The Indistinct Affair
She floated above him, indistinct, beautiful, angelic, shifting… a vision of glory after one too many drinks… another half-cut bad-idea shag that would turn out to hate all his music and have irreconcilably different eating habits to him…
“Prithee this be what you want, sire?” She gushed, and he reflected that, fuck, time after time, and time out of time, this was not a good place to be.
Still, though, the thought of her fingers on his skin brought the heat to the surface, and he remembered again that it had been weeks since Jane and he had split up. Was it for the second or third time? He couldn’t recall, but it certainly felt final this time – didn’t it always? – and as complicated as this situation was getting, he couldn’t deny the pleasant flush that female attention brought to his body, after such a while.
-
Carlisle figured that he had picked her up some time around one, while walking listlessly around wet Southerton streets, trying to solve the mystery of where summer had gone.
It was a Sunday in mid-July, and piss-wet. A mid-day walk in the park that was supposed to lift his spirits had dampened his enthusiasm instead. The girls that had languished so readily on the drying grass in their bikinis for old man Sunshine when Carlisle had first arrived at the Downs half an hour earlier had all scattered ahead of the downpour, skittering out of sight at the cantankerous, untrustworthy old bastard’s betrayal.
They were like magic, those girls – them and the ‘rounders’ playing students and pretty young families – you never saw them go, and Carlisle suspected that if he ever lived through the horror of waking before noon, and stalked Southerton’s common grounds from dawn, he wouldn’t see them arrive either. It was as if they were like butterflies – they rose out of the grass when the sun shone. Or maybe they were always there, but you could only see them through a heat haze?
Around the time that these thoughts occurred to him, he sussed out that he needed to be with someone other than himself. He found it far too easy to get lost in daft notions and melancholy when he felt like this. He resolved to take a wander into the city centre, and see if he could meet up with Ethan, or maybe Harris, and go to Starbucks or the pub.
It was a couple of miles into the city, and as he walked, Carlisle looked for somewhere sheltered to phone a friend. As he went, he ruminated on the lost summer, looking around him for signs of it, clues to where it could have gone. The incredible shower/burn/shower/burn of the last couple of weeks meant that every couple of minutes the water stopped coming and the sun sliced through, cooking his skin through the thin sheen coating it. The heat was such that the places on the pavement where water wasn’t actually flowing into the gutters kept drying out, before being soaked again moments later.
This created a surreal situation – Carlisle and the other victims of this climate found that their clothes and hair were the only things properly absorbing the rain – like giant, walking sponges, they walked along, while the ground around them spent most of it’s time dry. All around him, Carlisle could see his fellow pedestrians, steam rising from them as they caught the sudden sun. Further along, he could even see other hapless travellers caught in sheets of wet that almost looked like it was shooting up in strips from the ground toward the clouds, and he knew that in moments, he would probably be stuck in those same ludicrous spouts of water.
While he beat the wet/dry/wet concrete, alert for respite from the gush, he became dimly aware of a strange behaviour in the residential streets around him. As he walked, several of the houses along the way started to bark. Well, more to the point, the dogs inside the houses started up – deep, booming alpha-dog bellows and tiny toy-dog squeaks, and every type of canine grouch between. Carlisle was observant but he was also a realist, and was certain that it was just a coincidence that the dogs seemed to be grinding up specifically as he went past. Dogs had always seemed to like him before, and he had no reason to believe that they had suddenly begun some aural vendetta against him in the short time since he had left home that day.
There were no cats about, either, but that was slightly less unusual, as cats didn’t much like getting pissed on by the summer any more than their two-legged contemporaries did.
When he finally found somewhere almost dry to settle under a bus shelter, he pulled out his phone and thumbed the button to dial Ethan’s number. A number 18 bus bore down on him and he waved it on, but too late for it to drive past decisively – a heavy tyre sluiced through the rainwater near the kerb where it was deeper. Carlisle cursed and hopped back a little out of the way of the splash-back, and as he looked down at his feet, he was vaguely aware of a scurry of rats, brave in the rain, as they skipped out of view.
Carlisle tried to ignore them, unusual as it was even in this weather to see them this far out in the open, and listened to the ring-tone in the phone. The click as Ethan picked up made him forget the rodents.
“Ullo?”
“Hi, mate. It’s me.”
“Ayup… What you up to?”
“Ah, I’m just on my way into town. I wondered if you fancied a coffee?”
“Funk no, daddy-oh. It’s going to be a dark day in the old town, and I think you’d do best to stay the hell out of Dodge city.”
“What?”
“Bad Juju-Magumbo building up, specifically around Starbucks… I feel it in my bowel-sack.”
“You mean you just can’t be arsed to come out in this shit weather, right?”
“Uhuh.”
“Well, it wouldn’t kill you to just say that…”
“Oh, but yes it would. Can I convince you to reconsider your mocha-cappa-frappa-latte? Which as you know is latin for girl-drink…”
“Nah. I’m halfway there now.”
“You sure…? Remember, mucho bad Mojoga-Bumbo… Don’t say I didn’t warn you…”
Carlisle couldn’t raise the inimitable Harris Pax, but then, you often couldn’t. And with his housemate out of town fuck knew where, that meant the long and lonely ordeal of a coffee on his own. If it was possible, he’d have turned around and gone home, but anyone who had ever got the idea of a toffee-nut-latte into their head knew that it wasn’t so easy to turn your back on it once it was in there.
-
The girl had arrived a few minutes after him, and had seemed unusually preoccupied in his general direction since then. She seemed almost as out of place in the throbbing mass of conversation and bright-coloured teen-backpacks as Carlisle did himself, and that was saying something. Among the chatter and nonsense, she sat serene and sad, playing vaguely with the drink in front of her, as if it had been there when she arrived and had little to do with her.
Carlisle wasn’t really enjoying his own beverage, despite the seemingly ideal sugar/caffeine mix. The rain continued to pour outside, and the whole coffee house was suffused with a dampness that put lie to the youthful exuberance of the lunchtime clientele. Watching the packs of kids, clustered around a handful of drinks each, depressed the hell out of him, beyond the reach of even the creamiest and squirtiest of squirty cream – in his day, they gathered at each other’s houses at the weekend and got pissed off their heads, or shambled down to Crowfoot Shift and did it there instead. It maybe wasn’t a particularly enlightened way to spend your teens, but it showed a little more imagination then the weekly pilgrimage to the city’s shopping malls that this lot seemed to be engaged in.
Jesus, though, the girl in the corner was beautiful. In her mid-twenties, like him, but with a shine to her that had been rubbed off on Carlisle and his peers through all manner of debauchery and stupidity down the years. Long, dark hair, shapeless and everywhere, with an elfin set to her features that made her look otherworldly. The socially polite peripheral glances that he was restricting himself to meant that he couldn’t really make out what she was wearing, but he could tell that she was all in white, in contrast to the flat earth colours of the decor and the sharp brightness of the other patrons.
She was less good at keeping her attention subtle than he was. And he had to admit that the intensity of her gaze felt good.
He wasn’t sure if it was the good feeling, or the sugar, or the caffeine – perhaps it was a fear of an encroaching, sullen fug making advances on him – but when his mug was drained, and he would normally be heading for the door, he headed for her table instead.
-
There was something odd about the girl – of that much Carlisle was certain. She said her name was Eloise, and she spoke… well, to be honest, she mostly spoke complete gibberish.
Carlisle supposed that it was something broken in him that this trait didn’t curtail his attraction, or that it hadn’t stopped him with other women before. However, it was stranger this time then he had encountered before. In the case of Eloise, it wasn’t so much what she said, as how she said it.
Over a couple of drinks, she had explained her theories on various things, such as the state of the youth of the day (she thought that they were most often surly and inappropriate), the decline of church and state (she felt that as a people, the British lacked a moral centre that, for all it’s problems, the church had once provided), and Cherie Blaire’s fashion sense (most horrid!). But all that Carlisle had really learnt about her was that she had a tendency to adopt modes of speech by now long outdated, a Frankenstein’s monster of a patois that bounced happily from Shakespeare to Dickens to upper-class 1930s and back again, which he found fairly pretentious.
Carlisle had known a few peculiar people before, and had built up a strong tolerance towards them and their affectations – in particular, she reminded him of many of the live-roleplayers that he had met in the pubs of affluent, student-centric Southerton. Anyway, he had long since resigned himself to the fact that he would be able to ignore the worst of character defects for a pretty enough face – it was his curse, and his blessing.
“If you will, kind sir; another pint of this fine ale, and a glimpse into the mysterious depths of what ails you…”
The other things he’d worked out about Eloise were that she liked to drink, and that she wasn’t very good at it.
-
Sunday rule in Southerton kicks the drunk and the tipsy alike onto the streets at around ten-fifteen, so this was when Carlisle found himself trying to work out where he would be carrying the now half-cut Eloise so that she could sleep it off in her own bed. He knew himself too well, so he already knew that he’d be escorting her home, wherever that was, and his only reward would probably be the silky touch of her hair, as he held it out of her face while she puked.
Carlisle was more than a little pissed himself, and was struggling to focus. A lot of the evening – and of his experience of the gorgeous girl that stumbled slightly in his vision, swayed and merged in his mind, and he wasn’t really sure what he knew about her any more, beyond that she talked funny, and had him hooked.
He put a hand out to steady her, but found that he had misjudged the distance between them, and his outstretched fingers closed on air. She skipped coquettishly out of reach, and giggled. Then she burped softly, and looked mortified.
“Oh, my goodness, what must you think of me?”
Carlisle grinned.
“I think… that I should get you home. You’re a drunkard, and it’s not safe around here late at night for a drunkard.”
“But sir, what brave knight would risk a quest to transport a maiden plain all the way to her tower, only to find himself returning alone across hostile lands?”
Carlisle knew that he didn’t have to worry about getting home safe, but to be honest, the way she put it did sound like a lot of walking. He decided to let it pass that she seemed to be mixing eras and characters with abandon now – in fact, he wasn’t entirely sure whether she knew that she was doing it. At least she seemed a little more sober than he’d first thought.
“Well, uh…” he faltered, suddenly sober with shyness, “I only live about ten minutes away…”
She looked at him intently, and yet again he found himself drawn fully into those eyes, blotting out everything else. If you asked him what she was wearing, he wouldn’t have a clue.
“That sounds delightful, sir. As long as you can be relied upon to comport yourself in a gentlemanly manner.”
-
Carlisle had walked these moonlit streets thousands of times, and he had never noticed any rats before. He knew intellectually that they must be there, but they’d just stayed out of his way till now.
They weren’t being so shy tonight. He could hear the skittering of several sets of claws, and every now and then a high-pitched squeak, as they either chatted with each other, or perhaps trod on each other as they roiled through the darkness.
“Hm.” Carlisle turned to his steadily sobering companion. “How do you feel about rats?”
“Well, I was terrified of them way back when,” she said, “but more recently, I have found that they gather around wherever I go.”
“Ah, I see.”
But he didn’t, really.
That was when the dogs inside the darkened houses began their bellowing again, serenading them along their way into the night.
-
And then Carlisle really didn’t know what had happened, but suddenly he was on his back, in his bed, and there she was above him.
The sensations were intense and disorienting – it certainly didn’t feel like other one-night-stands he’d had – it almost didn’t feel like she was touching him at all. If it reminded him of anything, it was of that first moment, sitting next to someone that you hadn’t realised you liked – the first instant that you noticed that their fingers were just there on the table or sofa next to your arm, and you were suddenly sure that they had noticed it too, and felt the same way. The barest second in which you considered shifting position slightly, seeing if you could make their fingertips brush against you, accidentally on purpose, and wondering what it would feel like.
She must have had her hands all over him, but it was that electric anticipation that he felt, instead of flesh on flesh.
And something else, besides – Carlisle was horrified to discover that he was making that worst error of all errors – he was starting to think about this.
What he was thinking was: this was always how it felt, even though it was never how it felt. The full-on electricity was new, but that other newness, the excitement at uncovering new ground, with a fresh girl – that was very familiar. And after a quick re-evaluation of the day, taken in a spare instant between her warmth at his neck and her breath on his lips, he calculated that the cushion of attraction that he was floating on right now, letting it transport him up into her, was pretty much totally composed of that freshness – it was all novelty, and no substance.
She was achingly pretty, yes, but he couldn’t have told you what she looked like beyond that. He still had no idea what she’d been wearing, or saying, beyond it being a bit vague and odd (in both cases) – he struggled to even remember what her hair was like, beyond that it was dark and there was a lot of it.
He couldn’t actually remember how he had instigated conversation with her, and had a peculiar feeling that while he was certain that he had made all the first moves, it was she who had set them all up.
So when he felt the suggestion of a hand at the crotch of his jeans, and she called him “sire”, it was suddenly easy to see how this was all going to pan out. He had a very clear impression of having been hunted until she had allowed him to catch her. He also knew that he had allowed himself to become a slave to the anticipation of being with someone again, and built an attraction reaction out of that feeling, rather than an affection with traction based in genuine responses to her. The fact that she seemed to have picked him out, set against the equally salient fact that he didn’t really feel anything for her at all, beyond a knee-jerk reaction to the curve of her skin and her peculiar singularity, drew a picture of an emotional imbalance between them that would go nowhere good, and in not very long at all.
The best-case scenario was that they would have terrific sex tonight, and then he’d never see her again. But the sex itself would be a gamble – if it already meant too much to her, he would be forced into a position where he was either an arse over the next few hours, or a charlatan for a period of weeks, or even months!
Still, though, the thought of her fingers on his skin brought heat to the surface – as complicated as this situation was getting, he couldn’t deny the pleasant flush that female attention once again brought to his body, and that best-case scenario was looking pretty good.
But then, she whispered in his ear:
“Will thou look after me, sire?”
And it was just really damn annoying.
The affectation that he wasn’t sure was an act at all pulled him back into caution, and he retreated back down into his mattress. He wasn’t sure what he said next, or how she reacted – like every other exchange between them, it seemed like a mish-mash of several similar conversations that he had had with lots of different people.
He knew that there was concern in the words coming from him. That he had tried to work out how she felt – that this whirlwind affair didn’t mean too much to her. But he was confounded whenever he tried to remember precisely how she had responded – whether it had been with bravado, affected calmness, or even melodramatic tears. He was fairly certain that Eloise hadn’t liked whatever he had said, but he couldn’t say where he had got that impression from, beyond that she had also retreated across the bed away from him.
He hadn’t remembered any animosity when she had gotten up and left him – in fact, he only really remembered the shifting in the bounce of the mattress as she sat and stood, the padding bass of her feet on the floor, and the impression that she was just going to the loo.
-
But she didn’t return to the bedroom, and Carlisle was not sure what was going on, until he heard the muffled barking start half-way down the street, and drift across the no-longer sleeping town, radiating out in all directions. He hadn’t heard the front door go.
-
So anyway, that was the day that Adam Carlisle met and pulled Eloise, the patron spirit of every sad, lonely, beautiful and crazy girl that ever lived or died in Southerton, and then in a sudden and conscientious burst of heartbreaking mutant chivalry turned down the amazing, ethereal sex that she freely offered him.
And after all, wasn’t that the story of both their lives?
