Silhouette

Unpublished short story from about 2003

Tom grabbed his coat, put his cigarettes, zippo, keys and phone into the right pocket, fished them out through the hole in the lining and moved them to the left.

‘Off out?’ John was in his dressing gown eating cereal.

‘Yeah, I’m working at four and I need to get some food first. You staying tonight?’

‘Chances are. I’m up to season four, it’s getting to the good bit. See you.’

‘Aye.’ He was getting bored of living with John. They’d only moved in together because John’s previous flatmates had thrown him out. Of course that wasn’t the story John told but with every passing week it was the story Tom believed more and more. Still, he paid the rent, and while science fiction and gaming weren’t of much interest to him, it beat the kinds of conversations he’d had with other flatmates over the years. At least John didn’t have much of a sex life to discuss.

Stepping over the homeless guy sitting on his doorstep, Tom wandered down the street squinting into the sun. Typical, he thought, the first sunny day in weeks and he had to spend it at work. He went into the Italian café and sat down at the corner table facing the window. When his panini arrived he took out his phone and scrolled through jobs ads in The Guardian.

Nothing. Again. He checked every day, set up alerts, updated his Linked In profile regularly, but always nothing. The graduate jobs they’d been promised had disappeared and Tom hadn’t been quick enough to snap up the few jobs still going around. Debbie had snatched a gig in Glasgow working for a publishing company, Elaine and Andy were doing PhDs, and Jake was teaching English in China. Tom was still in Dundee earning peanuts. He’d go anywhere, do almost anything, but the reservoir was dry, his future barren. So he worked in the same pub he’d got a part time job in during first year, a bar manager with a degree in anthropology. The only person still around from uni was Siobhan and he hadn’t seen her in months, not since the party.

Draining his juice, he thought of the night ahead, tedium washing through his marrow. Half past three. If he was feeling conscientious, as he had when he first got the job, he’d be there by now, getting the banking done and out of the way, taking his time, making sure everything was done to the best of his ability. Not now. He’d probably sit here until after four. Blame the buses if the boss phoned. Fuck it, he could set the bar up in ten minutes and it didn’t open until five.

He didn’t have the energy to go on. Didn’t have the energy to go back. The drudgery of serving or home to John and his Star Trek marathon. One wall of the living room was covered with sci-fi DVDs. Tom enjoyed a bit of sci-fi but being subjected to it day in, day out was too much. John had this theory that each episode was another chapter in the Star Trek continuum rather than a story in its own right. And you don’t read random chapters of a book do you? No. You start at the beginning. So if he wanted to watch Deep Space Nine Season 3 Episode 11 then he had to watch the previous fifty-six. Inevitably he sat there watching every series of it from start to finish, pilot to conclusion. It had reached the point where Tom rarely entered the living room. Jesus, it was depressing.

His phone rang.

‘Hi Andy.’

‘Tom, where are you?’

He glanced at his watch. 4:05. He was fast today.

‘On my way to the bank, we need some change.’

‘Oh, okay. Phone me when you get back to the pub.’

 ‘Okay.’

High wall, granite blocks. No breaks, smooth. Curves away left and right, east and west, no end in sight. Moss covers sections, hangs on to the vertical, fearful of releasing for a second. How high? Unsure. Too high. Must be a way in, over, through, round. Under? Wall continues past the crust. He knows this instinctively, no need to question the answer. Why in? Just because… that’s why. Nothing to do on the outside. He rests his hand against the wall. It’s warm. It gives, relents like a sponge. He can push into the wall; its stone bending with him until a natural balance is reached and it will budge no further. He steps back, surveys. He studies. He tries other blocks. Each identical. No difference between high, low, left, right. The edge and the middle are the same. The moss stretches to accommodate. He varies his force, now pushing hard, now soft, now quick, now imperceptibly slow. The wall moves with him, each time responding with an equal reaction. He begins to walk, keeping his hand against the stone, palm and fingers, caressing, searching. Nothing. No clues. He stops, scans panorama. Nothing. Dirt and sand stretch to every horizon, the surface curve obvious on the uninterrupted terrain. A panic wells up, burning like bile in his chest. He doubles over, pain seeping into every cavity, every organ, every bone, pulsing through his veins. He must get in. The pain reaches and breaches every threshold until he runs, screaming, at the wall. He hits, face first. His nose explodes, dyeing the moss, fragmenting bone and skin. Nothing. When he comes round the wall has moved farther back. He is now about a mile from it. Still he can see no end, no top. Just a fortress wall, curving with the earth away from him. No sign of a gate, even a crack in the stone. He sits in the sand and cries, the tears washing blood and dirt from his skin, staining his bare chest black and red. The sun beats down. There is no wind. The air he breathes enflames his lungs, scorches his throat. He lies back. The sun is in the exact place it has always been. There is no night here, not that he can remember. Will there be night on the other side? Respite. Intoxicating blindness. To be able to sleep, dream, wake refreshed. He stands, pain surging through his cracked feet, blood seeping into the arid land. Nothing here but stone and the heavy press of time. He spits into cupped hands, the measly offering almost bubbling in the heat. He spreads it around his palms then attempts to wash his face. He turns his attention to the wall. He begins treading wearily towards it, ready to begin again, though where and how he refuses to even consider. He wonders what is beyond the wall. Water. Green. Others. The memory of a towered city, resplendent with running water, parks, people, sunlight gleaming off glass towers, imposing but finite. Anything is manageable but infinity. He wonders briefly where this image came from but casts it aside. It merely distracts from his goal.

Something was wrong. He knew from the moment he opened the door. Voices. Not TV voices—those are easily distinguishable from reality—no background music, no orchestrated set pieces. Normal conversation never flows like TV. Certainly not like Star Trek. There was more than one person in the flat. His first thought was burglars. A more rational explanation than the other: that John had someone over. Like a burglar himself he eased the door closed and tiptoed to the living room. Definitely John and someone else, someone female. They were laughing.

This was unbelievable. In all the time he’d lived there, John hadn’t brought a friend or family member to the flat, let alone a woman. That she might be a sex worker flashed through his mind but no, John wasn’t a renowned conversationalist. If he’d hired a woman for sex the last thing he’d bother to do was make her laugh, at least not intentionally. He stepped into the living room.

‘Not interrupting anything am I?’ He stopped, one foot still raised. Siobhan. Siobhan was here? With John?

‘Hi Tom,’ she said. ‘How was work?’

The last time he’d seen her had been an after show party for the university drama group. They’d both been members as undergrads. As a postgrad she was still involved and he’d gone along to see their latest production. At the party he’d unsuccessfully come on to her before passing out in the garden. ‘Good. How are you? I didn’t expect to see you here.’

‘Oh, John phoned me up and invited me over. I had nothing better to do so I thought why not?’

How did John even know her? ‘What are you watching?’

 ‘Dazed and Confused,’ said John. ‘I bought it the other day and Siobhan hasn’t seen it.’

‘You don’t have any grass, do you?’ she said. ‘I took some over but it’s all gone. There’s a bit of wine left if you want?’

‘Sure, I’ve got a bit.’

The joint wasn’t shaping up well. Never the best of rollers, his attention was divided between what his hands were doing and what his flatmate was doing. Well more what she was doing. Siobhan was draped across John’s lap. John was just sitting watching the TV, no obvious signs of awareness that someone else was there. That man should play poker.

Fuck this, he thought, roughly pushing the narrow roach into the massive expanse at the end of the spliff. ‘Here, it’s a bit shit but I’m fucked, I’m going to bed.’

Tired as he was, he knew he wouldn’t sleep. He kicked his shoes off in disgust, inadvertently knocking over a pot plant, flopped back onto the bed and hid his head under the pillow.

Exhausted by walking he fell to the ground. He didn’t know how far or how long he’d been moving but where his footprints had been red feet, dogging him, they were now red streaks, indistinct smears where the effort to actually take a step had proven impossible. If only there were some other way to travel. If he could fly up, over. There may still be a gate he has been unable to find. There must be a gate. Why build a wall which encircles, without entrance or exit? To keep people out? Which people? To keep people in? Why? Keep them away from what? Sand? The only other thing out here was him. He touched the wall, pushing it in, checking it still conformed to his expectations. At least if it moved then there was some hope. If he could find some way of pushing it harder then it might move far enough to admit him.  Some of the moss came away in his hand. It was wet. He peered at the wall where the moss had been. There was a liquid trickling out. He wrung the moss into his mouth. Water. He gathered more, ripping and squeezing as fast as he could, water running over his face, down his body and into the cracked ground. Energy pulsed, he was renewed. He could go on, wouldn’t die, a desiccated vegetable rotting in this infernal oven. He heard a noise. A rumble. Water, instead of dribbling, was running from where the moss had been. Fissures opened and more water followed. The bricks began to move, their uniform appearance breaking before his eyes. He stepped back, in fear.

It was always the same after working; insomnia. During working hours the mind goes to sleep yet as soon as the shift finishes it reawakens like hunger. He’d already gone through his repertoire of activities designed to encourage sleep: tidying the room, catching up on emails, wanking, reading. The thought of Siobhan, in his flat, stoned, wasn’t helping matters. He’d played the computer for a couple of hours, the act of shooting Nazi fuckheads usually allowed a release of tension but no such joy. He couldn’t get past the fire breathing zombie thing, just kept replaying the same section again and again. Round and round.

Eventually morning came, broken, shattered over the world. More job ads, more applications, more and more Google searches, another shift in the pub, pint after pint after pint after pint. He lay on his bed, life elsewhere, life going on and on and on. The history of humankind, sapiens going somewhere, everyone going somewhere, progress, progress, nothing but progress happening to others. Happening to others. He lay on his bed as morning broke, drained and unable to move.

He heard the front door close, Siobhan’s step on the stair. The shower, the toaster, John left.

         

The wall burst. A granite block exploded into his shoulder, spinning him to the ground. Everything was water. He felt his legs lift, cycling over the back of his head as the torrent flipped him downstream. His forehead collided with something and he gasped. The water sensed an opening and poured in, overcoming his gag reflex in a moment and filling his lungs. He could feel it spread through bronchioles and into air sacs like ink through fingerprints, could visualise his body filling. He could see nothing, couldn’t even open his eyes. Blackness choked him. The desert filled, the dam finally broken. The fissure in the wall grew, each block pulling others into the river. The moss still clinging began to grow, first covering the whole wall, then sprouting marram grass, then bushes, then finally trees, growing horizontally from the wall, curving up towards the stationary sun. As the reservoir settled, every available space filled, the initial force exhausted, the trees began to rot, crumbled to dust and floated calmly like algae. An ichthyosaur burst from the steel surface, arced through the air and hit the water as a dolphin. The sun dropped vertically from the sky leaving a moon, like an afterimage, in its place. The moon began to rotate in wider and wider circles until it covered the whole horizon in the space of a few seconds. The water responded, primal instinct woken by the moon’s presence - and began circling itself, creating a giant whirlpool. At the centre of the whirlpool, spinning so fast it looked stationary, was a body. It sank and bobbed like a fish-fly, disappearing, reappearing. The water level dropped, evaporating as the rotation increased speed. A few minutes passed and there was no liquid anywhere to be seen. The body, already dry, lay in a crumpled heap between the ruined edges of the wall. A twitch passed through him, then he vomited, streams of water boiling as they hit the already parched sand. He lay still, letting his wounds take care of themselves as the intense heat sutured the gashes curling round him like tiger stripes. His head pounded and his ears were ringing. He opened his eyes and saw a pair of feet, dark skinned, a ragged robe ringed the ankles. Using the last of his energy he rolled onto his back and looked up at the face that blocked the sun.