“His funeral was on the other side of the country.” That is the first thing he says.
“He used to look up at the marbled skies and get dizzy. His focus would eventually come to rest on the worms writhing in the brown earth at his toes.”
That is the second thing he says. He says this to put a poetic spin on things. But now he seems sick of his oft-repeated summary and makes his way out past the stares and sympathy pats.
Stepping outside the building, he meanders in the warm wind, breezing along him and flapping his undone shirt-tails and pocketed black tie. But his careless body language is betrayed by the intensity of expression on his face. The semi-detached houses have an artificial feel to them. A lack of substance.
He comes to number 23 and walks up the slabbed walkway, he avoids the gaps for luck. He reaches the door, knocks and then remembers.
He’s not here anymore.
He takes a key out of his pocket and unlocks the door.
Once inside he sits. From the red sofa he can see the front and back entrance. The front door has a stained glass representation of a setting sun and the back door has a mish-mash of colourful panes. He wanted it this way so the sun would shine colourfully down on them. It didn't work. The house is positioned in such a way that the sun shines briefly in the morning through the stained glass and once again around three. In the long late afternoons, in the mouthwash drinking mornings, on the multiple grey days, in the sighing evenings of card castles and cryptic crosswords, the colours just stayed dull and dark. Now it's dust and dark.
What he remembers most is the grouting. He remembers picking at it wide eyed listening to Ian. Those thick lines veining the short sharp twice daily burst of colour. How awe-inspiring they seemed to him, how familiar they seem now.
Brightness veined with darkness. Brightness now greyed and with black veins pulsing through with doubtless and sincere intensity.
He remembers Ian whispering into his slumbers.
He lies sprawled out on the red sofa, his legs angling uncomfortably over the edge and smokes a cigarette. Smoke hovers about him wrapped in stillness. He lies soaking in the mushy smell of old wood and heavy memories.
*
He has been here for three days. Following a trail of empty bottles, which have become receptacles for his cigarette ash, you would come upon him in the loft conversion.
The bottle at his side has a halo of ash, etched by his drunken state. He grumbles about not remembering where he's left the ashtray he'd made as a child.
It was like an oyster shell, he mutters, the concave surface fine and smooth, the convex worn and jagged. He'd put some putty on the bottom to stabalise it and used vermillion nail varnish to paint the convex.
He trails off and falls off into a slumber. A crimson bubble erupts from the corner of his mouth and slides down his chin on a trail of spit. He lies flat on his back upon his tatami bed; his head propped up by a plush, pottery green pillow. The cold white wall behind is lined with porcelain cherubs clumsily painted green. They rise diagonally from his side of the bed.
His hand reaches out and pats the other side of the bed. Feeling nothing he tucks it back into his pocket. He then turns on his side. The TV plays on in the corner of the room and the open window on the downward sloped ceiling is leaving a slowly darkening rectangular mark on the carpet.
His eyes are closed, his body is still but he’s awake. His pupils flutter under quivering eyelids as he attempts to move but feels himself pinned down. He attempts to stretch out of himself but is dragged back by the pressure. His altered state encases him in a fleshy cage. Or maybe it's just very realistic shadow-play.
*
He was woken up, candy-floss mouthed and burkaed in hangover, by John knocking at the door.
John convinced him to go for a drink and a talk.
He was made painfully aware of his pityful state, as well as the house’s, by John’s retrousé nose shivering with disdain at the accumulated stench of stagnation, by John’s darting eyes feasting on the cumulative misery.
He excused himself a moment, within a cough and left John hovering in the hall. He rushed up the creaking wooden steps and entered the bathroom. He exposed his gums and teeth to the mirror, frothed mouthwash, then ruffled his hair and pinched his cheeks. He then creaked his way back downstairs where John had distracted his prying eyes with a Private Eye Compendium.
As they sat in the café, he felt what little he could slip out of him, down the sides of the brown plastic chairs and over the laminated table. Words seemed to mist out and padded in swathes of cotton.
John orders two teas.
“Sugar?” the waitress asks John.
“Sugar?” John asks him turning away from the waitress. He nods.
“Sugar” He says turning back to her.
“Righty-ho. Two sugars.”
They sit in silence. She comes back and places the cups on the edge of the table in front of John.
“There you go sweetie. Your sweet teas”. She guffaws at their meek smiles.
“So how are you?” asks John. The question gloops out of him.
He looks at John, puts his head in his hands and starts spasming with sobs.
John places his hand on his shoulder.
“Listen, he was unhappy. He was very unhappy. There was nothing to be done. We're here to help you Isaac”
Isaac looks up at John.
“You don’t understand. He was my world.”
John lets out a long sigh.
“He was my idol.” Issac continues.
Benoît Du Cann was born at St Mary's Paddington, London in 1987. He is of French Catalan descent. He now lives in Barcelona where he teaches English and French. Other work of his has been published in Ignavia Press and in the upcoming issues of Kerouac's Dog Magazine.