ANOTHER YEAR WITH JOHNNIE by Emily Kate Ainscough
-
ShortStoryContest
- Posts: 41
- Joined: 01 Mar 2007, 07:47
- Bookshelf Size: 0
ANOTHER YEAR WITH JOHNNIE by Emily Kate Ainscough
The following story has been selected as a featured runner-up in our 2015 short story contest (Contest Theme - "The Self-Destructiveness of Vengeance and Hate")
ANOTHER YEAR WITH JOHNNIE by Emily Kate Ainscough
Campus was dismal. Not at all how it seemed when I’d visited in the fall. What where vast plains of lime green garlanded with tiny orange adornments where now empty. No youthful feet trod frequently against the blades, no picnickers with textbooks or groups of smoking hedonists spewed across its floor. It depressed the hell out of me to walk up those monochromatic stone steps into the marble prison I’d soon call home and it depressed me more to see the vacant expressions on similarly disappointed students surrounding me – fatigued from a summer of experiences they’d soon be taught to inadequately document. Unpacking was a highlight. Festooning lacklustre furniture with first editions of the classics and scratched records in each other’s sleeves. I didn’t bring a player of course, so in those deceitful sleeves they’d sit ‘till Christmas; lonely on my nightstand – gathering dust.
John Ford didn’t arrive ‘till morning, I woke to his shadow reining over me, running his skeletal figures through the spines of my hardbacks and blowing smoke on their exquisite covers. He picked one up and took it, borrowed it about a month before returning it – just like that. He was crazy rude like that - John Ford. Only he wasn’t John, never John, only Johnnie. The whole year unravelled like that, Johnnie being an ignorant jackass and me staying quiet about it. A new girl every night, and I wasn’t to be around when they were. I learnt to recognise feminine sniggers and pseudo-masculine chortles as my que to head to the club. The Jazz club, open all night, every night but Mondays. My tarnished haven. Its warm light glowed through evening fog exposing little pools of dapper young men and their swell swaying dates swigging European drinks for the class of it. I made friends at the Jazz club, musicians, poets, men referred to by their bohemian religions and atheists referred to by their drink. Jack (because he drunk Jack Daniels) was the first guy I talked to, like seriously talked to – about life and love and the tedious flatness of campus life. He was tall and thin and wore his circular gold rimmed glasses all day long even though he only needed them for reading, he read a lot. First time I spoke to him because he reminded me of my old man, with his ironed collar overlapping that funny little sweater vest “I’ll buy you a drink if you tell me your story,” and he did. From a broken home in Louisiana he became fascinated with Jazz, he learnt the piano real well but never played it for no-one. By the time he left school his mam decided he ought to be a lawyer so he went off to university to study law. He wanted my story in return but I assured him it wasn’t worth my breath – he was fine with that. Old Jack was fine with just about anything. He introduced me to some of his guys and we met some more together, it was nice. Nice in a nostalgic kind of way.
Of course it didn’t last long – by the summer Johnnie discovered the Jazz place and with it all its connotations. He stole it all from me. Stole Jack and the guys, stole those pretty little girls in those pretty little frocks and stole the tender low hum of the alto-sax right from my eardrums. He was crazy rude like that. Without the club I found refuge in other manifestations but it wasn’t easy. The world was so terribly grey and its inhabitants greyer. I’d take lackadaisical wanders down ghost-town paths just to distract myself from the incessant tedium of the ennui. It helped to be without the company of Johnnie Ford and his sarcasm but loneliness fell like the heavy heart in my chest and stapled me broken to the ground. Apathy became my soul mate that year, we were inseparable. Sympatico – until Sylvia. A lethargic me met a melancholy Sylvia wilting her marigold petals on a dampened bench one afternoon in the temporary cessation of the rain’s aggression. She was beautiful, beautiful even in her agony. Sinking under the heavy burden of weltschmerz her eyes began to bleed these iridescent spheres of perfect salty rain. I thought her tears might have been why the clouds stopped theirs – that they couldn’t compete with such sincere sadness. She held the cuffs to her jumper with the tips of her partially clawed fingers and her dampened blonde ringlets blew gently over her pale skin. She looked like sunshine and daisies growing in clusters through a field. She looked like the sky before a storm and the pavement shortly after and I loved her. Slowly at first but with growing haste I loved Sylvia Howarth. I loved her like a life-support and I missed her like the life I could have lived. That summer I spent an eternity in the subtle almond of her perfume and in the lines of verse my soul recited to my heart. My heart had become a raging dog of passion held hostage by the rationality of my head but I never let it show.
We never really spoke until one evening at a monotonous rub that left us both banished to the night sky with boredom and an escape from stale air.
Her voice grew from behind me shocking my knees into paralysis and my heart beats into interruption. “What you doing out here then Bertie?”
“You know my name?” That elicited a half smile from her cherry lips and she tried again.
“You’re outside, on your own?”
“Do you not count as company?”
“I was unexpected,”
“Indeed.” The conversation was turning my blue cheeks rubicund but I had to keep it going. “Just tryin’a get away from the smoke,”
She placed her fur coat down, lining-up, on the puddled step and sat down still behind me. “ain’t we all? But god I agree, dreadful smell, makes their pretty little fingernails all yellow too,”
I was plucking up the courage to turn around and just look her in her faded cobalt eyes or take her little gloved hands in mine and see if she listens to Jazz. I couldn’t of course; I just stayed staring out into that cold ultramarine sea soaring over our heads. There was this bird perched on a streetlamp and it just looked so damn pretty up there and so perfect I couldn’t stop looking at the damn thing. I kept having these flashbacks to my old house at Christmas, when my old man had to work so we ate the turkey at some crazy hour and it drove my mam insane. There was always some bird outside the window in that house, way up high minding its own. I closed my eyes and started to imagine and “Hey Sylvia,”
As I addressed her so did another young man who now stood behind her leaning against the doorway. Johnnie bloody Ford had his tux jacket swung over one arm and this sly smug smirk on his movie-star face. “God Bertie, don’t offer your jacket or nothin’. This pretty young thing is freezin’ in such a dress” but he put his own jacket over her tiny shoulders as he said that. I swung my whole body round to look at him but he’d already helped her to her feet and started guiding her past me. I got so damn angry then, like hell cultivated in my gut and it burned up my throat and drove my mind into the abyss. Clutching my world dark with thin eyelids so that only weak tears slid through. I sighed through gritted teeth and my clenched fists snapped red and white in my pockets. In the background faint giggles decked their petty conversations, “Syliva…god that’s a gorgeous name,” and a hushed “yeah well I have to live with him,”. He thought he was so funny that night with his spontaneous flirting and sideways comments. When I couldn’t take anymore I kicked the puddles beneath my beaten shoes and decided to head to my long lost club. But no, no of course he couldn’t even let me have that. “Hey Sylvia, you like Jazz music because I know this really great place,” face blotched pink and eyes strained bloodshot I turned on my heels and walked back to our room instead.
In seeing how it annoyed me he started taking her everywhere. Sylvia became the closest thing Johnnie ever had to a girlfriend, and it killed me. The worst part of it all was how terribly close Johnnie thought we were, like he’d talk to me sometimes the way you might talk to a tremendous friend. Only he never treated me like one, his superiority complex wouldn’t allow for that. I started to loathe him so much, not completely irrationally, but to an extent that I’m not proud of.
Jealousy does crazy things to a guy…so does university for that matter. And so somewhere along the line of envy and spite John Ford stole the last thing he ever stole from me, he stole my mind. I crumbled inside myself, the bottomless abyss of my hatred for him. I couldn’t get out – no outlet for my anger no escape. Writing had always been my panacea, any emotion any problem – I’d write my way out of it. Write my way out of the labyrinth. But no. No hate is too harsh, too cold a word too frozen to be thawed by my typewriter or anything and so it grew. And it grew. And it grew. That summer I began to imagine impossible things, consider them – plan them. To take my own life? But I am no defeatist, no. No to take his. To take a knife to that stubble-y neck and draw the blade and hurt him he like he hurt me. I deliberated poison, beating even a push off an unfortunate gradient but I’m a romantic at heart and be it buried under sleazy-ignorance - so is he.
He’d offered to share a ride with me back to uni because he’d have to ride by where I live anyway – he didn’t tell me why. The invitation confused me but in my senseless, sick mind I thought fate had provided me with the perfect opportunity to kill him. I was wrong. His motives where soon exposed when he rolled by my house shirtless with my Sylvia in the passenger. She looked just swell with her little blue and white summer dress and cute little hat, she looked so damn pretty, but she was already gone. Giggling to his every word like the other girls would, it was starting – the Johnnie Ford infection. She wasn’t the other girls though, she was so sweet and so pure and so much better than him – not worthy of being tossed ‘bout most of America to make his pathetic little room-mate jealous. It took three minutes for him to acknowledge me and only then at the prompt of Sylvia. “Damnit Johnnie, you’ve not seen him all summer, ain’t ya gonna give him a squeeze?” her cherry lips grew while she spoke leaving a smiling residue on her face when she’d finished. “Bertie” he finally sighed and I looked right up at him as he did. His peanut of a brain-cell had my full attention as I waited for him to humour her with an ‘I’ve missed you kid’ or a ‘glad to see you’ but no. “Pass us that lighter will ‘y”. And I did. He placed a cigarette through those cherry lips and lit it for her, the same cherry lips that once advocated their inhabitant’s destruction. “Dreadful smell,” I said. “It’ll make your pretty little finger nails yellow”.
I cried a long while over my first editions that night, blotted the pages with my jealousy and smudged their ink more than Johnnie’s fingerprints ever did. I’d let him ruin me. Utterly and unequivocally and he couldn’t even see. Cultivating a sore throat he spent a great deal more time in the room that week wearing my sweaters and drinking my beer. My cantankerous room-mate, his remarkable lover and me. The week was as unremitting as his arrogance and my tolerance was abating with each minute in his presence. I spent many a night staring taciturn through the knife in my luggage and painting “happy” endings in my head. I felt so abandoned in the world, more than alone – I’ve always been alone. I felt that even the absence of love had left me, leaving me with not even nothingness, but its memory. They’d catch me for my crime in the end. Maybe it was possible for the world to hate me with more ferocity than it already did; maybe the world had already given up on me. Maybe someone would try and kill me – but at this point I doubted even death would have me. Perhaps the only sane facet of my brain wished they did kill me and that the world would never get to see the boundless depth of my potential. The world wouldn’t ever cry at my poetry or fall in love with my voice. I could bend the world – if it would let me. What did Johnnie have to offer? Nothing. He couldn’t save our planet with a flash of his toothy smile…couldn’t flirt his way to greatness, couldn’t flirt his way to anything.
Sylvia had gone to her mam’s house that weekend, I smiled that she didn’t have to see. I knew Johnnie’s Saturday night routine like I knew my own and so I followed him knife in sleeve and tears in eyes. He’d go to the jazz club first, spend his money on pretty girl’s drinks and kiss a few – he was a bit of an egg that way Old Johnnie. When he’d blown all his cash he’d walk to the lake and just sit there a while, stare at the birds or whatever the hell else Johnnie likes to stare at. I stood behind him for a good ten minutes, he looked so nice there – peaceful. For the first time in my life I thought John Ford might have a soul, and if he did I swear to god it cried at the river, even if just for a moment – so sad. I wondered if Sylvia knew he came here, wondered if anyone did. But the perfect silence didn’t last long – I stood on a twig and he jerked his neck round faster than a blink. He spat at me, eyes wide with beautiful shock “Goddamnit Bertie, y’ tryin’a kill me or something?” Ironic. I walked towards him and sat a little to his right. “Go chase yourself Bertie, the hell you doin’ out here anyway?” I said nothing. The power swelled inside me and metastasized. Soon my head was full of compact emotion and I started to cry just to let a little out.
“y’ bent or something eh Bertie?”
“Why do you come here?”
He looked back down at the pebbles, they weren’t great for sitting and the wind was unkind to my skin, blowing fingers numb and hair all over.
“God I don’t know kid, the hell you ask me a question like that anyways?”
I nodded, bit my lip, looked down. I mean why would he tell me? He probably just needed some place to smoke. I stood up so I could look down on him. He was wearing my jumper, spilled something down it too. I hated him so much.
Then it started to rain on us, and I smiled with as little sincerity that Johnnie lived his life with. And in that moment, in my crazy stupid head I thought I was justice. It was my duty – I thought – to kill the bad guys. To triumph for my side. And John Ford was a bad guy, there was no dispute.
“I hate you Johnnie,” he laughed at that, cautiously, hoping that was the right response and that I wasn’t in fact his mental room-mate here to slit his throat.
“I hate you John.” He was wrong; and I watched his pseudo-cheery face melt to expose his fear. He looked up at me, I looked down at him – and he nodded.
“Yeah…” he eventually said. “Yeah, I know.”
I started to picture his blood all over my sweater he was wearing, and his pathetic little eyes swelling with regret. Would he beg? Would I listen?
“You stole my books and you stole my work and you stole my room for your sleazy one night stands. You stole my clothes and you stole my jokes and my taste in art and music. You stole my club – my sanctuary, and you left me lost and alone,” I gulped. “You took my friends and you call me a bluenose like you’re any better and I hate you. And you took her. Not from me – she was never mine but you still took her. You stole her from the world, my perfect…”
“What’s that in your sleeve Bertie?”
“My perfect…”
“Your sleeve” was bleeding now. In my anger I’d clenched the knife and it had cut my skin, blood was seeping and he was crying and I hadn’t ever seen him cry. My cover was blown – he knew what was happening and I expected him to run but he didn’t. He was too coward to fight for his life, he was pathetic.
“SHE WAS PEFECT” I wept, because she was – or had been, or could have been but “you ruined her…John Ford couldn’t just let her be. Observe the flower without plucking her from her roots and letting her wither in your darkness. And you didn’t even love her Johnnie…”
“Are you going to kill me now?”
I took the knife out of my sleeve and turned it between my fingertips. My sleeve now patterned with a crimson chrysanthemum growing fast and deeper red. I started to walk towards him and he crawled away, weeping and sputtering with blotchy cheeks. “You see the thing is Johnnie…” I walked slowly while I talked, like the psychopath he’d morphed me to be. “The thing is that the world is a very, very big place. Full of charmers and cheats and people like you. And it doesn’t need another one. This river, this city this WORLD is full,”
His bloodshot eyes were bleeding clear and for the first time in forever I had his full attention. He kept mouthing vacant apologies but horse throat or fear meant they were never voiced.
I raised the knife. “There’s no room Johnnie, for you or your ego. NO ROOM!” He hated it when I shouted, I did as well. My head grew hot and I felt out of control so then I started to break down. I fell to my knees and I bawled my eyes out, “no room…”
What happened next was all a bit of a blur. I held him by the nape of his shirt in one hand and the knife in the other. Both of us crying over both of us. I held it to his neck like I’d visualised doing for so long, justified it in my head over and over again ‘He stole so much from you,’ I hold myself. But something lost between the rain’s war and the sky’s peace I realised how utterly far I’d fallen. My arm had been bleeding for a while now – but I’d’ only just felt its sting. And the trees and the wind circled and bowed around us, like they were trying to hide us from God, from the world. The boysenberry sky shone at my epiphany and I knew I couldn’t kill him. I couldn’t kill him because John Ford had stolen everything from me, but he couldn’t steal the very essence of me, and he couldn’t steal my innocence.
I dropped the knife and then his neck. His face fell into the flooding pebble beach and his glasses shattered beneath him and he just lay there a while. In the rain and the glass and the tears and the blood and said nothing. I sat beside him frozen while he sat himself up and we cried together. I drew the remains of his glasses from his face and swapped them with my own. We sat there till morning, crying in silence by a flooded lake and the debris of supressed hatred. But I was brighter every morning, and have been every day since.
ANOTHER YEAR WITH JOHNNIE by Emily Kate Ainscough
Campus was dismal. Not at all how it seemed when I’d visited in the fall. What where vast plains of lime green garlanded with tiny orange adornments where now empty. No youthful feet trod frequently against the blades, no picnickers with textbooks or groups of smoking hedonists spewed across its floor. It depressed the hell out of me to walk up those monochromatic stone steps into the marble prison I’d soon call home and it depressed me more to see the vacant expressions on similarly disappointed students surrounding me – fatigued from a summer of experiences they’d soon be taught to inadequately document. Unpacking was a highlight. Festooning lacklustre furniture with first editions of the classics and scratched records in each other’s sleeves. I didn’t bring a player of course, so in those deceitful sleeves they’d sit ‘till Christmas; lonely on my nightstand – gathering dust.
John Ford didn’t arrive ‘till morning, I woke to his shadow reining over me, running his skeletal figures through the spines of my hardbacks and blowing smoke on their exquisite covers. He picked one up and took it, borrowed it about a month before returning it – just like that. He was crazy rude like that - John Ford. Only he wasn’t John, never John, only Johnnie. The whole year unravelled like that, Johnnie being an ignorant jackass and me staying quiet about it. A new girl every night, and I wasn’t to be around when they were. I learnt to recognise feminine sniggers and pseudo-masculine chortles as my que to head to the club. The Jazz club, open all night, every night but Mondays. My tarnished haven. Its warm light glowed through evening fog exposing little pools of dapper young men and their swell swaying dates swigging European drinks for the class of it. I made friends at the Jazz club, musicians, poets, men referred to by their bohemian religions and atheists referred to by their drink. Jack (because he drunk Jack Daniels) was the first guy I talked to, like seriously talked to – about life and love and the tedious flatness of campus life. He was tall and thin and wore his circular gold rimmed glasses all day long even though he only needed them for reading, he read a lot. First time I spoke to him because he reminded me of my old man, with his ironed collar overlapping that funny little sweater vest “I’ll buy you a drink if you tell me your story,” and he did. From a broken home in Louisiana he became fascinated with Jazz, he learnt the piano real well but never played it for no-one. By the time he left school his mam decided he ought to be a lawyer so he went off to university to study law. He wanted my story in return but I assured him it wasn’t worth my breath – he was fine with that. Old Jack was fine with just about anything. He introduced me to some of his guys and we met some more together, it was nice. Nice in a nostalgic kind of way.
Of course it didn’t last long – by the summer Johnnie discovered the Jazz place and with it all its connotations. He stole it all from me. Stole Jack and the guys, stole those pretty little girls in those pretty little frocks and stole the tender low hum of the alto-sax right from my eardrums. He was crazy rude like that. Without the club I found refuge in other manifestations but it wasn’t easy. The world was so terribly grey and its inhabitants greyer. I’d take lackadaisical wanders down ghost-town paths just to distract myself from the incessant tedium of the ennui. It helped to be without the company of Johnnie Ford and his sarcasm but loneliness fell like the heavy heart in my chest and stapled me broken to the ground. Apathy became my soul mate that year, we were inseparable. Sympatico – until Sylvia. A lethargic me met a melancholy Sylvia wilting her marigold petals on a dampened bench one afternoon in the temporary cessation of the rain’s aggression. She was beautiful, beautiful even in her agony. Sinking under the heavy burden of weltschmerz her eyes began to bleed these iridescent spheres of perfect salty rain. I thought her tears might have been why the clouds stopped theirs – that they couldn’t compete with such sincere sadness. She held the cuffs to her jumper with the tips of her partially clawed fingers and her dampened blonde ringlets blew gently over her pale skin. She looked like sunshine and daisies growing in clusters through a field. She looked like the sky before a storm and the pavement shortly after and I loved her. Slowly at first but with growing haste I loved Sylvia Howarth. I loved her like a life-support and I missed her like the life I could have lived. That summer I spent an eternity in the subtle almond of her perfume and in the lines of verse my soul recited to my heart. My heart had become a raging dog of passion held hostage by the rationality of my head but I never let it show.
We never really spoke until one evening at a monotonous rub that left us both banished to the night sky with boredom and an escape from stale air.
Her voice grew from behind me shocking my knees into paralysis and my heart beats into interruption. “What you doing out here then Bertie?”
“You know my name?” That elicited a half smile from her cherry lips and she tried again.
“You’re outside, on your own?”
“Do you not count as company?”
“I was unexpected,”
“Indeed.” The conversation was turning my blue cheeks rubicund but I had to keep it going. “Just tryin’a get away from the smoke,”
She placed her fur coat down, lining-up, on the puddled step and sat down still behind me. “ain’t we all? But god I agree, dreadful smell, makes their pretty little fingernails all yellow too,”
I was plucking up the courage to turn around and just look her in her faded cobalt eyes or take her little gloved hands in mine and see if she listens to Jazz. I couldn’t of course; I just stayed staring out into that cold ultramarine sea soaring over our heads. There was this bird perched on a streetlamp and it just looked so damn pretty up there and so perfect I couldn’t stop looking at the damn thing. I kept having these flashbacks to my old house at Christmas, when my old man had to work so we ate the turkey at some crazy hour and it drove my mam insane. There was always some bird outside the window in that house, way up high minding its own. I closed my eyes and started to imagine and “Hey Sylvia,”
As I addressed her so did another young man who now stood behind her leaning against the doorway. Johnnie bloody Ford had his tux jacket swung over one arm and this sly smug smirk on his movie-star face. “God Bertie, don’t offer your jacket or nothin’. This pretty young thing is freezin’ in such a dress” but he put his own jacket over her tiny shoulders as he said that. I swung my whole body round to look at him but he’d already helped her to her feet and started guiding her past me. I got so damn angry then, like hell cultivated in my gut and it burned up my throat and drove my mind into the abyss. Clutching my world dark with thin eyelids so that only weak tears slid through. I sighed through gritted teeth and my clenched fists snapped red and white in my pockets. In the background faint giggles decked their petty conversations, “Syliva…god that’s a gorgeous name,” and a hushed “yeah well I have to live with him,”. He thought he was so funny that night with his spontaneous flirting and sideways comments. When I couldn’t take anymore I kicked the puddles beneath my beaten shoes and decided to head to my long lost club. But no, no of course he couldn’t even let me have that. “Hey Sylvia, you like Jazz music because I know this really great place,” face blotched pink and eyes strained bloodshot I turned on my heels and walked back to our room instead.
In seeing how it annoyed me he started taking her everywhere. Sylvia became the closest thing Johnnie ever had to a girlfriend, and it killed me. The worst part of it all was how terribly close Johnnie thought we were, like he’d talk to me sometimes the way you might talk to a tremendous friend. Only he never treated me like one, his superiority complex wouldn’t allow for that. I started to loathe him so much, not completely irrationally, but to an extent that I’m not proud of.
Jealousy does crazy things to a guy…so does university for that matter. And so somewhere along the line of envy and spite John Ford stole the last thing he ever stole from me, he stole my mind. I crumbled inside myself, the bottomless abyss of my hatred for him. I couldn’t get out – no outlet for my anger no escape. Writing had always been my panacea, any emotion any problem – I’d write my way out of it. Write my way out of the labyrinth. But no. No hate is too harsh, too cold a word too frozen to be thawed by my typewriter or anything and so it grew. And it grew. And it grew. That summer I began to imagine impossible things, consider them – plan them. To take my own life? But I am no defeatist, no. No to take his. To take a knife to that stubble-y neck and draw the blade and hurt him he like he hurt me. I deliberated poison, beating even a push off an unfortunate gradient but I’m a romantic at heart and be it buried under sleazy-ignorance - so is he.
He’d offered to share a ride with me back to uni because he’d have to ride by where I live anyway – he didn’t tell me why. The invitation confused me but in my senseless, sick mind I thought fate had provided me with the perfect opportunity to kill him. I was wrong. His motives where soon exposed when he rolled by my house shirtless with my Sylvia in the passenger. She looked just swell with her little blue and white summer dress and cute little hat, she looked so damn pretty, but she was already gone. Giggling to his every word like the other girls would, it was starting – the Johnnie Ford infection. She wasn’t the other girls though, she was so sweet and so pure and so much better than him – not worthy of being tossed ‘bout most of America to make his pathetic little room-mate jealous. It took three minutes for him to acknowledge me and only then at the prompt of Sylvia. “Damnit Johnnie, you’ve not seen him all summer, ain’t ya gonna give him a squeeze?” her cherry lips grew while she spoke leaving a smiling residue on her face when she’d finished. “Bertie” he finally sighed and I looked right up at him as he did. His peanut of a brain-cell had my full attention as I waited for him to humour her with an ‘I’ve missed you kid’ or a ‘glad to see you’ but no. “Pass us that lighter will ‘y”. And I did. He placed a cigarette through those cherry lips and lit it for her, the same cherry lips that once advocated their inhabitant’s destruction. “Dreadful smell,” I said. “It’ll make your pretty little finger nails yellow”.
I cried a long while over my first editions that night, blotted the pages with my jealousy and smudged their ink more than Johnnie’s fingerprints ever did. I’d let him ruin me. Utterly and unequivocally and he couldn’t even see. Cultivating a sore throat he spent a great deal more time in the room that week wearing my sweaters and drinking my beer. My cantankerous room-mate, his remarkable lover and me. The week was as unremitting as his arrogance and my tolerance was abating with each minute in his presence. I spent many a night staring taciturn through the knife in my luggage and painting “happy” endings in my head. I felt so abandoned in the world, more than alone – I’ve always been alone. I felt that even the absence of love had left me, leaving me with not even nothingness, but its memory. They’d catch me for my crime in the end. Maybe it was possible for the world to hate me with more ferocity than it already did; maybe the world had already given up on me. Maybe someone would try and kill me – but at this point I doubted even death would have me. Perhaps the only sane facet of my brain wished they did kill me and that the world would never get to see the boundless depth of my potential. The world wouldn’t ever cry at my poetry or fall in love with my voice. I could bend the world – if it would let me. What did Johnnie have to offer? Nothing. He couldn’t save our planet with a flash of his toothy smile…couldn’t flirt his way to greatness, couldn’t flirt his way to anything.
Sylvia had gone to her mam’s house that weekend, I smiled that she didn’t have to see. I knew Johnnie’s Saturday night routine like I knew my own and so I followed him knife in sleeve and tears in eyes. He’d go to the jazz club first, spend his money on pretty girl’s drinks and kiss a few – he was a bit of an egg that way Old Johnnie. When he’d blown all his cash he’d walk to the lake and just sit there a while, stare at the birds or whatever the hell else Johnnie likes to stare at. I stood behind him for a good ten minutes, he looked so nice there – peaceful. For the first time in my life I thought John Ford might have a soul, and if he did I swear to god it cried at the river, even if just for a moment – so sad. I wondered if Sylvia knew he came here, wondered if anyone did. But the perfect silence didn’t last long – I stood on a twig and he jerked his neck round faster than a blink. He spat at me, eyes wide with beautiful shock “Goddamnit Bertie, y’ tryin’a kill me or something?” Ironic. I walked towards him and sat a little to his right. “Go chase yourself Bertie, the hell you doin’ out here anyway?” I said nothing. The power swelled inside me and metastasized. Soon my head was full of compact emotion and I started to cry just to let a little out.
“y’ bent or something eh Bertie?”
“Why do you come here?”
He looked back down at the pebbles, they weren’t great for sitting and the wind was unkind to my skin, blowing fingers numb and hair all over.
“God I don’t know kid, the hell you ask me a question like that anyways?”
I nodded, bit my lip, looked down. I mean why would he tell me? He probably just needed some place to smoke. I stood up so I could look down on him. He was wearing my jumper, spilled something down it too. I hated him so much.
Then it started to rain on us, and I smiled with as little sincerity that Johnnie lived his life with. And in that moment, in my crazy stupid head I thought I was justice. It was my duty – I thought – to kill the bad guys. To triumph for my side. And John Ford was a bad guy, there was no dispute.
“I hate you Johnnie,” he laughed at that, cautiously, hoping that was the right response and that I wasn’t in fact his mental room-mate here to slit his throat.
“I hate you John.” He was wrong; and I watched his pseudo-cheery face melt to expose his fear. He looked up at me, I looked down at him – and he nodded.
“Yeah…” he eventually said. “Yeah, I know.”
I started to picture his blood all over my sweater he was wearing, and his pathetic little eyes swelling with regret. Would he beg? Would I listen?
“You stole my books and you stole my work and you stole my room for your sleazy one night stands. You stole my clothes and you stole my jokes and my taste in art and music. You stole my club – my sanctuary, and you left me lost and alone,” I gulped. “You took my friends and you call me a bluenose like you’re any better and I hate you. And you took her. Not from me – she was never mine but you still took her. You stole her from the world, my perfect…”
“What’s that in your sleeve Bertie?”
“My perfect…”
“Your sleeve” was bleeding now. In my anger I’d clenched the knife and it had cut my skin, blood was seeping and he was crying and I hadn’t ever seen him cry. My cover was blown – he knew what was happening and I expected him to run but he didn’t. He was too coward to fight for his life, he was pathetic.
“SHE WAS PEFECT” I wept, because she was – or had been, or could have been but “you ruined her…John Ford couldn’t just let her be. Observe the flower without plucking her from her roots and letting her wither in your darkness. And you didn’t even love her Johnnie…”
“Are you going to kill me now?”
I took the knife out of my sleeve and turned it between my fingertips. My sleeve now patterned with a crimson chrysanthemum growing fast and deeper red. I started to walk towards him and he crawled away, weeping and sputtering with blotchy cheeks. “You see the thing is Johnnie…” I walked slowly while I talked, like the psychopath he’d morphed me to be. “The thing is that the world is a very, very big place. Full of charmers and cheats and people like you. And it doesn’t need another one. This river, this city this WORLD is full,”
His bloodshot eyes were bleeding clear and for the first time in forever I had his full attention. He kept mouthing vacant apologies but horse throat or fear meant they were never voiced.
I raised the knife. “There’s no room Johnnie, for you or your ego. NO ROOM!” He hated it when I shouted, I did as well. My head grew hot and I felt out of control so then I started to break down. I fell to my knees and I bawled my eyes out, “no room…”
What happened next was all a bit of a blur. I held him by the nape of his shirt in one hand and the knife in the other. Both of us crying over both of us. I held it to his neck like I’d visualised doing for so long, justified it in my head over and over again ‘He stole so much from you,’ I hold myself. But something lost between the rain’s war and the sky’s peace I realised how utterly far I’d fallen. My arm had been bleeding for a while now – but I’d’ only just felt its sting. And the trees and the wind circled and bowed around us, like they were trying to hide us from God, from the world. The boysenberry sky shone at my epiphany and I knew I couldn’t kill him. I couldn’t kill him because John Ford had stolen everything from me, but he couldn’t steal the very essence of me, and he couldn’t steal my innocence.
I dropped the knife and then his neck. His face fell into the flooding pebble beach and his glasses shattered beneath him and he just lay there a while. In the rain and the glass and the tears and the blood and said nothing. I sat beside him frozen while he sat himself up and we cried together. I drew the remains of his glasses from his face and swapped them with my own. We sat there till morning, crying in silence by a flooded lake and the debris of supressed hatred. But I was brighter every morning, and have been every day since.
-
tepih
- Posts: 11
- Joined: 14 May 2015, 07:43
- Bookshelf Size: 0
wow, the ending came surprising to me
