A Concept Novel - Chapters 1-2

A Concept Novel

Chapter 1

I’m such a loser because I have this mole on my head.
I hide it with some fringe but its fooling nobody.
The girl sitting opposite is looking at it right now.
I eat too many crisps. Crisps and chocolate.
It’s giving me spots all over my back.
My t-shirt’s not hiding them. Maybe I should wear two t-shirts.
Sometimes I’ll wear three t-shirts all at once to make me look bulky.
Well at least normal. Without that I’d just be thin as a pole.
Everybody’s good at something.
I’d get gym membership but I don’t want to look stupid.
Putting the machines to lift ten pounds.
There’s always a big guy who shows you how to use the stuff.
I’d look a boy to him. He’d laugh as he filled out the forms.
I’m not a Southerner. I don’t fit in. What are you writing?

I’ve noticed that girls never shake hands but on first meetings. That’s how I knew the couple opposite me had never met before. The guy didn’t look so different to me. Same hair cut. He was pretty scruffy too, but he was smiling. It looked as if he walked in smiling and had been smiling all day. Maybe he had stuff to smile about. Of course he did, he had this girl all to himself, even though I was there first. I could have smiled, introduced myself, worn a shirt that looked like a tucked-in napkin, a badge for Greenpeace. That doesn’t mean he actually cares.

I was writing and thinking in the county library, patterning a blank file pad with doodles and a first draft verse. I think I was going to call it ‘I’m such a loser because.’
If I couldn’t be the strong type then I could always go for something else – the suave, cultural tourist with hats and a wine cellar. People look up to that, like Hannibal Lector or someone. Everyone’s good at something. If I took guitar lessons I could be Rock n’ Roll Dale Hailey, the guy that plays acoustic down at the club on weekends. I could do Bob Dylan and Art Garfunkel songs. I don’t know what I’m good at. There are these posters for a Karate class around me. I could start that next week, then learn Chinese or whatever, but I’d have to bulk up first or they’d put me in the kid’s group. You have to be big to do those things. Poetry was just a stopgap, one of the many classes I was taking at the Community Centre on Second Avenue. I was convinced that poetry is what lonely people do to sound multifaceted. I’ve always liked that word. And influx, I like influx. Influx and discombobulated. I should use interesting words more often, be the guy that says funny things with funky words. I should pass Winston Churchill quotes off as my own, just come out with something profound then everyone would be impressed. That’s arrogant though. I should be loose, easygoing and pretend I’ve never heard of Churchill. I’ll still use influx though.

“What are you writing?”

A dilute voice crossed the desk that Sunday. I heard it and looked up to see a skinny girl with blue saucer eyes. I was not disappointed by her looks. In fact they were making me nervous. I grabbed her comment in the air and wrote it down without even knowing why. “It’s nothing” I said, sliding the paper into my lap, “Just a poem”
“Do you write poetry?” She seemed excited, interested, beamed with a smile and I knew she was going to ask to read it.
“No. Well yes, but nothing very good.”
“I try to write poetry, but the rhyming words are always hard to find! Did you know nothing rhymes with silver?”
My face slumped, unimpressed, and I quickly passed the conversation by with a smile. I took my pen and wrote another verse, something about the girl. It’s amazing, I though, how at one minute you can be so utterly enraptured in a woman only to find them the ugliest thing when their mouths move to impress. I tried to get this down on paper, and managed some metaphor and graphological rhyme. My thought stream was more impressive than what I had written. That’s a good title. I headed the page ‘Thought Stream.’ I scribbled some iambic tetrameter, our mission for that week’s homework, and wrote that the girl was a mirrored container, filled with the little water it holds, an optical illusion. I could paddle in her shallows all day and find nothing beyond her low cut top, her luring eyes. This was good stuff, and I was getting it all down, but by the end it was just a mess of uneven lines. I put a thick line through the whole thing.

The dim girl leaned over again and asked “Are you waiting for a blind date too?” and I almost didn’t know what to say. Was I? A blind date after all, maybe I wouldn’t know I was on it. No, that’s ridiculous.
“No.” I said “Just catching up on a little reading” I flipped up the paperback so she could see the cover, ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which made her beam brighter, her cheeks violently jagged, probably because of some clinical procedure “Oh how creepy is that. We’re reading the same book. Isn’t that weird?”
“That’s weird all right” I said
“Jon told me to have this out when he walked in, so he knows it’s me. Isn’t that clever?” I agreed, and she went on “You can be my support if he’s a creep. I’ve never met him you see. We just talk on the internet, so I’ve kind of got all worked up about it. Does that sound pathetic?” I couldn’t believe her confidence, but it was amazing. I guess I’d be like too that if I looked like her.
“Not really” I said “Sometimes you just get with a total stranger and it works out okay. I had a girl like that once”
“Yeah? Did it not work out?”
I thought about this for a moment, but couldn’t bring a memory far enough into the present to answer her. Instead, I thought about how Mandy and I met, and must have spent a good deal of time in recollection while the girl waited for a response.

*

DECEMBER 3, 1982

Dale Hailey sits at a railway station platform. To him, these places are holy. They hold a sacred quality that only these lonely loiterers can recognize, the ones that are by themselves with a newspaper, some just grasp their tickets. The entrance foyer where they collect their fare, that is the vestibule. The walk to the platform, that blessed walk, is through a small door that leads to the tracks. There are no trains waiting to leave. Dale Hailey likes it better when there are no trains, just the hallowed gap where one must not tread, the painted yellow line that separates him from heaven. Dale stares across the void, to the adjacent pulpit, Platform 3, where other parishioners sit, their paper coffees and downsized broadsheets are symbols of the life of the commuter. The ‘Snack Shack’ is always closed. An empty sepulchre where a metal shutter resists his temptation to buy overpriced nibbles. He buys some cough sweets though, from a machine and takes a pew. He waits for the 14:07 to Tacoma. It is delayed.

Mandy Hughes waits for the 14:21 to Seattle Central. It leaves from the same platform. She is short with red braided hair. She has freckles, pale skin, wears a tartan miniskirt, lavender stockings and a hippie rucksack, chopsticks in her hair. She is provocative, intently so, a magnet of notice. Decorated with beads, she knows all the meanings of her wrist charms, but not of her decision to buy them, for she needs no protection from Voodoo, no dreams that need catching.

*

I often looked back at the way I was then, the way I could speak to people. “Will the next train go to Tacoma?” I asked, even though I knew that it would. Mandy moved closer, shy, not assertive, but I wasn’t nervous, and never shuffled in my seat. She could see my red ticket, red for Tacoma. “I’m going to Seattle she said” I looked down at my hands, decided to crumple any festering lie and my ticket, “I think I’ll go to Seattle today”
“And it happened as easy as that?”
The library girl’s Virginia tones were merging with Mandy’s BBC English to form something quite odd, until at length I found myself back in the reference section.
“I think so” I said “I don’t remember”
“So it didn’t work out?”
I didn’t want to think about the day we met, but I couldn’t help but stare into space when the girl said, and my eyes fixed on one spot as if I would cry, but I would never lead my mind to Mandy, not right there in the library, so I just said “No it didn’t work out.”
Perhaps I couldn’t even recall the details of how it all ended, being so long ago. My present condition does not allow the events in my distant past to ever resurface. So suppressed are they that I can scarcely remember anything that happened over a year ago, yet the occurrences of late stick fresh in my mind like song lyrics. The girl in library that day parted my company a moment later. Upon saying “Well, I hope your date shows up, I think I see mine now,” she was all excitement as she stood, with faint lust in her tone, leaving Whitman on the table. I turned to see her walk over to a bemused, arty-type guy and shake his hand. They had hit it off immediately. I would call over “Actually, I’m not waiting for a date” but she wasn’t listening. In fact she was never listening. She smiled at me, and would probably smile at everyone that day whether they were fat or bald or completely repulsed her. She was one of those nice types. I had an urge of compassion and longing for past girlfriends as would normally greet me in a drunken state at five past midnight and have me reaching for old address books. I began to wish I could be a nice type and smile freely.

It should have been expected, I guess. The dullest day was topping the dullest week of what was possibly the most uninspiring portrait of American manhood in history: me, in the library for no reason, with work in the morning. It was building up to something big, a change in tide. The boredom would force something spectacular, and listening to a passionate song or having a maudlin movie moment would probably push me over the edge; make me buy a boat or get a tattoo, get drunk and start and fight or even speak out loud to a girl. No, this time it would be something really special. One week later, although I didn’t know it right there in the library, it would hit me like the biggest kick of spontaneity that would shake my mind and get me so excited that I would hardly keep my legs still. They would take me anywhere. They could have done all along, but I was afraid. I was always afraid to look stupid. After the library, I decided to go to the Community Centre. There was my creative writing class as seven.

Familiar faces bobbed along the familiar roads whereupon I walked everyday to and from my box-room apartment. There is the Chinaman’s wide gawk at eight thirty, his head balanced around a coil of scarves at his neck. He always walked quickly. He never ended up at the centre, so I guessed he turned off towards the prison and worked nights. It was probably the best he could get, being new to the country and all. The businesswoman walked slowly. The rear-view creases in her plaid skirt had been turning my head every morning for eight months now. She carried a bubble of perfumed air that lifted me from sterility for the briefest of moments. The woman took pottery at seven thirty, and picked up her kid at nine. The kid must have done the ‘making things’ class because he always had a rocket or a gun made from cereal boxes by the time I was leaving creative writing. I should talk to these people. Ask them where they’re going, even though I already knew. I needed to seize the moment, throw these people out of routine and into my world, then every morning we could say hi, and perhaps go for a coffee before our classes. I always wanted to be the Starbucks type. If the businesswoman drove she could pick me up in a car instead of me having to cycle everywhere on my tin-frame bike. I’m sure they’re all thinking the same thing. I was trying something new everyday, little things, but it wasn’t enough. That day, for the first time, I bought the ‘Big Issue’ magazine on the corner of fifth and Chester, and stopped to speak to the man about housing benefit.

The Buxton Community Centre was just about thirty minutes ride from the library. I had my assignment on me, but nothing final, so I was expecting embarrassment when it was my turn to read out. The centre did all kinds of things. Open mic nights on Fridays, amateur theatre on Mondays, crafts, calligraphy, writing, reading, just about anything that brings enough interest. I had eight classes in all. One a week and two on Thursdays, because the nine o clock acting workshop had the pretty blonde teacher. I was getting good at the acting, and was thinking about making it the thing I was good at. Writing was what I really wanted though, so in a way Sundays were the most important day. The foyer of the centre was full of finger paintings, modern art and framed photos of the various visitors the place had had. Steve Buscemi was above the door, ‘Thanks for everything’ it said. I always liked him in Fargo.

I don’t remember what happened inside, only that I made no new friends, never furthered myself with Sandra the reception girl, but signed up to a new film class, ‘Exploring the Frame,’ that started on Wednesday. Here was my poem,
“O Ancient Star, clouded youth
Offend not my eyes
Nor with any surprise
Remain thy course indifferent

Risk not your death spectacle
Til all is done,
The task is won
Til supernova, hide away
Home calls the man who fails the day”

Chapter 2

Twelve hours later the grey of my work station was staring back at me. My windmill calendar, it’s a year old now. I just had it showing the picture I liked. The one for July. The bars of excel spreadsheets lapsed every concentration it took for me to stay awake. There had been gruelling bike rides to work in the past, but that morning’s took the prize. I was stranded in middle lane when a truck driver swerved at my heels, kicked up dirty road water, smearing my already substandard suit and clogging my gears. The jacket was ruined but I couldn’t take it off. I was only wearing one silky-thin layer under my work shirt and my bony shoulder blades would probably stick out like chicken wings. Instead I had to suffer the damp every time my body moved against it. I guessed the receptionist’s screwed face was reaction to my smell when I walked in. I once had a thing for her, Sally Brightman. A period of predictable flirting patterns that once kept me eager for work. “Hey Dale” She still said.
“Hey Dale” I answered that morning, not quite knowing why. I think it’s what they call a rebound reaction or something. I should think before I speak. It’s making me look insane.

I slid into my office cubical like unwanted mail. It is small, cramped. There is a retail demon next door. Ordely Macintosh is of slick hair, uni-brow and Gucci stripes. I could never see him during the day, but could hear his keyboard clattering; the deadly rattle that meant another poor soul in a one-bed nursing home was buying seventeen pallets of toilet tissue – Lavender Soft or Quilted Peach. ‘The Kill’ he called it, ‘Moving in for the kill.’ But it was the way he answered his phone that drove me crazy, just by saying quirky variations of his surname like it was some kind of soubriquet. “Maccy” or “Big Mac,” thrown out through his sigh like customers were interrupting his busy schedule. The rest of us had to say, like the yammering guys on our radio advert said, “Stamlin and Copper Consultants, how can I help?” Mac and the boss even played tennis together. I sat in jealous loathing, my green stained shirt appropriate for my disposition. I was bored, playing with the height adjustment on my swivel chair and listening in on Mac’s calls, this one was not business. There was a lot of giggling, probably on both ends. A picture of his family: the wife, two boys and a dog stared back at the arrogant prick above his rolodex, and on the phone was his floozy, three calls in an hour. I shrunk back in my second rate suit, played with the layers of my shirts and thought at once that If I were to have a wife, or at that a floozy, I would be happy enough to quit this place and never look back. My own phone roused me, and the caller ID was an internal extension. I looked up at the boss’ glass encased office and saw him looking right back, the phone in his ear. I realised I hadn’t moved from the static slouch in my chair for ten minutes. I had officially, for the first time in three years, been caught slacking.
“Mr. Stamlin?”
“Hailey, what do I pay you for?”
“I was just…”
“Never mind about that. You’re figures are overdue, you’re the last horse to cross the line again boy. Quote me them now, the last thirty days”
“Now? You want them now? Hold on let me just find them here.” I rummaged under papers for my progress chart “Ah, here we are. One hundred and nine, sir, that’s from April 3rd”
“One o nine? In thirty what days?”
“Thirty three, sir”
I knew he wouldn’t be pleased, no right boss would be. Still, he never came over angry or ranting, like I wasn’t even worth the bother of deep breathes. He said quite calmly “You gotta be kidding me. That’s not even four a day. You gotta be kidding me that I pay you the good money worth of five sales and you only make me four. Now what sort of sense does that make?”
“Sir, I’d like to point out…”
His voice still coy, “I’d like to point you out Hailey. And that’s exactly what I’m gonna do at the next staff meeting if you don’t start shifting T.P”
“Thank you, sir”
Stamlin sighed, “Don’t be sardonic Dale”
The click let me know I was no longer connected, but I thought I’d talk to the dial tone in spite, “Sir, yes sir” in my best regiment voice. When I hung up Mac was behind me, and so was Sally Brightman. Being publicly embarrassed always made me wanna pee.

I never liked urinals, even the ones at work with the barrier, so I used the cubical. The lock didn’t work, so I held the door shut with one foot. Toilets are cramped. They should give you more room in toilets. I tugged off two plies of tissue that hung on the door, company brand, and as I did it revealed my name, there in black felt, ‘Dale Hailey sucks dick!’ written clearly in a thought bubble across the door – in a thought bubble! Anger reached my fingertips so fast that I bent them back when slapping the door. It hurt. This was typical though. Typical of schools, of colleges. Not here, not in this crummy office where hardly anyone even knew my name. I held the door like an oversized immense phone bill, trying to decipher how on earth it came to be. I wished it was a mistake and not intended for me, that way I could ignore it. But there was no ignoring it. I starred at the words again hoping they would somehow reveal a double meaning. It was clear enough. Just those four little words had ruined everything.

It was then, or shortly after when I peed on my trousers, that my opinion of work, bad as it already was, changed for the worse. Before I was just the guy who couldn’t sell, the skinny man who wears those substitute-teacher suits, but now I was an outcast, a loner with wet pants and apparently I sucked dick. I took the end of my tie, licked it and began violently scrubbing at the graffiti. It was not coming off. I spat at it, wrapped it with my knuckles, probably shouted at it, but it was permanent. It would probably last long after I got fired. I decided that I couldn’t go back out to the office, knowing that I’d probably pass the guy who wrote it, first thought it. I would definitely pass others that read it, others that thought it. My pride overcame any pragmatic urges I had to stay and earn money, so I left the toilets, picked up my bag and walked out of the building.

That day, on the stairs, I decided to ride home with fury, getting annoyed at anything I could for the sake of the bad day cliché. As I approached the rail where I locked my bike up every morning, something was different. It was only some of my bike. The front wheel had been removed, stolen, and now it just leaned forward on its flimsy frame against the pavement. A deep breath couldn’t escape the grit of my teeth, and not wanting to hurt it at first; I tried to prop the bike up by the rail. As I did it buckled and fell, dragging one of the prongs down my shin. The obvious pain extinguished my rage, and as I subsided, I thought I was crying. When I checked it was only the rain on my cheek. I looked up to see a storm against me.

Leaving the bike, I walked out into the town, about the distance of seven scattered trees with a blank expression and a dull mind that comes about from too much philosophising, too many misgivings. I was wet. My house was ten miles away. My boss fuming at my absence, and all my pathetic poetry left on my desk for everyone to ridicule. My eyes were squinting and arms dangled free of posture, my legs just about holding me to the wall of a shop. I had let go, thrown down my ores. I could have been mugged right there and not done a thing. My years exhausted me, drained away amidst the confidence of every other person going about their daily business while all I had was video conferences, outdoor aspirations, sitcoms on video, Chinese takeout twice a week and this mole in the mirror.

Everyone else was so free and easy, so confident and lax. They had things to go home to, places to walk to, people to meet. And there was me with my broken bike, my broken mettle. My life, I thought, was just a complaint. All I did was complain to my esteem and feel sorry for myself, for this mole on my head that everyone keeps looking at. I was idle to change. My pulse for life was slowing to a stop. The clouds of indolence were bit by bit covering darkness above my head, not by blackened storms, but in dreary grey. It was then I think, as that thought entered me, that from the corner of my eye came a clipboard. Holding that clipboard was a young girl, no older than sixteen, and as I prepared my frustration to be topped up over her bad attitude and impending survey, I spotted across the street a flash of silver. In the chasm between the sunlit walls of two barber shops, above the bobbing heads of the tourist mob, a great archway shone out a beacon, for propped against an old fashioned lamppost was the most glittering, most sleek and proper bicycle, that I had ever seen.

“Excuse me sir, could I borrow you for just a moment?” I was only half listening to the girl. In fact I wasn’t listening at all; I was fixated with the bike. A long way off, with the flowing tide of tourists ten rows thick, nothing could tear my eyes away from the post, and that bike.

The handlebars reared up like a peacock’s tail feather, a stag’s fiery antlers, and the body was intricate piping. The upper bar dipped a little like on a girl’s bike, but it was a man’s bike for sure. The survey girl was still talking as I drifted away from the wall and headed out into the tide. “Sir! Sir?” She called after, and it made people look at me, but I was beyond caring. Walking faster, I soon was beneath the lamppost. The bike was even more glittering up close, and I ran my hand along the bars, following with my eyes, I noticed there was no lock that secured it. I looked around. Everyone was walking fast, looking down at phones or papers, and no one else had spotted this chance. I placed my fingers on the nearest handlebar, flinching a little as if the rubber would scold me. My grip tightened as I tilted the frame to stand un-propped on its own two wheels. It came away from the post without argument. Here I looked up again, and in a flash mounted the great stallion frame. I stood astride the bike and leaned back on the saddle, caressing the handlebars and the gears. “Are you okay, Sir?” The survey girl was approaching.

I looked up at all the bustle one last time as my mind caved in with deep relief. The intricacies of self-worth spilled away with a gust as I had such a vehicle as would take me anywhere. Anywhere out of site, with enough time to spare. I was only forty one. The figure pleased me now. It was then I decided that I would make time, make time to do whatever I wanted. I gave an amazing laugh, wide and almost silent, a life’s worth of exhale as I put my feet to the peddles and started to move. Slowly at first, I felt no guilt or shame in taking what was mine. This bike was my ride out of everything. All the people were walking, and I began to speed past them weaving left and right between their steps, some mothers and children giving way, dragging their toddlers from my path, rampant and violent was the beast I rode, faster and faster as the crowd tapered away into oncoming loners. I turned my cheek to the wind to hear any cars that might be upon me, the road opened up, in all the space in the world and I was still weaving, still laughing. The high street of Buxton opens on both sides into footpaths, all leading to places I had never been before. I swayed left and right and standing up on the pedals, I chose a road. Peddling faster, I took the dirt track under my tires with rickety poise. There I floated, now free of the people, and things were left behind me. I would cycle alongside adjacent hedges for miles with one thought – I had got away with it.