by Lee Mather
“No, No, nothing like that,” she said. He stared at her surprised. She seemed to have developed a sixth sense when it came to knowing what he was thinking. “He’s stopped me from going to the gig this weekend. We argued and for once Mum joined in. She gave Dad a piece of her mind and he didn’t like it. He couldn’t take it, stormed out of the house. Mum’s on her own. I really shouldn’t have come out tonight. It’s my fault.”
Andy grimaced and tried to think of something comforting to stay. Instead he felt a sickness return as he remembered the dark sitting room. It consumed him and stopped him from functioning.
“Well, not all my fault. Fucking Anita. My sister can be a total bitch. She’s almost failing her degree. Her coursework scores are terrible, and Dad’s found out about her secret boyfriend. He shouted and shouted at her until Anita just happened to mention that I was going to see Oasis this weekend. He took it out on me, like always. Mum says it’s because I can take it. But you know what? Maybe I can’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Andy managed
“Don’t be. It’s him. He’s always been like this. He thinks I’m going to be this great doctor and make someone a good little Indian wife some day. I–I don’t want to be any of those things. As soon as I quit college I’m going to look for a job. Get as far away from him as possible.” She stopped and looked at her feet. “He doesn’t know I haven’t applied for uni yet. I don’t know what will happen when he finds out. He wanted me to sit the Oxford entry exams.”
Andy tightened his grip on her. He didn’t want to let her go.
Nor started to cry, just a little; a barely discernible whimper that she attempted to shield from Andy by tilting her body away from him. “I can’t do it. I can’t be this perfect person. Nothing I do will ever be good enough... I can see the disappointment in his eyes already. I wish I could hate him.” She stared at Andy. “Run away with me, Andy. We’ll go to Paris. You could paint by the Seine. I’ll write. We’ll send him a postcard with wine and cheese on it, let him know that I’m doing fine on my own.”
Andy laughed, but there was a little fear there. It sometimes seemed like Nor’s infatuation was with his painting rather than with him. Perhaps Nor’s father wasn’t the only one seeing what he wanted to see. He brushed it off. He needed to stop analyzing everything.
“I’d love to get away from here,” he said wistfully. He stopped short of saying that he had nothing left anymore. “So...you like to write?”
Nor smiled. “It’s the only thing I can do. But yeah, I’d like to be a journalist some day.” She hesitated, angry again. “Not a fucking doctor. I’m flunking biology, you know? He will be... I was going to say furious, but I think it will be even worse, I think he’ll be crushed.”
Neither of them spoke. The pressure returned. Andy looked at Nor wide-eyed, hoping she hadn’t worked out his silence was caused by inadequacy.
“He ripped up my ticket in front of me, told Anita that she had to stop seeing her boyfriend Rob. It’s his rules, nothing else. He’s such a bastard sometimes. He knows exactly which buttons to press.”
Paint him, as a thunderstorm. Paint Glib, creeping up behind him in the darkness, arms outstretched.
Andy looked quickly at Nor, concerned he might have mouthed the words, or worse spoken them aloud. She looked at the street ahead.
“I’m surprised at Mum. She normally makes excuses for him. I guess now I’m even driving a wedge between them. It’s me. It would be so much easier if I didn’t live with them. Maybe he’d understand I’m my own person. He says I can’t go to Oasis because the Eid festival is on at the same time as the concert. The newspapers reckon there’ll be clashes between police and Islamic protestors. It’s just an excuse, another reason for Dad to wrap me up in cotton wool.”
Andy barely heard Nor. The time bomb was ticking inside his head again. He battled to rid himself of the notion of painting Nor’s father dead. The potential of his skill was starting to unravel before him. If he could paint anything and make it actually happen, then his future would only ever be limited to his imagination. He couldn’t possibly handle that level of power.
They quickened their pace. Andy had no idea of where they were, walking an unfamiliar street in silence. They ploughed on, one heavy footstep after the next.
An idea popped in his head, something positive and normal, a buoy floating to the surface of his damaged psyche. Mark Horne had mentioned something about the concert.
“There are tickets left for Oasis. We could go?”
Nor looked surprised. She smiled. “Ha–if only it were that easy! Plus I’m broke.”
Andy thought of the sitting room, of his worsening need to get his hands on some cash. There was the biscuit tin filled with notes and other things. Most notably, Grandpa’s savings, the money Grandpa didn’t trust the bank with, and as important, didn’t want the taxman to get “his filthy paws on.” Only, Andy didn’t need Grandpa’s money. He could paint himself a suitcase full of cash. Or even paint the tickets.
But then he remembered Glib, Caroline Harper, and resurrecting the dead. There would always be consequences.
“Andy?”
Andy looked at Nor and realized she had been speaking to him.
“I can get the tickets,” he blurted.
Nor frowned. “No, don’t be silly. I don’t expect anything like that from you.”
Andy squashed the doubting voice inside his head and grinned as if he was in control.
“I want to, I really do. Think of it as part of my education. A field trip. Come on?”
Nor laughed. “Okay! Okay! Thanks. But don’t get cocky. I think I preferred it when you were all quiet and mysterious.”
Andy smiled as Nor squeezed his hand.
“So you’ve listened to the tapes then?”
Andy pictured himself after trying to bring back Grandpa, weeping as Live Forever played on the tape deck. It brought him down hard, took him a while to answer.
“Yes, they’re...” He smiled at her, the positive force of his imagination clicking into gear, rescuing him from the fall. “...a bit like I’d imagine riding a rollercoaster to be. I could feel my heart beating in my chest, and sometimes the words brought me up, but sometimes they took me down too.”
Nor stopped walking. She pointed distractedly to where the street turned into a sweeping cul-de-sac. “This is me–wait, you’ve never ridden a rollercoaster?”
Andy blushed. “They were never really my Grandpa’s thing.”
Andy noticed a change in Nor’s expression, a flicker of empathy, an understanding perhaps of what his upbringing might have been lacking.
“Okay, this is my plan. You get the concert tickets, and I’ll figure out a way for us to go to Alton Towers. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Nor glanced at the direction of the house at the entrance to the close, but she didn’t turn to leave. They stared at each other. Neither spoke.
In the movies, Andy would have leaned in and stolen a kiss while uplifting music blared in the background. In real life, he shifted from one foot to the next, an army of ants wriggling beneath his skin, confidence and competence in short supply. Nor seemed equally, uncharacteristically, ill at ease.
It was Nor who broke the deadlock. “Guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Night then, Andy.”
“Night,” he mumbled weakly.
Nor smiled then walked away. He watched her until she entered her house. The door shut with a hollow thud.
Chapter 11
Hal’s Place was mainly a takeaway but it also served as a small cafe thanks to a limited number of tables and chairs positioned at the front of the shop. It was on the same row as Edgerton’s Hardware, but it remained opened until late, taking advantage of the bus route outside that led straight into the heart of the city.
When Andy stepped inside, there were a couple of older student types in there, both eating overflowing kebabs of some description. The smell of stale lager and spiced meat drifted from them, polluting the air.
Behind the counter a hunk of meat roasted on a spit. It glistened with a coat of red-hot grease.
Andy wasn’t hungry. He had barely eaten since Grandpa died, but he couldn’t get an idea out of his head on the walk home, and that was why he stopped at Hal’s Place. He needed to scratch the itch.
“Could I have a fizzy orange, please?” Andy said to the bored-looking server in the striped uniform. The man, haggard and in his mid-forties, grunted and fetched Andy a perspiring can from the chiller.
“Thirty pence.”
Andy smiled and passed him a handful of silver. He glanced at the plastic holder filled with plain white napkins, grabbed a few and stuffed them in his pocket.
“Do you have a pen or pencil I could borrow?”
The server glared at Andy as if he had asked for a blowjob. Muttering something to himself, he produced a pencil with one end chewed so badly the wood looked like mulch.
Andy took it and thanked him. He retreated to the table farthest from the two drunks eating kebabs. They ignored him, speaking loudly about a fight they had witnessed in the city. He hesitated, considered the bad things that happened when he painted. He wrestled with the desire to please Nor.
The tickets aren’t life or death. They’re just a pair of tickets.
Before he could change his mind, Andy purposefully took out the napkin and unfolded it. He pressed it flat and started to draft the Oasis tickets, gripping the pencil maybe a little too hard. He told himself to relax and tried a smile. He needed to be positive. He had never seen a concert ticket before but he imagined they weren’t unlike cinema tickets. He pulled the crumpled stub from the film he had earlier slept through, then smiling distractedly, drew a rectangular outline. He scripted the word Oasis in the way it was drawn on the cover of the Definitely Maybe album. Next to it he wrote the venue–Maine Road, followed by Saturday’s date and then the time the concert started. For credibility he created a ticket number. When he finished he repeated this so he had two tickets.
Andy sat back. Two tickets for the concert, but something was missing. It didn’t feel right. The sketch felt broken. He looked across at the server who was slicing through the hunk of meat with a cleaver, as easily as he might have run the blade through warm butter. Hot fat dripped from the stainless steel as the man worked.
Andy considered his problem as he watched the server grip the cleaver, and tried to understand what might be missing. An idea popped into his head.
He positioned his left hand as if he were holding the tickets. He noted the angle of his fingers, of how the light fell against the shape of his hand, and how it showed off the small freckle at the base of his thumb.
It didn’t take Andy long to draw and he made it so the freckle wasn’t obscured. That was the key. In the picture he held the tickets. They belonged to him now.
Andy trembled with expectation. Something happened inside him, something soared. If this worked, then material things would never be beyond him. Still, he felt a terrible unease, as if he had done something very, very bad.
“They’ll never pass as fakes!”
Andy sat upright sharply. The two drunken students had wandered over to him, leaving a mess of unwanted kebab on their table for the unhappy server to clear.
Andy politely smiled to acknowledge the joke as the taller of the pair guffawed.
“You going to the gig, mate?” said the other student, fat, maybe twenty, with acne-ridden skin and thick brown hair styled in a long, sweeping side-parting. Andy blinked. For a second the fat student looked familiar–brain-achingly so.
Andy stared at him, trying to make the connection.
“He’s talking to you, dipshit,” said the taller one, his eyes perhaps double in size behind the thick lenses of his brown-rimmed glasses. He looked familiar too and Andy shuddered with creeping deja vu when he studied them both.
The two drunks swayed dramatically and Andy couldn’t be sure whether their movement was in his head. He leaned forward and gripped the table hard, trying not to vomit.
“You pissed, mate?”
Andy shook his head. The drunks were caricatures, distortions of Mark Horne and Stephen Pritchard. It was like looking at them through a circus mirror, the type that stretches and widens. They were older, uglier, drunker. Different and yet strangely similar. He shuddered as he watched them, doubt seeping like ice-water into his brain.
Andy blinked and they were just two leering drunks again. He steadied.
“So are you going to the gig?”
“I hope so,” he said quietly.
“You got a ticket then?”
At first Andy didn’t answer. They stood over him and didn’t take the hint.
“No,” he said eventually.
The pair exchanged looks and burst out laughing. Andy shrank, wishing the anonymity he suffered at college was with him tonight. He missed his invisible shield.
“Shame,” the fat Horne said. He fished around in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a crumpled green ticket. He straightened it in front of Andy. It displayed the Oasis brand but also showed the stadium where the concert would be played. Andy’s drawing had been way off. “Because I’m going. Heh heh heh.”
The taller Pritchard produced a ticket of his own and both students started to flap them in front of Andy’s face.
“Me too. Sorry kid. Maybe you can listen to the gig on the radio!”
They both laughed and gave each other a badly coordinated high-five, before stumbling out of Hal’s Place. The anger Andy wanted to feel wouldn’t come. He watched numbly as they continued to wave the tickets at him through the cafe’s large window. Fat Horne held both tickets above his head, thrusting his arms high as if he raised a trophy.
Andy slumped and stared at his improvised sketch. He sank. It was always the way, his despair never far from assuming control. A terrible nervousness gripped him, then anger, cold and cruel.
A screech sounded outside the cafe. A sickening thud followed it. Then screams. Lots of screams.
Andy started at the noise, looked up and saw a shimmer in the window. Something blue and large moved out of view before he could focus on it.
He staggered from his seat in a daze and wandered past the man who had served him, into the street. He hardly felt the cold of the night despite the goose bumps that rippled on his skin.
The bus was stationary. Blood was smeared beyond the back tires, two terrible dark wounds spread along the road.
Andy noticed the dirty white Reebok first, upside down, laces trailing. Then he saw the hand, torn clear from the arm it belonged to, positioned as if it held something, like the hand he had earlier drawn on a napkin. There was so much blood. He stood over the mess and saw the freckle on the base of the thumb, the sinews twitching from the dismembered wrist. He took a faltering step back, tripped on the curb and fell to the ground. The screams amplified as if they were inside his skull. He pressed his hands against his temples, the pressure growing and the smell of blood overpowering. He was too close.
His vision cleared unexpectedly. The severed hand held two tickets, spattered with drops of blood.
Andy scrambled to his feet in revulsion. The Oasis tickets screamed at him from the carnage. He took a step away from the madness. The pain in his chest was severe, debilitating.
He left the tickets and fled.
Chapter 12
Andy was tentative in the darkness. The sitting room door was ajar as always. The smell now was like an abattoir. It sickened him, a sensation worse than he had suffered after witnessing what the bus had done to the owner of that Oasis ticket. He had been there for two hours at least, paralyzed, cross-legged on the hard floor of the hallway. Nor was the only thing holding him together.
Glib felt so close again. Andy was afraid to close his eyes, in case when he opened them the demon would be there, just inches from his lips.
What have I become? He was dangerous, that was certain. Should he end it? Kill himself before he did more damage?
Andy strugg
led to make sense of things. He couldn’t paint again, he knew that much. The cost was too high. But this wasn’t just about his “talent.” He had seen Glib again that night, just before the accident. It was as if the demon was his shadow, always there, waiting in the background. But what for? Why didn’t Glib just kill him?
Maybe it would even be for the best.
Still, there was Nor...
Andy focused on her, only on her, pushing everything else to the back of his mind. He could have kissed her earlier. A better man would have. A better man would have drawn her near, pressed his hands firmly against her cheeks, closed his eyes and kissed her, with conviction, passion and strength.
A better man would act. But he knew he couldn’t. Death stalked him. It was everywhere. It was clear to him now. His paintings were real. He could make them that way, but not without a price. And the cost attached to life would always, ultimately, be death.
Andy kissed Nor in his imagination then, but something changed as they touched. Nor’s skin became blue and mottled, hot against him, her smell vile and putrid. Andy pulled back. Glib was there, lips black and thin, greedily sucking his vitality.
Andy was in the hallway again, gasping for breath. He shivered and his heart raced.
The sitting room faced him.
Andy had promised Nor concert tickets. He wouldn’t sketch them. That left him one option. Grandpa’s savings.
Andy hadn’t been in the room since the day he had found Grandpa dead. He could cope with the stomach-churning smell, the repulsive mix of putrefaction combined with the sweet chemical smell of dozens of air fresheners. He had adjusted to the stench and, although it wasn’t pleasant, it wasn’t debilitating either. It wasn’t this that caused him to remain rooted. When he tried to take a step nearer, his strength and courage abandoned him. He stared at the darkness and a massive hole ripped apart inside him, and tears trickled down his cheeks. All he could think was how Grandpa deserved so much better.
A better man would act.
Minutes passed before Andy stood. He took a laborious step, his foot wrenching from setting concrete. He took another. He had to get the money. He thought of Nor and crossed the threshold of the room. It was an unseen line, a border between countries.