It. (rasatabula) wrote in repose, @ 2017-01-30 19:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, cat dubrovna, jack penhaligon |
Jack + Cat: the Mean-Eyed Cat
Who: Jack P & Cat C
What: Post-daughter nearly dying and furniture tossing.
When: Fuzzy: nowish
Warnings: Language probably from the start.
He'd thrown every bloody piece of detritus in the office from the window. Defenestration, about all the place was good for and the benches that had been laden up with all the crap that could accumulate over the course of three years and an administration before that, which had labored under the impression that the place was a museum instead of a journalism operation - all gone. Smashed to bloody pieces outside, even the computers Melody had murdered months before, the psychotic technofreak. The decks were clear, old books on journalism, the lot on geopolitics tossed below and only the reproachful hum of the very expensive equipment left by deliverymen at Christmas at Jack's back when he locked up the place in grim determination of where next.
Not the B&B. Jack didn't want to feel guilt roil its way through his gut to bilge against savage anger, he didn't want Newt startled-quiet in a corner of the room with an offering of tea. The quiet, stilted voice on the 'phone had made him think of old arguments conducted under old stone, the scale of voices played off one another and no. If it came down to a choice between the quiet must of the B&B with its own old ghosts and turgid memories and a cat that would gladly take it out on him in bloody lumps, and another, Jack swung toward the main road instead of the walk back where his own bloody ghosts now lived. Jen, evicted and put to dust but the bones unearthed from a different corpse, the dust long since kicked over it.
He had a packet of smokes dug out from a desk-drawer, the kind with smoke thick and evil and strongly French and there was a bottle of single malt back in the B&B, the kind of Scotch worth glasses and slow consumption. It felt like a precipice walked on the sheer of a cliff, a long drop and the murk of unsatisfied fury still moiling away and if you were going to take yourself down, better a toe and then the slow slide into the cold clutch of it. He headed for the Cat, instead, one of the young bartenders who was all charm and preoccupation at this hour, the bar lines deep with cops. Bartenders who'd serve the one instead of the bottle and Jack wreathed smoke in purposeful, angry line toward the bar and getting blitzed slowly and by degrees.