A sad but hopeful story today, written in the dark early hours of the morning.  Do comment and let Cigs know what you think - do you like the change in voice at the end?  What do you think of the story as a whole?  What would you change/keep the same and why? Constructive criticism, as always, welcome.

Katja x

The quest came to an end one morning in a cafe in Soho, the kind that sell sticky cakes under plastic covers and pizza by the slice. She was still drunk from the night before and her eyes felt like marbles on a playground. Her eyeliner was smudged and her lipstick had been worn away kissing a boy she'd neither liked nor been intrigued enough by to question further than his name, age and profession - no more information than you'd expect from a hostage. Pushing him against the sweaty red wall of the night club she'd felt his tongue in her mouth and closed her eyes in the hope that the physical world would melt like paint from an artist's brush, thrust into the dirty water of her thoughts. But the world was persistent and his slug tongue probed her mouth, his hands running up her tights, pushing her skirt up. She kissed him hard with finality and left.

It had been three am before she slumped on her bed. This morning her clothes smelt of the cigarette she had bummed from a bag lady at the bus stop and her feet pulsed in her heels. She pulled her scarf round her and looked over the rims of her glasses at the fraying laminate menu on the table in front of her. A pot of tea, really strong, not piss-weak like her mother's milky brew, and toast, cheap white bread with margarine. That'd make the world right. It must. It had to. It would.

When the tea came, she stirred it over and over again staring at the ripples on the surface and trying to think of nothing much at all. But every time she emptied her mind it would all come rushing back in again like a spare room cupboard opened suddenly, a childhood's worth of stuffed toys spilling out. Whenever the world was still she thought of him. Not the way he finished but the way he was before, his strong arms and the brightness of blue eyes, his stubble when he'd forgotten to shave, its comforting roughness, the way he smelt just out of the shower. She made her mind shoo away memories of surgical shampoo and hospital disinfectant smells. He didn't belong there. It was a wrong memory - him sat up in that bed, his shirts folded neatly on the chair, his trousers hanging on a rail. When he was gone, they sat there still. No one thought to tidy up. But he would have; he would have wanted things neat and nice for her. Not a man for loose ends. Not a man for unnecessary words.

The letter had been on the mat when she had returned from the hospital. She knew his handwriting even from a distance, tight script but for long looping 'g's, always written in green ink since one day in primary school when he'd found someone else's biro in his desk and begun writing with it. He had written the letter with her Christmas present to him, a beautiful silver-plated fountain pen from Cross. He liked the way it sat in his hand and she used to watch him at his desk, still stubbornly writing letters even though the world had acquiesced to email. Sometimes he was a man out of time and it thrilled her, his total disdain for the easy route, for the way that everyone else did it.

She slid her nail under the fold and moved it slowly, breaking the gum but not the paper of the envelope. She wanted to keep it intact, like a child trying to open a present to preserve the wrapping paper. The letter was neat and short, no words wasted. He told her that he loved her, that he always had, but now he was going she had to find someone else to love her. He wrote it beautifully but frankly. He knew that she would be sad but she must remember that he loved her so much that he could not bear to think that she would be alone. A tear fell onto the paper and the final full stop smudged into a river of ink.

She hated that he meant it. And she loved that he did too. Stupid vainglorious fool. She looked down at the menu and saw another tear streaking down the laminate. The memory bit the back of her throat like whiskey after midnight and she stared hard into the mirror on the opposite wall, looking straight past a boy who was also sitting alone, a boy who was looking at her while he pretended to read his magazine.

He'd eaten his breakfast there every morning since June. The strip lighting was too harsh and hookers went there to drink tea to warm their aching bones but he liked it somehow. It made him feel like no-one, like nothing, just a bag full of chemical reactions - a mouth full of tea chewing on a bacon sandwich, like a machine made by a mad scientist type from spare bits of metal. No one talked to him. The waiter was Turkish and muttered most of time. They bowed and danced around each other every morning but the boy never knew the older man's name. It wasn't the way things worked in there. You came in, you bought tea, you sat down, they brought toast, sometimes eggs, often bacon. Talking wasn't part of things. The dominant sound was the broken old radio playing gypsy songs and Europop, burbling out from behind the counter, and the waiter cursing his cousin who worked on the grill. Too slow! Too slow. Always too slow, though a bacon sandwich would appear at a table almost before the order had fallen from the customer's lips.

...and 'Tales' returns, bigger and better than ever! It's been a while, so here's a long one to get you back in the mood for Malice. It could get even longer, depending on what you all think of it, so let Cigs have your comments (positive or negative: it doesn't matter so long as they're constructive) and enjoy the story.

Katja

Photo by Jim O'Connell on flickr

Hello lovely internet people.  It seems like I am now the official Malice editor, due to having too much time on my hands and an eye for being picky as regards layout. ;-) 

Today's offering from Cigs is possibly the start of something longer.  Have a read and tell him what you think in the comments.  Without comments, this blog is nothing.  Well, not quite nothing, but it's much more fun when it's interactive, and, as the saying goes, you get out what you put in.  Katja x

Fucking tubes. Always the same. Always delayed. This time? A power surge. Central and Piccadilly lines part suspended, commuters already backing up on the platform, the usual mutterings, pushings and shovings. I turned back to the stairs and began to trudge my way up – 'this staircase has 140 steps'. The escalators had stopped and the lifts stood silent. As I emerged into the sunlight I saw them, police swarming at the tube station entrance like bees around a harried hive. Something big had happened. Something really big. Sirens were catcalling in the distance and an alarm somewhere far off grizzled like a collicky child. I just started walking. Some people were doing the same but others were stood watching, lingering on the pavement, asking each other questions that they couldn't answer or looking to police officers for details that weren't being released. I tapped at my phone and called Ellen. It rang but she didn't answer. Perhaps the lines were down, the network overstretched. All the way along I heard rumours – bombs, the IRA, Al Qaeda, electrical failures, some kind of collision, a suicide. Out in the mass of humanity, liars jumped at the chance to exaggerate – a sniper at Downing Street just shot a bomber about to blow it up, a plane has just crashed at Heathrow. On Tottenham Court Road, I stopped at an electrical goods store to join a crowd of people watching at the window. The shop was closed but the TV sets in the window still mutely relayed the atrocity in glorious Technicolor.

 
Cigs is still snowed under at work and unable to post during the day, so once again I'm stepping in in an editorial capacity. A continuation of Nine Black Poppies today - exciting stuff, as the plot thickens. I hope you're all enjoying this story - if you read it, please comment and let Cigs know what you think! Katja x

The breakup with Ruby was messy in the way only teenage romances can be – a petty splintering of affection into recriminations and half truths. I was bored with her. Bored with her friends and their celebrity magazines. Bored with her mother, who flirted painfully as I stood dancing nervously from one foot to the other in her rustic style kitchen. Especially bored of her father who quizzed me aggressively, not knowing that I was far from the first to corrupt his darling daughter, whoI knew for a fact had given her first blowjob to a boy down the rec. a few days shy of her fifteenth birthday. Just as I had plucked up the courage to end the whole bloody farce, life intervened as it so often does. In the club, free of her for a night, I stumbled into the loos and heard a familiar squeak emanating from a nearby stall. Standing on the next loo along I peered over the partition and saw her, partaking of my friend Patrick in the way only a good convent girl can. The bitch – she'd wrecked it before I could.

She spotted me and tried to speak. "Don't bother," I said. "I can see you've got your mouth full."

At the bar later she threw a drink in my face and Patrick, gallant that he is, took a swing at me. He missed but the bouncers didn't and we ended up splayed on black bin liners in a back alley, barred and bruised for our trouble. Ruby remained inside. It seems she was more well known than I'd realised.

I called Anna as I walked home, shivering in the cold, my jacket lost somewhere in the cloakroom, never to be returned. She laughed when I explained about Ruby's antics: "Oh, I could have told you that! Everybody knows about her."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Where's the fun in that? Come round, I have vodka." Back then, Anna's solutions to heartache were simple but effective.

Cigs is busy with press week and his new job at the moment, so has (possibly unwisely) left me with the keys to this place. Mwahahahaaa! Ooh, the raw power ...

Nine Black Poppies will be returning when he has some more time. In the meantime, here's a short to keep you all occupied. You'll be pleased to hear that I'm not going to be inflicting any of my rubbish on you. Well, only a minimal amount - the opening sentence is my particular brand of genius, but the rest of it is all down to Mr Sigh.

Keep commenting, my lovelies. It's been too quiet round these parts recently, and you all know how I love a gossip.

Katja x



It was a good painting although there was something missing. She had made him look too beautiful, like a court painter prostrating himself before a king. His face was more symmetrical, the true mathematical measure of beauty and his eyes shined with an intensity that they seldom managed anymore in real life. She had missed the truth behind his crooked smile. This figure on the canvas was a hero that never laddered his tights, more Superman than Spiderman, saved from the problems of a real life. I liked his ugliness in the flesh – the chipped tooth from the time a drunk girl stumbled into him when they were getting into a taxi, the scar on his arm from when we twisted our arms up and under the bar to steal drinks from the padlocked chiller cabinet. The face on the canvas smirked at me. I didn't want to look at it directly. I stared at the reflection in the polished glass of the gallery doors. I held my compact up and looked at it as if I were staring out of a submarine at the vast eyes of a sea monster. It was a good painting. I couldn't deny it. It had technique. But his soul? His soul had dispersed like smoke from a pipe on a windy afternoon. All that was left was a shadow like ashes shaped into a silhouette on a wall in Pompeii. Little pieces of it are in quick snap photos taken with cheap cameras that nudge each other conspiratorially in the box on the top of my wardrobe. Bits of it rest on slips of paper slipped into books on my shelf, in letters he sent me when he first loved me. Not in this painting of hers. It's a good painting but it's not a painting of him.

Photo by Emilie Bjork http://flickr.com/photos/emiliebjork/256661078/

It was June. Ruby was in my bed and Anna was still in my head. My parents were on holiday and I had avoided the call up with a rash of excuses about reading for university. It was to be the last great summer before our world was shattered – before the pieces scattered to the four corners of the country, scrabbling around in the sweaty haze of Freshers' week, trying to finagle friend from foe. Ruby was good in bed but in a studied way, as if she had swallowed a hundred issues of Cosmo, sex tips in a database at the back of her brain, her throat trained by practice with bananas in the quiet of her bedroom.

She knew nothing about passion and when I looked into her eyes, I saw my own reflection. I should have counted my blessings but you can only be expected to count so high. Life was like an Ikea kitchen – just a little too clean, just a little too perfect. I thought of the chaos that swirled around Anna. God, what a life that was.  

Ruby was asleep under the covers, a little whistle creeping from her nostrils as she dreamed. I couldn’t sleep. I turned on the clock radio and listened to the controlled tone of a newsreader – death, death, war, death, scandal. It was just creeping towards 5am and the broken streetlight outside my window was still blinking. I stuck my head through the curtains, resting my elbows on the sill and looked out at the world stained in sepia.
 
The milkfloat was clinking and humming its way down the road and in its wake I saw Anna, her shift dress pulled up above her knees, her heels clutched in her hands. Her mascara had run and her hair was a tower of tangles, a beehive in the morning after. She looked like she was crying but she could have been laughing. She looked like she was waving but she could have been drowning. Her boyfriend was nowhere to be seen. I wanted to run down and talk to her but I just carried on watching.

As the milkman wandered up the path to No.32, Anna crept up to the milkfloat, cradling a milk bottle in her arms like a baby. The milkman spotted her. He shouted something – his mouth contorting in rage – and tried to give chase, but Anna was off at a sprint and he was out of breath by his third stride, doubled over with a stitch, slumped beside his milkfloat. Ruby would have never been so brave.

I pulled on my jeans and an old t-shirt that had ripped slightly at the shoulder. There was still dew on the grass and it was cold on my feet as I ran across the lawn but I had to see her – in that moment it was the most important thing in the world – far more pressing than certificates, exams, girls called Ruby or the Middle East peace process. Nothing else mattered.

I ran along the asphalt, little stones pricking at the soles of my feet, my chest tight from lack of exercise. I turned into the alley way that led towards the new estates and there she was, sat with her feet touching the opposite wall, glugging down the milk, cream around her mouth. She looked up at me and smiled her widest smile but the red around her eyes told a contradictory story of smoke and sadness.

“Oh hi. I was just having my breakfast.” She giggled and offered me the milk bottle. I took it from her and sipped from it, the cold glass startling my lips.

“Let’s be proper friends again”, she said and pushed her cold hand up inside my t-shirt, her nails running gently down my back.

Photo by HomingPigeon http://flickr.com/photos/homingpigeon/

I spoilt it, of course. It was the perfect teenage relationship – a marvellous mix of sex, clubbing and free drugs. But I'd read too many books. Even then I was hankering for romance. One night as we stumbled back to Anna's house, me ready to clamber up onto the flat roof and into her window while her Dad slumbered in front of Match Of The Day and her Mum fumbled listlessly with her vibrator in a valium fug, I pulled her into the kid's playground on the rec and sat down beside her on the swings. It was the place we'd first met, five years before when all the kids used to sneak out to drink cider and snog by the bunch of bushes behind the goalposts. The moon was full in the sky and somewhere on the council estates, a car was burning, the smoke drifting on a slight breeze. It was beautiful night. I turned to Anna and said: "I love you." She started laughing straight away.

"You're kidding." A pause and a slight flicker across her eyes, "You are kidding?"

I shook my head and looked down at my shoes, the dirty grey of trainers worn too often in the rain.

"Shit. Why did you have to go and spoil it?"

"I just. I really like you."

I sounded pathetic even to me, my voice retreating to a time before it had broken, a reedy little squeak escaping from the side of my mouth.

"I like you too." She said. "Like. Not love. Just like. Sure you can fuck but I don't want a boyfriend. They're boring. You of all people should realise..." The words tailed off into a sigh and she got up and walked away.

I didn't see her for a few weeks. My messages were studiously ignored. Her friend Annabelle saw me on the high street and smiled in sympathy.

"If it's any consolation, she said was it was a totally awesome fuck."

As we all know, that's a suitable epitaph for any great romance.

I heard Anna had found a suitable replacement for me. His name was Gregg. He worked at a pool hall and smoked roll ups which he produced at impressive speed, pub tables turned into production lines, his fingers fast and dextrous. Anna later told me this came in very useful. I, in the wake of my confession, was invited back into the fold about a month later, demoted to the position of might-as-well-be-gay best friend, the court eunuch in her little baccanalian entourage.

For a while, I was bitter. When we trooped on mass to the club, I aimed for George Best style drunkeness, pounding back vodka and dancing as if my strings had just been cut. But it faded likealmost teenage traumas. A girl called Ruby, one of the outrider of Anna's little gang, made her intentions clear one night as her hand strayed up my thigh and her tongue pushed between my lips. I thought nothing of her. She filled a gap. She was nice and I needed nice. But Anna was fascinating.