by James Rhodes
“Well, it is May: it wasn’t going to stay cold was it?”
“These flasks are supposed to be thermal.”
“Isn’t that only for hot liquids?”
“No, they’re supposed to protect the contents from temperature change.”
“Well, my system works. Why don’t they work?”
Milton shrugged. He looked as tired as he felt. After traipsing around for nothing all day what he wanted most was to sit down with a packet of ginger nuts and fall asleep watching Countdown and to have a dream about the girl from Dictionary Corner. Dan wasn’t helping to make that happen. To make things worse Milton wasn’t even sure what time Countdown came on, he might have already missed it.
“You should take that up with the manufacturer. These aren’t generic, these are the top brand.”
Dan considered the problem.
“If we are going to leave milk lying around in the May sunshine, we should probably invest in some of those ice packs.”
“Really? Shall I pick them up in our new car?””
Dan thought better of answering the question in the affirmative. He decided to compromise.
“I thought Gary had his car back.
“We don’t know that, maybe you could go and speak to him.”
Milton thought about it for a second: he had high hopes that Alison and Gary were getting back together and although he had only seen Gary intermittently over the last few months, he liked the idea of his friend being happy again.
“Not tonight though, definitely not tonight.”
“No, of course not tonight, this milk triangulation needs to be our top priority.”
“I’ll see if Carrie can pick some ice packs in town.”
“Well,” beamed Dan, “that’s that settled then. You should probably offer her dinner to sweeten her up a little. What are you going to make her and when can I have some of it?”
“Fish and chips, and you can have some when you get back from buying them.”
Dan’s face dropped.
“And put a bloody shirt on,” Milton told him.
14.
Gary was having a hard time eating the food that Alison had bought. A plate sat on his lap, Gary had been lusting after crispy beef in chilli sauce for the last month. The thought of it had been torturing him. Every time he ladled a bowl of cold soup out of the fridge and sat watching the radio on his television he had wished he could have crispy beef in chilli sauce. Now that it was in front of him, it was a massive disappointment. It was not as crispy as he would have liked, nor as sweet, nor as spicy. All things considered, it was rubbish, the triumph of flavour he was expecting did not arrive. He eyed Alison’s hot and sour soup with envy.
“How’s the soup?”
“It’s good, do you want to try?”
“No, I’m a bit sick of soup. Plus, I don’t have much of an appetite.”
“I thought you were starving.”
Gary moved the food on his plate with his fork.
“Not for this,” he said.
The air of the room stopped moving in response to Gary’s remark. The TV was showing a historical drama of the sort that Alison could watch now that they weren’t together and “didn’t want to miss.” Gary did not have the energy or enthusiasm to complain about it.
“What is it?” Alison asked.
“What?”
“Why do you look so miserable?”
Gary put a forkful of beef into his mouth so that he could avoid answering the question for a few moments. As he chewed he held up one finger to signify that he was still chewing but would answer her query just as soon as his mouth became available.
“I suppose because I am miserable,” said Gary.
“Look I know you think you’re cursed but you’re still here, you’re still surviving. I’ve sorted it so that you can live in the house for another six months, you have enough food, and people are looking after you. You should consider yourself blessed.”
Gary stared at Alison in cold disbelief.
“I’ve been in this house alone for months, I spent all my money on lighted, nobody visits, you never write, I have enough food today to fill me up but I’ve been eating the same shit meal for weeks: breakfast and dinner because lunch is too much of a luxury. I don’t heat it because I’m scared I will run out of electricity if I do. And, through all this, the one thing I’ve really been sad about is the absence of you. Waking up to a house without you is like a daily funeral, it hits me in the face as I wake up and then it sinks into my stomach with same soft lentils that I always eat. Now that you’re back, in the room with me you’re still not here. You still don’t love me anymore and tomorrow you’ll be somewhere in Leeds with someone else.”
Gary had more to say but Alison’s phone began to ring.
“Is it Neville?” Gary asked.
Alison nodded.
“I’ll take it outside,” she told him.
As Alison walked to the front porch to answer the call, Gary put his plate in the fridge and walked upstairs. The study shambled with his belongings. His old double quilt was folded up like a mattress on the floor. Gary dug into the piles of unsorted stuff that he was supposed to tidy up before Shelley arrived. He found his notebooks and a black marker pen. He sat down at the computer desk and opened the first notebook at the first page. A poem titled, “Miss you like you missed the point” filled the page. There was a crude line drawing of Gary slumped onto his desk. Gary held the marker aloft ready to scribble the words out of history. He made one small dot on the page and replaced the cap to the marker.
15.
Shelley set the alarm on her phone and opened the only book that she hadn’t packed; it was Carlo Ginzberg’s The Night Battles. She lay back on her bed and flicked through the pages of Ginzberg’s seminal micro-history. If she could find one piece of evidence to support the 18th Century witch trial that Alison had mentioned, her Ph.D. would be in the bag. Alison began a daydream about the village of Hettford that massively overestimated its size and cultural wealth. When she got to the part of the daydream that featured her cousin’s ex-boyfriend she put the book down at the side of the bed.
Episode Two: Three for a Girl
01.
Dan’s favourite tea towel was bright red; in the centre of the tea towel was a picture of the British crown, set in white. Above the crown sat the words, “keep calm.” Below the crown, the slogan continued “and slaughter the witches.” He was using it to dry the teapot; using the corner were the cloth folded to dry the ridges inside. Milton stood next to him at the sink and placed a soapy plate into the dish rack. Dan pulled the teapot to one side to protect it from getting wet.
“Are you going to dry that?” Asked Milton
“I am drying it,” Dan told him.
“Are you sure? Because I think at this point you might be polishing it.”
“I’m not polishing it.”
“Detailing it then.”
Dan took the kind of extended exhalation that signified he was about to attempt a speech.
“The thing with teapots is that if they’re not properly dry you get a residue of soap that affects the future flavour of tea.”
“I thought that was why you swilled the pot with hot water to clean it out before you put the tea in.”
“No,” said Dan, “it isn’t.”
Milton washed another two dishes whilst waiting for Dan to explicate his remark. When no explanation was forthcoming, Milton changed the subject.
“How do you think Gary is doing with Alison?”
“You swill the pot,” Dan told him, “to bring the temperature of the ceramic up. If you don’t swill the pot the ceramic cools the water and the tea doesn’t brew properly.”
“That’s not why I do it,” Milton told him, “I do it to clean the soap out.”
“Then that’s why your tea tastes like maiden’s piss.”
“I do the exact same thing as you.”
&nbs
p; “But you don’t understand why you’re doing it; it’s not enough to just swill the water around a few times you have to make sure the pot is warm.”
“It’s the same thing; anyway your tea always tastes of old soap because you don’t swill it the right way.”
“It never bloody does,” said Dan, “anyway, stop changing the subject, when are you going to ask her?”
“I’m not going to ask her.”
“You bloody are, I’ll keep nagging you until you do so you might as well get it over with.”
“No, we can just walk to the woods.”
Dan gave a, quite camp, stamp on the linoleum.
“But it’s so far,” Dan whined.
“You could use the exercise,” Milton told him.
“Need I remind you that you are the one with a girlfriend, not me?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, all these country walks you’ve been going on. It’s only so you’ll look good for Carrie.”
“Do you not think you should work on looking good?”
“No.”
Dan put the teapot on the sideboard.
“The advantage of being undesirable is that you don’t have to work at it,” Dan said.
“Well, I’m not asking her and that’s the end of that.”
“She’s staying the night tonight, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Milton sighed.
“So she could drop us off on the way to work in the morning,” Dan told him.
Milton fixed his gaze as firmly as he could on Dan's own gaze. Milton's gaze was the sort of unwavering gaze that refused to be moved on principle. It was the gaze of a Chinese protestor standing in front of a tank. It was the gaze of Boudecea eyeballing the Roman Empire. It was the gaze of the man at the supermarket till who thought ten items was close enough to allow him to use the 'ten items or less' queue.
“Fine,” said Milton, “I’ll ask her but you have to wake up on time.”
Dan puffed his chest out in defiance of the remark.
“I didn’t serve a year in the Army for nothing,” said Dan.
Milton didn’t validate the remark with a response.
02.
Carrie was dressed in a neatly ironed suit; her hair was pulled back into a neat pony tail comprised of three plaits that had each been neatly plaited. Milton was wearing old jeans and a t-shirt that he had got free whilst his shop was promoting a novel. It had a picture of a werewolf staring mournfully into a shot glass and the initials KMW on the top. It was reasonably clean. Milton was filling up a set of pink plastic water bottles with a 2 litre bottle of milk.
“Did you say Dan was coming?” Carrie asked.
“He was supposed to be but I don’t see him, do you?”
“Wasn’t this his idea?” Carrie asked.
“Yes.”
“So isn’t he going to be angry if you don’t wake him up?”
Milton smiled.
“Furious.”
Carrie shook her head.
“You two have a weird relationship.”
She picked up her car keys from the counter top.
“Are you coming then?”
Milton's broad self-satisfied grin was ready to go and it accompanied Milton out to Carrie's car.
03.
There were no curtains in the study. Gary lay on the floor, he had largely abandoned the folded quilt intended to serve as a mattress. His legs had found their way under the computer desk as he lay horizontally away from the mattress. In lieu of throwing the curtains open, Alison turned on the light.
“Hey Gary, I’m leaving soon. I was wondering if you wanted to have breakfast together?”
Gary didn’t open his eyes, or move. Alison poked him gently in the ribs with her foot. Gary rolled over and curled into the foetal position. There was a rustle as the nylon of his sleeping bag dragged across the floor.
“Gary, Gary, wake up.”
Alison bent over Gary and shook his shoulders. As Gary’s eyes opened his face blossomed from wraithish slumber to childlike glee, he fumbled to raise his hand to touch Alison’s cheek but was tied up by the sleeping bag. He looked down at his body, mummified in blue nylon and looked back up at Alison. The glee in his face had paled to blankness.
“Morning,” he said, “you leaving?”
“I was wondering if you wanted to have breakfast first. I’ve got the bedroom ready and my stuff in the car, so all you have to do is dress and eat. Oh, and can you tidy up your bedding?”
Gary’s eyes melted into Alison’s but he made no effort to reply to her.
“Gary, are you listening?”
“Bedding,” Gary mumbled.
“I’ll see you downstairs.”
Gary began folding his quilt in to a neat square. Once he began to hear Alison’s footsteps on the stairs, he flopped forwards onto it. Since the night before he had been trying to formulate a plan to keep Alison in his house. He had considered breaking the car, putting sugar in to the petrol tank or letting down the tyres but he didn’t have any sugar in the house and letting down the tyres would take ages and she’d guess it was him anyway. Gary went to the bathroom, showered, shaved and dressed. Then he went back to the bathroom because he’d forgotten to brush his teeth. It wasn’t that he was trying to delay Alison’s inevitable departure that was for sure.
Alison had made porridge, after Gary had gone to bed at dinner time Carrie must have gone shopping. Gary was irritated to see that she had bought a bag of sugar because he didn’t take sugar in his tea and neither did Alison and he couldn't imagine for one second that she had bought it to pour into her own petrol tank. Gary didn’t like porridge but it was a world better than the cold mush he usually ate.
“I topped up the electric,” Carrie told him.
“Thanks.” Gary replied.
“How’d d you sleep?”
“On the floor.”
“I mean, was it comfortable?”
“It was better than the street, thank you.”
Gary sounded sincere but Alison suspected that the sincerity was actually a level of irony so deep that only Gary and maybe Anton Chekov, if he wasn’t dead, would be able to identify. She decided to ask straight out.
“If you were being ironic how would I know?”
“You could ask Mrs. Fuller,” Gary told her, “or read more Jane Austin.”
“Are you going to be alright? I mean, you’re not going to kill yourself because I’m with Neville?”
“See,” Gary told her, “you have mastered irony.”
Alison couldn’t be bothered arguing about the usage of a literary device with Gary, least of all because she knew he would win with jargon and obscure references even if she was right.
“Look Gary, I know you’re upset that we broke up but can we not be civil? I’m trying my best to make sure you’re OK here.”
“Then don’t go.”
“I am going,” said Alison, “write to me this time.”
Gary put his spoon in to his bowl.
“I love you,” he told her, “no matter what. If I stop loving you I can’t think what might happen.”
“What do you mean?”
Gary drew in a deep breath and calmed his nerves enough that he could look Alison in the eyes.
“There is love in me the likes of which you've never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied in the one, I will indulge the other.”
Alison rolled her eyes.
“Oh, shut up you big drama queen. You’ll be fine.”
“Will you kiss me?”
“What?”
“Will you kiss me on the mouth?”
“No.”
“Just once.”
“No.”
“It’s because you’re scared, isn’t it? If you kiss me, all those feelings will come flooding back and you and I will lie together with the tranquillity of lotus eaters.”
“Sur
e it is Gary,” said Alison, “and the reason you won’t get a job is because you’re scared you’ll like work so much you’ll never stop doing it. By the way, one of the reasons I talked Shelley into taking this dump on with was that you were going to work as her research assistant. You are going to work as her research assistant. Right?”
“Fine, right. This Shelley, is she as pretty as you?”
“No.”
“Did you tell her how handsome I am?”
“I told her how you look.”
“Can I sleep with her?”
“You’re a free man Gary; you can do what you want.”
“Bollocks,” said Gary.
04.
The May sun of the previous day had faded into a constant whine of drizzle. The Hettford Woods were damp, dank and dismal. The night before, Milton had gone with Carrie to the big supermarket and bought ten lunchboxes, which had both an icepack and a water bottle. It was the perfect system. Milton had planned to put the thermal flasks inside the thermal lunchboxes but Dan had successfully argued that it would be counterproductive because the thermal flask would stop the ice-pack from working.
Dan had drawn a map of where he wanted the five containers of milk placed and fastidiously copied it to scale. Despite its mathematical accuracy, it was not the most geographically accurate map that had ever been created. The entire acreage of the woods was represented by a mere three trees and what Milton assumed was supposed to be a broomstick. Dan had drawn a squirrel on one of the trees and labelled it “Ratatoskr.” The area surrounding the woods was represented by simple line drawings. “The road” was simply two parallel lines. “Reginald’s farm” was represented by a small stick figure with a forked tail, cloven hooves and horns. Next to the stick figure a warning read, “Here be knob heads.”
Milton was doing his best to follow the instructions Dan had left which amounted to five dots around the wooded area that roughly circled the perimeter. Milton had tried to make notes next to the locations where he had left the milk to identify nearby landmarks, “the big tree” had been scribbled out and replaced with “the really big tree.” As he put down his second bottle
Now that he had set to the task, Milton felt a nagging sense of guilt at leaving Dan out of the procedure. It was, after all, Dan’s idea in the first place. Then again, Dan had been acting like a colossal arse so there was that to consider. So long as Milton did the job well Dan would have no recourse to complain, he had slept in so it was his own fault.