It. (rasatabula) wrote in repose, @ 2017-12-08 00:33:00 |
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Entry tags: | *narrative, jack penhaligon |
Narrative: Jack P
Who: Jack P
What: Narrative
When: Fuzzy now-ish
It wasn’t so bad. Daybreak and Jack woke from dreams that were memories, really. The color of dust that stuck to clothing, burnt red. The hectic nature of a newsroom, churning with life, idealism, ideas and a thin undertone of jaded cynicism to counter the bright young things’ impact on the place. The hum of an airplane as it processed air and the surge of adrenaline and excitement in the warm fug of greeting in stepping out of an airport into a new place. He remembered assignments, he remembered assignations. There was a woman in a hotel that was all Americans and reporters and no one else, when there was a threat of a bomb outside and the satellite line was down. They’d taken a bottle of whiskey and two glasses to a room and emerged several days later only to file late copy.
He watched his face change by degrees, slow enough that he almost didn’t see, each morning when he shaved. Twenty six didn’t look hugely different from twenty four, which wasn’t far off twenty two, when you thought about it. Twenty eight ticked over and how different could twenty eight be from twenty six, which wasn’t all that far off anyway?
Turns out it could be several degrees different, if you turned out to be in the right bar at the right time. He liked them, apparently. Bars, although his memory wasn’t actually drinking into a blind rage or into the sort of cold disaffection that drove his mother mad. But bars came with the meetings, run-ins, standing at the corner of somebody’s elbow until they turned around into you when they least expected to.
He met her in a bar. Several bars, actually. Jack got used to tallying the women when he woke up, looking for recurring faces. You do, when you’ve been told you’ll get married eventually and that she’ll die, all deeply tragic but the memories of frantic, mad love were fading as were the sensation of punting down the river half-drunk and the number of games he’d played to make it through university. The hectic life, packed bag by the door, a sarcastic editor - he, he was the one with the drinking problem - and god knows how many hours passed in airports with a cheap paperback picked up from the nearest book shop. He hadn’t read properly in years, it was hours sat under a tannoy and gate-calls interrupting Proust.
She was a redhead. Molten-copper hair and a smile that was knowing disinterest. He woke up from her as he woke up from any of them. A cup of tea, and a to-do list scribbled in the back of a leather notebook he’d dug out of a desk drawer in that shitty little newspaper, with top of the range equipment churning out the local broadcast. Met an editor, and he sat in the Capital office with the churn of the office outside glass doors and shrugged when she said newsprint was a thing of the past, it was all online now. He could see that, although his twenty two year old, dreams-of-Woodstein-and-Bernard die-hard would have curled up and shrivelled on a pyre of idealism.
She recurred. Some of them did, some of them actually passed through his imagination while waking. Redhead, bar, the kind of fuck that cleared out the smell of pink mist and sweet decay in lines of tents in a camp no one was ever going to bloody leave. The recurrence wasn’t novel. Jack didn’t like dancing to anyone’s tune, not without prior knowledge, signing on the line and the ability to cut the bloody strings when he felt like it. He’d expected god knows what, a romance. A grand love story for the bloody ages. Bronte, Austen, it was not. It interwove with trips to the Capital to sprawl out into the great anonymous, to have a good time and to meet new people. But it crawled beneath his skin while sleeping. He woke from quicksand, with the blurring faces of assignments and the clarity of one back ‘home’, a home he could remember better than the apartment around him.
He signed the lease while hungover. Not desperate-drunk the night before, just letting off steam in the Capital, a resurrection of the dreams the night before where the bars were clotted with people and living life on the bloody knife-edge was reality instead of a memory. On a place that was lodged above the bookstore, very close to that newspaper (considerate, really, for the man he’d be one day. Somewhere, Jack dropped the ‘old’, thirty seven wasn’t as far away as seventeen anymore) with the money piled in his bank account that looked like it had to be royalties on a career gold-dipped, didn’t it?
The problem was, of course, the memories didn’t stop there.