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Dog's Reasons (standard:other, 1922 words) | |||
Author: Siobhan McHenry | Added: Sep 23 2003 | Views/Reads: 3300/2331 | Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes) |
All about small town British Life | |||
Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story I don't know...they got in by a majority, the head of this mafia being the grandson of an Italian immigrant. This town is now full of big men walking around with their arms crossed, pumped up and proud, lots of Italian ice-cream vans are mysteriously driving around at night and there are more pretend blondes than you would care to see unless you were one of those oh so ‘proud' men....what this means for the future of this place, let alone this country I do not know, but it means my favourite Indian take-away has now shut up shop and the owners have all but disappeared... Elise, her real name...is in trouble, again. Just like that Andromache in those greek tradegies, her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend wants to kill her...and I witnessed all the drama unfold. We went to a barbeque at his house, us not being an item yet, and her still clinging onto the abusive git, who is a lot older than both of us...he keeps a machete in his kitchen drawer...and wears “designer” gear like Ted Baker and Hackett (enough said). Well, his new ‘girlfriend' a toned, muscley thing upped on copious amounts of vodka, sprang at us with the machete like a well-trained commando and started screaming about how much she'd like to cut us both up. We left early.... “ I was put into a mental hospital once..' Elise began. “ Why?”, I asked. “ I've never been too sure, I had so many strange visions, perhaps it was drugs. Gary has a habit, he used to work every day and leave me all alone with just weed to smoke. I smoked an eighth a day, just sitting in front of the telly, doing nothing...” Her eyes drifted away from me and she stared into the distance, quietly picking at a loose thread on her sleeve...We were sitting beside each other in her bedroom, the moon shone it's silver light onto her hair, her face was serene and sad. Outside the wind was blowing the rain hard, it dripped down the window like a multitude of tears, the noise was steady and constant, drumming against the walls. It was the middle of September, for most of the month it had been extremely hot and sunny, tonight was the first of the rain...it seemed to fit both our moods...we sat in silence, no T.V, no music... “Do you still love him?,” I asked her. “I don't know, perhaps I was just clinging onto somebody for all those months, I thought he would protect me. After he helped me get out of the hospital, I followed him everywhere, so convinced that if I was left alone, someone would come and get me, the police or the doctors, and put me straight back in there.” She lived all alone in a flat on the eighth floor of a high-rise. The room was messy, but not filthy, the floor was covered with her Art, paint pots, brushes, rags and paper. There was a single painting on the wall that caught my eye...a woman's face, in the style of Glimt she said, with long straggly hair, purple and brown, one dark eye drooping downwards, and splashes of blue tears... The next morning, the smell of fresh wet earth drifting upwards through the opened window, our mood was a little better...we decided to go to her parent's house to pick up the “rat” and take him for a little walk....I went into the newsagents to buy some fags (cigarettes) while Elise and the dog waited outside, shivering in the cold...I stood in the queue fidgetting impatiently and leaning on each leg in turn, dancing a little jig to shake off the coldness whilst the Indian shop keeper, smiling with soft, wide eyes and a fixed grin took abuse from two drunken teenagers, taking out can after can from the drinks fridge... “Oi, ow long ‘as this bin in the fridge then?, I ain't buying this, it's outta date! Wass wrong with you?” No Answer. No reason why. They stumbled past me and out of the door. Catching Elise's eye, I saw her turn her face towards the ground as they loudly chortled, and began to annoy her. I got my cigarette's and hurried outside.. “This your boyfriend then?”, one of them asked. “Yes,” she replied. “‘Ere mate, look after her, awright?” They stumbled off down the road. I could not express to her the unspeakable joy I felt so suddenly, her boyfriend!!! We walked in silence together, she still had her face turned towards the ground. What if she'd only said that just to get those blokes off her back? We didn't discuss what had just happened, I was too embarassed and confused to say anything more... “I'm starting to get chillblains,” she said, “Let's go to my cousin's.” “Erm, Ok.” Her cousin; a true metaller, tongue-pierced, aversions to baths...He was the same age as us, twenty. He lived in his Dad's attic..he and his Dad's girlfriend had an equal hatred of each other, he called her Clog, for reasons known only to himself. The attic was dingy, dark and full of the mixed putrid smells of B.O and pot smoke, on the walls were disgusting cartoons of aliens in unsavoury sexual positions, old prints of maps of the Thames, Gameboy scores, rotting doughnuts hanging on nails. He had a sensitive side too, Elise had said, he wrote poetry...I took up an empty space on the floor between pizza boxes full of fag butts and unwashed boxer shorts...he handed me a book of his “works”, one read: ‘Judy Garland eats Scat, fuck, shit, piss.' Suffice to say, we left early... So what is this all about? This story is about my first love, this story is just a diary of a week in my unimportant life you could say, I haven't even told you about our first kiss. If this story seems to you to be going nowhere, that is precisely because the whole point of this story is that all of us, every one of us here was going nowhere. It was an English, small town sensibility, we earn our money during the week on a minimum wage and then spunk it all on a weekend down the pub...if you are still living in this town after the age of eighteen, you can be sure, unless Lady Luck comes knocking on your door, that you will be living here for the rest of your little life. And that's the sad truth of it. There is no reason why...Everyone has their own excuses for it, bad childhoods, bad starts, bad opportunities. What is Reason? Reason is cause and effect, Reason is only an excuse... Tweet
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