Free Fiction Friday: Stop Looking At Me
It looks like I forgot to keep up with my original plan to post new fiction every Friday - winter illness and two young kids will do that to your schedule. So here's the latest instalment, but on a Tuesday. We'll call this one Token Tales Tuesday.
Our belated story this time is one that I'm not sure about. It was written as part of a larger suite of stories, some of which will be available in Strange Meat: Vol 1 when it's released. Each of the shorts are linked by the impossible appearance of a large block of wood that floats unerringly across the land, either revealing or enhancing the characters it comes across.
Stop Looking at Me is clearly a naïve work. Its scrappy and possibly tries to hard to be cool. The writing's awkward and doesn't delve deep enough into its characters. There are a few moments I like such as the change in character perspective, something I might steal for something in the future and the description of the block's arrival is neat enough.
I'm not sure it holds up though. It's an old story of mine, one where I was still learning and you can tell. There's something to be said about unrefined prose, censor-less and raw, but ultimately it doesn't quite hit the right mark. So I present it as a curiosity, one that has merits and flaws and is worth reading.
(References to Body Rock and iPods will help you date it)
STOP LOOKING AT ME
Stop looking at me. Stop reading my life. It’s embarrassing. Interloper. Parasite.
It starts with a girl, as usual.
Actually it starts with me fancying a girl, as usual.
You know the kind: way to cool stroke pretty stroke popular stroke fashionable stroke unattainable. I first saw her doing a play in the park. She was Puck, the play was A Midsummer’s Night Sweet Dream Cream Machine. I didn’t talk to her of course, too early for that, but I made sure my clap was the loudest as the curtain fell and then again as she took her bow. She was a real cutie. She wore sensible clothes.
My name is irrelevant, but let's call me Jack. I’m a seventeen year old loser stroke geek stroke nerd stroke punk, but hey who isn’t? I get over that fact by the time I’m thirty and everything ends up fine for me. I get married (not to Puck) and settle down in a nice house with a nice family and realise that things being nice are the way they’re meant to be. And that the meaning of life is procreation.
Let’s get back to the present though because the present is where it’s happenin’.
I’m the butt of every joke in my circle of friends. Fair enough, who can blame them? It wears you down though. You start to believe what they say, what they imply, what you read into their every utterance. It wears you down. I stick with ‘em though because they’re my friends.
It’s party time tonight, we’re gonna get sooo fucked. Caff's brother’s coming up from Babylon-don so everyone’s going round to Jez ‘n’ Steevo’s and we'll probably stay up till daylight getting drunk. I turn up around midnight and ‘Body Rock’ is on the stereo. Everyone cheers as I walk in and I proclaim that the party can now officially start. The party has been at full speed for some time already, however, judging by the number of people getting off with other people they really shouldn’t be.
I’m negotiating beer cans and drunks when I spy her. The colour drains from the room leaving her to stand out red and pink and blonde.
Puck me.
Honestly the most perfect woman (girl?) I’ve seen in my short life. Short stumpy dreads, more metal in her face than I have in my record collection, tits and arse both in the right place. Huge smile: check. Torn T-shirt exposing mid-drift: check. Thick rimmed glasses: check. Check out those eyes. I’m checking, I’m checking, believe me I’m checking. You get the drift. I’m besotted. My little heart feels ill. My little heart needs to kill.
She’s in the kitchen and I’m not. She’s talking to Bunji who’s cool and funny. I’m not cool and funny. He’s trying to chat her up and looks like he might succeed.
I’m not.
Going to let this happen.
I have a backup plan. Correction. I have the only plan I’ve ever devised. I’m the man with the plan. I’m the man with the best part of an ounce of weed in my back pocket (big pocket). Drunks and cans negotiated I frame myself in the kitchen doorway. The kitchen seems to be the cool place to hang out. All the slightly older kids are in here and so are the cute girls. I only have eyes and organs for Puck though of course. She turns and smiles at me, false recognition on her face. I smile back, humbled lust on mine.
"Anybody want to see something really badass?" I say to the room. Bunji starts a quip about already having seen my mum piss into her own face on the internet but I don’t let him finish it as I reveal the large packet of marijuana.
It seems that I have left an important part of my tale out and I feel the need to rectify this situation before we proceed. Just how have I, lowly fool that I am, come into the possession of a potentially girl-wooing amount of ganj? You see I would never normally buy drugs. The people who sell the stuff scare me. Dodgy types. Either that or they’re hippies in which case they really scare me. So I never put myself in a situation where there is any risk of me buying drugs, which can only mean that the situation has to come to Mohammed. This particular situation was a short nervous cockney man, yesterday.
I was walking up the high street minding my own iPod when a little chap of indeterminate race walks up to me and starts to talk up to me. I pull Hüsker Dü from my ears and listen.
"--me mate?"
sorry?, I reply.
"Wonder if you could help me mate?"
I nod a perhaps which he takes as yes.
"You see I just need ten quid to get a train ticket back to London. You not dodgy are you?
Dodgy? You not a cop are you?"
Cop? I think.
No, do I look like one?
"Nah, but you got to be careful ain’t cha? Do you smoke? You look like you smoke. Course you smoke. I got (looks around with comic exaggeration) some stuff on me and I got ta get rid. I was wondering if you knew where I could sell it. There’d be something in it for you, for helping me out. You know some people don’t trust me up here because of the accent but I’m cool you know? Just need a tenner for a ticket."
Students live up that way - I indicate the way with the earphone marked L.
"I can’t go all the way over there, train leaves in a bit. Just help us out. Here look I’ll do you a deal if you buy the lot off me, I’ll do you a deal. How much have you got on ya?"
Fiver
"Is that all?"
All I can spare
"S’pose that’s alright. Follow me, there’s too much CCTV round here."
The diminutive fella walked me to an open courtyard which seemed to have loads more CCTV cameras than the high-street.
This was getting deep man. I’d met a guy desperate to lighten himself of a wad of smoke and I was gonna turn up at the party tonight fully stocked, stoked and ready to pull. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I’d have settled with average fortune. The tiny brownish man pulled a cellophane wrap from his waist band and passed it to me as I passed him a fiver. Then he was gone as fast as his little legs could carry him. Well chuffed, I strode back to my house with a beaming grin across my face.
Bunji's mouth opened and these words fell out: That’s spinach.
The package lay in my out stretched hand. A Mexican wave of laughter rippled around the kitchen culminating with a pig splutter from Puck herself. As you can imagine I was devastated. I was Nagasaki on the morning after. I had been crippled by my own naïveté. Honestly who sells you that much weed for a fiver in the middle of town in plain daylight? Maybe I even knew subconsciously what I’d been doing. It had been the inevitable outcome since I first set eyes on the unattainable girl. Guaranteed that I would somehow sabotage my own love life and make a colossal fool of myself. Jack’s the useless kid and had felt compelled to justify that moniker.
All play and no work makes Jack a useless boy.
I pig spluttered and went red with embarrassment. Oh shit I’m such a goofy bitch. Luckily everyone was watching the funny looking kid with the spinach which he thought was really drugs or something. He was wearing the T-shirt that I was going to buy, but couldn't afford, from 'Rock Chic'. Damn. Someone always gets there first.
My glasses slipped down my nose.
I took the package from T-shirt boy’s hand and asked if anyone was hungry. I think he took it more seriously than the jest in which the comment was intended and he left the room. I watched him walk over the litter and drink casualties that filled the front room as he made his way to the front door which he opened. He just stood there looking out into the night. For a whole minute I just watched him standing on the threshold. Bunji was trying to get my attention but he is a cock-end so I ignored him. Bunji grabbed the bag of spinach from my hand and pretended to roll a J with the stuff. I didn’t look away from the funny kid with the ‘Your a Loser’ T-shirt.
What was he doing? Just standing there. What could he see that stopped him leaving the house? Why did he want to leave? Who was he? Nice arse. Somebody put Groove Armada on the stereo. I like that song.
Then he turned and looked right into my eyes and I couldn’t look away. He had me.
My name is important, call me Fayne.
Glasses back up nose.
I grabbed the door handle firmly. What had I been thinking? As if there was anything I could do. There was no recovery from that incident. Maybe if had I known that Puck was going to be here tonight I would have thought twice about embarking on such a ludicrous scheme. My in built face saving fail-safe would have kicked in, but no. I went and made a fool of myself in front of all my friends and the girl who I’ve fancied from afar for months. What a twat.
I opened the door to leave and saw a huge block of black wood, roughly seven foot by ten, floating towards me at about walking pace. It was coming right for me and I froze. I wasn’t scared, just in awe at its imposing presence. Its mere existence was arrogant two fingers at reality. It shouldn’t be here but it was. I saw it for what it was. I saw its intent and its drive and I respected that. It drew closer to me, right up to my face, and it wasn’t going to stop. Neither was I. I turned and caught Puck looking at me from her place on the kitchen work surface.
I had her. She couldn’t move from my gaze.
The entrance buckled and warped as the block pushed through it. I felt its push on my back and I walked forward to my Puck. I trod down inebriates and their waste as I crossed the room. Get the fuck out of my way. My eyes were in hers and hers in mine. I stepped up to her and lifted her off her perch and into my arms. I could hear a commotion behind me as people ran and fled from the absurdity behind me. The blackness advancing slowly and steadily through the house, indiscriminately casting man and mortar aside.
