Urban Romance

It was not that he hated people, far from it. His own family, and a select group of friends, evinced a fierce and protective love from him that was painful to contemplate. It was the ordinary folk, the big saggy women and the thin saggy men, they hurt him the most. But he did not hate them. They pulled from him a raw and stinging pity, a pity so thick and fog-like that it clouded his eyes, fucked his senses, sucked in through his pores and turned his brain a strange colour. They all looked like children; from a distance they really were indistinguishable from children. There is not an adult among us, Brian thought. He thought and stewed, drowned in a dank well of murky, aggressive airs. He sucked his ciggie and wolfed down the heat, exhaled through nose and mouth simultaneously, two intersecting vectors of yellow grey smoke.

He watched the people in the chippy queuing up for their food; felt that he begrudged them that as well, he wanted to call up the riot squad and get the water cannon turned on them all. It was turning into a night of total entropy, based on experimental baby steps through years of anger, self loathing, unnecessary risk taking and alcoholism. He crunched his knuckles, but they had been tried several minutes ago and didn’t crack. His paunch bumped against the steering wheel, his head brushed the roof, he felt like a gorilla in a circus act, about to smash the clown car and savage the crowd. He got his lunchbox from under the passenger seat. Linda had put some of last night’s lasagna in a microwaveable dish, wrapped it in cling film, along with four rounds of tuna mayo and a chocolate bar for afters. He took the chocolate bar, dumped the rest down in the footwell.

“Why do penguins carry fish in their beaks?” he read aloud from the back of the wrapper.

“Because they don’t have any pockets…that’s not even a joke, it’s just a plain fucking dumb fact.”

He felt sorry for kids these days, too many random numbers, too many disassociated yet convergent reagents. All those vampiric ideas competing for space in their heads, be this, buy that, this is you, this could be you. Outside his car the pressure was building, he could see the discarded coffee cups and polystyrene boxes vibrating minutely. The atmospheric processors were sucking, tightening up for a street level filter purge. In the next instant a rolling wave of mist and condensation blew through the streets, sending skirts and hats into chaos. Out of the swirling vapour a figure took form, pressed itself to Brian’s passenger window with hands as hollow and fragile as the bones of birds. Linda. Brian unhooked the push lock and the door opened with a sucking moan, the outside world hungry for the warmth of the interior body. Linda sat down and put her heel straight through the filmy bubble of Brian’s dinner. She looked at the half eaten chocolate in his hand.
“You’ve had your pudding first…”

“Yeah well, I always do that, I was saving the rest for later.”
“I thought I’d come and find you, I had a really bad feeling.”
“What do you mean sweetheart?”

Brian shuffled over in his chair and slipped a meaty arm across Linda’s shoulders, nuzzled his face into her hair. The droplets of rain caught up in there looked purified, opalescent, lab cultured. She spoke in her little submissive voice, hand over her mouth, small words. Very small words to hear.

“I was just doing the dishes and I got to the plate your Mam gave us for anniversary and I got to thinking that maybe you were dead somewhere and getting rained on and a slug was crawling on your eye.”

The pit fell out of Brian’s stomach, he clutched his Linda to his breast.

“Well I’m here now, you’ve seen me, I’m fine aren’t I?”

Linda’s blue eyes swiveled up and through her sparking gold hair, searching every fissure and rise in Brian’s iris. What did she see when she looked at him like that? Was the same naked hunger that drove her gaze evident in his? He had his doubts. Linda’s eyes burned with a cold blue flame, a heat that came from brain-based nuclear fusion, not the regular combustion that took place in the heart.
“I have to tell you something.”

Brian nodded, tensing up in his seat, preparing for a head on collision.
“I stopped taking the tablets, they were messing me up more than the last lot.”

“Well darling we’ll have to go visit doctor Simms and get you on some new ones won’t we?”

Linda shrank down further into his armpit, she was now speaking from his lower back, her breath hot on his kidneys.

“It’s not that Brian, no pills can make it right, there’s nothing wrong with me. I hate spending my days sped up and my nights doped out I just want to feel the sun on my skin.”

“But sweetie, listen to what I’m saying, you’re no good when you’re off the tablets, we can’t even have Lil over when you’re off the tablets. You say the strangest things darling, people can’t handle it.”

She was crying now, Brian could feel the small bones in her shoulders vibrating and dropping with each sob.

“But I’m not wrong Brian I’m not I never say anything mean or hurtful I just say what I see but I won’t anymore I can’t do it it’s like taking a piece of your brain away. The world doesn’t care Brian it’s just one big machine that goes round and round and if you can’t stay on you get flung off and smashed into atoms.”

The tears came hard now, and Brian bit back a lump in his throat, for Linda there was no bright side, just the intricate workings of the night and nighttime, perpetually. An anti-matter sun drove her thoughts, either that or she was medicated into a grey stick figure of spectral obeisance.

“It’s like this darling, either we live in the city and you take your tablets, or we go out into the country and you can do what you want. But there will be no Lil, no shopping at the Trafford, just you and me and a couple of hens.”

“I remember one time I woke up scared and I turned on the light and you looked dead Brian, you looked like you’d been underwater and dead for a long time. Like they’d just pulled you up from being dead underwater a long time.”

The sobbing subsided; her eyes gleamed even brighter, as though the crying were a purging of the irises on a molecular level. A bleed valve for the new energy that powered her mind.
“You know full well you can’t say anything to shock me Lind, we’ve been here before.”

Her face twitched, a strange colour change came over her, she stared at Brian with a new air of appraisal.

“I was doing some reading on those vaccinations the force made you have last summer, do you even know what was in those needles that you had last summer Brian?”

A hot flush rode through his cheeks. His top lip was perspiring. He shook his head.

“Something called colloidal platinum, to make you susceptible to mind control. What did they tell you it was for? Or did they even bother to tell you? Don’t you see? It’s just one big, dead machine and you're a part of it. A dead machine that has to feed off the blood of the living.”

Brian had tuned her out already, some latent ability to switch off her insane speech had surfaced once again. He was watching the street with his studied professional patience, his face calm and guarded as a Zen monk.