insearchofgatherings-blog - Tumblr blog

insearchofgatherings-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Full Brightness

One

I always took the train to London.

I made up excuses to my many friends with an affinity for swiftness by air. The train took you to the centre, not to Gatwick. Once you factor in the airport bus, it’s probably faster than flying. I like having a table, not a flimsy piece of plastic. Babies don’t scream from decompression. And even the most absurdly hypocritical (for myself), but would always strike a nerve with my environmentally obsessed peers – “the train is electric; flying is one of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels”. I was never one to truly put the environment above my convenience, but I loved how that one shut them up.

But the real reason was one of my few irrationalities – I just have a romantic connection to rail. I love the sound, the views, the ability to wander around, the automated machine coffee that they serve to you in a little paper bag as if it compensates for the taste. Flying is clinical and cold. Airports are places of fear and anxiety; train stations are places of long farewells and slow departures.

They say that for important people, time is everything, and commuting must be as quick as possible. It can’t cut into their important meeting time or their important coffee time or their important phone call time. But glancing around Coach F I can see more men in suits and women with short hair on phone calls than any 50 quid Manchester to London RyanAir flight.

I liked to imagine that they were CEOs and COOs and Chairmen and Chairwomen and that my irrationalities of train travel were also found in highly successful people. I bet Vice would write an article about that. These 10 Weird Habits of CEOs Will Amaze You. Probably more Buzzfeed than Vice. I don’t really read any of that, but the headlines pop up in my feeds against my will on an almost daily basis. A morbid curiosity into which of my friends like them has kept me from blocking the sites completely. But in reality, Phil sitting next to me is just an underling, a scrapper.

He’s set up in the most bizarre way, with one of those tablet-come-laptops propped on the table, wired into the solitary mains plug between our seats. It has a small fold-out keyboard, one that looks like a fake child’s play-toy, without even tangible buttons to press, just marked out character zones to tap on. But despite taking a six or seven-minute interval to retrieve all of this, he’s responding to his emails by phone, the tablet-laptop left unattended as he single-fingers his way through family summons and requests for documents.

A few years back I had made wearing sunglasses at all times part of my core existence. I think it originally started as a joke, but they quickly became something I was uncomfortable without, to the point where I collected three or four pairs of £2 Primark trash lenses just in case I couldn’t locate them when leaving the house. It had nothing to do with the sun, or even general aesthetics. And to this day, I’m not convinced that anyone else has those reasons either. Sunglasses hide your soul, and they allow you to look into the souls of others. It almost feels like a superpower - the ability to look at people, to see every nuance of their movement, expression and emotion, whilst never intruding them with the uncomfortable insecurity of knowing you are watched.

I had been reading Phil’s emails and texts for nearly an hour now, and he was none the wiser. What first caught my eye was the rather absurd signature on his phone emails – “Sent from My Phil’s iPhone X”. I liked to imagine it was a power move. A subtle humblebrag about how busy he is, and that yes, he did have time to respond to your enquiry, but only on his phone and with minimal effort given to email formalities.

I had the window seat. Forward-facing, with a table. The trifecta, as I called it. Trains aren’t like airlines, who charge you out the nose for any sort of upgrade in comfort. If you book it far enough in advance, all you have to do is check the boxes and more often than not you’ll get it. Occasionally, if it was one of the trains that came through from Inverness or Aberdeen beforehand, there would be someone in my window. I took no pride in booting them out, but it was a necessary evil to be able to endure the tough stretch between Peterborough and London when the carriage that began at 20% capacity now stretches to over 100.

I found that as long as you tuck a bag of necessities underneath the seat and go to the toilet beforehand, the four and a half hours is more than tolerable without being able to move. And spreading out while there are no coinhabitants in your compartment detracts fellow spreaders from joining you, only those with few possessions dare sit next to me when I’m at full spread. Still, I do look forward to the return journey, when the carriage capacity inverts, and the final stretch north of Newcastle is completed in a near-empty space with ample room to fire books across the full four-seater and go for exploratory wanders to the closing café car.

I had my laptop out, full brightness. I liked to believe that other people were as nosy as I was, and were constantly looking at what I was working on. I worked best in these environments – cafes, trains, even libraries. My personal penchant for procrastination seemed to disappear as soon as someone else could see what I was working on. It was a touch pathetic, no doubt, but I reasoned that as long as it worked for helping productivity, I was fine with the superficial reasoning.

I always wanted to seem more important and more busy and more creative than I actually was. No scrolling through social media, no films or TV, no reading the news. Just work, or perhaps something that looks mysteriously creative. I wanted the person next to me to think I was a genius or a savant or something above my natural ability. I had dozens of excel spreadsheets that looked like chaotic labyrinths of formulae, and despite their true use being quite simple, the look is all that mattered.

I had opened one that I wasn’t even going to work on today. It had several columns involving a calculation of individual standard deviations, which always requires several formula-heavy helper columns, packing it right out with numbers and increasing its aura of complexity. In reality, it was a spreadsheet that compared cafés across towns in England. Manchester was still winning.

It had been open for about 20 minutes, and I hadn’t touched it, nor even come up with a plan of what I was attempting to do. It was there as a placeholder for other, less sophisticated forms of computer-based procrastination.

I liked to remind myself occasionally that it was okay to shelve productivity and just look out the window for a while because otherwise, my obsession with the forward-facing window was almost pointless. The passing of a train through countryside is oddly captivating, and you can find yourself getting lost in the never-ending flow of towns and farms and animals and power plants and small stations that pass too quickly for your eyes to register the name on the sign. The East Coast Main Line was my regular, but occasionally if I could justify the extra hour, or if the advance ticket turned out cheaper, I’d take a West Coast train just for a change of scenery.

Sophie wasn’t happy that I was taking the train, but I refused to budge. Arriving in at Heathrow at 0500 this morning, a first-thing flight meant I could meet her there, at the airport, at around 7 or 8. A train meant I’d be in at midday at the earliest, and at King’s Cross, not Heathrow. I’m only there for two days, she insisted. Come on, gotta make the most of it. I told her I had already booked. A lie.

I hadn’t seen Sophie in nearly two years, since she vanished to Australia in search of some lost youth. There’s a special visa that they give for ‘young people’ to ‘experience the world’ that lasts for two years. I seem to recall that her haste to leave was brought about by the realisation that, at 29, she was about to miss the cut-off for eligibility.

Her long-awaited return to the UK being only two days told us more than enough about her trip away. She didn’t want it to end or couldn’t go back to England or some endless combination of clichés that seems to possess those who go outside their comfort zone ten years too late. Summoning the girls for a girls’ weekend epitomized this neo, post-crisis Sophie perfectly, because a quick glance at the group of six invited (and three further declined) showed a list of people that had probably never all been in the same room at the same time. I knew all of them to varying degrees, but none as closely as Sophie, and I’d wager the majority of the party felt similar.

It all made sense when Emma mentioned that there was a man now. My mind went off at this news. If I wasn’t already interested in this ‘girls weekend’ for general anthropological reasons, the news that the biggest misandrist and most publicly gay member of the group of queers that ‘the girls’ seemed to be loosely constructed from had now straightened up and got a man was so tantalizing I could taste it.

It also, less importantly, explained the brevity of the weekend. All the couldn’t stand going homes and man, fuck Englands and other clichés are normally abandoned when people return home and realise they don’t have much choice, but the talk on the channels is that this man is Portuguese, and that is where they’re leaving Australia for, London just being a stopover.

Everything about this seemed so hilariously, laughably, unbearably straight. I had always known that Sophie’s publicly overt lesbianism was a cover for something more complex and further along the spectrum, but she would never be seen dead admitting to sleeping with men in her university years, let alone running off to some country she’d never been to with one. Even the notion that this group ever was the girls and ever did things like girls' nights is nonsense. It reeked of something she’d spun her new man, trying to pass as a regular old straight who didn’t attend protests fortnightly just for the thrill of breaking the law.

I hadn’t even given a single thought about what Sophie might have planned for us. Emma, who no doubt had individually messaged everyone else in the entire group with the man gossip, spun off a list that I promptly ignored. I didn’t like going into events like this with expectations. I wanted the drama to slap me in the face, to take it head-on. And boy I needed some of that drama.

#creativewriting queer lgbt queerwriting scotland england queerauthor

0 notes

insearchofgatherings-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Almost You

One

There was something in your hair on the first day we met.

It’s an interesting peculiarity that I can’t quite recall what it was, but I remember being drawn away from direct eye contact a great many times like some magnetic repulsion was preventing it. I never believed in love at first sight, and the past few years has indeed proved that to me. For all I feel for you now is adoration in its purest form, yet all I thought that day was that you must have been walking through some trees earlier that night, or perhaps had an aesthetic predisposition towards placing imperfections amongst your appearance.

Sometimes I feel like there should have been a defining moment on that night, as Alex so bashfully introduced us, but I took as much notice of you as I did of his many fleeting romantic encounters. The same amount as he no doubt gave to mine. We had a mutual apathy towards each other’s romantic escapades, built from years of disappointing almost-relationships and a long, near-impossible struggle to like or even level with the people we would choose to introduce.

Perhaps I should have taken note of the strange rarity that this was only your second date, and dear Alex often refuses to tell me even the names of his elopees before then, let alone bring them to a social gathering. He tells me that he fears I put them off. I know he fears a lot more.

It’s always dark down there, in The Closet’s subterranean lair that they pass as a music venue. Even more than the absence of windows or breathing space, it’s like they purposefully break lights and remove reflective surfaces to try and hide the parts they haven’t cleaned properly. They’re one of those establishments that use the term dive as if it’s some kind of accolade, perhaps they see the stairs to the basement as a ‘dive’ into some kind of heightened cultural experience. I always knew that Jasmine would put the show on there, though I secretly wished for something better. But for all my complaints about the smell, the dark, the gropers and the bar staff that deny the groping, I seem to have an awful lot of significant emotional experiences in that dark, grimy underground cupboard. Not least the ones with your sister, but I’ll get to those later.

I never thought you were significant. Not on that night, and perhaps not even by the third or fourth nights of your presence. You were like a cancer, creeping in beneath the radar, beginning to take your grip on our lives while we slept, and when we finally realised how far you had climbed under our skins, it was too late.

I had already forgotten your name by the time we left, but in all honesty, it’s rarer for me to remember. Who?, I responded, when Anna sought for my thoughts on you during our mandatory post-performance pizza. That you hadn’t joined us was probably another sign, but it appears I was immune to signs that night.

Alex’s new date, she continued. Haven’t seen her before.

I had long grown tired of the kinds of analytical discussions of relationships that fill the twilight zone between smalltalk and bigtalk, but Anna almost lived for it. I even began to think this was the only reason she associated with Alex anymore because he was a consistent hive of new gossip. The combination of straight-talking friendliness with a historic struggle of never knowing what he wanted, from life in general as much as relationships, made him a beacon for those with delusions of cracking his code.

Spooky. I replied. Too cool for him. I at least remember that line distinctly from that night, but little else. I’m not sure where it came from, the idea that you were too cool for him. Perhaps I meant that you were too cool for me?

Did you talk to her at all?

A pause, as I tried to recall what we had even conversed about.

She’s a writer of some kind, like an actual one, not one of those uni students who has a tumblr, Anna continued, unprompted. I bet she’s heard about his reputation for sending girls away in tears and needs some writing inspo. Can’t say he’d make a compelling lead though.

No, I responded, after a pause. Still deep in thought. Anna fired up again, starting off on a rant that I must have filtered. I think I remember her bringing up Jamie as a comparison. Jamie was Anna’s favourite of the long run of flings, but I don’t think there was any apt comparison.

No, I mean I don’t think she knows his rep. I followed. Think she’s new to town. Has an accent at least.

As if that means anything, she fired back. Being incorrect wasn’t Anna’s favourite, and I punched myself for stoking any attempts at an argument. I could have continued, recalling the one thing that Alex had told me – that you’d only been here a month, but I knew that an argument wasn’t worth the bother.

We headed back down, spotting the crowd of vapers and analogue smokers outside the sole door slowly shrink as they were called to the depths by the sub-bass of an arpeggiator. The roof of my mouth was completely numb from the pizza, as is the norm for these sorts of evenings. No time to sit and enjoy. Neither of us bothered to find you or Alex in the crowd. I’m not sure why. Perhaps we had sensed something that we had better stay away from.

I hadn’t seen this new band of Jasmine’s before. I think this was the third or fourth group I’d seen her with, the musical projects coming and going like hair colours. Whatever talent she undoubtedly had was almost always truncated by her reluctance to work through a project, always settling for a few gigs and a few shoddily put-together originals, never to be heard outside of dive bars or rehearsal spaces.

They played a piece that night that I recognised. I sat through the whole song wondering if it was a cover or just Jasmine’s rushed songwriting completely ripping something else off. It was an instrumental, played on two synthesisers and an alto saxophone. Or maybe it was tenor, BK never seemed to bring the same saxophone to any gig, him being the worst of all the scene for bandhopping. The lights in the room had all been turned blue, a deep, aquatic blue with a kind of light filter that made everything feel underwater. As derivative as the music was, I remember noting that you don’t exactly need to be original to get an emotional response. I was immersed in the sounds, all the hundreds of artificial reverbs swarming me and enveloping me like a warm blanket.

It was definitely a cover. Too good to be Jasmine’s, I thought, quite rudely discarding the talents of someone I described as my third-most-talented-associate in the bin. I remember seeing you and Alex during it, and I looked directly at you, probably the only time I did properly that night. Dark room, dark hair, dark lipstick, dark dress. All gothed up and spooky, like so many of Alex’s flings. But you were smiling. A big, lame smile. Nothing spooky or mysterious about it, nothing pretentious or melodramatic. You were tapping along as if you recognised the song too. Like you actually knew what it was, unlike me. Perhaps that’s why you were too cool for me. I always knew more music than people. Not this time.

It was nearly three years before I worked out what it was. Rachel’s Song. Blade Runner. We were watching it at Alex’s flat, in preparation for the sequel. When the melody came in it all flooded back, and I looked across at you. There was that smile. The dorky, nerdy smile. No pretence. No melodrama. I don’t remember watching the film at all that night, from then on all I could watch was you.

#short story #writing #creative #blade runner #novella #almost you

0 notes