright in here?” she asked carefully, squatting down to pet the screaming dog. Her toes were packed into black heels, and swelled, protesting against their holdings.
“ I’sall fine,” Nick said, his words stumbling out through his mouth, trying to rise from the slow and tired world where his drunken mind had been hiding.
He had thought she was beautiful then, cloaked in fabric that swam with his swimming mind. She helped him from the warm and comfortable bed, and held his wild curly hair behind his head while he puked into her toilet.
What kind of woman does that?
When he asked her about it later, she said she was just trying to be a good hostess.
She was the sober gem in the ocean of sour alcohol and noise. She held his hand and walked with him out onto the balcony, where the cold air smashed him in the chest. He briefly considered punching it in return, before she leaned over the balcony to look out at the lights.
The blue-white glitter that masked the city scum shone in her eyes.
He remembered that she had made excellent coffee, and hours later she made him macaroni and cheese to feed the throbbing of his head. He whispered all of his ideas into her ear, while she lied on her back next to him. Her face was perfect, her eyes lined in black with red lips. He didn’t know when she had disappeared to make-up her face. Then again, he didn’t remember much.
Of all the people who had come through and filtered out, he had stayed, drank her bourbon, and tucked himself into the white sheets of her own bed. Of all the people, why him?
He was the one lying there with hair greasy and skanky breath. She was the one lying there and smiling at all of his musings and witticisms.
He couldn’t tell what those smiles meant.
And now he knew.
She had seen him through the glass, from another world. She understood his words as a translation from an ancient tongue, beautiful but without relevance. She didn’t grip to them like crevices in a rock wall. She didn’t fear death if she were ever to let go.
And now he could feel the weight, in eyelashes and teeth and the grime under his fingernails. Whatever had always kept him together was falling apart. He breathed slowly through the sheathe of fabric in his face and imagined her soft, slender, and perfectly manicured fingernails winding themselves through his black, curly hair, and throwing the back of his skull against the wall. He imagined the way the blood would arc against the gray walls, and the flat spot in the back of his head, matted over with hair, a thatched and wet plateau. He could see himself slide down, and the pink striped trail that would follow behind him. It would hurt, he knew, but in a dull and distant manner. He tasted the warm and coppery blood that would have come, miraculously, flying from his nose and lungs.
And he saw images of her pink lips hung over the toilet, and the sour pink liquid falling in waves and gathering around the edges of the water. He saw them making love in the morning, and her rising immediately afterward to fix her hair. He saw the lace-decorated cake she had bought from a shop on his birthday, and the violently silver box she had given him, filled with books that those who don’t read suppose that those who do would like. He saw them sitting in the moodily-lit Japanese restaurant, stubbornly sitting in front of some vile fish concoction. He was surrounded by her friends, whom she had brought with the understanding that people should be around on your birthday, and that he didn’t have any. They all looked at him quite strangely, like he was an animal in a zoo, a writer. He was a brief curiosity that they’d come along to observe, but didn’t find him as desperate and expressive and wild-eyed as they had hoped. He was just dreary, his sweater damp and pungent from the continuous rain, his face unshaven, and the pouches under his eyes a nasty gray. They stared at him with wide glassy orbs of violent colors, outlined closely with black. Somehow, to him they all looked the same.
He remembered the beautiful dresses that hung in the closet, over shoes that made her thin and tall and violent, and sunk quickly into warm grass. He remembered how often he would knock make-up and perfumes over with his elbows in the bathroom, and how angry she would be with him and her pink nectars fallen on the floor. He had always wanted to try the recurrent scene in romantic comedies, where the sensitive and handsome boyfriend kissed her at the climax of the dear protagonist’s anger.
In the movies the quiet violin music would always start playing, just then. When he tried, she shrieked and asked him, “What the hell are you playing at?”
He’d briefly made a game of watching with her, in the evenings, all of those movies that would leave her crying and asking him, “Why can’t our relationship be that way?”
The next day he would always try one of the things the sensitive and handsome boyfriends liked to do. She always called him mad, and didn’t once notice.
On her birthday he’d written something for her. It was a story about one of the sensitive and handsome actors, which he’d strung with bright and colorful words. He’d given it to her in the morning when she woke.
She’d spent all day reading it, and given it back to him with a fake smile.
“It’s beautiful,” she’d whispered in his ear. She was a terrible liar.
That evening they’d gone to a rock concert. The musicians wore clothes to make them look bohemian, and expensive hair cuts, and the music began to gnaw at your ears after a while. Delia had danced with her eyes closed and her thin arms waving in the air, banging together cheap metal bracelets painted gold.
He saw the piles of hats she kept hidden away in the back of the closet, boxy and fitted into each other, screaming in shadowed colors like some monster ready to burst out on you at night. They never seemed so real as when in half-shadow, and when the light of day fell on them they were nothing.
She never wore the hats. She didn’t let him take them out and sort through them because she found them hideous, and anyway, it was a silly thing to do, playing with a woman’s hats in that way. But she wouldn’t throw them out, that would be wasteful. What if they some day came back in style?
He imagined his fingers winding through her brittle blonde hair, and pulling her up the wall. It would probably tear out against the weight of gravity, and she would scream.
Oh God, make the madness stop.
As long as Nick thought about her, there were some things he just failed to imagine.
He couldn’t imagine touching her stomach, something she never allowed him to do. It was the part of herself she most hated, and wouldn’t eat his cooking because of it.
He couldn’t imagine playing with her hair, as this made her more furious than nearly anything. She sacrificed so much time and capitol to it after all.
He couldn’t see them sitting down to dinner together. He had ended that ritual long ago, when he resigned himself to the fact that dinners made her nervous, and that she couldn’t stand to talk to him and eat at the same time. Eating made her feel naked and shy. Every part of her that became warm and full she saw as unworthy, something that had given in to some forbidden temptation. She couldn’t bear for Nick to see her that way.
She didn’t seem to understand what he wanted from her.
But worst of all, he couldn’t imagine himself writing about her.
He’d gone through the romantic rituals. They had dated, moved in together, celebrated holidays and gone to parties and spent evenings doing nothing. If he knew anyone to introduce her to, he’d have done so as his ‘girlfriend.’ But honestly, it was only something he’d done because he had nothing better to do. He felt the compulsion to fill his flat up with some woman’s expensive furniture and colorful clothing and strong perfume.
But not a word had come out of it. When he thought of her in front of the typewriter, his mind turned gluey, and all he could think of was some imaginary woman, who ate all she pleased, felt substantial against him and let him touch her wherever he wanted, who smelled of sweat and dust and let her long, wavy and natural hair tangle into beautiful tresses before she combed it out again.
He wanted to write about her, but he didn’t know where to begin. Besides, he had the sneaking suspicion that Delia would sneak into his filing cabinet and read about it, and then accuse him of cheating. She wouldn’t understand why somebody so ugly could be better in his eyes than somebody who worked so hard. But Del never understood, and she would cry, hate herself, and possibly even him.
As much as he hated her, Nick couldn’t bear to break her two-dimensional heart.
He rolled with the imaginary woman in the recesses of his mind, played with her hair, and touched her stomach, and curled his head into the space between her shoulder and neck, where the perfume of stale sweat and dust was cradled.
When he awoke Del was fluttering around the house. Her presence stirred the air, and made noises like a singer inhaling deeply between verses. He opened his eyes and, for a moment, panicked. He worried about what he had done while dreaming, and how furious Del would be with him, especially seeing as he’d filmed it and sent her the tape. He would see her hair inflaming into a mad spiked ball, her eyes flooding red and her lips drawing back to show fangs. He wanted to run but he couldn’t seem to move his legs.
But then he looked about and saw that he was in bed, and he could see Del’s arse around the corner, bending over to fix her makeup in the mirror. He breathed deeply and sighed relief. Even then, he felt like a garage slowly filling up with carbon monoxide, like a goldfish put in boiled water, to drown. Garish purple spots erupted behind his eyes.
She walked through the doorway. He lay still, breathing shallowly and slowly and trying to ignore the pounding in his brain. She stepped gently, slowly releasing her weight onto the floorboards, but they creaked anyway, loud and angry in their protests. Del leaned over his still body. Her breasts huddled together in her shirt, imprisoned. They stood out of the top of her shirt nakedly, stung red and raw with the cold London rain.
Nick groaned and rolled over on his back. Delia’s black-rimmed eyes widened. She inhaled sharply.
“Oh, no! Did I wake you?” she said, with a whining hint in her voice. Her eyebrows came together bluntly, her shoulders leaned toward him.
“No Del, I was jus resting my eyes,” Nick groaned. He pulled the sheets up to his neck, clawing at them and his bare skin. He sat up, running his hands over his forehead. They came back wet with sweat, and cold.
“You’re sure?” Delia pleaded. She looked at him as if she was asking forgiveness from some omniscient God.
“It’s all fine love,” he mumbled, using his legs to roll out of bed, immediately wrenching his robe from the back of a chair. He wrapped it around himself and clung to it, quivering.
“What?” Her eyebrows drew together at him. The expression made him feel as if he were being interrogated for something dangerous.
“Nothing,” Nick said, turning away. He pulled his jeans on in one swift motion, threw his feet into boots, no socks, and wrapped himself in a flannel shirt.
Nick stared at Delia’s back as she walked into the kitchen. The way she walked, he could tell that she thought he looked like hell.
He tried to imagine Delia telling him what she really thought of his behavior, and what little care he put to his public appearance. He concentrated, but couldn’t manage it.
The water was running in the other room. Delia was doing dishes, and rinsing greasy, salted egg yolks down the drain. He heard her tongue click, but she didn’t say anything.
Sometimes, Nick wanted nothing more than her to scream.
He curled his gaze around the doorway to look at Delia from behind. She looked more tired than he had ever seen her, face to face.
Nick crept up behind her and wound his arms around her hips. As much has he hated her, he felt sorry for her sometimes. She slammed a cup down into the stainless steel sink, and then snapped off the water, focusing all of her keen attention on ignoring him until she was forced to quit, her throat quivering and eyes delicately closed. She tried madly to swallow back the acidy thing in her stomach that was screaming to let it all away. For just a moment, she glared into the gaudy floral wallpaper, and then leaned back into him. She had a resigned and miserable look on her face.
“You alright darling?” Nick whispered. He held her limp and skinny arms in his grip like a lifeless doll, her lips parted and her eyes, rimmed in black eyeliner and mascara, peeking through the jagged cut of her bleached blonde hair. They looked almost too wide for her face, and were the strange and floral color of bread mold. Tiny shards of storm gray seemed to line themselves up, like little metal shards, all pointing to the north in the black hole of the center. It had been shrunken, a pinpoint or bullet wound, by some doctor-prescribed amphetamine.
“I’m fine,” she said, giving out a self-sacrificing sort of prayer to the world. She quietly rubbed Nick’s hand with hers, like the foot of a statue to some monolithic god. He gripped her hand and felt a chill, stone coldness. He could feel her breathing quietly against him, with slow and gentle puffs of breath running through her lungs.
Nick sighed and backed away from her, only inches, and Delia pulled her weight back to her own tiny, red, puffy feet, and reached to turn the water back on. Nick stood, quietly, looking over her shoulder, but she ignored him, dragging the scratched pink and plastic through the lukewarm water.
Nick reached up to touch her shoulder, but paused instead. His fingertips hovered in the air, letting them tremble in the roar. Delia’s eyes looked downward, and she stood as if trying to draw herself in.
Nick snapped around and stomped toward the door. He took no care to make his footsteps light, and for this the floorboards made no creaking or groaning wail. The violent and roaring silence clamored at his ears. It twisted his tongue and his guts into a black ball, which barricaded his lungs and he couldn’t seem to inhale enough. He gasped like a fish laid out on the pavement, taking in air, but no oxygen found its way to his brain. The edges of his vision turned a static brown. Through the silence he could hear Del’s throat quiver, her eyes tear, and her stiff and cold hands resolutely pass the dishes through the water, again, and again, and again.
Delia’s eyes darted to him as he violently slammed the door.
The stairwell was filled with silence, roaring from worn, carved woodwork, and the dust settled on the plastic chandelier. It was falling down like light gray snow, the chandelier rocking slowly back and fourth from the doors manic crash. His breath slid inward and outward, the cold air let in by the always open front door tearing at the insides of his throat and lungs. He clenched his fists, squinted his eyes shut and pressed his forehead to the wall, bringing out everything inside of him just to not let his fists go at the weak layers of drywall and paint. He trembled and more bits of dust fell loose from the ridges in the wooden trim around the doorway. The sparse winter light and agedness seemed to turn Nick and the room around him into a swampy, feathered yellow gray.
He rushed down the stairs, skipping steps and filling his hand with splinters as it slid down the banister. When he had reached the bottom, the wooden prickles stood from his wide, red hands like tiny evergreens.
He threw himself from the door, tasting the angry cold air with a scowl. The winds twisted through his hair, whirling and scattered and tangled. Glancing around, his chest heaved, and the comfortable noise of the city filled his ears.
A wave of fury came up inside of him, and Nick sent his foot swinging at the wide red brick wall. Though his toe came back throbbing, he felt the tiniest bit better, that the building had taken some of the blame.
A whining ran into his ear, and Nick swung around. An overgrown, spotted dog, with a wrinkled face, rooted its nose around in the trash cans between the buildings. A comfortable sort of dog, whose tail wagged when a passerby showed it the least attention, who you could envision keeping you warm in bed, alone in the winter, or leading you on mad chases after rabbits and squirrels. In its wagging tail was reflected every misery and flaw of the civilized world.
Nick had had to get rid of his comfortable, wrinkled, and hairy dog when Delia moved in, because she was allergic. Now they kept that tiny, palm-sized, rat of a thing, and it ran around the apartment, filling the air with the sound of tiny metal bells and yelping, scampering feet.
The dog looked up at Nick as he drew near, and began to wag its tail, likely expecting a pat on the head, or a bit of sandwich, or possibly even a spot on the rug, in front of a fireplace, to curl up on for a fortnight, or even forever. But a garbage truck rolled by, sending the dog running. In the dog’s mind, all trucks signaled the horrible man in the khaki jump suit with the catching stick, to drag him into the truck’s black innards and keep him imprisoned. Every vehicle that came rattling along the corner, or sat rumbling in the darkness, contained that traitor who had betrayed the dog’s heart.
Nick watched the poor thing flee, frightened and whimpering, and then proceeded to walk, dragging his feet. He kicked through the scattered garbage on the sidewalk the dog had left behind, coughing the fumes from the truck, and sinking quickly with the spitting rain. It ran, along with paper coffee cups and wadded newspapers and strange gray dregs of something filthy, into a gutter in the corner, which slowly filled with this stained, tattered, and miserable waste. Little tufts of dead, straw weeds erupted from the dead, straw grass around the curb, their head bowed like nuns. Tiny eyes peered out of the blackness behind garbage cans, waiting for the rain to stop. Nick breathed, and tried to compose himself, tried to convince himself that he was finally alone.
Looking up against the bitter wind, he saw a bar looming over the gutter. Its dingy green-striped canopy hung like a great eyelid. A small crowd of smokers took refuge underneath it, blowing their curly blue smoke to converge, trapped, in the awning‘s curved womb. The ashes sat strewn across the sidewalk. They were scattered by the shuffling feet, like a prelude to some ancient ritual, a prayer, a dance, and a virgin pushed into a volcano.
Nick saw the bar and strolled past it, warily. An old gray cat rested in the window, flicking its tail and staring angrily at the peeling corner of a health inspector’s sticker. The loud, red letter was being masked by out-of-season Christmas tinsel.
He dragged himself to the corner, where a wall of double-decker busses arrested his progress, belching thick gaseous fumes that muddied up the cloud of white-blue smoke’s purity.
He spun around, eager just to move, and ran into a woman in a bile green sweater, leaking smoke from her nose and the corners of her mouth. Heavy bags hung under her eyes, and her hair, greasy and curly and heavy, like his, fell to her shoulders. It seemed to weigh her whole head down toward the sidewalk. Lines had gathered where her lips clenched around cigarettes, and her eyes squinted against the incoming wind. Her hands had been knotted and dried by some manual labor, and flexed as if they rung with a constant, aching pain.
He turned the other way, awkwardly mumbling some sort of apology. She coughed, dryly, into her shoulder.
Nick turned again, away from the coughing buses and the coughing woman, to face the door of the building. He was surrounded by a writhing crowd of smoke and bodies. He felt like a cornered animal, ready to spit and claw and bite for space. Mad to find a moment of peace, he pushed his way in, narrowing his shoulders and maneuvering through the crowd.
A pocket of wet, windy air circled around him in the doorway. The air inside swam around his head, thick and clanking with dim, anonymous conversations. He slipped carefully into an unoccupied booth, where stray bits of foam fluff seemed to burst forth from the faux red leather. There were syrup and coffee and booze rings dried on the table crusted with bits of lint and cracker crumbs and newspaper scraps. A small hole, had been burnt in the seat between his legs by someone’s cigarette, way back when smoking indoors wasn’t illegal
The waitress sided up beside him and leaned over the table near him. He could see down her shirt, but she looked tired and miserable and he turned his eyes away. Fat had crowded around her hips and stomach and arms, and she had the slightly scrunched look of someone who had almost grown shorter from constant traversing of a tavern floor. Her auburn hair was dawn up in a careless bun behind her head, and strands had escaped in her dancing servants whirl. She tucked them behind her ear, along with a ballpoint pen.
She pursed her lips at him. “What is it you’d like, dear?”
“Just a coffee, thanks,” he said, turning to look through the window. She gave him a strange glance and walked away.
Nick sat quietly, and watched the bee-dance of the people passing outside and the people running around indoors, listening to their odd cacophony of laughing and crying and sighing and coughing and all other strange, human noises. He sat quietly and tried very hard to be completely ignored, absorbed into the whirling crowd that meant he was anywhere away from Delia’s roaring silence.
The waitress snuck up behind him, turned sideways to avoid knocking a nearby, oblivious couple with the black plastic tray perched on her hand. She swung her arm around his neck and set his coffee in front of him, brushing her hand against his collarbone as she withdrew. He recoiled, instinctively, away.
He blew on the black concoction, and drank it quickly, paying no mind to the fleshy, dry feeling of his burnt tongue on the roof of his mouth. The coffee coursed through his brain, and left him jittering, his mind roaring with songs and literary quotes and colors. His right leg bounced cheerily in 1/16 time, to the tune of whichever top 40 rock song was playing. They ran together, and were all connected by the same strained and melodramatic grunge voice of the male lead singer.
Everything around him, slowly, began to bubble and fizz, the sounds rolling together, culminating in a low hiss that dragged itself carefully into the undercurrent of his mind. Images danced through him, unstoppable. He pictured himself tumbling, freefalling, down the winding oaken stairs in his apartment, going down forever. Each time he turned, the back of his neck cracked against the stair it fell against, indenting the wood and his skull in turn. His tumbling mind seemed filled with the miserable, roaring silence that haunted everywhere Delia stepped.
He focused all of his energy on halting, on digging the feet in his mind against the wood and not falling any more, on breathing slowly and looking around and knowing that he was, at once, still.
But it was torn from him; he couldn’t control the falling in his mind. He stared into the recesses of the bar while he, in his daydream, fell.
Nick snapped his head up to focus on the room around. There was an old man, probably disfigured, making his way to the bathroom to empty the bladder full of scotch resting in his swollen belly. He was doing a genuine, John Cleese silly walk, bending his right leg backward and kicking before resting it down, every time he took a step. He passed a woman who was taking bits of her napkin, tearing them off, rolling them into tiny balls, and placing them in an empty bottle of beer. Her shiny, sweaty red face looked anxiously at the man across from her, a heap of straight read hair being all Nick could see. The paper balls had climbed to the bottle’s neck.
Nick heard the red-headed man’s voice rise, slowly, over the woman’s head. Her hair, thin toffee blonde, was sticking to her face around her temples and neck. She was muttering some incomprehensible apology to the red faced man, and Nick could hear the top of her knee knocking against the table, a swift and rhythmic drum line. Her hands were shaking, and one tiny ball of paper fell from her fingers and rolled onto the floor. The man slammed his fingers onto the table.
Nick stammered, questioning himself. Panicked tears were welling up in the red-faced woman’s eyes. A few words found their way through the curls over Nick’s ears.
“You….. slut I can’t……….. men what ….. fucking thinking….” She winced, and he laughed maliciously, flicking a small sugar packet toward her head. It flew just past her ear and left a shallow red slit in its wake.
Nick pushed his coffee away and stood up, leaving his coat heaped in the corner between the seat and the wall. He looked at the sticky floorboards he was crossing, gathering breath in his lungs and energy in his gut. His stomach wobbled in protest, full of hot coffee and ready to flee. He glanced at the woman, who by now was all-out weeping. He grimaced and tapped the man on the shoulder.
The man turned around. His shoulders were broad and muscled through a thin T-shirt, which bulged around his waist and folded with the turn of his body. He was wearing pants bought from a bulk army supply store, telling the world that he thought he was a bad-ass. Pockmarked and blemished skin covered a broad face, carrying a fierce authority. Overgrown red eyebrows closed over deep-set, murky brown eyes. He gave off the impression of a comic-book villain, decisive and deadly.
“Please sir,” Nick muttered, stumbling over his words. The sounds of the bar converged upon his ears. “I don’t mean to interfere in your business,”
“Then fucking don’t!” the man snapped, twisting himself around in his seat. He man scowled.
“Please don’t go shouting at her, sir,” Nick said, carefully, inclining his head forward. He squared his feet and took a deep breath, trying to block out, in his mind, all of the heads that had suddenly turned directly towards him. His stomach begin to quiver.
The man stood up swiftly, with the woman squeaking away at the two of them with her hands over her mouth. Nick had just enough time to glance at the glass of scotch on the table, and the man’s dilated brown eyes, before seeing hairy knuckles flying into his skull. For a moment, everything swam purple and black chaos.
The man missed, knocking him powerfully just above his ear and sending Nick backward, scrambling with his feet to avoid falling and knocking away a chair. From across the room, the waitress’s eyes grew wide. The whole room was silent. Nick raised his hands in the air, palms toward the red, drunk, and fuming man before him.
“Sir, there is such a thing as harassment,” Nick said clearly, his eyes squinted. Coffee and adrenaline sped through his veins. His fingertips trembled. “Let the poor thing be.” He gestured toward the woman with a crook of his neck an swing of his shoulder, keeping his narrowed eyes intently focused on the man and his fists, half-raised at his sides.
The man lurched forward, at the waitress dropped her tray, letting it clatter on the floor. She shouted something to the kitchen through the sudden surge of talk. Nick dove under his raised arms, stumbling backward through scattered chairs. A young bus boy came scrambling through the doors and toward the pair. Nick cowered.
The boy walked over, and with a certain amount of screaming and wailing, he pinned the struggling man’s arms behind his back. The woman sat, with her hands in her face, weeping like a child, as her man passed out, and was dragged sleepily away by police. Nick got up and sat back into his booth, somehow exhausted. He checked his face in the darkened window. His hear was damp with sweat, and a small cut was beginning to clot above his eyebrow.
The woman was beginning to gather herself together, using trembling hands to put her coat on and pick up her purse. She started to walk toward the door, head hanging in shame. She turned her head sideways, as if to give Nick some sort of silent ‘thank you.’ Nick averted her gaze. That quiver in the pit of his stomach was now wailing.
Nick stared for a few minutes at the table in front of him. Reflections of city lights outside swam in its surface. A quiet voice sounded behind his ear.
“You look like you need this,” it said. He turned around. It was the waitress, and her voice was softer than the bark she had given him earlier. When he swiveled his head, he realized that most of the bar was empty. The fight must have spoiled their fun. A bottle of something pink-red was hanging in front of him, suspended in her pale and stopped with intricate cut glass.
“It’s mulberry wine,” she said quietly, as if she was at risk of being overheard by the solitary drunk at the bar, with his head in his hand. “I made it myself, from the tree in my backyard.”
“Thanks,” Nick said, baffled. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror. A mulberry-purple bruise had wound itself around the cut on his face. He took the bottle.
Time passed quickly after that. He watched the street people find themselves here, ordering strong coffee and sandwiches. When the bottle was empty he kept going, through whiskey, until a hot knot had formed in his stomach. It clawed at him, strangling any train of thought trying to wrestle its way through his mind. He stared out of the black window, and heard the roar of a bus pulling up at the corner. Its door folded out, and a woman came stumbling out of the bus, blonde and inebriated. She was clutching onto her oversized handbag desperately, and looking around. She didn’t know where she was.
A fury seized Nick then, blind and panicked. His fingers trembled at the sight of the stranger outside. A drop of whiskey flew out of the glass he was clinging to. His knuckles were white.
He threw himself upward, throwing money on the table and stomping from the bar. The waitress raised her head as he left, and tried to say “goodbye,” but he was lost into the strange, swimming night.
The sidewalk was tacky with the rain, and reflected the white and red and yellow lights of the city. Nick’s shoes slipped as her fumed down the road. The night people stumbled past him, wide eyes and wondering at what could make this man angry in their beautiful world. They giggled, pushing their fingertips to their half-open mouths. Nick resisted the urged to punch them.
A sickness over took him, and he bent over, into a dark always, and let the contents of his stomach flow onto the ground and into the nearest gutter. IT ran, sour and pink, past his lips. He sputtered and looked up. Hidden in the blackness between the rubbish bins were the round, moony eyes of a great white dog.
Nick fell to his knees, and kept puking, rooted to the ground by his bare palms. They scraped against the grainy sidewalk, and he could feel the water soaking through his knees. He shivered.
The dog came scampering through the bins and stood next to Nick’s doubled over and heaving body. It whined. Nick didn’t look up. Giving a brief whine, it lifted it’s way to brush against Nick’s hand, and licked his ear. It tickled, and Nick laughed briefly before more of the sour pink liquid came running from his stomach. It tasted like mulberry wine.
Another bus rolled by, and the dog scampered off, its tail between it’s legs. Nick winced.
His stomach was empty now, but it was so hard to pull himself up. He felt dizzy, and empty, and his hands were trembling. He leaned against the side of a building, pressing the side of his face against the cool brick. He raised a trembling hand and hailed a cab. He doubted he could manage the two remaining blocks home.
He felt his weight, in that brief walk to the curb, like he didn’t think he ever had before, every muscle in him trembling with fury. The inviting, marred leather surface of the seat invited him, and he laid down, his legs bent and his feet pressed against the door.
“Where ya going?” said the man in the front seat, too loudly. Nicks’ ears throbbed.
“Just to Division Street,” Nick said, slowly, mumbling. “Where it meets Condor,” he said, and then curled his head back into the fake leather. It was at once cool and warm, and smelled of cigarette smoke. He inhaled.
“That’s just two blocks, you know that, right?” the cabbie said again, loudly. He was stuffed into a leather jacket. His wide, hairy face had gathered the grime of London in its creases. His teeth were yellowed, and a bulge below his lip betrayed a lump of tobacco.
“Yes, I do,” Nick said, testily.
“Alright, man, I’m just saying, I’ll take you money, it’s all the same to me,” he said, and then fell silent. Nick was grateful, silently. He swung his arm over his eyes and felt the air flow in and out of his lungs. The cab screeched to a halt.
Nick yanked his wallet from his pants and shoved money into the cab driver’s sausage-like fingers. The man gave him a dirty look when he slammed the cab’s door.
He ducked into his doorway, feeling the warmth of the stairwell. He hugged himself, quivering, the stairs swimming in front of his eyes. Leaning against the wall, he climbed, remembering the pain of the splinters and glaring at the wooden banister. He could hear Delia pacing in the floor above him. He scowled.
The landing was dusty, lit by the plastic chandelier, still quivering back and fourth. Nick slammed himself against the wall, concentrating on the other side of the door. He heard Delia’s soft, clacking footsteps approach the door. She was still in her high-heeled boots. She hadn’t changed into her pajamas. She had been up, waiting for him.
His fist fell against the wall, the fleshy side of his hand sliding down the paint. He swore quietly to himself, and wrapped his hand around the worn copper doorknob. He turned it, creaking, and leaned forward. The stubborn oak door gave, and Nick nearly fell forward.
Delia wasn’t there, and Nick suspected she had gone to their room, not wanting to look like she’d been waiting. She never wanted to look subservient, but it ached in every crevice of her bones. Everything she did was for him, and he tortured her.
The hallway was empty, cold and gaping. City lights streamed in from the window, curtains thrown to either side. Nick breathed loudly in the silence, and then it came. Clattering and yelping, that tiny, palm-sized, rat of a dog screamed its welcome or displeasure to him. He saw it scampering, its tags coming together like bells. The whiskers around it’s mouth hung with droplets of saliva, and it’s mouth hung open over tiny, yellow fangs.
He took aim, and swung his foot through the swimming room. His foot made swift contact with the dog’s underside, and a satisfying thud rang out and it went screaming and sliding across the room. It collapsed in a corner, trembling and yelping, it’s tail between its legs in a puddle of its own piss.
Nick looked up, his chest heaving, and saw Delia’s wide eyes curled around the corner. She shrieked. The sound threw itself off the ceiling and pierced Nick’s ears. He hair was splayed out against the light, and her eyes threw themselves at him like a terrible Gorgon. They were swollen and puffy, holding only the gray shadow of the black lines around her eyes. She had been crying.
Nick raised his hands slowly, as if in surrender, towards her, with his mouth slightly open. His left foot remained planted, turned toward the crying, trembling dog. Nick watched her, doubled and swimming through his mind. Her chest heaved in grief and fury.
She bend over stiffly, wincing at the pain of the corset digging into her chest. Her white breasts trembled with her wracking sobs. Her mouth was opened, wet and ugly, and she drew in air in sharp, raspy rakes.
“Fuck you!” she scream, doubled over and leaning all of the air in her chest into the final word. Her elbows rested on her hips, and her beautiful white breasts showed out of the top of her shirt like ghosts.
Nick looked down. Her feet were red, cold, and bare.
He kept his arms raised, and slowly walked toward her, baring his palms like white flags of surrender. She sobbed and quivered.
With every thud of Nick’s heavy feet, the dog in the corner screamed.
Nick stood facing her, and let his hands drop. He watched, at the naïve and ignorant girl before him that he had reduced to tears. For the first time since he had met her, Nick felt fundamentally and momentously ashamed.
She spat out muttered protests and curses as he wrapped his arms around her. Soon, the noises stopped eeking from her throat, but her mouth still opened and closed, and she folded her arms and leaned her head into the soft curve of Nick chest.
He closed his eyes and pictured the world still, no longer spinning, and twirled Delia’s ravaged, corn husk hair between his fingers. She cooed some strange, otherworldly lullaby in her wordless laments.
“I’m sorry,” Nick said, and held her. She felt like a doll, lifeless, empty-headed, and, ultimately, alone. Delia shook her head and kept opening and closing her mouth, her chest heaving.
Out of the squeezing and whooshing breath noises that clawed themselves out from deep inside her chest, one of them managed to sound strangely like “eusauree.”
“Shut up,” Nick said. “Don’t be sorry for anything.” she grew quiet at his instructions. The yelping echoing from the corner ceased.
Nick spent the rest of the evening packing his things, most of which fit into a few suitcases and two boxes. Delia watched him form one of her white, overstuffed chairs, her bread-mold blue eyes unshielded and afraid. There wasn’t anything Nick could say to justify or explain himself. He had used Delia to fill a space, and could make no apology worthy of his sins.
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When Nick storms out after his cold encounter with Delia, theres too much description and you loose the power of Nick’s anger and frustration at Delia’s inability to release.
You say he enters a bar, but that seems like the wrong description to me. that makes me believe he’s going intending to get drunk and that maybe his purpose, I’m not quite positive. you use the word “tavern” later and I think that’s a better description.
I don’t think the ending is rushed because the entire piece is the ending. I mean the ending. At least how I view the piece, the point of it is to end everything. Although I wished the last sentence had been different, I’m not sure what it should be, but it doesn’t sum up the almost worthlessness of their relationship enough.
I really did enjoy reading this and found it very engaging, but a few of the details could be excluded or just rearranged to make the piece flow more. otherwise very good job. best of luck
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Your first sentence is good because it sets up a hook that makes the reader want to know more. “What things this 32 year old man be past by now?” I asked myself. You could however, take the ‘had’ out of this sentence and I think it would still work fine.
“Everything in her manner…” This is a great sentence!
What was so rare about the May morning sunlight? Okay, I get it now… It’s in London, the land of eternal rain. You could have set this up in the beginning, the fact that they were in London.
“She had been perfect that night, as with every night.” What night? Was this the first night they spent together? At this point the story gets very confusing. Is the narrative talking about Del? I believe it’s talking about some random woman he met on the train, but it’s not clear because her name isn’t given. I’d go back over this part with a critical eye because it seems that it’s very important to the story, yet, like I said, is quite confusing.
ArG!! Who is this “she” that’s drunk and keeps doing things around Nick? It’s very frustrating, unless you’re trying to go for some kind of mysterious woman that has an important part to play in the story. Can you just give her a name please? An identity? It would serve well to alleviate the confusion of this reader. I’ve gone through about 6 or 7 pages of hearing about “her” and to be honest, this is where the story falls flat. There’s no amount of CPR that’s going to bring it back to life for me or keep my interest like the first 4 pages did. This is I think a fundamental key to being able to write for your reading audience. If you get them so confused (and believe me, it doesn’t take long) they just give up. I will however try to finish the story because I’m already halfway through with it, but I suspect I’ll have to just resort to scanning through it.
” He curled his gaze around the doorway to look at Delia from behind.” This I’m sorry to say, is simply not possible.
This story I’m sorry to say suffers from a number of flaws. First, there’s no emotional investment in the character Nick. I have to either like a character, or not like them, but with Nick, he seems like a cardboard cut out that just bounces around never taking any action. Everything is happening to him, he doesn’t really ever make any conscious decisions, or put them into action. I thought the character of Del was better… But I think as a writer you have to ask yourself, “What is the core of this story? Where’s the conflict?” To me, it just reads like this guy vaguely dislikes this vain woman. That’s it. I can appreciate the time you took into writing this, but as far as the characters go… They’re all kind of flat. You narrative is probably your strongest point as I did see some beautifully well crafted descriptive sentences. But it just doesn’t feel like this story is going anywhere.
Perhaps that’s because you really lost me at the part where he met the woman on the train and went to her party. Everybody’s got to start somewhere, and for being as young as you are, I have to applaud your ability and courage to put this many words down on a page and then bare them to harsh reviewers like me. You are a far better writer than I was when I was sixteen, or even in my early twenties. You’ve got a lot to learn, but the the great thing is you can if you apply yourself. Check out Stephen King’s book On Writing, or do some research and find a good book on fiction writing. And read! This wasn’t bad at all, it was just the plot that was very confusing. Best of luck.
-Curt
I htought it was really fantastic.
Your great use of detail made it easy to read.
And you built your charcters beautifully and gracefully.
I felt moved when they moved.
It was a little hard to follow at some points,
grammer looked pretty good. I didn’t notice anything.
I’m still a little confused about where his sudden anger managment issues came from. I guess it was just the stress of everything.
Once again, it was fantastic and I really look forward to reading more of your stuff =]
I love this piece, especially the start where I get to know the characters. Your syntax, grammar and spelling are all fine, so I can’t criticise you there. My only piece of advice really is that sometimes you use too much description. Also, try to lay off the thesaurus. As Staphen King says: use the first word you think of.
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