A Short Diversion

My flatmate recently wrote a song. A very talented individual he is indeed. Anyway, it prompted me to attempt a short story on the subject of said song – here is Part 1. Concludes whenever I get round to it…

Dave, hairbrush in hand, examined the light acne on his forehead in the wall-hung mirror. Thoughts of age, thoughts of spent youth, the clutter of the hours inching out the substance from his day-to-day life. And his Janus. Sapping from him on one hand and at the same moment giving to him an outstretched palm of riches, those he had yearned for and yet which had disappointed him in the finding.
He surged the focus of his eyes outward, turning from his own image to that projected of his Janus, sitting on the bed, brush also in her hand, in the pristine act of straightening the bedraggled dark hair, pensive and with an expression of suppressed pain on her face. This girl who co-habited, who seemed to watch him even as he startled his computer to life in the morning, who seemed to cast her reflection into the top of his tea, lunged at his thoughts mid-sentence. Her and her beautiful hair, and yet she had coaxed him gently in to their entanglement, and now wished to shun him.
She got up roughly from the bed, in the throws of routine, and sidled over to him. Thoughts flicked across of her transformation, an evening in a health spa, stupid green gunk lathered on her stupid unknowing face, cucumbers on the eyes, the faith-healing rays as spouted from the health therapist’s mouth, all this layered and layered in her mind, poisoning it, and she in turn poisoning him, the overspill, the victim. He watched her figure grow in the mirror, his hand had been steady for minutes, not one stroke of the brush, not one fidget or change in posture as he mused the banality. She placed her arms around him, embracing his shoulders, a gift of affection that she would cheaply trade with another. The bitch. How she hoarded her affections, doling them out like a miserly drip by a hospital bed, never overloading, tickling enough to set the itch in place and hiding the consoling scratch under the covers, withdrawn from his life until she saw fit.
He murmured a dead-pan phrase of affection, grunted almost. Spat the toothpaste into the sink, how long had that been in his mouth? A torrent of scolding, warnings, brooding advice and a loveless peck later and he was on the street, on the train, at his office building keypad, 3, 7, 4, 5, blink and in, at his desk, the tea swirling by his side, the monitor flashing up in front of him, ready to pilfer another eight hours from his egg-timed life. And still he thought about Janus, her loveless peck and her primary colour duvets and her stuffed animals and that kitten. The kitten, the bastard. His fingers tapped at the keyboard, piles of text inputted by ape-technology by an ape into an overlord database. We created that which we are in the mercy of. Faster, faster.
And then home. Older. He caught her at it again, kitten in hand, fondling it, bearing her cheek against it until they became a synthesis, one beautiful bedevilled girl, and one object, living but useless, somehow conditioning us to love it, to put its food before ours. That bastard kitten, it steals all her love from me. And that bitch, she throws all her love upon it, this object, almost inanimate.
“Why do you spend so much time with that fucking thing?”, he spat, before he had time to rein it in.
She shot him a glance, half in mock-fear as though he were some outraged wife-beater, half in contempt.
“This kitten loves me, it knows how I feel”, Janus said.
“It’s a ball of fur, it knows fuck all, and it is in my seat”, said Dave, voice calmed.
He nearly drowned in self-loathing then. The vicious words uttered at the end of a soulless day could be as lastingly wounding as a rusted sword and could never be taken back. And Janus, always the recipient. He directed his venom at the kitten though, it lay there mockingly, pride of place. Dave lazily poised his arse towards it, ready to sit, shadowing in like a sinking whale, and the kitten, growing wide-eyed and fearful, crawled slowly away, its claws snagging on the material of the sofa.
“Don’t talk to me when you get home from work, you’re a grouch, I don’t want to be near you”, she said, and she grasped the kitten, scooping it into her arms and whisking it and herself away to the bedroom. In her absence, Dave settled out suddenly on the couch, as if a spring had been uncoiled and his unfurling limbs had to find the extremities of their purpose. One day he would get that kitten. He would get her, if the kitten was an unknowing pawn in this wounding game of hate, then it too would pay the forfeit. After all it was only a kitten, he would get the better of it.
Three more day-cycles of dark and light grey and he lay on his hands in a rapidly spreading pool of beer at the ‘Leper and Prosthetic’, his oaken local. Across from him lay a far drunker Ronnie, looking through the encompassing mesh of his eyes at the pitiful figure opposite. Four hours of hearing Dave harp on about his woes had lead him into an alcoholic tailspin, throwing back drinks until they rivered in his throat as Dave looked on unaware, trapped in his own head, bouncing thoughts off the twisted mug of Ronnie. At one point he even downed a yard of ale, resting the bulb on Dave’s unflinching shoulder.
Ronnie glanced at his wristwatch. Two hands waved theatrically back at him, made a number of subtle movements and then scarpered from his vision. The time for action had come, he decided, it felt right.
“Look here!”, he shouted, pointing in his companion’s general direction. Dave lifted up his head and was poked immediately in the left eye, which began to weep.
“You have to do something about this err, fucking, err”
“Kitten?”
“No! The woman, you need to tame her, set her back on the straight and, and just sort yourself out!”, Ronnie continued drawing patterns in the air with his scolding finger, occasionally touching and streaking the tears on Dave’s face.
“You cannot get her back”, he continued, “Unless you eliminate the kitten. I told you this would happen, the fickle bitches, they will love anything, so long as it is furry.”
Dave looked down at his arms and mused that he was that furry at all, and then he wondered when Ronnie would be quiet again. He picked up the pool cue leaning next to his bench and poked idly at Ronnie’s shoulder to try and make him stop, but he simply went on, “Listen, you need to make her jealous. Have an affair, it doesn’t matter what with.”
Almost as his slurred words faded he found himself sat in front of the computer, the monitor off, bloodshot eyes in the black reflection, right arm under the table fumbling for the power button. He tried to recount the events following the conversation. Taxi home, or bicycle perhaps. Whose bicycle? The monk’s? Then at home, a kitchen knife, no, not a knife, too violent, just a chopstick. Oh my god, not Janus?! No, nothing like that, not murder, not last night, not on a Thursday. Chopstick in hand, gathering support, a smashed cabinet, shoulder-barged perhaps, he felt his shoulder, yes, tender, makes sense, but was this before or after. He looked down at the mouse. A mouse? What did he do with the chopstick? And then, fumbling around the bedroom, “Shhhh, be quiet, you’ll wake him!”
Wake what? Nothing to wake, no, not murder, but still chopstick in hand, lighter shadows now, outside, fumbling around, more broken glass, yes, the patio door, and then back in. Janus in a nightgown, nauseating pink, how it offends the eyes, like being microwaved. Then finding it. His finger, orbiting the power button for minutes, falls in the dimple and ignites the machine. Cast back to last night again, focus, the kitten, the chopstick through the eye. The screaming, from Janus, the wailing and mewling, from the kitten, and then drop-kicked into the street, and Janus fleeing, gowns billowing behind her like chasing candy floss, enwrapping, swaddling her.
“Jesus!”, screamed Dave, and he ejected his chair back behind him, knocking over some fucking co-worker or other, sunken and dead in the heart, and leapt down the stairs, back to his house. The street was cordoned off. Exhibit A, chopstick kitten, was being manhandled into a plastic bag. In the background a woman in the crowd wept audibly. Janus was nowhere to be seen, probably never would be. The street seemed desolate and cold, despite the wafting crowds. All looked on, policemen consoling each other, people shaking their heads in mute disbelief, anxiety, the ills of society personified in the man who could do this. The weight of the world lent their heavy presence to the scene, the deities hovered just above, receiving that kitten soul, that symbol of purity, destroyed with a human eating implement. Those were Dave’s favourite chopsticks as well. What, in his drunken mind, had aroused such carefree waste in him?
He wrapped his scarf tightly around his mouth and nose and sidled away, gently asphyxiating, moisture from his smoker’s cough beading the material inside, creating a warm must of tobacco scent. The flat being off-limits, he went back to his office, his only other place of the Known apart from the supermarket, though the cold aisles and spear-stares of Tesco did not appeal. In front of his desk, his felled co-worker lay barely moving, the odd twitch from the corner of her mouth betraying her living, people stepping over her reading faxes. Faxes. As he lowered his aching drunk-starved body onto the chair, he looked over at the supple curves of the fax machine. Its grey figure, silhouetted.
“Yes, fax machine”, he whispered, “You understand me”. Dave looked around and then rose slowly but shakily to his feet. Using minimum footsteps, soft to the carpeted floor, he approached the fax machine as his heart bounded within his shirted chest. “You understand me”, he dropped his tone further. He outstretched his hand and lightly patted the top. The machine beeped loudly and, startled, Dave fled back to his desk. The secretary watched him with one chameleon eye, the other focuses on “Heat” magazine in front of her, her obese face chewing like a cow in the ecstasies of pasture. She snorted gently as unknown bodies passed into her, salad, perhaps, or pine nuts.
Over the coming days, Dave progressed with his work at a stately pace, sidling over to the fax machine in his lunch breaks. Too scared to return to his sealed-off home, as the Chopstick Kitten Controversy hit the headlines somewhere beneath celebrity jail-breaks and above African civil wars, he set up hostel within the warming dividers and ring-binders of the stationery cupboard, ruminating with his mind in the early hours of the evening after the office closed as the dispiriting sound of vaccum cleaners and Eastern European voices echoed through the closed door.
During the day he would edge closer to the fax machine, making gestures to it, sometimes stopping to make small-talk. It responded nonchalantly at first, an idle beep here or whirring noise there, but as the days grew longer with the onset of another fusty summer, she too seemed to warm to him, sending him read receipts on hearing a joke, the fax machine equivalent of maniacal and true-boned laughter. It was in early May, when all in the office now avoided him and his five-month body-clung shirt and strangely Post-it-note-gum-smelling breath, that he dared once again to stroke the smooth, dusted, powder-grey surface of his love. The fax machine purred gently, various lights illuminating a captivating green and then extinguishing playfully like sudden-hid emeralds. Harbingers of a wealth awaiting persistence.
Dave first made love to the fax machine on Independence Day. He had coaxed it into the cupboard after the office drones had left to hasten home behind blinking brake lights to microwave Macaroni and watch X-Factor. A3 folders and staplers cascaded from the highest shelves, denting his dear fax machine and bruising his head, yet still he continued in the throws of passion. It seemed that his love would never end, that in this selfless apparition, this almost Holy sender of messages, a female Mercury, with her wings replaced with toner, her oral senses replaced with sensual buttons, and the throbbing muscles of the thighs replaced with heady electronic infusions pulsing through her circuit veins with the inexorable eagerness to spread the word of clients and suppliers alike, he had but glimpsed the figure atop the pedestal, and now that he had drunk from this cup, he would forever yearn for more. If only it could be like this forever, he thought, but already, boiling within him, a torrent of bile was urging his feelings away, trying in vain to prepare him for a fall that would have to come, for around the apex of ecstasy lies only monotonous plains, and the next peak may never be within sight or reach. As he staggered, drained, limp, from the stationery cupboard, fax machine in hand, he caught a wink from across the room. From the photocopier…

To be continued.