1. A Sunday Kind of Loving...

I'm rehashing something that I first started posting on ABC when I joined 20 years ago. I had no idea what to do with it then, but have a better idea now. Sometimes, these things need to wait! Apologies to anyone who recognises it. It will change as it goes on... (image credit: mine)

 

It started the way it always started.

A quiet Sunday afternoon, dinner finished and cleared away, coffee pot bubbling nicely. I usually had a doze, but I had a story idea kicking around in my head. Strike while the iron's hot. So I set the laptop on the table by the window and booted it up. I poured myself a steaming mug, stirred in a couple of sugars, lit a cigar. I stared at the blank page, and let the scene begin to form.

I typed the title:

STAINS IN MY UNDERPANTS, HELL-HOUND ON MY TRAIL

Hm. I liked that. It had a suitable Bukowski-esque ring to it - just what I wanted for the mood of the piece.

I had another swig of coffee.

I popped the cigar in the corner of my mouth.

I put my fingers back on the keys...

 

(creee-eeakkk...)

 

I glanced up at the ceiling. The crack running across it like the Great Wall of China from space.

I waited.

Quiet again.

I looked back at the screen.

I started typing.

Jim took another beer from the fridge and popped the tab. He sat at the table with it and lit a

 

(creeee-eeeakkk...)

 

cigarette. As he smoked and drank, he looked around at the place - at the relics of his life. The broken

 

(cre-eeakk – creak...)

 

sticks of furniture, the junk-shop trinkets, the beer-stained carpet, the mould growing up the walls like black cancer...

 

(creak – creak – creak – creak – creak...)

 

...and POP went my bubble.

A few seconds later, the moaning started in lewd counterpoint - the tempo increasing, the scale rising, on and on in a rapturous crescendo...

 

(creak-uhh – creak-uhh – creak-ahhh - creak-uhh – creak-AHHH – creak-yeah – creak-uhh...)

 

I picked up my coffee and sat staring over the rim as I drank, imagining the scene upstairs.

The Datlens.

Bev and Steve.

His pallid, bendy frame pinned to the mattress by her quivering bulk - like a squid engulfing a sardine. He told me they were trying for a kid.

Jesus Christ!

Trying?

How hard could it be? They did plenty of training for it. They could have shagged their way through a fucking marathon.

Which is what it was, of course.

A Fucking Marathon.

All twenty-six miles, three-hundred-and-eighty-five yards of it.

Every fucking day.

 

(creak-yeah – creak-yeah – creak-FUCKmebabe – yeah...)

 

Internet porn was less graphic. And you could always turn down the volume. You knew the script, anyway. It wasn't much to learn.

I got up and went to the window. Outside, it was like a Lowry painting come to life and set by the sea. A few daft buggers on the promenade, scarfed and fleeced up, slanting into the November cold. Seagulls wheeling in the wind like tossed away chip wrappers. A beer-froth of tide on the beach. The pier stretching out across the freezing waves like a runway for suicides.

Partly it was jealousy, of course. After two years, even the suffocating physics of Bev Datlen would be bearable.

I didn't want to think about it too much.

 

(creak-fuck – creak-yeah – creak-ahh – creak-yeah – creak-JEEZus – creak-uhh – creak-yeah – creak-YESSSSSSSSS!...)

 

I suddenly realised how cold it was. The heat was all upstairs. All their heat and mine, too. And hot air wasn't the only thing rising.

I clicked on the 'X'.

Do you want to save changes to Document 1?

What was the point?

No

I closed the lid.

I pulled on my parka and hiking boots. It was time to join the daft buggers out there. Clear my head a bit. Get a top-up for the meter. Forget about what was going on in other people’s lives.

Think about the next thing.

Whatever that might be…

(continued) https://www.abctales.com/story/harryc/2-small-town-sunday-walking-blues