Friday Flash - Hairshirt In Reverse

Some days, you eat the bear. And some days, well, the bear, he eats you.

This has been one of those weeks where the bear wore a bib. A blocked week. I left my Thoughtballoons strip to the very last minute, and paid for it in the comments. And as for Friday Flash, inspiration failed to strike.

Rather than force it, or leave you without my weekend sermon, here's another old Elephant Words story, dusted off from 2007. Enjoy... and if you can't enjoy, endure. For me...

(Image by Austin Andrews.)



Hairshirt In Reverse



Have you seen my shirt?

“Which shirt?”

You know perfectly well which shirt. Which mean you must also know where it is. Must in fact be responsible for where it is. Something else you know: how much that shirt means to me. It used to mean something to you too.

1995. Like a million other sixteen year-olds before me, suddenly I’ve got this hard-on for individuality. I don’t want to listen to the same music as everybody else, or read the same books. I certainly don’t want to wear the same clothes. There was this odd little second hand shop in the back of the Corn Exchange. I was in there every Saturday, spending the peanuts I made stacking shelves Friday nights in Asda. Most of the time, I was their only customer.

Antique cuckoo clocks. Dusty old Serge Gainsbourg records. Coffee mugs with women on the side who lost their clothes when you filled them with liquid. (There’s a joke there somewhere, but I’m not in the mood.) Authentic Japanese Godzilla posters. In the window: a vintage 48 key concertina, a working Hornby 00 Gauge train set, and a French policeman’s hat like the one Claude Rains wore in Casablanca. A tag claimed it was the exact same hat. I never believed it.

Of course I remember the day I bought the shirt. It was the afternoon prior to our fourth date. Our third, three nights earlier, ended later than we expected. Just me and you and the swallows, we had Marigold Park all to ourselves. If the rain hadn’t stopped us, that could have been our night. We ran home laughing. I could see your parents in the front room watching telly, trying not to glance out into the street. You made such a big deal about kissing me goodnight. I knew it was for their benefit. I’ll say this for you, though: you knew how to keep a bloke interested. Do you remember what you said to me that night?

“Fuck, Porter – you’re going to get so lucky this weekend.”

It was the first time I'd ever experienced spontaneous human combustion. Good job it was raining. I walked home in another dimension. The shirt I had on got soaked, ruined. I couldn’t wear it two dates running anyway. I needed something new. Special. I worked overtime Friday, on the frozen food. My fingers lost all sensation by the end of the shift.

The thing is, there wasn’t anything special about that shirt. Not to look at it. Just a plain white thing with short sleeves and no collar. It wasn’t what I was looking for. I can’t tell you why I bought it. When I held it to my chest in the mirror... it just felt right.

Saturday came and your parents were up in the Lakes. You made fresh avocado salad, and we split a Bounty while listening to Nick Drake. It was the first really hot day of the summer, and after tea we walked up through the cornfields behind your house, looking for a place to set down our blanket. I started to take off my shirt, but you put your hand on my chest and told me not to.

“Keep it on.”

The thing is, your first time’s supposed to be all weird and hesitant and bungling… I don’t know about you, but that’s what I expected. When it wasn’t, when it… I mean, where do you go from perfection? Afterwards, you flicked a greenfly off my collar and told me you loved me. I reckon astronauts could see me from space that night.

When I got home, I hung the shirt on the curtain rail to catch the breeze from my bedroom window. I was worried Mum might smell us on it when she threw it in the wash. Except, by morning, I’d made up my mind. That shirt wasn’t ever going in the wash. I know you don’t believe in such things, but sometimes I think that’s where the magic came from. The magic that kept us together.

I took the plastic bag off one of my dad’s suits, just back from the dry cleaners, and rolled it over the shirt. I had this crazy romantic notion I’d get it out again in fifty years and wear it for our golden anniversary, but I needed it sooner than that. After we tried and failed to get into the same university... I had to take something of you with me to Bath. You hear about all those couples who split up while they’re away at college, I didn’t want that to be us. So whenever I got lonely, whenever some crazy girl turned my head with a look or a laugh or a keen knowledge of Chomsky… I’d go back to my room and unwrap that shirt, put on some Nick Drake, and remember.

And yeah, if we’re being brutally honest now, the times we did meet up… weekends, holidays, after you fought with Laura and almost dropped out… they were good, they were great, but they weren’t always quite as good as I imagined they'd be. But I told myself that once we were together again full time, things would be different. Better, I mean, better even than that night in the cornfield. But maybe I was kidding myself. Because we’ve been living here – what, twelve years now, and all we do is argue over who gets to open the new jar of coffee and take the first sniff, how it drives me insane that you have to screw up your shopping list and start again just because you’ve spelled ‘quiche’ wrong, and... I mean, god help me if you buy one more pair of culottes…

But no, I don’t want us to split up, and do you want to know why? Because whenever I put on that shirt (and OK, yeah, it smells a bit now—

“It stinks.”

–and there are stains I don’t even want to think about), I know I couldn’t ever meet anyone who’d make me feel half the way you did that on legendary evening in June, ‘95. So please, I’m going to ask you one more time – and don’t lie to me, Clare, because I’ll know if do. Please…

What? Have you done? With my shirt?

Friday Flash - Love Song

First #fridayflash short story of 2011... and I've actually managed to keep below the 1000 word limit. I'm sure that won't last...

Love Song

I’m in your bedroom, writing this song, trying not to make an obvious rhyme like ‘but I keep getting the words wrong’ because I know you wouldn’t respect that. You called me “the greatest lyricist of our generation” after all, do you remember, Evie? Of course you remember. It was the day we met. Well, the day we first communicated. The internet’s an amazing thing, isn’t it? That it could bring us together like this. How could you have known when you tweeted “I love Terry Tribeca, I want his babies!” that I’d be sitting there in my peeling wallpaper hotel room after that piss-bottle gig in Newcastle, late and lonely, just looking for someone to make me feel worthwhile... that I’d see your message and think: ‘thank you’?

You became my muse, I’m apt to confuse, the thoughts… the thoughts… the thoughts… This new album, Evie, it’s all about you. You had such a shock when I replied, you couldn’t believe it was me. Even though it had the verified tick next to my picture to prove the account was genuine, you were certain it was just my manager or somebody in my entourage mucking around. “Entourage”, ha. I guess my world seems a whole lot more glamorous from the outside. The crazy thing is, 15, 20 years ago, I probably would have had an entourage. I’d have had a record company that threw money at me, I’d have had stylists, publicists, photographers, hangers on… but those days are gone. Like I told you that first night we chatted, I don’t do this for the money. I do it because I have to. Because the songs are inside me, screaming to get out… and if I don’t have that release, well, I think I’d just go crazy, you know? Lose it completely. The songs keep me sane.

Not everything’s an accident, sometimes you have to be provident, if you want to make a start, in matters of the… The following night, when we bumped into each other at that club in Coventry, that wasn’t just coincidence, you know. I can tell you this now, we’re close enough that you won’t think... I went there to find you. I saw you talking to your friends about it on Facebook and as I didn’t have a gig that night and it was only a couple of hours on the train and I thought it’d make for a good song… Knock-Outs, remember? You said you didn’t think someone like me would be seen dead in a place like that. Didn’t I get recognised all the time? The truth is, hardly anyone ever recognises me. Your friends certainly didn’t. They didn’t even believe it was me. Yeah, I’ve been on the cover of the NME and my face is all over the internet – but everyone’s face is all over the internet. Unless you’re actually looking, you wouldn’t notice me. I’m not exactly a pretty boy, though “my unconventional look matches my unconventional lyrics,” says Alex Petridis in The Guardian. Though I guess since meeting you, my songwriting’s become a whole lot more conventional. You know I almost wrote a ‘swim any river, hike any mountain’ song last night? Maybe I’ll have a pop hit and flush my indie cred with it. That shit doesn’t matter anymore. I want to take you to Paris and Rome and New York, and not in the back of a fucking tour bus, Evie. I want my own private jet, like Bono. I never wanted to be Bono, but for you, Evie, for you I want to be Bono. I want to be whatever you want me to be.

I saw you in the arms of another, I went to pieces, then and there. I knew I wasn’t your only lover, just don’t tell me more for him you… Clumsy. That’s fucking clumsy, man. What’s happened to my writing? It used to come so natural. My mind’s on other things right now. That second time was a mistake, I admit. You were with your fiancée at that restaurant in Nuneaton. Not the classiest of establishments, but Michael wasn’t really the classiest of guys, was he? When I saw where he was taking you for your anniversary… I wanted to show you how much better you could do. That’s all. Crispy duck and a cheap Merlot? Is that really all you were to him? Caused quite a scene that night, didn’t he? Your ex… I know, I know it’s an adjustment, thinking of him in that way after all those years together, but you need to try. Part of you still expects him to walk in the front door any minute and start whinging about his shit day again. How much he hates his boss, wishes he could find something else, always wanted to be a fireman. Of course I read your blog, even though you don’t use your real name, enough of your friends know about it, leave messages on it, link to it… it’s hardly a secret. That post you wrote about me, long before we even met, that was what convinced me. You understood. And yet, by him, you were misunderstood. “Shame he’s not hunky enough to be a fireman - LOL!” That’s what Rachel wrote in your comments. She was right, of course, Michael was hardly a body builder. He couldn’t even fight me off.

You can’t have her, Mike. You’re not the man she really likes. I saw you leaving your office at night. My alibi is airtight. Mike. I know you don’t want to hear the details, Evie, but it’s done now. You don’t need to worry about him any more. We can get on with our lives. Come on, Evie, open the bathroom door. Talk to me. I’ll turn the music down if you promise not to scream again. Please, Evie, don’t be mad. Open the door. Don’t be like all the others…