by J G Alva
“Of course. What’s the point of being good at something if you can’t show it off? What’s the point of an incredible invention if nobody uses it? What’s the point of a beautiful piece of art if nobody admires it? You know this. You know it. I’m not telling you something you don’t already know. What I am saying resonates within you. I can see it in your face.” Alden smiled again; it seemed possible to Sutton that his skin might split along its many fault lines if he exercised his features too much. “But what still makes me laugh, what still tickles me, what was the most thrilling thing of all, was that I did it for so long. Nobody knew. Nobody.”
Alden was lost in his memories a moment, and then his expression focused.
“Why did you dump the bodies at historic sites around Bristol?” Sutton asked. “Answer me that.”
Alden’s hands traced the edge of the table between them.
“People don’t appreciate the wonder of the world around them. It takes a special kind of person to understand that. People walk around but they don’t see. That’s the artist’s job, to make people see things. And what better backdrop could I have asked for than those incredible buildings. You know, as I do, that how you frame a painting can make such a difference to how it is viewed.” Alden smiled. “Maybe I wanted to steal their longevity. My own grasp at immortality.” Alden shrugged.
There was silence in the room.
Alden’s eyes travelled along the walls, over the ceiling, his blind eye tracking the normal one, before his attention eventually came back to Sutton.
“There is one thing I’d like to ask you, if I may?”
Sutton waited.
“My diary. Nobody seems to know where it is.”
Sutton did not respond.
“I left it at the house so people would find it. But they say that it’s not there. Gone. Vanished into thin air.”
Sutton was silent.
“It’s very important to me. I want people to read it. That book…it’s the only way people are going to really know me.”
Sutton stared at him.
“You have it,” Alden said. “Don’t you. Where is it?”
Still, Sutton would not answer.
“Did you read it? Of course you did. How could you resist? Well, you probably know me better than anyone. Certainly better than anyone in here.”
Sutton cleared his throat.
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” he said.
A brief cloud of irritation crossed Alden’s features, before he quickly smothered it.
It gratified Sutton to see it
At that point, Sutton thought it was time to go. He did not know what he had come here to find, but he knew now that whatever it was, it had sunk beneath a sea of madness, perhaps never to be recovered.
He got up from the table and walked to the door through which he had entered the room.
Alden’s eyebrows were raised and his head tilted to the side, like a curious dog.
“No more questions?” He asked.
“Just one,” Sutton said, and knocked on the door. The guards would be coming.
“What?” Alden smiled as if he knew it all.
But what did he know? He was a man peering at the world through a cracked and broken telescope. From such a distance, through such a distorted lens, he could never really know anything.
“Do you want to know what it’s like to be normal?” Sutton asked.
Alden was still smiling. A frown creased his mottled brow.
“To be normal?”
He shook his head slightly, confused.
Sutton nodded.
“Yes. To be normal. To be the other side of the coin. To have taken that other path, the one that didn’t make you…different. Shall I tell you what it’s like? Let’s face it, nobody in here is going to be able to tell you.”
Alden’s frown deepened.
“I don’t underst-“
“Come on,” Sutton said impatiently, as if he thought Alden was being dense. “You’re the smart one. To be normal? To grow up normally? To have a mother and father that love you. To have friends. To care for people so much that you spend your spare time worrying about them. To fall in love. Do you want to know what that feels like? What it feels like to be in the centre of all that attention?”
Alden’s smile, or what passed for a smile on that ruined face, had gone.
The door opened, a guard on the other side of it. Sutton put his hand on the edge of the door but hesitated.
He looked back at Alden, waiting.
Alden watched his face. His expression was blank again, but as Sutton watched he saw him swallow thickly.
“How does it feel?” Alden asked eventually, almost in a whisper, and there was a catch in his throat.
Sutton smiled. It was sweet and it felt like it took up about ninety percent of his face.
“It feels like you’re whole,” he said.
The guard opened the door wider and he went out.
THE END
Just a minute of your time…
Dear Reader,
Thank you for reading my novel Tattoo; I sincerely hope you enjoyed it.
Tattoo was a hard won novel, a personal venture over a period of many years; although I personally believe that the devil is in the details, I had, up until this point, never been as thorough when researching the background for a novel. Thus, all of the buildings and locations in this novel exist, and are as accurately portrayed as I could make them, and all historical information is as correct as I was able to verify…with perhaps a few minor alterations, for the sake of the story.
Sutton Mills is an old friend. Ten years in the making, he seems to rear his head on a regular basis, and demand to be written about. There are other ideas for other adventures with Sutton, and I am hoping to embark on them in the near future.
And this is when you, dear Reader, can come to my aid! I was hoping that you might be able to take a bit of time out from your busy day to give a review of Tattoo. If you didn’t like it, and felt that there were things that could be improved, or tweaked, I would still love to hear your feedback. Reviews are an essential tool for any writer, to fine tune his craft, and inevitably they can decide if any more books are written. You, dear Reader, have the power to make or break a book, in this new and exciting digital age, and I can’t help but think that, thanks to this new found communication between reader and writer, that the quality of all fiction can only get better.
So if you have the time, please submit a review. Here is a link to my author page on Amazon. All of my books can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B018SSSXHW
Once again, many thanks for reading Tattoo.
Yours, in gratitude,
JG Alva
