Fini! Accompli!
Hmmm, I wish I knew french. I did German at school. When I say 'did' I mean, we gave our German teacher a nervous breakdown in year nine and then proceeded to see off fourteen substitute teachers before failing our GCSEs. Ich ... er, nicht .. sprechen ze deutsch or something or other, but I do have a good grasp of how to send someone insane. Ah, the joys of secondary education at the worst comprehensive in the area - where you learn the stuff that really matters. Like how to weld nails onto a length of pipe, and then narrowly avoid being hit with the same.
Anyway ... I'm getting distracted. I'm posting because I have astounded myself by actually finishing a story. I've never done that before. True, it's only 2000 words, but it shows it can be done. I'm reluctant to post in on Inverloch. I don't really know why. I feel oddly shy about it. Inverloch also never works, but that is a minor detail. I think too, I have a vague idea of submitting it for publication somewhere, if only I can convice myself that it isn't entirely dreadful, and if I can find somewhere to actually submit it.
I would really appreciate any feedback given.
‘How did you die?’ the demon asked.
‘Buying diamonds.’
‘A form of carbon?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Ah.’
It was not the sound of judgement, just the satisfaction of knowledge. David called it a demon because he had no other word, and because the world seemed to suggest that he should. It appeared right, and fit comfortably in his mind.
The world suggested many things, and was contradictory about most. This was the afterlife, but it was outside of life. He was dead, but pleasantly so. It was sad that dear Joanie was still alive.
‘Do you want to become a part of me?’ the demon asked. ‘I like your views on sunflowers, and the time you spent at Cheddar Gorge.’
David smiled. ‘That would be nice.’ He thought about his garden. Yes, the sunflowers were blooming. The ones in a line against the back wall. Every year for twenty years there had been sunflowers there, since Andrew planted the first seeds. He had been four.
‘I would like that,’ David said, ‘but I can’t stay here. I’ve cared for Joanie for too long to leave her on her own now.
‘You have a herniated disk, arthritic knees, high blood pressure. You also have the beginnings of prostrate cancer. Though that is not from caring.’
‘Do you know everything?’
‘No.’
‘What don’t you know?’
The demon laughed. Or there was a general purple rumbling.
‘Tell me about Joanie,’ it asked.
She had been ill for seventeen years. The symptoms had begun thirteen years after they were married. Weakness. Wobbly legs. They had laughed about it at first. Said she had been at the gin.
No one had said it, but it had been assumed that she would die for him. David knew he had hoped for it. For practical reasons mostly. It was so difficult to find good care. Even the best of homes were cold, indifferent, where there was care without love. There were the children of course. But Andrew was up in Scotland, and Charlotte was busy being something financial in London.
He had planned tender care for his wife, and then to go on, alone, into heartbreak. Instead, he had been stabbed as he left the jewellers. For his death, they got three diamonds in a silver bracelet.
Silly, to buy diamonds. They couldn’t afford it. Joanie would have giggled, had she been able, and called him a sentimental fool. But it was their thirtieth wedding anniversary on Wednesday, and diamond was the gemstone for it. Charlotte had told him that, she had looked it up on the internet.
‘Diamonds are precious,’ said the demon, as though trying the words on for size.
‘Clink, clink, woosh,’ said David.
A hill in the distance, or perhaps a cloud, quivered from yellow to orange. Curious orange, thought David, though he wasn’t sure why. It reminded him of something Andrew had once said. It held a memory of humour.
‘Clink, clink, woosh?’ repeated the demon, with a question.
‘An old family joke,’ said David, and told it the story.
Charlotte had studied Business at university. Andrew had started the joke then. Andrew always started the jokes. He said Charlotte was doing yuppie studies, and mimed holding a mobile phone whilst shouting ‘Buy! Sell! Sell! Buy!’ Charlotte took it in good humour, and even played up to the teasing. She had always been able to take a joke and she had an easy way with people.
She left university and moved to London, where she got a job in corporate finance after a long internship. It only made the joke seem funnier. David however missed his daughter whose life seemed to get faster as his got slower, and more full as his emptied. He was in this mood when she phoned him on a dull Wednesday afternoon.
‘Just a quick call, Dad. Time is money you know!’
The rules of the family joke were that he should laugh, but instead he said:
‘Not really. They’re quite different.’
‘Oh?’
‘One goes clink, clink, the other goes woosh.’
Charlotte followed the rules. She laughed. ‘Dad, you silly sod. You’re more eccentric everyday, I swear. Clink, clink? It’s all plastic now though, or digital rather. Anyway, I wanted - oh, hang on.’ He heard muffled voices through a hand pressed over the mouthpiece. ‘Sorry, got to go. Love to mum.’
‘Yes, of course. Take care.’
Click.
Press the red button, end the call.
Don’t forget the difference, my sweetheart.
David became aware that the demon was droning:
buy sell buy sell sell buy sell buy buy sell buy sell sell buy sell buy buy sell buy sell sell buy sell buy buy sell buy sell sell buy sell buy buy sell buy sell sell buy sell buy
The words floated around him. They tickled and made him shiver. They sank into him then poured out through the hole in his side. They climbed up, up and took flight on coloured wings, and were gone.
‘Charlotte is an interesting character,’ said the demon.
David was upside down. He was not wearing a tie, but still one fell forward over his face, a nuisance flapping over his nose and mouth. Blood ran up down from the holes the muggers had left, trickling down up over his stomach and chest to his neck and shoulders where it dripped into nothing.
Clink
Clink
‘Charlotte?’ David said, surprised, pushing the tie aside. ‘She was always the normal one in the family. Andrew was the one we all worried about. He listened to morbid music and was always tormented with depression.’
‘But she has the more complex issues, because she doesn’t know how to be what she is.’
‘Wait. How do you know all this about my children?’
‘You told me.’
‘I did?’
‘Yes. Charlotte doesn’t know how to be a grown woman, because her mummy was not a mummy. She was not a real woman. She was old when she was young, when she had to use a stick and then a wheelchair in her thirties. And she is young now that she is old and she has to be fed and washed liked a baby.’
‘Tell me about Joanie.’
He met her when he was sixteen. She was sixteen too. They say relationships never last if they began so young. It didn’t. In truth it never started. There was almost a kiss once, when they got caught by the rain in the pagoda in the park. They’d been eating fish and chips, and David still remembered the hot, sweet smell of the fat and salt and vinegar on their fingers and their breath.
David finished school a few months later and moved north where an Uncle had a business. He was miserable there for a few years until he came back. In that time Joanie had been to college. She still lived in the same place, with her parents in that semi off of Grosvenor Road. David moved back with his parents too. So much was the same as it always had been, but he was scared a little, because Joanie was beautiful now, and clever, and he was just a scruffy young man with no job and no career.
Joanie didn’t mind though. She thought his impression of his Uncle’s accent was funny. David got a job at a petrol station, and worked Saturdays in a shop. He learned to drive, and bought a car. He took Joanie out in it, and kissed her properly.
‘I wasn’t the first to kiss her, though. I always regret that. When I was gone she dated Mike Sergeant.’
‘She kissed Ben Higham first. When she was fifteen.’
David frowned. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Because you know it. She whispered it in your ear when you were slightly drunk and almost asleep. You just don’t know that you knew it.’
‘Well I do now,’ said David, and frowned some more.
He was standing again, wearing his favourite grey jumper. He wore it for work in the garden. It had a hole in the elbow, and he poked at it now. ‘Why do you ask me all these questions if you already know everything I know?’
The demon sighed and shrugged and set the world to a yellow tilting and a green rolling.
‘You know you are dead.’
‘Yes.’
‘So David must die.’
‘But I am David.’
‘Exactly. So you must give him up.’
‘Who?’
‘David.’
‘I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.’
‘Nearly. I am trying to help, but only you can lose yourself. Only you are yourself. Only you have lived the life you’ve lived, and the life you have lived is who you are, so you must give it up.’
I’ve already given my life up.’
‘No, you just died.’
David sighed. ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Tell me about Joanie.’
It was hard to be a young man with a disabled wife. He wanted to have fun. To go for dirty weekends, and have lazy Sunday afternoons away from his family with his friends in the pub. He had to learn about walking frames, and then later about wheelchairs. Joanie’s bladder muscles stopped working and she used a catheter bag. The muscles in her mouth and throat stopped working and she slurred her speech and could not swallow her food. She had to have it softened for her and often she spluttered and choked and could not cough to clear her lungs.
As her physical world shrunk, her mental one expanded. She had studied English literature at college and now she read and read. Her eyesight grew poorer and she moved onto large print books, and then to audio cassettes. She was often frustrated that they did not have all the books she wanted on cassette, and the slowness of having it read to her could not keep up with the speed and hunger of her mind. David loved to watch her face as she explored world after world. She was still beautiful. The disease could not take that.
Sex became awkward, but for a long time was still possible. But the control she had of her muscles weakened further. David felt ashamed making love to her unresponsive body and that shame eventually overcame his desire and his need. Joanie cried when he told her and tried to pull him towards her. He hugged her, and from then onwards they learnt instead to just lay together, him holding her.
‘How much have I told you?’ David asked.
‘Nearly everything.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You have given it up.’
‘I only remember things about Jeanie. I’ve told you about her ...’
‘She is closest to you and you have not yet given her up, that is why you can still remember her.’
‘How long have I been here?’
‘There is no time.’
‘Did I have children?’
The demon paused. ‘It has gone, David.’
‘I’m dying,’ David whispered, and began to cry. Then he remembered Jeanie, alone. ‘I am the lucky one,’ he said, and stopped crying.
‘Give her to me,’ said the demon.
‘How can I? She is my everything!’
‘Exactly,’ said the demon. It continued in a softer tone, ‘you are already dead. You can’t have her back.’
David let out a shuddering breath and looked down at his baggy jumper and the scarlet blood that dripped out of him. ‘I have to say goodbye first.’
‘I know.’
Everything sank away from him. The world came back, and with it, pain. Agony tore at his side. He felt the sick slipping away of life. His body knew he was dead and tried to go, and the world pushed him away.
He was substantial at first but grew paler as shades of him self were sloughed off and sucked into the wound in his side. It was dark with rotten blood and seemed like a black hole, pulling him into himself, collapsing him and drawing him down into death.
He forced his eyes away. He was in Jeanie’s room and he saw her in the bed, sitting up. He ignored the pain, knowing he did not have long. He went to Jeanie’s side. She was asleep but woke as he touched her face and whispered, ‘Jeanie, my love.’
Her eyes jumped around the room and she fought their erratic movements to focus upon him. She smiled, seeming unsurprised. The little electronic keypad that she used to communicate was on her lap and she fumbled with it for a moment. David looked at the display screen:
H e l o
‘Hello,’ he smiled. ‘I’m so sorry that I have to leave you. I promised I never would, but-’
He looked down at the screen again:
Lov yuo
‘I love you too.’
B with u ssoon
He kissed her cheek and stroked her face with a hand that was almost transparent.
Then, the room dropped away and Jeanie was gone, and David was too.
Anyway ... I'm getting distracted. I'm posting because I have astounded myself by actually finishing a story. I've never done that before. True, it's only 2000 words, but it shows it can be done. I'm reluctant to post in on Inverloch. I don't really know why. I feel oddly shy about it. Inverloch also never works, but that is a minor detail. I think too, I have a vague idea of submitting it for publication somewhere, if only I can convice myself that it isn't entirely dreadful, and if I can find somewhere to actually submit it.
I would really appreciate any feedback given.
‘How did you die?’ the demon asked.
‘Buying diamonds.’
‘A form of carbon?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Ah.’
It was not the sound of judgement, just the satisfaction of knowledge. David called it a demon because he had no other word, and because the world seemed to suggest that he should. It appeared right, and fit comfortably in his mind.
The world suggested many things, and was contradictory about most. This was the afterlife, but it was outside of life. He was dead, but pleasantly so. It was sad that dear Joanie was still alive.
‘Do you want to become a part of me?’ the demon asked. ‘I like your views on sunflowers, and the time you spent at Cheddar Gorge.’
David smiled. ‘That would be nice.’ He thought about his garden. Yes, the sunflowers were blooming. The ones in a line against the back wall. Every year for twenty years there had been sunflowers there, since Andrew planted the first seeds. He had been four.
‘I would like that,’ David said, ‘but I can’t stay here. I’ve cared for Joanie for too long to leave her on her own now.
‘You have a herniated disk, arthritic knees, high blood pressure. You also have the beginnings of prostrate cancer. Though that is not from caring.’
‘Do you know everything?’
‘No.’
‘What don’t you know?’
The demon laughed. Or there was a general purple rumbling.
‘Tell me about Joanie,’ it asked.
She had been ill for seventeen years. The symptoms had begun thirteen years after they were married. Weakness. Wobbly legs. They had laughed about it at first. Said she had been at the gin.
No one had said it, but it had been assumed that she would die for him. David knew he had hoped for it. For practical reasons mostly. It was so difficult to find good care. Even the best of homes were cold, indifferent, where there was care without love. There were the children of course. But Andrew was up in Scotland, and Charlotte was busy being something financial in London.
He had planned tender care for his wife, and then to go on, alone, into heartbreak. Instead, he had been stabbed as he left the jewellers. For his death, they got three diamonds in a silver bracelet.
Silly, to buy diamonds. They couldn’t afford it. Joanie would have giggled, had she been able, and called him a sentimental fool. But it was their thirtieth wedding anniversary on Wednesday, and diamond was the gemstone for it. Charlotte had told him that, she had looked it up on the internet.
‘Diamonds are precious,’ said the demon, as though trying the words on for size.
‘Clink, clink, woosh,’ said David.
A hill in the distance, or perhaps a cloud, quivered from yellow to orange. Curious orange, thought David, though he wasn’t sure why. It reminded him of something Andrew had once said. It held a memory of humour.
‘Clink, clink, woosh?’ repeated the demon, with a question.
‘An old family joke,’ said David, and told it the story.
Charlotte had studied Business at university. Andrew had started the joke then. Andrew always started the jokes. He said Charlotte was doing yuppie studies, and mimed holding a mobile phone whilst shouting ‘Buy! Sell! Sell! Buy!’ Charlotte took it in good humour, and even played up to the teasing. She had always been able to take a joke and she had an easy way with people.
She left university and moved to London, where she got a job in corporate finance after a long internship. It only made the joke seem funnier. David however missed his daughter whose life seemed to get faster as his got slower, and more full as his emptied. He was in this mood when she phoned him on a dull Wednesday afternoon.
‘Just a quick call, Dad. Time is money you know!’
The rules of the family joke were that he should laugh, but instead he said:
‘Not really. They’re quite different.’
‘Oh?’
‘One goes clink, clink, the other goes woosh.’
Charlotte followed the rules. She laughed. ‘Dad, you silly sod. You’re more eccentric everyday, I swear. Clink, clink? It’s all plastic now though, or digital rather. Anyway, I wanted - oh, hang on.’ He heard muffled voices through a hand pressed over the mouthpiece. ‘Sorry, got to go. Love to mum.’
‘Yes, of course. Take care.’
Click.
Press the red button, end the call.
Don’t forget the difference, my sweetheart.
David became aware that the demon was droning:
buy sell buy sell sell buy sell buy buy sell buy sell sell buy sell buy buy sell buy sell sell buy sell buy buy sell buy sell sell buy sell buy buy sell buy sell sell buy sell buy
The words floated around him. They tickled and made him shiver. They sank into him then poured out through the hole in his side. They climbed up, up and took flight on coloured wings, and were gone.
‘Charlotte is an interesting character,’ said the demon.
David was upside down. He was not wearing a tie, but still one fell forward over his face, a nuisance flapping over his nose and mouth. Blood ran up down from the holes the muggers had left, trickling down up over his stomach and chest to his neck and shoulders where it dripped into nothing.
Clink
Clink
‘Charlotte?’ David said, surprised, pushing the tie aside. ‘She was always the normal one in the family. Andrew was the one we all worried about. He listened to morbid music and was always tormented with depression.’
‘But she has the more complex issues, because she doesn’t know how to be what she is.’
‘Wait. How do you know all this about my children?’
‘You told me.’
‘I did?’
‘Yes. Charlotte doesn’t know how to be a grown woman, because her mummy was not a mummy. She was not a real woman. She was old when she was young, when she had to use a stick and then a wheelchair in her thirties. And she is young now that she is old and she has to be fed and washed liked a baby.’
‘Tell me about Joanie.’
He met her when he was sixteen. She was sixteen too. They say relationships never last if they began so young. It didn’t. In truth it never started. There was almost a kiss once, when they got caught by the rain in the pagoda in the park. They’d been eating fish and chips, and David still remembered the hot, sweet smell of the fat and salt and vinegar on their fingers and their breath.
David finished school a few months later and moved north where an Uncle had a business. He was miserable there for a few years until he came back. In that time Joanie had been to college. She still lived in the same place, with her parents in that semi off of Grosvenor Road. David moved back with his parents too. So much was the same as it always had been, but he was scared a little, because Joanie was beautiful now, and clever, and he was just a scruffy young man with no job and no career.
Joanie didn’t mind though. She thought his impression of his Uncle’s accent was funny. David got a job at a petrol station, and worked Saturdays in a shop. He learned to drive, and bought a car. He took Joanie out in it, and kissed her properly.
‘I wasn’t the first to kiss her, though. I always regret that. When I was gone she dated Mike Sergeant.’
‘She kissed Ben Higham first. When she was fifteen.’
David frowned. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Because you know it. She whispered it in your ear when you were slightly drunk and almost asleep. You just don’t know that you knew it.’
‘Well I do now,’ said David, and frowned some more.
He was standing again, wearing his favourite grey jumper. He wore it for work in the garden. It had a hole in the elbow, and he poked at it now. ‘Why do you ask me all these questions if you already know everything I know?’
The demon sighed and shrugged and set the world to a yellow tilting and a green rolling.
‘You know you are dead.’
‘Yes.’
‘So David must die.’
‘But I am David.’
‘Exactly. So you must give him up.’
‘Who?’
‘David.’
‘I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.’
‘Nearly. I am trying to help, but only you can lose yourself. Only you are yourself. Only you have lived the life you’ve lived, and the life you have lived is who you are, so you must give it up.’
I’ve already given my life up.’
‘No, you just died.’
David sighed. ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Tell me about Joanie.’
It was hard to be a young man with a disabled wife. He wanted to have fun. To go for dirty weekends, and have lazy Sunday afternoons away from his family with his friends in the pub. He had to learn about walking frames, and then later about wheelchairs. Joanie’s bladder muscles stopped working and she used a catheter bag. The muscles in her mouth and throat stopped working and she slurred her speech and could not swallow her food. She had to have it softened for her and often she spluttered and choked and could not cough to clear her lungs.
As her physical world shrunk, her mental one expanded. She had studied English literature at college and now she read and read. Her eyesight grew poorer and she moved onto large print books, and then to audio cassettes. She was often frustrated that they did not have all the books she wanted on cassette, and the slowness of having it read to her could not keep up with the speed and hunger of her mind. David loved to watch her face as she explored world after world. She was still beautiful. The disease could not take that.
Sex became awkward, but for a long time was still possible. But the control she had of her muscles weakened further. David felt ashamed making love to her unresponsive body and that shame eventually overcame his desire and his need. Joanie cried when he told her and tried to pull him towards her. He hugged her, and from then onwards they learnt instead to just lay together, him holding her.
‘How much have I told you?’ David asked.
‘Nearly everything.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You have given it up.’
‘I only remember things about Jeanie. I’ve told you about her ...’
‘She is closest to you and you have not yet given her up, that is why you can still remember her.’
‘How long have I been here?’
‘There is no time.’
‘Did I have children?’
The demon paused. ‘It has gone, David.’
‘I’m dying,’ David whispered, and began to cry. Then he remembered Jeanie, alone. ‘I am the lucky one,’ he said, and stopped crying.
‘Give her to me,’ said the demon.
‘How can I? She is my everything!’
‘Exactly,’ said the demon. It continued in a softer tone, ‘you are already dead. You can’t have her back.’
David let out a shuddering breath and looked down at his baggy jumper and the scarlet blood that dripped out of him. ‘I have to say goodbye first.’
‘I know.’
Everything sank away from him. The world came back, and with it, pain. Agony tore at his side. He felt the sick slipping away of life. His body knew he was dead and tried to go, and the world pushed him away.
He was substantial at first but grew paler as shades of him self were sloughed off and sucked into the wound in his side. It was dark with rotten blood and seemed like a black hole, pulling him into himself, collapsing him and drawing him down into death.
He forced his eyes away. He was in Jeanie’s room and he saw her in the bed, sitting up. He ignored the pain, knowing he did not have long. He went to Jeanie’s side. She was asleep but woke as he touched her face and whispered, ‘Jeanie, my love.’
Her eyes jumped around the room and she fought their erratic movements to focus upon him. She smiled, seeming unsurprised. The little electronic keypad that she used to communicate was on her lap and she fumbled with it for a moment. David looked at the display screen:
H e l o
‘Hello,’ he smiled. ‘I’m so sorry that I have to leave you. I promised I never would, but-’
He looked down at the screen again:
Lov yuo
‘I love you too.’
B with u ssoon
He kissed her cheek and stroked her face with a hand that was almost transparent.
Then, the room dropped away and Jeanie was gone, and David was too.