Rocket

Rocket                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    by Stephen Scott- First published- the text magazine- issue 3

It all started two months ago, in some pub, you forget the name. You’d just got back into the city from a weekend spent running away from everything including yourself. The Friday prior to that weekend, you’d wanted to throw yourself under a train. By the following Tuesday you were much more cavalier, what happened in those few days is another story but it was sufficient to render all problems obsolete. On that Tuesday evening you were telling tales to a friend, laughing hysterically like you didn’t have a care in the world. That’s when she appeared from nowhere. She wanted a chair. Take one you replied. She got hold of it and dragged it to a table a few feet away, you noticed she kept looking over and smiling and you smiled back. After a while she came back over and starting asking daft questions and you were drunk and you kept giving daft answers and none of it really mattered, all that mattered is that you were both laughing together. You remember staring at her face, taken in by the dark brown eyes, her energy and her cynical wit was truly infectious. You left the pub together and headed into town, your friend getting on with her friend, while you and her talked about books and motorbikes, how she hated modern motorbikes, like aftershave bottles, she was constantly moving, excited, ripping the shit out of over dressed fucks moving stiffly along like newly painted doors. It wouldn’t stop raining but you hardly noticed that, crumbling drugs into yours and her mouth as you queued to get into a club.

You remember stood in the middle of the dance floor, her hands around your face, a strobe sweeping the cracks of your brain for any sign of imminent ruin, something usually went wrong about this time but kissing her felt different and you even tried to dance but you were always shite at dancing, you always looked like an animal trying to avoid the slaughter man’s axe. You left the club together, dancing and stepping around the puddles, a pink glow suffusing the morning sky, you walked lazily to your house, made her coffee talked for another hour and then called her a cab. She left you with her number and her with yours. You kissed at the back door and then went  upstairs, sat on the edge of the bed, staring at a pile of freshly washed socks, slowly you began to pair them up, lots of odd ones, there was always lots of odd ones. After a while you went over to the window and smoked a cigarette. It was quiet, the city lights still sparkling like the white ruby loaded suit Elvis used to wear in the Las Vegas days. From the end of the street there was a dog yapping, it sounded louder at that time in the morning, nipping at the heels of a drunken man who was walking far too fast for the state he was in. The whole length of the street he kept falling over and that Jack Russell never did leave him alone. You turned into the room and reached for that half bottle of wine left over from the night before, there was always something left over from the night before. Taking it by the neck, you finish it off on the edge of the bed, listening to the street waking up.

You see nothing of the next morning; don’t wake until three in the afternoon. After coffee you go back to bed and start doodling nonsense on a notepad, thinking about her last night, trying to picture her face but the more you do the more the face distorts and fades away. You realise that you have to see her again; you need to see her again. When you finally make it downstairs, there is a message on the answer phone. It’s her. You ring her back and start talking about last night. Little things you’d forgotten about her come reeling back into your mind like fish hooked from the water. You arrange to meet her that night  in the Washington on Fitzwilliam st. It was just before they took all the teapots out and you sit there admiring the collection. An hour passes and you’ve had enough of staring at teapots and then she arrives, it turns out she’s been in the other bar for just as long. And so the drinking starts, she likes rum and coke with a cherry, so that’s what you drink too, the words constant between you, nothing feels out of reach and you can’t remember feeling so happy, happy just being with someone else. Her eyes shimmer between her lashes, they draw you in, drag you right into her heart, unloosening the five thousand safety belts wrapped around your own fucking heart, your brain is burning with an indefinable spark, pistons of excitement whacking up hard at your throat. You feel warm all over. Sense something is changing, some button has been pushed, like a rocket getting ready to blast off into the stratosphere, the engine rumbling under the table, fireballs spitting and whirling between the polished walnut legs. The two cigarettes that remain in the pack of Embassy jump and roll around, the alcohol in your glass shakes, the barman is creeping in and out of a blur, you’ve never had this feeling before, the both of you strapped into the shabby worn out cockpit, going up, shooting out, instrument panel dials on full tilt, the smudged glass in front of your tiny human eyes four inches thick, dead cow seats and dull metal harnesses and panic, panic, telling yourself not to panic, the stars will soon shake the eyes out of your sockets but don’t look back, you don’t look back, at least not yet. You both burn brightly, a white-hot trail in your wake.

It comes to that she lives in Brixton. You start making plans to go and see her. She likes that idea. Then some bloke starts up the decks and you drink more and talk less and then decide to get out and go back to your place. You glide down the street, feeling elated, and feeling high above the earth. A black cab with his light on comes towards you and in you both  get, mauling each other on the back seat, and it doesn’t stop, tearing at each clothes like they were bits of tatty unfashionable wallpaper. It doesn’t stop until you are both laid out knackered, naked in your bed, her asking you why there is a butchers hook hanging from your ceiling. You talk and smoke until you run out of both and fall asleep.

It turns out she has to leave for Brixton in the afternoon. You walk with her to the station and watch her get on a train. You then go and find a café and sit drinking coffee, thinking about her. For the next week or so that’s all you do, think about her.

Two weeks pass by before she comes back up. Her face, through constantly trying to visualise it, has distorted again but when you meet her off the train everything makes sense. She is more beautiful than you ever remember.  You walk from the platform hugging each other, as if the moment one of you pulled away you might never see each other again. The rest of the day is spent smoking in cafes and making plans. Only the two of you exist. The rocket boosters that have got you there have fallen away, you just float, you just float around.

The weekend passes too soon and she has to leave Monday morning. You feel sad watching her climb onto the train, her large bag keeps getting in the way, you walk away and you feel more alone than you have ever felt in your whole life, you now know, that you are in love with her.

But you don’t see her for a month, she’s busy working on some play and her face starts breaking up again into an image that is so distorted and unrecognisable that you try to not think about her. And in that month something happens. Maybe there was something in what she jokingly said about you, ‘for all I know you are probably the biggest womanising fucking shit that ever walked the earth.’ Whatever it was, something else took over you in the last few days of that month, an urge to be close to someone. On that rocket of yours, some switch got knocked, got switched, you shouldn’t have touched it but you couldn’t fucking help yourself. Drunk in the company of your ex girlfriend you ended up in bed.

Then she came back up. It was bonfire night. The pair of you ended up on the other side of town, staring into a big fire, you hardly talking to her. Then you told her because it felt at least that was a starting point but for her it was the vanishing point. From that moment on, it was dead. She wasn’t the sort to accept excuses, which was all you could think of. Nothing much changed in the cab back over to yours, out of the blue she told the cab driver that here would do and out she hopped, a brief sarcastic salute to you as the cab pulled away.

A little later, in the early hours with the dregs of wine bottle in your hand, you wandered aimlessly around and around the room. Drunk. That rocket, like a splinter cast into deepest darkest space. The stars shone ancient, dull and unfinished. You remember looking around the room, empty bottles of wine, were these some kind of engine appendage? The clothes tossed about rumpled and walked over, the remnants of a space suit? The clock that sat on your bookshelf, possibly the empty fuel gauge? The whole place felt like some black burnt out crater. Slipping your tired body into the blue nylon of that old armchair, you called yourself a cunt until the word felt meaningless. You got up and stood at the window, watched the moon slide behind a bin bag black cloud and you muttered sorry, until that felt meaningless too.