[Untitled]
I wrote this quite a long time ago.
He set her down gently on his bed, careful not to startle her, and then returned to the entrance to shut the door. With hands that would have been shaking the first few times yet now were rock solid he slid a pillow up beneath her head, to keep her comfortable. She looked so peaceful, her breathing light but definitely present, and that was a blessing. If he said that he hadn’t been hoping for the time when she was lying on his bed, he’d be lying. However, in his fantasies she had always been conscious. That presented an issue.
He pulled a chair over from his desk and sat down, casting his eyes over her slight form as he pieced together the events of the night and the corner of his vision caught sight of the digital clock shining out that it was so late that he may have called it early. He was glad it was not analogue, for the ticking might have been too much to bear.
They had been out to the park to meet with some friends of a friend. He should have known then that it was a bad idea, that there’d be only a few there that he knew and possibly even less that he liked, but he had been bored. And she had been eager. What was the harm in it? If any trouble kicked off they could just leave early, after all. There’d be nothing to stop them.
And at the start it had been good. There seemed to be no rampant drug takers, which was something he’d feared, just a bunch of people drinking alcohol and eating the trademark charcoal substitute you always find at an amateur barbecue. Good times, as they said. As usual, he was fairly sure that he had got more drunk first. He must have been, seeing as he vaguely remembered spending a good twenty minutes trying to chat up Harry Owens’ dog. Admittedly it was a very good looking dog, but it was still very much a canine and his sexual attentions tended to run much more in the way of homo sapiens. Harry hadn’t minded, at least he thought he hadn’t, he seemed less perturbed by his chatting up of the dog than he was by another bloke’s insistent advances on his mother.
A hand through his fringe discovered that his hair was damp. That’s what happens when you’re lying on the floor and the Smirnoff Ice misses your mouth. Not important. He remembered being roused from his poison-induced stupor when he had seen her between two guys he didn’t know, and was fairly certain she didn’t know either. Jealousy was often a close ally of sobriety, he had found whenever he had sat alone trying to drink jealousy away sobriety clung to him like an obsessive limpet. Of course he was stupid. How could he expect her to know he was interested if he never said anything? Much easier to just be there to pick up the pieces when the glass inevitably broke.
She stirred slightly, but it was more of a light murmur than a lively awakening. He sighed again.
The two guys he hadn’t known had wandered off with her somewhere… he thought it might have been the long grass but to his own guilt he could barely remember. His consciousness kicked in again perhaps… twenty minutes or so later. It might have been longer. Looking at the digital clock he feared that “longer” was far more likely. She had come back to him, with the two guys nowhere in sight and her walk about as far from a straight line as a roundabout is. She’d fallen on him and the blow to his face had knocked the last of the drunkenness out of him, although he was fairly certain it had been unintentional.
She had told him she wanted to go home, but he didn’t know where her home was. He had never been there. She was in no state to tell him. And halfway back to his flat she had passed out on him and he’d carried her the rest of the way.
It was a small mercy that she hadn’t been sick anywhere.
Notations & Nihilism 