The following fiction was featured in Issue Two of Minus 9 Squared, the Memory Issue.
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Peter’s head dropped heavily onto his left shoulder as he tried to slip between the guests to get to the bar. He was tired and unable to see clearly. The noise from the whole house was screaming into his ear and the endless crowd of people kept appearing in-front of him like an grinning, muddy coral. If he could order a drink he’d be able to think more clearly, maybe see more clearly and start talking. His sister would be cross if he hadn’t spoke to any of her guests. She would say something about letting their father down but it wouldn’t affect him. He had his own ideas about what would could be viewed as letting their father down but would exercise restraint, and that was the difference between them. She would invite people into her home without hardly knowing them and he thought it rude for the people to accept the invite in return.
The shoulders of strangers met with his own and he swung through the crowd as if being pulled by the left arm and then the right towards the bar. He smiled feebly at faces he knew and answered the occasional enquiry as to how he was with a polite nod and a raising of his dry cheeks. Coming closer to the bar he saw Mr. Fulman, who’d been a friend of his father’s when he had worked at St. George’s. The cigarette hanging lifelessly from his mouth suggested that conversation wasn’t on his mind, and the only thing that would be moving between his lips for the duration of Peter’s drink order would be a stream of smoke and the occasional grunt of dissatisfaction about being dragged to the same party another year on. Mrs. Fulman was the sort of lady who liked to think she was still an integral part of the social circles that were oh so strongly tied to the committee.
Peter order a bourbon with no ice and turned to face the room that had been fidgeting around him all evening. It didn’t matter to him that he couldn’t recognise most of the people there. The old and tired faces of his fathers generation were far apart and seemed in fewer numbers than in previous years. Their own particular methods in their work and ways in which they would begin conversations with friends of their wives had been pulled at and stretched into breaking. New, more colourful faces filled the gaps between the grey heads of the doctors who had had their day. Young men with dark hair who were a different kind of clever moved through the party with style, amassing freckles of conversation as they walked. In all of this, tired brown drink in hand, was Peter, who was not one of the old breed whom his father had once been and was not new and handsome, but swung between these two types of men, who both feared each other in the same stubborn way and whose occasional collisions of medical technique was courteously laughed off, but echoed in the quick disappearance of their smiles and rang out an ugly tone.
Sipping at his drink he decided he needed to go upstairs and clear his head. The suits and dresses of the party guests were merging into one pulsating quilt, whether it was the headaches or bourbon, a sit -down was in order. Peter tried to pass through the crowd with more ease on his way back, but was stopped by his wife just before he got to the door. She had a worried look on her face, it was the worried look she saved for him. He knew she loved him deeply, and that she understood how he didn’t agree with his sisters lavish parties, she was a social pornographer. “Peter darling, are you feeling alright?”
“Not really, I think I need to go upstairs and have a sit-down or something. I feel a tad dizzy and the music and people aren’t helping.”
“Shall I get you a drink?” He raised his glass to his wife to show her she needn’t bother and it was a silent toast to their mutual understanding. She smiled at him and kissed him softly on the cheek. He stepped round her gently, being careful not to lightly brush her side, but not to push it either. It is an odd moment when a man has to walk past his wife, he thought. Such an intricate balance of pressure occupied his mind on his way up the staircase, distracting him from the guests who felt like they couldn’t commit to just one floor in the house, forcing themselves to talk at one another at awkward heights.
It didn’t both Peter that his father had left Esther their family home in his will, or that people tended to think that she was his more preferred of children on account of her hard work for the hospital and her marrying an accomplished doctor. What bothered him as he moved his hand up the staircase he had slid down as a child was how she had gone about using their fathers good name to boost her own image. Esther had worked hard for the charity committee that much was true, but was it what she wanted to do? It was clear for him to see that she had sacrificed her own ambitions and happiness to maintain the family name at the hospital. Had he lost anything in choosing to read architecture over the more traditional practice of medicine? The struggle between what a person may want to do and what they feel like they have to do could pull them apart, but he was comfortable. Designing houses was important to him. Drawing homes for people to live in and to be happy in. What else were homes for? People trusted him to shape something they would come to love, it was clear that the people here cared more about their homes than they did their bodies, that spoke for something Esther felt she held over him.
He peered round the first door he came to on the landing; it had been the spare room when he lived in the house as a boy. The room was dark and he could make out a heap of winter coats on the bed. Contemplating whether or not to have a sit down on the coats he decided that feeling slightly dizzy he may end up falling asleep and that one of his sister’s guests wouldn’t take kindly to a drink being spilt over a coat they’d no doubt been saving for the one of the hospital’s most prestigious nights of the year. He moved across the hallway to a wooden door that creaked when he opened it, just like it used to. Esther had re-decorated most of the house to her own taste since she inherited it, but to his surprise, she had kept his old room fairly similar to how it had been when they had played in it as children. Maybe out of tradition, probably out of thinking it not so important. The single bed was in the same place it had always been and was home to several dozen old books. Across the floor were spread out several old chairs, some gym equipment Phillip had brought her that she had clearly never used and her old dolls house. Peter sat on his old bed and faced it. It was an exaggerated Georgian design but carried an attention to detail that leant it charm. The rooms were not to scale and he thought back to when that would have bothered him, when everything had to be beyond perfect and when he loved to draw houses for people, as opposed to just doing it for income.
The drawing came so easily then. He shut his eyes and took a long sip of his bourbon. When he opened his eyes again he began tracing the outside walls of the small house that stood proudly before him. Following the soft lines around each tiny room, his eyes worked their way into the centre of the house and he thought back to how he used to begin a project. His old record player would sit in the corner of his office and he’d skip over to it, vinyl in hand, clear black lines already webbing through his mind. The idea would have to be clearly set out before the needle touched the delicate rings on the record, it was all the preparation he needed. 8 summers ago the new building where the council would meet while they renovated the town hall was drawn to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Its spiral staircases stepped in time with the oak door-frames to Dylan’s loose blues guitar. Peter smiled and remembered how he pulled his wife into his office so they could dance together while he stopped occasionally to jot each brilliant idea down as it came into his head. Leaning over his desk, he would looked back to her while she swung her hips on the spot, smiling in pride at her husband.
He got up off the bed and walked over to the small window in the corner of the room. The party guests that had been outside for most of the evening had made their way inside to sit at the tables and drink whiskey, they were too tired to dance now and the old doctors would no doubt have won the attention of the young ones, who would be sitting like children, numb to the room and their new methods. The town shone in the November evening and each building rocked with the slow heat beating off the fans on the roof. His fathers house had always reminded him of a Beethoven flute, perfect in form and wise in it’s age, but it didn’t play any more. It was flat, it was like it had been halved. Like staring an inch away from a wall and trying to imagine you’re seeing miles across fields of country-side. Everything had halved since his hearing had halved. The doctor had diagnosed it as just a common cold, but the infection had left his ear drum too damaged to work properly again. A few people staggering drunkenly into the den that sat at the edge of the garden suddenly caught his eye and he woke from his nostalgic trance with a start. Rubbing his dry eyes he watched 3 figures fall into the small house that he moved out into as a young man. They would be trying to find more drink or perhaps they felt like dancing to something else. He felt like he should have been moving into town like his friends had, but it was his first finished project at 24 and stood for something more important than a meaningless town-house. He had drawn it in ’79 to ‘Beast of Burden’ by The Rolling Stones. His father had told him he had never been a burden to him and they shared a warming hand-shake in the kitchen. When he walked back upstairs he thought he saw a tear in his fathers eye, but remembering he hadn’t seen his father cry since his mother had died, he thought himself not a burden, but still not important enough to evoke a tear from the hardened Dr. Morris. The jagged edges of the den made Peter smile, a testament to how he felt at the time, staggered, but happy; young. But it was just in half now. He had not heard The Stones properly in years and the guitar and drums all played at once into one ear, the houses and rooms they once drew in his head were just balls of confusion. Even that first room which he had purposely built to face his father’s house was in half, and part of the now silent past.
All of the sounds had jumbled themselves and the record player in Peter’s office stood unused and had a collected a thick layer of dust. The rooms the music had once painted in his mind lay equally as dusty and all those ideas which had once exploded in his head were dormant, and he couldn’t remember the precise details and measurements needed to finished them. Sipping his bourbon he turned away from the window and moonlight back towards the dolls house. All his houses now were like the small one that was at his feet. There was something not quite right with them, they were just buildings and he felt like nobody would be able to call it home. Buildings for plastic people to live in, to sit on their plastic furniture, buildings with no colour or music. Everything was buried underneath the desert on his record player.
He felt ashamed that he couldn’t listen and talk properly at the parties his sister threw. Everything shouted at once and there was no staggered levels on which the different sounds once sat; the background noise of people mingling, the foreground conversations with old friends of his fathers and the music that governed it all. He thought it best to go downstairs and find his wife, maybe it would be easier for them both if they left. He had not spoken to her about how he felt about his life and work after what had happened to his ear but he knew she understood. She had seen the beauty fade from his drawings just as he had and the times when they danced to a new design in his office were gone. He didn’t dance any more, he felt halved, the heavy ringing from every old song split his head into a thousand sorries.
Peter rose slowly and walked out of the room. He tilted his head back and let the remains of his drink disappear slowly down his throat, he felt drained. Had he been too honest with himself? Along with realising what he had lost came a stark reality and this truthful darkness followed him out of his old bedroom to the top of the staircase that was now empty. Peter rubbed his eyes and thought about how he needed to find his wife and tell her that his acceptance had been for her.
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JAKE ATTREE: is a 19 year old student studying for a degree in Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich. Oringinally from Poole in Dorset but currently living in East London, Jake, scrawler of poems, short stories and the odd bit of comedy, draws from life’s finer influences, such as beer and Kerouac.
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