Re: B&B: Cat & Jack
She was here but Jack had the distinct feeling she was elsewhere as well. The room was too bloody fussy for his liking. Somewhere he'd acquired a taste for decor that was pared down to its bones, all the frills and frippery stripped out. Had spent too much time sitting on his arse in frigid meetings full of people he would never meet outside of them and would never choose to talk to, not to know why. The old manse parked in the middle of bloody Northumbria had been decked out in grand and dusty tradition. Boarding school had left him with the inability to live life sprawled out beyond what could be contained in a trunk and a bedside cabinet and journalism had only hammered the habit down and made it permanent. He'd lived somewhere incredibly expensive and polished and had equally determined he liked to know which were the cabinets and which were the walls and that he was capable of mess, but that was about the limit.
He doubted the decor was having the effect its donor had intended, but he looked instead at the matrioshka stacked in upon themselves on the mantle. It was fuss, it was just a different kind of fuss and Jack had pervese pleasure in that if he couldn't strip the fripperies off the bed and the curtain rail. He took another slow sip of the vodka and mulled it over as he flicked out a bishop in an angular line purely because the pawn had opened up the move.
"Probably," Jack hated the dark. The dark left him with nothing but himself, painfully self-aware even as everyone in town appeared to make merry hell with anonymity. In the dark, there were none of the facets he'd conjured up to make himself somebody else. In the dark Jack doubted, and while he was a bloody hypocrite about it - how long had he spent in protracted email exchanges, sinking himself into the mire of somebody else's life so he could extract himself from his own mess? - he found conversations of the kind that the dark prompted were not as easy to walk away from. But whatever the hell Cat was in the dark, it was probably less ghastly.
"I hate those events." The measure in the glass hadn't prompted honesty, but the look across the table did. "Everyone's looking for something or they're looking to get lost or to be someone else for a while. No consequences. I'm too myself to be anyone else in the dark, which means it's me with a bloody morass of people playing free from repercussions. I don't know free from repercussions unless there's enough of this. And doing something you'd only do because it's dark - I won't." No matter who it had been, there had been a horrible moment of determining whether or not he even had capacity to let go of all dragged in behind him, but letting go came alarmingly close to the last time.
"I would be a terrible Catholic. I would loathe confession, signing up to set out your secrets for somebody paid to judge them. That party got a lot better after I got drunk enough to stand it."
He didn't doubt believing in nothing. Jack wasn't sure he believed in God because he'd been a boy in a chapel every other Tuesday and every bloody Sunday reciting creed and prayer in chilly unison with every other boy. Religion ran through his country like ribbon through granite rock, easily forgotten and easily found but never center stage. He didn't believe in God because God didn't come when he was bloody called and God wouldn't have let him do what he'd done. He believed in everything else.
"Bukowski is behaving in the presence of company. He is a foul-tempered creature, and tried to murder my new photographer upon meeting him." But she looked more present and he didn't bloody doubt she liked hearing about stupidity. She liked telling people about their own stupidity far too much not to. "I made a promise a long time ago not to write the kind of material that's much worth printing anywhere with a decent reader circulation for a very good reason. I broke it because I was shit-faced. QED," he finished the measure in his glass and left it beside his side of the board.
"That, by the way, is the next one in the series." The Rilke, now. "It's sickeningly sentimental, so you'll probably enjoy it." A grin, entirely pleased with himself.