"Little Death" Extract 4: Haunted

Zach wakes in a cold sweat, unsure for a moment where he is.  He grips the cheap hotel sheets in each of his clenched fists, and remembers.  Bellevue.  He reaches for the glass of water he left on the nightstand, now disgustingly warm, and drinks it in one go.  The bedsheets cling to his legs uncomfortably, and he casts them to one side.  He gets up and strides naked over to the window, opening the window as wide as it will go.

“What am I doing here...?”  Talking to himself has become something of an annoying habit lately.  In another life he’d had a sounding board for every stray thought – William.  One of the most excruciating things following his brother’s death, the thing that had made his absence all the more immediate and real, was the silence.  It took months for Zach to become accustomed to having only himself for company, to no longer have William’s mind within reach.

Telepathy was a strong, not entirely accurate word for what they’d shared.  If one of them were injured, the other would not cry out.  And Zach had certainly not felt anything the day his brother took a bullet to the head.  But when it came to finishing each other’s sentences, and anticipating every single action, they had bordered on the uncanny.  And throughout their life together, neither had ever felt alone.  To suddenly not be one half of a whole, but simply one, had been almost too much to bear.

A cricket trills out there somewhere, and something flying over the hotel casts a fleeting shadow.  The night is alive, Zach thinks, buzzing and pulsing like one great dark body.  He dismisses this idea as the product of exhaustion, and turns back into the room.  His bag lies open on the floor; he pulls out his folder and empties it onto the floor, carefully spreading the various documents, photographs and newspaper clippings out over the carpet.  He hasn’t even bothered to justify to himself why he has brought these with him, when all he needs is the photograph and the phone records that Quentin Forrester gave him.

His own image, or rather, William’s, is plastered over the press articles, along with that of Georgina.  Zach’s name is often included at the end of the piece: Hall is survived by his parents, Miranda and Gregory, and twin brother Zachary.  Some of these are newspapers that Zach once dreamed of working for.  Reporters had always been his crusading, truth-seeking role models: permeated with the stench of black coffee and cigarette smoke, they let nothing get in the way of a story.  Right now, the idea of cannibalising somebody else’s misery and churning it out in the name of journalism makes him sick to his stomach.

He knows every piece of news coverage off by heart, but still Zach studies them, in the dull orange glow cast by the streetlamp outside, like the last light of a dying sun, until his eyes begin to sting.  The room is still incredibly warm, and so he leaves the window open when he goes back to bed.  He lies wide awake for a few moments, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, but is soon sleeping soundly with the sweet ignorance of somebody who doesn’t know he is being watched.

Flash Fiction #4: Chocolate

I remember a sweetness.

The very first time we did it, on the pile of coats at someone else’s party, you never quite let go of my hand. Somehow I stayed nervous even afterwards, so you kept your hand in mine, reaching with your left first for your cigarettes, then a lighter, then chocolate.

I was young, and so I loved every little weird thing about you. The weirdest, littlest thing being what I loved the most. The way you'd write your name on random objects, claiming ownership. Your finger traces in the dust, sand, steam, seemed almost flirtatious.

Memories are like Polaroids; easily smudged, creased, bereft of prologue or context.  You, giving me a mint in a café by means of a kiss. You, pulling the duvet to your side, telling me to fuck off. You, looking back at me before getting in your battered Mini. The last Polaroid.

Time runs away with itself, and it seems like I never leave this room. I light the occasional cigarette and gorge on sweet things, but it's empty pleasure and if I ever get the urge to phone you, I stop myself because by now it’s years too late.

Instead, I throw away your pictures, and the smokes, and the chocolate.  I try my best to forget every weird little thing about you, but still I remember a sweetness. It sticks, cloying in my mind, an unmoving trace, like a name written on a mirror in lipstick.

Flash Fiction #3: Dirty Pretty Things

I dream of lovemaking. Not the hard, angry sex that M and I shared, but soft, tender, beautiful lovemaking that the romance novels witter on about. I writhe under an imaginary lover, and when my eyes begin to flutter open then drop closed again, when I wander into that no-man’s land that's neither asleep nor awake, I slide a hand down my stomach and between my legs.

A low gasp escapes my lips, then another, my breathing quickens, and my imaginary lover and my fingers merge in the nightscape of my imagination, until soon I'm panting with my eyes closed and before I know it I climax with more intensity than any orgasm I can remember, certainly nothing I ever felt with him and as soon as he enters my mind, my nostrils fill with the sickly iron of blood and all I can see under my eyelids is his face, all I can hear is the desperate, almost sexual grunting as the breath leaves his body. I open my eyes, gingerly place both hands on top of the duvet, and I know with strange certainty that it is the last orgasm I will have for quite a long time.

I spend the next few days in my flat, wearing nothing except occasionally a bra and panties. I rarely eat, I drink a little wine, I smoke a hell of a lot more than I should. I sit at my laptop and type for hours on end, only to delete everything that I have written. I sit on my tiny balcony in a bathrobe, listening to distant police sirens and wondering if some day soon one of them will be coming for me. I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, and I think of my mother.

The last words she said to me; "If you walk out of this house, don't ever think of coming back." I stuck to my word, I never ever returned. I was eighteen then, barely. Tomorrow is my twenty-sixth birthday, or is it the day after... Home feels like a million years ago. Mum and dad are echoes - people I knew for a while but who won't ever come back into my life. I feel like crying, for them, for me, but the tears won't come.

St. Elmo's Fire is on the TV next door, I can hear it through the paper-thin walls, just like I could hear the loud grunts of gay sex through my bedroom ceiling last night - a far cry from my old angels. A muffled Demi Moore spirals out of control, and for a moment I fantasise that her character is in exactly the same situation as me. Except as far as I can remember, no-one in the Brat Pack ever killed their lover. I walk into my room, slam the door, collapse onto the bed and wonder if the boys upstairs will start fucking soon, if only to take me outside my own head for a while.

This passage was taken from a short story I wrote four and a half years ago, entitled "Camille".  The rest of the story was pretty much un-salvageable. 

Flash Fiction #1: Neverland

The locket keeps her sane. Or maybe it does exactly the opposite... Either way, she doesn't think that she would be able to cope for a single day if she couldn't look down and see Peter's face, framed in gold, around her neck like a talisman. Wendy knows that girls her age shouldn't feel like this; empty, alone, the widow of a man yet to die.

They were childhood sweethearts. Peter had been the guiding light of her adolescence, the only one she could ever imagine being with. She doesn't know if he felt exactly the same, but the main thing is they were together from the start. When eighteen came, they left home and set up house together, a grown-up child and his little lady. An engagement ring appeared like a thimble on her finger, and sometimes, in the middle of the night when neither of them could sleep, they would whisper words like baby to each other. She remembers calling him baby when they were saying goodbye, when he left to join the Forces and she stayed behind in their flat, twisting the ring round and round and searching for a picture of him small enough to fit into the locket he gave her.

The boys who used to flirt with her at school, they're married now - hitched to beautiful girls who fell pregnant after their first time. She hears them all talking about their jobs, their children, their fast and important and oh so grown-up lives, and she wonders why she hasn't changed at all since God only knows when. Secretly, she knows the reason. Peter. Her life is tied to his, she's always known that, and she's always taken comfort in it. Why, then, does she wish that things could be different? Her life can't start for real until he's here, until he's home and safe and never going anywhere ever again. She's frozen in time until Peter kisses her back to life.

A bomb could go off in a faraway country, and she wouldn't know. She might wake up in the dead of night, chilled for no apparent reason, but she wouldn't know anything for sure. Or a stray bullet could take his life, and still she'd be none the wiser. His thread would be cut short on the other side of the world, and Wendy would still sit in the tiny flat they called theirs; waiting, always waiting, for her Peter to come flying home.