I decided when I started this substack that among other things I would be using it as a place for short fiction. For various reasons the short story market is pretty inhospitable: per-word rates are minuscule, editorial publications are understaffed and overstretched, and it is basically impossible to plan financially or pay bills on the off-chance of winning a prize. Selling directly to the audience through Substack seems, for now, to be a better & more productive option. Here, then (for free) is a short story I wrote in 2019 that I never found a home for. I hope you enjoy it!
Michael’s hand looked unfamiliar to him in the water. It trailed like a lost comet while he tried to count the feathers on the tail of the vulture, who watched him from the edge of the swimming pool. He flexed his fingers, once, twice, and felt the air trap in his chest, counting the feathers, thinking of Catherine and how she might marvel at the sight of the bird. The vulture picked up one foot and then the other, and shuffled down the edge of the pool. Michael lost his place, and had to start again from one. Catherine had ruined everything.
Michael should have known she would when he’d first met her, this brutal girl with puddle-bright eyes and restless feet, when he’d watched her check her reflection in a compact shaped like a seashell. She’d snapped it shut, smartly, finally, like some divine engineer putting the final touches to their great creation. Something just behind his ribs broke free from its moorings and rose and bloomed in his throat where his ‘no’ should have been. She’d looked up then, her lips traced with plum from the red wine they’d been drinking together, and winked. It was another three years of these lunches before he’d kissed her under an awning on a fog-stained December night, and now, look where he was, thousands of miles away from home on a work trip, trapped in his hotel by a mysterious event on the day of his arrival and guarded by a vulture while the police ringed the streets outside and drank coffee in the lobby. How ridiculous of him to reach for her when he woke.
Abandoned in the water, with nothing to do but wait and dream, he saw now that she’d made the winter pure and solid. The man at the desk had been courteous but bored by his enquiries about when it might be possible for guests to leave the hotel. He asked another guest in the breakfast room if he knew exactly what it was that had happened. The man had been staring round-shouldered and morose at an arrangement of fruit, but he looked up dolefully at Michael’s question and shrugged, but the shrug was low on conviction.
‘Drugs, I think,’ he said. ‘Gangs.’
Michael thought this was the most he’d get out of him, and was already turning away when the man spoke again. ‘It’s all about the supply chain. There’s a reason these things happen – it’s all funded by us.’ Michael nodded, and moved away, leaving the man with his fruit.
The vulture beat its wings, and brought one foot up to scratch at its leg. It made him think of the way Catherine would brace one foot on the wall behind her when she was waiting for someone, which reminded him of the tough children he used to play football with in late spring, all of them rolling back to their homes scented by the earth. He loved this oafish grace of hers, the way she shook hands with new people instead of hugging or kissing, her noisy parrot-like laugh, the way she slouched on tube seats with one foot on the opposite knee. She moved over him like a ballet dancer, or a spill of slow oil, hair gathered up in one hand. Once he’d looked up to where she sat, beautiful, peaceful, terrible, like a crouching goddess, her knees either side of his shoulders, and he’d said, ‘one sharp twist and you could break my neck.’
‘That’s nothing,’ she’d answered, and her skin shone satin under the bedside lamp with what could either have been sweat or joy, ‘one sharp twist and you could break my heart.’
When he’d arrived three days before, the sunlit red and yellow buildings with their paper-sharp black shadows had nearly made him laugh. It was embarrassing, the way they sat innocently in the heat, like a child’s drawings, which would collapse if he prodded them. He’d stopped to take a picture of these buildings to send to Catherine, and hoped she’d see what he did, and would feel the same pleasure at their honest lines and unassuming prettiness under this flaming sky. She replied immediately, and said that she couldn’t believe death had ever visited those light-gilded cobbled streets, and then that she was a ‘total slut for bougainvillea.’ He’d had to stop himself from replying that he loved her, because he’d never said it before and he couldn’t stand for her to know he did, so in the end he didn’t respond at all. He’d have tolerated a hundred years of the endless London winter if only he could hear her voice talking about the buildings, if only his hands could find the violin curve of her waist when he reached, not awake enough to understand that she wouldn’t appear, no matter how long he listened in a half dream-swoon for her running the water in the bathroom. It seemed that death was here after all.
When he was small, his mother had taken him to a sanctuary for birds of prey, and the keeper had chosen him to put on the heavy leather glove and hold the vulture, whose name was Louisa. The keeper beckoned him over and pride burst and shattered behind his sternum - the same burst, in fact, that he felt years later when his heart had disobeyed his instructions and fallen in love with Catherine. Louisa regarded him calmly, while the keeper told the spectators in a strict tone that they were to forget everything they thought they knew about vultures, and that in fact they were peaceful, community-minded birds, and anything else they may have heard was nothing but anti-vulture propaganda.
‘You’re not afraid of her, are you son?’ asked the keeper, kneeling down so he was Michael’s height. Louisa closed one yellow eye, and he looked into the one she’d kept open, and shook his head. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘No.’
‘You were very brave. I’m very proud of you,’ said his mother on the drive back. Michael didn’t answer - he was watching the trees outside the car window rushing up and then collapsing back on themselves. He pulled at the seatbelt where it was too hot and sharp against his chest. He wondered what had come first and who imitated who, the sun or Louisa’s yellow eye.
His skin was starting to shrink away from itself, and the chlorine stung his eyes and throat, but he couldn’t stand to return to his room. Catherine had once told him that she thought there was a curious universal quality to the light in hotel rooms, a kind of localised beige depthlessness. They’d been eating fresh pasta with sage butter and ricotta that had been carved out for them like white paint from a huge pottery bowl brought round by a waiter who seemed like nothing so much as a proud new father, and she had been telling him about a horrible holiday she’d taken with her then boyfriend.
‘He wouldn’t shut the hell up about finding this one particular restaurant he was obsessed with, and we walked for hours, and when we eventually found the fucker it gave us both food poisoning.’ She wiped the butter from her lips in what seemed to Michael like a visual demonstration of the purpose of having a body.
‘All I wanted was to have sex on the balcony and look at old churches, but he had to find this restaurant and tell me all about his grandfather’s house just outside the city, which we couldn’t even go to because his family don’t know about me. The Grandfather was a famous nonce, apparently, but I suppose if you were a famous playwright in the Sixties you could do whatever the hell you liked.’ She dropped her balled-up napkin onto her plate, as if that settled the matter. She went into her purse and pulled out a small plastic bag, which she showed him. She asked if he really had to get back to work that afternoon. Two years later, when he’d stood at the base of the tree outside her house waiting for her to come out to meet him, feeling like a medallist on a podium, toeing his boot into the roots and breathing in lungfuls of wet concrete and the coming spring blossom, he thought of the way her eyes had glittered that evening, and how the pointed shoes she wore had danced in the gutter. They’d gone to the flat she was living in and kept going all night, and when the morning sun had warmed his wrists, and coins rang in far-off drains, she’d turned to him and told him that she never minded ugliness, if he would only just once lift what covered his eyes and show it to her. But he turned away from her, he did.
Before he’d left, he’d told her that he’d be busy at this conference, and he’d be in touch when he could. In the end, he had to stop himself from sending her messages hourly, cataloguing his thoughts, feelings and observations; pictures of green birds and the doll’s house jugs they used for the milk, of himself, naked and not tanned exactly, but with a sense of deepening tone, in the hotel mirror. He used carefully unaffectionate and studied catchphrases. He described things he’d seen out of the windows of the hotel and from the roof-top pool as ‘neat’. He thought he sounded like a parody of a troubling but jovial baseball coach.
He worried that if he spoke to her normally, everything he’d been so studiously avoided naming or even looking at directly since the first evening, when he’d at last seen the way she looked at him, would come blurting out. He wanted to ask her if he’d leapt into her skin like a memory shock at the first sudden kiss, if a voice had spoken from its faraway home among the grey rocks and churning green surf and told her ‘here he is, here he is as he always was, the reason God kicked you into life’, as it had for him. He had no way of knowing this, but she assumed that the baseball coach impression was because he was sneering at her, and that he had a set of easily conjurable speech affectations that he used on everyone so he’d never have to remember what he’d said. Everyone interchangeable. Glib. She thought it meant she was nothing to him, and that he was in touch so assiduously because he was bored. He was bored. Everything that couldn’t be intimately or distantly connected to her was boring.
This past February, he thought she might have said she loved him, but it was a falling-asleep mumble and he couldn’t be sure. Catherine slept like a terrorist, flat on her back and with violent limbs, and he lay awake while she flailed and muttered. Once she’d woken and seen his hands folded behind his head in the attitude of someone far too clever to sleep, all that this implied written into the set of his lips and curve of his hair. When they both slept at the same time, she would fold herself into his arms and their bodies fit together like two cogs in some strange machinery. Foreign contentment twisted its knuckles in his chest when he reached forward and wound a section of her hair round his fingers. He leant to kiss her forehead. She accepted it like a benediction.
‘Can’t you sleep?’ she asked, voice fuzzed syrup in the cold grey of four in the morning.
‘No,’ he said, ‘sleep is for cowards.’
He’d wanted to say, don’t leave me here, don’t go back to a place I can’t reach you. She was quiet for a while, and then propped herself up on one elbow and said ‘have you ever seen a kingfisher?’ He said he hadn’t, and she told him about seeing one in a flash of fleeting blue, just at the corner of her eye, at a place where two canals met.
‘It was magical,’ she said. ‘You are magical,’ he did not say. She made him turn onto his side, and wrapped her arms around his back. Sleep rushed forward to take him in a moon-buggy drag.
Here, in the pool on the roof, caught in amber, with the police chatting unhurriedly down below, the sun warmed red through his squeezed shut eyelids and panic took him. He couldn’t think of a way to tell her that if he lost her it would kill him. He remembered her one day the summer before, well before he’d first kissed her, frowning as she brought their beers to the table outside, fingers shining with cold condensation drops. ‘Beer gardens are like New Year’s Eve,’ she said. ‘All expectation, limited payoff.’ She’d swiped her hand through the air, bringing the twinkling strawberry of her cigarette dangerously close to his eye and said, ‘you’re afraid of being happy, darling. It interferes with your sense of mental strength.’
He pictured his heart like a bowl of sea water containing the last of a rare species of creature, driven there by boiling oceans; he didn’t know if he could trust her to hold it, but then again it was lighter when it was empty. Maybe, just maybe, she’d fill it back up if she spilled it, and keep the creature safe until morning. She’d once read to him from her favourite book of short stories on one of his sleepless nights, title worn off blunt and edges frayed from where she’d once dropped it in the bath. The dark held and cherished him when she was there and raked at him with its nails when she wasn’t. He knew what perfume she used in both summer and winter, and he had two sampler bottles which he used like smelling salts, and fear was strong and tasted like copper, but faith was stronger. It would never be too late with her to tell her the truth.
He turned over, and the vulture started as if it meant to fly away again, but then gentled and settled, and fixed him in the path of its blazing twin suns. When Michael was seven years old, he’d been given a tabbed and layered picture of a man with his organs, bones, and muscle all visible, and was told to colour it in. He’d reached for his pencil case and chosen his favourite red pencil to start on the muscle, when he paused.
‘Miss,’ he said. ‘Where’s the dark?’
His teacher asked him what he meant. He gestured towards his chest, where the thick dark lived, waiting to drag him under to the bedded rocks and to fill his nostrils with the clean rush of river. He saw that his teacher looked inquisitive and concerned, and that his classmates looked inquisitive and gleeful, and he said he didn’t know what he’d meant after all, and returned to his colouring.
‘Don’t you see, my Catherine,’ he thought, ‘what if all there is afterwards is a navy night, like a noticeboard covered in sparkling silver drawing pins, and they used to be us, and used to be everyone, caught and separate forever? If only without knowing it we could still touch noses under blankets, and drink our wine and cackle into the pink and blue evening, if only we could be there, our limbs spreading out like failed poached egg experiments, if only we were two burning stars puffed out from God’s own mouth into that sharp navy night, if only our fingers would still touch like amoebae under magnifying lenses, then oh, the thought of dying wouldn’t be so bad. It wouldn’t be so bad at all.’