Wolf and Bird: Part Three

The Miller family were seated under the canopy of a restaurant, finishing their meal. The street was flooded with still-blue evening light; it glistened on the cobblestones and glared against the window of the jewellery boutique opposite. Around the corner, in front of the restaurant, was the harbour, where fleets of yachts clinked and whistled and the smell of the ocean mingled with pasta sauce and parmesan and hot doughnuts. When the bill was paid, they walked back across the promenade and through to the caravan park.

Jared didn’t really belong to the Miller family, but then nobody did. There was no such thing, no little cohesive unit: they were just separate, splintered people who shared a house where nobody belonged.

There was Stephanie, who was stylish and prone to getting drunk and calling Jared when he was at some house party and telling him that she’d gone off with a strange guy and could Jared’s best friend Matthew come and pick her up in the Polo please? – and right now was striding along in a black lace shift dress with shiny platform shoes and a large expensive handbag on her arm.

There was Emily, who had bad skin and rimless glasses and was wearing a green strappy dress from two summers ago, which pinched her shoulders, which Jared knew because she fought with Marguerite whenever Marguerite asked to wear it, because it was the only dress she owned.

Then Brian, the red-faced father figure in the loose polo shirt and slacks; Marguerite, the tan-powdered mother wearing her cream suit with the brown silk vest inside.

And Jared himself, in his pointy shoes and black knock-off RayBans and leather jacket. The pretty-boy.

It wasn’t that it had never crossed Jared’s mind that he might have been gay. Of course he might have been gay. Obviously. Firstly, the clothes thing, he liked clothes, he wore jeans that he bought off the Internet and might technically have been made for girls originally, that was quite gay. Secondly, all his friends were gay. They'd been his friends since he’d started at the school, since he was about thirteen, so it wasn’t like he consciously decided to make friends with a bunch of gay guys; and they weren’t exactly camp, Jared thought defensively, it wasn’t as if it had been obvious they’d all turn out to like men or whatever. But that was the thing. Jared didn’t like men. He didn’t like anyone. He felt like such a blankness, like a bit of a waste. He didn’t like fighting – although he broke someone’s nose once, kind of by accident when this guy was giving Matthew a hard time and Jared punched the guy in the face and all of a sudden his nose was broken, which, okay, yeah that was pretty cool – or explosions or fast cars or Die Hard and obviously not Playboy.

He found it so difficult to be a person. It made him so sad and tired to have to keep trying. He wished he could just vanish, just stop being: that or to suddenly wake up in Technicolor, feeling real and lively. The sky was starting to darken at the edges. He kicked at the tough dry grass along the side of the road. Thinking about it made it worse, definitely.

When they got in, there was an envelope on the mat. The envelope said JARED in neat block capitals. Stephanie picked it up, because of course she did, because it was Stephanie.

“There’s stuff in it!” she cried, shaking it.

For a minute he had absolutely no idea who it could have been from. Then there was no mystery at all because there was only one person he had met since they arrived in France who he told his name to, and it was the girl on the dunes with the camera. He took the envelope off his twin sister and felt something other than what he usually felt – because that was the way he thought of it, wasn’t it, there was the general Bad Feeling, and then everything else was just Something Else – and opened it. His family all waited to see what was inside. He spilled the contents onto the table.

It was a jigsaw. There weren’t many pieces – fifteen or twenty – and they were all small.

“Who is it from?” Emily asked.

“I don’t know,” he lied, because it was easier.

“How did they know your name, then?” Stephanie said.

“I don’t know.” Lying was never easier, which he should have known.

“Are you going to make it?”

He attempted to look at it indifferently. “I don’t know. Whatever.” Then he scooped the pieces back into the envelope and went into his room to make the jigsaw.

It took him seven minutes, during which time Stephanie interrupted twice and he had to move the CD clock radio in front of the pieces so she didn’t see what he was doing. She didn’t even want anything, she was just like that. When he put the jigsaw together it was about the size of a large postcard, and it showed a field of tulips and a windmill and a lot of blue sky. On the sky in black marker was written:

MEET ME AT THE B27 POOL AT 6:30 TOMORROW MORNING…
YOU SHOULD PROBABLY BRING A CHANGE OF CLOTHES
(THIS IS FLORIDA BY THE WAY, NOT A KIDNAPPER/RAPIST)

He turned the jigsaw over carefully on the palm of his hand, but it didn’t say anything on the back. The tap went on in the corridor outside. The sky crumbled into dark.

Poetry: Offering

This poem is the product of staying up too late and reading poetry on the Wondering Minstrels website, a now-defunct poetry archive which used to post one poem by a published poet every day. Whether or not you think all the late-night reading was worth it in this case, it would be great if someone could link me to a similar service or at least a couple of good collections. I need more poetry for sure.


Offering

If it is said that not all loves are equal,
know then that my love for you
is a small thing
and I hold it in my hand like a stone.

It is not made from truth
I know we do not know one another
and so it is a false love:
it is the satellite and not the star
a small and unromantic thing, but still
I know the constellation of your face
the angles of your name
and these things are never far from me.

Look at your hard-edged beauty
and be lonely for a moment.
This is my gift
and I can only give you what I have.

If it is said that not all loves are equal
know then that I carry this small thing
this stone, this tiny satellite
and because words are soft and pliable
let us call it love.

Last of the Summer Whine

Or: I Interrupt The Blog to Bring You This Unimportant Announcement

I have been seventeen this summer.

You don’t need old age or experience to know what seventeen means. You just need a collection of pop songs to understand that it’s basically it. I will never spend another summer being underage, drinking sneaky alcohol and sneaking into sneaky nightclubs. I will never be as young again as I am right now, writing this post. This is it. After this, there are exams, and after exams, there is university, and after that you’re too old to be a rock star or a supermodel. At seventeen, you are not past society’s sell-by-date for anything. At seventeen, you are the absolute centre of the universe.

And guess what? I failed.

I failed to drink any alcohol, take any drugs, or have any dangerous-type boyfriends (or even the type of boyfriends that your parents quite like). I failed to drop out of school and play in a band. I failed to get a part in a Hollywood movie or have a book published or just generally find a way to appear in the Sunday Times’ Culture supplement. I failed to be the pretty one, which is more hurtful than any self-respecting feminist should admit. I failed to have fun. I failed to be wild or rebellious or alarming. I failed to stay out all night – I even failed to come home late. Let’s face it: I failed the whole rite of passage thing as wholly as it’s possible to fail. I missed the HMS Coming of Age in a big big way.

I simply haven’t lived the beginnings of an interesting story. All of my heroes (each of whom, it should be noted, is a wealthy white English-speaking man) escaped reality somewhere around seventeen. None of them attended university. Most of them have a dodgy relationship with alcohol and/or drugs. And yet here I am, still in school (even – how did this happen? how could it? – a Prefect), still making reasonable grades and still on good terms with the local constabulary. I don’t know how to do anything else.

And confronted with the decision, I always choose what they tell me to choose. I sign the formative years of my life away to education, even though I don’t really believe that there’s anything else I want to learn. Not now. Not when I should be hanging out backstage at Glastonbury, wearing vintage clothes and being photographed. You only get a very short amount of time to do that, which in my case is approximately now. The time that I am spending not doing my homework and watching re-runs of Arrested Development.

Is there a way out?

Well, there has to be. But I’m never going to find it. I’m going to sit at home and write a blog post about how this perfectly good ordinary life just doesn’t seem to be enough for me. After all, I am seventeen. How could this be it?

Wolf and Bird: Part Two

I'm more or less working exclusively on this at the moment, so here's the second part, which I hope is fun and interesting for you.

* * *

The breeze sifted its fingers through the whistle-grass, over the grit-smooth pebbles, onto the sand beneath. Patterns of white dust moved like ghosts toward the sea. Florida Cain sat cross-legged on a sand dune above the empty beach. She powered up her digital camera and held it to the landscape, framing the chipped mirror-grey sea with a ridge of dry grass.

Florida’s parents had been up late the night before, having a Talk. A Talk about Problems. A Talk about Florida. A Talk about Life. Florida was seventeen. Her hair was too long, her laugh was too loud, her hobbies were too many and all-consuming, and her clothes were wrong. That day she was wearing a vintage air hostess uniform which she’d found on eBay and paid for with her mother’s credit card, a denim jacket, legwarmers, four rings, white sunglasses, and tennis shoes. And a camera. A professional one with a big zoom lens.

Photography was one of Florida’s better hobbies: by encouraging it, her parents seemed to want to lead her away from the others – the protracted soundtracking of her best friend Nina’s unproduced screenplays; the way she assigned an animal to everyone she knew based on their personality or appearance; the sending of long typewritten letters to her favourite musicians at their home addresses (not to mention the musician who wrote a short, handwritten letter back to her that said “girl you really fucking make me laugh” and “I can’t believe you know my home address, that’s actually a little weird”); the MySpage page Florida and Nina ran, where people sent in their secrets through private message and had them published anonymously. The page had 70,000 hits.

Florida didn’t understand what was so worrying about these things. She didn’t even understand what was worrying about the biro graffiti beside the mirror in one of the bathrooms in school that said, “Florida Kane likes girls”. Firstly, as she pointed out to Nina, they didn’t even spell her name right (“which other Florida could it be?” Nina replied), and secondly, it was such a cheery example of graffiti: it didn’t have any swears in it or anything. And although the aesthetic choices were questionable – ballpoint pen on painted brick meant the letters had to be scrawled several times over – the overall sentiment was quite positive. The thought of Florida liking girls indiscriminately, liking every girl all the time, was a good thought.

“They mean you’re a lesbian,” Nina had said.

Florida was not unaware of this. It just still didn’t seem like a big deal. So how could an air hostess dress and a letter from Arizona be a big deal? Her parents’ fear that Florida’s weirdness would end up isolating her was beginning to isolate her. She started examining herself a little more. What other friends did she have, besides Nina? Why did she not know who Ross and Rachel were? Why had she insisted, at age seven, on changing her name to Florida (why not at least California or Manhattan? why the old people state?) and then stuck with that name ever since? What was wrong with her? She resented her strangeness, and then she resented her parents for making her feel strange, and then they took her on a holiday to the South of France.
So here she was. Click. Taking pictures. Click. Like a normal girl. Click click click. Sea, sky, little ridge of grass, all very normal, thank you come again.

Then she saw someone.

It was a boy. Or it seemed to be a boy. Standing behind her, looking out toward the sea. He was tall and slender, with a narrow frame, dressed in tapered jeans and a grey sweater and a wide-collared black coat with two rows of buttons. The white dawn was reflected in his pointy patent shoes. He looked strange. His hands were small and pretty; his skin was clear; his face was delicate, finely-boned. He made Florida shiver. She made him yelp by taking his picture.

“Hi,” he said, sounding strangled. “I didn’t know you were…”

She got up. “Hi. I’m Florida.”

“I’m – Jared.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Jared is an unusual name.”

He smiled at the side of his sleepy mouth, as if he was bemused. “So is Florida.”

“It’s not my real name,” she said matter-of-factly.

He frowned. “So… what’s your – is that like a fake name, or…?”

“I changed my real name.” She took his picture again. “I changed it to Florida ages ago.”

“Um – what are you – why are you taking pictures of me?”

She studied the small screen on her camera. His face looked fragile and feminine.

“Jared? Not that it’s any of my business, but are you a boy or a girl?”

“I’m – wow, okay, no, I’m a boy.”

She looked at him again. “No offence. Just so I know which folder to put these in, you know.”

A breeze lifted from the sea stirred his hair. He pulled his collar up with slim white fingers. “Is it, like, legal for you to take pictures of me without my consent?”

“Yeah, sure. But I’ll stop if you really want.”

He looked at her for a moment. “What time is it?” he said.

“Nearly seven.”

“I’m sort of lost, actually.” She took another picture and he just laughed to himself and continued: “You wouldn’t know where Lot B27 is?”

“It’s…” She stood on her tip-toes and pointed back across the glinting roofs, “… kind of, okay, do you see the watchtower there?”

“Yeah.”

“Down from that. That way.”

“Ah. Okay. No, yeah, I got it. Thank you.”

She smiled and lifted the camera again. “One more.” It clicked and he smiled and shook his head. “It was nice meeting you, Jared.”

“Right. You too.”

He walked off, down the dry slope, and she sat down and stared out at the white sky, picking at the laces of her shoes.

Wolf and Bird: Part One

Hopefully I'll get around to posting Part Two of this, unlike most of the Part Ones I post. This particular one grew in a very strange way, and it's not quite finished yet. Let me know what you think. It's a slow start, I know. Actually nothing really happens. But whatever, here goes.

Wolf and Bird

The aeroplane touched down at 21:34, local time, just as Jared woke up. The family took their bags down from the overhead carriage and filed off. Heat bloomed on his skin when they left the plane. It was 25˚ Celsius, at twenty minutes to ten, but it was not just temperature: it was stale humidity that hung in the darkening air. The baggage carousel rotated in a flickering grey room where the ceiling tiles dangled half-off. Everything was dragged to the taxi, where their father gave directions in wild-eyed, touristy French.

By the time the taxi pulled up at the caravan site, a blanket of tiredness had overcome Jared’s body. He took his suitcase from the boot. There was a wooden lodge at the entrance to the caravan site. His father went in to get a key, and the taxi drove away. Pairs of middle-aged women walked briskly along the pavement. The air tasted of salt.

His father returned from the lodge with a key, and the family wheeled their luggage past a barrier, past a car with all the doors open and the stereo playing “Eye of the Tiger,” and then were confronted by the sea, beyond another row of caravans. It was spread out, a piece of tinfoil wrinkling and smoothening in the wind.

They turned away and walked down a little hill. Their father stopped outside a cream-and-toffee coloured oblong block with big windows, then went to the side and unlocked the door. It swung outward and he stepped in.

Jared lifted his suitcase into a low-ceilinged, plywood-floored room that smelt of dust. There was a heater beneath the TV rack. The sofa was built into the wall in faded velveteen. The whole place felt vaguely upholstered, spongy and stuffy and discoloured. Along a narrow corridor there were kitchen units and a series of doors. His twin sister Stephanie walked down, throwing them open. They banged against the fridge and sink unit.

“Not bad,” she declared.

“Two of you will have to share,” Marguerite said.

Their father, Brian, cleared his throat, at which point Jared knew that he and Emily would have to share, because Brian liked Stephanie best. But he was surprised. “I think Jared should have a room to himself. He’s a young man, he’s –”

“I’m a young woman.”

“It’s not the same, Stephanie,” Marguerite said, making it obvious they had discussed it beforehand.

“It’s no big deal,” Jared said. “I can share with Emily.”

“Forget it.” Stephanie dragged her suitcase from the carpeted sitting room to a door down the hall. “After all, Jared is the eldest boy, so he’s automatically more important…”

Jared took his case and pushed into the first room off the corridor, a cramped space with a wardrobe, double bed, and very little else. He closed the door and sat on the edge of his bed, being the eldest boy in the family. He felt weightless. He didn’t feel like a boy. He never had. When he was a child he used to inspect Stephanie’s Barbies and Kens, their smooth plastic bodies, hungering for a similar flawlessness. And he never got over it. He still felt trapped and wrong, as if somehow he was never meant for flesh or blood. Not a boy. Not a girl. Jared was nothing. He was a negative value on the scale of humanity.

Outside his room, his family sat around the table and discussed whether to play Scrabble or Cluedo or Go Fish. Somebody was leaning against the other side of the wall; he could hear the soft thump of their head. He switched off his light and lay on top of his bed. Heat gathered in the small, closed room. It bloomed on his closed eyelids, soaked his skin, prickled though heat-swollen fingers.

He woke a few hours later. The house was quiet, the curtained window dark. He felt desperately sexy. He got up, took off his shirt and jeans, and leaned against the wall. Inside the door was a full-length mirror. His dim reflection was faceless, an dark shape between wall and floor. It felt more accurate than his usual mirror image: it seemed appropriate, representative, this indistinct blur of a person.

He opened the door and felt his way along the corridor to the shower room – separate from the toilet – but ended up opening the wrong door, onto two tiny single beds wedged into a room the size of an envelope. He could make out Emily’s sleeping shape in the one on the left. On the right, Stephanie returned his gaze with startling bright eyes.

“What are you doing awake?” she said.

“Trying to find the shower room.”

“On the left.” She shook her head. “You freak.”

He closed the door and found the handle of the shower room, switched the tap on and drenched his hands in cold water. Then, sleep-drunk, he sat on the floor of the shower room and put his head on his knees. Slowly his life was unpicking itself, collapsing on top of him like a circus tent, smothering him where he sat on the floor of a shower room in the South of France. He couldn’t stand to do anything to himself. He wished not to even have to look at himself anymore.

Two hours later, he woke up, his head wedged against the shower screen, one of his legs numb with pins and needles. The threat of morning leaked through the tiny window, a wash of pale dawn whiteness. He decided to go for a walk.

Some Poetry: Charmer

This is a very, very rough draft, so I am looking for some criticism if anyone could offer some. You won't get paid, but...

Well, you won't get paid.

Also, points for guessing who it's partly-partly based on. I've spent the last few hours tinkering with it, so I no longer have any idea how obvious (or indeed legal) the inspiration is.

Charmer

1
Son of a Tennessee preacher
naming the psalms in the colors of the fall
the call of the mockingbird and honeybee
God-fearing honor-roll descendant of the sun
running barefoot in the summer through the streams

2
White-eyed and sweating on the floor
the powder and the mirror
fifteen, too young to hear your God desert you
oh childish grace, oh drunken prayer
the Devil holds His hand against your brow

3
And so you stand before us, pretty saint
partly broken in androgyny
our love is born in sound and blooms in sinew
you pay your price: we trespass on your body
we dare to speak aloud your holy name

4
Do not say we don’t know you:
your beer bottles, your tapered jeans
your crucifix and cigarettes
we who count your lashes, pay your wages
we who light our candles in your name.

What do we know, if not you?
If not by us, how do you know yourself?