Trystan
06-22-2008, 07:33 PM
OK. . . it's not finished yet, and I'm sure that there are some errors (some I have corrected, others that I might have missed as I dashed through it)
This is the first part. Criticism: as long as it's constructive you can criticize the sh*t out of me! Or if you're not much of a critic (like myself) a simple "I like it" or "I don't like it" would be great. I have a few issues with it myself, so yeah, criticism is good.
The story is called "The Train", but this might change after a while. I guess it's a little morbid, a little grim etc. But I wrote it as a kind of "dirty realist" thing.
Blah . . . on with the story then:
Steven Murphy was a plain, unassuming, and rather dull man in his mid-thirties. He had been bald since he was seventeen, overweight since he was a toddler, and plain, unassuming and dull since he was a baby. He left school with A levels, did not go to university and instead pursued a career in business, wanting to be successful; an ambition most common with the young adults of his time (that is, from the nineteen-eighties onward). And like so many others, he failed. But it was not his only failure: he failed at losing weight, at making his marriage work, at being happy etc. But there was no shame in the latter failure – few people were really happy. His one unpredictable act is what I cover in this story.
It started in a room in a cheap hotel just off the M4 motorway, the nearest town being five miles away. He had awoken from a strange dream with a heavy head, and sat up in bed for a few minutes in a drowsy stupor, staring at his alarm clock. It read 7:30. He had been rising at that hour for the past seventeen years, and today was no exception. The weather outside was as routine as his waking at 7:30: a vast expanse of grey cloud with not a single partition revealing the blue sky, the suns rays having no option but diffuse through the thick layer of cloud, illuminating the hotel and the out-of-town shopping malls a dull grey. He rose and walked into the bathroom.
Recalling his dream, he noted how it struck a stark contrast from his current situation. In the dream, his sister had been kidnapped (in reality he was an only child), and he and his father had gone to rescue her. She had been kidnapped by his other sister who had impaled his younger sister’s head onto a kind of Roman spear. He killed her with piece of glass. Then, bizarrely, he took the glass and started scraping it over his father’s face, before plunging it into his stomach. He immediately regretted his action, desperate to get his father medical help. It was then, in deep despair, he woke up.
Feeling guilty for killing his father, he looked for what else he had dreamt, knowing that there was something else there. Unable to recall this, he applied some shaving gel to his face, and picked a disposable razor out of the bathroom bag which he had had for all his seventeen years of trying. He cut himself under the chin and reproached himself for it. He had an important day ahead of him, a job interview in London, and it was essential that he looked his best. True – he was an ugly man, he was quite conscious of this fact, but something that could be avoided (e.g. a cut on his face) was simply inexcusable. Luckily he had packed some post shave balm and he applied it with care, earnestly trying to avoid any further mishaps. After doing this he went back into the main room with its untouched mini-bar and its television set that offered a variety of pornographic films, a box of tissues conveniently placed on the bedside.
His mind turned towards food. There was no restaurant in the hotel, it being only a convenient resting place for travelers, and so he would be forced to walk over the shopping mall across the street, although he was unsure that it would be open at that hour. He decided to wait thirty minutes, going through his work sheets, memorizing the lines that he had written. They read as follows: “I feel that I am definitely ready for a job of this stature . . . I have a good CV, I’m sure you’ve seen it . . . I am enthusiastic about this opportunity . . . “etc. etc. etc. It was full of clichés; modern man’s typical script, loaded with exaggerations and lies about how “enthusiastic” he was. In actual fact, his old ambition had all but died, and he often wondered why he still pursued his fruitless search of success. But he was driven by some purpose. He had a six year old son, Billy, whom he only saw twice a month. His ex-wife had won the custody battle (another one of his failures) and had remarried to a smart, successful man with a full head of hair, a Mercedes, and a way with children. Steven only kept going for his son, he loved him so and he didn’t want him to see his father as a washout.
With his notes fully memorized, he put on some sports trousers, a t-shirt, and a sweat-shirt (not his suit; it had cost him too much, and to have it stained would be a devastating blow). He locked the door behind him, and descended the stairs, the corridors silent, save for a maid rustling some sheets in an empty room. She looked at him and he smiled; a gesture that was responded to with a nervous expression. He ignored this and descended the stairs, muttering his lines to himself.
The mall was a gigantic labyrinth of shops selling clothes, CDs and DVDs, washing machines, televisions, gardening equipment, sports and workout equipment . . . everything that modern man needs. There was also a McDonald’s which stood in the same part of the building as a cinema; a large mess hall complete with children’s play pens and widescreen televisions on the walls showing a wide collection of channels. The McDonald’s had just opened when Steven walked through the doors, now eager to feed himself in preparation for his interview, his stomach beginning to rumble violently. The previous evening he had gone without food. Being so fatigued after the days traveling he almost literally fell into unconsciousness as soon as he had reached his bed.
Behind the counter were two employees, a pimply faced young man and an overweight woman, gossiping with each other. Steven caught a few lines about a television program. The woman spotted him, and broke off the conversation with a look of annoyance. She shuffled over the till, switched it on and raised her eyes in askance at Steven, her way of asking what he would like. “A breakfast . . .” he said
“Hm, yes I thought you might have liked a breakfast at this time of day” she replied in a spiteful tone coupled with a condescending smile.
“Two bacon rolls, please” he specified, upset with her comment, but keeping his composure. She shuffled back to the kitchen that backed on to the counter, and brought him his food. He took a seat in the middle of the empty hall and began to devour his rolls, keenly stuffing them down his throat with all the eloquence of a barn house pig. But then his audience of condescending fast food monkeys hardly deserved anything better. The woman looked over to him disgustedly, and now with a sudden spark of rare joyfulness, he opened his bacon-filled mouth and smiled broadly. The woman turned and hastily went out of view. Steven laughed to himself.
Having digested the last of his breakfast, Steven was still hungry, and rose from his seat. Before he had the opportunity to approach the counter a few yards away however, he was tapped on the shoulder. He turned around quickly, wondering who had tapped him on the shoulder, and why on earth they would do such a thing. He knew nobody in that part of the world, though there was always the chance that he could bump into old colleagues or school friends; both of whom he would rather not speak to or even lay eyes on. It was not unlikely, many of them had probably ended up with the same fate of traveling from one business park to the next, heads bowed resignedly while they ate their lunch in a McDonald’s which was identical to the McDonald’s they ate in yesterday.
But it was not an old friend, or a colleague. It was a complete stranger. A woman of around his age who wore a red cotton jumper, which matched her rather red face; she must have been hot in it, the temperature being hot and humid inside and outside. She was attractive, having a nicely sized bosom, a pretty face with two keen eyes and long flowing black hair that swung and fluttered – even inside – like a Greek goddess from a film made in the 1950s or 1960s. And she spoke: “Oh hi, sorry to bother you, but I wonder if it would be OK if I sat with you. I never like sitting alone while I eat.”
“Er, sure” Steven said, slightly taken aback, but remembering to smile.
“Cool” the woman said, “you getting something else huh?”
“Yeah, after you”
They walked over to the counter in single-file, the woman leading the way. The woman moved majestically, and Steven admired her ***. It was hidden, then exposed, then hidden again under her black skirt that would dance upward with each step. She was a beauty alright, I know because I’ve met her. Her and Steven were opposites in more than gender. She was the Beauty, he was the Beast. I imagine that this is what most people (who were now filing into the mess hall in their droves) thought when they saw them there, eating bacon rolls and dipping them into small containers of ketchup.
She introduced herself as she started on her second roll: “My names Anne by the way.”
“Oh, I’m Steven”
“I knew a Steven once. He was my husband. “
“Oh”
“Yeah, and he died on the motorway. The M4. This motorway” she said, calmly and casually, without a hint of sadness or any sign that the subject of her dead husband may not be a good thing to touch upon with a complete stranger.
“I’m sorry” said Steven, perplexed at the oddness of this woman.
“What do you mean?” she said, still calm
“Pardon?”
“I mean are you sad for me or sad because a man’s life was lost when a huge Hungarian lorry smashed into his car at 80 miles per hour”
“Both, I suppose” Steven said.
“Well, you shouldn’t be sorry for me. I was quite glad of it. It’s funny that – when you fear for your life – like I did when I was living with him – you pledge never to wish that fear on another person. Because it’s so terrible. But I’m glad that for a few seconds he thought ‘****, this is it. That was life and all the things that I’ve wanted to do I’ll never get to do’. But the though of him sitting there in his Ford Fiesta makes me smile.”
“Well, we all feel like that sometimes”
“Have you?”
“I don’t know” said Steven awkwardly. Anne smiled at him, not maliciously but kindly, as if glad to hear that “we all feel like that sometimes” and that this man probably felt like that more often than most, such was his inhibited demeanor; like a lion trapped n the zoo, unable to take vengeance upon the world that taunted him.
The woman went on like that, going from non-sequitur to non-sequitur, as if she had eaten too much and needed to throw everything up in the form of words. She talked about her old job as a waitress, her new job as an office “nobody”, her cats, her car, her dislike of weather that changed from sunny in the morning to rainy in the afternoon: “it ruins things when you go down to the beach”. As time passed Steven took a great liking to her and listening to her talk about these things – when most people would just make offbeat comments about the weather or the food – was refreshing and had a calming influence on his mind. Finally she asked him what he did for a living. “I’m unemployed right now. I’m going to a job interview in London today.”
“Oh, well good luck. But do you think you’ll like the job?”
“Maybe” he said, feeling awkward again, now that she had turned to his own life.
“Well I hope you do. It’s a nightmare when you have to spend most of your time doing something that you dislike, isn’t it?”
“Sure, but I want to make something of myself. You know?”
“I know exactly what you mean. That can end in tears, though. But enough about that, do you have any family? A wife and kids, I mean?” she asked, not at all feeling that she might have been intruding.
“I have a son.” he answered cautiously. He did not know what to think of Anne: she was strange, and strangeness almost always equates unpredictability.
“And you want to make him proud?
“I do”
That’s very admirable of you. Especially today when you’re encouraged to be selfish. All I want is to do something I like. But maybe I’d feel different if I had a child”
“I certainly felt different” Steven said, growing more relaxed with Anne’s questioning. But thinking of his son, he suddenly remembered the tight schedule he was keeping for that day. He peered up at one of the televisions which was showing BBC News. The little timer on the bottom of the screen read 9: 45. He arrived at the McDonald’s at 8:00. Seeing this, he was suddenly thrown back into the real world. He was to catch the bus at 10:00. He needed to be at the station, in a small town a few miles south, at 11:00. Anne had pulled him from his dreary everyday existence into her surreal world full of car crashes and the instability of the weather.
He got up from his seat and started to panic. Then he remembered Anne. He had forgotten her there, and she looked up at him with her big black eyes and said: “You’ve got to go. Shame, I enjoyed talking to you. I would give you my number so that we could do this again some time. But I never want to see you again. It all goes sour.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we’d begin to dislike each other. I like you, do you like me?”
“Yes, I do”
“There you are then. I’ll miss you.”
“Goodbye”
And he left her there. After going through the glass doors which led out of the hall, he looked back. She had disappeared.
This is the first part. Criticism: as long as it's constructive you can criticize the sh*t out of me! Or if you're not much of a critic (like myself) a simple "I like it" or "I don't like it" would be great. I have a few issues with it myself, so yeah, criticism is good.
The story is called "The Train", but this might change after a while. I guess it's a little morbid, a little grim etc. But I wrote it as a kind of "dirty realist" thing.
Blah . . . on with the story then:
Steven Murphy was a plain, unassuming, and rather dull man in his mid-thirties. He had been bald since he was seventeen, overweight since he was a toddler, and plain, unassuming and dull since he was a baby. He left school with A levels, did not go to university and instead pursued a career in business, wanting to be successful; an ambition most common with the young adults of his time (that is, from the nineteen-eighties onward). And like so many others, he failed. But it was not his only failure: he failed at losing weight, at making his marriage work, at being happy etc. But there was no shame in the latter failure – few people were really happy. His one unpredictable act is what I cover in this story.
It started in a room in a cheap hotel just off the M4 motorway, the nearest town being five miles away. He had awoken from a strange dream with a heavy head, and sat up in bed for a few minutes in a drowsy stupor, staring at his alarm clock. It read 7:30. He had been rising at that hour for the past seventeen years, and today was no exception. The weather outside was as routine as his waking at 7:30: a vast expanse of grey cloud with not a single partition revealing the blue sky, the suns rays having no option but diffuse through the thick layer of cloud, illuminating the hotel and the out-of-town shopping malls a dull grey. He rose and walked into the bathroom.
Recalling his dream, he noted how it struck a stark contrast from his current situation. In the dream, his sister had been kidnapped (in reality he was an only child), and he and his father had gone to rescue her. She had been kidnapped by his other sister who had impaled his younger sister’s head onto a kind of Roman spear. He killed her with piece of glass. Then, bizarrely, he took the glass and started scraping it over his father’s face, before plunging it into his stomach. He immediately regretted his action, desperate to get his father medical help. It was then, in deep despair, he woke up.
Feeling guilty for killing his father, he looked for what else he had dreamt, knowing that there was something else there. Unable to recall this, he applied some shaving gel to his face, and picked a disposable razor out of the bathroom bag which he had had for all his seventeen years of trying. He cut himself under the chin and reproached himself for it. He had an important day ahead of him, a job interview in London, and it was essential that he looked his best. True – he was an ugly man, he was quite conscious of this fact, but something that could be avoided (e.g. a cut on his face) was simply inexcusable. Luckily he had packed some post shave balm and he applied it with care, earnestly trying to avoid any further mishaps. After doing this he went back into the main room with its untouched mini-bar and its television set that offered a variety of pornographic films, a box of tissues conveniently placed on the bedside.
His mind turned towards food. There was no restaurant in the hotel, it being only a convenient resting place for travelers, and so he would be forced to walk over the shopping mall across the street, although he was unsure that it would be open at that hour. He decided to wait thirty minutes, going through his work sheets, memorizing the lines that he had written. They read as follows: “I feel that I am definitely ready for a job of this stature . . . I have a good CV, I’m sure you’ve seen it . . . I am enthusiastic about this opportunity . . . “etc. etc. etc. It was full of clichés; modern man’s typical script, loaded with exaggerations and lies about how “enthusiastic” he was. In actual fact, his old ambition had all but died, and he often wondered why he still pursued his fruitless search of success. But he was driven by some purpose. He had a six year old son, Billy, whom he only saw twice a month. His ex-wife had won the custody battle (another one of his failures) and had remarried to a smart, successful man with a full head of hair, a Mercedes, and a way with children. Steven only kept going for his son, he loved him so and he didn’t want him to see his father as a washout.
With his notes fully memorized, he put on some sports trousers, a t-shirt, and a sweat-shirt (not his suit; it had cost him too much, and to have it stained would be a devastating blow). He locked the door behind him, and descended the stairs, the corridors silent, save for a maid rustling some sheets in an empty room. She looked at him and he smiled; a gesture that was responded to with a nervous expression. He ignored this and descended the stairs, muttering his lines to himself.
The mall was a gigantic labyrinth of shops selling clothes, CDs and DVDs, washing machines, televisions, gardening equipment, sports and workout equipment . . . everything that modern man needs. There was also a McDonald’s which stood in the same part of the building as a cinema; a large mess hall complete with children’s play pens and widescreen televisions on the walls showing a wide collection of channels. The McDonald’s had just opened when Steven walked through the doors, now eager to feed himself in preparation for his interview, his stomach beginning to rumble violently. The previous evening he had gone without food. Being so fatigued after the days traveling he almost literally fell into unconsciousness as soon as he had reached his bed.
Behind the counter were two employees, a pimply faced young man and an overweight woman, gossiping with each other. Steven caught a few lines about a television program. The woman spotted him, and broke off the conversation with a look of annoyance. She shuffled over the till, switched it on and raised her eyes in askance at Steven, her way of asking what he would like. “A breakfast . . .” he said
“Hm, yes I thought you might have liked a breakfast at this time of day” she replied in a spiteful tone coupled with a condescending smile.
“Two bacon rolls, please” he specified, upset with her comment, but keeping his composure. She shuffled back to the kitchen that backed on to the counter, and brought him his food. He took a seat in the middle of the empty hall and began to devour his rolls, keenly stuffing them down his throat with all the eloquence of a barn house pig. But then his audience of condescending fast food monkeys hardly deserved anything better. The woman looked over to him disgustedly, and now with a sudden spark of rare joyfulness, he opened his bacon-filled mouth and smiled broadly. The woman turned and hastily went out of view. Steven laughed to himself.
Having digested the last of his breakfast, Steven was still hungry, and rose from his seat. Before he had the opportunity to approach the counter a few yards away however, he was tapped on the shoulder. He turned around quickly, wondering who had tapped him on the shoulder, and why on earth they would do such a thing. He knew nobody in that part of the world, though there was always the chance that he could bump into old colleagues or school friends; both of whom he would rather not speak to or even lay eyes on. It was not unlikely, many of them had probably ended up with the same fate of traveling from one business park to the next, heads bowed resignedly while they ate their lunch in a McDonald’s which was identical to the McDonald’s they ate in yesterday.
But it was not an old friend, or a colleague. It was a complete stranger. A woman of around his age who wore a red cotton jumper, which matched her rather red face; she must have been hot in it, the temperature being hot and humid inside and outside. She was attractive, having a nicely sized bosom, a pretty face with two keen eyes and long flowing black hair that swung and fluttered – even inside – like a Greek goddess from a film made in the 1950s or 1960s. And she spoke: “Oh hi, sorry to bother you, but I wonder if it would be OK if I sat with you. I never like sitting alone while I eat.”
“Er, sure” Steven said, slightly taken aback, but remembering to smile.
“Cool” the woman said, “you getting something else huh?”
“Yeah, after you”
They walked over to the counter in single-file, the woman leading the way. The woman moved majestically, and Steven admired her ***. It was hidden, then exposed, then hidden again under her black skirt that would dance upward with each step. She was a beauty alright, I know because I’ve met her. Her and Steven were opposites in more than gender. She was the Beauty, he was the Beast. I imagine that this is what most people (who were now filing into the mess hall in their droves) thought when they saw them there, eating bacon rolls and dipping them into small containers of ketchup.
She introduced herself as she started on her second roll: “My names Anne by the way.”
“Oh, I’m Steven”
“I knew a Steven once. He was my husband. “
“Oh”
“Yeah, and he died on the motorway. The M4. This motorway” she said, calmly and casually, without a hint of sadness or any sign that the subject of her dead husband may not be a good thing to touch upon with a complete stranger.
“I’m sorry” said Steven, perplexed at the oddness of this woman.
“What do you mean?” she said, still calm
“Pardon?”
“I mean are you sad for me or sad because a man’s life was lost when a huge Hungarian lorry smashed into his car at 80 miles per hour”
“Both, I suppose” Steven said.
“Well, you shouldn’t be sorry for me. I was quite glad of it. It’s funny that – when you fear for your life – like I did when I was living with him – you pledge never to wish that fear on another person. Because it’s so terrible. But I’m glad that for a few seconds he thought ‘****, this is it. That was life and all the things that I’ve wanted to do I’ll never get to do’. But the though of him sitting there in his Ford Fiesta makes me smile.”
“Well, we all feel like that sometimes”
“Have you?”
“I don’t know” said Steven awkwardly. Anne smiled at him, not maliciously but kindly, as if glad to hear that “we all feel like that sometimes” and that this man probably felt like that more often than most, such was his inhibited demeanor; like a lion trapped n the zoo, unable to take vengeance upon the world that taunted him.
The woman went on like that, going from non-sequitur to non-sequitur, as if she had eaten too much and needed to throw everything up in the form of words. She talked about her old job as a waitress, her new job as an office “nobody”, her cats, her car, her dislike of weather that changed from sunny in the morning to rainy in the afternoon: “it ruins things when you go down to the beach”. As time passed Steven took a great liking to her and listening to her talk about these things – when most people would just make offbeat comments about the weather or the food – was refreshing and had a calming influence on his mind. Finally she asked him what he did for a living. “I’m unemployed right now. I’m going to a job interview in London today.”
“Oh, well good luck. But do you think you’ll like the job?”
“Maybe” he said, feeling awkward again, now that she had turned to his own life.
“Well I hope you do. It’s a nightmare when you have to spend most of your time doing something that you dislike, isn’t it?”
“Sure, but I want to make something of myself. You know?”
“I know exactly what you mean. That can end in tears, though. But enough about that, do you have any family? A wife and kids, I mean?” she asked, not at all feeling that she might have been intruding.
“I have a son.” he answered cautiously. He did not know what to think of Anne: she was strange, and strangeness almost always equates unpredictability.
“And you want to make him proud?
“I do”
That’s very admirable of you. Especially today when you’re encouraged to be selfish. All I want is to do something I like. But maybe I’d feel different if I had a child”
“I certainly felt different” Steven said, growing more relaxed with Anne’s questioning. But thinking of his son, he suddenly remembered the tight schedule he was keeping for that day. He peered up at one of the televisions which was showing BBC News. The little timer on the bottom of the screen read 9: 45. He arrived at the McDonald’s at 8:00. Seeing this, he was suddenly thrown back into the real world. He was to catch the bus at 10:00. He needed to be at the station, in a small town a few miles south, at 11:00. Anne had pulled him from his dreary everyday existence into her surreal world full of car crashes and the instability of the weather.
He got up from his seat and started to panic. Then he remembered Anne. He had forgotten her there, and she looked up at him with her big black eyes and said: “You’ve got to go. Shame, I enjoyed talking to you. I would give you my number so that we could do this again some time. But I never want to see you again. It all goes sour.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we’d begin to dislike each other. I like you, do you like me?”
“Yes, I do”
“There you are then. I’ll miss you.”
“Goodbye”
And he left her there. After going through the glass doors which led out of the hall, he looked back. She had disappeared.