Short fiction

Aschleep

I was back home from University for a while and had arranged to see an old schoolfriend, Owen, who’d got himself into one of the new flats in the centre of Crystal Peaks¾quite a coup, really, considering how prized those apartments were. The building process, I remember, had been going on since before I went away, all breezeblock shrapnel and scaffolding and unsettled dust. Now, I’d been told by friends (who, to my discredit, I’d looked up before Owen, and before Christmas even, just to get gossip) that his new place had been a hotbed of activity from day one, for parties and things. In one way, this didn’t sound like Owen, but in another way, it did. He wasn’t what you’d call sociable, but he was a very particular kind of pushover¾the sort of guy who, through maintaining a silent and almost continuous disengagement from human beings, had managed, somehow, to take more of them into his orbit than I could ever have done. It stood to reason, I guess, that he was living like that in his flat now.

The thing was, when he was younger, Owen lived with his mother and sister in a house right beside our school. Like I say, Owen was one of those kids who was so detached, so removed, so quiet, that he could never say no to anyone. He used to let people come round his house at lunchtime every day, six or seven at a time. He was quite indiscriminate about who he let in. There was one boy he used to have round a lot, a tall, spindly Year Ten called Colin Dockray, who, had put itching powder down Owen’s reversible sweater in one of our very early P.E lessons (Owen didn’t so much as flinch), and had also shook and messed his hair before his first school photo (ditto). As for me, I only ever went there a couple of times, and not, I’m ashamed to say, out of any concern for Owen’s welfare. It was more curiosity, really, that drew me there. It was evident, even on my first visit, that those kids had the run of the place. In fact, Owen exerted no discernible influence on the house’s atmosphere or appearance whatsoever. His mother was absent quite a lot of the time, and from the look of the place, you could tell that his small sister had all the design ideas. The walls in the hall, for instance, were Emily’s canvas, and with her tongue on one side of her mouth and crayons in the crib of her fist, they bore every idea she’d ever had. There was a skipping rope wrapped round the staircase, that was her touch as well, and I guessed that the toast crumbs on the oak table in the kitchen were hers, too¾spores, perhaps, from a thousand rushed pre-school breakfasts. Even the conservatory was primarily a storehouse for Emily’s old boxes, abandoned Saturday afternoon art-projects, most of them¾one, frayed at the bottom, a racing car; one smaller box had been an Astronaut’s helmet, and two had been selotaped together and blanched with grey paint, to make a makeshift submarine. This area, after a while, doubled as a place for the kids to incubate their new-found habit of smoking thin cigarettes, a sort of insulting half-concession to the ‘do it outside’ rule that Owen wanly imposed. Even now, there’s something absurd in the image of Colin Dockray trying to perch himself on top of a lank old banana-box to skin-up a cigarette. It’s strange. Here was a house of chaos, of accidents, of spilled colour and incidental flourish, and Owen, I remember, just sat there in the middle of it, expressionless and detached. The still centre of an earthquake. Everything went on around him – from that time we had the heavy snow and people were launching it out of his bedroom window, to the time that that horsey-mouthed girl, whose name I forget, came looking for a purse she’d lost the day before. The frightening thing was, though, that Owen barely reacted to any of it¾to the girl who’d lost her purse, to Dockray’s incessant smoking, to anything, really. He didn’t seethe, or hiss under his breath, as some of us might have done, and he certainly didn’t bawl and shout. He just seemed wearied by it, like it was a spell of bad luck to have these fourteen year olds boaring round his house, a spell that he just had to ride out until one o’clock, when everyone went back to class without him. His look, his expressionless face on those cold, bright afternoons¾that was exactly how he looked on his first school photo, the one I mentioned before, and his look hadn’t changed a bit, from that day to the time I last saw him, two Januarys ago. It was as if the wind changed, like in that old saying, and he had to stay that way, in his too-big blazer that he never quite broke in. I remember his fresh-ruffled hair, and his milk-white eyes and crossed brows, and it smacked of a boy who thought he was being fooled, but was never quite sure enough to say anything.  

            On the night I went to see Owen, I saw that photo¾the school photo¾again, on his facebook page. It seems underhand now, to have gone on there, spying on him, but the truth was I just didn’t quite believe this was how he was living. I’d heard it from friends, and tried to keep an impartial judgment until I saw him, but curiosity got the better of me. At one point, I clicked on this folder called ‘Gooood Times’ and a hundred or so photos came up, showing exactly what had gone on in Owen’s flat in the year since he’d moved in. The pictures were arranged chronologically. Some were almost a year old. I forget a lot of them now, but ones I remember¾a bird’s eye view of a boy called David, leaning over a toilet, with a visible and unflattering crown; a boy and a girl I didn’t recognise drinking spirits through a funnel, while a red-haired girl on a bed (tagged as ‘Shona Waud’) egged them on. What else? A bearded man asleep on a chair, with his face taped to the seat and one of Owen, throwing himself into a table for the benefit of a fuzzy girl with her hand up and two unnamed boys who looked like they were laughing at something else. I remember physically wincing when I saw this shot. It was quite a dive¾shoulder-first, as if out of a burning house. I came to recognise Owen, in later photos, where he was less and less evident, as that bruise-yellow shoulderblade, seen always in part at the edge of the frame. Later on in the album, there was a set of photos taken on the day that Owen’s guests decided to dye his hair a shocking blonde in the apartment bathroom (and stain his taps and tiles with gold dye in the process). It was a disaster¾vivid white on the fringe, thick patches of black near the roots and scalp. I mean when you look at these shots¾Owen’s docile smile to camera, the uncomfortable scrunching of his face when an unknown hand pulled his head back¾you could tell the decision wasn’t his, and you could feel how the whole thing came about, even without the photos. As the booze flowed, evidently, so did the ideas, the dares, and drunk kids can be so persuasive, and Owen, he just never said no.

            The picture that stuck in my mind that night, before I went, was a recent, dizzying Polaroid of Owen, leaning out of the fourth-floor window of his flat, his arms outstretched. Some brave soul took it from the street below, looking up, with a tall oak tree snaking upwards, and the logo on the Polish supermarket askew. The taker, I gathered, was Shona, the girl from the other photos. ‘I was ur safety net that day, sweetie,’ she told him in a picture comment posted the week before, though she ruined the charm by writing directly underneath: ‘Owen, did I leave my fone at yours last night? Let me kno x’. I looked at the picture for a long time. I’d never have known it was Owen up there¾I’d have never known it was a person at all up there – were it not for the caption: ‘Owen McNaught: freeee as a buhd!’ written, in leaky blue ink, on the white space underneath the picture itself. Similarly, if it wasn’t for the bird simile, I wouldn’t have guessed his arms were supposed to be flapping like a bird’s wings. I remember thinking that Owen was so obscured, it would have been near-impossible to tell what he was really doing at that moment. I mean it might be a flap of his arms, but, without the caption, it might have been a limp wave to someone out-of-shot, or a shaft of sunlight, or anything. What I started to notice¾more and more as the photos went on¾was how Owen always appeared obscured, or undefined, or else was never seen at all. He was that flash of white skin at the edge of a frame, a stray foot at the end of a couch, or just a blur in motion¾a hand, reddened by an imbalance of light, reaching across a coffee table. His presence was undeclared, but so there, that he seemed almost a product of the printing process itself, like one of those rude white orbs on people’s holiday snaps. He made me wonder.

            The night I went over, I arrived a little too early, too eagerly, after stalling at an off-licence to buy a bottle of wine. This was a habit I’d picked up on the way to University house parties. My other really bad habit was spending excessive amounts on alcohol, because I believed, at the time, that it was a good indication of status. To that end, the bottle I bought¾a dry rosé¾cost me a little more than fifteen ninety-nine, which left me with something like my cab fare home in change. That night, I remember, I was quite well-dressed. I wore my pea coat, black jeans, a purple shirt and a scarf that, somewhere along the line, I’d grown a ‘lucky’ attachment to. 

A friend had told me that when I got to the flats, it would just be a case of cutting down an alley behind the Polish supermarket. I couldn’t help stopping at the foot of the tower block to look up at the high window, the stripped and frosted oak¾to make a correlation, between the picture and real life. I looked for a long time. I half expected Owen to wander over to the window, swing his legs over the ledge, and give me a drowsy greeting nod. I stopped looking up and went down the alley. When I got to the end, the front door appeared, suddenly, on my right. There was a car outside the door, with no wheels, up on concrete blocks. The roof was covered with a shallow fall of snow. I went to press the buzzer to get in, but the door was ajar, so I went straight up. The staircase was made of black iron. Each of my steps was amplified as I went up. Owen’s door was off the chain, so I went in. I sort of wished I hadn’t. It was rude, looking back, to just come in like that. I remember how the awkwardness of it, plus the absence of a knock, registered as a white shock on Owen’s face as I appeared, breezily, in the doorway of his front room, the bottle of wine tucked under my arm.         

               ‘Hiya,’ I said, with an unknowing smile.                                                                        ‘Hey,’ he said, with a slightly puzzled look; he was sat up, cross-legged, in a large soft chair. He looked at me.

            ‘I got you this. Shall I…?’ I said, motioning, with a tip of the head, to the bottle in my arms.

            ‘Yeah, just put it on that table.’ He returned his gaze to the television.

            I went to put the bottle on the table. There was a large dint in it, as if a fist had been through and split the wood. His fall, I thought.

            There was a silence. I was standing beside the table.

            ‘Can I sit down?’ I said, after what seemed like a while. I forgot, somehow, that Owen never offered anything; you always had to ask, or just help yourself. I sat. I don’t think I even took my coat off, though it was very warm, with the stale closeness you get in blocks of flats, where the heating comes through continuously and stands, like a guest in itself, in the air. I wasn’t sure what to say.

   ‘So…do I get the old grand tour then?’ I asked, grinning.

   Owen looked at me. He’d been rubbing sleep from his eyes.

   ‘Erm, yeah. If you want,’ he said, though he didn’t move, and turned his gaze back to the television, as if I’d already gone.

   I stood up, probably a bit too fast, and went into the hall, taking the bottle of wine with me. I felt confident about the night, so I had a good swig from it. Then, I slowed my pace a bit, and looked around. I couldn’t say what I expected from Owen’s flat, even now. What surprised me, though, was how bare it was, like a house for sale, recently treated and waiting, in stillness, for the first viewing. This house was perpetually in that minute or so before the master key is turned in the lock, before the motes of silence are dispersed. The carpet was ash-coloured. The runners smelt fresh. The walls in the hall were brilliant white. It was obvious Owen didn’t share his sister’s flair for interior design, but then, he didn’t have a flair for anything, I thought, as I took another gulp of wine and looked back down the hall at him, the colours from the television reflected in his face. The more I looked around, the more I realised: this is exactly the sort of house someone like Owen would live, someone as separate, as distant as him. He didn’t leave a mark. No creases in his bedsheets; no silhouettes, in sweat, of barefeet on the bathroom lino. There was only one thing that suggested this place had been lived in, and it was down to his guests, I guessed, not him. It was those stains, those indents, those shocks in the architecture that punctuated my silent tour, in much the same way that shocks on a ghost-tour are supposed to. A large greenish blemish on the bathmat. A crack in the skirting board, a kick from a boot to the arteries of the house that, when I leaned down to look, was leaking air.

   Suddenly, behind me, I heard footsteps come through the front door, louder and larger than the person making them, as they reverberated on the floor. I looked up and a pair of odd-socks¾one grey, one red¾were walking briskly down the hall towards Owen. I stood up, and walked back in. There was a girl sitting on the arm of his chair now, looking at him. I sat down. I must have been looking at them, because in a minute, the girl said ‘Alright?’ curtly, as though to say that I was interrupting something. She was small, with long red hair, and a nose-ring. A circle of freckles on her left cheek, and eyes that were sort of warped with red in the middle, and bordered with pale black rings of sleep, or make-up, or something. She seemed to have someone else’s jumper on, I thought, by the way she wore it, limply across one shoulder. Round her neck was a red Polaroid camera. This must have been Shona. 

   ‘Hiya,’ I said. There was a pause.

   ‘How do you know Owen, then?’ she said.

   ‘I, erm, went to school with him.’ I answered.

   ‘Oh, right,’ she said. She looked at Owen, ‘Save me some of that cigarette, poppet?’

   Owen gave her the cigarette he had just rolled and she lit up. She asked me if I minded people smoking. I said no, it’s cool. Owen got up out of his chair and left the room, nudging the window open with his hand in passing. Shona carried on smoking and watching television. When she had finished the cigarette, she crushed it into the ashtray, never taking her eyes off the screen. I felt light-headed. We were both quiet. I wondered if she’d forgotten I was there.

   ‘Is that yours?’ she said suddenly, pointing at the bottle of wine by my foot. 

   ‘Yeah, yeah it is,’ I nodded.

   Almost as soon as I’d said it, she said ‘Could I have a swig off it?’

   ‘Sure,’ I went to pass it over, but she was already up. She took the wine from me, and had a long drink. She stayed standing up, and was now staring down the hallway¾to see where Owen had gone, presumably. There was a silence. She was lilting back and forth on the ball of her heels, looking down the hallway.

‘Is that your camera?’

She looked down at it suddenly. ‘Erm, yeah.’ She lifted it up, to show me the underside. ‘Konica Pop,’ she said, giving me a small, tight smile, and returning her gaze to the hallway. There was a pause.

  ‘Do you do that for a living?’

  ‘What?’ she said, abruptly. ‘Erm, no, it’s just a hobby,’ she said, more warmly, but still disengaged.

   I reached out and took the wine back from her, and had a long swig. That was the last of it.

  ‘You know,’ I said, slowly, covering a hiccup, ‘I’m one of those people who carry cameras on their wrists. You know, put the string ’round my wrist and carry it around?’

   ‘Oh, right,’ she edged closer to the hallway, as if staring something out at the other side of it. And when she spoke she spoke to the hallway, ‘you wanna be careful doing that, ’case someone decides to FUCKING NICK IT!’, she screamed.

   There was a silence again. I didn’t know how drunk I’d become until I stood up, just at that moment, to go to the toilet. I squeezed past Shona, mumbling some kind of ‘excuse me.’ I was finding it hard to keep my balance, my palm on the wall as I walked, and I was humming to myself in a way I only do when I’m drunk. I stumbled to the door, didn’t even push, just let my weight do the work, and it sidled open. As soon as I looked down into the toilet, I realised I was going to be sick. I dropped onto my knees, put my head in the bowl, and waited. Nothing happened. My head was very hot; the cool, scentless air from the bottom of the bowl was quite relieving, and I think I mumbled as much to myself. I remember feeling like I was bored, then I don’t remember a lot, only rubbing my eyes, lifting my head and realising I didn’t feel sick any more. I flushed the toilet and stood up. My coat was a little lopsided, if that’s the right word, and I was leaning forward a little. But I smoothed back my hair and I was alright. I could hear loud voices through the wall. As I came out of the toilet, it must have looked like I’d been punched in the belly. I heard the voices more clearly; they were coming from the kitchen. I walked in, and rested my head on the door. Shona was screaming at Owen, who had his head down, and was slowly and lethargically trying to peel the plastic film-wrap off of a stonebaked pizza.

   ‘I always tried to look after you, but fucking no more!’ She roared in his ear,

then turned around and saw me. She did a deep breath and said:

   ‘Look, do you know how to cook?’

   ‘A bit.’ I was still groggy, and it came out like a question to her question.

   ‘Can you show Owen how to cook this thing, please, because I’m leaving.’ She took my arm and led me over to the counter. I looked down at the surface of it. There were toast crumbs and, out of the force of habit, or maybe a reflex of tiredness, I brushed them away with my hand.

   ‘Erm, yeah, it’s already cooked.’ I said, looking down at the pizza. ‘It’s just a case of sticking it in the oven.’ At that moment, I looked up, and caught Owen’s eyes, for what seemed like the first time.    

   ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Shona, ‘could you do that for him?’ 

   ‘Okay,’ I said. Yawning, I pulled the film off and some frozen cheese went on the counter. I turned the oven on, put the pizza in, and shut the door.

   ‘Yeah, just leave it for like twenty minutes…’ I said, turning around to Owen, and smiling weakly.

   Owen walked out. ‘Cheers, babe,’ said Shona quickly and followed him out. ‘Oi you, we need to talk, ‘I ain’t leaving here ’til I get my fucking phone.’

   Eyes half-shut, I nodded, oddly hurt. There was a clock on the wall. Half-eleven. I was in no mood to hear them argue. I decided I should go. I went into the front room to collect my things. My wallet, keys and scarf were on the arm of the chair, and the bottle of wine, tipped over now on its side, was next to the chair. The television was still on, but muted. A film was playing. In the film, a tall, doe-eyed man was being led, by the hand, through a throng of people by a short and furious woman. The ashtray smouldered with a fresh cigarette. There was quiet for a minute.

   A buzzer went off in the kitchen. The pizza was ready. I wandered into the kitchen to get it out. From the bedroom, Owen strode towards me, more swiftly than I’d ever seen, frightening, and Shona came stumbling behind him. He barged past me, and over to the oven. He opened the oven, reached his hands in to get the pizza.

   ‘SHIT! FUCKING SHIT!’ he screamed, reeled, clasping his hand. I grabbed a lavender-coloured dishcloth and ran it under the tap. The dishcloth had been seared quite badly and the stitching was split.

   ‘Owen, Owen,’ I said, ‘come here, come here,’ he was leaning down now, holding his hand between his thighs, biting his lip and yelping. ‘Owen!’ I shouted and pulled him towards me. I grabbed his hand and clutched the wet dishcloth to it. Owen whimpered. The pizza was on the floor. Shona appeared in the doorway. She was only wearing one sock. She looked at Owen.

   ‘I hope you rot in hell, you fucking THIEVING BASTARD!’ she screamed and flung herself, a little theatrically, out the door.

   I still had hold of Owen’s hand, so I let go. I went to wrap the scarf round my neck. Owen was breathing quite heavily, deep and relieved breaths. After a minute or so, he said¾

   ‘Is this, erm, gonna be alright?’ He was trying to take the dishcloth off and look at his hand.

 ‘Yeah, yeah, should be,’ I said, ‘just leave it on for a bit, though, yeah, and make sure you keep wetting it.’ I put out my hand. ‘Okay?’

   ‘Okay.’

I walked with him into the front room, then got myself together and left, quite quickly, more hastily than I should’ve done. If it was the wrong decision, I was punished, because I slipped on the iron steps, while sprinting down; one step, then two, and bruised my thigh. When I got outside, I had to limp. The snow had started again. I buttoned up my coat, and checked my wallet, to see if I had enough money to get home. There was no money in it now, but my cards were there, so I should’ve been glad, really.

Jay Lawrance