Fall - A Collection of Short Stories (Almond Press Short Story Contest)
Page 19
Then he sees a life that is not new to him, the most recent of them all. The first time he sees a Walt Disney film is the moment his life begins. He is seven and is staying with Mrs Pritchard, his next-door neighbour, after school as his mother doesn’t finish work ‘til six. He is captivated, mesmerised, he has never seen anything like it: the vibrancy of the colours, the grace of Snow White’s dainty steps, and he marvels that every glitter of every diamond, every nose twitch of every tiny woodland creature is a completely new picture. His world, his passion, his life has always been drawing. He spends all the free time he has with his sketch pad and coloured pencils. One Christmas he even got given the watercolour pencils that turn into paint when they’re wet. No one saw him for days after that. Now he has discovered a whole new dimension. Sketch pads are no longer sheets of paper, to be used one after the other: now they are corners created into flick books where the flutter of paper brings his creations to life.
His parents disapprove. His mother never lets him watch television unless the show has educational merit. Cartoons do not have educational merit in her eyes. His father tries to interest him in “real art”. He takes him to galleries and tells him the stories of the paintings but after seeing the living, fluid motion of cartoons he feels cheated: the paintings are snapshots of a story, not actual stories in themselves and they are usually dull variations of the colour brown with a bit of blue and seem to involve Jesus dying or being born more times than not. Cartoons are a whole story told by pictures that actually contain primary colours: a vibrant alternate world. With Mrs Pritchard as a willing accomplice he devours the entire works of Disney with insatiable hunger.
He leaves home amidst argument and disappointment. He is going to college to do an Art Foundation course, though his grades are good and he could equally well be going to university to study Architecture, as his mother wishes, or Fine Art, the compromise his father had hoped to realise.
Lucy. She works at the ramshackle “ca” near his squalid one bed flat in Byker. It must have said “cafe” at some point but the stencilling of the last two letters had worn off the front window, or been picked off by bored students. She captivates him: she is his Snow White, his Sleeping Beauty, his Cinderella. She has the most incredible long, graceful fingers and each movement of her hands is a dance he could watch for ever. She wears too much make-up, not due to arrogance but to create a mask to shield her from the world. She happily flirts with the middle-aged married men but is shy around the younger ones who might actually ask her out. When he asks her to go and see a film with him she stares at the grey linoleum floor that she has already mopped twice that day and tucks her hair behind her ears six times (he loves that tic) before she answers. She is beautiful and she understands his talent, his passion, his drive. She likes having a man whom she can curl up with on a Sunday morning and watch Disney films in bed. She says that the “struggling artist” thing is romantic and what do they need money for when they have each other?
He misses Joshua’s birth for another convention. He has been on the road a lot lately trying to interest various television companies in his work, without much luck. No one is interested in hand-drawn cartoons anymore. They want computer animation that can create shows much faster and cheaper. They don’t understand that what he does is an art; it’s too old-fashioned. Even Disney has only produced a couple of cartoons in the last five years and even then they are massively computerised. Many people are sympathetic: he’s a talented artist why doesn’t he cut his losses and computerise his work? Cartoons are dead and animation urinates over the still-warm body. He knows that if he can just get his stuff seen by the right people then he’ll make his millions. He’s taken loans on that basis. Lucy is working double shifts so her sister is looking after Joshua during the day and she doesn’t half make him hear about it. How she had to buy his nappies, again, and how her sister is too good for him. When he sees her, Lucy is wan. She’s stopped eating again, her usual response to stress, and as a result isn’t producing enough milk for Joshua. That gives her sister something else to nag him about.
He’s drinking quite heavily now. It starts out as cheeky bottle of Jack in the car to keep out the cold on the long journeys. He flips the car somewhere outside Aberdeen when he falls asleep at the wheel. Fortunately he hits a tree rather than another vehicle as he hadn’t paid the insurance for months. He knows it’s a write off from the way that the bonnet has concertinaed to half its normal size. He abandons it and hitches his way back to Newcastle with a lorry driver with a penchant for Cliff Richard songs. Since the heating has been cut off he drinks to stay warm. Lucy and Joshua are staying with her sister. There is a heated argument which includes her sister telling him he isn’t a “real man” as he “doesn’t provide” for his family. Then Lucy begs him to get a real job. She snivels. It’s a long time since he last saw her not crying. His main feeling for her is disgust. He is an artist! Van Gogh was not appreciated in his own time. He knows that he’s a walking cliché but when he drinks he sees the colours, those beautiful, vibrant colours, weaving and interlacing before his eyes.
No more! He knows this life he doesn’t need to see it again. Doesn’t want his failure rubbed in his face. He wants to forget, to not feel, to not be. He wants to embrace the emptiness of the blank paving stones and cast himself on their unthinking mercy.
By the time the avalanche came to a halt, half the cliff face had come away in a debris of boulders, rocks and dust which lay scattered over the mountain wherever inertia had caused them to rest. He embraces his new form: his rough hewn surface already adorned with yellow-green lichen that serves to augment the sparkling crystals that course through him. He is solid, at one with the landscape. He feels the war of the elements around him, the wind that sometimes caresses him, sometimes whips and chastises him, flinging rain harder than gravel at his exposed surfaces. From his resting place he watches the interplay of light and shadow, moonbeams and cloud-covered sun, summer’s hikers and winter’s frozen beauty.
No more! He knows this life he doesn’t need to see it again. Doesn’t want his failure rubbed in his face. He wants to forget, to not feel, to not be. He wants to embrace the emptiness of the blank paving stones and cast himself on their unthinking mercy.
By the time the avalanche came to a halt, half the cliff face had come away in a debris of boulders, rocks and dust which lay scattered over the mountain wherever inertia had caused them to rest. He embraces his new form: his rough hewn surface already adorned with yellow-green lichen that serves to augment the sparkling crystals that course through him. He is solid, at one with the landscape. He feels the war of the elements around him, the wind that sometimes caresses him, sometimes whips and chastises him, flinging rain harder than gravel at his exposed surfaces. From his resting place he watches the interplay of light and shadow, moonbeams and cloud-covered sun, summer’s hikers and winter’s frozen beauty.
FALL
Winners of the Almond Press Short Story Contest 2012
Please have a look at the profiles of the writers featured in this collection at this link:
>>Profiles<<
Samuel Dodson | Corrina Austin | Holly Ice
Zena Hagger | James Watson
Jennifer Etherton | Michael Rumery
Adrian Hallchurch
Javier Moyano Pérez | Mahalia Solages
Patricia Pribolova | Thomas Brown
Hannah Lavery | Adam Ley-Lange
Neal Mason | Elizabeth Richards
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