JC
Sound of Pen student, Sophie, writes soooo beautifully. Here are the opening chapters to the story she’s been working on. Prepare to be DAZZLED!
Chapter 1
If there was ever a girl able to make herself disappear it would be Rose, I thought, as I held her hand in the darkened cinema. Every movement she made seemed so fleeting, so unfinished. When we walked together I kept my eyes pressed firmly on the curve of her shoulders; she had a habit of fading into the crowds without warning, leaving just a trace of her perfume on the breeze. I would wheel around in vain hoping to catch sight of her, until she appeared grinning before me and I wondered if I’d ever lost her in the first place. She had a trick of always being in my blind spot, impossible to keep in view.
So it was my idea to take the train a couple stops down to the local cinema, and catch a movie. Now, in the half-light, I held the way her eyelashes looked in my mind, framed against the white of her face. I stared as shadows slipped and danced across her lips and cheeks. You could only see her when she
wanted to be seen, so I spent a lot of time committing her to memory. Terrified to lose her. Terrified she would one day wash away completely on the tide. The holding hands was my idea as well. Another way of anchoring her, keeping her beside me. Her hand felt small in mine. Every few seconds I squeezed it and she squeezed back and as we smiled together in the darkness she felt the most real she ever had.
__________
I’d met Rose a few months back when summer, after burning painstakingly slow through early May, had finally flourished in a blossom of bitter, beautiful warmth across the coastline. The air boiled like water and stung the backs of my eyes. Dull, metallic whispers curled in from the cobalt waves and washed up on the shoreline, battering relentlessly against the shimmer of heat in the sky.
School was over and we’d rented a house by the shore. There was something about going home that unnerved me, knowing it would be nothing more than a visit. Knowing that when summer ran out I’d have to go somewhere, do something. So instead we packed up and rushed to sea. Janie and Will kept
talking about the future, their future. They were convinced they had a whole world ahead of them. To me the future just seemed like a blank, endless expanse of days that had to be filled. I pictured an empty existence. Years stretched ahead, glinting deceptively in the sun. I was certain I’d burn them all
away like a book of matches.
Tourists flooded the cafes, laughed and screamed and swarmed the beaches. Sweat stained the back of our shirts, slicked our eyelids shut. The thick smell of salt had settled deep into the veins of the town and stiffened the sky into a smooth blue sheet. Pink, writhing crabs draped from the old fishing nets, slung
over the sides of the peaceful barges in port. A waitress hobbled towards us with a tray of watery coffee. Janie inspected the map, dragging one nail over the web of coloured lines. Will was telling her about some guy from our old building, who I could only vaguely remember. I was feigning interest in the pattern on the plastic tabletop, trying to blink the glare of the sun out of my eyes.
‘Well it says it should be near here.’
She frowned and shook her hair out across her shoulders. Will took the map and rolled up his sleeves, sighing in discontent. From the heat or from the fact we were already lost I couldn’t tell. It was always this way. I would sit in quiet and listen to them talk. I liked it. They never talked about anything important.
Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have someone you could say anything to. Someone who could fill every stuttered silence with idle conversation. Will always said I was hopeless. He figured if I was doing nothing with my life I might as well have someone to do nothing with. I hadn’t talked to a girl since Mary Thomas called me up and told me I was too quiet and we were better off as friends. Janie folded the map and leaned her head on Will’s shoulder. I tore one of the napkins in half, and then in half again.
The house was small, and tucked away round a corner. It had a large bay window which faced out towards the ocean, a couple of minutes away. My room was grey and blurred and hot. I lay down on the bed, trying to flatten out my body as much as possible. The room smelled funny. I could sense all the people who had slept in it before. Layers and layers of them, lying flat on the bed. My head hurt. It had been hurting ever since I woke up and I knew it would hurt when I tried to sleep. Will said it was because I worried too much. Janie had snorted and said that was stupid.
Sometimes I missed the soft Janie I had first met, who wore her hair in plaits and carried round gum wrappers and strings of sea glass. We would sit on benches and talk and she would tell me special things. She used to sit with her knees hugged to her chest. I liked that. I liked the soft clothes she wore and the soft way she did her makeup. Janie used to tell me often that I was too nice.
‘It scares people’
‘Not you.’
‘No. Other girls though.’
‘Girls don’t want me to be nice to them?’
‘You’re being difficult Charlie.’
I couldn’t remember how long it took me to notice the change when I introduced her to Will. Maybe I saw when she cut her hair short and bought a stick of eyeliner. Maybe I understood when I saw them kissing at that New Years party and Will’s eyes had gone soft at the edges. Maybe the first time they met, when Janie’s voice went shaky and she stopped sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin. Janie and Will. I was almost certain they only let me hang around them because I introduced them to each other. Janie and Will. And then Charlie.
Chapter 2
Last traces of amber faded from the sky as I walked across the grey sand. The sun had slipped gently into the sea, like an old penny, and the sky, crestfallen, had draped itself in icy blackness. I let the breeze flow through me, drying out my bones. It was a hot night and my skin desperately drunk the cold carried on the wind.
I had rolled up my jeans, but still kept away from the impenetrable dark of the ocean as it clambered its way up the shore. I leaned against a brick wall further up the beach, and fumbled in my pocket for my matches. Will always lit our cigarettes for us and I had gotten used to not carrying one around.
I was thinking about something. That was the trouble really. I was always thinking, never doing. Right now I was thinking about my purpose. I got sick to my stomach sometimes thinking of it. Sleepless nights spent staring at the ceiling had convinced me that it was all that mattered. For some reason, the quiet of a peaceful existence repelled me.
It was why I could not just resign myself to a simple wedding and happy life. It was why I could not take even a summer job. It burned inside of me all the time, this idea of purpose. I didn’t want to end up sad and middle aged and lonely. Lonely if I married or not. I feared the idea that each of my days would slowly slope into each other until every single one was the same. Until I went crazy with the dull monotony and strangled the closest person to me. I lit a crumpled cigarette and breathed in the smoke. I liked the way it spilled down the back of my throat and eased the worry in my mind.
There was a man who lived on my street growing up who got the same bus every morning to work, and fed the same stray cat every afternoon on his way back. He spent every evening in his garden with a paper and a cigar, ate the same meals cooked by his neighbour each day. He spent his time looking forward to the rare days where an episode of his favourite show would run, or there would be girls selling flowers on the way to work. I thought often of how I would shoot myself if my life was ever spent like that. Just waiting around for dull things to happen.
It became a comforting idea. Killing myself. I kept it at the back of my mind and tended gently to it each month, careful not to probe too hard in case I actually did it. It was a last resort, I told myself. A fail safe in case things went so badly wrong I could no longer bear it. I nursed the idea as I thought about the man on our street, and hoped he’d married his neighbour, and taken in the stray cat and that every day there were pretty girls selling flowers on his way into work.
I hovered there, in that half state of thinking and trying my very hardest not to think, wondering why my life was suddenly hurtling down a track I had no interest in being on.
It was the cry of a seagull that snapped me out of my thoughts. Lonely, mournful, imploring. I stopped walking and listened to the sound echo along the beach; a dull moaning that whispered like silk through the sand. I had always been scared of seagulls. Their voices sounded like the rattle of wind
on bone. Like the first wail of a premature baby. Like the thoughts you keep carefully stored away in the back of your mind.
I cried for hours when I got back. It started methodically, like always. I brought my knees so tight to my chest that they weighed against my heartbeat. I folded my head into my lap, like I was crumpling a piece of paper. My spine was rigid, my bones unmoving. I pressed my bitten fingernails into the back of
my neck. My sobs came rhythmically, up and down. Each breath felt welded into the next, until I was trapped within them. The warmth of my tears stained my roughened skin, the cracks in the wallpaper pressed like daggers into my shoulderblades. My fingernails dug desperately deeper and deeper until blood weeped softly to the surface. I moved them calmly to a new position and repeated the urgent motion until I was left with small blossoms of red in neat rows across my neck.
What can’t quite be described is how loose I felt. Each joint twisted open, each bone hollow and empty. Like I’d been picked over by the vultures and discarded. My arms dropped dully to my sides, as if they were trailing through soft, soft water. I barely noticed they were there. My hands ran over the
chipped wood floor, the cracks in the varnish. Coarse splinters caught in my skin. I could feel the soles of my feet press hard into the ground. Hot breaths spilled from the base of my throat, fast and desperate. I held them to me, clinging tight, letting the ache of pain find its way under my skin until it reached
my very fingertips. Even my skin was loose, prised apart by the brittle air. You could have picked it off like orange peel. Blood spooled behind my eyes and I was suddenly all too aware of my heartbeat.
It was that summer, that hollowed night, while Janie and Will slept next door in each other’s arms, that I finally realised what the seagulls were crying about.
Chapter 3
Rain the colour of cool slate had pressed itself into the landscape for hours, smelling of earth and polished stone. It left the beach and the littered streets empty, hammering soulessly against bolted windows, like thousands of glass fragments cascading from the iron sky. The bitter smoke and roars of the passing cars had been bleached from the air, leaving a veil of serenity draped over the town. Every shuttered windowpane I stared out from was filled with grey.
By first light it had cleared and the only reminder of it was a metallic taste on the wind. Silent mist still draped the house in a silvery cold and burned me almost to the bone. I had been lying awake, through the whole grey night, stretched out on my bed, over the covers, relishing the ice beneath my skin.
We’d passed the first week of summer all too quickly. Drinking sugary tea each morning and heading down to the cluttered beach to lie out on the sand.
Janie, her skin sunkissed, her hair pulled back in plaits she hadn’t worn in years, liked to clamber around the rocks by the shore, peering into cavernous holes and shrieking in excitement as she excavated a shell or a clump of bright seaweed. Will would spend his time walking among the waves, battered by pearly foam, stooping every so often to pick up a pretty piece of sea glass. He was making a necklace for Janie. He would lay his favourites out on the kitchen table in the evening and press me to choose the ones deserving to be hung round her neck. It was the quiet way he liked to love her.
We lost hours and hours to the comfort of the breeze, giddy with happiness and drunk on the amber sunlight. I would stretch out with book after book shading my face, immune to the imperfections of the world. We would stagger back, ripe with laughter, when the night started to stain the sky. Janie would
pull out her old record player and everything else would slip away. One of our first nights we’d drunk copious amounts of cheap alcohol smuggled in Will’s case. (‘Just like the old days,’ he’d smiled.) We’d stumbled down to the ocean and into the piercing cold of the night time tide. It stung me with a
sense of happiness that I’d stored greedily away for want of anything to do with it. Janie laughed and kicked through the stones underfoot and squealed when the tide came in and sprayed her with a glacial tenderness. I stayed perfectly still, listened as hard as I could, but that night there were no seagulls
crying at all. Even when I eventually slept, there was nothing but the faded hum of the record player in the other room.
I was buying a record for Janie when I first saw Rose. Puddles that hadn’t quite faded from the road splashed under my boots and last desperate raindrops dropped every once in a while, from awnings or streetlamps. The town was still sleeping. I grinned at the eerie feeling of excitement that brought. Without the mindless chatter that usually filled the now empty shops I could hear the screams of the sea as waves rose and the soft whispering hush as they fell again, like pieces of blue silk ribbon. You forget about your
purpose, in the fresh breath of the morning. You remember instead, the subtle beauty of the world.
We’d discovered the shop on the fringes of town a few sunsets ago. Somehow it always seemed to be open, the window boxes filled with fresh flowers, the shelves stacked with old books and vinyls in strange leather cases. A stooped, elderly man with a darkly shadowed face always sat on a high stool behind the
counter, turning over pages and pages of old yellowed comic books. A nest of sparse, white hairs crouched protectively on the dome of his head; deep wrinkles sunk grooves into his mottled, papery skin; his right leg was shorter, twisted, discoloured. Staring like polished glass from his gaunt face was a pair
of wall eyes, one green, one blue. Every so often, he would let out a dry little chuckle that racked his small frame and sounded like the rustle of ancient parchment. Other than that the shop was always silent, always empty. Well, most of the time.
It was the bell that first alerted me to her presence. A small, brass thing that hung above the doorway and let out a weak, strangled chime whenever someone stepped foot over the doorstep. She was blonde. I remembered when my sister used to take up the bathroom for hours, dousing her hair in peroxide. She would emerge with a towel wrapped around her head, her face flushed, and tell me that beauty was, inevitably, pain. This was not that kind of bright, yellowed blonde that screamed for attention but a softer one. The colour of melted gold, liquid amber, burnt toffee. Her features were sharp, angular; her skin was smooth, her lips the colour of wine.
She looked fragile, standing alone by the door. Not quite real. Not quite part of this world. Like a faded photograph. I felt that if I held a hand to her cheek it would go right through.
Later, on one of those violent August nights while Rose slept beside me I almost brought up her ghostlike entrance. How she had stepped, like a daydream from the clutch of the grey wind; how I was endlessly petrified that the wind would carry her away again.
It seemed stupid though, with my fingers drowsy in her hair, her skin scorching mine. I noted each inflection of her breath, the steady rise and fall of her lower back. Each dip of her spine so prominent against her glass skin. Some time in the middle of the night, the window clanged open and the screech of the gale outside echoed in my ears until morning. There were times with Rose that she felt so real, so close, so there. And there were times she was too far away and her skin felt like thin, thin letter paper
that could wash away down the sink.
Sophie has made such thoughtful use of colour. Here are our favourite songs about colour.