The Stand

Twenty six years old and fumbling – delicately at first, but with gathering passion – at black lace lingerie, beneath which lies an evasive secret so often denied him. He is not himself, and his body feels awkward and unfamiliar as it clashes with hers upon the sheets, which are drawn down to the end of the bed as if to say: this is not a secret act.

He is certain then, as their bodies collide in ska-like rhythms, that this moment does not belong to him, and neither to her, but to a mutual universal biology that demands such collisions of them. He cannot tell her he loves her because he does not, and they will awaken together only once. With this, he comes – vilely, cheaply – to conclusion, heart racing, breath short, and a terrible reality descends. How many others just like him? How many human beings briefly elevated by the hands of strangers as the ice gets thinner underneath them?

The girl disappears into the bathroom, and, stretched out in the darkness, he realises that their connection is not lost because it had never really existed. It is difficult to imagine that just a few hours previously both of them had wanted this. Still drunk (but lacking now any degree of charm) he pulls up the sheets, turns onto his side, and slips into unconsciousness with one final thought:

She will never know how little this means.

Maladjusted (or, Waterloo Before Sunset)

Alice looked up at the sky and wondered why, despite the voice on the other end of the telephone, all she could think about was the clouds. They appeared purple and somehow comforting, injecting her with tearful strength. She knew it was over; it was all there in his voice. Finally the words poured down the wire:

‘I loved you. I did. But I don’t want to see you anymore.’

The girl has never been what trendy, voyeuristic teen magazines are so fond of calling ‘comfortable’ with her body and, even now, as she stands squarely against Waterloo’s fading light, eyes cast over the Thames, she is conscious that somebody somewhere might be watching her. It is doubtful (the logical part of her mind knows it is she that holds a vantage point on the rest of this little part of the world from up here) but there are cracks in the ceiling of her current psyche and it is hard to break the paranoia of a lifetime.

She has always wanted to bring James here. There is a certain romance in the idea of leading him up expensively carpeted stairs, his dumbfounded hand wrapped in her excited fingers, lingering momentarily to gawp at what might lie behind the windows of the poetry library, before finally stepping out onto the balcony. It is always winter in the fantasy, always overcast and always beautiful.

It is on the balcony, on more or less the spot she is stationed now, that she coyly lights a cigarette and waits for his reaction. In the Real World she is not a smoker. In her Fantasy she is Hepburn, minus the filter, expelling smoke as though it is air, and his words are always the same:

What if somebody catches you?

She answers with a knowing smile, offering the cigarette over without ever looking at him. He pauses, weighing up the consequences, then reaches for it.

I like it here, she says, and her voice no longer sounds awkward or unkind to her own ears.

The vision washes away, lost in the murky, rolling river below. It has been two weeks since Valentines Day but it does not feel distant. It was the last time she remembers being happy. James had taken her out for dinner at a Thai restaurant near Abney Park Cemetery and then to Camden for drinks. In the corner of The Shakespeare Inn they had experimented firstly with beer and then with cocktails, and she had told him that her father had once seen Morrissey there. This knowledge had excited her far more than it had James. At twenty-four, she knows less about life and considerably more about The Smiths than she had at sixteen. The night ended, as perfect nights have the devilish tendency of doing, at around half two in the morning, and they stumbled to the bus stop with all the abandon of youthful inebriation. They sat upstairs on the 286 amidst a small population of London’s late night workers and early morning drinkers. The windows were foggy and it wasn’t until nearly half way home that she lifted his arm and moved into his chest. Her heart was beating fast and slow, an exaggerated throb that seemed, on some hopelessly hopeful level, to tie the two of them together. She closed her eyes and it felt as though the rest of the human race were simply bit-part actors in the film of her life. Everybody on the bus existed gracefully around her and James, entering and exiting their lives on cue, saying all the right things at all the right times.

I will never go to waste in the wrong arms, she had thought.

Again she returns to the river, another daydream lost, and the wind rises and falls in the same way her body had once risen and fallen above her lover. She thinks of him fucking his new found soulmate: a blonde, self-confessed indie girl in little green shoes and drainpipe jeans; a genuinely vile modern day Debbie Harry, whose darkened bedroom boasts black and white photographs of James Dean and Twiggy. She sees them sprawled on a double bed smoking post-coital cigarettes and listening to The Rolling Stones, their bodies close and warm and well adjusted. It is this terrible image that returns, like a prodigal child, again and again; a framed photograph that burns in the back of her head, keeping her awake, worsening at midnight when it drags her out of the dream world and into the real. It is unforgiving and cruel, and yet…

It is not totally unwanted. She can almost deal with this psychic pain, just as long as she can cling onto the cold comfort of such treacherous human emotion. All is paradoxical. She does not want to feel this way, nor does she want to lose the illogical power that love, hate and confusion bring to her sedated soul.

It is the eyes that do it. If she could rid this ugly mental portrait of his eyes then perhaps she’d be able to grasp the handle and control herself. It is the eyes kill her. She cannot bear to imagine him looking at somebody else in the way he had once looked at her. This is, she feels, the one true reason for heartbreak.

She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and removes a fresh deck of Marlboro cigarettes. The pack looks big in her hands and she considers throwing it overboard; considers letting go of this whole sad twisted affair. She could tour a few bars and stumble home before midnight, lungs clear and mind hazy. It is only when she realises that, by throwing twenty cigarettes onto the streets of London, she might unwillingly entice some curious kid to light up the first of what could lead to a million little death traps that she rips the packet open and removes one of the unfamiliar sticks inside. It is a glorious feeling. For a few moments she does nothing more than stare at it: the cancerous orange filter, the tender silver print of the brand name above, the smooth white paper behind which lies the most accessibly addictive plant in the world. Her body tingles as she relapses into fantasy, and the desire to introduce a single match to this damaging instrument makes her belly rumble. She thinks of all the girls in all the bars she has ever sat in, twirling what PG Wodehouse would call ‘gaspers’ between their delicate fingers, smoke rising as naturally as rain from their beautiful young bodies. It is an exclusive club to which she has never been a member. Until James she had been alone and Paradise had dwelled within every youthful soul except hers – the dancers cosmic, the lovers entwined, the people happy. He had changed all of that.

She fishes a book of matches from her coat and remembers the night they first made love. They had slept together before that evening but that was to be expected. She’d been a virgin when she met him, choosing Morrissey lyrics over flippant flings with nightclub boys. Then, at nineteen, she made an important choice. She didn’t love James (that came later) but she was emotionally involved, and the part at the end of the night, when it came to saying goodbye, was getting harder. In the summer they lived outside, wrapped in each other’s arms on concrete curbs, and she knew how much he liked her because it was only with her that he didn’t light one cigarette with the dying embers of the last. He chose her, the rest of the world and its vices be damned.

Summer was dying by the time she found herself in his bed for the first time. It didn’t feel as though she had given anything away. Rather she had given a part of herself over to him; a metaphysical fragment of her being that bound them closer together than anyone else in the world. Everything was almost right. They slept together a lot after that. It was graceful, thrilling and it put the universe on hold for a while. There were no horror stories to be told and for the first time in her life she enjoyed getting undressed in front of another human being.

On Mondays James had a nine o’ clock lecture and after he had left she would stretch out on the empty bed wearing only a tee shirt, the covers crumpled and free. It was during one of these moments, in the company of her boyfriend’s iPod, that she realised it for the first time.

It came upon her suddenly, like knowledge or truth. David Bowie was singing about pretty things on the stereo and Alice was sprawled out, pleasantly warm in the afterglow of sleep, the dismal shadows of Britain’s rainclouds suspended in the sky outside the window. She listened to his voice rise above broken piano chords and take over the entire room. It was not Buckley’s Hallelujah or Dylan’s I Want You; nor was it one of Burt Bacharach’s everlasting depictions of romance, but somehow that song seemed to come alive, transforming one girl’s tired internal soliloquy into a feeling of the purest importance.

She was in Love.

Her mind fluttered over the words and she stared at her hands as if she was seeing them for the first time. James had recently bought her a ring, an inexpensive silver band that made her quaintly aware of her own fingers. She clenched her fists and giggled. Soon she would leave the haven of his bed and have an early beer in the student union. She didn’t know why but it felt like the right thing to do.

She thinks of these moments not with regret or longing but with quiet shame. They belong in the past, when all was well, and she quickly becomes aware of a foolish heat spreading slowly through her cheeks. She wants to hear Bowie come screaming from the Thames, his voice loud, angry and all-encompassing, but it does not come. Instead, she returns her fixation to the cigarette between her fingers. Shaking, she raises it to her lips and lights up. The first lungful is unforgiving and she splutters out smoke without ease or elegance. It tastes different to the way it had once tasted on James’s lips. At first she had not liked this and he had chewed gum to mask her apparent abhorrence to tobacco. Then one day he had forgotten and, almost unwillingly, she began to enjoy the subtle undertones of flavour that passed from his tongue to hers.

She tightens her chest and tries again, this time bracing herself for a harsh intake of polluted breath. It goes down a little smoother and when she exhales she almost feels like the wild, free character of her fantasy. Looking at the world from here, each floor of the Royal Festival Hall set in stone beneath her, she feels guilty and afraid. She wonders whether anybody will ever truly know or understand her. She is terrified that when she is gone nobody will know how she loves to walk in the rain, or find keys in the road and fantasise about the locks they might fit, or how she has fallen in love with the hands of a hundred boys without ever knowing them. These are the things that keep her lucid on sleepless nights whilst all across her beloved London a thousand lonely hearts lull themselves to sleep with the sounds of half-muted television sets. These are the things with which she will be buried.

It was almost dawn. In a few hours she would be in a lecture theatre, eyelids heavy, praying for sleep. James was next to her, just out of reach, his leg tapping ten to the dozen against the early morning chill. She wanted the dark to hold out, wanted to turn off her shyness.

‘People were talking about us tonight,’ he said. ‘It made things feel awkward.’
‘I know.’
‘Still, they’re right. It’s primary school mentality, all that “my friend fancies you”, but I do like you. A lot.’
‘I know.’ She reached out and held his hand, trembling hard, trying not to let it show. ‘I like you too.’
He didn’t look up.
‘Your hands are green,’ he replied.
‘What?’
‘Your hands…’ He held them up to her. ‘…are green.’
He was laughing as if this was the last thing he ever would have expected. Alice laughed too, taking in the bluish-green complexion of her palms.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she started. ‘It’s these jeans, they’re so cheap. I’ve had my hands in my pockets because of the cold. The colour must have rubbed off.’
‘That is cheap.’ He laughed uncontrollably, enough to send her nervousness spiralling out of existence and into the dark remnants of the sky.

Later they kissed, and later still they slept, but before either of those things they simply sat on a quiet road as morning knocked at the window, laughing at the colour of her hands.

The cigarette is gone in an instant and the girl hoists her body carefully up onto the stone railing overlooking the water. She does not stand up right away, to do so would seem sudden. Instead she sits for a while, staring straight ahead, like some beautiful onscreen starlet dressed in black and white. If Waterloo is the station then she is the train soon to depart, heaving onwards with regret.

Eventually she stands and, to her left, Big Ben stands with her, its clock face crumbling with her tears, mocking with clarity and precision. Whoever she is now, it is not Alice. She is not bitter or angry or vengeful; she is only a human being with a geographical fetish for this part of the capital.

She drops her jacket to the ground and stretches out her arms. James is surprisingly far from her thoughts. There is only one sentence in her mind, and when they see her they will understand. It is not so much a suicide note as it is a final proclamation. When she lets herself fall it fills her mind completely.

Written in eyeliner on her left arm, the words:

I will never go to waste in the wrong arms.




(Manchester, 2008)

This story appears - for better or (what is infinitely more likely) worse - exactly as it appeared in "Bottom of the World" (Issue #2, November 2008)