Short Fiction

If It Ain't Broke...

 “I guess - you’re either dead or you’re fine,’ he says aloud. ‘As long as you’re - alive -’

He stops and sets down his drink, taking his time to release his grip. There’s not really much point in getting another, he knows, but he will anyway. There’s not really much point in sitting here, alone, like this, but he will anyway. Or maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll lie down. He twists, with difficulty, pushes the cans from the sofa cushion, and they make a satisfying clatter-clank-glug. Hmm; must have been something left in that one. He drags his feet over the arm of the sofa and stretches onto his back. He can feel his face - it’s heavy. He keeps his eyes open, for a while.

              He’s dimly aware of an invasive change of light in the room, moving. He watches the car headlights swing across the ceiling, and doesn’t move. The sofa is warm. It’s dark now; he’s been dozing. The car is taking too long to park - the headlights swing around again and finally the dull hum of the engine stops. Headlights go off, and it’s much darker in here than it was before. He remains where he is, stretched halfway across the couch, bum wedged into the crook by the arm, legs over the arm, feet dangling. He thinks about his feet and twitches a toe almost involuntarily - the shock of pins and needles jerks his leg to his chest and makes him swear too loudly to hear the tinny jingle of keys at the front door. He hears something, though, and freezes, foot in hand.

              ‘Hey, boyfriend,’ Amelia calls, swinging into the room, snapping on the light. The sudden brightness makes his head spin, and he groans. She always swings into the house. Unless she’s in a bad mood, when she skulks. She’s been skulking a lot recently, according to Mike. But she’s swinging her bag now and it lands horribly close to his head.

              ‘Oh, fuck, ’Mee,’ he complains, pulling himself into a sitting position. She looks at him for a second, then laughs. He looks at her for another beat, gets the joke and laughs too. Her eyes are bright and her voice is erratic of pitch.

              ‘What a day! What a brilliant day! Guess what I did today!’

              ‘Ugh, I don’t know, what did you do?’ He sits up now and sees she looks slightly crestfallen, but covers it by swinging across the room to perch on the coffee table. She pivots on her arse, laughs manically and regains her sparkle.

              ‘Something amazing, that’s what. I’m amazing -’

              ‘-And drunk, it seems - did you drive?’

              ‘I’m not drunk! Well - I had a couple with work - I did drive - but I didn’t kill anybody -’

              ‘Oh yes? How many wounded?’

              ‘Piss off,’ she laughs, but she’s enjoying this. He is too. He likes her best merry. ‘I’m not going to tell you if you’re going to be a knob. You’re just jealous.’

              ‘Of your crap driving? Or your skills at evading drink-driving laws?’ He unfolds himself fully, places both feet on the floor and realises with an uneasy jolt that his movement has placed their faces close. She leans back - she knows it too - and he grabs her hand to avoid bumbling and make their proximity intentional. If it’s intentional, it’s not awkward.

               ‘Okay, what did you do?’

              ‘I finished the book.’

He looks at her open, grinning mouth and her triumphant expression.

              ‘But, that’s great! Isn’t it, like, a month early?’ He’s improvising. He only knows that she works in publishing - editing - and it’s stressful. She works long hours and rants in the pub about authors he has never heard of and “those fucking wanking arsehole twats” whom he believes are her bosses. She’s nodding vigorously, astonished that he’d remember. Jimmy never remembers anything.

              ‘Yes! It’s printed, bound, and the promo starts on Monday - and it was done by me!’ she pauses to laugh shrilly again. ‘And I get a fat bonus - and a promotion too! You are now looking at a woman who -’ she strikes a pose, retrieving her hand, Jim’s ridiculously hurt - ‘who earns upwards of twenty thousand English pounds a year!’

              ‘Brilliant!’ he cries, and hugs her. ‘ ‘leccy bill’s on you, then.’

              ‘Fuck that,’ she grins, and leans over him to rummage in her bag. Trapped, he’s enveloped in her scent - heavy perfume, clean hair, a musky hint of sweat and wine - and he involuntarily catches his breath.

              ‘You and I, my friend, are - getting -’ she leans back with two heavy bottles in hand. In his relief, he doesn’t anticipate her usual gracelessness and she hits him on the side of the face.

              ‘Agh!’

              ‘Oh shit, I’m sorry!’ She panics, and tries to touch the immediate ugly red wound beading on his eye socket without putting the bottles down, and confuses herself. ‘Does it hurt? Oh, it’s bleeding -’

              ‘Look, let me-’ Jim disentangles the bottles from her hands and lets her cool, clumsy fingers investigate his face.

              ‘It’s bleeding - a bit, shit, how hard did I hit you? I’m sorry, look - let me get some ice -’

              ‘Hey, it’s fine,’ he says, concentrating on not wincing by looking at the smudged makeup on her face. She’s still flushed from car heaters, booze, and excitement, and her mascara lies in a concertina under her eye. Her foundation has long since melted into flakes around her nose. Lipstick is fresh, though. He wonders about that and lifts a hand absentmindedly. She tenses and moves back.

               ‘Ice.’

              Jim doesn’t move as she scrambles into the kitchen. He closes his eyes and hears her clattering round, moving too quickly, gasping infrequently at inadvertent accidents. He opens his eyes again when she returns, carrying a plastic basin full of ice, a tea towel, two large wine glasses and an unlabelled bottle filled with purple liquid. He smiles, then looks again at the liquid.

              ‘That’s not that blackberry shit again, is it?’

              ‘Shut your yap. It’s for the cham-pag-ne.’

She pronounces the hard g. He grins and winces as she holds the tea towel of ice to his head. She shushes him and holds it there. It’s suddenly quiet, so quiet that he can hear her breathing but not his own. He lets it go between clenched teeth and the noise surprises her. She meets his gaze, and the quiet grows. The room is too bright; he can see every capillary in her eyeball, could count the grains of mascara on her lashes if he wanted to. She looks at him longer than she needs to; he notices, his cheeks flush and he refocuses on her iris, holding his breath again. She wets her lips and forms a word: ‘Gay.’

They both laugh, loudly, wildly, tearfully, relieved, refreshed.

              ‘Hold that, then.’ She presses his hand to the makeshift icepack and leans forward.

              ‘As I was saying, you and I, my friend, are-getting-drunk.’

She lifts the two bottles of champagne triumphantly.

              ‘Ugh, you’re such a girl ,’ he says. She laughs.

              ‘I know, but I swiped it from the work do. It’s horribly expensive, so naturally tastes like arse. Hence - the schnapps.’ She’s fumbling with the first bottle, dripping water from the washbasin-cooler everywhere. Jim takes it from her. ‘I’ll do that.’

              ‘Ok, but it’s freezing in here. I be Man, I light fire.’

              The ‘fireplace’ still exists, but instead of coal and a clean grate, there is a camping stove. She fits it with a canister and lights it, while he spills a minimal amount of champagne over the table. She looks disapproving.

              ‘Collateral damage,’ he shrugs, and hands her a schnapps-heavy champagne.

              ‘When’s Michael home?’

The question makes him blink.

              ‘Dunno, after the match finishes, I suppose.’

              ‘Mmm,’ she nods, but the temperature has changed. He notices that it is cold, and moves to sit cross-legged in front of the camping stove. He looks about him moodily, with a vague idea of -

              ‘-Ashtray?’ she asks, handing it to him. It is emblazoned with a crest, and he contemplates it while lighting a cigarette. He sees her out of the corner of his eye stretch out on the sofa, land on the fast-melting bloody icy tea towel and jump up. He sniggers, and pointedly ignores the streak of blood on her wrist. He’s not thinking about it. He never thinks about it. It’s only very occasionally that he gets a flashback of it, and the resulting shivers are less frequent now. He thought at the time that the cold fear was never going to let his stomach go, but he hardly remembers any more. She doesn’t often talk about it, if ever. He sometimes sees her with her hand on her collarbone, though. He knows that she and Mike talk about it; he hears them in bed at night, through the wall. Mike - Michael, of course, she never calls him Mike - sounds loud and angry sometimes, but never in front of him. She makes cryptic references on occasion when she’s drunk and thinks she’s being funny, but when she gets weepy - and she’s been doing that a lot, since - she sobs into his arm about… other things, he thinks. Nothing very important. That’s it.

              Mee’s drained her glass and this disturbs his absent minded reverie. They reach for the bucket-cooler at the same time. She has pushed her hair back with her blooded wrist, and left a reddish-brown streak across her cheek. He doesn’t mention it. In her exertions reaching from the sofa to the floor, her shirt is pulled aside at the collar, revealing an ugly, raised red scar running from collarbone to breast and forking up again into the armpit. She catches him looking and flushes, as if embarrassed to have brought it up.

              ‘Does it still hurt?’ he asks, pouring the drinks, affecting nonchalance. She shrugs, but has that mildly confused expression she wears when she doesn’t know exactly what she can say.

              ‘No - well, not really,’ she says slowly, lifting her drink. ‘Not - not often.’

He nods and looks back down at his drink. He has poured a full glass of schnapps with a short of champagne. They both start to laugh, laughing away the tension, dispelling the dark shadows. The camp stove flickers along as the front door opens.

              ‘Heeeere’s Mikey!’ Michael calls, popping his dishevelled head around the door with a manic grin. He staggers into the room, hampered as he is by a crate of  lager and a large bag of what smells like Chinese takeaway. Amelia cheers and sits up. Jim waves the schnapps glass at Mike.

              ‘Mate! Poured you a drink!’

              ‘ - Is that that blackcurrant shit again? You can piss right off,’ he laughs, and the room is warm as the three settle round the coffee table. Michael congratulates Mee’s success with a firm embrace, an inappropriate number of kisses and an enquiry as to whether she’ll be paying this month’s electricity bill. She slaps him playfully and swears at him. Jim’s boisterous and entertaining, telling the story of his nightmarish interview with his tutor, and Mike embarks upon a blow-by-blow account of that evening’s televised sporting event’s success. Mee drinks too much, slurs about her ‘bastard wanking’ bosses finally giving her some credit and not calling her ‘Miranda’, and it is not until the boys have outlined for the third time exactly how they’ll trick Earl into giving them his pool table while still allowing them to hang out in his pub when Michael realises that Amelia is asleep, nestled into the crook of his arm. He nudges her gently but she does nothing more helpful than roll onto her side, knocking the rice onto the floor. Mike gestures to Jim and he rolls his eyes, but struggles to his feet anyway and takes hold of her legs. It is not a graceful procedure carrying their sleeping burden; she snores, people stumble, there is grunting and swearing - but it is certainly less hazardous with two bearers - and eventually they place her on the bed, where she rolls onto her back and groans.

              Her shirt has become unbuttoned; the full extent of the scarring is revealed. Jim leaves the room quietly - not to say awkwardly - and returns to the sofa, ignoring the image of that gritty-pink three-pointed knife wound across her pale, blue-veined, smooth-skinned chest. The fingers of cold creep around his neck and he shivers and reaches for a lager, jumping at the sight of his own red-stained fingers against the glittering ice and the gravel-coloured plastic. He wipes his hands on his jeans and lies back in his former position, back flat, head low, legs hooked over the arm of the sofa. Jim, too, makes contact with the wet tea towel and yelps, throwing it into the basin, where the bloodstains seep slowly into the water, mingling faded pink bloody ribbons with the ice.

              He nods to himself as he closes his eyes. It’s true. As long as you’re alive, you should be fine.

              The door crashes as it opens - it swings too fast and clashes into the wall. Jim is shocked out of his reverie and tries to retain composure before he safely can, resulting in another strangled yelp.

              ‘Hey, man,’ Mike says, as he staggers into the room. Mike’s squinting - when he’s drunk, he squints - and he shifts himself from the doorway to the opposite armchair while Jim arranges his legs into a less exposed profile position. He pulls himself along the length of the sofa and rearranges his body casually, knees at a right angle, one foot against the arm, one on the floor, body facing Mike. Michael has shifted himself sideways over the parallel armchair, feet pointing the other way; they face each other.

              ‘Pass me a lager, mate,’ Mike says. Jim reaches, pulls it out of the cooler - which by now is just water - and rolls it along the floor. Mike intercepts.

              ‘Cheers,’ he calls, as Jim reaches for one of his own. At the same time, they crack their cans open and they simultaneously fizz over despite their curses. They dissolve in laughter and Mike rolls from his seat to the floor on his knees.

              ‘Sshh, shhh,’ he giggles. ‘Amee’s ’sleep.’

Jim stops laughing. ‘Is she?’

              ‘Yeah, yeah, she’s fucked. Ha, as usual.’

              ‘Ah, she likes a drink. She’s fucking…’ Jim trails off. ‘…fucking…’

              ‘Yeah, yeah, she is.’ Mike stretches and yawns, with his eyes closing. Jim wants to say something. He likes to talk about her when they’re alone together; he likes to hear Mike praise her, and tell him things, though never the sort of things that she tells him. Amelia’s a girl; she talks about things, like sex and God and love, but not about Mike - although sometimes about Mike. Jim lies back, comfortable in the light and the warm. He hears Michael lift his can, drink, and exhale. Jim’s eyes are closed.

              Jim’s eyes open, in the horrible waking shock of one who wakes unexpectedly. He knows he heard something. It’s not long after he closed his eyes; maybe an hour, maybe a second. He heard something. He can discern, through the wall, Amelia turn over. She moans, indistinctly - that was it. She’s not moaning now. He pushes himself to his feet groggily and amongst the clatter-clank-glug of his third-full can he hears her take in her breath, an inadvertent, sleep-governed gasp of sleep-governed fear and it clutches at him - she’s gasping regularly, she’s crying, Jim takes a step and steps on his can -

              ‘Mate.’

Jim looks at Mike. Mike isn’t looking at him. He is lying, head back, across the armchair.

              ‘Don’t. She’s having… nightmares.’

Jim sinks heavily into the sofa again and it welcomes him. He picks his legs up and lifts them over the chair to his comfort position in the silence.

              ‘What sort of nightmares?’

Amelia moans.

              ‘She… can’t have me with her. When she’s having her nightmares, she can’t have me with her. She screams if she… if I…’

              ‘I know,’ Jim says. ‘I mean, I, er, heard…’

Mike nods, and in the dark, it’s enough for Jim to shut up. There is another long pause.

              ‘Is it, umm,’ Jim begins. His voice clatters into the dark like a glass breaking, and he gets a reckless exhilaration from speaking, eyes closed, into the dark. ‘Is it about what happened?’

There is an intake of breath. There is probably only five feet between them.

              ‘…I…’ he begins. There is another intake of breath, and a pregnant pause. ‘Yes. Yes, of course it is. Of course it is. She’s… fucked up. She’s fucked up! She’s not…’ there is another heavy pause and a gasp and a strangled: ‘Of course she’s not strong enough! She can’t fucking handle it! Of course she has nightmares and she screams, and if I touch her, she screams, because she needs… she clings to me in the dark, but when she’s asleep…’

Jim’s breathing comes quickly, as does Amelia’s through the wall. Mike’s is ragged and regular, but Amelia’s gasping frequently, yelping, squeaking - the noises are brief, abrupt and unexpected -

              ‘Where’s the fucking ashtray?’

Michael’s on his feet, he’s scrambling round in the dark. He is tall, much wider than Jimmy; bigger, bigger. He spies the ashtray on the table and folds himself into it. He kneels now, besides the table; his knees under, his elbows on. He looks at Jim with wide, bloodshot eyes.

              ‘Jim,’ he says, through the faint, uncomfortable, glaze of tears. Jimmy remembers that he’s drunk, he’s really drunk. ‘I - wasn’t - fucking - there.’

              No, he wasn’t there, Jim thinks. No, he wasn’t there. He didn’t cradle her, white, blind, heavy, and he didn’t wipe his sweating hair out of his eyes with her blood. He didn’t cry into the dark and his seconds weren’t years as he screamed and cradled and screamed -

              ‘…You’re the first person she saw,’ Jim replies, slowly, speaking in fragments, ‘afterwards. She knows that you were there.’

Michael looks at him sharply. Jim’s suddenly struck to the stomach. To the quick, they say, in stories, but this is to his stomach. His face flushes, hotter and hotter, under his best friend’s stare, at the same moment as the fear is back around his neck, colder and colder and grabbing at his stomach and he wants to throw up - they don’t talk about it, they never talk about it - Jim exhales, through his teeth, and the noise makes Mike look away as he speaks.

              ‘She knows that you were there.’

These words make the monster tighten his grip on Jimmy’s stomach. He lurches to his feet and staggers back against the mantelpiece, steadying his stance. He takes a deep, huge breath and pushes off, away from Mike and his girlfriend shrieking in her sleep, around the sofa and through the door to the bathroom. He can’t manoeuvre the door with himself and he’s already lying on the floor, head rested on the seat, when Mike is there, Mike with his height, snapping the bathroom light on and shutting the door as Jim vomits.

              Jim wakes up and knows that it’s morning. It’s very early morning, but the dawn’s broken through the curtains. He’s lying on the sofa again under that fluffy throw that makes Amelia sneeze, but that she insists on keeping. It smells of heavy perfume, her hair, sweat, spilled wine and cigarette smoke. Quick footsteps pad through the room from the kitchen and a woman’s grunt makes him open his eyes. Amelia is there in her white dressing gown with the red stripes, holding the basin. The room is clear of debris.

              ‘Oo, I’m sorry,’ she says in a quiet voice, distracted enough to spill the basin of water on herself and jump, causing her to spill more. ‘Hang on, wait -’

She sweeps out of the room with the basin and there is a clunk, a splash and a curse under her breath.               ‘Bugger. Do you want some sos?’

Jim grunts and closes his eyes from the light as Amelia bustles slowly. He’s not quite sure how she does it, but she manages to create a very slow flurry of activity in mornings like this, and she’s scraping and clashing and clattering things around in the kitchen as he lies, warm under the grubby blanket, listening to the crackle and the chopping.

              She doesn’t bother with plates, although she immediately drops tomato on her breast. The ends of the scar are exposed, and Jim can’t eat. She’s a peppermint cane, with her white skin and red stripes, it’s all red and white, red lips, white neck, red-rimmed eyes, red on white, red sandwich, white bread, and the ebony topping of her hair -

              ‘What’s up with you, Happy?’ she asks, focusing on the sandwich, but glancing at him. ‘Is it burnt?’

Jim sits up and looks directly at her. He reaches forward and with one hand presses her sandwich on the table, and the other on her shoulder holds her in place while he kneels, manoeuvring so that they face each other on their knees, hands touching, one hand on her shoulder, cold fingers on the back of her neck. She hasn’t moved, or protested, but her eyes are wide and her lips are parted, three red ovals on her white face.

              ‘Amelia.’

She looks at his left, then his right eye, and her free hand moves to cover her scar.

              ‘Mee, I…’

Her eyes turn redder and look wetter. ‘Jim, don’t. Don’t. Please, don’t.’ She is squeezing his hand, and his fingers press into the back of her neck.

              ‘I… have to. I have to make things better.’

              ‘Things are better,’ she states, very slowly. ‘Everything’s fine, just as it is.’

              ‘No, they’re not better,’ he says, quietly, and softly. ‘But they will be. Amelia…I’m moving out.’

              Jim stands on the pavement and takes deep, heaving breaths of the morning air. It’s hazy outside; it’s still early and the sun is bright but not yet warm. He blinks into the morning, smiles slowly, turns to his left and walks down the road.

Katy Tucker