HELP ME!!
Final draught of creative writing to be handed in on Monday. So my lovelies, here is my last favour to ask from anyone who feels like it for a while:
Overview: “Welcome to the Midnight Support Group. It’s the most fucked up dream you’ll ever have, but it’ll save your sanity.”
Alice, 20, had her whole life planned; the place at university, the tight-knit group of friends, the long-term boyfriend.
39-year-old ex-Oxford Professor David thought he loved his life. Tipped to be the Next Big Marlowe Authority, he spent his days absorbed in the academic world beneath the city’s famous spires.
Under normal circumstances, neither would come across the other. But that was before they were diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease.
Now, while Alice tries to put on a brave face to save her Mother from the pain she suffered watching her father go through the same degenerative process, David seems unable to accept the limitations place on his life. That is, until he and Alice’s dreams take them to the same place. A place where they can talk, breathe, live like anybody else. A place called The Midnight Support Group.
The three/four extracts here all take place in the dream world of The Midnight Support Group. Following Alice and David from their first meeting to their final deaths, they would take it in turns to narrate both their real and dream-lives. While David’s degeneration would seem quicker, ultimately it would be Alice who first died, the Prologue technically from the end of the story, narrating their final meeting and her death. David’s epilogue takes place about five months after this. [The second extract describes their first meeting in the ‘Dream World’] and the third takes place about half-way through the story, describing one of the many ways in which the Support Group forces them to confront their past and inevitable futures.
PROLOGUE
We meet up in this place sporadically. It is an uncontrollable urge that every so often we cannot resist, and we find ourselves back here, half-caught by traces of artificial light that reflect off the wooden surfaces and highlight the tiredness in our eyes. We sit on silent, rusty stools and run our hands over a bar which should glue us to it with the sticky traces of the day's drinks. But it is unnervingly smooth. No left-over drinks are needed to keep us here.
The barman, dressed in ripped jeans and a t-shirt sporting the name of an obscure, old rock-band, places our usuals in-front of us without another word. Jack for him, Strawberry Daiquiri for me. This place isn't the type you'd expect to serve cocktails.
We sit in silence. Even the sound of the jazz pianist, trying to make the best of his splintering instrument, eludes us. He lights a cigarette. The odourless smoke lingers in the air, contorting into shapes, pictures, stories which become more layered and yet more blurred with each exhalation.
I take a sip of Daiquiri. I expect sweetness, but it is merely a thick liquid, suffocating my tongue. His drink is left untouched. The ice has melted into it, turning it a paler shade of dark. He is more hunched than usual, his head bowed so low that strands of his hair are trailing in it despondently, the rest obscuring his craggy features from me. Usually these evenings are our escape. We exchange thoughts and dreams and forget, just for a while. But for today, reality appears to have him.
"Are you alright?" I penetrate our silence. The words reverberate around us, unanswered as he continues to stare at the glass his hands are clutching with a desperate grip. Eventually he looks up. Blank, confused eyes stare straight through me. His face is paler than usual, more tired.
“I think this is it”.
There’s no response to that. This is the day we’ve been trying to avoid for the past twelve months. The sentence that we know means that this is our final meeting here in our last refuge from reality. In a final show of solidarity, I lay down enough money to pay for both of our drinks. The Queen smiles up at us. We look away, back to our respective drinks and worlds, waiting, silently, for the pale shades of morning to creep back and guide us home.
PART ONE
“Alice Woods. Nice to meet you at last.”
It is perhaps the bluntest introduction I have ever heard. I immediately warm to the speaker, silhouetted by the dull secretion of the single light behind her. Despite our proximity to one another, I can make out almost nothing of the girl beside me at the bar, save for the quizzical, sea-green eyes she has fixed upon me.
“David…” Is all I can manage in reply before the barman approaches and her attention turns to him.
“Can I have a Strawberry Daiquiri please?” Her voice lilts with the soft intonations of a gentle flirt. Her head rests on her shoulder and her auburn curls fall sideways to frame a pale, elfin face. I am surprised by her request. Cocktails are ordered by tired-out city women in bars that try too hard to be chic, not by girls barely past legal drinking age in pubs still musty from the saw-dusted floors of years gone by. But the barman has already begun to arrange the drink’s ingredients, the fresh colours sparkling in the wake of a lamp against the backdrop of the room’s black.
The barman finishes the Daiquiri and turns his attention to me. I consider asking for a generic cider, but if there was ever a time that demanded something stronger, this was it.
“Famous Grouse, please. With lots of ice.” Alice giggles in response.
“You’re such a cliché.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. I just didn’t expect you to be a cliché.”
“How can you expect something from someone you’ve never met before?” I am half confused, half annoyed by the accusations flying at me from someone a generation my junior whom I have never seen before in my life. But as my tone rises, she remains unflinching, instead placing some coins into the barman’s hand before he can tell us the total. With a quiet confidence, she leads us towards the cluster of tables behind us. At first, this room had felt small, the all-wooden interior claustrophobic and overbearing. But as Alice begins to lead me through the room, it feels as though it is yawning and stretching into an incomprehensive abyss of tables and chairs scattered haphazardly around us. It is now that I realise that we are not alone as I had first thought. At each small, round table, two people sit opposite one another. Faces highlighted by a spectral, flickering light omitted by a lone, creamy candlestick on each table, they appear oblivious to all those around them. Something unnerves me about this sight. Yet it is not until we eventually reach our destination and the scrape of Alice’s chair along the unvarnished floor fills the room that I realise what it is. Despite the constant movement of people’s mouths, contorting into vowels and consonants and words and phrases, there is an ethereal silence. What should be a cacophony of voices does not even amount to a gentle murmur.
Dazed, I place a hand on the table to steady myself as I slowly slide into the chair to face Alice. Confused I touch my face with my other palm, almost expecting it to bloodlessly penetrate the flesh. Instead, I meet three-day-old stubble coating sunken cheeks I only just recognise as my own.
“Where am I?” I look to Alice for support, panicking from an unfamiliar sense of uncertainty. She takes a teasing sip of Daiquiri, a cheeky glint appearing in her eyes as they circumnavigate the room before eventually returning to meet mine.
“Welcome to The Midnight Support Group.”
“The what?”
“The Midnight Support Group. It’s the most fucked up dream you’ll ever have, but it’ll also save your sanity.”
I open my mouth to interrupt with scepticisms but she continues talking before I can utter a word
“I’ve been coming here a while now. Waiting for you. I was about to give up but the barman told me to wait, promised me you’d come. Anyway, he kind-of explained what this place was-”
“Fucked up?”
I regret it as soon as I’ve said it. I like Alice and, confused as I am about this place, I don’t want her to dislike me. Yet it seems to have had the opposite effect, her mouth stretching upwards into a grin.
“You learn fast.”
“I’m a professor.” I shrug
“How modest. Anyway, if the barman hadn’t already told me I’d’ve guessed from the Grouse.” A pause. Unable to think of a suitable retaliation she giggles, victoriously, and continues. “So. The Midnight Support Group. Everyone here exists in real life. But in real life, none of us knows the other person we’re talking to. Nobody here would have met without this place.
We come here through our subconscious. Sometimes we’ll end up in other places, but ultimately it’s all based here, in this pub.
Anyway, the people we meet with, we all have the same problems as one another. But only in Real Life. Here our problems don’t exist. Well, I think we have to talk about them a bit. Like an actual support group, you know. But seeing as nobody let’s us forget them in our everyday lives, we can come here instead and just be who we want to be. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in a wheelchair for about eight months. In this place, I’m just like I used to be. I can walk, I can dance, I can do anything.
I know you’re thinking that I’m talking rubbish and you’ll wake up in the morning and forget all about this place but I promise you that you won’t. At least, I hope you won’t…”
With this last sentence, her voice trails off. I am stunned into silence. Alice, so vivacious, is the last person I would have equated with Motor Neurone Disease. But as she leaves her unfinished sentence between us, she detaches her eyes from mine, their spark momentarily extinguished. Her head droops forward as if in prayer, mirrored by her hair which falls to hide her face as her hands move from their open position to intertwine with one another. She quickly recovers, unclasping her fingers to move her curls behind her ears, revealing a quirky smile directed towards me. But for one, unguarded moment I am allowed access to a girl so completely different to the one who approached me at the bar so few, uncountable minutes before. It is then, as her smile wobbles and fades that I realise the reality of this surreal unreality. Like an addict’s rehab, we have encountered our Last Chance Saloon and I know that I will find my way here again, whatever it takes.
But before I can reassure Alice, someone pulls away shutters that had disguised a window in the centre of the room. Morning mercilessly marches through, determined brightness tearing through the black until every last corner and person has surrendered to the sun and bleary-eyed we stumble, head-first, into daylight’s relentless embrace.
PART TWO
I am outside. Lilac sky and a fading moon peek through a veil of thin, slowly dispersing clouds. My feet are bare and decorated by dew from what must be morning grass. Leaves wave to me, gently, from above. Yet the floaty, pale yellow dress I lusted after in Mum’s catalogue stays flat against my otherwise bare skin. The dress I couldn’t bring myself to ask for because it was fifty pounds and when you’re me, you never know how many days to the pound you’ll get out of it, let alone how many wears. Even the river seems motionless, the still waters stretching and yawning into forever.
I almost recognise this place. It looks a little bit like University Parks. During school this was my group of friend’s second home during summer. Images roll in-front of me now. I can almost see the long days we spent talking, laughing and kissing on the river’s banks, drunk on the sun’s seemingly eternal warmth and the cheap Hungarian wine purchased with the aid of an older sibling’s ID. We were perfect examples of the Middle Class Teenager cliché. But we didn’t care. We didn’t care about anything.
A more real figure interrupts past’s brief wondering. David has appeared next me. He, too, is barefoot and wearing chinos and a shirt. I don’t think he ever quite grew out of being a student.
“Happy birthday.” He smiles. “I’ll give you your present later. I’d rather it lasted.” Laughing, I thank him and agree. Yet another one of those silences in which we say so much and so little passes between us.
“Shall we sit down?” He nods. We settle by a tree, whose drooping branches are like persistent memory as they dip and weave towards us. Silently we nestle into our places and I rest my head, contentedly, on his shoulder and stare out at the river.
“Al?”
“Mmm…”
“Why are we here?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t been here since sixth form.”
Another silence passes between us and the look on David’s face tells me that we’re thinking exactly the same thing: maybe that’s why. I’ve read enough books and articles about support groups to know that the first way to come to terms with your situation is to embrace your past. Read enough articles to know that a breakdown when confronted with repressed memories is an essential part of the recovery process. I concede that we might be right.
Here is one of many places I have been avoiding for fear that it would be too overwhelming. I fear that remembering how happy I was, how happy they all still are, could incite so much anger and resentment towards the Disease. Myself. I don’t need that. Even now, when I am not quite all here, I feel as though I am mourning for my past and for everything I can now only relive through shared dreams. I know the Support Group has unusual ways of making people confront realities of a situation but this one feels like an unnecessary jab to already bruised skin.
“Hurting?”
“A bit. Yes.” My eyes and the tears that refuse to blink away in their corners make it impossible to lie.
“It’ll be worth it.”
I take a deep breath. “I lost my virginity here.”
It’s a beginning and the memories of the fulfilment of another cliché come tumbling back. A drunken midsummer evening aged 17, a guy I ‘quite fancied’ and who thought I was ‘pretty fit’ in return, behind the secrecy of natural fences. Afterwards we lay next to one another and proclaimed that our adventure had been ‘alright’. He lit a cigarette and passed it to me. I convulsed at the touch of his fingers, savouring excitement of the stick’s illicit taste. I would never tell him this, though. The whole thing was ‘just sex’. ‘Just sex’ fuelled our relationship throughout sixth form. Our inability to exchange feelings meant that when I found out I had Motor-Neurone Disease and decided to forgo university, he jumped at the opportunity to insist that our relationship wouldn’t stand the course of his degree long-distance. Now he has lots of ‘just sex’ with other girls, while I make do pretending that I don’t miss just another activity too much for someone who can’t even walk.
“Do you miss it?”
“Sex?”
“Yeah.”
“Mmm.” Yes, I shout. Yes, yes, yes. I miss the feel of being able to willingly submit myself to someone else. I miss being able to change that so I was in control. I miss moving so effortlessly and naturally with him and the feel of his tired body pressing down on mine. I miss that something so normal is something I can no longer comprehend being a part of my life.
“Sex changes when you’re ill though. Miranda cries afterwards every time now. I think it’s because she knows one of these days it’ll be the last.”
“She cries infront of you?” I am used to a world where people would suddenly disappear into a room and return, red-faced and swollen-eyed, claiming that everything is ‘fine’.
“No.”
His world is like mine. We live each day under the pretence of normality and refuse to admit that we remain fearful of the knowledge that each day could also be our last. I rest my head on his shoulder. He runs his hand through my hair, turning strands around his fingers in absent thought.
“I’d give anything to go back in time for a day. To experience it all like it used to be.”
I look up at him. Our eyes meet. So do our thoughts. My left hand begins to circle his knee and move playfully towards his inner thigh as his moves up my reign of hair and towards my neck. Yet before we can even begin to pull together, we break away in unison. It would never work. Even despite our desperation and longing, neither of us wants it to work. If we’ve learnt anything from the Support Group in past few months, it is that this friendship is our last chance, our last escape. Mindless fucking around is too dangerously close to reality. Instead we move to our original positions and teeter on the ethereal, hands entwined in amicable comfort until the purple haze of dawn marbles with day-time’s unmistakable blue.
EPILOGUE
Snow tumbles from a veil of nimbus clouds to settle on the famous Oxford spires. Each turret and tower that stretches into the sky seems to be competing for attention, to be the tallest and the greatest of all those around it. From his chair, reclined at the perfect angle, David surveys the scene. The panorama reminds him of the days when such a sight had been a symbol of everything good about his life, never failing to instil him with an unflinching, staunchly pride. Two years have passed since his college doors closed on that life, yet it feels much longer. No more hiding behind a smokescreen of illicit cigarettes, stashed whiskey and fancy, emotionless words, it is a different world that decorates David’s face in invisible smiles these days.
“Mummy! It’s my turn!”
“She done it yesterday! Tell her!”
His children’s voices sing a familiar morning chorus. The good-natured argument that had started every day for five months now, has become like a comfort blanket to David, filling him with a sense of contentment and happiness far greater than his academic life ever had.
Like each day for the past five months, Miranda soon manages to persuade Jessica and Adam to work together. Happily, they do so, shaving skin and choosing clothes and changing tubes, while narrating the events of the previous day to Dad. Innocent chatter of school and parks and friends weaves into a gentle lullaby, dancing around David and through him, before coming to rest on his eyelids. Slowly, the melody of voices pushes the soft skin downwards, gradually blurring his family’s figures as they move around him. David’s world fades into the perpetual black of a final, dreamless sleep. Outside, the snow keeps falling.
OR option two. Get rid of 'part two' above (the bit where the meet for the first time) and replace with
It is an un-extraordinary night. Sure, the winds are bitter and the angry frost is laid in wait for the dawn, but such elements are nothing unusual for a Welsh December. Consequently the locals are undeterred from pouring into Winter Wonderland. A sea of bobble hats and scarves and people so wrapped up that they look like walking marshmallows forms around me. Winter attire manages to make everyone look the same. This is going to make my job of finding her in this crowd much harder. But then I am drawn to a lone figure walking determinedly through the slowly meandering crowd. As they walk past me, I catch the trails of a familiar scent; cinnamon mixed with something only I recognise, and I know that this is who I have been waiting for.
She appears not to notice the world around her as she walks. The sweet smells- candyfloss, candy-nuts, candy-canes- that decorate children’s sticky fingers are lost on her. As too are the warming scents of coffee and hot chocolate that permeate the air, emanating from brightly coloured, cardboard cups clutched close to the bodies of adults. She has not enjoyed these sensations for a year now. She hesitates. Does this mean that there’s enough time for me to fix the caffeine craving these aromas have forced upon me? No, must concentrate. But only briefly before changing course, deciding to walk over a pile of browning leaves. They rustle sharply under our determined feet, leading us away from the main promenade of the Wonderland. I should have known. While sharp, burning coffee may be my comfort, dead leaves are hers. One of Lily’s quirks. Maybe she feels solidarity with them; her name, after all, represents the very death that these leaves have surrendered too after all.
My foot catches a hidden twig. The sound of it breaking in two fills the bitter night air. Her pace quickens and her hand reaches to her pocket; she must have heard me. I think I know what her fingers, decorated with nails bitten to the bone, are reaching for. I can sense her fear and now I feel almost like a predator observing my next meal. Is this how she always feels?
We are on the outskirts of the park now. Even the Ferris wheel that dominates these grounds and the city’s Christmas skyline seems distant. The excited squeals and shouts of the children and students and adults that inhabit it die out by the time we reach here, alienating the two of us from their world.
She has come to a stop by a darkened corner marked by a single tree. I stand back and wait in the shadows and watch her. I need not get any closer. From the way that she softly raises a hand to her bowed head, I know that she is crying, silently. There will be no good time to approach her, but it has to be done eventually. Slowly I walk up and place a hand on her shoulder. Her muscles are tense beneath my fingers. But before I can try to alleviate her pain, she shakes me away and turns around, accusingly.
“What are you doing here?”
“Why do you think?” My reply renders her speechless. We pause, our eyes meeting. “You really thought I’d let you do this on your own?”
She shakes her head. Slowly, her hand reaches for mine and our fingers intertwine. She has been fighting everything for a year; it is time to stop.
I wrap my arms around her. She flinches a little as I do so but it is to be expected. But she soon submits herself to me. Safe. I am a different man to the one who forced himself into Lily’s life exactly 365 days ago.
Slowly she reaches into her pocket and reveals the items she has been involuntarily attached to for the past year. A letter to her the attacker that she couldn’t send, his identity still unknown. The bloodied necklace he used to keep her still. The pepper spray she reaches for every time she feels she is in danger. Cupped in her upturned hand, the scar on her wrist, a knife wound, is given a rare unveiling. Once red raw, it is fading now. She hesitates again. I squeeze her tight and that seems to be enough. The items fall into the mud beneath the tree. We break loose, and kick dirt and leaves over them to form a makeshift graveyard. Then she finally breaks into a smile that I know is unforced for the first time since that night. There is still some way to go, that scar will never fade completely. But for now, we walk hand in hand, towards the coffee and the candyfloss of Winter Wonderland, where we disappear, at last, among the crowds.
So yeah, if you have a lot of spare time and feel like doing me a massive favour... Please help!!
Overview: “Welcome to the Midnight Support Group. It’s the most fucked up dream you’ll ever have, but it’ll save your sanity.”
Alice, 20, had her whole life planned; the place at university, the tight-knit group of friends, the long-term boyfriend.
39-year-old ex-Oxford Professor David thought he loved his life. Tipped to be the Next Big Marlowe Authority, he spent his days absorbed in the academic world beneath the city’s famous spires.
Under normal circumstances, neither would come across the other. But that was before they were diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease.
Now, while Alice tries to put on a brave face to save her Mother from the pain she suffered watching her father go through the same degenerative process, David seems unable to accept the limitations place on his life. That is, until he and Alice’s dreams take them to the same place. A place where they can talk, breathe, live like anybody else. A place called The Midnight Support Group.
The three/four extracts here all take place in the dream world of The Midnight Support Group. Following Alice and David from their first meeting to their final deaths, they would take it in turns to narrate both their real and dream-lives. While David’s degeneration would seem quicker, ultimately it would be Alice who first died, the Prologue technically from the end of the story, narrating their final meeting and her death. David’s epilogue takes place about five months after this. [The second extract describes their first meeting in the ‘Dream World’] and the third takes place about half-way through the story, describing one of the many ways in which the Support Group forces them to confront their past and inevitable futures.
PROLOGUE
We meet up in this place sporadically. It is an uncontrollable urge that every so often we cannot resist, and we find ourselves back here, half-caught by traces of artificial light that reflect off the wooden surfaces and highlight the tiredness in our eyes. We sit on silent, rusty stools and run our hands over a bar which should glue us to it with the sticky traces of the day's drinks. But it is unnervingly smooth. No left-over drinks are needed to keep us here.
The barman, dressed in ripped jeans and a t-shirt sporting the name of an obscure, old rock-band, places our usuals in-front of us without another word. Jack for him, Strawberry Daiquiri for me. This place isn't the type you'd expect to serve cocktails.
We sit in silence. Even the sound of the jazz pianist, trying to make the best of his splintering instrument, eludes us. He lights a cigarette. The odourless smoke lingers in the air, contorting into shapes, pictures, stories which become more layered and yet more blurred with each exhalation.
I take a sip of Daiquiri. I expect sweetness, but it is merely a thick liquid, suffocating my tongue. His drink is left untouched. The ice has melted into it, turning it a paler shade of dark. He is more hunched than usual, his head bowed so low that strands of his hair are trailing in it despondently, the rest obscuring his craggy features from me. Usually these evenings are our escape. We exchange thoughts and dreams and forget, just for a while. But for today, reality appears to have him.
"Are you alright?" I penetrate our silence. The words reverberate around us, unanswered as he continues to stare at the glass his hands are clutching with a desperate grip. Eventually he looks up. Blank, confused eyes stare straight through me. His face is paler than usual, more tired.
“I think this is it”.
There’s no response to that. This is the day we’ve been trying to avoid for the past twelve months. The sentence that we know means that this is our final meeting here in our last refuge from reality. In a final show of solidarity, I lay down enough money to pay for both of our drinks. The Queen smiles up at us. We look away, back to our respective drinks and worlds, waiting, silently, for the pale shades of morning to creep back and guide us home.
PART ONE
“Alice Woods. Nice to meet you at last.”
It is perhaps the bluntest introduction I have ever heard. I immediately warm to the speaker, silhouetted by the dull secretion of the single light behind her. Despite our proximity to one another, I can make out almost nothing of the girl beside me at the bar, save for the quizzical, sea-green eyes she has fixed upon me.
“David…” Is all I can manage in reply before the barman approaches and her attention turns to him.
“Can I have a Strawberry Daiquiri please?” Her voice lilts with the soft intonations of a gentle flirt. Her head rests on her shoulder and her auburn curls fall sideways to frame a pale, elfin face. I am surprised by her request. Cocktails are ordered by tired-out city women in bars that try too hard to be chic, not by girls barely past legal drinking age in pubs still musty from the saw-dusted floors of years gone by. But the barman has already begun to arrange the drink’s ingredients, the fresh colours sparkling in the wake of a lamp against the backdrop of the room’s black.
The barman finishes the Daiquiri and turns his attention to me. I consider asking for a generic cider, but if there was ever a time that demanded something stronger, this was it.
“Famous Grouse, please. With lots of ice.” Alice giggles in response.
“You’re such a cliché.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. I just didn’t expect you to be a cliché.”
“How can you expect something from someone you’ve never met before?” I am half confused, half annoyed by the accusations flying at me from someone a generation my junior whom I have never seen before in my life. But as my tone rises, she remains unflinching, instead placing some coins into the barman’s hand before he can tell us the total. With a quiet confidence, she leads us towards the cluster of tables behind us. At first, this room had felt small, the all-wooden interior claustrophobic and overbearing. But as Alice begins to lead me through the room, it feels as though it is yawning and stretching into an incomprehensive abyss of tables and chairs scattered haphazardly around us. It is now that I realise that we are not alone as I had first thought. At each small, round table, two people sit opposite one another. Faces highlighted by a spectral, flickering light omitted by a lone, creamy candlestick on each table, they appear oblivious to all those around them. Something unnerves me about this sight. Yet it is not until we eventually reach our destination and the scrape of Alice’s chair along the unvarnished floor fills the room that I realise what it is. Despite the constant movement of people’s mouths, contorting into vowels and consonants and words and phrases, there is an ethereal silence. What should be a cacophony of voices does not even amount to a gentle murmur.
Dazed, I place a hand on the table to steady myself as I slowly slide into the chair to face Alice. Confused I touch my face with my other palm, almost expecting it to bloodlessly penetrate the flesh. Instead, I meet three-day-old stubble coating sunken cheeks I only just recognise as my own.
“Where am I?” I look to Alice for support, panicking from an unfamiliar sense of uncertainty. She takes a teasing sip of Daiquiri, a cheeky glint appearing in her eyes as they circumnavigate the room before eventually returning to meet mine.
“Welcome to The Midnight Support Group.”
“The what?”
“The Midnight Support Group. It’s the most fucked up dream you’ll ever have, but it’ll also save your sanity.”
I open my mouth to interrupt with scepticisms but she continues talking before I can utter a word
“I’ve been coming here a while now. Waiting for you. I was about to give up but the barman told me to wait, promised me you’d come. Anyway, he kind-of explained what this place was-”
“Fucked up?”
I regret it as soon as I’ve said it. I like Alice and, confused as I am about this place, I don’t want her to dislike me. Yet it seems to have had the opposite effect, her mouth stretching upwards into a grin.
“You learn fast.”
“I’m a professor.” I shrug
“How modest. Anyway, if the barman hadn’t already told me I’d’ve guessed from the Grouse.” A pause. Unable to think of a suitable retaliation she giggles, victoriously, and continues. “So. The Midnight Support Group. Everyone here exists in real life. But in real life, none of us knows the other person we’re talking to. Nobody here would have met without this place.
We come here through our subconscious. Sometimes we’ll end up in other places, but ultimately it’s all based here, in this pub.
Anyway, the people we meet with, we all have the same problems as one another. But only in Real Life. Here our problems don’t exist. Well, I think we have to talk about them a bit. Like an actual support group, you know. But seeing as nobody let’s us forget them in our everyday lives, we can come here instead and just be who we want to be. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in a wheelchair for about eight months. In this place, I’m just like I used to be. I can walk, I can dance, I can do anything.
I know you’re thinking that I’m talking rubbish and you’ll wake up in the morning and forget all about this place but I promise you that you won’t. At least, I hope you won’t…”
With this last sentence, her voice trails off. I am stunned into silence. Alice, so vivacious, is the last person I would have equated with Motor Neurone Disease. But as she leaves her unfinished sentence between us, she detaches her eyes from mine, their spark momentarily extinguished. Her head droops forward as if in prayer, mirrored by her hair which falls to hide her face as her hands move from their open position to intertwine with one another. She quickly recovers, unclasping her fingers to move her curls behind her ears, revealing a quirky smile directed towards me. But for one, unguarded moment I am allowed access to a girl so completely different to the one who approached me at the bar so few, uncountable minutes before. It is then, as her smile wobbles and fades that I realise the reality of this surreal unreality. Like an addict’s rehab, we have encountered our Last Chance Saloon and I know that I will find my way here again, whatever it takes.
But before I can reassure Alice, someone pulls away shutters that had disguised a window in the centre of the room. Morning mercilessly marches through, determined brightness tearing through the black until every last corner and person has surrendered to the sun and bleary-eyed we stumble, head-first, into daylight’s relentless embrace.
PART TWO
I am outside. Lilac sky and a fading moon peek through a veil of thin, slowly dispersing clouds. My feet are bare and decorated by dew from what must be morning grass. Leaves wave to me, gently, from above. Yet the floaty, pale yellow dress I lusted after in Mum’s catalogue stays flat against my otherwise bare skin. The dress I couldn’t bring myself to ask for because it was fifty pounds and when you’re me, you never know how many days to the pound you’ll get out of it, let alone how many wears. Even the river seems motionless, the still waters stretching and yawning into forever.
I almost recognise this place. It looks a little bit like University Parks. During school this was my group of friend’s second home during summer. Images roll in-front of me now. I can almost see the long days we spent talking, laughing and kissing on the river’s banks, drunk on the sun’s seemingly eternal warmth and the cheap Hungarian wine purchased with the aid of an older sibling’s ID. We were perfect examples of the Middle Class Teenager cliché. But we didn’t care. We didn’t care about anything.
A more real figure interrupts past’s brief wondering. David has appeared next me. He, too, is barefoot and wearing chinos and a shirt. I don’t think he ever quite grew out of being a student.
“Happy birthday.” He smiles. “I’ll give you your present later. I’d rather it lasted.” Laughing, I thank him and agree. Yet another one of those silences in which we say so much and so little passes between us.
“Shall we sit down?” He nods. We settle by a tree, whose drooping branches are like persistent memory as they dip and weave towards us. Silently we nestle into our places and I rest my head, contentedly, on his shoulder and stare out at the river.
“Al?”
“Mmm…”
“Why are we here?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t been here since sixth form.”
Another silence passes between us and the look on David’s face tells me that we’re thinking exactly the same thing: maybe that’s why. I’ve read enough books and articles about support groups to know that the first way to come to terms with your situation is to embrace your past. Read enough articles to know that a breakdown when confronted with repressed memories is an essential part of the recovery process. I concede that we might be right.
Here is one of many places I have been avoiding for fear that it would be too overwhelming. I fear that remembering how happy I was, how happy they all still are, could incite so much anger and resentment towards the Disease. Myself. I don’t need that. Even now, when I am not quite all here, I feel as though I am mourning for my past and for everything I can now only relive through shared dreams. I know the Support Group has unusual ways of making people confront realities of a situation but this one feels like an unnecessary jab to already bruised skin.
“Hurting?”
“A bit. Yes.” My eyes and the tears that refuse to blink away in their corners make it impossible to lie.
“It’ll be worth it.”
I take a deep breath. “I lost my virginity here.”
It’s a beginning and the memories of the fulfilment of another cliché come tumbling back. A drunken midsummer evening aged 17, a guy I ‘quite fancied’ and who thought I was ‘pretty fit’ in return, behind the secrecy of natural fences. Afterwards we lay next to one another and proclaimed that our adventure had been ‘alright’. He lit a cigarette and passed it to me. I convulsed at the touch of his fingers, savouring excitement of the stick’s illicit taste. I would never tell him this, though. The whole thing was ‘just sex’. ‘Just sex’ fuelled our relationship throughout sixth form. Our inability to exchange feelings meant that when I found out I had Motor-Neurone Disease and decided to forgo university, he jumped at the opportunity to insist that our relationship wouldn’t stand the course of his degree long-distance. Now he has lots of ‘just sex’ with other girls, while I make do pretending that I don’t miss just another activity too much for someone who can’t even walk.
“Do you miss it?”
“Sex?”
“Yeah.”
“Mmm.” Yes, I shout. Yes, yes, yes. I miss the feel of being able to willingly submit myself to someone else. I miss being able to change that so I was in control. I miss moving so effortlessly and naturally with him and the feel of his tired body pressing down on mine. I miss that something so normal is something I can no longer comprehend being a part of my life.
“Sex changes when you’re ill though. Miranda cries afterwards every time now. I think it’s because she knows one of these days it’ll be the last.”
“She cries infront of you?” I am used to a world where people would suddenly disappear into a room and return, red-faced and swollen-eyed, claiming that everything is ‘fine’.
“No.”
His world is like mine. We live each day under the pretence of normality and refuse to admit that we remain fearful of the knowledge that each day could also be our last. I rest my head on his shoulder. He runs his hand through my hair, turning strands around his fingers in absent thought.
“I’d give anything to go back in time for a day. To experience it all like it used to be.”
I look up at him. Our eyes meet. So do our thoughts. My left hand begins to circle his knee and move playfully towards his inner thigh as his moves up my reign of hair and towards my neck. Yet before we can even begin to pull together, we break away in unison. It would never work. Even despite our desperation and longing, neither of us wants it to work. If we’ve learnt anything from the Support Group in past few months, it is that this friendship is our last chance, our last escape. Mindless fucking around is too dangerously close to reality. Instead we move to our original positions and teeter on the ethereal, hands entwined in amicable comfort until the purple haze of dawn marbles with day-time’s unmistakable blue.
EPILOGUE
Snow tumbles from a veil of nimbus clouds to settle on the famous Oxford spires. Each turret and tower that stretches into the sky seems to be competing for attention, to be the tallest and the greatest of all those around it. From his chair, reclined at the perfect angle, David surveys the scene. The panorama reminds him of the days when such a sight had been a symbol of everything good about his life, never failing to instil him with an unflinching, staunchly pride. Two years have passed since his college doors closed on that life, yet it feels much longer. No more hiding behind a smokescreen of illicit cigarettes, stashed whiskey and fancy, emotionless words, it is a different world that decorates David’s face in invisible smiles these days.
“Mummy! It’s my turn!”
“She done it yesterday! Tell her!”
His children’s voices sing a familiar morning chorus. The good-natured argument that had started every day for five months now, has become like a comfort blanket to David, filling him with a sense of contentment and happiness far greater than his academic life ever had.
Like each day for the past five months, Miranda soon manages to persuade Jessica and Adam to work together. Happily, they do so, shaving skin and choosing clothes and changing tubes, while narrating the events of the previous day to Dad. Innocent chatter of school and parks and friends weaves into a gentle lullaby, dancing around David and through him, before coming to rest on his eyelids. Slowly, the melody of voices pushes the soft skin downwards, gradually blurring his family’s figures as they move around him. David’s world fades into the perpetual black of a final, dreamless sleep. Outside, the snow keeps falling.
OR option two. Get rid of 'part two' above (the bit where the meet for the first time) and replace with
It is an un-extraordinary night. Sure, the winds are bitter and the angry frost is laid in wait for the dawn, but such elements are nothing unusual for a Welsh December. Consequently the locals are undeterred from pouring into Winter Wonderland. A sea of bobble hats and scarves and people so wrapped up that they look like walking marshmallows forms around me. Winter attire manages to make everyone look the same. This is going to make my job of finding her in this crowd much harder. But then I am drawn to a lone figure walking determinedly through the slowly meandering crowd. As they walk past me, I catch the trails of a familiar scent; cinnamon mixed with something only I recognise, and I know that this is who I have been waiting for.
She appears not to notice the world around her as she walks. The sweet smells- candyfloss, candy-nuts, candy-canes- that decorate children’s sticky fingers are lost on her. As too are the warming scents of coffee and hot chocolate that permeate the air, emanating from brightly coloured, cardboard cups clutched close to the bodies of adults. She has not enjoyed these sensations for a year now. She hesitates. Does this mean that there’s enough time for me to fix the caffeine craving these aromas have forced upon me? No, must concentrate. But only briefly before changing course, deciding to walk over a pile of browning leaves. They rustle sharply under our determined feet, leading us away from the main promenade of the Wonderland. I should have known. While sharp, burning coffee may be my comfort, dead leaves are hers. One of Lily’s quirks. Maybe she feels solidarity with them; her name, after all, represents the very death that these leaves have surrendered too after all.
My foot catches a hidden twig. The sound of it breaking in two fills the bitter night air. Her pace quickens and her hand reaches to her pocket; she must have heard me. I think I know what her fingers, decorated with nails bitten to the bone, are reaching for. I can sense her fear and now I feel almost like a predator observing my next meal. Is this how she always feels?
We are on the outskirts of the park now. Even the Ferris wheel that dominates these grounds and the city’s Christmas skyline seems distant. The excited squeals and shouts of the children and students and adults that inhabit it die out by the time we reach here, alienating the two of us from their world.
She has come to a stop by a darkened corner marked by a single tree. I stand back and wait in the shadows and watch her. I need not get any closer. From the way that she softly raises a hand to her bowed head, I know that she is crying, silently. There will be no good time to approach her, but it has to be done eventually. Slowly I walk up and place a hand on her shoulder. Her muscles are tense beneath my fingers. But before I can try to alleviate her pain, she shakes me away and turns around, accusingly.
“What are you doing here?”
“Why do you think?” My reply renders her speechless. We pause, our eyes meeting. “You really thought I’d let you do this on your own?”
She shakes her head. Slowly, her hand reaches for mine and our fingers intertwine. She has been fighting everything for a year; it is time to stop.
I wrap my arms around her. She flinches a little as I do so but it is to be expected. But she soon submits herself to me. Safe. I am a different man to the one who forced himself into Lily’s life exactly 365 days ago.
Slowly she reaches into her pocket and reveals the items she has been involuntarily attached to for the past year. A letter to her the attacker that she couldn’t send, his identity still unknown. The bloodied necklace he used to keep her still. The pepper spray she reaches for every time she feels she is in danger. Cupped in her upturned hand, the scar on her wrist, a knife wound, is given a rare unveiling. Once red raw, it is fading now. She hesitates again. I squeeze her tight and that seems to be enough. The items fall into the mud beneath the tree. We break loose, and kick dirt and leaves over them to form a makeshift graveyard. Then she finally breaks into a smile that I know is unforced for the first time since that night. There is still some way to go, that scar will never fade completely. But for now, we walk hand in hand, towards the coffee and the candyfloss of Winter Wonderland, where we disappear, at last, among the crowds.
So yeah, if you have a lot of spare time and feel like doing me a massive favour... Please help!!