Ah, hello. Been feeling a bit ill and crappity for a coupla days, but much more cheerful now. Things that may or may not help when one is feeling crappity include the following:
Crisps
Watching cute and pointless films with Elijah Wood in them.
Making people go to the shop to buy you Neurofen and crisps.
Thinking about what the polar opposite of a Mary Sue might be. (How about, instead of the author inserting herself into the characters' world, she inserts the characters into her world and removes herself from the picture entirely? Yeah! Who doesn't want to see Dom designing ads for pig-feed!)
Reading the collected works of
ajhalluk whilst wrapped in a blanket.
Telling oneself that spending 140-odd quid on a Palm when one has less than a tenner in the bank is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and that one will do this very thing this afternoon, contemplating this fact happily, but not actually doing it.
Not buggering up one's medication (note for future).
Playing a game whereby one replaces random words in film titles with the word 'wank'.
Finally reading some of the things one has had bookmarked for the last century.
Posting the first chapter of the novel one didn't write last year, along with warnings for General Underage Nastiness and Goings-On. Because, why not?
Chapter 1.
The summer Stefan was fourteen, he went up on the roof with Patch. Patch, he was called, this boy, like a dog. No one knew why Patch was called Patch. He was sixteen, from the North, a compulsive liar, and sometimes he beat people up -- but Stefan didn’t mind. That afternoon, Patch had got fags from somewhere, and he said he wanted someone to smoke them with. He could be all right, Patch. Julie said, "He’s such a bastard, I don’t know why you talk to him. I reckon he’s mental. I heard he set some bloke on fire!" But Stefan said, "I dunno. He’s always been all right to me."
The roof was a cool place to go, if you could get up there without anyone seeing you. You could lie flat on the tiles and look up into the sky, watch the clouds building on themselves like weird banks of fungus, changing and mutating, deformed. Or you could lean back on your elbows and survey the grounds. Stefan liked doing that. He liked to pretend the whole place was his, or maybe not his, just belonged to someone he knew. He liked to imagine he was a friend of the family, here for some big weekend shooting party or something. That the grounds were full of pheasant and, like, partridge or whatever. His knowledge got kind of hazy at this point, since it was mostly garnered from watching repeats of Brideshead Revisited in the TV room, but anyway, pheasant and partridge. Maybe deer. He didn’t really like the idea of shooting the things, whatever they were; he mainly liked the thought of striding through the grounds in weird clothes with a gun. And then going back and having dinner with more than one set of knives and forks, and then brandy and cigars. Stefan kept this little fantasy to himself. He felt it was best that way.
"That girl Susan," said Patch meditatively. "The one with the little round tits. D’you know her?"
"Not really," said Stefan.
"Course you do. You know all the girls. They fuckin’ love you." Patch leered at him, and Stefan couldn’t help smiling. He liked the warm glow of Patch’s approval, although he wasn’t quite sure what he’d done to deserve it.
"Anyway," continued Patch. "I’d give her one. Any day. Of the ... fuckin’ ... week." He held his stolen Benny to his lips between thumb and forefinger, movie-star style, sucking the life out of it. His already hollow cheeks were like caverns in his face when he did it, his cheekbones sharp and angular. Stefan thought that if his life were a film, he’d shoot this bit in black and white. Not too much contrast though, lots of warm light grey.
"Yeah," he said. "That Susan’s really fucking sexy."
Patch lay back on the tiles, shading his face from the sun with one hand. He grinned, and smoke leaked out from the sides of it, rising up into the blinding bright sky.
"I bet she’s a right little goer, when you get her knickers off. I bet she’s a little whore. Yeah... I mean, look at her. Totally beggin’ for it, man."
Stefan laughed. "Yeah."
"Jesus ... imagine what those tits look like when she’s got nothing on. Fuckin’ magic, man." He put his hands behind his head and shifted so that his bony chest lay in the direct path of the sun. He’d taken his shirt off, said he wanted to ‘catch some rays’, so Stefan had as well.
"Yeah," said Stefan again. "Imagine."
An almost companionable silence fell up on the roof. Some kind of bird started making a noise. It was a kind of hacking noise, like someone trying to be sick, who’d already chucked up everything he had to chuck. Stefan wondered what kind of bird it was. Probably not a pheasant, he thought. Or a partridge. The grounds of the house didn’t go very far these days. They ended at the hedge, and then there was the ring-road, and then a housing estate. Sometimes Stefan and the others bumped into the people who lived on the housing estate, on their way back from home visits or rare days out. The housing estate people would look at them with their faces all pinched up and disapproving. Then they’d look away, and pretend they hadn’t seen anything at all.
So, all things considered, it probably wasn’t a pheasant. Just some townie bird who’d moved in later on. It probably had fleas, or whatever it was birds got. It probably beat other birds up.
"What’s so funny?" Too late, he realised Patch was staring at him, his head twisted round at an odd angle.
"Nothing. Just thinking about that Susan with no clothes on."
Patch sighed and closed his eyes. "Oh fuck, man," he said, as though he hadn’t brought up the subject in the first place. "That is one sweet, sweet picture you’ve put in my mind..."
Stefan shifted. The tiles could be quite comfortable, but it depended largely on your state of mind. He’d let his cigarette go out, so he reached over and grabbed Patch’s lighter to get it going again. The fag crackled and fizzed satisfyingly as he puffed on it.
"So, Patch."
"Yeah, man?"
"Tell us about the place you were at. You know, before you came here."
"What the fuck, man? What d’ya wanna know?"
"Shit, I dunno. What were the girls like?"
"Weren’t no girls there, man. Boys only."
"Weird."
"You’re tellin’ me. Had to look elsewhere for the ladies, oh yeah..."
Stefan squinted over at him, grinned.
"Yeah? What, like, you went out?"
"Out and about, man. I’m tellin’ ya, I was known in that town. Well known."
"Cool, man."
"No kidding."
Patch rolled over onto his side, and propped himself on an elbow. He smirked at Stefan. His voice was low and conspiratorial.
"There was this one time, right. I went out after tea. There was this loose window in these toilets on the ground floor, yeah? You didn’t even open it, you basically just lifted the whole thing right out of the wall. It was so fuckin’ easy, we was always doing it. They didn’t work out how we was doing it for ages, it was totally mad. Anyway. So, this one night, I went out, and I was fuckin’ lookin’ for it, man, I was lookin’ for something. And I thought, well I’ll just go up McDonalds, ‘cos, like, everyone went up McDonalds. It was just where all the townies hung out, right? So there was all these kids there, these townie kids. And there’s this big gang of girls, right, and they’ve got the hair all scraped back, and these little tight denim jackets on, and that."
Patch stopped to flick his spent fag-end expertly off the edge of the roof. Stefan watched as it torpedoed out into blue oblivion. Patch slid a second straight out of the pack and lit it.
"And, right, there’s this one bird. Really cute, man, she’s got these brilliant tits all squashed into this little tight fuckin’ top, and it stops like, here, so you can see her... what’s that bit called? Midrift or whatever."
"Midriff. No ‘t’," corrected Stefan without thinking, but luckily Patch was too involved in his narrative to notice.
"Yeah, midrift. Anyway, totally brilliant, man, I’m tellin’ you. So she comes up to me, right, and says..."
Stefan began to zone out. The sun was so warm on his skin, it was like lying in a bath full of Lemsip. Comforting, nice. Stefan closed his eyes and allowed the details of Patch’s dubious adventure with the girl at McDonalds to wash over him in a kind of dirty, drowsy blur. He imagined himself directing the scene. This bit would be in colour; the kind of yellowy, browny colours you saw in old snapshots, like the ones Julie had stuck up over her bed. He could see this girl’s tight top, only it wouldn’t be pink, the way Patch described it, but horizontal stripes of hot orange and yellow, curving and stretching over her body. She’d be sucking on a lollipop. When she took it out of her mouth it would make a little wet sound, and it would be red. Her lips would be red, but not bright red and shiny, like girls’ lips on TV. Pinky red, and you wouldn’t quite be able to tell whether it was the stain from the lollipop, or her lipstick. It would extend slightly outside the edges of her lips, like her mouth had got sore in the cold.
Patch’s voice had a rough, frayed edge to it. It went quieter, but higher, like it was about to tip over the edge. Like even he could hardly believe the story he was telling.
"...and we’re round the back in this little dark alley, right? And we’re, like, snogging. And she’s so gaggin for it, man, she’s so up for it. So she totally just, sticks her hand down the front of my jeans..."
Stefan framed the scene. The girl and Patch in the alley. He considered the lighting. It would have to be just enough, so that you could see the girl’s stretchy, stripy top, the colours still vivid in the darkness. And the lollipop like a beacon, like the red traffic light glowing in the dark. He could see Patch, too. Patch’s hair a bit longer in this scene than it was now. Now it was close cropped, you could see the pale curve of his skull through it. In Stefan’s film, though, it was darker, spiked up a bit with gel. The light glistened and broke on the gel in Patch’s hair, reflected off his white shirt like a moon.
Patch and the girl were kissing. It was like they were trying to swallow each other whole, like those snakes you saw on David Attenborough documentaries. They left warm snail-trails of spit around each other’s mouths. Patch’s hands were up inside the girl’s orange and yellow top, and the stripes were bulging and distorting. Stefan could see it. He could see it all.
"...and then she fuckin’..." Patch was whispering now, he’d shifted closer to Stefan on the tiles, and he was whispering, like Stefan was a best friend, a confidante. "She totally fuckin’ sucks me off in that alley down the side of McDonalds. I swear..."
Stefan could hear the wonder in his voice, that such a thing could have happened to him, and even if it hadn’t really happened to him, that it could happen to someone, somewhere, one day.
"Oi. Are you asleep? Are you dead, or what?" Patch sounded annoyed. Stefan realised his eyes were still closed. He opened them and daylight flooded back in. His private screening room, the dark alley, the girl and her body and the warm old colours all disappeared. There was only Patch leaning over him, his face in shadow, forehead wrinkled in a frown. The short fuzz of his hair haloed by the sun.
"No," he said. "I’m awake."
Patch’s green eyes were bright and clear against the day. "Good story, weren’it? Did you like it?"
Stefan said, "Yeah."
"Yeh," said Patch. "Thought you would." He smirked, and lay back down on the tiles. Stefan blinked as Patch’s body disappeared, and was replaced by the glare of the sun.
It was unwise, perhaps, but Stefan was irritated. A hot spark of temper flared and glowed quietly somewhere at the back of his eyes. He sat up and looked down at Patch, who still smiled, hands folded behind his head, eyes shut against the sun.
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
"Calm down, will ya? Means nothing."
"Well, why fuckin’ say it then?"
"Ah, come on, man, leave it." Patch laughed and flicked his second cigarette away across the flat roof. Then he reached up and gripped Stefan’s wrist. "Listen," he said, "be nice to me ... and I’ll be nice to you. Get it?"
Stefan watched Patch’s face. He’d stopped smiling now. His face looked pale and sharp and hungry. He was like a spring wound up tight. Stefan noticed that Patch had tiny light brown freckles that went across the top of his cheeks and up the sides of his nose. His throat moved up and down as he swallowed, and, watching it, Stefan found his own mouth drying as though in sympathy. Patch’s eyes were half-lidded, dark slits in his face, his eyelashes thick and heavy, like a girl’s.
"Um," said Stefan. Patch was pulling at his wrist, guiding Stefan’s hand downwards. "I dunno..."
But his hand was on the front of Patch’s jeans. It was warm. Stefan was warm. The day was warm. Stefan’s face felt as though it was on fire. His mouth seemed simultaneously dry and full of spit. He swallowed, and the swallowing seemed to make an unusual amount of noise. He wondered whether Patch could hear it.
"What if ... what if someone sees?"
"They won’t. We’re on the fucking roof. Come on, man, just do it. Means nothin’. Just be a mate, yeah?"
"Yeah. Okay." As he unzipped the fly on Patch’s jeans, Stefan thought that was a funny word. Mate. He was never quite sure what it meant.
He told Julie afterwards. He always told Julie stuff. It was like he couldn’t help it. He even told her about the pheasants and the grouse and the cigars.
"Shit," she said. I can’t believe that."
"I know," said Stefan. They’d nicked a packet of Jammy Dodgers out of the kitchen, and were eating them in the alcove under the back stairs.
"What was it like? Was it horrible?"
Stefan thought. "No. Weird. All right, though."
Julie looked at him. She had biscuit crumbs round the sides of her mouth. She combed a hand thoughtfully through her slightly fuzzy black hair.
"Do you fancy him?"
"Shut up! It’s not like I’m gay or anything."
"God, I do."
"You said he was a bastard."
"So?" She shrugged. "Being bad makes men more attractive. It’s a well-known syndrome, actually." She carefully parted the two halves of a biscuit, and licked the synthetic cream off the right-hand one.
"Oh," said Stefan. "Well, anyway. I’d better go." He stood up and looked down at Julie, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She was wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and cut-off denim shorts with black tights, and she had a shoulder bag made of blue fake fur. It had badges on it. One said, Don’t piss me off, bitch! He suddenly felt a warm rush of affection towards her.
"Julie," he said.
"Yeah?"
"You’ve got some ... biscuit on your face."
The summer Stefan was fourteen, he went up on the roof with Patch. It was a memorable summer. Because of that, and later because of Julie, and after that, the dreams.
Crisps
Watching cute and pointless films with Elijah Wood in them.
Making people go to the shop to buy you Neurofen and crisps.
Thinking about what the polar opposite of a Mary Sue might be. (How about, instead of the author inserting herself into the characters' world, she inserts the characters into her world and removes herself from the picture entirely? Yeah! Who doesn't want to see Dom designing ads for pig-feed!)
Reading the collected works of
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
Telling oneself that spending 140-odd quid on a Palm when one has less than a tenner in the bank is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and that one will do this very thing this afternoon, contemplating this fact happily, but not actually doing it.
Not buggering up one's medication (note for future).
Playing a game whereby one replaces random words in film titles with the word 'wank'.
Finally reading some of the things one has had bookmarked for the last century.
Posting the first chapter of the novel one didn't write last year, along with warnings for General Underage Nastiness and Goings-On. Because, why not?
Chapter 1.
The summer Stefan was fourteen, he went up on the roof with Patch. Patch, he was called, this boy, like a dog. No one knew why Patch was called Patch. He was sixteen, from the North, a compulsive liar, and sometimes he beat people up -- but Stefan didn’t mind. That afternoon, Patch had got fags from somewhere, and he said he wanted someone to smoke them with. He could be all right, Patch. Julie said, "He’s such a bastard, I don’t know why you talk to him. I reckon he’s mental. I heard he set some bloke on fire!" But Stefan said, "I dunno. He’s always been all right to me."
The roof was a cool place to go, if you could get up there without anyone seeing you. You could lie flat on the tiles and look up into the sky, watch the clouds building on themselves like weird banks of fungus, changing and mutating, deformed. Or you could lean back on your elbows and survey the grounds. Stefan liked doing that. He liked to pretend the whole place was his, or maybe not his, just belonged to someone he knew. He liked to imagine he was a friend of the family, here for some big weekend shooting party or something. That the grounds were full of pheasant and, like, partridge or whatever. His knowledge got kind of hazy at this point, since it was mostly garnered from watching repeats of Brideshead Revisited in the TV room, but anyway, pheasant and partridge. Maybe deer. He didn’t really like the idea of shooting the things, whatever they were; he mainly liked the thought of striding through the grounds in weird clothes with a gun. And then going back and having dinner with more than one set of knives and forks, and then brandy and cigars. Stefan kept this little fantasy to himself. He felt it was best that way.
"That girl Susan," said Patch meditatively. "The one with the little round tits. D’you know her?"
"Not really," said Stefan.
"Course you do. You know all the girls. They fuckin’ love you." Patch leered at him, and Stefan couldn’t help smiling. He liked the warm glow of Patch’s approval, although he wasn’t quite sure what he’d done to deserve it.
"Anyway," continued Patch. "I’d give her one. Any day. Of the ... fuckin’ ... week." He held his stolen Benny to his lips between thumb and forefinger, movie-star style, sucking the life out of it. His already hollow cheeks were like caverns in his face when he did it, his cheekbones sharp and angular. Stefan thought that if his life were a film, he’d shoot this bit in black and white. Not too much contrast though, lots of warm light grey.
"Yeah," he said. "That Susan’s really fucking sexy."
Patch lay back on the tiles, shading his face from the sun with one hand. He grinned, and smoke leaked out from the sides of it, rising up into the blinding bright sky.
"I bet she’s a right little goer, when you get her knickers off. I bet she’s a little whore. Yeah... I mean, look at her. Totally beggin’ for it, man."
Stefan laughed. "Yeah."
"Jesus ... imagine what those tits look like when she’s got nothing on. Fuckin’ magic, man." He put his hands behind his head and shifted so that his bony chest lay in the direct path of the sun. He’d taken his shirt off, said he wanted to ‘catch some rays’, so Stefan had as well.
"Yeah," said Stefan again. "Imagine."
An almost companionable silence fell up on the roof. Some kind of bird started making a noise. It was a kind of hacking noise, like someone trying to be sick, who’d already chucked up everything he had to chuck. Stefan wondered what kind of bird it was. Probably not a pheasant, he thought. Or a partridge. The grounds of the house didn’t go very far these days. They ended at the hedge, and then there was the ring-road, and then a housing estate. Sometimes Stefan and the others bumped into the people who lived on the housing estate, on their way back from home visits or rare days out. The housing estate people would look at them with their faces all pinched up and disapproving. Then they’d look away, and pretend they hadn’t seen anything at all.
So, all things considered, it probably wasn’t a pheasant. Just some townie bird who’d moved in later on. It probably had fleas, or whatever it was birds got. It probably beat other birds up.
"What’s so funny?" Too late, he realised Patch was staring at him, his head twisted round at an odd angle.
"Nothing. Just thinking about that Susan with no clothes on."
Patch sighed and closed his eyes. "Oh fuck, man," he said, as though he hadn’t brought up the subject in the first place. "That is one sweet, sweet picture you’ve put in my mind..."
Stefan shifted. The tiles could be quite comfortable, but it depended largely on your state of mind. He’d let his cigarette go out, so he reached over and grabbed Patch’s lighter to get it going again. The fag crackled and fizzed satisfyingly as he puffed on it.
"So, Patch."
"Yeah, man?"
"Tell us about the place you were at. You know, before you came here."
"What the fuck, man? What d’ya wanna know?"
"Shit, I dunno. What were the girls like?"
"Weren’t no girls there, man. Boys only."
"Weird."
"You’re tellin’ me. Had to look elsewhere for the ladies, oh yeah..."
Stefan squinted over at him, grinned.
"Yeah? What, like, you went out?"
"Out and about, man. I’m tellin’ ya, I was known in that town. Well known."
"Cool, man."
"No kidding."
Patch rolled over onto his side, and propped himself on an elbow. He smirked at Stefan. His voice was low and conspiratorial.
"There was this one time, right. I went out after tea. There was this loose window in these toilets on the ground floor, yeah? You didn’t even open it, you basically just lifted the whole thing right out of the wall. It was so fuckin’ easy, we was always doing it. They didn’t work out how we was doing it for ages, it was totally mad. Anyway. So, this one night, I went out, and I was fuckin’ lookin’ for it, man, I was lookin’ for something. And I thought, well I’ll just go up McDonalds, ‘cos, like, everyone went up McDonalds. It was just where all the townies hung out, right? So there was all these kids there, these townie kids. And there’s this big gang of girls, right, and they’ve got the hair all scraped back, and these little tight denim jackets on, and that."
Patch stopped to flick his spent fag-end expertly off the edge of the roof. Stefan watched as it torpedoed out into blue oblivion. Patch slid a second straight out of the pack and lit it.
"And, right, there’s this one bird. Really cute, man, she’s got these brilliant tits all squashed into this little tight fuckin’ top, and it stops like, here, so you can see her... what’s that bit called? Midrift or whatever."
"Midriff. No ‘t’," corrected Stefan without thinking, but luckily Patch was too involved in his narrative to notice.
"Yeah, midrift. Anyway, totally brilliant, man, I’m tellin’ you. So she comes up to me, right, and says..."
Stefan began to zone out. The sun was so warm on his skin, it was like lying in a bath full of Lemsip. Comforting, nice. Stefan closed his eyes and allowed the details of Patch’s dubious adventure with the girl at McDonalds to wash over him in a kind of dirty, drowsy blur. He imagined himself directing the scene. This bit would be in colour; the kind of yellowy, browny colours you saw in old snapshots, like the ones Julie had stuck up over her bed. He could see this girl’s tight top, only it wouldn’t be pink, the way Patch described it, but horizontal stripes of hot orange and yellow, curving and stretching over her body. She’d be sucking on a lollipop. When she took it out of her mouth it would make a little wet sound, and it would be red. Her lips would be red, but not bright red and shiny, like girls’ lips on TV. Pinky red, and you wouldn’t quite be able to tell whether it was the stain from the lollipop, or her lipstick. It would extend slightly outside the edges of her lips, like her mouth had got sore in the cold.
Patch’s voice had a rough, frayed edge to it. It went quieter, but higher, like it was about to tip over the edge. Like even he could hardly believe the story he was telling.
"...and we’re round the back in this little dark alley, right? And we’re, like, snogging. And she’s so gaggin for it, man, she’s so up for it. So she totally just, sticks her hand down the front of my jeans..."
Stefan framed the scene. The girl and Patch in the alley. He considered the lighting. It would have to be just enough, so that you could see the girl’s stretchy, stripy top, the colours still vivid in the darkness. And the lollipop like a beacon, like the red traffic light glowing in the dark. He could see Patch, too. Patch’s hair a bit longer in this scene than it was now. Now it was close cropped, you could see the pale curve of his skull through it. In Stefan’s film, though, it was darker, spiked up a bit with gel. The light glistened and broke on the gel in Patch’s hair, reflected off his white shirt like a moon.
Patch and the girl were kissing. It was like they were trying to swallow each other whole, like those snakes you saw on David Attenborough documentaries. They left warm snail-trails of spit around each other’s mouths. Patch’s hands were up inside the girl’s orange and yellow top, and the stripes were bulging and distorting. Stefan could see it. He could see it all.
"...and then she fuckin’..." Patch was whispering now, he’d shifted closer to Stefan on the tiles, and he was whispering, like Stefan was a best friend, a confidante. "She totally fuckin’ sucks me off in that alley down the side of McDonalds. I swear..."
Stefan could hear the wonder in his voice, that such a thing could have happened to him, and even if it hadn’t really happened to him, that it could happen to someone, somewhere, one day.
"Oi. Are you asleep? Are you dead, or what?" Patch sounded annoyed. Stefan realised his eyes were still closed. He opened them and daylight flooded back in. His private screening room, the dark alley, the girl and her body and the warm old colours all disappeared. There was only Patch leaning over him, his face in shadow, forehead wrinkled in a frown. The short fuzz of his hair haloed by the sun.
"No," he said. "I’m awake."
Patch’s green eyes were bright and clear against the day. "Good story, weren’it? Did you like it?"
Stefan said, "Yeah."
"Yeh," said Patch. "Thought you would." He smirked, and lay back down on the tiles. Stefan blinked as Patch’s body disappeared, and was replaced by the glare of the sun.
It was unwise, perhaps, but Stefan was irritated. A hot spark of temper flared and glowed quietly somewhere at the back of his eyes. He sat up and looked down at Patch, who still smiled, hands folded behind his head, eyes shut against the sun.
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
"Calm down, will ya? Means nothing."
"Well, why fuckin’ say it then?"
"Ah, come on, man, leave it." Patch laughed and flicked his second cigarette away across the flat roof. Then he reached up and gripped Stefan’s wrist. "Listen," he said, "be nice to me ... and I’ll be nice to you. Get it?"
Stefan watched Patch’s face. He’d stopped smiling now. His face looked pale and sharp and hungry. He was like a spring wound up tight. Stefan noticed that Patch had tiny light brown freckles that went across the top of his cheeks and up the sides of his nose. His throat moved up and down as he swallowed, and, watching it, Stefan found his own mouth drying as though in sympathy. Patch’s eyes were half-lidded, dark slits in his face, his eyelashes thick and heavy, like a girl’s.
"Um," said Stefan. Patch was pulling at his wrist, guiding Stefan’s hand downwards. "I dunno..."
But his hand was on the front of Patch’s jeans. It was warm. Stefan was warm. The day was warm. Stefan’s face felt as though it was on fire. His mouth seemed simultaneously dry and full of spit. He swallowed, and the swallowing seemed to make an unusual amount of noise. He wondered whether Patch could hear it.
"What if ... what if someone sees?"
"They won’t. We’re on the fucking roof. Come on, man, just do it. Means nothin’. Just be a mate, yeah?"
"Yeah. Okay." As he unzipped the fly on Patch’s jeans, Stefan thought that was a funny word. Mate. He was never quite sure what it meant.
He told Julie afterwards. He always told Julie stuff. It was like he couldn’t help it. He even told her about the pheasants and the grouse and the cigars.
"Shit," she said. I can’t believe that."
"I know," said Stefan. They’d nicked a packet of Jammy Dodgers out of the kitchen, and were eating them in the alcove under the back stairs.
"What was it like? Was it horrible?"
Stefan thought. "No. Weird. All right, though."
Julie looked at him. She had biscuit crumbs round the sides of her mouth. She combed a hand thoughtfully through her slightly fuzzy black hair.
"Do you fancy him?"
"Shut up! It’s not like I’m gay or anything."
"God, I do."
"You said he was a bastard."
"So?" She shrugged. "Being bad makes men more attractive. It’s a well-known syndrome, actually." She carefully parted the two halves of a biscuit, and licked the synthetic cream off the right-hand one.
"Oh," said Stefan. "Well, anyway. I’d better go." He stood up and looked down at Julie, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She was wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and cut-off denim shorts with black tights, and she had a shoulder bag made of blue fake fur. It had badges on it. One said, Don’t piss me off, bitch! He suddenly felt a warm rush of affection towards her.
"Julie," he said.
"Yeah?"
"You’ve got some ... biscuit on your face."
The summer Stefan was fourteen, he went up on the roof with Patch. It was a memorable summer. Because of that, and later because of Julie, and after that, the dreams.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
*sigh*
You really are a very talented writer. Write more of this?
(no subject)
Thank you very much for this - it's really very encouraging!
(no subject)
What's the basic plot to this? Have you decided?
(no subject)
(no subject)
I've found, personally, that the depression up to a point is very creativity-inspiring, but when you get beyond that point it totally kills the muse. So for me, at least, the meds have helped push me a little bit back toward the creative side again. When I was on Wellbutrin a little while, too, I thought I was able to be more creative as well, but everyone's different.
(no subject)
But I feel good today. Ok, haven't done any writing, but that's just my natural laziness. :)
(no subject)
(no subject)
that is all.
(no subject)
Thank you for saying this. I really need to get off my arse (or perhaps stay on it?) and work a bit harder at this writing thing. I seem to have a mental block about writing things that aren't fanfic.
*kicks self*
(no subject)
but i have to add...
Who doesn't want to see Dom designing ads for pig-feed
...if you don't write this (as well as finishing that there novel), i will be very very disappointed!! *g*
n.x :)
ps. do you really design ads for pig-feed? (asked the city girl, intrigued)
(no subject)
Yes, I do design ads for pig-feed. And all manner of agricultural equipment and paraphernalia. I also type up articles about grain and nasty horse diseases and barely-disguised advertorial, and I unofficially proofread the editor's bigoted, semi-illiterate, quasi-psychotic leader column; and I put page-layouts together and I attempt to rescue the terrible photos people send us of recently-deceased machinery salesmen. It's an exciting life.
I may indeed insert Dom into my job -- I'm interested to find out how he'd get on with my boss.
(no subject)
n.x :)
(no subject)
Talk about creeping up on me.
Wheeeee!!!
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
:)
(no subject)
Thank you! :)
(no subject)
That was lovely. Style, set-up, everything. Felt very real. And I want to know what he's going to get up to with Julie and what the dreams will be about.
(no subject)
I want to know what he's going to get up to with Julie and what the dreams will be about.
Unfortunately that's where it all kind of falls down... I never quite worked out what was going on myself. Heh.
(no subject)
wow!
This is so smutty but so sweet! And the thing about your writing is that one can take certain phrases either way but the second way will still be a deliberate invention not an accident. Or not.
are these the kids who go camping and someone has a tin mug and is birdwatching or something to do with bird habits you researched a while back?
WHAT DREAMS?????????!!!!!!!
poule x
Re: wow!
Re: wow!
Yes, Stefan is the one who goes camping in the marshes, several chapters later. Well-remembered there... :)
WHAT DREAMS?????????!!!!!!!
I'll, um, get back to you on that one...
(no subject)
But because I'm mean and nasty, I can't pick out a bit I particularly like, and instead I'll go for the bit I didn't - I think the choice of biscuits at the end presents a bit of a continuity issue, because the ones they stole were Jammy Dodgers, and the Jammy Dodgers I've had you can't lick the red stuff out of, you have to scrape it off with your teeth (which then end up coated in stickiness for the next hour or so), but Julie was clearly licking the biscuit, which suggests that maybe she was eating a bourbon or a custard cream. Deep and meaningful, no?
(no subject)
Thank you! :)
(no subject)
I feel like there was such a warm, lazy, just barely tangible sweetness around a scene that should have been horribly smutty. Perhaps my smut-tolerance has gotten a lot higher...hee...but I think that's what was so appealing about this--the comfort level with things one is "supposed" to find appalling. I'm very intrigued.
I loved him staging all the films in his head, staging the colors to be softer, and dare I say, more romantic? And I liked the feeling of "something's about to happen" that was creeping around the whole time I was reading.
This was such a great line:
...Stefan thought that was a funny word. Mate. He was never quite sure what it meant.
And then he spills everything to Julie, and the whole big-shrug casualness of their convo...was perfect. And I loved her outfit. Your descriptions are amazing.
Of course you know how much I love your writing and how talented I think you are!! I do hope we get to see more of this and that you keep plugging away. This is really an interesting piece!
My only advice, if you don't mind it, is to be careful of your quirky tangents. Obviously it is what makes your fics so wonderful, but you have to walk a fine line between quirky and overdone, yes? Does that make sense? If it doesn't, I'll just go over here and sit in the corner. :P
*hugs*
yours, in obliquity....
which tangent, cos I only saw a biscuit which is more round! If it was a chocolate finger then it could be a stumpy tangent.
Seriously, I only ask this as I never *get* the stuff between the lines in stories as the action distracts me from allegory and what not. Took me three sittings of Hamlet to realise he meant to stab Polonius behind the curtain!.....it looked like Ralph Fiennes was just flayling around, ignoring basic Brownies safety-in-the-home talks. (he obviously didnt win his Hostess Badge).
poule x
Re: yours, in obliquity....
(no subject)
This deserves a better response really, but I've got a bloody awful headache today so you'll have to excuse me. Thanks again!
(no subject)
(no subject)