First chapter of A Stranger Leaves

 A STRANGER LEAVES by Adam Lee Parry

er one

 

It was precisely 9 o’clock and after his bath the music on the computer came to an end. He wondered if he should clean his teeth again, but decided not to. Cleaning them earlier had been a Herculean task that had woken the child next door and set her off wailing maniacally.

He dressed in his finery: clean jeans with no trendy holes, a blank black T-shirt tucked in tight, finally his blue buttoned shirt which highlighted the attempt at a potbelly that he had garnered of late. He took his anti-psychotics and anti-epileptics.

I’m ready, he said as he booted up, his new coat half on as he stepped out and locked the door behind him.

He chased after his shadow down the hill hoping he would reach the bus stop in time.  He groaned when he saw that no-one else was waiting, and stoically resigned himself to a long sojourn.  He tried to distract himself with stars and the pine trees at the amber lit turn in the road. I wish I’d brought my camera. Stop wishing! He reprimanded himself.  Yet he had sneezed earlier so he allowed himself this one. He forced himself to wait. After a cigarette the bus came with a weary slowness toward the stop.

The bright lights in the bus made him feel covered in stains, made him remember a dream then he forgot it as he took a seat.  Apart from a couple of women in the seat in front of him and the driver the bus was empty.  The air smelt stale and he anxiously fidgeted his feet on the carpet of discarded tickets.

Surprisingly the eight miles into Town seemed to pass in no time.  He bought a Burger and ate walking along the pavement – eyes fastened on the many bare legs going this way and that. He considered that it was rude to stare but decided seeing as he hadn’t been further than the chemist in  about a year he was sure the good Lord didn’t mind that much.

Near the Castlegate he went down to a bar called Characters and was lured in by a builder’s bottom. A builder’s bottom though both slim and shapely, the builder’s bottom owner with her cascade of hair like a black waterfall topping her off.

She was putting on an Adele Adkins song on the jukebox when he went in.

‘Oh, no, not that it always makes me cry.’  He said to her, she sort of smiled. After a while he sat near the corner table where she sat with an empty bottle of wine and a licked clean glass in front of her. After a brief, cack-handed attempt at a conversation with her dejectedly he sunk his pint and left.

Outside The Moorings the crowd of smokers halted his way forward.  He looked through the window of the pub at the teeming mob within. As he went in a bouncer told him it was three quid entry – he forked out thankfully. Only just in the door he saw an acquaintance. Dave. Dave Somebody. Poet-guy. Cyber punk was playing along with a tad of neo-Goth. There were people everywhere. It took a while to get a drink and when he got to his seat, turned for no reason, and saw the girl from Characters.

‘You follow me?’

She laughed. ‘Could you get me a double vodka and lemonade?’ She thrust a fiver at him. He went back to the bar, reluctantly gave the girl her change – she stared off into the distance as if he had suddenly disappeared.

For a while she seemed to disappear and he got talking to a black lipped lesbian wearing a tie and her freckled partner sitting on her knee. A guy called Two showed them the studs pierced into his back, two lines of them parallel with his spine like someone had hammered carpet tacks into him. The girl from Characters had left her vodka and lemonade untended so he purloined it and necked it in a oner.

The lesbians left and Dave Somebody- had long gone. Two had fallen asleep.  He needed a smoke.  Outside the dark-haired girl stood. She asked:

‘Can you take me to your place?’

Before she changed her mind he frogmarched her up to the taxi rank. Inside, on the way home, she lay with her head on his lap, while he gently fingered her and told the dark glints of her eyes:

‘I want to fuck your eyes.’

Back home they fumbled in drunks’ embraces.  He kissed as if he had forgotten the taste of kisses.  His kisses and small nips of teeth bites lingered lowering by increments down her abdomen. He licked and lured moans from her mouth.  She came so gently, so gently her nails bit into his hands. Not too soon after that she fell asleep.

He paced, he pondered. He wanted to sketch her pale form half-hidden beneath the duvet cast about her.

He paced, went back to see if she was still asleep. She was.

He took some extra anti-psychotics, an anti-epileptic or two and two and a half anti-depressants. Still he couldn’t sleep- and went back to pacing just staring at her and listening to her gentle snores.  At some point before dawn he must’ve fallen asleep.

 

 The next two days he spent going down to the newsagents for Helen’s wine and going down on her. To his surprise she told him she was 21 going on 22.  He’d surmised that she could be no older the seventeen. She was a drop out from Psychology School, but was now studying alcohol in all its forms. Despite dropping out of University she was soon psychoanalysing Ash.  He caught her reading his diary and she quickly interrogated out of him that he had a schizophrenic disorder and was one of the best book thieves in that particular part of Scotland.

‘How many people have you slept with?’ Helen asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t keep count.  You are the first person I have had sex with since the middle of the last decade.’

She didn’t seem to be impressed with this.

‘What about you?’

‘I’ve had four or five boyfriends.  I lived with a couple of them, but there’s an old guy on the top floor of our tenement who gives me a £100 to pose for him, but that’s not exactly sex. Can I use your telephone?’

She did for about an hour or two.  Then it was about 5 o’clock.  She’d been on the phone to her Dad, Ash thought she was going to cry – but he realised she wasn’t the kind of person who breaks down in tears, as if she knew by experience that it never brought what she needed.

Tentatively he asked:

‘Did he hit you?’

‘No. He had an affair and left me and mum – she started drinking too much, she wasn’t an alkie like me, but she got really depressed.’

‘I don’t know him, but you know,’ Ash said, ‘he’s probably regretting everything he said to you. When my Dad was in hospital last year he said he wished he’d never spent his whole life being angry,’ he laughed. ‘I’m old enough to be your father and I’m sure if your Dad was anything like him it would break his heart seeing you like this.’

‘You think so,’ she said and for the first time since she’d spoken to him these last three days there seemed to be hope in her voice.

 The taxi she’d asked him to call for her arrived. He watched her from the hallway, fragile framed by the door.  She did not look back or see him wave.

A few days later Alison’s cocaine calm voice answered when Ash rang needing someone to talk to.

‘The Moorings,’ she purred. ‘That’s one of the most haunted pubs up here.’

‘Yeah?’

‘It used to be a coaching house way back.’

‘Where did you hear about that?’

‘In one of my Mum’s books about local history. Barrels and tables would slide across the dance floor back in the nineties.  Some bar staff said they heard voices coming up from the cellar through the trapdoor behind the bar. Oh yeah, the beer taps would stop working, or the lights, and the jukebox and when the engineers came in there was nothing wrong with them, then a few days later they’d all go off again one by one until the engineers got sick of them calling.’

Ash laughed. ‘Maybe we should do ghost tours of all the haunted pubs in Town and charge the tourists a packet. I’m sure they do stuff like that in Edinburgh.’

They chatted awhile longer but after hanging up he could not stop thinking about the Haunted Moorings.

At times over the next two weeks Ash found himself haunting the Moorings looking for Helen. It wasn’t until the third Saturday after they first met and in a somewhat less rowdy bar that Helen walked in. She looked smart.  He was getting a Budvar and she came over to the bar and he told her she was looking good.

‘I had an interview for a job at Snafu.’

‘Did you get it?’

‘They said they’d phone.’

They went and sat at an empty table. He asked a lot of questions out of nervousness but he seemed to be talking to a brick wall. Within ten minutes she had fallen asleep on his chest.

The bar manager and the bouncer were taking a particular interest in them. Ash squirmed.  He tried to wake her up. Eventually the bouncer helped Ash struggle her out of the bar into the crisp, cold night of the smoker’s pavement. How he got her to the taxi rank amazed himself. Helen remained in a vaguely conscious state as the line ahead of them dwindled.  Ash’s anxiety levels grew as only a few couples ahead of them remained, because Helen was snoring on her feet. At last theirs arrived and with the help of one of the taxi marshals in an iridescent yellow jacket he got her in the taxi. She almost lay down on the back seat. It seemed pointless trying to put a seatbelt on her. She swayed and shifted with each turn and twist round bends the taxi driver made so he held her tight to him so she wouldn’t hurt herself.

‘There’s just one more corner,’ he reassured her. ‘Then it’s all a long straight stretch home.’

He sat her at the kitchen table and made her some noodles.  She helped herself to a container of cherry tomatoes and they shared a bar of chocolate. Ash took her through to the sofa and she remained there alone until the next afternoon.

She came through to Ash’s bedroom.

‘Will you go down on me?’

He laughed. ‘My nose is still recovering from the abrasions of our last sessions.’ But, he didn’t want to nay say her- he enjoyed imaging tendrils of flame emanating from the tip of his tongue, raging the flames into her, opening all the pores of her body as if he were some sexual magician. Yes he enjoyed it- it seemed to Ash that he wore a clear plastic space helmet that domed up from his head encasing her belly and buttocks, flowing back round to his agitated tongue and lips.

That night and the next day the snow came. Ash presumed she would want to go home, but she’d ripped the skirt she’d been wearing, only had opened toed silver shoes and a T-shirt that wouldn’t keep the chill out even in Ibiza in July. Yet she insisted they go to the RBS so she could pay her share of the taxi fare and the wine he’d bought before.

He dressed her in his favourite black jeans. They wouldn’t button up for him anymore but fitted her like a condom on a penis. He threw on her a baggy black and white sweater and gave her a pair of oversized sneakers. He looked out at the snow teeming down put over his pyjama bottoms a pair of trousers, fitted a second set of socks, two thick fleeces and his Christmas coat.

When they finally got to the bank the fucking thing was closed. Oh well, he thought another trip to the offie with my debit card.

But, the snow was beautiful, made more so by the fairness of his village and Helen beside him.  He said hello, as he usually did to people passing,

‘Do you know them?’ Helen wondered.

‘Not all of them, it’s just the way it is here.’ He remembered how seemingly friendless the city had been back before he came to the village up the valley from the River Dee.

He loaded up with cash in his own thankfully open bank and despite knowing they would have to walk all the way up the hill they encumbered themselves with three bags of groceries and a rather bogging hotdog. Being 21 going on 22 ascending the hill wasn’t so bad for her, but Ash puffed, panted, groaned, took more than the occasional rest until they were back thrusting themselves through the door and dumping the bags at their feet, until they caught their breaths, like they were exhibitions in a surrealist art show.

By the time Ash got round to putting all the messages away Helen had drunk the bottle of rose and was making good speed on the paltry white. She asked him if she could use the phone again. Of course, he said, but then got in a bit of a mood when she asked him to give her some privacy while she talked. He went and lay on the bed, not really eavesdropping but most of what she said he could clearly hear through the wall.

First she called the STD clinic and found out that she had Chlamydia. Next and for about an hour she spoke to her Dad, a dentist.  He seemed to have disowned her, or she him, when she dropped out of Uni. Each strain and sound of her voice seemed to yearn for some forgiveness from him until she finally gave up as if knowing she would never hear the words:

‘I love you, I’m sorry.’

Then Ash heard a thud. He rushed through.

‘Helen! Helen!’ He called.  She’d fallen from the computer chair and lay curled up the floor in a vast soaking stain of wine. Or urine? He should try and lift her up, shouldn’t he?  He thought about it.  She wasn’t that big, but he was middle-aged, smoked too much and hadn’t picked up anything heavier that a book for a long time.

He escaped back in the bedroom worrying about it. For an hour or so. I’m being selfish, he derided himself and finally went back through to her.  Psyching himself up like an Olympic weight lifter he got his arms under her as if he were not just carrying Helen, but all the heavy weight of her 21 going on 22 years of life.  He raised her and carried her to the sofa. Ash switched off the light leaving the room pitch black and presumed she would sleep and he could too.  Of course he couldn’t.  He called up Alison.

‘High’, he said nervously.

‘Certainly am. Sorry I didn’t call you back.  My daughter came up just as you called.’

‘She’s here.’ he blurted. ‘Not your daughter. Helen. Helen’s here.  She just passed out.  I don’t know what to do.’

‘Is she breathing?’

Ash looked over.

‘Yes, I think so.  I don’t want to call an ambulance. What do you think?’

‘Get a grip, she’s probably just pissed.’

‘Wish I was.’ He heard Helen snore, not as gently as before as if she had reached a place in her dreams way up high where the air was thin.

He apologized for bothering Alison as it was 3 o’clock and they dragged the conversation out a bit then he hung up.

Helen still slept.

Ash called his oldest, dearest friend Martha who lived in a wee village outside The Capital. He had first met her in 1990. Christ! 22 years ago.  She had the same birthday as his Mum.  They’d met in a playwriting workshop.  Then a year or so later he incurred his schizophrenia.  She wrote to him in the asylum.

He’d seen a news item about a gardener reproducing an immense field into a copy of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers.  Before he’d even mentioned it to her, like synchronicity, or a coincidence, or perhaps just life she sent him a postcard with an aerial photograph on it.

When he got out of the asylum she took him to the Sunflower field and Ash wondered if he hadn’t been on so much medication could he have made something as beautiful as this.

‘Hi Martha.’

‘Ash,’ she said croakily.

‘So you’ve still got your flu.’

‘Afraid so.’

‘I met her again!’

‘Who?’

‘Helen.’ Duh. ‘She’s here and snoring.’

‘So you’ve got a woman in your bed so you’ve decided to call me.’

‘I made her sleep on the couch.’

Martha laughed, lightly and coughed.

‘Anyway I was wondering if I can come down and see you.’

A pause. ‘Why not?  I’m free until the ninth then some friends from Chester are staying.’

‘Hey.  I was on your blog and I saw you’ve a new book out.’

‘Haven’t I sent you a copy?’

‘No, but I’d love to read it.’

‘It’d be good to see you if you actually do come down this time. Don’t phone unless you’re actually in Edinburgh.’

‘Sure I don’t want to leave you in the lurch again.’

‘Don’t mention that.’ She snapped.

‘I’ll let you know when I am there, if I am there. Please take care, you sound awful. If you haven’t got over your flu by the end of the week I’ll send you a recyclable carton of Orange Juice. See you?’

Suddenly Ash felt like taking a pill.  Then he considered renewing a library book, except it was only 4 o’clock and wouldn’t be open yet.  Instead he did some phone banking.  When he loudly said ‘yes’ to the lady’s recorded question whether he wanted to know his balance or not Helen woke up.

This time without being asked he went down on her again. Afterwards she kissed his ear causing such a vastness of pleasure that spread through all his nerves surging like a nuclear kiss detonating on every part of him.  He sat transfixed at her feet as if she had just performed a miracle. Unwilling to move;  to never move from her long slender toes, stay here every day.  She touched his ear once more with her tongue like she was speaking to him in her body’s esoteric cipher.

Eventually she went through to the kitchen and made pork chops and vegetables while he was sent off to buy more wine. During the meal they watched Withnail and I.  Helen told him of a drinking game where everybody had to imbibe drink for drink all that the characters in the film drank. After that they watched The Children of Men starring Clive Owen.  

Once more once the film was over his fingers and tongue were in her.  If he lay here between her thighs giving her kisses and nibbling on her maybe she would never leave him alone.  But, morning came again and most of the snow had melted.

He said. ‘I have to go and see my Dad.’

‘Now?’

‘Takes me two hours to get there. Then two hours back. Come with me on the bus into Town and I’ll get a bus out to my Dad’s from Broad Street.’

Helen thought about it for a moment, then leapt up and got dressed.

‘There’s a bus in nine minutes,’ Ash intoned.

‘Well get your clothes on.’

He did.  He needed to see his Dad more than he needed wine, more nasal abrasions, but mainly to rid him of the fear that he might never see him again.

There was a double decker at the terminus.  He started to go up the stairs.

‘Not up there,’ she said. ‘I feel sick.’  She plonked herself down on the first seat in front of which was brown reflective glass.  For most of the journey they stared at each other in their reflections, unspeaking. Yet once she started to recognise the buildings and streets a sense of palpable relief came over her.

She put her forehead to the cold glass of the bus window. ‘I feel awful.’ She moaned.

‘If you like I can get the driver to make a detour to your doorstep.’

She laughed and the sound seemed to dispel the despondency of the air at the bottom of the bus.

‘God, its so early.’ she said and sighed. ‘My back is killing me and I’ve got to go to GUM for a check up, but that’s not until 14 o’clock and my back is sore.’

‘Man, I thought I moaned a lot, but that must be just in my head. If you like I’ll get the bus driver to take you straight to the undertakers.’

A woman across the aisle reading a Danielle Steel novel tittered, and then Helen and Ash laughed together as if for the first and final time.

They said goodbye to each other on King Street. She hugged him, did not kiss him. He looked back a couple of times, saw her sleek in his old black jeans and her silver shoes, the black and white t-shirt about her like wings.

Then Ash went to see his Dad.