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| Author: |
Jenn Ashworth interviews herself |
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Me: Feeling chatty today?
Me: Nah, not really.
Me: Sulking, are we?
Me: Suppose.
Me: Tell us about what made you want to write this story.
Me: An argument I eavesdropped on in a cafe.
Me: That really true?
Me: Could be.
Me: Anything else?
Me: Go here - if you must.
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| Submission Date: |
| 26 Nov 2007 |
Category: |
Short story
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In Podcast and Chap-book
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thumb
I know she wants a camera. I’m supposed to get one for her. She doesn’t talk though, doesn’t come out and ask. Chloe has better ways of getting what she wants than that. Catalogues have started appearing on the kitchen table, biro-marked flyers from Jessops in the bathroom. I know how much it is going to cost me, how much she thinks sixteen is worth.
When I say she doesn’t speak, I mean she doesn’t speak to me. She brings friends back for that. I’m left hovering on the landing, listening to the noises in her bedroom. They laugh like baby birds. The stink in her room, which is mainly a fog of perfume and sweat, feet and cigarettes and damp school blazers, curls out into the landing and hangs around for hours.
I do knock on the door, but before I can push it open she’s there, her face and chest jammed between it and the wall. There’s something in there I’m not supposed to see. Drugs, or smoking, a bottle of gin, a boy. I can hear smothered giggling. I never look at her eyes. Best not to. I look at my hands every single time I have to talk to her. Dirt from work is ground into the knuckles. She’d be embarrassed by them. I put them behind my back. Now I look like a frigging waiter. She’d be embarrassed by that too.
‘Shall I take your PE kit?’ I say, ‘get it washed?' She closes the door and I can hear shuffling, the crackle of a carrier bag. It appears, mud-spattered and stinking a second later. As I’m on my way down to the kitchen I can hear them making fun of my accent. ‘Shall I take your PE kit’ rattles round with the smell for hours.
It’s a hockey kit. The mud smells like dung, like the sea, like bruised grass. I give it a rinse in the sink before I put it in the machine – feels strange to be wringing out her knickers over the draining board, but I’ve got to do it – otherwise the mud will clog the pump. I know how to do things like this – the cooking and the shopping, even for sanitary towels. Ironing was a sore point for a while, but even the tricky parts of her school blouses have become second nature. I almost like it. I’m slow, Sunday mornings with Iron Butterfly on in the background, careful and precise, licking my thumb to test the temperature. It’s not bad.
In the shop I tell the assistant how much money I want to spend. She tries to talk to me about shutter speed, bracketing and light metering, but I just shake my head: not interested. The assistant touches my shoulder and makes me jump: the bag’s ready. It’s bigger than I thought and I feel conspicuous as I walk home. I know full well I look nothing like the kind of man who’d buy himself an expensive camera.
I’m supposed to take up a hobby, or go to a nightclass. You get weird otherwise. Not weird, just a bit eccentric. I thought I’d try yoga. I bought a mat and practised touching my toes between classes. I’m the only man there and I worried a bit about the women thinking I was only there to look at them. It’s not so bad now, all that closed eyes, visualising streams and rivers and what have you, sorting out the sore places in my back.
I drink as well, two or three evenings a week. Nothing serious, one or two pints, the paper. The regulars nod at me now, and I nod back. They probably think I prefer to sit on my own. I wouldn’t mind a friend to clap on the back and do loud laughing with, to say ‘women’ with and to make a drunken speech to.
There is a woman at my yoga class. She always takes the mat next to me. She’s got marzipan coloured skin. I know a few things about her. She can unlace her shoes without unlocking her knees; she hinges at the hips like a toy; when I drive home after and I see her car in front of mine at the lights, my hands shake a bit.
Chloe’s not in, so I just leave the camera on her bed, the receipt stapled to the plastic handles of the bag. She isn’t back by the time I want to go to sleep, either. It’s morning and I’m chewing toast when she appears.
‘Happy birthday, for yesterday,’ I say. I can’t tell if she’s sulking or not. It isn’t my fault I missed it. She looks rough. God knows what she was doing last night. She’s not opened it yet.
‘Is there something wrong with it?’
‘It’s automatic,’ she says, ‘point and shoot. Compact.’
‘I don’t know what those words mean.’
‘I want,’ she says, putting the box down and making her fingers and thumbs into a rectangle, ‘creative control.’ She looks at me through the lens of her fingers and frowns, ‘I want,’ she says, letting her fingers drop onto the shiny lid of the box, ‘to learn how to do it properly.’ I think she’s still drunk.
‘This is a very good camera,’ I say.
‘I’ll use it for practice,’ she says, after a while, ‘until I get a proper one.’
Because I’m still watching her with the box she sits on the carpet and scrabbles her fingernails over the edge of the Sellotape on the flap and opens it.
‘Well?’
She shrugs.
‘It came highly recommended.’
‘Did you get film?’ she asks, holding it up to her face. It is wrapped in plastic, but she doesn’t peel it away. Before I can say anything she says, ‘Oh,’ and looks at the receipt. ‘Fifty five pounds,’ she says, and shakes her head, ‘you could have got a second hand Zenit for that price,’ she puts the camera back in the box, ‘and a few films.’
‘I don’t know what a zenick is,’ I say, and pick up the toast.
‘Zenit,’ she says, leaving the room. ‘and you forgot the batteries.’
The woman’s name is Suko. I get there a bit early and take a mat at the opposite end of the room to usual. For some reason I don’t want to be anywhere near her. I don’t want to have to look at her. I find some of those postures we get into suggestive of other things. I want to look at her without her looking at me. I want to look at her eyes close-up without her seeing me. After the class I walk really slowly through the leisure centre until she passes me and goes to her car. I take my time tucking my mat into the boot until her car shudders around the corner. Then I drive fast, catching her up until there are only two cars between her and me. After a while, I park and watch her get out of her car. She shuts the door and the lights in her house go on. I see a spider plant in the window and her arm closing the curtains. Then I go home.
I’m thinking about that marzipan, although it isn’t, I’ve realised, marzipan at all. It is very milky coffee, it is uncooked pasta. Horlicks. She is a very healthy colour. Horlicks. If I had thought of it earlier I could have told her about it. I could have licked my thumb and touched her skin and said you know the first time I ever saw you I thought you had skin the colour of Horlicks. I try to imagine what she would have done, what her laugh would have sounded like. Happy, or like the baby birds in the back bedroom? She might have made fun of my accent. I wouldn’t mind getting the chance to say ‘Horlicks’ out loud to someone who isn’t her, just to test if it sounds how I mean it to sound.
Chloe is lying on her bed with her eyes closed. She might not be asleep – the blue lamp on her desk is still switched on, making a warm yellow circle on the cover of her textbook. I can see the wires of her headphones creeping out from under her hair. As she turns in her sleep (she is asleep, I’ve got so close to her I could touch her if I wanted to) the cord wraps itself around her throat and her teeshirt bunches up around her chest. She’s wearing black knickers, shorts really, like a boy and I can see how flat her stomach is, a little concave sail strung between her hips. There’s a heavy smell about her, not in the room, but from her body. It is grown up – thick - oily and menstrual. Her hand is on the pillow and there’s dirt under her fingernails; yellow stains on her fingers.
She opens her eyes and I keep still. She used to do that when she was a baby. I’d think she was awake and I’d be rushing to get her milk but she’d go off again, no trouble. But now her eyes come fully open. I just stand there. She won’t remember in the morning. I can see her focusing, waking up properly, and I start making my mouth into the shape of an apology but she moves over on the bed and puts her arms out to me. I reach over and put out the light, the little bones in my neck cracking as I lick my thumb and get into the bed.
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