CCLaP Weekender: August 29, 2014

CCLaP Weekender

From the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography

August 29, 2014

New fiction by Mark Wagstaff Photography by Teimur Henrich Chicago literary events calendar

August 29, 2014 | 1

THIS WEEK’S CHICAG

For all events, visit [cclapce FRIDAY, AUGUST 29

4:30pm Six Points Reading Series

Chicago Cultural Center / 78 E. Washington / Free poetrycenter.org The Poetry Center of Chicago presents this evening of readings by Simone Muench, Jason Koo, and Roger Reeves. Curated and hosted

by Danielle Susi. Held in the center's Millennium Park Room.

6:30pm Rhino Reads!

Brothers K Coffee House / 500 Main St., Evanston / Free rhinopoetry.org A poetry open mic, featuring Roger Bonair-Agard and Sara Henning.

7pm Poetry Pentathlon

Uncharted Books / 2630 N. Milwaukee / Free unchartedbooks.com A humorous poetry competition hosted by the reading series Waiting 4 The Bus. Register at waiting4thebus.com/pentathlon.html.

7pm After Hours Reading

The Book Cellar / 4736 N. Lincoln / Free bookcellarinc.com A reading by contributors to the latest issue of After Hours Magazine, plus an open mic.

7:30pm D. Bryant Simmons

Women & Children First / 5233 N. Clark / Free

womenandchildrenfirst.com The author reads from her newest book, How to Knock a Bravebird From Her Perch.

2 | CCLaP Weekender

GO LITERARY EVENTS

enter.com/chicagocalendar]

SATURDAY, AUGUST 30 2pm

Butterfly Poetry Project Nitecap Coffee Bar / 1730 W. 18th / Free facebook.com/thebutterflypoetryproject A poetry feature by Javon J. Smith, plus an open mic. Singers also welcome.

4pm Chowdown at Sundown(era)

Challengers Comics / 1845 N. Western / Free challengerscomics.com A cookout and signing with Sundowners creators Tim Seeley, Jim Terry and Sean Dove.

7pm Lane Milburn

Quimby's Bookstore / 1854 W. North / Free quimbys.com The science-fiction author reads from his newest book, Twelve Gems.

7pm Myopic Poetry Series

Myopic Books / 1564 N. Milwaukee / Free myopicbookstore.com This month's show features Luis Humberto Valadez.

7pm Red Rover Series Experiment #78

Outer Space Studio / 1474 N. Milwaukee / $4 groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries This month's show features 13 performers.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 31 7pm Uptown Poetry Slam

The Green Mill / 4802 N. Broadway / $7, 21+ slampapi.com International birthplace of the poetry slam. Hosted by Marc Smith.

August 29, 2014 | 3

7pm Asylum

Le Fleur de Lis / 301 E. 43rd / $10

lefleurdelischicago.com A weekly poetry showcase with live accompaniment by the band Verzatile.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 8:30pm Open Mic

Kafein Espresso Bar / 1621 Chicago Ave., Evanston kafeincoffee.com Open mic with hosts Chris and Kirill.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 6:30pm Jeff Leshay

City Lit Books / 2523 N. Kedzie / Free citylitbooks.com The author discusses his newest thriller, Dangerous Trades, in conversation with local journalist Vince Gerasole.

7pm Wit Rabbit Reading Series

Quenchers Saloon / 2401 N. Western / Free, 21+ witrabbitreads.com This month's show features Megan Burns, Sara Henning, Andrea Scarpino and Laura Madeline Wiseman.

7:30pm Tuesday Funk

Hopleaf / 5148 N. Clark / Free, 21+ tuesdayfunk.org This month's performers include Jasmine Davila, Ryan DiGiorgi, Anne Hoilub, Scott Smith, and Holly McDowell. Hosted by Andrew Huff and Eden Robins.

7:30pm Homolatte

Tweet Let's Eat / 5020 N. Sheridan / Free homolatte.com This month's show features Daryl Murphy and Michael James. Hosted

by Scott Free. Enter through Big Chicks at the same address.

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9pm

Two Cookie Minimum Hungry Brain / 2319 W. Belmont / Free, 21+ Facebook (search on "Two Cookie Minimum") Stories and cookies, both for free, the latter vegan as well. Hosted by John Wawrzaszek, a.k.a. Johnny Misfit.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 6pm Ryan Browne

Challengers Comics / 1845 N. Western / Free challengerscomics.com The comics artist discusses his ongoing series God Hates Astronauts.

7pm Marian Szczepanski and Ruth Chatlien

Evanston Public Library South Branch / 900 Chicago Ave.,

Evanston / Free epl.org The authors both read from their debut novels, Playing St. Barbara and The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte.

7pm

Reading Under the Influence Sheffield's / 3258 N. Sheffield / $3, 21+ readingundertheinfluence.com This month's show, "Save It For Later," features Clarie Zulkey, Tyler Snodgrass, Leah Pickett, and Lisa Mrock. Reading starts at 7:30; doors open at 7:00, and those wishing seats are highly encouraged to arrive early.

9pm In One Ear

Heartland Cafe / 7000 N. Glenwood / $3, 18+ facebook.com/pages/In-One-Ear Chicago's 3rd longest-running open-mic show, hosted by Pete Wolf and Billy Tuggle.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 7pm Napantla Release Party

Poetry Foundation / 61 W. Superior / Free poetryfoundation.org A release party for issue #1 of Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color.

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7pm The Book Cellar Annual Spelling Bee

The Book Cellar / 4736 N. Lincoln / Free bookcellarinc.com The return of the annual humorous spelling competition for grownups. Celebrities judges and real prizes for no entrance fee, so arrive early to sign up for a slot.

7pm

The Next Objectivists Workshop Pratt Beach Street / Rogers Park / Free nextobjectivists.blogspot.com A poetry workshop hosted by the long-time literary organization.

Group meets near the water at Pratt Street Beach, just a few yards north of Pratt Street itself.

To submit your own literary event, or to correct the information on anything you see here, please drop us a line at cclapcenter@gmail.com.

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Featuring

Paulette Livers plus six open-mic features

The CCLaP Showcase A new reading series and open mic

Tuesday, September 23rd, 6:30 pm City Lit Books | 2523 N. Kedzie cclapcenter.com/events

To sign up in advance for an open mic slot, write cclapcenter@gmail.com August 29, 2014 | 7

Around that time shots of depleted rainforest filled the news— scars and interruptions, raw earth gleaming through. From above, wide-angle, looked to be a hungry disease stripping skin from bone. Cool image to carry depletion. Imported it, too, when I saw layers in my wardrobe, gaps where clothes were felled and taken.

Once, I’d joke there’s no space in the wardrobe—the closet, I learned to call it. Now I had all the space.

HIT THE Photo: “Canterbury East Signal Box,” by Alex Drennan [flickr.com/31074376@N06].

8 | CCLaP Weekender Used under the terms of his Creative Commons license.

ORIGINAL FICTION

SWITCH

BY MARK WAGSTAFF August 29, 2014 | 9

The sun shines all day. Night folds in like a blanket off the Pacific on slick, fine sand where we sank to impromptu love. Night bringing me all the new things I learned to worry for: dwindling wilderness, fires up-state, big government, Mexican killer bees, hungry young men who ride the night coast from the city. Fears brought by night and settled, in the spaces between old clothes. I’m getting calls from attorneys. They ask, do I want hard or easy.

In the sitcom world, a wife says, “Why don’t you lose those old things?”

Things, italic—relics of life pre-marriage. Jess never did sitcom—nor romcom, though she wants that. She has tight timing, carries a scene with her eyes.

A colonist, she supplanted my old things with strategic outfits, freebies, best deals, favours to girlfriends cutting it as designers. Sensational is her job spec, wholly boldface. We no longer go out together. The sun shines all day.

With her tall stands of dresses cleared, leftovers come to light. Surprised, how many old things I possess. Outmoded shirts, jeans with optimistic waistlines, promo tees for projects Jess so nearly had cooking. Things I shipped west: a once-best interview suit, an impulse Camden Lock jacket I wore maybe once on Venice. A stumpy green-and-white stripe tie, bunched to an intractable knot.

Where was I, years between? Breaking deals and dodging arrangements.

Migrating, ahead of debts and dead-eyed disappointments. Jess found me intriguing, then quirky. Her attorneys want done quick. The place sold, the Rose Avenue address ceded to some more sharply-defined couple. Jess needs to be closer the Hills, audition-ready. I’ll miss her ambition more than I’ll miss these warm-cherry streets.

I start to pack, two heaps on the unused bed, what to ditch and what to keep. A bag to sling over my shoulder—told her lawyers: take it all. No tussle, no inventory, no digging-out gift receipts. My generosity a little pinch of unease to carry down every red carpet. I pile clothes that don’t fit, scuffed collars, failed promotions. Anything that won’t suit life in a cheap town. Try to make each decision instinctive, not catch myself holding old things. The knotted tie feels greasy. Twenty year old polyester—unwashed, impervious to Pacific heat. Sniff it, not believing I taste sweat.

When syntax slips, when Jess has to say sorry for me, I tell people I’m from England. They smile encouragement or nod, mystified. To say I’m from Kent, from Canterbury means nothing. Why would it? This west coast July is a party where everyone earned the same treats. But the tie smells of English July: hesitant sun, quick scrabble of light. A school tie, it smells of release.

I got that tie leaving school. Not my school, on the edge of town, clipped on all sides by oilseed fields. My school with its spotless ethic: compete and exceed. I made a chart to countdown days to each holiday, envying friends whose mothers colluded in absence. Envying Daniel, who claimed to come from a troubled home. His parents hated each other. A queen, glammed-up in misery: Daniel, the friend I loved and would have traded my stiff, regular 10 | CCLaP Weekender

family for the thrillingly noxious air his dad breathed into every corner of their country slum. At night in Daniel’s cushioned room, watching him try on make-up, his father’s complaints and bigotry conveyed through the walls— challenged, overtopped by his mum’s untethered screech. Daniel would pout, plead for release from this damage. His sister rarely came home.

I ached to orbit Daniel’s star, but lacked his full-frontal glamour. At school I craved space with the cool kids, but their casual transgressions alarmed me.

That bright and lazy crowd I wanted for friends haunted the girls’ school down the lane. They harvested intelligent, confident partners who read books and smoked weed—girls who understood sex as a form of smartness. On the uninvited fringe, I watched them pair up, regroup and move on. They might throw me a smile when I played the fool. If I told Jess that, she’d take a halfbreath, lift an eyebrow that keen quarter-inch, say, “Played?” in the high rise up-talk she smothered over her Jersey miaow. I never got further than to tell her my childhood was quaint.

Daniel’s sister, Nicky, wasn’t at the girls’ school down the lane nor, that often, the school she was meant to be at. The less-achieving school, the police-aware, rowdy barn two miles beyond my parents’ suburb. Store-front conversations, reported by my mother, told that spitting and swearing, theft and foul humour, were all those kids knew. The hooker school, nothing too outlandish to be true.

I met Nicky at Daniel’s, I guess—though her room, a curtained-off segment of hallway, stayed vacant most times I called round. In her brother’s scandalous mouth, Nicky’s role as child of guilt seemed wholly miscast.

Daniel the eldest—there’d been a sister: unfunded, rejected at birth. Her name, appearance, whereabouts unknown. Daniel said his mother felt so bleached about it, she nagged his dad to an atonement insemination. That was Nicky.

Neat gossip, but nothing in Nicky suggested conscience or gratitude. Her dad tore her up in her absence, her mum didn’t defend her. Daniel, applying lipgloss, called her his project. Across cities and time-zones, I’ve scanned for redheads with burnt-copper eyes, buckshot freckles thrown into sunk-paper skin. A sullen, retracted mouth—indelibly English. A snuffed voice that made, “Fuck,” mean everything. She moved like a slugger’s best shot. I’d no choice but fall for Nicky.

Exams came—no one studied and they all did better than me. It meant a lot to my parents. I begrudged their foiled aspirations, though not enough to shoot my life down the pan. I would, as Jess deposed, move towards that.

Exams in the smoky days of June, then we stayed on at school a couple weeks after, hands in our pockets as all the little kids still buzzed around. We pursued aimless, tinkering projects, had classroom quizzes, slung ourselves flat on the buckled couches in our breakout room. Stretched on itchy grass behind the outbuildings, smoking and making plans for summer. For the school disco.

Lame, sure we knew—school disco? These were boys who could talk their way into the only nightspot in town. I’d hear about it next morning. On the two-stop train ride to Daniel’s village, I’d perfect those stories: outfoxing the August 29, 2014 | 11

bouncers, scoring free drinks, while college girls poured themselves around our young shoulders. I’d form those stories a seamless way, so Daniel might think I’d enabled the cool kids somehow. He wasn’t impressed. To him that nightclub stank, set against an evening’s worship of the mirror. But I told him those stories anyway, to smother my absent hours.

I’m not sure my parents noticed I had no friends. They had none either.

They talked about acquaintances, about random past events. Days on end, the phone never rang, the front door locked tight at nine. My existence, my conception, inexplicable to me now as then. I recall my mother glanced up from the TV listings, annoyed at this bothersome word. “Disco? At school?”

“After school.” I never tried to keep contempt from my voice. She wasn’t slim, rushed and anxious like Daniel’s mum. She wasn’t the cool kids’ mums with their pills and affairs. She was completely no one. “End of school.”

We hadn’t talked about end of school. I hadn’t applied for college or jobs. No one asked me about it. I had no urge to move in any direction.

Plausibly, the rest of my life could have passed in my room, drawing maps and experimenting on myself. Daniel was headed to art school, so he said.

Anything, he said, to get clear of this poison. He’d take Nicky: “She’s useful in a crush.” The cold way he missed me out of his plans numbed me on the train home.

My mother’s generation, liberated by war, taking tentative swipes at jobs before they married, had a task list to guide them. I don’t know she wondered what I’d do with my life, if she talked to my father about it in his off-hours between work and staring under the hood of his car, gripping the engine in a hold between solace and panic. She must have been dancing or something, to meet my father. We never found that conversation. This inconvenience—I’d be late, the door bolts couldn’t be closed at nine. “A disco?” Her tone spiked on whatever late hour’s scent might stain my expensive blazer.

“I won’t be in uniform. I’ll change.”

“You won’t take your best clothes.”

I had no best clothes. “I’ll wear Saturday clothes.”

“To school?” She rubbed her arms briskly, a gesture to settle dissent. “I want that uniform. I can get something on that, second hand.”

Summer stretched ahead, thin and unyielding.

I live with sunshine, don’t flinch anymore stepping from aircon into blank heat. Everyone on Venice and Main Street, in the regular grid from Lincoln to the boardwalk, is beautiful. Everyone pared and tinted by sunlight. Jess most of all. Her swags of gold hair, quick eyes, bankable features gained traction in the big world, as our ten-dollar lunch and stolen-mascara days faded. She’s a star. I’ll fall out the bio.

Check along Rose for recyclers, but the tree corner where they park their carts is dusty quiet. In England too, I tried telling Jess, seafront towns draw the homeless. I said she must have seen that back East. She doesn’t talk much 12 | CCLaP Weekender

about back East.

I can’t dump the sack—someone will take my picture, pin it up in accusing laminate, like a guy ditching a weapon. The people keep the city clean. So I head for the bus stop, looking for an unlocked dumpster. “A skip?” That inflection Jess commands made it exotically absurd. “What the freak’s that?

A skip? How does that explain what it is?”

A rough clatter opens behind me—a blonde, all in white, skateboards down the street. Stood easy, toes and ankles guiding her board, her hands streaming air. Oversize shades like reality goggles. She swerves by cars, navigating off minute muscle adjustment. Striking and strange, all in white.

Daniel knew how women worked—he showed me the walk, told me what to say, to build traction. His hair in a pretty pigtail, he straightened my spine again and again, pushed me to roll from the hips, to be the big dog. I wanted him at the disco with me. He said he had to manage his image, couldn’t waste it on some sweaty school hall. So who would be my Plus One? My nonfriends copped all the cool girls, paired in ironic couples, to dissolve and flow on momentary desire soon as the lights went down. I imagined how I’d say Hi, talk with someone who’d listen. A walk to the edge of the field, fingers touching through the dark.

Daniel warned me that Nicky was no Plus One. “First. She’s fourteen.

At a sixth form disco. Second.” He pulled his baggy jumper over his knees, to make a short woollen dress. “She doesn’t blend.”

“I could smuggle her in.”

“And there’s her shtick.” First person ever I heard use that word. “Plus she’s working.”

Somehow, she got employed as a maid at a passing trade hotel. She worked days, cutting school. Nights too, it seemed.

“But what if I ask her?”

He flicked his hair. “What if ?”

Call it the evolution of cunning: I went out to school next morning like always, but took a wide swing around, zigzagging back to the suburb’s edge, resolve morphing fast as a virus in my veins. Guess I was bricking it—defecating myself, as I explained to Jess’s faux-horror. Yet, though scared walking up to that other, bad school, I felt encased in fluid, packed in a bubble that showed only reflections. But what’s the life of a bubble?

“What the fuck are you?” Three pumped young bullies working their necks. Couldn’t Daniel have just slapped them silly?

“Looking for someone.”

Those boys didn’t like that. None of their clothes had quite enough give— overtight collars, sheer sleeves, well-padded muscular groins. The physique of angry hours spitting through windows and throwing knives at walls.

The least personable spoke for them. “Why you looking for someone?”

“He’s a bender,” one said.

August 29, 2014 | 13

“You a bender?”

The sceptic inspected me closely. “What is he?”

Effortless, they ringed me. The playground gathered and I understood too late my burgundy school jacket had incendiary meaning to that mob of greenand-white.

“It’s nice.” He had my lapel, relishing it through his fingers. I knew he’d pull me close to his face but the sudden, twisted knot in my spine, his nicotine breath, made me gag. Up close he looked bored. “Shitty fucking bender.”

“I’m looking for someone. A mate.” My strangled voice, slumming.

“Nicky Taylor.”

Their laughter, that boom when a close formation of jets or a siren—from nowhere—streaks by.

“By the hour?” the witty one said. “She your mate by the hour?” He made a screwing gesture, slurping and popping.

They knocked me around, to save face.

Not permitted a watch because I’d lose it, I moved through unquantified lateness. Register would have been called, my square left blank—to be filled with a red circle when I didn’t show at lunchtime. Everywhere, people looked sure of what they were doing: on the bus into town, at the bus station where old women wheeled shopping baskets across the oily concrete. Where longhaired girls held clip folders to their chests, waiting a ride to college. Some may be famous now, some dead. The town smelled brisk, its business driven, in that pre-silicon age, on a sparkly chatter of typing.

The Poplar Lodge Hotel lay out on the ring, a 1920s bankrupt mansion, re-purposed as secluded rooms for salesmen off the highway. My uniform stained with truancy, damp heat melding my shirt to my spine, I gawped in at the racks of tourist leaflets and bric-a-brac bought joblot. At the receptionist in cornflower blue, her hair knotted, her appearance sleek with tradition. My plastic shoes struggled with the dense carpet as I crept into her eye-line.

She continued sorting index cards into boxes. “We filled our quota. If you want a summer job, you have to come in May.”

“I don’t want a job.”

“You don’t want a room?” Twenty-two, twenty-four, her trim jacket and pussy-bow collar posed deep, official dignity in her young face.

Whatever I smelled on myself, she smelled it too. “Nicky Taylor. I need to see her.”

“Again?” She leaned on the counter. “She’s working. What’s wrong with you boys?”

Any of the cool kids could have turned that girl, unpinned her hair and beguiled her. “A minute. Just to see her.”

“I don’t know where she is. We have sixty rooms. Why don’t you come back when she’s finished?”

“When’s that?”

She swept her hand towards the dirty sunlight. “Go to school.”

When my mother got home, maybe she thought it too late to be angry. I 14 | CCLaP Weekender

hadn’t any sure alibi, she didn’t believe I fell off a bus. Hardly ever had time alone with her, my father always nearby reading the paper—dismantling valves and washers—watching TV the way people did then, who still remembered when TV was stern and important. Sometimes, he’d stay up for late movies.

“That James Bond,” he would say. “That Steve McQueen.”

Grudging, my mother made lunch—I watched her, so unlike Daniel’s mum whose sharp, pecking movements expressed her constant repulsion of brute, masculine forces. My mother didn’t eat but couldn’t hold her weight, a barrelling round her hips made larger by elastic-rim skirts, the only kind she’d wear. Daniel’s mum wore jeans. I wondered how it was to have a thrilling mother. I’d never seen mine naked and couldn’t imagine what difference it might make.

“Are you still going to that disco?” she said.

In the oddness of an unplanned afternoon, there seemed a chance to open conversation.

“Everyone’s going. I need a Plus One.”

“A what?”

I imagined a mother cool enough to go with me.

“Someone to go with.”

She swayed on a rare gust of curiosity. “You want to take someone?”

“It’s a disco.”

“Who do you know?”

I didn’t know anyone. I could have cried, she could have held me, our bodies tight. “Nicky Taylor.”

A shaken scowl, the name already forgotten.

Any money I had went on train fare to Daniel’s. I tried walking to his village a couple of times, but the country lanes were sinks of sadness. On evening trains, young men sprawled drinking lager, saying what they would have done if they hadn’t been wasted. They seemed to share the same experiences daily.

On evening trains, young women redid their make-up, practised swearing in rollicking voices. I couldn’t grasp what made everyone different to me.

Daniel, creamily draped in his chair, languidly flicked through pictures of men with large pricks. He had subscriptions to Dutch addresses. “Him I could manage,” he told me. “I could tame him.” An experienced virgin, no one local met Daniel’s standards.

He had my lapel, relishing it through his fingers. I knew he’d pull me close to his face but the sudden, twisted knot in my spine, his nicotine breath, made me gag. Up close he looked bored. “Shitty fucking bender.”

August 29, 2014 | 15

His dad stayed clear of Daniel’s room, scared of contagion by glamour.

His mum would knock for permission. So when the door cracked back on screeching hinges, I jumped, scared of attack. Daniel’s head dangled over the chair back, staring upside down at Nicky.

“You dirty fucker.”

“Hello sweetheart. Good day at the office?” Daniel’s adam’s apple strived against his throat.

“Why the fuck you come to my work?”

Daniel’s gaze lolled towards me, pouting disapproval. “Did you invade troll-girl’s doss house? Bad. Bad boy.”

“Just to say hi.”

Daniel scrutinised an engorged penis. “He skived it, darling. Bunked off to see you. I had to lie for him.”

“You did?” I sounded grateful.

“I told them you took a big wank down a drain.”

“Why the fuck you come to my work?” Nicky stood over me, hair tangled, her freckled, acned face free of all generosity. “They said. I knew it was you.”

“He’s after you, honey. Don’t be shy, boy.”

Nicky’s features had nothing elastic, no complicity. Her red-gold eyes hard and set, dead skin dappled her lips.

“Want to come to my school disco?”

“Oh, fuck sake.” Daniel slid to his feet. “Boy’s a novice. A knobby novice.

Nicola.”

She glanced, thin lips curled.

“This sad excuse for a youth wants your company at his sad excuse for a party. He craves your lean fury and nice tits. There will be mild alcohol there and things to steal.” He caressed her face. She allowed it. “Do him a favour, baby. His life’s all downhill after.”

She broke from him, shot me a look. “You’re shit.”

He shut the door softly behind her. I expected a joke, but he looked stern, enlarged with duty. “Please don’t insult my sister with cheap come-ons. She’s worth a thousand of those stupid cows that fuck your non-friends.”

“She’s fantastic.”

Gently, as though tired, he laid his cheek on the door.

High over where the sun rises, the studio hills take shape. Coming from a land of small eruptions, to me the hills’ jagged heights are the establishing shot of some epic thriller, a wash of matte, a digital framing for awakening or goodbye. I love the business. It doesn’t disappoint. You can lose all your ghosts in those hills. By the retail barn at Lincoln and Rose, drunks pass the bag and I watch a wired, young woman zigzag her cart through the parking lot. Security look on—old uncles watching a toddler steer a toy stroller. See, Jess? I learned your language. The boulevard ripples and hums with pollution, the sun shines on a hundred miles of low, flat houses while, up in the hills and 16 | CCLaP Weekender

chilled in the city, projects get inked. All the movie stars down-town, setting tables and weaving hair. All the writers out in Hawthorne, living on crackers and capsules.

The day before, I didn’t want to go to the disco—saw myself on the wall, watching everything unroll without me. My countdown chart showed two days left, nothing after. I tucked my shirt and knotted my tie—passive actions repeated hundreds of times, never to be unlearned. My mother sponged and brushed my blazer till my truancy never happened. She smoothed my collar, squared my lapel. I wondered, should I have kissed her.

Everyone bored with school, with ennui—a word the cool kids caught from Sartre. We lay behind the sheds smoking—I sucked up jokes thrown at me, questions why I bunked off. Not known for subversion, I gambled on concealment and lost my audience. “Home with mummy,” one kid said, the matter settled.

Maybe then, we understood how we’d start to dismantle, our jokes and antipathies empty, with school done. A kid stood up. “This sucks.” We looked at him, indistinct in English sunlight. “This sucks,” he repeated quietly.

Someone laughed.

I went home with Daniel after school, his selfish glamour unnerving in the tight, busy train. Entirely himself, or that version of himself that suited him then, I struggled with his blatancy, his Manhattan slang and femmy good looks. He made me feel stunted.

“Told you twice, love. More than twice.” His pout turned me over. “I’m not decorating your arm at your silly soiree.”

“Your school.”

The uniform didn’t touch him—he wore it like dress-up. “No, girlfriend.

Three-thirty tomorrow it ceases to be my school. No way I give nish for it after.” He tapped the window. “I got real life. College. Get appreciated for once.”

“I appreciate you.”

“That’s a big help.”

As we got off the train, a schoolboy voice shouted something puerile.

Daniel half-turned, dropped a shoulder, blew a mean kiss. Just walking to his house, I got nervous how nothing about us synced. I slept in an airtight suburb. He took moonlit glides on the scruffy rim of an old village. My father kept a boxy saloon he tinkered with and rarely drove. Daniel’s dad had a red tune-up job—yeah, Jess, I keep trying the lingo—that he slammed to the floor and scorched into the night every time his wife’s resentment clipped his balls.

The car was gone when we got to Daniel’s that time, the oil-smeared cinder patch where it parked, black and churned from sports tyres.

His mum, unblocking the kitchen sink in a wallow of chemical fumes said, “Your dad’s not home,” her voice punctured from working the plunger.

Readily responsive, Daniel clasped her nervy waist, kissed her, nuzzled August 29, 2014 | 17

her hair. She calmed, assured of something beyond my limited vocabulary.

“We’ll get pizza.” He followed me upstairs singing, ‘Say a Little Prayer for You.’

“Nicky in?” I sounded hopeful.

He chuckled. “She’s making money.”

His dad and Nicky weren’t home when I left. For once, Daniel walked me to the station. Midsummer twilight faded in thin ribbon clouds speckled with faint stars.

Awkward, I said, “We’ll stay in touch,” like a statement.

“I’m here for summer. We don’t do vacations.”

“Where is your dad?”

“Maybe hunting the lost princess. It’s not the first time.”

“Wasn’t giving her up his idea?”

“She doesn’t know what he’s like. Me and Nix know.”

“Want to meet her?”

He stopped—a dramatic trick, signature and loaded. “Please, please think before you verbalise.”

“Is your mum okay?”

“I’ll hide the knives.”

We stood in abstract proximity. Down the track had nothing to see.

“I’ll go there.” His arms caught the distance. “The real world. Nicky, too.

This town won’t hold her.”

“What about your mum?”

“She scrubs up. There are men.”

He never asked what I’d do. A single light, miles away, enlarged along the track. “Will you ask Nicky about tomorrow?”

“Really want in her pants, don’t you? It’s okay. I see it. She’s a dish. She’s not a virgin.”

Nothing sane or clever to say. “Doesn’t matter.”

He laughed—the stagy laugh he used on straights. “Honey, I am not surprised your bed stays cold.”

But he was a virgin, we both were. “Tell it like it is.”

He held my arm, friendly—not loving. “Men you pick up and put down.

Men fit love between fights. Women shoot different juice.”

Someone opened every window on the train. I froze as summer night raced past.

Had to hurry, to catch the last bus to my suburb. I never got bored enough to explain to Jess our car-poor culture as kids. As I strove through town, lawabiding pubs turned customers out on waves of beery warmth, to amble home in threes and fours, to try their luck at the one nightclub. Couples fondled on benches or clipped along, hands tight-locked as though distrusting each other.

My tie off, my jacket folded inside-out, I could maybe have passed as a young office boy, with tricks and connections, with steps marked into the future. Restaurants with waiters in black bum-freezers displayed men in suits, gesturing dripping forkfuls at women in structured dresses. For a moment it 18 | CCLaP Weekender

seemed plausible I could turn back, wait the end of Nicky’s shift at the Poplar Lodge. Once I’d navigated her anger, surely she’d see me for real? But I’d miss the last bus.

Streets back home lay rigid with dark. Away from the main road nothing stirred—trim, modern houses set and motionless, sleeping bodies freighted into tomorrow. Every door and window closed and dark: no dogs, no music, no sex—however sex sounded. No clue in the flavourless air. I took detours, walked up a road just to walk back. A momentary disturbance, a flaw in the fabric. Darkness settled and everyone sleeping.

Checked the front door twelve, fifteen times—crawled upstairs so the treads wouldn’t creak, carpet wiry on my fingers. Stood at my parents’ door, but no snoring, no muttered curses—no anxious cry of protest in dreams of falling. Hurried and clumsy, I finished off quick in the toilet and crept to bed.

“Be funny, not doing this.” My mother spoke to the tie knot, crinkling my lapels just to pull them straight. Sixteen, old enough to try anything. “Be funny.” She brushed my shirt.

If I’d held her arm or clutched her hands or done something, if I’d done something, what might have been different? If I’d brushed back her hair, given her some incentive. I snatched the bag of clothes and went for the door.

Out the parking lot, the young woman’s cart grinds on the lip of the sidewalk. She wrenches it straight, its rags and cardboard and failed electronics clatter ‘round at the skew of the wheels. Her coat, her tee-shirt and jeans the muddy brown of tough wear and hard ground. Her hair looks recently-cut: a strip of untanned neck, some razor-nicks reaching into her beach-front crop.

Jess refused to sign the petition to have the boardwalk sanitised. In the longrun, she told me, you get credible word-of-mouth off liberal positions.

See the woman’s shoulders clench as she squares for the ridge up to Lincoln. The sun catches wind-shields and paint-jobs like flashbulbs in the pit. I jog to overtake her, sweat breaking on my spine. Purposeful—they’re always so purposeful—she doesn’t see me. “Miss. Excuse me.”

Eyes viscous and bloated, her mingled features a little Anglo, Turkish maybe, and something else, some race without pity. Her full lips bear deep vertical cracks. She has cheekbones starlets would kill for.

Hold out the sack of unwanted things. “Clothes. Good clothes. Shirts.

Tees. There’s an English leather jacket. Not hardly worn, look. It ain’t lousy.”

A few folds of colour meet the light. Buttons and destitute logos.

So impressive, how she does nothing but stare me out. She maybe sees me some different way to what I left in the mirror. Sculpture maybe, or a raving evangelist clown, or as something unsettled in need of cautious treatment. I push the bag at her. “Look at this stuff. Like new.”

The soul-boys came to school in turned-up jeans and button tees. Cool kids August 29, 2014 | 19

wore grand-dad shirts—hook cuffs, no collars. I saw waistcoats. I mean vests.

Just us babies wore uniform on our last day. No one else had clothes in a bag.

Daniel bunked off—time with his mum, I guess. Everyone took the piss of me, even our form teacher, striding into the room in his tracksuit, asked did I know what day it was. Not funny, but everyone laughed.

We tidied our breakout room, cleared lockers, ripped down posters—space for next year’s bands. The whole day, we had one real lesson: Miss Stichbury, so straight-edge she couldn’t pass up that final chance to convince us maths was fun. She liked to say maths was fun. I liked Miss Stichbury—quick and neat, only presentable woman on the staff. For our last forty minutes together she got us folding paper, dabbing glue, building cubes and cylinders. She made a dodecahedron—coolest maths I ever saw. Guess she practised, in whatever hidden stretch of town spinster teachers lived. She was only about thirty-five.

That seemed old then.

We built our shapes into a sci-fi city, tubes strung around to suggest some future high-rise transit.

She looked us over, a little flushed. “That’s maths.”

Behind the sheds smoking: young men in adult clothes, and me. I’d given up trying to claim a uniform wasn’t uniform if no one else wore it. That didn’t fly. Lower year kids all wore it.

“I’m going,” Robert said, or maybe Tim. “Got last assembly.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go to the pub.” Simon, or maybe David. “Get started.”

These boys I wanted as friends had money for beer and cigarettes. They had sex and did nothing cut-price. They catalogued their parents’ flaws as a scrapbook of future moves.

Robert or Tim, Simon or David stood up, too cool to brush the dead grass that hung off their jeans. Scissoring upright, resetting belts and cuffs. No one said it was the last time we’d lay there.

One by one, they slid through the tricky fold in the hedge. A habit of caution, like we’d get detention that day. I heard their voices fade down the sandy path, that final, harsh laughter.

Two-thirty, last assembly: every end of term we sang the brave songs,

So impressive, how she does nothing but stare me out. She maybe sees me some different way to what I left in the mirror. Sculpture maybe, or a raving evangelist clown, or as something unsettled in need of cautious treatment.

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sniggered through praise of achievement. Every July was someone’s last time and we’d move up. Now we’d topped out, no next time for us. A scruffy fringe to the lower years in their shirts and blazers: our replacements, who squinted round at us—the new daddies.

The staff—no one said faculty then—crammed on-stage in restive proximity, while the Head ran numbers on matches won, records preserved and broken. Who’d been accepted for sixth form college, who’d go other places. I watched Miss Stichbury cross her legs, neatly tug her hem. A spotlight caught her raised knee. She looked turned inward, solving algebra behind her eyes.

The Head wittered about the disco, attempted some joke drawn off the dance moves of his implausible young manhood. A few younger staff looked embarrassed. Miss Stichbury seemed to be counting her fingers.

As we stood to shout the school song, that thought—I’m not coming back—flushed everything from me. That frame to my life, the hated structure, fallen through no greater effort than passing days. The piano stopped. No control anymore—little kids bundled around like back in nursery. I looked left and right—saw no one I knew. Laughter and shouting rose in dusty sunlight.

Phys Ed teachers, men of action, scattered chairs to start retooling the room for the disco.

An ex-schoolboy in the wrong clothes, I dived towards Miss Stichbury.

“Have a good holiday.” She smiled, already moving past.

“That was great. What we did. That city.”

She hesitated, weighing my rushed tone. “There’s a whole field of maths games. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“I want to do that. Maths games.”

She looked puzzled. “Are you going on to ‘A’ Level? I didn’t think— No, you’re not.”

“I could— apply.”

Her eyes tightened. A teacher swooped in and, easy as a quiet word, channelled her away.

Across the field, the din of little kids as they surged onto buses, as engines rattled to life, came hardly louder than high wind shifting the treetops. I scragged myself through the fold in the hedge, in Saturday clothes, my uniform stashed in what used to be my locker when I was a schoolboy.

If I ever told this to Jess, who at sixteen took drama class nights and weekends, she’d ask if I felt transformed, guided to some new journey.

I glanced back a couple of times, waiting some Phys Ed teacher—they patrolled the perimeter for a shifty smoke—to stick his stubbled head through the bushes and roar me into detention. But the rules had vaporised.

The track fed out on a quiet road by a pub, popular with farm lads who dealt weed and ran parties in barns too remote for the cops to care. Boys I wanted as friends went there to meet girls. Simon or David—James maybe— stayed late one night and woke in bed with the barmaid. She fellated him and cooked breakfast. It might have been true. Like Jess always says: take the August 29, 2014 | 21

filmic explanation.

Three hours till the disco: I had time to go home and back, but how could I? I had cash my mother grudgingly offered—“In case,” she’d said, her mouth down-turned. Enough for a couple of drinks.

The lane broadened, acquired well-tended houses from the 1930s expansion of the city beyond its Victorian rows. I watched a boy and girl— brother and sister, or lovers—their serious, private school uniform tailored and grown-up, push open a front door on a clash of piano music and shouted hellos. A hallway of dried flowers and reflections. The girl turned to shut the door, her adult gaze brushing past me.

Gradually, streets shifted into smaller, older shapes—the artisanal leaded terraces about to be highly desired. The summer before I started secondary school, my mother took me visiting in one of those cottagey streets. Only time that I met anyone my mother described as a friend. A woman her age—pretty, the way of fragile people. She kept a wall of books and dainty things under glass, spoke deafly, with what I’ve learned to call sweet cherry lips. When we left, my mother told me the woman had been away, “For her nerves.” We never visited again.

In dense California sunlight, my unwanted clothes lap and curl on the sidewalk—the bright-toned litter of oh-so strategic brunches. The young woman with the cart emptied them out and kept the trash sack, folding it carefully in her library of polythene bags. She steers her cart over Lincoln.

Hot hummers flash by, German Whips, cop cars, rigs hauling gas. Security guys from the big box stores gesture at me and the fallen clothes. I feel bad for the leather jacket, but someone will find it. I feel bad for the movies that didn’t get made, prematurely trailed on those tees.

My cellphone beeps. A guy wants Jess to do something with Vitamin Water. Ethical and responsible. She’s a fit, he tells me. She’s all about values. I don’t care how he got my number—some outdated tip sheet maybe, or brittle new intern in her agent’s back office. It’s good that people want her. She’s an attitude they can cash. It’ll be good when she glides on-stage to pick up that little tin man. That day will come. I’ll watch the reruns. I tell this guy, I’ll mention his pitch. He asks if I want to help her or not, if I’ll see her, like, this hour. Wired for chances like everyone in this town. I say I’m on it, and block his number.

Across the street the bus goes to Westwood, UCLA. Pick up a connection there to Sunset and the Hills. Takes an hour and then some—we did it, couple of times, when Jess’s car was on the bricks. To me, to my foreign eyes, she never looked so pretty as on the bus. This side of the street, bus goes to LAX. Canterbury that long-since afternoon: all tourists and furtive work breaks.

The kids who usually ruled the town from four till seven were all home early 22 | CCLaP Weekender

to change for parties, to pack for family vacations, their uniforms bundled on wardrobe floors, out of mind. Could have gone to Daniel’s, but instinct said he wasn’t there—he had talent for quick, harsh decisions. Beneath the trees at Poplar Lodge, a man in smooth, tight linen climbed out from a low-slung roadster, moved briskly to the boot to haul out bags. A dark woman in a green dress resolved from the hallway with a bellboy whose oversize jacket looked like a disguise. The two men gathered luggage while the woman watched, swinging a little from side to side. She stayed a couple of seconds after the men went in, then followed, smoothing the hips of her dress. I watched the hotel half an hour.

Back in town, the cheap cafe where kids hung out shut shop, its signs folded and chairs tipped against each other like drunks. I asked a waitress sweeping crumbs if I could have a can of orange. She rolled her cigarette to the side of her mouth, “Piss off.” Knocked my leg with her broom, wiping dust on my trousers. I walked back to school, already tired.

Teachers who volunteered to police the party stood around—some still in day clothes, sucking plastic cups of white wine. Grossly early, I was their joke: hot to trot—whatever that meant—more eager than I’d ever been for class.

Baited, I had to sponge it up. These grown men: some had wives at home, some had children.

The hall strung with disco lights, but imperfect blackout leaked grubby sunlight to stain their cheery promise. The hired DJ put on a tape and read a magazine. Two people alone in a vast room, we didn’t acknowledge each other. I started upstairs to check on my things—a bellow sprawled me flat.

“Upstairs is out of bounds.”

I examined this teacher’s face. Weren’t we adults? “Left something in my locker.”

He looked baffled. “You don’t have a locker.”

Kids I didn’t know showed up, their chinos and soft shirts made me look slapdash. My parents worked, I didn’t get why they never had money. I talked to those boys about nothing, about their sixth form colleges. “I don’t have plans. I’ll see what comes.” I thought it sounded cool.

Mr Deighton kept bar—a chemistry teacher, he’d labelled drinks with formulae. You could tell he didn’t like vacation. “What’s your poison?”

I had to save cash. “Is water free?”

“In what sense?”

The first female arrived. A boy called Settles brought his sister—her overbite shaped her face into startled disgust. She seemed unwilling to touch anything. Through five years of lessons, games and detentions, I didn’t know Settles or anyone.

Simon and David, James and Tim and Robert arrived, augmented with slim, intelligent women in clothes that tracked every young line. Simon pointed me out, raised a synthetic cheer. Their girlfriends, if they recognised me, didn’t show it. David breezed over—years later I’d know that casual, selfpossessed hurry in publicists pitching boldface. His girlfriend, Tina, stared August 29, 2014 | 23

through Lennon glasses that pinched a cute ridge on her nose. A hot secretary type, you’d tell casting.

David called me the nickname I hated. “Thought you’d bring someone.”

Why would he think that? “Just come to dance.” Comedy, my best defence.

“Hey. He’s dancing.”

Because David couldn’t be ignored and because the joke centred on me, the rest came over. They called me that nickname. I answered. The women talked among themselves, but Tina went on staring.

“You dancing?”

“Show us.”

“He got spastic moves.” James jerked his limbs, made curdled noises.

“Go in, I’ll show you.” I could stand their attention one last time.

“Thought you’d bring someone.” His audience established, David upped his voice.

“Yeah.” Robert twinkled against me. “Where’s your mate?”

Instinct said ride it. “Who?” Simon looked up from building a smoke. “That glamorous young lady.

With the sister at slut school.”

“I don’t know where he is. We’re not close.”

“Not what I heard.”

“It’s lies.” I had to say that. Had to.

Laughing, Simon and his woman went out. The rest trailed into the hall, their catty disgust killing other kids’ conversations.

Tina glanced back. “You going to college?”

“No.” Seen from outside, fragmentary disco colour gashed the hall windows.

Simon would have taken his girl to the smoking patch by the sheds. To avoid them, I walked the opposite way: past the oil store, the boiler house, till I saw some kid by the gate hut. I’d sat in rooms with him: good with numbers, algebra, he knew all the nodes and vectors. Out of uniform he looked taller, lean and powerfully average—the build and looks that pass unseen to accomplish everything. I ducked aside, the gravel damp from something leaking.

Headlights struck a milky pool from darkness. A woman’s voice, cautious through the trees. “I said I’d be here. That’s a nice shirt.”

“Took me ages to choose.” He sounded modestly proud of his indecision.

In jacket and jeans, Miss Stichbury looked elfin, her hair shorter than his. He moved close. She touched his arm. “I’ve got my car.” Their shadows blended. A careful door shut, then another. A pause extended five, ten seconds. An engine pearled out on the dark, and lights swung into the country.

Stumbling in the sweet, tarry scent of the oil shed, I felt the night bust apart.

When it’s dark here and I’m on the terrace, kids scavenging through the sage brush and screams of cop cars on the south wind, a prickly sense of waste 24 | CCLaP Weekender

smothers everything before Jess. Places, people, nights beneath starlight and rain clouds—all flimsy compared with her white-hot business. What could I almost have done, given that same dedication?

Everywhere here, beautiful women make mad bank from their dreams.

Everyone’s a creative, their networks and profiles pimped with must-have product. It’s good for your lungs just to breathe the same air. Sure, there are the recyclers, the Spanish cleaners looking beat. Beachcombers whose granddaddies OD’d on government acid. Food truck guys with difficult stories back home. Nearly people, clinging to some slim credit, something they walked-on in years ago. Me, good at nothing but taking calls and booking time. The bus comes every fifteen minutes, but there’s traffic, always traffic.

As I stumbled back into the hall, I saw the whole scene laid before me. Kids danced, fingers pulling complex implications out the air. Their sisters and sisters’ friends jigged on the spot with awkward rigour. Hate to think any of them stayed in that town—still there now, collecting their kids from school and smoothing clean sheets. Mostly, the party sprawled in corners: boys stretched flat, girls on elbows, gazing astutely the way people did before devices. Some wine got spilt, slicking blue and red in the lights. The DJ pumped beats while science nerds, our future tech billionaires, bellowed about graphic equalisers.

I reeled back into the lobby.

No one else would have come in uniform, and hers made for a smart, cunning choice. Her hair in folds of lava across her shoulders, spilling front and back on the bright green jacket of her hated school. Her green-and-white tie in a bunchy knot, her thready white shirt; she wore trousers—acrylic, heavy green trousers. Among flippant party styles, she looked the shit.

Whispering started—I heard them: “Hooker school.”

Nicky surveyed the room steadily—every nerve, every sinew, I guessed, could flash anytime.

“Great to see you.” My voice broke too high. “Want a drink?”

Kids looked away in sudden, loud conversation. She moved towards the young history teacher corralled to help Mr Deighton tend bar. Down the queue, Settles’s sister drew breath.

Nicky zoned on the young teacher. “Wine.”

Mr Hirst didn’t wear a tie. He hinted in class at socialist interests. Unskilled with adolescent women, he tried to be friendly. “We have to check. With the wine. We have to be sure you’re sixteen.”

Nicky tapped the table. “How you do that, then?”

His eyes fixed on her.

“He’s sixteen.” Her hand flung sideways, two fingers shooting the ground.

“He’ll have two wines. He’s sixteen.”

Alerted, Mr Deighton looked me over. “Well, he’s a sensible chap.”

Mr Hirst turned to Settles’s sister.

“I was before her.” Perhaps not said with full conviction, but Settles’s August 29, 2014 | 25

sister didn’t fold. “Why does she get served? I’m next.”

“That’s right.” Nicky’s voice thrillingly fractured. “You’re next.”

I scraped just enough for two wines and took the plastic cups, shaking.

Settles’s sister turned from the table. “Slut.”

Nicky watched the girl go to her friends. Like clockwork, they turned to stare.

A little booze in amateur blood, the presence of girls, the realisation many of us wouldn’t meet again had loosened the dance-floor. Couples angled each other. Boys stomped and bellowed. Girls lined-out, watching each other’s feet.

Numbers swapped and promises made.

“These your friends?” Nicky folded one arm beneath her tight breasts, the elbow of her other cupped in her hand, the plastic wine beaker loosely pinched at its rim.

James and David lolled against a wall, splayed legs keeping their patch clear of dancers. Tim and Robert patrolled among couples—they had clipboards, examined kids’ moves, pretended to grade them. When a boy gestured to back off, they wagged their imaginary pens. People stared at Nicky—at her uniform, her hair, her packed, incendiary shape.

Tim and Robert paddled over. “Is it fancy dress?”

Tim used that foul nickname. “This your girlfriend?”

“Yeah.” Nicky glared. “This yours?”

Holding that stupid clipboard, Tim made like to write something down.

“Suppose where you live you take what you get.”

Robert grinned. “And you don’t have to carry her books. Not big books.”

Years later, when Jess asked me to walk a scene where she told some guy to shove it, in a romcom that stalled pre-production, I rehearsed her with what Nicky did then. She took a long pull of wine, hand tightening on the beaker, shook her hair—quick as that, flicked the cup at Robert. He jumped. Nothing came out—she’d finished it. She folded stray hair from her face. “Flinch.” Jess got it fifth take.

David had climbed to his feet, tugging the curtains for balance. Afternoon booze must have got him—he yanked forward, stumbling through dancers.

Pushed and slapped by guys on show to their girls, he headed for Nicky, “Hey, hey,” oblivious to jabs at his spine. “Nicky.”

She watched him tangle with some kid whose girl was showing her arm like to say it got bruised. I glimpsed Tina channelling through the crowd, her black shirt repelling party frocks.

“You know him?”

Nicky ignored me.

David tore from the angry couple. They followed, Tina catching them up.

Tim and Robert lurked behind me, in a crowd distracted from dancing.

“Didn’t say you’d be here.” David, earnestly drunk, caught Nicky’s hand.

“Don’t say nothing. Ain’t that how you like it?”

“You said,” he sounded hurt. “You said we’d keep on.”

Her red-tinged eyes widened. “We live in the same town.”

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The girl with the arm and her boyfriend got either side—a very married, synchronised barrage of complaint. The kid poked David’s chest. “Say sorry, huh? Say sorry.”

Tina didn’t force her way: the crowd moved for her, seeming to recognise something coldly grown-up. I’d seen her round town: pale, serious, those glasses pulling attention on her dark eyes. She prised aside the angry girl, gripped David’s shoulder. “Come on.” Her quiet voice clear against the music.

Nicky watched, expressionless.

Tina faced David around, then looked back, “Work it out.”

Nicky settled her chest a notch higher.

Split-second, I thought Tina would fly. But she led her man away.

Hard, irritable breath spackled down. A Phys Ed teacher barged through knotted bodies, his tobaccoand-chilli spit slicing a path. He didn’t want explanations. He slung us out.

Simon or David—James maybe—stayed late one night and woke in bed with the barmaid.

She fellated him and cooked breakfast.

It might have been true. Like Jess always says: take the filmic explanation.

These Hispanic women here waiting—they see it, cleaning house. Condoms scraped from under beds, residue tidied from bathroom shelves. Their husbands drive cabs, their sons clean pools. They might notice a white guy waiting the bus, a character in motion.

One woman tells beads through fingers scarred with cleaning acid. In San Bernardino one time, checking locations—that’s how we booked our out-of-work days—Jess surprised me in some little cream-wash church by hitting her knees, hands together the way kids do saying grace. Stupidly needing small-talk, I said I didn’t know she was Catholic or even religious. In that little church, she told about Jersey—street corner justice, the hustle, the scramble for love. The upright Italian priest who stopped a bullet, who kindled her dreams of the stage—the stage, chrissake. Where was I, all along?

Outside school, the bass-line pulsed. I racked my bones for how to start with her. “Thanks for coming tonight.”

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“Dan paid me. To shut you up.” She leant forward, her jacket clutched over. “Where we going?”

I wondered what he paid and what it bought. “Got two ciggies left.”

“I got this.” The half-empty bottle gleamed blackly.

“You took it?”

“That young bloke. Teacher. Said I’d give him a feel of these. Come on. I told him five minutes.”

The idea Mr Hirst might chase us, demanding his share, seemed comic, but my laughter sounded wrong, away from Daniel’s room.

“Whole house can hear you two. Dunno why you don’t go with him.”

But her brother wouldn’t have me.

Simon and his girl had clearly made love. They lay in easy estrangement— him propped on the shed smoking, her flat on the ground, picking at stars with her fingers. A taste of weed and completion frothed from their bodies.

Nicky froze, instantly angry.

Almost no light behind the sheds: just the glow of Simon’s cigarette, distant starlight, the dulled whiteness of Nicky’s shirt. Four people in outer space. “We got chucked out.”

Thin, breathless noise—first Simon, then his girl, slipped from ironic laughter to stoned incoherence. Simon pointed me out, shaking. “Chucked out? He say chucked out?”

The girl twirled her hands like hippie dancing. “Said we’d miss something.

Didn’t I say? I said if,” nickname, “shows up, then pants get pissed.”

Nicky sucked on the bottle. Simon scrabbled upright. “This your date?

This bottle-swilling sort?”

His girl collapsed laughing. “Slut school.”

Nicky said, quite ordinarily, “You take him. I got her.” A sharp elbow jogged me forward.

“It’s fancy dress night.” Nicky stood over the girl. “You get the prize for best car crash.”

Two sounds: a hard crunch, a grungy squelch, as Nicky kicked the girl’s face—four, five, six times. Noise split the night, the girl clutched her head, screaming through her fingers.

Nicky spun at me. “Go on.”

Battling inertia, Simon lurched up. Clueless, I butted his stomach. He threw a headlock, tarry fingers frisking my teeth. I bit, pain paralysing my jaw.

Pushed away, he came at me again till Nicky’s kick crumpled him on the shed wall.

“Go on.” She punched my back.

I grabbed his ears—a ludicrous grip—to smack his head at the wall.

“Hard.”

By the throat, I drove down his skull with a definite crack.

Could hardly run, all of me shaking. I chased Nicky, a shadow against a dark sky. Stumbling at her, my face hit her fist.

I staggered, quavering and, though all around lay black and unbroken, the 28 | CCLaP Weekender

twinkling of her knife at my chest, its bright, precise emphasis, gleamed in my skin with the brilliance of metal toned to take life.

“Stupid fucking bumboy.” Her free hand punched me again. The knife took another sip of me. “He could have had me while you fuck about. I said: we’re doing this.”

Breath sobbed from me.

She slapped my face with hard, strategic purpose. “Shut up, you stupid queer. We hurt them. They’re after us. Say nothing.”

Strange by night, the hedge solid and spiny, while behind us the school floated on yellow haze. Someone hit the klieg lights—the main building a vast industrial ship stilled amidst a black ocean. I expected uniforms, running with flash-lights.

As Nicky’s rage spilled out, I found the way through the hedge. She barged in, kicking at briars, getting scratched. “These are my good school trousers.”

The accusation lodged with me—not from choice, I still hear her say it.

Weirdly, the lane seemed lighter—oilseed rape pushing out its sickly glow.

“Where is this?”

“There’s a pub down the end.”

“If I wanted fuckers letching at me, I’d go home.”

“Is your dad back?”

“Get it right: you’re my brother’s bitch, not mine.”

“He thought your dad went to look for your sister.”

Daniel sometimes grabbed the front of my shirt, side-on as we walked.

As emphasis, as warning—he made it camply comic. Nicky pinched when she grabbed, right where the skin split open. I folded in after her fist. “You say nothing about that cunt.”

A siren broke across the dark. Think before you verbalise. “I really like you.”

She pushed me away. “You’re piss.”

What do I regret? For a long time, I regretted leading her over the field instead of down the drive. We could have been in town, cadging lager off pissheads in the park. Through stupid, macho daydreams, I regretted not fighting her. I thought she’d have to fight to be in love. But that moment, when we fell from the fields into the country road, a speeding car shot by: the red squall of some drunk, some hitman making tracks. The car swerved into the bend, its lights on Nicky’s face as the piston wave streamed out her hair—red ribbons flying, falling back on pale skin. I’d never seen beauty so perfectly staged. I said nothing. I regret it.

From the pub’s open door an old tune played out: ‘They drove for miles and miles up those twisting turning roads. Higher and higher and higher they climbed’.

She looked at me. I had nothing. From her inside pocket, she took a man’s wallet—slim, stippled leather. “Scotch.”

Blondes at the bar, no older than Nicky, leaned right around to check me.

A country voice said something, flattened laughter blew like smoke. I didn’t know what anything cost. “Two double scotch please.”

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The guv’nor’s paunch and biker ‘tache closed me down. “You lost?”

“I know this area quite well.”

“You know the area?” He sucked his charred lips. “You know your way round?”

The blondes were openly giggling. Young denim shirts nudged elbows, traded gestures.

“I’m sorry,” I said without thinking.

“For what?”

“I just want to buy a drink.” I showed the cash Nicky gave me.

“You want a drink,” he spoke like a man toiling uphill, “you do me a favour.”

Everyone watched—no talk, just muffled laughter.

The big man turned, sweat stains towering up through his shirt. “Got an itch I can’t reach. Just there.” A gashed finger jabbed his spine.

“You want me to scratch it?”

“Well,” he told the bar-back mirrors, “I don’t want you to bite it.”

Blocking laughter and all that went with it, I reached forward, my fingertip pressed the slab flesh. How he swung back around—nearly graceful, like he rehearsed it, keeping time under his breath. Carried on its own momentum, his body rolled, his arm sprang down, pinning my hand to the bar. “You bender,” he said evenly. “You cunt.”

“Busy in there.” I gave Nicky the glass, failing to hide I was shaking.

“I heard.”

On a woodpile behind the pub, she launched her knife at the ground, flicking it again and again in the exact same groove. Her face showed nothing.

I searched all the things I’d heard said to girls—jokes in the cafe, Daniel’s shtick, movie lines: ‘We have only tonight.’ Light from a window spread a russet gleam through her shoes. A few threads of blood veined my shirt where she stung me. “I enjoyed that.”

She didn’t speak.

“What we did. I enjoyed it.”

Her skin flat, her freckles dull spatter, she shotgunned her drink. “Got work tomorrow.”

“We could walk to yours.” It seemed possible. “There must be a way through the woods.”

“Bollocks.”

“Daniel paid you?”

“Not enough.”

“Could I pay you? For a night out.” I knew where my mother kept her purse.

“Why they call you that name?”

That nickname—thought I’d never hear it again. “Had a haircut once, made me look like that man in the films.” The name stuck for years. “I hate it.”

“You’ll find someone knows what you are.”

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“But if I pay you?”

The sudden, brash snarl of an engine split across us—some guy racing himself, flashing by on sports wheels. She was up and walking before the dust settled.

Silent, we reached the tidy streets: primly curtained, subdued. I pointed at the house. “Kids there. Boy and girl. Stuck-up. I want to hurt them.”

“Fucking shut up.”

Men walking dogs or going to keep some arrangement stared at Nicky.

Once, that town seemed rich with chances, but with Nicky beside me it all looked slackly self-pleased. Maybe her wallet concealed enough for one of those starch-cloth restaurants. Maybe we could have eaten and run, flicking English salutes. Maybe we will, in the movie. “You fancy the club?”

“I don’t want to be with you.”

“Okay.” What else to say?

Hot today, out on the road. The sun shines, the sky milk-white with pollution.

I drive, but not well. I dance without much style. I’m okay in bed with someone forgiving. I’m not broke, at least not today. I love this town, the hustle, the business. I love watching kids on the corner, hearing crazy jerks on the radio, meeting dudes who talk bull. I’m an evangelist of this, stripped of religion.

People wait at the roadside with great tension in their spines. Jess taught me that stage school stuff—how to unknot and loosen into the part. She used to work my shoulders, tell me I kept everything in my middle trapezius. What I most want is that someone inks her for a real movie, a real picture, where she can play dowdy and complex and dig right out of her range. See the boldface crits: ‘A revelation,’ ‘career-defining.’ I cry a little. That’s okay. Everyone here’s rehearsing.

At the train station, on narrow plastic seats, Nicky and me stared across the tracks at faces that seemed better equipped for boredom. A seat left empty between us—to those faces we must have resembled the drag-out of a small, failed affair. Like we argued and irretrievable things got said. Before cellphones, people had ways they held their hands to signify insularity and rejection. Nicky studied her spiky fingers, face curtained-off with hair. She was beautiful. I told her.

She cracked her knuckles.

“I mean it. You’re fantastic.”

“You can go. I get trains all the time.”

A train arrived the other side, its noise and light sparking bogus hustle.

Heads appeared from the piss-smelling passage beneath the tracks—heads, then bodies, slumped and climbing like weary invaders. People who stayed late, who waited this particular train.

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for local stations, your train’s somewhere behind—twenty minutes, maybe.

Nicky spat between her feet, watched the phlegm bubble and die.

“We could go to London. Tonight.”

She flexed her hands.

“Why don’t we?” Me, suddenly street-smart.

“Don’t you hear? I’m going home.” Her eyes popped a little, their fine muscles resolving beyond my shoulder.

I glanced ‘round—two policemen strolled onto the platform, staring heavily left and right.

The late London express clattered over the points, slowing, its screech fading out. Figures on the platform stirred and flexed. The patrol officers started their slow, deliberate walk.

Nicky got up. When I replayed that night—time and again, waiting the bad things to stop—I knew I should have respected how casual she made it.

No panic, no rush as the train reached the platform, lights from its windows throwing tense silhouettes.

Those days, English trains still had slam doors. You had to pop down the window, reach out to release the catch. A line of heads appeared along the carriages, elbows canted to twist the handles. A few sprightly types jumped before the train stopped, the doors they let fly slamming over against dented metal. Muddy announcements mingled with footsteps, with shrieks of college girls back from a night by the sea. Nicky tunnelled the crowd. I tagged after.

In the smoker, people dozed or stared at the yellow windows, glittery cellophane wraps on the floor like husks of something transformed.

Disembodied hands cracked tall, flat newspapers. Harsh lights buzzed through smoke. Nicky slammed down, propped her legs on the seat opposite.

I mirrored her, self-consciously hoisting my shoes on the seat beside her.

A crackly voice reminded us the train ran fast to Ashford, then Tonbridge, Sevenoaks, Orpington, London.

“Check that door’s tight.”

I stared.

Two sounds: a hard crunch, a grungy squelch, as Nicky kicked the girl’s face— four, five, six times.

Noise split the night, the girl clutched her head, screaming through her fingers.

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She spoke into the window. “Do it.”

I leaned out the nearest door, unhooked the catch and slammed it again.

“Pigs still there?”

“What?”

“They out there or on the train?”

Had I looked? I was meant to. “Think so. Think I saw them.”

“Did you see them?”

“Yeah. Their hats.”

She kicked the seat edge, her leg tight with potential.

I felt my pocket. “Got no smokes.” I never said smokes. I said ciggies, like some sitcom joker. Daniel smoked menthol with a gold band. Lifesaver, he called it.

“Fuck sake.” She cracked a clean pack, made me lean right across. I said thanks like a nance, reached for my lighter but she had matches, flicking the spent stick with invasive propulsion. Tight shoulders pushed out her chest, her hair clumped with smoke and night dew. She had magnificence—only time I ever met it.

A last door slammed. Those old trains came to life in pieces, each carriage stirred, couplings tightened, power engaged the wheels—that lethal third rail power that flicked along unnoticed. At the platform-end level crossing, a string of headlamps glared, faces at the barrier looked blindly through the train, cyclists tipped down on one foot—everyone blocked, waiting. We pulled more power, more distance, terrace backs giving way to squat retirement homes, to the cinder gypsy yards and, beyond the street-lights, damp meadows lost in reflections.

One second to the next, I followed rich dreams of what we’d do at Charing Cross, past midnight. Nicky would know where to go, how to arrange things.

I’d wake on some friendly couch, in a box room or sly hotel, and, years later, in a flat in Deptford or Peckham, we’d remember our great escape. In-between heartbeats, I saw it: the lost life I’ve chased all the while.

Smoke coloured her imprecisely: a figure flushed with neon, closed and impatient. Let’s not play what if, Jess says. Sounds good, how she says it.

Let’s not play what if, but I should have switched seats, strung an arm round Nicky. Not been afraid of punches or cigarette burns. I should have been glad of them, should have known that easy transgression is worthless.

Local trains shuffled: no space to build speed between stations. That late express hustled a thin path of momentary lights—damp on the rails cracked and flared across tiny, snug houses, there and gone into black. “You okay?” I tried to pack meaning in the void words.

She looked pale, muddy with freckles. “Why you here?”

Only for her. “Going London.” Or Tonbridge or Ashford—whatever dead town, didn’t matter.

“I’m going home.”

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shocked to whiteness by the high-power lights of a restless car. Sudden, silvery opening—old flooded quarries, catching stars and transitory streaming neon. Black islands and fishing haunts, signs of deep water. Beautiful country, where a man could live sunk and forgotten.

“Go to Ashford and come back you mean?” Weird—I heard my mother in my phrasing, that yearning for exact arrangements.

She lit another cigarette, didn’t offer me.

Between my shoes, brown spits on the floor—blood or corrosion. My mother would be in bed, fretting, my father asleep beside her. Would she worry about me? I pictured her beneath the sheets in her blue nightdress, her face closed from things that were closed to me also. What music was playing, what were her plans the day the test came positive? Chasing newness my whole life, I left everything old unvalued.

“I know you said you don’t want to go out—” “Fucking shut up.” She backhanded the wall, the crack of her knuckles an explosion among smoking corpses. “Going home.” She got up, walked to the door.

I followed, conscious of bleary eyes at my back. “What you going to do?” an absurd, camp whisper.

Her face—I remember its hard, humourless certainty, her cliff-edge cheekbones, green fire in her sharp eyes. A face you won’t find in casting, on agency books, in web trawls of pushy hopefuls. Bone and liquid, utterly startling—once seen, forever in dreams. Her voice harsh gravel, “Hit the switch.”

She caught the chain-link emergency cord, yanked it from its casing.

Everything shot forward, the wheels in a screeching slide. Lights flickered, momentum threw me against her. She punched me away.

As the train lurched, Nicky thumped down the window, sprang the door and jumped—dark closing over her. Paralysed, I clung to the frame till the rattle of boots pushed me to choose. Hard earth rose to buckle my legs, punch air from my lungs. I chose her: in every bruise, in cracked ribs and shredded skin. I wore my wounds from that night. I cried when they healed.

Of course she rolled with the fall, already up and running. I staggered, the train high above me: an inexplicable street, windows and lights, flung down in the country. A man shouted from the gaping door. Didn’t hear what he said.

Distant in the haze, the bus crawls—an older lifeform, lost among new models. Impatience spreads between us—we watch, disempowered, relieved and angered in the last of our waiting. These cleaners and store clerks, nursing attendants, the recyclers, these bums who manage their illness just so far. We could be here in the sunshine, back east with its withering storms, sand-shot down Mexico way, or some small town in England, watching clouds roll on and on. Doesn’t matter where we are. We’re specks of demographic. We’re consumer preferences. We watch movies.

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Tears in my eyes—do I call her now? From LAX? Tonight or tomorrow, in whatever dead town? If I reach her voicemail what do I say? ‘Hi, I updated my status.’ If she picks up, will we fall in that same conversation led to this?

Would she hang up, call her lawyers? Get her management to remind me the deal fell through? If one day I come this way again, she’ll be too preferred for the boardwalk cafe, too invited for that little Korean place where they let us run a tab. She’ll do good, rewarding work and I’ll hate it all. I’ll find someone else and compare her with Jess and fail and live alone.

This is where she comes running down Lincoln, a bag on her shoulder, shouting to wait, colliding into me with hectic momentum. This is where she says she was hasty, a fool—I was right for her all along. We ride to the airport, go back east. In the final shot, she’s on Broadway. That works. Opening shot, Broadway on the scruffy morning we met dodging unplanned rain. Closing shot, her in the lights, taking the cheers. That works. I could write that. It’s cash-able, it’s feel-good. If you don’t want to feel good, how the fuck do you want to feel?

The bus pulls up—a true English gent, I let these ladies on first. They don’t acknowledge the courtesy. I don’t expect it. I step on and pay my ticket.

Takes about forty minutes to the airport, in this traffic. The driver’s eyes are wet and boiled, like he’s lain fearful all night.

To now, I got no clue how I crossed that field. Rough ground, damp, immune to hot days, sucked my legs. Nicky stopped by the gate—solid dark but I saw her cleanly, vivid. Clearer than in her cubbyhole on the landing, drenched in music. As I remembered her, once Daniel cut me from his life.

“You’re great.” I meant it.

She vaulted the gate with casual power.

I didn’t know the country. I knew the railway, the station, the lane to Daniel’s house. I didn’t know Nicky, how she could do this or anything.

“Go,” she said, hard and clear. “Just go.”

As I struggled to climb the gate she kicked up stones.

“Go. I don’t want you here. Dan hates you, know that? Hates you.”

But he let me watch him, so why care? “If you want, another time—” “Fuck.” Her tension electrified the air.

I’d have to knock to get in. Face my parents, bloodied with no excuses.

Bruised and empty-handed. The one thing my mother asked, I didn’t do. “My uniform. I left it at school.”

“Thought you left school.”

“My mother wants to sell it. Get money back.”

Nicky scragged the bunched material at her throat, twisted the tie over her head. “Get money on that.”

I held her tie close to my face, feeling her warmth fade out as she vanished from me. I watched till her hair was half-tone grey on blackness, till I imagined I saw her when she was already gone. My breath rasped against dead night, August 29, 2014 | 35

and the scream of a fast car braking. Closing in, briefly idle, then speeding away.

I told lies and worse than lies, through the unravelling of who I used to be.

No one believed me, and my picture in news archives will, I guess, show up some day in some dirt-raking on Jess. When scornful men in homeland suits inquire into my name and status. So it goes. The past eats and stays hungry.

I did what I thought was right—too much a kid, even at sixteen, to know that doesn’t pay. What I told them all—my folks, bleached to ash, the sour detectives—all true. I stood at that gate and Nicky walked, and I watched till only my pain moved in the darkness. I knew she kept a knife, I could never have torn it from her. I knew the taste of her knife, I could never have used it.

And for Simon and his girl to swear to my violent inclinations: that’s a joke, right? But the detectives—gastric from a bad lunch—sighed and stared at the ceiling when I said they should go look for a car, maybe red. They owned the rights, they sat in the big chair. How they framed it made it true. I was the last to see her alive. C

Mark Wagstaff was born by the sea and lives in London.

Since the late 1990s he has had stories published in journals and anthologies in the US and UK. Most recently Mark’s work has appeared in Prick of the Spindle, Tethered by Letters and Cobalt Review. His story ‘Some Secret Space’ won the 2013 William Van Wert Fiction Contest. Mark has also published four novels, a novella and a short story collection. His second collection will be published later in 2014.

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Teimur Henrich PHOTOGRAPHY FEATURE

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Location: Trier, Germany Somnambula Around four years ago I spent some time in a small town in Germany called Bitburg, where my parents live. Suffering from insomnia I started to walk around through the empty streets and realized, that because of the absence of sleep ordinary things and places become more important and closer, at the same time they seem distant and miniature. It’s like when everyone sleeps the city gets another face, a more contrasted face. So I started to explore the somnambulistic side of Bitburg—every night I took my camera and my tripod on my nighttrip and tried to portray this “other face,” that’s the reason why all the photographs are in vertical format.

Somewhat later, in the summer in Hunsrück, my insomnia was more welcome: I wanted to complete the photographs in and around Bitburg and so I continued my nightly forays, this time with a more or less intervention: I started to use dynamic light for these photographs trying to create this somnambulistic touch that i liked in the photographs of Bitburg.

The Hunsrück shots seem more colourful and more dramatic at first glance, but the important thing is what unites all of them in this series: the calmness, the silence and insomnia.

Nachtsicht Started as an addition to the “Somnambula” but later grew up independently.

A construction area at night is like a big photograph that we can walk through. Tools, machines and imperfect ended construction phases or parts are getting a very unique, sculptural character.

Even with the official permission to enter the site, there is always a feeling of doing something forbidden. It’s almost like as a child I watched my father’s toolbox: The apparent chaos of each tool and each bolt has its place. You can see inside, but touching is not allowed. This was the axiom for the approach to this project—no additional light, no arrangements, see a mise-en-scène, shoot a mise-en-scène.

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flickr.com/teimur teimur@gmail.com

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CCLaP Publishing

An official painter for the Lithuanian Communist Party, Martynas Kudirka enjoys a pleasant, unremarkable life with a beautiful wife and all the privileges that come with being a party member. Yet in the summer of 1989, his ordinary world suddenly turns upside down. Political revolt is breaking out across Eastern Europe, and Martynas comes home to find his wife dead on the kitchen floor with a knife in her back. Realizing the police will not investigate, he sets out to find his wife’s killer. Instead, he stumbles upon her secret life. Martynas finds himself drawn into the middle of an independence movement, on a quest to find confidential documents that could free a nation. Cold War betrayals echo down through the years as author Bronwyn Mauldin takes the reader along a modern-day path of discovery to find out Martynas’ true identity. Fans of historical fiction will travel back in time to 1989, the Baltic Way protest and Lithuania’s “singing revolution,” experiencing a nation’s determination for freedom and how far they would fight to regain it.

Download for free at cclapcenter.com/lovesongs

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The CCLaP Weekender is published in electronic form only, every Friday for free download at the CCLaP website [cclapcenter.com]. Copyright 2014, Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. All rights revert back to artists upon publication. Editorin-chief: Jason Pettus. Story Editor: Behn Riahi. Layout Editor: Wyatt Roediger-Robinette. Calendar Editors: Anna Thiakos and Taylor Carlile. To submit your work for possible feature, or to add a calendar item, contact us at cclapcenter@gmail.com.

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