by Angela Peach
“What? Did I go too fast?” I asked, regretting my daring nipple move now.
“No, you're fine. But I didn't come over here to have sex with you Nikki, and if we continue, I think that's what's going to happen” she said carefully.
“Oh. Shit. Sorry.” I tried to pull away, blushing crimson at having misread everything, but she held onto me.
“Whoa, hold on. I didn't say I don't want to have sex with you. Just not tonight. Is that okay?”
I nodded stupidly at her, studying the way her pupils had dilated in her eyes, the flush of desire on her cheeks, her swollen lips. I felt intoxicated, but the artist in me wanted to note every single detail on her face. She smiled and nodded slowly at me.
“Good. Well, I guess I'd better go.” I stepped back to allow her to slide off the bench. “Let me know when you have time to do my painting and we'll talk price then.”
“Sure, I'll do that for sure.”
“Thanks. I'll see you soon,” she said, leaning forward for one last soft, but lingering kiss, and then she walked out of my studio leaving me breathless and more than a little turned on. I braced my hands against the bench, noting one of our beers had been knocked over and was seeping into a pile of rags, but didn't move to clean it up. Amanda's ass had knocked that beer, while we were making out. It was a work of art all in itself.
Then my eyes caught sight of the time.
“Ah shit!” I cursed, suddenly alert and needing to make a decision. Risk running indoors and not making it to my room in the three minutes I had before 'sleep' took over, or staying out here in my studio. The latter won out, and I had a camp bed in the corner specifically for times like this.
As I laid back, one of my last thoughts before I went was wondering what Amanda would have thought if I'd fallen asleep on her mid-kiss?
CHAPTER SIX
It feels like it has taken years to reach this point in my life, although I think it’s only been a matter of months. Or it has been months that feel like years.
There was a day once, long ago, when everything went wrong and sent walls caving in around me. Inside those walls were worlds, worlds that live on.
I inhaled and filled my lungs full of smoke, holding it there for pleasurable seconds before I blew out, calming myself with exhalation. I looked around my pathetic flat that I called home. It’s just a big room with a bed in a corner and a kitchen area in another, but in between is a wall of windows that I love to stand at, looking out at the city before me.
There is always someone walking past. Sometimes, it’s a man who talks on his mobile phone. Other times, it’s a woman who smiles. I imagine that she is on her way to meet her lover and the anticipation is spreading across her face from the pleasure she knows he will give her. Or perhaps she is going to buy a chocolate muffin.
All these people and all these lives, on their way to where they have to go and I have nothing better to waste my time with than wondering about days that do not belong to me and are more interesting than mine.
I brought my left hand behind me and fetched out the piece of paper Mr Chan had given me with Helena’s address typed on it. The words had not disappeared as I expected and I re-folded the page, returning it to the resting place in my jeans pocket.
Will I get her tomorrow?
I am scared to be where tomorrow may take me. Who goes to sleep at night secure that all will be the same when they next open their eyes? My life can change in the blink of an eyelid.
My life is fragile like love.
In my hand, I let an egg drop and, as the shell splits spewing its contents, all I can feel is the slit that shreds my heart in two. All my love has come tumbling out and there has to be someone to scoop me up and put me back together again.
I walk over to my covered canvas and pull off the sheet, seeing the frame that will make up my image of Freya. As soon as I see my colours, I drift into imagining the soft touch of her skin on mine and immediately feel a tug inside my pants that longs for her fingers. How did she get in when the spectre of Helena has always stood guard at my heart to see off any challenge?
Every wall has a weak point and every piece of armour has a chink. Arrogance shields and blinds eyes from seeing what can be let loose. I have given up fighting because I have been overtaken by lust and it’s not all that bad.
I lit up a cigarette, staring at the beginning of a masterpiece, alternating my eyes between the world on my canvas and the world outside my windows.
There must be a difference somewhere between what happens in my head and what happens outside the walls that surround me. Perhaps one day I shall open my eyes.
I breathed out smoke circles and watched as they faded away from me. A circle enclosing dreams that drift away as soon as I try to grab them.
It’s the life of my story.
It’s time for me to go looking for Helena and I take another drag as I enjoy the moment, knowing it will never come again. There will never be another moment when this anticipation is so exquisite and the pain of not knowing is such an untold pleasure.
It’s the second before the orgasm starts when you might go back but it’s never going to happen because you know what lies ahead. And acceptance brings an avalanche that cannot be stopped.
Allowing the heart to love is allowing for the avalanche and all that it brings. I think I like the snow. I think I want to be covered in it.
I chucked my butt in the sink, absent mindedly running the tap for a few seconds to drown out any fire. It’s what I do with my own fires.
I walked over to the corner that housed my bed and lifted my jumper off the floor, where it lay discarded and threw it on, slipping into my boots at the same time. There will be no tip-toeing today. I slammed shut my door behind me as I shuffled down the stairs and I felt my chest swell with pride.
I am me today when I could have been someone else.
I looked at the toes of my boots as I knocked Freya’s door with my knuckles because I am used to looking down and not ahead. I imagined that I heard the soft tread of Freya’s feet along her hall carpet and counted in my head the steps she would take until she answered the door.
When that moment went by and I was still staring at my feet, I knocked again, knotting my eyebrows with impatience.
I shook my head, laughing to my toe-caps, realising Freya had gone out. She knew I was going today to check out the address Mr Chan had given me and she had deliberately made herself scarce.
I slid my fag packet out my jeans pocket and took one out as I made my way out, beyond Freya’s impassive door. This won’t be the first time and neither will it be the last. Barriers are nothing when you have the power of your mind.
I strode out into the sunlight of the day, determined as it was to get through the clouds that were forming a wall to prevent it reaching me.
I looked left and I looked right, breathing in the day, letting the growing wind brush against me, not yet bruising but ready to push me in the direction that I needed to go. I follow where I am led, knowing love is the driving force behind my footsteps. And what other point is there really for stepping forward if it is not to face the challenge that love holds before us?
I am not scared. I have been working to this day for years, desperate to locate Helena, so that I could ask all the questions that grew on top of each other to form a mountain of words in my head, strangling any real speech in me.
As I walked, the questions floated around my head, tormenting me and I began to hum the lyrics to a song that also tormented me. The songs that torment me are the songs that live on forever.
I sat on the ‘Clockwork Orange’ singing to myself.
My fingers were strumming against my thigh, as I sang the words louder, losing myself in the music. Life is all about losing yourself. If not, how would you know when you are found? I was poked in the ribs by the irate passenger beside me and I shut up then, mouthing an apology I did not mean.
Insincere words are easy for me to say.
How could it b
e that Helena was at the other end of the same city as me? I have pounded the streets in search…No, I’ve not. I’ve stayed in my apartment, scared to venture out because if I bumped into her, I would have to face my fears when I was unarmed. I’m ready now. I’m prepared to hear her say she no longer loves me but I’ll never believe it.
As I walked, I thought back to days gone by, when Helena and I were held together in the spider web of love. I feel the trail of her fingertips down my cheeks, held in the grip of her brown eyes.
“I love you,” she said.
I panted with the love surging through me. “I know.”
“No,” she said. “You’ll only know when you don’t have me.”
“I’ll always have you,” I told her, confident in the power of my adolescent love.
I was reminded of her words, as I held my phone in front of me, walking the paths I was commanded by Google Maps, at once in tune with my heart.
Without realising, my hands had grown clammy, my phone slipping every now and then, as I periodically wiped my hands down the front of my jeans. I exhaled, realising I had been holding my breath, looking up to see my glorious sun surrounded and overtaken by the grey clouds that owned my skies.
I begin to curse as I felt the first spits of rain, memorising the last two roads before I shut off my phone and rammed it into my pocket.
I am almost there. In five minutes I will be upon Helena’s house, where she sleeps and laughs and maybe thinks of me once in a while. Today, after ten long years, I will walk back into her life again and hope that welcoming arms will hold me to her.
Where have I gone in ten years? What have I done? What have I achieved?
Ingenting.
The years roll behind me in an avalanche that I am incapable of stopping, try as I might to stand in the way of Time. I will never get those ten years back.
I was twenty when it all went wrong. I am thirty now. Those years are gone, as I edge my way toward my death.
I want my life back.
I want to write my own life instead of looking back on it, having slid away from me when I am too old to feel happiness.
The rain is wetting me in fat, heavy blobs as I finally saw the number of Helena’s house amongst the row of impeccable terraced houses. I stood watching through the iron railings that sat on the metre high wall, to keep out the riffraff such as me.
And then I saw her.
A spectre, passing by the window, but I knew immediately it was her. It was Helena, twenty feet away, separated only by rain and brick.
It’s now or never. I am not brazen like Nikki, I like to protect myself and keep my heart to myself, not give it away like clothing pegs. But Helena has my heart, she always has and I need this moment. Just a moment to remember those empty years, a wasteland where love could not blossom.
My feet found the way before my head did and before I could control my body, my hand was pressing the bell. I heard the ringing at the back of my mind. It sounded like a hospital alarm.
The door opened.
Helena’s eyes met mine.
“Nicosia Poppadoppaluss,” she whispered, remembering the pet name she had called me.
“Helena Poppadoppalussanuss,” I replied, giving the correct answer.
She ran to me, taking my face in her hands and kissing me. “Nick!”
“Hell.”
“Get in,” she said, pulling me in from the rain. “You’re soaked. Come in here,” she said, as I followed. “I’ll put the fire on to warm you. Sit here,” she went on, pulling over a pouffe. “I’ll go make tea.”
I shivered in front of her gas fire, feeling my hunger and my cold. I threw my eyes around the room and saw the photos of Helena with a man.
She came back in the room as I scowled at one in particular: her wedding photo.
“Drink this tea,” she said.
I took the warm cup, wordlessly.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said.
“You’ve put on some,” I retorted.
She laughed uneasily. “I’m expecting a baby.” I felt horror as her hands unconsciously went to her stomach.
“You couldn’t wait for me?” I asked.
“Nick, it’s been ten years…”
“You said you’d wait forever,” I interrupted.
“I was twenty. I’ve grown up now.”
“Because you’re married?” I said, unkindly because I was feeling hard done by. I don’t know what I honestly expected but it had not been finding Helena pregnant and married to a man.
“You left me!” she shouted. “What did you think I’d do? Pine myself to death? Don’t think you’re better than me because you’re a martyr and I’m a realist!”
“I left you?” I tried to find a memory but my mind rebelled against me.
“Yes, Nick. Don’t you remember? I told you I’d love you forever and I meant that. I still love you but I have learned to live without you. That’s what people do, they move on.”
“You still love me?” I stood up and walked over to her. She’d cut her hair. It no longer curled off her shoulder blades but sat on top in a straight bob, those wayward curls having been defied. “I never stopped loving you,” I said, when my lips were centimetres from hers.
I felt her breath on my face. It was a warm wind that caressed me back into the palm of her hand. “Why didn’t you phone me?” I asked.
She gave me a look, as if I did not know who I was. “Don’t you recall? Are you forgetting you abandoned me?”
“I abandoned you?” I repeated with the horror running through me.
Her deep brown eyes caught me and I saw the film of tears grow over as the memories caught up with her. She touched my cheek with her hand.
“When I needed you, you were nowhere,” she said, softly.
“I have never been anywhere that didn’t involve you,” I answered.
She brought her face to mine and kissed me. I closed my eyes but the fireworks deserted me.
“Vakker kjaerlighet,” I whispered, beyond myself.
Helena pulled away. “What did you say there?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, struggling to pull together the voice that had whispered those words to me.
“Nick, I had glandular fever. For three months I reached out to you and you never came.”
I stuttered. “I never changed my phone number.”
“My phone broke. My parents got me a new one, I didn’t have your number.”
“You knew where I lived,” I pouted.
“Oh, I should chase after you after I’ve been ill in bed for months and you can’t be bothered to see me?”
“I came every day to your door.”
“My parents would have told me,” she said.
“Did they?”
“No,” she said.
“Then they lied,” I told her, turning away, throwing my hand across the wedding photo so that it would fall to the ground and break. “Who the fuck is he anyway?”
“My husband?” she said, almost apologetically.
“No, fucking Willy Wonka.”
She gave me that look where her dark eyes smouldered. A look that, when I was a teenager, would have shot me down. “He’s a good man.”
I guffawed and immediately regretted it, as I saw her defences go up. Once upon a time, those defences would have been to protect me. I quickly saw that her loyalties now lay with other legs between hers.
“Drommer,” I scoffed.
I saw the shade of red work up from her shoulder blades to her throat and up her cheeks. “You come to my home and still think you are better than me? Look at you: jeans full of holes, boots that are scuffed to death and a jumper that’s holier than the Pope. You don't even have a coat!”
“I don’t need a coat to love someone!” I shouted back.
“Love isn’t fancy words and half-painted canvasses, Nick!”
“And what does Mr Husband do?” I said, pretending to be a peacock, strutting. “Oh, I look after Mrs Wife,”
I mimicked.
“Edmund Nightingale is the manager of ‘Marks & Sparks’ in the West End.”
I fell into a fit of laughter. “Manager at ‘Marks & Sparks’? That’s what I’ve been thrown over for?”
I saw the rage on Helena’s face but I’ve seen her rage before and it didn’t scare me. Only one thing scares me really.
“You left me!” she said, fuming closer into my face.
“I never left you,” I said. I gave up then and put my lips on hers, where they belonged, trying to remember the taste of her and how our lips moved together, how our bodies pressed against each other.
All I knew was the touch of ice upon me.
Where was my Helena who used to fill me with such longing I was fit to burst? I kissed her harder, feeling no resistance, and wrapped my arms around her tight. Where once there was fire, there now was glaciers.
Isbre.
I felt the tickle of tears gliding down my cheek and I opened my eyes, pulling back to see the unhappiness leaking from Helena.
“You broke my heart!” she screamed at me, pushing me away.
“No, no, Helena, you broke mine. I’ve been waiting all this time for you to mend it.”
She wiped at her face savagely, smoothing away her tears. “So you’ve been a nun, eh? Who else have you slept with?”
I took a step back, stunned by the venom in her words, so quickly after a moment of tenderness but doesn’t tenderness always breed resentment?
“I…I…,” I faltered.
Her face snarled, her lips curling tight over her teeth. “How many, Nick?”
My head started to pound, faces swirled around as I struggled to hold on to where this gravity grounded me, hearing “How many? How many, Nick?” over and over again.
“I’ve had…some…other lovers. Poppy…no, I had Malena…fuck.”
“There’s two already.”
“I can count!” I shouted. “There was Jude and Evie, ah fuck.”
“Up to four now, keep going.”
I screwed my eyes shut tight. I couldn’t tell who I had been with, who was mine or who was Nikki’s, that bitch on heat that fucked anything in a skirt.
