Troy’s Possibilities
Rodney Strong
© Copyright 2017 Rodney Strong
Rodney Strong asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
Published by LoreQuinn Publishing
Author website: www.rodneystrongauthor.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
Cover design: Debbie Weaver
To Mum and Dad, who were there at the start of the dream, but couldn’t be there to see it come true.
Contents
Dedication
The one where I opened the door
So here’s the deal
Home life
The one where I went for a walk
The one where I went to a show
The one with the birthday present
The one at the beach
The one with the brother
The one with the revelation
The one after the trial
The one that got away
The one that almost wasn’t
The one with the photo
The one with the parents
The one with the acting career
The one step forward two steps back
The one where I ran
The one where she runs
The one where we both ran
The one with the actual date
The one with Emily
The one with the flatmate
The one with more dates
The one with Kelvin
The one with the freak-out
I’m not sure any more
The end or the beginning
It doesn’t matter any more
About the Author
The one where I opened the door
It starts, and ends, with love. Okay that’s not true. As I lay writhing on the floor the thought foremost in my mind was definitely not of love.
They say that love is blind, but no one talks about it being excruciating.
Rewind 30 minutes.
That morning I’d woken, slowly becoming aware of sounds and smells and light pushing against my eyelids. I wondered how old I was. Most days it’s hard to tell. Eyes still shut, I moved first one leg, then the other. No pain. Flexed my fingers; they felt strong and supple. Finally I opened my eyes and stared at my hands. They looked young, wrinkle free, yet slightly callused. I sighed. It narrowed the age down but not enough. My phone lay on the bedside table. The screen confirmed the date, and my age.
Hauling myself out of bed, I glanced at the corner of my room. Nothing had changed. I shuffled into the bathroom, rubbing sleep from my eyes. Staring at me in the mirror was the face of a young man, and I despised it.
My name is Troy Messer and I’m twenty-five years old. Again – or still, I think. It’s complicated. I’m an average-looking sort of guy, a shade under six foot, with short brown hair. Plus blue eyes that according to my flatmate and best friend, Emily, never smile. Several women have accused me of being handsome, but I usually dismissed them as drunk, which some of them were; deluded, which in one or two cases was also true; or just plain mistaken. I’m quite bright when I want to be, and athletic if I work hard at it, which rarely happens. In short, there is almost nothing extraordinary about me. Almost.
Having turned away from the mirror, I briefly flirted with the idea of going back to bed, but general apathy has its limits, stopping just short of not paying the rent. I wandered down the narrow hallway into the kitchen. We lived in a bungalow with the original wooden floors and doors, and small rooms with tiny windows – built when people were shorter. Ours was one of many along the street; in fact if it wasn’t for the second-hand BMWs parked on the road you might think you’d stepped through a rip in time.
The bedroom walls were covered with a sickly mustard wallpaper that looked sixty years old, but had been selected by the landlord’s three-year-old daughter. It could have been worse. Her first choice had apparently been Peppa Pig wallpaper. However the kitchen had been updated with modern appliances and a spacious pantry.
There was a note on the kitchen bench: Fridge.
I sighed. We’d been friends for ten years and Emily had what could best be described as boundary issues – she was constantly trying to fix me. Not that she knew what was wrong, but she’d decided a man of my age shouldn’t spend his time drifting through life with a weariness reserved for returning soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
She’d experimented with a range of diagnoses for my problem, and offered up a bunch of potential solutions with varying results:
Bored with job … Emily had left the newspaper on the bench with several adverts circled. Everything from a waiter to the CEO of a power company.
Too much time … She’d dragged me to dance lessons, pottery classes, and one failed attempt to learn sign language.
Relationship … Not with her, of course – that’d be weird – but she’d set me up with several women, assuming that if I had someone in my life then I would actually have a life. I did admittedly sleep with some of them, so it wasn’t a complete bust, but the experiment stopped when I jokingly called Emily my pimp.
Mental stimulus … This was her latest. She had decided I needed to challenge my brain. So for the past two weeks she’d been leaving puzzles and treasure hunts around the flat in the hope it would spark some enthusiasm.
I opened the fridge with a little trepidation – I never really knew what to expect. Nothing exploded or leapt off the shelf. Apart from plastic containers filled with leftovers, some eggs and a bottle of expired milk there was nothing out the ordinary. As I went to shut the door I saw one of the eggs had writing on it.
Next door is the lowest clue.
I briefly thought about frying the egg but rebellions are pointless if someone isn’t around to witness them. Assuming next door meant one of the neighbours, I exited the kitchen and was nearly at the front door where two thoughts stopped me. One was that I knew Emily was usually literal. The other was that I still had my dressing gown on.
Retracing my steps, I reread the egg, and thought about it from an Emily perspective. I crossed to the kitchen door and looked down. Something was written on the bottom of the door. Not ‘next door’ as in the neighbours, but the next door I would open. Shaking my head, I squatted and squinted at the tiny writing.
Stop and smell the roses.
That was puzzling. I didn’t know if it meant the next step in the game or a suggested lifestyle direction. I decided to consider it while having a shower – I do some of my best work there. And yes, sometimes that refers to masturbation.
I padded into the bathroom and turned on the water. In most houses this would be a simple task of rotating the mixer. Unfortunately, along with the original floors and doors, the house had the original bathtub, the original plumbing, and quite possibly the original shower curtain. To get the water to the right temperature is akin to cracking a safe. Rotate the hot tap twice, cold tap once, hot tap three times, cold tap once, hot tap back the other way twice, wait one and a half minutes, and there you go – water at the perfect temperature emitting from the showerhead with the same ferocity as sweat dribbling down your neck on a hot day. But if you
lay down in the bath and let the water fall on you it was like a gentle massage, with the added bonus that sometimes you got clean as well.
While waiting for the water to reach optimum temperature I stared at myself in the slightly cracked mirror. Nothing had changed in the last five minutes – or ten years – but one day it might.
It took some manoeuvring to get comfortable in a bath made for someone five inches shorter than me but finally I was able to relax with my left leg bent and my right leg leaning against the wall. Water misted down, hitting my chest and slowly spreading across the torso, while I wondered what excuse to use for being late to work. I don’t particularly hate my job – in fact sometimes working as an analyst at the second largest bank in the country was quite rewarding. But it’s hard to muster enthusiasm for another day, another meal, another conversation, another one of everything I’d done endless times before.
After pondering the problem for a while I decided things would be easier all around if I called in sick and spent the day in bed.
Extraction from the bath was trickier than getting in but eventually I managed it with minimal damage to knees and elbows. Drying myself was interrupted by a knock at the front door. I ignored it and continued with the tiresome process of making sure every part was dry. It seemed like no matter how hard I tried, there was always one spot missed which gleefully soaked into my clothes. It was like a battle between my brain and body; the score was 6,000 to nil in favour of my body. It didn’t help that the towel was five years old with the softness and absorbency of sandpaper.
The knock came again. I wrapped the towel around me, wandered down the hall, took the security chain off and opened the door.
The girl standing on my front porch was slim with long blonde hair and blue eyes. She would have been about my age, and slightly shorter than me. She wore figure-hugging faded blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt, dark boots, and carried a large shoulder bag. The sun streamed across her face, filtering through strands of hair that left rippling shadows when she talked.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hi.’
‘Do you know you’re naked?’
‘I have a towel on.’
‘Barely,’ she replied with a grin.
I looked down. The towel had come open, leaving things poking out that were best kept hidden. I readjusted the towel. ‘Can I help you?’
She was struggling to keep her eyes locked on mine. ‘Do you think you could put some pants on?’
‘I could close the door,’ I replied, already over the encounter.
‘Can I use your phone? My car died.’
‘Don’t you have a cell phone?’
‘That died too.’ She gave a helpless shrug.
‘Unlucky.’
‘Not really – it was a piece of shit.’
‘The car or the phone?’
‘Both. So can I use it?’
‘Um, use what?’
‘The phone.’ She said this like she was talking to a two-year-old, and I didn’t know whether to be amused or insulted.
I sighed. ‘Sure. Come in.’ I led the way down the hall, followed by the hollow echo of boot heels. In the kitchen I turned back around. She was pointing something at me.
‘What the…?’ was my last rational thought for several minutes. My eyes erupted in burning agony and I fell to the floor, writhing like a crazed marionette doll being operated by two drunk monkeys. My eyes refused to open, and they felt like they were being stabbed by millions of little needles.
Through the pain I became aware of sounds from the other rooms of the house, then footsteps approaching. Instinctively I scrambled backwards, eyes still glued shut, and smacked my head on a cupboard. The floor was cold against my arse so my towel must have come off. I tried to rub my eyes, my head, and cover myself at the same time, failing on all three counts. A door opened and closed, then someone grabbed my hand. I jerked it free.
‘Don’t be a baby,’ she said, putting something cold in my hand. ‘Pour this on your eyes. Then come and get me.’ Boots retreated, and the front door slammed shut.
What? No goodbye? No thanks for falling for my stupidly clever trick and by the way your penis is the biggest I’ve ever seen.
I groped around with my free hand and found she’d put the milk container in my other one. My addled brain hoped it wasn’t Emily’s soy milk since she hated wasting things. I fumbled the lid off and poured the entire container over my face, accidentally inhaling some, coughing and spraying milk around the kitchen, but kept going until it was empty and I lay in a growing pool of dairy. I might have made a crack about crying over spilt milk but I was too busy actually crying. And it was Emily’s soy so this woman had even more to answer for. Eventually the pain subsided enough for my eyes to slit open.
The phone was inches away from my hand; the rational thing would be to call the police immediately. Instead I stumbled into the bathroom, ran a basin full of water and plunged my head into it. Coming up for air, I checked my appearance. My eyes were puffy and angry red, but at least I could see out of them. Water streamed off my face and after three more dunks the pain subsided to manageable proportions. I stumbled back into the kitchen in search of painkillers, slipped in the puddle of milk and skidded into the island bar, unfortunately at groin height. Fresh pain erupted, and a stream of swear words shot into the air.
Cradling my injured genitals, I explored the house, looking to see what was missing. I tried my room first, where organised chaos was completely destroyed. Casual observers might not have noticed the difference, but there was usually order beneath the clutter. An assortment of pillows, currently strewn across the room, usually formed a vague person like shape in the centre of the king-size bed, my oasis in the desert sized mattress. Piles of clothes typically dotted the floor, seemingly carelessly dropped, but there was a system. Pants over by the drawers, agonisingly close to their destination, T-shirts by the door, undies and socks in the top drawer. Some things are best kept off the ground. Now a tangle of everything littered the carpet.
My eyes went to the corner of the room. I went over to the canvas leaning against the wall, untouched, unfinished.
After a few minutes of searching I realised my iPhone was missing from the bedside table. Swearing, I went into my roommate’s room. Fortunately it was spotless – Emily was a neat freak, thinking if she started every day with a clean room it was like starting the day fresh. The thief obviously hadn’t gone through her room at all. Which made no sense. Emily’s stuff was worth way more than mine, so why only target my room? And what did that girl mean, come and get her? I shook my head, another in a long list of bad ideas.
It was then I noticed Emily’s jewellery box open and empty on the top of her dresser.
Which leads us back to my original starting point – recently pepper sprayed, naked, and extremely pissed off. Logic dictated that the next move would be to call the police, closely followed by a call to Emily. While I had every intention of calling both the police and Emily, it didn’t matter whether it was now or in a few hours. In the meantime I planned on taking my visitor up on her invitation. The loss of my phone wasn’t a big deal, but no one fucks with my friend.
I retained enough sense to put on trousers and sunglasses.
Rummaging around the pile of pillows on the bed, I pulled out my iPad. Thank God for technology – the Find My Phone app pointed to a spot halfway across the city. A search of every pocket came up with $32. More than enough to get a bus into town. Normally I would have walked into the city, just me and my thoughts without distraction from unimportant people doing unimportant things. But the thirty-minute walk might cool my anger, and I was determined to keep the fires stoked.
I slammed the door shut behind me and stormed to the bus stop. Three doors down from our place an elderly couple stood outside their gate having an argument. I’d seen them around before, just a casual hi in passing. This time the woman grabbed my arm.
‘You there, settle this for us. This one or this o
ne?’ She held up two paint samples.
‘Um, for…?’
‘The house, son, obviously,’ the man told me.
Both options were horrible. One was a sandy grey colour and the other bright green. I pointed to the grey as the least offensive. The man looked triumphant and the woman waved me off in disgust.
The bus was half full with an assortment of retirees, unemployed and student artists accompanying me on my search for revenge. The student artists annoyed me the most, carrying their large portfolio bags and eyeing up the rest of us with a critical painter’s eye as if they were trying to capture our true essences. I’d wanted to be one of them, but life had taken several unexpected twists. Now I viewed them with a mixture of envy, annoyance and disgust.
I checked several times during the journey, but the phone hadn’t moved in the fifteen minutes it took to cover the distance between the house and the place marked by my screen’s blinking light. As the bus travelled closer I began to have second thoughts. I’ve been shot several times, beaten up more than my share, and suffered through excruciating and sometimes fatal illnesses. Until today I’d never been pepper sprayed, and looking to get it done twice in one morning bordered on sheer stupidly.
But I needed to get Emily’s jewellery back.
When the bus pulled over I queued up behind a young mother with two crying children. For a moment something shifted in my heart, before I stifled it behind a curtain of indifference. She gave me an apologetic smile and I returned it with a look of encouragement. As the bus rumbled off I paused on the edge of the pavement to get my bearings. The air smelled of diesel, fried food and – as of ten seconds ago – baby vomit. The mother was mortified, but I just shrugged. With the start I’d had to the day, baby vomit wasn’t an issue.
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