Short Story / Notes from the windowsill (Analysis)
Tale 1
Love
Somewhere on the other side of this dark night there is a bar. She is in that bar. Her each smile correlates to a rise in Fahrenheit. The men, from each crevice of this establishment had been stealing the odd glance throughout her presence. First, they were a little coy hardly wanting her to know precisely what they had been eyeing up. She knew. Her smiles are mandates to leer more. Sassy, sexy, slender blond with pale blue eyes and soft curly hair. Her legs reaching up all the way to heavens. Tonight, she is serving the amber nectar. Note the slender wrists and those fine elongated pianist's fingers as she pours pint after pint. She is paralysis. They are the paralysed beasts. She is the combined currency of all their desires.
The first time we met had been under the 'Beauty and the Beast' sign in Tottenham Court Road. That rainy afternoon she wore a long fluffy green overcoat. Her hair was a little unkempt and wet from the light drizzle. Still, I wanted to touch her. It was a brief encounter. She had to be somewhere else in two hours. We went to eat at the Hari Krishna eatery close to Soho Square. The home made bread I had grown to love so much, she liked too. That afternoon it tasted a little sweeter. She wrapped a piece of it into a tissue and tossed it inside her coat pocket. Each little thing that we had in common, however insignificant, I played out to be of major importance in my mind.
The rose quartz that dangles from my neck but stays hidden most of the time for anyone to notice, was her gift to me that afternoon. She looked into my eyes, smiled and said, 'I have something for you.. This will make you feel loved'. The little gift was for the tapes I made her before we met, for the incense I sent her when she had a cold and for the words I wrote her when there was little to say. It was a small oblong piece of pink stone. There was a piece of metal on top encircling the stone through which a chain or string could be threaded through. She took my right hand, dropped the quartz on my palm and closed the fingers around it. The stone inside my palm was cold and her hands encircling mine warm. There was little ceremony to the event yet it felt ceremonious. It felt like she was claiming me. A motion to put her stamp all across my neck. I had never worn anything around my neck. Later that afternoon I found a piece of string to thread through the metal attachment and put it on. It wasn't stifling as I first thought it would be. I kept on clasping it not knowing why. When allowed to dangle it rested on me like the soft touch of a hand.
I wanted our hour and half to go on and on. We ate and talked. I remember little about the content of our conversation. She probably said more. I stared more. I think she liked me. When we left she held my hands and kissed my left cheek. That was sweet. No complaints. I knew I wasn't going to see her that evening or until her next trip to London, or mine up North. Providence though, had other plans.
That evening she was going to sing at a gathering but the guitar accompaniment, an ex-boyfriend had not turned up. Typically unreliable, he was circling around Kent in a white van. At that time or later, I didn't bother enquiring why.
In her moment of panic I received a text message. It read, 'do you play anything?'
'Only words..', I replied.
I dragged along my best friend, a competent pianist, as my entrance ticket to see her. When she saw me her face lit up. Another warm embrace and a kiss on my right cheek. I could get used to this. Embraces, feeling her lips on my cheeks, feeling her cheek on my cheek, feeling her tightly clothed body and that fresh scent of desire.
The gathering where she was going to sing had been organised as something of a second wedding reception for a close friend. The groom's parents were Swedish. They had missed the wedding the previous month and had harped on about a formal reception of sorts. So the happy couple hired out a small community centre called the Tabernacle in some dingy part of East London.
That night, she wore a tight white top that had a pink heart shaped motif across the chest. The dark blue jeans were even tighter and clung to her long thin legs like stretched leather. I tried in vain to keep my eyes off her. There was a bar in one corner or the large hallway. She bought our drinks. There were no outside pockets to her jeans for the change so she handed me her money for safe keeping. Copper, silver and crisp Bank of Scotland notes. I touched the notes to feel her touch on them. Scottish notes so close to her skin now rested in my back pocket. She went to the corner of the room where there was an upright black piano and muttered something to my friend sat on the piano stool. He started fretting about playing the odd chord or two. She burst into song. No microphone. Her voice projected into thin air across the low ceiling of that long room. Some of the guests present continued to mutter.
There were five songs. When she had finished singing there was a huge round of applause even from those who had muttered all the way through each song. She came by to sit opposite me on a long table. That night the conversations flew over my head. Like her notes before, the words entered me like painless bullets only to fly straight out. They didn't hurt. Later they would. I could not make out individual words. We spoke occasionally across the table to each other and said more to others sat to our left and right. I tell a lie. She spoke, I watched. We had already established this trend. She had this way of nodding her head when laughing out loud. As the candle flame flickered my intent gaze countered the flames lack of still. If she was the flame I was the moth. I the moth encircled that flame in a fit of desire. The heat would burn my wings, choke my insides but still I'd want to be devoured by it.
Intimacy is a glimpse of what is to come, what is inevitable. It seldom disappoints the watcher. The protagonists might suffer, toss and turn, unable to sleep at night, feverish at odd times of the day, but intimacy feels no guilt. Its byproduct, love, turns bitter even quicker. Love is a dog from hell. It bites you from the inside, chews up your innards and spits them out without failing. You desperately want the dog to choke to death but it won't. It consumes up your very arteries and the blood that spurts through them. By the end, there is little left of you until you find someone else to be intimate with. But what of love? It flows through you again? Wrong. You discover some semblance of understanding through some old text written three thousand years ago. You pick up a new hobby, get a new hair cut, buy some new clothes, become a Buddhist, all in a vain hope that love would strike you again.
Happy times. Bittersweet memories. These linger deep inside the mind only to rear their ugly heads on select Sunday afternoons. A long walk through some park, even better, a short and fast run through an uneven pavement, there is no use. There is no escape from those once happy thoughts. However, as the years pass by, you are a lot less bitter about all those things that hadn't taken place. You sit on the windowsill, stroke the cat and take an occasional sip from a lukewarm cup. A train hurtles past. You feel a little less love.
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Tale 2
Flowers
Two years before the last millennium had ended I sent her flowers. That first time she became ecstatic. So surprised, she wrote, ‘You sent me flowers.. I love flowers.. no one had given me flowers in seven years.. and so many of them too.. so beautiful.. so soft.. I lay on them and felt so soft.. if you were here I’d love you..
Love and touches..
A xx’
That evening, I lit a candle and incense sticks, and laid on the floor with her words. The words played inside my head over and over again. I liked the allusion to softness, hints of future touches and that she found my flowers so beautiful. So much she had said and much she hadn’t, but specific combination of words had stuck to me. They felt holy, like a revelation and I knew that the words could not have been made up to express mere gratitude. I tried to visualise what she looked like when she first saw the flowers. Was her hair ruffled, was she humming a song, was she smiling, did those pale blue eyes light up? I knew that she felt happy, beautiful and wanted. I was convinced that I made her feel that way. This made me happy. The candle eventually burnt out and all I could see in the darkness were the fluid curves of some imaginary shapes emanating from the green stereo lights. They danced to the rhythm of Chet Baker. There was much to ponder about the darkness, the dancing shapes, the night, her words and how I felt about her. That the night could be so cold and brutal was ultimately revealed in the physical distance between her and I.
The flowers were sheer impulse. The phone had been picked up and I dialled a florist in the Border counties in between Scotland and England. It was the 12th February. They were to be delivered on the 13th.
Why not the 14th?
I had always hated the idea of a day dedicated to Valentine. Misunderstood, wrongly celebrated it reeked of commercialism. Money, for my young mind could not possibly have been linked to love. The former, materialistic and the latter, so pure that the likes of me could not possibly comprehend. Why should I care about some long haired priest who was killed eighteen hundred years ago on the 14th February? Legend has it that he wed couples defying an imperial edict from Roman emperor Claudius II. His punishment was to be clubbed to death. Not satisfied by a lifeless body they chopped off his head too. All in good measure. As the head fell off it rolled down to the feet of the newlyweds, leaving a holy bloodtrail that resembled a thorny stemmed rose. The robe and roses in holy communion anointed by the blood of Valentine. Those little lovehearts, lovespoons, red roses and chocolates make for little commemoration of the priest. So why give his name to the day? Why wait till the 14th to buy flowers?
I didn’t.
In my dreams I wanted to scatter petals over her naked limbs each morning, each night and in each moment of every hour. The petals marked touches. White, yellow, cerise, mauve, blue and all the colours of the universe etching out patterns shaped to my touches. As we cooed, kissed and turned over embracing each other, the petals fell off her one after another, sticking to the sheets. White sheets so clinical, now cumswayed and stained by crushed petals and pollen. A few grains of pollen would remain stuck to her body like lingering kisses only to be soaped off later under trickling hot water.
She lived up in the sticks. There were very few houses there. What habitation there was lay in a few scattered cottages all along a dense wood. The delivery man from the florist struggled. In the days before universal mobile suffrage he had little chance of contacting me for directions. Even if he had little would I have known. No phone boxes in the depth of that wood.
The flowers got delivered to a house down the road from her and left outside of the front door. A card was left too. It wasn’t spotted until much later that evening. When her neighbour, an elderly lady had finally noticed and brought it round it was well after midnight on the 14th. I wondered later about that old woman and what she might have made of my flowers. Did she smell them? Did she like the colours or how they were arranged? Perhaps, she was lonely, a widow and they reminded her of a young lover and those warm summers of youth, where the sun never sets and it never rains. Perhaps, sensing some romantic urgency she felt compelled to take the flowers to the intended recipient in the dead of night.
Flowers are the currency of our affections. Reduced to the level of human psychology, they are bartering tools for sex, love and future touches. To the living they signify promises and in some cases, dreams. To the dead a flower signify memories of the past. But what of the dead, the likes of dead priests like Valentine or lesser beings who don’t get days named after them? We lay flowers on graveside hoping the dead to see the colours and smell the scent. Where there are no graves, the wardead is remembered through plastic renditions of some bloodsoaked poppy field in the Low countries. Their lives, lost in the whim of some moustachioed Prussian, militant Serbians, or deranged Austrian form plaques inside churches, old school assembly rooms and monuments, all the time no closer than five hundred miles away from where the unmarked graves stand.
Flowers matter little to the dead. What matters is the affection, how we feel to the dearly departed and how those after us might feel about us when we are but ashes and bones. They matter to the living though. They mattered to her. So I gave her flowers each year or whenever I felt she would have liked to have received flowers. When I found out that she liked yellow flowers the best I sent her only yellow. Each time I sent flowers her responses were a little less intense compared to that very first time.
1998 was a good year. That was the first time I gave her flowers.
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Tale 3
Honeypie
I
She loved honey. Honey poured out of what she said, words she wrote and songs she sang. She once called me honeypie. I loved that. No one had ever called me honeypie. I felt so happy that I walked ecstatic with a beaming smile for days. This would strike as rather odd to those who knew me. I rarely smiled. Smiles did not suit me. I had bad teeth.
For years I did not know how to smile. I would stand in front of a small circular shaving mirror practising the act. I could never get it right. A smile begins with the parting of the lips. The outer edges of the point where the upper and lower lips join, they point upwards very slightly towards the eye forming a crescent shape. When she did it the contours of her face took on an even prettier form. Her left eyebrow would be raised a little more than the right. There could only have been millimetres in it but I noticed. Somehow, I liked it a lot. Later, when I told her she said that she liked me more for noticing things like that.
After so many attempts in front of the mirror I came to the conclusion that the shape of my mouth was too small. It could not participate in this complex muscle manoeuvring exercise. If there had been an art to it surely it was beyond me. A friend who was popular with women, had told me that girls liked boys who smiled. I believed him. There was no reason not to. My smiling friend with good teeth had also stressed that the girls liked the boys best who had ice white teeth. I struggled with the concept of ice white. Ice as I knew it was transparent. I knew that the tip of one of my lower molars was getting to the stage of being translucent. It was neither yellow nor white, but a cloudy white shade. I was confused.
Bad teeth is a sign of much worse to follow. You never know where it would lead to. Bad teeth, bad breath, ketone bodies stuck to the inside walls of the oesophagus, blocks on the epiglottal muscle, cancer, paranoia, hernia and maybe, a slow painful autopsy. My teeth were mostly yellow. It was not that I never brushed. I brushed after each meal. Over brushing had actually started to wear off little bits of the gum flesh leaving twin tones of yellow and white. This was even worse. I would stand in front of the mirror trying to practise the perfect smile without revealing my bad teeth. It just did not work. I had met men with teeth much worse than mine. They did not have to maintain the outward signs of respectability that I had clung to. I was young, twenty-something and at least some girls were curious about the source of my brood. This supposed interest made me feel a little more wanted. Brood breeds reticence. I was constantly broody.
I lacked upper canines on each side. This was blatantly visible. Opening the mouth showed up the gaps to such an extent that it made me look a little rough around the edges. If girls really liked sweet smiling boys the best, I stood for little chance. It occurred to me that perhaps I could have got away with a closed lipped smile but the moment I would part my lips, they would instantly dislike me.
Most women I had known were a little reserved. Looks concerned them. So it concerned me too. I was at once interested but circumspect. There was something distinctly different about her though. She went for character, not looks. At least she told me so. So I started to construct tales within my mind that would allude to a fighting spirit. Apparently, she cherished this in a man. This process of mythologizing was pleasurable. I could make up all kinds of tales. Even if demons and monsters did not exist in the real world but they certainly resembled a few characters I had known. I had lost my upper canines in a fight two years before I met her. That was the version I liked to tell everyone. In truth, it had been a serious beating on a dark December night. The false claim made sense to me. A fight would suggest an nobler spirit in a man than a mere beating. Losers took beatings where brave men fought on until they fell. A beating where some demonic scoundrel grabbed me from behind with my hands firmly held back as his monster friend continued to punch viciously, seemed a little too confessional. It could not have been impressive as a story. It was laughable. I surely wanted to impress her but I feared that even she might not like the loser.
In the middle ages men ate a great deal of vile meat. They barely showered, washed their hands or brushed their teeth. Bad teeth went with the territory. I had no such historical excuses. I had not touched meat in years, brushed regularly and even flossed at times. But bad teeth had somehow embodied all that I felt was wrong with me. I had been working 50 hour weeks in a few jobs. The jobs themselves were tickets to drudgery. Slowly suffocating and spiritually degrading. For one I was up at dawn, for another I was staying out till the early hours of the morning. One even instigated the clearing of dark smelly urine from a seedy nightclub lavatory. In between the urine and amber nectar I fell asleep most days in the library. Heaven knows what people thought of me. Deep down it was more than an embarrassment. I felt disgusted, ashamed and at times frightened about being found out as a misfit. I enjoyed polite society, aspired to it and liked the girls who belonged to that world. There was an element of softness to these women. They looked at you for a moment longer and without assuming too much. They gazed at your soul and melted you with a look of softness. They judged a little less and often found it fashionable to sport an oddball for a lover. Theirs was a middleclass bliss.
Even if I could joke about it, try and instil some dark humour in my opening lines to impress some sweet girl, I was too embarrassed to smile because it showed up the gaps between my teeth. Those gaps represented something more sinister, my abject poverty. I might have lived in poverty but was ashamed to wear its cloak. I regularly stumbled in the middle of conversations and knew little about what to say in polite company, the part about where you ate, went holidays to or did over the weekend. Any notion of sympathy towards my real situation felt patronising. Ultimately, I had concluded that bad teeth would take away my ticket to these soft, gentle unassuming souls. Their untroubled lives were wholesome. Mine felt like that of a reprobate.
II
It had been a severe beating. There is a dark stretch of road facing a row of closed garage doors that adjoined Bedford Street to Richmond Road. I worked late four nights a week. On three other mornings I worked early. On the way back home I frequently walked along to a Spar supermarket in City Road. This stayed open all night except on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I was usually there at half three in the morning. I bought the same old copy of The Times from the morning before and an egg mayonnaise sandwich. Those sandwiches tasted so good. The cold bread, the even colder bites into solidified egg yoke layered with lettuce and mayonnaise, felt sweeter than the taste of honey covered female flesh.
One night I was walking along the dark stretch of road and noticed two lads in black bomber jackets approaching me. They walked past without looking. There were no grounds for suspicion on my part. Bomber jackets were in fashion and I walked past so many at that time of the morning that had I stopped to look at each individual face it would have taken forever. After they had walked past I heard a slight rustle behind me. Then I felt my arms being grabbed from behind. They were pulled back. I still had one sandwich left to eat. Under my left arm was the folded newspaper. The sandwich, newspaper and I fell to the ground.
It was dark. I was curled up on bare asphalt. I am not sure how long I had been there. My head hurt. I could not turn around as the upper part of the body all the way down to my stomach ached. I tried to open my eyes but could not open the right eye at all. There were obstructions just above and below the right eyelid preventing the eye from opening up. Much later, I had realised that the right eye had swollen up so much that it was impossible to open it for a while. As I lay dying, or so it felt at that moment, I estimated home to be five minutes walk from there. I could barely move let alone get up from the posture I found myself in. I felt very weak and a little nauseous. I was conscious of what had happened and where I was but lacked the strength to vocalise my thoughts or to have shouted for help. Help would hardly have been forthcoming at that time of the morning. My glasses had disappeared too. There was little point in looking for them either.
I do not remember how long it had taken me to get home or how I managed that feat, or for that matter if I had encountered anyone in the slight chill of early morning mist. The sky was turning a shade of dark pink into the distance. I remember the streetlamps vividly. They were dancing. It was either that or there was something wrong with my vision. I found this slightly amusing. I was conscious that I could bump into these dancing lamps. So I tried to walk remaining as close to the left of the pavement along the terraced row of houses. They kept on shifting as I walked past each streetlamp. I cannot remember if they danced alone or with lamps from the other side of the road. All I remember is that they were moving about. Somehow, I had managed to reach where I lived, find the keys inside my pocket, unlock the door, stagger up the stairs and finally, open my bedroom door. Even if I had been noisy in the process of getting in and getting up the stairs, those whom I shared the house with would barely have noticed. I came in late most nights. I bumped my head on the door as I tried to shut it. It was accidental. Normally it would have hurt but my pain threshold had been greatly increased that night.
I didn’t report the incident to the police. I didn’t go to the doctors. I didn’t shower. I didn’t shave. I didn’t get out of my room for two and half days. The inside of my mouth had felt all cut up. There was a 3 litre bottle of coke bought just the previous night. I drank some of it. At first the mouth hurt. The cold drink was swirling inside my mouth and I could not swallow. Then I taught myself to swallow whilst lying down. I would only get out of bed to urinate. There were wine bottles close to my bed with candles stuck on the top. I took out the candles and filled them all one after another until there were none left to urinate in. Fresh urine has no smell. I knew that from my work at one of the clubs. The walls, the posters, I and the urine filled bottles lay there for two and half days.
Recovery was bliss. It felt like a hibernation from the world of working and worrying constantly. Previously I would only lie down for a few hours here and there. I had worked for so many hours and days that my body had been left exhausted. My present state had provided a reason to lay low as there was little else I could physically do. I couldn’t read with one eye. No music either. I did not own a compact disk player or even a tape deck. The old transistor radio that I owned had ran out of batteries. When awake my conscious thoughts turned to what was going on around me. There were people walking on the creaky floorboards and mice squeaking underneath. I had never realised how uneven the floorboards must have been in the house. Some children played football out in the street during the early evenings. There was also the monotonous sound of the German couple next door making love. Their love groans would occasionally be blurred by the hissing of trains hurtling past. I heard a car screech to a halt once. Ambulance sirens followed. It wasn’t for me. There was a wailing cat somewhere into the distance. It cried each night. I slept for a while, woke up to hear more noises and then fell asleep again. I heard all manner of noises. Perhaps it wasn’t a conscious effort on the parts of all those who made bodily or mechanical noises but when you have so much time, you hear a little more.
By the time I was ready to go out of the house I had lost two of my three jobs. This was all my own fault. I hadn’t rang any of the establishments to explain why I could not come to work. Part of me looked forward to no more mopping up of the honey coloured piss or waiting around the dark corners in a dingy nightclub to collect empty bottles. Cigarette dipped into lager smells vile after a while. In cider, the smell is revolting. I was worried about my rent and what the landlord would say had I fallen behind but my third employer Marcus had turned out to be rather nice. This was unexpected. Men who supervised the menial workers in whatever sector, in my opinion had always cared little. It was an industry of high turnover. People left constantly and new ones lined up instantly.
Two jobs lost. Two canines lost. This is how I had lost my ticket to those soft eyed girls. Bad teeth, teething in hatred and broken nosed, I was to become honeypie.
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Tale 4
The Barber of Cathays
I
I am somewhere in between thirty and thirty-five years old. I am fat, concave and in some debt. It could just be the posture but I am convinced that there is a layer or fat encircling my upper abdomen. The other possibility and one I like to think of the least would be something growing inside by belly. I should get it checked out but am scared of doctors. They poke. I could not be one so I hate them all. The last time I went to the hospital, almost two years ago, there was a dark haired pretty girl, a student doctor who inspected me down below. When it came to her peeking inside my undergarments if I could, I would have turned red. She had smiled but somehow it did not make me feel any better.
I sit on a swivel chair with the upper torso leaning forward. The fat is noticeable. It consists of layers of adipose tissue stuck to the inside of my outer skin. Soft to the touch the loose flesh bulges out at least a few milietres. There is a layer of flesh around my chin. Photographs never did me justice. Or at least that is what I thought ten years ago. Now I look positively abhorrent. I am all fleshed up, filled up and hoping to be carted to the land of flesh-eating beetles. These beetles do not really exist nor do they bite, but I make them up. They crawl inside me through the nostrils and all my other cavities while I sleep. They consummate inside me with their hairy tentacles and segmented bodies. I choose not to care. I try to sleep. I want to wake up slim, happy, without my double chin, the debts, the bulge, tumour or whatever else it could possibly be.
I sleep badly. I have slept badly for so long that I could not possibly tell you what is a good night’s sleep. I don’t suffer from sleeplessness. I just sleep badly. I go to bed. I fall asleep. However, sleep is often a conscious but tired extension of the same thoughts I had while awake. I lie there, sometimes still, sometimes tossing and turning, all the while aware of lying in bed asleep. I can never be truly unconscious. I get so tired from not sleeping for days that I delude myself. I make things up. I make up acts, events and even entire relationships with fictitious or real people. These events are not always false. Sometimes, they could be positively bizarre and mostly do not lead to any definite mapping out of what I might do in a particular situation. I do not always think of the same situation either. Events are like acts in a play that I write in my mind. If something takes my fancy, like seeing a pretty girl on the street, I might construct a whole series of events that would revolve around what I should say to her if we were to converse. More often than not I am unable to make eye contact with the girl as we walk pass. Inside my head, the chance conversation is fully scripted.
Often I would allow myself the pleasure of playing out events different to how they had actually taken place. I might have spoken to someone, perhaps a chance encounter with a girl I like or liked, today, yesterday or even from ten years ago. I play out the events in my mind so that the outcome is different to what might really have happened. In the reconstruction I am much better looking, muscular but not fat, taller, debt-free and generally happier. I am the archetypal hero, handsome, successful, a brilliant pianist, raconteur, everything that I really am not.
So many things keep me up at night. This is one of them. I stay up late into the early hours of the morning wondering if I am fat. It had occurred to me that I could just be unfit and perhaps not fat. There must be a distinction between the two. This puzzled me. A girl at work suggested filling out personality profiles. Women fill out lots of these. They are addicted to them. They talk about doing them all the time. The answers, as if, are supposed great insights into their soul that no man would ever get to find out. I thought to myself that popular psychology might well know me better than I knew myself. After all, these profiles tell you who you are, how you behave and generally, how you belong to a distinct group that behaves in a particular way. What could I possibly have to lose? No set of conduct is apparently unique to an individual. All humans are grouped together and classified into a group or another. Sisterhood, or brotherhood in my case, was not an altogether welcoming notion. First I was sceptical. How would I feel belonging to a group? Brotherhood would rob me of my very essence, my supposed individuality. The luxury of not being compared to anyone is hard to compromise. Previously, at worst I could be thought of as a little odd. Odd is fine. It is perfectly acceptable. I have even grown to like it since it was first said of me a few years ago. Yet, this soon ceased to be a valid dilemma. I fell into the same trap that all women seem to have fallen into ever since the advent of women's magazines. Filling out profiles turned out to be so addictive. One after another I kept on ticking boxes. The results hardly mattered. The addiction was not in the same league as things you snort through the nostril or like smoking but I did neither since they both cost money that I could not possibly account for.
II
I live by the coast. It is more like a muddy estuary. In truth, I live in a little shared terrace three miles from the coast. Those who live in my street would hardly identify themselves as coast dwellers. I do. I grew up in cities and spent most of my adult life in a sprawling metropolis. So the three miles seem like little more than an accidental marking on a large map that separates me from the waters. I don’t fish for a living, I don’t own a boat and in truth, I don’t even swim, but to say that I live near the waters makes me feel more liberated. Three miles is neither here nor there. It is just ten minutes on the bike if I peddle frenetically along the pavement avoiding the major roads. So I really live close to the waters.
Winter evenings are always dark, cold and wet. Most evenings, if I am not exhausted after work, I run out of things to do. The television does not interest me much. The radio could be an option if I am worried and weighed down with thoughts. I could not construct tales sitting at home either. That would necessitate going out. Winter is not good for evening walks. A bike ride is more eventful. A few swift pushes on the peddle and the body feels much warmer. But even this presented a different problem. At the end of summer I could not find my green woollen gloves. After frenetic searching I managed to find one glove. I could go out for walks with one hand in pocket but the windswept bay would be a different prospect for one-handed cycling. The estuary wind is chilly. The summer cycling gloves, the one with cut out fingers that made me appear sexy, or so pointed out by a girl three years ago were not an option. There are more holes in them now than the designer of such a product had originally intended. I like their threadbare look but the fingers freeze after a few minutes into the bay breeze. That breeze is so cold and even colder when it rains. The chill travels up the fingers to the arm and then goes straight to the shoulders, and finally through to the head. Before I knew I am too cold even to think, let alone make up my tales.
My head presents a problem altogether different. I am losing hair. The loss of hair could not be attributed to the cold but it feels colder without the hair. The patch, as I have grown to call it sits on the back of my head. The barbershop I go to is run by Cypriots. This is a family run traditional business. On the window there are flags of Wales and Cyprus, the Greek part of it. The father is in his early sixties and plays the mandolin. He charges a pound less for the same haircut than his two sons. I am yet to work out why this might be the case. I thought about it long and hard, as you would do for a man in my financial desperation. Perhaps the sons charge me for telling me their tales of sexual exploits that I really don’t wish to hear. In truth, I prefer having my hair cut by the father. Not merely because it is cheaper but the conversation is so much more sedate. He talks about the old days, balmy summer afternoons’ fishing in Cyprus, where his mandolin came from, the Greek Orthodox Church and his choir singing. I have seen his Church from the outside. It stands somewhere on the other side of town towards the bay. Two concentric turrets enclosing a dark stone building. It is strangely imposing, almost frightening as you stare at the silhouette against the setting sun. It is the only object of any architectural interest in West Bute Street. The drabness seem to set the tone for the housing estate encircling the church. It stands out as not because of its splendour but for how ugly it is. It is so ugly that I have to take a different route to the Bay each time I cycle there. That and the pimps and pushers make that road impassable. Yet, I tell the old man that the Church is beautiful. I don’t think he would suspect me of the alternative. His sons might but I don’t lie.
The sons are ravenous in the early summer heat. Both in their late thirties all they can talk about are antics on the golfing green, muscle-cars, massage parlours and the pretty young students walking past the shop. In their minds all the young women in the world get instantly aroused at first sight of these two love gods. I try to blot out the words as they come out of their mouths but even the monotonous drone of the trimmer cannot silence them totally. Each new tale transcends to a level of exasperation that is even more desperate than the one told before. They tell me names of women as if this adds a degree of validity to the event. The truth is I don’t care. The narratives of their banal conversation from these dates are recounted to me in each gory detail. Even the food consumed is of some relevance. Prawns, house wine and restaurant chain cuisine form the basis of their first dates. Sometimes the tales get so elaborate that I wish there would be a tale about meatballs choking someone to death. This never happens. Their world of muscle-cars and the orange complexioned women continue to choke me. Where are my beetles? I feel the irrepressible urge in wanting to summon my flesh eating beetles. They would consume each mortal being within those conversations and inside the salon.
The gravity of my feelings on this matter runs deep but perhaps not as drastic to expurgate all species of barbers. I would surely want to spare the father any torture. His mandolin plays a bittersweet sound. In summer afternoons when the pretty students have disappeared, he leans against the window pane and plays the old mandolin. I do not know any of the tunes he plays yet the notes soar higher and higher to a plane where there is no exasperation. Each time I shower there are more dark follicles cluttering up the drain. I look at the mess, sigh and look forward to my next trip to the salon.
‘What will it be today’, asks the older brother. He knows perfectly well what it would be. I visit the father once or sometimes, twice a month.
‘Just the usual’, I say smiling. The father is not here. Perhaps he is at lunch or that it might be his day off. Perhaps it is a church trip to some holy relic. I couldn't just turn my back, make excuses and let the hair grow. The imbecile son has to do.
There are three old Moroccan red leather chairs in the salon. I sit on the middle one. He presses one foot down on the hydraulic pedal that hoists me up even higher than before. His head is clean shaven. It always glistens with sweat. The gloss looks sticky. It does not drip but I anticipate a thick blob of greasy sweat falling on me. The thought sickens me but there is no way out of the chair. My sense of civility gets the better of me. I try not to think too hard. His greasy head is perhaps my fate in years to come.
He looks at my face on the mirror. He smiles and speaks of the bald patch, ‘there’s plenty left mate.. keep it short and no bitch is gonna notice!’
Regardless of there being any truth in his pronouncement I like hearing this lie. I wish desperately that he is right. He is right. See, I could fool you. It works on women shorter than me. It might also work on women just a few inches taller if they did not resort to wearing high heels. Heels present problems but I try not to think of women in high heels. Any taller and there is nothing to hide. There I am all glistening and smiling through a crescent shaped blob stuck to the top of my head. Tall women could find me out easily. The patch is there to stare at. They only have to look at me. There is no getting away from my state of being. Fat, sleepless and with a bald patch, here sits the present.
x
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you.. This – not sure if this was a typo with two periods.
I wrote her when - you can take out this ‘her’ the sentence is long already and having this makes it too much. I’d like to point out, you wrote: The gift was for the tapes I made for her before we met. (how can he make tapes for her before he met her?) – Second: for the incense I sent her when she had a cold and for the words I wrote her when there was little to say (incense? The little stick that smells when you light it right? What’s that got to do with the tapes you made for her and the little gift? The gift was a quartz so what does it have to do with everything else? I’m confused.)
mine warm- mine was warm – if you don’t want to add ‘was’ at least put a comma.
There was little ceremony to the event yet it felt ceremonious – Did you mean ‘There was no little ceremony to the event yet it felt ceremonious.’ ???
my neck. Later that afternoon – Start a new paragraph with ‘Later’
~~~Here’s a partial review. I didn’t have the chance to read it all. But so far it’s pretty nice. I like how you put your skits together. I like the love tale the most. I’m a sucker for love. I was a little confused with some things, like what I had indicated above. Otherwise it’s a nice tale. I could get into more details if you like. Let me know and I’ll do a complete review and edit.
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I really enjoyed your dicriptions in this, you could really see how much he liked this girl. Inperticular i liked the moth to a flame line
“she was the flame I was the moth. I the moth encircled that flame in a fit of desire. The heat would burn my wings, choke my insides but still I’d want to be devoured by it.”
You described how much his desire for her was something that was so strong that he wouldn’t notice anything else around him, even if the world were to come down upon him as long as he had that moment to be with her he really didn’t have to have anything else..
I didn’t read the entire thing, however i will enjoy coming back to this later when i have more time..but for now i have to say i agree with the ezine readers, and i very much look forward to reading the rest.
“Her each smile” grammatically weak
“She is the combined currency of all their desires” great line. Some sort of vagueness though, as to what did or did not happen between your two characters. That vagueness may be what makes the story interesting.
Nice, if gory, telling of the St. Valentine legend and good explanation as to why to not send flowers on the 14th! (with you on that one)
“Flowers are the currency of our affections” Nice wording. Different flowers even have different meanings when sent to lovers. I like the images you’ve used with flowers here.
At first I had a hard time getting into these stories, but once I was used to your writing style I loved them. These are interesting short stories, and even though they leave me wanting more, they still feel complete. I love the honey story the most. Your writing style reminds me of Chuck Palahniuk’s writing. It is interesting and unique and once a reader gets used to it, they are, or at least I am, captivated by it.
OK… I have never given such high marks. Know that first. Second I enjoyed these immensely. So much so that I took much longer, and was (perhaps) more critical than I usually am. I see a great talent in your writing. Compared to the over used themes I find too much on this site, your plots are fresh, and well rounded. Thank you.
My Thoughts:
stealing the odd glance throughout her presence. – Can a glance be “throughout” a person.
feeling her tightly clothed body and that fresh scent of desire. – Can a scent be “felt”
touched the notes to feel her touch on them – Not a fan of word repetition, such as you’ve used “touch” in this phrase. You’re writing, it is mature enough to reach for deeper and different terms to stimulate the reader’s mind.
We spoke occasionally across the table to each other and said more to others sat to our left and right. – not sure what this sentence means…
only to rear their ugly heads on select Sunday afternoons – the emotion is not significant enough to come on other afternoons? Only Sundays?
Tale 2
no one had given me flowers in seven years – fix your tense on the word “had”, should be “has” to match the other statements.
dead a flower signify memories of the past. – Clarify your pluralities here… If it a single dead person, then a flower “signifies”
Tale 3
It could not participate in this complex muscle manoeuvring exercise. Seems wordy, “muscle maneuver” works just as well.
I could have got away with a closed lipped smile- again tense on the verb… should read as “gotten”
embodied all that I felt was wrong with me. I had been working 50 hour weeks in a few jobs. The jobs themselves were tickets to drudgery. - The previous thoughts, and the one’s that begin here are separate and distinct enough as to warrant different paragraphs…
During the paragraph in which you describe the beating, I (personally) believe the word, “eye” is over used. You’re creative enough I think to work around this in a more detailed way.
The sky was turning a shade of dark pink into the distance. – Either , “Pink stretching into”, or “pink in the distance”.
inside of my mouth had felt all cut up. - the word, “had” is superfluous and adds nothing to the thought.
I had never realised how uneven the floorboards must have been in the house. - if the protagonist is realizing the floorboards are uneven, then the “must have been” phrase makes no sense. Noticing them makes them so, not “have been”
Tale 4
at least a few milietres – I’m not familiar with this word, “Milietres” is it a distinctly European word? I’m not mocking, I’m really asking…
The entire two paragraphs regarding sleeplessness is fantastic – I relate to this entire tale because violent, though non-similar events (referring to Tale # 3) chase the sleep from me as well. Is this something personally experienced? If not, it still commend the manner in which you’ve approached it! I’m prolly arrogant enough to talk to the “pretty girl on the street” though…
In truth, I live in a little shared terrace three miles from the coast. – Is the terrace “little shared” as in not many people share it, or is it a “shared, little terrace”?
peddle frenetically along the pavement avoiding the major roads. – Why is the pavement avoiding major roads? ”along the pavement, and avoid the…” is what you mean. Yes?
The radio could be an option if I am worried – the word should be “would”... as “could indicates a physical ability or inability to be an option.
and the body feels much warmer. But even this presented a different problem. – I am so guilty of this, I search each sentence I write for it… “But”, in the first place should never be used to start a sentence. Secondly, “But” negates the previous sentence. In this case the body does warm.
a few minutes into the bay breeze – discussed previously… either, “a few minutes out into…” or “a few minutes in…” I am again thinking that perhaps this phrase of “into (something) may be cultural. If so, pardon my ignorance and keep them as the are.
I am yet to work out why this might be the case. – Tense on the word, “am” conflicts with the tense of the rest of the paragraph. ”I have” works here instead…
He looks at my face on the mirror. – Your face can be on the mirror, though a haircut would be hard. I believe he’s seeing your face “in” the mirror, or your face “reflecting on the mirror” if you must use the word, “on”.
Fat, sleepless and with a bald patch, here sits the present. – Initial read I couldn’t determine the meaning of this sentence. I catch it after thinking about it, but you could probably state it clearer.
I like these works. I like your turn of phrase, and your story telling ability. Yes, I’d say these are very good indeed.
~vato
You’d likely get more people to read these if you split them up and posted each as a separate story. Many times I go for shorter pieces when reviewing because I don’t have the time for so many pages. Also you might get better reviews for the last two stories that way, as they are (in my opinion of course) much better than the first.
As far as a critique goes, I noticed quite a few basic punctuation errors which aren’t that big of a deal (only takes a bit of editing to fix that). I also noticed that in some instances you are overly descriptive about characters (i.e. what they are wearing) and their environments, and at other times you are the opposite.
The pacing is pretty good. You know where your story is going and you get there relatively efficiently. Your characters are pretty well fleshed out (for a short story, anyway) which stands to reason because the stories are semi-autobiographical, leading me to the conclusion that your character is a close approximation of your actual self.
Basically, you have some good stories here that are kept from being great by an unfinished quality. Some rough spots in the narrative, excessive description, and minor errors keep the quality lower than it could be. It does show through that you have a genuine talent with words. I think that with practice and attention to detail you can write some great stories.
“Her each smile correlates to a rise in Fahrenheit” A bit awkward. I’d Strunk “each”
“First, they were a little coy [,] hardly wanting ….....”
You are mixing tenses in the first paragraph. Proof and correct to it is all present.
“up all the way to [the] heavens”
“She wrapped a piece of it in[to a] tissue and tossed…” Strunk bracketed item.
“and for the words I wrote [her] when there was little to say…” Strunk bracketed.
“or string could be threaded [through].” ”Through” is redundant
” accompaniment, an ex-boyfriend [,] had not turned up. Typicall….”
“Embraces, feeling her lips on my cheek[s], feeling her cheek on [mine], feeling her tightly clothed body and [that] fresh scent of desire. Delete “s”, change to “mine” and add “that” to this sentence.
“There was a bar in one corner or[of?] the large hallway…..”
“gaze countered the flames lack of still.” Horribly, grammatically wrong but interesting :)
“It consumes [up] your very arteries and…” Stunk “up”.
This is marvelous. Your friends are not blowing smoke, but you do need a good editor. You mix your tenses, screw up modifiers, miss comma breaks, but the raw talent shines through. I enjoyed this immensely. I’m going to continue reading now, but I think I won’t do any more edits, just give you impressions of each piece.
I have now read the other three and they all need that editor, but this stuff is full of original talent and not something I have ever seen. I suggest, for efficiency sake, you break this down into four posts so it is not so long and daunting for URBIS reviews. To be frank, the first episode is brilliant, the other three are only very good. Don’t be afraid to bring back the girl, on occasion. She represents hope. She might come back, ot they might run into each other.
Good stuff.
You’re very good at writing so other can picture the events. You use clear words that paint a vivid picture of the action and events. I would love to see what you would do in a longer situation.
Those readers were right, you are very good.
Many folks get tired of hearing all about what’s wrong with somebody, and it’s no different here. You do make the teeth bit relevant as it affects your relations with girls since 20’s, including I guess the jewel in your collection, and gives us another story—the beating, and your reaction.While the hair bit allows us a little Cypress, it still gets redundant, as do the teeth, and I think you should mention them more succinctly. At least 100 less words for each.Ex. You’ve already said this in every other way but these particular words, but we feel you are redundant as we know all this already:”Even if I could joke about it, try and instil some dark humour in my opening lines to impress some sweet girl, I was too embarrassed to smile because it showed up the gaps between my teeth. Those gaps represented something more sinister, my abject poverty.”
Sometimes your command of punctuation is great, sometimes not so, which I find odd. Pages 1 and 8 have examples of the 2nd, makes me wonder why 2-7 don’t.Establishment comma had, coy comma hardly; most of the other probs are missing commas. Yet some places you haven’t got them at, read fine, so this will not be easy for you to fix—you know how to use em, could be a stylistic venture. But, use them where you want reader to pause a beat or get what goes with what.
I don’t like any of the endings but the writing itself, the things it conveys, is darned good and why nobody put you down. Plus I think it is only at urbis where they have to criticize your work. The e-zine readers were just being Normal World. To be publishable in a major way, I’d pick up the pace of the writing, leave everything in but not keep repeating it different ways, and come up with smash endings.You have lots of talent.
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