#1

This is just a first draft of a story I originally wrote with a pencil on a scrap bit of paper. First drafts mean nothing.  

Sad Song.

The room was just like any other you’d expect to find in the once luxurious tenements that flanked the avenues and terraces of the West End. The ceiling was unattainably high and if a light bulb went you’d be reading by candlelight until you could afford a ladder, a light bulb and to feed the meter silver. It had the hollow carved cornices that no one would ever put in their house now because of the draft they let in, and the window bays were so huge that if the draft didn’t kill you the inability to heat the place would. In its heyday it would have probably been a living room or a bedroom depending on how the house was originally split but now it served the purpose of both and more. Kitchen, study, library, the only thing the room wasn’t equipped for was the call of nature. There was however a communal toilet but you had to make sure and bring your own toilet paper. Mod cons (or lack thereof) aside the place was perfect and the rent was worth the location alone. I told the old landlady I’d have to think about it but that I’d get back to her within the week. By the following Thursday I’d moved in.

By the following Wednesday the old lady was dead, well that’s what they’d determined. She hadn’t been discovered till the Sunday. Her family came round and told everyone who was renting that they were selling to someone who was going to lease it so we were safe. But they were taking all of her furniture; a van would be round next week. Her very attractive granddaughter told me that she was rich and let the rooms so cheaply because she just wanted them to be lived in. I offered my condolences and my phone number.

People mourn in a very uniform manner but they handle grief on their own terms. For example, when my cat died when I was 10 I was so broken up about it that I threw rocks at all the neighbourhood dogs because I thought they had somehow been behind it all. The old lady’s granddaughter, Lisa, took a different approach all together.

A few days after she’d stood in my doorway with her stiff upper lip and a few hours after we’d met for a drink she was stumbling through the same door, pulling me along by the arm. She started dancing around while taking off her coat and asked for music. I put on an old Otis Redding record and she tried to find the beat. Is this The Commitments? She laughed and fell to the couch. The shock sobered her for a second before she started crying and telling me about her grandmother. My experiences of loss only went as far as my dead cat so I spent most of the time nodding and making agreeing sounds.

It has a sweet melody tonight
Anybody can sing it any old time

Halfway through one of these noises I hiccup-burped and the resulting effect was so unbearably close to a laugh that I thought the best way to cover it up was to pass it off as one. I realised my mistake at once. Lisa turned on me and I couldn’t turn away. The look she gave me was the middle ground between ‘I hate you’ and ‘I hate you but want to sleep with you to forget about my dead grandmother’. It was fortunately the first and last time I’d see the second look but I was a veteran of the other. She grabbed me by my shirt collar and I could smell her tears. And the whole time she was kissing me, all I could think of was her grandmother. 

I could picture her standing in the corner, watching us. A boy she’d met twice trying to get her granddaughter into a bed she used to own.

And then the record started to skip and Otis was at the end of count in to a song that would never start.

In the morning I was woken by a knock on my door. They’d come to collect the old woman’s furniture, the bed and a chest of drawers. The movers looked like brothers, a family business. One had hands like a butcher, fat and red from the cold with a thousand tiny cuts, all at the same angle. An apprentice mistake. The other had hands like a boxer, fat and white from being taped too tight with knuckles put out of joint by a thousand punches. A trademark left hook. They manhandled the chest of drawers down to the curb and I grabbed the nearest t-shirt.

The toilet was occupied and I waited outside while the brothers lumbered up the stairs as if the weight of the bed already rested on their shoulders. The latch on the door flicked and my upstairs neighbour emmerged and gave me an acknowledging nod which I could see meant that it was too early for verbal communication. Even if it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have known what to say. I shuffled past him and onto the sticky lino that made the noise of someone chewing with their mouth open every time you took a step. The bare lightbulb showed me in all my morning harshness.

My face was white, whiter than the boxer brother’s knuckles. The bags under my eyes were the same bruesish purple as the mark on my neck. I spat in the sink and washed my mouth out with lukewarm water.

It was as if last night had ever happened. The only proof that she was ever here was the mascara ruined shirt and the love bite on my neck.  And I imagined her getting all of her grandmothers old possessions and keeping the bed. That was the romantic in me. In reality it would probably get thrown out, on the account of us breaking the headboard.