The Complete Incomplete Steven Savile
- Omnibus -
Steven Savile
BadPress Pub
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Table of Contents
Remembering You, Forgetting Me
Playground of the Broken Hearts
And So Yearns the Sparrow’s Heart
The Pain, Heartbreak and Redemption of Owen Frost
Copyright © 2011 Steven Savile, Smashwords edition
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Published by BadPress Pub.
Cover Illustration and Interior Layout by Stanley J Tremblay, www.FindTheAxis.com
Visit Steven Savile on the web at: www.stevensavile.com.
My idiot heart was always looking for a happy ending. That was just the way it was. I needed to believe that there was order in the chaos that was my life. I needed to know that there was a chance that out of the madness there would rise an element of the mundane that made it all so much more rational.
Sometimes of course there are no happy endings no matter how much we yearn for them.
There isn’t a happy ending machine that we can toss our hearts into only for it to spit out a matching one a few moments later with a nice little label that says: “you will love Melina Durovich, a Slovakian of Germanic descent currently living a life devoid of even the subtlest hint of magic.” It doesn’t happen that way, despite the fact that I do actually love Melina; she is an exiled Slovakian with the merest hint of delicious foreignness in her accent when she talks and her great great grandfather was from a tiny principality called Hanau in Hesse-Cassel. Love is love, and I have waited long enough to find it, turning over stones, rooting through the dark places, looking for the pearl in the shell. Of course, it was a lot more complicated than it needed to be, but isn’t it always?
I found her sleeping on a park bench, the early morning light picking out the shapes and lines of her face. Dew had settled on her flushed cheeks as though she had been sleeping a long time. I couldn’t help but stare. The rapid rise and fall of her chest disabused me of the notion of sleep. The dew was sweat. Now, I should confess a weakness I have for beautiful women – but not beautiful in the conventional sense. They don’t have to be dusky Amazonian beauties or lanky Scandinavian ice maidens. They just have to have a certain something, and she had it. Of course, I have my share of hidden shallows, like most men my age, I won’t lie and pretend that I don’t but I like to think that I see beyond the surface to the fascinating core. You see women fascinate me. I might not be good with them but I like to surround myself with them. I crave their attention and validation even if it is only in the form of friendship. I am nothing without a woman by my side. I am uninteresting and uninterested. I need women to tell me otherwise. Some do. More however do not. Most think that I am like a favourite old shirt, something comfortable they can slip into when they need that reassuring familiar safeness. I don’t exactly exude danger.
Instead of walking by I found myself sitting down beside her on the bench.
She smiled without opening her eyes.
She smelled of all of the mixed aromas of the dawn, fresh, full of vitality and life.
I wanted to say something memorable, something witty and intelligent and unforgettable all rolled into one because sleeping beauty deserved no less from her prince charming. Instead I managed a rather weak: “Nice morning isn’t it?” which was not the kind of introduction fairy tales were made of.
“Mmmm.” She said.
I really wanted to find something else to say. All of a sudden I had become a staunch believer in second impressions, my first one being so miserable. The second line out of my mouth wasn’t much better.
“Do you run,” I almost said come, “here often?” I wanted to slap myself.
She opened her eyes. “It is good for the soul, to feel the sun as it rises. This is my happy place.”
I couldn’t help but smile. My own happy place was currently a small patisserie Rue De Mausapant called Gaspard’s where the blend of coffees and pastries was intoxicating and the thick layer of French cigarette smoke only added to its otherworldly charm. “It’s a good spot,” I said, looking around. I felt like such a fraud. There was a headless statue of a long dead poet and a dried up fountain with ugly copper fish that had turned a sickly shade of green. The sun bleached the colour out of the poet’s stony flesh but at the same time brought vibrancy to the haphazard colours of the flowerbeds. The only remarkable thing about the park was the bench itself. I hadn’t noticed it before but the seat back was carved with a frieze of some sort. I could make out the bodies of a host of peculiar creatures that were jumbled one on top of another as though clamouring to escape the confines of the wood.
“There is something you want to say?” I noticed an irregularity in her speech. The cadence of the words was just slightly askew. Instead of finding it irritating I found myself thinking of it as endearing. It was a little peculiarity to fall in love with – because that is how I fall in love, with the peculiarities first, long before I fall for the women underneath.
“Would you,” I couldn’t believe I was going to say this, it was so unlike me, “like to grab some breakfast or something? I know a great little place not far from here.”
“That would be nice,” she said, surprising the hell out of me. It wasn’t until she stood that I realized just how tall she was. Taller than me by an inch, which put her just over six feet, and willow thin. Too thin for some men’s tastes. “But my father always told me not to talk to strangers.”
“I’m Jack,” I said, smiling. “And you are?”
“Melina.”
“Melina,” I repeated, trying the name on my tongue. It felt right. “Well, Melina, my new friend, shall we?” I offered my arm, almost making a joke out of it but quietly hoping she would take it. She slipped her arm inside mine as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to do.
“Lead on.”
We walked a while in silence. I nodded to an old woman sitting on a wooden chair reading the newspaper as we past. My French was poor but I knew enough to recognize that the headline was something to do with missing children.
I wanted to talk. I wanted to know everything about her and I wanted to know it now.
“I don’t usually do this,” I found myself saying as we walked beneath a crumbling arch that had once been the way into a church but now stood like a testament to heaven in our material world; detached, useless and crumbling to the point of being dangerous.
“Do what?” Melina teased. “Walk up to strange women and invite them to spend the rest of their lives with you?”
“Ah… well actually I do that all the time,” I lied with a smile. She didn’t need to know that impetuosity was not my middle name. Not yet at least. As ridiculous as it sounded I wanted to be her onion. I wanted her to know that with each layer she peeled away there was more of me to discover until she reached the heart. I didn’t want her to think I was some kind of two dimensional cardboard cut-out. She didn’t need to know that swimming with a stranger in the gene pool of need-want-must-have sex was about the most terrifying thing I could think of. Not yet at least. I hadn’t even bought her breakfast yet for Christ’s sake. There was a proper order to this kind of thing and finding out that your would-be paramour was socially retarded was definitely further down the list.
“You do, do you? That is good to know.” Somehow she kept a straight face. “So, tell me Mr Jack do you still have the magic beans?”
I didn’t know exactly how to take the double-entendre. Did she mean it to sound as provocatively sexual as it did or was I being completely stupid? There are times, I will admit, when I am all for waving my stupidity like a flag and this was definitely one of them.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Magic beans? You sold the cow your mother gave you to take to market for a handful of magic beans, didn’t you?”
Now I knew she was messing with me but I couldn’t help but play along.
“Seven beans was a good price,” I insisted. “And look at all the golden eggs the hen laid. I know it wasn’t exactly part of the bargain but it paid for the new house after the beanstalk ruined the old one when the woodcutter chopped it down.”
She looked at me, her head tilted slightly to one side as though she wanted to see me from another angle in case it might give away some secret she couldn’t otherwise see. “You are a funny man, Mr Jack.”
“Just Jack.” I said.
We were on Rue Monet, close to the banks of the Seine. The water was dirty but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like Venice where the garbage people through into the canals turned putrid in the rising heat of the day. It was Paris. Even the dirty water had an air of the romantic to it, hinting at days gone by and simpler times. And I was walking with a beautiful woman at my side. It couldn’t get much better.
I had moved to Paris eight months earlier so the language was still very much a mouthful and I was getting fed up of tying my tongue in knots trying to master even the simplest of phrases but the French aren’t exactly renowned for their love of us Brits so I was getting used to being given a loaf of bread when what I really wanted was toothpaste. Crossing the Channel had been a case of running away rather than running to something. I had an idea about picking up some teaching work or maybe curling up in one of those ridiculously romantic garrets to write piss-poor poetry and wallow in self-pity. The wallowing I could do. I could probably even stretch to the piss-poor poetry but that wasn’t my motivation. It was the effect, not the cause. Sarah was the cause, or rather the desperate need to be on the other side of the planet from her was. Sarah who thought of me as a little chocolate boy to be broken up and swallowed, my nuts left wrapped up in the bits of silver foil to be thrown away later. Okay that was a pretty bad way of saying our sex life hadn’t been so wonderful. It wasn’t bad, it was just pedestrian. All couples go through that. It’s familiarity. It is the strong ones that get out on the other side. Someone told me once: “A real man doesn’t make love to a new woman every night of his life. A real man makes love to the same woman every night for the rest of her life.” It was a tough lesson learning I wasn’t a real man. Of course, it was one Sarah was quite happy to teach me.
“What are you thinking about?”
I wasn’t about to confess, so I made up a childhood memory that was almost true.
“I was just thinking how weird it is that park benches seem to play such a large role in my life. When I was seven my parents took me to the park to play while they worked out who was going to get custody of me. All I really remember of that day was being dressed as Superman jumping off the park bench shouting ‘Look at me! I can fly!’ and all the time they were plotting to ruin what was left of my childhood.”
“That’s so sad,” she said, without the slightest hint of irony.
My heart ached for this woman already.
“I’ve learned to live with it. I promised myself once that I would never do that. Never give up like they did. But we promise ourselves stupid things sometimes. God, you know what? I need to stop talking before I bore you to tears. Your turn, Melina, come on, tell me about yourself.”
“There is not so much to say, my father was good with words and loved the old stories. He used to sit with me and the others and tell us all the stories he had gathered, and sometimes we would share our secrets with him and he would make us feel almost magical. My uncle was a gentle man, who worried so much about the details. He once told me a story about a hand that named each and every one of the individual fingers. In German. He loved explaining to us his world of ideas.”
She was talking about them both in the past tense so that made me think she was an orphan, and there was a childish innocence to the recollections that hinted that she had been alone for a long time. And there was no talk of a mother in her life. “It sounds like you miss them both,” I offered.
“I do, they were very special people. They kept me alive.”
It seemed like an odd thing to say but I let it pass.
We turned off a small side street onto Montmartre with its cluster of penniless artists selling their chalks and their etchings, oils and watercolours, doing still lifes and portraits of restless children to turn a cent. Girls sat on boxes having their hair braided whilst boys experimented with henna tattoos. Clowns gambolled and juggled whilst tripping over their floppy shoes. The street was a one of a kind in Europe, so much creativity, so much talent, being thrown away by kids who were next to homeless. We looked at a few of the paintings, dropping a few coins into the berets weighting down the papers, clucking or cooing occasionally before one brought me up short. The artist was a curiously deformed man, who sat hunched almost double over his work, a single hypnotizing pastel rendition of Melina reclined in almost classical repose on the same elaborately carved bench that I had found her on, and there, leaning over as though to place a rose on her breast and a single loving kiss on her lips, was I. I felt myself shaking as I looked at the picture. I wanted to believe that it wasn’t her, that it wasn’t me, but it so obviously was. It didn’t matter that I had never seen the bench before or Melina for that matter, or even the repulsive little hunchback who had fashioned the art. It was me. I stared at it for the longest time.
“Beautiful,” Melina breathed at my side.
“You are,” I said.
“You like it?” The ugly little artist asked, scuttling forward crablike to kneel before us both.
“Yes.”
“It’s yours.”
“How much do you want for it?” I asked, knowing I had to have this picture. And knowing that I would pay whatever it cost without thinking twice.
“If you love it enough it is free, if not I will collect what I think you owe.” I reached into my pocket for money as the little man rolled the picture into a tube and secured it with a short piece of string. “Your money’s no good to me. Put it away before I take offence.”
I didn’t know what to say so I simply said thank you and walked on down through painter’s paradise arm in arm with Melina Durovich thinking that I was the luckiest man alive and unable to understand how it had happened inside the space of an hour. It was dizzying in the extreme but so, so sweet.
In my life before coming to Paris I had been a play therapist working with children through learning difficulties at times or helping those suffering from severe trauma come to terms with how arbitrary the world could be in its twists of fate. One boy had watched his parents die from the safety of his car seat after a lorry driver had fallen asleep at the wheel and driven them off the road with his rig. Every visit was the same, I would put the toy cars in front of him and Brandon would play happily for a minute or two before ramming the cars into one another and screaming. It was difficult to watch, knowing that his infant mind had seen something it simply wasn’t ready to come to terms with and that there was not a lot I could do to help. Sometimes there are no happy endings to the fairy tales of New York, London and the other big cities.
“I want to do something stupid and impulsive,” I said suddenly.
“Like what?” Melina asked, leaning in to me. It felt so right having her there.
“I don’t know.”
“Steal a car?”
I stopped short. She was smiling mischievously. I liked that look on her. But I didn’t do things like that. I didn’t go around stealing cars for Christ’s sake. The most impetuous thing I ever did was break my leg jumping off a slide in a Superman suit because I was stupid enough to think that I could fly. It wasn’t quite the same memory that I had shared with Melina. Suddenly I felt ashamed that I had lied to her like that just because I wanted to make myself look better.
“Okay,” I said, realizing as I said it that it had to be one of the most stupid ideas I had agreed to since I had dropped my best friend down a well by mistake in high school. “On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“It has to be a convertible. I have always wanted to drive so fast the wind in my face almost made me blind.”
Melina laughed. “Silly, that can’t happen, even with a soft top.”
“Ah, but it will be fun trying.”
First we bought pastries for a picnic we planned to have for lunch and then we wandered around the streets looking for a car to steel for well over an hour. I was ready to give up – the French weren’t very big on convertibles it seemed and I wasn’t about to make my debut as a car thief in a rusty old deux cheveaux piled high with onions and strings of garlic – when Melina squealed with delight as we turned the corner onto Rue de Leon and found a polished cherry red Chevy Nova pulled up against the curb. It had all the grace of a tank but by God it looked the part. Soft leather seats, white walled tires, and fins that would have done a shark proud. This was a car worth stealing.
I jumped in behind the wheel and reached over to pop the lock so Melina could slide in beside me. Unfortunately I had no idea how to get the engine started without a key and Mr Cherry Red Nova hadn’t been stupid enough to do me that particular favour. Melina reached under the dashboard with both hands while she rested her chin on my thigh. A second later the engine roared to life and she sat up, a lopsided grin on her face as she leaned over to kiss me. It was a first kiss to still the heart.
“I think you might want to drive, Mr Jack.”
I revved the engine and put it into reverse, angling out into the empty street. It was a beast. And it was too wide for a good many of the tightly meandering Parisian back ways. After a few twists and turns of the road we passed a sharp suited guy waving a shoe over his head as though he intended to beat someone’s brains out with it. High up above a beautiful blonde girl ran a brush through her long hair as she leaned out of her apartment window. I couldn’t help but chuckle and the sight of a pretty little elf leaving a fancy dress party that must have been in one of the apartments above the old cobblers on the corner where the window was filled to overflowing with leather shoes of all sizes and colours.
“Feels good doesn’t it?” Melina said as we pulled out onto one of the main roads out of Paris, heading toward the coastal resorts of Bretagne.
“What?”
“Doing something you shouldn’t. Stealing a car. Driving like a maniac with a strange woman beside you, wanting so desperately to pull over and just make love with wild abandon to someone who is essentially a complete stranger.”
“Yes,” I admitted with a wry grin. “It does.”
“I know. Pull over.”
I hit the brakes so hard the car nearly wound up in the ditch at the side of the road. By the time the car stopped spinning Melina was laughing so hard she had tears running down her cheeks. I couldn’t help myself. It was contagious. “Well,” I said defensively as my laughter began to subside. “You can’t exactly blame a guy, can you? I mean when a beautiful woman says come you say how many times.” I couldn’t believe I’d just said that. It wasn’t me. I didn’t say things like that. Still laughing, Melina pulled me into a deep almost desperate kiss. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. Stuff like this just didn’t happen in my life. Up until a few hours ago my life had been painfully ordinary. Now it was as though I was living in my own Bogart and Bacall movie.
She dragged me out of the car and we made love right there on the side of the road with an urgency that was both exhilarating and frightening in its intensity. It was certainly like nothing I had ever experienced before and almost as certainly would never experience again.
We lay there at the side of the road, exhausted, as the occasional car sped by. I rolled over and propped myself up on my elbow so that I could look at Melina lying there beside me. Her face was flushed, the sheen of sweat glistening in the midday sun. I could smell that smell, the product of our sex and mingled sweat. I reached over and traced a finger along the slight curve of her smile.
“Beautiful,” I said again, and meaning it even more if that was possible than I had the first time.
Melina’s lips moved but I couldn’t read or hear what she was saying.
“What?”
“I need you,” she repeated. I liked the sound of that. After the Dark Ages of Sarah I didn’t expect to hear a woman – beautiful or otherwise – say something like that for a long time. It was nice to hear.
“You have me,” I said in all seriousness.
A girl with a red cycling hood rode by, looking at us as she past. She smiled strangely at Melina.
“We need you,” the girl on the bike said as she pedalled quickly away.
Melina kissed me before I could really think about what the girl had said as she rode by and didn’t break the kiss even when we were both hungry for another breath. By the time I looked up the girl was long gone.
“Do you love me?” she asked innocently as we sat back in the car.
I meant to ask how I possibly could, instead I said: “Yes.”
We drove until we found a plain white stucco church in the hills. I pulled up onto the gravel by the wooden doors.
“Wait here,” I told Melina, jumping out of the car to go in search of the priest. I knew what I was doing but I had no idea why I was doing it. Love seems like such a simplistic answer but it is as close to the truth as I can come.
The church was cold inside, and surprisingly plain and lacking ornamentation. These old churches usually had gaudy golden icons or elaborately carved gargoyles and angels looking over the altar but not this one. Five rows of plain wooden pews, each pew with five hand-sized bibles, on either side of the aisle. A simple wooden chandelier suspended from the beams of the low ceiling. There was a simple stone font to one side and an oversized wooden altar that dominated the interior.
“Hello?” I called out hesitantly, walking slowly down the length of the aisle. “Hello?” I called again.
The altar was spectacularly crafted. It appeared to have been hand carved and lovingly shaped to bring out the characters in relief from the wood grain. I expected to see Jesus and the Apostles or perhaps a rendition of the crucifixion but when I knelt before it what I actually saw was a delicate recreation of what looked like a gingerbread house and a path into the trees being marked out with breadcrumbs.
“Dornröschen found you then?” the priest said coming up behind me. I turned my head to see a giant of a man walking purposefully down the aisle with an axe resting on his shoulder. He didn’t look like any of the priests I had ever seen before. He wiped the sweat from his brow with a chequered handkerchief and stuffed it back into his pocket. I pushed myself to my feet and turned to greet the man. Two young children, brother and sister walking hand in hand, trailed in his wake. I reached out to take the priest’s hand as he offered it to be shaken. It engulfed mine and when we shook it felt almost as though the sheer brute strength of the man would rip my arm from its socket. This was a man you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of.
The children looked up at me expectantly.
There was a disjointed, almost surreal aspect to the whole thing. I mean, I was standing there face-to-face with a woodcutter in a church that was a living anachronism. It felt as though I was being dragged into a story. Hell, I half expected to see the woodcutter carrying the bloody head of a wolf in one hand or the children cowering in terror of the wicked witch in the corner. The illusion was hardly dulled when the big man planted his axe in a log beside the pulpit and dusted off his hands on his trousers.
“I’m sorry,” I said, waving my idiocy flag again.
“I assume you are here to get married?”
Were we? Up until now I hadn’t exactly been thinking things through but I was in a church and there was a beautiful woman waiting for me in a stolen car outside, so why not? It felt like something this crazy new impetuous me would do but I couldn’t help but wonder what the old conservative me was thinking right now consigned as he was to the sucking black hole of my subconscious where I abandoned all of the different me’s I had grown out of during the course of my life.
“Can we?” I asked, thinking about the rigmarole of paperwork and waiting that went along with the blessed union these days.
“Oh yes,” the woodcutting priest said with a broad smile. “We have the witnesses,” he nodded to the children who had sat themselves down at one of the pews and had their hands together in prayer. “All we need is the bride.”
I went back out to the car. The full heat of the sun was beating down on the bright cherry red metal. Melina looked like an angel sitting in the bucket seat with her hair thrown back. She appeared to be dozing. I wondered how long I had been inside the church that time forgot but it couldn’t have been that long. “Princess,” I whispered in her ear. I touched her cheek, amazed again at how beautiful she was and how utterly insane this day had already been. She stirred but she didn’t wake until I kissed her, once, lovingly on her upturned lips. She opened her eyes and smiled. “My Prince Charming,” she said, wiping the sleep from her eyes.
I opened the passenger door and knelt at the side of her seat, the gravel digging into my knees and said something I never thought I’d say to a woman again, not after the way Sarah had trampled all over my idiot heart with her size forty-one stilettos. “I promise to love you forever and never stop taking risks and being impetuous while you are there to enjoy life with me. Being with you makes me come alive. Will you be my wife, Melina? “
She looked at me then, kneeling in the dirt by a roadside chapel, a hint of sadness in her eyes as though this wasn’t the way she had always dreamed of finding her true life companion.
“Well?” the woodcutter called from the doorway. He seemed in a hurry to get on with things.
“Yes,” she said, stifling a yawn. “Yes.”
“Good.” The big man turned and disappeared back into the church.
I just knelt there wondering at the turn of events my life was taking. I had talked about destiny, the stars and the planets, the guiding hand of fate but I don’t think I had ever truly believed I would find someone to love and make it last. I used to think of it as the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children. As a child of divorce I always lacked the fundamental trust that one day my loved ones wouldn’t just up and leave never to come back. It took me a full minute before I realized she couldn’t get out of the car because I was in the way.
We walked through the door hand in hand. There was no music but that didn’t matter.
The woodcutter waited at the altar, the axe head planted between his feet, his hands resting on the handle. As we walked towards him I noticed that the children were smiling.
“Please kneel,” he said. “We come here today before the Lords our Creators, to bless the union between Melina Dornröschen Durovich and… Jack.” The two children clapped happily. I couldn’t help but smile at their unbridled enthusiasm. Since that day on the bench in my Superman costume I don’t think I had ever had the chance to just enjoy things. “I want you both to place the palm of your right hand on the flat of the axe head and take your vows. Now, do you Jack, promise to love and cherish this woman, give life to her and from this moment forth protect her from whatsoever monsters may come to cause her injury or harm.”
“I do,” I vowed solemnly, not really understanding what it was that I was agreeing to.
“And do you, Melina Dornröschen Durovich, promise to serve as guide to Jack as he learns the ways of our people, awaken in him the magic and together do all you can to keep the dreams of Our Lords the Creators alive?”
“I do.”
The woodcutter smiled. “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss your bride Jack.”
I did and it was a heart-stopping kiss. The kind of kiss that seals the final scene of a thousand fairy tales though ours was just beginning. I felt like I was King of the World.
The children came up and hugged us. Melina knelt drawing them both into a fierce embrace before she placed a kiss on each of their foreheads. I ruffled the boy’s hair and picked the girl up and carried her outside with us.
I looked at my watch. It was almost five o’clock. We had met at dawn, made love at noon and married before dinner. It was turning out to be quite some day.
We left the children and the woodcutting priest waving in front of the church and drove back toward the city. My new wife looked increasingly tired as we passed through the quaint villages and towns on our way to Paris. It was understandable of course with all of the traveling and the sheer intensity of our new relationship but I didn’t think I would be able to sleep for a thousand years. In the hills outside of the capital we wound down a narrow country road that took us past a spectacular chateau. I didn’t realize I was speeding until I heard the sound of the gendarme’s siren chasing us down the hillside. I had been too caught up in the rush of sensations; the wind streaming through my hair, Melina pressed up against my side, her intoxicating scent filling my lungs, and the power of the car beneath us. The sound of the siren brought me thudding back down to earth with a bang. Not only was I speeding, I was doing it in a stolen car. I didn’t know whether to accelerate or pull over and wait for justice to do its thing.
“Drive, my love. Drive.” Melina whispered sleepily in my ear.
It was all the encouragement I needed.
The roads were narrow and the turns ridiculously tight. I saw the shape of the gendarmes’ motorcycle in the rear-view mirror, a black spot gaining fast. I didn’t want to be caught, not like this but the old Nova was too big and cumbersome for what I needed it to do and within three quarters of a mile it was pointless. The motorcycle was on our bumper and the gendarme was gesturing for us to pull over. I didn’t have a lot of choice. I pulled over and waited. So much for my newly begun life of crime.
The gendarme placed a hand on the door and leaned in, saying something in French. I didn’t have a clue what it meant. I was too busy looking at my own reflection in the mirrored glass of his shades. He had obviously been watching too many old TV shows.
“Parlez vous anglais?” I asked, feeling ridiculous.
“Oui, monsieur. May I see your license, please?” I reached into my back pocket for my wallet and passed it to the officer. He flipped it open and took out the credit card sized license. “Wait here.”
I didn’t see that I had a lot of choice. He unclipped the radio from his panniers and spoke into the mouthpiece. I didn’t need to be a genius to know he was calling in to check out the license and registration. My heart hammered in my chest. Melina shifted beside me, somehow able to sleep through this whole thing. I had a handful of notes in my wallet, not enough to buy a decent meal so definitely not enough to buy my way out of this mess. The glove compartment was stuffed with manuals and an assortment of useless bric-a-brac. The pastry box was on the back seat where we had left it and I couldn’t help but wonder if the gendarmerie had the same weakness of sweet dough and jams that their American cousins had. Of course, knowing my luck there was a dead body stashed away in the trunk waiting to earn me eighteen to life in a dank Parisian gaol for my troubles.
I saw the policeman walking back toward the car. His face was grim.
“Is this your car, sir?”
“No,” I admitted. There was no point in lying about it.
The gendarme removed his mirrored glasses as though to get a better look at me. Maybe it was a trick of the light but his eyes appeared to be a sickly yellow colour. They made his elongated face look almost wolfish. A long tongue licked over his lips as though savouring the prospect of arresting us.
“What strange eyes you have got,” Melina hissed. She had come awake and was staring at the gendarme. I could feel her body trembling against my side.
The gendarme laughed mirthlessly. I noticed then how sharp his teeth were, filed to points.
“Get out of the car, Jack.” I could have sworn he was about to say: “Because I am going to eat you.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head stupidly. “No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I said get out of the car.”
“No.”
He reached in with dirty yellow claws and grabbed me by the throat. “Get out of the car, Jack.”
He made it perfectly plain I didn’t have a choice in the matter but I wasn’t going to go down without fighting. I braced myself for a struggle but the gendarme was faster and stronger. He slammed me face first into the side of the car. The shock of pain was blinding. I felt my legs give way and my body just crumple and fold up on itself as I slumped to the road. The gendarme scrambled forward, eyes wild and slavering as he jumped on top of me. I could hear Melina screaming somewhere in the distance but there wasn’t a lot I could do about that. He pressed his face down biting into my neck. The pain was incredible. I thought I was going to black out. I struggled and kicked but there was no way I was going to be able to dislodge the rabid policeman. I grabbed a handful of hair and tried to yank his head up from the meal he was making of my neck. Yellow eyes stared at me. Blood – my blood – dripped from the gendarme’s sharp teeth.
I slammed his face down into my forehead using all the strength I had got. Blood sprayed into my eyes; his and mine. I did it again and again, ramming his face into a bloody pulp against mine until I was virtually blind with the pain. I rolled the unconscious policeman off of me and began to crawl away.
I couldn’t think. The pain was sickening.
My vision swam in and out of focus until the blurs resolved into the shape of Melina standing over me. She was holding one of the Nova’s hubcaps in her hands. “Finish him off,” she said. I knew what she meant. In the stories the big bad wolf always died when the woodcutter chopped off its head with an axe. I didn’t have an axe so the hubcap would have to do. I took it from her and forced myself on to my knees. I had vowed to protect her from whatever monsters might come to harm her. Kneeling over the gendarme I slammed the lip of the hubcap down again and again making a mess of his neck. It took fifteen minutes to hack through though he was dead long before that.
I had blood on my hands and all over my face as I got back into the car. My hands were shaking uncontrollably. I had stolen a car and killed a man. I felt sick to the core.
“Take me home.”
We drove the rest of the way in silence. Melina could barely stay awake. I was crying, for myself and for the dead man I had left in the middle of the road.
When I pulled up outside my front door an hour later, with dusk settling over the crowded streets, Melina stirred long enough to shake her head. “Home, Jack. Where you found me.”
I understood but I didn’t want to, if that makes sense. I didn’t want it to be over. But sometimes our idiot hearts don’t get the happy ending they long for. I drove to the park and carried sleeping beauty in my arms back to the bench where I had found her that morning. This time my kiss would not rouse her. No amount of kissing would. She had fallen into a sleep so deep it might be a hundred years before she woke again. I knelt over the woman who had changed my life. I would never be the same again. Tears ran down my cheeks mingling with the blood that had dried there.
At first I thought it was a trick of the moonlight and tears but it wasn’t. She was fading; being absorbed into the grain of the old bench. I watched, my heart aching, as sleeping beauty took her place within the intricately carved frieze with Little Red Riding Hood and Rumpelstiltskin looking over her magical sleep.
I walked away feeling empty.
Even though she had never been there, my apartment felt empty without her. I sat in darkness, the rolled up painting of Melina and I on my lap. I didn’t want to look at it. I wanted to die. The man who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all was an idiot.
Before dawn there was a knock on the door. I had been expecting it – one of the gendarmerie come to arrest me. I gathered myself together and opened the door. They were all out there, the girl in the red cycling hood, the old painter, the priest, the man with the shoe, the elf girl, and the girl who had been brushing her beautiful hair, the brother and sister from the church. It was the old painter who spoke.
“I’ve come to collect my price, Jack.” He held out his hand. In them he clutched a handful of beans. “We need you Jack. You might have killed the big bad wolf but he was nothing. We need you to climb the beanstalk and kill the giant. He is stealing the children. Grinding up their bones to make his bread.”
Noah looked out over a city of insomniacs, relishing the vertigo-rush of the wind pressing at his back, trying to bully him over the edge. The copper railing pressed into his stomach. Out there, over the edge, fireworks rubbed elbows with the moon in a bruise-purple sky. A shower of reds and golds and greens raining down like slowly falling confetti.
Sahra came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. “I wonder what they’re doing down there?” she whispered in his ear, ever the lover. Instead of drawing him back from the edge she rested her cheek on his shoulder, enjoying her nearness, her new scent: cinnamon.
“Everything.” He said simply. “Listen carefully and you can hear them crying.” He put a finger to his lips and tilted his head as if listening. “Can you hear the buildings crying?” Noah asked after a while. She strained to listen, half-believing that the homes of bricks and mortar down there really could weep, just as she wept every night when she felt the cold white sheets leeching the heat from her skin, Noah within touching distance and yet so, so far away; a dead man walking in his familiar skin.
They could have been standing on the edge of the world with plastic champagne glasses in their hands.
“I’m not letting you go,” Sahra said softly, making a cat’s cradle out of her fingers and effectively trapping him within her arms. She flexed her muscles, letting him know who was boss. “At least not yet.”
Noah laughed her name out into that purple bruise, “How did you make me fall in love with you? Tell me that and I can die happy.”
“No way, buster. If that’s what it’ll take to keep you alive my lips are sealed. Simple as that. Now you can live forever if I want you to.”
“God, I still love you.” Noah said, adding their own little secret to all of the others cherished by the dark night. “I don’t know why…”
“You’re not supposed to.” Not saying whether he was supposed to love her, or to know why he did.
Beneath them three drunks splashed knee-deep in a small fountain, beer cans in hand as they attempted to drown one and other. Studying them like God watching over his laboratory mice, Noah swallowed the last lukewarm mouthful of Asti Martini and tossed the green-stemmed ‘glass’ over the side. He watched it shatter on the ground.
“I could do it, you know. Just open my arms and jump. It wouldn’t be graceful. I’ve never managed anything graceful in my life. But I could do it.” He felt her hold on him tighten but didn’t have the heart to lie. It would be so much easier to just say the right thing; a few reassuring words but it had been a long time since he’d lied to Sahra. And there was no point lying about this, she knew all about his father, his brother, his whole dysfunctional mess of a family.
Noah lifted his hands, lost himself in the cracks and the creases, wondering what fluke of evolution had given him skin instead of feathers.
He had been eleven when his father had jumped.
His eleventh birthday.
Instead of rushing home to peel the ribbons and wrappings off his presents, Noah had taken nearly an hour coming home from school, pretending to be Glen Hoddle as he dribbled a good-sized stone every inch of the mile home. He scored a hat trick for Tottenham and was called a genius by Sir Alf Ramsey all in one hour. The house wasn’t a place he wanted to spend time, not since his mother had died two months earlier. Ovarian cancer had started to take her but fear had finished the job. His father had found her in the bath, wrists open, scarlet water going cold around her corpse. When they had taken her away none of the ambulance men could look at him. They looked behind him, over him, around him as if it was him that had died, him that had become a ghost. He wanted to grab them, spin them around, press his face close to theirs until it was uncomfortable, and hiss: “Why? Why did she do it? Tell me that! Why did she leave me when we could have had two more years…? Two years!” But he didn’t. He folded in on himself, collapsed like a castle of sand being kissed by the blue sea.
Walking up the drive Noah had seen what he thought was a huge black-winged bird perched on the roof. Only it wasn’t a bird, of course, it was his father wearing nothing except one of his oversized gabardine trench coats. Unbuttoned, the tails of the long coat flapped in the evening wind like a pair of huge cotton wings. The image was etched on his mind like so many frames from the old Super 8 projector gathering dust in the basement. Fists clenched, arms raised in a vee, the coat lapping around his bare legs like some diaphanous lover, Noah’s father had simply started to fly. It was the briefest, cruellest illusion. In a heartbeat flight became fall. In another heartbeat a naked man was lying dead on the gravel drive, arms and legs akimbo in a whorish sprawl whilst his youngest son ran screaming towards the broken body.
“A penny for them,” Sahra whispered teasingly in his ear.
“What?”
“For your thoughts. A penny for them.”
“Oh…”
“Well?”
“They’re not worth it, believe me.”
He could feel her smiling. “Let me be the judge of that, why don’t you.”
“I was thinking about Isaac,” he said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. His brother was wrapped up in those thoughts of his eleventh birthday and his father’s suicide. It couldn’t be any other way. Growing up second best; knowing that Isaac, two years older with two years more love and all of those emotional firsts was the Golden Boy with his butter-couldn’t-melt-in-here-daddy smile, the always forgivable sinner. It was hard, being the brother of a saint, an angel. Being loved less. “Trying to tell myself I didn’t hate him but it’s difficult, you know.”
But not impossible. Not until the accident on Hope Street:
It was just a road, not wide enough, too busy with buses, people crossing and never looking. Cars hitting their horns. Isaac crossed it every day. What was there to fear in the familiar?
He was ahead of Noah, maybe ten – fifteen – feet, walking hand in hand with his new love, the luscious Sahra of the snake tattoo. Noah walked slowly, watching their backs, listening to their easy laughter. They were still giddy with the residue of night before’s alcohol buoying them up as they started to cross the road, called by some ghost in a shop window they hadn’t seen before. Isaac was eating a toffee apple. It was a stupid thing to remember all these years later. A toffee apple.
Noah saw it roll across the road.
It was 12:55 on a Saturday.
Cars were coming both ways.
Isaac wasn’t looking.
The car hit him. A red car, Japanese, a cheap, horrible Japanese car. Isaac didn’t look; he stepped out into the road, into it. The sound was nothing: a dull crump. All Noah could think, even though he saw the truth with his own eyes, was that it wasn’t loud enough, important enough a sound, to be the car hitting his brother’s body. It should have been more.
But he saw the car, saw Isaac. Saw his foot caught and drawn inside the wheel arch, the hideous arresting grace of the car dragging it around, ripping him out of Sahra’s hand and tossing him into the summer sky. Saw him dumped in the gutter, used, torn, and broken. An action figure thrown away by a petulant child.
Noah felt his heart hit his breastbone once, and then freeze. He couldn’t breathe.
There was screaming in the street.
He thought Isaac was dead.
Knew he was.
Noah stopped, couldn’t move, just couldn’t. Didn’t want to know… from where he stood it still wasn’t real… but then he ran, slow motion, running, running, but not moving, needing to be there, so very very scared of being there… making it real.
“Isaac.” One word. The only one he could say. He could see his leg, could see where the wheel had burned away the instep of his blue canvas sneaker, and melted it into a red mess that was blood, skin and bone fused together with the material. Above it, above that ruin of a foot, Isaac’s ankle: a misshapen lump that didn’t join anywhere with the foot. Every bone, every link, severed. The foot left to hang limp.
“Someone get that shoe off him,” someone said, the vultures already gathering.
“Leave it alone,” Noah hissed feeling cold, so cold, knowing he must have looked rabid and not caring. There were two victims in the street. Two people changed forever by one step into the road. “Call an ambulance!” Noah yelled, hoarse. Scared, angry, wanting to lash out. More people had gathered. He knew they were looking at him but couldn’t care. Tremors chased through his body.
The driver of the car was out in the street talking but he couldn’t hear the man’s words. It was as if a skin of glass had been melted over the man’s face. “He stepped out in front of me, I didn’t see him,” he whispered, needing Noah to believe him, to forgive him. Some small part of Noah felt sorry for him, knew he’d see Isaac stepping out into the road every time he closed his eyes. But it wasn’t enough. The rest of him ached to tear the man’s heart out with clawed fingers and choke it down his gagging throat. He wasn’t up to forgiveness.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Sahra said, bringing him back to the present, her fingers gentling his aching neck. She had been there, of course. Lived through it with him. The months of nursing Isaac through reconstructive surgery, physiotherapy, the ammoniacs and antiseptics of the hospital wards, slowly coming to terms with the fact that he would never walk again.
It had been like watching Icarus come tumbling out of the sky, wax wings melted into a gooey mess of freefalling feathers. The Golden Boy struck down by the Anti-Midas touch, his whole life turned miraculously to lead. The transformation was rapid and painful; Isaac’s constant lashing out hurting everyone. Fifteen days after he realised he’d never walk again, Isaac refused to feed himself. He curled his hands into claws and drew them tight against his chest. His lip twitched as Noah tried to pry them open just enough to force the spoon into his mouth. Isaac chewed unenthusiastically, turning the food into mush before he spat it out in his brother’s face.
As Noah reached for the canary yellow bowl again, ready to try and force another mouthful of food into Isaac’s mouth, it went spinning across the table and shattered on the floor and he was left reaching for thin air. Isaac’s vindictive eyes stared at the empty table, at the exact place where the yellow bowl had sat just a moment before. Behind him, Sahra stared at the mess on the floor, her face unreadable. Isaac’s tongue clucked in his throat as if he was trying to say something. Trying to crow…
Noah knelt and mopped the food up, brushing the broken porcelain into a small heap on the linoleum tiles. He examined the shards, picking out one that had broken into something like a shark’s tooth. He put the sharp edge of crockery against his brother’s cheek and sliced a three-inch gash beneath first his left eye and then his right, so he seemed to be crying tears of blood.
“I know,” Noah said to the ghost of his brother’s memory as much as to Sahra. “But, I can’t help thinking that if I had done something different, been a better brother…”
“Isaac didn’t want to live, not after the crash. I was there remember. You did everything you could. Everything.” Sahra soothed, her touch like feathers as it settled on his neck. “You fed him when he didn’t want to be fed, tried to care for him, but he didn’t want to be looked after. He was too independent.”
She wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know, but it was nice to hear it from someone else; a third party not so emotionally wrapped up in the three years of death that had stalked his family, claiming everyone he had cared for one by one until he was alone.
He suffered from the worst nightmares after his mother’s death. She used to whisper him into sleep with a sweet little nursery rhyme about the Nine O’clock Horses come to carry good little boys to bed, but after she was gone bed meant sleep and sleep wasn’t the realm of cowboys and spacemen anymore, sleep wasn’t the place where imaginary friends waited with reckless adventures; no, sleep was the door into the darkest room of his imagination. The door that opened to betray Noah night after night with thoughts of suffocating in coffins and ovarian cancer, of being buried alive and having his testicles rot, and the all-consuming blackness. Childhood’s end.
The only way he could sleep was to press his face into a wall, and even then he needed some kind of noise, like a radio playing quietly, to lull him into sleep, even as he struggled to keep his tired eyes open, winning for a while but never for long enough.
The dreams all ended the same way.
He’d wake up from a dream within the dream, a dream where the Wolfman stalked him and he didn’t have a silver bullet, or where Dracula wasn’t afraid of sunlight and his crucifix was nothing more potent than a piece of driftwood, his holy water as useless as Evian, and it would be dark. Black. He wasn’t afraid of the dark, but in this dark he knew he was alone.
The nightmares finally stopped when there was someone beside him at night, a body to curl around, to make spoons with. A body that stopped him from being alone. But that did stop the cemetery thoughts that had been building inside his head from eleven deep into his twenties:
Small emeralds of quartz. Dead flowers in jam jars. Gravestones with their words of grief turned green and weathered smooth, beloved son, devoted father, adoring mother, missed, loved. Dates and death. After his mother’s death Noah took to wandering the churchyards fascinated by the stones and their inscriptions, standing longest at the small featureless headstones, talking in his head to the children he thought were buried underneath, taking a handful of gravel chips from one grave or another, but only the interesting ones, the dangerous sounding ones, slipping the stones into his pocket and walking home, trying to whistle and blowing a lot of air between his lips.
While other kids were trudging to school with pockets full of rubber bands and bootlaced conkers for their playground wars, Noah’s right pocket was always weighed down with a handful of those small green flakes of quartz lifted from graves in the local cemetery, his own way of giving the ghosts a chance to escape.
Inviting them to haunt him.
The fascination spread into Sunday afternoons. He’d lie with the newspaper spread out on the bed, huge pages open on the obituaries, making up stories for the lives of the people beneath the doves and crosses. They drowned at sea, were killed in bank robberies, saved their dogs from being hit by speeding trains. They were all heroes, his dead. Heroes like his mother who had done nothing more incredible than love her son and leave him alone too young.