1. A Sunday Kind of Loving...

By HarryC
- 131 reads
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
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