It. (rasatabula) wrote in repose, @ 2016-02-20 14:18:00 |
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Entry tags: | *narrative, jack penhaligon |
Narrative: Jack
Who: Jack P
What: Narrative: relocation.
When Shortly after fog.
Warnings: Bloody imagery, then nothing.
He didn't have a bloody word in his head to put onto paper when he left the diner. It was an itch that wouldn't scratch, dry and scaly and ill-fitting but he meandered past the local hostelry and thought his agent and editor both cheerfully toward hell-fire. He missed her. He could imagine poured silk and scarlet on her, and the spike-heels she already owned: she stacked them in his closet without a by-your-leave or say-so for condemning his shirts to wrinkles. A Casablanca moment, bare-legged, bare-arsed, lying on the quilt on the bed with her ankles crossed and her smile split-spread. You romantic arsehole. I don't have to pretend I don't know you to want to fuck you. She'd get off on it. Showed up places in business-smart tight, draped herself around a drink and introduced herself to his stories.
The whole of this tiny town could send itself sideways to hell if he wasn't out by morning. He two-stepped back to the motel room written on the flat of a key-ring with a single glass of gin and tonic roping itself pleasantly warm through his innards. Dark room that smelled of ash and cigarettes, spilled booze and rumpled sheets: Jack saw light from a lamp that was unplugged, saw the shape sagged on the end of the bed.
Well this is a shit-hole, make no mistake. Have you gone and got yourself washed up? Bright hair, the slice of her chin, the pleat of her fingers against the buttons of the sole shirt he could see in the cupboard that didn't need the mercy of a professional laundry service. He remembered: she'd said the same thing in the past, hadn't she? Or was that Minsk, when she'd been on the end of the phone? His eyes were blurred but the dark was full of shadows and it didn't matter when she was oiled-silk and the smell of chemically-floral shampoo over his shoulders.
"I'm not going to win any awards out here," his smile was fulsome, blown-wide on joy. He didn't give a shit how the pump-and-gulp of a respiratory and blood-flow system was bloomed into saccharine prettiness on card-stock, he could feel her elide in with the one-two beat under his chin, where her fingertips were, under the line of buttons and beneath the splay of ribs where her palm was warm heat and promise.
You're an old man out of ideas. You're lucky you can get it up still. Insouciance, but her fingers were on his buttons. She stalled, and he could see the shape of her mouth in darkness but not her eyes. Why not her eyes? Don't forget me, will you? Plaintive and Jen didn't emote where anyone could see it. Nothing soft, nothing wistful. She'd scream and she'd pelt plates at the wall if he didn't move fast enough to get out the fucking way but never this. Never lost. His hands over hers, and he stroked thumb along the web of finger-and-thumb.
"Why, you think you're not lodged in my head hard enough, even when I rise to the colossal heights of my craft?" A laugh like a shard of glass from the woman of the hour. More like sink to the pit of mediocrity. I know you.. Fingers tight on his thumb, winch-close. Me. I'm not something you write about, Jack.
When he woke, not even the courtesy of a rumpled shirt, a strand of hair. He woke, the smell of ripe meat and antiqued iron and the sheets were painted black with dried blood. Matted hair, bright as copper, the flung out hand cold and blue and bloodless, across the pillow. The sound, animal, rang off the walls until his throat scraped shut and he heard nothing, saw nothing until the fog retreated and left him the mercy of stained emptiness and the paralytic coma of three bottles stowed in the cupboard for the sybaritic moment of self-hatred well-known.
It took three days of oblivion before he dug the notebook out of the bag, seven pages of scrawl on aged sheets and a heart-stopping moment of bullets he recognized in his own slapdash pencil. A train ride, funded by who? In darkness conjured by what? A town that drew people in from outside by what?
He checked out of the motel room, empty bottles and the notepad left in the wastepaper basket for the maid to remove, iron on the back of his tongue and bleary self-recrimination barely verbal in the back of his skull. Jack didn't think. He didn't want to think. He didn't want the motel room that had been comfortable halfway house for three bloody years, he didn't want the blandishments of anonymity.
He bought the house during a terrifying half-hour with an estate agent in the Capital who made his headache even without the vice of a right and royal hangover clamping his skull to bits and he took the key with him. Edge of the lake, halfway falling down, a money pit. And he went there, instead of the office with the forgiving couch and the detritus of someone playing at abstinence in a burlesque bar. The pens, the paper, the press. Nobody read the bloody thing anyway, the journalists were paid for drivel as often as diamond.
Out. By morning, no less. Depending on how many mornings you counted. He watched the sun come over the water with a fifth in his hand and an ancient suitcase on the living room floor belching clothes and he fell asleep in a chair that had belonged to someone who'd sold the bare minimum of furniture as they leved up roots, and left all of this - self-destruction - in the rear view.