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OCA Creative Writing Course - Assessment Pieces.

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Howdoo all.

 

Sorry I've not been posting much, but I'm knee deep in a creative writing course, and drowning in a novel.

I'm about to submit my first three pieces for assessment and thought I'd post them here, just for the sake of sharing really, though critique's are welcome.

 

They have been informally assessed by my tutor and have suffered a redraft based upon the feedback, so as I finish my final drafts, I'll put them up. Think I'll upload them rather than post them as replies though, as they have some dead naughty words in them and I don't feel right self-censoring.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

---------- Post added 21-07-2013 at 15:51 ----------

 

 

 

First submission is a 1000 word limit, and it was the culminating project on building characters up.

 

 

DEN

 

Den’s arm snaked down the side of the seat, near-wedging against the driver’s door. His nails scratched on the gnarled plastic as he turned the tight workings, manoeuvring himself into a higher, more intimidating driving position. Not a moment too soon he reared up to full height, spine vertical, chest puffed to capacity. His head, which tapered to a near point and was peaked with a sod of Arabian hair, dabbed greasy dots on the ceiling of the car. But for a single skin tone, he would pass for Middle Eastern; he was never more than a good summer away from having to either adjust his racial views, or add himself to the long list of people he despised. He scowled his adjoined eyebrow into a thick W and stared out onto the pavement, his eyes slitted with razor sharp hatred. He carefully nudged the lock on the door down with his elbow. Not intentional… Not a retreat. His gaze caught on the patriotic tattoos covering his forearms. Symbols of his more extreme views, etched onto his chest in drunken determination, showed faded through his white shirt. He folded his arms, in case the polyester wasn’t thick enough.

The Asian youths barely noticed him as they walked beside the jammed traffic; but for the sound of the central locking on the Corsa they would have sauntered on oblivious. Den’s posture faltered as young ethnic eyes fixed on his. He saw nothing recognisable in the gang, just alien faces and arcane ways. Their counter-stare, inquisitive and neutral, struck with the savagery of a wild cat. Den could feel his cheeks twitch under the burning foreign gaze, and fought against the smile for as long as he could, until the heat of shame burned too hot to ignore.

‘Hiya lads,’ he motioned at the youths with a submissive nod, and the gang melted into indulgent laughter. They walked on, their mirth fading little.

Not until they became a dot in his rear view did he relax the chair a little to free up the steering wheel from his belly and enable him to turn corners.

*

Twenty minutes later, car parked; imagined race battles fought and won; traffic beeped at, drivers sworn at, he straightened his clip-on tie and headed into work. He exaggerated his limp – as he did whenever memory served – in case the eyes of subordinates were fondling him from the dark windows of the towering football stadium ahead.

‘Poor bugger,’ they’d say, ‘injured fighting the... something or others in... which war was it again?’ But they never could remember that part of the story. If they’d paid more attention, or if Den had been a little less practised at his craft, then they would have realised that there never really was a story. Hints and implication were Den’s tools, and he used them like a sculptor with a chisel. He chipped away at the marble of assumption, leaving the statue completed only in the mind of his audience. There’d been no war. There’d been no honourable discharge. There’d never even been a soldier but for the eight year old boy in his G.I. Joe costume, a stick for a gun and his dad’s old beret to make the ensemble real, sobbing uncontrollably as he cradled a broken knee next to the mist-slippery climbing frame.

‘Can’t stay a soldier with a bad knee,’ went the tale, ‘sorry lads, can’t really talk about how I did it.’ Technically, he was true to his word, though a more forthright report would have been, ‘couldn’t become a soldier with a bad knee,’ and, ‘can’t really tell you how I did it ‘cos the doctor says I was shocked catatonic.’ It never felt dishonest, not really. Had it not been for the knee he’d have been in Iraq doing what his dad had in the Falklands, and his granddad had in France, instead his war was in England, wherever he could find it.

He brandished the limp like the medal of honour he’d never had the chance to earn as he marched along the cavernous walkway. His footsteps clicked in announcement, echoing on the bare concrete walls. In the soles of his bulled boots, he’d nailed black taps to furnish his importance. Soon the halls would rumble with the stamping of footsteps from the stands high above, now they echoed with the whispered gossip of the orange coated safety stewards in their pre-work meeting of minds. Meaty smells and coffee steam mixed in the air, and Den walked through them, taking his breakfast by the nose as stewards proffered nods of respect at his passing. Some of the nods he returned, fleeting autographs from the humble hero to those who idolised him like royalty. He signed in on the steward’s sheet with all the ceremony of an inauguration, flourishing his signature over three lines. Den smiled down on his work with an important air, raised his upturned – and if asked, racially well bred – nose and grabbed the short yellow jacket of the security steward. He unfurled the coat as a peacock does its tail, displaying the word SUPERVISOR on the back with the superiority of a general. The exclamations of awe from the stewards gathered around the drinks machine were no less impressive for their being imagined, and he went off to work with the swagger befitting his rank.

*

Den loomed before the double doors. His arms folded tight, the etchings of his extreme politics covered for the sake of professionalism. Excited voices began to reverberate through the walkways as the first football fans were allowed access. He screwed up his eyes into his angriest frown in preparation for their arrival, the movement draining the last signs of intelligence from a face with few to spare.

In all his glory Den stood firm, his expression said, ‘you aren’t coming in,’ but his overall look said even louder, ‘if they sent me to guard the door, then it’s not worth coming in anyway.’

Edited by FatDave
Just read Tallyman's post about the external server. God I have been away too long.

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The word count for this was 2500-3000 words. I only just managed to snip it down to below the upper limit. The assignment was at the end of the Style And Language segment of the course...

 

 

 

Hero

 

The flaking door creaked as it swung back. John Simmons flashed her a weak smile from within. She returned a cocky smile, then held out her hand for him to shake as he welcomed her into the hallway. She brushed her breast on his chest as she past him, then gave him a playful apology.

‘That’d do,’ she thought. ‘The line between successful and slutty is a hard one to balance.’ It was an effective interrogation technique if used sparingly, though God forbid they ever lose themselves in the fantasy.

Still, she pushed out her ass as she climbed the bare wooden stairs ahead of him, so he could grope it with his eyes. He pointed her into the tight apartment. Even with the bare bulb glowing and the thick curtains closed, the room was stained sodium yellow from the streetlamp outside. It reminded her of Nonno’s nicotine coated house whenever they moved a photo from the walls. The floor was crowded by two bulging suitcases, and a deflated looking couch and chair, whose stubby legs sank deep into the sticky green carpet. He invited her to sit down and she did so, balancing her weight on one cheek. She watched him weasel around in the crowded sink for a clean glass.

‘How’re your ribs,’ she called.

‘Not too bad, only got me in the fat.’

He wore a baggy grey jersey with West Virginia Power written in green around crossed baseball bats. Though only in his early twenties, his nose was as gnarled and bent as an old tree trunk, and an old white scar underlined his left eye, which pointed off angle just enough to be noticeable. She searched for further signs of battle on the knuckles of his busy hands, an indication, if present, that he gave as good as he got, but there were none. In spite of these things, he wasn’t bad looking, though he certainly wasn’t good looking. Rather than being in possession of ugliness, he was merely short of handsomeness. He was unhandsome, unmuscular, untall, and from their brief meeting that morning she could tell he was unhumorous, unconfident, and unsmart too. John seemed perfectly placed in the middle of everything. A real Mr average. She wondered for a second if his jersey was extra-medium.

She watched him half fill a tall glass with vodka, then to the top with orange juice. He sipped at the drink, then poured the rest into the sink and brought the bottle and glass to the chair.

‘Oh, it tasted like a party,’ he said to her frown, then poured himself a beer measure of the spirit. ‘I’m sorry, would you... do you drink at all?’

And there it was, the assumption that most only hinted at with suspicious looks. It was the free space beside her on even the most crowded bus journeys. It was the horror on the face of the passenger next to her on the plane.

‘Oh, I’m not Muslim,’ she laughed, rubbing her sun varnished hands. ‘But no, thank you.’

He mirrored her smile, ‘I just thought... Your name... Armet...?’

‘Artemisia? It’s Italian,’ she garbled, then pushed him away from the subject of race, ‘you were in London?’

He nodded, not bothering to follow her eyes to the wall of pictures and the case of souvenirs on the otherwise bare wall. The photos were a map of baseball games, the team, she assumed, was the West Virginia Power. Every photo was of John alone, self-shot at arm’s length, the playing field in the background. The display case housed a jumble of tacky merchandise, mostly coloured in red, white, and blue. A paper flag bore the words, Phelps – London 2012. The other items were unrelated; a medal for participation in the Michigan Bacon Bake-Off, a laced black garter from God knows where, a pink sash which said, ‘OUT AND PROUD – GAY PRIDE 2010.’ Funny though, there was no way in hell he was gay.

He sighed from the fridge, chipping ice from the freezing compartment into his glass. ‘Well?’ he said with a subdued smile, when he sat, ‘what do you want to know?’

‘Oh, I thought we’d get to know each other a little first.’

‘You want to put me at ease? Make me feel relaxed?’ he shook his drink at her, and she saw he’d already drained half of it. ‘There’s really no need.’

She fiddled her iPhone to record, and held it out for his approval, then unfolded a small notebook and sat poised with her pen.

‘Why don’t you tell me what happened in your own words.’

John took in a deep breath, seemingly preparing to tell the day’s events in one, then blew it out like the first cigarette of the day. He stared off behind her, as though reading a teleprompter.

‘My father... He’s a great man,’ he reassured her. ‘He’d been turned away from the army because of his lazy eye, but he never gave up on looking for ways to be a hero.’

Artemisia smiled, tried to cut him off. Did he think she was here to write his life story? He ploughed on through her roadblock.

‘He never wanted to be a father. That’s why he left. But I don’t blame him for that.’

‘Err, no, John!’ she insisted, ‘why don’t you tell me about what happened this morning at the marathon.’

‘Ok,’ he grinned. ‘It was late in the race. Everybody who mattered was already finished. The last few old men were tiptoeing over the line.’

*

He didn’t know there was something happening until it had already happened. There was no explosion, at least none he heard. The air thickened. He felt like he was in the school swimming pool, wondering if he had enough air left to get to the surface. His ears buzzed, high and loud, and they just would not quit. Ahead a dense cloud had swallowed the far pavement, and swelled to claim the last runners and the finish line they no longer ran towards...

*

‘Hold on.’ Artemisia raised her hand like a traffic cop. ‘So you weren’t near the blast?’

He scowled at her, and she almost apologized for breaking his account with so trivial a detail. ‘No,’ he said, but his voice was softer than his expression, ‘no I ran towards the blast.’

‘Well, that makes you a hero, John.’

‘Ha!’ he scoffed. ‘A hero huh?’

*

People fell about the pavement, frisking themselves for injury. Everywhere there was screaming, he couldn’t hear it, but he could see it and he could feel it. Then he was running. There was no in between part, no time to think, no choice in the matter at all. He ran towards that greedy cloud which spat out all it couldn’t swallow. Few followed him; he felt like a salmon in a waterfall of panic. He slid on the flag strewn ground as he came to the barrier which separated the watchers from the runners. Police and stewards were fighting the hexi-fencing, pulling it and trying to make it do exactly what it was designed not to. Here and there civilians helped, words of encouragement for the runners emblazoned on their t-shirts. They wore summer sandals and patriotic caps, shorts and fanny-packs. They looked out of place, tourists in a warzone.

The fence lifted for a moment, and he saw his chance. Like someone was pulling him forward, he was on his belly and scrambling through the debris. Then like a sprinter in the trenches, he was alone behind enemy lines.

*

John drained his glass, his eyes unfocused. He filled it quickly, content with the pebbles of ice which remained.

‘There were people laying everywhere,’ he said, his voice wavering. ‘I just stood there for a minute. It was like... It felt like somebody had thrown a million dollars into the wind, and I felt so panicked and rushed. Like... it’s gonna blow away, why is nobody picking it up?’

‘And how did you feel when you realised you were all alone?’ Artemisia dabbed at him with her voice.

‘I felt like, what the hell am I doing here? Is this really worth it?’

She frowned and wrote, “worth it???” in her book for later.

‘I was half blind, half deaf, and almost completely dumb. It just didn’t seem real. When I called out for help, the words seemed to hang in the air, like they had nowhere to go. It was like being inside a tin balloon.’ He closed his eyes and blew out all his breath. ‘And then all my senses just fell in on me.’

*

The dust cloud seemed thinner on the inside, but visibility was still close. Everything began to slow down, and he felt his head begin to spin like his first high. Slow sound swam through the grainy air and lingered like ghostly whispers from the recently departed. The air tasted of scorched metal, and everything felt like memory, like he was somewhere far away being smothered with a pillow. Everywhere shone red. He hadn’t expected so much blood, thick and pooled on the ground. The dust was settling but still the blood stayed bright and clear, an abstract portrait of human fragility.

*

Artemisia growled inwardly at the line. She shielded her book from him and wrote, “abstract portrait - rehearsed story???” She realised he was craning his neck to peek at the book, but he turned his attention back to his drink as he continued.

*

He cried for help, begged God for it. What the ***** was he doing here anyway? He didn’t belong here, he hadn’t trained for this. All the planning, all the fantasizing over this day, and he’d relied on an idea that he’d somehow just know what to do. This wasn’t some dumb action movie. This was John, alone.

A midget sized blue M&M gave him a thumbs up from the doorway of a Mini-Mart, grinning with perverse satisfaction at the destruction. He punched it and it wobbled on its weighted stand, then fell on the second attempt.

A thin man nearby, pale and dirty faced on the ground, cradled the blackened stump of his leg. Bone poked from beneath deflated flesh, and he thought of the windy West Virginian falls, when his mother’s sheets would end up hanging from the branches of the dead oak. John felt himself retch, not at the bites of flesh which littered the ground, but at the sheer brutality of it all. It felt so real that all his life before seemed like a dream.

He’d felt personally attacked on that eleventh of that September. He’d wished he was there when the planes hit, wanted to fight the terrorists or run into the buildings to drag out the injured. All his fantasies were set on that fateful day and in news interviews after, where they would speak of his altruism, and he would counter with modesty. But watching that hadn’t felt like this. There was no TV screen to shield him. How could they hold memorials to this? How could a minute of pre-ballgame silence pay for what had happening here?

He felt the cloud growing heavy on his chest, felt the dust closing in and the pressure made his head spin. He moved...

*

‘Hold on,’ said Artemisia, finally allowing her weight to settle between the two cheeks, spewing dust from the couch into the musty air. ‘I’m sorry; you talk as though you knew this was going to happen.’

‘Of course I knew,’ he said with a scornful laugh which asked why she didn’t. ‘I knew it would happen eventually. The only real question was where.’

She allowed her gaze to slide over his shoulder to the shrine. She mentally fondled the medals, the trophies and the sashes. His face burned joviality from each lonesome photograph, but they all bore the same needy eyes, the same hope for something missing. Sporting events, pride marches, galas and parades, the only thing they had in common was that people would gather there.

‘You didn’t have anything to do with..?’ She felt the question out slowly, and let it hang when there was enough of it asked.

He scrunched his face in a look of distaste, and she felt foolish. ‘When the towers fell, everybody watched on TV. Everybody! Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, my dad stopped and watched as heroes ran into the fire.’

Artemisia sucked in a damp breath and wondered how long since she’d taken the last. ‘You’re what, some kind of catastrophe hunter? You go where there’s likely to be a terrorist attack?’

‘Three thousand people died when the towers fell,’ he spat. ‘Three thousand! What do I get as my crowning glory? Three dead, nobody gives a trout’s tail about three dead.’

Artemisia leaned forward and rested her chest on her knees for the briefest of moments. Her head throbbed, though it was as likely from the oxygen starved air in the apartment as from John’s story. ‘You can’t measure deaths against each other.’ She realised she was shouting as he stared back with sympathetic eyes, ‘you can’t rank terror according to the body count.’

‘I know, I know.’ He nodded as she rose, and his soft tone coaxed her back to her seat. ‘But that’s how people think. There’ll be disappointment when they read how few were killed. They’ll never know the horror of what happened there. They’ll never see the girls.’

*

John stumbled forward like a tangled marionette. At his feet were two teenage girls. They lay on their backs, their eyes closed, their foreheads touching. They were just sleeping off their late night slumber party. Zany kids! Wake up you zany kids! The nearest wore a University of Boston hoodie and hot pants. Her legs were smooth, tanned and thin; they were sexy down to the point where they were bent back under her. Her soft skin had been chewed by some unseen monster, her right foot twisted completely off, leaving a hanging bloodless mess of dirty purple meat. Her breaths were short and quick and quickening, and soon they became drowning gulps.

Her friend would have been beautiful anywhere else. She wore a clean white tee with the sleeves torn off to make it a vest. She was perfect, untouched by the blast. Yet she was still dead. He could do nothing for the girls. Somewhere two mothers might be laughing over their morning coffee, unaware that their worlds had just ended. He shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t have tried to help.

John felt the concrete hit his knees hard, his stomach began to churn from the smell of the blood. Around him things were finally happening, and a sense of charge being taken started to fill the air. Or maybe it was just the dust of the blast clearing. John remained on his knees, staring at the sleeping girls. They were both still now.

Wheelchairs shot passed him, aiming for those well enough to scream but not walk. He felt hands on his shoulders and he allowed himself to be pushed to the ground. A figure looked down at him, his face shaded by the halo of the bright afternoon sun.

‘It’s alright,’ said the deity. ‘Help is on the way. What’s your name friend?’

But God would have known his name. Was it a test then? No. God wasn’t there. He’d never been in that place. He was amidst a deity no signal zone where God became fallible.

The man kneeling over him pressed down on his stomach. John and saw the wooden splinter peeking from his side, the thickness of a pinkie and the length of a pointer. There was little blood, no pain at all, and it moved as if it was buried shallow. He’d live, but it at least looked bad. It was a ticket out, a re-do for a mistake he should never have made.

John screamed and pushed the paramedic away and told him to help someone else. He pulled himself upright with a stagger and limped away from the carnage. Every few steps someone offered help, but he refused, his eyes never lifting high enough to see who had asked. He saw in the distance the cameras covering the race, themselves racing towards the horror. This was a story beyond exaggeration, beyond embellishment. This was a story beyond telling. He ducked into a first aid tent until they were past.

*

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‘And that’s where we met,’ Artemisia said in validation of his story. She closed the pad, she hadn’t written anything in it for a while. ‘So if you didn’t want to tell it to the press, then how come you’re telling me?’

He sucked his lip, staring at her as though she’d only just entered. He grinned into the last sips of drink, as if he’d been wondering that himself.

‘Because if I don’t then it will have all been for nothing.’ He slurred and drooled and spat, careful not to spill on his jersey. ‘I need my story to be told, otherwise they both died for nothing,’ he repeated, his head beginning to loll.

‘John,’ Artemisia whispered, a doctor presenting a grave prognosis, ‘you know we can’t print any of this.’

John allowed the glass to fall from his hands onto the table, where it wobbled on its base. He stood on his unsteady legs and used the back of the couch to aid his walk to the wall of trophies.

‘You’re a writer,’ he gasped, ‘everything I’ve told you is true, just leave out the parts that’ll fog up the heroism.’

He leaned against the wall for support, between the photographs and the display case. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘you can take my photo here. See if you can get the trophies and the photos in too.’

But his voice was low as she tip-toed out the room, leaving him alone again with his daydreams and wishes.

 

---------- Post added 22-07-2013 at 15:55 ----------

 

This is the last one then. This was to be 2500 - 3000 words, and it was my assignment for the section entitled Plot And Structure, in which I had just been practicing symbolism in writing.

 

 

The Confession.

 

Jason pushed the door closed with his back, the wind whistling between the cracks in the ancient wood. With heels clicking on the wet stone floor, he crossed the kitchen to one of its few furnishings, an oak table so wide and heavy that the lighthouse must have been built around it. This was a family table, around which people were as likely to be painted in oils as they were to be served dinner. It seemed a strange thing to have, seeing as his father had spent his last twenty years in solitude. The bare brick walls were lined with dusty cupboards and glass fronted cabinets, which displayed only bare shelves. In the far corner was the door to the stairs leading both up and down. On it a painting hung cockeyed, framed in silver, the lighthouse at night. Frank had probably painted this, the solicitor in charge of the will had said his father had enjoyed water colours. Besides, it wasn’t good enough that someone would have charged for it; a simple four colour picture of the lighthouse as it used to be, before lightning, or perhaps corrosion, had rendered it a flaccid stump above the second floor. The painting showed the place at its finest, glowing bright against white tipped waves, warning the pinprick lights in the distance not to approach lest they be sunk by its jagged edges. Perhaps it was a self-portrait. He produced a crumpled letter and threw it into the centre of the table.

Outside, the rain began to wash the dusty windows.

*

Thirty minus one tired faces stared up at him. First thing Monday morning wasn’t the best time to introduce himself to a new class, and two hours of mathematics was about the worst way to do it. They’d been fond of their last teacher. From what he’d heard from the faculty, a well-placed question could lead the old man on an hour long reminiscence of his times in America, and even that was preferable to double maths. He’d lost the kids though, lost sight of the reason they were there, and once gone they could never be brought back. A fresh face and a clean start might do them good. Jason had bought new jeans for the occasion, expensive Nike trainers too, the ones the kids were wearing now with the blue streak and the bubble. No way he’d be outdone by an old fogey.

‘My name’s Mr McKenzie,’ he beamed, ‘but you can all call me Jason.’ This hadn’t produced the wow effect he’d been expecting, instead the thirty faces minus one stared at him the way a racer might a traffic light. The minus one was a thin girl in the far corner, her desk pulled further back than the rest on the row. She was the one who wafted him with stale smoke as she sauntered into the class after he’d called the register, thumbing her Blackberry, which even now beeped and buzzed in ignorance of the start of school. He could tell her off, a heck of a way to meet, true, but after the whole call me Jason line he didn’t want to prove he was all the things they expected of a teacher. Did that meant he’d lost them already?

April’s mousy hair pulled tight into a pony tail, giving her a permanent look of surprise. Her blue on blue tie was knotted fat, hung low, and the tongue was wide and short. Her skirt and shirt were equally strained, hinting at curves that few of the other thirteen year olds dared hope for. Even so, few of the boys in the class watched her to her seat, and the looks she did receive were a mixture of revulsion and fear. The sleeves of her tracksuit jacket were pockmarked with brown rimmed Braille. He knew what had caused it. Hot rocks, they’d called them when he was in college, the burning waste from spliffs not ground finely enough. She inspected them now, not bothering to pretend she was listening like so many of the others in class were. This was the girl you never saw on Grange Hill; as sexualised as any grown woman, as aggressive as any drunken old man.

Funny how of all the names he’d called out, hers was the only one he could bring to mind.

*

‘April Jones,’ Jason said with a sigh. ‘April bloody Jones.’

He sat on the spring bed, the mattress rolled in the corner for refuse, and watched the horizon bend and bounce. The wind was beginning to mash the sea white, just like in the painting downstairs. The clouds far off were weathered pebble smooth. The bedroom was lit by what light the clouds allowed. He’d seen a circuit breaker outside, and had considered turning the power on until he saw the walls weeping dirty water from the broken upstairs. He could climb no higher than he had, below was the cellar, from which rose the smell of stagnancy.

He leaned forward, his head touching the cold glass, and he could see the path he’d taken to get where he was. The road had flooded over, he’d been warned it would. Perhaps no one had warned his father. Perhaps he came here all those years ago and the roads flooded and the tide didn’t recede again for twenty years. Maybe he’d wanted to come back all the time. What if he’d spent his years waiting for his neglectful son to come rescue him?

‘You’re too young to have been a teacher, Jason,’ his mother boomed from the near past, ‘too divorced.’ He cowered at the voice in his memory. No, his father hadn’t been trapped here, he’d been freed here.

‘What did you expect the girl to do, you being like you are?’ she’d howled, her voice quivering with near-delight. ‘If you were a bachelor then all well and good, everybody knows what a twenty five year old bachelor wants, but a divorcee? Well…’ She’d left the sentence open, but Jason had understood. It was his own fault, all of it, for being a victim. He should have taken a leaf out of his grandfather’s book, held onto his stiff upper lip, man up, and all that. No wonder Susan had left him. He never did get around to the question of what he should do about the trouble he was in. The smug lecture had been for nothing.

The road rose from the far side of the water and disappeared into the forest. It was so near, and had been so beautiful to travel. He couldn’t imagine any other time in his life he’d felt as happy as he had walking that path. The leaves rubbed together in the breeze, the light filtered green. Vast carpets of bluebells rang in silence, and nothing cared for his problems, not the plants or the animals or him. But even in the thickest of that wonderland of light, where the canopy covered him like a roof, the smallest breaks between the trees had revealed the darkening clouds. Still he wished he was back there now, more so back in that classroom before it all started. If only he hadn’t lost his temper.

*

‘April Jones, for God’s sake! Is there any bloody point to you at all?’ He’d felt the blood boiling in his face, then heard the echoes of his shouts, but between the two there had been so little control or memory. She jumped to her feet, the chair toppling back over itself into the wall. He waited for the outburst that never came. Instead, her chin crumpled and she ran from the room, her eyes erupting in tears.

‘Sir,’ Michael pleaded from the first row, he’d never managed to get call me John to stick, ‘I’ve heard her dad left last night. Moved away.’

Oh Jason! Oh Jason you bloody fool, why’d you have to have her temper?

*

‘Oh Jason,’ Jason said to the crashing waves outside, ‘you bloody fool. Why did you go after her?’

*

He caught up with her in the girls toilets, he’d tracked her trail of sobbing through the echoing halls. She huffed and swore when he came in, and tried to barge past him.

‘Oh, April,’ he said, his eyes and his voice soft. ‘Oh April I’m so sorry. If I’d have known…’

‘You’d what?’ she screamed, and he could tell her tears burned her not for being cried, but for being seen. ‘You’d treat me like a f*ckin’ baby anorl, innit.’

‘No April love,’ he pleaded, and held his arms out as a gesture. ‘That’s not how I see you.’

She glanced from hand to open hand, then mistook his intention and fell between them. It had only felt awkward until she broke and cried into his t-shirt, then it became something else. They stood for a while, first in tears, then in silence. When they parted he looked at himself in her face.

Oh Jason, you bloody bloody fool. He’d already crossed the line. But now he wanted to tell her how much he understood what she was going through.

*

If only he’d left it at wanting.

The windows were rattling now, the storm demanding entry. The phone rang out like a metallic saw, but he ignored it. It couldn’t be for him, nobody knew about this place, not even mummy, and it certainly couldn’t be for his father, his ashes had sailed on the neap tides more than two years ago. Who was even paying the line?

Jason searched the cupboards, but found none of the liquor which featured so heavily in mummy’s stories of the man. He craved whiskey - not the taste, just the idea of it. It seemed so fitting, to toast his self-pity alone on a stormy night. How soap-operatic it would be. All he found was a box of crackers which tasted of damp, but the box was sealed when he found it, so perhaps the sourness belonged to his mouth. He ate them anyway, and stared at the crumpled letter on the table for a while.

Outside the ocean rolled, and a far off ship rolled with it. Its lights shone like a beacon; now it bared its red belly, now it was gone from view behind another large swell. In a flash of inspiration he rooted beneath the sink, in the metal lunchbox he’d seen, and retrieved a flare gun. More a flare tube, it had an unguarded trigger pull to fire the single shot. He considered heading outside and calling for the ship to rescue him from his island, but the thought was fleeting. The sea didn’t discriminate villain from Samaritan in times of storm, and the goodness left within him ached to picture friends chewed on the molar-rocks around the lighthouse, where in better weather fat sea lions once basked.

He placed the end of the flare tube in his mouth, but this idea too was fleeting. It wouldn’t even kill him, not outright anyway. It’d stick to the roof of his mouth and burn until he smothered on the smoke. A good job, badly done. He threw it into the sink, drenching it from the tap lest the idea return. A flash of lightning lit the kitchen blue, but the shadows closed in again. The ship was gone, sailed off unaware of the pathetic little mathematics teacher hiding in the lighthouse.

‘You’re at your best ignored!’ Christ, his mother must have put a voice recorder in his head when he was a baby. Through twenty-odd years her disapproval was in crystal clear high definition.

‘Why don’t you just be a bloody man and stand up to your mother?’ Susan used to say so often it sort of became her catchphrase. ‘Stop letting yourself be pushed around and grow a spine. Stand up straight. Tuck your shirt in. Tie your tie properly... Oh, for God’s sake, come here.’ After a while the voices faded into one and he couldn’t remember who’d said what. He’d been surprised that his mother had approved so readily of Susan at the start. But of course she had, they were the same bloody person. She would have never approved of her though.

*

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He held her beneath sticky sheets. April was so small in his arms, stripped of the working class high fashion and her force field deactivated. Even when they made love he couldn’t wait to cuddle her, and soon as they finished they snapped into each other’s arms like north and south magnets. On the occasion that Susan would bestow sex upon him, if they had ever come close to getting the sheets sticky with their gentle meandering lovemaking, she would have changed them immediately afterwards. But now he lay naked and cold and vulnerable. At the age of twenty five, he was born at last. She fitted against him so well as they snoozed that he wondered if she was even there at all. Perhaps this was all some masturbatory fantasy, his body’s coping mechanism to get over Susan. God, wouldn’t that be wonderful? To solve his own problems for a change; he’d made a start, refusing his mother’s offer of lodgings when Susan had kicked him out of his own house, and he’d felt strength growing that he’d been convinced he never had.

‘I love you,’ April whispered into his chest, then buried her face deep and he could see her ears redden. She must have been awake a long time, willing the courage to say the words. She was waiting to hear it said back, waiting to be caught after her leap of faith. Now would be a terrible time to tell her that Susan had agreed to take him back.

*

So why the hell had he done it?

The rumble of thunder outside felt like the lighthouse crumbling around him, and it only added base to April’s threats in his head. Sea spray shook the windows and the twisting wind broke bricks loose from above. He threw the curtains across the window, the sight of the churning water testing the little courage he had and setting his jaw to tremble. But the curtains were too small, and all around them he could see the quick emulsion of cloud and wave before they separated into two torrents of unforgiving vengeance. Fits of rain battered the glass then calmed to nothing, only to begin again their tumultuous siege.

The phone rang, and he swore at it. There was nobody he knew that could contact him here, and nobody he could think of that he wanted to speak to. None alive anyway.

Why couldn’t he just have loved her? They could have been a secret long enough for their relationship to grow some respectability, and everything would have been fine. He wanted to love her, he’d explained that just before she began to shout. It was never just about sex, something existed between them more beautiful than that. It had been pure, basic and rich. But now they would call it rape.

At least he’d told the truth, when she had lied. She didn’t love him, never had, otherwise how could she have planned everything the way she did? His eyes followed that vile letter as invisible hands pushed it around the table. How soft he had been to have believed her affection. How easily he’d been duped. At least with his mother, with Susan, their loathing was overt. What kind of mind could have written those words? What kind of human being would feel happiness and take such steps to arm herself against someone she loved? But it was there, somewhere - a time capsule of evidence; her DNA, his DNA, neatly packed and ready to be opened. What kind of person would save their abortion? What kind of place would even allow her to?

Ah! There it was. He’d reacted with such terror that he hadn’t given common sense the time to rebut. No place would allow her to keep an abortion. Of course they wouldn’t. She had lied to him in her letter, and he’d eaten the lie hungrily. He’d wanted it, it had nourished within him some need he never knew existed. Now everything was over and it felt liberating. He smiled a little, but it was like balancing on a wire, and it dropped almost immediately. It didn’t matter that she’d lied, accusation was enough nowadays. Jimmy bloody Saville and operation bloody Yewtree. It was like a red hunt, and even the innocent, the victims like him, got caught up. Still, the wheels were in motion and there was no stopping them. All that was left now was that stiff upper lip. All that was left was to face the consequences.

He dragged the note towards him, and hovered his pen over the blank side for a while, chewing over his confession like tough meat he just could not swallow. He felt he should say sorry, but he couldn’t bring his hand to lie. Slowly, he wrote out four words.

“I did nothing wrong.”

On numb legs he stood and walked out into the storm.

 

---------- Post added 22-07-2013 at 15:57 ----------

 

Aaaaaand that's the lot. Apologies for the dodgy formatting, I'd have rather submitted them as word documents with the correct layout. Seems that using space bar to indicate new paragraphs doesn't work on here.

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