Originally I had a title for this, but I hate it now...any ideas?
Kayle Young stood by the panelled windows and stared unemotionally into the narrow garden enveloping in front of him. Mostly devoid of any chromatic flowers and following an uninteresting straight path, it was bordered by short silver birch trees and headed by a century-old towering fir tree at its end. But he wasn’t even glancing at the minimalistic-style grounds, even though he had already observed they probably originated from 18th-century planning. His blue-green eyes instead stared blankly forward, ignoring incoming sensations.
“Are you even listening to me?” asked Lorena, from behind him. She was sat impatiently at the round pinewood table, tapping her fingers to an unknown beat and exercising her eyebrows thoroughly. Kayle ignored her; he had spotted the interesting flight path of a far off bird. It contrasted against the moody downcast swirls of the late afternoon sky, and moved from tree branch to tree branch, momentarily pausing before hastily fluttering across to another available perch.
“Jesus, Kayle, I didn’t know it wasn’t going to be this difficult,” Lorena said angrily. In an attempt to demonstrate her annoyance, she threw herself up from her seat almost knocking the delicate frame of the handmade wooden chair in the process. “Don’t you have a fucking kettle in this place?” she added as she pointlessly searched every corner of the white surfaces that ordained the sides of the small kitchen. Her hands checked the grimy wall tiles, and her head dodged lights and cupboards in her futile quest to locate it.
Kayle sighed, “You know I don’t like hot drinks. Or you should know I don’t like hot drinks.” He had only half-listened to Lorena’s tirade about the house, his living conditions, the state of his clothes and hygiene and anything else that had come out of her endlessly tireless mouth during their one-sided conversation. Instead he had breathed shapes onto the window, letting it condense and forming it into objects with the tips of his fingers. Lastly had been a wilted flower, broken and forgotten by its carer…but it had evaporated and he was forced to turn round.
Lorena had given up her search and instead had poured herself a basic glass of water from the tap, forcing the water to pour out so furiously she had sprayed herself involuntarily and left specks of the liquid lingering on her grey jacket. “You don’t know how fucking hard this has been for me these last few months. Last time we spoke was two weeks ago after you decided to unlock your bedroom door and breath some fresh air,” she berated, loosing some of her dark brown hair from her clip in the process, so she swept it back casually with her free hand.
So she’s back on that, Kayle thought. He had spent four days and four nights sleeping and thinking and writing in his bedroom, shoving his desk behind his door to prevent her, or anyone else, coming in. It had been a moment of inspiration, a time to collect his thoughts without listening to the wailing and whining of Lorena, a 27-year-old social worker who acted like she was still 18 and wore makeup like she still was. The example today was the dark eyeliner rubbed badly around her eyes, half smudged by tears forming at the base of her deep mysterious brown eyes. Who knows what goes on behind them, Kayle wondered.
“I’m the one who keeps this excuse for a relationship going. All you do is sit up on your desk and write fucking poetry or whatever the hell you do up there. I don’t know. Unless you rent movies and jerk off to sad teenage girls, or something. For fuck’s sake, Kayle, you’re 31, and you still don’t have a stable profession. Get a fucking grip,” Lorena was half-shouting now.
And now she’s back to the job issue. “For one thing, I don’t jerk off to bad porn movies in my bedroom, although heaven knows why I don’t – I get enough shit from you running off with your countless students. Secondly, if you even bothered to know anything about my life, you’d have given half a damn what I wrote. But you don’t. And pray explain to me, what exactly do you do to keep this ‘excuse for a relationship’ going?” Kayle answered, calmly and confidently. He wasn’t scared of confrontations and Lorena was playing right into his game. They’d had a million of these arguments.
“Well I-“ Lorena started, her eyes swelling too much so that tears began to fall down her cheek. She ignored them. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. Fuck you, Kayle, fuck this, and fuck everything. We’re finished.”
Kayle felt instantly uncomfortable. It was another one of these common social engagements he was so poor at reacting too – he knew the ordinary response to such a statement from a pissed off female should result in him falling down on his bony knees and pleading for her to come back. But he also realised this was usually backed up by a genuine conviction to heal the ties between the pair. Kayle felt nothing at this moment, except an enthusiasm to get writing on the fourth chapter of his current novel, because he had just worked out a cunning plot twist involving the gruesome death of a particular romance. So he just stood there in his entire lanky figure, watching half-bemused as Lorena gathered her belongings, most of which had fallen to the ground. And suddenly Kayle smiled; not because he was happy, but because he felt he had to show some sort of human emotion to her, and so his lips formed into a bowl shape grudgingly and even flashed a little tooth.
Lorena noticed. “You son of a bitch.” She threw the glass at him, but Kayle’s reactions were enough to allow him to move his head in time, the glass and the water not drunk smashing against the window frame and shattering and splashing over both Kayle and the floor and the table. Some glass stuck in his bare arm and a little blood emerged, but he wiped it away and looked up to see Lorena exiting via the front door.
“Adios,” he murmured, and began to clear the mess. And then he wrote a poem.
* * * * *
Kayle watches the white clock with noticeable boredom as the red hands tick from 1:29 am onto 1:30 am slowly. He turns away, his left eye still trained on the device, knowing that time goes faster if you’re not watching it. A half-broken blue biro dawdles ungripped in his right hand, rocking a little as it balances between his thumb and his long, thin index finger. A small empty notepad is on his lap, and various crumbled balls of paper surround him in random patterns, like planets of a solar system orbiting their sun with different paths. The carpet however is dark red, not black. Kayle is sitting with his legs crossed (although his legs are too long and bony to be crossed correctly) next to an unlit fireplace, which appears to be more like a black hole, rather than a bringer of warmth. He watches as small bits of charcoal rise and fall with the dust in the room. Its early morning and an empty glass of orange juice asks to be refilled.
The fridge is a short walking distance from the lounge, but Kayle walks leisurely, stretching his cramped muscles as he does. He pauses at the exit of the lounge, staring at the outline of the plotted plant occupying the darkest corner of the room, far from the illuminations of the light bulbs. A Boston fern bought for him by his mother. Lying solemnly on a small, mahogany table it spreads over and downwards from its pot, like it has tried to reach for freedom but realised there was nothing but thin air to run on. Kayle caresses the edges that appear slightly serated, but to the touch are smooth and cool. Is it sad that I am attempting to relate to a plant?
As he turns the handle and walks into the hall and towards the kitchen entrance, the sound of the doorbell is resonant in the hall, echoing and glorifying in the morning silence. And who the hell comes to your door at this time and expects you to be awake? Kayle glances curiously at the front door, but blurred windows and the absence of the security light, which is usually activated when someone comes to the door, mask his view. Thinking it is probably kids having a laugh, he half-heartedly walks towards the door, leaving the chain on but pulling the handle so three inches is given to the stranger.
“Kayle, it’s James, let me in mate, forgot my keys,” the voice says genially. Kayle instantly takes the chain of and lets the door swing open, and turns round, not even greeting the figure who steps in quickly and shuts the door behind him. “Man, it’s bloody leathering it down out there. Got soaked just walking back from the train station,” says James, who’s about five feet six but makes up for his lack of height with the amount of talking he manages to do.
“How did you know I’d be awake at this time?” Kayle asks, as he pours himself another glass of orange.
“Because your always awake at this time, mate, you know what I mean?” James responds with a large grin on his face. Preventing the fridge door from closing by reaching out with his short arm, he ventures in and comes out with a large bottle of vodka and embraces the drink like he has just found treasure. “I need some of this stuff. It’s bin fucking hard work out there tonight.” He gulps about a quarter of the bottle down in one go.
James is a DJ at one of the fashionable clubs in the city, and wears chunky silver jewellery often connected to car symbols and likes to cloth himself in bubble jackets and come back in mid-morning half-drunk. Or merry in this case. “You’re addicted to orange juice, man. You’re gonna turn orange soon. Now that would be a sight. Kayle the fucking Orangeman,” he says, laughing in ridiculously overdone amounts to his own joke, “Kayle the Orangeman.”
Kayle ignores him, finishing the last of his coveted drink. “Better to drink something that helps me rather than damages me,” he comments, unable to refrain himself from doing so. Another thing about James was his inability to stand down from arguments.
“Better to have some fun than fucking sit here on your own like some sad bastard without any friends. Haha, you fucking billy,” James said, insulting Kayle in an almost good-natured manner. “You need to go out some more, mate. No point being healthy and bored, eh?”
Kayle gripped one of his hands in a fist and fought an inside battle to prevent himself from lashing out at James. “Who gave you the job to judge everyone else’s life? Perhaps I’m more content with myself than fake posers like you. Like anybody in that club gives a fuck about you. Like I’d want to spend time with people like them,” Kayle answered with obvious self-control, and almost walked out of the room to prevent a full-blown argument from erupting.
But James must have been in a good mood. “You’re fucking delirious mate, fucking delirious. Get a grip, get a fucking grip,” he repeated in his alcohol-influenced state and went upstairs still gripping the top of the vodka bottle.
Kayle went and sat down in the exact same spot where he had originally moved from, beside the fireplace, with the paper planets scattered around him, pondering what James had said as he often did after an argument. What the hell does ‘get a fucking grip’ mean, anyway? What am I supposed to ‘get a fucking grip’ of? Both Lorena and James had echoed the same words, but they meant nothing to Kayle, who shook his head despairingly, picked up his pen again, and wrote a poem.
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