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This whole story came from playing my word game a year or so ago. Im thinking of adding more. Bringing the teacher back into the story. Im still deciding wether this is a short story or a potentual novel...
Please criteque, I like lots of different views.
Chapter One 2007 early spring
(first person, Gardener, Sid)
His pock marked face was so rebarbative, so terribly grotesque that for many days I couldn’t look at it without wincing. I would stare at his heaving chest as he lectured us on the treacherous grounds of philosophy. Whenever one of us wayward youth played up he would take our chin in his greasy mitt and thrust his face inches from ours. His eyes were the only things that didn’t look like decay on his face. They were flinty and cold, they sat like hard marbles set in folds of chicken skin. He scared me, he scared us all. It was his nose most of all that scared me, something was devouring it from the inside. When he held it to my face I could smell it, a softly putrid smell that lingered long after the experience. The older children told us that it was a venereal infliction. They said he used to be hansom in his distant youth, hansom and wild. He had traveled the world on a pirate ship, reaving treasure from the wealthy. He romanced many fine and exotic woman. At first I couldn’t believe them. I believed what our priest hinted to us, covertly he would mutter about god’s comeuppance. The way he would stare at our philosophy teacher while giving stirring lectures about the evils of sodomy. He was just another one of those ignorant men, mawkish and frail-minded, even his face was weakly plain. I’m told now that a lack of testosterone gives a man a weak chin. The philosophy teacher was a bumptiously candid man; he threw ideas at us like missiles. Our classroom was surreally bare compared to the gaudy poster littered walls of our more conventional classes, but for the four huge black boards. They occupied each wall from corner to corner and reached from knee height to the height that an up-stretching arm could write on. As we walked in we couldn’t help looking with trepidation at what he had written in preparation for a new lesson. One Word on each board, big Words, in meaning if not in actuality. Hard Words, dangerous Words, deceptive Words, omitted Words, forgotten Words, neoteric Words, some at first easily defined, but growing more difficult to grasp as we explored the depths of meaning. He would clutch the white chalk with a peculiar desperation, he wrote in small capitals, pressing hard. As if, I once mused, he thought that they would escape from the blackboard and rush into the world like the evils of Pandora’s Box. Maybe they already have. He claimed to be curing us of the truly tragic wont to practice sciolism.
Years later when I had escaped that tortuous house and was allowed back into the real world, I found myself unable to forget him. He didn’t forgive me for my sins, he was the only one who didn’t hold forgiveness over our aberrant heads like a swinging sword. Nor did he accuse.
I write this in my break as a nude model for a life drawing class at the university where He trained. I don’t know why I came here. To this wind torn city, without any notable renown. Certainly not to find Him, I tell myself. I have found a home of sorts in its strident stench. More of a burrow really, lined with the fading but still warm detritus of life. Posters of bands I hardly understand. Things from places I traveled through and found little inspiration but a familiar character to where I just left. Glossy pictures of pretty girls in no cloths doing things no girl has ever done for me. Photos of pretty girls who might have done things to me if I gave them half a chance to want to. When I go back to the class and take off my flowery dressing gown, I will think of my philosophy teacher. He became the father figure that guided my artless life, my every decision was hampered by his Words, the simplest Words are complicated in my mind. My mind is a thesaurus with poor grammar and little common sense. He is a dynamic that controls my depraved nature from wandering. He may not have rehabilitated us, but I’m sure the world is littered with f**ked up individuals wondering what he did to them, how he managed to install these unexpected morals. They certainly never began in our cracked hearts. Every morning for three hours I sit in a cold room, with my clothes astray, they all see I only ever pretended to have dignity. The art teacher confessed to me one day, after a morning in the cold making things smaller, that I was the best model she had ever used. My every pose was rich in character, more than just sadness. Artists seemed to find sadness in anything. It must be the easiest emotion to emulate. I’m not by nature a sad person. Bleak or angry, depraved, cold at times, but I’m quite happy in my grimness.
I went to a gallery once, where the best students put up their art for the public. I had my own special partitioned area, I sat in my cheap brown suit, surrounded by the macabre of my naked self. I look relatively respectable with my clothes on. That day I meet Maddy, sweet young Madeline.
She is only nineteen. I’m forty-three, far from virtuous, that you can tell from my sanctioning such a liaison. Maddy wandered about the exhibit aimlessly at first, her dark eyes bored. She had come with a girl who had done some art. Her friend was other wise engaged by a gaggle of stylish looking young artists all embellishing their creative natures, their melodramatic temperaments. It seemed only Maddy and I could see their posturing for what it is. She looked into my little booth at my little freak show, I think the name drew her at first, “Under His Skin”. If I have no skill (except being still for as long as I want), I have one gift, that only others can benefit from. My body draws out talent, the most awkward of artists become fluid with expression. Her dark eyes played over all my tortured tendons, my all torn skins. She stopped at a full frontal of me, my paper bound eyes met hers and she smiled widely. Her hand was pressed against her abdomen, her head slightly askew. I walked up behind her until I was about two hand lengths from her and asked “Do you like that?” She whipped around, her grin morphing into a sneer. She gave me the up and down look, the one that will influence someone’s impression of you long beyond the first encounter. The sneer stayed along with a humorous glint in her dark eyes.
I had already looked her up and down when she had walked into my booth, I had at first taken in her thick blond bob, framing a old black and white movie heroine’s face. Her white shirt was slim fitting and the lace framed buttons were undone enough to give me a captivating hint of cleavage, in my mind I was already undressing her. My eyes had glanced swiftly over the rest of her body, the long shirt was tucked into dark green cotton pants, they fitted tightly over her hips and widened down her legs to a pair of white leather boots.
With her hand still on her belly, fingering a button, she looked into my eyes and then turned to the picture.
“Oh! That’s you!” She said in her strangely rough voice, like she had been screaming.
“Yes, do you like that?” I asked again, still standing too close. At the time I didn’t think I had a chance in hell, I just wanted to make her squirm. She looked at it sideways as if it showed a different picture that only she could see.
“Yes.” She whispered, stepping back towards me until we were almost touching. Her eyes were unapologetic as she surveyed it from a distance.
I whispered back “I assured you its a lot bigger when I’m warm. There was no heating in that room.” I thought surely that would get her. She sniggered breathlessly into her cleavage and her creamy cheeks pinkened lightly. She was watching me from the corner of her eye, words almost formed on her red-stained lips when her flamboyant friend noisily entered the booth and we both drew apart hastily and guiltily. The tall girl with long gothicish black hair and a red t-shirt over a short denim skirt grabbed Maddy’s hand and said in low tones,
“I think its time for a pipe, my sweet Madeline.” She noticed me belatedly and grinned sheepishly, “Hi Gardener, are you enjoying the show?”
I smiled widely showing my governmentally tidy teeth. “I am now.”
The girl seemed to take up the whole space with her energy.
Maddy raised an eyebrow in my direction and asked, “Would you like to join us for a pipe? Gardener, is it?”
“Officially yes, but I would prefer you to call me Sid. And yes I would be honored to join you for a pipe… as long as your delightful friend here doesn’t mind.”
Her friend laughed musically and said, “of coarse, I didn’t know you had a nickname, where does it come from?”
I grinned, hoping I would catch her name sometime (I cant be expected to learn the names of every artist that stares at my slightly less than perky naked arse for three hours every day for the last half a year.)
“Sid Viscous, before your generation I’m afraid.”
The tall girl sniggered and said, “yeah, just a bit, my dad used to listen to him before he met mum. Apparently she beat the punk out of him and now he just listens to U2.” Maybe it was a subtle reminder of the inappropriateness of our interaction or maybe she just talked to much.
Later as we hunched in a dank and gusty alley, I allowed my arm to touch Maddy‘s, in the pretense of shielding the feeble flame as it tried to light the weed in the pretty pink twisted glass pipe that Maddy’s friend had produce with an airy flourish from her bra. I decided then that she wasn’t subtle at all, she just talked too much. Maddy seemed to lean back into my arm as she pulled a lungful.
As we sat on the steps outside the gallery letting the drug wash over us. I don’t do drugs much these days, its hard on my mind and body, I don’t bounce back like I did when I earned my moniker. Both girls I could tell didn’t do them much themselves. In Maddy’s words, “I’m still rather unaccustomed to this… this… I’m very stoned.” She leaned on my arm and hid her eyes in my crappy brown jacket shoulder. I laughed and tried not to sound too condescending as it had annoyed me when I first got stoned with a long timer. Later when the worst had worn of her trip, the three of us found ourselves a liquor store and got a bottle of cheap vodka. The friend took large and violent gulps of it, shaking her whole body in response to the terrible taste. I took brisk tight sips forcing it down my throat in a sort of hard shudder. Maddy was the only one who seemed at home with the brutal drink. She held it in her mouth swirling it over her tongue, her eyes closed slightly when she swallowed, like she went somewhere else for a moment.
By then we were very obviously headed for an inevitable drunken and clumsy encounter and we would have woken up in the morning with hideous hangovers and fur encrusted mouths. She would see the reality of a forty-three year old man and politely run away without giving me her number. It seemed inevitable, I couldn’t change the coarse of events. Luckily, it seemed Maddy could. When her friend left, giving her a long and meaningful stare, as usual over-acted, Maddy rolled her eyes.
“Have you ever done coke?” She asked me.
I scoffed at her. “I’ve done a lot over the years.” She hummed quietly into my arm, lifting her face to look at me, she looked more young and innocent than ever. It made my chest feel as if it was full of golden light. All warm and fuzzy. My blood burned under my skin. She spoke softly, sleepily, “I’ve not done anything other than weed… Do you want me because I’m so young?”
I was compelled to tell the truth. “Yes, it turns me on.”
She sucked her lower lip for a moment and then said, “Good, I like an honest man. Shall we away?”
(third person)
Picture a middle aged man sitting in a flowery dressing gown. And nothing else. Grey light from a grey sky makes the concrete and easy care gardens seem ever more drab. He sits hunched over the aqua blue painted bench, scrawling over a chaotic pile of pad paper. It has been folded, unfolded and then refolded many times. Ash falls onto the pages from a sweet smelling cigarette hanging from his petulant bottom lip. As he concentrates, scribbling franticly, his clean-shaven face is slack and curiously tensionless. Only pale blue eyes show any animation, they flick mechanically. He writes a lot and fast, easily using words not often employed in common speech. Although no breeze touches his short light brown hair, it looks windswept. The high forehead gives him an illusion of a receding hair line. Every now and then he will run a long fingered hand back though it. Under the thin material of the flowery gown, you can see his sinewy back. Ribs and vertebra stand out, shoulder blades seem almost delicate. The wiry bunches of muscle jerk and twitch under the field of peach rose petal as he writes.
Chapter two (transcribed from brail)
Dear Susan
I’m was so stoked to get your letter in the mail, hardly anyone send letters anymore. A lost art. Its good to hear you are doing well and have a good job. I’m still jobless, not that I care, I get enough from odd jobs and stuff to keep going. I still live with my mum, she doesn’t mind though, I’m the youngest and she doesn’t want me to leave her all alone. Yeah Helen is still at uni, she even passed the year. I don’t know why we are all so surprised every time she just pulls through, like in school. Speaking of the uni, I went to a exhibition thing with Helly a few weeks ago. I was real boring until I met this guy they use as a nude model. I would never tell anyone but you about this. He is like 43! Not all that hot or anything, looks his age and everything. Was trying to ******** with my head from the very start. Its weird how I can only ever tell you about these sick things I think and do. You always helped me, from the start. All we do is hang at his house, ********, drink, watch TV. Its so perfect, we don’t expect anything special from each other. From the start he admitted my age turned him on most. He says he loves me all the time and I say it back sometimes. I tell mum I’ve made a new friend, a new best friend who for some strange reason never meets friends parents. Silly that I still have to lie to mum about these things. She wouldn’t like him though, he smokes, he seems smart from the way he talks but you can tell he is BAD. Bad all the way to the core. He sniggers when people die in the news, he is mean, and likes to ******** with peoples heads. He makes me feel sick in the stomach, literally. Every day when I leave his flat, I stop at the door and look back into the mess and wonder why I’m doing this to myself. I realize I’m sad and pathetic and decided it cant go on. But I cant stop, I cant get enough of this self-punishment. Its funny I tell everyone else lies that I almost believe when I say them. So they tend to believe me. I tell myself he doesn’t effect me, I’m just using him, not the other way around. I could never tell you those silly lies. Maybe because I cant see your eyes when I say this s**t. He told me he knows a guy who can get us jobs on a boat that does private charters in Indonesia. I could disappear from this sad life and leave mum alone. I wouldn’t even tell her where I went, just leave her a note. I could cook for some dodgy charter boat that sounds like a smuggler/pirate/explorer. Its so bloody romantic, he keeps talking and I keep say yes we should do it, and he says well then its decided, I will ring him later and he never does. What then if he does, should I go on this wonderful sounding adventure or will just be another disappointment like every other thing in life. I don’t know why you encourage me to tell you these things. I do love your new and strange look on things, ha ha ha, well maybe not look. Feel? sound? Its hard to understand where you are coming from even after all these years. Remember those games we would play where I would pretend I was blind too and we would run around in public trying to sword fight with our canes but we kept missing. I miss that. I miss talking to you in person.
Love Maddy.
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