“Why are you reading this?” said Jim, pointing at Graham’s copy of William Tell by Friedrich Schiller. “Have you gone all German?”
Graham stared at him for a second but ignored the question and carried on reading. He was at the café inside the Student Union with Jim and Neil.
“It’s not even on the reading list!” Jim shook his head, hopelessly.
Neil and Jim started talking about the highlights of Shannon’s leaving do the night before. As a strict, non-drinker, Graham was a complete outsider at parties or other social gatherings. The only advantage the guys drew from Graham’s presence at parties was him driving them home.
“Anyway,” Jim began, “I tried to hit on Shan last night. She broke up with Furry Fred the other week.”
Neil chuckled. It was a common thing to laugh at Fred’s chest hair. He was still one of the best cricket players in Bristol. Girls like Shannon clearly liked prominent athletes. Graham licked his finger to turn the page.
“But she acts like a bitch when drunk,” Jim said.
“What do you mean?” Neil said.
“I was trying to kiss her, and she pushed me off the couch. What girl would do that after five shots of tequila? And hell knows how much she’d already drunk before we arrived!”
“Obviously not over The Fur,” Neil said.
“Bernard would have nailed her straight away…”
Graham twitched after that comment.
“Well,” Jim continued, “she was the one who dumped Fred. I just wanted a memorable shag!”
Graham closed the book and slammed it down on the table. The noise made the waitress spill the coffee while serving a student.
“Gee…” Neil muttered.
“Rubbish, isn’t it?” Jim grinned at Graham. “How far in are you?”
“He’s about to hit the apple,” Graham said.
“That’s the only exciting part!”
“I’m saving the best part for later.”
On his way home, Graham stopped at Tesco Express for some coffee and paracetamol. A couple in the queue was arguing about crinkle fries versus curly fries. To his right was a little girl crying uncontrollably because her mother wouldn’t buy her any Hello Kitty chocolate biscuits. Crowded places hold nothing but nasty human scents and noises. The person behind him had foul-smelling breath. And the cashier was making rustling noises while packing up crisp bags for a customer.
“Hi.” A voice came from out of nowhere.
To his left was Shannon, smiling. “Graham, right? You were at my party yesterday.” She was holding a bottle of skimmed milk, a pack of cereal and a pregnancy test.
“Hello.”
She looked hungover; her dark curly hair was worn out and unwashed, and her blue eyes pale squinting.
“You didn’t have fun last night, did you?” she said.
“Of course, I did. What makes you think I didn’t?”
The queue was moving forward. Graham noticed that the person behind him looked disapproving of Shannon’s presence as if she was about to jump the queue.
“Come on,” she said, “you were staring at my Francis Bacon posters for hours!”
“I like disfigured faces.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“You’re weird,” she said.
“Oh, and you’re not? They are your posters, after all…”
Graham was next at the till, and Shannon handed him her shopping. “I’ll pay you back!”
When she disappeared behind the magazine stand, the bad breath of the person behind him got worse. Graham felt nauseated. The man at the till scrutinized him before scanning the pregnancy test. Graham stared back.
“Why are you staring at me?” the cashier said, taking Graham’s money.
“Your thumb.”
Graham grabbed his shopping and quickly turned to leave. Before he reached the magazine stand, he heard the closing of the till and the crunching of bone followed by an agonizing groan. When he found Shannon, he pulled her out of the shop with him. Outside, she pushed him away to release herself.
“What’s wrong with you?”
The blue in her iris had come back to life.
“Nothing, just some precog…, oh, never mind!”
The sound of sirens on the main road almost sliced his brain in two. That reminded him of his unfinished coursework on Kafka. He started to walk away from Shannon.
“Precognition? I get that when a forgotten dream comes true.”
He stopped and looked at her. She was probably one of the few people who didn’t confuse precognition with déjà vu. The sirens had dropped.
“Do you want to come around my place?” he said.
“I don’t know. I was going to eat some breakfast.”
“I have bowls and spoons…”
“I actually have something important to do…”
“I have a toilet as well.”
She looked slightly irritated and probably felt uncomfortable with his persistence but finally gave in.
He was watching her walk around in his apartment, which looked extraordinarily neat. The midsummer morning air had cleared the stuffiness. She looked comfortable in his place and somewhat investigative. She took a sneak peek down the corridor where she saw two bedrooms, one on each side. One of the doors was open.
“Is that your room?” she pointed at the one with the open door.
“Find out,” he said while pouring her skimmed milk into the cereal bowl. The midsummer smell had fused with Shannon’s water lily deodorant.
“Oh, my God! I can’t believe you live with Jim.” She must have seen Jim’s party pictures on his pin wall, showing him and Bernard dancing naked at the union. She could’ve simply smelt the terrible Jean-Paul cologne. “You could have warned me that you live with that bell-end!”
Suddenly he heard her opening the door to his room and spilled the milk.
“Hey!”
He stormed into his room and saw her staring at his H. R. Giger posters showing biomechanoids, aliens, necronoms and Debbie Harry – all twisted works painted with dark acrylic colours in shades of metal. To Shannon, those were probably eel-like creatures with heads resembling men’s glans or women’s buttocks. Another poster showcased naked female reptilian humanoids intertwined and penetrating each other. His room still smelt of the black coffee he had in the morning.
“Speaking of dirty…iew,” she said.
She tilted her head when examining the Anima Mia poster in greater depth. Then the rigidity in her posture loosened up. She put both of her hands on her hips. Graham licked up the tasteless skimmed milk from his fingers before it dripped onto the carpet.
“You lost weight since the last term,” he said, assuming that she was comparing her bum to the eel’s head. She turned around, looked to her left where his bed was, and then looked to her right. Her curls seemed revitalized; they were dangling like tinsel.
“Are you religious?” She pointed at the cross above his bed.
“I guess. Why?”
She looked on her right again, scrutinizing his favourite piece of art by Giger Satan I, which portrayed Satan using Jesus as a bow. The background showed a vast wasteland of piled up, decayed human remains. Jesus’s pose was like on the cross, except that there was no cross in the picture, just a string threaded through the wounds of his hands to form a bow. Satan’s hand was tightly clasped around Jesus’s lower body. His gaze and the gaze of his demons were fixed firmly at the viewer. The most unnerving part of that picture came from the arrow–a nail aimed at the viewer.
Every time Graham looked at it, he saw Satan in his comfortable stance, drawing the arrow back to the anchor point and…
“How do you sleep at night?”
“Pardon?”
“How the hell do you sleep at night?” she said. “Every time you sit up in bed, you have the devil playing William Tell with you! In fact, it doesn’t even matter where you are in the room.”
He couldn’t help but grin. “Your breakfast is in the kitchen.”
“You’re weird.”
“I’m not having breakfast at 1 p.m.!”
They were both sitting awkwardly on the sofa, staring at the empty TV screen. There was an ashtray on the table with a no-smoking symbol on it.
“So, who do you think might have impregnated you?”
She almost choked on the milk–there was milk coming out of her nose. After a round of coughing and wiping her lower face, she threw a nasty look at Graham.
“You are so rude!”
“As far as I’m concerned, I paid for the pregnancy test…”
She shook her head numerous times and carried on eating her cereal. His leg started shaking.
“Since you’re so straightforward and direct, let me ask you something.”
“Anything.”
“I don’t think you believe in God.”
His leg stood still.
“You use Him as the apple on your head…”
His head had started to ache.
“I didn’t put it up there. My mother did,” he said.
“So, you don’t believe in God.”
She put the empty bowl on the table.
“I do,” he said and swallowed a pill of paracetamol. “It’s just–everything was so much easier when I didn’t…”
She moved closer to him.
“But nobody’s telling you what to believe in.”
“I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because of what I did.”
.
.
.
—
P-chan (c) October-November 2010
-Excerpt from short story collection 2025-
