Day 11
5,009 words tonight / 18,396 words total. A crazy day, not the best writing by any stretch but I’ve now caught up completely!
22. Prodigal Son
The morning after the accident, Rowan woke on another bench in another park.
There was a terrible smell in the air, which immediately made Rowan think of Rod. He sat upright and gathered himself. He didn’t know what park he was in, but there was no-one around and, thankfully, no ducks. The events of the night before came back to him slowly: the drinking, seeing Sara, drinking some more, the accident, the ambulance, the hospital, drinking even more…
It was time to go home.
It turned out he was in a park just a few minutes walk from home. Perhaps, in his drunken state, he had tried to make it all the way back but only got this far. Or perhaps he’d just wandered there randomly. Whatever the reason, it was a relief to be so close to the bacon sandwich he’d invariably be able to persuade his mother to make him.
It was a Friday and the house was empty save for his mother, who was making cakes in the kitchen.
“Hello, mum,” he said.
“Rowan! I’ve been worried sick. How have you been. Come here! Ugh… When did you last shower? Where—”
Rowan stepped away from her and opened the fridge. There was bacon. “Can I have a sandwich?”
“Of course, you sit down. Bacon? A bit of tomato sauce? I know what you like, Rowan! You may be getting all grown up now but you’re still my boy!”
Valerie busied herself getting the frying pan, oil, plate, bread… she moved erratically, in jerks, but somehow precisely too. She was a woman who knew her own kitchen.
“How about Sunday lunch together, Rowan? All of us, the family?”
Rowan chuckled.
“What are you laughing at?”
He pointed up, at the faint smudge of the word ‘wankfest’ on the ceiling. Valerie didn’t bother to look up. Hands on hips, she said, “Rowan, it’s not funny.” Her youngest continued to laugh, even harder. He was thinking about Rod, about how Beth had thought he was masturbating. Mid-road wankfest, he was thinking, and it tickled him.
Valerie harrumphed and turned back to the frying pan. She didn’t know what to make of the boy most of the time. Ill or otherwise, he was such a handful. He’d turned up today looking like some kind of Dickensian street urchin: grubby all over, clothes tattered, hair in his eyes. Of all her children, Rowan looked the least like his mother. Sara was thinner than Valerie, but had that same black hair her mother had when she was young. Camille had thinner hair but shared Valerie’s once voluptuous figure—now long gone, of course. Jim had Valerie’s withdrawn expression, both had slightly down-turned mouths. But with Rowan she shared nothing. He was stocky, square-headed, with eyes that could intimidate almost anybody. He was uncontrollable, a menace.
In her darkest moments, Valerie wished he wasn’t hers. In fact, she would rather accept the guilt of the desire than deny herself those moments of relief at the idea of receiving a letter explaining that nineteen years ago, a terrible mistake was made…
“You’re not sorry, are you?” she asked, in a rare moment of confrontation.
Rowan thought about it. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Well, you did.”
Rowan nodded gravely. “Hmm.”
Valerie threw her arms up in exasperation, then continued on the sandwich. “There you go,” she said, putting the plate down in front of him. He ate in silence.
It occurred to Valerie as she watched him eat that even with company, she was no less alone.
23. Font Size 235
The office that Mark Selwyn and Sara Barrett shared was on the second floor of a rather large building, which wasn’t owned by any one company. Rather lots of companies paid a very rich landlord for a bit of the floorspace, with which they could do what they wanted.
One company, FlameBrand, had a meeting room on the top floor for which they paid seven thousand pounds a year. They didn’t use it very often; mostly they just used it to come up with ideas for new product lines. The ceiling of the meeting room was painted like the sky, to encourage free thinking. The chairs cost over three thousand pounds each, to ensure anyone seated experienced maximum comfort. There was a massive electronic display panel on one side of the room that had a screensaver which flashed the motto “Creativity through Collaboration” in font size 235 unless someone made it stop. Nobody ever did.
Mark Selwyn would sometimes go up to the top floor and look in. Perhaps if he worked in that kind of office, he would be happy. He could give up all his dreams of quitting working life, and do a job he really enjoyed. If they needed an accountant, he could be there man. He knew a lot about accountancy. He could do financial accounting, management accounting and tax accounting. He could even do auditing. Maybe FlameBrand needed an auditor.
On her first day working for Mark Selwyn, Sara Barrett went to the wrong floor and found FlameBrand’s meeting room. She thought it summed up everything that was wrong with the world. It was so false, so superficial. She thought if she ever had to work anywhere like that, she would kill herself.
When she finally found Mark Selwyn’s office, she asked him what he did. “Accounting, mainly,” he said. She thought he seemed quite proud of that and thought him a bit odd.
After all, she thought, it can’t be such a special skill: It’s just counting with a prefix.
24. London Love Match, Again
Tom didn’t want to see Camille again after their first date. He correctly assessed her to be a nutter and waned nothing more to do with her. At the end of the night, he gave her a false telephone number, put her in a cab, and went out for a drink with some workmates. Meanwhile Luke, the friend who he’d texted the word ‘Nutter’ to, was still arguing with his girlfriend Amanda.
Camille had no idea she had been given the brush off by her date until she tried to call him for sex the next day and a woman’s voice told her: “The number you have called is not operational.” She didn’t care.
One man was as good as another.
She called up Linda at London Love Match. “I want someone for tonight,” she said.
Linda knew who it was right away. “Hi Camille… No joy with Tom?”
“No. And I think he’s broken his phone. I need another.”
“Another…?”
“Another man, obviously.”
“Oh.”
There was a pause.
“Hello? Linda?”
“We’ve exhausted all of your primary matches, Linda.”
“What does that mean?”
“You see, the computer checks all the things you like against all the things the men on our database like and give a list of those men who match you the closest.”
“Whatever. Sounds great. Give me one.”
“Well, that’s just it… You’ve dated them all.”
“All of the men?”
“All of the primary matches, yes.”
“I don’t like Shrek,” Camille said suddenly.
“I’m sorry?”
“I don’t like Shrek. I like, um… James Bond.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Find me a man who likes James Bond!” Camille demanded.
“I can’t just change—”
“You can!” Camille hissed. “And you will.”
“No, Miss Barrett, I’m afraid we can’t help you anymore…”
“Bastards!”
“…you’ll receive a full refund…”
“Screw you!” Camille yelled, slamming the phone down. She thought for a few minutes about what to do. She tried Tom’s number again: no answer. Then she tried Mark Selwyn. No answer.
One man might well have been as good as another, but no man was certainly not as good as any man, Camille thought.
25. Luke and Amanda
For Tom’s friends Luke and Amanda the argument about the text message proved to be a fatal blow to their relationship. The next day Amanda walked out, claiming she couldn’t stay with a man she couldn’t trust, a man who thought she was crazy.
Luke was past the point where he cared. “Fine,” he said. “Go.”
Amanda moved in with a friend soon after went back to full-time education. Although she was somewhat older than most students on her Bachelor of Performing Arts course, she made a number of good friends. Years later she got some work in TV adverts that paid reasonably well. Still single, however, she became increasingly depressed and began what turned out to be a lifelong dependency on prescription drugs.
Luke stayed in the flat they’d shared as he was the original tenant. He married the next woman with whom he had a relationship, a flighty girl called Alice. His insecurity about her fidelity grew steadily until, after three years, he decided to confront her head on about it. However, he never got the chance: he was killed on his way home in a freak construction accident. As coincidence would have it, the foreman of the site was the man Alice was having an affair with. Once the dust had settled on her double loss, Alice emigrated to the Central African Republic, where she spent her days as a teacher in a school for local children.
Tom outlived both Luke and Amanda, happily going about his life using the word nutter willy-nilly, oblivious to its potential consequences.
26. Right, That’s It!
“Right,” said Valerie, throwing open the door and yanking the curtains apart. “That’s it!”
“What’s what?” asked Jim, dazzled and bleary-eyed.
“We’re getting you out of here. We’re going to walk around the block—we can take that film you didn’t watch with me back to the shop.”
“No… Mum, no… I need to keep going.”
The counts of dice rolls had become extraordinary. Valerie looked in horror. “Jesus, Jim! Is this what you’ve been doing all this time? Are you unwell? Do you want some help? Is something getting you down?”
“Yes! Your nagging is getting me down! Let me be!”
“No,” said Valerie firmly. “Not this time. There’s boys that hang round out there. I’ll not be safe. You are coming with me!” She took her son by the arm and began pulling at him, tugging him into a standing position. Finally, Jim relented. “Okay, okay, but just to the shop and back.” He threw the die one more time, recorded the result and went downstairs with his mother for the first time since Fred Wallace had been in the house.
“I was thinking,” Valerie said as they left the house, “of having a family meal. It’s been ages since we were all together. What do you think?”
“Yes, it has been ages,” Jim agreed, squinting against the harsh winter sun.
“I was thinking tomorrow, a nice Sunday lunch. You’ll eat with us, won’t you?”
“Okay,” Jim said.
“Good. That’s you and Rowan as definites. If you see the girls, mention it to them, will you?”
The attractive young man was working in the video shop again, so Valerie took the DVD to him rather than posting it in the quick-drop box. He didn’t notice her there. She’d hoped that perhaps he’d ask her if she enjoyed the movie, or something.
On the walk back, Valerie broached a subject she had wanted to touch on with Jim for a long time. “You’re twenty-two,” she said. “Have you thought about work?”
“What do you think I do every day?” Jim asked, brushing the hair out of his eyes.
“I mean paid work…”
“When I publish my findings, they’ll pay,” Jim said, his tone firm.
“I can’t afford to keep you forever, Jim. You need to pay towards the mortgage, the bills… And anyway, you should get out more. Do you—well…”
“Do I what?”
Valerie stopped walking and looked at Jim, deeply concerned. “Do you have any friends? At all?”
“Of course!”
“I’ve never met them…”
“Internet,” Jim said simply. “We talk all the time.”
“Oh.”
They carried on walking in silence for a while.
“If I found you an interview, would you go?”
“I have my research—”
“What if it was only a few hours a week?”
“How many?”
“Ten. Maybe fifteen.”
“How much?”
“Five pounds an hour.”
Jim eyed her suspiciously. “And how much would you want?”
“None, Jim. None of it. You can keep it all.”
“Okay, if you can find a job like that, I’ll apply. Happy?”
Valerie smiled and opened her handbag. Inside was an application form. “Here you go,” she said, handing him the form. “But how—” began Jim… then he looked at the name of the company: Hollywood DVDs. Whatever Valerie was, she wasn’t stupid.
27. What’s in a Verb?
Sara spent that Saturday out in the cold, in the beer garden of a local pub, The Yellow Torch. The temperature was six degrees Celsius; not one other person ventured outside the whole time she was there. Sara saw that as being a victory on two fronts: she loved the cold and she loved solitude.
She spend much of the day drinking vodkas (no ice, no lemonade, no nothing) and rereading some old Agatha Christie that she’d found in the corner of her room. In between bouts of reading and drinking, she thought idly about her life and what should come next. She had taken the temping jobs to give her some money and eventually to make some opportunities for herself. Perhaps she could travel. Spending her time on the internet the other day looking up places to go had been something of an inspiration for her.
So what was stopping her?
One definite problem was that she had no idea what she’d do when she got there, wherever there was. She wasn’t like those people she’d met at various jobs who spent all their time fantasising about jumping out of planes, climbing mountains or learning how to meditate. She hated those people. What she sought, if anything, was to be left alone.
Maybe that was it.
Maybe she’d got it all wrong. Maybe doing was for other people—no idea what she’d do, that was what she thought her problem was. Well, maybe she just wasn’t a doer. Maybe she would just sit around, doing nothing. Technically, she thought, sitting around was doing something—but that line of thought was a red herring. This wasn’t about semantics, this was about her life. Why couldn’t the adventure just be being there?
Just then, her mobile rang. “What are you up to?” Camille asked.
“Nothing,” said Sara, irrationally defensive of the thoughts she’d just been having.
“Want to drink somewhere?” The Barrett sisters had little in common except their mutual love for alcohol.
“I’m in the Torch now,” Sara said.
“Are you with anyone?”
“No…”
“Great, I’ll be right there,” Camille said. “Oh, and were not sitting outside, weirdo.”
28. Janice
Fred Wallace, the plumber, had been recommended to Valerie by Janice. Janice was an old friend of Valerie’s. She was very, very short, and wore all manner of colourful accessories: red thick-rimmed glasses, oversized gold glittery bracelets, the works. She was responsible for the colourful patchwork coat that Camille was wearing the morning she pretended to collapse in front of Mark Selwyn. Janice had originally intended it for Sara—“That girl could do with some colour,” she’d said—but Sara had given it to her older sister. Sara was very fussy about what she wore.
Janice was married to a man even shorter than she, called Rodger. For the amount of times he said it, his name might as well have been “Rodger-with-a-D”. Rodger was a generally forgettable little man, his only memorable features were his very hairy nose and ears. People who met the couple, who experienced how dominant Janice was over her husband, could not believe that she never demanded he trim the excess hair. But what nobody knew was that Janice found the hair quite arousing; Rodger had often requested he should be allowed to cut it. This request was denied every time.
Valerie and Janice had always been close and like all close friends they were rarely honest with each other. For instance, Valerie never said to Janice: “That outfit it really garish,” or, “Why don’t you buy Rodger some nose hair trimmers?” Similarly, Janice had never voiced her concerns about the sanity of Valerie’s kids, nor did she repeat the rumours passed around the high street about them.
But something had changed recently: Janice had become deeply concerned about Valerie. So when she visited on Saturday evening, Janice decided to confront her old friend. She was as tactful as she knew how, which wasn’t very tactful at all.
“What’s your problem, then?” she said, interrupting Valerie’s conversation about Jim’s potential video shop job.
Valerie put down her glass of red wine on the kitchen table in front of her. “Whatever do you mean?” she said. “What problem?”
“You’ve been acting all depressed lately. Come on, ‘fess up. What is it, a man thing? Or the kids? Or has God done something to piss you off?” Janice laughed hard at that before carrying on: “No, seriously Val, something’s bothering you. Tell me what it is.”
“Well—”
“Wait, let me guess… Is it the menopause? I bet Rodger a fiver, you see…”
“What?”
“Joking, Val, joking! Jesus…”
The both sipped from their wine. Janice studied Valerie closely, who reacted awkwardly to being watched; she shuffled in her seat and touched her hair nervously.
“So?” asked Janice.
“No.”
“No?”
“No, there’s nothing bothering me.”
Janice drank some more wine. “Liar.”
Valerie looked around her conspiratorially, although she knew there was no-one around. “It’s just difficult, you know…”
29. Synchronicity
“It’s just difficult, you know…” Camille said to Mark’s voicemail, about men and relationships.
“It’s just difficult, you know…” Rowan said to the barman, about keeping his temper with people.
“It’s just difficult, you know…” Jim typed into an online forum, about trying to disprove established mathematical laws.
“It’s just difficult, you know…” Sara said to no-one in particular, about work and life choices and so on.
30. Flirty
Camille and Sara sat inside the Torch, nursing a beer and a vodka respectively. “No man tonight?” Sara asked.
“No,” said Camille. “You won’t believe it when I tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“You won’t believe it: I’ve been through all the men at the agency. You know London Love Match. The whole lot that have anything in common with me.”
Sara stifled a laugh. “What did you put as your interests?”
“The usual: TV, films. Shrek. You know.”
“How many men are into Shrek? You should have said sex. You’d have been able to meet with every man there.”
“Yeah,” said Camille despondently. “Shrek probably did put them off. Too late now, though.”
Just then two men came and asked if they could sit with the Barrett sisters. Camille said yes immediately.
One of the men introduced himself as Jack. He was tall, with broad shoulders and a square jaw. The other was Samuel, a skinnier man but equally clean-cut. Sara begrudgingly moved her chair to allow them to sit.
Jack was speaking more to Camille than Sara, but she had more than enough attention from the extremely tactile Samuel. She thought maybe he was a pervert.
“So, ladies,” Jack said brightly. “What’s the plan for tonight?”
“We don’t know,” said Sara. “Maybe go see Shrek?”
31. Monument
Jim’s wrist hurt from dice-rolling and masturbating.
He conceded his mother probably did have a point about his social life. He turned the light on and looked at himself naked in the mirror. His skin really had deteriorated: thin and splotchy on his body. His hair was long and greasy and he desperately needed a shave. For the first time in his life he noticed the start of a pot-belly.
It was time for action.
The first thing was to tidy his room. He gathered all the crisp packets, biscuit wrappers and drinks cans he could find and threw them into a plastic bag, which he knotted and took downstairs. He picked up all his clothes and began splitting them into clean and dirty—but this proved dull so he decided to treat them all as dirty by dumping them in the washing basket in his mother’s room. He even summarised his dice roll totals and threw away the reams of paper he’d been keeping his tallies on.
The next thing was personal hygiene. He found his clippers and cut his hair back to a number one all over. When that was done, he shaved his face—then, for good measure, he shaved all the other hair off his body too. After that he took a long bath and followed that with a shower. He cut his fingernails, his toenails and brushed his teeth. He cleaned out his ears with cotton wool buds. He used deodorant and some of Rowan’s aftershave. There was no reason for it—he wasn’t planning to go anywhere, but he was on a roll…
On a roll… those words echoed round his mind, taunting him, teasing him…
But no, he needed to get himself under control. He never set out to get obsessive over any of his research, it was always supposed to be a hobby, nothing more. When had it happened?
He thought about Rowan, his psycho brother. Always smashing things up, shouting, arguing. Perhaps it had been the same for him at some point… perhaps at one time he’d just been mildly frustrated at something… but he’d thought about it and thought about it and thought about it, and allowed it to build and build and build until it was so big he couldn’t think about anything else. Perhaps it was as if he had erected a great monument in his mind, that took up all the space that was in there. A monument to anger, so vast that all he could do was kneel before it and worship.
What, then, of the others? Camille? Perhaps one bad experience with a man? The idea that they could never satisfy her, never be enough? What if she projected that onto the next guy? What if she met him with the expectation he could never be what she wanted? It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. She too had this monument in her mind, something she had built herself but was incapable of seeing around or pulling down.
It was all becoming so clear to Jim: it was a family curse.
Sara, then… what of Sara? Always so withdrawn. She too had probably had some experience that haunted her. She so wanted to be free, without knowing what from… Well Jim knew—from the idea that the world wanted something from her, and she couldn’t deliver it. She had built that up and focused on it, just as Jim had with his dice, as Rowan had with his anger, as Camille had with her relationships.
So what to do about it? Jim thought this over for a while and decided it wasn’t for him to preach to the others. It would only get him a punch on the nose from Rowan, anyway. But he could do something about himself. He could change… could become someone different. It had gone beyond the dice rolling with him. He had become a recluse.
He went downstairs to speak to his mother, but she was with Janice. Her handbag was by the front door. Jim quietly took the application form and went upstairs to fill it in. Once it was complete, he slipped out, closing the door behind him.
He had one thought all this time, and one thought only: he had to bring down the monument in his mind, the false idol, the—
32. Recuperation
Dr Jenkins, the man who checked on Rowan and treated his diagnosed mental illness, lived very close to the Barretts. So although he wasn’t a GP, he was the first person that Valerie called when she saw what had happened to Jim. Dr Jenkins, an ageing hippy with a walrus moustache, arrived in minutes.
“Jim? Jim lad? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah—What happened?”
“You were attacked, Jim! Mugged! They took your wallet!” Valerie was hysterical. She was soaked through, all three were outside on the pavement, no more than ten yards from the front door.
“Oh! My head.”
“Yes, yep, yeah…” Dr Jenkins said. “You got a right old bang on the noggin, that’s for sure…”
“Will he live, doctor?”
Dr Jenkins lit a cigarette and nodded. “He will, he will.”
“Oh thank God!”
Jim pulled himself to a sitting position with the doctor’s help. “I think… I can sort of remember… I was coming out of the house, there were three kids… one had a navy sweater on…”
Dr Jenkins took out a notepad and began scribbling the details. “It’s okay, Jim lad. Keep going, I’ll just write in case you forget later.”
“I’ll call the police,” Valerie said.
Just then there was a shout from the other side of the road. “What the fuck has happened here?” It was Rowan. He ran across to the doctor and Jim. “Jenkins? Is that you? What are you doing to my brother?”
“Ugh… Rowan… He’s helping me, you idiot.”
Rowan slapped him swiftly across the back of his head, right where one of the young lads had hit him only minutes before. “Ow!”
“I’m not a fucking idiot, Jim!”
“Enough,” said Dr Jekins. “Calm down.”
“Was he attacked?” Rowan asked the doctor.
“Yes, yep, yeah… attacked and mugged. Lucky to be okay, I should think.”
Rowan insisted on hearing the details. He was clearly becoming more and more agitated as the story went on. “It’s no-one else’s place to steal from my fucking family!” he stated when he’d heard enough. Then, he stormed off to find them, despite protests from the two men.
Valerie returned with a blanket and a cup of water.
“I’ll be okay to get inside, mum.”
“You shouldn’t stand…”
“Really, please, I’ll be fine.”
The three made their way inside, uneasily.
“What has the world come to when you’re not even safe on your on your own street anymore,” Valerie complained.
Once inside, the two men sat down. Janice had left and Valerie busied herself with tidying the cup she had drunk from and the plate she had eaten from before eventually sitting down. She watched Jim with concern. Slowly, her face began to change from concern to horror. Jim became worried that perhaps he was bleeding, and put his hand to the back of his head. “What, mum, what is it?”
“Jesus Christ in heaven, Jim. I don’t know how to tell you this… it must be the shock… All your hair’s fallen out!”
33. Singles
Sara and Camille were stuck with Jack and Samuel, whether they wanted to be or not. The two men were very determined. The foursome ended up in a local club together. Because the dancefloor was below ground, neither woman got the message from their mother about what had happened to Jim.
Not that they would have gone home anyway. If they went home every time something happened to a member of the family, they’d never go out.
By coincidence, Mark Selwyn was in the club too. Neither Camille, his failed date, nor Sara, his employee, saw him. But he saw them. It suddenly occurred to him there could be some conspiracy… how on earth could these two women know each other. He broke out in a cold sweat, collected his jacket and left immediately without even saying good-bye to his friends. It was only in the cab home that he realised they shared a surname. What was the odds of that? You would never have guessed, he thought to himself. They have such different breasts…
The club was packed as it always was on Saturday night with local youngsters posturing and preening. The music was a mixture of dance and pop—Camille loved both, Sara hated both. Both agreed it was far too loud. Men in pastel shirts clung to the walls like light fixtures while women danced around pretending not to notice the onlookers.
This was probably Sara’s idea of hell. The sweatiness of it! It was all so tactile, so close. But mostly, it was so desperate. Why not just hand out raffle tickets and pair the men and women up that way? The whole thing was a waste of time and energy. Camille probably had the right idea with her dating agency. At least it bypassed all of this. Sara looked at the faces of the patrons closely: a lot of mouth smiling, but little eye-smiling. Admittedly, that may have been the effects of the alcohol but regardless, she just couldn’t be convinced people were actually enjoying themselves.
Camille was playing her favourite game with Jack. It involved her leaning close to him while dancing, looking him straight in the eyes, and waiting for him to touch her. Then, as soon as her did—POW!—he would slap his hand away and give him a filthy look. Jack was completely at a loss as to how to deal with her, but he was so drink-fuelled he kept lunging in, only to be suddenly repelled each time like a moth that flies into a lightbulb.
Sara and Samuel were sat at the bar drinking. Sara had already drunk the equivalent of half a bottle of vodka, but she was used to it. Her tolerance was higher than most people’s and poor Samuel was no exception. He was trying to keep pace and he was struggling.
He did the best he could to make conversation. But whatever he tried, Sara wouldn’t be drawn in. “So,” he said at one point. “What do you like to do with your spare time?”
“I like to sit around,” Sara said.
Yes, and poor Samuel had no idea she was being sincere.
